 
Mus Peechy's Other End

(nux vomica)

by Andrew McEwan

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Copyright 2012 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

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Cover design by Andrew McEwan

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

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PART ONE - modus comedo

Chapter 1: A GUIDED TOUR of THE HEAD.

The fictions of the living and the facts of the dead; these are just two of the items on the agenda.

I am your unofficial guide.

I may lie, it's a clinical condition, but then the truth is a subjective element, one easily transmuted: gold to lead.

Take a piece of gold and tape it to a TV screen. Place the TV in a fridge, making sure both are switched on, and leave for a few days or until the desired result is achieved - i.e. the gold has turned to lead.

Unfortunately this does not work backwards, as any good alchemist will refuse to tell you.

But who cares?

Really, when was the last time you went out of your way to HELP a total stranger?

If there is to be a moral to this story then let that be it.

Enough!

Figure it out for yourself!

The book containing the story, the story in the book will be about anything it pleases.

The details will take care of themselves.

I, personally, plan to interfere as little as subhumanly possible.

So pay your fare and take a ride; and if you don't like it, well, you can get off, can't you ...

i - the rusty skeleton.

There is a wall of doors between me and you, a wall of doors, some of which are locked, some of which are false, some of which are electrified or have handles that come off in your hand, some of which are too small or too big and heavy to open, some of which vanish or move sideways, up or down, and some of which jam.

If you try squeezing through they eat you and spit out the pips.

The people on the outside have the keys.

If you try breaking the doors down your fists hurt and bleed and turn black and blue.

There are no letterboxes or other apertures through which to scream. Besides, nobody would listen.

They speak a different language on the outside.

They steal one another's thoughts and turn them inside-out and make them unrecognizable.

They would interpret my screams as laughter, joyful and fulfilling, not as pleas for HELP.

They would answer in like vein, jeering and flowery, phrase they remember from books.

They would use these same phrases over and over again and I would retreat.

It might never happen.

It already did.

Smile and the world smiles with you.

Wanna bet?

Do you believe in God, young man, old man, broken man, side of beef?

Whose?

There is but one...

Crap!

There is a wall of doors between me and you, a wall of doors.

When I told Mus Peechy I was going to write a book he jeered and flowered something awful.

Who cares about the words? I argued; nobody reads the words anyway, they just sort through them at random, looking for pornography or pictures or phrases.

I hate his laugh, the jeering flowery one.

He is a genuine old man and has a rusty skeleton.

It squeaks.

Myself, I can be whatever age I like - four or forty or thirteen-and-a-half or ninety in a week.

It makes no difference.

Time is irrelevant.

I know exactly how the book will begin.

Damn that Mus Peechy!

Damn the corporation and the mould on the ceiling!

Damn the outside world!

Damn them all, that's what I say, the human race gets what it deserves ...

I only hope there is a Hell, and that the fires are hot, the air hotter, and hottest of all, the food.

You should see the stuff they feed its in here.

In here they feed us shoe-leather and pickles.

Can you imagine?

Shoe-leather and pickles WITH NO FUCKING RELISH!

I like relish.

Mus Peechy likes relish; it oils his joints and lubricates his hinges.

Shoe-leather, after all, is just shoe-leather without that extra something. Pickles just pickles without a dressing of the savoury smack I enjoy best.

You could send me some; good idea.

But I don't know the address or telephone number, even if there is a telephone, or for that matter, an address.

Hey, Mus, do we have an address?

He squeaks off to ask.

ii - body language.

Random thoughts in a random diary, that's what life is.

The man in the room opposite mine thinks he's Ivan Denisovich.

At night he shouts and bangs on the wall.

They should never have given him that trowel, I tell you.

I was taken away from my wife in '41, citizen chief.

I've forgotten what she was like.

Look how much ice you've left on your wall!

See if you can manage to chip it off before evening.

Eh, you're making it lie too loose.

Well, if it's not visible, how d'you know it's there?

Any baccy?

Don't talk bunkum, Alyosha.

I've never seen a mountain move.

Well, to tell the truth, I've never seen a mountain at all.

But you, now, you prayed in the Caucasus with all that Baptist club of yours - did you make a single mountain move?

Once I tried replying to this, being somewhat intrigued by the question; but, like Alyosha says: of all earthly and mortal things Our Lord commanded us to pray only for our daily bread.

They took the man up to the roof soon after and I have to sneak into the hallway now to hear him, he has so little breath.

In the small hours you can listen to the weeping of a thousand captive souls out in the hallway, tiny reverberations that crawl in motley groups about the tiled floor, searching the cracks in the skirting for a way beyond, a way so long denied them, a way to escape that their dreams have convinced them is real.

It's pathetic to witness this solemn parade, to count all the blind, hunting fingers, groping at plaster and dust like refugees cast adrift on an imitation moon, the lunar surface vertical and unyielding; pathetic, as my soul is there too.

A bit at a time, that's how I'll write the book, a bit at a time ...

Who is this talking?

A subhuman; a blackhead; a slug - three derogatives, my three, a trinity of vulgar, spurious epithets.

The humans have three legal bodies; the subhumans none, being dispossessed.

How are things on the outside?

Good question.

All the humans I see are talkless, ignoring, dangerous.

Mus Peechy can extract words from their wandering selves, but not me, I don't exist in their universe; I'm a minus, a negative.

When I breathe the air stays still, which makes me think I'm dead.

When I eat the food remains on the plate, relish or no relish, which, as you can imagine, is frustrating.

When I scrawl messages on scraps of paper and stuff them in greasy bottles stolen from the kitchen that isn't a kitchen at all but a processing-plant, a kind of giant lichen that sucks in and regurgitates, they get nowhere, float at the head of my cot and dangle tantalizingly, becoming large and luminous as the unknowable hours pass, and then drop of a sudden, shattering in a blitz of recycled sand and potash and soda and maybe lead-oxide.

The scraps of paper float down. The writing is illegible. The ink changed from black to green and the words shuffled so as to say another thing altogether, which I am unable to decipher.

I try reading with one eye shut and one eye cast askance, but the words only blur.

I hold the paper before a mirror, but the jumbled letters rotate, hold hands like a dancing troupe, throw their skinny legs in the air.

So I crunch the paper into a ball and swallow it, hoping my guts might successfully digest the news and translate the hidden, cryptic meanings for my head.

Tongues are useless in this instance, beings organs tuned to the exterior currents and waves.

It is therefore important to have a reliable spine, a trustworthy nervous-system, a happy-go-lucky synaptic nest whose thought-eggs hatch well and often, thus supplying the mind with the necessary answers, even if they're not always correct.

Did I tel1 you about the murder?

Of course not, it hasn't happened yet!

Silly me, jumping the gun, which is what the mad soldiers do and who can blame them - only somebody ought to let on about the bullets, hmm?

Who is this talking?

This is Colonel Peacemake, killing you bastards with one drop of the thumb ...

My head is a rubber ball that bounces off the rubber walls and comes not to rest.

My head is a concrete shelter worn and discoloured by wind and rain.

My head is a metal bucket full of slops that the pigs won't eat and the subhumans will if they get to the kitchen in time for supper: the lichen to remake and prettify and serve on china plates that are really plastic.

My head is a place I once knew.

My head is a forgotten realm of bright sparks and bright ideas and terrible gloaming.

My head is my own, but I don't own it.

My head is heavy and hot and deformed and scarred and hairless and about the size of one of those funny round bombs with the sparkling fuses.

My head is a museum.

My head is a lake, the lake in which my brain drowns.

Do you have a head?

What's it called?

Does it swell often and ache?

We subhumans ought to stick together.

That's what they do for us, which is ironic in a way, putting us on the inside, taking us one at a time up to the roof.

I paint faces on my elbows and they converse.

I do the same with my knees and heels and big toes.

There is quite a party going on by the looks of things.

I run down the hallway and smash through the doors.

I contemplate the devastation I have wrought, the blood on my hands, the dangling blade.

I am beaten.

I smile, and the world kicks me in the teeth.

I frown, and the world jeers and flowers and has a good laugh at my expense.

I am beaten and abused by those, like me, who pretend not to like it.

Which is a lie.

Which is a lie?

But it isn't me after all, which is the truth.

It is Ivan, that fucking Shukhov pilgrim from across the tiles.

He crawls on stealthy suckers along the ceiling; he lifts the blade and plunges; he giggles, the only sound he makes; but they know his giggle and know it's not me and know what to do with murderin' gigglers like Ivan Denisovich who isn't Ivan Denisovich either but an insurance salesman they caught with a copy of Slug Weekly about his person, that person anonymous, without a real name, without anything but a measly, twice raped wife and a long dead dream of happiness; and hollow revenge, a pleasure, a re-enactment of pain, a symbolic absolution, a plunging and a lifting and a plunging again.

Whoever he is, he won't come back from the roof this time.

I get to see the corpse and clean up the mess.

The victim's, that is; of Ivan nothing will be left ...

Not even a stain.

Not even a puddle of urine and shit.

Not even bones - which ought to shut him, close him, spiral him away on the wind.

The insurance salesman will have nothing to say.

The insurance salesman will be one less.

The insurance salesman will never have existed.

The insurance salesman will not serve his three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days.

From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail.

For him, there will be no leap years.

iii - what feet do when you're asleep.

For all those who died trying, died for a reason, died for a purpose they held true, this book is dedicated.

For such there is a Heaven.

For such no nectar too sweet nor smile too broad; an everlasting summer is theirs, for all those who died when they might have lived.

It is the meaning of life, to find, to hold something, somebody worth dying for.

It is a meaning, however, that is readily corrupted.

Be warned, be vigilant, be aware of the holes into which you might fall, the holes dug by others like you as they step lightly to avoid the traps of your own making.

Negotiate, one and all - and keep a map of excavations, lest you drop out of sight.

Can your feet be trusted?

When you're asleep they're awake.

How do you know they're not a-roaming?

The punishment feet take!

Would it surprise you if they went their own way after dark, free of all that stubborn weight?

Clop-clop-clop they go ...

I secure mine with a length of string. It allows them to pad around in circles but no more, so they're always within reach, and I can sleep sure in the knowledge of their obedience.

They got loose once and left me crippled, and when finally they did return they no longer fitted my shoes.

The greedy mites had gorged themselves on spiders and mothballs. It was a whole week before I could walk properly.

Mus Peechy suggested the leash, an innovation of his I've tried to get him to patent, but Mus is of an altruistic bent and will hear nothing of it.

More fool he, I say, as the humans will capitalize on the idea and make piles of money they won't know what to do with.

Mus Peechy wouldn't know what to do with it either, come to think of it; he'd give it away in great basketfuls to anyone who asked and use the rest to stuff his mattress, which, like mine, is rough and hard.

Strange feet are everywhere to be seen at night.

They scratch at my door and whisper.

A tour guide should have a hat.

Okay, I'll make one out of a shirt, an old shirt, a blue shirt.

Is it straight, can you see?

The floppy bit's supposed to hang over my right ear.

It's too big!

It falls around my skull like a bag, a luxury suffocation model, like the blue plastic ones popularized by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.

What a grand bunch of lads!

What a brave, handsome, glorious rationale was theirs!

They say fashion goes round like a wheel, and they're right, only this spoke is a stake at which mothers burn and children conflagrate.

A tour guide should have a leaflet.

Okay, I'll make one out of a tile, a new tile, a tile loose and white.

Is it square, can you see?

The corners are meant to point outwards like shiny bayonets.

I can hear singing.

I can hear gunshots.

I can hear singing and gunshots.

Must be a march, a march of banners proclaiming rightness and wrongness, a pro-government anti-slug rally, the throng cheering and cheering and cheering and waving little flags on sticks, running and dancing and cheering till the boys have marched past to the sound of singing, gunshots, cheering and little flags on sticks.

I don't have a window to see and cheer and wave.

I might be imagining it all, wishing I were a hero, wishing one of the healthy girls was singing and waving at me, lifting her skirt and cheering, inviting me into her steamy loins, her fond and wet and pro-government cunt.

I can hear screaming.

I can hear gunshots.

I can hear screaming and gunshots.

Must be a riot, a riot of banners proclaiming rightness and wrongness, an anti-government pro-slug rally, the kind healthy girls no longer attend, if they no what's good for them and their steamy, fond and wet and cheering loins, their cunts of singing, screaming, gunshots and little flags on sticks, sticks that can be used and frequently are to wedge open thighs...

I can hear feet.

Feet can hear me.

Your feet?

My feet?

Everywhere there are feet, twice as many as heads.

You can be asleep when you are awake, too.

This is my head, the swollen aching one: shaven, coarse and traced with pink lines, white contours, yellow scabs that might be volcanoes or atolls or chewing gum - all the holes here are for real, although they don't always function as a unit, as I've said, sometimes they get mixed up, and believe me, having a fork stuck in your ear is no fun; neither is talking and not saying anything; or listening and not hearing a sound, which can be scary, especially if you are next asked to repeat what you've just been told, which you haven't heard, the instruction or the question in whatever order they arrive - questions and instructions are all the same; and there's my teeth, the few remaining; my nasal passages, hard and soft palates and sinuses, bones hyoid, frontal, temporal, occipital, parietal; and other bits as well, like vertebrae and skin, actual elastic skin that heals and sweats and keeps out the rain - not that it rains where I am - not often, except, possibly, up on the roof.

iv - hairs and warts.

Mus is sitting on my cot reading my notes of which there are several sheets, splotched and messy.

He winks at me and lets his neck go slack, the weight of his packed skull to slowly reach to the floor and beyond, falling to the planet's rumoured core, to China and beyond, to the stars, which is Mus's way of explaining freedom.

He is my inspiration. I shall not kill him off, I tell him, if he agrees not to laugh.

He says okay and makes a few useful suggestions about the direction and content of the text, drawing on his own experiences of the outside.

I thank him.

I scribble furiously, copiously, while he chatters neverendingly, paints air-pictures and waves his arms, re-enacting events from the past, the common past, the real past, and not the future past as the corporation will record it.

I wonder briefly if what we are doing is not in some way subversive and he says yes, it is, but that it doesn't really matter because we are no-people and worthless dogs and will be dead soon in any case.

I nod, lick my pencil and write.

Hot night?

Sleep with a corpse!

Just make sure it isn't yours, otherwise you'll have a lot of explaining to do come morning.

Cold bath?

Add some petroleum and a match; better still, take an electric iron in with you and smooth those worries away:

Tepid lunch?

Spice up any meal by serving raw goat's liver lightly glazed with lemon juice and brandy and just that hint of strychnine!

Alternatively, heat the strychnine with an alkali in order to manufacture a white crystalline substance that can be easily deposited in any salt-cellar.

NB: this last may not prove fatal - always read destructions before use; keep in the way of children, small furry animals, and sunlight; store in a horizontal position, making sure the cap is unsecure. Remember, chemicals can be safe if not handled incorrectly at all times!

So much for the hair and wart remover.

So much for peeling, blistered flesh.

So much for the mould on the ceiling. For all I know it may contain, that mould, a secret elixir, the key to immortality and superhuman strength.

Too bad I don't have a step-ladder...

The best way to remove hairs and warts is with a chisel.

You can give yourself a whole new look in minutes.

The best way to grow hairs and warts is by the application of stimulants, the injection of hormones and thickening agents, the localized reproduction of epidermal cells, over-exposure to strong sunlight, or transplants.

A mixture of the above is recommended.

It is important that the subject not expect to remain living.

Use only one body at a time and freeze-dry the reproductive organs before initiating any of the outlined procedures.

For further information and a free wall-chart contact the corporation at the as yet unknown address.

Thank-you.

There is a door ajar, a trick door that leads you right back to where you started from.

Mus says I should cease monologizing and get on with the book - which is easy for him to say.

How do you spell that? I ask.

All the lights go off, which means it's night, or so we're conditioned to believe.

The sun may yet hang in the outside sky, but the inside azure is thrall to a timer and switch.

We part company, Mus and I, go to our separate rooms and beds and dreams.

The room opposite mine is quiet now, empty, waiting for its new tenant, a fresh bundle of limbs that will have to be dragged up the hallway and chained, fed with a straw and pinioned.

Branded.

Infected.

The slug, the blackhead, the subhuman, taken up to the roof when it's his turn and -

I must confess to having more warts than hair.

I must confess to whatever crimes they say I committed.

I must confess to this and that and the other, sign with an X where they tell me and behave in a totally irrational manner whenever some visitor is shown round the crowded wards.

I must, yes, or maybe tomorrow I'll discover a cousin or uncle in the giggler's room, a close friend bound nowhere, stripped and tied and covered in bruises, the distinctive abrasions of cast stones...

His name I won't remember, but he'll look with horror at me, and in his mind the connection will be made; he will blame his close friend for informing, turn his anger toward the one least likely to have effected his arrest and subsequent detention, the one whose punishment is never complete.

His eyes will roll and his tongue loll as he thrashes and groans, choking on blood and bile, pacing deliriously about a room that still echoes with the dry humour of Solzhenitsyn.

And when finally he collapses, face down on the bed, there will be between me and him a wall of hate, misconceived and ill-directed, a wall of hate high and unstable that may one day fall on both our heads.

A bit at a time...

Who is this talking?

Samuel Bluck perhaps, or Luke Scott.

Chapter 2: THE CLEAR PEOPLE.

THIS SEASON'S PLAGUE, or, HOW TO DODGE BULLETS - the truth, the truth, the truth, reads the leaflet blowing down the street.

It spins in a breeze and impales itself on a severed branch, there to be taken apart be the forthcoming rain.

Samuel Bluck wipes away the memory of its sight.

He straightens his red tie and strides, taking in the white clouds and yellow sun like any other morning. He is on his way to work in a tenth floor office where he licks envelopes and staples sheets of whiter than white paper.

There are other people on the street, all of them walking in the same direction, all of them ignoring the subversive litter that has appeared overnight like unwanted snow, all of them uniformed alike, different colour ties setting them apart, different colours for different floors.

It isn't far; it's never far.

The time approaches seven-thirty and Samuel waits in line at the elevator. He takes the elevator up ten floors and marches to his cubby-hole, his desk.

It is a day like any other day, a day in the life of Samuel Bluck, his feet together and his hands busy, his tongue moist as it swings left to right, right to left.

The phone rings and he answers.

Somebody smiles at him from behind a chin-high screen, and, a glance about him just to make sure, he smiles back.

My conscience is clear, he tells himself.

My hands are busy, not sluggish...

Not sluggish in the least.

So why the panic?

What's changed?

Who said that?

Why am I sweating?

Am I ill?

My God!

No, no, it can't be, I was nowhere near, I was far from, I was whole and clean and polite and respectful and calm; be calm, it's nothing, a flush.

A flush - what's that?

Please, please don't smile at me again, it's unsettling, it's unexpected, it's unnatural and dangerous...

He staples two pieces of paper, adds a third and fourth, checks the sum off against his list, making sure the date is correct, and places it in the OUT tray.

Back on the rails, Sam?

Okay, don't think just do, don't think just do good, don't think, okay?

The things they teach you in school; the important things.

I remember eschatology best.

Is that the time?

Of course it's the time, fool, that's the corporation's own clock.

But don't count the hours; don't watch the second hand; don't sing songs under your breath, they could be mistaken for something they're not, something you shouldn't even know.

If you must think, think about a blue tie with yellow dots and the floor above, where, legend has it, the cubby-holes are one half as big again!

Can you imagine?

A full two square yards!

The machines even call you Mister, upstairs.

Walking home at six in the evening is like walking out of a mirror: everything's the same as the previous morning, only the other way round.

Two people are stood by a stunted tree reading the leaflet that has impaled itself on a severed branch.

Samuel Bluck slows, because the crowd slows and he's part of it, and a nasty situation can be felt, a nagging imminence.

The two reading the leaflet become suddenly aware of the suspicious eyes and seem to contract, as if trying to climb back into their shells.

They are slow too, too slow, and the crowd can see it.

They are responsible for what happens next.

There's no question about it, they invited it upon themselves...

He tells himself this as he fights with his blankets, upsets his wife, who calms him, calms herself, although she has been disturbed by the things he's said in his sleep, brought on by a bad dream, a dream of cast stones and oversized flakes of four-cornered snow.

A gold tie steps forward out of the crowd; he strikes a match and burns the filthy litter.

Others follow his example, as they would even if he dropped his trousers and shat in the street, Sam can't help thinking, next purging his mind of the shame and reaching for his own silver lighter.

The guilty parties tremble, flap and moan as balls of flaming paper are tossed and kicked at them, eventually setting ablaze their clothing, their yellow ties fourth floor and besmirched.

A helicopter floats down and lifts them away like old shoes in need of repair; worn tyres, their once proud treads reduced to smoothness, revealing their black heads and singularity, their inferior performance when set against their more worthily attired peers.

And Samuel, glancing up at the last, tries hard not to feel, but to laugh and cheer and shake hands with the rest.

His wife's name is Nancy.

If Samuel makes it to the thirteenth floor they may yet have children.

Why aren't you eating?

I'm not hungry.

But I made it specially - it's the last of the ham.

He slouches at table, fork in fingers, knife at attention, tarnished blade vertical in pink piggy flesh.

You're acting like a baby, playing with your food.

I'm not hungry, he repeats.

It's your favourite...

It appears hollow, he doesn't say. The ham reminds him of skin, humanity's veneer.

The knife stuck in it.

The glorious weekend.

When the sun sets the world is another place, an unfamiliar land of massed shadows and criminal elements that prowl; so don't go out, don't break the rules, and beware of the subhumans that crawl and slither along pavements and into the carelessly open windows of the upright.

He'd read in the newspaper of a man living not far away, in a building much like this, his and Nancy's, tens of others, a man of average height and build; this man had fallen asleep in his chair while listening to the radio, and he hadn't woken up; the slugs had found his door ajar and sneaked in, trailing foul odours and slime.

They ate his hands and feet, the tools of the state.

They murdered him, stole the radio which was later discovered smashed, its entrails scattered like dead insects in the road.

There was a lesson to be learnt, a new lesson every day.

Or so the newspaper would have Sam believe.

Dare he question it?

Doubts - evil, vile, subhuman doubts fill his skull.

How did they get in?

The leaflet?

Why now?

There had been leaflets before, there would always be leaflets.

What is it about this particular leaflet - the fact you noticed it at all?

Read it?

And the yellow ties, what was it you felt for them?

Comradeship?

Sympathy?

Brotherhood?

He apologizes to Nancy and eats his ham.

Serve the fuckers right!

We should've skinned 'em, hung their bleary carcasses from the tree!

Samuel Bluck would be a gold tie one day and lead the crowd, be at its head, first to strike and first to burn and first into and out of the elevator, the special elevator reserved for those on the top floors.

People would lower themselves, make themselves smaller, belittle themselves like obedient supplicants and answer his phone - one of many - for him.

His would be the power to...

What?

What did they actually do on the top floors other than have their phones answered for them?

What were they for?

Samuel, in a mood of reasoning, of deliberation, is unable to say.

He belches.

Nancy smiles, an honest, trusting smile, so unlike the covert grin of a day earlier, and he experiences those once forgotten guilts again, recalling in detail the curve of her thigh, HER shoulder and hip, invoking horror and loathing and disgust and a DESIRE TO FIND HIS WAY INSIDE HER CLOTHING...

Smoke a cigarette, a state-issue cigarette, the kind the slugs say are baited.

Baited?

But they are so nice, so delicious, so fresh; you can relax with a state-issue cigarette.

They HELP you, are here to HELP you, in stout, healthy packs, glitzy cartons.

And I love my wife; really, I love her, yes HER and nobody else, and in my mind I can see and smell and touch, not my wife at all but another, one with a less than honest smile to stretch the monotony of her face, adding dimples.

Fuck the cigarettes...

Fuck HER:

Fuck?

Not the eleventh floor; be realistic, not the blue tie with yellow dots, the extra space...

You're hurting me, Sam!

You're a bitch, Nance, a sick animal!

What's come over you?

Why, you think I'm behaving strangely - if you ask me it's you who's strange, you who's altered, physically and mentally, you whose breasts sag, you old whore - eh?

Stop it!

Quiet - shut up - I'll kill you - I'll expose you for what you are!

The two men flopping against the wall, covering their eyes, a tear in each.

The crowd forcing its way forward, garishly lit by orange flames, pretending hatred, glad that the target is not on this occasion themselves, grateful for so many things, not least the opportunity to exhibit their steadfastness, courage and raw determination to wipe from the face of the Earth the filth, the very pestilence that ails it.

The circling, hovering helicopter, a bird whose silence is remarkable, a product of the corporation and a symbol of its greatness.

The leaflet.

What is it that scares them?

What are they frightened of, the powers that be?

Samuel Bluck sleeps no better.

Nancy's shivering, the bruises on her body remind him of the two men and their reading.

Just how many slugs are there? he wonders.

How many humans are really subhumans underneath?

How many heads, ostensibly clear, are in fact black?

And am I sufficiently brave to admit I'm one?

Sorry, Nance.

Fuck you, Sam, fuck YOU!

Chapter 3: CORPORATE LOWLIFE.

Luke Scott's left leg is shorter than his right leg, which is why he wears a rollerskate.

The money in his pocket weighs against his thigh and he pats its bulge as he kicks along the dark road beneath extinguished street-lights, skating past a black hedgehog, the vehicle's invisible crew taking no notice of the coded firefly.

Luke is immune to the parked car's occupants.

He ducks down an alley and enters the underground, right foot pacing, steering him round corner after corner as the noise of pumps and animals collects in his head.

The night is fresh beyond the new and old concrete, the meandering ducts.

He stops at a ramp and looks back over his shoulder. Glints of colour can be seen.

The ramp's metal howls under his wheels and its howl echoes from the depths.

He imagines the sound to be the screams of slugs, the protests of subhumans, the bitter laughter of blackheads as they stumble blindly like tortured moles about the caves and among the looming abysses of their self-styled worlds, the places they themselves have created and which, in mind if not in body, they inhabit.

He feels no sympathy for them; his own position is hazardous enough.

Luke has no compassion to spare...

If he is to survive, and he must, then there can be no room in his world for those who've had their chances, taken them and lost.

Luke works for the corporation; he and others like him are the bottom line, the scavengers who clean up and as such are tolerated, the rats that come out only at night, flit and scurry below ground and above, the vermin whose tenure will last.

Until the boot comes down.

Hey, lay some paper, huh?

What you see is what you get - ten, ten more, ten again.

Roll the coin.

Which way up?

Double, Luke, you feelin' lucky are you not?

Yeah, I'll take that...

The ramp lies behind him; up ahead the base of elevator shafts stir the darkness with an oily gleam.

There is a voice, a quiet voice that nevertheless absorbs its listeners, drawing them near and enfolding their ears.

A story is being told, one Luke's heard before, a story of the future when the rats boil from the sewers and spread disease through the city and its people, the man-rats whose purpose is neither hate nor greed, the flood which courses now in their veins to wash away, cleanse once and for all the streets and buildings, their common walls, the day toward which every one of them is breathing...

Must not die, must live.

As the echoes sail; as the greys and blacks merge; as the now becomes then; Luke sits and thinks.

Chester joins him, a limb across his broad back, tied there with lengths of plastic string.

The limb is an arm.

Chester unties it and lays it to one side before squatting down. He asks Luke what his count is for the night and Luke answers with a grunt, meaning he has not foraged.

The limb is discoloured.

The candles that hover spread an illusion of flatness, a milky paste that fails to illuminate more than two dimensions.

The limb is a woman's.

Somewhere a house of cards falls, casting ripples in the gloaming.

Chester shrugs, gets to his feet and sidles off toward the chute, its fiery orange radiant, dulled by the wan light through the distance between Luke and it, a distance he has failed to cross, the receptacle one of many: orange for limbs, green for torsos, blue for hands and feet, should they be separate, and red for miscellany.

Nobody scavenges heads; heads are left.

How will I eat? he thinks.

He has won at games of chance, but not worked his shift as he ought to've.

It will be talked of.

The others like himself may yet cast him out.

Into the open...

The stars cut his eyes. A movement heightens his senses, focuses his mind to a stranger's plight.

The slug is being followed from overhead, tracked by a silent copter, the unseen presence of state troopers, the hunters and the hunted each quick and slow.

Luke skates in their turbulence, waits.

The copter circles and moves off.

The troopers raise their voices.

The subhuman, unable to turn, fights.

His situation is hopeless; hidden, guided blades slice him open, and as the blood spills, the rat closes.

Into the open...

The stars cut his eyes.

The hunger he knows is familiar and unfriendly, gnawing at his stomach much as the state troopers gnaw at the slugs they catch.

The stars are swamped by day - sun and cloud.

He can set his own quota, if needs be; he can satisfy many stomachs.

The money in his pocket does not diminish with the passing hours, those to come, to be spent in hiding and idleness, the scraping of stones against rocks, the primitive art of the cave dweller a colourless haze in a colourless world.

Luke Scott can sit and stand and skate, glide and glimpse the outside through a fissure.

He can watch all he pleases, can draw the faces he makes out and the expressions clothing them, can read the lines, the lines above the bottom line which is his, the lines drawn by another hand altogether.

He can even smell their breath; but has no wish to breathe it himself.

He can touch without feeling.

He can count and puzzle, add and take-away, multiply and divide.

And if the answers he comes by are wrong then he can wipe the slate clean and start again: a flat stone scratching a hard rock.

Hide.

The sun exposes.

The moon cloaks less than it reveals.

Hidden in the dark corners are the slugs and the rats.

The sun and moon conspire.

The corporation makes it work for the state and the state is making it work for the corporation.

Maybe they take turns at the editing machine, swap hats, run each other's charade.

What is for sure is that the hidden don't long remain beyond the searcher's eyes, those instruments cut by the stars, honed by the wind to a glassy perfection.

Smell them?

Spot their trails?

The day will always come, the night arrive, and from one to the next will stretch repression.

Hide?

Not in the open.

Hide?

Not in the dark.

Hide?

In the flat stone that marks the hard rock; behind the sun, in the rock itself.

And live for now, waiting.

Luke flashes past the railing with his eyes shut.

The air in his face chills his gums.

Okay, deeper, this is my offering to the gods, their appetites insatiable, matched only by their greed.

The piles of gold to my either side are worthless.

The dragons crawl on their bellies and send smoke-signals to one another, filling the place with a stench like death.

Bad death.

Their eyes are great jewels, sapphires and rubies and opals, and their scales are hammered from plates of copper and steel and zinc, traceries of fine glass running like bright streams at their borders.

Their brains though, are small, housed in skulls too heavy and inarticulate to manage speech.

A useless article, really, for they do not think, just grasp and devour.

Is it time for breakfast?

The smoke-signals tell of nothing but aches and pains and schedules.

Is it time for breakfast? they puff, the fires in their throats and the indigestion in their guts seemingly about to overheat...

He, me, I am not their keeper, rather their slave.

The dragons are fat and old, yet undying; they will eat themselves often, starting with the tail and working upward to the head.

When all is gone they will sleep a while, secure in an egg, and stumble loosely from the granite shell upon awakening.

The railing is spiked and tall, a fence of bars without end, its base clogged with litter, a riot of greenery disguising the fallen bodies of climbers, the casualties of hope.

If the dragons ever learn to fly for themselves, thinks Luke, then the blackheads will make even easier targets.

His home is a hollow tree in a forbidden forest on the edge of precinct 9.

Precinct 9 is mostly derelict.

The tree is an oak whose branches hang like strands of greasy hair.

When not asleep he reads books stolen from the wrecked houses, the words forming the pictures in his mind that he later translates onto slabs of buckled concrete and roughly hewn faces of eroded sandstone, read and yellow and grey canvases which often collide.

There are huge machines that shift the foundations of tower blocks.

It is as if someone has ripped the pages from a book and shuffled them, mixed the images, remaking the scenes and the plot.

He has a precious cache of chalk stashed in one of the larger branches and has recently experimented with charcoal, of which there is a ready supply. Both mediums are demanding. The book he is reading at present has full-page illustrations, peculiar line drawings that seem oddly familiar, like he's scrawled them himself some time ago and since forgotten. The book isn't easy. The book isn't long. He reads a page at random and sets it down. Mus Peechy's Other End, is its title. He may finish reading it one day. On the scale of mountains there is no hurry, on the scale of mountains...

Chapter 4: ORDERLIES JURGEN, JERZY AND JOSEPH.

On the scale of mountains a man's life is short indeed, even if he has three...

The walls have been newly painted, whitewashed so that they glimmer as if still wet.

He pushes a body on a trolley, the wheels of which squeak, causing him to grimace.

As he passes a nondescript doorway shrieks and laughter reverberate through the glossy white plastic.

The body sits up and smiles.

Jurgen frowns; Jerzy takes over the grimace; Joseph opens the door and shouts at those inside, quietening them.

All these things happen at once.

The patient flops down on the squeaking trolley and lapses into unconsciousness preparatory to surgery.

He has a cist the size of an apple on his right shoulder that he insists is the remains of his pet parrot, the bird having melted - struck by lightning, he, the patient, sez; cut short, terminated, zapped in its feathery prime.

Jurgen couldn't care less.

Jerzy could, but he's better with corpses than living people, which is to say he's more at home with dead parrots than breathing patients.

Joseph opens the door and shouts at those inside, quietening them.

All these things never happen.

The orderlies each light cigarettes...

One time Jurgen caught Jerzy buggering a stiff; he'd smeared petroleum jelly between its shaven legs and was just fitting the last piece of the jigsaw when Jurgen snapped in, barking like a rabid mutt.

Jerzy had warmed the dead limbs with an electric iron and wedged them apart with sticks.

The stiff was smiling, its arsehole flaccid and unzipped: a single touch of cool blade to palsied flesh.

It took Joseph half an hour to prise loose two thirds of himselves; the shock to his system overwhelming...

As for the corpse, its smile, like the smile of the patient on the trolley, was unrealistic.

The dead expect so much.

The living expect death.

So much for cigarettes.

For lunch Jurgen eats an oyster bar.

He wags his long tongue at a blue-sleeved nurse, ducks the polystyrene and coffee dregs, and winks.

The nurse is bald and towering, the kind of meat he likes best. The blue sleeves are edged in purple and green.

His oyster bar has melted.

Perhaps it was struck be lightning.

He thinks maybe he'll teach it a few words.

Jurgen is human; he has three legal bodies; Jerzy and Joseph get up and go back to work, voting with their feet.

Grammar is often the first casualty of a tri-totalitarian state.

In a private suite on the thirteenth floor lies prostrate a man of triple importance, a member of higher powers and higher stratas and higher echelons of the corporation.

Jurgen watches while he is spoon fed, cloth at the ready, tense and nervous, here in case of drips.

This is a man who condemns slugs to slugdom, locks subhumans away in tiny boxes, disposes of blackheads by turning a switch or pressing a button.

Jurgen wonders what colour it is.

He daydreams.

The man is ugly, he tells himsel, ugly as sin, which is red as blood, the button or switch, the private suite and cloth, all the foaming vomit that collects about his lips.

Wipe?

Yessir!

The man's eyes are brown, dumb brown, the brown of tobacco, the tobacco in state-issue cigarettes.

Red, redder, reddest - the man's nose could be the button or switch.

Don't laugh, Jurgen, Jerzy, Joseph; if it ever gets out, that business with the corpse - hnnnggGH!

The man's prostration is a lie.

The food, of course, would slide out of his mouth.

The man is in truth standing on his head, which is flat and circular like the base of a lamp.

He is not a man at all but an illumination.

Jurgen spits in his soup; Jerzy does somersaults on the bed; Joseph walks over and presses him off, using just his gums, a turn of tricks, a favour he'd like returned.

Somewhere a loudspeaker crackles.

Button it! it shrills, or else leave and not be safe!

To which three J's reply: who but us can glimmer as if still wet?

Wankers!

The white of our coats is the whitest; the white of our walls is the shiniest...

The white of your coats and walls is red.

Blood red?

Sinful.

The clocks tick for the orderlies, too; but there is plenty of time. We'll get back to them, back to you...

Sadly - echoing through glossy smiles and white teeth are lips the deep pink of oceanic shells.

Where the fish swim.

Gut them and see.

The patient's cist is a parrot after all.

Chapter 5: THE REALNESS IN QUESTION.

The tree.

The tree is ancient and hollow now, but once it was young like the world, young and pure and unbent by age and regret.

It stood long ago in a green field. The nearest house was a mile distant, and a child's rope swing hung from its sturdy lower branches.

A little girl would come and skip and chirp, while away the long hours, the languid afternoons beneath shimmering leaves and gaudy butterflies, these like soft jewels from velvet chrysalises each pearly spring and summer.

But the girl has grown, a woman from a child, and the springs and summers are hoops of wood deep within the tree's core, the core which is hollow, forgotten. And the rope swing is rotted, fallen, lost to the wind and rain much as the green field is lost to Precinct 9.

Luke occupies the tree. It is his home.

Precinct 9 is gutted, hollow in its turn.

Precinct 9 is occupied solely by vagrants and ghosts and wild grasses, a slug's hunting ground.

He watches them in the early morning as they pick their way through the empty ruins, the abandoned shells of houses, fireplaces dead and smokeless, the smoke rising instead from scattered pits, holes dug in the concrete and asphalt wherein crude ovens reside, heavy with tasteless bread.

The tree sits among a forest of iron railings.

The mostly derelict precinct smells of tar, burning rubber and illegal cigarillos.

In one building that has a roof a printing-press is busy reproducing subhuman literature.

The blackhead who operates the machine is tall and wizened, her cheeks scarred and hair matted; but there exists a gleam in her eye that some would call insane and others inspired.

She has no name.

She is a none person.

The leaflets she produces will be cast like oversized flakes of snow and dutifully avoided, unread by those loyal to the state, the corporation, the human race.

Only the slugs will dare focus on the black ink and white paper and red blood, and they will not see the footprints of rats but the truth ...

Luke occupies the tree. He oils his rollerskate and sleeps on and off, reading between times his book.

The rat.

The rat is Luke Scott, who, in a prior life, may have been a famous actor or an unfamous poet, or both.

Such things he dreams, on and off...

He eats raw fish, or what he imagines is raw fish, which is good enough, for he has no sense of taste and supplements a diet of mostly tree bark and finger-nails with whatever he can steal or find roundabouts, often fighting a slug for the scraggy remains of a dead bird that the slug has brought to ground by pitching a rock into its aerial path, thus killing it.

The slugs are terrified of him. Only their fear of hunger can spur them on.

Luke is terrified of nothing; except maybe heights.

Once he was stuck for a whole day on a roof sixty or seventy floors up.

He couldn't remember how he had got there.

The drop was all he understood.

It still haunts him, that drop, the fall he avoided in the end by leaping from one building to the next, a floor or so lower, and so on, until he reached the pavement and safety.

It is a nightmare, the roof, that roof, any roof more than ten or twelve feet in height.

Even from that shallow a platform he might break an arm or a leg.

Lucky for him he has his rollerskate...

He recalls his brother.

Mike was his name; they were identical twins, all alike, only his brother's right leg was the shorter, which was handy as they needed just one pair of rollerskates between them.

Mike enjoyed high places.

He would climb trees and lamp-posts and the masts of boats moored on the river. He would scale the tallest buildings and make his twin quite dizzy. He wouldn't use the stairs, that'd be too easy, but clamber up the bare walls with a knife gripped in his teeth, fingers and toes and wheels finding purchase, like a fly.

Then one day a loose steel gutter proved his undoing.

He dropped.

His brother ran to catch him but was too late, splashed with gore and cut by flying bone as Mike met street.

He looked like a comic strip.

He looked like bird shit and raspberry icecream.

He looked like Hell.

It wasn't real - isn't...

So Luke changed, becoming something else.

And the world changed also, becoming something different, his place in it tenuous and fragile and barely legal.

And the rat was born to them all, born of filth.

The book.

The book tells it like it is and nobody cares which is like it is, okay?

The book has pages that mean nothing and pages that mean lots of things, nothing among them.

The book is full of e's and a's.

The book has words like giggle and HELP in it, HELP for some reason always in capitals.

There are other words in capitals, too; but these aren't so important.

HELP is of the utmost importance.

HELP is HELP.

HELP is PLEH backwards.

PLEH means nothing.

HELP is for Hungry Elephants Love Peanuts or Hot Elastic Limp Pantaloons or How Eagles Lift People.

HELicoPters and People.

A gentle breeze turns the pages.

An even gentler breeze tugs at the letters, each individual curve and line and point.

The eyes that make sense of all this are non-stop and wondering how so many things can be written in so small a space.

The eyes are wired into the brain which sees it upside down.

The brain then decides what is relevant, makes silent comment and complaint, and pauses a moment to rest.

Brains are stupid, though; the book says as much.

They sit in your head and do nothing all day while you stumble around in a state of confusion, a confusion of state.

The mind is the thing you need; the mind puts stuff together like tree and wood, gore and blood, and if the stuff isn't friendly then the mind takes it apart again.

Minds are clever ...

The book has a mind of its own. This mind, the book's, puts stuff together and takes it apart again almost at once. This mind is fast and tricky. This mind is linear and non-linear, a paradox the book itself has fashioned from the random actions of its hosts.

Me and you.

Them.

No shit...

It's pretty tough going, but the pictures are nice, and if you, whoever I am, don't try too hard, we can see the invisible words, the invisible inferences and meanings that hide like snipers between the curves and lines and points.

No shit?

Yeah, and that's not all; if we read the book upside down our brains will see it the right way up and we'll understand at last the significance of the sentences, those imposed on slugs and non-slugs, each a sentence in length, each timeless, infinite and disposable.

No shit!

Luke closes the book and his eyes.

Through holes in his eyelids and the trunk he can see a blackhead collecting firewood to feed the ovens in the holey road.

It he strays too near the tree...

Luke the rat will start early on his quota tonight.

Probably ...

Chapter 6: HAPPENINGS and UNHAPPENINGS.

Sitting on a hillside beneath the Monument To The Devolution of a Sunday afternoon, eating cress sandwiches ...

When appears a man reading a copy of The Illustrated Slug, a wicked glimmer in his eye as he next pisses against said monument - and you pretend not to notice, for he exists in another world to you, a world of blackheads, a world of lost souls and mad dogs.

But I'd rather be mad than stupid, eh?

The man wanders off and you cross your legs.

The sun hardly moves and the shadows seem constant, stunted, unhinged. And you imagine them wandering off too, following the man.

Greta sips cold tea while Box does cartwheels.

Mother and son are so happy.

A yellow bird flits across the sky.

Greta laughs and chases Box who waves his arms and dodges her snatching fists that would pin him, tickle him, make him laugh like her.

Box is five years old and Greta twenty.

Box is a quarter her age.

When Box is ten Greta will be twenty-five, and when Box is twenty-five Greta will be forty, and when Box is forty Greta will be dead, or fifty-five; either way, he'll be catching her up instead of the other way round. Only he won't tickle her, and neither of them will laugh, as by then the world of the blackheads and the world of the clear people will be irrevocably locked.

The slugs will be everywhere...

The future is a funny thing.

Life is too short to miss.

Art is a three letter word, like God: it means different things to different people, and all of them are right.

Some of the time.

Truth is, nobody knows for sure.

Greta asks herself if the man is really worth it. She looks at Box and sees his father's nose, her eyes and mouth.

What kind of name is Bluck anyway?

What kind of a man - a married man - is Samuel?

As usual, Greta gets no answer.

But she knows she's right.

Some of the time.

And he did smile back; didn't he?

Greta rewinds her memory and sets the scene to motion once again.

Box has clambered onto the monument's marble dais. He walks round it one and a half times and pisses against what he imagines an exploding engine from which skinny arms reach up to cradle his tiny penis.

Box sticks his tongue out and counts the palms he's turned shiny, the fingers he's glossed, the knuckles he's wetted and splashed. He thinks the monument's ugly and should be torn down, which is a big thought for a boy of five, a big thought and a beautiful one.

On the crowded tram Box stares at knees, seeing there are many kinds, each with its own characteristic bumps.

His mother holds his hand.

The tram stops suddenly and three men in long black coats push their way on, brandishing pistols.

A man sneezes and is shot in the brow. The blood from his wound spatters Greta, who screams, and Box finds himself holding her hand instead of the other way round.

He grows a whole six inches taller and stands in front of his mother.

The three men ignore him and get off, dragging the dead man after.

You've not to speak of it, someone whispers in his ear, the ear that Box could swear was his but couldn't be because his ear would be, should be too low; but he has grown rather more than six inches, he realizes, and the world outside is not the world of a five-year-old.

Greta is forced to sit in the bloodied seat.

The weight of people is such that she has no choice, being nearest.

Box remains standing, even though his mother taps her knee, the gesture reflexive.

The tram starts moving and the other knees take on a more hideous, repugnant nature, growling behind stockings and hems and trousers; and all Box wants to do is get off, and run.

At home in bed that night he gets his wish, only what happens in his dreams does not translate to his waking hours and the new day is full of doubts beyond his understanding if not his grasp, which, paradoxically, has awoken inside him as he slept dreaming of trams and bullets and men in long black coats who push their way through life, courting death and passing sentence on sneezers whose sole crime is bad timing or an unfortunate allergy to pistol-grease or the sweat of palms turned shiny not by urine but from the repeated handshakes of statesmen and gold tie executives each time a medal is pinned on them for being good at their job.

They wear whiter than white dress-uniforms and stiff shirts for these parades.

They salute and jerk off.

Box knows intuitively that somewhere a functionary will mark the cost of that bullet down on a sheet of paper, in triplicate, and staple that piece of paper to another, adding a fourth and third, checking the date before placing the sum in his OUT tray from where it will be magicked away...

This will be his job; one man's work that will keep him busy all day, on the straight and narrow, sane.

School is a bore.

The teacher prints on a blackboard, large uniform symbols meaning right and wrong.

Box copies these down on his slate and puzzles at their form, the why and wherefore of their absurd curves.

A piece of chalk strikes him like a bullet and he straightens in his chair, the teacher's gaze direct and accusing.

Daydreaming, me? he sez - no, Miss!

Stay behind after class.

Yes, Miss.

Be quiet...

She threatens him. Her folded arms remind him of infinity and her pursed lips of equal signs.

Box folds his own arms and matches her stare.

And so they remain for several minutes, until a tear swells the teacher's left eye and she gently unfolds and strokes his head and he can tell that she's going away and that he'll never see her again, and that what she is teaching now is not threats but hope.

He doesn't tell his mother.

Greta watches him as always, her gaze intent.

Box spoons his food with unrivalled enthusiasm, his appetite grown with his mental self.

On the wall behind him is a picture of his father, the father he remembers as a pair of receding heels, leather shoes, checked blue socks. The paper surrounding the picture is dirty, stained by his mother's leaning with the palms of her hands against it in order to look as closely as possible at the faded image, its place above the sideboard as fixed and permanent as the sideboard itself, every item of furniture in the small house unmoved since those clothed feet departed. None of it bartered or sold. Only the piano missing, and that stolen.

Sunday comes once more, with it the crowded tram, the malignant knees.

Box stands near the back, well away from the red umbrellas that are the current fashion.

His mother has a green umbrella, which she appears to have forgotten; or maybe she prefers to get her brown hair wet.

Greta with wet hair is funny.

Greta with dry hair is funny, come to think of it.

There is a spiked fence, a railing newly installed about the Monument To The Devolution, a fence without a gate in it.

There are few people out in the rain and the sun is masked, hidden behind a wall of grey cloud hundreds, no, thousands of miles thick.

The sun is trapped, captured, made prisoner like the statue, and it is up to Box to mount a rescue mission.

For this he employs the HELP of a stranger, a man he finds reading a pictorial magazine. The stranger smiles warmly and HELPs Box to climb the spiked fence. Box drops to the other side, out of sight of Greta, and the man hands him the magazine, points to the statue's tallest arm and makes a gesture like the planting of a flag or the fixing of a candle in its holder.

Box returns his smile and dutifully scales the brass limbs, the monument composed of bigger and bigger, longer and longer upthrust fists and fingers, blunt arrows aimed at the captive sun.

The rain has varnished the moulded brass, making it slippery, but Box neither hesitates or stops.

He bites his lip, clambers skyward.

The topmost hand is the size of his skull.

He wedges the magazine between its thumb and forefinger.

Far below, the stranger cheers. Overhead, the sun comes out, dazzling him, wrapping him in fire, and a voice in his ear, his own voice, his own ear, tells him that what is done is done and there's no changing it; that there are those who will try, but in the end their efforts are futile, unworthy, selfish and pointless; that nothing cuts like the truth, and that the truth is not a knife...

For an afternoon, the cheering is triumphant.

Greta worries and searches.

Box climbs down, glad he's rescued the sun.

The stranger vanishes.

Am I stuck?

Box, is that you?

I'm stuck.

Greta finds a stick and levers two of the railings apart, her strength that of motherhood and desperation.

Box squeezes through and hugs her, breathless, knowing that she can change the world too, a glimmer in her eye he hasn't noticed till now.

They hold each other's hand on the tram home.

They eat enough for ten that evening.

During the night, Greta takes the picture down; and in the morning Box flops noisily to the floor where yesterday a plump chair had been.

Chapter 7: THE UNDERTAKERS.

X, Y and Z, as they are known to one another, crouch waiting inside the darkened hedgehog, playing mind games and studying maps and watches.

Their vehicle is parked beside a doorway, the building faceless in the dead of night, outwardly deserted.

But they know different. The doorway is sealed, the unremarkable structure a safe-house for interlopers.

X thumbs a button on a hand-held instrument and grins as the needle swings across the illuminated gauge.

There are subhumans nearby, breathing, alive, for now...

Their activities can no longer be tolerated.

At the designated hour the three exit the hedgehog and walk around the building, careful to avoid the many varied traps that have been rigged to give advance warning of just such a clean-up operation.

They step over trip-wires and negotiate subtle mazes of infrared light.

What catches them out is a more crude device, a sleeping cat whose tail is crushed, whose remaining lives are extinguished by a short burst from Z's nervous carbine.

X and Y glare at Z who shrugs, then judders, killed by a falling typewriter, the keyboard of which removes the back of his head, shearing.

X and Y dive for cover.

Y rolls upright, silent, and charges a likely window, enters the building in a shower of glass and splinters, X close behind, blazing fire.

Several shadowy forms collapse unseen to the dusty floor.

Their enhanced vision picks out a stair and the two clamber upward, unwinding the vertical metres, the spiral, spitting live rounds into blackheads and blackness, eliciting screams and damp thuds as they progressively climb.

The dark is home to flickers of blue and orange light, footfalls and percussive echoes.

In one long room on the fifth floor X and Y discover the remnants of a hastily shred manifesto, the leaflet's print small and angular in the dimness provided by a gibbous moon through cracked panes.

They pause to tread on the subversive literature, further tear it with their rubber soles.

X grunts, turns and staggers toward the door, a wetness in his side centred round thin steel.

Y follows and retrieves the glinting knife. Stepping over the corpse she races up the next flight of steps, darting left and right, firing at anything that moves.

The floors number eleven, after which is a gravelled roof.

Stood on the parapet is a naked man, silhouetted against the silver moon, a shotgun held flat to his chest, its barrel under his chin.

Y lets fly the reddened blade, and misses.

The man's expression, guessed at, assembled among the shade, unnerves her.

Then he pulls the trigger.

On the ground below Luke Scott sees the body topple, a white shape momentarily illuminated, a candle's brief flicker.

The sound of a gunshot reaches him, closely followed by the body, headless and stripped.

He is tempted to look away, reminded of his twin brother, but the dark sanitizes his vision, and he is quick to react when the corpse strikes the pavement mostly whole...

The head lands a split second later with a crack like a bad coconut.

Luke collects his booty and disappears down the street, its gutters strewn with brightly coloured theatre tickets and glossy programmes, some of them years old.

From there a tunnel and the underground...

Below the city a card game and scratched walls, incised glass and concrete, lines meaning faces, lines denoting tally.

A winner; a lucky strike; a bonus!

This consists of half-a-dozen silver rings, jewellry he bets against two film wrapped volumes of poetry, the chances dice, which he predicts correctly.

In a pool of moonlight - in a private corner Luke unwraps his prize and finds the pages blank.

He is not disappointed.

He has a new pencil, one in each glued spine.

He licks a graphite tip and writes.

In a pool of moonlight...

Y sits in the hedgehog and fingers her grazed cheek.

Beyond the vehicle's windows the night is thick.

She takes off her boots and gloves and drives at speed in the direction she's pointed, turning the wheel when necessary, small adjustments to a course that leads nowhere - but away.

In a pool of moonlight, ringed in silver, jewelled in bands of cold and smokeless fire.

In a private corner, scraping sounds on paper, marking words from below and beneath the threshold.

She lights a cigarette and hums distractedly.

The blue-grey fog before her eyes outlines the black interior, its noiseless veneers smooth and crowding.

She collides with a body in the road; doesn't slow.

The edge of dawn picks at her eyes, and she yawns.

Writing it down.

It is not the dawn at all but a fire, the light yellow and garish.

She accelerates toward it.

The flames are alone, alone with Y.

She gets out of the car and stands before them, the carbine hanging from her shoulder, its magazine half empty, nuzzling her hip.

The fire invades her mind.

To Luke each letter is significant, each individual curlicue vital to the pattern, each separate vowel...

Y flicks the hair from her hot face and kneels in front of the crackling blaze as if at an altar.

She leans on the stubby carbine, its barrel under her chin.

The flames spit heat and sparks.

Above the fire the moon floats blithely, clear, shadowless.

She imagines climbing a spiral stair of gases toward that chill heart and knows she's done it once already this night.

One from three, as alive as the fire, as potent, she rises like a coil of steam.

They send fools in place of fighters, she tells herself.

Times are bad.

Slugs are worse.

Worse still: slugs are increasingly daring.

...rich with meaning.

Chapter 8: THE ABSENCE of COLOUR.

Samuel awakes; he rolls over and finds Nancy gone.

He hears a noise in the adjoining room.

He glances at the clock's luminous dial and swings his legs out from beneath the covers.

The noise comes again.

Puzzled, Sam fumbles for the light, but nothing happens: no power.

Nancy's robed figure shimmers in the darkness, a grey shape, its outline given substance - a ghostlike film - via her listless flesh.

Or so he imagines it; the illumination comes from within, is of her, pale and disconsolate as she walks about their cramped apartment, buffing ornaments and straightening cushions, talking, mumbling to herself.

She is sleeping, he realizes.

Should he wake her?

No, watch and see...

The walls are off-white, the ceiling several shades dimmer, the deck of some scuttled battleship.

The carpet bleeds silver threads and the furniture, ill-defined, is near black.

Samuel Bluck stands between bedroom and living.

Nancy folds and refolds his clean shirt, its whiteness unnatural, next to it his tie, his red ...

No!

Red!

My tie is red!

This tie is white!

It can't be, he thinks, it's wrong, there are no white ties, white ties don't exist, they denote no floor, have no place, are not real, and therefore, he cringes, cannot, forcing himself forward, must not, nearer the table and Nancy, sleeping, walking, mumbling Nancy, his wife of nine years, belong TO MYSELF, he finishes, reaching, Nancy grabbing the tie before he can and turning away with an expression of pure hate etched into her corded face, the nose grotesquely large, the mouth stretched open like a fishes, the eyes swollen like peeled eggs!

TO MYSELF!

Sam?

What?

Where did she go?

He shakes his head and stumbles toward the bedroom; the clock, its luminous dial is not to be seen.

But he can hear it ticking.

Something moves above him and he looks up. There are smoky features impressed in the ceiling, grinning like monkeys, rows of milky teeth.

The teeth are pitted, stained.

He raises himself on his toes to get a better view and sees the pits; the stains are numbers, endless lines of numbers, singular and regularly spaced.

He wonders what they mean, what they count, what they stand for, signify; and then the monkeys close their mouths and stick out tongues the hue of concrete and gravestones and their hungry stares become too much for Sam and he clamps his wooden fingers over his own bulging eyes and turns away - sees in his mind the dark kitchen explode, the treasured refrigerator vomit cartons of black milk and cheese, black pig's trotters, ice...

He screams; hears nothing.

But doesn't wake a second time.

This is no nightmare.

Nancy taps him on the shoulder and he starts.

Samuel BIuck, she whispers, WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU WANY HERE?

And she is wearing the white tie, tight round her throat like a hanging rope, the skin translucent, the veins fat with colourless blood.

Who am I?

Speak up, Sam; what are you afraid of?

He can't reply; mustn't.

The sound of his scream suddenly bursts in his skull.

The black eats Nancy, slowly climbs along her limbs, rots, advances like a burn.

Tiny mushrooms sprout in its wake, their pores musty, dancing on the air, bobbing, floating gently below stygian parachutes, settling in Sam's lungs, growing wings and buzzing deep in his gut like a sapient virus; while his limbs hang loose, immobile, his body held upright solely by the viral insects that have invaded his system, adopting his persona to suit their selfish needs.

They operate him.

Samuel Bluck is a machine that calls people Mister.

The black is white.

The white is the state is the corporation.

The black is noise, subhuman silence.

The white is black.

Confusion: the word in Sam's mind reads confusion.

Confusion is no colour, non-colour, as are black and white.

White and black; confuse them and you'll know how Sam feels, Sam and Nance in their confused apartment, the power off.

Alone is the word.

Alone, Samuel mutters, the world is alone; the people, too; a loneliness intrinsic and human, triply so.

So what is a slug?

WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT DO YOU WANT HERE?

A blackhead?

Nancy sighs and unbuttons her robe, the somnambulist, her face empty.

The carpet's silver threads entwine her like vines.

In the frozen seconds she stands eternal, some forest deity here spurning the raiments of man, his cloth not of her, his spirit alien to her own.

Sam takes a step back.

Her body shines.

He peers at his damp flesh. It appears waxen and drab.

Hers projects an aura, a fine mist of dead skin.

He trembles.

She sways.

He retreats further, bumps into the bed and falls onto his elbows and hands.

She weaves the air, mystic patterns, the patterns numerous, tumescent phalluses

A subhuman?

Samuel watches as Nancy disregards each of the countless members, preferring to harvest her own loins, a basket of their orgiastic crop.

The white eats Nancy, slowly climbs along her limbs, rots, advances like a wave.

Mushrooms blossom into frogs, winged creatures whose throats distends and whose heads are fluid.

The phalluses twist together, forming a bridge.

Nancy begins to cross; then pauses, glances down.

Below is a maelstrom. Below is the world made whole, as once it was, in chaos.

He wants to call out to her, but remains quiet, guilty.

She hesitates, a troubled mien, an indecisive aspect, an unsure countenance.

And she falls, is quenched by foamy strata, layered hurt and distrust.

And he knows that he's lost her.

It is painless, yet truthful. He should be grateful, yet the doubts linger.

Next to his white shirt lies his tie, the colour of which he will soon discover...

Red?

Stained or dyed?

White?

Bleached or cleansed?

And what am I?

Which Samuel Bluck shall choke himself come morning?

Which shall make the journey to work, ride the elevator?

More importantly, which shall not?

Nancy wants attention.

Samuel rolls across her; they stick, a junction, a meeting of ways.

He kisses her lightly but feels it's too hot for sex and so clambers out of bed and wanders toward the scrupulous kitchen.

He wonders what her kitchen's like, whether it's as tidy.

He opens the treasured refrigerator and finds chaos inside, a cascade of milk and water ridden by cheese and pig's trotters, the floor's white tiles quickly obliterated by the sludge and its subsequent pooling.

Damn it!

Sam?

Go back to sleep.

You woke me...

The power, they switched the fucking power off!

Don't shout, Sam.

But...

Datum - FEED THE THING!

The thing is you; you are it, the thing; yours is the appetite, usually ...

It's called your stomach.

But don't be fooled by what they teach you in school, what you take for granted, that a stomach is, well, just a stomach. It simply isn't true - a stomach is much more than that, a stomach is: a) an intestinal organ, a dilatation of the alimentary canal, a handy pouch for digesting food.

Okay so far, okay?

b) the raw material for a football or similar recreational. aid.

Can they expand or what?

And, and this is the pertinent elucidation: c) a parasite.

Don't let it know you know.

Or else.

Stomachs are hard things to describe.

When you die your stomach will eat its way out, devouring your corpse like a lava, which indeed it is.

You are its host. If you were to cease feeding it, it would kill you.

Stomachs have it all worked out, you see, in gruesome detail.

You don't essentially need a stomach; that is, you didn't, but stomachs have been around for so long now that it's pretty difficult to imagine life without them.

Just think of culture, what would be missing, foodwise, etc., if man had never had the urge to eat.

He would be different, man, in many ways.

For better or worse? is the question you must ask.

Stomachs ache.

Stomachs are alive; they break the grassy crusts of boneyards late at night, giving rise to myths and horror tales. A whole movie industry owes it being to stomachs.

They grow wings and fly off to the moon to mate.

Now, think about your liver, your pancreas, your heart, lungs and kidneys, your brain and skin...

Think about who you are; or what.

Then say you're lonely.

Say WHO YOU ARE!

Deny it; deny this, that that second cup of coffee you want is not really for YOU but something, some THING else inhabiting your abdomen, sending coded messages to your brain, which, strictly speaking, is not your brain at all, rather a mass of convoluted nervous tissue that for reasons of its own has decided to make its temporary home in your skull.

Like a hermit crab.

Coded?

Quite a set up, isn't it?

The bones now, those you get to keep. Without your parasitic friends/tenants, you'd be skinny and bleached.

The bones and the teeth.

The nails and the hair grow and fall out are or severed...

They know; they escape. The nails and the hair though, are dead. The bones and the teeth are held in thrall while all that is flesh is swallowed, and swallowed again.

Poison?

I suggested it, yes.

PART TWO - comedus modus

Chapter 9: THE STEAMROLLERS.

I'll tell you what happened to Timothy Wall, husband of Greta, father of Box.

He was crushed...

The movement is slight, yet certain, certain as the breeze in his hair.

It runs like a ripple, a ripple of excitement, fear, trepidation and lust.

Hey, Tim, see the man in the green two piece \- he's holding a cudgel?

Loosely; likes its feel, its weight; yeah, I see.

I knew him, back when - back, you know.

The man is staring at me.

Stare back.

Back when?

We were kids.

Timothy looks in on his son. The boy is asleep, or pretending to be.

His wife, young and pretty. Their child, won through his affiliation, something Greta's never understood; but he won't argue, not today.

He leaves, and Box opens his eyes and sees his father's blue checked socks.

Blue for Bank Clerks.

He gets into Ron's car and they drive to the rendezvous, a house in Precinct 4 whose long, curving driveway is cluttered with numerous similar vehicles.

Tim and Ron get out and walk to the front door, ring the bell. A woman lets them in, smiling, saying nothing as she leads them into a large, empty room.

They wait patiently three or four minutes and are joined by others, faces they seldom recognize, Bank Clerks like themselves, here to listen and obey.

There are rules.

There are always rules.

You keep your own and break others', they will be told.

There are others...

Others not affiliated and others whose socks are checked blue; so learn the difference.

Tim sips a glass a white wine and hears of the upcoming movement, of his place in it, in line.

He is scared, but doesn't show it or speak out loud the thoughts, pictures of blood which haunt him.

The room stirs, it throbs with Bank Clerks. Tim is one of them, and loyal. It is his loyalty that has earned him a son, his affiliation that Greta has never understood.

He has not and will not permit his feeling to show; he will not fail.

For Box, he tells himself.

He and Ron and others link arms and sing...

For Greta.

He and Ron avoid each other's gaze.

The air in the room glows blue with cigarette smoke.

There is no time to go home.

Tim realizes this.

Ron shakes a man's hand. Tim another's, a woman's.

In his mind is an appointed hour and place, a department store in the neighbouring precinct.

He finishes his wine, gulping it.

This is neutral territory. The Shop Assistants look on, not taking sides.

The breeze is generated by ceiling fans, the revolving doors.

Tim loses sight of Ron as confusion sets in: the number of Tax Inspectors has been grossly underestimated; two or three cells must've joined forces, and the cudgels are not slight.

As a result his fear finds a tangible form, a physical form, the manifestation a side of himself he'd rather not meet face to face.

A display of cosmetics erupts to his right.

Ahead, struggling for position on an escalator, are four women, feral creatures whose teeth gleam luridly in the artificial light.

He picks up an aerosol can and lays about him, terrified, no enemy acutely visible, only blurred figures.

It is as if he's wrestling a series of ghosts, insubstantial shapes amid the rain of debris; the tumult horrendous, yet strangely invigorating...

He senses the proximity of death, a rawness that causes his eyes to swell, his sight to expand, his speed and strength to multiply.

He brings the aerosol can down on a balding head. The head mimics the cosmetic's counter, its display one of many, hues and colours gone wild on the ground floor, spreading higher as the distal minutes flash by, far away and uncounted.

The Tax Inspectors appear strongest around the confectionary and magazine stands.

The Bank Clerks are spread evenly; disciplined, thinks Tim, not overwhelmed by the superior force but attacking along every flank, probing for weaknesses and gaining, however slowly, the advantage.

The tussle on the elevator grows, a focus of dresses, skirts, howling, the machinery jammed, fingers trapped, perhaps a limb or two scissored.

He elbows aside a pug-faced girl, kicking, stamping on her puny chest, skidding in a residue of perfumes, lipsticks and eyebrow-pencils, and reaches the stationary stair, its metal steps clogged, just as an entire rail of blouses jounces down from above, flattening Bank Clerk and Tax Inspector alike, swathing all in cotton and nylon, floral prints and paisley.

He dodges the rail and clambers over the bodies to the first floor. Missiles fly, china and glass vases, mannequins and coat-hangers, their hooks unbent, sharp as razors as they swish through the warbling air.

A florescent strip explodes, closely followed by a second, and the clinical illumination is dulled, then to strobe dizzily, freezing and unfreezing the gyrating combatants as they charge madly at one another, tearing eyes from sockets, teeth from gums, bruised and ragged as the battle degenerates into a primordial frenzy of murder...

In one instant Timothy Wall stumbles upon a blue-socked Bank Clerk gutting his adversary with a jagged porcelain shard, smearing himself, naked and triumphant, with the man's writhing intestines.

The BC is himself impaled, ripped to shreds as Tim looks on, buried under a pile of clothes, aerosol gripped so tightly the can has buckled, but nonetheless hidden as one of his fellows falls prey to a crack squad of Tax Inspectors.

He cannot hear the screams; there are too many, all laid together, mixed up like sweets in a jar. He could dip his hand in, but not know if what he chooses is a soft centre or a hard, their film wrappings identical.

In the semi-darkness the two sides are indistinguishable, their socks abandoned along with their minds, the department store beginning to resemble a tumbledown landscape of caves and distant volcanoes, rainforest and scrawny pasture, the latter occupied by odd-looking mammals, their meat and fur target for improvised spears and bows, clubs and axes...

The Shop Assistants have either fled or been sucked into the frenzy, posing as referees but in truth unidentifiable, slick with sweat and semen as they gleefully join in the carnage, ostensibly in pursuit of shoplifters, yet in reality switching sides to their own best advantage.

Tim breaks for cover, sniffed out...

He vaults a fallen display cabinet, landing among a phalanx of bewildered shoppers, all of whom duck their heads, wave their scarves.

He bolts for a fire-exit, finds it locked.

He runs in snatches, collides with rails and racks and pillars and hydrants, trips over mutilated corpses, the carpet surrounding them disturbed.

He unleashes a spray of deodorant, blinding a woman, striking her with his free hand.

He is hit in the ribs by a block of imitation marble balustrade, and goes under.

In the dream place, the full darkness, he listens; and as he listens the pictures return, pictures of blood which haunt him, himself a ghost now.

He can still taste white wine.

He can still feet the impact of the imitation marble balustrade, the first floor concrete, hard and unyielding beneath its thin veneer of woven fibres.

He can smell deodorant...

The movement is slight, but he can sense the change.

The department store falls silent, its displays and counters wrecked, reshaped into weapons and barricades.

Slowly, one by one, the shoppers emerge like frightened animals, their voices hushed and birdlike.

The Shop Assistants smile warmly, themselves again, and blue checked socks and green socks with yellow stripes hang like scalps or trophies from their belts of terylene and polyester.

There is no victor.

The police arrive, eventually, to survey the battleground, whistling and smoking as they step gingerly to avoid the worst stains and puddles.

Next come the press-photographers and TV newsmen with their attendant camera teams, sound-recordists and grins and make-up ladies and potential sponsors.

In due course there will be a sale.

And following that, business as usual!

Anyone found alive in here is arrested and charged with a variety of offences, among them double parking and vagrancy. A fleet of ambulances is turned back, services not required, as those that are badly injured have generously agreed to die, thus saving the tax-payer money, cash that can be better used in the linings of toxic waste containers, the manufacture of newsprint and hardboard...

Timothy Wall is off to the Happy Hunting Ground.

For him the pressures of a modern working environment proved too great.

He leaves a wife and child, a job vacancy and a pension, the terms of which are unclear, but seem to involve our Box in some future conspiracy.

Chapter 10: THE DICTIONARIES.

There are a lot of very weird things going on, which is nice, which is not a problem. What is not nice, however, what is a problem, is people's insistence on doing something about it; all these weird things, people among them.

Myself, I blame the people.

They're weird; something should be done about them.

Nice word, weird.

I could do with some weirdness, a pound or two for the book.

Widdershins is another nice word.

Wentletrap, also.

Wen...

Mus Peechy has lent me his dictionary, which is old and out of date, like Mus, so some of the words have changed meaning - meaning changed, they have, that is.

I know that pronouns aren't what they used to be.

Adjectives, too.

Take the word knapsack for example; in Mus's dictionary it means: A BAG OR WALLET OF CANVAS OR LEATHER STRAPPED TO THE BACK AND USED FOR CARRYING FOOD AND PERSONAL BELONGINGS, etc.

Now it's something you put bodies in.

v - mirrors that lie.

Just make it up as you go along, is Mus Peechy's advice.

Yeah? What do you know about it, Mus?

I invented the page.

Really?

Really; and the pen, and the ink, and the numbers.

Numbers?

Page numbers.

Oh - why in this particular order?

He yawns.

His station at the moment is cross-legged in the door, head against the righthand post.

He shrugs.

They have to be in some order, he says.

Why?

Because they'd be chaos; people would get lost, they wouldn't know one chapter from the next!

Are you angry?

Furious.

Why can't the people just start at the front and work their way through in a logical fashion?

Because, you see, that would be too much like life.

You mean starting at the front and working through, day after day, as in life, would confuse people?

Yes; without the HFLP of page numbers...

Calendars.

What?

Calendars are the page numbers of life; a new number every day.

Mus gets up, scratching. The floor makes him itch The itch gives him something to scratch, other than his head, which is raw and peeling.

He has a recognized disease, the name of which eludes me.

Its treatment though is one with which I'm familiar, involving as it does the physical application of cream.

Cream for aches and cream for cuts; cream for dandruff and cream for breakages.

Magical cream!

The mould on the ceiling has grown; soon it will envelope the light fitting and then begin an inexorable descent of the four walls, a slow decorator.

The floor covered the mould will climb the iron legs of my cot and then begin an inexorable descent of my four walls, a slow decorator, a shifter of scenes, the curtain to lift on a new me, a new production, this one starring Richard Burton or Lawrence Olivier or Dame Margo Fontaine or Daffy Duck or Stan Laurel or Ivan Denisovich or Richard the Lionheart or God or Jimmy Trent who used to live in the same building as me and who has been installed in the room across from mine...

He likes it; sez it smells of oranges.

I don't tell him what oranges are these days. Let him find out for himself.

He is tall and angular and has difficulty with stairs.

When his time comes they will take him up to the roof in the elevator.

Lucky devil.

I find myself in a strange bathroom; strange because all the mirrors show something different.

The sinks are funny too, and the toads indescribable.

Joseph and Mary!

One mirror reflects a house.

little scarred sections of brickwork

tiles, facing

chimney askew

door painted green, silver fittings

pocked with rust

number seventeen

windows boarded up

loose slates, choked and

broken drains

gutters that sag under the weight

of neglect

a lonely residence

old and crumbling

without warmth

garage daubed in graffiti

lawn overgrown

railings, sills, plaster rotting

no one lives here

no one but me ...

I am not a house.

I may have rooms, be built of bricks; but the drains are not of me, the windows - I think they're windows, so long since I've seen a window - blank.

If I had windows they would be beautiful. Things would be happening behind them.

If I had drains...

Well now, will you look at that, a person just came out the door.

Hello, lovely weather we're having. I'm popping off to the shops for some body-bags and ammunition - you know the kind of thing.

Yes, I agree; you might get some relish while you're there, okay?

The toads start up a chorus.

Mary and Joseph!

My arm is grabbed, my insubstantial arm, and I am dragged away down a long, white painted corridor.

The paint shines.

I pass a man on a trolley and wave.

He has a parrot on his shoulder, a parrot reduced.

Take a bite out of that!

The orderly pushing him winks at me and shouts, quietening a raucous din that bubbles through a closed door...

The orderly pushing him grimaces.

The orderly pushing him frowns at the trolley's squeaking wheels.

The raucous din is laughter and the door opened; none of it true or factual or even relevant, for I have seen it all in a mirror and it is the wrong way round.

The man on the trolley might be me or Jimmy Trent or God or Lionheart the Richard...

Give this man some cream.

Yes, sarge, right away, sarge, and may I say your mustache is positively gleaming!

Next time it's the roof for you, sonny.

The roof?

Sonny? A cage can take years off a mouse.

My fur will fall out and I'll turn pink and shrilled.

How's that?

I said my fur will fall out and I'll turn pink and shrilled.

Shrilled? queries Mus Peechy.

Ah, where's the dictionary?

I traded it in.

What for?

A different one.

Let's see...

Shrilled won't be in; shrilled is banned; shrilled means ASS BACKWARDS or APPROXIMATELY EMPTY, I think.

Hmm.

vi - indecency.

Who can disguise a smile?

When she talks her whole face moves; not just bits at a time, but all at once...

It's fantastic!

If only she'd stayed a while longer we could have become friends and I'd've told her everything.

Did I tell you about the murder?

I did.

Did I tell you about the victim?

Well, her name was Cynthia Monrose and the insurance salesman killed her.

She was often to be seen shovelling things in the kitchen; was short and cute and had several teeth missing, due, I suppose, to a poor diet or a punch in the mouth or whatever. Anyway, it was Cynthia's job to feed the lichen which in turn fed us and of course the blue flamingoes that run willy-nilly along the smooth walls and peck holes in the tiles in which colonies of tiny insects make their homes.

It was her job, too, apparently, to debug the system...

Her broom was stunning.

Her wash-bucket sloshed liquid and foam. It sizzled and crackled.

Her happy smile was life itself and her lips maize pudding!

Death to her was sharp and knife shaped.

Death to her was surprising if not fortuitous.

Death to her was prearranged.

Death to her was not unbecoming.

In my opinion, the giggling trowel-pusher from across the tracks made a bad deal.

In my opinion the flamingoes are that shade of blue commonly known as powder.

Mus Peechy would not agree, but what does he know about flamingoes?

The head behind my face has no value; the mind it contains, however, is priceless...

See if I care.

Take a dead female of doubtful virtue and tie her to a rock by the seashore and wait for a monster. Any monster will do, just so long as it can swim, which is flying under water. Any rock, any seashore - but make sure the rope is woven of carpet fibre.

This last detail is important, it has to do with shrouds and resurrection, the point of the exercise being: the dead female is made living and virginal and you can get a refund.

Some evenings we hold races.

One night I won a young boy from down the hall; his name was Turbot, he said, and he lived below the waves, rising on occasion to squint at the sun and bask in the cool shadows.

I stroked his fins and he tickled me.

It was the evening the entire corridor flooded. Of course my Turbot was never seen again.

The following day I was sad for minutes; then I broke something, possibly a door, and felt much better.

In the dash they dart, cheating, tails dangling like mobile phones, fingers and toes splayed like illegal cigarillos.

They are painted and slavering.

They fight.

It isn't broken up; bets are laid and knapsacks aired.

I HELP load the dice.

I recall smiling, sweeping Cynthia and remark that the track will never be the same, never as fast, never as dangerous.

They fight with scissors, which is bad form.

I load the dice, arranging the spots as I'm instructed.

One of the male nurses is raped - nobody knows by whom.

He is a spy, someone says, an infiltrator, an outsider whose eyes are on wrong.

Bang! that man is shot.

Having to line up for chow is new; I never thought I'd see the day when we had to line up for chow.

What you talkin' about?

Who is that?

Hey, what's your name?

Hold it straight; I can't load it if you don't hold it fucking straight!

See...

Back of the line ya gan.

Back of the line, behind the sticky tendrils of lichen that spew from the steaming hatch, back of the backs that line up for chow, behind the doors that swing and thump airily, back of the queue.

I shall complain...

Your name's Peechy, right?

No sarge.

Mus Peechy?

No sarge.

Mus Peechy the Alligator?

No sarge, you'll find the Alligator somewhere else, somewhere soggy.

Wrong!

Frightened, I turn invisible.

He blinks at my reptilian - or supposed reptilian - camouflage.

I am not who he thinks I am not.

I am not who he thinks I am.

I am not who he thinks.

I am not.

I am.

I'm not Mus and Mus isn't me.

He swears; sez, FUCKING HELL AND TIGERS, FUCKING GOATS, FUCKING IN HERE!

I don't pretend to understand, because I'm invisible.

This is indecency, being not seen; it's considered rude, has its slot in the dictionary, a new edition just out this week, just now arrived and shiny...

vii - the latest inventions.

The slugs will win...

What's the difference between a fork and a cigarette?

Slugs don't smoke cigarettes. They don't smoke forks either, but that's besides that point.

My fork is blunt and has a built-in compass so I can more easily find my way round the wards; which is okay, but I think it would be simpler if they stopped moving the walls.

You get up in the afternoon and step into the hall and WHAM, you're in a closet, or KAPOW, you're staring at somebody's lunch or breakfast, the mess of it nauseating as it creeps toward your feet, looking like a dream you had.

The slugs will be triumphant, which is an elephant in triplicate; crazy...

Who can blame the mammal?

Who puts these animals together?

Not God, not Jimmy Trent, not Ivan Denisovich.

Then who?

The anonymous author?

The reptile?

Are you pointing the finger?

Watch this space...

Did you see it move?

Clever, uh?

I need a machine to do the writing for me, one with some imagination, and buttons; it's gotta have buttons, buttons are a must; and flashing lights; and sound.

It will number the pages and arrange the pictures.

It will work for nothing, as I do, and have as many days off as it damn well pleases.

It will moan out loud and scream occasionally.

It will function in a disorganized way, making mistakes, making cups of coffee, making vain attempts at punctuation.

It will be able to read and love, read and hate, read and drum its fingers and rotate.

It will despair.

It will start again.

It will say things like: oh, shit!

And it will gaze dreamily out the window...

There I go with windows again!

Mus Peechy will sit on its bed and masturbate.

Mus Peechy will sit on its floor and yawn.

Mus Peechy will. grow flowers in his ears.

Mus Peechy will take a look and shake his head, blossoming, and it will cough and sneeze, grow faint.

There is such a machine.

There is such a thing as a tree that soaks up the sun and rain and turns green.

There is a fence which can be installed at low cost.

There is a cloud, one of many.

And there is a me. I have a patent number attached to my left ear. If you wanted you could burgle the patent office and steal my file and find out what I'm supposed to do.

And tell me; it would be a big help to know, my programming would begin to make sense and I could get on with things, things like this story, this book, which is ill and in need of the physical application of cream.

Any kind will do; it's all the same.

Perhaps you'd like to invent a cream with a difference, the difference being its smell or texture or colour, the cream of creams being cream; or maybe it'll not work.

Who knows?

The metal tag just came off in my hand. I can read the number, give you a clue, tell you which filing cabinet to pilfer, rummage through; but I won't, can't. You're not real, and not real people are very definitely weird.

There I go with weird again:

Catch...

Nah, you missed it; but do not worry as the next space will be along in a minute.

Which is sooner than you think.

Do you think?

Can you, I mean, would you mind?

Guess what, Mus, I just lost another reader.

If you nail a piece of celery to an apple and attach the apple to a moving vehicle the two items will shortly fall apart. If you use FABSTICK however, your apple and celery will stay together and the moving vehicle will be the one to disintegrate at speed.

Remember: FABSTICK gets it done!

FABSTICK adheres!

FABSTICK sticks, fabulously!

FABSTICK is user friendly.

FABSTICK, yeah!

Clue it with our revolutionary new car dismantler...

Available at all leading scrapyards and military bases.

Non-refundable, special offer, last week only, FABSTICK, the ultimate in do-it-yourself yourself-it-do's.

No, sez Mus; that's not what I meant, not what I had in mind, not what I envisaged.

No? I reply, wriggling loose of my towel and tiptoeing over to the tile which is beckoning.

It's too...

Square, cornered, white?

You cannot invent...

Words, things, items, people?

Circumstances.

I write this down with a puzzled expression.

I glance up but he's gone, vanished from my uncircumstantial presence.

Maybe it's the tile, I think; the tile whose minute arms and legs have caused him to be unpleasant.

Or maybe it's me; maybe I've upset him with my digressions; maybe...

He'd like me to stick with the facts. Fact is, I don't know any - what do they look like? - am relying on Mus. He is my voice and I've cluttered him. He is my conscience and I've appalled him. He is my muse.

But he's also a liar.

Aren't we all?

White or black, there's no real difference, difference a word I seem to be writing a lot, if differently, different, like.

Too much?

Probably.

Who cares?

A question I've asked before, a question I'll ask again.

Who cares?

I'm going to sleep.

viii - dreams and daydreams.

Outside the sun is shining, its brightness compelling, its soft luminescence tranquil to the mind, through the eye.

It is alien and brilliant and sparkling with life.

Creatures with several legs walk in it, gossiping and fanning themselves with outsized leaves. Some of them spread trails of glittering slime which is collected by industrious workers and made into souvenirs, glass and jewellery and plates.

It is a wonderful vision.

It is whole and miraculous.

It is dreamt; but the eyes on stalks are unaware; they meander, oblivious of their imagined state, uncaring, it appears, of only being spectres...

The dreamer is equally dismissive.

He is enjoying the parade, the transient freedom, the feel of the moss and air beneath his feet. He is quiet and rested, grinning at the carved moon as it climbs from its hiding place overhead.

A pearl, he thinks, asleep.

A cheese whose hardness, whose greenness and stench would dissuade all but the most determined adventurer.

Only the Devil himself, perhaps, would brave such conditions as can be expected to be met in pursuit of the silver messenger's downfall.

But that's another story, one with cats in it.

Situations overlap in dreams, as I'm sure you know.

It can't be helped.

Nevertheless, the moon rises, the creatures wander, the sun glides, dips, sinks behind the horizon which is briefly mottled red and gold and traced in like-coloured fire, flames that linger in the memory like holiday beaches or cooling flesh, relaxing...

And the pictures roll by.

Everything happens, from nowhere to nowhere. The visions are timeless, imperfect, often crude, of poor quality and production, a series of disjointed frames that somehow manage to flow and meld and synchronize.

They fill your head with confusion; yet deep down, below consciousness, that confusion is understood.

The images are translated.

The story retold and deciphered.

The old and new meshed and focused, ready for the next show, a triple-feature of today and tomorrow and yesterday and all the bits you missed while sleeping, irreplaceable segments, historical asides, futuristic flashes, contemporary scenes and narrations on the weather, all of which are beautiful.

Then, strolling, awake, you are taken by surprise.

The world melts around you and you find yourself in a strange place. Its sky is green, tinged with purple. Its clouds are the keels of giant fishing boats, the nets of them stretching like webbed lightning across the gaseous vault.

They snare trees and bushes, uprooting entire forests as they indiscriminately trawl.

You draw a knife and chase after, regardless of your own safety, risking capture and certain death in an attempt to sever these choking lines, thus releasing whole tracts of woodland, acres of innocent meadow and estuary.

Sometimes you are successful; sometimes you even manage to lure a cloudy vessel onto submerged rocks, wrecking it, drowning its crew.

But this is not your wish; the crews are ignorant of the damage they cause. Only there is no other solution, and so the gaunt sailors die in pairs and by the boatful, the woodland is less diminished, the world that melts around you slowed in its destruction, the fleet above all but unchanged.

And you think of tomorrow, of what tomorrow may bring, and whether it will be an end or just another beginning.

Aslumber once more and the planets turn round the stars.

The bands of light and dark are indistinguishable.

We run - in pursuit of us is a fiend.

It has two legs and two arms and two eyes and an opening and closing mouth.

It lurks drunkenly, ever nearer, no matter how fast we run.

We trip and fall - upon us now is a waster.

It has two legs and two arms and two eyes and a mouth that no longer shuts but remains open permanently, grotesque in its dimensions, sickening to gaze into, a tongue therein that seethes with frustrated hunger.

We get up and fight - chasing us is a reflection, one we have engendered through vanity.

We stumble - it devours us.

We travel to another realm and start over.

We wake up sweating, peeling invisible layers of skin from our damp brows, and say to ourselves that it's only a dream, a dream can't hurt us.

And when next we lie aslumber we discover how wrong we have been...

Who cares?

I'm going to wake.

I've got this cream; you rub it on your eyes and it stings, keeps you attentive, alive, irritable and bored.

You don't want to take risks, do you?

You sit there wondering at the things you've told yourself that have yet to come true; the promises you made and the grim determination you experienced, the obvious deceits. But none of it matters.

You're safe.

You have: what?

No time left.

No place to go.

No one to turn to.

No hope.

Nothing a few drinks won't handle; nothing something out of which you get a buzz.

The planets stop.

The stars wink out.

And it's morning, afternoon, evening, night ...

ix - binoculars.

Sorry, Mus.

Identity, he says, ought to be a major theme of the book; perception, too.

Interpretation, I add; the shapes people adopt, the postures, their irrationality, self-destructiveness, courage, lack of courage, the lengths they'll go to and the cries they'll utter and the protests they'll make and the words they'll follow as if their lives depended on it, the codes and doctrines and beliefs.

Now you're thinking!

The narrative should zoom in on these, pick them out, plot the curves they make.

Yes.

I can see a white flag in the distance; it is being hoisted on a long pole and wafted. The pole's other end is connected to a limb. The limb is connected to a torso, the torso to a pair of legs with a foot on the end of each, a foot that wears a boot that treads the pavement and stairs and spends its off duty hours in a locker.

Is polished and worn.

Is flexible and tough and water-resistant, fire-proof and scuffed.

I can see all this and more.

Bricks and concrete are no guard against my vision.

I have x-ray eyes, tri-focal glasses, green, heavy, ribbed and rubberized.

I can see a courting couple; they think they're hidden behind curtains and doors, confident of their privacy as they kiss and undress, faces gleaming with pleasure, hands sliding, cocks and cunts well oiled, greased, feeding like straw animals, snouts in the trough of one another's loins.

I can see a corporate director, a high-flyer. He is sitting upright at his desk of marble, playing with a stack of cards. He makes two even piles and then shuffles.

A woman enters his office, a man closely follows; none of them appear healthy.

The room is dim and secretive, lavish in its furnishing yet somehow drab, as if the King Louis and Queen Anne, the Ming and Picasso are all out to lunch and so absently inanimate.

I can see a hollow tree, an ancient oak surrounded by broken, ruptured asphalt and buckled railings.

Inside squats a figure adjusting a rollerskate, a stub of pencil in its mouth. The figure is happy, perhaps singing quietly, although its flaccid belly is empty.

A sound alerts the figure and it tenses, disappears, reappears some distance off, scurrying like a rodent through the coarse grass, under a sky low and threatening.

The nose twitches.

The eyes roam.

The wheels gyrate wildly.

And the sound comes again.

It is a lame dog, a pathetic mutt crawling dizzily over the assembled rubble, its sniffing like that of a child locked in a cupboard, concentrating its waning sight on a last ray of sunshine.

I see it tremble and expire, its final breath heavy with the odour of poison.

The figure crouches over it momentarily; and then, sure of its death, knowing of its killer, begins to pile rocks about the beast's sorry carcass, its ragged, exhausted corpse, raising a cairn to its whiskers.

I can see Mus Peechy was right ...

Chapter 11: THE WHALERS of FORGOTTEN DEEPS.

They venture inside his mind via hypnosis. It is a treacherous undertaking, an inhospitable environment littered with the partly chewed and dismantled ideals of his childhood and youth, the many hollow casts of his adult neuroses...

They risk their sanity in search of his.

It has been abducted, kidnapped by an illusive bogey.

He sings:

baby says she's got my best

interests at heart

she wants to put me safe

behind bars

baby says she's concerned

for my health

but I know she's just after

my wealth -

don't call me manic-depressive

paranoid or schitz

I ain't no psychotic and

I ain't prone to fits

what is catatonia?

and who the Hell is she

to tell me that I'm crazy

when I'm sane

that's plain to see...

He shuts up.

They jab him and he lies vulnerable on his bed, exposed to meticulous fingers and eyes, myriad tubes and liquids, spangled lights.

They raise their sails and stow their oars; regard, with uplifted spirits, the cerebral wind that howls and fans and sprinkles.

On a beach in a cove they sight their goal.

It has climbed from the sea and melted into the land.

It is the land.

Like cartoon characters they pace across its gigantic head, making for the distant blow hole, backs bent under the weight of - in reality - microscopic harpoons, chemical needles with which to immobilize and entrap their prey.

But the bogey is wily. It hugs its own contours. It quivers and shakes, unbalancing them.

It sings:

don't call me manic-depressive

paranoid or schitz

It shuts up.

Literally: the blow hole is sealed, the gigantic head dips below the waves, the waves of divisible pasts, taking them with it.

Those that can swim, do so.

They fly under water...

Orderlies Jurgen, Jerzy and Joseph watch with interest. A quirk of fate has allowed their self this opportunity, this insight into the workings of the corporation, this chance to witness at first hand the dissolution of The Head Of State, a balding fat man they had no idea existed.

Perhaps he doesn't; perhaps he never did; in which case the fat man is an imposter and should be dealt with in the appropriate manner.

Accordingly, they do nothing.

The specialists stand frozen at the bedside, eyes squeezed shut.

The curtains are drawn, the lights dimmed, the TV unplugged.

It is a solemn, sad occasion.

The end is near, the air whispers, the air Joseph breathes, Jerzy swallows, Jurgen holds...

Maybe an assassin will break down the door.

Maybe the fat man will wake up and tell jokes.

Maybe the male nurse leaning on the encephalogram, polishing its metal casing, will get bored and start filing his nails.

Anything is possible.

The bogey is like a mammoth slug, an incubus.

Its nightmarish form slithers subaqually, balancing bubbles on its nose, waving its fins and tail.

They follow it with the HFLP of robot cameras and specially designed sonic devices.

It comes up for a breather, impossibly large, impossibly small, outgrowing its skin at regular intervals spaced randomly - like a car accident, a plane crash, a train derailment, the iron hard carcasses of itself mangled and useless, damaged like the brain in which it wallows, thwarting their best efforts.

They have tried to understand it, but its language is not theirs; it speaks a tongue of chaos, vowels of anarchy, diphthongs of paradox, consonants of entropy.

They can only hope to kill it, eradicate its nuisance and redeem their chief from the thrall of its confusing menace.

After all, they need him.

A regrettable situation, they say privately, one with which we must cope, and learn from the experience...

I ain't no psychotic and

I ain't prone to fits

Once more on the beach they unearth a surprising array of fossils, among them trilobites and leaf fronds, the latter's blades clustered in groups in four like the tines of forks, the former's three-lobed bodies reminiscent of the angry lineaments of former Heads Of State.

They pause to examine the find, less shocked than perhaps they ought to be at the evidence of guilt and betrayal, the messages of unlawful killing so obvious in the assorted faces.

They shrug.

what is catatonia?

The male nurse twiddles a knob. He glances at the specialists and flicks a switch.

and who the Hell is she

They loop their arms round each other's shoulders and hold an impromptu meeting, discuss strategy and possible courses of action, compromise, a coup de grace...

Maybe.

They inform themselves of the risks, the rewards, but decide against spontaneity.

The political quagmire is such, they reason, that someone must be available to take the fall.

Certainly.

And who better?

to tell me that I'm crazy

when I'm sane

that's plain to see...

\- jota

The orderlies, the male nurse become uncomfortable, irritable, and sick.

Chapter 12: BIG DUMB FISH.

Okay, here sits Samuel Bluck in a chair too small. for him, a child's chair, one of thirteen in an exotically furnished passage of the thirteenth - lucky, lucky - floor.

He is speechless.

Speech is not required.

He is alone, was escorted and told to wait; and wait he does, has, will, Samuel Bluck...

He's stopped shaking; stares at his hands as they lie flat and alien on his thighs, middle fingers in line with his trouser seams.

His hands are white. He won't bite his nails, is being watched, he's sure, by more than fish eyes.

They don't blink, he observes, the fish, the hundreds of fish in their tanks against the wall.

They just swim methodically, unnervingly; and watch.

Why me?

Why am I here?

A fish - a big dumb fish, rising each morning to the lure of the dawn, the necessity of work, the distant siren-call of promotion.

Samuel fucking Bluck!

I hate you, Nancy. I hate you and I hate the corporation and I hate the state. All three of you I hate!

The thirteenth floor is too narrow and low. You are squashed like an insect, and they make you, make you wait.

There is no choice.

Who needs this?

Why don't I just walk out?

And go where?

Not home; not possible.

Then where?

Precinct 9?

Slugdom?

Oh, Christ...

Lucky?

He can smell burning.

There are no visible doors, no obvious windows or alternative exits; even the elevator has disappeared from view, lost round a subtle, devious corner.

There are only fish-tanks and chairs, the latter made of wood, the former's glass outlined in streaks of glue.

The fish manoeuvre like projected lights.

Then, suddenly, they speed up, enter a frenetic phase, chasing mechanically delivered food and crashing like deranged birds against the toughened glass.

He can hear them thump, imagine the entire transparent wall bursting, flooding the passage, washing him down some hidden pipe, dumping him in sewer or street.

The vision terrifies him; yet, the picture of such chaos appeals to a more recent, manifested guilt, that incarnation of himself which appears determined to transform his life from one of average conformity into another of ravening lust, obscene demonstration and bloodthirsty OPPOSTTION!

The burning smell has increased.

The only detectable door is inside his head, and it stands ajar.

Dare he enter?

If he does, there's no turning back.

So?

Maybe they made my mind up for me.

Maybe they already know and are keeping me here waiting while they decide how best to dispose of me.

Maybe I died...

Maybe. Certainly I was never alive.

But can I be born?

Yes, I can take hold of the strings and break them, unbind myself; it is within my grasp...

I had only to see it and now I have, at last, the courage.

So act, Sammy, do your damndest.

Okay.

The fish will take to the land and conquer. They will-grow legs and develop lungs and march upon the citadels. They will sweep all before them and they will avenge the rain.

So says Samuel Bluck, blackhead, subhuman, slug.

So says I and me and myself.

Watch out!

So says the book; and it's beautiful...

Anarchy!

In the dark rooms they scream the dark word. All the lights wink, explode.

The gold ties run in circles and slaver, grasping at whatever they can, none of which is truth, all of which is beyond them.

It is the end of the world and they are HELPless.

Watch out!

Under the tables, under the ceiling, under the sky; the fear is everywhere and growing like a blob, some fifty's sci-fi pic monster.

Aaaaaaaaarrrggglihh!

The under people are rising, the under people are coming, the under people are reaching past the bait, the stick. They wish to throttle the over men, make them dead and history and eat them and excrete them.

No pain?

Are you kidding?

It is a chain-reaction.

Samuel Bluck rises from his too small chair. He picks it up by two wooden legs and, smiling, accelerates the furnishing along a curve, liberating the once active now drifting fish from their gaudy aquarium - the water's torrent a spuming gush, the pieces of jagged glass exotic snow.

Big and dumb, he is swamped and carried away, laughing like a drunken tyke and pummelling his chest, unravelling his red tie and casting it about him, flailing the now exposed doors, the petrified faces behind them.

The water foams and multiplies. It swells as the passage shrinks.

Desks become reeling boats and many a captain of industry is drowned by this new tide, this fresh ocean, unchartered and compelling, this liberating force.

The water is possessed of an illumination all its own. It glows like summer, full of reflections, a sea of lives...

And Sam's the man.

And Sammy rolls and geysers and shrieks insanely until his lungs fill.

Then he gargles.

The tide comes in, sluggishly.

Sorry, but Samuel Bluck couldn't wait.

Goodbye...

Everybody's trying on fins for size.

Inflatable blossoms grow fat on exhaled air and float magnificently before bursting.

So it's tails or nothing, okay?

And the slugs come out of the closet.

And the high-flyers are trapped in the nets of their own making, cut down by silent helicopters and dismantled, taken apart by opportunist dreams and resurgent powers, gods who walk the land beneath the homelike waves from whence they were banished, exiled, beaten and imprisoned.

And they're annoyed.

And they can swim, fly under water like never before.

And they breathe with efficiency, talk in bubbles.

And they can fight.

And it's evening, then morning.

And it's their day...

So watch out, says the book, adding: for surprises.

Chapter 13: POMONA.

WE THE SUBHUMANS DO DECLARE OUR RIGHTEOUS SELVES AS LEGAL AND

LEGITIMATE AND LIVING! they bellow from cars and buildings and rooftops and pavements and throats and mouths.

WE ARE THE SLUGS AND THE BLACKHEADS AND THIS IS OUR FINEST HOUR! they shout with blue plastic bags on there heads; worn as crowns, the symbols of a true freedom.

Greta is searching for Box in the crowd. He set off at a run, openly enthused, stretched like a spring, elastic in his young limbs, elastic and fire...

Greta is worried despite herself, despite the carnival going on all round her, for everywhere she looks she sees people laughing and dancing, wearing grins and smiles, some drinking, others fornicating in the road.

Life, it seems, has become a boisterous street-party.

Someone tries lifting Greta's skirt.

She scowls at the offender and elbows her way into the throng, parting revellers, all of whom appear, if not surprised, then utterly bewildered.

It is a mass eruption, an unconscious outpouring of relief, despair and insanity.

She's convinced of an ulterior motive; but the broad daylight shows up no police, no state troops.

Wha? she thinks.

Box, Box, Box, where are you?

Box, what has happened?

What is going on, Box?

The world has gone mad!

Something in the water?

The clear people are tinged with lunacy!

Perhaps the very air has been polluted - and so many, many slugs...

I'm with them, she realizes, a deviant who in the eyes of the law has no rights and should turn herself in.

Into what?

I feel perfectly normal

I have a child running loose and who knows what that child may be getting up to; but the celebration is definitely fun.

Box and the knees jive. Box and the knees wink at each other, spin and levitate.

Box and the knees sprout wings and fly; and Box and the knees see things differently; that is, not the same.

High above the city they go their separate ways, the knees to hinge thighs and calves, Box to glide over the tallest buildings and soar like an eagle through the gulches and canyons of his concrete home, the place, deformed and irregular, that unwinds below as if a giant map he was holding had suddenly come alive.

It all looks so strange...

The people appear unimportant on the scale of skyscrapers, manmade mountains with which Box rubs shoulders.

He is a bird now, and as a bird he wings his spiral path groundward, dipping and rising as the terrain demands, seeing the army and the army's blue plastic heads.

His metamorphosis complete Box lands on a flag-pole.

The pole sticks out from a building directly above the doors. Its flag has been burned and hangs in blackened shreds and a white sheet decorated with the goddess has taken its place, flung over the pole's end like a wedding shroud.

The goddess moves in the breeze, the exhalations of women and men.

Her name is Pomona; she is the goddess of fruit trees.

Her ripened harvest seethes, a human tide. Her branches are far reaching and secure, her roots deep. Although plentiful, the fruit newly gathered cannot last, will turn sour if not quickly devoured, can only be kept under the right conditions, and in the present turmoil few if any of these conditions can he applied.

It is irony and no less that in victory the recently oppressed will adopt many of the stratagems and wiles of their onetime oppressors.

So Box is fortunate to be a bird. His new status holds no such traps. His freedom shall not be reversed, will not be forced down his throat.

Greta is searching for Box in the crowd.

As time passes the blueheads grow restless and surly, their shape formless as yet and their manners increasingly puerile. The beast, the throng not knowing, not being told which direction to take attempts more than one, several conflicting, and the inevitable result is that of a at first good-natured riot.

Open the windows, they cry, open the windows and breathe the cleansed air!

The people are bored...

Open the bottles, they sing, open the bottles and drink the enlightened age!

The people are anxious...

Open the secret files, they demand, open the secret files and burn the transcripts and tapes!

And who can blame them, fault them even?

Incinerate the past; destroy the old order!

It is as it should be...

Then the lynchings begin.

Box alights next on a tree limb from which he observes the looting and destruction, the emerging violence and growing fear of reprisal.

A thousand, ten thousand minds wonder if the cameras are rolling.

A thousand, ten thousand minds construct various scenarios on the theme of death - theirs.

Pain drives them to greater extremes. Their fury becomes unchecked. They have crossed the line, the invisible point at which there's no turning back.

They wallow; they swell with desire and they tunnel their vision, narrow their goals, blinker themselves, refuse to look either left or right, upon the mounting decay...

It is glorious!

It is profound and it is total!

We give everything, of and from ourselves...

And the lynchings increase.

On every street corner the crowd heaves, pulsates with anticipation, cheers as the rope, the belt, the cable \- people are nothing if not resourceful - the knotted tie grows taut.

Petroleum is thrown and matches sparked.

The hanged quiver in coats of flame and the raw day is made that much brighter.

But the throng stands too close and is singed.

Box flies off, horrified; he knows the people to be their own best enemies.

The state is sitting, crouching, hiding, gorging itself on their stupidity.

The spontaneity of this uprising, its source a mystery, will, they feel sure, peter out. The beast to slink back to its cage, the victory stamped on, unless the slugs, the true slugs, the genuine sufferers, the unseen and unheard and unknown reveal themselves and take control, harness the tide, its power and wildness, steer it toward a manageable, realistic end.

Give the whole a purpose; and then feed it, the beast, else it turn on them, wrecking all that has been wrecked and remaking nothing but the corporation's mandate for dominance and fiscal rule...

Plus retribution.

Greta is searching for Box in the crowd.

A little bird settles on her shoulder and whispers things that reassure; pipes a melody.

And she at least can be happy.

Chapter 14: ONTO THE NEXT BUILDING and OTHER STORIES.

Colonel Peacemake, alas...

3 - the war party.

As the dust settles, in the wake of the explosion, the level of noise diminishes to a point where shouted orders can be heard, if not always correctly interpreted.

The state troops at the colonel's behest charge the doors - some on them yet standing, a flurry of weapon's discharges and panic...

He slaps his face; he slaps the face nearest him in a display of useless antagonism.

He kicks ass and berates and shoots one soldier who is already dead and so refuses to obey the colonel's misheard commands.

War is ever such.

War, on this occasion, is a personal thing, waged against an impersonal foe, an enemy whose many faces are hard to see and harder still to slap.

Them fucking slugs! he tells himself.

Them fucking slugs is everywhere!

Why, some of these shithead troops are probably subhuman on the inside.

The colonel will have every opportunity to find out: insides will be spread out like pizza topping.

FUCK 'EM, BOYS!

The colonel squirts in his pants...

In a lift-shaft flames dance.

Beside the open doors is nailed a neat row of gold ties.

What floor is this?

Does it matter?

Their are bloody footprints on the tiles, as if a horde of red-painted rats had raced past, hammers in claws.

The lights go out.

Somewhere a soldier screams and vanishes.

There is a loud splash, the kind a fat diver makes when he inadvertently belly-flops.

Colonel Peacemake waves his men on down the corridor past a ruptured fire-extinguisher, its white foam solidified, smelling of apples and oranges.

A lanky trooper thinks: Huh?

The wall at the end of the corridor is missing, replaced by a hole, a drop, some flaking insulation and plaster.

The colonel waves his men on through.

They think he's crazy.

He indicates the bridge which none of them, being subhuman, can see.

They tremble, but such is their faith that they tread the air like messianic kites, and proceed across to the next building mostly intact.

The ones that fall, that perish, have failed his test.

The ones that float, that survive, are believers and will do anything he asks.

FUCK ME, BOYS!

The troops squirt in their pants...

Gunfire joins in the laughter, a catchy sound with no true beat.

It's a machinegun chorus.

Their laughter is heard behind closed doors, which the bullets soon open, and another victim of the struggle goes down on the unwritten list.

The colonel taps his foot; he likes this number.

He orders his soldiers onto the floor where they annihilate.

There's no worthy competition.

A boy dies in his arms. He kisses him and steals his wallet and dumps the coward out a window, its glass splintered, its aluminium frame warped and green.

At times like this, in these crises, admittedly rare, this the first, Colonel Peacemake likes to think of himself as the rightful delegate of the state.

He owns shares in the corporation; indeed, they pay him, so it is only logical that he should step into the breach, as it were, and unleash some order.

Perhaps he'll run for directorship when this is all over; or perhaps not.

For the present he is content to pull his trigger, get on with the job, be a man...

Who's he killing?

Does it matter?

There are bloody footprints on the tiles, a trail he follows, waving his troops before him, ascending stairs and descending stairs in pursuit of the vile and subversive, the ungrateful and loathsome, the potential dead.

2 - the unknown soldier.

Targeted from above and below he tries hiding in a broom cupboard until the assault passes.

There is crud between his cheeks.

There are no medals on his chest and he has turned his uniform inside out in a vain effort at concealment from the omnipresent eyes of his colonel who likes his arse and will be annoyed he's missing and maybe even come after him.

He holds his balls in one hand, frightened he'll lose them, because that's what happens to deserters in this progressive age - more than pensions are severed.

He gulps and feels around, presses a warm thigh.

He knows it's a thigh by its texture and shape, by the fact it has a twin, a neighbour, dividing them a cunt.

He loses his fingers and then his mind.

But not his balls...

This is LIFE, a soldier's LIFE!

Forget the fighting, forget the enemy; plumb for the moist spoils!

Wait a minute, is that a knife she's got?

You greasy bastard, thinks Greta, gutting; you skinny prick; I only hope your uniform fits...

And it does; she's tall.

She leaves red footprints along the dim corridor, a trail leading to the outside world.

1 - reefs.

Just below the surface figures move, planting mines, out-moded devices that go up in puffs of coloured smoke whenever a person steps on them.

Just above the surface rat-men scurry, garnering limbs and holding handkerchiefs over their grimacing faces.

None of them like the day...

A hedgehog zooms by, dragging whirls of blue and green fog behind it, the vehicle's black finish besmirched with organs and blood and burnt skin.

Y is driving.

The car in which she's snuggled runs on liquid hydrogen.

It makes an adequate bulldozer, an inadequate caravan.

Y is in a state of confusion. Of all the obstacles in her path the only ones she must avoid are those of her own making, the guilts and uncertainties of a lifetime spent gunning down blackheads in whichever way, shape or form.

A wealth of experience is to be found in her troubled mind; none of it relevant, its criteria subverted under the present chaotic regime, the climate of entropic forces which has upset her, made her just another swimmer in this ocean of anarchy, thrown her existence into absurd disarrangement...

She begins to hallucinate: the blue plastic bags are chunks of fallen sky. The slugs are unslimey, dry and pleasant to know and converse with. The state never did know what it was doing. The men are women and the women men.

She lights a cigarette.

It tastes different.

She coughs and thumbs it out.

She swings left into a crowded alley. It's a dead end; corpses lie stacked against a wire fence like cheese gratings.

Her radio crackles.

She answers but gets nothing back; static alone fills her ears and static alone occupies her head, which is shaven, rough, pitted.

Reversing up the alley Y runs over a dog. It yelps, but she can't hear it.

The evening sun finds her and she throttles toward it, the road wide and straight and long.

In the middle distance, silhouetted, resembling a dark keyhole, stands a lone presence, neither woman nor man, but something androgynous, pure - in its blackness - and haunting.

She drives at great speed for it, and it grows, proves to be farther away than she imagined, swelling as she nears to fill and obscure the city that has sporned it, blotting out the sky.

Welcome to Hell.

A voice describes the indescribable, paying particular attention to the unseen.

It solicits applause and demands that every potential admitee suck on its outrageous penis, draw its boiling semen, take it as a calf does milk.

I hope you enjoy your stay.

My names is Thorp.

Let me introduce myself.

Do you deserve to be here?

Have you earned the right?

Think hard before you reply, sister-brother...

Welcome to Justice.

My, there's quite a queue, isn't there?

The colonel is down to five men. These five stroll toward the barricade in an upright fashion, willing the bullets to miss, the fire to consume only their clothes and hair.

They are foolish. They are his finest, the best, and a tear distorts his vision as he watches them die.

Gallant to the last, the troops proceed as zombies, riddled cadavers to the barricade and begin tearing it to pieces.

The blueheads manning it flee in astonishment and fear.

The proud colonel strides up behind his loyal soldiers and pats them on the back, whereupon they rend him limb from limb, disposing of his various bits and portions as they march in ragged file to the next obstruction, dropping their weapons and singing old drinking songs along the way, crawling unbowed from the debris when the roof collapses on them, and generally making free with the situation.

For example, a wounded slug finds himself at their crushed feet. They peer at him mysteriously. They pick him up, place him carefully to one side and trundle on.

They leave a grenade in his lap.

It goes off.

What practical jokers!

They join the queue; reluctantly it must be said, but by now the queue extends beyond the realms of heat and redness...

Thorp puts in for a rise; is elevated to Advocate, one of many.

Thorp puts in for a rise again; is elevated to Sentinel, one of himself.

Thorp is not responsible for what happens next.

What happens next, however, is responsible for Thorp.

Welcome to History.

I hope you enjoy your stay - but it's nothing that hasn't happened before.

Pull a cat's tail and the cat will scratch you.

Pull a man clear of a speeding vehicle and the man will thank you, or tell you to get lost, or push you in front of the next one; which goes to show cats are a lot more predictable than people, whose behaviour is weird, erratic.

Greta finds this out when she walks into the room in which is laid The Head Of State, Chairman Boot.

Baby! he cries; baby's come to me, she's seen the light and come to me!

BABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABY!

Greta fumbles with the revolver and shoots him in the mouth.

The men standing round his bed ignore her.

A male nurse enters the room and shrugs.

With him is an orderly dressed in white.

The orderly scratches his heads...

Greta throws the gun away and walks from the room, feeling numb.

She sighs and wanders the maze of passages.

There are blue flamingoes painted on some walls. Patients sit patiently on their cots.

They wave to her as she passes their doors and she waves back.

The outside world is a strange place, she decides.

She prefers the inside, or what she thinks of as the inside, as we are all shut up in our own sticky globes, snots dangling from God's nose, his gargantuan snout...

Pull a rabbit out of a hat by all means, but just you try getting one in!

In other wor(I)ds, BE, CARFFUL.

And HELP.

Thorp gets tired of writing and so takes pictures instead. He sticks the pictures in albums and places the albums on shelves in the library, any library, the library for instance that houses a collection of animal miniatures and the deeds to the temples of the gods.

Meantime, Greta gets drunk, and fucked.

Join the queue...

Welcome to Us - the book.

Chapter 15: THE BODY FACTORY.

There is a war going on inside my head, a war in which all the soldiers dress alike, wear the same uniform, and none know which side they are on, if any, or what they might be fighting for, if anything, a war to the bloody finish, if there is one, a war to the very limits, if there are any, of explanation.

x - the new flesh.

Luke Scott scrambles into a receptacle marked red in an effort to escape the flood.

His rollerskate spins uncontrollably as he clambers upward, using his teeth, finding the scantest purchase in the total black; and then a wind rises, forcing him up like a ping-pong ball as it rushes from beneath.

Luke concedes to the wind's direction as it matches his own and together they fly, tumbling toward some distant, invisible summit...

It is cool, that wind, cool and howling.

As he's carried aloft Luke wonders if this is death or simply a reprieve.

The turmoil of his thoughts, the constant buffeting of the aerial current makes his skull echo as if split wide open, a distended maw ready to feed on all that it finds, shape and sound alike, its appetite horrendous.

His body hits a fine spray of luminescent guts, entrails like coloured sand, biting.

He loses his right shoe.

His nose is cut, a tooth broken.

The air quickly sours and he is flung into a huge vat of miscellany, a lumpy porridge of intestinal garbage in the first stages of its recycling.

Luke climbs out of the vat and looks around. There are other vats, large and small, other receptacle outlets: orange for limbs, green for torsos, blue for hands and feet, should they be separate - and each is full.

Nobody scavenges heads, he reflects, heads are left.

Skating through thin pools of wan illumination he comes upon a slug - headless.

The wires dragging behind it connect to a wall socket.

Luke unplugs it and it stops what it is doing, stops adhering nails to fingers.

A second acephalous non-entity attaches fingers to hands and so on down the line, till at the other end stands erect a dormant individual, a fleshy construct lacking only a voice and a face, the finished somebody - anybody - to leave the premises via a different exit, to begin its cannibalized life anew...

Nature is a beautiful thing.

The corporation has effected a corporeal loop.

In manufacturing both product and consumer it has fashioned a unique and impenetrable monopoly, a perfect symmetry of supply and demand that will guarantee its future, ongoing success.

Thank-you.

We can't live without it:

The state we're in!

Look at yourself and tell me you haven't seen you somewhere before!

Look at the people in the street, the strangers among them - something fishy here...

How come?

Could they live without you?

Could you, more to the point, live without them?

Yeah?

For how long, exactly?

Luke scratches his head self-consciously; he's unplugged the entire line and brought production to a standstill.

Hey, who's side are you on, Luke?

WHO'S SIDE ARE YOU ON, LUKE?

HEY...

He removes a stub of charcoal-from his ear and starts drawing on the walls.

His drawings are really scrawls.

He composes a few lopsided stanzas of poetry and steps back to admire his work.

His poems are really ditties.

He can't sing either.

What he can do, is get out before it's too late.

Too late for what? you ask.

Too late to get out, stupid.

He runs along a wide passage with an open door at its far end. The door leads him outside, onto the roof.

We meet and shake hands.

Luke's comes off.

I apologize and he stares blankly at my feet as they shuffle embarrassingly, the toes outsized and lumpy, the joints swollen like bags of rocks or sweets.

I hand him back his hand but he throws it away, no longer interested it appears, in the splayed, damaged digits.

Okay, I grumble, and remove my left foot together with about six inches of ankle and calf.

Luke smiles, takes off his rollerskate and tries the foot on, which fits.

I watch as he wanders around, jumps up and down, putting the appendage through its paces.

He nods, and I fumble with the laces of the rollerskate.

I'll be able to keep up with the flamingoes now...

An explosion cracks the sky.

The sun turns red, bloated like a wound.

And you can see it's not a circle, but a sphere.

Chapter 16: THE OTHER END of MUS PEECHY.

War makes teabags of us all, sez Mus, the philosopher.

He's wearing a white sheet and pretending to be Plato or Socrates; or maybe he's the son of Silvius and the grandson of Aeneas who fled burning Troy with his own father on his back, only to misplace his wife. Not that Silvius himself had any better luck, catching as he did an arrow from his clumsy sibling one day whilst out hunting, the careless lad to be banished, our hero, eventually founding an island home, clearing it of a bunch of unruly giants...

Mus continues, expressively: the eyes, the eyes, the eyes - there is a door of windows between me and you, a door of windows, some of which are possessed of views and some of which are curtained, some of which see internally and some of which are blind, shuttered or boarded.

If you try squeezing through they eat you and spit out the pips - but on which side?

I clap politely.

He taps his foot.

I spin my wheels ...

The fictions of the living and the facts of the dead, quoth the ghost of the insurance salesman, picking up my manuscript and leafing through its murky length.

I never did learn to read.

I never did learn to write.

I never did learn to monologize, either; and Mus Peechy, to the best of his considerable ability, corrects my spelling.

Who drew the pictures? friend Shukov wants to know.

What pictures?

The peculiar ones; look for yourself.

I never did learn to draw.

Now that it's almost over I will confess to having regrets; but not on paper. You'll have to read my mind, something you may live to regret.

Mus unwinds himself from his latest role and sits on the edge of my bed, slips to the tiled floor between bloodstains.

The insurance salesman fades with a final salutation. Here you are, he says, and hands me a biscuit.

I smile.

Thank-you.

But you've nothing for yourself.

Eat it.

We've nothing but we're always earning.

Now for that last slice of sausage.

Into the mouth.

Getting your teeth into it.

Your teeth.

The meaty taste.

And the meaty juice, the real stuff.

Down it goes, into the belly.

Gone.

And then the book ends; the book ends by gradually running out of words.

Noting the shortage I add some of my own.

So there you have it, I scrawl in failing curves of failing pencil, making images from the joined letters, making a kind of sense from those images.

So there you have it, the expiry date, the best before, store in a cool dark place, serves five thousand even without the loaves.

So there you have it, the final page, as good a time as any to mention that the world, any world, with just a little effort could be an even more beautiful place.

Now look, you've made me cry!

Ah...

When all I really wanted to say was: I have accepted my madness as a gift - it bears fruit, fruit which sustains me, for now.

I listen, and the silence of my heart -

Who was that talking?

My name is Fixed; I break things; it's what I do.

But who gives a shit...

Honestly.

fin

