

地獄の真夜中

midnight in hell

Jigoku no mayonaka

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Victor

Malone

Copyright  2019 Victor Malone

All Rights Reserved

###

DEVIL'S WAX PUBLICATIONS

"At my house I've got no shackles  
You can come and look if you want to  
In the halls you'll see the mantles  
Where the light shines dim all around you...

You are just a thought that someone  
Somewhere somehow feels you should be here  
And it's so for real to touch  
To smell, to feel, to know where you are here..."

\- A House Is Not A Motel

by Arthur Taylor Lee

-"In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat."

\- A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow

"I've lived in a places you wouldn't shit in Jack, I've done time with men who'd off themselves and the whole world with 'em like they doing everybody a favour. And you know what I know Jack, what I know from that? Man is just a thing; he eats, he sleeps, he fucks, and all the rest is just passing time. Now how much of those things he does depends on how big that hole is inside him. You know the hole I'm talking about Jack? That one! It rips open inside everyone when they suck in their first, screaming breath. It's why babies scream Jack. We think it's a demon inside us, the great white whale, the Prince of Darkness! But it's not Jack. It's just a big empty hole. I've seen men try to fill it with women, with other men, with the good book -thank you Jesus! - with money, power and everything you can think of on the planet. And you know what finally separates the men from the boys, Jackie-boy? The wisdom, the knowledge of the ages, you know what it is Jack? That hole, it can't be filled. We pretend because no one's got the balls to live with the truth. The truth being that inside that hole Jack is what we really are - nothingness. Just a need Jack. The truth, that we ain't any more noble than we are knowable. And every dark place in us, every rabid fucking impulse we have, is just the nature of the beast."

\- Nature Of The Beast

By Victor Salva

### THE BITS:-

JENNY

THE DEVIL'S CHERUB

MIDNIGHT IN HELL

COMPOUND DRONE

CRYSTAL BEACH

DIGITAL FOLKLORE

SUBLIMATION REMASTERED

THE IMPROBABLE EXISTENCE OF ADHD

J E N N Y

Light weaves in and around - and gets lost in - the obsidian head...

Miranda hated this fucking job, and just about everything that came with it. The people, the hours, the work itself, of course. Everything apart from the car she was now parked up outside 'Mr. Muscle's' house in. Because this was a nice little car and she didn't have to pay for anything at all. Not even the petrol.

There he was, tending his plants again, the skinny little runt. He was always out here doing this, he'd been here when she'd come to spy last Tuesday as well. He truly was the skinniest man Miranda had ever seen, the runt of the litter, she was surprised he even had the strength to use those shears. No wonder he was having problems with his little girl, who in god's name could look up to a man like that?! And how on earth did he get such a beautiful wife?

Still, it wasn't all bad this job. She could set her own hours, and skiving was easy to an extent. She'd already spent an hour parked up in the petrol station drinking her machine Costa and eating Rolos. That was until that paki had come out and told her to move her car. Cheeky little curry eater, she hadn't voted brexit - twice! - for that kind of treatment.

So what if she wanted to take it easy before work. She could afford to scoff a few packs of Rolos, nothing wrong with her figure, unlike Elaine. Or most of her friends for that matter. Oh and don't even get her started on those plebs at the job centre. It was as if the government had a policy of only hiring the fat and crippled. They seemed to have a 50% quota or something.

Anyway, no more going down there. No more dealing with that. She didn't belong with those losers, and now that she had this little number to keep her busy...just as long as she wasn't too busy of course.

Also, it had to be better than her last job. Care worker. For fuck's sake! A chav's occupation if ever there was one, and Miranda certainly did not consider herself any kind of chav!

If that old bitch had farted in her face one more time when she was wiping her arse. They said that she couldn't help it, that she was old, and all that. But come on, Miranda pleaded, I don't care how old you are, you can control that. Mrs. Williams, they said she had multiple related conditions, they said she'd had a hard life, but then they said a lot of things didn't they?

Miranda allowed her train of thought to cease for a moment as she unconsciously let out a long sigh. Her eyes turned to to her mother's pendant hanging from the rear view mirror. Yeah her mother had gotten it right. Unlike the rest of them. The things that some of them said about her mother were not true, they were just jealous of her, she was cleverer than everyone else that was all.

She was smart in the normal way, the school way, but she had a little extra to her too. Special knowledge which her father had passed onto her. A great man, not like that pansy in the garden, with his shares, or her own dad, that no mark. No, Granddad was an important man. And he passed things on to his daughter, which she passed down too, and hence the pendant now swinging in the car. A strange symbol that she didn't understand. The simplest way to describe it was as a circle, square and triangle intersecting. But this was superficial as within and between then, there seemed to be multiple smaller, less easy to define shapes and patterns. She had never seen it duplicated.

She opens the glove box and removes the knife. Now thankfully Ryan takes after her grandfather, not his dad's side of the family. He'd given her this knife for her own protection when she came up against clients. Not that she expected any trouble from Mr. Muscles there. And despite the reports of class room violence she was pretty sure she could handle a nine year old girl unarmed.

But still, it was a nice gesture and it made her feel closer to him. She imagined it would become more a good look charm than a genuine weapon. Being considerate was just one of Ryan's endless good qualities.

Although God knows she could have happily used it to slit the throat of that filthy old sow last month. Oh god, what a baptism of fire that had been. You'd think they'd screen a little more carefully for a trainee social worker's first job! And to say that she had considered Mrs Williams a dirty mare. That house had been absolutely covered in, smeared from top to bottom in...

Miranda made her way across the freshly shared garden, even more fussy up close. Well at least they're tidy, let's hope that trend continues into the house, she thought. God knows it would make the nicest change after that house!

She was just about to knock when the door slid open, making Miranda jerk inside. Crafty that, she thought, as if they'd been watching her. Christ she'd gotten the whole clan for a greeting party. Sure sign of a freak family that. When they all answer the door together like it was a holiday or national event. He looked too relaxed, she too happy (and their coupling even more shocking up close - she was stunning!!), the girl (ironically) the closest the gang had to normal and the little boy...

She questioned her records and wondered if it was this googly eyed freak she was really here to see. The girl seems normal - intelligent and healthy - a little stuck up perhaps, but well, you can't have everything can you?

She tried to remember exactly what it was they had said about her behaviour in school. Something about being generally high strung and demanding, but she couldn't remember any specific details or incidents. Was she violent? Hard to imagine but these were often the ones, the butter wouldn't melt types the first to grab a pair of scissors and stab the nearest little boy in the hand! Well, she'd figure it out, they didn't exactly look like a family of geniuses either way.

"Come on in," said the father, cheerful and direct, far too confident for his size that one.

The girl (what was her name anyway?) appeared to be continually bouncing on the balls of her feet, while the brother just kind of glided from left to right, like he was on a track, pushing his glasses incessantly up, even though they had never fallen down in the first place, his eyes darting spastic style behind his lenses like a ball of flies.

This is what happens, she thought, when you mix the bloodlines like this, a geek and a prom queen, you get a freakazoid your school writes home about and Dark Lord Geek.

He introduced himself and his family by name, even the spastic, but Miranda didn't really pay attention, she was only really interested in the one who came last. The girl, the one she was here to see.

Jenny.

So that was the centre of attention's name. Jenny. Plain name, Miranda thought, for such a big fuss. She wondered if she was faking to get out of school work. Those soft touches at the office would believe anything, the bleeding hearts...Oh she'd shake that place up...

"Sorry," Miranda surprised herself by speaking out loud.

She realised that Mr Muscles had been droning on and she hadn't been listening to a single word.

"No, don't be. You are just doing your job, and I trust doing it well. Like I was just saying we see no shame in this visit. We know that Jenny is a special little girl and sometimes special girls need a little extra guidance."

"Jenny is very talented," chipped in the mother in her annoying voice, "I'm sure she'd love to show you her paintings when she shows you her room."

Talented, special, check them out, Ryan was special, these kids were tools. And the way she assumes they're going to be spending time together in her room, sounds like prom queen has been on the Social Services Training herself! Ha! She needs to slow this down, get a drink and get her bearings. Not that these people have rattled her mind, but it is, after all, her first proper day in the field. She could fill in fields on a database all week with that black fellah in the office but that didn't really prove a thing now did it?

The smell of the house. She kind of thought of it as an old person's smell, but worse than that, the smell of damp dogs and mildew; clothes left too long to dry. Miranda had never trusted people whose houses smelt like that. Ryan's didn't. Hers certainly did not. Now that she came to think of it: Elaine's did.

Tidy enough but this stuff doesn't match them or their pay-grade, but then as was already well established, they didn't match each other either. Miranda had their file, and Miranda knew their income, therefore Miranda knew that little Miss. Congeniality could not afford those leather trousers, let alone the Gucci shoes that went with them.

The place was fairly typical. Clean but not serial killer spotless, and certainly nothing like the Scat Palace (thank god!). A little cluttered perhaps but not in hoarder territory either. She was scanning for the nature of stuff too. They had been told not to judge, jump to conclusions or impose their own values in terms of client's possessions, but Miranda knew better. Oh and for the record she hated that term - 'client' - what a crock of shit. They didn't pay them a penny! They probably should charge them for the visit though, retrospectively, regardless of the outcome.

Muscles was rabbiting on about something and prom queen was ushering them into the lounge. Gesticulating wildly towards a garish sofa - talked with her hands far too much, that woman, Miranda thought.

As for their not too cluttered possessions there wasn't anything too odd. As mismatched as the rest of the family perhaps. And if they had any sense they'd clean up of course, hide the needles and the porn. Pre-warned about the visit or not, the cunts knew they were under scrutiny.

The picture in the reception room had been a little odd, small bronze-framed little oil number. A ship at sea at night. Just a little too Gothic for her tastes. Ryan had the most wonderful knack for coordinating...

Ah shit, Miranda thought, I really need to pay attention now.

(Jenny, Jenny, Jenny...odd couple...boy's a freak but not the subject of the file...)

"So as you can see Miss Booth, Jenny is a very creative young lady and we like to display her art. We believe in encouraging anything like that, not just the arts, whatever interest or passion interests them. Although we are on the whole a very artistically inclined family..."

(artistically inclined, oooooo, get him)

"Daddy loves movies," butts in the problem child.

(well let's just hope you're not in them, hey?)

"Mummy plays the violin."

Now the freakazoid had sidled up to her, or perhaps he had been there a while. He had one finger so far up his nose that he must have been poking the back of his eye ball. There was saliva gathering around the corner of his mouth and he was looking straight at her. Or at least Miranda thought the little freak was. How can she really tell with that bundle of flies behind coke bottles he calls eyes?

"...and this is Jenny's latest ensemble..."

"It's a montage daddy," the problem child protests.

"This is actually the subject of the latest controversy at school."

"Well what's the problem?" asks Miranda, pulling down her glasses and squinting at the huge sheet of paper tacked up - inappropriately she thinks - above the fire, on the lounge wall.

She could sympathise with this bit at least, some of Ryan's teacher's had been real difficult about the way he spent his class time, probably jealous of him.

She scanned the rather vast, colourful and in places - she had to reluctantly admit - not badly rendered child's drawing.

"What did they expect her to do in art class?"

"Ah, well," begins the doting father, "Jenny tends to be creative in all her classes. Tends to mix her lessons. And ultimately I appreciate this, that they have to have an agenda and a curriculum, a focus so to speak. But it's difficult for some children such as Jenny to stick to that. It strangles them. The structure I mean."

Mum: "And she's great at her maths anyway."

Vrrruueme!!!

The little freak boy made a noise which could only be likened to a motor car...but a spastic version. All eyes turned to him and he finally sucked in the trail of drool that has slowly been emanating from his mouth. It had almost dripped off his girlish chin.

Miranda returned her eyes to the picture, tried to forget the little shit and keep looking for trouble ('interpreting signs, cries for help' - yeah, she'd been listening to the darkie) but couldn't find anyway.

It's a bit out there, she thinks, sure. Hyper-imaginative. Kid's probably a bit of a wappy day dreamer - dragons, two-headed dogs, princesses - is that the pope?! - inoffensive monsters and a weird mash-up house, but...She was expecting dismemberment, sodomy, rape and torture, like that religious mania stuff the Catholics go in for. The stuff on the monastery ceiling that the nuns get their rocks off too. But this was basically a little girl's drawing, a hyper version, but still a silly little girl thing. Something that may have been a tree ran through the centre of the action, but so long and narrow that it could have been a creeping vine. Miranda wasn't curious enough to ask.

At this point the mother was the prime suspect. Miranda liked to have a prime suspect, not just at work, but in life in general. Even one of the posties was under suspicion...

As they were leaving she suddenly noticed a huge painting, a real one this time, hung on the wall adjacent to the controversial mathematics. Something about it pulled at Miranda in a way such things usually didn't. She wasn't one of those ponces who stood about art galleries stroking their collective beards, but it...resonated with her. She wasn't sure if she had seen it before or simply liked it, but damn if it wasn't striking a chord.

"Interesting isn't it? It means a lot to us." The words catch in Miranda's throat, she wonders why she is over thinking her response. "It seems to register with you," continued the mother.

"I have...I mean I think I might have seen it before, but..."

"Do you visit galleries often?"

(oh yeah luv, got nothing to do whatsoever me! no life!)

"Sometimes. What I meant was I may have seen it before, or maybe I just like the shape."

Miranda was not going to give them the satisfaction of asking whether it was famous. Knowing about that stuff didn't make you special.

"Is it a particular symbol I mean? Inside the other stuff I mean?"

"It's almost unique, a sort of abstract piece...I like the arrangement of lines."

"But you said..."

"Oh no sorry, I just meant the picture itself, the object, has meaning for us. Sentimental value."

And for the second time that morning, Miranda felt slightly queasy.

"It really seems to strike a chord in you my dear," annoying blondie chipping in with her opinions again, and the patronizing tone brings her back to where she is.

(Dear?! She'd fucking dear her...oh dear!)

Miranda's lack of response seems to bring the matter to a close, and they filter out of the lounge, and back into the hallway, without another word. Now the freakazoid is trailing by like a needy dog or sneaky spider. If he's going to be so quiet why can't he just go sit in a corner somewhere, keep himself to himself; he was giving her the willies.

The girl puts her hands gently on his shoulders and explains in a very mature manner that she has to speak to Miranda alone and that perhaps he can go play with his new toy for a while. It's kind of hard to believe that she is trouble at school, but Miranda knows too well how different they can be in the different environments.

He grins like a lunatic and scurries off upstairs ahead of them; that boy really was weird, never talks, never blinks. And he smelt funny too. He smelt of that aftershave Terry used to wear. A musky tang; the aftershave of a man that, not a nerdy little boy. Plus, was that a little stiffy poking out of his trousers? Ha! If ever an object was destined to remain unused.

"Well I guess it's time to see Jenny's room," said Mum, with that smile that seemed to get forever wider. Miranda couldn't quite decide whether or not that smile was genuine, but she hated it either way.

(oh, well bugger me sideways, and there was me thinking I was the one running this operation!)

"What about the basement mummy?"

"Well maybe the nice lady can see it quickly before she leaves, but she wants to know about you Jenny, not some stinky old basement."

"Okaaaay," the problem child replied, leaning into her mother in a particularly irritating manner.

Jenny bounced up the stairs, rattling on the whole time. Telling Miranda about all the things she had to see in her room (I don't have to see anyway of it) and again her thoughts drifted back to how she came to be here. It had all all started with Miss Jamaica in the job centre threatening to sanction her if she didn't go on some pointless course, and implying that it was her fault that she was unemployed in the first place. Like to see her wipe Mrs Williamson wild arse, she thought, but then it wasn't like she had to worry about getting shit on her face.

Then a few days later she gets a letter saying to come in for a 'mandatory' meeting. One of their pet words that, and not one Miranda was particularly fond of. So she rocked up, in her best suit, taking calming drags on a cigarette, and lo and behold she gets a job offer. Different woman this time, white woman, invites her up to some office on a floor she's never been to before and lays the whole thing out. Turns out she will be replacing that goody two shoes the local paper had been banging on about for weeks (too perfect, Miranda thought). Some silly bint who had let herself go missing. Now everyone was supposed to be either crying or helping the police with their enquiries.

Miranda pointed out her lack of experience and university education. Apparently not an issue. Not any more at least: Full training would be provided and they would start her on 25k. Miranda, despite what some said, was NOT work shy, so she bit her tongue and didn't even mention the other business.

But god was that first day a challenge, even to someone as strong and confident as Miranda. That dirty mare and her kingdom of scat: the floorboards were literally rotten with it, dripping shite into the foundations! She didn't believe what the so-called experienced one she was shadowing said, that wrinkly old prune wasn't mad, just plain perverted. But you weren't allowed to say it any more, were you? But then again, you weren't allowed to say a lot of things.

Seems fairly typical she guessed. Never had a girl, so she wouldn't really know, but seemed in keeping. Same as what she'd seen at other people's houses and in movies. Well cared for but not too spoilt. Some dolls piled up neatly on the bed, some action figures which looked a little out of place, a short shelf of books and a little old fashioned TV in the corner. Oh and drawings of course, everywhere, and some mess and clutter. By the side of the bed is a small, home made style bookcase, not much taller than the bed. Miranda takes a moment to browse the spines: A mixture of thick and thin, paper and hardback. Narnia, Potter, some weird one for older children that she knows about but has zero interest in. The books looked normal, that is until she dropped her eyes to the second shelf. This one covered with grown up novels, more what you'd expect to find on a student's bookshelf, or on one of those beard stroker's coffee table. Shelf number three equalled another level; cerebral, esoteric and archaic. Dead languages, obscure talents, and topics that could not possibly be of interest to a girl her age. Probably just her parents showing off, trying to impress the neighbours. Those fuckers hadn't read these, let alone the Show Pony bouncing around on the bed.

She took one down and perused it. An old book with surprisingly modern looking diagrams, it recalls the painting from the lounge, written by some fellah called Malcolm Manvers. Made up name that, if ever she heard one.

The girl still couldn't sit still she noticed. She was as dynamic as the brother was still. Is this some of the 'untapped' energy the teacher's kept banging on about in the preliminary report. Well again, she didn't want to defend her too hard, because she probably was a grating little twat after a while, but they'd said similar things about Ryan when he was young. Said all sorts...hyper among other things...and probably these days they'd have labelled him ADHD. Really not fair, because that's what he was, ADHD, not violent and hyper. Just because he didn't always want to stay in his seat (those classes were too long anyway) and hit the occasional other boy (probably had it coming). Imagine being sat next to coke bottle lenses downstairs for an hour straight. Who wouldn't hit him?! (Well Gandhi perhaps, but he was a cunt!) Today they would have realised he was special, medicated him, and then he'd have done better in his exams. Much better...

Jenny kept picking stuff up, or dragging it out, telling her to look at it, and then hitting her with something else before she had a chance to respond. Miranda was getting annoyed and had to keep reminding herself what she was doing. She knew that she couldn't just lose her temper and forget about it like with the people she had cared for at the home. There'd be reports, follow up visits, all sorts of crap.

These people had status, this work was monitored by the government and every other nosey little cunt. So she pulled a tight smile across her face and tried to say something to fake interest. If it really got too much she could nip to the loo, play with her phone for ten minutes, that's something you could do in any job. I know, she thought, let her ramble on for a few more minutes, let her tire herself out and then ask her the prerequisite questions.

And then get the hell out of here!

She would blag it with the parents part, and make up the answers based on what they had said before hand. Or just guess. They couldn't monitor it that tightly, surely.

"...and here's another one of my drawings," she said, landing a large hardback notebook of plain sketch paper into her lap. These drawing looked different to the others, more mature and detailed. The topic had shifted a little too; not so much Kings & Queens now but real things. A cat, a mushroom, an old chinky with one of those stupidly long beards they sometimes had. Miranda had to admit they were good. A little too good, frankly. But regardless as to whether Little Miss Attention Whore had drawn them or not, she was tired after four or five pages. She place the book down gently by the girl's side and asked:

"Are you happy here Jenny?"

She stops, toys with the thing in her hand a little, looks left to right, sharp, as if looking for the answer and then blurts out 'yes' followed by a grin. A big stupid soppy grin that would be better off on her bother.

Oh god, it's a child, she was interviewing a child, children can't give straight answers to questions. She thinks about telling her to sit down, shut up and pay attention. Be serious! But they told her to put the child at ease, interrogate in a natural environment, as long as they seemed to comprehend the question and weren't giving off tell tale signs then that was fine.

But God! Why was she here? Little Miss Centre Of Attention wasn't being abused. She could tell that much. Were the government responsible for discipline now? Screw that, she thought, tell the teachers to man up. (God, she hated teachers!)

"And what about your brother?"

"Tom?"

(well unless there's another cunt I haven't seen) "Yes, Jenny, Tom."

A longer pause this time, then "uuuuumm, yes."

"You don't seem so sure."

"Weeel, Tom gets bullied at school sometimes but he's happy at home."

(oh, no shit) "That's a shame."

"But I can sort them out."

"How do you sort people out, when you don't like them, or they hurt you in some way?"

"Like what way?" (Paying some attention at last.)

"Oh I don't know. Maybe say mean things, hurt your feelings. Say your pictures are rubbish or something."

Jenny wrinkled her whole face up at that.

"Uuuuuum, hit them," big smile, "hard in the nose."

(seemed reasonable)

"And what about daddy?"

"What does daddy do when people are mean to him?"

(Jesus!) "No, I mean what do you think about daddy?"

"What about daddy? What about daddy? Daddy loves movies and mummy, aaaand, he lets me draw where I want, even on the walls sometimes. He understands when I get in trouble, or fights sometimes, but he can be strict?"

"How does he punish you...I mean what would make daddy mad? Give me an example."

"I didn't say mad, I said strict."

(smart arse)

"Okay," gentle sigh, "which of daddy's rules do you think are too strict."

Constant movement as she thinks and it was really driving Miranda mad now. She just won't stay still, perched on the edge of the bed one moment, in the corner the next. Up up up down, opening and closing books...Maybe they should have her on some pills.

"Bed times."

"Oh yeah," actually growing a little bit interested now. Because it would be fun to uncover abuse, wouldn't it, to get one over on Mr Muscles and his wife.

"Yeah, like last Saturday me and Tom were watching Anti-Christ, and then all a sudden for NO reason he says, 'time for bed guys!" Like how?! There were 32 minutes left, I know because I could see the dvd counter and I'd already read the box."

(Mmmm. Maybe make them autism pills then.)

"Was that all?"

"Yeah, but a lot can happen in 32 minutes!"

"No Jenny," using her name for the first time, albeit through strained teeth, "I mean your father. Is that all in terms of his strictness?"

"Oh silly billy. Erm, yeah, well other stuff but just stuff like that really...you know. He's a good egg on the whole, my old dad."

(What? The? Fuck?)

"Well I think that's everything for today Jenny. It has been very nice to meet you. Try not to worry too much. I just need to speak to your parents quickly, and I'll be on my way."

In a disappointed tone, "You mean we're going back downstairs."

(Well unless they've migrated to the attic...)

"Yes. Let's go."

A sideways pout was the extent of further resistance. The girl quickly tidied up some of the things she had been playing with and goes to the door to leave. They descend the stairs in silence, then, all of a sudden, at the bottom of the stairs she grabs Miranda's hand. The older woman rips it away a little too abruptly and has to smooth it over, "Oh sorry darling, you just made me jump. What's a matter?"

"Sorry, sorry," she bounces up and down on the bottom step. "But I'm ex-ci-ted, the basement, I can show you the basement, fiiiinally."

For fuck's sake, she thinks, but then what can it really hurt? If she's fudging the parent's interview then she's still gonna get an extra hour for lunch.

"Okay."

Jenny takes her by the hand again and this time she manages to maintain her composure. She still doesn't like it though. She allows the girl to lead the way.

"Do you like your job?" she asks.

"Why do you ask that?"

"Well I like you Miranda, don't get me wrooong, buut, you seem kinda like what my teachers say I am in class."

(annoying as fuck?) "What's that then?"

"They say I'm distracted."

"Do they now," well the file in the office says 'precocious' and not half are they right, she thinks. And why does she insist upon dragging her vowels down the road like that?!

"Don't worry I've been listening to every word you've said. You are a very interesting young lady."

"I know."

Miranda wasn't sure what was more irritating that she said that or that she said it without a shred of arrogance. She was sure the doting odd couple would find it simply adorable.

They came to the basement, under the stair case, opposite the lounge. It looks as if someone (probably a child) has scratched something into the paintwork with a protractor. But then it could just be wear and tear. The door appears freshly painted, more so than the others, and the handle is shiny brass. Jenny suddenly grabs it and flings the door open. Miranda isn't sure why, but she expected it to be locked.

"OPEN SESAME!"

For a second Miranda sees a black figure flicker through the shadows of the darkness. But knows - even before the girl pulls a cord shedding the room in light - that she is imagining things, just her eyes adjusting.

Well no worries there. This isn't like that horror movie or any other. In fact it's not even creepy in the way basements usually are. No bare brick or dusty floors here, no menacing bags of cement or mouldy cardboard. This was fully renovated and furnished.

"This is..." (better than the rest of the house, not least because it isn't cursed with the mouldy dog smell) "...really nice Jenny. You are lucky to have a basement like this, are you and..."

"Ricky."

"I know I know. Are you both allowed to play down here or is it off limits?"

Miranda isn't sure whether or not she wants to encounter any abuse now. On the one hand, excitement, get one over on the fuckers and a good story for Thursday night with Sally and Elaine (when does anything ever happen in their lives...especially Elaine). And she would make it clear it the rest of the office who was top dog.

On the other hand. A LOT of paperwork, tedium, extra training from the darkie, possible court appearances...

Jenny was deep into an explanation of her dad's 'ingenious' heating solution. Miranda tuned her back out and took an opportunity to survey the room. It wasn't no laundry room or torture chamber, but it wasn't a man cave either. It was like a nicer version of the lounge they had upstairs.

Two long white faux leather sofas arranged in perfect symmetry. A glass coffee table in between with equally symmetrical lamps and a small stack of magazines she has never heard of.

A tastefully tiled floor (might even ask them where they got these from...) an artificial strip light which managed not to be stifling or migraine inducing. Didn't really match the rest of the place, didn't seem like a family room at all.

Two pictures, again with the symmetry.

This isn't what Miranda would call a 'smelly old basement.' Could they be hiding something down here? Miranda was hungry by now and didn't really care, even if they were beating and raping the girl and her spazz brother down here, they both seemed happy enough. No harm, no foul, right?

Miranda thought about her own home, this wasn't necessarily better but..oh fuck it, what was she even doing still here.. The visit was over, decision made. Delay the paperwork until tomorrow afternoon. It was time for lunch now, and nothing else.

In half a voice, "Yeah it's really good Jenny. But I'm really busy. I have other boys and girls to see. And I'm hungry..."

"So you don't want to watch a movie?"

(yeah, lets make a day of it!) "No. I've got to go."

"You still need to talk to mummy and daddy?"

"Just real quick," making her way back toward the steps, "Let's go...now please."

The second she gets back into the hallway they are there, the parents at least, like a couple of pod people, stepford wives. Weird.

"Is everything okay?" Him. Too bright.

"Do you need to ask us any more questions?" Her. Too cheery.

Miranda cleared her throat, checked her background to see where the hell the kid was, shuffled her papers and folder, asked a few questions and half listened to the answers. Moments later, she was outside alone with the door closed behind her, and could attach no rational explanation to the immense sense of relief she suddenly felt.

Back in the car:

She turns the radio on, back off again in instant irritation then lets out a long sigh. But then catches sight of the pendant and thinks, "you know, not bad old girl, not bad at all. For a first day alone, bet none of them had a day like that. And a no mark like Elaine would have just crumbled at the whole scenario. So not bad. But she didn't follow the poxy procedures a hundred and ten percent, so she would have to spend an hour tonight (in her time!) squaring that.

But still, not to worry about that now. All in all a good morning and nearly two and half 'til she had to hit the office. Better than wiping that lazy cow's arse, and a pleasure, for sure, in comparison to the palace of scat they sent her to last time.

She panics for a second that she has forgotten her lunch money but is quickly reassured by the sight of a screwed up twenty in her glove box.

Zizzis time!

What the...

God she nearly soiled herself. Her mum had always said she got 'lost in your own little world dear,' and her mum knew best, but what was that mad blonde bitch doing knocking on her window?

Indicating (nay telling!) her to wind her window down.

Miranda fakes a smile.

"Sorry to startle you there. You looked away with the fairies. Ricky wants to show you his room."

"What?!?" Miranda instantly regrets how aggressively it had come out.

"He's just really jealous of all the attention Jenny has been getting lately, and he 'wants to show the cool lady my room too.'"

Well perhaps the little shit isn't that much of a mongoloid after all. Hope for him yet, she thinks...

(Five minutes...worst case scenario five more minutes, still plenty of time for a calzone and a glass or two of wine)

She follows her in and, unsurprisingly, the whole clan is waiting at the bottom of the stairs. They all go, silently, to Ricky's room. In fact, this is the first time she has seen the boy calm.

They are a few feet from the bedroom when he suddenly pulls ahead, making his motorcar noise, and bursts into his own room like a raid. Miranda follows, already trying to phrase a few platitudes in her mind, to get her in and out and to Italian food as quickly as possible.

(Well this is tidier and I didn't expect...what...?!?)

The woman on the bed is nude and positioned and not moving.

(abuse. No. But...)

The woman is on her knees, but arched back with her arms behind her to break her fall. Her eyes mist over, adjust, and she has her first true chance to take in the chaos - her eyes have been removed and replaced with coins, dark and coppery, the tits above the slit belly have candles burrowed into them, twelve inches long and protruding, they are even lit, burning and dripping an ever growing red mound between her thighs. And this bring her eyes to the ultimate obscenity, a rusted triangular blade protruding from her cunt, a garden trowel inserted by its wooden handle. There is a small black object speared on the tip like a sacrifice to the dead. She doesn't want to look closer but has to know (put that in the report for the little Nigerian nig nog!)

A spider. A medium sized British house spider.

Why!?!

(this is just like my dream)

Nausea washes over Miranda and some how this final touch is the worst thing of all, and if she was going to ask a question, if she was even thinking of asking, or capable of even forming one in the first place, this would surely be its topic.

"So what do you think?" screeches the girl in enthusiasm, "Ricky wanted to show you his raspberry pi and electronics kit but I said you would be more interested in this. In his..." as if searching for a word another had spoken (most likely one of her two guardians) "His sculp-ture pet."

"Sorry, wh..." words spill like whispers.

"I bet you want to know what Ricky put in her mouth, don't you? Can you guess?"

"I don't know?"

"Well go on, ask him, he's right there for Christ's sake."

"What did you put in her mouth Ricky?"

"Guess!"

"I don't know," hating the break in her voice.

Jenny answers in a dead eyed monotone: "Milk. Milk. Lemonade. Round the corner chocolate's made."

And, in spite of herself, she begins to look and sees enough of the dark edge of an object to know the girl is serious.

She turns toward the door but mum and dad are blocking the exit now.

And then the freakazoid falls on her from nowhere and pulls something over her head, and the last thing she thinks is: where did he jump down from? A familiar smell. And the last thing she sees is a cloudy patch of white.

* * *

Miranda is awoken by light. And Jenny thinks what an ugly bitch she is, really, inside and out. That fat, sweaty chin and those cheap earrings, too chunky, too yellow. And so patronizing, like she doesn't know, like she doesn't know when the teacher's do it too. Even the headmaster, the fat controller, hates her. She's not stupid. But then that's the problem isn't? She's not stupid.

Her father (definitely not stupid either) pulls the head of the desk lamp away from Miranda's cheek. "Looks like she's awake gang."

Her mother stands there as always, inscrutable, demure. Yes, her mother is not just a beautiful woman but understands how to hold herself. This is important, and Jenny knows why.

Her brother bounces up and down on his feet, doing a spastic half clap, just like he did when the red snakes slid out of his toy's belly the first time Jenny sliced her open. Her brother wasn't stupid either, but, he did absolutely love to act so. He would gimp his way through entire terms at school. Then poison his bullies and frame his teachers incognito.

They selected her after they saw her racially abusing the advisor at the job centre. By that point they had already learnt that Little Miss Perfect was, well, too perfect. And they couldn't do what they needed to with her, so an alternative conduit was needed. Miranda's predecessor had certainly been a better person inside and out...as much as she now made her brother happy, there was something regrettable about her demise in Jenny's eyes.

There is a cloud of spittle around the social worker's thin mouth. She is much grubbier beneath the basement lights, greasy skin Jenny hadn't noticed before, a smattering of teenage acne around the chubby chin.

The ropes have burnt her wrists and the desk lamp reddened her cheek. Jenny is just relieved that her parents didn't choose to strip this one down to her underwear. She doesn't think she can take the sight of that!

Ricky pulls off his prop glasses and adjusts himself. Ricky has seen The Usual Suspects 79 times (he keeps count). He walks over to the fat sow and says in his real voice, "I was going to poop in your mouth too, but getting a closer looks at it's already full. You've been spilling shit out of it all afternoon." Then, prodding her flabby tits to emphasise each word: "And. You. Have. Made. A. Mess of my mother's carpet." Marking the end with a twist of her nipple, which from the agonised expression of her face, seems to have landed.

"Now now Ricardo. We're not savages. Even if the establishment is under the delusion that we need a little extra help, after care and tidying up after," say her father.

Jenny can see how the commoner bitch can see the change in her father. She can just read her chubby little mind when she looks at dad.

He continues, "Now I think the problem is, nay, the two, MAIN, problems are, that you have failed to read the terrain, and failed to show us the proper respect - as both a human being and a healthcare professional. Is that what they call you people these days? Doesn't matter. You're not important. Point is you have been a very silly girl.

If you had looked a little closer at the big fuck off picture we showed you in the lounge, you'd have noticed a few hints and clues, let alone the one at the bottom of the stairs. Do you still not realise why it was so familiar you inbred cunt?"

"But what does all this have to do with me?"

"I'm not going to explain it all to a plebby little prole like you! If you can't think for yourself. Christ on a bike!"

"Jesus bike! Vruuuume," her brother shouts, staying in character, and loud and screechy. He does get a little carried away sometimes - vibrating his whole body with both arms stretched out and hands tensing as if accelerating a motorbike. It's enough to make the silly old sow jump out of her skin.

She's just murmuring now but looks as though she could burst into frantic at any given moment. And this pisses Jenny off, and she doesn't like to get pissed off. It's a loss of control and violence is an admission of failure. That is of course all things being equal, and they certainly aren't that here, are they?

On the upside, when she sees the fear and desperation in her eyes, she knows that her mother has been inspired on this one. Absolutely inspired.

"So we tried before with the lady upstairs, nice lady. The problem was, well that was the problem actually," he beams, "she was so bloody bloody nice. That her blood lacked the sin of a worthy sacrifice. You however, well I knew your blood was enriched, overflowing with goodness, from the moment I first spied you at the job centre racially abusing that poor Afro-Carribean lady. Just trying to do her job and being very patient, I felt, in the process. Now that has startled, nay, confused you, hasn't it?"

Jenny hated to think in clichés but her father was right, the silly twat looked the proverbial rabbit in the headlights.

"So I got your details and the wheels were in motion...Soon you got the the job and the rest is history. But it's not just your attitude which makes you such a worthy sacrifice, it's your history too..."

She still appears scared but Jenny isn't so sure that she is still listening to her father. Her focus is elsewhere. Has it sunk in enough for her to consider escape. She stops focusing on her father's words and focuses in on the visitor. She's seen that look before, the 'I want to escape' look.

She looks at her brother but is is difficult to guess what he is thinking, he's staring off in that way that he does.

She notices that the sow has managed to work her hand into her jeans pocket just as she produces the small blade. It would be a pathetic weapon even if the playing field were more even to begin with.

What the fuck does she think she is going to do with that thing?

She's thinking about how to punish her when her father steps forward, without skipping a beat in his speech, and knocks it from her hand, hard.

And then, as if on cue, Ricky lunge forward and scratches her face, he doesn't leave much damage behind but it is the gesture and the attitude behind it which speaks volumes.

She begins to whimper and the tears soon follow. She is murmuring a name. Repeating it like a mantra. But Jenny can't quiet make it out.

A drop of blood joins the spittle as her father goes through the final elements of the mystery - the specifics of her selection for sacrifice after the first woman's disappearance got the entire county talking, the nature of the sacrifice itself and the link to Miranda's heritage - but Jenny suspects that the silly woman isn't processing any of it.

Oh well, the details aren't that important, and sometimes a story is better with a few doors left unopened.

She is distracted from her thoughts by the heavy scraping sound dragged along the concrete. Her mother has fetched the sledge hammer. She raises it to her chest and tilts it towards her daughter. Light weaves in and around - and gets lost in \- the obsidian head.

Jenny takes it. Swallows.

Licks her lips.

Then the special girl, who preferred to mix her lessons, lifts the hammer into the air at the same time her shadow falls upon Miranda's face. And the last two thought to race through the trainee social worker's mind are: 'how on earth can she lift that thing so easily?' and that her grandfather had been a fool.

THE DEVIL'S CHERUB

You imagine a glimpse of light - to see that the sign and the signifiers have abandoned you...

That fucking stupid numpty! Ha! King of the sixth form my arse! I just sold him a bag of wood chippings for 20 quid! I'm not usually that blatant. I usually cut it down and under weigh, fill it up with twigs or just sell them that pretend stuff they sell on the internet now. Dumb fucks wouldn't know twig from bud anyway. Get their Knowledge of weed from 50 Cent alums and Ice Cube movies. Never seen the stuff in real life. Seen it on Youtube maybe. Fuck! That's not my only scam like. I got a dozen more: stole some England tops too, that I'm knocking out for a fraction of retail. From the same place I get the weed (my fat uncle by the way) who steals it from someone else (basically a daft, skinny cunt version of himself.) Uncle Pete's got a right spread, what Dennings likes to call a smorgasbord. Shades, clothes, trainers, pills only the doctor should have. My mum thinks I'm oblivious to all this, thinks I'm a thick twat, but who does she think helps him sell it all on the secret internet? As if Pete could figure that out for himself, can barely boot up his woefully out of date PC.

Anyway, lets take a pause in my resume to allow me to introduce myself. I'm basically an exceptional student, attempting to pose as a marginally, below average student, but somehow getting it wrong and being mistaken for a retard! Fuck!

And yeah I like the stuff you think I like, junk food, fast video games and woman-hating hip hop. But I also like one or two things you probably wouldn't expect. But back to that daft numpty of a sixth former - Connor - he told me he tried to buy grass off Craigslist, Craigslist list for fuck's sake! You couldn't write it! Sorry for that one...old woman phrase. One of Pete's that. He didn't even open the bag!

No, Connor doesn't worry me too much, weighs about a stone more than me really, but he's got a mate and to be honest he'd kick the shit out of Pete let alone me. Always wearing a track suit from his gym, not that UFC stuff, one of the chink ones, don't remember which, point is he's really fucking good at it. Bobs in Year 11 (one above me) tried to fight him once, and everyone thought Mr Kung Fu was gonna end up covered in his own blood (because Bobs is built more like a stocky little man than a teenage boy and from a real violent family - real deal that lot). Fuck! That was so satisfying to watch that it almost made me like Connor by proxy. Almost. They had to take Bobs to the hospital. Wasn't really that hurt like, just teachers covering their backs, but was kind of wobbly on his feet, lot of blood. Just realised it's making me smile now!

The point of all this is: I've not just got to break into Dennings' - no doubt crappy - house, I've gotta keep my eyes peeled for that Bruce Lee wannabe as well. And maybe one or two other cunts who I've upset recently. Now don't ask me why I'm going to do what I'm going to do to poor old Dennings. Because I don't know. He's not even the worst teacher at Pontias Academy, that would be Coldwell. In fact, I almost like the cunt in a strange way, but he's so...

Anyway, it's funny, isn't it? Helps that as far as anyone knows he's never had a girlfriend. Not while he's been at our school at least. Not gonna say that I have a 'gaydar' because that's the type of shit a sixth-former would come out with, but...I can smell a bender a mile off!

Now why am I breaking, or hopefully just sneaking, into his house. Well as you are probably aware kids like me, regardless of our socio-economic background, get away pretty much scot-free with the old police. Not like I could shoot a baby in the face or shoplift forever, but you know what I mean.

Sure, I could just get his laptop in the staff room or the classroom when it's quiet, and then bury my surprise gift in a subfolder, use an obscure title or make it hidden. Risky to begin with, but technically simple, and not half not as risky as going into a house uninvited. But it's passworded, I seen him on that screen before - who knows maybe he really has got something to hide on there - but either way, it's definitely passworded. Now I have got a simple boot disc for that but no time for loading that and the 12 step process which follows at school now is there?

But also it's just for the 'shiggles' as Ross likes to say. You see, there's an excitement in doing something you shouldn't, and for me, a real fucking charge in getting away with it.

Now if your advanced enough to know how basic the boot disc is, then you might be asking what if that sucker don't work? Well for that, I got something in my pocket, looks just like a pen drive, in fact it essentially is a pen drive. But the magic is inside. The beauty of this little gizmo is that it will penetrate straight into windows, doesn't matter what screen I'm on - as long as windows (not sure about those apply cunts) is on the other side of that screen - and it will embed the data so deep, that it won't only make them look well hidden, it will look as if no outsider, especially a spotty teenage boy with a poor reputation and even worse grades, is likely to be responsible.

I got it from that uber nerd in my computers class. The only one I allow myself to openly perform well in, because I enjoy that one, yes I do. Okay for a nerd, him. His porn is well fucking filthy too. The ones with the coke bottle lenses and the weak fists have always got the best porn! Notice that?! Fuuuck.

His sister gets on my nerves though, god it must be the only time that a teacher yells at a student and I'm on the teacher's side. I've got nothing against most of the weird kids, but who sits in Maths class drawing all that Game Of Thrones shit?! Twat!

Shit he's at the corner of the road where our academy is with that stupid fucking box and I think he just spied me behind this tree...

...nah, thank fuck, he's just checking the road. False alarm! So if you're asking how I plan to get in this house without getting caught in the first place, well, he stopped driving to school about a month back. Sorry basted probably can't even afford to run a car - Pete says they get paid fuck all and I've got a feeling he might actually be right for once - so he's been walking home and I've been following him. Proper Columbo style and noting down his faggy routine and he does a few things like clockwork, including going straight back out for a full hour, five minutes after arriving home from school. Always an hour.

Also, much more weird, that box. Started carrying that around the same time he lost his car. Big bulky brown cardboard number like you use when you're moving houses, not something you carry your shit to work in. Not if you're halfway normal, anyway.

Old Connor isn't the only one who's got it in for me. Last week I made an enemy of the hardest lad in my year, because I'm smart like that. So how did you manage that you say. Well, nothing, really. Just said a thing about a thing that got back to him. More just repeating a rumour than anything else. Why am I the one who always gets caught?

Anyway, better keep my head in the game. So what do we have coming here? Couple of girls, not together like, one walking a little behind the other. First one's pushing a pram. Not anyone I know though.

Jesus I think that's what Pete refers to as jail bait. Not for me like, don't like it when they have the make up like that, that much I mean...but then I know she wouldn't be interested in me. That kid will probably grow up wanting to fuck his mum, not his fault, who can blame him? She's just that hot!

Oh and what do we have here. If that was beauty here come the beast! Looks like she just purchased shares in a chippy conglomerate. This one reminds me of another of Pete's mate's classics - 'wouldn't fuck her with a stolen one!' Or is it 'rape?' Never mind, that cunt wouldn't know the difference! Fuuuck.

See Uncle is always telling me I'm nowhere near as smart as I think I am (usually when I've just helped or corrected him) and it doesn't usually bother me but occasionally it does. You know. I'm not sure why but I do like working with him though, especially online. There is this...freedom...you see they're always telling me where I'm allowed to go, and what I'm allowed to do, and, and well fuck them, you see on line I can go deep and wander where I please. It's not just about all the free shit I can just take, like blu rays that would cost me 15 quid or video games that would cost me 60, or even that really great Jap porn (and so much of it!) no it's the information as well and the fact that on the chatrooms, if I'm myself, my true self, I'm not judged or segregated. I mean fuck, they don't know I live on a council estate next door to some cunt who smells like tea bags! I tried telling that gimp in IT class once, thought he might get it, but not at all, he just stared at me through those six inch thick lenses of his. Blinked a lot like. Maybe he was trying to Morse code me!

And right there on the corner, up a bit of a hill is "The Black Pearl." One of the better Chinkys in town. I watch him go inside, see him framed in the yellow window. Looks different, a little broader.

Still with the box though.. He looked a proper dick struggling with that all day at school. Thought he was gonna drop it on a year 7 at one point! Nob!

You know he eats here every Wednesday. Exactly the same time, waits at the same table. No one else is ever in, like the yellow shit hole is reserved just for him on Wednesdays! Always a large white bag full of those foily tins the chinks like, and always a little brown side box. Always given to him by the same chink in the same way. The one with the stuck up hair, and the belly sticking out and the glasses which are never fucking straight on his face. Can't work out whether he's got retarded eyes or crooked ears. Looks a proper spaz either way.

He creeps me out that one: it's like if I'm pretending to be retarded but I'm really clever, then he's a spaz trying to pass himself off as normal! Ha! Not falling for it sonny-jimmy-boy, not one bit. You keep forgetting to wipe the drool off your lip! - probably because you're a 'tard. Sonny Jimmy Boy, that's another one of Uncs, wherever does he get his old fashioned nonsense from?!

Sister's all right though. Not as tidy as that little number back there with the pram but...Unc's mate reckons they've got sideways ones. Thing is though he isn't joking, he actually believes it, he's that thick. Fuck. Actually, doesn't even make sense on its own terms that, now that I come to think about it. Think he's a virgin actually.

A few minutes later I watch Dennings leave (glad he was quick) and hang back a little to keep that safe distance going. I hear some cats screwing - that torturous wail - and then I see one with a dead bird in its mouth. Weird that, isn't it? Just see a cat trotting along with a fully grown dead bird in its trap. Like I might expect it with a dog. I mean yeah they might be famous for killing birds, but when do you ever actually see one of the cunts pull it off.

He's stopped outside that house again. As bog standard as all the other houses. Why the fuck does he stop here? Always. He never does anything, but as they said on that cop show I was watching last night - 'there is no such thing as coincidence.' Has he got a touch of the old Rain Man perhaps. You know that movie with the actor who's gone a bit mental now. There's a kid in my Math class who's like that. It's like Dennings is just counting bricks or something. And what is he doing with his fingers? Has he got something in his hand? His phone maybe.

You know, now that I think of it, there is something different about Dennings out of school. I'm not soft, I know, I know, teachers are people too and all that. But I mean really different, like 'dual lives.' That's one of those phrases I have to keep down under the radar when I'm in school. You don't ever wanna get marked out as clever, whether you are or not. Not just because of the likes of Reece or Bobs either, the staff are likely to stamp on a cocky little prole. Stamp him right down into remedial college.

Yeah, Dennings seems more confident, and maybe even cooler too. Never thought I'd say that! Fuck. He's still stood there though. Simple explanation: he knows the people who live there. But then WHY does he never see them. Doesn't even knock.

Got it!

It's his ex. He did have a girlfriend once up a time, but she left taking old Denning's heart with her. And now the sad puff stalks her. Actually, having said that, who's to say it's a chick? Maybe his bumboy lives there. Hmmmm.

Well he's moving again.

So how am I getting into the house to plant the stuff in the first place. Well like I said I've observed this post school routine before. That's how I knew about the chinky and the mystery house stop, and that magic hour - not two, not three, not twenty minutes, one hour.

And I plan to be in and out in half of that tops.

Now I shouldn't have any nasty little surprises because as far as everyone knows he live alone and he told a girl in my class that he doesn't even own a gold fish. He did come to school once with this little blonde haired boy with a bowl cut. Probably just his nephew or something. But that's the only time any of us have ever seen him with anyone else.

But yeah, that's right I still haven't answered the question. HOW am I gonna get in there? Well, he has an alarm but like every other fucker he doesn't set it. You can tell from the way they flash. And like I said no pitbull. Now Dennings aint dumb enough to leave one of his doors or widows open, even for a hour, but he does leave one downstairs window round the back on the latch. And I've already tested it, on an identical window type, and all it's gonna take is a solid little rod to force the handle and...Voila Bitches! I'm in!!

He's stopped again. Not a habit this one. No routine here, he's just looking at a billboard. That one with the fancy mattress with three layers of what do you call it and memory foam and a soppy cunt with a silly smile plastered all over his airbrushed mug! To be fair if I was banging the piece in the background, which I assume he is, well then I guess I might smile like a twat all day... But I'm assuming it's the graffiti that has caught Mr Dennings' eye. Because not even he's that fucking boring.

Someone tagged it a few nights back. But its not the usual obscenity or some simple but memorable logo, it's a weird shape, like these intersecting triangles. Something off about that. I wouldn't think anything of it on a school desk but who climbed up there to do that?! And I feel like I've seen it somewhere before, on line, but can't think if it would have been on the regular internet or the secret one.

I decide to sit down behind the substation to play with my phone (always a good time killer - do it at school sometimes when I'm supposed to be working) while I wait for sad sack to move on. I gotta keep my distance anyway. He might actually know where I live and if he sees me...

So what do we have her? Usual pointless update on facebook (I'm not officially on there but I have three fake accounts). Oh god if that bitch posts one more picture of her family holiday to Peru...I only got on here to stir it up (trolling possibilities unlimited) and get a glimpse of my female classmate's sexier pics. Not happening. Sure, I do have an elaborate plan to stir it all up later (been a bit preoccupied lately - obviously) but not a bikini shot in sight. I think the news is lying to me about all this teenage sex, because most of the ones in my year couldn't pick out a cock in a line up. Why didn't you take your camera to the beach cunt? Or don't they have them in Peru? And the other thing is...

Ah shit this aint no evil twin, that's fucking Connor all right and he's with Mr Kung Fu. Just came around the corner opposite the billboard. Vaping and occupied by something but I can't tell what. With a bit of luck they are both too high off the placebo I sold them to notice me. Then there's this slow motion moment where we look in each others direction and they're looking at me looking at them looking at me and ('do they recognise me yet?) now they've shifted position in a way

that...

might...

imply...

Fuuuck! I turn back the way I was going. I take the corner so hard I almost stumble, knock my elbow slightly into the street sign. I'm leaping over things which aren't even there. Thing is I can move when I have to BUT I can't see me outlasting either of those cunts. Stamina. Owens is always banging on and on about me improving my stamina.

I chance a look back. Not only can I see them but they are closer than I expect. I speed up. I'm running at that kinda of personal speed where you can't believe that you haven't lost balance and landed smack on your face.

I run into a jitty and take a weird little short cut I know. I basically circle back and come out at a street in between the substation and the billboard.

God I hate having to run like that.

Just give me a moment to catch my breath and get my shit together.

...

Well anyway, once more, back in the game, back in the game. Dennings. Get to the house, round back, wheelie bin, window, do the deed. End of.

I think of my ready-loaded excuse in case he sees me. He's not that smart old Dennings. Don't get me wrong he is a clever cunt, cleverer than most of the teachers...probably; definitely smarter than old Golder our ever elusive headmaster. I haven't even seen that twat for two months.

Actually fuck that...ignore the nonce. Why would I engage. It would be weirder to engage. Occasionally I over think - my uncle has noticed this - and as dumb as he is, he is smart - this is a flaw that I'm aware of. But a small one. A man who knows his limitations has none. Owens said that. Now he is thick, but eloquent thick, so smart enough to fool average thick...I don't know...Something like that.

I sense we're approaching his house now. I'm not as nervous as I thought I would be, but I will be when I get outside. See, right now, doesn't mean anything, even if he did know I was following. But breaking and entering that's another story entirely. Though I'm not technically doing the breaking part, will that soften the blow?

Yep, he's stopped and he's putting that silly box down to get his keys out.

I thought he'd live in a place like this. Didn't surprise me the first time I saw it. All tucked away, good distance from the school. Ha! The house itself is no major surprise either, place is just about what I expected to be honest. For his income, for his type. The garden's a bit messy though. That's the only thing really. I say a bit, on closer inspection it's a fucking tip bucket. All the grass and 'plants' and weeds and shit growing freely, pushing up against the window ledge. And some sheets of wood, like palette ends stood up against the wall beneath the window. Fine one to be lecturing us about lines and structure - the cunt! With a chavved up garden like this.

Now what do we have here then? this fucker's a little creepy. Big old heavy statue of an owl on the gate post. Neighbours not got one...actually no other fucker on the street's got one. Now I know an owl ain't a demon or a gargoyle or like noncy or nothing but I don't like it's haughty stare, or the direction it faces! And they are weird in real life, have you ever seen one?! Not when its decapitating a mouse, just while it's hanging about like. Look like they belong in books and nowhere else.

Don't remember him having it before though.

There's is moss in the grooves and cracks like an infection, like a skin disorder. And its eyes are so deeply set they look twisted. There's something wrong with that statue. I'd knock it off its fucking perch right now if I didn't have bigger fish to fry!

Maybe on the way out big boy, me and you, me and...

Now owls are getting to me, maybe Miss Stricken is right, about me needing a...

There are a bunch of rubbery little slugs all over. Down the wall the owl is perched on - like he's shitting them out! - then onto the pavement and up the path toward the house. I feel like I'm following a trail, like in that fucking kid story, you know, the one with the nonce in the candy house. Something's making me think now that this is a bad idea and I really shouldn't be here. I have broken and entered before like, once, well twice, well kinda...But that was different, not a fully functioning home and not a teacher, not one of my teachers. But alongside my fear a growing curiosity about what is actually inside that place. What does the owl guard?

That was weird, just going past the gate there I felt a kind of heat spot, like the opposite of what they are always talking about in those paranormal shit shows my mum watches (daft bitch!). They always say, usually in the fucking nursery 'oh I feel a cold spot right here' and then all the fuck 'tards agree that there is an inexplicable (another word to watch) temperature shift. No shit Sherlock! It's the cuntin' basement what do you expect? Underground dick head underground! But anyway, this one is warm, fucking hot as shit actually. It is a winter's night right here though so what's this. Vent surely, just a flue from the boiler or something.

Window frames are a bit grubby too. Not maintaining them are you sir?! And more of that black snail slime. And a powder, everywhere, like one big slug perimeter. The back garden is as creepy as the front is scruffy. I can see a tiny little shed nestling in the far left corner. The path leading to it buried in grass. There's some bins or something off to the right. And maybe a bar-b-que or something like that in the corner.

But its the branches more than anything. Creeping out of the side of a tree I can't even see. Because the trunk, along with everything else on that side of the garden is shrouded in... ('shrouded' is the kind of word Dennings would use if he was telling a story.) "The back garden was shrouded in night and mystery." Actually that's better that one of his! Ha!

I'm scared but I gotta look in that shed; more and more I feel like I'm going to find something.

The small window is plastic not glass, and a little dislodged. There's some wire or something trapped in there. Most of the view is blocked off by a sheet of card on the inside but I can see something. Two large cans of old paint stacked on top of each other, and a plastic bucket and spade. You know, like the poncy ones kids take to the beach. Cobwebs all over the top like messy hair. Fuck it's creepy and I can't even tell you why. I think the logo on the side of the can has just moved then realise it's a big fuck-off spider, shit my pants I did. Jesus!

Fuuuck...

Seems colder now.

I look up without thinking about why and see that moon looks too low - like it's pressing down on me. Even harder than before. I see the breath in front of my face. I have to go inside now. I have to see it all. Every bit.

I get to the window, the one with the inch gap I intend to exploit, and there is a snail on the glass. Just the one. I don't like it. It's hard to explain.

It's like not clues (fuck sometimes I don't have to pretend to be dumb!)...signs, god it was Dennings actually wasn't it? Always banging on about signs and signifiers in that self-published dribble of his. That poem of his: and at midnight in hell you find a glimpse of light, you see that both the sign and the signifiers have abandoned you..."

And I don't know why but I start thinking about the spider again - recall it disappearing back into the darkness. Like does it stop existing, or what?

I distract myself with the fun I will have when I get back home, and the buzz of accomplishment that pulling this shit off should give me. I take a few breaths and man up. Drag the wheelie bin round from the side of the house, get on, extract my rod, work my magic.

Now I'm somewhere I shouldn't be.

There's a definite pong here, not an exotic smell, just that kind of horrible festering wet dog smell you sometimes smell, like Unc's house and mum's too if she had her way with all the fucking pets. The way you'd expect Fred West's house to have smelt if that makes any sense. But it's not really the smell. It's the concentration. The density. Right here and nowhere else, like the winter hot spot outside by the gate.

He has left that box in the hallway by the front door. Still closed and sealed shut. You'd think I'd wanna take a gander at that thing. But something tells me it will be boring. If there's any dirt to be found it'll be stashed away somewhere. And if I don't find any I'm gonna leave a little behind, so Old Dennings is gonna have to to do some talking either way!

Let's check out the lounge.

Well that phone looks as much a prop as the owl outside. It looks as if it has never - never - been used; green, outdated and shiny, with one of those rings on top instead of buttons. You know what I mean, I don't know what you call 'em. What's that magazine at the side of it? Caravanning Weekly. Hmmm. Interesting. Didn't have old Dennings tagged as a caravanner, could imagine him in a tree house by himself in the middle of nowhere like. Wall paper's old fashioned, not what I had his style pegged as.

His kitchen shines like a big, shiny bastard. Ha ha! Serial killer white, like that show with the killer who kills killers, or some shit that thinks it's clever. And I might just be a kid but I know what stuff costs, and this stuff, costs a lot. All German and Swedish brands and everything brand spanking new.

It's a schizophrenic house this, can't decide what it wants to be. Chintzier than my Gran's in one room, pretentious as Miss Stricken's must be elsewhere. It's just off, this place is off. There's something in the oven, but that's off too. But something left in there. All those horror movie possibles rush through my mind. Dead baby. Dead Bird. Dead rat. Basically a lot of dead stuff.

Maybe it's Dennings! Ha! He's no that fucking scrawny you cunt!

Yeah, I get it, just fucking open it already.

A ceramic cottage.

Odd place to put it, but not exactly scary.

Let's see if there's any pottery in the fridge. Nah, nowt out of the ordinary in here. Except for a dozen or so small black eggs in a plastic container on the second shelf. Obviously not chicken and I know they're not duck because my granddad gets them from his mate (who likes to pilfer national parks) all the time. Let's see...they weigh about what you'd expect, but the outside feels more like skin than shell. A softer, more leathery texture.

I check the cupboards real quick. The one next to the one above the oven has a huge meat cleaver strapped to the inside of the door. Never seen one that big before, not even in the movies.

Now there's no slugs this time but more of the powder. I feel like I'm following it about the house. With a bit of luck it'll lead me straight to his PC!

Time to check upstairs, for some reason that's always where I've expected to find his laptop. Don't know why.

God here he goes again, Gran's wallpaper, that puffy stuff, anal-graph or something, bet his bedroom's all post modern and shit. God talking of which those sixth former really are thick as fuck. I was having a quiet word with Mr.Bent (funny because he's anything but the big bastard!) at the back of one of their civics classes and they were trying to explain to each other different systems of government and one of them says...

Jesus that slime's here again and not a little either, a big puddle on the wall. It stinks too, like shit, and it's everywhere, I can almost see pictures in it. You know like when some dozy mare claims she can see Jesus in a slice of burnt toast..

I just saw something. Move all by itself. Silently across the landing.

This isn't funny. I'm thinking of stuff to distract myself but I am scared really. This house is cold. It belongs on one of those shows. It's older than the rest of the street.

Maybe I saw nothing, I'm not sure any more.

I study the landing and take a slow, deep breath. I am considering the doors when I notice that there is a consortium of insects festering at the base of the one across from me.

I don't even want to go in any of these rooms. Why couldn't he just leave his laptop on the coffee table like a normal. Fuck! What if he took it back out with him? Fuuuuuck!

Is there a PC about that I can use instead?

Then I notice that his attic has one of those easy pull down ladders installed. And is that the whirring of a hard drive I hear? I'd know that sound anywhere. Kinda love that sound actually. It relaxes me. I check my phone for the time and decide that I'm only giving this ten more minutes.

I bring down the ladder, push everything else to the back of my mind and start to climb.

Bastard! One of the steps just broke. Is the fucker trying to booby-trap me or is this just another example of Denning's sloppy maintenance. Either way he's a cunt!

I get inside and...Eureka! A nice, new, accessible PC buzzing away in the middle of the room.

There are some shapes on his screensaver but at a glance, from a certain angle, the whole thing resembles nothing more than 0s & 1s. I knock the mouse to wake it up.

Tabs at the top...I flick through them...opening the one by one. They are all the same, squares of video. Green. We've got a thousand bits here: Skype and cctv and office cams; dog pounds & car parks & creepy alleys (partially lit and grainy as shit!) And the people don't really look like people people, they look like figures.

I click on one of the videos and all I get is something that looks about as sharp as the school security footage. But this ain't no school it's like one of those prison yards in the cop shows, and some sorry sap in a giant dog cage, who looks real desperate like he's not really there any more.

I flick through more of the tabs.

These people at their keyboards look confused, do they even know their webcams are switched on? This thought makes me look around for a camera of my own, smile you're on...snakes and caravans....eclectic, actually that's one of Denning's pet words, eclectic, he loves to say that in class when he's not reading us his poetry.

But yeah I just realised that the wall behind me and both sides are lined with snake tanks. He never mentioned owning one snake let alone, what...50 of the cunts! And what about Louise Jenkins - yeah! - she asked him once in class if he had any pets and he said:

"No, not even a goldfish."

Now I'm scared. I'm starting to think that whatever it is that shot across the landing or lurks in the shed, well like there are ten of those in this room with me right now, moving all around me, but they're invisible. I check my watch - he has spent precisely 40 minutes of his 60 and my 10 are up.

Something doesn't scan with all this, it might not be all that eccentric to use your attic as an office, but to surf these websites and keep secret snakes. I'm trying to do what Pete calls a 'risk assessment. When he's buying and selling on that black market he often starts trying to sound fancy.

But seriously, Stop and Think. How weird is this, really? This house, the whole set up. So I might not have to plant the Cheese Pizza but is there anything else going...Oh weird, that one seemed to open itself. A video window - centralised and taking up most of the screen. Well this looks wrong from the get go.

There's a little blonde boy - 5, 7, 9 - I don't know, lot younger than me anyway. He's got that regulation hollywood hair cut all the child stars have before they become cokeheads and opium fiends.

But he's only wearing white pants and the room is bare accept for a pommel horse.

He's just standing there. What the fuck is he doing.

A man walks in. That's Dennings.

Fuck me sideways; is that that kid he bought to school with him!

Oh. My. G-

Dennings bends him over the pommel horse, goes partially out of frame and comes back with a whip. A big fuck off slave whip.

He starts to rail on the boy but the picture is too grainy to read either of their faces, BUT it's definitely Dennings and that kid he was with that time and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the kid aint enjoying it.

Fuuuuck...

Shit!

What was that?!

A really loud thud but it came from above not below, like there is something else above me like the false bottom in Unc's suitcase.

Fuck! Three more!!

Fuck this for a game of soldiers!

I scramble down stairs. Nearly break my neck. Look around frantically like I forgot where the back window is. Or should I just go out the front, who cares if some cunt sees me at this point?!

The flaps are up and the box is empty now.

There's a slippery, squelching sound coming from the kitchen. Movement and slurping. I know Dennings isn't back yet.

The light is on.

I step forward even though I know I should be walking away...

{}{}{}

Spinning and squealing in its own chaos, the Wandering Kid has been trapped and imprisoned by the bicameral mind. A weak spirit this, aura also lacking, the palest purple, hanging on the precipice.

The wandering Kid's eyes are violent and bloody, They scream with a cosmic density.

Its shod ape skin tears at the edges once more. Finger nails grow and expand, sharpen.

The expectation of flesh always gives it a tingle - that apple in the garden. That last sequel. That final regard...

There are others here now also - fresh ghosts in the machine - their searchlight eyes writ with liquid crystal, they know much, about the people on the other side of the abyss. Before their time. But this is for the older ones to judge.

Finally, in this realm, one it can consume, beyond its master, if it can stabilise its form it will devour this one, even the bones will be absorbed.

For the time being there are the cold embryos of the ancient ones to satiate his hunger

{}{}{}

An obsidian slab illuminated by the light of the fridge.

It was hard to tell where the head ended and body began, ditto body and legs.

Tentacles emanate from its torso and empty the little black eggs like straws. The shells are discarded into pulpy little messes on the floor.

It turned towards the intruder, hisses in silence. Being frozen to the spot he can only look back. It has one waxy, red eye in what might be its forehead. This congealed eye stared back at him through a delicate thread of veins.

Carl feels a presence behind him, turns to see a man approaching and is forced through the door, past the thing by the refrigerator and into the middle of the kitchen.

Then the man enters, and Carl only knows it to be his teacher from his place in the house and the voice he sports. The rest of him has changed. This is no longer the meek educator but a man of the world, an intelligent predator.

"..."

"You look a little surprised to see me Carl. Am I back early?"

"..."

"Maybe I never left. Did you find any of my little toys? I know you didn't disturb my box. Don't worry about that. Not sure how he got out though. That is against protocol. Have to look into that won't I?"

"..."

"He does enjoy those eggs though. Although I think right now he has your scent. Don't think he would stop at your blood either."

"..."

"Come now, you hide your intelligence, now is the time to show it, surely. What do yo think is happening here?"

"You're keeping a boy prisoner, you're some kind of pervert."

"What did I tell you about us all being prisoners? Weren't you paying attention in my class? Not listening to my poetry?"

And the boys recalls a dream he used to have, about two older boys holding him hostage.

The monster stays by the fridge, no longer interested in its bizarre sustenance, but not making any moves towards the intruder either. It seems to be awaiting orders...or permission. Slithering on the spot.

"I could teach you, I need a protege. I don't think your mother would miss you, do you?"

"What did you do with that boy?"

"Oh he's still here. He is both my offspring and my waste. The son being the father of the man and all that..."

"..."

"You could even say complicit. Here, let me show you."

The teacher removes the oversized meat cleaver from the inside of the cupboard door, with one quick, lean, smooth movement. Turns back to his student. The one who wasted his potential.

Then without warning he hacks into his monster, the creature shakes with primal response, but besides that accepts the turn of event like a loyal pet.

Purple foam spews from the mouth (if that's what the fleshy hole is) and the congealed eye bulges as the teacher pushes the thing harder against the cupboard door, his forearm tensed around the blade.

Weird high pitch sounds. Fluids of various colour, slimy and thin, running down the dark flesh, pooling fluorescently on the floor, the flesh having no choice but to give way, surrender.

The home owner digs his fingers inside, begins to yanks upwards, the screams reach a higher register.

He peels off the rubber skin of the monster to reveal a skull. No, another face.

And it is every inch the face from the video, the face of innocence. That is apart from the too large mouth and the infinite number of teeth within.

The intruder can do nothing but watch, as the boy's jaw dislocates to reveal an abyss.

地獄の真夜中

Pounding black lights break the whiteness...

There was something wrong in the town. You could say it started with the graffiti by the bench, but in fact it started weeks before that, with the birds. Dead birds, plump and unusual looking, popping up all over town. One on his street, one on some netting by a disused Indian grocer - hanging limp like a spider-web victim. A particularly large one by a faltering lamp post. There size wasn't alone in being off, their colour stunk too. By turns too black and exotic for local birds.

Sure Joe had seen dead birds before, sure, obviously, but they were the borderline foetus of fallen tree eggs, nature's little abortions - pale, purple and spastic. And they were common. But these were big fuckers, fully grown, cut down in their prime like hunting victims: objects in motion which had finally collided with their destiny.

This town had been his childhood home and most of his life. And although it had never been perfect - the sense of urgency to 'get out' being there for as long as he had been self aware - it was only in the last two years that it had really begun to 'get him down.' That, of course, being a euphemism for despair. His friends had disappeared from the town one by one. Taken by jobs, women, time and in one partially expected case, suicide. His mother had assured him that over time he'd cease to miss these people and they would be replaced by new ones. And yet this new portal of experience had failed to present itself, and so he had been left with loneliness and distance. The distance was an icy void of ambiguity, the loneliness, self-explanatory.

So when Joe was sat on that bench that sunny afternoon - a week and a half, precisely, after the start of the dead bird sightings - and he saw that oblique graffiti on the ground by his feet, he was most certainly looking at a sign which (at least in his mind) had been waiting to arrive.

Adherence#jfje38frk9.onion

He scribbled it down, with his finger, in his phone, on one of those virtual post-it notes. Feeling silly, knowing that more likely than not it was going to turn out to be some silly teenager's facebook account. Or a part of some wannabe, bespoke, retrobrand's viral ad campaign.

There was a uncommon sense of urgency as he got in from the cold that night. The way that house swallowed him up so completely, the house being his only true comfort now that so many other elements had moved on. He didn't even notice his mother's wet cough or the drone of her visual opiate, the muffled sounds of a programme in which a group of people competed in an insidious manner for a prize of false value.

When he thought of his mother he wondered whether this was really someone to be taking guidance from; she had grey eyes and greasy skin and a lolling grey tongue. Perpetually lost in a cloud of cigarette smoke - and all the carcinogens which that implied - his mother was dying, accept she wasn't dying... His mother was dead meat, abattoir fodder. His mother was ill informed. His mother was English.

He climbed the stairs, up the muddy carpet, past the oft painted walls: there were scrapes and stains here which marked reminders of the past...data points. Was it really the house which was his bubble? Or, in fact, merely his room. Such a small bubble. He'd heard the expression that a safety net could turn into a hammock under the wrong circumstances, for him a comfort zone had become a prison. To think about how much of his life was lived out in this space - but then he didn't suspect he was unique there. Lives being generally ordinary.

It wasn't always the house or the room though, there was sleep and work. He'd had a job he had hated with a passion for fifteen years. And it was that passion which kept him going. His biggest pleasure came in finding new, and increasingly elaborate ways to avoid work. And to annoy his colleagues in the process. He knew that he was inherently sneaky and had always sensed that this could be applied effectively to some enterprise which had not yet revealed itself. But for the time being he had to be content to hide in the stockroom.

In life in general he engaged in a more subtle form of hiding.

He went to his room, settled into his cluttered desk, and woke up his PC. His room was a state of the present and a reflection of the past. The usual soft white illuminated both half his face and the room which housed it. In turn a patchwork of the old and the contemporary - the ephemera of his life - dots not worth connecting sprawled across the carpet.

The address was a dud. Bringing nothing but the obligatory '404 error' love letter. He'd thought the syntax off from the start, no 'www,' more of a jumble than usual, no typical domain of geographical origin.

He messaged a friend. One of only two that he had any type of relationship with any more. And these being purely digital. Tom was 'the boffin' and generally more advanced on computers than Joe, his 'go to' guy so to speak.

A quick Skype exchange (written not spoken - they didn't want to speak to one another) gave him his answer. It was a deep web url, only readable by the onion router. It was easily accessible, he installed it with surprising ease. Something he'd been contemplating for months now anyway, in order to circumnavigate regional restrictions and censorship.

The website wasn't actually called 'adherence' or anything like:

### MIDNIGHT IN HELL

Was the unsettling moniker, rendered in some pinkish alloy of blood and sperm.

Japanese binary investment. Joe wasn't entirely sure what binary investment was (being hardly capable of balancing a cheque book) but it was the juxtaposition of economics, with that inappropriate name - and the deep ambiguity which it created - which unsettled him. And of course the matter of its location, why did something like this need to be hidden?

A horror movie style drone note spat from his exhausted computer speakers. It started deep before dropping several phases in the register.

Then, hanji characters, pale blue and opalescent, danced behind the Roman figures, sliding back and forth.

These Hollywood style histrionics should have served to make the whole thing seem less daunting, more the stuff of fiction, but in reality only pushed the site further into the realms of the forbidden. Joe felt as if the butterflies in his belly had been pinned to the walls of his stomach.

There was not a link or button to be seen. Just the small whitish English lettering and the larger Japanese. He moved his cursor all about the screen hoping to illuminate something. Eventually, shifting it as far as it would go into the bottom right corner, he revealed a small grey box. Not much more visible than when it had been invisible. Following a moment's hesitation, he clicked.

A pass word box appeared in the centre of the screen.

He took a breath and typed 'adherence.'

The screen flashed red and blue.

Four rows of Japanese writing filled the screen.

Blue text.

What followed was a maze or endless flow chart of links. Some led him to a choice for further links, plainly aligned on the left of the screen, others to content (although it was stretching the boundaries of most people's definition of the word), and some required additional passwords ('adherence' no longer cutting it).

He felt like a gerbil in a laboratory maze trying to reach a piece of cheese. He felt like his younger self playing a fighting fantasy game book, trying to reach a treasure or escape a dungeon.

Most of the links which provided content took him to surveillance type video. Sometime it was one central image, invariably of a prisoner, other times it was a bank of images stacked in a grid four by four. The only themes diversity and mundaneity. Joe thought that he had heard word of this before. A commercially accessible network of CCTV cameras. A friend's eccentric grandfather had watched them for hours, rescue dogs barking silently in pens, public quadrants occupied and not, parks where realist pornography or casual violence threatened to ignite at any moment, meaningless data. But there was something sinister in the arrangement here; weight through repetition and design.

He clicked on a verdant image to have it 'flip' to reveal yellow text on black. Initially meaningless it quickly revealed itself to be a transcript of the conversation in the video. Why no audio? Were they being lip read? Directional microphones not being practical in the circumstance. But then Joe had to reverse engineer his thought process to try and answer the question: why does he assume these people are being spied on in the first place?

But they are, aren't they?

He noticed a tiny white arrow in the bottom right, missed before and clicked it to reveal a dozen more screens of video, as eclectic and mundane again.

Another arrow, and more videos, and so on and so forth. Screen full after screen full.

He remembered a horror movie he saw on DVD years before. About a group of desperate reality TV wannabes in a fully rigged up house, which turns out to be some sort of underground snuff ring. The sick and rich elite paying to vote on, or predict (he couldn't remember the details) who would be snuffed out next. But these were public places. Car parks and shops and the data points of day to day existence and they couldn't be vulnerable. At least not in that controlled manner.

So why were they being watched and who would want to watch them?

Then eventually he found a submenu and discovered that the CCTV cams were the tip of the iceberg...

...and this exploration dragged on into the early hours and as the sun seeped into the sky he thought he saw another dead bird, through the gap in the curtain, on the decking of his mum's garden. When he ventured into the dawn it turned out to be a frog - large, rotund and very much alive. He stared at it, cigarette in hand, and something passed between them. A living bird landed on the fence, tweeted, departed, and in that very moment he decided that this trail must be followed to its conclusion, however fiery.

The sub menu contents had raised far too many questions. Questions which had dislodged the scales from Joe's eyes; there was a world out there - that small piece of the lie was true - but it wasn't the way they described it, and it certainly wasn't the one they spoke of in school. Nor the one which lurked on the other side of his mother's TV set. It wasn't the stuff of inspirational speeches it was the stuff of people forced into paying debts they never accrued in the first place. It was the exploitation never discussed by the side of the water-cooler.

So begun a matrix of dead end trails: there were the message boards and forums, the sub-reddits and 4Chans, meet-up groups and craigslists, onion routers and deepwebs: packed full of liars and scammers and half-baked visionaries one and all. At some point in the midst of of it all he found himself sitting in a pub across from a prematurely grey man with the face of a depraved baby. There was a shiftiness to eyes, a furtiveness to his hands; Bitcoins had been exchanged, promises had been broken.

Pounding black lights break the whiteness...

She is cut out against the glass encased night like a stapled moth. Her limbs more white than yellow in this bluish hue of electric moon light.

She looks too perfect and turns in slow motion. When her slick hair slides back off of her face LCD eyes of blue are revealed...

He went to the library where he was watched by an owl faced woman with purely square glasses. She moved with marionette jerks and questioned him with her eyes. He poured over the hypnotic sepia of the micro fiches, searching for any history of bird deaths (or indeed outbreaks of animal abuse in general) or any oblique graffiti which had mystified the town. There was nothing really. Something about some teenagers shooting a swan (with an air rifle) and a case of man who had had sex with a dog (so carefully worded as to not cause offence that it rendered the whole thing indecipherable at best, comical at worst).

He looked at the books they had on investment and searched for ones on the financial sector in Tokyo, knowing even as he did so that it was a wasted venture. Knowing that the internet would be a better place for this kind of loose and specific investigation.

On his way out the door he caught site of an unassigned library card on one of the shelves. He pocketed it without even thinking about it.

It was as he was returning from the library, half full of dismay and half way across the town square, that someone hissed out of the darkness like a conspiratorial snake. At first he saw no one accept a pair of tramps. Then he he realised that it was one of these who was trying to make contact. A raggedy little semaphore. His smile looked out of place, his partner in crime didn't even make the effort, preoccupied with his cache of cigarette butts.

Joe approached - more care free than usual, recent events and mood swings had ground him down - and he surprised himself with the smoothness of his entry.

"Yes, what is it?" he asked calmly.

The non-hisser, the taller of the two men by a good foot, shot him a filthy, cold stare and departed without word.

"Come here mate," said the other motioning towards the pillars of the town hall, which stood a little away, Joe followed further into darkness.

"Why?"

"I know a thing or two about a thing or two."

"Like..."

"About adherence, about what you're looking for..."

Joe's stomach fizzed. Suddenly he noticed things. New details on the scene. The tramp, who he truly was (or, at least, the true dimensions of who he was) as opposed to just 'The Tramp.' The face could be the face of a prisoner or a teacher, masked onto a life of unfulfilled potential and he saw the micro of the man too: the tiny grey black bristles and the contours of his hand. The sick cells which made his eyes the wrong colour. And suddenly he felt faint and saw that they were the only two in the very centre of the town - the ubiquitous square.

Two men under a yellow spotlight, surrounded by black, a horror movie moment.

"You okay there. Looks like someone threw you for a loop there for a moment there mate." There is nothing insidious in his tone and he steadies Joe imminent demise with gravity, a surprisingly solid hand on his shoulder, "You look all green around the gills..." There was suddenly nothing malevolent or ambiguous about the man without a home, this player on the stage had a guardian role in the narrative.

"Do you know anything about the website?"

He'd anticipated riddles and delays but the man was forthcoming:

"I can't tell you that mate. But I can tell you that the next step on your journey is towards one of our little oriental brothers. Not the type who run the site. The ants, the ones who run the world."

"Chinese."

A smile charged with a note of understanding passes between them and it is the single strongest connection that Joe has felt in months, years even.

"Yes, my friend," the homeless man says in silence.

Something moves on the fringes, a shadow on the periphery.

"Where?"

"Well of course the place you always go when you need a Chinese."

"The take-a-way."

A Raucous laugh from the tramp brings the world back into focus.

"That easy?"

"That easy pal, sometimes it just is."

"Which one?"

The hobo delays his answer for a moment - eyes darting left and right as if for an interloper.

"The Black Pearl."

That night he endured the worst of nightmares. Two young boys trapped in a shared cage. Both victims and predators - complicit in their own misery. Whilst Joe looked on, filled with guilt and shame, eating plants he had never seen in the real world. Rust spread like mould. And he was tripping in the dream. He knew he was a tripping in the dream. A dream within a dream: A Russian Doll state of mind.

And in the early morning snooze state he glimpsed another one. Chris. His friend who had taken his own life. But this version of Chris physically resembled a forgotten boy at school and was obsessed by computers. All he would converse on was computers, particularly at a micro level - with hands full of circuit boards. Despite the non-personal nature of the conversation Joe felt accused, as if somehow the routes around those transistors, capacitors and semi-conductors somehow mapped the specifics of his friend's down fall. The answers, the details which continued to allude his bereaved mother. And this just served to add another layer of mystery guilt.

The sky was scratched and blemished the night he went across town to the Chinese. It threatened to rain, but it didn't. He almost caught a bus, but he didn't. He sensed trouble that never came.

He half expected every homeless man that he passed to engage him in a dialogue. He was struck by how much hillier this part of town was, every single step seemingly more of an effort. The town overall was a toy model town compared to the almost magical expansiveness of childhood. He had simply stayed too long.

The drab Chinese looked like a million others and he questioned what he was doing here. The compact balding man who ran the show looked stretched out and hen-pecked. The assistant looked like she had been pretty once upon a time. The rest of the room wasn't worth describing but one thing stood out, worthy of attention - whirring and clicking and beeping away - a very old, very blocky computer attached to a modem and its own server. Looking pre-PC, pre-Amiga even, a BBC schools contraption.

An over stuffed man with a t-shirt which refused his belly and an explosion of hair was sat there doing things he shouldn't do on such a public computer. He recalled something his religious studies teacher had said about hiding in plain site. And this made him think of the mystery buildings he walked past every single morning on the way to work. Right there in the middle of town and nobody knew what they were for; large and moneyed and set far back behind impossibly high walls.

He placed the special order as directed. The man behind the counter seemed deranged and the strange order did nothing to settle him. He grunted several times and then went back to the kitchen where he yelled - in neither English nor Mandarin.

Whilst he waited he fidgeted nervously, his hands all over the counter like bugs, he moved things and put them back again, took a small plastic pen meant for orders, stuffed it deep into his pocket.

An older and more polished man appeared and led him out the back exit marked 'staff only' in crude penmanship. They entered the back alley. The temperature was different here and exotic garbage lined the walls. A cat exploded with sexual fury and toppled a box hidden in the darkness as Joe tried to avoid the Chinaman's eyes.

"Why did you come here?"

"I was told that I had to come here for answers."

"Answers to what?"

"Why the birds are dying. The company in Japan."

He already felt as though he were transforming when he dealt with these matters. Had this confidence returned or been grown in incubation. His mother once looked him in the eye and told him he had lost something. He hadn't believed her.

"Are you a businessman?"

"What?"

"Are you looking to invest in the infrastructure?"

"I'm looking to binary-trade."

A long sigh like air seeping out of a child's balloon as his eyes go from an empty box in the alley to the street light above.

"Well you already know how to go deep. Your task is as easy as it is difficult. Find the Blue Café chatroom and ask The Scandinavian for an address. If he will speak to you."

"What's his name, or, erm handle."

"The Scandinavian! That's his name!"

"Oh." His confidence depleted like the air from the balloon, again Joe felt that he was in a world he had no place stepping foot in.

"How, how will I know I'm in the right one, chat room I mean?"

The proprietor eyed him incredulously, "It will be blue."

Joe entered the chat room moments after entering his house. His mother's wet cough and facile studio laughter followed him up the stairs, but its tendrils were stopped dead by the door.

He needed not just the secret address to access it but some basic code too, obviously he was not not versed in code but the Chinaman had given him the verses he needed, written down on a slip of card with the rest of it.

>>>>C:/ drive pathway .exe

{[1.

2.

  3. **dltd**

  4. **prsnt**

5. story descriptors

6.

7.

8. further variables

9. See SD=(1.) ]}

BITS(0,1) > EVLTN > AI > STRTN PNT >

An extremely simple interface loaded up in the centre of the screen and after several inexplicable conversations, one with angeleyes89 and bigguncummer22, about lost pets and assisted suicide respectively, this transpired:

TheScandinavian: what are you looking for??

Joe: who says that i am looking for something?

TheScandinavian: don't answer a question with a question.

Joe: I am looking to invest.

[...]

Joe: I am looking to trade.

[...]

Joe: I just want to know why the bird are dying.

TheScandinavian: Credentials?

Joe: I am out of my league.

TheScandinavian: We are all out of our league. And our element for that matter, life is an unsolicited challenge. I can give you the info you seek, I have nothing to lose. But accept two things. 1-you risk your peace of mind. 2-It will mean nothing at all.

[...]

TheScandinavian: Well do you accept the conditions?

Joe: Yes. I accept.

And then, after a gap that seemed to last forever and made Joe physically sweat:

Scandinavia: I feel compelled to warn you that the route you seek is a circle which only leads back to a start-point more painful than you left it.

[...]

TheScandinavian:

Electrum Industries

(Binary Trading & Custodial Services)

57b Murakami Road

Eroropo District

East Tokyo

Japan

The day he travelled to the airport was clear and spotless. Clouds never arrived to conceal the sun. Joe's heart was full of possibility...

Arrivals. Too many people in a semi-frantic state. Joe hadn't even been in an airport since his father was still alive. So many lines, so many flight on so many monitors. He just needed to find his flight, and then drag his case into the appropriate space.

The Departure Lounge. People circled him in patters of their own: nervous/excited first time fliers, those who travelled for business, those had been circling the globe without purpose for years, and even those overly enthusiastic travellers who had overly-embraced foreign lands and forgotten to book their ticket home. He spoke briefly to a bitter German businessman. For a little longer, to a young Welsh couple who were on their way out to China to teach English as a second language. Joe was familiar with the concept because it is something Chris talked about in the months before his death.

Security. He remembered what a comic on Netflix had said about security staff in airports, and how to deal, and more importantly not deal, with them. Joe hadn't been on a plane for over a decade but it all rang true. It was like a bunch of jobsworthy, minimum wage monkeys had suddenly been given a position of genuine power in the world.

The Gate. Unsupervised brats ran around while there parents turned a blind eye - or too ignorant to see the flaws with the their offspring's behaviour in the first place - and when a foreign man tried to fill the gap apparent to all but themselves received a borderline threatening dressing down for his troubles.

There had been a friend in his social circle who was always particularly incensed by this kind of behaviour, a friend who, despite his ardent leftism, sometimes joked that he should perhaps join the Conservative Party because they were "trying to snuff these people out!" A friend whose ultimate inability to come to terms with his frustrations with others had led him to take solitude in his own company and a bottle. He tried to imagine that friend doing what he was doing now. Could he? Did it matter in the first place?

The truth. They had simply all stayed too long.

The plane. The other passengers were loud, their children over-produced, the plane late. The hostesses pretty, the food dry, the clouds painted to the sky...

The flight was by turns restless, frustrating, exciting and, as he passed in and out of conciousness, dream ridden. He got drunk and he sobered up, he walked the line.

He dreamt of an alien creature loose in the cargo hold. Wrapping its tentacles through layers of shadow and feeding upon various stored domestic pets and the occasional slack jawed third world stowaway. He imagined a black puddly nucleus of darkness alive in a weaker black. It squelched and scorned and seethed with undetectable hatred. The red glow of its eyes an illuminated warning (that nobody could read) as it drained the blood and gluten from a cat's spinal cord. It's head was a swirl of vapour and solidity, slime and sin; Was this the slayer of birds? The god of lost things?

Its intentions were degenerate, and, somehow, it knew of his presence shortly above. Of his mission, his quest, and the moves he intended to make. In short, this thing would block the answer to his question. Had a thing like this always been blocking him? A cosmic chess partner.

He awoke to catch a square headed china man looking back at him. No, that wasn't right. He was just adjusting his seat, in a typically selfish and abrasive Chinese manner, practically crushing the legs of the chubby girl directly behind. He was confused because he was still waking up, and the the guy in front didn't half resemble the china man who he ordered, in code, from in the restaurant. The hen-pecked manager, right down to the crumpled forehead and squinty little dog eyes. Of course it wasn't, and he remembered now where he had seen him before. Spitting in a bin in the departure lounge. In fact, his entire family had been hocking up half their lunches into that steel container. They were, after all, Chinese, and he was destined to witness many more public discharges of sputum before his adventure ended.

***

He has torch eyes which illuminate Joe's sternum like an eerie spotlight (serial killer cross hairs...home invasion).

He wakes up to a jolt and the notion he is dreaming. Then realises that he his is awake. Then turns to the young boy next to him, who is seemingly mesmerized by his high end tablet.

Joe's eyes turn to the screen, "what you doing there?'

"I'm on the deep web. Mummy and daddy are asleep, they have no idea what I get up to when they are asleep."

John recognises the website's layout, having ventured there himself once or twice, out of pure curiosity, after that initial night of discovery which had placed him on this plane.

"Are you on Velvet Street?"

"Yes."

"What are you doing on there?"

"I'm hiring somebody to kill you."

John awoke with a start and found his plastic cup toppled between his highs. Thankfully it contained only drops which had once been ice. The little boy had crashed on candy and was now zonked out against the widow. His tablet tucked away safely and securely in the back of the seat in front.

Soon coffee was served, he observed the other passengers - at least those that he could see - and time got strange. Soon the whole venture appeared to be unrolling in a series of micro spasms - a DVD sped up or slowed down - Cause/effect, control/response - x32 x8 x16...

Liquid-metal announcements chugged along on the tannoy tracks, liquid and bi-lingual, colliding into a sea of nodes, everybody moving at their own speed. Objects in motion collided ignorantly, children went unsupervised and business men micro-slept...

The hydraulic compressors decompressed and he left the airport...

He stepped into the Tokyo air - it was all or nothing now!

In a taxi with little fuss and, as is the way in these things, relying on a stranger to deliver him to his destination. And by the time they moved onto an elevated highway the grey, white and off-white blocks which formed Tokyo were entrenched in a web of crepuscular rays.

On the street now, in the thick of it, hurricane, step into the abyss, the traffic flow too slow to be bullet like, the people shuffling but too polite for the anger of New York, London even, taxi driver, perfect Americanised English, must have gotten lucky. But then this is Tokyo, perhaps this is the norm.

His hotel is in Central Tokyo and his hotel is opulent. An impossibly beautiful woman behind the reception, an impossibly high room in the oil black sky, the view from the window grainy and sepia-aqua-marine, the bar like a novel, an art-house film, an image in the mind, steeped in atmosphere, low lighting, muted sounds and the low hum of air con. A woman who may or may not be genuine, may or may not be a mercenary...may not in fact even be a woman, but this is to be a theme here. For the gaijin, for the foreigner.

Shinjuku. And into the street proper, into the bars and shops and laundry mats, between the hospital buildings and the places of emergency and purpose, the houses of mystery, a bar impossibly red, carmine and crimson lit-up! Blood, with candles sexy enough to eat and tables sleek enough to fuck, a chrome men's room made to feel good, to pass out in, to come up in, to die in even.

And into the RLD, first thing fucking last and all that, of manga and anime and hentai and blu rays of the world stacked high in every store, a dozen brands of tobacco and a thousand type of vending machine, with perfect plastic vaginas more real than the real thing, and girls who look impossibly young and perhaps too young and XXX lantern bathing everyone in veins of illumination even redder than the bar. And the sleaze is automated, digitized to a level not seen in Paris or London or even new York. And little robot sentries guard the perimeter and it is hard to tell toys from the cutting edge. They'd pack the women themselves into vending machine if they could, if not for earthly concerns such as air supply.

His companions are new and cool and interesting, but so high and immersed in it all now that he can hardly remember how he acquired them. And they have tattoos and quick mouths and private jokes afforded by their linguistic skill, their bi-lingual nature, and one of the group who is impossibly nice (impossibly friendly and always smiling a meter wide smile from ear to ear). And he questions that but then questions his paranoia. And they share joints and beers and bar snacks & spirits from all across South East Asia, whilst the music is Anglo or a Nippon version of Anglo, and they ignore the English teachers and the model like Japanese girls - tanned and tall- and are only interested in him him him.

There is an overly styled but undeniably sexy girl amongst the party. Her boots are silver, her eye shadow is hummingbird blue, she passes him a Thumbelina bottle of wine with which to wash down his designer pills. Joe considers her but quickly concludes that he wouldn't make a move on such a girl on any continent.

And despite the plethora of narcotics which surround them all, one of the group reserves his highest level of enthusiasm for an imported English tobacco he has purchased from some hipster joint. He insists on showing Joe the packet every single time he takes it back out to roll afresh. Red roses and gold trim, apart from its exceptional darkness Joe can see nothing exceptional in it at all.

(and i wonder why and i wonder how and i wonder what i am doing here. I am high, naturally and synthetic - not that I am one for the distinction - and the bar lights and cell screens are like elegant constellations, spun through my vision - and my groin stirs subliminally at it all - and my hand would probably shake if i knew any better, and this cigarette, this American Cigarette's embering end looks like the fire of hell for a sinners paradise, and i can't truly believe that I'm actually fucking here! And the ONLY reason I know that it is real is that its so hyper not real, that and the fact that I can feel the arm of this plush Tokyo sofa like I feel...)

The coolest of the group casually, but surreptitiously, hands him a baggy half full of off white powder (a purple tinge) and he asks what it is and is met with a grin in response but trust is complete now so he simply pockets it, pushing it down deep beneath his wallet so as not to lose it, just another slice of excitement in a night of adventure.

At one point in the RLD Joe finds himself staring at a vending machine. It is one of the electric buttons that has caught his eye - rectangular and transparent plastic, backlit yellow. It becomes his entire universe for a brief spell. It's shaped to joy. It doesn't matter which product it is connected to, for a brief spell it is perfection. It inexplicably raise his dopamine levels one note higher, sky-worthy. His body is cold empty.

And on the way home he suddenly discovers himself right there in the middle of the intersecting footfall flow, the X across the intersection, following the zebra stripes, the one you always see in the movie shot, a huge electronic screen hanging above them like an art gallery in outer-space. And as you and your friends cross it transfigures itself from coca-cola to baseball products and back again.

And back in the hotel, with the powder still unidentified and an impossibly sleek flat-screen television, showing weather and news and inexplicable game shows and obligatory dubbed American movies, a new western and an ancient horror and one about an English man in China, but the 'special services' button brings a vacuum to the chaos, a ultra sharp video of cruelty and spite, a woman in a room, a woman in a desert, and he drifts in an out of sleep as his body tries to decide whether he is up or down, has the exhaustion finally eclipsed the stimulation, either way the drip of the powder runs down the back of his throat and reminds him why he is here...

Joe woke up early in the morning. Too early and now he had a day to fill. He decided that he wanted to delay the hunt, a chance to take in the city and normality before he began his search for the address proper. He wasn't sure whether this was because he wasn't confident about finding the building, or was scared of what he would find there. Either way, he wanted to do tourist things. So he went to Starbucks and the park. In the park he got into a conversation with a very old man:

"...We are having a problem these days, with the birds."

"Sorry," Joe asked, unsure as to whether or not he'd understood the elderly man due to his thick accent.

"The birds," endearing little flapping gesture, "the crows, we have e-pi-demic. Like the rats," chuckle, chuckle, "in new York...ha!"

Joe considered this for a few moments, having already discovered that these conversations were doubly-difficult, for as well as thinking before your speak - in the manner any sensible person does - you also had to attempt to simplify as much as possible. In other word, syntax was forever an issue. And you forget that slang is slang when you use it everyday.

"Erm...I'm not sure what you mean. We have pigeons in England in cities, like...I mean we have an issue with the birds, 'pigeons,' they can be a nuisance, they shit everywhere, but they're not really a big problem. You know what a pigeon is right?"

"Yes, pigeon bird, you just say."

"Oh."

And I know anyway. I know all birds. But we have e-pi-e-pi-demic"

"Yeah sorry that's the word that's confusing me. Are you sure you're not misusing it...slightly"

Chuckle, chuckle, "No, you don't understand. Crow not like pigeon. Crow is black bird of death. They attack people. I see them attack lady just over there. Crow is no pigeon. The crow is a flying rat."

"Wait, really! They're violent. Wow! I know birds could be but I thought that hardly happened in built up areas. We have swans in England and they can be very viscous, even though we let them near children in country parks and places. They allegedly break arms!"

"Allegedly is like probably, yes?"

"Er, shit, no, yeah kind of...it means some people says. So maybe really."

Puzzled look.

"What I mean is someone says it, could be bullshit, could be gospel."

"Gospel?"

"Oh sorry, I'm using slang. It's like definitely true, really true."

"So allegedly is really true?"

"No Gospel is. Allegedly might be true."

"A-leg-ed-ly. Everyday I learn a new English word. Thanks to you. I allegedly have again."

Joe laughed, syntax or no syntax, this guy was clever.

"Does this happen a lot? The attacks I mean."

"Yes. All the time. This is why I am telling you about it. E-pi-demic"

"You mean like six times a year or six times a day?"  
"Most weeks at least one report in the media. But think many more go unreported. I saw it myself. Right over there near bushes and the plastic bear. She was hurt, badly. But not serious."

"Hospital?"

"Yes...but just to be...caring, careful."

"Oh, so like a precaution, because, well I imagine she was shook up."

"Oh yes very scared. Crying. Eye was hurt almost blue!" Silly impression. "And precaution was last week's new word. Thank you for reminder."

"..."

"But there are rumours that this problem is more serious."

"How do you mean? The environment and stuff." Should he try for 'ecosystem?' Almost harder with someone so switched on.

"No the violence. Some think...and I believe them, the worst atrocities of the crow are covered up. Little girl in Nigata prefecture, hacked to pieces by crow."

"..."

"Some say raped, but that just crazy talk," does endearing dismissive sign followed by endearing cuckoo sign.

"..." Then: "Do you have other problems with them? Do they cause damage?"  
"Yes like with New York rat so many issues. And so hard to stop. They take many things, they even take special internet cable to make their nests"

"Really?! Has this caused issues, problems I mean, with the internet here."

"Ah internet always problem in Japan, young people so lonely and talk type to not real people."

"You mean, real. Not real friends. Strangers." Joe feels forever conscious of trying to speak both slow and simple.

"No, ah ah, I mean they might as well speak to the bird," the endearing laugh again, "but wear sun glasses so eyes not pecked out! They might as well speak to trees or that how do you say..." Pointing at a panda bear shaped trash can with a hole for a smile that could only exist in artifice.

"Oh we say bin usually."

"Yes! I knew trash was wrong. Americans! Their whisky and movies are so good I almost forgive them!"

Joe doesn't know whether to the older man means for Hiroshima, or murdering the English language."

Following a handful of mildly awkward beats:

"They speak to total strangers you mean?"

"No, Japan is craziness and tradition, Asia is ghosts and money, something has to fill your..." snapped fingers with jazz like frustration: "god damn it...the gaps, the gaps. Robots, little children toys are now friends."

"AI?"

"Yes, this I love!"

The conversation had gone far deeper than Joe could have anticipated or hoped, but was also shifting in a manner he couldn't hold onto. He still wasn't entirely sure what the old bird watcher meant. Yes, the Tamgotchi had made the news back home, and he had seen little, virtual girlfriend programmes on Japanese Gameboys, but he was not aware of a fully fledged social algorithm yet. What if that is what The Scandinavian had been? And would it even matter if he was? He was here, wasn't it? An escaped prisoner, the bars of mundanity having bent wide open to allow access to a large park in one of the most dynamic cities in the world.

"Yes so they have many fake things, and Manga always popular, this good, good for child's imagination, I read, my son read, but who is reading real books now, where has Shinto gone?"

"..." Joe knew nothing of the country's native religion.

"Anyway, back to birds, here please take payment."

Reading perplexed counter look, as shifting and starting to unzip bag: "Sorry...gift."

"Oh...I can't"

"You must. I have read now. Now read, anyway.... Book about birds," the older man explains whilst removing a book which borders upon being a tome:

" _Birds & Their Importance"_

Joe takes it, part out of inevitable politeness, but with a taint of curiosity mixed in from somewhere. "So what do they plan to do about the birds?"

"This is actually very good question. Because in Kyoto they have release gas and this kill all birds, not just too many, we, er o-"

"Over do it? You over did it."

"Yes we over did it with the birds, and this gas was bad for people too. Many Children get sick and a few die."

"Really?"

"Yes. There are some still have," imitated laboured breathing.

"Oh respiratory problems."

"I don't known this word, but yes. Some little girls still breath badly."

Their conversation reached a natural conclusion and just as he was walking away the man made him jump out of his skin.

"Overkill!"

"What?"

"We overkill the birds!"

Joe was not sure which was funnier, the sudden outburst or the look of delight which accompanied it, but he laughed either way.

Occasionally in this life, you meet precisely the right person at exactly the right time.

He rode the underground bullet to Marunouchi. A large and leafy commercial district, shadows shifted, pavements moved. Commuters filled and drained out from subway exits. There he entered a record store, named in English: The Sound & The Fury, where he was conspicuously ignored by a trio of hipsters. Dressed in: A Sion Sono T-shirt, one with a a weird amalgamation of a double X & a 4, and a type of top he could only put down to being 'a Japanese thing.'

There was an intensity to the arrangement of matter here unlike a British or American record store; even more tightly packed, dishevelled, loved, cultural detritus as a form of mutated love. He felt self conscious browsing the wares, being not much of a muso, even if one of the aforementioned friends had talked about nothing but and dragged him to some of the most obscure gigs imaginable. Interesting there was no division between the native artists and the English language ones (the latter having precedence, of course) or style, genre, critical reception. It was a free for all where Springsteen could stand by, even lean upon, Ryuchi Sakamoto, just as long as they were in the same quantum of language.

Growing insecurity and indefensible melancholia was creeping into his veins faster than the other night's drugs. How could he be anything other than happy now? But those split second multiverse acquaintances were gone and he was alone once again - plus what the fuck was he doing here?!

He fell down an alley to escape the growing rain and found himself inside a small coffee shop. The coffee swirled around his belly, and he realised that he was paying for the previous day's exotic fair. He looked out the window at liquid dirge and took the smallest sips of his drink. His eyes switched between the rain and the frothy heart floating on his lake of coffee. The coffee was a little off, and as he pondered whether or not it was to his taste, he accidentally locked eyes with the waitress who had served it. She smiled awkwardly and looked away with embarrassment. So hard to tell here whether a look from the opposite sex was interest or mere curiosity at the comparative albino.

She was closer to pretty than ugly but had ears twice their natural size. Not for the first time he chastised himself for his superficiality, a form of shallowness that had led him to be alone in an alien city in the first place. But then, fuck, he was in Tokyo!

His mind wondered: Where had his sense of urgency gone? He realised that he was losing his drive because excitement was being replaced by its even more seductive twin - fear. He'd come, on an almost invisible whim, to track down something he didn't understand, and had zero idea what he would do with it, IF he found it in the first place!

Even the later things he saw in that maze of links and surveillance cameras - that he tried not think of at all now - could offer him any guidance. Perhaps it had been what he needed to shake him up out of his apathy. Would he still have made the trip had it not been so upsetting? How could they just keep opening the presents like that? One after the other. As if nothing had happened, as though it were all a game, and against a little girl too.

Next he wondered if (at least in the meantime) he should just do the normal tourist thing, pick up a lonely planet guide, and traverse the city. Then he thought about the last time he had seen his mother, sandwiched between the settee and the television, she had resembled nothing so much as a slab of thawing meat. Then he thought about what absentee friends may have made of the city. Two in particular who he would have liked to have walked this city's streets with.

The slower he sipped the faster it rained. The nearly beautiful girl had given up on service and was now perched near the end of the counter reading a book. It looked like a hanji translation of Catcher In The Rye. He considered trying to ask when there was a thump on the window. A homeless man who looked the oriental mirror of the one from the square back home. He gave him an accusatory, even violent, stare. He rose his right arm in a fist and then slowly tapped out three numbers in the air using his fingers:

One whole hand - 5 and then two fingers from the other -7. Then he stuck something to the window. Something very small and a little sticky. He vanished as quickly as he appeared and Joe went to see what he had left behind. A small dead bee. One bent wing like an analogue aerial. The bulbous abdomen smashed but unmistakable.

A small dead bee.

57b.

Eventually he asked for directions, from a school girl at a subway opening. She would not have been his first choice - someone older - but the decision was a spur of the moment one. And as soon as he asked the question he felt better. Her English was perfect, she knew not just the district but the street. It seemed pre-ordained.

She reaches out an arm. Slowly. You turn to meet her gaze. Slowly.

Her skin so much darker than you. You want to step into the light and vanish with her. Leave behind this space and the cruelty and indifference of all those who exist within. She stands on articulated legs defiantly, she stands alone. Her reflection, lambent in the night glass, is invisible to her diode eyes.

He made his way through East Tokyo, at a descent so mild he wasn't aware of it, and as the Tech areas gave way to relative ghettos - dirtier, less well maintained, more vacant buildings - his organs rearranged themselves. When he reached the building it was the eight stories he was promised but nowhere near as grand and modern as Joe had envisioned. Grimy, black rust climbing up the frontage almost with malignancy; windows non-transparent with dust. Eight Stories high.

Sometimes a shell like this might be semi occupied, might hide a gleaming Russian Doll of an office, or entertainment complex; Sparse studio space in a old warehouse; Hipster Bars in a dilapidated factory. Something told Joe that this wasn't the case here.

He approached the doorway with trepidation, thoughts of past crimes unbidden. A broken light hung above, its dusty contours surging with the ghost of electricity; spiders and bugs swarmed in the corners, amongst the rubble, amongst yesterday's news. His hopes were dashed. There was no modernity - merely post industrial death. Unless they were hiding here, which seemed fitting for such a nefarious entity. But where: The basement, the top floor? Inside the very walls like abducted children? In a secret basement below the official one? Is this where they shoot their movies? Is this where they launder their money?

He decided that all he could do was see his mission through to completion. He'd come this far, and maybe it was crazy, but even crazier would be to get this far and then turn back; to reach the building and then not check the room.

He looked at the worn piece of paper for the thousandth time. Electrum Industries - 57b. So presumably he wanted the fifth floor. He took his feet through the dust. He noticed that some of the adjacent rooms appeared in far better shape. Sure the floors were dusty and raw with concrete, but double glazed windows which looked new and office furniture, fridges and air con units in a similar state. Shiny fixtures spattered about. Maybe it got better the higher you climbed. Maybe the fifth floor would be five star and first world. It was like the old building had eaten, and semi-digested, a much newer one.

He moved his feet through the dust to the stairwell. There was some graffiti on the walls, but the stairs themselves were in good condition, not without hope. Joe ascended through slides of shadow and light, the air seemed stifled and mildly polluted. Here and there were more new fixtures, door frames or electrical junction boxes. Hinges which gleamed golden.

Something swept past him, barely missing his face. A bat, a bird...a crow. He spun around to catch sight of it but all he saw was darkness moving within darkness. A lighter shade.

But somebody else is pulling his strings now and he moves on, more slowly. Counter the floors as the new and old flickered by. The fifth floor is perfect, clean and crisp and bright, and just waiting for its furnishings and bright-eyed personnel. His heart swells and he prepares to slip into bullshit mode if somebody does happen to be here. The offices have large windows and shiny unmarked plaques on doors of polished wood. 6.01...6.02...6.03...

No.

What?

Then he realised they were running the American system of floor allocation. One simply equals 1, not ground floor. He was one storey too high. He tried to tell himself that this was encouraging, that there may be a real business below.

The staircase is as well lit as the new offices above, but the fifth floor itself is not lit at all and the ground is soft.

The entire place is open plan and carpeted in dead birds. A death rug running the gamut from humble pigeon to mighty eagle. The topography formed from various stages of decay.

There was nothing else.

He followed this avian plethora down the fire escape and down into a back-alley, much like the one behind The Black Pearl. It terminates in a bin. The bin is surrounded by beady eyed little crows. Fear ran down his spine and his hands began to shake. The sounds of the city sunk away beneath invisible waters.

They're just crows, he told himself, but he knew the rules had changed.

Amongst all the Japanese and the obligatory English swears - fuck, shit, ass - Adherence was spray painted red inside a red triangle. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

* * *

To begin with he thought he had the wrong street, district even, the lighting closer to violet than purple and the streets wider. The neighbourhood more expensive but the hotel smaller and less fancy. If it wasn't for the the name being a facsimile and the driver's almost agitated insistence he would be convinced he had lost his mind. He considered the heady whirl wind of drugs, romance and attraction that had comprised his first night in the world's largest economy. And the uncertainty and disappointment that had made up the day.

The hotel was a dusky triangle of granite, against a bright, pink sky. Five stories high. It appeared dark and two dimensional. A double glass door, several shades lighter, centrally placed. A pair of cookie-cutter apple tress - lush and light - placed either side. The sign is hollow light held by the dusk - pink and blue: Nippon Nights.

As Joe entered the lobby zipped up around him and splashed him with controlled air. The lobby was plusher than you would expect for a hotel of this size: an elaborate water feature weaves in and around ivory swans (dynamic of defiance, they look ready to ascend the stone skies and attack the unbelieving) whilst Arabic servants float about on tip-toe and invisible circuit.

The receptionist, similar to the night before but not as pretty as he remembered, directed him: "down the hall, turn right, take the elevator to 1102."

He traversed the clean and diamond patterned carpet. He found his room without incident. The room looked much more familiar than the rest of the hotel. How could he be so forgetful? Why did he feel he was in the wrong hotel?

In the bathroom he unpacked his day onto the counter: a half eaten sandwich, some scrunched up receipts, the large and rather odd gift from the man in the park.

He got onto the bed and switched off all but the dullest light.

He drifted off quickly, with an image, perhaps ripped from the night which lit the flame, one of the surveillance disturbances. One of the few that didn't pertain to imprisonment. A woman on stage, a crowd gathered in anticipation, a stripper, a sexual charismatic, secreting an obscenely large object from her centre, the whooping and guffawing approval of the leering mob...

Somewhere in the blackness he dreamt. The old man from the park. The old man's fingers sliced in and out of the gassy-mist, whilst his eyes refused to move. So much more piercing and full of intent than that sunny day in the dark:

"A great circuit in which individuals play the part of electrons, creating with their paths bits of information we are ultimately unable to read."

"I saw something that night, something which I can't unsee."

"The Stripper?"

"No, worse than the stripper, far worse, worse even than the albino..."

A shape pulls itself from the darkness - an unpacking of shadows - and slips silently around the corner. Joe pursues in slow motion, and it occurs to him that he has spent a lifetime in the pursuit of objects and concepts (...of love, of money, connections, financial security, peace of mind...)

He has only taken about a dozen steps when the creature reemerges with the shadows. The creature which took away his friends, the one in the fuselage - which deluded him to believe it is him, his own demons sourced from his insecurities, but this is just another lie.

He pursued it down the hotel corridor, this dream version more just a tunnel of black.

The corridor swung back and forth like a pendulum. It was was growing, drawing more shadow into itself and growing. A truncation of its core, an extension of limbs. A swirl of tentacles around it. Each tendril-end possessed an eye and each pupil a mouth, a ring of shark's teeth. A slickened endoskeleton in the middle, muscles twirled around it like a barber shop's poll. His throat was clogged by the stench of rancid eggs. Those eyes were growing, as preternaturally red as in the cargo hold, as in his dreams. Had they been watching all along, from across the town square as he spoke to the bum, from behind the library shelves as he browsed the books, from the other side of a webcam.

As the eye grew brighter the shadows peeled away revealing more and more of the ancient thing's form. And as Joe's terror reached a crescendo his reality morphed and he was back in his hotel room bed.

Is this a dream after all? The shapes of real world furniture reveal themselves in more solid patches of darkness, his eyes adjust to the dresser, the bedside table, the mirror. But what is the the large mass two metres to the right of the bed.

The uncertainty was disorientating. He went to pinch himself (did you ever actually do that when you were dreaming?) but nothing shifted. The mass was still there. Was it moving?

Was it merely the curtains after all? No, it wasn't.

It moved again, for sure this time. As his eyes continued their adjustment he realised that it was two humanoid figures stood side by side. This did not resemble the amorphous, nebulous creature of his dreams or nightmares.

There were two men in his hotel room. They were here to kill him.

Without fear or forethought he rolled out of his bed and across the floor scrambled into the bathroom. Stood up straight and kicked the door closed behind him. It autolocked and he looked about him for weapons and escape. A way to sound the alarm. Desperation.

They spoke for the first time and their voices were from his homeland. He recognised their cockney accents.

He runs through the obvious scenarios in his head. What can be used in defence? How can he he get out the room? He is too high up and there is no window anyway. What can he use a as weapon or to make them back off? A toothbrush? Break the small hand held mirror. A bar: hand rail from the wall, shower rail...fuck would he have the balls to use it anyway? Would it do any good if-

The book. The huge bird book is right there on the counter, laid fortuitously near the sink. He unpacked his bag in the bathroom this afternoon, and the bag itself there below the sink near his feet. Joe considered the logistics of using the tome to brain one of the criminals.

He wedges the hardback between the door and the door stop. That should buy him some time. The handles rattles. Voices are heard.

He rustles through his bag looking for help.

Clothes / wrappers / coinage / a spent boarding pass...

The door shakes. They are trying to kick it in. Soon they will.

He sees a can of deodorant spray - flammable \- doe she have a lighter? In the front pocket - for some bizarre reason - the stranger's library card. The one he lifted from the shelf without knowing why. He needs a blade not a fucking-

BEEP -BOOP

As he slammed the library card down on the counter it passed the the adjoining door in an arc and unlocked it. The electronic bleep followed by the light switching from left to right, red to green. The adjoining door. He couldn't believe it.

The enjoining door to the adjoining room.

He looks again for a weapon but there is no more time - the door shake even harder, a visible black gap appears.

There isn't sufficient time to run through the room, to possibly struggle with the door the other side and get into the corridor (not that there is time to think all this through at the front of his mind) so he hides behind the bathroom door. In the adjacent bedroom, in the dark.

They are issuing threats now but his brain cannot decode the words.

He traces his hand hands down his body in an unconscious search for a weapon.

He sees shadows slice the light behind the door.

His hands dig into his pockets, he doesn't even have his usual hard, sharp keys but...

...BUT he does have a tiny little pen. The ones they give you in travel agents and banks and job centres to fill out forms - the ones which are never sufficient to the task.

You also sometimes get them in takeaways.

These must be the trousers he wore the night he went looking for The Scandinavian. The pen left there all this time.

Then the voices are louder and someone is bearing down on him. He thrusts out his fist, sharper end first, as quick and hard as he can. The pen sinks into something and a soft squelch, followed by a loud scream is heard.

Something splashes his face.

He sprints for the exit, he doesn't look back to see the second assailant tending to the first. Blood from the other man's severed carotid artery drenching his clean white shirt.

* * *

He wondered the flickering streets, occasionally recognises a building from the day before, occasionally mistaking a stranger for one of his pseudo-friends from Shinjuku.

Sees the alpha-hipster, waves but is blanked.

Sees the waitress, wrapped up against the cold, somehow more attractive in her coat, but still indifferent to his presence.

He wonders if this is an extension of his dream.

Wonders if that dream is taking place in his small bedroom in England.

Wonders why the light is different after midnight.

Directionless: he returned to semi-dilapidated office block, to the graffitied alley way. The sodium lights swept down like crystals, swirling and whorling and surrounding everything. The balls bounced off of the concrete of a distant basketball court, the surrounding office building lights came and went like zeros and ones, distant cries, shouts and horns conversed, whilst out there somewhere was an ocean. There was always an ocean, dark but beautiful.

But Joe remained in the alley, staring at another batch of graffiti in an enigma of a foreign land; as mystified by the alien characters - the semi-phonetic language of Japanese - as he was by his own.

COMPOUND DRONE

And everything is changed as an epiphany of understanding lifts the scales from your eyes...

PART I: An Ivory Marionette

She walks across the sulphurous compound exercise yard. You watch her through dusty eyes. It's like there's been a scrim pulled across her visage. She shifts with wax and hot air. She is the devil in disguise. The dirt of the yard is so bright under the bare sun that it has been rendered salt-like. A crow casts a shadow as it cuts a hole in the sky.

You've seen many come and go by now, dragged through the compound by arm and leash and jaw. Some stutter and stumble. Some fall and are dragged the rest of the way on bloody knee. Others just weep and give up there and then. Surrender to the dirt.

You've seen them come and go but this one is different - victim has become perpetrator: Her outfit that of a servant, but her gait something more.

The yard is like a baseball diamond. You've been in a periphery cage like a tortured sentinels for days, years. Time is liquid but you do know one thing for certain: the compound is as secure as the day it was built. Every wall and edge rock solid and razor sharp. Each point of the diamond has a control tower, with an armed guard in its peak. There are no exceptions. The twenty foot titanium walls are lined with electric coil. There are further layers of security - internal and external \- which remain hidden.

The guards are running on machine code; their guns an extension of their soul.

Once, in earlier days - which may not have existed at all - your explored the peripheries and contours of the compound with an ally (friend??) looking for unkempt corners: weaknesses and ways out. You found none.

The woman passes an automated-sentry and laser grid. She is heading for the control panel, where she has a made a name for herself. Where she has been unnervingly accepted. Yes, she is different, and the men look at her differently too. Sure the prurient interest is still there, but there is fear and respect also. She possesses a command and status that none of the others girls did. You wonder if she arrived on the bus at all.

She has crossed an invisible line.

You're therapy interrogation session was different this week. You'd expected it from the moment the new doctor had arrived. You knew something was wrong the moment you stepped into the Adherence Room. You have a kind of sixth sense for when there has been some form of sea change within the administration - a change of heart at the very top. The doctor and his secretary (also changed) were present but with two additional players. A man - square and squat - stood by his empty seat. And a woman - tall and lithe - in the corner. Hiding herself where the walls meet.

The new doctor was as light as the old was swarthy. He arrived in the middle of the night, flanked by the guards and lit by the moon. From the angle permitted by the bars of your cage he appeared somehow absent, half-a-man. An ivory marionette.

You wondered if these types were to infiltrate the facility one at a time, night by night, until...Until what?

The fittings and fixtures were not so different. They betrayed nothing.

The small window was as high and bright as normal.

The doctor slid back the smoky dome as normal.

The assistant fired up her binary short hand machine as normal.

The hologram flickered into life and 3-dimensions in a moment. The inverted triangle, the Xs and the 4, the DNA helix, the hexadecimals numbers scroll, then a new graphic, one you have never seen before. A video game blip moving around a grid. Logo Unidentifiable.

The girl abruptly disrobes.

She reveals herself to be dressed for distraction - something black to halfway between the knee and the waist - made up to intoxicate like the girls for the videos. The girls from the bus. But their propaganda is usually saved for the manufacturing of the tapes and he has never seen one in the interrogation room before. You wonder whether she is a special case like the one who roams freely around the yard and - assumingly - the rest of the facility.

The light from the high window glints off her contours. The doctor tells you to concentrate. The secretary-assistant is as officious as the old one.

The chronology of this sequence is as unspecified as the rest of your time (life??) in the compound.

The barrel of the gun is tightened against your neck.

The exposed nipples swell with blood.

A new batch of images flickers through the holo-dome.

It settles upon a shape.

The questions begin, the doctor's dry tone.

When you travel would you rather:-

  1. Go somewhere familiar

  2. Go somewhere that elicits feeling of security and continuity

  3. Go somewhere very distant and completely alien

  4. Go on a quest that is both disconcertingly non-specific, and for which you have no clear notion of how to achieve

The muscle man's finger tenses until trigger cracks dry against the barrel.

You have only seen the central control panel on one or two occasions. And you know that it is like a server with a hard on. Circuit boards on a blood binge all fired up on amphetamines and adrenalin, plasma and crystals. It blinks and stutters, LCDs blue and green and whirring, hard drives and newer technologies you don't understand writhingat you with possibility.

A man pulls these levers and pushes these buttons all day - or at least somebody who looks like him - you'd call him the fat controller if he were not so thin.

You only viewed this place and it machinations, and it unsettled you. And disturbed you, and perhaps it disturbed you because it turned you on so. Or vice-versa.

Two days ago an experiment got out of hand and a giant metallic-spider burst through the titanium door right into the yard. Throwing up clouds of dirt, it screeched across the dirt and landed just feet from your cell. Its eyes were black and bulbous and glazed and alive with death. Its pincers twitched with digital fiendery. You didn't feel sympathy for it exactly but it didn't conjure the hatred you expected either. Its dying was a strange thing.

PART II: A Ship at Sea

The night is oily black and moonless. The compound is like a ship at sea on nights like this. Swaying on sleep patterns and circadian rhythms. You dream this moonless night. You dream of inverted crosses and skies. You dream of ice and glass. You walk through childhood paths that eventually lead back to the yard, where tin men put the spider back together again. And all the time that this is happening, as they carry arms and shift legs, the head remains in place in the dirt. Those black orbs trained exclusively on you.

It's as if he's sending you a message telepathically. Burrowing electricity into you brain.

You know that when he is remade it will tear you limb from limb. He is telling you this, sending the signals.

You begin to count your days in the dirt again. Not for the first time you think they have swapped your fingers in the night. Your palms now strapped to the digits of an interloper.

In an attempt to distract yourself - which you know to be futile even as it transpires - you think about the female who has ascended her station. Precisely what her role might be, and where she sleeps, and it occurs to you that she resembles the one from the revamped therapy session. Then you question if they are one in the same, but cannot seem to quite summon the face of either. All faces being lost to you now.

You know something is wrong the following day when they bring a larger consignment of girls than usual by truck. And a new driver too. The driver doesn't belong this side of the wall, his face doesn't fit.

The girls are wrong too. Not just in number. One or two look right but the majority are plain wrong. And this unsettles you in ways you can't explain. Jointy limbs and pale teeth and mixed up doll eyes. Not attractive enough...or attractive in the wrong way. Is the enterprise growing desperate or is this just wishful thinking?

That night you are visited by a sign. A distant satellite you believe to be the north star grows and pulsates and moves towards you. Somewhere in between your eyes and the moon it reveals itself to be green, and when it lands before you, its feet in the dirt, it reveals itself to be an angel and wraps her warm arms around you. She takes you to a secret corner, puts on a secret show and weaves data from the secret stars, sends those glowing green symbols cascading across the globe and explains the mathematics of chance.

And everything is changed as an epiphany of understanding lifts the scales from your eyes, you are no longer a prisoner, to this compound or any other.

But as you transition your way through hypnogogia, meanings shift and images are lost, things makes less and less sense to you by the moment and then...

...and then you are back in your cage.

The morning before or after something terrible happened with the bus. Bones and smoking glass everywhere...

The tin men showed up right on cue, in your dreams and in perfect formation.

But they cannot put the girls back together like the spiders, parts are missing and besides this, some of their organs were not correct in the first instance.

In this violet dream the tin men dig and dig and dig and dig but you can't see what they are kicking into the graves. You want to ask them but you can't. You want to ask them but you can't.

So you do what you always do when the occasion calls for it: you avert your eyes to the gloss of the moon.

The dome is the same, dimensions, smoky, but the players have been repositioned. This time it is the attractive woman who points the gun at your head and the man is in the corner, naked. There is something wrong with his penis. You wonder if this is a sexuality test - surely they realise all that was burnt out of you a long, long time ago.

The holo-colours conform to a certain pattern:

How does this combination of colour make you feel?

Confused...

Okay. Does it conjure any particular images in your mind?

Just triangles and things...other shapes...

Okay. Can you relate it to any specific past dream?

A telephone, and I can't pull the cord into the room, and I have that troubling Eureka 'this is dream' moment. Then this figure appears, slides into the frame, tall and well built, holding the remainder of the telephone, but wearing a sheep mask. And I don't know if it's my brother playing a prank on me or someone who mean me harm and I'm getting increasingly alarmed that it is the latter and then I wake up. With that usual sudden jerk of horror and relief.

When the taunted sun hit the remnants of the spider from a certain angle it nearly resembled a bird. Your glare deflects off the guard's armour - they have no luminescence - the sun bounces off everything.

The tin men from your dream never arrive, of course, but they clean the spider up. Proficiently and ruthless. Automated and efficient. But while they do get his bulk they leave a few scraps behind - blobs of flesh and slithers of hours. One black, razor wire, strand in particular haunts you. You can't stop looking at it. The opportunity to pick it up is more a motivation to escape your cage than freedom.

What is freedom anyway? You forgot a long time ago. All you recall now is a bird chained to the sky.

PART III: A Menagerie Of Gore

Today's session was different than all before it. Perhaps because you are still drugged. It makes you doubt your perception of the girl and if there really had been dead girls on the bus...yesterday...when was it?

The questions seem different and to take longer too. Everything has shifted into a higher register. The hologram takes on shapes it has never taken on before...

And it stirs something in you too, something long forgotten. There is a word at the centre of this black haze, but is a word alien to your tongue, yet you know you knew it once, and, you know it is a word bursting at the seams with meaning. One of those words they were obsessed by at the anchoring station when you were small.

After the procedure time slips away again. It is impossible for anybody to say whether or not you dreamt during this period. But tendrils of hypnogogia molest you ailing mind. And you have been reaching for a vision ever since. Time passes without incidence. You do not see the woman who has climbed the ranks nor any one else for that matter. Besides the uniformed guards who barely register any more.

You don't want to think about the difficult question they asked you the last time you were in the Adherence Room so you try to remember your old friend, the one you explored the compound with in seek of escape. And what he had said regarding the rumours of the place across the sea, the island which used to be visible from the compound "where the sea contains serotonin man and the fauna will save your very soul. The fucking peace man, absolute total peace, like what they told you a woman would provide, you know when you were at school, or in church, but never mentioned...failed to tell you, about the utter fucking pain which could come with it!" He couldn't remember if most of the men believed in the island any more because he hadn't spoken to any of those other men for a very long time. The most you hear of them now is their screams which pierce the night, the screams of the ones in that room you don't want to think of, the one far worse than the room with the holodome and the seemingly endless questions, where you lose yourself completely and your screams pierce the night. The fatal fantasies of those doomed men are powering the nightmares of the next generation.

There was a disaster with the bus today. Two of the girls arrived already dead. You have never seen this before and it unsettles you. You even saw their cadavers - decomposed dolls - dragged from the bus and into the sunshine.

Where is she? You know she is somewhere close and on her way. The one who broke the rules, the tradition defier. You can already hear those boots echoing, in from the future on the polymer floor, in your mind. She will treat them like dogs. She will treat them like dogs.

...Something to do with a horse in a stable.

Okay. Can you relate it to any specific past dream?...

Seemingly more in control with every passing day. Her rise punctuating your fall. You can't remember your name yet she blossoms - clad in rubber and stood in the dirt. This angel of death beyond the boundaries of custodian.

Then one day, under a low sun, everything changes. And they take you to a place you hoped to never see again. The Nightmare Portal.

A waxy black underworld, blue strip lighting sizzles across the tops of the walls. This place doesn't have all those servers and flashing lights. But you know that the control room powers this one. This is the real purpose of its energy. Not the spotlights which sometimes prowl the yard at night. Not the electrocuted hand-restrainers, or lazer-grids, none of those things.

It is here to light up the fantasies which kill a man. Here they manufacture the drones to be sent out into the world. To brainwash in the cities, and do their bidding in the town.

In the villages they have bunkers of their own.

A transparent pipe fills with melted black plastic as the screams increase. This then disappears into a section of the machinery which you cannot see. A metal bucket waits to collect something from the pipe above, a piece of guttering, but you have no idea what might come out.

There is a bank of screens, a entire wall of monitors before you....

THE NIGHTMARE PORTAL

They strap you to a chair and then they inject you with a toxin. A phial of fluorescent green liquid, and you feel your blood burn and loose your balance.

You stare at the code on the monitor in front of you. You don't understand it but know that it represents the boundary between machine language and the shiny interfaces the men in the control room and the doctors in the sessions take for granted:

>>>>see reference points [data cluster: 04,06&historical database]

>>>visual definition: w40, h25

>>color: not purple(78)

>>>>name= 'anxiety paradox'

>>>print (name +number)

The code shimmers and shakes and travels from the screen until it is inches from your face.

You find yourself within a holographic movie and then...

It all slips in that way which hallucinations and fantasies always do. Hidden and nonchalant. A thing becoming a glowing pale orb becoming a naked woman clothed in an egg of seaweed light. This aura shimmers all around her, makes her eyes burn. The thing transforms continually:

A man becomes a boy becomes a monster > an old and withered Asian man > a cat with green stones for eyes > a spider with tentacles > a silver woman she is

She is cut out against the glass encased night like a stapled moth. Her limbs more white than yellow in this bluish hue of electric moon light. She looks too perfect and turns in slow motion. When her slick hair slides back off of her face LCD eyes of blue are revealed...

Scorpions everywhere, in the sun lit corridor now as well. Crawling over your shoes. More than their bodies could possible hold. It doesn't seem to bother the others. As if only you sees them...

A synthetic gender-neutral voice speaks out to you from the digital void: 'We have a throne of blood, you can sit in it if you wish, we will only take your fingers in return.' You are considering the proposal when you forget its details.

The minuscule fungi does bring back memories and rules and warnings. A wizards cap, a dome of death, a vital temptation, a lost love. You turns it in your hands to examine its angles. The gaps between the gills seem daunting (infinite). But of course you must eventually taste...Rancid and bitter, but with something sweeter lurking below. Something waiting, a lurking after taste. Your thoughts turn insidious but transgressions soon mutate into joy. And your heart pounds the way your friend's did when his speech hit its stride. A twisting of tingles and judders around his torso, along with a thickening of the stomach, and you lay back in the carpet of leaves, the earthly fibres, and the mystery twists around you, the ground shakes and the dirt mutates. Above the purple-pink sky opens up, a gigantic silver aperture, and rains down candy, followed by Black rain. It falls throughout the forest and the ground strains further against its cage.

...the corpse splayed open like a rainbow - multi coloured viscera ... and the uninvited salesman throws you up against the wall looks you dead square in the centre of the eyes and says, 'talking out loud is not a good thing to do when you're dancing in the devil's shoes,' and down down deeper and down down down down deeper and down and you will know him by thy name Luu-ci-Feeer but occasionally thoughts make their way up to and break the surface, persistent questions such as have you gone too far and how far can too far go, you know it was once nice to dance with the devil but you don't want to end up making out with him and the creatures in the starry graveyard continue to dig as the lightning rains down on them, there are more, many more watching in the woods....

Sentinel eyes and...

Now the tinmen are measuring the new recruits for their flesh-zips, digital rulers marking their skin with a light temporal. You don't know when you came out of the Portal's hellucinations, but this is nearly as bad, as the girls cry and squirm and the dominatrix slaps them down...They probably wish they were still on the bus out in the desert...

You know that the beach is somewhere behind your house and you just can't reach it, just can't reach it, and you wonder why you never cited this dream when you were questioned and there are so many routes down hills just unsteep enough to walk and paths around the side of wooden clad houses and you find yourself in a maze of alleyways with identical brick walls brownstone but you can't navigate this maze because it keeps shifting shifting shifting then eventually you realise that it is not the shortcomings of your sense of direction but that the bricks themselves are moving with you, the walls are moving turning lefts into rights and then you know as they begin to disappear that the bricks are not bricks at all but servers piled up to the sky and they are not disappearing they are simply shutting down the fans and then the lights

Gone.

And the machines draw power from your anxiety, and the instruments read rising levels.

The black plastic slushes through the transparent tubes, it swirls and bends and finds its settling point. Rumbles and whirs. More clanking and warm air against your cheek. A plastic smell, acrid and sweet.

Again something from the anchoring station, a video they showed you once.

It crashes into the crude rusty bucket which sits below all that technology. Spat out by the guttering.

You question how it can all be boiled down to something so small and precise.

Perfect.

A corrupt little monolith.

A single videotape.

And your final thought is about the slave who became a master - where is she now - you can almost hear her boots pounding down on the floor, echoing down shadowed corridor.

One day they will come for you too, they will boil you down to plastic, and drink your blood...

CRYSTAL BEACH

...the trees had changed colour again, were now nearly purple and that this was the most dangerous colour of all.

The little ghost boy in the corner appeared to be trying to get out of his cage again. His cage was a cage like any other, yet seemed to fit him like a coat. And though arms and fingers and tentacles and tendrils occasionally broke the threshold and defied the light, Bryan and Timothy ultimately felt safe in the knowledge their captive was secure.

The truth was, neither of them remembered exactly how he came to be captive in the first place - did upon occasion fight, even come to blows over the matter – but were both ultimately confident in their belief on two fronts. The first was that he was harmless and meant them no harm. The second was more abstract and harder to explain, but essentially they believed he belonged to them.

They also knew that he represented their future or past. But not which, and this was something that the old man delighted in not revealing. Yet the things they knew were far outweighed by the things they did not know, the infinite mysteries of the air and the night. They didn't know who had lived in the cabin before them. They didn't know why the trees and plants of the forest were their enemies. They didn't know where the old man went when he wasn't with them. They didn't know what the thing behind the pantry door actually looked like and they didn't know why they could never leave the cabin.   
They also didn't know how they came to be here.

Supplies and taunts were dropped off once a month by the old man. He had a comically long beard and a stained demeanour. He cackled and sputtered but didn't move like a human being. He never stopped asking questions and his eyes were even more questioning than his mouth. He walked sideways.

He seemed concerned for their well being in a round about way. But he was more than a mere guardian, he was the only other person the boys had ever known.

He brought basic supplies; food, candles and the blankets they called bedding. He would occasionally fix things, if the tap stopped flowing the two fluids or, when Timothy, the younger of the two boys, was disturbed by the purple light which came through the hole in the curtains.

He brought these things on an old fashioned horse and cart. Two things stood out from the old man's decrepit clothes. His bright eyes and his strong hands. His hands were so decayed with purity that they resembled the rusty tap in the bathroom, and seemed capable of dragging anything. The old man's eyes were brighter than the sun and pure emerald. On that particular morning those little green pits reflected the unusual cargo of the day; that pile of deadness overflowing from the cart bounced back in them. Deracinated and dessicated: a multitude of small, black bird carcasses forming a mutant avian corpse. Spastic arms spilling over the sides, whilst silently escaping gasses functioned like mesons holding the bulbous flesh together. A feathery black miasma.

After clattering and banging about the place, doing precisely what the boys were not sure, he gathered his various brass tools up in his sack bag, tipped his hat to them, and reminded them to never leave the house or open the pantry door - no matter how much it shook (no matter how much the thing behind it begged).

Just before the old man closed the door, he suddenly spun his heels, and almost as an after thought, told the boys that he wouldn't be around at the usual time next week. This change in protocol disturbed Timothy, he turned to Bryan, expecting to see a reflection of his angst, but to his surprise the slightly older boy was smirking. Timothy pondered the meaning of this, did he know where the old man was going instead? No, that was ludicrous, Bryan was in precisely the same position as he was.

***

Watery light splashed against the boy, causing his frame to appear translucent and flicker like a spool of film played at the wrong speed. As if ghost-boy hadn't been granted a full body, whilst everybody else was free to wander about in the daylight. Timothy sometimes watched the little ghost-boy when Bryan wasn't watching him.

It was hard to tell whether he was aware of his presence. He did sometimes observe the boy playing with his light, and sometimes his shape seemed to shift with his moods. Although his moods totalled two: serene and disconsolate.

***

The box was fashioned from a material that nothing else in the house was, and it projected, from a small hole in the top, a world in miniature, indistinguishable from their own. That was, until you tried to touch it, and found that your arm would pass through any part - be it stone or sky. And to change the pod was to change to the story.

The pods were another element of the old man's cargo. The boys inserted the latest one. They slid back the smoky dome as normal. A 360 degree circle of light was thrown up from tiny bulbs, a surprisingly authentic image:

A woman was taped to a wooden post and her teeth were being removed one by one, by a harlequin with a golden pair of pliers and rusty teeth. Now and then the blurred image would fixate on the jester's face - revealing sloppy spit addled lips and shiny shiny eyes.

Bryan seemed excited by the pods in a different way, alien to Timothy. He was always rubbing himself and fidgeting. And when Timothy asked him to stop he always got angry with his friend. Started screaming and occasionally kicked over the table. He'd storm out the room but then Timothy would discover him alone late at night rewatching the pod. He dare not remind him of what their guardian said about routines.

Timothy preferred the ones about the beach, the ones with the sunny meadows and the powerful yet elegant horses in their wooden homes...

***

Timothy was at the window, studying the caterpillars which intermittently clung to the other side of the glass. They were large and dark and came and went at random. Their numbers varied and they left a slimy residue behind their movements. Bulbous and many-legged. They first made an appearance a few days after the end of the last ice season. They terrified the young boy at first, and Bryan hated them with a passion, but now Timothy has come to welcome their presence. As they seemed to offer explanations; made him ask bit by bit, more with each passing day: what else lies out there, in and beyond the forests?

He spun around as a bang from the pantry sent a shudder through him. The old man had warned them both so much of the danger of the unseen monster behind that door. He claimed it had sliced other boys in two, eaten them for breakfast and picked its teeth clean with their bones. Older, bigger boys too.

Timothy has been here so long (how long?) that he is no longer sure whether he has seen snatches of the beast - slimy tentacle, arachnid leg - or simply dreamed them. And Bryan claims to have seen its entirety, but more and more the younger views the older as a liar.

He stared at the door, trying to slow his rapid breathing, waiting for further movement from the pantry. It never came.

* * *

Timothy had started dreaming again. He hadn't dreamt for three months and Bryan had told him that this was normal, that as you moved from being a boy to a big boy you dreamt less and less, until you stopped entirely. And that that time was closer than he might think. This scared Timothy. It was something like the way he felt when Bryan stared at one of the magic-box projections too long, or the old man stared at Bryan for too long.

That night Timothy tossed and turn, sweated, got all caught up in his blankets and reflected on the thing the old man said, wondered why he wouldn't be making his usual house call, but above all fixated on the door. Why did it shake more and more - and what lay so angrily behind it? And was there sometimes a queer, smoky voice as Bryan claimed, or was this merely a trick or dream?

When he finally fell, like violence off the edge off a cliff, into fitful sleep, he dreamt. The dream was all secret lights and screams. It wasn't watery like the pod stories were but more like ice. Like the burning bone in the sky. Like he was up there. Right up there. And Bryan was there too but Bryan wasn't really Bryan. He was a person he'd never met but suspected existed. Literal Bryan, however, didn't usually put in an appearance. He was off somewhere in the periphery most of the time, behind rocks and shadow. Watching.

In the dream the caterpillars from the windows kept him company. Most of the time they kept whispering in scratchy little voices about 'lava' and 'pupa,' strange alien words to Timothy's ears. They said Bryan was lying and that they weren't on the windows of his house to keep him inside, but to show him the wonders that awaited. To tell him that they were merely the tip of the iceberg. That there was so much more.

He asked them if the pods they watched came from the woods, and they said yes, all of them, but there were other things in the woods too, water purer than the neon sludge from the taps, and people much wiser than Bryan or the old man. And although the bad may also lurk, they were few in number, and easily avoidable.

And then later in the dream there was a weird man covered in lumps and he just kept screaming screaming screaming at Timothy. Demanding to know why he had done the things that he had done. And Timothy wanted to say that he hadn't done anything, to protest and explain, but nothing came from his mouth and the next thing he knew there was a caterpillar at his leg and it smiled up at him. Timothy was consumed with lumps as it burped the most musical of burps through its big, shiny, metal teeth.

* * *

The next morning Bryan told him to come and look out the window. There were only two of the big green and black caterpillars today and in between them was a clear view of the forest. Bryan wanted to show him that the trees had changed colour again, were now nearly purple and that this was the most dangerous colour of all. Even worse than orange or black or even green. He asked Bryan whether or not this affected the fruit, whether the strange misshapen flowers that his friends always warned him about were even more deadly when the trees changed colour. But this just seemed to anger the older boy. He shrieked that the wrong-flowers were bad through and through and you should never eat them, or even touch them for that matter. It didn't matter what colour they were, why ask that question?

The younger boy was questioning the wisdom of a follow up question when the pantry door shook. The sudden sound made his stomach lurch and both boys turned in tandem to see the pantry door shake like it never had before. A gap, a visible black gap of about six inches appeared. They saw nothing in the darkness, but there might as well have been monsters and angels lurking there for what it was worth.

Timmy froze to the spot, whilst Bryan took an unintentional step back. There was some form of structure within the darkness, but they couldn't say what - grey bending into black. Timmy could see from the slightly older boy's face, that he was ashamed of his fear. Bryan had once boasted that he felt none. That fear, like dreams, was just for children. And though Timmy could not possibly speak the impulse aloud, his impulse was to fling open the front door and run like the wind, deep into the woods. Even if he could only dine on the forbidden flowers, he was willing to take that chance. At least in that moment.

And then he does!

* * *

He runs down the path and into the forest, the world passing by his periphery, a crystal blur. The ground is damp and mulchy and magical. Mud puddles explode around his small feet. Up ahead he spies a hundred different gaps in the trees and contemplates which to take, as if they didn't all lead into the same forest but a hundred different ones.

Now inside it is different than he had expected. Cold, darker, but also flatter, somehow anti-climatic after all these years of fear and fantasy. And barer too. Skeletal even. The floor is densely carpeted with leaves, they run the gamut from dark black to piss brown. The trees are uniform, cookie cutter, white-maroon. Medium of width. They seem a different colour than they did from the house. Less dramatic. Not so much of dream. But still, Timothy had never seen anything like them before. He strokes smooth bark with small, sweaty palm.

He grabs a fistful of leaves - all colours - and smells them, sniffs hard, drinking down the scent. Swallowing it deep into his lungs, breathing it out with the mist. Then he scrapes some leaves aside to make a small clearing and feels the dirt itself. Picks a small amount up and lets it slip between his fingers. Watches it fall in clumps between them. Smells it just like the leaves. Tastes it, cautiously, reluctantly, feeling that he is half sinning but so much of the past is already forgotten. He feels as if he is in another world. He is, of course. A world of space and depth, of silence in between things, of death warmed up. Of lies forgotten. Of vices unknown. Of secrets that have lost their meaning. Of perfect answers to questions never asked. Of all the things he would have been doing if he had been here instead of somewhere else.

He climbs to his feet and continues his journey, and soon a path emerges, beaten down through the vegetation, and he follows it. Sometimes blackbirds swoop down and land on the branches, and insects, not before seen, rear their tiny heads. He saw a blackbird once on the cabin garden, and of course Bryan said it was evil, and to never look it in the eye, but now up close Timothy found them to be friendly creatures.

The path begins to widen and soon opens up into a clearing of sorts, but the grass is both taller and darker here, and the blackbirds seemed to keep their distance from the cottage in its middle. It is sandy in colour and raggedy in design. The horizontal slats seemingly held together by air itself. The apex roofing titanium thatch. Three equally spaced and sized windows, but only the last emitted any form of light. But Timothy could not decide was this purple or merely the lightest shade of black. The possibility troubled him, whilst fear kept him from further investigation.

He'd never considered what he would do if he stumbled upon other abodes or people like him and Bryan. Did they have a monster and a ghost-boy? Did a mysterious and secretive old man deliver their food and yarn and pods?

He approached it step by tentative step, crouched low. The place was so solid and so alone. There was something wrong which he couldn't put his finger on, as if the house was surrounded by an invisible wall of ghosts. He never took his eyes off the windows.

The idea of being seen by unseen eyes terrified him. He imagined a bigger more dangerous version of the thing behind the pantry door. Then he imagined, what if Bryan came to look for him and left the cottage alone? Would that thing escape unguarded? Was their absence, alone, enough of a lapse for the door to be opened. He imagined it having the run of the place, wrapping its tentacles around every piece of furniture, filling the empty space of every room.

He is nearly at the door and crab walks the rest of the way. He draws up to the bottom of the window as slowly as he can. There is not much light and he sees clutter but cannot identify much. He spies a skull, on a shelf high above the fire, which is polished to a high shine and can only belong to a dog. Its apple contours and milky surface startle him...and this is enough detail for him, enough information. He flees the window, cottage, the clearing...and back to the woods.

He runs and runs and with each passing step feels with even greater urgency that he must flee. That the devil himself is nipping at his heels. Eventually his breath runs low and his legs run out, he collapses into an old heap, like an abandoned tree trunk.

And there he spies a small mushroom. Shitty brown with liver spots. The old man had warned him against the mushrooms even more than the trees. Almost as much as the pantry door. He is not so quick to look and touch and taste and smell the mushroom. The minuscule fungi does bring back memories and rules and warnings. A wizards cap, a dome of death, a vital temptation, a lost love. He turns it about in his hands to examine its angles. The gaps between the gills seem daunting (infinite). But of course he must eventually taste...Rancid and bitter, but with something sweeter lurking below. Something waiting, a lurking after taste. His thoughts turn insidious but transgressions soon mutate into joy. And his heart pounds the way Bryan's did when the holograms hit their stride. A twisting of tingles and judders around his torso, along with a thickening of the stomach, and he lays back in the carpet of leaves, the earthly fibres, and the mystery twists around him, the ground shakes and the dirt mutates. Above, the purple-pink sky opens up, a gigantic silver aperture, and rains down candy, followed by Black rain. It falls throughout the forest and the ground strains further against its cage.

The tingles get louder and angrier and hotter and all about the air shifts and shapes mere geometric patterns shift about his eyes and he can feel his very pupils dilate and flood his eyeballs with knowledge turning them black black black blacker than a Jester's cap...

...And now perhaps even the notion of purple is lost...

...and he is chasing a furry rainbow coloured spider down a narrow dirt path which winds about the trees with a knowledge all its own it leads him to a glowing stream and he runs along the side of the quick moving water for a moment of eternity and he suddenly realises that he is being guided along the path which now appears like salt under the new light and there stood before the thickest oak tree presence made special by a spotlight is a black and purple suited harlequin with thin lips and mysterious eyes.

"I don't think you should be outside in this place at night. Not when you just ate that mushroom."

"Where should I be?"

"You must return to that place which intrigued you so."

"That Strange cottage in the clearing back there?"

"Yes."

"I'm not sure I could even find it again. Why should I return?"

"Why child? Why indeed?! You should never run from that which afraids you. You must find light in that darkness, and besides, it is a magic place."

"Magic?"

"There you will find three things: An answer, a tale, and that which you seek. Is that not magic?"

"..."

"Sometimes, you can find things inside things, smaller versions of the same things, but simpler and easier to hold and understand...simply remember...that the map is not the territory."

"..."

"Well there's no use looking at me that way kid. Traditionally, I'm not even supposed to speak. Why, I'd like to meet the creator and give him a piece of my mind!"

And so Timothy returns back down the salty path towards the mysterious cottage. He reaches it in no time at all and approaches without fear or trepidation. For both his body and his mind is still transformed by the mushroom. Looking through the window he notices something which he hadn't before. Next to the skull that unnerved is a golden ring atop a miniature pedestal. This gives the boy some comfort, perhaps this was not a place of evil, but a place like any other. He moves to the door and finds himself staring into the vertical slats, getting lost in the grooves, as he tries to summon the courage to knock.

He has never entered another domicile in his entire life.

His thoughts threaten to encompass him as the door opens, without warning, in silence. The interior it reveals is as raggedy as the stone work, and cluttered and busy. It seems brighter from the inside, but not an ounce of light passes the threshold. There are large leather and cloth bound tomes with pages threatening to escape their binding. There are pictures boasting gilded framing, a plethora of wooden furniture, rocking chairs and occasional tables and chests of tiny drawers, more than the cottage should be able to sensibly hold, judging by either the outside or the in.

The only occupant an old hag, framed by the fireplace and hearth, silhouetted by the flames beneath her cauldron, drenched in a bundle of rags and blankets - grey, black and burgundy.

"Come join me boy-child, don't concern yourself with the door, it will close as it opened."

Her voice is unsettling, as it shifts gears without warning, through an alien register; both guttural and high pitched, dismissive and damning. As he begins to slowly cover the short distance between the door and the fire, the hag motions at a small, wooden bench opposite herself, on the other side of the cauldron.

Her fingers are too slender for the rest of her, but still gnarled and mottled and ugly, all yellow boils and green blemishes. She is short and squat, but there is a hidden strength hinted at by the hard lumps of muscle which squirm beneath the rags. She sits cowed with her head down, all but the smallest patch of cheek obscured. This patch is grey, the shade of the dead. She reminds Timothy of the pile of dead birds the old man had the last time he visited (Oh god how will he react when he finds out?!) and he suddenly fears the possibility she can read minds. He tries not to think any more bad of her just in case she can read his thoughts.

Behind her some sacking is hanging from the ceiling and stretched the width of the small cottage. Smeared in blood (hopefully animal) a symbol that Timothy has seen before. A random yet designed conflagration of shapes. There are bottles and jars and potions and books, stacked and crammed into every conceivable space. The place smells of the old man's rotten eggs. He notices an exhibit very close to him, a real but no longer living bird. Larger and rounder than the black birds, cut down and frozen in mid flight, or just upon its initial take off. In short, it is a demented doll's house, and there is something wrong with the way things are set and the points where they meet. It is not hard to imagine a curse within the foundations - thirteen dead dogs trapped in concrete.

Her voice is a glossy croak and Timothy doesn't take in all of the words that it forms. He merely knows that very intonation which suggests a question makes him nervous...Stories...she wants to tell him a story. The only story outside of the pods was the one told by his guardian. But as it nears its strange conclusion both boys realise that they were being mocked, in a way which they could not understand.

She has a small pouch in one hand and uses the other to remove dust and toss it into the flames. When it makes contact with the flames it flares up momentarily. There is a rainbow flare and a sweet crackling sound, the report serves to punctuate her words.

"I could tell you nine, nay, nine hundred stories and it would be the same one every time. Across the land, across the sea, across the stars." She throws more dusts into the fire. The flames meet it to create more sublime colours. "Man and machine and monster are not so different.

"I want to tell you a tale boy-child. I hate fables but love fairy tales. And this one perhaps has an important meaning, or maybe just more nonsense." With the last few words her small mouth curves upward into its necroses carrier.

"But why a story now? I have so many questions...and I feel strange."

"Because it is words which hold together the molecules we perceive, not atoms. You have been a prisoner of the older for far too long. The nucleus is within." And with these last words she taps a nail upon upon his bony chest.

"So are you going to tell me the tale now?"

"Patience my child. We are waiting for something first."

"Oh. What are we..."

With this the cottage door slams open in a gust of wind and leaves. Bryan stands in the door way, burdened by fire wood and other objects, which spill over his arms. After the initial shock of seeing his friend the first thing he notices is that he is skinnier. Could this just be seeing the boy in a whole new context, only the second he has ever seen him in? It never crossed his mind that Bryan would follow him and he questions whether any of this is real. Wonders if it is a dream and a talking spider is due to make an appearance at any moment.

"What are you doing here?"

"Why, looking for you of course. You ran away!"

"You have worried your friend my child. Such a good little non-woman is he! I asked him to gather some things that the night does not permit an old lady, for our tale...and for our food."

Now the witch stands, as close as she surely gets to upright, and reveals her form at last. Much taller than she had looked all wrinkled up on the chair. Not as tall as the old man or the jester, perhaps, but a good two feet on either of the boys. Her face is mottled blue and grey - an inverted triangle. Hair of silver snakes. A nose broken and stretched in a dozen places. Eyes which drips down her cheeks like melted wax. They move about but don't appear alive. They terrify Timothy. For the first time since he left the cabin he senses true danger, like shadow cast upon a window.

She points a bony finger into a corner and Bryan unburdens himself of his load. A good dozen pieces of perfect fire wood. He then empties the contents of his sack besides it. There is a large tuba shaped fungi, a copper cup, a seemingly broken clock, several small pouches and a very small skeleton of which animal Timothy does not know. (How ever did he carry it all?)

Timothy doesn't know why but he doesn't want to look too closely at his friend. Doesn't know whether he is angry at him for leaving. Doesn't know many things. Thinks that Bryan looks far too comfortable with all of this, as he sorts through his haul and hands things to the hag or puts them aside on nearby shelves. She gives everything a quick, cursory, yet seemingly expert glance, and moves onto the next, occasionally a soft grunt seems to signify approval, or something less binary.

Outside, thunder filled the gaps between the trees.

She slides open a near by drawer and removes a tatty box of owls heads. She begins to hum as she pulls them out and tosses them into the bubbling solution one by one. They plop side by side like a dance formation, more follows, liquids leave glass, fabrics are pulled from unlikely places. Next are the pouches from Bryan's forage, dried leaves and herbs and a powder coloured a shade of orange. Ingredient both likely and peculiar. The brew changes colour.   
The fungi is next, Timothy is surprised by how quickly it changes the colour of the broth again, a quick swirl of shade.  
Her fingers strain against her hands.  
The last of the owl's heads slips beneath the murky waters, the eye seeming to possess an air of accusation. Timothy has to look away.

How excited the old crone has become about the brew tells Timothy it can be nothing good. She busies herself, casually opens a drawer, in which - between a used bottle and a damaged book - lies a dead baby. She lays it upon her lap and plucks a knife from somewhere. The blade - a rusty scythe in miniature - splits the infant's skin. Timothy thinks of his own hands in the forest mud, as he watched her penetrate the carcass. She pull out its intestines, gently. Black lightning splits the sky as the flesh slips through the witch's fingers, opulent and greasy. When they are full removed she uses the same blade to sever the tie, tosses the calamity of snakes into the cauldron, watches as the hot waters devour it.

Her veins strain against her fingers.  
The broth goes through a whole sequence of colour changes.  
Her smudge eyes turn red and begin to rotate.  
The windows tremor beneath the storm and Bryan begins to shake. Timothy has never seen him afraid before.  
Bryan sits beside him on the bench, opposite the old thing. Her voice grows louder, bends and expands and possesses a quality that demands their attention. It fills his ears and the room. It surrounds them all. It crashes inside Timothy's head like the waves. Only the ever growing flames can compete with it.

The lightning gives everything a silver rim. Timothy turns to Bryan and barely recognises his profile. Timothy studies Bryan's face and he is sure it isn't just the cast of the fire, he is bonier, his eyes are darker, more watery. He is no longer sure if Bryan is still his friend, or if it is Bryan in the first place. Or just some wraith from the hag's cauldron.

A particularly loud clap of lightning causes Timothy to jump enough to leave his seat. He feels as if he has less control of his body by the second.

The room begins to breath the flames, a dilation and constriction of shadow. The floor tilting back and forth - a ship lost at sea. His eyes are suddenly drawn toward one of the paintings. It is not like the old man's pods but Timothy feels more wrong for looking. Everything about it is alien, the clothes, the architecture, it is only the humanoid figures which bind him to it. They are shadowed by giant metal towers the like he has never scene, and surrounded by far too many lights. The movement above takes his vision: The sack banner above the fire seems larger now. Has the symbol changed or is it just a product of its mystery? The rough, red lines curve and convalesce, shine and spread.

The final ingredient: The old hag gets to her feet, and as if making a grand announcement, begins to wretch. It sounds like a bucket of rocks and water being dragged up from the bottom of a well. She spits hard and wet and wide. There are too many colours in the witch's spit.

Skeletal finger pass a pair of copper cups, filled from the pot with grey mucus - the phlegm of the dead. It happens in slow motion, and though Timothy tries to protest, to point out as politely as possible that he has already imbued something which perhaps he shouldn't have, his breath falls silent. His lips do not move. That is until, in unison, like clockwork, he drains the cup in sync with his friend.

The witch's word are like footsteps at the bottom of a well, as she begins her tale. A picture like the ones projected by light from the magic box, fills the cauldron:

THE TAILOR'S SON & THE DRAGON'S EGGS

Once upon a time there was a tailor's son whose heart was full to bursting with love for the King's only daughter. She was the fairest of all the fair maiden's in the land. Her hair flowed like a golden river whilst her eyes shone like a priceless jewel. She had the grace of a swan and the heart of a nun. Yet alas, the tailor's son was less than a nobody in the kingdom, for times had been hard on his father's business.

So with a heavy heart the young man set to sowing and trimming until one day great news befell him. The King was to visit the town square the very next noon. Thus he rose before dawn and ran to the town square in order to intercept the carriage and grab an audience with the King.

A great crowd and fanfare awaited. The king arrive with trumpets and velvet carpets and many comments on how magnificent his horses and painted carriage were. Even more so than anticipated.

The tailor pushed his way through the massive crowd. Stumbled down onto his knees and declared his love. The King looked upon the boys unkempt countenance and pallid face and declared:

"You! Ha! You! Dear boy! For you will never be joined in matrimony with my only daughter unless you complete the most impossible of tasks!"

But the tailor's son was brave and true of heart and he replied that he would succeed in any challenge or die trying. But the King was a cunning and not entirely just King, so he thought for awhile upon the nature of the task.

"I will meditate on this tonight within my chambers and tomorrow I will return to the square as the clock strikes three to give you your answer."

And the young tailor's heart was filled with joy and he bowed down before the King thanking him profusely.

And so clock hands came around and the king returned just as he promised he would. And some commented that his horses and carriage were even more magnificent than the day before. He stood and addressed the square:

"I have decided what you must do. There is a tree that you and your father must know of, as it is very famous throughout the lands. An unnaturally tall tree bred unnaturally from the tears of the purple dragon. After she wept at the death of her husband - the infamous black dragon - at the hands of the the Ogre armies of the west.

Legend has it that high in the clouds, at the very peak of this most tall and unnatural tree, lies a nest full of dragons eggs, their powers beyond compare. If you can steal six from the nest, and bring them to me without a single scratch, then my daughter's hand, and half my lands and gold will all be yours. And this King is a man of his word and let all witness it now. So that nobody may gainsay my words later."

And the town's people, having been haunted and terrorised by these winged-beasts for so long, knew all too well how dangerous they were, and how impossible the young man's task.

The night before he set out on his quest the tailor's son was fretful of what to do, and feared making himself a fool for all the world.

His father discovered him wandering the house late into the night and asked, "son, for what can be the matter?"

"Oh father, for I fear I have been set a most impossible task. And will surely die during my quest."

His father conceded that things certainly did appear bleak and the tree did appear most unclimbable, even without a circling dragon acting as sentry. However, he said not all was lost and advised him to seek the counsel of his wiser and betters, explaining that this was what he did when he was stuck upon the sowing of a particularly tricky garment.

"But who should I ask father? For I know but a few men and none of them wise."

So the tailor retired to his bedroom to ponder his son's words, and thought upon the answer.

"I have been thinking upon you problem my son and I think that the Jester is the most worthy and wise of men. Only the truly wise can convincingly act the fool."

So the tailor's son sought out the trickster at the theatre where he rehearsed to entertain the King and all the courtiers. He told of his desires and goals and troubles and The Jester agreed to help, upon just one condition, that if the young man succeeded in obtaining the eggs and exchanged them for a great fortune he wanted but a single chest of gold in payment. He agreed readily.

"I am a trickster for sure and I masquerade as a fool before the King and all. But I am aware of the ways of beasts and the wiliest beast for each and every task. Yours my child is a spider. We will trap and capture all the most wily spiders in the forests and field and get the old hag in the woods to fashion from them a pair of magic shoes. These spider shoes will allow you to climb any tree, be it the Purple Dragon's, or one ten fold taller! Even one enchanted by a thousand necromancers or cursed by a million witches!"

And so off they went to gather all the rarest and most precious spiders in the lands. Be they as big as a house or as small as a grain of sand. And the hag took the bits and fashioned a most splendid and lively pair of shoes for the Tailor's son.

With trepidation and fear in his heart he began to climb the tree. Though he was scared to begin with his fear soon gave way to great joy, for he climbed like a spider and perceived no danger whatsoever. The tree could have reached to the moon and back. But then the great lady dragon appeared above the mountain to the east. She flew toward her tree and the closer she got the more afraid he became until he began to shake. And it only took one swoop in his direction for the Tailor's son to fall. The Jester thanked the heavens as the branches and a bush broke his fall. The young man returned home,

"I have been thinking upon your problem my son and I think that the Alchemist is the most worthy and wise of men, not the The Jester as I told you before. Only he he truly understand what this world is made of can turn dirt into gold."

So he sought out the metalsmith at his favourite Inn where he was often found to be imbibing a tankard of hops. He told of his problem and again gold was agreed upon for payment.

They went together to purview the giant tree, which climbed into the sky like a bewitched bone.

"The problem is no matter how well I climb and how these splendid little eight legged fellows do me justice I just can't keep abreast of the trunk with that blasted dragon flying at me."

"Well then my boy it occurs to me that we must distract that reptilian queen so that you can climb in peace and reach the eggs safely. And bring them back down just as safely."

"But what could possibly act as decoy to such a narrow minded and ferocious beast?"

"My business is precious metals, making diamond from coal and gold from clay, but also I mix gold and silver to form electrum, minerals of the sea into the most impenetrable of armour for the King's armies, and seemingly worthless stone and sediment into the most useful of tools. I shall fashion a treasure shinier than gold, brighter than silver, and more vivid in colour than even the queen's most beloved Topaz."

And so off they went to gather all the rarest and most precious minerals in the lands. Travelling across the wide sea to lands his father could only have dreamed of. Rubies as red as the battlefields and Emeralds as green as the forests.

And The Alchemist did indeed fashion a wondrous new element. And when the son shone upon it it radiated like a fiery cave. Surely not even the cold-hearted dragon could resist such a sight. So again the tailor's son began to climb with his sack his upon his back. And this time when the dragon appeared over the mountain The Alchemist directed it just so and the dragon was indeed hypnotised.

The young man reached higher than before on the tree, nearly to the nest itself but suddenly the clouds moved and the ethereal light of The Alchemist was upon his face, instead of the dragon's and purely blinded he fell further than before. Thankfully, the myriad branches and trees saved him once more.

The young man returned home once more,

"I have been thinking upon you problem my son and I think that the Fortune Teller is the most worthy and wise of men, not The Jester or The Alchemist as I once said. Only the one with the greatest insight into the present can truly predict the future."

And so he found the fortune teller in a small cave where he liked to go to meditate for long periods, and a deal of help for gold was quickly struck.

"I have been thinking young tailor, why your previous attempts to climb the tree and possess the eggs, with or without that humongous dragon, have come to fail. The key is not to climb. We must simply use my magic to predict when the purple dragon is absent, ravaging far off lands, and the winds are in our favour. Then a good half dozen eggs should fall from the tree of their own accord and you shall simply collect them in the net with which you shall surround the tree."

The young adventurer's heart was filled with hope and joy, and he enquired,

"But what do you need to complete such a task? Can you tell such a fortune now?"

"Alas my book of spell and pack of cards are not enough for such an unusual reading. To predict the flow of the winds and the mind of a dragon requires tea leaves, but not just any old, the subtlest reading of the finest leaves."

And so off they went to collect and gather all the rarest and most precious tea leaves in the lands. When they had just the right combination the teller boiled them, adding a single drop of the tailor's son's blood, then poured them from saucer to cup and stared deeply into them.

"Yes yes, I see now, sooner than I could have hoped, the purple lizard will venture north tomorrow, to slay an innocent village, when the sun is in the midpoint of the sky. We shall come here an hour after her departure and fulfil your task...and your dream. That beautiful, golden princess' hand shall be yours!"

And so they arrived when the sun made its destination, and though the Tailor's Son had a pile of rope the spiders of the shoes said they had a superior plan, spinning the perfect natural web, all the way around the base of the tree, both firm enough to hold the fallen eggs, but not so without flexibility as to break them. Eggs, they said, were their business.

The winds soon came and dislodged precisely six eggs from that unseen nest. And they fell and fell through the skies until they hit the spider's web. Yet alas they did not land there safe and secure, but instead bounced off and landed on some near by rocks.

The Fortune Teller could not believe his eyes and the defeated tailor's son dropped to his knees and wept. The Fortune Teller tried to comfort him, but he sent him away, declaring,

"You are a fool, all of you have led me stray...made promises which you could not keep!"

And so with a heavy heart the futurist left the boy in his pain, vowing to never to tell another fortune. It was a hot day and eventually he fell to sleep near the rocks, surrounded by the rancid smell of broken dragon eggs.

When the Tailor's son awoke he didn't feel himself and was indeed felt bewitched by an unseen presence. The sun and trees and indeed everything else was different. Suddenly he was excited and cared less for the princess and the kingdoms she possessed. He didn't even recognise the black leathery egg fragments which surrounded him.

He was full of love for all the maidens in the land and never realised the cause of these new feelings. The eggs left in the son had fermented like beer and now their vapours caused a most unusual heightening of the senses.

And he seduced and loved and left many maidens, both foul and fair, despite the disapproval of his father, the hard working tailor. And soon he left his father to live alone in an Inn. And eventually the love and smiles and shiny hair of the maiden's were not enough for the one time adventurer and again he began to ponder the quest which now seemed like little more than a dream, and the fairest maiden of them all

who had once enchanted his heart.

And he remembered the answers of those wise men he had sought, and realised that all their words had been the same. That all the people in the kingdom's words were the same, and this knowledge haunted him forever more, and he most certainly did not live happily ever after.

As she completes the tale her final words sputter out like a record, followed by a gasping cough, all gas and detritus. Timothy turned to Bryan, but he was lost in his own world, smirking, not with arrogance as he sometimes did back in the cabin (to imply some form of superior knowledge) but with serenity. The old hag sprayed black and green phlegm into the cauldron where they sizzled into the depths. Just as it appears she is about to stop a new round bursts out and her head slams back. Her eyes turning whiter than white.

"There is a third boy. You didn't mention him."

Timothy doesn't know what to say. This is both true and not.

Her hands tense up in the air in front of her: "I see him moving through the forest like enchanted water. He cannot perceive himself: his hands are like plates, his feet pegs...I cannot...I cannot read him."

They look at one another but Timothy is distracted by the poor state of the older boy's eyes. For his part Bryan looks like someone has cut his strings.

"It is the hour of the wolf boys and as I am not always as evil as they say, will not make you go back into the forest just yet, you shall stay here tonight, to sleep off your intoxication," and for the next part her tone drops a register, "and the tale..."

From nowhere Timothy finds himself in a bed which fits him like a glove, and before he can consider how, the darkness swallows him whole.

* * *

The cottage is cold and bare. A swarm of silver light filters in through the sooty window. Timothy awakes to find it is just him and Bryan now, the witch had departed and seems to have taken the cauldron and all her other possessions with her. Will she return to the sea as the old man said she would?

He rubs his eyes and stretches and finds his body paying for the previous days exotic fair. Timothy moves in jerky nervous movement whilst Bryan appears as though he dare not move at all. He friend seemed changed again. Different to even last night, and it occurs to Timothy that Bryan was changing even before the incident, before he upset the balance by leaving the house.

Outside could be another world entirely, for the change in the light is total, and a new cast lays across all the trees. New edges to everything; the trees more black, everything else grey. Bryan leans against a tree in the grey dawn, splutters, coughs, spits, and then turns to Timothy with fear in his eyes.

Timothy catches site of hair-legged insects and sounds of unknown origin. Before, every last thing about the forest fascinated him, but now the speed of change has caught up with him and he doesn't know what to say, let alone do. But Bryan seems even more unsettled and is unconsciously pacing a circle around the tree.

"Bryan. I just remembered what she said. She thinks ghost-boy has gotten out?"

"What?!"

"Our ghost-boy, don't you think that is who she described in her vision?"

"That was just a dream"

"Which part?"

"All of it you fool."

After an uncomfortable silence:

"The little ghost-boy is out here somewhere though," concedes the older boy.

"How did he escape his cage?"

"Ha! Don't be foolish, that was a cage of his own making. Besides we have a more

serious..." Bryan's trails off.

"Sorry?"

"We have another problem," replies Bryan, a degree of irritation in his voice. "I did something before I left and I...I don't know why..."

"..."

"I opened the pantry door. The monster stalks these trees also."

"You...sorry you..." This is more terrifying than anything else that has happened, and Timothy feel the way he did when the caterpillar looked up at him in his dream.

"Don't make a big thing of it. This forest is huge, that thing will have greater mischief than us to contend with."

An insect lands on Bryan's nose, departs.

"So where now?" What else can he says?

"Onwards!" retorts the marginally older boy, with nonchalance.

"That's it? Onwards?!"

"Where else can we go?"

***

Bryan picks up his pace as he clears a succession of felled trees and Timothy cannot stop thinking about punching him in the back of the head. He has never had these thoughts before. He feels that right now he could rip off the older boy's head and toss it into the witch's cauldron. Instead he tries to make conversation, because he needs to hear their voices between the trees.

"I dreamt of the tree, the one in the tale. But in my dream it looked more like bone than wood. So tall and narrow that from a distance it looked like a giant spine, growing out of a hill and into the heavens."

"What do you know about the heavens? All I dream of is that thing I let out of the closet. I swear I've heard it moving through the forest."

"What do you dream when you dream of it?"

"Believe me you don't want to know. But I swear I have heard it moving through the trees, or trampling them down rather, not far back there. To begin with, I mistook last night's storm for it, that's why I shook so."

"Might just be the wind the other times too. And what about what you said before? About the breadth and depth of the forest and the nature of the creature's mind."

"No. It's coming for us."

Timothy was no longer sure what role his friend played in things. Before he had been subservient, to the old man and their way of life, but now it seemed as if anything went. He still wasn't sure that it even was Bryan - the releasing of the demon from the closet was particularly out of character - and he was trying to observe him more closely, without being noticed. It wasn't just that Bryan walked funny, he left no imprint upon the ground...weightless. He takes another look and decides no, this isn't the outside light or the effects of the witches weird broth, his friend is changed or bewitched by a doppleganger, his body is shadow and yet his eyes are like sapphire torches. He knows that he must get away, that going back to the cabin is not an option, neither is continuing with this wraith. He observes his own feet, sinking into the mulch, as he considers what to do.  
He wonders where the little ghost boy is now. Is he as lost as they are? Is he afraid? Has

freedom changed him?

"I know you said not to ask, but what do you dream of? When you dream of the thing in the closet?"

"I dream of the creature doing all kinds of...unspeakable things...that...that and the thing in the pod stories, the old man's light shows, what the old fool used to call 'the beast with two backs.'"

A fat blackbird lands in the clearing a few feet ahead of them.

"Shoo Shoo," Bryan waves about his arms with spite.

"No, maybe he can tell us something."

"What could that thing possibly tell us."

"The birds are wise."

"Ha you are such a baby sometimes, remember the old man's cart full of the dead blighters?!?"

"If you're arrogant young friend doesn't desire an audience with me I could speak to you in private. Then we won't have to inflict our stupidity upon him."

Timothy considers that his perception is still altered by the plants and the witch's magic but somehow knows that he is not.

The boy and the bird go to the furthest edge of the clearing.

"I have experienced more in these past few days than all those before and do not know what to do anymore. I don't know who is more villainous the witch or the old man. I don't know if I should have eaten those mushrooms or drank that foul smelling brew... I don't know if the ghost-boy is real or if he is telling the truth about opening the door for the beast," and then lowering his voice somewhat for this last bit, "I don't even know if that is my friend over there or a sinister doppleganger!"

"Life is a maze of confusion and false dead ends. But the thing that you must grasp to free your mind from these shackles is that YOU CANNOT SEPARATE THE DIRTY AIR FROM THE WINGS WHICH BEAT UPON IT."

"But what on earth does that mean?! I'm sorry but you're just confusing me more. Can you at least explain my friend to me."

"I cannot explain your friend. I would simply advise you to trust your instincts, it is not so difficult."

"But you are so free, we have been prisoners."

An uncruel laugh precedes the bird's response, "We are no more free than the spider, the beetle, the dog of the sea, or you boys. The creator's code had tied us all to something. Every spider may dream of becoming a bird, just as every birds yearns to be..."

A distant rumbling like rain rolling up a hill. Bryan runs without warning, declaring the sound the one he heard before. Timothy turns to the bird.

"You must run also my child," declares the black bird.

The green was so thick now they were lost in it, it was like being at the heart of an absolute infinity. Infinite gaps appeared between the trees. The blood from Timothy's heart rushes in his ears.

There is no old man, jester or witch now, just the two boys and the thing they were warned against.

Its body indescribable, it's tentacles infinite, it's obsidian slime crawls around the bark of the trees, fills the gaps between blades of grass. Trees crash before its centre. Previously unseen creatures of the forest flee into the undergrowth and distance. How did a pantry ever contain this thing?

His feet pound the forest floor, he feels hot breath from a mouthful of teeth, sees a wall of black flesh tracking his periphery; a crenated tentacle draws red from his side.

He can see some form of change in the terrain up ahead, a golden aperture. The closer he gets the more blinding the light. For a moment it seems as if the monster is by his side again, a blur of red eyes glowing.

But then a white light bathes down upon the scene. It is the ghost-boy, and he is descending upon the monster with a look of serenity upon his face. A new mood now. He moves between the trees like a descending bird. And some how, inexplicitly or inherently, they know he is here to save them, that there instincts about him meaning them no harm all these years, have been true...

Light explodes against liquid. The ghostly boy's watery limbs truncate and bifurcate all about, weaving between the other thing's dangerous bulk. The light jumps from his eye sockets like doomed moons.

...His ambivalence wrapped around the tarry monster like a gluon of bath time bubble. Death is not really his game but his entire being, and still it is a mystery whether the one time prisoner is their past or their destiny...

The ghost-boy's legs are pinned to the tree. Multiplying arms slap out wildly at his tormentor. A tentacles slides around but fails to grip.

A jagged tentacle slices the ghostly midsection, he bleeds light, and in response jams a inflated thumb into one of the creature's red eyes...The ghost-boy slams an inflated fist into the monster. Opalescence surround them - expands and contracts...then explodes-

The heat blast turns everything yellow and propels them. Timothy lands soft-hard in the sand. There is a discordant hum in the air. A pain between his ears.

And he sees the sand stretch off around the bend and the water which joins it stretching off into infinity and realises he is in the place promised by the caterpillars.

He sees Bryan somewhere near, smoking and unmoving, and he realises that he doesn't care if his friend lives or dies.

And then, of all times, he remembers where he last saw the symbols etched in blood in the witch's cabin. They were writ tiny beneath the...

He lifts his eyes to sky and looks out over the glittering ocean. There seems to be more land off in the far distance. A metal structure on the island, it glints subtly beneath the sun, its shape unlike any he has seen before. Castle like with towers.

He sat and stared for the longest time at the shifting surf - he breathed slowly. More slowly than ever before. The light of the one time prisoner returned to the ether and the remnants of monster were washed into the sea - not even inflicting upon its eternal blue.

He found fruits and shells and stayed on the beach for sometime. At night he stood, above the grass and below the moon - in a strange form of limbo - behind him were the hollow voices of a young boy and an old man, and ahead, he suspected, the people from pod's lightshows frolicked by a crystal sea. And out there, semi-illuminated by the moonlight, that giant metal cottage out in the ocean somewhere, breathing fire. He stood there alone, but he had the trees, and for now at least, the trees were enough.

DIGITAL FOLKLORE

And when I knocked on the door a scarecrow answered...

"So let me tell you about my neighbours."

"What? Your neighbours?"

"Yeah my fucking neighbours, my old neighbours from when I was a kid. Isn't that practically why we're here. I mean I wanted to stay at home and enjoy my buzz in peace. You dragged me out."

"Okay cool your jets. Tell me about your 'fucking neighbours.'"

"I don't know where to start. Because there are so many others attached to this one. Stories I mean, not neighbours."

"Well you can start by telling me where you were living."

"Yeah. Okee dokee, let's start at the beginning. This was when we lived in Moorfield. We lived there for five years. Until I was about 15. And at first I hated it because it was a very sporty town, if you wanted to play football or golf all day you were sorted, if otherwise, forget it...and I didn't really make any proper friends in my class at school but then I met this kid called Roger. He lived two streets away, but went to a different school entirely. Something to do with his parents religion. They were Catholics, or at least pretending to be to get him into a better school!

"Anyway he loved to play video games like me and we both had Ataris so we were quids in. We had a lot of fun actually.

"So everything was great, and it was one of those summers which only seem to exist when you're a kid, but then we get these weird new neighbours..."

"Oh, here we go! Goosebumps time! Or, is it Jackanory?

"Don't worry it's not about to turn into The 'burbs! Well not quite, but to this day, if I watch a film like that I recall this couple, those times."

"Just a couple? Not a family then?"

"Nah, just the two, straight, unmarried. Nondescript, but not quite."

"What's that mean?"

"Well they were plain, but lots of small things stuck out. He was reasonably good looking in face and body and she, although a prettyish face was, let's be honest, obese. You never saw them together much. He was obsessed by washing his fucking car, but before you say, so far, so suburbia, so what? I mean ob-fucking-sessed. Like it was pathological. He was strange. You talk about your dad waxing the car a lot but this was another level."

"But what do you mean by that? You mean as in he did it every single day, or he did something extra. Something eccentric, like taking a hair dryer to it or something."

"Almost buddy...almost...Okay this is what he used to do, he used to assemble his tools - far too many to start with - like a surgeon, out on the drive and he'd have like not just a pad but like a fucking clipboard. You know like people in offices, or those ones who molest you in the street for five pounds toward the RSPCA or some shit. And then he would be out there for at least five hours. Presumably following this list."

"You obviously had exciting Saturdays. I know Channel 5 was a major event back then but did you not at least have a VCR?"

"I didn't watch him all day, but I'd come and go and every time I looked out of my window he was still there. Looking like he was in nirvana and then he'd be touching it up every night after work as well. Was he ever happy sprawled out on the drive with his precious chamois leather."

"Admittedly that is pretty crazy, but not much of a story."

"Well that's not the story. I'm just setting the scene remember. Explaining how they didn't quite stack up."

"So besides the car fetish, how did they not stack up?"

"Hardly ever went out, and never together. Almost weren't a couple at all, didn't see them together much, in fact, the only reason you knew for sure that they did interact was because you could hear them yelling at each other at least once a week. Sometimes four of five."

"So what. All couples fight. Some more than others admittedly, but..."

"Yeah, but note I said yelling. Not shouting. And it was with such intensity. Plus the content of the arguments, it was raw, but also, sometimes, kinda weird."

"Define weird."

"God you're always so cynical. Do you ever take my word for anything?"

"I'm not mate I just want you to explain. I mean what have you really told me so far. They're a couple. They shout at each other, sorry yell, he was a geek about his car and she was a fatty. I mean it's not like you should be home right now in case Hollywood come knocking for the rights."

"It was weird, it was as if half the dialogue was missing, or two separate conversations were playing on top of each other. Like they weren't actually right there together but living completely separate lives."

After a few beats:

"I'm building up, oh, believe me I'm building up to something here."

"But it's not The 'burbs."

"Well it's like The 'burbs if John Waters and Atom Egoyan had gotten together and directed it..."

An indeterminate number of beats [who's counting?!]:

"Okay so you and Roger are aces, but your neighbours suck, then what happens?"

"Then she disappeared."

Street-lights and moths hang between the mustard coloured houses. The road between the two sides more like a river now, too wide for a surburban street. Unshadowed by the moon, fortified by the rain, and you know, here also monsters lie. You moves so surreptitiously across the road that you are virtually tiptoeing. You can see the vapour of your breath nebulous and sparkly before you. The ice of the night stings your cheek.

You'd lived on a street like this yourself once, in another lifetime. And you wonder if one of these houses could even be your house. And then, as if by way of answer or rebuke, a cardboard cat. Its movements mapped out as a series of x & y coordinates across the grid, programmed by a computer, powered by machine language. Once upon a time all of your nightmares had centered around encounters with uncanny animals.

You think of the rumours of a concealed beach to distract yourself from uncomfortable memories. How could a beach lie so far inland? Even a man made one.

The front garden path is diamond below the street light and seems to narrow into an apex at the door. There is something unnerving about the way the door is painted an almost organic red, and the two small squares of glass, roughly at eye level, are not transparent at all, but a treacly black.

The natural compulsion to knock is there - strong and overwhelming. Silent electricity draws your hand upwards (up...up, up, up...) and you can not resist one last look back. Just in case secret sentries have now revealed themselves.

You open the door and comes into a reception room which is like a vortex. The furnishings hide themselves from your eyes with cloaks of darkness and you try to catch up with them. A gangly hat stand is the first to appear. A whipped skeleton. A masquerader. A prop. Household objects have configured themselves into something more menacing, an element of the conspiracy against you.

There is more here too, you know.

A cardboard box in a corner. Closed tightly.

A doll on a shelf.

A calendar by your shoulder, too old to ever be useful again.

A phone, too new.

There is a pale light beyond, in the house proper, and you are reluctant to step into it.

You take a deep breath and enter the lounge. A few degrees colder now, like he was back on the street. This room and its furnishings are the most unsettling component yet.

A trio of green couches, from another era, frozen in time. The carpet, appearing brown (impossible to know for sure in this light) has an anaglypta pattern, etched in yellow.

There is an old book on the occasional table at the end of the sofa - "The Infinite Melancholy of Malcolm Manvers" \- with one of those hewn brown covers, pseudo-antique. Almost valuable.

You picks it up, are surprised, firstly by its weight, then by its pages. Although a small sized hardback it weighs down on his hand like a folio. The pages are rough and sandy and made up of archaic sketches and written in a pictorial language. Somewhere between ancient Egyptian and contemporary Chinese. He flicks through the pages and it is all rendered in this manner. And although it is largely oblique, a snap shot registers: An eye = masonic? A triangle = change? A grid = The space within which we operate?

Catching the top of his head, in a wide, oval mirror, he realises that its doppleganger is on the opposite wall. They seem perfectly aligned and this minimalist touch seems at odds with the clutter and chintz of the rest of the room. Inexplicably you fear your reflection in this mirror; fears that it will reveal too much or something hidden - a layer otherworldly...death. This funhouse configuration of parallel reflection bouncing back and forth at uncontrollable speed. A rational thought in a sea of chaos.

Another occasional table. This one housing cake. An opulent, dark and half digested number. Antique sweet. The dates that spill from its severed side pulsate in the quarter light to appear slug-like. Beside it a sherry glass, half full with a liquid verging on solid. Black oil. Disturbingly it has no scent.

You tries to move across the room but find your footing entangled. Its as if the foundations are built on a slight gradient, which only now reveals itself from the darkness.

The floors look overly hard, the floors appear too soft. You are forever seeing things just out of site and reach, like oversized spiders on your periphery. And you knows that the street, beyond the walls, is not the street any more but a dawn chorus. The world revealing its true colours now that your eyes are averted.

You want to leave this room and know you can't go back. Deeper into the house you must go. You have to finish the viewing even though you are afraid. The rooms insist upon shifting around you like a kaleidoscope. You try to pick a focal point and stick to it. The circle in the door which leads to the rest of the house. You reach it. At first the door is locked but you realise that you are just panicking. You take a breath and turns the handle.

There is a painting at the foot of the stairs. Its position forces you to look at it. A galley lost at sea, painted from a sinister point of view. All blacks and the darkest of greens, a pin point of amber light within one of its cabins symbolising the loss of hope.

You head up the stairs, which prove springy and cake-like, as the shadows fall upon you like rain...

"Because that's all he ever did. He invited us 'round and told us these really long stories. No tea, no biscuits, no pleasantries, just talk talk talk. And they always had an ending that was a.) inappropriate, or b.) just plain fucking unintelligible! Like he didn't really understand what a story was."

"Well maybe you should tell me one of his, because at least he told them."

"Ha ha..."

"Did he think your neighbours were weird, your mad uncle I mean? More to the point, what was your parents verdict on all this? Did they like your neighbours?"

"You know your parents don't tend to be very candid about other adults when you're that age."

"Well fuck that anyway, you had just gotten to the exciting part. You said she disappeared for fuck's sake, and we've still managed to go on another tangent!"

"Well. Okay. Here goes. As I said, they fought a lot. And they were a little weird."

"Weird together, weird apart."

"Bingo. But it was when they separated that things got really strange."

"I thought she disappeared?"

"Well no, a lot of people think that she was missing, but the official line is that she was away somewhere."

"They split up..."

"No, not permanently. Nothing like that...she just went away for a while. To her mother's apparently. Not because they had a row though, just to visit. Or at least that's what he told everyone..."

"How long was she gone for?"

"Jesus! I was just about to tell you that when you interrupted. If you want me to tell you a story you gotta listen. I might actually get through it if you let me tell it."

"Okay, sorry, I'll zip it hence forth."

"So she leaves. For three months. And his behaviour got stranger. And then stranger. First of all we don't see him for three days. Not that we exactly hung out with the guy, but, you know, car, work, garden, howdy-ho to the neighbours. All that. But then there's nothing. His beloved car doesn't leave the driveway for four days. Looks like he's not going to work. The thing's even starting to get a little dirty. Which is obviously unheard of. Don't know how he could stomach it. But then things change big time. He was a boring homebody but then he starts going out all the time. And I mean, all the time. Like he's a regular social butterfly all of a sudden. Out every night, bringing people back, boys and girls. Never just girls by themselves mind, but mixed groups all the time. And not people you would expect. Not that he was a geek or anything, he was just stultifyingly average, kinda conservative, and some of these people seemed kinda hip, and others seemed kinda...well, scummy.

"I can tell you are just itching to ask me a question so..."

"At the same time?"

"Huh?"

"The chavs and the cool kids? They there at the same party so to speak?"

"Ah yeah. Good question. For once. No. Never the two shall meet. No he seemed to keep his social circle pretty well divided. But he had all the bases covered. There were some real hard looking cunts sometimes too...and others.

And soon he starts dressing differently too. I couldn't really tell you how he dressed before, just that this was different. An expensive, modern looking tan leather jacket; a kind of designer affair. Grew out the old stubble, and had a braided pony tale. But that part was fucking bizarre because his hair wasn't long enough, I mean, you know too soon, couldn't have grown it that quickly, so it had to be a extension, fake whatever. Even my mum and dad made fun of him when they saw that thing. And he started wearing these slim line purple sunglasses.

And then we don't see him for a week, but this time the car is gone. But then he's back before the car. And naturally we're asking, did he loan his car to somebody for a week, or, has he been hiding inside the entire time?

But this is all pretty circumstantial and mundane, right? I mean not exactly a story worth coming to the pub for."

"Weeellll..."

"Well this. Cut forward a few days: The police show up at the house. Wifey's still away by the way. Now the police coming would have seemed a much bigger deal to me back then, as a kid, than now admittedly, but it wasn't just the police. Some of the dodgier fuckers in his circle start showing up and pounding at the door. Never heard anyone explicitly threaten him admittedly but...you know.

"Now meanwhile, obviously I'd been telling Roger about all this stuff. And obviously being a kid he was interested. And we were both kind of imaginative - how do you say, vicarious living, kinda kids - so we got a lot of mileage out of this thing. We talked about it, we joked about it. Roger even wrote little stories about it, because Roger loved to write and watch horror movies and stuff. I just...

"Yeah, I see that look, I am going off track again. So to cut to the chase, one night Roger was sleeping over. We did this a lot but this was the first time since the summer holidays. And we wanted to 'engage with events directly' so to speak. Something we had been learning about at school. Now we did prank phone calls all the time anyway, and Roger was proper good at them, so naturally that's where our minds turned first, but we couldn't agree how to approach it, and we didn't have his number anyway. We tried to find him in the phone book but he was ex-directory.

"And we weren't positioned to spy from the house, as in house to house, because they were adjacent and we lived in a semi so unless we were going to pitch up at the back of the garden and look into their back windows. But they tended to have their blinds down anyway."

"So what did you do?"

"Well, basically we did that. Or rather Roger did. Not that he was really brave, just that I was a complete pussy! He went to the end of our garden, which was unusually large for a house of that size, and was able to sneak in through a small gap in the fence, he had a cluster of trees for cover."

"So let me guess, Roger was never seen again."

"Oh Roger was seen again, that night and the next day. And then..." A few more beats than usual: "Roger was never seen again."

All the doors on this next level are green and luminous - the colour of grave yard eyes. You counts four but still things insist on moving.

(you can't hold onto anything in this life and you'd be half mad not to know that!)

You need to pick one. One of the three in a row or the adjacent one. The loner.

You moves towards it with trepidation.

The handle is copper and brass and it chills your hand. And again you are afraid to enter a new space.

Your muscles cramp up and the door opens in slow motion.

Room 1

Bleached light explodes across your field of vision. It fades, as your eyes adjust, to reveal a clean but bare room. A perfect white shag carpet and white walls. Without smudges or clutter, it looks freshly decorated or just built.

You search for an object, you search for meaning, but all you can find is a lone ant, making its way across the carpet. You watch the minutiae of its ridiculously slow progression. Left right, left right, adjacent parallel leg, switch sides. It struggles with a particularly large fibre, almost tumbles onto its side, regains traction, six legs on one side valiantly grabbing a carpet strand.

Determined.

Single minded.

An white desert stretching before him, even the halfway mark still a galaxy away...

Room 2

Like the first, completely empty, accept for an ornately framed oil painting, with gallery style strip light above. Illuminated perfectly. A teenage boy is tied to a stake - heretic-like - whilst a group of younger boys crawl toward him. Apart from their bent knees, shaggy-hair and demonic eyes, the lynch mob appeared cut from the same human cloth. Upon closer inspection, those evil eyes are not the clichéd red, but a tanzanite blue.

Room 3

Like the last, but sans painting and with a nondescript woman sat on a stool in the very centre. Head at a slight angle, eyes blank:

"We don't have to worry about that. I just wanted to say: The fact that I know you so well protects me little, it only saves you the effort of telling me lies. Nevertheless you are making compliments. Don't, I'm telling you, don't. Add to this that I don't know you everywhere and always, especially in this darkness. It would be much better if you let the lights be put on. No, rather not. Yet, I will bear in mind that you have already threatened me, but we don't have to worry about that. I just..."

The completion of the loop tells you that you are not being addressed directly. You close the door on the babbling form...

"It's not so much a matter of what he saw, because I don't understand what he saw, and frankly, I don't think he did either, it's more a case of what happened to Roger after he saw whatever it was he saw."

"But he was okay when he got back to your room, right?"

"He got back, he told me what he saw, he went home mid the next day. He went out, according to his parents that afternoon, by himself to the shop, and never came back."

"Seriously?"

"Again, serious as a heart attack."

"You mean they really never found him ever."

"He is missing to this day. Never found the body, and although the few people who know about our sleepover antics think it was just a coincidence, I am convinced to this day that that bastard had something to do with Roger's disappearance."

A pattern of beats fill an awkward silence, and then:

"I went back you know?"

"No shit. To confront them or just in the normal way"

"A bit of both really. I was called into the area for work. Do you remember I travelled a lot at the time? But that house, that garden, was the first thing on my mind and it started keeping me awake again."

"Really?"

"For nights on end."

"I can't tell how serious you are being about any of this."

"As a heart attack. I had nightmares...In one dream, a midget followed me everywhere threatening to tell everyone what I had done. Not that I had done anything but I felt inexplicably guilty in that way in which you do in dreams. I've always felt so guilty about Roger. If I hadn't told him that story about that house. If we'd not had the sleepover, and on and on into infinity, ad nauseum...

"I couldn't believe how much smaller everything looked. The house was half the size...the garden seemed so tiny."

"Well of course they did, they always do when you go back older."

"Because you're smaller?"

"Well more than that actually. It's because that small area was your whole world then. It defines you. It's your entire map, your context."

"You mean because you're not allowed to go much further."

"Yeah. Hell yeah. That's your territory, your reality. You know there's more out there. But only intellectually, you don't really believe it in the day to day. It's all abstract. And you're not allowed to go there by yourself anyway. You can't even explore the other side of town.

"How was the town? I mean beyond it's shrinkage."

"Well it shrunk in other ways. And I've wondered if this is also rose tinted spectacles but I think not. It's real. The place is dying, like a hundred other towns like it."

"Details."

"It didn't revel itself itself straight away. But look a little deeper. More immigration and yet less people about. I'm not talking about anything as melodramatic as a ghost town. It wasn't a truly forsaken place. There were parks and an operational council, but everyone just looked poorer. There had always been an element, but now it seemed to be most people! And homeless. So many more and permanently camped out in a way you didn't used to see outside of cities. The indigenous population too.

"Sometimes I used to look at them and imagine that one of them was Roger. Especially when I spied one frantically scribbling in a pad one day. Imagined it was Roger, writing about all the terrible things my neighbour did to him."

"Were there any leads or theories at all? Suspicions at least, there's always gossip right? I know that nobody suspected your neighbour, but was it deemed foul play?"

"There was lots of gossip. I don't think it was his parents, despite the cliché. The police questioned them both but obviously that's routine. There were rumours about his dad but most of it was bullshit. Funnily enough his form tutor - we went to different schools remember - was outed as a paedophile about five years later. But it was girls and purely sexual. No history of violence or sadism.

"I dreamt that I went to that place. And if I'd been a writer like Roger I may have said that the sky was like ash in a damp ashtray. The house was different. Not just smaller like the rest of the neighbourhood but warped. Warped and gangly, dirty and grey. I tried to write about it like Roger might have wrote about it.

"It was if there had been another house hiding inside it all along. A darker house. The house of my nameless neighbour's soul...

"And when I knocked on the door a scarecrow answered."

"Creepy, did you go to the house for real?"

"Sure I went. And reality was well, reality. It looked about the same, give or take a plant or a blade of grass outta place. A nice car, better than his, but not as clean."

"Oh. So that answers my next question: was he there?"

"Yeah he'd long gone. And the new guy looked like a serial killer, which meant that he probably wasn't."

"But wait, I just realised something. You never did tell me what Roger saw."

"What do you mean?"

"In the window. You said he sneaked into the garden. You said 'Roger told me what he saw, went home, went to school and then disappeared.' I would guess it was something insignificant and mundane, blown up by a child's imagination, but the way you tell stories he could have been fucking his dog in a gimp suit!"

"Well something in between actually..."

"..."

"Wait! Which one's in the suit?!""

Some beats, then:

"He said he watched him through the window watching his wife unwrap a box. You know, a gift. And she just kept pulling out more packaging. Like each box contained another box, and she was crying the entire time. And he was watching her but not in the benevolent way you usually would a loved one unwrapping your gift. Like he was waiting for a time bomb to go off in her face."

"Was he sure she was actually crying? Could it have been tears of joy because he'd finally proposed, or because he'd bought her something she'd always wanted?"

"Well he was a kid, we both were. I don't know if he could really be sure of anything. But I tell you with certainty that whatever it was that Roger saw that night, it did have an effect on him. He was genuinely shook up, he wasn't just trying to spoof me, or add some excitement to the sleep over."

"I'm sorry, for taking the piss before...I don't know."

"It okay. Sometimes I google it. Play amateur detective for the night, think about doing it properly for the whole year. Loose interest and forget; life gets in the way. But one time I did find a picture, a man on the run in an unrelated case, but the worst type of crimes, and..."

"..."

"He looks just like Roger, I mean if he'd lived another twenty or thirty years. But I know it can't be..."

The rest of the house is old-fashioned, but these stairs are plain archaic. The wood is weathered with rusty and uprooted nails every which way. The eighth step was even missing.

And now the desperate and unbidden notion hits you, that this could be your house. Back then or now is unclear - but undoubtedly your house. If you were to peel back the paper would you find another layer, your parent's choice and the family portraits. Are these ornaments Russian dolls, holding others within them, and then more still inside those ones.

This old pottery model of a Yorkshire cottage, is there a jade dragon inside or a porcelain doll with a creepy sneer.

And the oversized glass tangerine...Inside perhaps smaller, less grandiose ornaments of spun sand.

Then the concept of the attic hits you, like a suddenly remembered nightmare. Oh, and the possibilities there turned the stomach and twisted the mind inside out. A giant spider, with hair like razor wire, raping memories. Did it spew on the photographs? Ignore the moonlight? Did it even bother to put on this show when nobody was here to witness it? More like a play than a movie, it refused to do its thing for an empty theatre. (And if an actor performs when nobody is there to witness him, does he scream when a prop tree falls on his head?)

The Attic

Again you feels the tip of reality that you had suffered down in the lounge. Except this time it feels as if you are the one who is tilting. It's a little like being drunk and you imagine that this is what drugs feel like.

Barbed wire is strung around the place like a psychopath's tinsel. In the centre of the room a computer, new and white modern, out of place. Two stacks of cardboards boxes either side like sentry towers.

This room feels like it should have a rocking chair as a centrepiece, not a PC. Certainly not a brand new PC.

And the HDD light flickers away, the hum undetectable. A metal chair sits in front of it.

There are four oil painting. One on each wall. A ghost town (never go home) , two men in a old fashioned inn (considering the story), and a jungle (every man's sin his own).

The fourth is a much larger version of the galley oil print.

With the enlarged size and improved light you can see some details now. You can see an actual figure in the lone cabin with light. A silhouette there. And is that a shark fin by the stern or just a cluster of wave? It really is impossible to tell.

But the real revelation is the land in the foreground. The edge of the cliff looking out to sea. Because there is something there. Watching. Like a bit player in a dream. Even if they can't be seen you know that they are there.

You sit down on the rusty old chair and turns on the state of the art computer.

A media player you have never heard of - Morpheus AV \- has three separate widows open, all minimised in the task bar.

He opens them one by one, from left to right:

First:

A fluorescent, hypnotic video, like reality-television shot in sepia.

A perfect little girls' perfect birthday party. All the tropes of the day are present, up to an including a large capitalised banner above the arch way behind the well stocked table. No doubt an eye catching shade of sparkly silver if it could be viewed in greater fidelity.

Seemingly, it isn't yet time for the guests. But the perfect girl is perfectly delighted by the number of perfect presents piled up against one wall.

The scene is happy, fit to burst.

A large square box is right in the centre of the table. Not just a surprise to the girl, You had not noticed it before either. In fact, was sure that it was not there moments ago.

A perfect spider leaps from the box and lands on the girl's head. It is so large her face can no longer be seen. Just a black obscenity upon her neck. Her arms flap about wildly, kite-like.

Her screams audible on the muted footage.

Second:

Shot in brown monochrome.

A featureless albino crawling out of a box. Then slithering ever closer, snake-like, towards the camera. Then opening his mouth to reveal a microchip upon his butchered tongue, bordered by slimy teeth.

Then, his eyes fall in accusingly...

Then, his hands stretch out unnaturally...

Then, his body betrays him...

Third:

Black and white, grainy, like security cam footage.

The image filtered through a dozen VHS dupes. There are two men in a pub, clearly having a conversation. But their features, surroundings, none of these details are clear. You can see beer, but not the brand. You can see a carpet, but not the length, texture or colour.

You find a speaker control and turns the volume right up. Only the feedback buzz is heightened. But yellow subtitles - with broken syntax - appear at the bottom of the screen:

Well you can start by telling me where you were living.

Yeah. Okee dokee, let's start at the beginning. This was when we lived in Moorfield..

We lived there for five years. Until I was about 15. And at first I hated it because it was a

very sporty town, if you wanted to play football or golf all day you were sorted, if

otherwise, forget it...and I didn't really make any proper friends in my class at school but

then I met this kid called Roger. He lived two streets away, but went to a different school

entirely. Something to do with his parents religion. They were Catholics, or at least

pretending to be to get him into a better school!

Anyway he loved to play video games like me and we both had Ataris so we were

quids in. We had a lot of fun actually.

So everything was great, and it was one of those summers which only seem to exist

when you're a kid, but then we get these weird new neighbours.

SUBLIMATION REMASTERED

and then there was only you...

He awoke - from a dream in which his cat had adopted electronic eyes and the voice of his enemies - to find a colony of ants assembled about his coke can, fresh laundry outstwinide his door, and a stool resurfaced (defiantly) in the toilet bowl.

Things were creeping to the surface. The talking cat sauntered along the Formica kitchen top and purred and chewed softened fish bones insinuatingly. The cat did many things in particular ways, including debate. It's would be kind to call its approach dogmatic. Though the cat might argue pragmatic.

The rolled cigarette kept lose its fire and his eyes kept slipping from the page, that row upon row of precision manipulated characters. A room within a room, a story within a story. He'd been reading and smoking for what seemed like forever, trying to keep his mind from other matters.

The bathroom was grindhouse green and the lounge was cigar brown - pale cigar, like the cheap ones they sold in the backpacker district. Out on the balcony the modest district lights swelled into a perfectly cinematic dusk. All violet and deep purple and off the spectrum of light he could perceive. There was an arc of gentle silvery light, hanging between the clouds, over the four star hotel in the distance. Directly below in the alley a stocky Vietnamese man scraped the grill down as his little girl ran about his hairy legs. He sold salted eggs, mainly to the locals. A few feet down the mama-sans were playing cards; still in the same pyjama they had worn all day. It was a miracle how they all squeezed around that table, with their beers and chips and cards and ashtrays and other paraphernalia. Various individuals shuffled about on their own tracks, their aims clear only to themselves, if anybody at all.

He turned his mind back to himself. He knew one thing, and one thing only, for sure, he had to find the old man. He had to hold onto that one data point even if it was a fool's errand or a witch's fable. That perceived structure was the only thing holding this fractured world together.

Sometimes he discovers small gifts left by the cat - pulpy and unlikely - in the corners and recesses of the hotel room. This is cleaned up automatically by the owner or one of her daughters on cleaning day. A day with a nebulous location on the calendar, but The Guest is just happy he doesn't have to clean up after himself any more.

He has been a guest in the hotel (or technically, family run guest house) for 513 days. The family consists of the mother (the clear leader and matriarch) the father (a bit of an oddball) and two teenage daughters. The husband, for his part, always appeared beaten down, as though continually henpecked, perpetually ill at ease. The daughters were never less than pleasant and an English language lifeline.

He considered the book he was half-reading. Wondered if he was wasting his time reading pulp when he could be reading an award winner. He admired literary fiction but reflected on what others had said. About polish and precision, about story being for the dead and their arrogant insistence that the form always had to be pushed forward, and he went, very quickly, far too vastly, off on a tangential toward a buried memory of black and neon, of kissing a girl on a motorbike under a crystal gold sky scraper hung in a high-definition sky of murky green...

He follows the fortune teller through a warren of back alleys...

Sliding through corners, a never-ending configuration of brick. Things identifiable and not. He catches sites of cats which are somehow different to his own, accept for the same insinuating stare, they have that, those accusatory eyes.

He gets maddeningly close but in his frustration he loses him every single time. It's like one of those dreams about trying to rack up a line on a powder smattered coffee table whilst a fan blows upon the scene, or count a money stack but notes just keep multiplying from nowhere, as if his very fingers were producing them...

Or worst of all when he was trying to get to a specific destination he just couldn't fucking reach. False turns and rooms and walls...or plain idiocy it was hard to tell, but the point remained, could. not. fucking. reach!

Even this cheap b-movie seemed to have meaning, scrubbed and polished, leaving only the inherent grain behind, it told tales of sublimation and ghosts left in walls, there was story and subtext here, no doubt, but beyond this, way way beyond that (and yet right there too, at the same time, for all to see, like the corpse on the slab) was a more fundamental and objective meaning, experience transformed into something else. More manageable - film a reduction of life which transcends it.

But wait, wasn't he reading a book? When did he switch from the page to the screen? This had been happening more and more of late - events colliding with one another until it was hard to tell which occurred first.

He'd been dual processing for months now; knowing full well that the fires which fuelled him could become the flames that burned him. Too much information, too much data. It was pushing up against him, and when he tried to shut it off, by staying at home and turning off his phone, he could feel it piling up against the door, accumulating in spaces which couldn't possibly accommodate it. Yet he knew it was there, in that preternatural way that you knew you were being watched.

Though real now, oh yes, so much more real than the real. The world growing more ridiculous by the second and these squares of light offering more solace than the silver girls in their black city nights. The view from his balcony was like a shot from a movie, and he knows somewhere amongst the glowing scenes the old man who could tell the future walked. But could he tell The Guest's?

The air con hummed. An emergent star twinkled. The cat meowed across the kitchen surface debris like a deadly beast on the primordial prowl...

Unit 1

That's what I'm saying. They were saying

exactly what you were saying!

Unit 2

In more detail though right?

Unit 1

Oh yeah, in a lot more detail.

Unit 2

I haven't read a British newspaper since I left

the continent.

Unit 1

(sarcastically)

Most of them are online you know?

Unit 2:

Yeah I know, but like I said before, I've not been

doing the news in general. Not after...

Unit 1:

Well yeah...

Unit 2:

The twin horrors! And besides I only really use the internet for lesson planning and pornography!You know that.

All units laugh in unison - a consensus has been reached.

Unit 1:

It's an apple imitation of it's former self anyway.

The net I mean.

Unit 2

Okay mate, so what's the misogynistic joke of the

day?

Unit 3

So you want a joke?

Unit 2

No, I want a misogynistic joke.

Unit 3

Knock knock.

Unit 2

Who's there?

Unit 3

Go fuck yourself!

when i reached my hand into the heavens all it came back with was cuts...

The book was full of systems and numbers, a mind even busier than his own. And as he strayed towards its meaning enjoyment slipped as his eyes were drawn again and again to that monolithic four star hotel across the way - behind the ghetto and its children - and again and again his eyes were pulled to the north star, to the floor to wall penthouse suite with night club lighting, complete with disco ball. And he fantasised about the depravity he imagined there, even though his own was plentiful and cutting him more and more by the day. Stretching him into shreds across the framework of the structured life they told him he must live; that they said - would kill him if he refused.

So he imagined the gyrations and tendered flesh, transgressionary transactions across beats and cocaine. Bass lines which ricochetted around rooms perceived by psychedelic eyes. Stock people on the balance sheet.

There were ants swarming away under all the rocks of this city, rats hiding in every corner. Everyone he knew had dirty hands, and no one no longer knew who was exploiting who - the fucker or the fuckee...

Everyone knew he had dirty hands.

He'd been in a bar with a friend two nights before, looking at a group of Japanese tourists exchanging phone numbers with the resident transsexual. A meeting which could only be clandestine. Perhaps they were shooting their little movie up their right now...and who would enjoy it? And how would they feel in the morning? His friend said that they could have been speaking of anything, but, he pointed out, the dynamics were all wrong. One girl with all those guys, slightly odd in any group, but Japanese? And then there was the matter of the attractiveness of the girl (which was significantly above average), and finally, of course, their interest in the ladyboy...the woman and the half-woman shaking hands over a watered down rum and coke.

He dropped his book by the drain and flowed, like his own ghost, into his bathroom, stared into is own eyes, examined the increasing lines on his own face (and those little grey hairs) before putting his hand into the the mirror, into the glass and through the waterfall, onto the other side, into Alice's territory, into an unknown that was complicit in its own mystery.

He follows the fortune teller through a warren of back alleys...

Sliding through corners, a never-ending configuration of brick. Things identifiable and not. He catches sites of cats which are somehow different to his own, accept for the same insinuating stare, they have that, those accusatory eyes. Yet they lack, thankfully, his contumacious nature.

But now new players have joined the stage: rows of children up above, hanging over flower baskets, frame by their parent's window sills. He thinks that they hold objects in their small hands, but for some reason can not look closely at their hands. For that matter, he is having difficulty focusing on any element of the children.

He finds himself in an area unfamiliar. Is he still seeking the teller or has this changed also. Is this a real world place?

Unit 1

You ever noticed how the fucking guy has to

know the best everything in the city. And I don't

just mean restaurants and things like that,

because I was doing that last night, with the

burger thing. But everything. He recommended

some solicitor or visa guy or whatever he was

meant to be and he was no better than the back

packer ones down on Bui Vien, fuck, worse even, he didn't even have an office...

Unit 2

Say what now? He didn't have an office?!

Unit 1

Yeah he met me on the street, and as you know it

wasn't exactly a regular visa enquiry, so I asked

him for privacy and he gave me the old 'things not

like they work in your country' line, like I just

go off the fuckin' boat!

Unit 2

Twat!

Subdued laughter. Cigarettes and feet are shuffled, glasses refilled, beer cans discarded.

Unit 1

Wait! Me or him?!

Unit 3:

Both of you!

More laughter - louder this time.

Unit 4:

He probably didn't have an office.

Unit 1

Yeah well not much of a recommendation. But with Gary

I think he at least has his reasons. You know his

past and that. But the Viet-Kieu one is just a total

cunt. Like I have never met anyone that insincere

in my life. In my life!

And I could tell from the second I met him, and I've done this before, had an initial instinct about somebody, ignored it for whatever reason, and then am eventually proved right all along...fuck, more right.

Sorry, you'll have to excuse my ranting I'm high on all sorts of drugs right now. (a pause whilst Unit 1 replenished his cigarette)I mean he might have his reasons too...I get that. His childhood probably wasn't easy for starters. But dealing with cunts like that day in day out is turning a cynical man into a nihilist! (a beat) And have you noticed that they're all the fucking same these middle-aged viet-kieu guys, all a little too polished and smug, totally disengenous. Slick. They're like lego men you could move around the city, they could take each other's places in the restaurants that they run. There's one at my new school...

Unit 2:

Back to Gary for a sec though: it isn't just normal everyday expat stuff. It's like 'I know they best place for toilet parts in East Saigon, you need a Ubend I can hook you up my friend!'

[Unit 1 & 2 bind in laughter]

Unit 2:

And his voice, his slow monotonous voice I can't stand that either.

Unit 1:

Shit really. Cool...I thought it was just me. To be honest

I wouldn't actually mind the dude if he wasn't so anti-me!

A series of programmed responses circulate the table in a domino effect.

Unit 3

This place does something to people man. I know a perfectly nice guy who put a cigarette out on a little girl's arm because she was hassling him to buy some stuff. That dude just snapped. Like your friend Marcus said, this city isn't right for 90% of the foreigners who live here. And I don't think that's an exaggerated figure. Most people really are stressed and unhappy, they're being ripped off by their employer or the locals or...

Unit 2

Or their landlord! Did you hear that story about Martin? What his new landlord tried to do right in front of his face?! On the first day!

these faces should have been lost to time...

As he showered he recalled last night's dream:

A beach tropical but with shadows beneath the sands and black hearted waves. A sky so movie perfect it put violet to shame. And then, with that seamless transition found only within dream - a jet black soldier in the corner of a gloomy hotel room. Not black as in Negroid but black as a silhouette or a slab of granite.

And The Guest's own flesh smelt off in spite of the soap and the heat, and the notion that time had soured and that he was already long gone, and everything after that night a dream, as tedious and anxious as a thousand before, except he wasn't waking up this time, hit him hard, hard, hard.

So he dragged his dusty ghost of a frame through the old town streets and without even trying spotted a new flaw every day. Every thing just got worse and worse...

Until that day in which he met the old man, a traditional Vietnamese fortune teller. Much like a traditional Chinese fortune teller, much like the stereotype, as all stereotypes were found in reality, were they not?

The pyjama like ensemble, grubby and grey, the long long beard, white or grey, groomed or dirty, sometimes braided in some fashion...sometimes not...

His eyes two sparkly little dirt-stones. His manner inscrutable even by the standards of an oriental octogenarian.

And he made a gesture, spoke a line and vanished - before his eyes if he had not glanced for a micro-second toward an exploding motorbike exhaust.

Then he had laid eyes on him again, two days later, in district 9, almost the opposite side of the city. He had doubted himself at first, a real it is them, it isn't them, fuck it is them! Moment.

This time the man seemed to smirk at him before he turned his back on him and crossed the dusty road. Seemed to virtually walk through a pair of playing children.

What did they say? Walk softly but carry a big stick. Well the teller sported no stick, at least not visible to the eye, but he projected an uncrossability - indestructible, apart.

He sat, still dripping, on he edge of his bed, below the the wall-fan unit. He had to stop thinking about a strange old man who he would almost certainly never see again, and who may not even be, in reality, all that strange.

He cast his mind back to sex:

Those memories now have the emotion stripped like a veneer, and this change so strange, yet the electricity is still there, fires stir and flash with memory of sex. Guttural fucking of a perfect butter-candy cunt, gasping a bone shaking orgasm through gritted teeth, spitting upon a pillow, into her hair.

And to feel a release but it not be enough, just another conflict, not a statement of love.

She was framed against a large cheap oil painting of another woman. Layered not just in terms of their matching beauty, but their form, voluptuous and dark and coffee black. A freeze frame moment, better than dream and doomed to never be repeated.

The soft light filters in though the tiniest gap in the black out curtain - in spite of them. And finite moments of smoke caught within it. And time shifting now, with his flesh against the pillow, something cheaper than silk against his skin.

But this is gone, nightmares so erotic in its place...sweaty sheets to send the message that the anxiety was eternal and omnipotent and make him feels as though he had not grown at all, all that progress a dirty myth. Bodily fluids and secret despair.

An intelligent man can never be anything, saint nor beast, winner nor loser. Who was it who said that? And why did he remember?

Unit 1

(around the cigarette in his mouth)

It's all data farming these days buddy.

Unit 2

It's like the thing that it would have been

pretentious to say just five years ago, and which

the smarter Sci-Fi writers were telling us 30

years ago, at some point became fact.

Unit 3

Science Ev-en-tu-a-li-ty.

Unit 4: oh fuck all that. You guys are the worst

to drink with. Can't we just talk about pussy! Hey

what's the joke of the day.

Unit 2

Okay, here goes! What's the difference between

a girl's track team and a pygmy tribe...The pygmies

are a bunch of cunning little runts.

An intelligent man can never be anything...

The sun was halfway toward night.

Children played in the traffic, and yet, were not uncared for, ribby dogs sauntered along the edge of the gutter, and certainly were uncared for, abused even, neglected. The inevitable bikes (scooters really) rattled and zipped. At the bottom of the road, in the horizon, tall and proud and vertically framed by two far shabbier constructs, was the Bitexco tower. It was sleek, silver and shaped like a highrise undergoing a torque test. It's contours attractive, it's often mocked (and admittedly inexplicable) heli-pad appealed to The Guest. As did the rest of the building.

Perhaps that's where the celebrity footballer set down on Saigonese soil the other week, clearly being far too talented for any form of commercial flight.

The Guest was here to eat, essentially, though the atmosphere itself was always an oddly reassuring delight. The pale yellow light of an electric kebab stand flickered around a moth. Its stature squared off by a couple of bricks. Stands like this cluttered the street approximately 30 feet apart. Selling poor quality versions of western food or authentic Vietnamese traditional - the Pho was a delight - the burgers barely fulfilling the definition - the constant was cheap.

For a moment he thought that he saw the fortune teller sandwiched between a book chain store and a premises of unknown origin. The Guest had a lazy streak a mile wide, running through his centre and this encompassed (amongst many other things) the learning of new languages.

But of course as he draw closer he realised it wasn't the wizened old man who carried himself like both a ghost and a statue. Just a weirdly tall Vietnamese. His heart rose and sank in his chest at that moment of pattern recognition. Jesus, a veritable tingle could have been on its way. He was that excited to find the teller.

He decided to walk around the corner to a street restaurant where he could get a meal for a dollar or two. Some combination of rice, vegetable, meat and seafood.

He sat at a plastic table under a Saigon Beer parasol and lit up a menthol cigarette. Observed the cool kids in their 20s at the adjacent table. The Guest has never really been sure of the significance or status of tattoos in this culture. Perhaps somewhere between the elitist gangster taboo of the rising sun and the lame commonality of Churchill's wasteland. Oh well, perhaps his cat could answer the question. He seemed to have an opinion on everything else...

He tucked into his dollar meal - served in Styrofoam - with a plastic fork and remembered the incident at 3am. He had awoke to a scraping sound outside his door. When he went into the corridor to investigate he found the son stood alone in the darkness, staring into the darkness as though it were the most natural thing in the world. When he saw him there was the usual strange movement of his eye, up and away, so difficult to read, accompanied by a nervous expression, but were nerves even within his remit? He could be sure that the other man saw him, was aware of his fundamental presence, but not much else. He then walked into a corner and began to jog on the spot and slap his palms against the sides of his head.

The Guest returned to bed, leaving him in the darkness.

This is not his first encounter with the man child. He has glanced into open rooms when passing to see him standing still in middle of the room wearing nothing more than a t shirt. He has seen him beating his chest violently to the rhythm and flow of bloody minded propaganda songs. The great and eternal triumph of the north. Brainwashing in action, but such passion, for someone who collects packet of sugar and magazines they cannot read. But then is he really so out of place? In this time and place, the lunatics having clearly taken over the asylum (given power beyond their pay grade by gas-lighting politicians) he should fit right in to the new order...

The fortune teller sits in a room of smoke and mist. The Guest speak rapidly, words bursting out and wrestling for space amongst many more of their kind. The

Teller's only response is an intermittent micro change in his facial expression. The Foreigner feels fear in his dream. Feels as though he is running out of time. A sense of all things running down now.

The Teller says - in a language uncategorisable - that he cannot read fortunes any more.

The Guest senses movement below, what he at first believes to be black snakes turn out to be a part of the teller; his legs, somewhere just blow the knee, morphing and seguing off into a quartet of crenated tentacles.

He looks to him for explanation but now his eyes are black and bloody stone.

Unit 1

I always thought Nihilism was kind of sophmoric.

Unit 2

Really...I'm surprised to hear you say that, it's not exactly, well...they don't teach it in schools. I don't think it's a part of most people's intellectual

development...but surely worth considering.

Unit 1

Yeah I've read that stuff, but it leaves a lot unanswered.

Unit 2

Thing is I was discussing this with Leo just the other night, and he was anti too and what I would say is whether I'm right or not - because how can anybody really know - it never gets a fair hearing because by it very nature it's so bleak. Most people shut down immediately because nobody wants to hear a philosophy that tells you your life is worthless and pointless and the universe is an empty nasty little void!

Unit 1

Well...guess it's the opposite of religion in that way!

Unit 2

Exactly! Exact-o-fucking-modo!! (after several beats)

And that kinda caught on, right! You know just because something is terrible doesn't make it untrue and just because something is childish doesn't render it useless.

Unit 1

Nah, I hear you dude. It's like all this specious

optimism all over facebook.

if you go back and change all the mistakes you made you erase yourself...

Through all these shadowed mannequins and hallucinations, a deep sadness, like he had never known before, would rain down upon him, steal into his heart, and settle into his bones, often post-witching hour and sans hope, a cold void, a raggedy comedown and enlightenment combined. That there really was/is/always will be, nothing at all: to be, to do, to see, to go. And although some were certainly much smarter than others, what they all shared, what we all share, is that we are dying inside, just some of us are better at hiding it than others.

And pulling smoke through embers, to view the fluorescent-scape of the city, did nothing at all to lift this feeling. Because some knowledge, once acquired, can NEVER be lost again, no matter how much memory is burnt, no matter how much serotonin is drunk, or love made, it awaits you in the morning, with the eyes of the Black Soldier, who hides inside my exotic nightmares, and pushes the sky away.

Tonight the sky appeared more neon than the hotel, and the palms were the colour of doom.

Last Night's Nightmare: A sea change. Barely a bad dream at all really. I was flying, nay floating, nay flying. Through grainy clouds and plum darkness and soon illuminated by the Saigonese light, sprawling and centreless. South East Asia's answer to Los Angeles; Sprawling quadrants of gold, intersected by two million red and white lights drifting both ways down a neon river, an allegory for two million hungry ghosts, with an insatiable appetite for regret. A journey is not a destination and every arrival just a bitter ending separated by time...

I approach the Bitexco tower. It is even more beautiful way up here. A greed of greenish light, a watery aqua-marine. The sense of height, danger and freedom is something more than intoxicating, like a drugs high with clarity and weight. And the endless potential of all this is could be the scariest thing, I want to swoop and soar.

Freedom. Can I be separated from the air?

He follows the fortune teller through a warren of back alleys...

Sliding through corners, a never-ending configuration of brick. Things identifiable and not. He catches sights of cats which are somehow different to his own, accept for the same insinuating stare, they have that, those accusatory eyes.

New players have joined the stage: rows of women up above, hanging over flower baskets, frame by their window sills. Knives in their small hands, he is having difficulty focusing...

The tall buildings disappear at an exponential rate and he soon finds himself on a wide suburban street, back in his own country. The houses are evenly paced with silvery windows...What is it they say about never going home?

The map has shrunk.

His house has been rearranged.

Unit 1

So it suddenly struck me, that we as a species, are

more willing to accept the loss of gender than a new

form of currency!

Unit 2

Oh fuck mate! Tell me about it! Back home they're all fiercely debating which toilets people should use while western civilisation burns to the ground around them! We're better off out of it buddy, believe me!

Unit 2

Anyway, on a lighter note, are you still looking

for that fortune teller?

Unit 1

I told you I saw him right.

Unit 2

No.

Unit 1

Oh must have been Frank. Yeah in District 7 of all places.

Unit 3

Thanh Binh District. That's where you should be looking.

Unit 2

Yeah, you see them on the street around there.

Unit 1

Not the only thing you see on the street around there, anyway, so he was swaying between a couple of those over priced westernised eateries, you know with the pancakes

and everything. And god damn it if he didn't vanish...

Unit 2

In a puff of smoke?

Unit 1

Into thin air! The smoke would have been reassuring. Some sort of proof the motherfucker exists! Seriously though that is the 3rd time I've definitely seen him, as in not mistaken him for somebody else, and each time he has either vanished or moved somewhere he shouldn't have been able to move.

Unit 2

What do you mean?

Unit 1

As in he has walked through a wall. I have chased him

down to a dead end before and he has gone!

Unit 2

But, are you seriously looking for him. You strike me

as kind of a serious guy and, well, you don't seem that into tarot and shit put it that way.

Unit 1

I have this reoccurring dream, nightmare really, where I'm trapped in a room with him and I want to escape but I wanna get closer, you know all afraid and excited at once in that way you can only truly be in dreams, and

I'm just rambling on and on, a lot of it is pure nonsense, or at least, completely out of context, and he says that he can't tell my fortune because...I mean not just me, all fortunes are off the table now. Because he's taken like a vow to never read again.

Unit 2

Does he say why?

Unit 1

Yeah, he does eventually. He reckons he let someone

down one time, like seriously down and he vowed to never read again!

Lit neon, like black, lost violet...

A street of fire lined with ever changing neon signs. A night at the same table could seem like a time-lapse experiment here. Backpackers, English teachers, rogues and criminals. The police, local middle class, tourists and sometimes (inappropriately) their children. An seemingly endless flow of bars, restaurants and bar-b-ques, sometime difficult to tell one from the next: Fish burgers, beef burgers, chicken feet and pizza; mocha, Choca, pancakes and waffles; weed and cigars, Pho and Bhan Mi. A boy toying with a cobra whilst breathing fire. The pestering street vendors and their selective English even more numerous than the bars: Lighters, T-shirt, hats, ashtrays,...fake jewellery, rusting silver and unauthentic artefacts. Photocopied books and ornamental fans. Low end members of the Saigonese Mafia rubbing shoulders with the eastern European burnout, selling hits of laughing gas to anybody game enough. And for the gamer still darker pleasures more contained, wander down heroine hem for drugs which glitter under both the streetlight and the sun...

The Guest felt secure in the knowledge that within a mere mile radius he could procure anything from a vegetarian hamburger to crystal meth amphetamine.

Butterflies of the night staring into their illuminated phone screens with petulant looks upon their faces. Looking up, when they remember to, to beckon lone white men into their cavern of a bar.

And what of the cast of characters in this rogue's gallery?

Oh so many many people come and gone, good and bad, ugly beautiful. There were rogues and lovers and fighters, young and old, sons and daughters. To recall one at random: a man who spent his days walking off his artificial energy, his gait corrupt, his skin rocky, and where he spent his nights no one knew.

He spoke to The Guest once. Of his cheap hotel and unusual financial arrangements. About his clearly doomed to fail plans of rehab and retraining for the future, of his addict mother, of his absentee father. Be he a loser to most, he still had more heart and focus than most of them. Childhood innocence within that corruption so endearing. He kicked out a light, pure electrical energy manufactured by his amped up central nervous system.

Far, far better, than say, the curry smelling Indian who lied and cheated and told every one what he thought they wanted to hear as he attempted to palm off his bar bill, named Cash, ironically, as he never actually had any. Or the the young, selfish wanna be trailer trash who was a child grown over, unable to face the consequences of his actions, or tell his own experience from scenarios he witnessed in movies, as he blazed a trail through the city; the convicts with breeze block heads, obsidian eyes and histories of violence, and smiles that didn't reach above the nose - Quasi-pseudo-buddhsit-wannabes - convicts from the nearby convict island. As if just being a bit of a cunt as opposed to a total one made you something of a guru, the desperately naive or masculinely insecure hanging upon their every word, regardless of how nonsensically they slotted together, how randomly they fell. Little boys bullied at school trying to make friends with the bullies.

The ones who brought absolutely nothing to the table, yet thought they stood head and shoulders above you.

The ones with their own 'businesses.'

The hackers, the deep market sellers raiding the pharmacies at a profit, the commercial essayists, the ones who claimed to simply 'make money' for their money, thieves and liars and wannabes...and lost souls rubbing up against one another, objects in motion, creating friction and further misery.

The Guest tried to forget them all as he watched a svelte bag of bones and broken dreams sliding up and down a greasy pole (lit neon, lit black, lost violet...) and the longer this charade persisted the more he felt his eyes drawn into hers. Their eyes locked like a mechanism and out of nowhere a block of dialogue fell between his ashtray and his Jack & Coke. The words of the wise man:

But he could no longer recall them.

He lost interest. Recalled the dream in which he finally came face to face with the teller; had the meeting he yearned for:

But he could no longer recall it.

He had come to believe (with a worrying lack of doubt) that the jade eyed cat was projecting thoughts into his mind; and that over time, these were mutating into memories. And these memories were replacing authentic ones.

One such pseudo-memory placed him within a warren of back-alleys, desperately chasing an old man, for something supposed, yet utterly unknown. But just as his frustration seemed to reach a untenable crescendo he came face to face with a Vietnamese fortune-teller. The long grey beard of stereotype, the generic and washed out robe. He had come across many such a sage during his journey through S.E.A. yet this was his first engagement.

The octogenarian took him into a room that was as dark as it was small. He spoke for many hours. Two beams of light intersecting the scene.

The words - neutral at the time, forgotten later - came back to the man with preternatural force, two weeks later in a titty bar:

The contact clothed eyes flashed below the bulbs and brought the man out of his reverie. He takes in the sexual theme. Ass, pussy, tits, legs & cunt...the genetically impossible shade of her eyes, a shield (or is it a cage?) of cigarette smoke keeps pace with her movements.

The fortune-teller who had survived invasion and napalm, hypocrisies and restructure, brutal capitalism and pseudo-communism, did not talk in vagaries and platitudes. He delivered his philosophy with precision.

But he could no longer recall.

The Guest absorbed these words effortlessly, but was told nothing of the future, and so the meeting continued to haunt him.

Everything you put out there is built inside you...

Back in the day, when he first set off on this journey, his plan had been to put philosophy in one pocket, poetry in the other, and walk towards the sun. Now, years later, he stood in the gutter, and could not even tell you in what direction that fiery orb rose and fell.

He choose to distract himself, to draw back into himself. And this time he thought of his enigmatic pet, but was not sure if this was a coda to the dream, a fragment of hypnogogia or something which actually happened.

It was rare (unheard of even) for him to hear things, aural hallucination being uncharted territory even on psychedelics. Certainly hearing things that simply weren't there...

Unit 1:

What did you mean the other day about the internet.

Unit 2:

As in?

Unit 1:

'Pale imitation'

Unit 2:

Oh yeah. Well it used to be 25% TPB and now it's

80% GAFA. It's fucking ridiculous...plus it's populated

by a bunch of self-absorbed millennial twats.

Unit 1

Yeah, wanking themselves to death on social media. Never had a moment between them. Did you hear Dan is leaving next month?

Unit 2

God, why do the good ones never stay? Why is he going?

Unit 1

Well that girl screwed him over and I think he's disillusioned with the people.

Unit 2

Martin said something really cool the other day. South-east Asian people care about two things, and two things only: Ghosts & Money.

Unit 1

Ha! Good title for a novel!

And whilst you were not looking a river ran ran through your heart, and a river ran through the city. A secret river composed of black glass and paraphernalia. You saw an abandoned flip-flop floating past the door of a barbershop, you saw the rice paddy fill with rain, you saw nature disrupt the construction projects on every periphery of the city. Because this country has two seasons: blisteringly hot, and blisteringly hot with rain. And when you break away all the bullshit this world also is two-tone in nature. The mototaxi drivers astride their metallic mosquitos don their plastic capes, and it was, for all intents and purposes, business as usual. And the umbrellas went up but the restaurants still served. And the dealers were unperturbed, and the whores plied their trade indoors. And that rain ran ran ran away, with itself, hitting its stride, momentum of absorption, like yourself in your worser moments. As the tainted water sluices through districts rich and poor, quadrants developed and forgotten, new and old become indistinguishable, because the water does not care about the map, the damage it cause is indifferent to history, it is just water, and it washes away trash as it washes away the things that you would like to keep.

Feasting on hot slime in the dark womb...

One day a policeman visited his hotel, but not in his official capacity, after he left things began to change. He was a relative (most likely eldest son) of the husband and wife who ran and owned his guest house. And when he coupled this with the husband's military uniform (framed in that light the strength within his awkard but squat frame presented itself) and their retarded son's chest pounding rendition of blood thirsty wartime propaganda songs, The Guest questioned who they truly were. How plugged into the establishment? What degree of power did they yield? They didn't appear to be even the most powerful family on the block, but power was like that, could be concealed like a hidden face.

Unit 1

Blah! Blah! Blah!

Unit 2

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Unit 3

Yada! Yada! Yada!

The family who ran the place had begun to swap faces. They had a nasty habit of doing this. Yet, contradictorily, their voices remained fixed, and they always remembered to switch them back before dinner. Dinner was always administered at precisely 6pm, local time, without fail.

The slightly younger daughter started taking phone calls in the darkness, whilst the rest of her family slept. Whilst the slightly older daughter began to view bizarre websites, Facebook, K-Pop and teen fashion giving way to the esoteric and occult: real life necronomicons, binary trading, crypto-currencies, hacking sites, suicide guides and nihilist-philosophy forums. The deep web in all its twisted glory: zoophiliacs, malicious software, street drug vendors, religious cults, steam tunnel schematics for Ivy league colleges and random penis shots.

(and besides anything else, this is unpatriotic)

He watched the deterioration of their family meals with curiosity and unease. Vegetables giving way to snacks, meat to mould, love to hate...

...until one morning he reached the bottom of the stairs to find them feasting on a live dog for breakfast.

Passing effluence and decay between one another's mouths with silver spoons...

The mother snow-balling pre-masticted matter like a giant bird. The father picking shiny hairs from his teeth. One of the children breaking for micro-pukes between mouthfuls.

Unit 1:

If Curb Your Enthusiasm is a cigar then Seinfeld

is a cigarette.

Unit 2:

What?!

Unit 3:

Did he really just say that?

Unit 4:

Yep! He said it!

Unit 3:

What the fuck?!

Unit 1:

It's not my problem you people aren't cine-literate.

Unit 4:

Ha! He said that too.

Unit 2:

Oh, I just remembered. What are you doing tomorrow?

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...

>>>I have seen the dark universe yawning,

Where the black planets roll without aim,

Where the roll in their horror unheeded,

Without knowledge, or lustre or name.

Winds in this petty pace...

Tomorrow and tomorrow...

Winds in this petty pace...

BUT what is ANY ocean if not a multitude of drops!

>>>You never suspected what lay hidden in yourself and in the world, you were living contentedly at the periphery of things, when suddenly those feelings of suffering which are second only to death itself take hold of you and transport you into a region of infinite complexity, where your subjectivity tosses about in a maelstrom...

UNKNOWN UNIT

The thing is we are the only thing in this world that knows it's Alive and the only thing that knows it is going to DIE! And that right there lies the problem.

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THE TELLER OF FORTUNES

He moves through the buildings, their outlines shadowy against the sickly glow of sunset, his avatar that of a stickman. Invisible to most foreign eyes, a walking shadow, to the locals his presence is something more nuanced, to some forbidden, others cliched. A few remaining units simply don't possess the tools or reference points to connect. For the The Teller might as well be invisible.

Older than time, yet always of his moment, he blends in and stands out like a neon drone. And even in this light, where half of his appearance is hidden, one of the more perceptive children on the street, could tell you, that this man is set apart. tinh thần, they say, tinh thần.

He wears a grubby uniform and his beard hangs down to his waist. One addition to his attire, an attache case.

Buildings open and part and shift for him - bricks move silently in the twilight. A city which bends to tradition as it ploughs on with progress.

His walk stretches on through the dusk, a pattern to his movements, that he only breaks on occasion; to swerve a crate or sidestep a cluster of trash. Virescent eyes glow from the shadows; that most sentient of beasts, they recognise The Teller, even if the nearest dog can only unleash a pack of barks.

He exhausts the clustered warren of back-alleys, and through a door hidden, and via an enigmatic building, enters a second tier of pathways. Here things are just as plain and dusty, but without the detritus of city lives: no empty fruit crates, no semi-deflated tires, no 'how on earth did they end up here?' car-parts...

And he navigates these alleys with as much skill as the public ones, for an equally indeterminate amount of time, before entering a even more secret hem. Longer and narrower than any alley you have ever walked, day or night.

The sky above him is now deep purple and there is no one to hear the echo of his footsteps. A door will soon reveal itself, the glow incremental, The Teller knowing. He knew his destination before he knew his destination, and he has been here several times before.

This is one of his trading posts and one of the few places he allows himself to be seen, or to interact for any significant amount of time.

Purple lumens cut into the black a degree at a time, lines form, then form letters, making a word, cut into the darkness: THE VOID.

He enters an antechamber - blank and silent \- a light drizzle of dust, through shop rags and eventually a saloon type door.

He enters a large, darkly lit bar. Pink trim lighting around the edges, chromium tables scattered around, longer more luxurious leather sofas line two of the walls. A podium in the middle, windows nowhere. Black light and the tubular lighting where gas and electricity meet.

Trisected into a general drinking area with chrome tables and a small stage in the centre, a bar area and, lining the lefthand wall, a string of semi-private siderooms, arches making doorless doorways.

The Teller glances into each room as he passes, his forensic eyes taking in several activities in a series of micro-moments. A maujang game, a strange algorithm represented by a (military grade) 3D hologram, two fat men bartering over a baby doll - plastic, clotheless and life size, and a man trying to beat his personal speed at stripping and reconstructing the components of a fire arm.

The opposite wall operating as a giant projector screen. The left-hand side a digital ledger of transactions: synonymous addresses and encoded money, crypto-currencies & utility tokens. Whilst the ticker for major fiat and FOREX rates run along the bottom. The remainder, the bulk of the screen, shows a single image: A public Park. With all the tell-tale signs of a CCTV feed. Some form of mundane voyeurism.

A more mortal man than The Teller may have reflected on the ironic juxtaposition, of a large screen showing something less interesting than its own location.

At the bar he orders a bottle of whisky with a ship on the bottle, from a Eurasian bar maid with silver hair. She pours him a good measure and places the bottle alongside the tumbler.

Partially glimpseable, through the bar, is a set of larger tables for more important people.

The Teller pours, take a sip of his whisky, admires the picture on the label and removes a tarot card from his breast pocket. He shows it to her, the image knowable only to the two of them. She understands and immediately exits the bar through the bar hatch. She approaches one of the important people, whispers in his ear and brings him back to the bar.

He is wide and bulky, shaven headed with a golden earring. He is also shown a single, anonymous card. He seems reluctant to meet The Teller's eyes, as if intimidated by rumour of their ability to bend light.

With a green light of a nod The Teller lays the slimline case upon a space seemingly made for it. The smooth flow of this movement belies his years. Another thing instinctively noted by the minority.

The Teller reveals five items, arranged perfectly within the case. Held in place with a specially moulded inlay.

These objects are not important.

The Important Man examines them. With eyes, with fingers, and occasionally with a monacle.

Seemingly satisfied he gets and goes to the podium, to the dancing girl.

He takes her down by her uncertain hand and her doppleganger replaces her from a seemingly invisible puff of smoke. This unit is 7.5 shades darker, tailored more for the Japanese market.

He leads her back to the bar with a large hand on the small of her back.

She sits at the bar like a disengaged robot. It is not until he pulls the slider that the zipper tattoo intersecting her flat belly reveals itself to be real.

He unzips her flesh.

Organs are present, but not the right shades or placements. They are wrong by degree and there is seemingly custom space within her anatomy for each of the five items. The important man places them, matter of factly, in their new homes. He is slow and methodical and each things finds its new compartment of flesh. And context being everything, these penetrations appear natural in the moment. For example, one nestles comfortably between her heart and an upside down liver.

She is led back to the stage in reverse fashion. And a ceasing of the music and trio of claps is all it takes to change the atmosphere in the bar. Her brief replacement is led somewhere backstage.

The muahang players drops their tiles, the gangster drops his slide, ending his loop of self-competition and a baby doll is no longer the centre of the universe for large obese men. Big and small tables are united as a loose arc is formed around the stage. The important and not so important mingle. As much as they ever will.

The petite stripper squats down and tenses as if to defecate. Arched back, tense fingers. A sort of grimace. Tiny serpents of sweat slither down her limbs.

She rubs and pushes upon her belly. Her cunt dilates, and eventually a black dome emerges from inside, an opening eye. Soon the eye is angry and the other thing protrudes.

A gush of slime. A hardening of flesh. A foul smell.

Shock, confusion, arousal, the usual spectrum (and Venn Diagram) of emotions.

It suddenly drops with a natural transition. The slime a kind of stretched membrane between her genitalia and the pitch black egg. Spermy trails of cunt-snot.

But The Teller wasn't here to cast runes amongst ice and ash - sometimes, you simply had to act. The Teller had been living outside of himself for a very long time, and he had turned those childhood memories into something else, not vanished them after all.

Virtually everyone takes a couple of nervous steps back as The Teller embraces the leathery egg. The stripper coughing and gasping for air by its side, on her hands and knees, clearly in pain and indifferent to the destiny of the secretion. There is a moment of stillness whilst even The Teller seems unsure of what to do next before he stands to his feet with a face full of pride. He appears almost wistful as he stares into that hard yet wet skin of augite lustre.

He rinses the remainder of the spermy-membrane off with his whiskey. Tilting the bottle in an almost ritualistic fashion, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world. As if he were giving benediction.

Nobody has ever seen an egg like it before, nobody will ever dare speak of it again.

A coda is not an ending...

He was hiding on the stairs in the evening, listening to the daughter and mother argue about a book she had received in the mid-morning post, his frustration with being unable to decide the words gave way to rumination: It occurred to him that everything in life has something else hidden beneath it and it was usually a trap; the exception being answers, which usually concealed further questions.

He had observed the change in their dynamic, and one day all those finer instincts collapse and he became a target for their hatred, because, at the end of the day, there is only so much love to go around.

He gave up on gaining more insight into the family and crawled off into bed. Asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow, he dreamt that he awoke beneath lime-coloured moonlight, and tore his skin off in a dark room.

He leapt form a window and trawled the surface of the earth. Like an uncaged beast, in pursuit and sex and flesh and peace, he was the threat and the danger, the question and the answer. The animal let loose that becomes a boogie man and scares the children to sleep.

Grasping a liquid blade - knowing that love was lost now - he took what he wanted, and paid his victims no mind, for he saw all those people for what they truly were; marionettes, with daggers in their eyes, and crystals in their hearts.

A conclusion is merely the point at which you stop thinking...

THE IMPROBABLE

EXISTENCE

OF

ADHD

and witnessed fireworks being fired like ghosts across the frozen lake...

The Man had been awake from the drilling in his building for days. The noise had led to all sorts of disjointed, schizophrenic sleep patterns, confusion at work and the purchase of an eye mask.

He'd been in the country for a weeks and didn't like it. He didn't like it at all. He walked and walked in all directions but not that far for fear of getting lost. He ate in restaurants most days but only ones with picture menus for fear of not being able to understand the words.

He spent his night socialising with a work colleague, an overweight American who never stopped talking and seldom made sense. On the third night, they went to a nightclub together and even this brought confusion. The very procedure of eating, drinking, table space etc being different. They rented a table for fifty dollars and received 8 beers, a small bottle of whisky and a platter of fruit for their trouble, half of the fruit was unidentifiable; alien. The whiskey was branded. The beer was beer.

They spoke to a Chinese girl the American knew in some sense. He was vague about the how and the why, irritatingly so. The American spoke semi-fluent Chinese which meant he understood 50% of what was going on around him, which gave him a 100% advantage over the man.

The girl looked like she was for sale and the man asked his friend to make her an offer. He refused in laughter, giggles and general nervousness. It was hard to tell whether or not his friend was telling the truth. He was later to find out this was often the American's way.

After an unsuccessful, vaguely exciting - if only in comparison to the nights in between - night in the club they went back to the colleague's apartment. The man was gratified to see that it wasn't much better than his own. Arguably even worse. No water stain over the kitchen counter, but an even shittier, older mattress, and a broken gas hob. Strikes and gutters, isn't that what they said?

When in the bathroom The Man found his colleagues medicine cabinet and subsequently his medication. A nice little yellow/brown phial of stimulant pills for ADHD. It was two thirds full and he stole five. The pills themselves were yellow/blue gel caps - reassuringly recreational in their colouring. He felt virtually no guilt for this, as the American had not helped him with the prostitute, and, more significantly, he very much doubted the man was ADHD in the first place. In fact, he doubted the existence of ADHD.

His mornings brought work.

A shortish walk which encompassed a surprisingly variation of terrain for such a monotonous city. As he passed through the park he watched the elderly doing their choreographed drone exercises - health remnants from dictatorship - and witnessed fireworks being fired like ghosts across the frozen lake.

On the return journey more further fireworks clattered like machine gun fire and the butcher shops and whorehouses were lit with the same pinkish light.

On Tuesday morning the man was called into his boss' office. The school headmaster was typically inscrutable Chinese. He had a slightly nervous framework below a polished exterior. His office was impeccable - specific in colour & flow - and borderline gaudy. He seemed to have spent more on its furnishings and ornaments than his and the American's apartments combined.

He had a brother, absent now, who had the nervous framework on the outside, and seemed to be in constant recovery of a bender. There were many rumours centering around this balding, yet younger brother. The Man, in his quieter moments, liked to speculate on the percentage of validity. He had the time to speculate.

His boss obviously had him here for a reason, but his fluently bilingual (and rather attractive) assistant was absent and the men, not speaking a word of one another's language, sat there in an awkward silence.

The Man killed the time by studying the passage of time dictated by the ornate hand of the older man's rather expensive looking clock. Possibly antique, possibly gold. He actually became quiet fixated on their swirled contours as he viewed them through a semi dissipated cloud of bijou smoke. This time the man had chosen to drink alone, forfeit the American. He found the company to be a few degrees more agreeable.

Eventually the assistant entered smoothly and broke whatever there was to be broken.

He finally met the third teacher at the school. Same nationality as the goof ball, but different origin of gender and state. She had a strange energy and raggedy doll's hair, she stretched out her vowels to infinity and was outspoken consistently. She entered and left in a whirlwind.

She was trouble.

Eventually the American entered, he seemed goofier and fatter than usual. The Man hadn't thought this possible. He would later ascertain that the source of the increased mood was his ADHD medication and a few hours of afternoon drinking with another foreign teacher (from a different school) who was so often spoken of and yet so seldom seen, that he was beginning take on a mythical status in The Man's mind.

His first night club hadn't been half as perplexing as his first trip to the supermarket. A medium sized store's worth of milk (all of which turned out to be yoghurt) and a perplexingly large quadrant of shelves stacked with sanitary towels. Other foods of Asia: Sashimi from Japan, Shabu-Shabu from 'nam, Kimchi from Korea.

To the fresh produce, to something more exotic. A small tank of floating fish, he couldn't decide which they resembled more: a real life human penis, or the phallic-demons of manga. Further down, on steel trays and under glass, butchered dogs - pink and peeled. Another reminder that absolutely anything in this world could be rearranged. What had the obnoxiously well-travelled septugerarian on the flight out said to him?: "to know the map is to know the territory." Did this extend to eating your pets?

The American arrived to their dinner date with one of his many friends. He had a huge number of these dubious friends, all natives, and some, like this one now, were surprisingly pretty. He had no idea how the goof ball met these women, even factoring in his superior language skills and genuine interest in the culture.

The girl was reasonably interesting, spoke strong English and talked of issues such as syntax, cultural appropriation, and the future graduation of the city to second tier status via increased tourism. A matter about which she seemed particularly enthused. He wished the American would leave, so he could have the girls attention all to himself, even if only as a potential friend, if only for the network she could bring.

The first time he went into the Quaylin Muslim restaurant he was struck by how grubby it was. Chest freezer broken, wallpaper peeling off all about it, laminated menus stickier than the food. His meal, however, was an unexpected delight and the noodles, made before his eyes in the back, were the best he had ever tasted. Yet the single strongest impression was that cast by the owner's little girl. Daughter, waitress, boss of her younger brother - navigating the tables like an old pro. She was probably more capable than him, let alone her contemporaries. Her father only had barks for her.

The start of summer was to be the first atmospheric challenge, the meteorology truly presenting itself for the first time. It brought trash fuelled torrents of rain water which brushed up, sickly, against your bare ankles. At no other time did the sheer decay and dirtiness of the place hit you. You felt molested by the denizen's detritus. And holes in the ground delineated for evenly spaced, road-side saplings, had been reappropriated by the locals into conveniently frequent trash receptacles.

Sure, he had observed the mountains of trash on virtually every street corner, and the gravelly, incessant spitting from day one, but it was as if now the filth was seeking him out.

Around the same time the weather warmed up the drilling left the building. It was, however, replaced by a pounding sound of mysterious origins. He slept better but his dreams grew stranger.

It was around this period that he first spent time with, and got to know, the American girl. She basically turned out to be a more extreme version of what he had anticipated. Different, to the other foreign teachers at the school, but not in an entirely good way. More interesting on the surface, but lesser in her core. Every other word which dropped from her mouth appeared (and would eventually be revealed) to be a lie, and whilst he didn't like her and didn't trust her (and had had the privilege of far more attractive female company during his last assignment in the Far East) she did possess an undeniable charisma, which set her apart from the smattering of dowdy foreigners or undemanding Chinese. The natives expectations being so low that they would sooner crawl into the ground and die, than question anything from a utility bill to an authority figure.

And through her he finally met the quasi-mythical teacher from the rival school. Finally some new blood, and for all of five minutes it seemed as though it was going to be his night. This middle aged man \- who had been described to him as, by turns, 'kinda like you' and a 'Billy Idol lookalike' - certainly sounded different to his own co-workers. Simply put, The Man had not known what to expect.

He arrived forty minutes late, despite continually professing to be 'just around the corner.' (And why lie about such a thing?) He was bold and ugly and covered with tattoos of religious significance; though The Man tried (by the very day) to be less judgemental - he sensed, that due to the older man's inability to construct a single story containing the trifactor of a beginning, middle and end, and the fact that he had once casually (almost proudly) confessed to never having read a book from cover to cover (as though this non-achievement were some form of achievement) - he suspected that his elder did not truly grasp the ink upon his skin, that he was not a scholar of Buddhism, nor any other religion.

The would be mystery man, and bona fide disappointment, was also joined by a friend of his own, a Russian girl, so small and quiet, that she might as well have not been there at all. And if her presence was noted at all by The Man, it was met with a response closer to depression than joy.

The evening was such a disappointment that when, around ten minutes after midnight, the dopey American arrived, he was actually pleased to see him.

After the others had all dropped silently and noisily away - about an hour later - The Man couldn't decide if he was pleased or disappointed to find himself alone with the goofball. It struck The Man as they settled into ordering that his 'friend' was a little fatter and better dressed every time they met. He smirked at the potential of that trajectory as he sipped his bitter Bijou, and chased it with cheap beer.

The American began to talk him through the supposed nuances of that range of spirit, the clear and the dark, the raspberry and gin...

Things wound on, things wind down.

They saw a child urinate in a restaurant, they saw a fat tearful man almost punch his wife and they saw a hooker in a golden dress, and yet it still managed to be the dullest of evenings.

Shortly before dawn they found themselves in a warren of back alleys, which could have been vice-ridden or merely functional. It sometimes being hard, in Asia, to tell a brothel from a stationery store.

The man reverted to his nervous giggle when asked about some of the stores. This made The Man confused as to whether he was laughing at the vice or just giggling unintelligibly in that way he was prone to. His conversation was often punctuated with inappropriate laughter and his enthusiasm seldom understandable. An outlet of nervousness or a born eccentric it was difficult to tell.

One bright afternoon, when his taxi traversed the city, due to his inability to pronounce his address correctly, he saw an old, long bearded fortune teller on a stool. On the pavement by the side of a highway, staring into the middle ground. His shirt was dirty clean and his eyes beyond wise. The most deliciously satisfying stereotype, the most intriguing character. He didn't believe in such things but had always wanted a reading. Perhaps these were the type of things he could explore to get some mileage out of the experience. After all, his contract with the school was to last a year.

* * *

One of the few things The Man could find to love was how, even in a third tier city like this, certain quadrants were imbued with light: freshly born neon, which ran both pink and purple, up the side of newly built skyscrapers, signifying something as ultimately meaningless as the look in a dog's eye, yet so full of purpose; veins of energy which threatened to take the whole concrete substructure into the sky like a rocket...a brazen bid for freedom.

And yet, move away from those lands, redeveloped purely for a new form of growing middle class, and fuelled by corruption you can't even imagine, and you came again to the to the dirt and the scrap, where the sky had no spectral colour, but merely the grain of a detuned television. And although the moon was supposed to be the moon, regardless of where you looked upon it - a version of a star with the decency to be alive, as opposed to a frozen ghost - this one looked uniquely their own, as though only viewable with Chinese eyes. It defied the precise form of any lunar cycle, not truly a quarter or a half, but a jagged signifier unreadable.

During the season which most of the foreign teachers referred to as Fall he made friends with a male Chinese teacher at his school. He was shy and reserved but was to prove himself a great asset. Eccentric English names adopted by teachers at his school were nothing unusual, but despite being the most patriotic person The Man had ever met, his new friend had chosen to name himself for an American city.

He lived with his parents in a tiny apartment, his family having fallen from grace somewhat, and his conversation was peppered with everything from Chinese folk tales to the time (twice, in fact) that he saw a UFO as a child. He was surprisingly candid that, despite being 28 years old, he had never kissed a girl.

Parallel to this burgeoning (and unusually positive) friendship was the arrival and departure of a new teacher in record time. Leaving his 3rd rate school bought apartment in just five days and with minor damage.

Which would have been easier to take if (during their one and only conversation) the newcomer hadn't argued the toss over every single negative thing The Man had to say about the accommodation, city and gig in general. If none of his warnings were of any consequence to him, then why could he not stomach a single week?!

* * *

A blood feast nestled at the dawn of the topaz sky. This land could be rich and indifferent, united and ambivalent, or even just cold and alone; but only powerlines broke the vista, only the construction cranes cracked the sun.

Did a cat just crawl into an alley? How could the thing survive in this climate. The Man was a dog-man, but there was a certain sentience to cats which was hard to deny. They seemed to know something that we did not. The Man averted his eyes from the window and continued to eat the same meal he had eaten for the past five nights. He sipped his beer and craved another methylphenidate buzz.

In an attempt to abate his home sickness, he accessed UK television via a VPN. He saw a BBC documentary about the governments using the police to intimidate candidates who had the audacity to run in the 'democratic,' local elections. The bully boys surrounded the house, the bully boys pushed the cameras away. And indeed, if this was how their master's behaved in front of the world's most renowned news agency, how did they behave behind closed doors? But perhaps the most sour truth of all was that his own country wasn't much better. Not much at all. Because back home they were carrying out a supposed exercise in democracy with a name gimmicky enough to hint at its insincerity. Data mistaken for truth, fiction mistakes for lies, populism mistaken for democracy, the entire world turned inside out, an inverse of itself.

Sometime at the start of winter \- deep within a symphony of spitting, a litany of car horns - on a bubblegum grey morning (and in the foggy depths of a come down) he saw a one eyed man kick a rat to death. He had it cornered it against the dirty curb, his white marble of a left eye jostled about in his skull, the organic one ebony, and even deader, the demise itself surprisingly quick and mute. The rodent did not scream amongst the traffic. It stayed where it was told.

The second time he visited the Muslim restaurant a colony of ants were so involved in the corner of the door, it was as if they conspiring to impede his entrance. The food was as good and cheap as usual, but the girl seemed even more beaten down and wise beyond her years than usual. Her father more guttural and frequent with his barks. He noticed the brother played and she did not. He vowed to take her candy next time he was there. He handed it out by the fist load to the the middle class brats in his classes.

The chest freezer door was still broken.

Cold, cold, cold...A sheet of frost encased the entire city. When he got in doors he would scrape the ice from his beard, the condensation of his breath having caught and frozen between the hairs. He had to wear a special coat. What a pleasure to return, how he came to love interiors.

This icy semester brought trouble with the cold, and most units hunkered down in their respective apartments. The city becoming both the map and the territory. During this period The Man gave up on outside communication (deciding the wall to be impenetrable) and upped his night time strolls through the city. His radius increased with the knowledge that home could never be more than a five dollar taxi ride away. The true power of these jaunts would not come to him for many years, sometimes mixed in with so many other bits of memory.

Denuded street light passed through the fog, and semi-illuminated mustard paths and pulpy puddles. These places so poorly defined, between what the city was and what the city was destined to be, were of a particular fascination to the foreigner. Sometimes he wondered how many steps it would take to bring him to the edge of things, not merely the boundary of the metropolitan area, but to a river, a border, a dividing line.

Sometimes he would walk a path he felt he had walked before and instead come to a new parsing of the light. A block unseen.

Sometimes he would see the secret side of the city, the night time city, the underbelly. Back door maujang games lit by sickly cases of light. People sat, inexplicably, alone in deck chairs on the street. Scribbly dogs which roamed forever.

Halfway through the winter term a new foreign teacher - a Canadian - arrived, unexpected, unannounced. This made The Man paranoid for his job. As he made little effort with it and never spoke positively of the country. In fact, in the two and half weeks or so, he hadn't spoken. And he himself wasn't anywhere near a full teaching schedule yet. So the Canadian's employment seemed at best superfluous.

The teacher was introduced to him over overly sweetened coffee. He was fat, even fatter and larger than the others, and if not more eccentric then at least as eccentric in a different way.

He was a life long loner who'd been bouncing around south east Asia and China for 18 years now. He was a ham radio enthusiast who wanted to know if it was okay to mount an antennae on the exterior of his school-rented apartment. This led to The Man making a joke about the new teacher, describing him as some form of omega spy (the image of his overweight ass struggling on a window ledge to mount some movie looking apparatus, whilst the Chinese stared on with bemused looks, striking him as particularly funny). This led to the other foreign teachers not laughing. This was virtually always the case when The Man attempted humour. The truth was, The Man wasn't sure if it was funny himself...or a joke for that matter.

On a night designed to welcome the newcomer he failed once more to successfully mix with the other foreigners. In a past life, which now felt a dark star away, he had been something of a butterfly. Where then he had moved at the speed of light, now he was not even sound. It had all begun reasonably well but soon descended into a heated debate on the totality of Chinese law. The table shook with beer and bijou and cheap cigarettes and impromptu opinions. As individuals both confounded and confirmed their images in equal measure, the American girl slipped away into the night, and the moon came down of its own accord. It occurred to him as he trudged through the snow that despite the intensity of the the discourse they had all essentially been on the same page, their sticking points nuanced. If you were to divide the room, they would all find themselves on the same side. The Man, however, was not sure where he would stand.

Around the same time the day's got longer he finally discovered the source of the disembodied pounding that had kept him from sleep and concentration. There was an industrial workshop in the basement of his building; a residential building. He was on the fourth floor, his heart bled for those on the first.

The third time he went to the Muslim restaurant there was a man outside on the street burning a sheep's face off with a blow torch. He had to step around the man's work to enter through the door that had become warped by cold.

When he got inside the clammy warm interior he found the little girl had a black eye to match the one the American girl had waltzed into work with that morning. She'd entered the staff room with a purple eye and a crooked smile - preternaturally happy with her damage - a wind up toy let loose on the world with the delusion of freedom. A toy with missing pieces, mistaking being broken with being set free.

On his journey home he inexplicably managed to cut his hand on a rusty chain link fence. When he examined the damage back in his apartment he found that the cut had bruised and taken on the shape of the others. A trio of bruises, a triangle of misadventure.

Was infection coming?

Now safely nestled away in his apartment, he drank the tea he didn't care for and wrote. A tale of characters both distant and far. A misanthropic woman and a wolf in sheep's clothing. As he looked into the sheets of black beyond his window he remembered his future and forgot his past. He couldn't remember the last time he wrote, and wouldn't again for a very long time.

The new teacher became more and more of a feature. The large man slouched as he walked and ate a seemingly endless supply of instant ramen noodles. He would often pass the man in the school corridor with a veritable beard of the stuff swinging from his jowls, whilst one of the indigenous staff hung on his every word.

One day he sported a bandanna and a T-shirt of the school's logo, seemingly without irony. There was a coffee stain near his stomach which was half the size of the logo. Also, a sour tea-like smell orbited his person. Even though he was probably the most likeable of the foreign staff he found himself avoiding the teacher more than the Chinese chemicals they sprayed in the park. Something told him that they couldn't become friends, even if the smell vacated. Plus, some form of end was in sight; a flight and a new beginning.

Then in the spring there was an incident involving the broken toy, her husband and an undisclosed third party. The details swung from hazy to contradictory. Some rumours involved the bandanna man, others not. Sometime violence and police involvement factored in, other times this was dismissed as pure nonsense.

A couple of mornings later, as he was running late for his class, he bumped into Bandanna on the school steps. He looked as though he had been caught somewhere he shouldn't as opposed to doing his job. His attention was occupied by something down the street but The Man could see nothing whatsoever of consequence, as if the Canadian had the privilege of being able to see around corners.

Whatever was going on in the other teacher's lives he was certain he could no longer stomach any of them. So he spent the night seeking solace in the darkest, dankest corners of the internet, and the morning filled with shame for the things he'd watched.

He watched many things.

He watched...

He watched...

He watched a home made conspiracy channel on Youtube. A North American, twice his a natural size and clothed in oily skin, argued with inordinate passion, that the current president was a cabbalist. And offered, in the way of evidence, a (projector throw) angle from the press pit, in which the pentagon coat of arms resembled an esoteric symbol.

He watched...

How could the little girl have ever known what was in that box?

He watched...

It were as though the corrupt and adventurous few had seen things that they could never unsee.

He watched the fading of the rain.

Then he slept: A strange linear dream of mundaneity, obscenity, and a moment in which the whitest of white women was all trussed up like a b&w white minstrel, whilst a mist concealed assailant struck her with a cat on nine tails. He dream awoke to find this limbs all turned to black tentacles. He squirmed about his cheap mattress unable to rise, the carpet his enemy.

In the morning only shards of all this came back to The Man. In between a cigarette and a cup of tea, an intersection of fragments unsettled him, filling him with an inexplicable guilt. And although it faded before he had set foot out the door, by the time he arrived at school, it had mutated into a sense of dread. As cold and unsettling as the fish trapped beneath the frozen lake.

He botched his first class and muddled through the rest of the day in a similar fashion. Difficult to care either way at this point in the proceedings.

Then the impossible happened - the five day teacher returned...and he was changed somehow. His eyes sunken deeper, his skin two or three degrees more bluish, and his temperament boosted. He spoke slower, and although he was more stimulated ('connected' someone said) there was something more off about him than ever. And when he was in the staff room at the same time as the American girl, The Man couldn't leave fast enough. It was too much weirdness for one place, too many unknowns for one context.

Why had the man returned? And more to the point why had the headmaster allowed it? Or perhaps that wasn't the real question at all, perhaps the real question was: how bad had it gotten it he other place, for him to come back here?! In The Man's eyes the 4th, and now 5th, teacher had gone from a little hard to read and holding back, to a damn right anomaly!

Yet one relationship still endured, his Chinese friend named for a city, remained a feature of his life. He took him to restaurants, to shops, museums & bathhouses, he spent more and more time in his parent's shoe box apartment. His mother was nice but overbearing, practically force fed The Man salty fish for breakfast. The father did not share his son's patriotism.

During their almost weekly trips to the bathhouse they would sit surrounded by gold and steam and order bijou and cigarettes straight into the waters. And in those water swap stories and cultural anecdotes. The UFO stories were followed by others just as colourful. He introduced him to Chinese food and The Man reciprocated with American movies.

He tried to cure him of his virginity with a trip to a brothel, but the twenty something oriental froze like a statue on the opposite side of the road.

His final week at the school: the goofball had finally persuaded a Chinese girl for a second date and was now talking about marriage, the Canadian was in an uncharacteristically bad mood and the wind up toy had gone AWOL. The headmaster assistant confided in The Man she had already been fired from every other English school in the city and rejected by the only university, but for reasons unknown the headmaster could not bring himself to fire her. She was sick of calling her switched off mobile and wondered if all westerners were this irresponsible.

In his last two week in the People's Republic his building turned silent. This filled him more with a sense of spite than relief. And then, in a final stroke of irony, which would have been impossible to take if her were not mere hours from departure, the economic immigrant discovered a new section of the city, never before seen, it glowed with red light and modernity and vending machines. The irony was not lost on him, but being too deep in to care, he could only note that it was like the ace in your hand, when one hid in your sleeve, or a hidden beach behind your urban house.

Two days before departure, on a solo and final night out, he reencountered the prostitute from the first month. And in a watered down version of his planned depravity, he paid her fee for one night. She was distant, she was strange. Pliable and lost. They watched Chinese television which only she understood. She smoked in an unusual manner.

On the television, a magazine show piece on Ritalin and school children in Korea. The transliteration not lost on The Man, this much he understood. He looked to her face for a reading but she was inscrutable, air headed or indifferent it was hard to tell.

ui

And although the prostitute was not a denier of the existence of ADHD - judging by her temperament - she almost certainly would have been, had she only known of the condition in the first place.

>>>>end text

### Victor Malone can be contacted via his agent at:-

### Electrum-Representation@hotmail.com

