 
IMBROGLIO

by Andrew McEwan

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Copyright 2011 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

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Cover design by Andrew McEwan

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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BEFORE ~ PREPONDERENCE: attending to his anger and dealing with sundry confusions, our hero finds himself in Purgatory suffering an identity crisis.

One: The Love Apple

The fat whore told jokes to relax her customers, laughing as she stretched her pink knickers, flesh marked, indented, a script elastic, moulded to her thighs and belly the impressions of too tight silk and cotton. Her pale flesh was mottled, the fine mesh of pubic hair ensconced in its niche like a squirrel's arse hanging out of a silver birch, all leafless branches. The bra came off last.

Currently the muse of Michael Tomatoes...

He scratched her in pastel, smudged her outline, reading her skin through the pigment as he whorled his fingers, flat tones softened into contours. The whore had no name and no edges. He paid with portraits, images of her about her work and her apartment, a lavish den of nebulous curtains. Her clientele, both male and female, paid no heed to the artist, who they thought a curiosity, no few of them offering to purchase. But she kept all his work, regardless.

It was her little piece of fame. Theatre for the masses. They queued for miles outside her chamber, a long wriggling line of patrons condemned to this waiting, a promise at its end they could only guess at – should this be their first time. Michael had stood through twelve red-hued afternoons, each soaked with blood rain, before entering her phallic keep, the brittle wooden door shedding dust as he knocked, worm-eaten timbers adding to the under-floor mulch.

The was no answer. The door simply swung ajar. He was next in line and behind him was silence. First a stone waiting room, stone walls and stairs flaking wetly. No discernible light source. The keep's dimensions - much as the whore's - were at this juncture shadowy, unknown depths slithering with unknown pleasures, a peculiar, damp allure. He could taste sweet tea, the sensation crawling under his tongue, lifting it like the flap of a circus tent. All manner of wonders inside. Having paused to savour, Michael approached the spiral steps and climbed.

He was here for no reason he could fathom. Death had taken him, emptied and assessed him, read his envelope and posted him, a mailing of his soul to this intermediate place where many questions were asked (not least of which, why?) but few answers gained. That was the purpose of it, he supposed. It was Purgatory, and by definition...unexplained. Inexplicable? That fear abided, a remainder he had to purge. He had to find his courage, a bravery previously unknown, and having found it employ it as a tool, a means of escape into whatever preferential realm existed beyond the grave.

Michael was frightened. There was no sense of time here, just nights and days. No regularity. Thursday might follow Monday; there might be two Saturdays in a row, one cold and the other warm, February transmogrifying into July, sunshine from snow. The sky could be any colour. The earth too; the consistency of marshmallow or the hardness of concrete.

What had been his crime?

All he could remember was a girl. About six years old, dressed loosely, blonde hair flailing in ringlets as her head turned.

It was his last mortal thought.

Previously...

'A bowling team for manic depressives?'

He nodded. 'Why not? I mean, how many social activities are there open to people of a certain disorder?'

'Hundreds – thousands,' replied Redbear, christened such by Michael, whose reasoning in applying the epithet was forgotten. He had another name. Then so did everyone. Michael's imagination had, not unusually, cart-wheeled. There could be no Indian blood; not Red Indian anyway. Redbear did possess an eastern nose, one that might conceivably belong to Vishnu. Thankfully, Redbear did not possess a white horse or a flaming sword.

The fact of his ruddy complexion, under the beard, the result of a debilitating bashfulness, was neither here nor there to the love apple. Red's burly stature was to Michael, likewise, too obvious. He preferred complicated solutions, however much reality, in its long frock coat, complained.

'It's perfectly feasible,' he found himself saying, no longer sure what he was taking about.

'Bowling...' Redbear provided, shaking his big head.

Yes!

'I need a drink.'

Redbear always needed a drink. He drank every day, strolling in sweatpants and heavy cord jacket past Michael's window between six-thirty and seven, returning minutes later from the corner shop with a white plastic carrier bag tight round the tubular containers of beer. Each evening, and mornings too, his sortie to the shop a Sisyphean act, a preamble to imbibing that was his sole exercise. Mind and body stuck to this routine, and each was tempered by it.

Feeling mischievous, he'd tailed the slow man one damp April, the sun yet in the sky but the temperature minimal, all heat waylaid by buccaneers or otherwise robbed of substance. He wished to see the athlete in training, the batons collected from the Pakistani against a backdrop of cable TV, strains of the subcontinent thin and reedy, coloured beyond any digital revolution and yet somehow contained in a black box of glass and plastic. Michael knew there to be wires within, a colour code of their own aiding this other magic. Redbear was oblivious, possessed of incredible focus. Michael stood outside the shop, peering past the ads and over the freezer, round the shelves and through the moments it took to enact a much practised transaction. What kind of beer? Which brand? These things weren't important. Time itself would see this as a cultural imperative, like Morris dancing.

Redbear, eventually suspicious of the close presence at his back, paused on pavement and turned his head.

'Nice day,' said Michael, shivering. 'What's in the bag, fat boy?'

Brows knitted.

'Don't tell me. Let me guess. It's a first aid kit for dipsomaniacs, right? It's fluid contentment, energy for a soul depleted of battery acid, the golden blood of angels crushed and mixed with Fairy Liquid. It's...'

'LCL.'

'What?'

'Lager,' he translated gruffly. 'Low carbohydrate.'

'Oh.' Michael did well to hide his disappointment.

It was feigned anyway.

'Who the hell are you?' Redbear asked, now turned entirely, square and large before his stalker.

'Me? I live here.' He pointed.

And so began a beautiful friendship...

'How many people do you need?'

'Four, I think.'

'Do you know four manic depressives?'

'Well, there's us two.'

'Sorry, Tom, I don't fall into that category. I'd be disqualified. I understand they're pretty strict in the run up to tournaments.'

'Well, you can lie, can't you? You don't have to sit a test.'

'You don't?'

'Not that I know of.' He was having doubts. It was a ridiculous idea. He'd had a dream about it. Bowling, that is.

'Pity. I'm good at tests. Even if I don't know anything I can always pass a test. It's a gift, I suppose. I have a degree in mechanical engineering, but I don't know the first thing about mechanics, or engineering for that matter.'

'There's a girl I know.'

'You know a girl?'

'Yes – you know.'

'I do.'

'That girl I met, or who met me.'

'What's her name?'

'Vanessa.'

'Nice?'

'Of course she's nice. A little...' He stroked his chin, puzzled, unsure how to describe her; how he felt about her, even. He stuck his fingers in his ears and pulled a face. '...maybe.'

'Who?'

'Vanessa. You know. I introduced you.'

He hadn't.

'You did?'

'Yes – you remember...'

He didn't.

'Right.' Nodding, flushed.

'You talked about marbles. You argued tactics and compared thumb flicks.'

'Oh, that Vanessa,' said Redbear, peering at Michael like he was a talking fish, some fantastical undersea sport's pundit whose commentary was ludicrous and whose tips were not to be trusted.

This was getting them nowhere. Michael decided to leave Redbear out of his bowling plans entirely.

But Vanessa wasn't interested either.

Strangely, the day before, she had expressed an interest in catalogue shopping.

Michael set about finding a connection.

Mail order bowling balls? Too simplistic.

He sat carving a piece of wood, pine whose origins were Scandinavian and whose brief tenure in the earth had not ended in a life-giving flurry of cones but at the insistence of large mechanical pincers; thence to the mill, its brethren pulped, perhaps the stuff of great literature, more likely packaging, newspaper or toilet-roll. It had made it up a notch, splintered into a line of fencing or even floorboards, chosen for its straightness, its lack of knots, an uncomplicated mass of fibres, unseasoned yet true, soft and yielding under the shear force of Michael's Stanley knife, red-hued, with which he cut and fashioned. His sculpture was tactile, rounded, curves rolling into curves as he cut, turning the wood in his palm and slicing on occasion his fingers; thus the Elastoplasts.

He liked blue ones best.

It was a lack of concentration, he conceded, wincing with pain at a cut. Patched, he continued, one finger outstretched as if splinted. The wood's shape seduced, revealing itself in ways he understood. He felt an empathy with what was made, an intimacy of form and knife slips. It was like watching a woman undress, he supposed, only much, much slower, the curve of breast and hip manifesting, shrinking from a greater whole, the outer layers peeled away to leave the suppleness of belly and thigh, gentle under his hands. He could spend hours like this, immersed in a woody foreplay he directed, but over which he had no real control. The sculpture was itself, in and of itself, separate from its maker's design. The sculptor was the tool. In tandem, a relationship of body parts, they came together in moments of frisson and mutual respect.

Breathless, having paused to do push-ups, Michael levered himself in the direction of the fridge. His damaged finger throbbed. He pressed it against a cold bottle of milk as he drank.

Shirts, he realized. Shirts and slacks and shoes, socks too. There was a certain looseness of clothing in bowling alleys. The shoes were provided, but the remainder of the ensemble was constructed from your own wardrobe. Skirts were impractical; too long and you tripped over them, too short and they rode up (and you don't want to fall on your arse in a mini...). Too baggy and they got in the way of your swing. In had to be trousers; not jeans, either. Pants. The shirt was important, theorized Michael, on grounds of movement; you didn't want chafing or static. The material had to be right. Natural fibres. For coolness, cotton. T-shirts were okay, only lacking finesse. If you wanted to be taken seriously then a short-sleeved number, open at the neck, with a single breast pocket and no tails was in order. Just don't tuck the thing in! he mentally remonstrated, before phoning Vanessa with the news, only garbling it and coming over all phlegmy.

'I'm going to a wedding,' she told him. 'Not a tournament.'

'A wedding? Whose wedding?'

'You don't know them – an old girl-friend's.'

'Can I come to the reception?' he begged, he hoped, not pathetically. The milk residue in his throat was constricting.

'I was going to ask you...'

'Yeah?'

'...the next time I saw you.'

Not knowing when that might be, Michael's wounds remained open. He bled on the carpet from a finger corrupted, internally from a heart that threw itself against his ribcage if he drank too much coffee.

'Saturday night,' said Vanessa, surname Cardui.

And everything was hunky-dory.

Then, just as despair turned to good humour, there was a knock at the door.

It was TNT. Would he take a delivery for number 59?

Sure...a parcel, brown and square, for a Mr Unger-Farmer. Practically no weight to it, Michael found, giving the brown cube a shake. His curiosity was inflamed, but he was too polite to do anything intrusive. Who knew what might be inside? Certainly he wanted to find out. Tampering with people's mail was, however, illegal. He wondered if he could have it X-rayed. Perhaps a trip to the airport or the A&E...

He thought about calling Vanessa again. Dismissing the idea – she'd think it ludicrous, this obsession with the unknown, his fixation with the lighter than air contents of a neighbour's parcel – he put the box down, address side facing up, and went to make a cup of tea.

Seconds later Michael was back in the hallway, staring attentively at the postage stamps adhered to the brown surface, stamps stamped with inky letters and numbers, smudged and unreadable. There appeared to be several different dates and place names. The stamps themselves bore the likenesses of reptiles, iguanas and alligators against a backdrop of rock, water and tree. The currency symbols were largely obscured, making it impossible to discern a country of origin, although in the corner of one the Queen's head was visible. And the address label, he noticed, was only the latest in a series, each pasted atop the last in a strata of glue and destination, a map of words the delivery driver himself adhered too. He tried to imagine how many pairs of hands there had been in the box's journey; how many eyes, human and computer, had scanned its superficies, reading languages binary and alphabetical. The parcel had been a long time catching up with Mr Unger-Farmer, he surmised. Or were the previous addressees different?

No. 59. There was an enormous, treacherous hedge, the kind that swallowed entire lost tribe/hidden treasure expeditions. He could knock. But later. The driver would have posted a card describing the delivery's whereabouts. Mr Unger-Farmer would come and collect it.

Michael was suddenly frightened. He stepped away from the box. He returned to his kettle. He ought to wipe it of fingerprints, deny ever having received it, leave it outside, in the rubbish, move house, somehow retrieve the card from Mr Unger-Farmer's and take great pains in destroying the evidence. He ought to forget all about it and take a holiday. Didn't he have an exhibition in the offing? Yes! So concentrate on that; finalize.

'Easy for you to say,' he commented.

'What's that supposed to mean?'

Nothing, nothing...just a paranoiac frenzy.

He drowned a teabag. It bobbed and spun, but the water was cold.

There was nothing else for it...

Driving, he allowed his mind to wander unfettered. The urban landscape was unchanged from the previous day; suspicious in itself, given the dissimilarity between the two time frames, one present, the other past. Maybe it was his memory, and yesterday had been different, his brain now filling in the gaps, so all appeared, in retrospect, familiar. Maybe today was unreal, those differences so far unseen, not consciously witnessed. He would have to make a special effort. He couldn't be arsed, however; just let it slip by.

The sun was shining. People, strangers, moved through his vision with a deliberacy suggestive of known direction. They had a purpose, it seemed, an objective, be it groceries or friends, other people of their acquaintance or vegetables with whom to share a few pre-digestive hours, an intimacy of preparation to be experienced by Vanessa's girl-friend, her marriage following a recipe card. First came the ingredients; a groom for main course. He was cut and tenderized, seasoned and arranged in an ovenproof dish surrounded by family and close friends. They would cook together. They would be served together, before going their separate ways. The chef, as bride, would pick and choose. And if she overcooked him, or he failed to rise, she could always get a take-away.

Michael laughed as he drove. They forced him to, the women with children, the men with women, the children off on their own. The boys jauntily walking, making much of smoking cigarettes and the girls...okay, sometimes the girls made him sigh. The girls were too real. They failed to form an amalgam. Uniquely individual, each demanded his full attention, resulting in a headache and a dark, looming cloud. In the sunshine they were beautiful, ageless...the women too; one and the same, they graced the pavement in groups, chatting, smiling, or alone, lost in thoughts Michael could never know. Sitting at traffic-lights he watched a woman of about eighty slide in zip-up shoes, heavy overcoat weighing her shoulders despite the warmth, pulling a wheeled shopping-bag. She must have run once. She must have been a foot taller, lithe and sprightly, pigtails flying, smiling those same smiles he could see in younger faces, lost from her wrinkled mien, but not forgotten. They were still there, locked in head and chest. They were still hers, smiles she shared. He imagined her youth, long gone. How must it have been? Hers loves. Her losses. She'd outlived both. She had more memories than storage space. She needed an upgrade.

The insistence of car horns brought him back. He had no real wish to return. He was happier in that other place. Reality crowded his brain.

He drove.

Past houses and buses and pedestrians, cars parked and parking, undergrowth and verges competing for space with lamp-posts and last night's pizza boxes, the pizzas themselves regurgitated farther down the road, a series of roughly circular splashes not dissimilar in design to the Mexican meatball and cheesy pepperoni ensembles they'd previously been. In death as in life, thought Michael Tomatoes, looking left and right, checking his mirrors, creeping out of a junction. An aerial shot of the reconstituted pizza's distribution would prove interesting. He'd search for patterns, desiring to know the route of each alcohol-fuelled craving, the identity and condition of the person or persons who had traded money for mouthfuls of stringy Parmesan and defrosted vegetables, the speed and accuracy of the eating and the time it took for the reverse procedure. That aerial shot might look like a graph, or the result of strafing by a flock of oversize, extremely pissed-off Technicolor seagulls. He came to the mini roundabout and slowed.

He was two streets from home and his finger had again started bleeding.

The fat whore turned over. Sleeping? No, never that, she crushed her lover, suffocating him in folds. The man's limbs twitched, although whether in pain or pleasure the artist was unsure. Perhaps deliberate oxygen starvation was his heightened desire, the twitches ecstatic, the resistance token, his muffled sounds less audible, more fitful as the seconds passed.

Blue light spilled through the keep's slotted windows, source unknown. The blue of gaslight, oddly cold.

There was a breeze, also tempered, not blowing so much as sliding, easing its gaseous body through drapes and cushions, manifestly lowering the temperature.

Michael paused.

He caught the whore's eye.

Impossible to tell what, if anything, she was thinking. The man was still beneath her now, his stiffened arms coloured the same pale hue as the light, his temperature that of the invading air; his body as its, thin and cold.

'What do you make of it?' she asked, surprising him.

'I've been here too short a time,' he replied.

'But you must have some thoughts,' the whore chided, rising. 'For instance: might he have been alive?'

She meant the corpse, he realized.

'Is that possible?'

'Who knows – it's not impossible; but to remain alive here...that's like trying to juggle with ice cubes. Even if you use gloves, sooner or later they melt.'

Two: The Sugarfly

Old age; a safer way to die. Does electricity grow old? Thoughts are electric, the man thought, nameless, contemplating the fall. More a dive, really, a long aerial descent, his body arced, arms outspread like wings...that didn't work. The rush of air drowned any last contemplation, any meaningful dialogue between body and soul. Probably just as well, as he might have changed his mind.

Too late now. The scrub he hurtled toward, the concrete that raced up to meet him, these things were everything, blurred into a green-grey mass of which he was soon to be part, lungs and heart compressed, liver and spleen burst, stomach torn and kidneys squashed from anus, thence to frighten passers-by, a human smudge on the face of an embankment thirty metres beneath the carriageway. He'd chosen this bridge as he was fond of it, anonymous and with no identifying marks. He wasn't even sure if it had a name. For twelve years he'd crossed it on his way into town, a weekday commute both numb and energizing, the journey itself routine while the arrival was one of promises and expectation, delight at the prospect of the coming hours. He was an optician. He looked inside people's eyes. He saw the veins red-streaking the backs of vitreous orbs, fluid filled sacs feeding the umbilicals of optic nerves. He liked to think of the eyes as foetuses, ones never to be born, a symbiotic relationship between themselves and the head in which they swam, exchanging information with a brain shy of the light of day.

The brain needed a translator. It could not look upon the outside world. It supplied the eyes with blood in return for images electrically decoded, interpreted via two spherical bodies, independent yet working in concert.

How honest were these eyes? he often wondered, leaning over a patient in the dark of his office, shining a false light upon pupil and iris, invading with battery empowered bulb the soft interior of each delicate instrument. Could they be trusted? He liked to think so; they were beautiful and pure. No falsehood or deception was in their design. They might be fooled, and frequently were, but they always owned up to their mistakes in time.

'I'm sorry, sir, but the doctor is no longer available.'

'He's not?'

'No, sir; he's left the practice...'

Michael was puzzled.

'He's passed on,' the receptionist explained, a tangible reluctance in her manner that was irresistible.

'I don't follow...' said the love apple, maintaining eye contact, his naïveté feigned and with the aim of discomforting the woman, his motives entirely mischievous and altogether, he imagined, puerile.

A delightful kind of torture. He simply desired the truth; the facts to be stated. No beating about the bush.

It worked.

'He's dead. He committed suicide. Nobody knows why.'

'I bet I do,' Michael stated.

'Pardon?' She was shocked; so shocked she didn't believe what she'd heard. She was giving him the opportunity to retract, to pretend he'd spoken otherwise. But Michael was having none of it.

'I bet I do,' he repeated, pulling his chair closer and leaning on the reception desk.

'How? Did you know him personally?' Her hand was at her throat. Frightened but intrigued, her voice had dropped to a whisper.

He looked left and right to make sure no-one was eavesdropping. 'There was no note, right?'

'I don't believe so. The police never said.'

He smiled. 'I have it.' He nodded.

Her expression now mixed fascination and terror. 'You?'

He leaned back, bending the tubular metal chair.

The receptionist was lost for words. She would have to raise her voice to ask anyway, so just mouthed like a fish while Michael reclined in his glory, satisfied she was his to land.

How old was she, about forty-five?

'If you'd like to take a seat along the hall another doctor will see you.'

'Thanks.' And he got up, having imagined it all.

The interloper's office was cool, recessed lights behind non-reflective grids. There were glass fronted cupboards, a chair with big armrests...

'Right – Mr Tomatoes, just a routine check, is it?'

'Eh...'

He wore glasses, the optometrist.

'Ah, no; I see. This is your first visit.'

'Actually...' Sat in the chair he found it difficult to talk. His eyes wandered, taking in racks of varicoloured lenses and stainless steel ornaments. They'd snatched him from the hall and pressed his head against a series of plastic and foam stops, instructed him to peer at a little red and yellow boat on a blue ocean, photographed the backs of his eyes and subjected those same orbs to jets of pressured air in order to see how they'd react. They'd wobbled. They'd watered. He'd almost swamped the yacht.

It had happened before. He knew what to expect. Still, it was impossible to do anything but react.

Like an electric shock. The air hit his eye and he jumped. A most subtle and amusing torture, he conjectured. Anything for a laugh.

So this wasn't his first time in a chair with big armrests.

Michael, though, allowed that truth to lapse.

The optometrist slotted a pair of examination frames behind his ears having dimmed the lights. He dropped a pair of lenses into the frames and asked Michael to read the letters projected onto the far wall.

Michael complied, struggling around the third line, guessing thereafter, unable to distinguish between his F's and E's.

The projected image changed. The lenses too; like swimming through a series of different pools, the density and constituency of the medium altered both perspective and visual range. Underwater, his field of vision was concentrated. There was only darkness to either side.

The lenses changed. Things slowly came into focus. A slow process of evolution was evident, his fish eyes gaining in complexity over aeons, honed by nature and his environment into instruments of aquatic penetration, able at a distance to discriminate between foe and food. They were organs of great sophistication. E's and F's left readily identifiable imprints; colours were distinguished and shapes identified, given meaning and names. He was better able to negotiate obstacles static and motive, reefs and shoals. He moved through this universe with a confidence not previously experienced, advantaged in the war of survival, the pool still with those shadows at the extremes of his contextual range, silent and threatening, quietly foreboding, but as he swam toward the clear light the reality of his focus mitigated the harsher unknown.

'Michael?'

'Eh...'

The frames were removed, the lights dimmed further.

The optometrist shone a light in his eyes, cop fashion.

Panic ensued...

A hot cold bath, the icy burning of trauma quelled in an instant by a fascination with the projected image of his veins, the canals of Mars streaking the office wall over the torchbearer's shoulders. He seemed to be falling toward them, into them, a reddish backdrop of receding fear inviting him to embrace this world of dilute blood and fire, to mingle with its warlike persona, each changing a little or a lot, the effect on the other measured by future scenarios. He saw a whole galaxy of possibilities, spectra of colour and noise, plot and counter plot hinted at in the interaction of canals, their branching like fates, the territories they separated either allied or antagonistic, armies honed to a fierce readiness, gleaming under the fitful light of stars.

'Okay then. Everything looks fine.'

A bead of sweat froze halfway down Michael's back.

The lights came up again.

He was handed his prescription and invited to browse beyond the office walls, to peer into cases and balance pieces of wire and plastic on his nose. His myopia, although not serious, was detrimental to watching TV and driving. He required lenses to supplement his own.

After several minutes of this an assistant enquired if he '...needed any help.'

Michael wasn't sure what she meant. He just stared in silence. Hot air circulated, rippling off cabinets and office furniture, tables, desks and chairs about which persons scuttled, some on unfamiliar territory, while others – uniformed, alike in blouse and skirt – moved with a predatory surefootedness, slinking about obstacles to come on their prey with a disabling smile. He was her victim now, yet unsure how to react. Her teeth, white and even, lacked menace. They didn't appear sharp. He leaned closer for a better look, causing her to step back. 'Erm...'

Somebody across the room decided to laugh. The sound, brief and self-conscious, shook the large shop windows and caused the gilt to peel. Lettering fractured like burnt skin, changing colour and flaking away. The love apple's sweat glands guttered, the descending moisture a torture of extremes, once more cold and hot as the fluid raced down his sides, finding refuge in his socks. There was a sudden squelching weight in his shoes. The assistant gulped. A customer modelling Calvin Klein squinted into a mirror, his exaggerated lack of vision making the whole How Do I Look procedure a mockery of self-deception; it became impossible to lie in the face of no facts, the image presented a blur of flesh and shape viewed through a price tag. Of course, he'd like them anyway, frames expensively fabricated, once with their proper focal depth attached to convince their owner of value, not vanity, a fashion accessory with a practical slant.

Michael was perhaps jealous. He couldn't afford as much. He thought of the opposite extreme, of cheapness, the irony of tack; but wasn't sure he could pull it off. No style was just as much a statement, he conceded. The whole irony thing was a lifestyle choice you needed a lifestyle to perfect.

But what of the assistant?

She was asking questions pertinent to his health.

And, 'Uh-huh,' was all he could say.

'Would you like to try something on?'

'Maybe another time,' he stated.

Only by this time the person was laughing again; and pointing.

They weren't laughing at him, he realized. Their laugh was an absurd expression of surprise. Not necessarily amused surprise, either, just surprise in general. They bent their bodies in several directions at once, like drunken weather vanes, cockerels whose orientation was not dictated by wind – lest it be from their arses. They pitched and rolled as if on high seas, accompanied by polite giggles and embarrassed titters, a partner gazing round and finding Michael's beleaguered eye, one of two with plus signs yet to be translated into a curvature of plastic. He had no difficulty reading their language, no problem with their F's and E's. He judged them summarily and despatched them, rightly or wrongly, into one of two realms of perdition, that is: either the correct or incorrect one.

'Okay, okay...' he then agreed, needing a change of perspective. 'Direct me, kind lady, to the mid-price range of spectacles, and adorn my face with the apparatus of seeing better.'

Only by this time her smile had faded and she'd walked away. He was talking to an insect the size of two house bricks, which flapped its thin-veined transparent wings and winked conspiratorially.

'Angular boy...'

That's what she called him, one night after sex, their hips nudging and torsos conjoined. His penis lay on her thigh, dreaming fitfully.

'Annng-ular boy.'

Her voice in his neck reverberated sweetly.

He had a nose for complications, she thought, unnecessary detail he felt obliged to magnify and upgrade. Victim to his own imagination, Michael Tomatoes' was a world of obtuse angles and acute bends, twists and vistas in his sensory tree-scape he peopled with chimeras and animated using anything from somnolent old ladies in the park (the fungal excretions of sodden wooden benches, decades of old lady sweat having warped their pithy DNA) to blurred sepulchral visages glimpsed through the windows of passing ghost trains; these last common enough, as locomotives and their carriages often whistled past his toes in the most unlikely places. His living-room, for example.

'I'm not paranoid.'

'I didn't say you were,' Vanessa explained. 'They're after you, after all.'

'Who is?'

'Those invisible people.'

She said this with an invisible nod, as if party to a secret he no longer recalled.

Taking the piss, he realized.

Too late...

His wife had noticed it first. Putting the cat out of an evening, half in shadow, crouched under the windowsill, one eye and three legs showing. She'd thought it a reflection, leaves and cobwebs, perhaps a crisp packet wedged between brick and concrete, giving that uncanny metallic stare.

But the cat didn't appear next morning. And there was no sign of the paper boy.

Then her husband began acting strangely. He was impossible to rouse, looked as if he'd been awake all night playing backgammon with a bunch of elderly Chinese, drinking Absinthe-laced tea and smoking unusual tobacco. Morning saw him with a four day growth of beard, a tongue like bacteria-friendly linoleum and the most improbable, throbbing erection. It stood proud of his linen pyjamas and refused to be mitigated. Red and hungry, his tumescence shone, some nine inches of crooked flesh the hardness of granite and the hue of - from top to bottom - aubergine, rhubarb, strawberry and pomegranate.

He stared at his penis briefly, delirious.

She was afraid to touch it.

Then the head swelled, turning yellow like a particularly virulent zit, the gland next opening in mimicry of a flower; slow motion, the violent release of seed a measured explosion, darts of semen jetting in every direction like pieces of shell from the mouth of a choking octopus, armoured pods of a life potential...

The member wilted. The air hummed. The wife clutched her breast. The doctor, in obvious pain, did his best to remain calm. But the future was spelled out: words short as days.

Walls and ceiling were impregnated. The bedside lampshade was torn. His beloved's knees slowed the tiny rivulets of blood flowing from beneath her night-dress, creating ox-bow lakes in their dimples as the blood negotiated rougher terrain.

The humming rose in volume; was the hum of flight organs quadraphonically arranged.

The sound he could not escape.

Not, thought Michael, in a million years. The sugarfly had drank from his eyeballs as he slept, slaking its thirst for images and its hunger for ideas. It preyed on the imaginations of unguarded poets, men and women whose brains spawned verse, whose lives were a song unheard. It enriched them briefly; or, as here, drove its victims insane.

Three: Other Earths Tabulated

The love apple believed in mathematics. He thought numbers could explain everything. Mathematics had nothing in common with reality. They were two separate shoes for two separate feet.

At school it had all seemed so puzzling, arithmetic he could not comprehend as instructed by a teacher short and strict. He couldn't remember her name, just her chalk as it scratched, figures across a blackboard that made little sense to the young Michael Tomatoes, whose attention was taken with less complicated equations. Boy girl. Boy nicotine. Girl party. Nicotine alcohol boy, and such like. Things in brackets made his head spin. They were separate and he failed to cope with the fact. The teacher would go through sums on the board and he'd be able to follow, multiplying and dividing at will, only his mind would go the moment the bell rang, leaving him clueless with homework.

'The dog ate it, Miss.'

'Stay back after class.'

Unwritten, unspecified, the natural mathematics of space and time were far easier to grasp. There was an obvious relationship between matter and antimatter, for example, two sides of the same, endlessly spinning coin, obverse and reverse forever trying to catch each other up and cancel out. The direction the coin spun, or the velocity thereof, was of no concern, as these factors might be treated as either positive or negative, interchangeable and near perfect. Near, as nothing was ever wholly resolved; there was always more to discover, more to fathom. Day followed night when Michael was a boy. Summer came in the wake of spring, although seasons were less well defined than days, weeks or months. They might seep, bleed together and appear out of place, snow in June and sun in November, making a mockery of calendars and confusing tortoises whose owners had packed them up in straw and cardboard or only recently coaxed them out. But there was a balance, one he understood. Organic matter shifted. The more people there were, the fewer plants. Inorganic matter, the rocks and stuff of a planet in its gaseous envelope, stayed pretty much constant. Ergo: 1+1 = 2.

(Go back in time a million years, weigh the planet. Same mass as now, give or take the odd meteor. Right?)

Organic + inorganic = Earth.

Simple enough.

But what of the other worlds encroaching, feeding off this like grubs deposited by space-borne ants? Was that mass lost for good, or did it somehow flow back?

It was the sort of question that kept him awake at night as a child, years rolling back and doubling numbers in his head...128, 256, 512, 1014, 2028...years themselves, past and future, one at least he hoped to see, others he could imagine...4056, and the Earth is no more, cut open and stretched flat so as to afford two sides, new continents underneath with names like Atlantis and Hades, lands created by man and machine, a whole other world where happened strange things to gravity...

Colours swarmed behind his eyelids, myriad tiny dots composing a blackness not total, photons trapped and rebounding. Even in the dark they were everywhere; too weak to see by, offering only shades and outlines, yet sufficient for Michael to focus on the top corner of the room. He saw three right angles there and superimposed a circle over them, squeezing three dimensions into two. Then came a shadow at his door. Had it been a signal, his mental defiance of logic? Was this a door into another realm? Light from the hallway projected the shadow against a wall. It wore a broad-rimmed hat like Zorro.

Thin in silhouette, it didn't linger. Michael listened for a swish of cape or rasp of steel, but heard only a passing car; by the sound of it, a low resonating thump, a Volkswagen.

Next thing he knew it was morning.

The years rolled forward again.

At school that day he had maths, the boring kind, the unimaginative. The teacher scratched her chalk and turned her neck, bringing her face into alignment like some meteor-raked planet. She asked a question, posed a problem, selected her victim when no coherent answer was forthcoming. Settling her gaze on Michael Tomatoes, she pointed with the chalk and spoke.

Michael, though, had no idea what she said. His gaze was fixed upon a white breast, an entirely different body couched in its cotton restraint and glimpsed through a blouse gaping between buttons as its wearer slouched.

It wasn't his first mistake. Neither would it be his last. The rubber struck him above his right ear, clouding him in chalk dust, casting a veil over the milky vision that had him trapped.

'Eh, fifty-six, Miss' he said.

'Stay back after class.'

There were as many worlds as people, each unique, Earths it was possible to visit, even stay awhile. But to inhabit? Better to do some initial sightseeing, he reasoned: they weren't all nice places to reside. Certainly his own had its faults. Distorted at the edges, sagging in the middle, liquid at the core. Others looked more attractive, surer underfoot and better defined. Such rigidity, however, led to tensions in the crust, to sudden outpourings of lava, tsunami and earthquakes that might reshape the whole. These were unpredictable worlds, given to pharmacological hungers and necessitating emergency repair. The grass always looked greener, but it was wise to import some first, run taste tests and await results, perhaps employ a third party to garner opinion on the various merits of outwardly attractive globes. No point in getting your fingers burned. Caution, Michael, people have been known not to survive. People have been known to invade, to usurp, to enforce change, to uproot entire civilizations and replant flags. Attacks might be brief and relevantly benign, easily repelled, or they might be longer lasting, violent in kind, actions not words, cruel and direct as opposed to offhand and vague, a rape as opposed to an insult, sorties characterized by a deliberate, destructive rage. Every country had its dangers, every alliance and federation its moral ambiguity, every nation its borders and every man, woman and child - on a cellular scale - his or her own selfish desires. All these things composed the Earth of an individual. Some were peaceful, others warring, internecine, political, cultural, religious factions whose conflicts were not always obvious to the casual observer; you had to watch that person's news, and even then the pertinent information might be censored. So there really was no telling. It was an age old dilemma, where to spend your holidays.

Aged fifteen he attempted his first manned landing. Hands (his) and tongues (his and hers) engaged in a tricky descent through clouds made perilous by alien weather systems. He had a pretty good idea of the topography, but couldn't say for sure if the natives were friendly. It was an alliance he sought, an exchange of ideas and philosophies. He wanted to establish a dialogue and open an embassy. Cupping her breast after half an hour of snogging seemed like a good start. Albeit grounded he was vulnerable, the air tasted sweet and the view of her ear was pleasing. He gently squeezed and her breath rose in volume, her embrace became tighter. She was hugging him to her now. It was time to venture farther.

He lay her back on the grass, moved his hand down and under her T-shirt. The flesh was blissfully warm, the feel of her breast through her bra more intimate. His thumb found the nipple, small and flat. He slipped his fingers under the wire and pushed the supporting apparatus toward her shoulder. Her tit moulded itself to his palm and he rolled it clockwise, kissing her faster...

Contact. Michael had a hard-on but was nervous. How far could he go without offending local custom?

He stopped kissing her in order to look at her face.

Bad idea. She blinked once and moved his hand away, sat up and adjusted her clothing.

Then she got up and walked away.

It was new kind of pain he was experiencing, he realized. From here on nothing would be the same. Wounded emotionally, even by just this graze, he lay on the grass smoking, peering up at the stars. The descending night revealed them, countless suns about which orbited countless worlds, this girl's but one of billions. He could only ever know a fraction. Life was too short. He appreciated that now. She'd shown him. Hers was a mathematics of quotas.

But at least he had something to tell his mates about, though no doubt they'd deride him. They were all experts on the fair sex, of course, and could separate a girl from her knickers in no time, while he had still to get his fingers wet, let alone meet the object of his desires in its living room, a fire there and he the kindling.

Watching the stars come out, Michael couldn't decide whether he was relieved or disappointed.

It was only the start of his problems.

The Earth's name was Susan.

He wrote her name in the back of an old school book along with the date and outcome. It was a list he hoped to add to and elaborate on. Thinking of it in what was then the future, Michael lamented the loss of such a record. Although the list had never got very long, on names or detail, he would have viewed it with a kind of smiley nostalgia, recalling these few girls he'd explored as an eager, undamaged teenager and wondering what he might have done differently. Could he have been more successful? Was he too restrained? How would he have fared under different circumstances? There were worlds he wished he'd never encountered and worlds whose gravity he'd surfed but whose surfaces remained unknown, worlds he might have visited but was too scared, put off by attendant satellites, lesser moons in the shape of boyfriends, or necklaced with a minefield of social rings. There were worlds that had sent him invitations he'd failed to RSVP, worlds he'd collided with and been eclipsed by. Worlds, too, that had crushed his heart and set his lungs on fire. You took your chances with atmospheres. Wildlife, also. And there were viruses.

Four: Ramch

Then he came, a pink man with red ambition, crushing underfoot the small things so as to accommodate the large, ambitious boots containing grubby toes.

He boasted of raising an army, of conquering worlds.

He enlisted Michael Tomatoes.

'We should start immediately, this very hour. There is no time to waste.'

But there was all the time in the world. In Purgatory.

'I shall re-shape the land with corpses, carpet each mountainside and dam each river until there is only one life left.'

So it was possible to die twice?

'And you, my friend, shall record this. Your canvas shall reflect mine, and specify my glory.'

Happily ensconced in the whore's keep, it was a commission the love apple could have done without.

Saturday.

Still no sign of Mr Unger-Farmer.

Sitting on the windowsill watching a learner driver, Michael trembled externally and shivered internally from a breakfast of tobacco and ice-cream. A puzzling mixture, he failed to recall how and when, exactly, it had seemed like a good idea.

'S just the excitement, he thought.

The wedding reception was that afternoon.

Vanessa, in a dawn phone call, had spoken of hors d'oeuvre and appropriate dress, given the hotel rendezvous and added in a whisper, 'Just behave yourself.' Which he took to mean, 'Don't drink too much, dance with bridesmaids or spread rumours about the groom, feign a vegetative state or start any arguments.' That she thought of him thus was disturbing. For his part he was in love with her; but then he was in love with the entire female gender. Vanessa had simply decided she liked him, which for Michael was reason enough.

A taxi pulled up. It wasn't his. Too early. He didn't like the look of the taxi anyway: NO FOOD OR DRINK, DO NOT SLAM DOORS, NO SMOKING, USE BOTH DOORS...the driver, cigarette in hand, had his arm out the window. Another taxi pulled up behind. After some debate a man got in the latter and three fat girls, variously made up, bounced the first.

He had an hour to kill.

'This is my best side,' said Ramch. 'Don't forget the fact.'

His horse was enormous, nostrils steaming despite the heat. Its hooves were stained red with blood. The pink man, naked atop it, held a sword that scratched the earth, its blade varying in width about a central channel, dark runes etched into the steel, one edge razor sharp, the other toothed.

Michael sketched him using a charcoal of bones and pulverised rock.

Then he broke off for lunch.

Five: The Morphology Of Chaos

Drowning in thirst, he approached the bar with a fresh melancholy. All had been well until a few minutes ago, when dancing he'd stepped on the toes of a bridesmaid and scraped her nail polish. This exploded images in his head of a patient blacksmith's apprentice given the task of polishing an endless stream of newly fashioned wire nails, each six inches long and freshly made, extruded from a machine like spent bullet casings. He took each in turn in a cloth and wiped them down, burnishing their shafts to rid them of oil and bundling them into rough hessian sacks, each of a hundred. The nails would find a variety of uses, from fixing fence posts to - secreted in the bellies of credulous goats - choking serpents.

Nervously, he ordered another pint of lager.

Vanessa was nowhere to be seen; there was just a maelstrom of people, all ages and races moving their bodies disconcertingly, some coy, some openly flirtatious, swinging hips and arses to a rhythm of Greatest Hits and badly covered classics. The house band wore tuxedos, as did the waiters. The guests ranged in style from Sunday morning gardening to Royal garden party. The reception had been going for hours, with those present at the nuptials having already consumed massive amounts of food and alcohol, later joined by less intimate friends and more distant relations, resulting in this witches' brew of co-conspirators...

At least one of which was out to get him. He just wasn't sure whom. The old lady in the pink saffron dress with the pearls round her neck and in her ears had been a prime suspect, insisting, as she had, on kissing every guest. The bride's mother, no doubt, lush and florid, massaging her palms to warm them up before shaking the hands of revellers. Taking prints, Michael thought, vetting those who dared approach the door. Or were the guests slipping her notes? He couldn't decide. It might look odd if he offered her a fiver, so he made to sneeze as he was ushered inside, holding his hand then in a manner to suggest it was occupied. She waved like a chorus line girl, fingers to ceiling, and he was through. Next was the barmaid, her position critical. He could drink from bottles; it wasn't unknown; but if she had advanced intelligence the bottles would be doctored, or she'd insist on opening them herself, handing them over with a pickpocket's smile. He chanced it. Draught beer. Sucking the foam he detected no knowing glint in her lenses, nothing to betray her allegiance to an enemy without a name. Don't take unnecessary risks, he told himself. But beer was necessary. No way to avoid it. After that, and several quick pints, things quietened down. Vanessa found him, crushed him to her breast and offered to introduce him around. His confidence rising, Michael said, 'Sure, why not...' and she dragged him from his stool, at an increasing pace to circumnavigate the arena. 'Phew!'

'They're nice people, don't you think?'

'Who?'

'Roger and Alison.'

'Which ones were they?'

He wasn't being sarcastic. He didn't think.

'The bride and groom! The ones on the cake!'

'Not very tall, are they?'

She smiled indulgently. 'That's an old joke. Next you'll be saying, "Looks nothing like them."'

He pointed to prime, thought better of it, said it anyway, giving his finger a jab. 'How do you know it is them? Maybe you went to the wrong wedding. Maybe you got your dates mixed up. Do you know the people on the cake?'

Her hands were on her hips. 'Are you going to be like this all night?'

'I've had a rough day,' he said.

She folded her arms. 'Not yet you haven't.'

It was true, his day had been rough; he'd got mixed up with the time, thinking he was supposed to be here at two, when it was seven, which left five hours to account for, an entire afternoon of dysfunction.

It had started in the park, bending ash trees into a pagoda, then moved on to the supermarket, where he arranged an entire aisle of pet food into the likeness of a border collie, using the variously coloured tins, sacks of kitty litter and bone-meal as pixels before being asked, politely, to leave. After that he took a bus to the airport, pretended to lose his luggage, spilled coffee on an air hostess, got into a peanut fight with a bunch of jabbering Scandinavian teenagers, photographed his arse in a booth, presented the result to said air hostess by way of a gift, an apology for ruining her blouse and scalding her tits, and got his face slapped, narrowly missing arrest before dodging back onto the bus, which, by pure chance, stopped right outside the hotel in whose Pacific Ballroom he now stood, Vanessa lost to him as he handed the barmaid a twenty pound note.

She looked at it suspiciously and he started to sweat.

She passed it under an ultraviolet light.

Someone, the bridesmaid, tapped him on the shoulder.

'Buy me a drink. A double vodka and lime'

It was an instruction. Michael grimaced, not daring to look down at her toes. They'd be steel and sharp, he knew, garishly shimmering tines.

The barmaid appeared almost sympathetic, delivering his change before taking half of it back again.

The bridesmaid, whose name was Alice, clanked her ice off teeth and glass, tipping her head back while keeping her eyes on him, the music and lights swarming about her in a corona of stroboscopic sound. It made him feel sick. She licked her lips after each swallow, soon emptying the glass, peering at him quizzically until he ordered another.

'You trying to get me drunk?' she enquired, adjusting her strapless ball-gown.

Before he could answer she hitched her skirts up and retrieved twenty Regal King Size from behind a garter, black with red trimmings, like another part of her.

'Because if you are...' she continued before not finishing.

Michael bolted. Ducking under a conga line and straddling a bench seat he found himself in a peculiarly dark recess, the music muted, the wallpaper 3-D, a cigarette smouldering in a tin ashtray the only movement.

'Got a light, big boy.'

All he could do was scream.

His clothes burst into flame.

The blacksmith's hammer rang down, casting sparks like fireworks, the iron tongue of his giant anvil resonating with a shrill, piercing cry. Ramch stood laughing. His horse shook its head and stamped its feet at each strike, throwing red dust into the baked air that spun in vortices of heat.

'Eh, are you okay?'

Michael flapped like a chicken in an effort to beat out the fire. The smoke in his eyes made them bleed.

The bridesmaid pushed him into the men's room and stuck his head under the cold tap.

Someone pissing splashed a neighbour's shoes.

'Better?'

'Ungh...'

'You freaked out.'

So many bodies. So many dead.

They just wouldn't stay in the ground.

Giant loopers stirred them up, their rolling caterpillar gaits and ploughshare, stumpy limbs. Forward they arched in the hunt for leaves, dragging their modular rear ends, uncovering hundreds of corpses as they traversed this desert of coarse red sand. The wind would bury the dead again; it had buried them the first time. The loopers, oblivious, paused to chew on shields, thinking them their favoured metal flowers. Ramch liked the machinelike caterpillars. He admired their single-minded assault of these faux oases, the way they blithely sucked armour and munched weapons reminding him, he told Michael Tomatoes, 'Of a child at a mother's breast: knowing nothing else and trusting only that which feeds.'

Succinct...

A slap. Not the first Vanessa had given him, and probably not the last. He kind of liked it, he confessed to himself, keeping it in his head, making sure to appear hurt and surprised.

'What was that for?'

'Being a pathetic shit,' she quietly told him.

He shook his face and, one eye shut, looked around.

It might have been beneficial if he could see a clock, as he wasn't sure what had been and what was yet to be. Was the bridesmaid past or future? He couldn't say. On the other hand, clocks and Michael didn't get along; he had a strange relationship with time, being entirely suspicious of it, as it was no doubt of him.

'What did I tell you this morning?' She was angry, that much was obvious, but it was the kind of anger that barely suppressed a laugh. 'On the phone, remember?'

He said he didn't.

'About behaving yourself,' Vanessa reminded him, accentuating the point with a nail (oh, God, not those!) in the ribs.

Michael tried to think what it was he could have done, what heinous crime he might have perpetrated in the name of his own callous amusement.

He couldn't.

'Bastard...' She kissed him; a wet one.

It must have been good, though, for all that tongue.

Which ended abruptly, as someone dragged her away. Not quite kicking and screaming, but with a certain disappointment evident in her body language, the kind that displays itself through fake broken limbs and a resigned, crooked shrug. The third party, a man taller than himself, led her off like a stray dog, or disobedient child, which suggested he was known to her and she had neither been arrested nor abducted. But his displeasure at her departure was aimed largely at her and not the unknown rogue who'd usurped his place, bringing him to the conclusion that he was miffed by his memory loss and the fact Vanessa had not filled in the gaps.

He looked around again. He was at the bar. Still? He couldn't tell which was his drink, so raised the fullest glass, only to find a cigarette end floating like two drowned squirrels following a particularly violent bridge-edge wrestling match. Red and grey; lipstick and ash, they bobbed together, locked in death amid the froth.

Precise...

A punch. At least an attempted one. He'd seen it coming, puzzled as to why, but with the forewarning a dumb assailant provides his victim, along the lines of, "Shit teeth!" or, "Fancy a knuckle sandwich?"

Swaying, taking a half step to one side, Michael watched in bemused amazement the follow-through, involving as it did the bride's mother and a cabal of aunts, all of whom wore the same dozen ivory slips beneath their saffron, all of whom kicked their feet like inverted beetles, lying on their backs in a display of sixty's underwear fashion and advanced liver spots, the mother herself wearing no knickers Michael could see and with the tattoo of a raging bull where once her pubic hair had been, snarling angrily in folds of pink flesh between navel and clitoris. Several onlookers fainted, but not the bride, though what she was still doing here the love apple didn't know.

Screaming, gesticulating, she waded through her upturned relations and hooked the man at their core, her new husband, his assailant, whose fingers pointed roughly in Michael's direction, but whose voice was choked as she lifted him by his tie. Their faces met, both beetroot. He desperately clawed for air.

They did look a bit like the people on the cake, after all.

Enduring...

He was a mushroom.

As patient and steady a fungus as any before seen or known. He had his mulch, his brothers in the dark, an underground system of communication to rival any large metropolis, and the smoothest, roundest dome.

He was rightly proud of his dome. Its subtle discoloration and shy flaking was the envy of his neighbours.

Clinging to the ceiling, behind the lights and above the noise, he surveyed the throng with a detachment born of perspective, an upside-down world of heads, shoulders, breasts, arses and toes. The throng milled like seabirds, stabbing their beaks at scraps of food and conversation, shuffling their elbows in time to the music, mimicking one another, in and out of focus, part words and partial sentences exchanged like foreign currency, foreign soil between their ears, brains in which germinated ideas only half their own. They spoke these out loud and others took them up and added to them, interpreting as they may. They chattered, beaks in random motion, talking and chewing as one, mulling and masticating both metaphorically and factually as about them feathers were preened and talons brandished in a dance that had no name.

Just life. A situation. The living interacting. A ritual. A binding. A joining of flesh and souls, belongings, even wardrobes.

Michael observed each nuance, giving every gesture, be it direct or vague, equal scrutiny. The unspoken was more real, he felt, suspended from a ceiling high and shadowed...

'That one there,' a brother asked. 'Is he conscious?'

'Of what?' Michael enquired. 'Of the fact he's had too much to drink, or the fact he's clearly stoned?'

'If he's aware of anything...at all...'

'Exactly.'

The brother was confused. He was having difficulty understanding the nature of the upside-down.

'Look at it this way,' offered Michael. 'The only reason he's here is to have a good time.'

It didn't help. His fellow mushroom shrugged and fell quiet.

While the birds went on jabbering, tossing their heads and shaking their tails, feathers ruffled and smoothed, jokes caught and dropped midst the planetary interplay of vocal chords.

They'd be gone by morning, but he'd still be here, entrenched in the mulch of his forebears. The ceiling was rotten, a perfect foundation, always close to collapse yet held firm by the very thing that corrupted its fibres, the mushrooms themselves simply products, the latest invention of Life and Death as they swapped roles, manufactured via chaos, here, in this ballroom, of this eve, given form. Speech too, that borrowed from those below, patterns of a language common to all living things, shapes and constructs to be found in skin and bone, those same shapes and constructs as dictated the mushroom's innards, aligned his vertebrae and stretched his dome. He had water like they. He had substance. He had reality, though flawed.

He had a tremendous headache, a huge ugly pain exasperated by the image of HER, in the mirror and out of it, before him as he dripped coldly, HER painted face and bestial smile.

The bridesmaid.

'Feeling better?'

'Eh, yeah – I think so.'

'Good. You panicked. What was that all about? I didn't know what to make of it; you just,' she juggled invisible balls, 'ran.'

He nodded. 'I know. I had to be somewhere. I'm sorry.'

Why was he apologizing? It didn't make any sense.

She didn't either. She said things like, 'I was in the supermarket the other day and the tins of beans looked so scared, like they were afraid I'd buy them.'

I can imagine.

'Can you imagine? One fell right off the shelf. Fainted...'

Black closing in from either side.

57 varieties.

'I put it back, of course.' She laughed. 'Upside-down.'

Vicious...

The nails going in, the stench of burnt horn, the pliers. The blacksmith's chest and back were scarred, thick hairs coiling from around old wounds and through new contusions. He looked as if he had been beaten with his own tools, hammered and filed. The victim of torture, he raised the black horse's hooves one at a time, burning the hard foot with the fresh shoe and driving home the nails, polished by his apprentice who sat wholly in shade, with only the gleam of burnished steel to see by.

Six: Columbine

Vanessa wasn't speaking to him. Redbear too, had vanished. Perhaps he'd found a cheaper off-licence, or changed his schedule. Whatever, his disappearance, along with Vanessa's umbrage, left Michael feeling lonely. Not that he wasn't alone already. But this was different.

He was bored. And boredom was a dangerous, cross-country stage.

There was no telling what he might do, no guessing in which direction his mind might jump, what fanciful creation or dread vengeance his imagination, in its coarse sensualism and involute madness, might conjure up for him to wrestle with. Ennui was no end in itself, alas.

He had to keep busy, employ his hands in a constructive process. He picked up scissors and paper and cut out zebras and elephants, lions and giraffes, all of which refused to stand on their own two legs. Crushing them into a ball he tossed this out the window, thence to be attacked by a neighbour's cat. The paper animals unravelled, and gave as good as they got.

He couldn't bring himself to drive. He had no wish to leave home, even for his car and the motion of the road, the blur of traffic and trees. There was something inside he had to do, a necessary thing he was almost aware of, but which kept slipping away, eluding him like thin girls chocolate.

Like the last piece of an Airfix kit.

Like paradise...

Instead he had this: a vista of blue rocks stretching to a horizon not the product of a curve. On each rock an inky pillar, a piece of fruit: apples, bananas, pears, drupes the size of castles, great fleshy edifices whose worms beavered away like monkeys at typewriters, little interested in the world below their feet; smoke rising from chimney stalks and skins shimmering under the fitful, varicoloured light.

Ramch, at the edge of a desert of bricks, nodded appreciatively.

Behind him and his army (Michael, the war-horse and a ramshackle of infantry) was a dry expanse of hard red dirt fashioned into elongated cubes by the combined forces of geology (microbes with slide-rules) and weather (precipitation with a central computer).

Like cigarette smoke, the memory of it – or more properly nicotine – floated in his brain, awaiting, the impatient irregular, its call-up.

Your Craving Needs You, he projected, huge coloured letters in the grey June sky.

He'd succumb for sure; it had been less than twenty-four hours. Abstinence motivated by guilt.

But it was the guilt he was confused by.

The memory of that, or lack thereof, as his recollection of Saturday was plagued by holes.

All he could remember was Columbine.

The masked girl; a superhero. The wife of Harlequin; a fool's bride. The love apple's once betrothed...he hadn't thought of her since she'd failed to return, twelve months now and not a word. At first he'd waited, but as the days passed it became clear she was either dead or unwilling. There was no ransom demand, so that ruled out her abduction by all save aliens – which she believed in, being a Faerie Queen. Michael simply respected her absence. He did not get the police involved, phone all the hospitals or maintain a vigil. She went as she came. No trace of her remained. No photographs, no clothes. Not a razor or a toothbrush. Everything had faded away. There was only the occasional smell. In the bedroom, her hair. In the kitchen, her burnt toast. In the living-room her feet, as she did handstands against the wall, and in the bathroom her elbows, which smelled deliciously of roses.

He loved her, he realized. He'd told her so and she'd cried. They'd married on a Thursday in the rain. And she'd dissolved, her elbows' telltale odour smothered by a bouquet of wild onions, cat mint in her hair and parsley between her toes. Michael asked himself if she had existed at all. But yes, in another place and time. Her face was there somewhere in his mind. Her smile, sweet Columbine, found of a morning on a pelican crossing, lost of an afternoon just outside Gretna. The spontaneity of their union was now like a dream.

A knock at the door split his head open. A second glued his skull back together again and raised him from his chair.

He answered without thinking, not suspecting a neighbour, Mr Unger-Farmer - or so he claimed - steepling his fingers and chewing his lower lip like an anxious rodent, just the one desire his motivation, the parcel he'd come to claim.

Michael swallowed hard.

'You have it? Yes?'

The air behind Mr Unger-Farmer appeared to ripple, as if he had an exhaust.

Michael lied.

'It's not here?'

His eyes were hypnotically big.

Michael blinked rapidly, countering their glare.

'Are you...sure?'

Of course he was sure, he replied, fluttering his lids, editing through their shutter action the accuser's glower.

'But my information...'

'Information?' he blurted. Someone had informed?

Mr Unger-Farmer stopped chewing his lip and stood with his mouth open. A change came over him. He was rumbled.

Phoney, thought Michael. What information? Where was the card from TNT stating the whereabouts of the delivery? Where was the proof of identity, the blood and tissue samples, the retinal scan? Did they think him such a fool that he'd hand over the box without question?

'You, eh, don't have it then?'

It was pathetic, this attempt to fool him into handing over private property; even private property that weighed nothing.

'No,' he said.

The pretender backed away, visibly shaken. The heat haze intensified, seeming to almost lift him from the pavement.

Michael closed the door.

He would have to leave. It was dangerous here. He was being watched. He had to find somewhere safe for the box until the real Mr Unger-Farmer could collect it. In this he could not fail.

Seven: The Castle Of Victor Formica

Ramch, decided Ramch, needed a place to lay low for a while. He pointed with his great sword at a large, bulbous pineapple atop a precipitous indigo stack and declared, 'There! There I'll rest my bones and count my fortune! There I'll hear the entreaties of the damned! There I'll roast children, gnaw on their limbs and stitch their hides, wash in their blood and fill my belly with their entrails! There I'll die!'

Die?

'And there I'll wake, Michael,' he added in a whisper, 'another man.'

He decided to lose himself in his portfolio.

This meant a long drive and several days juxtaposed with a nature both legitimate and artificial. The woods were always a good place to start. He parked under a Douglas fir he'd once slept in, needles in is shirt, and with the parcel on his lap contemplated the arboreal, the leaf and bark, green and brown of a kingdom moist and dry, as full of life as death, a silent laboratory occupied with the manufacture of noise.

The sun offered shade.

The sun interpreted a spectrum of waves, bouncing colours off one another and pushing together space and shape, forcing Michael to squint. Light was omnipresent, refracted through the car windows and further mauled by his spectacles, those he was required by law to wear whilst driving, but which he was accustomed to putting aside when bipedal, never desiring to see into a distance that had no end, scared of those possibilities and his ability to manage them. Too much information overwhelmed. A limitless panorama required discipline, a steadfast approach to the visual deconstruction of the universe, its rebuilding an undertaking he'd always felt, if not incapable of, then neither obligated to.

Easier to let things bleed...

But who was he kidding. The universe was out there, manifold.

He left the box on the driver's seat and departed the car. Immediately birds shuffled amid foliage spiked and broad. They were sentries, guardians of a vegetable demesne he wished to access. An architect of branch and grass, Michael was familiar with their scrutiny. The birds watched everything; they were the messengers, the scribes, the storytellers whose prose was both written and oral, impressed in the mud of sun-dried pools, pushed from the throats of magpies, words of deeds that were ever accurate, explicit in form and detail. Nothing escaped the birds attention. Their many eyes were as one. Seeing everything, they missed nothing. No falling tree or shitting bear went unregistered. The birds made it real.

Neither trusting nor owning a watch he was unsure of the time. The many shadows colluded to make a mockery of such concepts, a debunking of the man-made which made him feel at home. The sun flickered, interfered with by clouds, flirtatious belles whose frills and tresses were made to tease; they danced with their lord, knowing he would burn them away, but under whose magnificence they were helpless, as sheep wet from the stream, to be wrung by a kind butcher, their fleeces quickly shorn. They gambolled, these weightless pillows, counting themselves fortunate. They shone light and dark, stained blue and red where they'd been mounted, impregnated by the ram of hot and cold, come lambing, waters broken, to bleat and moan. They fashioned lightning, the meek clouds, producing thunder and rainbows.

Loud and beautiful.

And the smells, the countless odours. Animal and vegetable, the smells crowded him like penitents, each with his or her story, a point of incidence or origin, a conglomerate of airborne desires, emotions that had a common core. Along with the colours, the smells were there to seduce, flies and bees, pigeons and squirrels, third parties in a sex war, a struggle for propagation and survival. They made him sneeze, his own noise quickly swallowed by the wood, drowned in soughing branches and running water.

He tripped, broke his fall with his hands. The earth was dust dry, then mud wet a few paces farther, squelching as he approached a stream.

Water rushed over a concrete lip the purpose of which was long forgotten, its construction, like that of the toppled walls nearby, belonging to another century, or at least the beginning of this one. The bricks were yellow and powdery, older than the trees, as if the woodland had been overlaid. Michael thought of looking for an edge or tear and lifting that veil, but he shared his direction with the water, which after its own fall disappeared into a tunnel. This was his point of entry, one of many. Beyond was a darkness adorned.

First with Christmas lights, twenty or thirty tiny bulbs snaked round a pine, bright echoes off fire-resistant baubles and (probably toxic) glitter balls. Presents beneath, an Action Man tank for starters, Action Man himself with his coarse blond hair and facial scar somewhat out of scale in regard to the Scorpion...but who's to complain? He's waited a long time. Tired of them plastic boots, he sits his arse in the tank and points the way. No more perambulation for this toy! Crushing the enemy under caterpillars, swivelling his turret...what more does a soldier need? Especially if he's eight years old.

Second with...

'What say you, Michael, is it too tall to climb?'

'On horseback maybe.'

'And on foot?'

'I would say that then the horse has an advantage.'

Ramch laughed a victor's laugh and slapped him on the shoulder.

The infantry shuffled.

The warrior considered these, and, making his mind up, killed them, attracting the attentions of six giant crows.

'Now, let us see if my plan works.'

A negotiation followed, with Ramch bartering each corpse. The crows were unruly and did not care for conversation, but having bloodied their beaks they listened while he made exchange: transport to the pineapple atop the indigo stack in return for the meat, which he stood over now like a spiky pink tattie bogle.

Suspicion high on both sides, they agreed.

Fireworks.

Back garden explosions.

Rockets whose cardboard bodies could be found scattered days after their launch, spent gunpowder receptacles charred and crushed.

Catherine wheels. Flaming implements of torture; the precursor to a beheading.

Roman candles, jumping jacks and bangers, all manner of pyrotechnic mischief visited upon the earth, the sky bright with saltpetre and roasted metal, the cat under the bed and the love apple - christened such by the nurse who'd made him blush so many years ago - in the emergency ward.

London lights in the back pocket. A splendid blue and green corona encompassing his loins, which frazzled.

Thirteen years old. He could still see her smile as she unbuttoned his jeans. Fear made real.

And thirdly...

From the air Purgatory was resplendent. Stretching forever, it rippled.

Balloons could be seen, or perhaps huge gaseous whales in the distance, improbable leagues from where Michael dangled, talons through his shirt. Floating cities, some inverted, hung suspended from a ceiling he knew to be there, but which was obscured by the Doppler effect of intervening realities. To his rear the brick desert softened with perspective, coming to resemble a tongue, while beneath, the blue pitched like a sea of old copper kettles, tarnished and shot through with steel rivers, partially buried, like the tines of a fork through a mouthful.

The pineapple swelled as they neared, revealing features impossible to see from the ground, hundreds of irregular doors and windows pocking its segmented skin, balconies and walkways girthing the enormous fruit at whose crown sprouted a cupola of greasy, truncated leaves.

'Ahoy!' bellowed Ramch, kicking his legs and waving his sword. 'Anybody at home!'

The cupola revolved like a gun port.

The two crows supporting him flapped impatiently, crashing wings. Feathers spun to ground.

Michael feared the worst. Either they would be blown from the sky or dropped by the birds, whose argumentative cries were directed as much at themselves as those they'd agree to carry. But the pink man seemed unconcerned, repeating his halloo as his flesh tore; that of the horse, also, clumps of muscle and skin rending where it had been pierced, for neither Ramch nor his mount – the burden of three crows - wore clothing of any sort. They had only tissue to grip, whereas the crow bearing the love apple had a cotton-polyester mix.

Night descended.

As sudden as that, catching even the birds unaware. The pineapple was lit, glowing from within as if from a million birthday candles. It radiated a lush citrus hue that bathed the aviators in a warm, kindly wash, mellowing even the crows, who hovered on the up-draught, black eyes gleaming wetly. Ramch laughed in triumph, as if he had called down the dark. His sword shone a pale red, its after-image visible like a poor animation as he coaxed the birds nearer, stabbing with the long blade until he fixed it in the fruit's leathery rind; and so anchored, took his own weight, directing the crows to release him.

Michael too, who fell head first onto the rounded dome, scrabbling for purchase on the puckered castle surface before colliding with a narrow balcony. Similarly, the war-horse floundered, somehow managing to stay on its feet as it skied the sloping pineapple wall, hooves cutting trenches before it came to rest against a protruding balustrade.

He felt his head and it hurt.

The pink man dropped beside him, smile visible, sword left implanted above.

Ramch pushed open the French windows and stepped into the yellow, disappearing without a word. The interior space, an irregular room, was glazed as if with a coat of varnish, or hard syrup, the flesh beneath this veneer the pineapple's own, lush and striated, with just the hint of movement, that, on closer inspection, proved to be the slow passage of juice. The candles stood in niches about the walls and the floor invited him to take his shoes off. There was an ornate double bed, ribs instead of springs and no blankets, stood on legs that were legs, the scaffolds thereof, bones long stripped of ornament, cracked and pitted femurs to the front, to the rear tibia and fibula intermeshed with radius, ulna and humerus, fastened with scapula and clavicle to form a headboard that just lacked a head.

And then there was the door, open to a hallway golden and curved, itself assembled from teeth. Molars and incisors crushed...

Thirdly.

Beautifully.

Disastrously.

Aged twenty.

He fell in love.

A girl with big earrings the centre of his cosmos, her lighthouse disguising rocks, a Siren's illumination no man could resist, the scraping of his keel as the loss of his oars, incidental to the kiss.

An inexplicable phenomena, the desire to fall down holes onto sharpened sticks. Scar tissue the least of it, a mere consequence, pain's long echo but a reminder of the original impalement, that pain not so much remembered as experienced over again with each subsequent infatuation, love guarded now by cynicism and a willingness to resist, to separate, eking out a sexual existence from the core of need and want.

Carving, in effect.

Art from death.

His heart broken, Michael Tomatoes had immersed himself in paint and wood. A necessary awakening, he busied himself with tools, drawing, sketching, modelling and remodelling, fashioning anew, a psychosis of dreams motivated by a desire to shape, the image, when complete (never finished), to walk and talk, laugh and cry, love and lose, not in his stead, but in the stead of self, self apart, as an expression of his being divided. Art and artist.

Death from art.

His heart was broken. Often he explained this to himself; perhaps a justification, or a rationalization of why, on such days, he found himself in the black tunnel, trailing his feet through freezing water, feeling with his hands what he could not see with his eyes, expunging via the passage that feeling of guilt - guilt itself an expression of anger, anger at himself, no longer separable, no excuse or schism sufficient to remove painter from painting, sculptor from sculpture...the two inexorably bound, whether they agreed or not, whether they enjoyed each other's company, whether they desired nothing but pain and separation. To create anything it was essential to trust, and in trusting, someone or something, a chosen or given medium, risk loss. A poet's metaphor, he thought: at the end of the tunnel was either death or life, meaning choice.

Jokes apart, he'd loved since, and would again. It was easy. Distance was no object, in time or space. All of it was in his mind, a universe of the imagination he could if he wished get serious about, yet one he preferred to dismantle and reassemble in every manner of guise, from Sublime to Ridiculous and back, a journey through unmapped Bathos.

Tourist guides there were aplenty. Illustrated walks, brochures, a change of face and boots everything a person required to be on the trail, visiting such places as Maybe and Somewherehereabouts, stretch marks round nasal cavities where had been born works of brain and fingers, products of that same imagination grown too big for his skull, indigestible mind-fare he'd dropped and mostly forgotten about, the progeny of whim and lust. Madnesses, his children, both good and bad, alive and dead, beyond count now, living and killing on a macrobiotic scale...

'What's that you say?'

'I was talking about dieting.'

'But you're not fat; you're skinny.'

'Thanks...'

'I mean – for health reasons?'

'No, I just want to starve myself; see how that feels. I'm looking for a kind of spiritual clarity.'

'You're nuts,' she told him.

'Thanks again.'

'You're full of shit.'

'I know. I want to shed that. It's what I'm getting at.'

'Through not eating? Tom...' She was exasperated. 'I don't understand you.'

'Me neither.'

'You're being deliberately difficult. I feel you want to push me away. But I'm staying.'

'You are?'

'Yes.'

'Why?' It was an honest question. A big one.

She answered immediately.

'I have absolutely no idea.'

Shaking her head she looked like a Alsatian, but without the dribble.

Momentarily, he forgot her name.

...Eating in order to prolong life. Sustenance from enlightenment from meditation from a vegetable diet. With claws.

Ramch, he intuited, had used the door, accessing the pineapple's inner rings. But for what purpose?

In Purgatory, a halfway house, composed as it was of both guilt and innocence, the only reasons were personal; it was the unresolved that found themselves here. What quandary then, drove the pink man? And what of his own?

All he could remember was the blonde child.

Loose on the road.

A draught through the windows nudged him onward and he left the room with its bed of bones, following the corridor, a winding descent past other doors, varying in construction from twisted soup cans to complicated ball-bearing clocks, each he guessed of a similar inch thickness to the door of teeth, but all closed, with no obvious handles. There were doors of marbles and doors of fish tanks, narrow aquatic realms occupied by tiny octopuses and miniature submarines, doors of bent plastic straws and doors of stone, vertical layers of slate interposed with granite and marble, like a section through a tree. Set at irregular intervals to either side, they appeared more solid, more tangible than the walls, whose bright niches imbued the pineapple's interior with a pleasing yet insubstantial feel. The walls might melt but the doors remain, ingresses beyond which stretched infinite rights of way.

Michael took his shirt off and dropped it; his trousers, socks and underpants. He stood naked before the most surprising and largest door of all, placed at the end of the corridor and manufactured from rodents, stuffed rats and voles, mice of several species, guinea-pigs, hamsters and gerbils. Small and large, black, white and brown, they were fitted like rocks, snug pieces arranged by shape, aspects of death pieced together, teeth bared, hairless tails coiled round backs and legs, feet grasping and eyes reflecting the last they'd seen.

Afraid to knock, imagining the surface merely frozen, needing only his breath to warm it, he nervously scratched his balls.

The door opened from the inside. A short man wearing a bath towel emerged, dark skin contrasting with the thick white wrap about his waist. He smiled and sucked his gut in, nodded at Michael and muttered a hello before quickly escaping up the yellow corridor, whistling to cover his embarrassment at having been discovered so. Not that Michael cared. He stuck his foot in the jamb as the door swung closed and listened to the throaty gurgle of a toilet cistern. He entered the bathroom, mundane if spacious, wondering what he ought to do next. Was he unclean? Should he shave? Neither his bladder nor bowels troubled him. He couldn't recall last eating or drinking. Had he been either hungry or thirsty in the past he was sure he would have felt compelled to satisfy those urges. Presented now with tiles, porcelain and chrome, the harshness of his environment disturbed him. There was no comfortable vagueness here, no soft edges or easy contours. This was a well lit, dangerous reality; thus stark.

And cold. The back of the door was a white laminate, smooth and hard with no hint of its compacted mammalian outer side. But what was or wasn't out there didn't matter in here. In here only the fittings, the taps and shower curtain, toilet seat and scales held any import. These were all things he might use, or not, depending on his needs.

He remained though, unsure of those.

Eight: Removed

'Feeling better?'

What kind of question was that?

'Where am I?' he replied, genuinely confused.

'My place, stupid. Under sufferance,' she said, climbing over him. 'Fancy some breakfast? I've just got time before I go to work.'

'Hmm.'

'Eggs?'

'Bacon and eggs. And fried bread...'

'Fried bread only,' she chided. 'No meat – and no lewd remarks, either.'

'Mushrooms?' he asked of his veggie girlfriend, smiling, he hoped, winningly.

'Got none.' She dressed in a hurry, regulation blouse and skirt over cotton bra and knickers.

He smiled at the little bows.

'Tinned tomatoes then.'

She shook her head before securing its outgrowth in a ponytail.

'You'll be telling me next, "No brown sauce".'

'No brown sauce. Sorry.'

'Shit...'

'Yes. And I need to find my shoes. So don't push it.'

All elasticated up, she left the bedroom.

He must have come out of the tunnel at some point, he reasoned. He must have found the day; not necessarily the one he'd lost, but a day all the same.

Michael lay where he was, comfortable among her sheets, with her perfume and her nightie, discarded some hours before, anticipating cooking smells, dozing, for a good half hour before receiving a kiss on the cheek by way of an apology and the promise, if he'd get the shopping, of her famous macaroni cheese.

He grabbed her wrist.

'There's cornflakes,' she told him.

'And milk?'

'Bye. See you this evening.' And she was gone, Vanessa Cardui in a daze.

Her teddy bear winked.

A sly, malicious lowering of one frayed eyelid, the gesture brought a chill to his lungs, an inhalation like that from a fridge. He couldn't take his eyes off the teddy, which remained still, knowing that if he did it would advance, clawing at the duvet, or perhaps ducking under to gnaw at his legs. This was an evil bear, a jealous brown ursine creature sat at the foot of the bed, awaiting its chance, some lapse it might cruelly exploit, teeth bared and paws lashing out. Michael pulled his feet slowly toward him. The bear, Funnykins, leaned over, readying itself.

The atmosphere hummed with a cold blue light.

He made a break for the door, slamming it behind in time to trap his tormentor, who scratched at the wood and rattled the handle, growling angrily the while. There was no lock, no means of securing the bear inside, so he looked around frantically for anything he could use either as a barricade or a weapon. Just a towel on a radiator; but he was able to bind handle to radiator, manoeuvring vacuum in front of door for good measure. That ought to buy him a few minutes. And it was a few minutes he needed, naked in the hallway, his clothes the wrong side of this portal, a few minutes in which to dress himself and find an exit.

Emptying the washer produced the expected blouse and skirt ensemble, a departmental store uniform that would have to suffice, naturally underlain with Vanessa's white cotton, tight below, spacious above, the former a discomfort he'd endured before, the latter cured with kitchen towel. Fortunately his was skinny. Still, he couldn't fasten the skirt properly, having to make do with a zip half way up. That just left shoes, and a hat, a disguise of some sort to convince the world of his girlie credentials.

No time to put his face on. Stuck between a plastic bag and an umbrella advising Holsten Pils as a preferred method of inebriation he chose the umbrella, imagining it had more defensive options. The bag might be useful for suffocating teddies, but he really didn't want to get that close. Besides, it was flimsy, plain and unbranded, and served only to mute the creams and greens of his outfit, while the umbrella was perfect camouflage, neatly matching his skirt and designed for golf. The question of footwear remained, however, to be resolved by Tom & Jerry oven gloves.

The scratching at the bedroom door fell silent. No longer a backdrop, its absence served to increase the threat. Michael poked his head round the jamb and made quick scrutiny of the adjoining living space.

Plenty of places to hide for a bear one foot tall.

His heart had stopped, he felt. No, it was only muffled by the kitchen towel.

Then a window broke. Funnykins had found another way out.

He bolted for the front door, brolly raised but unopened, Tom chasing Jerry chasing Tom. Outside the sun offered a morning of long shadows and growing heat. There wasn't much traffic, pedestrian or automotive. He had no money for the bus. His own car was some miles from here, he thought, although he couldn't be sure. When had he driven last? No sign of it in the street. Must still be in the woods. A roar and a crash. Not the bear – breath caught – but a passing inter-city and a milk float, the milkman startled by a cat.

There was an obscenity as he swung a boot.

Missed, naturally enough, the large ginger practical joker then vaulting two fences and a bush before placing itself, tail erect, in the love apple's path.

If it was in cahoots with Funnykins he was screwed. Something about its protruding tongue though, spoke of a different truth.

Michael crossed the road.

Ginger watched his back.

The sun levered up, foreshortening ghosts.

People began to appear. None he recognized. Crouched beneath the umbrella's generous canopy he made his way into town on foot, losing first Tom then Jerry, their cartoonish ways tripping him and stubbing his toes. His bare feet on the pavement felt primal, encouraging him to wander across a variety of surfaces, from concrete to grass.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd walked so much. Maybe it had been yesterday; maybe ten years ago. Always more of a driver than a pedestrian, he sensed a fundamental change in attitude, a constitutional shift not unlike that experienced by political parties that can't get elected – something he might change his mind about later, in car, in power, in partibus infidelium.

His legs felt good. That was it. It was ages since he'd felt the wind on his knees, a raw feeling Michael wanted more of. Short trousers had been the norm until he was eight of nine, thereon for sports only, something he shied from as a teenager. This was a Cub Scout thing, grass stains and grazes, sixpence a week subscription and merit badges. A time of innocence. He revelled in it now, flouncing his skirt and kicking his shoeless heels. Who cared if his feet got dirty? If he smelled, he smelled of earth and dog shit inadvertently rollicked in; a healthy boy odour, how he must smell under the skin.

Slugs and snails and puppy dog's tails...

The sugar and spice appearance a dissimulation.

But he enjoyed that too, the crease of elastic about crotch and under arm, the annoying shortening of stride dictated by the style of skirt. It he was to break into a run, it would be one of those quick shambling perambulations adopted by women caught in the rain or late for the bus, with just the bottom half of his legs in motion, while everything from the knees up remained relatively still. He'd get where he was going, but against physics, fashion shaping his gait, a more powerful force on the planet than anything yet discovered by man; appropriately feminine. Not that men didn't suffer the inconveniences of such dictates, but what they suffered paled next to corsetry and stilettos. Extremes perhaps, yet valid benchmarks...self-sacrificial.

Then his eyes caught a policeman. In a vehicle outside an off-licence. Windows down, short-sleeved, talking into a radio.

Michael changed direction.

He couldn't go back the way he'd come, so he headed instead for a gap between buildings that opened onto a stretch of derelict land, an old mine, long since levelled, black dust and dandelions its congregation. There were newer churches in these parts, mostly involving reconstituted ingredients. Past the site were houses.

Kids playing football scrutinized him. They had cold, cruel eyes; too young to hide anything.

They followed, curious and smiling. Who was the crazy woman? they wondered. Why was she walking here? They lit cigarettes and threw coals, which bounced off his umbrella.

Underneath he was laughing.

He admired their rudeness. It was honest. They grew bored and returned to their game, goalposts fashioned from beer cans and the bones of old pit ponies.

Feet black, Michael arrived at a garden.

The contrast was magical. From death to life, a boundary marked by wood slats and chicken wire. Nothing substantial. Still, he feared to trespass. Was it that he belonged among the dead? Or was life just too scary? Unable to decide, refusing a referendum, he followed the makeshift fence to its corner, then on to a scrub path that turned into concrete and eventually tarmac, a short distance from there to the road that marked his original trajectory. Though what it was he'd aimed for was forgotten.

Escape, surely. Funnykins was back there, a teddy bear in mortal combat with a tom cat, himself fleeing the scene like a frightened bride the embrace of a new husband, at once embarrassed and ashamed, victim to a man/woman compatibility struggle that was, in reality, as complex and dangerous as Lego.

He'd hit his head, and never fully recovered. Sledging in his anorak. X-rays revealed nothing, but to the love apple there were obvious cracks.

He'd fallen down the stairs, off his bike attempting a wheelie, out of a tree, from a roof, over a fence, banging his cranium on surfaces as varied as limestone and linoleum.

He'd had stitches. Bruises, large and small, had adorned his frame. There were metal plates, screws in his limbs. He'd had skin grafts and his tonsils removed. His appendix had exploded.

But all that was behind him. Growing up, eventually, had seen a long running series of accidents come to an end. Now he only sliced his fingers, minor injuries more the result of carelessness than folly. He had recently poisoned himself; out of stupidity, using the same glass for wine and Indian ink.

He was getting old, it seemed.

'That's disgusting,' she opined, reclining, naked.

Disgusting maybe, but she liked it.

'How long have you been carving dildoes?'

'They just come out that way,' he explained, turning the object, using it to stroke her thigh.

'Phallic.'

'Admittedly...'

'But nice...all the same...'

Dioecious creature, he watched her eyes close as he parted her labia with the wood, its shaft a convolution of roundels, three-dimensional and smooth, flowing curves that borrowed her sheen as he worked them both.

It gave him an erection, sculpting, the intimacy of self and material like nothing else.

Sex was an adequate substitute.

To combine them was difficult, extraordinary yet limited; of her he could only shape so much.

Hands covering her face, she raised her hips.

'Hmmpff...'

'Nice?'

'Ohmmm...kind of.'

'Nice.'

At which point he drifted off.

The candles no longer bathed him. Her skin no longer transfixed. Instead, within the scope of his vision, affected in part by cannabis, several elves meandered, one riding a bicycle, the others on foot. Six inches tall, they dressed in baggy dolls' clothes, the looted wardrobes of many a Barbie and Barbie clone. Whatever they could get their hands on. Easy, as the security was lax. They took furniture too, even rooms, entire houses if transport could be arranged, cardboard and plastic dwellings they'd hitch to battery-driven racing cars and locomotives. The elves weren't fashion conscious or vain. Their skin was pale, a waxy grey-blue. They looked like tiny corpses, zombies whose presence bode ill.

The elf on the bike spoke to him, gesturing wildly; but it was in German, squeaky Frank, and he failed to comprehend. Something about wings? Yes, the miniature cyclist kept pointing at his back, flapping his arms – that was clear enough. But not the message, the significance. These were fallen angels perhaps, employees of Heaven who had somehow become detached, or laid-off. They required his help, he supposed, in a way he could not fathom. He might fashion them pinions, for theirs had been clipped. But in this would he invite God's wrath?

'Atheist,' he stated, not believing.

'Hnngnh?'

And he was here, his fingers wet.

'Not you,' he said.

All movement ceased. He'd destroyed the moment.

'Take it out.'

Michael complied, removing the wand as she removed herself, as he had been removed by mathematics, by the magic numbers estranged.

Nine: Dynamo

Chemicals, they washed through his brain, a flood of misappropriate hormones and ill-disciplined visceral secretions whose tumult sparked chaos, electrical storms to gouge and raze.

Steroids drove him crazy, their interaction a confusing medley of physiological occurrences, each attempting to climb over the others, internecine tumblers all wanting to be at the top of the pyramid, with none prepared to give way. And where the body led the mind followed, collapsing in on itself, attempting increasingly risky rationalizations until there was nothing left but delusion, the worst kind of cure, the drama thereafter to be set on a different stage.

Either that or the acute ward. Drugged and safe. Mechanically restrained.

Pacification...

No. Michael Tomatoes simply accepted the inevitable. By not trying, or pretending to be in control, he fooled his thinking mass into believing it was safe, that no harm would come to it via paroxysm or meltdown, that it was in absolutely no danger of being permanently damaged by either direct physical action (him leaping from a building, say) or indirect mental vacillation. That it was OK. For instance...

Ten: Post Flux

It had seemed like drunken bravado, one of those stupid bets you either forget about or think better of come morning.

But Redbear was serious.

Asleep on Michael's settee, under a quilt of unknown origin, he looked beatific in a dishevelled, hirsute kind of way. Like a Greek god, Alexander himself here transported. Like nature personified, neutered by somnolence. Like nothing unsafe or deranged.

But Redbear was an elephant, and stubborn. Irked, it seemed, by something the love apple couldn't put his finger on.

And he wakened.

Smiling, smoking, scratching, belching, sucking tea.

'I took you're picture,' Michael told him, 'while you were asleep.'

Redbear shook his head.

'I'm doing a collage: Interpretations of Normal, Abnormal and Fucked.'

'That's the title?'

'Yup.'

'Shit title.'

'Thanks.'

Redbear pulled a face.

Michael wasn't sure he recognized him.

'So,' he grinned, teeth impossibly white against gums too purple; 'are you going to do it?'

Crap.

He rolled his own.

'Do what?'

The laugh was derogatory.

'Right...'

'Well?'

'I don't know.' He picked the lighter from the carpet and turned its wheel, grinding flint like corn; two surfaces meeting, unequal; soft and hard.

Flour and fire. Would he rise? Bake or burn...

'You were all for it last night.'

'I was...drunk.' He was going to say, "full of shit".

'Full of shit, you mean.'

The hardness in Redbear was new. Michael didn't understand. It was as if he'd worn away the surface to reveal – not aggressiveness, but persistence. Redbear wouldn't let go.

'You'd have to help me.'

'Of course.'

'We could get arrested.'

'So?'

Why was he nervous? He'd done worse. He'd seen the inside of a cell.

Then he realized: he wasn't alone, there was someone else turning the page, dictating the words, another person involved in the mind game that to Michael Tomatoes was Michael Tomatoes, his to spell and shape. A third party beyond his control. Redbear, curled beneath a quilt he'd made his own and sure, in the near future, to curl under again. To infiltrate.

Was that what he was doing?

He could kill him, he supposed. But how to dispose of the body? Too big to trash. He'd have to cut him up, mail him to different parts of the world. Expensive in stamps, though. Cheaper to buy a spade. Or exhibit his remains, limbs and organs a mélange of disparate themes, from hunger to thirst, the transference of energies, biology made simple, in cross-sectional detail.

'Any more tea?'

'Sure.'

With an axe.

A Sunday in April.

They had to wait till it got dark. Not too long, as Michael hadn't got up till one, the intervening hours spent recuperating, in preparation, down the pub.

'Should be easy,' Redbear assured, his confidence bolstered by pints and roast beef. 'I can't see anything going wrong.'

'No,' Michael replied, incredulous. 'Me neither.'

Ten o'clock, and the city centre was mostly quiet, just a few groups of revellers milling like pigeons, tripping over one another and talking in high, dislocated voices.

An ordinary evening. The rain had held off.

Redbear hefted the cardboard drum and Michael slipped his arms through the harness straps. It was heavy, the drum cylinder able to rotate on a spindle welded to the frame of an old rucksack, a kilometre of thirty millimetre red ribbon bought wholesale at a knockdown price thanks to Red's mum being dressmaker to an amateur operatic society, currently staging, complete with line dancing, The Barber Of Seville in Eighteenth Century France.

The idea was simple. Take an eccentric path through as many streets, restaurants, hostelries and pubs, round pillar-boxes, litter bins, bench seats and lamp-posts as he could without being waylaid, stymied, pole-axed or entangled, doubling forth and back until the ribbon ran out. Easy. As installation art it made perfect sense. Childlike and annoying, his route would take in and tie up burger-munchers and cinema-goers, bind and restrain bar-proppers and pool-table groupies, cause pedestrian chaos, bring lovers closer together and strangers to exchange the time of day in a variety of ways from cordial to explicit, fist-fights erupting, drinks toppled etc., in the wake of one near exhausted impresario with no time to pause and a stupid grin.

Or at least that was the idea. What actually happened was that the heavens opened and the ribbon gained an adhesive quality that left Michael Tomatoes glued to an information kiosk, just two metres into his jaunt, the bright fibre of anarchy sticking out behind him like a cartoon tongue.

Redbear thought it hilarious. His belly shook.

The love apple just sulked.

Had it been his own idea he might have felt differently. As it was all he could feel was humiliated. He couldn't go anywhere with the ribbon. He was defeated by a solvent. The drum was a solid mass, bending his back...

Then the episode began.

He'd seen a psychologist once, and that's what she'd termed it; an exciting name for a mental state of absence. The truth was he couldn't remember, not accurately, and the various eyewitness reports were at variance, but after the ribbon fiasco it seemed he'd climbed the nearest building, a four storey Victorian office block, and disappeared for two days over the slates before surfacing, smeared in dog shit, in a skip outside a butcher's shop under refurbishment – fifteen miles away.

It was Vanessa who found him, on her way to work one morning, the bus stop within earshot of the waste receptacle. Or was that nose-shot? Either way, she'd taken him home, cleaned him up, later admitting her obsessive attraction to "weirdoes".

Michael promised never to do it again.

'Do what again?' She mocked him, unimpressed by his proclamations.

He thought a while before answering.

'Love another.'

She wasn't expecting that. She wasn't sure what he meant by it.

He figured she'd vanish anyway.

The calmness she brought frightened him.

That and the truth.

Meanwhile, a future self looked up at the stars in daylight. There weren't many, but the few whose brightness pricked the blue did so in the pattern of a porpoise, a hunted creature playfully flicking its tail. Michael identified with it, smiling from beneath the umbrella. Somehow he'd persuaded a man to buy him an ice-cream, which, as he was distracted, dripped to his knuckles. The man had been about forty, in a business suit with clean shoes and a handkerchief in his breast pocket. What he was doing buying strange women ice-creams Michael didn't know. Perhaps he was lonely, or merely sympathetic to ugly girls. Whatever, he'd followed this shoeless gamine a short way before capitulating to embarrassment.

Michael, intrigued, had waved.

The bathroom was spotless. The longer he stood among its fittings the cleaner it became. He began to feel dirty; perhaps the desired effect. The shower, bath and sink were seducing him. The toilet, previously incidental, solicited in tandem with the bidet.

USE US! they screamed.

He felt like prey.

The approaching, silent, chrome and porcelain jaws of the bathroom widened to accommodate him...

Feeling he had no choice, he turned a tap on.

No water flowed, however, rolling round the sink till it disappeared in a fast stream down the plug hole. In Purgatory, for dramatic effect, he might have expected blood in its place, thick and lush. But the reality, hot and cold, was pineapple juice. From the shower head golden yellow pearls of stickiness. In the toilet and bidet sweet sluices and jets of...well, what looked like piss. That was the best description of it; liquid waste from some goddess, waters he was required to bathe in as a sign...of what? Obedience? He couldn't tell. He was trapped. He stepped under the shower and glazed himself.

All his body hair washed off, dissolved by the acidity of the juice. Michael watched it gurgle between his toes, scorched pink.

He must look like Ramch, he thought. Maybe that was it. The man he'd encountered earlier had been bald; only not pink, but brown, as if the pineapple reduced its guests to their barest selves. Made children of them, innocent and clean, without the roughness of age and experience gained in the living world.

Here they were as babes.

Turning the shower off he stepped out, took a towel from the rail and faced the white door.

Electric and pure, he was able to attract it open.

A woman stood naked in the passage and he blushed, stepped aside permitting her access, then searched for his clothing. Gone, of course. There was the woman's, blouse and skirt; but he decided against wearing those.

He walked briskly upward in the direction of the room of bones. The doors to either side of the corridor were as they'd been previously, structurally unique. Now though, each stood ajar. Just a crack, a few millimetres of light or dark with the promise of colour beyond. They were designed to tempt him, to lure him from his path; whatever that might mean. The fish he found peculiarly alluring, slow and peaceful to the point of indifference. Dangerously sanguine: they too had to eat. He pressed on to his original destination, the one room with which he was in part familiar. Others stretched on with the winding passage. But it was into this he moved, for it possessed a splendid warmth.

And an occupant...

Rich in both curves and curls, reclining on the skeleton bed like a lizard on a rock, was the fat whore.

'Tell me, Michael, what manner of creature are you?'

The question, coming so soon, was a surprise. He searched for motive in her languid gaze, her mottled limbs covered by the vaguest gauze.

'Man or mediocrity?'

'Man,' he answered, hopefully.

She smiled. 'Then take off that towel, and start behaving like one.'

She spread her legs and invited a different conversation.

She tasted not of pineapple, but liquorice.

She gripped his head so that he could not draw breath.

'How goes it, friend? Will history be enough for you? Will time, in consequence, become your greatest ally?'

Faint, Michael was no longer sure what he was hearing; whether she was even speaking to him.

Breath caught, restrained, memories surfaced. Of the more recent the suffocation of the blue man in her keep seemed pertinent. What was it she'd said? "Might he have been alive?" and thus have no place here, a stone's throw from the furnace. Was it life that dissipated him, gaseous and chill? The love apple felt only the heat of her loins. He had no temperature himself. In her power, under her control, unable to breathe he became detached from his body, his physical side, leaving his flesh for his mind - where the flesh might be true or false, experienced through or via a separate, tangible being. Not necessarily himself. Anyone. Anybody. Any given reality. All things, right or wrong, correct or mistaken. Perceived, extraordinarily, by him alone.

'A test, I think,' she mused. 'What say you, brave captain?'

'A hunt.'

'A hunt? Yes, I like the idea. But a hunt for what, sir? Butterflies?' She was all sweetness, talking to this other man.

Michael was unaware of him. On the outside, there was nothing to feel.

He laughed quietly.

Bones creaked as he lay down.

The whore grew wetter, and sighed.

'Something, I think, with four corners.'

'Like a box?'

'Perhaps.'

'Or...let's see. If it were a cube, it would have eight. So not a box as such. More a square...'

'A quadrangle!'

'A quartet...'

'Yes. Very good. In fact, exceptional.'

She giggled, rolling her chubby thighs.

'A foursome,' he stated.

'A foursome,' she echoed. 'A thing of fours.'

'A greater number than three. A lesser number than five'

'A singularity.'

'A four-legged thing.'

'And why?'

The answer was a long time coming.

'For no other reason that it is missing, my sweet. Though whether it wishes to be found...'

'This fourth.'

'...is arguable. Perhaps it is deliberately lost.'

'Hidden.'

'Concealed.'

'Set aside. Buried.'

'Beyond hope of redemption. Disguised...'

'Sailing under false colours.'

'Deviously employed.'

They laughed. Michael's ears popped, squelched.

'Oh, Victor...'

'Columbine...'

Eleven: The Cat's Feathers

Lust. A taut length of elastic between tonsils and testicles, wrapped about lungs and heart. Makes it difficult to breathe...

The horse was where he'd left it, almost. The balustrade against which it had come to rest was mostly consumed. The pineapple munching beast teetered on the brink of a fall, eyes black and gleaming, coat shimmering under the light of several moons, each with its face turned away, unwilling to witness the warrior's exit or, more likely, observing moments of greater import beyond a horizon stacked with colour, serene.

It greeted him with a shake of head and mane. Moonbeams scattered off the sword above.

Ramch wiped his hands on his chest and began to climb.

Reaching the sword he pulled it free, feet braced on the castle's irregular skin.

The cupola turned, its cropped head-dress of leaves menacing.

Ramch grinned, and in a few brisk strides took the blade to it, further truncating the once lush crown.

He set to then on the castle, hacking its soft flesh beneath the hoary rind and shaping the inner rings, from top to bottom, in the image, hundreds of feet high, of himself; only not a self he recognized.

His war-horse urinated, a thick yellow stream that together with the pineapple's juice formed an adhesive residue, one permitting their circumnavigation of the massive drupe, Ramch cutting and horse pissing, fruit and skin tumbling, spinning away as the pair made their way round, sculpting a route to the castle's base and the indigo plinth on which it stood. From there a stairway led into the rock, broad and steep, unlit. They made their way down, listening as the castle hardened overhead, the adhesive curing to a glassy film that cracked, dusting the stairs with crystal...

Michael opened his eyes.

Had he imagined it? He lay on his back in the rain, not knowing where it had come from, warm sluices polishing his face and bending the long grasses. His blouse stuck to his chest and his skirt clung heavily about his thighs. Neither hand held the Holsten umbrella.

All he could see were grass stems and clouds. He had no recollection of where he was, of what might lie beyond the constraints of his vision. The only noise was the rain spattering his lashes, the gentle soughing of green and yellow stems as water and air passed through them.

Something tickled his ankle.

A chasm...

He was late for work. Bedraggled. The supervisor turned purple, pulling at her collar to vent her anger, necktie company issue, suit regulation; smart, respectable, what was expected of employees of Hubert Mason.

Michael didn't have the nerve to apologize, scurrying instead to his shared locker and a pair of flat shoes, straightening his hair and adjusting his breasts before venturing out onto the shop floor, where he busied himself with customers, taking particular time with old gentlemen at the cosmetics counter. 'Hmm, I think this is more your shade, sir. And some anti-wrinkle cream, is it? No problem. There. Yes. Look in the mirror. Perfect.' He loved patronizing the old dears. His smile covered everything.

'What time's your break?' asked Rod, inserting a till roll with painted fingers. 'I hate this. I just know that bitch is watching. She'll be over in a minute, telling me I'm useless, sending me off to dust shelves or rearrange coat-hangars.'

Michael laughed, trying not to make it obvious. 'Eleven. Do you reckon she'll dock me?'

'How late were you?'

'An hour.'

'An hour? Shit, Tom, you're lucky she hasn't hauled you off to the back office.'

The back office. Tales related to it. Fables...

'Time yet,' opined Michael. 'It's upside-down and backwards!'

'What? Fuck!'

'Here, let me do it.'

'Thanks – see you at eleven.' And he was off, ducking behind hosiery.

Michael took the till roll and re-fitted it in seconds.

Two teenage boys hovered, wide-eyed and nervous. Twelve or thirteen, they bobbed and weaved, all skittish.

His smile became triumphant. A bra fitting! How he loved this rite of passage; even better with two initiates. He had fond memories himself of his first brassiere, the pride in his father's eyes as the little bow was positioned across his gaunt sternum. He'd worn it to bed, A-cup bursting with shredded newspaper, straps indenting shoulders and back for all to see in the changing rooms. Such temporary scars spoke volumes.

He'd become a man, with the welts to prove it. Soon the girls would start bothering him, hungry for his penis.

Michael sighed and wandered over. 'Need any help?'

'What? No – I mean. Maybe...I don't know. Maybe he does.'

Elbows were pulled and feet shuffled.

'Who? Me? I just came with you. I don't need anything.'

'Ah, don't be shy, boys; we've all been there. The first time should be special.'

They looked terrified.

'Seen anything you like?'

'Well...'

'Yes?'

The braver of the two, a scruffy blond, pushed his chest out. 'I've got mine already; but I don't have it with me,' he boasted.

Michael was confused. He sensed a lie. 'You don't?' What was he, some kind of radical? 'Doesn't your old man believe in them?'

The boy shook his head, attempting familial pride yet unable to sustain it. Definitely something missing.

'Support,' the love apple intoned, 'is vital.'

Blond kid nodded. 'It's just...'

'I understand.' And the other? His eyes were bright buttons. 'What about you?'

'Something in chocolate, with frills.'

'No problem. Follow me, gentlemen, to the fitting room...'

Replete with mirrors.

'Now, a small selection. Let's see.'

Rod made an appearance, seemingly desperate.

'The back office?'

Rod nodded, lip bitten.

'Take care of my friends here, will you? I may be some time.'

And that was it. If he'd expected ceremony there was none, no public dressing down or humiliating Tannoy. Just this: a verbal message, delivered by a friend. No joke, surely. Rod was incapable. Too serious...

But the doubts persisted, gnawing at his backbone as he made his way down long corridors of stock for disposal, last year's fashions boxed and shelved, hung on rails. The years' before, going back decades, items of apparel assembled in reverse chronological order down the improbable length of passages that broke at right angles and meandered forever, this historical maze lit at its nether end by a 40 Watt bulb and marked by a sign on a door reading OFFICE.

He knocked. Swallowed.

'Come.'

He entered. Stood. There wasn't much room, what there was occupied by a desk of black wood, scarred by some heavy object. The supervisor sat with her legs crossed in an ample leather chair behind it, impatiently tapping the pads of her long, steepled fingers.

'How long have you worked here, Michael?'

'Two years.'

'And do you like it?'

'It's okay.'

Her eyes widened and her head tipped forward. She lay her palms on the desk and peered for a moment at her nails. Sharp nails.

He found he needed the toilet.

'We haven't spoken much,' she continued. 'That's usually a good thing. But with you...' She got to her feet, buttoning her jacket. Unbuttoned her jacket and sat on the desk's edge. 'Perhaps we should have talked earlier.'

Michael said nothing. He didn't think it wise to reply. He had an uneasy feeling.

'Got a girlfriend?'

Eh?

She rose. Moved closer. 'I could have you fired.'

Oh.

Her breath stroked his ear, her hand his stomach, pulling gently at the blouse, teasing, making its way down his thigh and round to his buttock.

'I'd like us to be friends, Michael. What do you say?'

He was speechless; throat arid.

'Shy?'

'No,' he croaked.

'You've not been with a woman?' The expectant look in her face was too much. Gleefully wrongdoing, she turned him till his back was to the desk and lifted his skirt. 'Just leave everything to me...'

She wanted his semen, and would pull it from him, first sucking him hard, arousing him against his will, then laying him on the desk, trousers about her ankles as she squatted over him, vulva pumping, milking his groin. She threw her jacket off and loosened her tie, rolled her sleeves up. This was business, her actions seemed to say; needful, desirous. He did not enter the equation as anything other than a tool, a means to an end, her body in control of his, bending him to her carnal wishes.

'That's my boy!' the supervisor encouraged, riding him. 'Keep it stiff now. Wouldn't want to hurt you.'

He took the threat seriously, believing he had no choice.

'There...yes...there...oh, you are a good boy, Michael...'

Her eyes closed, teeth bared. Nails incised the black table.

He emptied his balls inside her.

'There,' she repeated, leaning over to kiss him. 'Good boy, Michael. Now, get yourself cleaned up, I've work to attend to.'

Sliding off the desk he pulled his skirt down. The supervisor straightened her tie and fastened her cuffs, donned her smart jacket.

'You can go now,' she told him. And as he turned for the door, 'Friends?'

He made no answer.

'Michael?'

A chasm of stars superfluous, having no place in any sky, filled him with dread and wonder.

'Why don't you take the rest of the day off, hmm? You're looking a little pale. Must have caught a chill or something.'

The space contained many horsemen.

'Yes,' he said. 'I think I must.'

'Tomorrow then; be on time,' the supervisor instructed, before shooing him into the bleak corridor.

And a meeting of minds, contestants frozen, suspended, radiating the light in this firmament, lives fabulous yet unknown.

The pink man, mounted, sword trailing, studied the closest.

They were heroes, he saw, good and evil, separate and combined, individuals not dissimilar to himself in that they fought for desperate ends, at the mercy of gods and lesser beings, battles raging across continents and down years, men transported through life, death and time. Each carried many names. Like weapons, these titles were honed, forged, earned – carrying weight in distant realms and travelling before, the very mention of them enough to stretch gaits and loosen bowels. Each was terrible in his way. Even those that were kind.

He stood among them, recognizing himself, seeing himself as changed.

They gazed back, expressions fixed, giving nothing of their who or why. And that he understood, for knowledge of them, his kindred, was nothing, meant nothing...until, in turn, he was that hero, each alive.

Sort of but not quite.

It was how she said she loved him.

It was his understanding of reality.

Arrested for indecent exposure, she paid the fine.

He wondered if he was still on for the cheesy macaroni.

The were fire engines outside her home.

She looked at him quizzically.

Explain?

I have absolutely no idea, he lied.

The ginger cat was visible beneath a hedge, a sleek marmalade strand.

Funnykins?

It was okay, she said, she was insured.

Michael, realized Michael, would be returning home.

He gulped.

Vanessa, in her way, held his hand.

She was amazing.

They got to his place, journeying by taxi.

The last of her money.

He had some in a vase.

They bathed.

She had no change of clothes.

Those he'd worn were already soiled.

She raided his wardrobe...

They found Redbear dead in the garden, crimson like a rose.

'We should bury him.'

'You don't want to call the police?'

'No.'

'Why?'

'He's dead. It's deliberate.'

'You think he committed suicide?'

'I don't know.' Thoughts of Mr Unger-Farmer haunted him. Had he come looking? 'Maybe he was killed.'

Vanessa insisted they not jump to conclusions. She had some experience in first aid from the Girl Guides. Although there had been no corpses, the nearest being Brown Owl in a state of collapse brought about through a half bottle of gin on a field trip, the consequence a guttering head wound via which she had earned her proficiency badge.

She took a deep breath and made to examine the bearded man.

Redbear's protruding tongue was purple.

'Looks like he choked,' she opined.

Michael admired her cool. Hands on, compared to his dispassion, which had no hands at all.

Vanessa pulled open the great ursine jaws and stuck her head in.

He waited for news.

She removed her head and blew. 'Doesn't smell too good, whatever it is. Pass me that stick.'

Y-shaped, she wedged his mouth open and disappeared one arm, found something and tugged.

It was a little bicycle. Vanessa looked at him for an explanation.

'Elves,' he said. 'I hadn't thought them dangerous.'

Her eyes were disbelieving; perhaps she saw something else. A coat-hangar perhaps, or the twisted remains of a pair of spectacles.

'Wait; there's more.'

The bloody remains of the miniature cyclist.

'Christ...'

'They live in the garden, I think,' Michael told her. 'They're dimensional beings given to mischief.'

She was incredulous. 'Mice?'

'No. Elves,' he asserted. 'Little people, like that.'

'Tom, this is a rodent.'

'And the bicycle? How many rodents ride bicycles?' He had, he recalled, seen a monkey ride a tricycle at a circus; but never a mouse, certainly not without stabilizers.

Her head shook. 'It must have climbed in afterwards, after he swallowed the wire.'

Why was she ignoring the evidence? Couldn't she face it, accept the truth?

She tossed the elf over the fence.

'Come on, help me get him into the house.'

Inside, out of the sun while she washed her hands, he smoked. The cigarettes were Redbear's, a shared weakness with which Michael did better to cope.

Sat in a chair of crushed beer cans, his friend appeared alive. The vivid colours had drained, giving him a natural pallor. He looked well, in fact, something Vanessa mentioned on her return, knuckles on hips. But what to do with him? Michael didn't want any more run-ins with the cops. On the other hand...

'Where's your car?' she asked.

'I left it in the woods.'

'In the woods? Whereabouts?'

He had to think hard. 'Can't remember.'

'Shit. Know anybody with a van?'

He had to think hard again. 'Max.'

'Who?'

'He ferries stuff around; stuff too big for the car.'

'Can he be trusted?'

They were behaving like criminals, he thought. 'Sure – so long as we don't tell him what it's for.'

'Fine. Give him a call.'

Michael hesitated.

'Well?'

'He's out of town. Removal job.'

She mouthed an obscenity.

'Why don't we just leave him here?'

'He'll decompose. He already stinks.'

'Yeah – but we could leave. I need to escape. It's not safe.'

'And go where? Tom...Michael...what's happening?'

'Number fifty-nine,' he confessed.

She shook her head confusedly.

'Mr Unger-Farmer,' he said.

'Who?'

'The Devil, who else?'

'You don't believe that.'

'The homunculi must work for him. Look at Redbear. Look at what happened to your flat.'

'The Devil did that?'

She'd take some convincing, he saw. 'It was your teddy bear; Funnykins; they got to him.'

'Now I know you're nuts.'

'It's the truth, Van. I wouldn't lie to you.' Had he in the past? 'We need to go on the run.'

There followed a terse silence.

Then, 'Right. Better pack.'

Humouring him, but it would do for now. He needed to find his car and the package. He needed to find his spare keys. He had money in the bank from a recent spree of sales, particularly the roomgoyles with which he had established his reputation, crude corner pieces shaped from old railway sleepers, the oak yellow and hard. They peered at him here, a foursome in his own living space, ugly and malformed, creatures both evil and kind; impossible to judge, as they'd been friends in his hands, under the knife. And now? Snakes' eyes and eagles' beaks, they occupied four corners, wings furled and throats scaled, cracked and lined...

'Under the stairs,' he said. 'A duffel bag.'

Twelve: The Metal Lens

He'd left his glasses...in the car? He had some sunglasses in there for sure. But his normal pair? They weren't on his face; failed to recall when last he'd been aware of them sitting on his nose, holding on to his ears. Must have lost them somewhere.

Vanessa's, that was it, along with his clothes.

In a fire.

A conflagration, the black horse stamping amid raging coals, smoke and steam venting, the ground erupting, baking orange and yellow dissolving in a white-hot maelstrom of...corduroy. Two Japanese delivering pizza menus. Well, that's one way to earn a crust. Vanessa slapped him on the shoulder. 'Let's go.'

The Japanese, boy and girl, regarded him strangely.

He thought of the pizzas unborn, awaiting an order. A strange mode of procreation; just a phone call away delicious thin-based cheese 'n' tomato pepperoni with green peppers and mozzarella.

Parents, these days.

He was hungry. There came an ice-cream van, jingling merrily up the road.

The Japanese shivered. Sympathy for the frozen children, the stillborn progeny of milk and sugar, silent and cold.

It was sinister, he thought.

The colours seemed to pale, bleaching away as if sucked. Strawberry, lemon and lime, banana and blueberry leeched from the world as if at the insistence of a mouth and tongue, the ice-chilled reality of flavours bleeding down a throat of fear. Michael felt himself pale. He looked at his hands and they were white. Vanessa eyes were colourless, opaque spheres. She was blind – blind to what was happening around her, at least. Her gaze was fixed on the surface, the shimmering, oily superficies that offered the illusion of depth but was in fact flatness. Safe then, spared the vague realm of the underneath, the subvisual dimension of possibilities in which he was forced to live; or exist; no life as such, just an indeterminable phase of breathing when aware of breath, sleeping when aware of sleep, finding himself herein, discovering himself lost. No place to abide. Best send a substitute.

Name?

'Hey...or you coming or not?'

She brought him back.

To lose her, he realized, would be a mistake.

But it was out of his hands. The ice-cream man, impatient, drove on.

He was watching again, drawing, describing what he saw in swift strokes of charcoal, interpreting all and misrepresenting some. It was ever the way; there was no quota for accuracy. The pink man had fought his way through a series of trials, decapitating man and beast, opening stomachs and sharing their contents with the black horse, before reaching these walls, height immeasurable, breadth unimaginable, each stone a wall itself, elongated and rough, like skin cells under a microscope, singular, each possessed of a life of its own, all the information needed to construct the entire gargantuan defence. And he had to scale it somehow, find a way through or over. For this was the boundary wall of Purgatory and beyond lay the precincts of Hell.

Ramch sat with his back to it, having struck sparks with his sword. There was no cement between the bricks; not as he knew it. There was a coruscated mass of flesh and blood, penitents squeezed from both sides: some trying to escape, others trying to get in. He'd have to fight his way through.

'Angular boy.'

'Van...'

It was what he called her, waking in her arms, falling asleep in her lap, outside of space and time where the mathematics didn't count.

1+1 = 2.

There was no escaping it, however.

Like infinity...

1-2-2-1 or 2-1-1-2; or 1-2-2-1 2-1-1 2 2-1-1-2 1-2-2-1; or 2-1-1-2 1-2-2-1 1-2-2-1 2-1-1-2 1-2-2-1 2-1-1-2 2-1-1-2 1-2-2-1 1-2-2-1 2-1-1-2 2-1-1-2 1-2-2-1 2-1-1-2 1-2-2-1 1-2-2-1 2-1-1-2; and so forth. Might as well be oranges and pears.

Orange-pear-pear-orange.

Pear-orange-orange-pear.

Where each value could be represented by a set, the pattern remaining constant.

O-P-P-O P-O-O-P P-O-O-P O-P-P-O; or P-O-O-P O-P-P-O O-P-P-O P-O-O-P O-P-P-O P-O-O-P P-O-O-P O-P-P-O O-P-P-O P-O-O-P P-O-O-P O-P-P-O P-O-O-P O-P-P-O O-P-P-O P-O-O-P.

More simply: oppo or poop; or oppo-poop-poop-oppo; or poop-oppo-oppo-poop oppo-poop-poop-oppo oppo-poop-poop-oppo poop-oppo-oppo-poop.

Where oppo = 1 and poop = 2.

Ergo: oppo+oppo = poop.

No wonder he had a headache.

Little wonder she thought he was nuts.

Vanessa had a plan.

'We can borrow my sister's car; she doesn't live too far from here.'

'You have a sister?'

'Two actually – but that's another story. She won't mind as long as I promise to bring it back.'

She looked at him sceptically when she said this. Michael nodded.

'Come on. It's nearly three already.'

He shouldered the duffel bag and followed her lead. The main street was full of shoppers, variously dressed, gambling on the weather, and they crossed unmolested, cutting through back lanes and side streets until they came to a big house by a cricket ground, some twenty minutes later. Michael spent the time going over the contents of the bag in his mind, a survival kit of tinned fruit and teabags, chocolate bars, clean socks, various T-shirts and lightweight camouflage netting, a false moustache and a Swiss army knife along with a tube of toothpaste, soap, a selection of drawing pens, permanent markers, a compass of his own design (unperfected...) and a packet of condoms, ribbed for her pleasure.

That was about it really; although he couldn't remember when last he'd checked the contents, so doubtless some details had changed.

Nobody home. Vanessa had a key. She made him wait by the garage. Minutes later the wide aluminium door levered open. The car's engine started. 'Get in.' And they were underway, decided...

In which direction the woods lay, at least; Michael was sure of that. Vanessa too, who'd been dragged through nettles and across streams, mud to her knees, in order to view two trees wrapped entirely in tinfoil, glimmering magically, blue and purple in the late evening sun, dancers poised in metal skirts and slacks, fingers outstretched, heads thrown back.

The love apple often came out this way. Usually alone, at night. 'To converse with owls,' he joked.

He knew it well, but still couldn't remember where he'd parked.

'Where do you normally park?' she quizzed.

'I don't,' he replied. 'I just stop and get out.'

So they did, coming to rest by a toppled gate, plagued by midges and inhaling dead bark and live sap.

Cloud-shadow dimmed the light.

'Now what?'

He picked up a stick and pointed. Bending one knee he thrust. Sentiment du fer...

In the space between the stones the bodies lay thick. Not all of them moved; some had long since given up, choosing to rot where they sagged or, more originally, desiccate. Ramch, without his horse, the black beast stationed beyond the wall as it was too big to pass, probed with his long sword, tickling a stench of body fluids and crystalline, stringy guts. The damned rose at him, seemingly out of reflex, and he cut them back like grass. Progress was slow, yet steady, the traffic a maelstrom of decay, increasingly lubricious, the slime of putrefaction a packing grease, the odour of death a surface oil, a suppuration crushed from the pores of all those crammed into this humanly negative bearing race. There were cavities, dark recesses where only smells moved. There were narrow cataracts where it was necessary to separate limbs from torsos and heads from necks.

Fires and floods.

'Here's some tyre tracks,' Vanessa said. 'Recognize them?'

He thought it an absurd question, but not wanting to upset her kept his mouth shut and looked. The rubber's spoor impressed earth once sodden now set, rolling handprints whose palmistry he read with an uncanny depth, picking shaped nodules of soil and crushing them between his fingers, the faecal remains of countless miles, smelling his digits and pursing his lips. It was his car all right. He planted the stick in the ground and dropped to his knees.

'Yes?'

Michael imagined himself passing this way, seated eighteen inches above the soft loam and its tell-tale prints. He stepped inside that head, that time; but the image was as unclear as the event. Recalling his portfolio sharpened the focus, only not enough. Lacking in detail if not definition was an impossibly stark outline in the distance, way beyond anything he was accustomed to seeing, the silhouette of a man about whom the world collapsed. A cut, a rent, the figure stared back.

'Hey...' She prodded him with a foot.

'The other side of those trees,' he said.

'You can see it?'

'No.'

'Then how do you know it's there?'

He shrugged. Toting the bag he wandered off.

'Wait!'

She was ill-pleased, only laughing. Annoyed, if effervescent.

The clouds multiplied.

There was a chill wind like breath...the breath of the anti-Claus, the love apple was reminded, a story of childhood terror welling up from his shins; Christmas in Hell courtesy of an aunt who mainlined speed and necked Pernod, the smell of aniseed vomit-inducing...

Santa Claus the bastard, and his kick-arse reindeer!

Old Nick in his red boots, drinks blood this time of year!

(sotto voce)

All the little children, curled up in their beds

Better watch the chimney...

Or they'll wind up dead.

Santa Claus the bastard, no presents in his sleigh!

Just the hearts of boys and girls, beating to this day!

He shivered.

That aunt, the inspiration behind a series of anti-Christmas cards he'd produced (Xmas Sucks! Burn the stable!), had hanged herself New Year's Eve. Not a happy memory; but useful all the same.

'Wipe that smile off your face, young man!'

Yes, auntie.

'Come walk on my spine...'

Vanessa was waving her hand in front of his blanked visage. It was raining. The clouds, tightly bunched, leaked.

The car had no windows and was on bricks. The passenger door was missing, as was the rear parcel shelf, the bonnet and sundry engine components.

But the box?

Twenty feet away, dented. Michael breathed a sigh of relief, temperature uncertain, turning the multi-stamped and franked parcel over in his hands, holding it to his ear and shaking it. Nothing rattled. As before. Still, it was reassuring.

Opening the duffel bag he placed the box inside. Vanessa held an A to Z, using it as an umbrella.

'Can we at least get in the car?'

He was puzzled. 'Mine?'

'No, stupid; mine.' She rolled her eyes.

It sounded like a good idea. But Michael had other plans. Water ran into his mouth, clear and fresh, streaming down his face, neck and chest like coldly pulsing veins, the fluid nourishing, his skin taut, grateful of the speeding life-stream that brought vigour to his muscles and colour to his flesh.

Inhaling, he felt his bones bend.

The expression on Van's face was scything.

Seeing it he ran away...

Through streams and rivers, across an aqueduct funnelling semen to a womb magnificent and ordinary, from which sprung the demonic host, familiar yet strange, a species apart, only part of the species, quietly counting their change.

Toward a pylon, a mile hence, radiating messages in a language unrecognizable to anyone in a vegetable state, pulses intangible to a closed mind, one with no doors, only shutters, electromagnetic voices across a vista of ash, beech and oak, silent words the love apple interpreted as kind – but which might as easily be cruel, like a girl's smile.

But what a girl! Charged, this woman, with everything a man could desire, electric in her instance, bilingual in her charm, floating dovelike on one's arm, the apostle of love laid bare, shaved and manicured, a dizzying waveform given substance through the medium intervening, in this manifestation, air, the ghost of wet-dreams and solitary afternoons, of too much drinking and insufficient...reality...stubborn and life-threatening, the rain hammering on his head, the focus of his desire a fixed structure of painted steel lethal in its work and fastened, by bolts large enough to be clothes' poles, to the earth.

He ran through bracken, wetly exuberant, tripped once over a fallen larch, its former self a carcass giving rise to fungus, ants scurrying, leapt twice a stream that doubled back, but which he outmanoeuvred, thwarting its trickery, and in three minutes – or so he reckoned, watchless – made it as far as a field and a fence. The pylon hummed, inviting him near. But the fence was barbed wire. Michael's lungs heaved. Not to be outdone he looked left and right for a gate or stile. None. The wire ran both sides of stained wooden posts, four feet high. It was not meant to be crossed. He could try cutting it, he thought, only that seemed like cheating. This was a test of the pylon's making, her metal strung, meshed and tined. Standing on the lowest wire he found it strong enough to take his weight, yet flexible enough to throw his balance. He pictured himself caught like a rabbit in a snare, having to chew his leg off to escape. The fence was an instrument, with strings not for music but torture, chords determined by the struggle of its prey, a fearsome sieve here erected to keep ill-suitors from the warm steel embrace of the goddess. Her electricity wasn't free.

She mocked him. She dwarfed him. The rooks on her arms shat their displeasure. He was unworthy, they told him.

Michael shook his fist at her entourage. He threw stones. They only circled and laughed. They were too high.

The sun broke through, radiating off her frame.

The rain stopped, the last drops shattering into a rainbow.

His heart hurt, he found, losing it in his chest a moment. Did it move around? The pain floated in and out of focus.

Calmly, he walked, the detritus about him spewing foam. Pieces of meat hung from the sword, its toothed edge with a visceral coating, its straight edge reflecting the gleam of innards ruptured, its runes varnished with excreta and its central channel mired with the clingy residue of skulls.

Beasts there were, tormentors, ghouls to chase the many, most whose direction was forgotten, if ever known, their drooling nightmares hunting them down twisting stone corridors, byways in the wall Ramch avoided, mindful of being side-tracked by the entreaties of innocent-seeming children, small and afraid. It was him they should fear, the pink man daubed with gore, who even the monsters proved shy of, thinking him one of their own.

But still the smallest hands were upraised, as if begging water. How did they come to be here? he wondered, recognizing it as weakness. He was not here to defend. He was just passing through. Hell itself, in all its carnal bleakness, was his destination. Hell, where he would be told...

And the question?

A stinking reptilian creature snatched a child in its jaws. Singular in years, she did not scream.

No time.

He brought the metal down, slicing it in half. But by then it was too late; her pain, now his, was real.

Magnified, blossoming with detail, the world moved beneath, written in footprints and described by soil, grass and insects as a place where feet might tread, a mutable landscape composed of individuals, assembled from shapes and contours. Crushed, malformed, corrupted. Blighted by too hot summers and too cold winters. Ravaged by disease. Beautiful any time of the day, the light playing off dew drops and butterflies' wings. Wasted. Rotten. Perverted, thorns made to inflict pain, suffering in a wave of poisons, from a myriad insect bites, swamped by horror as is nature's law...survival of the fittest.

Interpret, he thought; or imagined, pacing toward a horizon glittering with yellow broom and red poppies, a circus tent of the afternoon, albeit waning, spangled and mottled, clowns inside, jugglers and magicians, all manner of performers about to perform: what lay over the horizon a curtain call.

Ramch plagued by ideas, haunted by consequences, coming from every side the misconceived, the misinformed, the hollow souls of foot soldiers only following orders, the deaf and the blind, those with excuses and those with shame, those whose skin burned, guilt weighing heavy on their shoulders, those that professed pink to be blue and those who lied about their shoe size, a raft of would-be Cinderella's choked by conscience, troubled by sisters more worthy perhaps, having lied to their fairy godmother, having claimed what was not rightfully theirs. Souls in torment, here embroiled, a neverness of culpability theirs to enjoy. No wonder they screamed. The air, the voice, the torment was pulled from their lungs. They wished to escape, to pass beyond the wall, to find sanctuary. But the wall was a maze.

The pink man was deafened.

He killed and mutilated.

It made no difference. Not here. Here the dead and lame were commonplace.

He slept in a ditch and woke to a new day, not knowing its name.

He had the duffel bag.

Damp but not cold, he rolled onto his arse and straightened his eyes, focusing on a cow more white than black; easier to look at that than colour, this neutral bovine.

Something told him he was in trouble, but how deep or bad he was unable to gauge, brow furrowed, mouth askew, wondering at all the things that had gone before, most of which he'd forgotten, the knowledge of his empty memory an irony he appreciated, yet one which poked him as if for fun. The image of a dead man in a garden came unbidden. A dead man with a beard. A woman and a cat, perhaps one and the same. A dark nemesis, determined and strange. They crowded his consciousness. But what pulled at him, what tugged was a feeling of belonging, of positioning, of noise from a stream.

Water. It marked the way.

Thirteen: Frequency Molestation

It was one of those things. They just decided, against sanity, to do it. Redbear insisted he had army contacts and could get his hands on some genuine explosives, but Michael was convinced of the necessity of a do-it-yourself firebombing. More intimate somehow. Instead of relying on black-market incendiaries, he wished petroleum and matches.

'It's no good if it looks like a terrorist attack. That comes with a certain inherent glamour. I want this to appear sloppy. Half-arsed, even. Not political but personal.'

Red shrugged his shoulders, jostling punters queuing for lager.

'Disgruntled,' the love apple stated, eyes misted over like the true believer. 'Like someone – me, you or whoever – just couldn't take it any more, and thought, "No! I can't stand it! I've had enough!" The revenge of the little guy, yeah? Fighting against the establishment. Besides, I like the smell; sulphur and four-star...' Inhaling deeply. 'Yummy.'

They agreed on Wednesday, during the late night phone-in.

They blacked their faces and dressed in tuxedos, red cummerbunds as utility belts and karate slippers as stealth shoes.

They took the bus and walked to where they'd stashed their equipment.

They stayed hidden until the eleven o'clock news, at which time Redbear approached the security gate and tapped a ten pence piece on the window.

Michael, watching from nearby bushes, admired the big man's cool.

The plan was to subdue the guard; only the guard was missing, so Redbear took things into his own hands and raised the barrier they could as easily have ducked under. Each carried two five gallon jerry cans as well as a mishmash of flexible plastic lighter-fuel refills and a bottle of spirits, Napoleon brandy for Redbear and Smirnoff Blue Label vodka for Michael.

They found the guard in reception doing a crossword puzzle and there followed a tense moment's non-verbal tussle during which the guard, in his sixties, appeared at first perplexed, then amused, thinking this some stunt of the station's – only he couldn't remember any. He pushed his hat back and scratched his head. The big man hugged him semi-ferociously and requested he leave the building, not call the police, and retire from uniformed duty.

Michael doused the plastic ferns.

They laughed at the portraits and drew moustaches.

Redbear trashed a door with a fire extinguisher and they made there way deeper into the building.

'Enemy headquarters.'

'The fortress of drivel.'

Everywhere there were speakers...

Not much music was played. Instead, droning out across an area of several hundred miles, the inane ramblings and conversational masturbation of a DJ who laughed at his own jokes and talked down to the squeaky teenage girls and bitter insomniacs who composed his active, willing audience. But it was not for them Michael Tomatoes leaked flammables. They were lost already. It was for all the passive listeners, the cringing masses whose employers and convenience store owners saw fit to brutalize their aural sensibilities with a mixture of banal intercourse and predictable airwave gimmickry. The boys were here to champion their cause, every man and woman made to suffer the faecal charms of late night local radio, whether entombed on the swing-shift or simply hunting after-hours comestibles. It was for them, the nameless, faceless victims of dire patter and irritating jingles. It was for a higher justice. To purge the ether and cleanse the atmosphere. That was why they were here, confronted by a red light and an ON AIR signal.

Freedom was only a combustion away.

They shook hands and shoulder-barged the studio.

Torched it, the entire building, people running and screaming, things exploding, a vast conflagration that had Michael and Redbear grinning like Cheshire kittens, their clothes on fire and their soles melted as they ran and screamed with engineers and producers, charging up and down corridors waving flaming swivel chairs and brandishing charred coffee percolators, the fire they brought engorged on non-flame retardant drapes, blinds and furnishings, spreading outward from its studio source and swallowing timber, cracking glass, melting plastic, until all that was heard was a roar, what Michael would later think of as a cheer, a celebration of a freedom bought with heat and violent gas reaction, the broadcasting paraphernalia it consumed bringing a quiet and a calm to the lobes of those afflicted by the station's previous vacuous outpourings, misrepresented as entertainment and delivered with an unappetizing sluggishness, a complacent lack of adventure, a lip-service to choice and a sneer, just barely disguised, at the innocent folk who had to stomach it all...

Yes!

Altogether a good evening's work.

In the morning, washed and scrubbed, burns dabbed and soothed, he phoned the request show, but couldn't get through.

The next time he saw Van she was suspicious. There were absurd artist's impressions on the news.

It took only a week for the radio station to get back on air.

Naturally, ratings, particularly for the late night phone-in, with a string of bad fire alarm jokes and references to "red hot" topics of discussion, went through the roof.

INTERMEZZO...

From here to there was an alarming distance, especially straight up and down, a fall as opposed to a stroll. One was much more fearsome, given that gravity and not perambulation was the driving force. If gravity worked sideways, he thought, we'd really be sin trouble.

Not that walking in a straight line wasn't beset with difficulty. Far from it. There were all kinds of obstacles to be negotiated, from brick walls to other people, hundreds and thousands of them, each attempting to get somewhere, in the process occupying space you yourself wished to inhabit, but couldn't, as that volume had been usurped.

Timing came into it. Measuring, too. Wisps of steam issued from his ears as he concentrated, making a series of adjustments in both speed and orientation, leaning one way then the other in an effort to maintain direction. The least deflection the better.

He started with something simple, the half mile to the supermarket as the crow flies putting in his path only one major road, four lanes of potential disaster, but otherwise just houses and gardens, bushes and fences to scramble over and wrestle through, utilizing doors and windows where possible, gates, ignoring the TV watching residents whose surprise at his appearance and subsequent passage through their living-rooms and kitchens, downstairs toilets and gazebos left them momentarily paralysed and disbelieving, sufficiently so that he could be on his way in seconds and they might return to whichever soap opera, film or documentary had previously occupied their attention. Dogs were more of a problem. He had to accelerate away from those. But he made it to the supermarket via roofs and embankments, and was so pleased with himself he took a taxi home, after first purchasing beer and pizza.

What he needed next was a challenge. Distance alone was insignificant. It was terrain that mattered.

He took his shoes and socks off and considered his toes.

Essential to every journey. But his toes looked unconvinced.

If it had been possible he would have built a bridge. But bridges required materials and advanced engineering know how. So a tunnel it was, requiring only stubbornness and the crudest props. Covert as opposed to brash, no Roman general conquering Europe would have approved. Generals though, Roman or otherwise, had tax payers to back them up and politicians to impress. He had only himself, his two hands and what sat between his ears, swelling and shrinking like a sponge, aching and disposed to falling asleep.

Getting started, as ever, proved the toughest. Once underway the excavations made good progress, hampered only by subterranean watercourses – natural and man-made – and a lack of geological information. Obviously there were rocks, but which kind and what degree of difficulty they posed, i.e., how hard and thick ran the seams, was unknown. Soil, loam, these were easy to dig, yet prone to collapse. As much time and effort went into shoring up the soft earth as digging through the igneous intrusions and sedimentary strata.

Maintaining a straight line was nigh impossible.

He had tools. His imagination. He had a destination in mind, what he called reality, there over the hill through which he drove his shaft, wide and narrow and dry and wet, a land not so much pleasant as occupied; for the place he left was his alone.

Anticipating diversions, he packed a few items he thought might be useful, and toted them in a sack.

Expecting adventures, he kept his pencil sharp, much as his pick, and wrote a diary of events by the light of a pocket watch.

Wishing to minimize the risk of accidents, he told himself not to get carried away; something which proved difficult the farther he dug, the tunnel stretching behind like a memory voided, expunged of past events.

Mushrooms grew under his fingernails.

He repeatedly banged his head.

The tunnel collapsed at some point, its rumble suggesting no turning back. But he was determined, controlling his breathing to conserve his air. The temperature rose with each passing mile.

He sweated buckets, his body replenished by frequent streams.

Sustained by the image of reality, he continued beyond track of time, the tunnel a shrinking space, a capsule, its walls closing behind, tightening like a sphincter as he no longer shored them up. The rocks grew softer, yielding to his spade. He didn't need the pick. The refuse became less and less, the subsurface stretching open to accommodate his form, which had begun, like its surroundings, to lose its shape.

He swam in lava.

He was heat.

The steam he generated found its way up to the world, powering geysers that rejoiced in fresh air, his spirit released.

Reality was invaded. The tunnel a success.

His soul drove the wind...

He stole to feed his drug habit.

It sat in the corner and slavered, making a mockery of its leash, a tether much longer than it appeared and made of some extraordinary elastic.

His habit painted and wrote prose, blinding him with imagery, its capacity for beauty its defence. But what if his eyes were wrong? He went to have them tested in the hope of a cure, a means of ridding himself of his nemesis. The prescription he was given turned out to be a curse, however, as the lenses provided simply accentuated the lines and intensified the colours.

Okay then, he needed to replace the drug, supplant it with another, one less sociologically damaging.

But what? What was legal and strong?

There was no substitute for alcohol. So he continued, stealing dreams and turning night to day, leaving confusion in his wake.

Furious for no obvious reason he punched the wall. The inevitable pain was almost enjoyable; its echo at least, once the agony had ceased to leave a throbbing like that of blood in loins. Sexy. There was a connection, he saw. He moved his fingers carefully, testing for breaks. The knuckles were slightly swollen, inflamed by a passion he could not control.

Curious, he decided to experiment. On himself at first, sticking pins in his knees and burning the soles of his feet, then to masturbate, substituting pleasure for pain in a medley of small wounds.

It left him breathless. He considered a victim, another to practice on. Preferentially willing, but...no buts. He'd get them to sign something, a contract. They'd use a word that meant stop. That was how it worked, he was sure. Only who? A girl, necessarily; he wasn't that adventurous yet. A stranger; had to start from scratch. Literally. The choicest of cuts.

He cruised the supermarket. His favourite haunt, home to single women with single shopping-baskets. But which of these would quiver at the touch of his Stanley knife?

Impossible.

He thought of personal ads.

Too slow.

A prostitute?

Too conservative, somehow. Not intimate enough.

Had to be a girl with a light in her eyes, intelligent and dignified.

He wandered the streets till it got dark, hanging around bus stops and criss-crossing the park.

And found her under an umbrella, anticipating rain.

Then.

Under the influence of automation.

Gear lever and steering wheel like erogenous zones, drunk and stoned, he lost several hours in the country, not recognizing the roads. Dark, fields and trees blank cut-outs, silhouettes through which he glimpsed stars, steering via instinct, weaving more than he thought; not much traffic to hazard and no police, blue lights ablaze, to challenge his course. It was like he dreamed. Far from home, too far to walk, he'd staggered to his car with the idea of sleeping there, only waking sometime later at forty miles per hour.

Lost, in time and space, fences, bushes, gates scraping doors and mudguards, wheels thumping curbs and bouncing from ditches. Too pissed to fully comprehend his predicament, yet sober enough to be able to continue, having no idea of direction, he drove, sideswiping undergrowth, the gap in his memory of an uncertain length. How was he here? Where was that? It was too bright in the car. He thought about turning the lights off, but didn't. Squinting, he followed the road, made a turn, doubled back and followed the road once more. The lights faded. He breathed a sigh of relief. He saw a sign, a name he knew, a village. His bladder stung. Lights again, on poles. Good sign. There were houses now, occupants sleeping. He couldn't read the clock in the dash.

The houses faded behind.

A blue shape sat on the bonnet. Another, green, had attached itself to the rear screen and was busily gnawing the wiper blade.

There were people in the car. He felt their presence, silent and cold. They were colourless, yet solid. They didn't move.

He didn't move his foot from the accelerator. Didn't glance aside. Not afraid, he followed the road, turned, turned, and found himself on a dual carriageway.

The blue figure reclined, hands behind head, its foot tapping just above the grill. Its green companion had disappeared. But no, he could hear it pacing on the roof, the metal popping, indenting and springing back under its ponderous weight. A green face appeared at the top of the windscreen. It waved, then breathed on the glass, misting it before writing a reversed HULLO with its flat finger end.

Like a sucker, he saw.

Someone sneezed in the back and someone else handed them a tissue.

He tried to keep a straight line, but felt the car rise above the road, floating like the rubber had worn away.

The green face spread its lips on the glass and blew, inflating its head like some weird toad. He could see right down its throat, see its luminous innards behind a flapping pink tongue. Shaking his head, he peered round it to where the blue creature squirmed, curled now in sleep and in danger of sliding off the bonnet altogether. He pointed, holding green's eyes. But green was unconcerned, unsticking its face only to smile, jaws full of piano keys and fingers playfully striking chords.

He was passed a lit cigarette. His surroundings looked suddenly familiar. The passenger door opened and he was alone.

In a manner of speaking...

The words came and went in a great swathe, hundreds of them overlapping about a bar stuffed with bodies, faces working, pumping sound, issuing smoke that billowed and was shaped by the conversation, the laughter and derision pouring from mouths, buffeting walls and rebounding in earlobes. Some words were solid, delineated in a number of sizes and styles and affixed to paper. Both machine printed and hand written, letters arranged and juxtaposed. He tried to take in as much as possible, but it was impossible to concentrate on any one strand. He'd listen to the person talking to him, yet another's voice would overwhelm; or a poster over the first speaker's shoulder would grab his attention and he'd focus on that instead, jerking himself back, realigning his mind and vision before the person addressing him realized. Only by this time he would have lost the thread of what they were saying and be unable to reply in kind, mumbling something vague and smiling, drinking, whatever, filling the gap in the hope they'd reiterate. It was hard work, concentrating on one person. His eyes slid off. He was drawn aside. They smeared on his glass and faded from his attention, which switched without cause, slipping at random as if sampling flavours, tasting the variety of words that occupied this audio realm.

They thought him rude, perhaps. Or just preoccupied. He sat in silence – his own, with no-one inclined to talk to him, their voices bouncing round; through him, but no longer directed at him. He melded with the furniture and peered at wrists and fingers, attempting to decipher their language, that of knee and hip, gestures controlled and accidental, a whole other level of conversation outlined in trousers and skirts. The audible world faded as he stared, and he became immersed in the subtle interplay of lit cigarettes and adjusted seating positions. The way a glass was raised or a lash fluttered, a beer mat was turned or a pool ball struck fascinated. A more beautiful language it was difficult to imagine. Secret though, like the accompanying odoriferous undertones of flesh and hair, smells natural and artificial lingering in the smoke-filled room, hovering midst the throng of intercourse, spoken and postured, the contracts forged and transactions made.

A girl waved a hand in his face, bracelets jangling hello. He articulated a smirk and shrugged.

She wanted to know where he'd been.

Was he going back again?

She crossed her legs in his direction and turned her shoulders, the swell of one breast pronounced toward her chin.

He wasn't sure how to answer.

He'd forgotten his dictionary.

No matter, over the coming hours he deciphered her in a number of way, lapping at her vulva and nipping the soft skin of her breasts, tonguing her as she him, their spoken words few, their gestures many, odours multiplied and heady, a dialect both rough and smooth...

I don't have a big penis

but it's an interesting shape;

though oftentimes slow to rouse

I've a tongue to compensate.

...like tarmac...

Accelerating and braking, negotiating obstacles, tunnelling and clambering over, unfastening gates and moving hinges, communicating with the outside world through an interpreter, her body the conduit, the garden and the living-room, both empty and occupied. Spelling her name a thousand ways. Along vistas and aisles. Driving blind and with your eyes wide, through light and dark, in the presence of warm flesh and almost understanding.

Via woman, alive.

AFTER ~ EXAGGERATION: as things heat up and cool down in Hell, a triumvirate of men and machine engage in complicated thought and action.

Fifteen: The Adjudicator

The fat whore told jokes to relax her customers, laughing as she stretched her pink knickers, flesh marked, indented, a script elastic, moulded to her thighs and belly the impressions of too tight silk and cotton. Her pale flesh was mottled, the fine mesh of pubic hair ensconced in its niche like a squirrel's arse hanging out of a silver birch, all leafless branches. The bra came off last.

Currently the subject of Herschel Byrd...

Regarding her portraits, oblivious of her own work, her drinking of semen and slaking of thirsts, the adjudicator considered briefly his situation: eternity spent in dour criticism of other's unearthly deeds.

Tenure. That was the question. Whether one was worthy or not of a place at this most heavily laden of tables – and as food, furniture or guest? The table was large, immeasurably, those assembled for the most part mundane. Their evil was casual thuggery; foot soldiers, they pretended to greatness, while the truly great gorged themselves on lesser brains. The whore was one of history's manipulators, drawing from her customers' accounts both cash and information, the latter a more luxuriant currency, hers to indulge, the former simply necessary to grease the wheels of trade. And greased they were, in death as in life. The well of penitents never ran dry. Her confessors queued for miles.

She would not tell him of her schemes, of course. She wished to see them bare fruit first. Then would she delight in juices cunningly squeezed; the more bitter the better, a taste for acid that was her very heart.

Another client dispatched she dressed perfunctorily and sidled across to talk.

'You seem preoccupied, Herschel. A little tense, maybe?'

He frowned. 'Spare me your wiles, please. As ever, I work.'

'Admiring my paintings?'

He closed one eye. 'I've not seen their like. A recent recruit?'

'In a manner of speaking. Am I under investigation, or is this, after all, a social call?'

'Everyone's under investigation,' he replied.

'Including you?' She put a hand to her ample bosom.

'Including me.'

The whore giggled irritatingly.

'But who judges the judge?'

'A committee,' he told her, straightening his tie.

There fell a silence between them. Byrd shuffled, checked his watch, all six hands in three-dimensional motion, while the fat whore lit and chewed a cigarette.

Sucking the last from the brand she flicked it over her shoulder, burning a hole in a chaise longue that had so many holes in it already.

'Back to work then,' said Herschel.

'Back to work...'

They weren't so different, he thought. Neither was here for the good of their fellow man – quite the contrary. In all its manifestations, identical in number to its populace, Hell was a locale of traitors. Ducks with shotguns. There were standards to uphold; and those standards were base.

Sixteen: Untitled

Delirium.

The system dictated the use of sparrows' nests as buttons. There was a sequence, which inherently he understood, but one with no logic behind it; a transference of alphabetical eggs. The ability to climb trees and shin drainpipes was essential, as was a knowledge of ornithology, as sparrows might to the amateur eye look much like blackbirds or thrushes.

The danger was inherent, too. Greasy bark and loose brackets, myopia and uncomfortable shoes all contributed to the difficulty of egg fondling, not to mention the vagaries of the spuggy's breeding season.

So far he had managed A through W (although M was dropped and T suspiciously cuckoo-like), locating the nests without too much trouble, in hedgerows and among brambles, in treetops and on building sites. In each case an egg was switched from one to the next, A becoming B and so forth, resulting in Z egg in A nest. Only now he was stuck: no X.

Stomach rumbling, he contemplated.

How to push?

There was the remote control and the elevator, the telephone and the cash register, buttons aplenty, one to zero, associated letters embossed or engraved. They came at him out of nowhere, big red buttons and cool blue buttons, green buttons and brown buttons, mother-of-pearl. How not to push? What else were buttons for? Holding trousers up? The threats, the abuse, the screaming were incidental. Going up or down? They simply confused him. He needed some control... a system, yes, it was in there somewhere, and he'd thought he'd found it. Only now this: no X.

Like losing a dimension...

A chromosome...

Identity, oddly, only being known as Mr X. Not a real name; a fiction.

Marks the spot. Saving that no spot is marked, there being no actual marker. So that was something else. No wonder he floundered. Loss of name, of place, of reality as he knew it. Couldn't even spell ylophone.

No wonder he had a headache.

Little wonder she thought he was nuts.

'Pistachio?'

'Thanks. Any beer?'

'Are you kidding?' Looking around. 'Maybe a sip of whiskey.'

'Eh, no thanks.'

'Suit yourself.'
Single or double breasted, he wondered, in make-believe conversation with a tailor, admiring the fellow's chalk lines.

French?

Windows?

'Uh-oh...look out.'

Exactly, through the glass...

'Fifteen stitches. Proud of yourself?'

What were any of them talking about?

'First time?'

Was everything a question?

'Don't worry; it's not such a bad place. There are worse...there are worse...' Fading away.

'Ask what's in the syringe. They hate that. They drop their shoulders and fold their lips and pretend like you're five years old.' A different voice, this. 'They have every right to restrain your person. They term it permissible force.'

He showed his bruises, buttons of irregular shape pressed into upper arms and lower abdomen, blue fading through brown and green to yellow, circuits beneath the flesh instructed to shut the fuck up and behave.

But not all the buttons worked.

Some were even pretend. Punch these buttons and no information was exchanged; no electricity, fluid, air or mechanical arm made any contribution to the kinetic energy of the world.

Fake buttons.

X.

That bastard sparrow would die!

Theoretically, in Y's grave.

W was its changeling. Thus X was saved, being W transmogrified.

Bingo.

He breathed a sigh of relief. Able to complete the sequence he did so, whistling like an ice-skater on water, pretending the temperature was ten below.

Just don't look down...

It was all cartoon violence anyway, the slap round the chops with the chicken in the chilled food section, the poke in the eye in the coffee shop and the kick in the shins outside the old peoples' home. None of it hurt. The expletives were random keyboard strikes. Even the policemen, in their strange hats, smiled – or were smiling, he couldn't remember which. Or what they'd done with his bag.

'SONS OF BITCHES!' One way to attract attention. 'YOU FUCKING CUNTS!'

Go for it, boy. See the lights come on? Why not take a piss on the floor?

Hang.

He didn't believe any of it anyway...

They couldn't do anything to him if they couldn't reach him. And who was going to come in here and look? Who would risk that? Some benign psychiatric nurse?

In your dreams, arsehole.

'In your dreams.'

'What?'

'The monsters come in your dreams.'

'They do?'

He was smirking.

He smirked back.

'Better get me to sleep then. Good night.'

'Michael?'

Mother...

'Michael!'

Father...

Hadn't seen either in years.

'We're going to take you home with us...'

Wait a minute. Weren't they dead?

'We'll take good care of you. You'll see.'

Buried. He remembered the funeral. He'd wanted to carve the casket; wanted a single casket, a cube, regular in shape; wanted...

'What are you doing here?' Conscious.

'We've come to see you. To take you home.'

'Home?'

'You know.'

'I do?' It felt better now that he was asking the questions. 'Tell me.' And making the demands.

They looked at each other, conversing in a language unheard, reading one another's faces, silent and cold.

'We've got ice-cream,' said dad.

'No.' He shook his head. 'I want a balloon.'

Mania.

They put him a dentist's chair in a white room in a white smock under a white light with a white man who smiled genially, stainless steel in his white gloved hands. The chair had leather straps, but these were left unfastened; a sign of trust, or a threat; he couldn't decide.

'Just a check-up,' said the white man nodding. 'Open wide.'

He closed his eyes, only to have them opened by a second white man in a white lab coat in a white room with white floor tiles. He too brandished stainless steel, crooked implements in his fingers he lifted from a tray held by a white nurse in a white uniform with white teeth and black shoes.

'If you're not going to co-operate...'

'I'm co-operating!'

He smiled now. 'That's better.'

Nurse also, lips like lilos...

Only he forgot to ask what was in the syringe.

Substance X, he supposed.

It housed new dimensions, a whole drug realm of unimagined strangeness. In a sense it gave him focus, like a third hand to stop the binoculars shaking. He could see clearly an immeasurable distance, the intervening flora and fauna benign, coloure softly, no harsh edges. A gentle cartoon world where death and corruption held only fascination. Nothing could harm him here. It wasn't real. Violence in this world led only to amusement, the flattening and pronounced throbbing of limbs and exaggerated bruises.

He was vexed by bunny rabbits...

Beautiful women cooed in his ear and his tongue unrolled, splashing his shoes.

He ran and was chased, whooping and yelling like a five-year-old, naked under the sun, diving in rivers and playing snap with fishes, ascending freezing mountainsides and enjoying cocoa with eagles.

The endless summer rolled. But always on the horizon lurked a storm.

Even from the highest peak it was difficult to gauge in detail, just a black swirling mass that grew in intensity as each day passed. It would come soon, spill inland like a tidal wave. He knew this, but didn't quite believe these lazy mornings and manic afternoons could end. After all, what danger might come is way? He'd shrug it off like an avalanche, thawing his limbs in a fire. He couldn't die here. This was a gentle land of extremes.

The storm was evil, he knew. It would tear him away.

It had a voice he recognized though was unable to identify.

It brooked no argument.

'You're in denial,' the storm mouthed. 'You're ridiculous.'

He didn't reply.

'You're obsessing,' they told him with some chagrin, voices raised over the din.

'I'm obsessive,' he replied, shouting.

Their disgust was obvious. They mumbled something. But all he could here was the helicopter.

Seventeen: Ward 9

'They pulled you out of the sea,' said Vanessa, 'at a reputed cost of seven thousand five hundred pounds.'

She'd brought him grapes, which she sat eating, spitting the pips into the brown paper bag.

He'd been flushed, she delighted in telling him; expunged from the land along with his duffel bag.

'Did they find it?'

She shook her head. 'No budget.'

Damn.

'If it's any consolation, I lost my shoes.'

Michael decided to ignore her. He knew who she was, after all. And himself? Yes, although a look in the mirror would, he believed, surprise him.

'You really did it this time.'

'Thank-you. Now go.'

'You want me to leave?'

She appeared genuinely hurt. Sadistically, he nodded.

As if this was her cue a nurse came round. Smiling as Vanessa departed, dangling grapes, she pulled the curtains to.

'I need a blood sample.'

Michael refused. He did not wish to leak.

'Mr Tomatoes...' Her tone dismissed argument and he rolled up his sleeve. 'Not afraid of needles, are we?'

'No. No – I like them.'

'Good. And I like rupturing veins. Sorry if I'm a bit clumsy: got the shakes.'

She took the blood, spilling none, and looked at his chart.

'The doctor will be here soon. If you want, you can ask him for drugs.'

Comedian, he thought, peering at her black shoes.

So this was a hospital. Did it have a name? The curtains back he could see other beds, other patients reading books or cutting toenails, a few with visitors, lineaments at once concerned and bored, babies in laps and toddlers on reins, older children having vanished into some medical laboratory to be the subjects of experiments, the practitioners of which having nothing but the best intentions. There were jugs of water and fruit bowls in abundance. Cards, newspapers. A sign. Handmade.

WELCOME TO WARD 9 – HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR STAY!

The sickoes...

Encouragingly there were no muscled security guards, or bars on the windows, to prevent unscheduled departure

He'd see what was for dinner (breakfast? lunch?) then escape.

In the time and place that was Byrd's current location, overlooking a dark mass of mangled trees and twisted metal stanchions, the result of an implosion, the adjudicator stroked his chin, peered at the wreckage, twisted a finger in his ear and shrugged.

'What's it mean?'

The man questioned shrunk.

I don't know, was his answer.

'Puzzling,' opined Byrd, feeling pleasurably cruel. The man was in extreme discomfort. Probably enjoying it though.

'Come along.' He clicked his fingers. 'Let's take a closer look.'

It was a theatre, or had been, a raised stage in a clearing on whose blood-soaked boards had stood the paraphernalia of execution, the audience crowded in the surrounding boughs or clumped together on the grassy apron, viewing the play from every angle, clapping at each axe stroke and guillotine resonation. The executions were for the most part historical re-enactments. Kings and queens, bishops and revolutionaries who shared a fate strode forth in full regalia or empty skins, calmly tipping their heads, arms and legs into straw-filled baskets, or else screaming dementedly, offended by the act of dying, pleading unfinished business, unresolved love affairs or simply innocence. Always good for a laugh, with the outcome inevitable. Only here something particularly odd had occurred. And seemingly there were no survivors.

Herschel was perplexed; the man, his sole witness, apoplectic.

The committee, any committee, would want answers. Who was behind it and why? Was this an accident?

He certainly hoped not. That really would take some explaining. There were no accidents – officially – in Hell. Just consequences.

Those destroyed by the implosion, and presumably part of the wreckage, would turn up eventually, no doubt miffed at the inconvenience; a blow softened by the uncovered facts of their dispatch, and how clever a plot or cunning an enterprise it was to so remove them. To be involved then would be an accomplishment, something to boast of to friends and neighbours. Accidents, on the other hand, equalled social embarrassment. And the naïve could not be tolerated.

No.

He needed a new identity. Swinging from bedclothes knotted, wondering at the proximity of rose bushes, was probably not the best time to be thinking thus, but the question could not be avoided. It was essential to his future well being. He required a persona both convincing to the world without and commodious to that within. He needed himself not to be himself but someone else. Someone sensible in fact; who he could live with.

Two floors up a knot came undone. Shitty viscose sheets, he thought, lying in manure, winded and with his backside scratched.

Strangely, he lay there counting windows.

Thinking of names. Faces. He missed his duffel bag. He wondered if Mr Unger-Farmer could swim. If there was an ocean in Hell, surely it had evaporated. So no need for life-jackets, snorkels or non-nylon swimwear. A rustle in the bushes turned his head, a hedgehog out stalking worms.

He got to his feet and brushed himself down. His hospital pyjamas were a bit of a give-away, so he ditched them, leaving blank flesh. Paisley was never his thing. He would do well though to find some alternative, and soon. He'd also need money. But a name came first.

He had to think hard about his name. It needed to be the right name, a moniker that was acceptable to his conscious state, that he could use without thought, a reflexive tag allowing no give-away pause. The pyjamas abandoned at his feet were warm, shapeless stitched sections of cloth he raised, examining them more closely as if hunting for clues. There, inside the collar...

Sylvester Orange. Sounded like a cat and a piece of fruit. Sounded like a writer. A poet. A bad one.

Yeah, he liked that...

Poorly rhymed.

Running from the hospital grounds past a somnolent car park attendant, he steered for a nearby public house, flashed through, grabbed a coat and some loose change and got himself part way decent. No repeat arrest, anyhow. The coat covered his balls but not his knees, and despite the month (July by the calendar glimpsed behind the bar) it was chilly. His stomach was full of dumplings and jam roly-poly, complaining bitterly now it was being put under some stress, and Sylvester was forced to evacuate in a derelict bus concourse.

He hoped the tramps didn't mind. Where did they get their trousers? Maybe he should have asked; but didn't like to outstay his welcome.

Finding a half-eaten burger he wiped his arse on the carton.

The burger might have been currency in trampdom. Or the tramps might have been vegetarians. Too late now. He would have to learn to recognize underworld commercial opportunities.

He felt his best bet to be the city centre. As the hour progressed and the pubs emptied there were bound to be unconscious individuals of his dimensions. All he had to do was lurk in shadows, loiter in back alleys, until a likely candidate presented himself, too drunk to stand up and too stupid not to lean against a wall under the full glare of main street illumination.

Nature provided.

A little baggy perhaps, and stinking of vomit. But the shoes, now, he dug the shoes.

Open-toed. Karmic...sandals a prophet might wear, a man verbose and challenging. Not in a loud way, but subtle...deeds leading to a future role as possible bishop of Utopia.

Words he could make a career out of, pelted with eggs on street corners, his soap box a cornucopia of wonders...

If he stole a guitar he could busk for silver; if only he knew how to play. Sleeping among pigeons and frightening children, the local constabulary would take it in turn to offer him stern looks. Not wanting to get their hands dirty, they'd truncheon-twirl in accompaniment, threatening yet impotent, as he knew and they knew that the pigeons were his, and pebble-dashed helmets were dangerously undermining to the effectiveness of the force. People would take the piss. There'd be a stand-off, birdman and brainwashed in uneasy partnership, citizenry none the wiser, the unclean and the washed each pretending ignorance of the other till one day one or the other forgot the plot.

Sylvester knew no chords, however. He just laughed.

Laughed at the drunk offering him change. Laughed at the sober shaking their heads and rolling their shoulders. Laughed at himself, yet without a spiel. What manner of poetry was that?

Scratching himself intimately, he sighed.

For his part Byrd was pragmatic in the extreme. How many years, what proportion of eternity he had spent in this theme-park-cum-institution, he had no way of knowing, calculating or recalling. What it was that had earned him his tenure was only marginally less obfuscated. Nothing here was relative, an irksome fact if you were given to introspection, but one, under the circumstances, that was for the most part irrelevant.

Who'd want such information? The denizens of Hell were largely concerned with abiding.

Not all. The majority. And majorities counted, even in this perverse democracy.

Everything was discussed openly among those who wished to discuss everything.

The Devil was busy. Upstairs, maintaining his image.

No fun terrorizing the dead.

That was the adjudicator's job; the threat being eviction.

Byrd couldn't remember much of his former life other than it had ended violently, arguably prematurely, and that he had expected no soft option. That he'd landed on his feet only kept him moving. Whether his name was even his own was open to question. More likely an epithet a committee had accorded him, their reasoning affected by ennui or self-flagellation. No matter, something had been seen among the remains.

Eighteen: The Oracle

Chinks of light or slivers of dark? An elephant out walking an ostrich. Or was it the other war round? The bellicose frogs of the fourth dimension. All these things could be viewed from under a railway arch.

Cars snaked on and off the neighbouring bridge, its paint flaking, the heads of rivets exposed and rusting.

Smoking once extinguished cigarettes he sat cross-legged on a sheet of polythene, raising a can of Special Brew to his lips infrequently and marvelling at the generosity of masons, long dead bricklayers, their legacy both a roof and a thoroughfare, cemented in a preceding century with the casual abandon of erectile philanthropists. Hey, we can afford it! They stuck stones together magnificently, generous in their art, contoured and geometric, each with a secret history.

The cars lit up a vault of stars. Trains tested their security.

Victorian...

Nearby, on a similarly locomotive wall, was fastened the number 7.

The first of his eight visitors arrived.

Shirley, she said her name was, gap-toothed and bedraggled, with a tattooed breast and a limp, yellow fingers and a purple orbit.

'The minister socked me,' she told him, adopting a little-girl-lost accent, sniffing through one nostril at a time. 'Couldn't remember me vows.'

'Yes, but what is it you want?'

She looked puzzled. 'Just an explanation...' Tearful, even, wearing her thumb on her lighter.

'You were too young to marry, and too wicked,' intoned Sylvester, cadging a flame from her torch. 'God has another purpose.'

'For me?'

'Who else? You'll find it...' he paused, '...under a nineteen-eighty-nine Ford Escort; blue with cloth seats and sports trim.'

Thanking the oracle, she departed.

Next came twins. Boy and girl, Colette and Steve, teens, difficult to say which was which either vocally or facially. Only the girl had tits. Displaying them, their means of income, that and her pubescent rhubarb patch, the pair appeared proud, if only chemically.

'I'm keeping a diary,' she said. 'There's too many names to remember. And all the faces look alike; same twisted expression.'

'Fucking guilt,' her brother chipped in. 'But at twenty quid a throw, better than knobbing the babysitter.'

All very interesting. But what did they want?

'I'm pregnant. Don't know whose, so blackmail's out of the question. Want to know if I should I have an abortion?'

'Absolutely not,' he replied, not having to consult the bones.

The twins talked behind hands.

'That's it?' inquired sister.

'You don't have to pay me anything,' answered the man cross-legged.

'But...'

'The father's a racehorse owner from Doncaster,' he gave up reluctantly. 'And yes, I'd appreciate some of the action. Next!'

Drug dealers and cat burglars and suicides. Sylvester dispensed advice gleaned from the scaffold of a chicken, laying his hands on and charmingly deflecting abuse. They whispered crimes, threatened violence, left puzzled but satisfied. Payment was optional. He had no use for stolen watercolours but was sympathetic toward cold hard cash. Each story was a misery, balanced between the innocent and the scatological, an unpleasant theatre of lives crushed and perverted; often through choice, misuse of resources, the sad result of too much or too little information.

He ought to write a book about it, he thought. Knowledge, false or true, had the power to both expand and diminish.

'Mr Orange?'

He'd counted eight, surely.

The twins were one it seemed.

'What is it?'

'My life has been short,' she said. 'And now unresolved.'

She frightened him, this child.

He found himself without words.

An insect buzz reverberated round the arch. Loudest behind his right ear, an electric hammering of wings, the static of fear coated him in bristles which the insect's unseen presence then stroked, spines buried deep in his flesh like the electrodes of his soul, positive and negative growths here shorted, crackling and warm. Smoke drifted about him. The girl stared wide-eyed.

'Mr Orange?'

She wanted an answer.

He perspired.

She parted her blonde curls, fastening the curtains behind her ears.

'I can get it for you,' he said. 'I know a path, a way over.'

It was a promise. Listening to himself Sylvester wasn't sure what he'd said, what that entailed. It was fear talking, a fear he'd forgotten but which hadn't forgotten him. Its voice was his own.

'Thank-you.'

The buzzing lessened and the girl departed.

He gulped the remainder of his Special Brew.

She wanted her resolution and had charged him with the task. But how to find such a thing and where to begin to look? Had he lied just now? He didn't think so. He had the words; they had been his. Wasn't he the prophet? Sylvester had to justify the mantle. This was a test. But the only path he knew was down to the river, and the river led out to sea.

He lit another foreshortened cigarette. There were tunnels under the water, passages composed of bricks. And the ghosts of masons? Perhaps, or miners, stout men like pit props, candles on their helmets and canaries, ponies as companions down among the glittering coal. He could trust those, blackened children dragging bogies while their father's swung pick-axes, generations of men poisoned and choked. That would be his route, beneath the river, following crumbling sewers, exhausted seams, the restless dead to guide him.

'Who is this character?'

'Some man's psychoses...'

'Living or unliving?'

'Not sure.'

'Not sure?'

'We don't have him on record. Most likely a manifestation, the consequence of trauma and bad blood.'

Thus the mayhem. But Herschel remained sceptical; as was wise; his fellow adjudicator might easily be playing him for a fool, the naked sword-wielding fellow a resident (he fitted the profile) and therefore up to no good.

Tread carefully, was the maxim. His collar felt tight.

'Any idea where he is now?'

His peer just shrugged. 'I wash my hands of it,' he said.

'Most kind.'

'Wouldn't want to step on your toes, Byrd, now would I?'

The plot thickened. Herschel was intrigued, assuredly, but couldn't help thinking he was being targeted somehow. That glint in the whore's eyes, an expression captured in her portrait; these were clues to his fate, if obfuscated.

If it was true this man had fought his way in, was he at the vanguard of a greater force, an invasion? That might wake the committee - had it yet been formed - from its complacency. An attack on Hell could only be launched from one place, Earth, the upstairs living world, a notion so bizarre as to undermine every tenet of miscreation the Devil Himself regarded as set in stone. He might only guess at the aggressor's motives. Revenge, as ever, was applicable. Incursion as a result of rejection? A failed applicant? Bizarre. Byrd had though to go with the idea that the man operated alone. There would have been rumours otherwise. A greater force would have alerted those agents on the upside.

Nineteen: Misnomer

Ramch surveyed those strewn before him. They lay on a field of grass beneath a cloudless sky...an even green, a placid blue. Torsos slunk away. Fingers and toes burrowed into the soft turf, those with legs and arms still attached upending like penises filled with blood, vibrant tumescent occurrences that to the pink man were curious, even amusing, as the arms and legs could never follow the fingers and toes into the burrows...

Reminded him of a girl he once knew.

A name he couldn't remember...

Like he failed to recall his own, stood there with a puzzled expression, the weight of the sword in his hand, finely balanced.

Michael planted it in the earth, feeling terribly naked.

Her look was calculating, manipulative; she had him exactly where she wanted, gripping him with her thighs, bending his ears forward with her thumbs. She could control him and did, his sometime wife; she had him mesmerized.

'Columbine?'

'Yes, my sweet, what is it?'

'Do you love me?'

He should have known, but was intoxicated. How could she, Queen of the Faeries, love him, a mere mortal?

Of course she didn't answer, just widened her smile, its cruelty interpreted as kindness by the man in her embrace, his fate already sealed, and him without an obvious parachute.

(Herschel Byrd was fascinated. He hovered invisibly.)

Hell, the love apple realized; a place where nobody could be trusted. Trusting was why he was here. Purgatory, if he remembered correctly, where he'd found himself previously – what difference? No wall divided them. At least no wall with two sides. A defining joke, with those dumb enough to suspect otherwise spending their quietus in self-inflicted despair, never able to find a way through, always coming back to the same side, chasing the impossible, either the hope of redemption, of absolution, or the finality of total, ubiquitous pain.

(Herschel nodded. A most interesting manifestation.)

And she was responsible for this. She'd driven him crazy. Okay, maybe only given him a nudge, but it was enough. She'd peeled off his lid and stuck her spoon in his brain. Not killing him; Michael had attended to that. In name at least, sacrificing what little grip he had on reality in exchange for...what? A berserk alter ego, an invisible bear coat. A pair of mental running shoes. How to define a void? A big empty black space full of light. Depression and mania, two sides of the same door, or wall, the room you find yourself in never the room you feel you need. Not a cell because there is no lock. Not necessary. But how do you wake up when you keep dreaming you're asleep?

Not a mathematical problem, he realized. An emotional one.

He needed help. He needed to be saved.

By whom?

Himself of course, wherever he was, the love apple, Michael Tomatoes as he was properly called, christened such by parents who'd died, retiring early to their graves on account of lung cancer (father) and (mother) a falling safe. He needed himself to find himself, by accident or gruelling detective work. He needed to carve himself, and make himself tactile. He needed the paint on his hands to match the paint behind his eyes.

He needed. Not Columbine. Vanessa? Vanessa was nice (he loved her) but there was no future in it. Funnykins put paid to that.

Who then? And by what name? He didn't want to find himself only to find himself alone.

He didn't wish pain.

Best not to think about it.

He'd try that.

'So, what do you think?'

'About what?'

'Isn't it a good idea?' He could see Redbear wasn't impressed. Then again, Redbear wasn't impressed by much. A laconic dipsomaniac; he took everything with alcohol, including his medicine.

'Come on, the pub's open. Let's go.'

That was bowling out the window. Michael enthused instead about his contribution to a sculpture park on the site of an old steelworks, which the local authority had named Steel Works, the themes being steel and work.

'I see it as a cage, a kind of life in metaphor: you're not sure if the figure is lying down or getting up. He's indecisive, or his memory's gone...or maybe his back. It hurts to move so he just leans on one elbow, on his side, one leg straight, the other bent, knee level with his chin...' Built in sections in his garage, welded from scrap barrel hoops and motorbike frames before being bolted together on site. 'The face is deliberately vague; empty, like the rest of him. You can see straight through. He's empty inside. His head's empty. His body's empty. There's only the rusty skeleton, stiff through idleness or age.'

'How much did you get for it?' Red demanded.

'That's not the issue.'

'How much?' His glass empty, he slid it across the table.

Michael didn't want to tell him. It would start an argument.

Redbear rolled a cigarette.

The love apple visited the bar.

'Did you see that film last night, the one with Elizabeth Taylor?'

'No.'

'Fancy a game of pool?'

The bearded man wiped the floor with him.

He bought more drinks.

'I had an idea for my exhibition.'

'Is that all you can talk about?'

'What?'

'Your work, Tom. It's boring.'

He was devastated.

'I mean, that triptych you did on the history of steam locomotion...'

'Uh-huh.'

'...I loathed it.'

'I sold it.'

'It had no...

'Yes?'

'...meaning; there weren't even any steam locomotives.'

'Yeah – but.'

'It was just old postcards and theatre tickets.'

'Travelling! You took the train wherever, off on holiday, out to see a show. It was part of the adventure!'

'Hey, calm down. I just saying...'

'That I've no talent!'

'...you know.'

'No! I don't!'

'They weren't even representative of the time period.'

'Huh?'

'The postcards and tickets. It was all stuff your mother collected.'

'How do you know? What's that got to do with it?' He stood up in order to look down on his critic. His knees shook the table, causing oscillations in froth and furthering the agitation of bubbles.

'Oh, come on; I know everything.'

'You do?'

'Sure. I've been watching you for ages.'

'Since when?' He sat once more, rocked in his chair, feeling the cold hand of apprehension.

Redbear tamped his rollie out.

He would, he supposed, have to kill him.

But first another round.

Recumbent...

Stylized, infected, the work of a delinquent imagination; the lying man, he called him, slumped in repose, choked and blue-faced by a lack of oxygen.

The elves applauded, thinking him finished, this work complete. But it was far from over, as they should have suspected, agents of a darker force here gathered for a terrible purpose.

Some he plucked the heads off. Others he squashed into an old cake tin. And one, entire with bicycle, he framed for murder.

Then he returned to Vanessa's, pulled the stuffing from her favourite teddy and used the non-flame-retardant ursine innards – via the magic of a gas oven – to ignite her flat and contents.

'Assuredly,' said Sylvester Orange, itching terribly and smelling of curry. 'I saw it with me own eyes.'

'But that's impossible.'

'Not so, my friend. Takes but a twist of the imagination...' He made a hand gesture reminiscent of Fagin.

The person to whom he related his story, discovered on a park bench waxed and flaking, was, she claimed, an undercover detective. Sylvester had no proof other than the bulge of her suspenders. What had drawn him to her in the first place, a subtle undulation.

''T was a cold and wintry night...'

'In July?'

'January. And all the city was sleeping, dreaming dreams of Easter Bunnies and cotton candy. When, just past two, there roared a mighty tabernacle.'

'What's a tabernacle?'

He scratched his chin. 'A kind of covered meeting place, on wheels.'

'Like a vehicle?'

'Aye...only roaring, venting a great rage.'

'A lorry with a bust exhaust, you mean.'

'Scattering ghosts and crushing strays, as it carried a secret cargo.'

Paused for effect. Her eyebrows rose. She crossed her legs the other way. He swallowed.

'Well?'

'The tabernacle slew; icy was the road. From between its curtains spilled...'

'Don't tell me!' she interrupted. 'A baby elephant with big ears.'

'No – four suitcases.'

'Oh.'

'Three of which were quickly recovered by the attending penguins. But one of which,' he winked, 'went undiscovered.'

Inclusive...

Laughing out loud at passers-by and shaking the hands of shop assistants. Making hoax bomb calls while eating a celery and prawn sandwich on a mobile stolen from a pregnant reflexologist. Punching tourists. Tearing the final pages from international best-sellers. Introducing vermin to supermarket deli counters and infiltrating the smuggling rings of redundant factory workers with the goal of selling at a loss to rival consortiums. Burgling the offices of public servants and stealing nothing but carpet tiles. All in a day's work for the urban terrorist. Posting pornography to husbands with reference to Readers' Wives. Bending car aerials into animals. Hiding paper money in electrical cabinets with just a corner showing and shitting in elevators. Copulating on traffic islands, wired for sound. Filling road excavations with expired chickens and lamenting publicly the declining standards of western civilization dressed as a kangaroo with a canister of helium there for the inhaling, backing singers drunk on methylated spirit and an organ accompaniment organized along the lines of a public flogging. Dressed as a Rabbi, mugging schoolgirls for their knickers. Each was a treasured ambition. Getting a pan stuck on your head and wandering aimlessly about a departmental store china department. Throwing up in the fryer of the local chippy. Pretending to go into labour during a performance of William Tell you then fail to produce a ticket for, blaming that bastard Rossini and making your escape through the orchestra pit. Feigning loss of memory. Chaining your entire back catalogue of girlfriends to a barrier in the central reservation. Sawing in half those ugly dogs that tow around old ladies.

Life was too short, he realized. There was only ever time for excuses.

And what's more...

'The ninety percent rule,' she stated, yawning theatrically. 'Ninety percent of everything is garbage.'

He couldn't argue. She was adamant. The majority of anything - life, art, sausages – was rubbish. There was just no escaping the fact. Music: ninety percent garbage. TV: ninety percent garbage. His own work?

'Sorry...'

Ninety percent garbage.

Food for thought, thought Michael Tomatoes. Impossible to improve on it; it being mathematical, a statistic.

'But you have to wade through the garbage to get to the good stuff.'

You have to chance your arm.

Twenty: The Man The Future Built

Tom re-affixed the hand, teasing an adjuster screw until finally satisfied of that appendage's working condition. All he required now was food. The outside temperature was two degrees, a thick slush in the street, kerbside where the traffic had swept it. He checked his operations manual one last time. His lungs worked. He waited the few minutes it took for the hand to warm up; a spare, the original having malfunctioned, returned to the suitcase along with the tool pack and various tubes of adhesive. He was alive, he told himself. For a purpose.

What purpose would become clear. He left the crumbling toilet block and headed toward light and sound, a restaurant or café. Italian. Tom emptied several plates of sauce-coated pasta of various design and recipe along with two bottles of house red, left a large tip from the fat wallet with which he'd been provided, before walking happily the short distance to a Travel Lodge recommended by his waiter, Antonio who winked and smiled. 'Please come back soon, sir...' His room had a view of the river.

In the morning he would deposit the suitcase in a locker at the station and buy himself new clothes. Tonight though was for dreaming...

A knuckle rapped a dial, its fluctuation no immediate cause for concern

'Problem?'

The knuckle's owner, a hellish technician, shrugged.

'How many cards?'

He put the pencil aside having not marked the sheet.

Tom's eyelids shuttered open. Above him on the ceiling scrolled numbers, sevens and eights predominant, rolling like the numerals of a petrol pump. His head filled with something intangible as he lay paralysed, semiconscious, its full measure taking several hours to assimilate. Eyes drying out, he lay unmoving till dawn, then jerked fully awake, threw himself to the floor and, teeth clamped round a chair leg, waited for the shaking to stop and the pain to go away.

He tasted fear for days.

Part of him enjoyed it...sensation still new to him, unresolved, the threat of violence and the promise of joy both equally palatable, touch and smell, sight and sound that in the living world abounded.

The possibilities were endless.

And he explored them, a lifetime's education in love, sex and death crammed into the space of three months, by which point he'd established a career, a reputation, a history and a pattern of erratic behaviour that unbeknownst to Tom had his programmers in a flap, desperately trying to both catch and cover their arses, lying to one committee after another. The mission was on track, they stated in their reports, filed whenever a committee convened. All was well. The missing humour had been identified as melancholy and would be recovered forthwith.

April, however, saw delusions and the onset of paranoia.

He forgot who he was and why. He walked the streets reading car number plates and counting lamp-posts.

He called himself Michael and imagined a childhood, the past becoming something he'd experienced, not acquired.

So where did that leave him? Other than Hell, by whatever name, in the company now of Herschel Byrd, who (like Michael?) sought the truth.

Only Byrd told him he was somewhere else. Earth, in fact, and this body was just a representation of his true, mechanical self.

The adjudicator had clothed him at least, in suit and tie.

He looked like an accountant.

Byrd picked his teeth.

'How do I get back?'

'You can't; someone has to find you. A nuisance, I agree – more interesting is why you're here in the first place.'

'The package...'

'Yes?'

'The Devil.' He gazed around at barstools stacked on tables and fruit machines flashing lights. 'It was addressed to him. Mr Unger-Farmer up the street.'

'I'm not familiar with the name,' said Byrd, fiddling with the umbrella in his drink.

'An alias, I'd assume.'

'Yes...'

He was failing to make a good impression, Michael saw. He felt as he had once at a job interview.

'What do you suppose was in this package? Didn't you open it?'

'No; it seemed empty. Just a square box. It was important though. I could tell that. It had a quality. A weight without mass.'

Curiouser and curiouser, Herschel thought. Just what was that bitch up to? Obviously the manifestation was involved. He was her painter, after all.

Something occurred to the love apple. 'I'm not dead then?'

'It wouldn't seem so. Why do you ask?'

He remembered the blue presence in the whore's keep. Had that entity been rescued?

By whom?

'No reason. I mean, if I'm not here, as you say...' He couldn't trust the adjudicator; or anyone, in fact. His own faculties were suspect. The man wished to pick his brain, to scrape it out. Like emptying half a grapefruit.

'Why don't you start at the beginning. That way we can piece together your movements and perhaps uncover something of your mission.'

But there were gaps. Smaller gaps than he'd have Byrd believe, but gaps none the less.

'Another drink?'

'Eh - thanks.'

His glass filled, as did the bar with well-heeled professionals in skirts and slacks, smoking and drinking and munching crisps. Not how he'd imagined Hell, that vision played out in the spaces between the bricks in the wall Ramch had crossed, or thought to cross, his memory of it sketchy, the blood on his hands not having stained. And his hair, grown again. Odd.

'Melancholy,' the fat whore said. 'Such a tiresome thing. We're well rid of it.'

'But for how long, angel? It's sure to return.'

'Then we'll just have to lose it again,' she stated. 'Three humours are quite enough.'

The brown man demurred.

'Blood, phlegm, choler; these are humours to indulge, Victor. Melancholy is for wallowing in.'

'Yes. Only...'

She stroked his cheeks. 'Why don't you see how that snoop Herschel Byrd is getting on?'

His anus tightened. 'Me?'

'Of course. You're not scared of him, are you?'

'No,' said Victor Formica.

'Then do the spying job; I've clients to see.'

May.

Stood in the road he had the sudden desire to walk in front of a bus. Easy, he could simply pause, or run, whatever it took to be simultaneous with a double-decker, and afterward in several pieces, bloodied and ruined, a smile on his face – no doubt – the passengers concerned with destinations delayed, not corpses under-tyres, peering at their tickets as if to make a point. Shoppers would gather and gesticulate, picking out individual organs, teeth and excrement. Policemen would push their hats back on their heads and be glad the weren't with the ambulance crew. Those guys would have to use spades and pick remains out of the asphalt. Or maybe they'd leave those bits. He wasn't familiar with the workings of the emergency services. High pressure hoses perhaps...

Or not. Ignoring the impulse he reached the kerb and other streaming folk. But something in his head kept yelling "jump".

He fought it, blistered and bruised, waking up in thorn bushes, sleeping in strange beds, the girl, the boy, the traffic cone unidentified, simply that which he fled from come morning, afternoon fuelled by alcohol, sure of the man following, the woman ahead. An unusual feeling. His face pressed against the windscreen of a family unknown, father, mother, two kids, so familiar, yet alien, entirely separate lives. But there, this close to him, real and actual human beings, men and women whose experiences were entirely outside of his, the other side of glass dirtied with insects and smeared by artificial illumination.

He did not understand. He cried nights. He carved. He painted. He made tracings of gravestones and felt close to the dead, the occupants of soil under granite who probably couldn't give a shit, laughing at his weaknesses, the story of his distemper keeping them in worms for weeks. Hey, they'd made it, they'd left, successful in that departure and contemptible of his fear and guilt...

Don't bring that with you, they suggested.

We don't want to know.

Adapt.

That was their message, what he read from newspapers and advertisement hoarding, what he slept under and wiped his bottom with.

Survive.

There was no easy way out.

How about a way in then?

That he could paint, or sculpt, or live.

Or, as of now, imbibe.

He needed to fall in love...

And did, at a checkout, the love apple flushed, all thoughts of Columbine packed away in an attic and all thoughts of a robotic heritage displaced, forgotten along with missing humours and the proximity of the Devil, Mr Unger-Farmer or whoever at his door a revelation he failed to comprehend. In all save panic. He knew, on a cellular level, whatever his cells might be composed of, the evil he confronted; he understood it. What confused him was the predilection the evil had for wearing different hats.

If only it would dress the same twice.

June.

Redbear! Well met. But what's this? A dissolving of consciousness, the colours bleeding and the textures nondescript, lost under numb fingers, digits criss-crossed with cuts, desensitised, impressed on the windowsills of victims the untraceable imprints of the man charged with electricity, his earth as his live, blessedly neutral.

Questions were asked...

By law enforcement officers.

Someone had downloaded pornographic images from the Internet, blown them up to advertisement size and pasted them to hoarding along with by-lines along the lines of: Losing Interest? Or: How Close Is The Next Vehicle?

They seemed to think Michael had the right printing industry connections. But he denied everything.

'Big flies,' Redbear suggested.

Insect anarchists.

The policemen pulled at their collars, peculiarly nervous.

Sylvester came to with his head in a toilet. He felt perfectly fine. Peering in a bathroom mirror in a bathroom he didn't recognize he pulled his lips back over his teeth and shuddered. The mirror fronted a cabinet stocked with toothpaste and brush, which he used, wondering to whom they belonged. There was soap in a dish. And razors. Realizing the possibilities he stripped naked and took a shower, shaved next and combed his hair. He couldn't bear to dress in his old clothes however, so left the bathroom in a towel.

The phone rang downstairs. He waited to see if anyone answered.

No. Nobody home. He walked into a bedroom and looked in cupboards and drawers, finding ordinary trousers and shirts, a man's things, with the exception of several items of lingerie among socks paired and arranged across a spectrum of colours. The obvious neatness worried him. Looking again at the shirts on the wardrobe rail he found a similar pattern, left to right, pale to dark, all on identical hangars and facing the same direction. But if the socks and shirts were panchromatic the suits, trousers and jackets were monochrome, silvers and blacks, as were the shoes. He dressed quickly, choosing dark grey wool over peach cotton with yellow cotton beneath charcoal leather. And a tie?

The phone rang again. There were no ties he could see. He ran downstairs and picked up the receiver. 'Hello?'

'Ah, Mr Unger-Farmer, you're home.'

'Who?'

'Mr Unger-Farmer?'

'No – he's not here...'

'I beg your pardon,' said the voice, a man's. 'It's just you sounded a lot like him. Do you know when he'll be home, or where I might contact him? It's a matter of some urgency.'

'No. I'm sorry.'

'That's okay. I expect he's still abroad.'

'Yes,' said Sylvester. 'I got a postcard from him, from Laos.'

'Laos? Goodness. Well, if you see him, when he gets back, ask him to give Mr Twopenny a call.'

'Right. I'll do that.'

'Excellent. Goodbye. Mr...?'

'Jones.'

'Mr Jones.'

He hung up, strangely amused. So that was the householder's name. But what was he doing here? Did he know the man?

Sylvester began an exploration. The kitchen first, high-tech and spotless, all gleaming stainless steel and burnished aluminium, excepting the fridge which was red. Beyond lay an unremarkable utility room, the contrast lying in its ancient wash-tub and mangle, antiques from an age before electricity when to launder was a chore requiring the efforts of muscle and soap. He pictured heavy-set washerwomen pounding the stains from underwear, dewlaps swinging above massive breasts, forearms to make Popeye jealous and fingers that were no more than stumps. It was a wonder the clothes survived. On a shelf were ranked (he counted them) thirteen bottles of bleach, nine unopened boxes of Brillo pads, four cast irons of different size and weight, a framed picture of Mussolini and two empty brass candle holders. The portrait was signed, he noticed. The dining-room next.

More portraits, black and white and colour. Some of the faces looked vaguely familiar, but Sylvester couldn't put a name to any. The room boasted a large mahogany table with eight chairs, routinely carved and upholstered, a centuries old sideboard, cracked and oak, wood panelled walls and ceiling in what proved to be ply, and a carpet worn through to the underlay. Folding doors separated it from a living-room whose view was taken up by an impenetrable-looking hedge, containing a TV whose enormous screen was concave and housed in a bright pink cabinet. Newspapers and video tapes littered the floor, none in boxes or with titles. Nowhere could he see a VCR. Two huge leather armchairs occupied the room, much worn, a standard lamp being the only other furniture besides a gas fire.

He sat in one, feeling at home. It was comfortable. Under the newspapers were bare boards. And in one corner a cat litter tray.

There was a knock at the door.

Sylvester froze, feeling suddenly vulnerable. The living-room was invisible from the road but there was nothing to stop a caller nosing in through the bay window. He scuttled to the door and peeked round into the hallway. The front door was robust, with an oval window in stained glass beyond which lurked a shadow. Masculine. Tall. The knock again, resounding in a passage of peeling wallpaper and dusty picture frames. The letterbox hinged and an envelope dropped through, falling among a small mound of unopened correspondence, junk mail and papers.

Bizarrely, he wondered if Mr Unger-Farmer had remembered to cancel his milk.

The envelope was unsealed. The figure gone, he tip-toed over, finding it contained a thick wad of used notes secured by a crumbling elastic band.

Pocketing the windfall Sylvester rummaged through the pile, discarding letters and pizza menus in a search for something more interesting. He paused once to silently question his motives. Theft? Clues? Rabid curiosity? Into this last category fell a delivery card from TNT.

A package, it stated, left at an address he surmised was nearby.

Returning to the armchair he pondered his fate, how it was he came to be here, and why he ought to linger.

At least till Mr Unger-Farmer got back...

He counted the money. Twelve thousand pounds.

But he couldn't remember yesterday.

Twenty One: The Picture

All spiders are called Eric. They brought good luck. Vanessa had told him, shaking her head at his cowardice in evading a scuttling eight-legged monster speeding across the carpet of a Friday night.

Who was Michael Tomatoes to argue? She liked her insects, did Vanessa, coo-cooing wood lice and tickling slugs.

Not that slugs counted...

They had a name though. Bob.

Byrd grinned, squirmed in his chair, a curious look in his eyes and winkle pickers on his feet. There was something sluglike about him, an oleaginous quality that made Michael want to reach for the salt.

What distracted him, though, was the horse at the bar.

'Tell me again about your wife,' coaxed Byrd, fidgeting.

He'd spoken of her? The memory evaded. A ruse? He couldn't keep from staring at the black shape and its shiny hooves.

'What's to know?' he replied, annoying his host. 'I need the toilet.'

'No you don't.

It was the truth.

'I, eh, need to speak to someone'

'No you don't. Who could you possibly know?'

Byrd was suspicious. No helping that.

The horse flicked its glossy black tail and winked.

'There are plots afoot,' the adjudicator announced, leaning close. 'Concentration is of the utmost. There are those who would lead you astray, and have perhaps already, souls whose damnation is either under review or perpetually disappointing. Don't get me wrong; it's the system. Persons deceased must show a certain level of wrongdoing in order to remain in residence. No-one wants to be born again and have to start their evil careers from scratch, not when Hell provides a stage of unrivalled possibilities. Here wars can last centuries. Power is freely available; wealth; whatever it is you desire. Few wish it jeopardized. But...' He gazed around at the assembled punters, none of whom seemed currently occupied with anything more terrible than beer mat rending or accidentally nudging rumps. 'Lately...'

Michael was intrigued, not seeing the horse had moved, gaze locked, drawn into the hypnotic vacuum of Byrd's cranial space.

'Let me put you in the picture, Michael...'

Framed by the wall, Hell and/or Purgatory. Both, a place on the inside that was on the outside, a there that was here and an opposite identical, obverse to reverse – a whole death scenario based on life in all its complexity, beauty and filth. More graphic perhaps; or not, dependent on experience, sanity, circumstance. There and/or here to be shaped.

The challenge was to paint.

Or sculpt.

Or drench your underpants...

Twenty Two: Specimen Hotel

August, and the start of a new football season, the sky intermittently blue, the earth mostly brown and green - absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Only there was a sickness abroad, a degenerative fever.

She'd seen it weeks ago in menswear, the lethargy of women, their indecision over underpants translating into nervous ticks and a sudden drop in the shoplifting statistics. They just couldn't make their minds up: Y's or boxers, cotton or lycra? A malaise had descended, a perplexing, nervous undertone that addled their usually focused intellects, casting doubt over the accepted fact that they knew best when it came to their menfolk and the cradling of their genitalia.

What with all the shit Michael was giving her she hadn't paid it much mind. But now, his disappearance total, Vanessa was quickly becoming obsessed, developing a passion for inquiry and a determination at odds with her burgeoning theory of civilization's decline.

She alone appeared interested. Her focus sharpened while other's became vague.

Or so she thought. Thinking was a trap you could fall into, leading in ever smaller circles. That had been Michael's problem, one he tried to resolve through his art, externalizing his inner conflicts and thus diluting their threat, nailing his demons to paper and reshaping the casualties of an overactive imagination. He was always chasing himself, perpetually confused by the simplest details, reading into everyday occurrences the happenings of cosmic events. Conspiracy theory, it took his nascent paranoia out to lunch.

So thinking was dangerous? Perhaps only to men, who had enough strange ideas as it was. Not to girls of a practical bent. Vanessa would cope...

She'd coped with Redbear right enough. She'd coped with the police before and after Michael's initial, and ultimately soggy, vanishing act. And she'd coped with Michael himself, her infuriating love apple discovered in a skip amid mouldy seat cushions, a lampshade on his head.

And now? Lunch break, girl talk, all thought of Michael put to one side while she concentrated on the slipping attention spans of her work-mates.

Here was Susan, for instance, previously infatuated with her boyfriend, a man twice her age, divorced with three kids. Susan was moved to love him having admired his skill in coping with and steering two, three and five-year-old boys through a Christmas wonderland of giant snowmen and clockwork reindeer. How well he coped, she'd related, with the voracious appetites of his children, steering them clear of the more breakable displays and rationing their chocolate elf intake. Regardless of need, she'd felt compelled to offer her services there and then. What followed was a romance out of fiction, even down to the great sex and the dozen roses. She began listening to Radio 4 and studying Renaissance art through the medium of the Open University. They'd planned an autumn wedding. Until: 'He caught me snogging his brother. He's got a Porsche...' Vanessa doubted if Susan could even remember the names of the kids.

Mandy, doing her nails, looked up from her magazine to ask what "cunnilingus" meant.

For a girl with her predilections, a crying shame.

And her boss...peering now out of one eye at his watch, back straight and notepad at the ready. His timekeeping was legend.

It hadn't always been, she recalled; securing a promotion had changed him from a laid-back floor-walker to an even more laid-back supervisor, until around Easter when suddenly he'd developed a keenness for punctuality. Something of a joke at first. But threats of disciplinary action soon followed.

The girls came to order, sweeping crumbs from blouses and cleaning tables, washing cups and arranging chairs in what was now a well rehearsed piece of theatre. Ritual behaviour, everything in its place and a place for everything. Nothing left askew or misplaced, all neatly aligned, tidied away. No personal effects discarded. No unwarranted – non-Hubert Mason's - jewellery. Things had labels. Impossible to miss the microwave, it had MICROWAVE embossed on it. There were MUGS on hangars, matching. There was COFFEE, TEA, SUGAR. The kettle had instructions. How much water, for efficiency...

As a joke it had been funny.

Vanessa smiled, quickly turning her attention to her shoes, one of which was smeared. Disaster. Should she leave it and be daring, impetuous? Too late, Susan buffed the paled leather with the inside hem of her skirt, adding a cross look and a that's-one-you-owe-me stare.

Darn, she thought. Van was developing a thirst for rebellion.

Her sisters had found it strange, her asking their help in disposing of a body; her explanation at best disturbing, 'He's dead anyway.' 'Yes, but shouldn't we inform the authorities? What about his family?' 'Got none.' 'Are you sure?' 'Absolutely. Look at him...' as if this were enough. Justification. 'Just help me bury him, for God's sake!'

Which they did, reluctantly. What were sisters for?

'What have you got yourself into?' they whined. 'Poor dear.'

But they dug like navvies, the pair of them.

Nobody appeared to miss Redbear, a fact which disturbed her in a way she failed to pinpoint. Guilt had something to do with it. She had never really known him. Not that she felt she ought to; he was Michael's friend. She had her own friends, those girls and boys she saw less of as time rolled by, falling away like old skin, sloughed as she aged, a process accelerated by the present climate, that viral detachment of which her sisters sang-froid was perhaps a symptom.

In his chair. His chair, Sylvester brooded. But where was he? The phone had rung several times and not been answered. There were no more knocks at the door. A newspaper dropped through it, front page expounding chaos, a strike put down via means necessary and culprits spirited away. Regretfully, he had not checked the date, the ignorance of it gnawing at him, dispelled by a crackle of static.

The TV...

Must have sat on the remote, he told himself, cringing behind the armchair like a baby, the television's sudden awakening having propelled him out of it, shrunken and humiliated. But not apprehended. The chair back swelled as if pushed, a shape having occupied it. He could only see round the edges, spherical and pink like a bloated pig's stomach, a giant bubble-gum orb pressing into the seat he had just vacated. And it came from the TV, the screen having bulged outward, narrowly missing him. He felt like the fly who'd luckily side-stepped a frog's bulbous, sticky tongue. Only to fall foul of a toad? He dared not breathe or look behind him. The static fazed, snapping like an electric current. Then, as if at the flick of a switch, the orb fastened to the other chair. Instantly, he mused. A change in polarity? He could see more of it now. Centring the swollen mass was a flickering white circle, contained in that a darker, striated disc at whose centre noisily shuttered a stygian pupil.

Looking for Mr Unger-Farmer, but not finding him. Veins pulsed in the distended sac, signifying anger.

Blue sparks skipped about the room, igniting some of the newspapers. There was a flash like a welding arc, a high-pitched keening as of rotating machinery, and the eye returned from whence it came...

Sylvester breathed once more. He was glad it had not been a nose extruded through the TV, that might have sniffed him out, some dangerous interloper, nasal hairs agitated prior to interrogation. He crept through to the kitchen and sat with his back to the red fridge.

It hummed invitingly. The noise made him hungry, stomach rumbling. How long since he'd eaten? The clock on the oven, he saw now, had been taped over. Sylvester got to his feet and peered out the window. Beyond stretched a lawn, perfectly flat, either side a hedge as tall and thick as that out front. The garden stretched beyond his vision, which, he recalled, was limited; he simply couldn't make out its far boundary, the grass blurring into the sky, green into blue.

A clank behind him. That of milk bottles as the fridge door popped, turning his attention from the back garden vista to the intimacy of the appliance whose lulling volume had increased. Feeling his heart he reached for the handle. He should shut it, he thought, smiling nervously as he pulled the bright door wide. The interior was plastic, glass, cold. The intruding air crackled with rime and was quickly frozen, sharp tongues of ice probing the draught, drawing the moisture in like filings to a magnet. Sylvester's borrowed clothes buzzed with static, each fibre teased forward, coaxed toward the chill in what had to be the coldest fridge in the world. Not a freezer, he understood; the milk was seen to slosh. It's temperature dipped beyond that, a void in which matter was suspended, impossibly bright and deep.

Vanessa turned the key in Michael's door and welcomed herself home. Some frantic shopping since his disappearance, the calling in of favours at work, together with a liberal splurge of elbow grease and her sisters' help in matters grave and personal, saw the house in a new light. There were rooms she hadn't entered before, doing so with a pang of conscience quickly dispelled by their contents. In one, nothing but plastic containers, bottles, receptacles of every shape and size emptied of contents and scrubbed of labels in preparation for some plastic montage of vessels; a yet to be seen work of the love apple's contrivance, title unknown, purpose unspecified. In another, swathed in dark, window bricked up and light-fitting missing, shoe boxes, several with shoes, most with doll's heads or paper clips, black-painted cardboard rectangles containing everything from key-rings to condiment sachets, stacked floor to ceiling in no obvious configuration, pattern or order, simply assembled, objects collected not categorized. A storehouse of ideas, she fancied, imagining Michael foraging in the dark. A place to seek inspiration, opening boxes at random and interpreting each treasure as he may.

She kicked her shoes off and sat in a sofa old as sofas, its smell reminiscent of summers gone, this latest wrapping its gift of odours about the cushions like a tree amasses rings. Probably all that was holding it together. That and the string. The television in the corner was an aquarium.

Jumping to her feet Vanessa plucked a CD at random and spent the next 38 mins. and 6 secs. in reverie, accompanied by Hawkwind and Bring Me The Head Of Yuri Gagarin...

She thought of the first time she'd glimpsed an erection. She was fifteen, and spying on her cousin masturbating. He worked in a bank now, had married a beautician. The sight left her cold, she remembered, having first got over the urge to surprise him, what would have been a cruelty as Vanessa was never very good at keeping her laugh in. Well, men were so serious about their tumescent parts; whereas she found them hilarious, if useful.

'I love the veins in your penis. It looks like a map. There are A roads and B roads; motorways...sights of special scientific interest. There's probably a place that corresponds exactly to the patterns of veins in your cock.

'Now, where's that atlas?'

She liked to explore, did Van. She had loved him. What she felt now though was more complicated. Not seeing him allowed her focus to shift onto herself, her eyes to see more than eyes in a mirror could. Her life had been predictable; but that was another self; this possessed an increased dynamic, a willingness to pry and probe, together with a determination to secure answers to questions she would never have taken seriously before. Perhaps some of Michael's paranoia had rubbed off. Perhaps not. She had yet to decide. Not that it mattered a great deal. The world was changed, and a changed world required a changed perspective. Or had her perspective shifted already, giving the impression of a world made anew?

Sophistry, she realized. Thinking too much again.

The conspiracy, such as it was, was subtle. They would not quickly reveal themselves. They being the forces ranged against her. Her being? 'Fucking hell,' she said.

She took her clothes off and headed for the shower.

Dressed, hair caught in an elastic band, she contemplated a bacon sandwich, taken with a sudden hunger for meat. A need. A realization of dead cooked flesh that made her mouth water.

She shuddered with it, a taste, a smell that brought to mind Michael.

The phone rang and she answered.

But whoever it was just breathed.

Creepy...

'...unless a butterfly lands on you'

Huh?

Byrd had gone. The bar had emptied. The horse was nowhere to be seen.

Michael got up and walked to the exit. Walked into a corridor, dull and plastic, polished and scratched, stretching left and right for an impossible distance. It appeared to narrow to a point in either direction, to shimmer into nothingness. He decided to forgo the choice and turned back through the deserted taproom, leaving then by a toilet window.

Into an ordinary-looking back lane. Bricks and mortar, litter, uneven flagstones, the smell of urine; graffiti on shop emergency exits, people in the distance queuing at a cashpoint machine, flesh exposed as the sun was shining, in the sky a wealth of blue and a dearth of cloud.

Normal. Too normal. He even felt normal, which wasn't normal at all. The city was home, the place where he lived, which he'd left under circumstances he found difficult now to bring to mind. Strolling, unhurried, he peered in windows at goods and fashions, confused insofar as he failed to comprehend what this city was. Real or imagined? Was this Hell or the real world? Both, maybe. He nodded, searching next for clues.

But his own identity was as complicated as any particularity the city chose to show, exhibiting its myriad forms through countless faces, flesh and stone. It was human yet mechanical. Solid yet fluid. Precise yet clumsy in its manipulative arts, those vague and deliberate, with and without purpose, countless feelers delving into the lives of the inhabitants who composed its very soul. A planet, he thought, himself an Earth; skin and bone or iron and glass, it mattered little: the constituent parts had building blocks and street plans, just like the whole. They were inseparable. Identity, like truth, was only a piece, one of many, a fragment of the picture he had yet to behold.

Was that possible? An overview? Could one man truly know himself, sufficient as to understand others? Or would each individual remain guessing, hopeful of an outcome not too deleterious?

A likely compromise; for those given to compromises, anyway. Michael Tomatoes, here, in this guise, might not be afforded that luxury. Indeed couldn't. He'd be either right or wrong, pay the full price, and...

Someone, a young man, bumped into him, cutting his wrist with a knife.

Michael stared at the blood in his hand.

Danger had made itself known.

It rode the buses and tramped the streets disguised as old ladies and toddlers straining at their reins. Danger was everywhere. It swung past, intimidating, goading, pushing, needing him to react – and he did, subtly he hoped, knocking over coffees and tripping children, shoulder-barging old men and glaring libidinously at teenage girls. Which at least got him a place to stay for the night, a bed in which she practised tongue knots and thigh swirls. Michael lapped it up, feeling dangerous too, saying little and leaving in company with only the smallest regrets. He immediately forgot her name.

The simplicity couldn't last, however. Sunday...everything quietened down. Shops were open but shoppers few. He sat on a bench in his accountant's suit and watched the creature approach.

It grinned.

'I've a message,' it spat, drooling uncontrollably, strings of mucus stretching to its pot-belly, which twitched intermittently as if at a live meal.

'Yes?'

'You're to come with me.'

Michael didn't think so.

It smirked, holding its discoloured elbows and scratching with yellowed nails.

'The message is from Columbine.'

'So?'

'It could be to your advantage.'

He wondered what he had to lose.

'This way...' the creature indicated, waddling off.

And he followed, glimpsing the night's human debris as it hid from the sun, slouched in doorways and packed into dank alleys, byways of his past acquaintance recalled via another's memory, one whose presence still lurked in his consciousness, a man at once kind and cruel. The creature never once looked back, but kept a steady pace, its breathing hoarse and direction seemingly random. Michael recognized buildings that earlier had been unknown. They walked in circles. He picked out motifs, carvings blackened by soot, worn by rain, architectural details and weed-clogged gutters taking on equal significance. Everything had a meaning, every brick a story. History resounded in cornices and the cracked empty faces of clocks whose arms had rusted to stumps, time amputees among whom he was at home, cut from the herd and branded on the inside, so that he tasted his own charred remains...

His feet hurt. Before long it was night. Broken neon struggled to make sense above a portal best described as black.

'She's waiting. Ninth floor.'

He smelled it leave.

He stepped inside, through a set of double doors into a foyer carpeted and lush. There were marble pillars and intricate floor tiles, clusters of greenery sprouting from brass vases and urns, shiny leather sofas and coffee-tables of coloured glass. The reception desk curved round one wall, above it a huge oil on wood landscape, an Arcadian scene of garrulous peasants and happily corpulent livestock. But there were no people; no patrons or staff. Not so much as a concierge or a bellhop to help with his luggage, of which he had none, just himself. Twin elevators occupied a central position, their cages at rest, cables taut, wrought iron shafts disappearing into a rotunda whose angels stretched bows or played flutes, inflicting their magic on the mortals beneath.

Michael searched for the stairs, glimpsing them, broad and twisting, through a mesh of fronds.

The elevators' bronze fittings winked seductively as he circled, but the love apple had chosen his means of ascent.

It had him paused on a landing staring at a corpse. Gunshot to the chest, a bloody hole the size of his fist, ribs and organs disordered.

Michael stepped over the man, who smiled as if asleep.

Screams failed to be contained by rooms.

Continuing up to the next floor he wondered how many such encounters would be his. They failed to deter him. He wasn't frightened. The death he witnessed, violent and cold, lacked realism. It was movie death, produce of a special effects department, off the shelf and misdirected, for to the likes of Michael only reality was scary. And reality was somewhere else...

Between the floorboards, for example, hidden away in crevices and mined by dust mites, their short lives spent in the excavation of the raw material of a continuum. There was no more valuable commodity. Only the mites were small enough and clever enough to extract it, atoms of space and time passed along a line of mandibles and stacked in rows and columns that neared perfection. From there it was transported by a succession of insects, each devouring the next, the reality diluted the farther up the food chain it travelled; till at the very top, along with beans and carrots, or perhaps a side salad, it found its way into people.

It paid then to consume beetle larvae, to regard the cockroach as a desirable starter, and for main course, a bowl of reality-rich weevils.

A maid approached pushing a cleaning trolley.

He barred her path to the elevator.

She avoided his gaze, waiting for him to move.

Michael studied the assemblage of cleaning products.

The maid blushed crimson.

The hotter she got the colder he became, watching as she turned violet, sweat pouring from her brow, soaking her apron. Her hands twitched on the trolley handle and her tongue protruded, a livid purple. Bottles and brushes tumbled to the carpet, spilling their contents, bleaching the weave.

Curious, he took a step closer. Her ears issued steam and her eyes started to bleed. The skin round her neck melted.

Her bones seemed to dissolve inside her, and she sagged, uttering no sound, a look of terror on her softened mien as she slowly formed a puddle.

Michael proceeded to the next floor.

Only to find it missing.

In its place a ceiling, himself suspended from it, striding over paint and leaving footprints in the plaster \- the first man on this moon.

A maid approached pushing a cleaning trolley.

She inquired of his room number and offered fresh towels.

Michael panicked.

Beating her head off a wall, one hand in her hair and the other round her throat, crushing her larynx, he observed as if from a distance her eyes bulge, viscous pink sacs whose pupils were huge and oily, smeared with horrific images, his twisted visage reflected in them, all teeth and gums. Her head misshapen, he flung the maid back down the corridor, her body snagging in a ceiling rose, one arm flapping while the other clawed. She wasn't dead, he saw. She might come back at him. He half ran, half fell onto the stairs.

Up a floor, thinking momentarily it was down...

But all was not as before.

The maid was dead already, bloody and sagging backward over her trolley, mouth blistered and peeling, the stink of bleach hovering over her face.

A door stood ajar.

Men talking...

The snap of cards.

78 in brass numerals three inches tall.

Voices.

'Any answer yet?'

'None.'

'Try again later.'

The smell of cigars.

Cleaning products and cat mint.

Michael grimaced at the tightness in his balls.

Strangely, he found it comforting, the first spontaneously normal thing he had experienced in a long while, a sensation visceral and yet within comprehension. It made sense, the cramping of his testicles somehow symbolic of another life, an alternate existence beyond these papered walls. He felt connected, adjusting himself as he walked, taking each broad rise as it came and arriving on a very different landing.

Strange how he received no mail, she thought.

She would go to the cinema...

The number 1 bus offered both time and perspective. Seated on the upper deck familiar streets became disordered; along each terrace whole new windows to gawp in, people busy ironing and watching TV in first floor flats while neighbours beneath mirrored their actions. The bus provided a glass tableau of lives being lived, few constructively, most relaxed, unworried for the best part at the turn of events Vanessa suspected, the slow rise of despair a melancholic tide of indifference...phew! Was it really as bad as that?

Yes. She supposed so. Maybe it was her own mood affecting her judgement; whatever mood that was. But no...wait a minute...yes...it was a pretty accurate description. There were fewer smiles than a year ago. A general apathy had descended. No escaping the fact...she was witness to it, her brief months spent with Michael arming her with a battery of sociopathological defences useful in deflecting what was considered normal with a view of turning normal over, upside-down and inside out; gutting normal and inspecting the bits, then to put normal back together and, finally, recognize it.

Vanessa shivered.

It wasn't cold on the bus.

The flats became houses, the living-rooms bedrooms, curtains open and shut, flat colours and multihued drapes beyond whose thin veneers humans performed a variety of acts, some fun, others painful, upon friends and enemies, acquaintances met hours earlier never to be seen or heard from again. Missing. Boys and girls, men and women whose normal was corrupted, not by themselves - an almost gentle act - but by the likes of...what, who, them, us...participants in a drama unfolding, the torturer and the tortured together in an embrace of fear?

Love, they said. Hurts.

Vanessa shook herself.

So did the trees.

She got off the bus and walked the last few hundred yards.

There was a police cordon.

At eight o'clock at night?

The police had guns...

If she'd read the newspapers and watched the news like a normal person she might have known about the demonstration that afternoon. She might have known what it was in aid of and anticipated how it was to be conducted. Most importantly, she might have appreciated the volatility of the situation, understood something of the politics and not got involved in the aftermath.

She'd been the only passenger on the bus. The driver had seemed nervous, more than usually unpleasant.

The casualty ward was no place to wake up.

She was asked her name by a hairy man with a pencil and poked by sexless creatures wearing bright orange aprons.

The curtains now hid scuffles, the use of force to administer drugs and secure confessions. There were the dark silhouettes of what could only be described as technicians, persons whose faces were masked, whose hands were gloved, who were all seven feet tall.

Vanessa didn't have a criminal record.

They put her out with the rubbish.

Bruised somewhat, bleeding from gums, she found a bus driver to take her home.

Seated on the lower deck by the emergency exit she stared at her knees.

Her mind was disorganized. Flashes of violence interrupted her study of the bony hinges, glimpses of erupting faces and stomachs spilling to the ground. There were dead, she knew; they'd been pointed out to her, bodies draped on gurneys in disused hospital corridors, corpses whose life was bagged, stomachs and faces in the gutter issuing fluids, leaking colours, painting with guts and tongues. The message was clear. The art of death was strewn.

She ran the bath while sitting in it, cold plastic warming her flesh, hot water sucking the pain from limbs.

She was in one piece, she told herself, reconciling the lost hours.

The phone rang. She counted. Fifteen times.

The fridge was impossibly loud.

It shook the kitchen, dislodging hubcaps from shelving and shelves from walls, coating the floor with a rainbow of pasta shapes and a varnish of Worcestershire sauce. Gearbox innards crashed like stalled helicopters from stationary flight-paths inches from the ceiling. Blue paint flaked to reveal red paint and red paint cracked to uncover green. The stuffed otter fell into the sink and the wooden budgerigar broke its beak on the washing-machine. Glass shattered. Air screamed. Tins rolled from cupboard and pans shimmied off the draining board, hitting the varnished floorboards in a cacophony of metal noise.

The bath water remained perfectly calm.

But rime, not steam, coated the walls.

Vanessa's heart was still. She numbered the seconds it took the silence to imbue the outside world.

As the last cocktail stick rolled to a halt, nudging a pepper mill in the shape of a ballerina, breath invaded her lungs and she felt a stabbing pain in her breast, pulling herself from the bath in that instant and clawing at the towel mat, the towel on the radiator, stretching for her clothes. Ice had formed, scratching her blue limbs as she escaped the tub, melting now as her exhalations clouded the room. It was dark outside.

She dressed.

The light-bulb exploded.

She switched the kitchen light on having picked her way blindly through the debris, and surveyed, post vibration, the scene.

The fridge appeared almost bashful. She had to put her ear to it to hear. Not a book was out of place in the adjoining library; and there were thousands in there, pristine and dusty tomes occupying the wall space, dominating the insulated cube.

The kettle winked.

Vanessa carried it to the sink and filled it with water.

She found coffee by the radiator, mug minus handle near the back door.

The back door?

Opening it presented a drop.

She was upstairs, after all.

And the kitchen?

Her nipples hurt, her breasts heavy inside one of Michael's T-shirts. The word SCROTUM in letters composed of tiny wriggling, book-reading sperm...

'The little bastards are obviously programmable. I'm just stating a preference.' With a facetious glint in his eye, bottom lip curled and soon meshed with her own.

She contemplated the fall.

The back door was closed, by herself. Which left one other, humming softly, white and black, black on the inside till the light came on, always faster than you could operate the handle...

In the fridge – there were, he realized, things in jars.

He ought to examine them, he thought, query their nature. Were they bits or wholes? They looked, some at least, like foetuses. Suspended in space and time. Did they dream? Had they lived lives? They might have names and memories, deposited here until a suitable assignment came along. Angels, or imps. They might be prisoners, held in storage for aeons. Again, until a suitable assignment came along. Agents, or saboteurs. Specialists, this a larder of talents.

Twenty Three: Thinly

There was no sleep in Hell, only waking; a landscape of unexpected dangers. Sleep was an impossible dream. The sun circled, but neither rose nor set, and the clouds held a malice all their own.

Ramch, his blood on the steps, descended trancelike, only half conscious as the walls faded around. The steps grew broader, longer, until eventually they were as mountaintops flattened by the weight of worlds.

The shallowest valleys stretched before him, green and lush. It was always noon, the air pungent and warm, the meadow thick with flowers. Insects hovered separately and in their hundreds, prey to birds...

No days passed, yet Ramch walked with an increasing purpose. At first he was given to believe this was some ordinary land, a place of men and women and honest labour. But he had not seen any people, and few animals. All life, if truly life it was, kept a wary distance.

Hell was strange, unmeasured by time. In startled moments of introspection, a luxury he disdained, Ramch thought he no longer breathed. It was as if he had to concentrate on the act to make it real.

He sipped water from his flask, barely wetting his lips to conserve his supply. But truly he had no thirst.

Distracted, he had wandered onto stony ground, all trace of greenery faded, slipped behind like a sheet pulled from a table without disturbing the crockery. The sun languished to his left, seemingly to move when he took his eyes from it, its heat burgeoning yet its strength decreased, for it was possible to stare direct. And Ramch did, catching the bloated orb in motion. He smiled and the sun appeared to sulk. The ground was flat, dusty, littered with rocks the colour of dried mud. He opened and emptied his flask. The liquid ran into a pool where it spilt, outlining the shape of a hoof.

He felt empty. Emptied of courage, of belief. This was a loveless place beneath his feet.

He did not belong.

From the horizon, improbably near, a figure approached, countenance distorted by a heat haze, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and cape.

The figure held out a hand to Michael, only to be knocked sideways, buffeted by some invisible force.

And in turning, disappeared.

'The thing to remember, son,' his father had instructed one summer's day, waist deep in quicksand, 'is not to panic.'

How old was he then? Seven or eight, junior school balsa-wood submarines and plastic soldiers his concerns, battles pitched and submerged, on paper and in colour, hand painted and flatly drawn, the perspective of depth not yet matured in the young Tomatoes' imagination. But not a distant thing...

How might he have handled his creation then? A character heroic, here beginning a journey as yet unknown.

Michael had run for help, flapping his arms wildly, gesticulating excitedly at passers-by, most of whom ignored him and his gyrating ways – until finally he happened upon a group of youths, boys leaning and joking and smoking, spitting and leaning and joking, smoking and leaning against a park bench and a post-box, his animated state inviting dog-ends and hawking, and ultimately help. Father to his chin, still calm, was a sight to behold. The youths pulled him out. He emptied his shoes, patted Michael on the head, and joked and smoked with the boys, the youngest of which now felt excluded. Hadn't he been the hero? Nobody believed so; he had just played his part; a short part in a tall tale, a future beer yarn scenario.

'Don't say anything to your mother!'

He, Ramch, would have told...

Of impossible continents and fabulous inhabitants, flying cities and glass oceans. The loss of innocence...

Wet and roomy, he recalled, her lying there not making a sound.

He would have placed him in a wood with an axe and directed him to fell trees and build ships, sail seas, conquer lands, right wrongs and rescue maidens. Ramch would have fought and slain, untroubled by any morality more complicated than the etiquette of gold. And he would have left that behind, weighing the pockets of lesser mortals as he took to the hills, his bounty lying in the unknown, the territory as yet unfound. The world was his, and beyond.

It stretched flat, naked, inviting his toes, his boots, his sword. Earth. Hard packed dirt he scuffed, carried with him from one adventure to the next, sometimes accompanied, more often alone, both a mercenary and a friend, the avenger, the salvager, the rescuer of souls...

What next for such a man?

Oblivion?

'Only two things to remember about girls,' said dad. 'Upstairs and down.'

Oblivion...

Of flesh touched to flesh, the torture of the incomplete, the mismatched union of body parts, a juncture of the stiff and the relaxed, opposites united in a frenzy from which pleasure was derived...oblivious of the consequences.

But he'd learn that later, about age seventeen.

And a half.

An altogether different quagmire.

Ramch paused, unsure of the dark. A shape moved in it, large yet smooth, black on black, the horse he had trailed to this beach of tar. Born of a coal sea, the stallion kicked and shook as a new-born, flicking tail and mane. The wave from which it sprang lay broken, the stench of gas its birth, the promise of heat and light to come. He reached out to it, touched its warmth. The horse reared and stamped and broke the annealed strand, bringing a flame to the world...

Inviting experiments with tobacco and cannabis, acid and magic mushrooms.

The man turned and was visible again, his arms folded in two dimensions, a stern look on his face; either anger or impatience. He seemed to imply that Michael was wasting time. He had the mathematics to prove it. He had the numbers. The love apple hummed internally, current passing through old valves. Silently, he apologized, and continued on his way. The man tipped his hat and was gone.

'Now we're getting somewhere,' muttered a technician. 'Just watch and see.'

Abdomen...

The belly, the gut, swollen through indigestion, too much Chicken Kiev and cheap red wine. No sympathy from Vanessa, whose vegetarian meal and Pinot Noir sipping left her with a smile.

'Serves yourself right,' she opined.

It was self-inflicted. All his ills. He had only himself to blame. Take that business with his agent and her hairdresser. What the man had done was criminal, but hardly worthy of immortalization, Medusa recreated in welding wire on the roof of his car. Even if it was good publicity; she failed to see the funny side.

He was a pig, he confessed, given to indulgence, rolling in the mud of his desires.

The life of art possessed him.

Vanessa rolled her eyes.

'Were you like this before I met you?'

He nodded. Her relief was obvious: it wasn't her fault.

'When did it all start?'

She was serious, he saw.

'O-level metalwork – the forge, the heat and flames, the intense colours reflecting the high temperatures; a spectrum of malleability, the transmogrification of steel...' He paused. 'Or perhaps it was those clay ashtrays we made in infant school.'

She shook her head.

He grimaced, trying not to fart; at least not out loud, squeezing one out on the sly and hoping she wouldn't notice.

She did, grimacing in turn. 'Either light the things or go to the toilet,' she said without humour.

He obliged.

Buttocks...

Red raw from spanking, blue knickers half way down her thighs, the girl admired her arse in a full length mirror. Her silver dress was clasped about her waist and her yellow hair bound in a green ribbon.

'More,' she demanded, not satisfied. 'Then take a Polaroid.' For her boyfriend, he was given to understand.

Such were the contrary ways of women.

Condoms...

She liked the flavoured ones.

'No good for fucking,' he said.

'Tough.'

She had a mean streak...

'Cavity wall insulation,' he offered.

'Big girls' bubble-gum.'

He hurt her and she asked for more, or begged for mercy, whatever, whichever, whoever she was, this accomplice. She dug her nails in his thighs and chewed his foreskin. There was blood in their mouths, his and hers, red streams diluted by red wine, body fluids drawn into symbols across bellies marked, reddened, sensitized, redly taut.

They dripped together and filled the prophylactics.

He drove her home.

The sword was buried to the hilt in an animal the size of a Transit van, half rhinoceros, half kangaroo. How it had got there was unknown. Ramch took hold and drew it out like a needle from a peach, the wound closing to invisibility and the rhinoroo hopping off, nodding its nose horn and rolling its armoured shoulders in thanks.

It looked like a giant surgical instrument, Michael thought, a kind of multi-tool for the amputation of limbs and delicate slicing of flesh.

It could part lovers and divide the spirit.

He would wield it with care...

Hope abandoned, kicking in a door, this the eighth floor and the culmination of the broad stairs, he searched frantically for a way up. There must be a penthouse, he reasoned, smashing windows and breaking furniture. A private entrance, a service elevator, anything, some means of continuing his climb. He trashed each suite, hurled televisions to their deaths on patios and in swimming pools, upturned beds and used a fire extinguisher to demolish bathrooms, shattering tiles and rupturing plaster to find, he hoped, that secret gateway, the route to the stars long promised, hidden from him now beneath or behind...cupboards, ceilings, carpets...his to expose.

But there was nothing. Not even the lift shaft went higher. Everything just ended here on floor eight. There was only the roof beyond.

Maybe that was it, Columbine sunning herself among ventilation ducts and pigeon shit. There had to be a fire escape. Outside, extending from balconies; of course, bare metal rungs to the top.

And two deckchairs, in one of which he sat.

'It's a fine view, is it not?'

He agreed it was.

'You could set your easel here and paint each degree, each day a different aspect, working your way east to west as the year progressed and the seasons rolled, warm and cold, through light and shade, dry and wet.'

Michael nodded. She had inspired him before, to landscapes, picturesque scenes of grass and sheep.

'If, that is, you had any real talent.'

What was she saying? She was being deliberately cruel, coldly manipulative.

'What did you do with the box?'

'What?'

'The box, with Mr Unger-Farmer's name on it. What became of it?'

'I don't know...'

Her eyes were suddenly huge. Then she laughed.

'I can see you're blue around the edges, Michael. An interloper, no less. But who sent you, hmm? What game is afoot?'

'I don't understand.'

'No, you wouldn't. No talent, like I say; for art, espionage, or sex.' She counted his shortcomings on her fingers, adding, 'Cooking,' and, using her thumb, 'Rolling cigarettes.'

He was flabbergasted.

'In fact you're quite pathetic,' she continued, warming to her tirade. 'You're selfish, facetious, conceited and...yes, a bore. Whoever programmed you must be completely anal and frustrated. Who did program you, by the way? Do you know? Not Herschel Byrd, that's for sure; he imagines you're some kind of avenging angel, albeit one sadly unconscious of his role. Like Herschel, really.' She laughed, jiggling in her trademark pink lingerie, flesh pimpled and in folds. 'And you're gullible,' she went on. 'An utter fool. Any woman could control you. You're so believing. All it takes is a smile.'

The flabbergasting slowed his cognitive processes.

'But that said, you're somewhat appealing. You've got a nice bum.'

It was reassuring...

'Now, Mr Tomatoes - or whoever you are - get you about your task!'

Save the world, you imbecile.

Only a matter of days.

Twenty Four: The Fascists

The grey men collected on the frozen lake, breaths issuing steam, fingers intertwined and feet stamping. They formed a circle round a patch of cleared snow, the water's frozen superficies glimmering steely in the early morning drizzle, the thin light picking out buttons and teeth. They stamped their feet like birds raising worms, and at the first central cracks they opened their coats to reveal a panoply of luminous shirts.

Twenty Five: The Fridge

Sylvester closed the refrigerator door, blocking out any screams for help. That there were screams he was in no doubt. Laughter, too...more than the rattling of milk bottles and the crackling static of ice chill.

He let out his breath, having held it from the great sucking void.

There was a rapping on the window like that of long fingernails.

Erratic and increasingly loud; he turned to see hail. Pea size. Marble size. Golf ball size chunks of frozen water.

Must be winter, he supposed.

Didn't seem right, somehow: too warm, his recent, uncorrupted memory informed.

Too green.

But cold...

The phone rang and he rushed to answer.

'Mr Jones?'

Placing the receiver on the adjacent Yellow Pages he headed for the door. He took a big fleecy grey coat from its hangar and stepped outside. Beyond the hedge confused traffic coughed and crawled. The coat had a hood and he tipped this forward, narrowing his vision to a tube.

Huge compacted snowballs exploded round him, all of them missing, none as yet with his name on. They smashed windows and dented car bonnets, ripped through umbrellas and toppled metropolitan pavement walkers, pummelling individuals as if targeted, bludgeoning to death ordinary-looking men and women. Speeding, opaque incendiary devices, they fell in their thousands, spat from thick black clouds squatting over the world like battleships seeding the ocean floor with mines.

Sirens resounded, but it was too late for the fallen. Even those indoors failed to escape the cull, brains splattered via the intuitive breakage of roof tiles and ceiling roses, candelabras unhooked and vases rocked from shelves by air compressed into pulses, condensation and rarefaction accounting for victims tripped by draught excluders in the shape of dachshunds and squashed under pianos, impaled on brass fireplace ornaments or poisoned by fractured gas appliances. Homes imploded, the weight of ice suffocating. Fires raged, bringing flooding. And the dead filled the gutters.

The devastation lasted roughly an hour. Sylvester was unscathed, having walked only a short distance, finding himself at a house numbered 78, the card from TNT in his hand and his thumb on the bell, which clanged.

The house seemed familiar, he thought.

There was no-one home. He walked around back, crunching through foliage and snow, both now floating to ground in a mixed salad of white and green leaves, fruits and...skis, his skis, poking from a drift in an array of tines, a sculpture sprouting from a large steel bucket, consisting of sports equipment and artificial limbs, a spare parts bin for the athletic amputee.

Sylvester remembered learning to ski when he was nine. Somewhere in the Alps, a nursery slope with more languages than trees. He'd broken his arm, feeling a twinge there as if to confirm, spending his holiday playing ping-pong and learning how to mix cocktails, the barman disadvantaged by a leg cast yet gaining revenge through the alcohol-free blending of juices.

And the occasional beer.

Probably in jail now, he thought, the Portuguese who'd asked his advice on girls.

Sylvester dragged his hood down. The back garden he found himself in was his own. There was his apple tree, his apples, his trellis. Here was his back door, open a crack and painted a lurid green. He stepped into his kitchen, strangely under-whelmed by each subsequent realization, more surprised by those things he did not recognize, like the glass-handled steak knives sticking in the wall.

The kitchen was a disaster. The image of it blurred. There was not one kitchen but two; before and after superimposed. His eyes watered. He blinked. The room was tidy, yet strange. He blinked. The room was frosty and chaotic, everything in it either dislodged or upended.

Like someone had swung a cat. A big one.

He blew steam through his teeth, then noticed the fridge door. Shut, but with claw marks.

Sylvester explored.

He wondered how long it had been since this was his home. Weeks? Months? His memory was intermittent, teasing him with images of where he might have been. Had he moved? He didn't think so. There were too many things here that obviously belonged to him. Books. CDs. But his life had been overlaid, reconfigured by another and forever changed. He wasn't who he'd been. He scratched his head. Recalling the delivery card, that which had facilitated his return, he searched for the package addressed to number 59, to the Mr Unger-Farmer whose clothes he wore, giving up eventually and finding his way back to the kitchen, fixed now in its chaotic aspect, to see if the kettle still worked.

It had stopped snowing. There was no more hail. The bombardment had spared him and his once abode. The windows were intact and all but the kitchen entire. The only other damage was to the world as a whole...

Out there, bleeding, a revolution had come. He listened to it on the radio, a broadcast crackling with interference, like something from decades before, an old recording of an older diatribe, the guttural spiel of a general whose inspiration was murder.

There was no electricity. He drank his coffee at room temperature. No milk. Powder scooped from the floor.

He switched the radio off. Not to save the batteries, but to distance himself from a reality inherently cold.

You could cut a thing in half forever, he knew. Unless it was a number. Unless you dealt in fractions. It was semantics. Life and death were just words. Man or machine?

Words...

He tampered with his fire prevention systems.

So that was why he sweated so much. Threatened by internal combustion, with the risk his major organs might explode.

Cool it.

He yawned, another mechanism, useful perhaps for stretching jaw muscles, should he wish to swallow wildfowl whole. Like a python. A dragon whose metallic content was high.

If he cut himself he bled. But what was his blood's chemical composition? How deep was his skin? Were these his own teeth?

Tom didn't know the answers. He didn't know much, come to think of it, which was what he was now doing, kicking his feet on a child's swing. The play area was a rink. Icicles hung from the climbing frame and the slide was a toboggan run. The kids were all sledging, unquestioning of such freak weather conditions – while the parents laid siege to supermarkets and forced sheep into car boots, their primal instincts activated by the unprecedented turn of events.

The politics didn't interest Tom.

The violence did, its random proliferation like an influenza bug, spreading through social contact the disease of blunt instruments, symptoms ranging from fist-fights to gunshots. There were shearing forces at work, opening heads and parting flesh. And it was worse at night.

The world was lit by fires...

Leaving the swing to its echo, he took his knife and held it against the throat of a tree, the bark there smooth and taut.

But the tree was alive. He stood back to admire its sagging branches, leaves wilted beneath an overcoat of grey.

Tom took hold of its throat and shook.

The children stopped their sledging to watch.

Among them, only the blonde girl smiled.

The others pointed and laughed.

Dissimilar.

Not altogether alike.

Naked corpses through a thin shower, misty and silvered, pink and brown, shaved, gyrating to no music she could hear, wetted, polished, holed, dented, hundreds of them, a zombie chorus line in some bizarre rendition of Oklahoma, each grinning, lips folded under, teeth bared in a grimace of...not surprise...

Surrender.

And she danced through them, with them, her cold hands in theirs, her cold skin pressed, her gums receded and her feet numb. Only she wasn't dead. She was convinced of that. Were they? Undead, perhaps, cursed. Stripped of body hair and given to perform this sham against a backdrop of white, a whiteness evinced by nothing, meaning nothing, composed of nothing. No colour. Just the opposite of black.

The only colours were pale, empty, sucked to opacity by the all consuming whole, the void outside her skin which orchestrated the show, conducting the silent music with an invisible baton.

It required a different approach.

She had to escape this throng.

But it was so comfortable, the bodies around her offering protection, the safety of a womb. Why would she want to break out? Wasn't everything here?

Death, she kept telling herself, unable to remember her own name. Death had taken her. She could not allow that. The dance was a mockery. The choreographer was...

Vanessa fixed her toes, curling them into a continuum unknown. Gripped. Others crashed into her, tripped and fell. She rubbed her hands over her scalp, bare and chill, the action energizing roots and challenging follicles to grow. Her palms sucked the dead cells from her body and drew them into hairs. Her nails grew. The zombies bayed, screamed into the void. She might take them with her. But their cries, their anguish went unheard.

The white shattered and she...tumbled. Was that it?

'Bitch! Hey, bitch! Want to play, bitch! Sit on my face, huh...'

Not a question she entertained, unfolding her wings, still damp, and leaving in search of solid ground.

They'd follow her. She understood that. There would come a time when there was no place left to run, or fly, a time when the walls had corners and the air grew turgid with dimensions, layers of fact and truth, lies and fiction from which she had to pick.

Choose...

Trust.

It made her laugh.

She was hard and cold and would not be mistaken. She was indifferent, disdainful of hope and love. She had no time for it. Her work here was more important. She had to cleanse the gut.

He looked up to see a huge ginger cat leaning in the doorway. Calmly, it lit a cigarette.

Sylvester held the cat's gaze for a few seconds; then it dropped to all fours and padded away, high-stepping through the drifts.

It had brought his memory back.

There, before him, detailing his transformation.

He rushed upstairs to change.

Whoever had equipped him had equipped him for combat. Or, more accurately, urban survival. The jacket he wore, outwardly normal, had more secret pockets than a shoplifting nun's habit. In each was a weapon, an arsenal complex and deadly, tools of the trade for a cross-dimensional assassin. He was a one man invasion force. About his person had been flame throwers and rocket launchers, automatic pistols and a quaint variety pack of grenades, stun through fragmentation. There were garrottes and poisons, smoke canisters and viral agents. A destructive battery was at his disposal, hardware sophisticated and crude. But Tom had selected the knife for its whittling potential, ditching the remainder in a phone box rigged to self-destruct in a given number of seconds, leaving a crater the size of an two Olympic swimming-pools that gave pause to the authorities, who wondered who, other than themselves, had the wherewithal to create such a disturbance.

Tom doubted he needed all that stuff anyway. He had to take out the men in bright shirts. That was his mission. If it put him on the side of good, all very well; but he had no illusions. This wasn't his battle. He was a base servant, a myrmidon in thrall to thrill seekers.

Hell had spilled over. It had happened before and would again. Hereon in was about management.

He felt incredibly lonely now that his life had been peeled away. Would he ever go back? To what hadn't been his in the first place, he admitted, an existence modelled on an individual unknown, who had presumably been disappeared. There was a guilt attached to that. He must look like him, he thought, enough to fool the neighbours anyway; the man couldn't have too much in the way of family, or friends either. He had to have been a loner, somebody no-one would come looking for or really miss, a person anonymous, one who others readily left. A confused man, like himself, given to foolishness and desirous of change. The pseudonym was his: Michael Tomatoes. O-levels in metalwork and art. Tom wondered what memories they had in common. Or were his more a composite? Did one complement the other? Whose anima was the driving force? Were either of them real at all?

Where was that individual now?

Pulling on trousers, falling flat on his face, engaged in a comedy of dressing of Harold Lloyd proportions, wrestling with the wardrobe and tripping over his socks, only half on his feet at any one time...

Breathless but breathing. Himself once more. Staring madly at a ceiling he recognized from under a girl.

What was her name?

A big girl, a pink girl, a talented girl who swallowed.

And?

Then the gap. Then the missing parts. Until now. Until his garden, his kitchen; his cat grown large.

No need now to put the cat-flap in he'd bought. Malcolm could use the door.

He laughed uncontrollably for fifteen minutes, unable to stop despite the pain, even falling down the stairs.

It grew dark.

The moon rose, full and copper hued, reflecting the sorry state of tides.

The moon reprised...

The moon took a snapshot of the Earth and saw...

Boxes, each with an idea. Containers for liquid and solids, packaging to disguise contents, actualities buried in polystyrene and given new shape by shredded paper, via bubble wrapping.

People, each with a desire. Containers for liquids and solids, packaging to disguise contents, actualities buried in preconceptions and given new shape by past experience, via ignorance and fear.

Earths.

What the bad men exploited, corrupting the soil.

She thought of it as sculpture.

She could sense the shame.

The ice walls pulsed almost unseen, pumping odium into veins, feeding muscles with sadness, the lethargy of contempt that none the less energized limbs to a brutality they themselves had never known, experienced here for the first time, on a subliminal level justified. There was art in it, deep down somewhere – not necessarily good art, but an arranging of sorts, a conscious effort to demonstrate ideas and delineate opinion, so long as it conformed.

There was only room for sheep. The men in bright shirts dictated a style and the sheep agreed.

They danced and died. And were reborn as storm-troopers, then to invade a neighbouring land.

More sheep to the fold.

Sheep who only knew they were in a field by the four walls.

History repeating, she thought, not proud of it, but inside it, seeing its workings, the pulsing of its frozen heart.

And hers an insignificant warmth...

To be directed carefully, pinpointed, not wasted on grand gestures, not spent within these cathedral chambers. Targeted elsewhere, the buffeting of her wings to be exaggerated in a different hemisphere.

'I told you once, didn't I, about my dream?'

'Which dream? Not the one with the ice hockey players I hope.'

'No! I gave that up; I told you.'

'What – the dream or the ice hockey...oomph!'

'SHUT UP AND LISTEN FOR ONCE YOU MORON!'

'Eh, okay.'

'I went to this other place...'

A cold place of shadows and bright lights, the sky reflecting the earth and the people like ghosts. Everyone had a door in their backs. They hinged open and you could step inside, live within, eventually become that person. Not that I did. Too scared, perhaps; or too cautious. I couldn't help but think how many other people might already be on the inside, one person stepping inside the next and so on, an endless sequence of overlapping personalities with the foremost subsumed. What became of them? I wanted to know, to understand. Who was this person or that person originally? Who was I? Had someone, a number of others stepped inside me? How many? The very idea chilled. Who was I if not myself? But if I'd stepped inside another body...Only I had no memory of that. Did I have a body at all to start with or were these people, male and female, young and old, merely forms of transport to a wandering soul? Warmer on the inside, I realized. To be without a body was to be exposed. Then I simply had to do it, open a person's door and enter their world. But which? And on doing so would I forget who I was before? Had I occupied countless lives down the years? Wearing each body till it wore out or was irredeemably damaged? Was death left out of the equation?

'Like buying a new car.'

'Or hiring one for the weekend...'

Twenty Six: Slice

A sharp knife was taken to the world. It cut through countries, oceans, sliced through cities and towns, villages, houses and places of work. It severed folk about their daily business, freezing them in cross-section, innards displayed like in text books or those charts on butcher shop walls. It separated partners, husbands and wives. In its wake everything paused.

The knife was to blame for her losing Michael, for Michael losing his mind. It was to blame for the disaster unfolding, having slipped its bonds. It was complicit in the unravelling of lives and minds, its sharpness such that few noticed the dislocation until it was too late and no way then to cross the divide. Bridges were useless, stitching that dissolved in the wound. Only a mating of parts, so precisely severed, could cure the ails of souls...

'Oh, please.'

'What? Something I said?'

'More the way you said it.'

He couldn't remember saying anything, scratching his head as if removing a caul.

'You disappear up your own arse sometimes, you know?'

He knew.

'It's the happy pills,' he told her.

'There, you're doing it again.'

'I'm sorry...'

'And stop apologizing!' She was torturing him, the shame of it fleeting. She could control him, it was simple. 'It doesn't make it better.'

He shut his eyes and unfolded his arms. She stroked his chest and poked him till he smiled.

He was mouldable, she realized.

Losing him was careless. Finding him would be difficult, or easy. She had yet to really look, supposing he would just turn up.

Hadn't he always?

But if he was where she suspected, in the freezer compartment, looking might not be appropriate.

Twenty Seven: The Four Humours

His father's father's father, Mulligatawny Orange, was wounded at Ypres in 1916 having tripped over a German helmet and fallen into a bomb crater, impaling himself on a British bayonet the property of one Sgt. Curzon, who owed him fifteen shillings from a bet of a week before involving two Belgium girls and a chicken. Curzon's legs and lower torso were missing, but he had a solid grip on his rifle, the butt of which sank along with the sergeant's right elbow into the mud of what once had been a barley field.

Private Orange couldn't believe his luck. Sgt. Curzon had been avoiding him for days.

The bayonet pierced his left shoulder just below the collar bone. He lay with his face a foot above the sergeant's, his knees trailing in guts, blood running down inside his shirt.

The survivor of a mining accident two tears previously (even at forty-one the war had seemed the safer option), he wasn't about to lose hope now, not with a pregnant wife at home and the lure of an honourable discharge pending. No sir. He searched Curzon's pockets. But any valuables he'd had on him must have been in his trousers, as Mulligatawny found nothing besides a tin watch and some French letters.

He cursed, and dribbled spittle onto the officer's nose.

It was a story he would tell his children, and they theirs, a number of exaggerations coming in along the way, the six hours he spent in the crater becoming six days, the fifteen shillings fifteen pounds and so forth, the entire battle raging around him while he slept like a baby, cosseted in the arms of death yet refusing to die.

The truth was that eventually he thought to detach the bayonet, stumbling back to the British lines as machine-gun fire rippled the swollen air and men plodding in the opposite direction marvelled at his luck, hoping for some of the same in the seconds in took for them to pass from this world, last thoughts spinning from heads opened by shrapnel, vital fluids turning the field into what later generations would come to envisage as a particularly vile Masalla sauce.

So he lived to tell the tale, fathering another child, his father's father, Franklin, who served in the Spanish Civil War.

The nick-name was inevitable, he supposed.

'Hey, Franco, why you never scared?'

He just shrugged and cleaned his rifle.

'Me an Juliana, we think you got no balls,' said Pepe. 'No fear, no balls.'

As a theory it lacked science. As a joke, humour. But Franklin just shrugged; he was impossible to goad.

'Maybe you should take a look in his pants, eh?' Pepe suggested to his compatriot, lithe and agile.

Her smile was mischievous. She crawled toward him on all fours, shaking her long hair like a mane.

Franklin shook his head and cleaned his rifle.

Juliana nudged his chin with her nose. 'Ignore the fool,' she whispered. 'Meet me after dark.'

How could he refuse?

They made love in an orange grove, which Franklin found amusing, rutting like farm animals midst heat and straw. Juliana professed undying love for him and a real hunger for his seed, which he gave in abundance, aged thirty and a virgin, finding the time right to procreate, the woman healthy and the night air clean, which he believed important insofar as the begetting of an heir was concerned. His mother demanded grandchildren. She had fourteen. Only Franklin was still to deliver, leading to rumours that all was not well with his mind.

He studied. He read books. He did not smoke or drink, was unmarried, his life, he professed, given to a higher purpose...

'Not the church!' Father clutched his chest.

'No,' he explained. 'Freedom.'

A sigh of relief from Mulligatawny, whose shoulder he said was giving him gyp, his excuse to head off down the pub.

Mother rolled her eyes...

So did Juliana.

And Franklin cleaned his gun.

Two days later Pepe was shot in an ambush. Those not killed were captured and tried.

Found guilty, Franklin and Juliana married before a firing squad. His last wish. They dragged her aside - her salvation a colonel who clutched his groin like it were a bag of fruit, who later deserted (and was shot), leaving her free to raise her child - aimed and missed.

Although all professed to be atheists, the soldiers worried that his calmness was a sign from God.

His father then was Franco Junior, a boy with an angel's face who all the girls wanted to kiss, a choir boy with a voice so sweet it made the blackshirts cry. And an unholy temper quite at odds with his father, his mother's bane and an embarrassment to those of sensitive hearing as Junior raged and blasphemed, kicked over pews at the slightest provocation, dropped his pants during services and assaulted young ladies in the bell tower, for which he became rightly famous.

'Ah, that little Franco! Who has he up there now?'

Trouble inevitably followed. As did a spell in the army, and, inevitably, jail.

On his twenty-first birthday, having served two years for reckless endangerment – with a doctor's wife twice his age and a friend of Juliana's – he was put on a boat and returned to England, his father's home, where, after many adventures, deflowerings and run-ins with the law, he met his match in a girl with a mean right hook, named Flo.

Sylvester was born in 1965, the only child of obdurate parents.

At his Christening, insisted upon by senior family members, his mother and father glaringly absent, the vicar remarked on his sad countenance, unsuccessfully pulling a face before dousing the babe, who cried with the weight of worlds on his shoulders and sent a shudder of hopelessness through the assembled throng. They blamed Franco and Flo of course, scheming thereafter how to prise the child away from their angry presence, into the warm comfortable bosom of the Orange clan, whose sons were miners, whose daughters telephonists, whose northern roots were set in coal and fixed with iron.

But Franco Junior would have none of it. He took his wife and child home, simmering for years after as the boy grew, timid yet unafraid of his father, staring into the distance when his mother called, independent of them both from age five and the start of school.

School to Sylvester was where time stood still. He could spend years there, he realized, and not change at all.

School was the safe, stable environment he adored.

Until, aged fifteen, he was expelled.

Suddenly fate had taken a hand, it seemed. Franco laughed so much he wet himself, piss stains adding to beer stains on the couch from which he held his vigil, Flo having absconded with a postman years before. Overnight his father's ire had turned inward, rotting him with bile. Only now he had his poor fool of a son to console him, the spotty youth whose crime was masturbation.

In a cubicle, behind a pink door, either side plugging and evacuating girls.

They let him sit his exams, most of which he failed, but in a psychiatric hospital, a long road of counselling his reward for genes whose narrow survival he blamed on those same fates, mocking him still, as they mocked his father in his inebriation, mocked his father's father before a lead-puckered wall as the firing squad was made to reload, mocked his father's father's father who in his dotage was to relate a story no-one cared about anymore, the spittle dribbling down his chin as he murmured Sgt. Curzon's name, rambling about Flemish girls and the chicken that got away...

Such was life, he thought. That he'd anticipated disaster from an early age made it none the easier to rationalize. But then why should he? Wasn't that just dodging the issue? His forebears had fought evil, sometimes with evil. And here was evil again, back stronger than ever.

His great-grandfather would know what to do. He'd give his blood to feed the soil; his grandfather too. Even his old man, dead now, would challenge those squeezers of throats whose oratory was predictably heinous, even if their language was sometimes close to his own. He'd make them pay, with lives if necessary, just as his father had before, although with rather less fuss. The Oranges were a breed, he told himself, swallowing hard. They did what they did and didn't explain. Whatever their personality, be it phlegmatic or choleric, they knew what to do, and in doing it remained true to themselves.

Sylvester's truth, however, was melancholic. Pensive and sad. He had victim written all over him, yet with a hint of acid...

Underground.

The passages were slick with condensation, the cement between the bricks crumbling with age. Rats scurried, slugs slithered, the dispossessed gathered about bean tin fires.

None of these took much notice of the prophet. They were beyond redemption, no longer caring of sunlight and solace. They crouched in the dank sewers and wandered the subterranean waterways, fishing for debris. They were, man and beast, scavengers. No amount of promise could lift them. Happiness for them was forgotten, too painful to envisage, wiped from their minds by a submerging panic. Many were deformed, outwardly twisted. Some were even born to this, into a kingdom of misery, bright children who would never shine in clean air, ears twitching and eyes shuttered, as one with the gloaming through which he travelled. Yet even here there were subversives, rebels whose outlook was estranged from the core, rogue satellites that might at any time cross the divide from maudlin to ecstatic. Never able to survive in the world above, they still were curious, making expeditions and securing prizes, buying and stealing with deft hands and salvaged money, notes and coins washed their way by luck and accident. Shy creatures, they kept their distance.

Sylvester kicked beer cans and trudged across unknowable surfaces. He had a blonde girl's insistence on answers to guide him, her sought after resolution driving him with a memory of insect wings and a threat of violence, subtle and to the brain.

He had conduits.

Water treatment works.

Sluices, cataracts, weirs, dams, a host of manmade and natural features for the guidance of the planet's liquid resources, its circulation of prime importance, to nature and industry, power to electrify and cool. He wondered how many individual drops there were and if they clung to a particular continent, ocean or hemisphere. More likely the drops journeyed through bodies, flesh and stone, made tours of countries and circumnavigated the globe, never settling in the same place twice, lest it be by chance, occupying through time every pore of the Earth, composing plant and animal over generations, being drunk and passed from one condition to another, frozen and boiled...suspended in clouds.

The drops carried information vital to the development of mankind. Each had a million stories to tell; it was a matter of understanding their language, deciphering their codes. All history was encapsulated in the wet spheres, singularities whose composition of hydrogen and oxygen was deceptively simple, belying a computing capacity in excess of Arthur C. Clarke's wildest dreams. The drops were energy as well as information stores. They powered themselves and the world. They knew everything and forgot nothing. No detail was too small.

But water merely flowed, it did not decide. It coloured the land and the air; but it was left to men and women to give those colours names.

And what the child sought?

Sylvester, his head in a channel, listened as best he could to the chatter of distant drains, the gossip of sewerage as it was swept on its way. There was something strange out there, bobbing, the currents affected by its presence, pushing and shoving but unable to escape. The thing was determined. It had already travelled the globe. Washed up it would be stranded, a situation that did necessarily suit its purpose, as it would then have to wait to be found. In transit, manipulating waves, it retained some control. Only its identity, its destination were a mystery, perhaps even to itself. The thing was drawn, as Sylvester was drawn, given to favour certain courses. He and it breathed with fishes...

He and it were found.

And wakened, he in a toilet bowl with no memory of himself or the other – memory now returned.

It one box that had eluded him, not here among his collection at any rate, those items he had begun assembling in his teenage years. They made him the artist he was, Sylvester appreciated, oddments and trophies, some of which were representative of people, places or events, most of which weren't; curiosities discovered on beaches and under benches, hidden or lost; treasures collected and thereafter employed as his inspiration, the motive force behind his artistic ego, the love apple of his creation who at times seemed like an entirely separate being.

Sylvester wasn't aware of him at that moment. He replaced lids and returned the torch to its niche above the door.

He'd changed into winter clothes, dull and heavy.

The phone rang, which surprised him. Someone was out there. Someone with him in mind.

Descending the stairs he debated whether or not to answer. Whoever it was must suspect he was home, so was there any use in hiding? From whom? The receiver vibrated under his fingers. His mouth was dry.

'Hello...'

The ice cracked and a head appeared, tumbling dark straw curls.

The men came forward and raised the child, dressing her pink flesh in a rainbow of scarves.

But she had a dissatisfied smile.

Twenty Eight: Painted Lady

The crazy people had won. The crazy people had called an election and voted for themselves. Theirs was the only party. Only crazy people were allowed to vote, so the majority was large. Absolute.

There was a curfew crazy people alone violated.

Vanessa was one, by her own design.

Hubert Mason's during the day wasn't much changed, if you ignored the armed guards and the new, faceless money. There was rationing, but not for all. Her supervisor now wore a pink shirt and a shiny pin. Not even Van dared cross him, although she did forget to sweeten his tea. Each morning the assembled staff were lectured on behaviour and deportment, on how to spot interlopers, undesirables and reactionaries whose purpose was corruption. Once spotted the guards stepped in. There was much screaming and occasional bloodshed. She kept her wings folded and grinned. Her boss, the sometime floor-walker, had taken to stroking her thigh.

At night she was avenged.

She had access to the fridge.

So much had changed, she thought, not least herself. She'd never had a purpose before, much less one as violent. She never would have imagined herself capable of dealing in death.

At night she seduced with a passion, and destroyed with a kiss.

There was a reward on the head of this temptress, who the official media belittled and scorned, pretending their madness to be hers. But she was above such fulmination, employed after dark with returning the dead to their graves.

By the score, which she kept, nudging three hundred by September's close, the sky still frosted and the earth packed, autumn on the horizon, its thunder stolen by forces most would regard as hot, not cold.

She lived in that world, holed up in Michael's attic when not at work, surviving on a paltry diet of cheese and cress sandwiches and cleaning her teeth with wire. The man downstairs knew nothing of her. She eavesdropped on his telephone conversations. He mumbled yes and no down the line. He talked in his sleep as she sat on his chest, and she heard his confession, afterward cooling his brow. He looked like Michael. He painted canvasses to the glory of a state deranged, including among the phallic symbolism and subliminal imagery tiny irreverent messages of his own. Looked at closely, a button might reveal an arse, an earlobe a tit, a perfect smile the ingress of worms. Like her, he was a counter-revolutionary.

Biding his time. Through fear?

He had a lot to be scared of, his dark past for one.

Puzzled by the contents of his home, those feminine touches she'd failed to retrieve or still had a use for, like the ironing-board.

Usurped...

That intrigued her. There was more of a picture, his nightly ramblings - now that she paid more attention to his words than his gonads - offering clues to what ailed him, his pain the result of deletion, or separation, a schism like that of twins divided at birth.

Had one died? Was this Michael's resurrected brother? Sylvester's paintings bore the love apple's moniker. But whose talent was in the hand? It seemed like too simple an explanation, long on trash novel plot and short on plausibility. The idea amused her though: disunion, of a soul...

Michael's whereabouts were a mystery. Vanessa had put him from her mind. As she drained blood from veins his image crept back. Seen in crimson puddles and glimpsed in fading eyes, the face of her lost love, agitated and bemused, running wildly, flailing arms, scooping dog shit in crisp packets and chasing her for miles.

Anyway. She checked her nails. There were rendezvous, appointments to be kept and assignations arranged.

Sailing from the dormer, filling her lungs, the painted lady fluttered, all girlie and lost as she descended on a city ill-prepared, toothed with steel but unprotected, falling as each night, the men and boys, to her innocent smile.

Twenty Nine: Being Being

Consternation quickly turned to apathy, the people resigned to a new order as if at the turn of a page. The past was rewritten or faded. The nation was boxed. Of other nations less and less was heard. The newspapers grew thinner and the TV became home to parades and documentaries designed to explain...

Tom worked the nightshift in a bakery. He had a talent for cake decoration and for arranging cherries on tarts, a real eye for detail. He spoke to no-one and kept his nose clean. The bosses nodded approvingly.

By day he walked the streets, marvelling as time appeared to roll backward. Cars grew more primitive, shop windows more austere. The city took on a siege mentality, anxious and inward, a nervousness appeased by a lack of ambition, the weariness of pedestrians mirrored in the sluggishness of traffic. Colours were drained from faces and clothing, reds, blues and greens that were then concentrated in the faces and clothing of others, brightly garbed individuals who amassed an intensity of pigments so radiant ordinary folk had to look away. Tom was able to stare, though, tinting his vision at will and focusing on these characters, who strutted like peacocks and drove convertibles the rain never touched, the rime never dulled, as colourful as themselves, brimful of luxury and intoxication.

They were his target, he knew. But he lacked a passion, a willingness to kill that was a flaw in his programming.

Tom observed. Nothing else. He watched the people pale and the city decline. He worked at the bakery, where the cakes were always bursting with rich ripe fruit and the pastries sparkled with sugar. He didn't sleep. He floated absently on the outside while on the inside he was energized, active with glazes, flaked nuts and whipped cream.

Negative and positive.

The bosses nodded approvingly and presented him with a reward, a commission no less, a birthday bash whose sweet trolley he was to design, thick with chocolate and sumptuous with brandy, rolling and wobbling with jelly and blancmange. And what was more: ice sculptures, a cake huge and tiered, jam sponge embellished with ribbons of varicoloured icing, adorned with frosted scenes from Selected Histories, Myths & Legends, picturesque and painted, raised like a ziggurat and flowing with delicate liquorice streamers, its architecture classical and its aspect mouth-watering, precise in scale and elevation.

'A real chance for you to shine...' they told him.

An IMPORTANT occasion.

Tom was only happy to please. He wouldn't let them down.

They nodded approvingly and slunk away.

He cracked his fingers, dabbed his brow, and took to mixing.

If it was a masterwork they required, they'd get one.

Sylvester answered the door to an ursine man with a plastic bag full of beer and a ruddy complexion, who invited himself in.

'Shit,' said the bear. 'Did they have to bury me so deep?' He peered at his nails as if lamenting the waste of a good manicure.

'Hey,' said Orange. 'Where'd you come from?'

'Under the earth, stupid.'

They drank and talked...

'Haven't seen you in ages.'

'That's because I've been missing. Visiting with elves.'

'A-ha.'

Danny sat in the crushed can chair and appeared right at home as he rolled cigarettes, handing one to Sylvester.

'Ah...now that's better.' His body spread to fill the metal furniture. He raised a finger, recalling something, dug inside his denim jacket and retrieved a spectacle case. 'You forgot these.'

There were still gaps in his memory, it appeared.

Sylvester cleaned the lenses on his T-shirt and slipped them on.

The world came into focus.

'Wow...'

'I don't know what's been happening,' stated Danny. 'But...'

They went back a long way, to a school playground and a sandpit in which a passive Danny Delfinger was routinely baited. Twice the size of any of the other kids, he was as soft as warm-day raspberry nougat and just as florid. Sylvester, in a rare moment of temper, had broken another boy's nose.

His knuckles still tingled. Regarded as a loner, an obvious, studious target, most kids left him alone on account of his parents' reputation, built on phone box sex and off-licence scuffling.

'The things you do to get along,' the bearded man lamented, at once humorous and cynical.

They smoked in silence a while, under the scrutiny of roomgoyles, those denizens of four corners quietly malevolent...

Like wrestlers. Boxers and their seconds.

'Eh, Michael?'

But he wasn't listening. He was taken with detail.

Of unconsciousness – a drug flashback, immersion in the fabric of his surroundings, their deeper currents and colours. Reality concentrate, it said on the label. Use with extreme care.

Who was she again? A girl be barely remembered. There, on the edge of vision, her hair in his nostrils, her smile in his testicles; lost to him, a creature organized and deliberate.

'My spaghetti is cooked while yours is still in the packet,' he'd told her, glibly self-indulgent.

She liked straight lines.

He wasn't one.

She regarded him strangely.

Danny was laughing, tickled pink.

He'd once repaired washing-machines for a living. Then survived on disability, having got his tie stuck in a spin program. Until the new regime.

'They've put me to work cleaning houses. Bagging evidence mainly. Everything and anything into blue plastic bags. You wouldn't believe some of the stuff. I turn up on someone's doorstep, sometimes alone, sometimes with a crew, and I bag them, their whole life.'

'Criminals?' asked Sylvester, worried.

'Kind of,' said Danny. 'What are you working on at the moment? Any chance of a preview?'

He felt threatened, was perspiring.

The bear extinguished his cigarette in an empty can.

'Michael...'

Yes?

'Michael, Michael.'

She used to call him? And he used to call her?

'What's the matter – got a headache?'

Close to panicking. Too sharp through these lenses. Being...

...in hospital, not allowed visitors.

He'd escaped.

But to where? he thought.

Danny's eyes bulged. The roomgoyles tongues lolled like dogs'. Wrapped in a blanket of his own sweat, guzzling lager, he looked through 360 degrees without moving.

'Why don't you take a drive,' his companion suggested. 'I know how much you like to.'

Get outside, grab a coffee.

'Here.' He held up a bunch of keys. 'Take my car. It's the red one.'

Being...

Streams of unconsciousness whistling past, oranges, pineapples and lemons, vague orbs whose understanding of reality was limited through experience - or a lack of it. Bright and cheery electric personas travelling at speeds unknown, no mathematics in their genetic make-up, no predilection to forces governed by an intractable nature or tied to the apron strings of Physics with a capital P; not governed by Laws invented by Scientists, these amorphous wonders, but wholly independent, orbs fashioned from chaos, ideas given substance and substance set alight.

They sought homes in heads, minds engaged in a frenzy of interpretation, what was and what only might be balanced across a universe stretched between ears. Burning slow or fast. Detonating with the force of dying stars or the release of bowel gases. Positive and negative energies vying, shoving electrons, poking quarks, bullying their neighbours and corrupting their associates in a dance of creation without beginning, middle or end.

Dread anarchists, the orbs drank and laughed. They dismantled nothing. Who? Us? You must be kidding!

True.

Does the tree blame the axe?

No; it was the woodsman, his deed. Lemons, pomegranates, tomatoes...these were innocent.

Tools.

The men in bright shirts employed them. Their subordinates also, those who danced with insects, friend and foe, wasps and beetles ever wary of long sticky tongues. Ideas crazy and sane.

Being...

Electromagnetic radiation whose waves, electric and magnetic, varied, but not simultaneously.

The pulsed for fun.

Being...

October, no snow on the ground, yet the earth still frozen, the food in the shops in cake bars the constitution of which was not detailed on any label.

Being...

Alone, he realized, intemperate and overheating, systems breaking down. Perhaps he should have stayed off the red wine, used more of it in the glazing of cherries, less in the assuaging of fires.

Alcohol burned, as did tuxedos and tablecloths, bright shirts and party-poppers, flags, pennants and folded napkins, representations of cliques and chickens, heraldic devices consumed, origami transmuted to ash, those still animate running, some headless, all affected by chemical processes, internal conflagrations and external attack, the love apple sharp and melted in the midst of a flaming cake, its remains dissolving and his fingers stripped to the bone...metal...glass...

The fire he'd unleashed was green.

Minutes earlier, having circled the table slitting throats, the revellers paralysed via the ingestion of oddly stuffed mushrooms (there was as much death in the kitchens; a good climate for fungi) and all but the guest of honour with their necks slack and tongues protruding (she sitting, amused, thinking this some birthday surprise), he had felt in control. Now events were out of his hands. Now the flames had taken over, a party of their own unfolding, gorging, rampant, gatecrashers whose rationale was greed.

And?

She'd smiled, given a cheeky wave.

And?

High fives among the technicians who'd brought us this far, not withstanding poker games.

Their cards were on the table...

Mr Unger-Farmer looked in, gave silent thanks, before straightening his tie and getting back on his sleigh.

And?

The silent tumult of riven souls.

Being...

The liquid in the join, what it takes to attain some movement, a lubricating fluid; blood or wine; words, sweat, spit; what it takes to get a thing moving, to motivate, to energize, to demonstrate an action. Love. Sex. Death. Each perhaps an end in itself; combined, a powerful hallucinogen.

Being...

Some intermediate madness. Alive and dead.

BOTH.

That place in the road where no car passed, over whose surface no rubber had ever impressed. Immaculate tarmacadam.

Being...

'A dangerous situation,' posited Herschel Byrd. 'One for which you hold a certain responsibility.'

'Harrowing,' replied Columbine, flagrantly unconcerned, 'I'm sure.'

Being...

The length of a piece of string.

A talisman against drowning. What every sailor wished, as the ocean was life and death and each wave might be his last.

Stood at the prow, Ramch surveyed the water. Blue and white, glassy green, it shifted as a million separate parts, yet as a single mass, swelling and sighing like a lung, folding and crashing with a force that would tear it apart. It spilled into itself. Dragged east and west by the moon, pushed north and south by the sun, the sea mixed knowledge and confusion. It soaked him. Dressed against its onslaught, he chose not to fight back. It was a scabbard to his sword. The ferocity of its surface was balanced by the calm beneath. Home, that deep place, past where the light reached, to the hero's true identity, lost one silent afternoon to a mermaid who promised his sails a wind. He hadn't understood the price at the time. It hadn't seemed important. Whoever he had been had bargained. What choice was there? They had drifted for days. Food was scarce. Fresh water locked in clouds beyond the horizon. They would all die. Go mad first, become a brother's accuser. But die, of thirst or another's hand. So he'd given his name to the mermaid, that she might keep it or use it in any way, and a storm was conjured up. Too much wind then, a violence from which he alone was spared, washed up without a memory in a strange land, people there whose speech he failed to recognize. He had to learn, and quickly. He had to fight, surprised at his liking for it, a talent in his bones that were sometimes broken but fast to mend. He had to find himself, over and again.

Thirty: Repair Man

Driving. All expectations put aside. The world an unfamiliar one, its people wan and grey. His brain wasn't where he'd left it and it took some finding again. There was a woman in it, an indelible stain. Just one of numerous wounds, he thought, juggling his disappointments, numbering his successes. Difficult to say which was greater, as it depended how they were assessed. By emotional weight, then the disappointments won hands down. By life-defining significance...err...fifty-fifty. By ultimate consequence – if that made sense – he didn't know. It was open to interpretation; how he chose to see, whether good or ill should come of a given situation, relationship, circumstance. Fates and gods or an indifferent universe. Pick. Traffic-lights were tricky in monochrome and he was grateful for the willingness of other road users to get out of his way.

But he knew exactly what he wanted out of life...

Somewhere, somehow, he'd forgotten. Remembering now, the whole gamut like a tidal wave, a multiplicity of events and images, people and places one atop another in some orgy of memory, it was as if he was swamped by someone else's past, their identity fostered onto him. His own supplanted, lost, drained away to be replaced by...what? How could he argue this existence wasn't his? That it belonged to...who? No stranger. He knew all there was to know. But himself? It was ridiculous to be suspicious of that, of himself. A peculiar form of paranoia. He dug cigarettes from a door pocket and depressed the lighter. Outside the streets bled past, rows and rows of identical dwellings, even and scrubbed and overhung by a pall of smoke and dust. The sky was low. The clouds flat. Grubby kids in short trousers pointed in awe at his vehicle, the reaching arms of parents dragging them back.

Passion. Here there was none. Here endured the bereft. Of all the colour inside his borrowed car, in its paintwork, none leaked into the world, not by proximity, neither in reflection. It was a separate universe. He was apart. Not physically, he could run into a brick wall. But would any flakes of paint or chrome retain their hue and gleam once adrift? He imagined not. There was interaction, but no cross-over. They were that side of the windscreen, he was this. It was terrible, what had befallen the Earth; it had sunk below itself. It's misery was total.

Despair. It was the opposite of passion and threatened to swallow him. Yet just as his flesh cooled and the colour passed from his cheeks he noticed via the mirror something on the back seat. At first he thought it was his duffel bag, that which he kept under the stairs, primed for midnight expeditions, foraging trips into the woods and the suburbs in search of trinkets, cast-offs, implements ancient and modern, the shed skin of society, its technology, simple and bold – only dirty, like it had been dragged through a ditch. It was larger though, rougher in texture, a hessian sack, the sort of thing coconuts came in. The sack had a presence which unnerved him. It demanded his attention, more so than the road. And he was frightened to stop, to slow down. If anything, he accelerated, eyes fixed more behind than ahead, sweat running, dripping off his nose. He was fearful and the fear excited. He felt a new thirst, an animal lust. His body swelled and trembled. His every muscle tightened, so that he thought he might burst. The steering wheel deformed in his hands and he crushed the throttle pedal through the floor.

The sack moved. It contained something. Something lost perhaps. Something he might redeem. Had he the courage, the determination...

He turned, decided. It was fates and gods. Indifference, on whatever scale, was nothing. And he wished something at the end.

His last act or his first to run down a blonde girl, a child with surprise in her step and ringlets, occupied with a cream tart as she skipped lightly off the curb.

Afterward...

Herschel picked up the pieces. He had a soft spot for Columbine, information he kept from the committee. Her birth would be soon as these things were reckoned, up there in the land of the living. Then who knew how she'd fair? Pink and naked, she might be loved, she whose exclusion, by a narrow vote, brought both laughter and tears. Her empty keep was a museum, a gallery, on display all her wicked ways, from sodomy with an orthodontist to bestiality with a horse. By insects, large and noisome, her garret was occupied, her larvae hatched from eggs fertilised by every murderer and rapist known through time.

Who'd tutor them now?

Byrd shrugged and picked his nose, straightened his tie.

And...

She found him at home. It was January, cold but not snowing, frost on the cars, his window. Colours leaked through the white overcoat. She could see through the glass he was making something. What it was she couldn't tell; but it moved in his hands as if living, tactile and strange, growing and shrinking under his knife, swelling to fill his palm, beginning to find its shape. She had need of him for the first time in months. Her wings were broken beneath her cape. She could think of no other that might straighten them, her pinions torn and bent. But she was afraid to knock. Oddly, she felt warmer in the cold. She thought her wings might heal. In time, perhaps, they would. Her fear though, was that she could lose the gift of flight. They'd mock her then, her pretty pinions, being just useless stumps.

Inside, what he had made left his hands, circled him twice before coming to rest on the ceiling. It nestled there among others, metallic insects whose presence weighed heavily, and she wondered then if she was mistaken, that he had changed. The ceiling moved, yet was calm. A hum escaped the room, barely audible; like cats purring. He opened a paper envelope and crumbled two sugar cubes into a saucer. An insect floated down, wobbling like a damaged aircraft. It was broken, like her. Here, like her, for repair. She smiled and rapped her nails off the pane. He jumped. Afraid. Of a butterfly?

She opened her cape to reveal pink underwear.

ADDENDUM ~ FORMULAE: the scale of events as pondered by, among others, a flushed-cheeked bearded gentleman with a bad back.

Thirty One: The Anti-Claus

This close to Christmas, his attention began to turn toward the inevitable. That he hated children and took the utmost pleasure in terrorizing them beyond words was no real compensation for the tireless slog of dragging himself about a planet that seemed to get bigger every year. The chimneys narrower too, and the mince pies as likely to be passed their sell-by date as home-made, sour and brittle as opposed to sweet and crumbly, decomposing in the mouth like rotting pig's trotters. Really, the people got what they deserved. The festive season was over. Now little more than a commercial opportunity, its underlying cynicism had rubbed off. Santa had called it a day; the elves were redundant and his sack contained not presents, but nightmares, gifts of the dead distributed by a man in a red suit who liked nothing better than to lick the sleeping faces of sons and daughters, sucking the warmth from tiny noses and chilling fingers and toes.

But it wasn't enough. Even in the past, when innocence was real and flues agreeably smoke-filled, his dissatisfaction with the annual practice of jollification was simply exacerbated by the empty months between, cooped up with little helpers in the frozen north. He'd turned to drink to alleviate the boredom, venturing south to the more stolid of British public houses in an effort to cool the days...

'Is this seat taken?'

She batted her eyelids, one hand round a pint of beer, the other holding a cigarette captive between assiduously manicured nails.

She didn't wait for an answer, but leant her weight to the chair, which groaned.

'You look like you need a friend,' she told him, exhaling. Then: 'What ails thee, fat man? Too much of the wrong thing, I dare say.'

His sweetheart.

She bled him dry.

But the reward was a life a crime...

In conservation with Michael, one day in a past he no longer recalled with any conviction to accuracy, he wondered about the significance of it all. Revenge was no real motive. He could never really hurt Columbine, not in any visible way he might understand. She was the joker, and as such would always have the last laugh. She manipulated everything. No man, living or dead, could no her mind. But it was the dynamic of evil that it serve no end, and as such his efforts went to feed the flames, the fire itself a greater thing as it kept the whole world warm, and without heat there'd be no cold.

Without pleasure?

'Pain,' spake Michael Tomatoes, in the full throes of a hangover. 'I don't know how you do it.'

'Easy,' Redbear explained; 'you just never sober up completely. That way you avoid complications.'

'Like daylight to vampires...'

'Precisely.'

As conversations went it lacked direction, the reason the artist whose struggle to focus and debilitating need for self-indulgence led him to wander, verbally and mentally, sometimes entirely off the stage. That his genesis was ambitious had something to do with it, he supposed, Michael being the product of a toy industry whose roots were more Pinocchio than Terminator. The elves though, had done him proud. They'd sourced a template and – the original transposed – installed this changeling without alerting the neighbours, some of whom, Santa conjectured, where in the business of business underground.

It was to be expected. Nothing in Hell went unnoticed. There were myriad ongoing plots and schemes. Columbine was involved in any number, the whore who had as many fingers as there were pies. She was at the centre of everything, a black widow whose keep resonated with the luggage of telegraph wires.

The reason he was here; he liked to think of his own accord; but where his once beloved was concerned all remained obfuscated, each detail disguised, endlessly tormenting to the investigative eye. To outmanoeuvre the whore was nigh impossible. Part of the game, the joke whose punch-line was an epitaph – yet it was up to the individual how they came from the grave.

And returned?

He shivered. Too warm.

Rolling a cigarette, he yawned.

The machine had that inspired look, meaning a creative process was underway. What was it this time? Puppy chequers? Okay, that had been fun, especially with stuffed animals in a hotel conference centre prior to the launch of a range of beauty products whose testing was, to say the least, suspect. The politics didn't really interest him. The ensuing chaos did; an embarrassing medley of polite corporate spin-doctoring and off-camera intimidation that had the big man in stitches for weeks. But Redbear struggled to find entertainment value in say, painting lamp-posts luminous pink.

Michael sighed and folded his arms.

'Don't tell me.'

'I haven't said anything yet.'

'I know, and it worries me. I hate these pensive silences. I need a drink.'

Michael scratched his chin. 'Red...'

He couldn't remember when exactly. His memory pickled. He couldn't say for sure, or describe in detail. More a case of how things felt. It was all there somewhere, the pertinent facts, only his mind was like a used teabag: however hot the water less and less flavour leaked out. On bad days he sat in his chair and let the elves feed him cakes. They trimmed his beard and polished his boots. And on good days he rubbed his palms together deviously, enjoying the illusion of success.

But it wasn't enough.

He took up the unspoken challenge. Attending the feast, arranged about the giant table, he crooked his arms and dislocated his shoulders in order to feed himself using the obligatory six foot long utensils.

The meat was good. Tasty not stringy. And for dessert?

Reminiscences, false memories and unrequited love. It was what they programmed into him, scenes from a life not truly lived, yet experienced nevertheless, made real by a surfeit of emotion, what every genuine flesh-and-blood human being carried around inside him or her, regardless of their own Existence Map.

It enhanced and confused, burdening Tom with what for want of a better description was a soul.

Only not his...

Thirty Two: The Nature Of Events

Sylvester.

Covered in pustules, from head to foot an oozing bag of pain, he hung, suspended by one ankle in the void. This was his damnation, he realized. He suffered outside of time, condemned by a girl with blonde hair for a malfeasance he did not clearly recall.

Perhaps he was here for that reason, his punishment not yet begun until he confessed his guilt, then to make amends.

Was that how it worked?

The pain was separate from him somehow; like the rope cutting into his ankle, not of his body but connected to it, a vital sustaining strand.

He drifted in and out of consciousness, inspired and delirious by turn.

Clearly he'd failed the child. But in what he was uncertain. He had not been given a choice, he felt. Had been cheated of his life. Usurped. Dangling here though, he did not wish revenge.

Dangling here, his skin boiled, streaming pus that dripped from elbows and nose, rancid droplets of melancholia that, he fancied, were being collected in a saucepan somewhere below.

He was being slowly squeezed, as if drained of a poison, milked in this fashion by an unknown who bled his sores.

But was he a resource, or was this a cure?

Dangling like a fruit, Sylvester awaited harvesting, to be collected in a basket; twisted from his stem and laid with his kin, drupes like himself to be eaten raw, or processed and tinned.

'I'm sorry. It's nothing personal.' said Danny Delfinger, before bagging him, stowing his existence and hauling him off to be catalogued, or maybe categorized.

'No. Wait...' Hadn't they been friends?

It was snowing again.

He was leaning on his desk, resting his chin on one palm and gazing out the window, twiddling a pencil while scrutinizing the world; at least as much of it as he could see. Cold out there, yet pretty. Girls wandered by in hats and scarves. And he suddenly remembered everything. Death visiting in the hospital, cancer devouring his brain, with no hope of remission. Then a nurse he hadn't seen before, fat and frolicsome in high-heeled shoes.

Being beaten with a bicycle pump.

Forced to eat his own excrement.

Institutionalized...

It came unbidden, facts he already knew, unfiltered, what had previously been offered up as memory now full-blown, unexpurgated. He'd beaten others, and murdered. He'd robbed and even tortured; pets initially, inhabitants of kennel and cage. But there was only every confusion in animal eyes. Suffering, that terrible bright fear, manifest through understanding, if not believing, was only ever seen in human orbs, those particular globes, sacs of dream and image forever in rebound. There he'd found his satisfaction, and been driven mad.

Thinking it froze him to his chair. Colder inside than out. Refrigerated, he scratched his confession in pencil before burning, some hours later, the record.

He needed sleep, Sylvester thought. He needed, if not to lessen the magnitude of his guilt, then frame it in a different sky.

He needed to feel tomorrow was a new day, with a new sunrise, not a repeat as each day before...

He needed to be able to look in the mirror and instead of a wound see a smile. Then might begin repair – but at a price? The cost of his redemption was the sole detail lacking. He was damned. All that had changed was his appreciation of the circumstances in which he found himself. Had he progressed? Scaled the slippery slope of perdition? Was this a promotion and had he the luxury of time? For what? He was undead, neither decayed or ageing.

And what had passed had gone before...this day...his penultimate, for surely tomorrow would see the resolution, the inflating and bursting of the Orange ball.

February.

He sat counting money stolen from a widow, the neighbour of a girl he'd befriended New Year's Eve with the tattoo of a heart inside her thigh he'd left teeth marks round, her son awake in the adjoining room. Aged seven, he'd appeared at the bottom of the bed clutching his sodden pyjamas, only she was too drunk to care.

Enough for a half ounce of the Moroccan and half a dozen cans of Special Brew.

His cat brushed his leg.

He loved it, he realized.

The heads of similar cats had exploded in connection with golf clubs and airgun pellets.

It made him wonder why. He wasn't evil. Bad perhaps, certainly dangerous; yet more discerning these days, no longer given to random violence, but purposeful attacks on carefully chosen targets. He had a brain.

He lit a cigarette and peered out at the snow, strangely focused.

The phone rang but he didn't answer. A girl perhaps. More likely the offer of work; debt collection his one staple, what Sylvester liked to think of as necessary art.

Necessary as bones.

March.

There was a knock at the door. It was late, midnight. Sylvester, shaken awake, leaned out of his chair and walked - back straightening the while, evolution in progress – from the relative warmth of the library into the clammy chill of the hall. He figured it was someone he knew; someone who knew him, more importantly. Had to be, an almost friend at this hour...

A black disc, ovoid, was silhouetted behind the leaded glass panes. He opened the door, leaving the hall light off, and was met by a sword.

'Die now or later?' was the question asked, the voice sexless from beneath a hat brim.

The sword reversed him back to his chair.

'Decide...' the voice mocked. 'Or have the choice taken away.'

The warmth of his own blood shocked him. 'Later.'

'Good.' The hat tipped back to reveal a girl. 'Hate a wasted journey. Which is where you come in.' She smiled, examining her nails.

Sylvester was more curious than petrified. She'd nicked his chin with her blade. No worse than a razor cut.

The girl paced, the sword disappeared beneath her cape, examining the many titles that filled the walls.

'Have you read them all?' she asked.

'A few.'

'But not many.'

'No.'

'Lazy,' she commented, 'rather than indifferent. Yes?'

He agreed.

'I have a job for you, Mr Orange. One which will prove dangerous. But the risk is reflected in the pay.' She placed her small hands on his shoulders and he felt the weight of worlds. 'Will you take it?'

'Do I have a choice?'

'Decide...' she chided. 'And see.'

Thus, oddly dressed, did Sylvester Orange discover himself, and others, behind the fridge door.

There was no formula for success, she realized. What there was were opportunities, a limitless supply, an army of greedy ants primed to do the bidding of one persuasively armed, equipped as she with the paraphernalia required to control a large percentage of the living world.

She was a queen, even if her subjects didn't always recognize it. But what did they know, still naïvely alive?

She was not precious about her plans. Most went awry. The trick was to be seen to be in control. The ability to convince her contemporaries of her manipulative powers was akin to exercising those powers for real. She took credit, albeit silently, for every misdemeanour rumoured to fall at her door. The scheme of scheming was to appear to be the architect. And if not? Not evince surprise at the consequences, however gruesome or unpleasant, lest your slip be allowed to show...

Columbine. As many faces as lives. She'd drunk the blood of kings and kissed the brows of heroes, knelt at the feet of potentates and warmed the beds of slaves. Equally loved and feared, her image could be found in ancient pottery fragments dug from the earth of Rome, on the ceilings of Latin cathedrals and the backs of cheaply laminated paying cards.

Ubiquitous and proud, the fat whore. The game was her all.

'But that damned melancholy, Victor! Back stronger than ever!'

The world reeked of it. Hell too, which was not to be borne.

'We must hatch a plan, my sweet, and rid ourselves of it. We must find a receptacle and decant it, concentrate. Then lose it in the postal system...'

Upstairs, where it belonged.

Thirty Three: Last

The elves untied the ropes and Santa shrank a few inches, height not girth. He felt better for it, grinning benevolently as of old.

Gently, he hefted his sack, and finding it bearable, signalled for the contents to be amplified. It never got any bigger, despite all the shovelling, just denser, thicker, darker, until eventually it lost its red sheen and became like a black hole. He tried the weight again, that of a collapsed star, and marvelled at the mass of despair.

The reindeer were skittish. The clouds had fled to leave a full moon. Perfect weather for visiting, he told himself, clambering onto his sleigh. But something wasn't right. The elves knew it, too. They shrugged, whispering among themselves. Santa tugged his beard and fidgeted with the reins.

What? He didn't know.

The elves avoided his gaze...

Then a penguin appeared, waddling up like it belonged here at the North Pole. And the curtain fell on Imbroglio by Andrew McEwan, who would like to thank you for making it this far, to what would appear to be the conclusion of the novel.

Kind Regards.
