 
SUBVISION

by Andrew McEwan

*

Copyright 2011 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

*

Cover design by Sue Shone

*

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.

* * *

1

Early Sunday morning, what light there was in the room circulating only dimly, void, like the air, of any firm ideas, Scherzo sat quietly reading: eyes strained to the imperfect silhouettes of stains, registering their shapes, their meanings as he would the printed text of a bent-spine novel whose themes were similarly varied and whose letters arranged themselves on every page to the design of a long dead author in a kind of spontaneous conception of words.

A white knuckle rapped on the dirty window, smearing false initials in the grime. Breaking his silent reverie, it transformed the stains, losing them to the sombre totality of the square room. Glancing up, a figure crouched on a rooftop across the street resolved into a chimney; its bolted aerial quivered, the physical echo of a bird. The knuckle and its brothers composed a wave. Scherzo got to his feet a little shakily and stood before the thin glass. The man on the other side bled from the nose. He was smiling, gums pink and teeth yellow. The world around him appeared disturbed. 'Open the window!' he shouted. 'Hey, Scherzo, open the fucking window! It's freezing out here. Let me in, eh?'

'It's stuck,' Scherzo replied.

'What? Come on!'

'The window's stuck. It won't open,' he reiterated. 'You'll have to use the door.'

The bleeding man, Wilson Hives, frowned. 'Your mother would've got it open,' he complained later, disgruntled, sat plaintively in front of the fire, sucking at its warmth like some satanic calf. 'Your mother would've gone to the ends of the earth to help me. You know that? You know why, Scherzo? Because she loved me. She was special, a rare kind of person, your mother, the kind of person that would go out of their way to open a window. Stuck or not, she would've found a way.' He wiped fresh blood from his nose, getting into his stride, a fondness for preaching that had involved him down the years in countless, pointless fist-fights. 'You know what I'm saying, Scherzo Trepan?' He was like a mina bird, thought the younger man: stupid and predictable; you always knew what was coming. 'Your mother's one mistake was you...'

Scherzo ignored him, filled his water bottle and kept his cage clean, but otherwise behaved as if the avian impresario didn't exist. But it hadn't always been so.

Scherzo never had dreams. His sleep was impenetrable by such. Often though, in years past, his sister Annie would share her nightly wanderings, wide-eyed over orange juice and cornflakes, tales of monstrous proportions that seemed as vivid to Scherzo as if he'd dreamed them himself, curled like a new leaf in his bed. Sometimes he'd be jealous and convinced she was making it up. But the strength of Annie's dreams lay in their strangely tangible colours, leaking from her ears and nose as she talked, pausing to sip coffee, check the time, hug her pink dressing-gown more tightly about her, its excessive frills jewelled with plastic sequins and edged in fake pink fur.

'There were all these weird shapes crashing into each other. They were ships, on the land, in this ploughed field full of freshly harvested potatoes. It was a battle or something, and they were firing cabbages in place of cannonballs. Anyway, one of the captains, a big grizzled man with a long beard which hid his body, he jumped overboard, right at me. I was caught between two of the ships, a red one and a blue one, and he started waving his cutlass at me, saying he was going to cut me in half. I dodged out of the way but he came after me. Then the ships all melted away, some turning into birds, others into worms, still fighting, struggling back and forth like me and the captain. I threw handfuls of air at him and they exploded like grenades, making chips of the potatoes. There were all these feathers too, I remember, falling like snow until the field was covered and it was like running on a huge duvet. I found this telescope growing out of it and I picked it, turning it on the captain.' Here she fell silent, as often she would when primed with some choice detail. He could do nothing but sit and wait while she got up, turned a few brisk circles, dressing-gown a-swirl, then sat again, leaning across the breakfast table with a smile. 'And you know what, who that captain was with the cutlass, threatening to cut me in half?'

Scherzo had no idea. 'Who?'

Annie cuffed her little brother. 'Him,' she stated. 'That man. You know who I mean.'

'Wilson?'

'Him,' Annie repeated. 'I wanted to kill him, but all I could do was turn the telescope the wrong way round and look at him through it so he was really small and far off and I could step on him. But then I woke up.'

Scherzo was angry. He liked Wilson. Wilson had given him a football for his eighth birthday just this week past and not even shouted at him (his mother had) when subsequently he'd burst it after having to climb onto the school roof to fetch it down and tearing a hole in his trousers. He knew Wilson wasn't his father, and Annie resented him for that. But what had his father given either of them? His mother? Scherzo couldn't remember him. Perhaps Annie could; only she wouldn't say. She'd tell him her dreams but not her memories, say, 'Our Father Who Art In Heaven, Hallowed Be Thy Name...' And glare at Scherzo to sign off with her at the proper moment.

Together, 'Amen.'

Monday arrived. The sun shone. Outside his window rested a builder's van, aluminium ladders tied with nylon string to its chromed roof-rack. The metal frames gleamed dimly, distantly oiled, removed from the new light by a film of dirt and perspiration, shadowed in myriad overlapping veils of boot, thumb, finger and palm prints. Scherzo closed the curtains, strapped on his watch, left the house via the front door. He ran a short way down the narrow street, then cut through a fallen metal fence and a stand of leaning ash trees, the morning breeze in their upper branches like the actions of invisible flying squirrels. Beyond stretched a field, large and green, its fresh grass emerging in clumps, the corroded soil hacked by generations of football boots, cricket balls, shot-puts and javelins. The field was deserted this early. Scherzo crossed to the incinerator plant which rose obliquely from the earth half a mile from the trees, across the river. Camouflaged, contoured and screened, the locals were both ignorant and hostile to its being, no longer sure in their own minds as to either its reality or its position. There had been protests to mark its birth, the population marching, placards raised, slogans devised and acronyms formed, symbolic coffins draped in black plastic daubed with white emulsion skull and cross-bones at the proposal and planning stages, demanding at worst the plant's relocation, out of their backyard, away from their children. And Scherzo had marched with them, in full agreement; but the building work was already underway, the incinerator taking shape below ground, rising imperceptible inches after dark, until eventually it broke the surface, masked and anonymous, subtly shifting the gentle folds of the land. Its presence was quiet. The protests ebbed with time and the availability of accurate information. Public and private concerns evaporated.

Recruitment was secret. Scherzo was approached in the street one night past eleven, eyes snagged by the siren gleam of a shilling. There followed a lengthy induction, a process often bizarre, always challenging, that climaxed in a vow of mortal silence, the cover of false documents and used notes, cash in hand each Thursday.

If you were to dig beneath one of the random gorse bushes, chopping at shallow roots and dispersing orange-yellow blossom, puzzled as to the origin and constitution of the increasingly plastic clays, dizzy with effort, you believed, and weary of the search, you would, if you were obdurate, come ultimately upon the brittle hardness of wax-shielded concrete. Not that any casual treasure seeker ever got that far. The top few inches were rich in metal, sown with coins and curiosities, baited with interesting yet valueless objects on the rationale of open concealment, the lesser surrounding the greater, the certainty of greed over prudence, the knowledge and conviction of deceit.

It worked beautifully, the unfortunate explorer both dazzled and gassed, departing with minor trophies and a headache.

Scherzo arrived at the bunker entrance this side of the river and began shuffling his feet. Entry was gained via a series of ritualistic movements, coded steps, pressure points in the earthwork's superficies it was necessary to excite. A silver cage emerged from the fishless water, its roof the bed, shingled and muddy, sliding from the frothed liquid like a diseased refrigerator dumped long ago and here reclaimed, as every weekday morning and occasionally at weekends also, through the medium of Scherzo's beelike dance on the strand. Some morning, he knew, this ritual would fail him; but until that day he would ride the glistening elevator down amid the glutinous loam to his work in the incinerator's caustic heart, there to wrestle with waste and oxygen, to stoke the fires and clean the flues in accordance with his karma. It was dark inside, a perfect blackness. The elevator came to a barely discernible stop, its door slid wide, and in poured the disreality of subterranean lights. The improbable fastness. He shaded his eyes from the inferno and sidled rightward, feeling his way, reading the temperature and coarseness of inlaid pipes and peeling walls, tickled by motes and irritated by sound, noises of men and machinery, indistinct patterns of shift and function, with the latter overwhelming the former, a god to the assembled penitents and worshippers. Scherzo found a handle and turned it, entering the creamy demesne of the rest area, its placid atmosphere soothing. He headed for his locker, number eight.

'Hey, Scherzo, want a coffee?'

'Yeah, thanks,' he replied, fumbling with the peeling locker's catch.

'Three sugars, right?'

'Three,' he echoed, gaining access, 'right.'

He pulled on overalls, stepped into boots, carried gloves and goggles in his moulded hat, red and plastic and shaped exactly to the peculiarities of his skull. Everyone had their own. They varied in shape and colour as well as size and thickness, relief moulds around which the hats were baked relative to the wearer's job and situation within the labyrinthine plant.

'Here,' Ruth said, passing him an equally plastic mug. 'You're early this morning. I only just got off.'

He shrugged and drank.

'Problems?'

'What makes you ask?' queried Scherzo, face misted by coffee fumes.

'You look tired. I've never seen you look tired. Your expression is fixed somewhere else, like there's something in the world you'd rather not know about.'

'What if there is?' he rejoined, irritated by her stabbing truths. And he hadn't even been thinking about anything in particular...

She sat on the table, upsetting used, discarded mugs and greasy plates, a fork clattering to the bare concrete. 'I can help you with it,' she said. 'But you have to want to tell me. You have to be honest, holding nothing back, or whatever I say or do will prove useless.'

'Another time,' Scherzo urged, gripping his mug.

'Now you're being deliberately evasive.'

'I am?'

'Come on,' she purred, 'tell auntie Ruthie all about it.'

'There's nothing to tell,' he stated.

She squeezed her lips tight, then smiled widely. 'You don't trust me, Scherzo. Is that it? But you know you can.'

'I do?'

'That's not fair,' admonished Ruth. 'Come on - what's preying on your mind?'

Her eyes were like drills, diamond tipped. Her hair was pushed back, uncovering her white brow, a line where her hat had been, a subtle shading of sweat and dust. He held her gaze, shared no words, imagining her spread naked across the table, the purer tones of belly and hip. Maybe she would pick up on it and fold, Scherzo thought. Or maybe not. Ruth was not so easily out-manoeuvred. Such crude tactics as he employed served only to harden her resolve. She'd get her way. He began to tremble; his face to redden. Her eyes dropped briefly to his feet as if to undermine him and that smile illuminated him like a spotlight, the future writ large and in teeth.

'You finish at six?'

'Six,' he confirmed, defeated, the coffee tepid when next it touched his lips.

'I'll meet you on the outside, Scherzo Trepan. We can talk then,' she instructed, regardless of cameras and recording equipment. 'In the park, by the big oak tree. I can soothe your nerves and you can tell me everything.'

His blushing was out of control now.

'Seven-thirty,' Ruth concluded. 'Okay?'

'Seven-thirty.'

The bitch.

Steam enveloped him, cut him adrift from the interior world of the incinerator and its nebulous occupants, those companion souls he seldom encountered. The soot-laden air spun voiceless frenzies before being sucked clean, the vents whistling all round, housed in every available surface. Through these holes, temporal passages to the Other Side, Scherzo could hear and see the conveyors, snatches of motion between the omnipresent pipework, heavy with refuse on its way to be screened and sorted, its usefulness measured, sieved and shredded at the behest of independent, self-programming computers, by robots, so as to maximize the efficiency of the waiting ovens.

The hours went quickly, a blur of vignettes: revelling, demonic clouds and vaporous cavorting, pallid goblins and sweltering flibbertigibbets, disembodied bugaboos, imps, ogres, lycanthropes and ghoulish familiars, all paramours of Satan. Energy switched in every corner of this distended environment, in hands and lungs, the magnified, intense howl of the furnace as heat was crushed from matter, pressure from heat, electricity the sole means of survival, a totality of sparks that was non-stop and yet motionless as everything moved at the same speed, in the same unstated direction, a wonderful confusion of sequence that served like Scherzo and his brotherly co-workers the whim of official momentum.

It came as a welcome respite, the perfect blackness of the elevator. Riding in that wall-less box, separated from either dimension, neither on earth or in space, Scherzo could relax, allow his corporate body to unwind and ultimately disassemble, to step from the river a less encumbered creature than that of seconds before. He'd glance at his nails then, striding airily up the field toward the goalposts and buildings, wondering at their ragged shortness. He'd come to his front door and it would be opened, the ghost of his father extant in the hall. He'd prepare a meal, bathe, watch television, still with the elevator's quietude cloaking the axle of his mind, the wheels turning smoothly, disguised as ears. And he'd fall asleep eventually, in his own bed under floral sheets full of spring odours courtesy of the washing-machine on any other night but this, any night that wasn't, from the outset, to be different.

But he wouldn't dream; so maybe it was worth the trip. He'd keep his date with Ruth and extend the bounds of his evening, take a chance and dip his fingers in the magic tombola, twist his fork in the plate of spaghetti that was fate and perhaps, if he was lucky, win a goldfish or a balloon.

2

Doctor Mood looked in on his patient a little after seven, fresh from the theatre where he'd been to see the final dress rehearsal of a new play he hadn't thought funny and as such had had to sneak out near the end. The play had been written by an ex-colleague, Ambrose Peters, whose sense of humour and timing (heart in! heart out! what's this left over?) appeared to have suffered since their days together at the hospital. It was some years now since they'd gone their separate ways, Peters into writing full-time after winning a competition the theme of which escaped both Ambrose and the judges, Mood into the lucrative realms of private practice, screwing his mostly elderly patients for every penny he could. He was constantly amazed at their willingness to cough up more than blood, pay cash in advance, listen attentively while he explained the necessity of signatures to terminal cases, cheerfully accept the exorbitant prices he routinely charged, and generally fall at his large feet such was the demand for his somewhat unorthodox, not to say controversial services. It was not unusual for him to treat a patient at home. He owned a sizeable property, detached and crumbling on the outskirts of town, lived alone but for a tribe of cats he wasn't sure belonged to him, had an arrangement with a local couple whose names he always forgot, who cleaned and tidied his abode, inside and beyond, the garden, he felt sure, gateway to another planet, in return for his maintenance of their corns. To these he applied linseed oil, baking powder and the occasional sweep of a file.

Presently the doctor administered to his newest patient a carefully measured dose of home-made chocolate, the recipe for which had been his grandmother's dying secret, revealed to him under the knife of his lone presence. Mood had never liked the old witch, but had long coveted her store of remedies, a pharmacopoeia the mass of which still eluded him. Essentially, the chocolate was a means of transference, as it was the secret ingredient that mattered here, as specified by grandma. He'd made sure of her burial; that was his promise, to position each of her limbs and organs in the place of her choosing, at the exact depth and map co-ordinates, in the precise orientation of, she explained, her rebirth. Fear had ensured his compliance. Fear and satisfaction. Thinking of her, sat at this other woman's bedside, reminded him oddly of the play. A predictable commentary on the times, its subject matter might be seen as a leitmotiv for much contemporary art and literature, a crude dissection of alien minds and motives whose purpose was to degrade, to exploit the fascination the world understandably had with its visitors, by chance to entertain. An invisible enemy, the aliens had been given more shapes than a child's year old cache of Plasticine, more names and misnomers than any bodily function. June 20 would be the second anniversary of their landing. And, reasoned Doctor Mood, they had yet to lay waste a single city. On the contrary, there were rumours, officially denied, that repair work had begun on the Amazonian forests, that hitherto lifeless deserts had sprung tender green shoots - only to be trampled by a clique of African governments who cited locusts as the reason behind their shelling. But it was the knurled inhabitants of these same deserts who dropped like new rain, as locusts, quite inexplicably, had dwindled to nothing.

The woman smiled a toothless smile as she stroked the doctor's leg.

1st Mutant: (wearing a rubber suit, carrying a lantern on a pole) Do you see that star, young traveller, so bright in the heavens?

2nd Mutant: (dressed as a tramp) Which star is that, watchman? There are so many. Is it the star just risen over yonder chimney or the star pinned like a distant bulb to the depthless vault above my head? Another? A blue or red one? Tell me which or let me on my way.

1st M: Why such haste? There are many nights to follow this one. Linger while there are no clouds to hinder your vision. Take your time, friend, and study each star as you find it. Then tell me if you can which star it is the aliens come from.

2nd M: (shaking his head in surprise) Aliens, watchman? What aliens are these of which you speak? I have no knowledge of them.

1st M: (seeing his bewilderment) You have not heard of the invaders? I find that difficult to believe, young traveller, and can only imagine you have spent the last twenty months in some walled institution where all news of the outside is forbidden. If not, your professed ignorance of this scourge is either a bad joke or a wicked lie. Tell me which, and your name!

2nd M: I can tell you neither. Sincerely, watchman, I have no memory of these things. It seems to me that I have wandered this same road all my life. Perhaps this is not the first town I have come upon or you the first watchman to have questioned me such. I don't remember. Truly, I can recall nothing of my past.

1st M: (appalled) It is they! The aliens have warped your mind as well as your body!

(a burst of noise off-stage, lights in the sky)

3rd M: (semi-naked woman, body covered in scratches, face a mask of terror) Help me someone. Oh, please help me. They'll ravish me should they catch up...

1st M: The fiends!

2nd M: What is this? What can we do?

1st M: We can fight, that is what. Are you with me, young traveller? Have you the courage to face the beasts or will you stand idle while this poor woman is molested?

3rd M: Kill them! Kill them all!

1st M: (calming her) Have no fear, lady, for be there one or twenty this stout fellow and I will defend you. They cannot do this. They are inhuman. We shall die fighting if we must.

2nd M: (searching for a weapon) Bravo!

3rd M: You are so strong and valiant. How can I ever thank you?

(they kiss, a hideous alien lumbers on stage dragging its outsized phallus, the woman screams, faints)

Alien: (drooling) Here she is, lads; tonight's entertainment. Get it while it's hot!

1st M: Stand back, foul monster!

A: (amused) Eh? You dare challenge me, human?

1st M: Yes, and this other, too. You'll not have your filthy way with this virtuous lady.

A: You think not? You must have been drinking. Come, hand over the wench and I will forget the insult you've paid me.

1st M: (turning to the audience) Never!

A: (seeing he means business) Ah, the sun is rising. You planned to trick me. Well, you have failed. See, I return now to my burrow and my mates, another night to grant your wish of death. You disgust me, you puny humans. You're lucky we have some use for you or else we'd stamp you out.

1st M: Be gone, loathsome creature!

2nd M: (impressed) You heard the watchman. Leave this place while you can, for one day others as brave as this man will rise up and defeat you in open battle across the planet, and when that day comes it will be your last. So back to your stinking hole. Grovel in the dirt. You have been warned what the future holds for you!

(the alien slouches off, tail between legs, leaving a trail of slime)

3rd M: (in her saviour's arms) My hero!

1st M: (taken with her fragile beauty) My love...

(end of scene)

He stopped her at the second button. Patted her wrist. 'That's enough for now, Mrs Fry - you get some sleep and I'll look in on you later. There are a few papers I need you to sign, all right? Good.'

Chocolate-coloured spittle dribbled down her chin, gravity hugging it to her loose flesh. 'I'm getting well, aren't I, doctor,' she stated in a loud, resonant voice. 'I can feel it all coming back; my youth, just like you said.'

'Excellent,' replied Mood. 'Now go to sleep. It's sleep you need above everything else. Gets the juices moving!'

She chuckled, tongue rattling like a dry bean in a tin. He reached the door, secured it behind him and padded languidly down the stairs. In the drawing-room he lit a fat cigar, and taking his magnifying glass from its worn leather case began once more the detailed scrutiny of grandma's spidery runes. In the past Doctor Mood had thought of transferring each of the fragile, ancient pages onto photographic plates which would then enable him to enlarge and project their confounding images against a wall; but this had seemed like too public a means of investigation, and so he continued to screen the pharmacopoeia by hand. Its thousand plus pages were his life's torment. Mood often wondered if his grandmother had not deliberately allowed him the smallest of insights by way of a mute revenge on whatever tangle of fates had denied his parents a daughter, sprinkling his mother's womb with nine sons instead, of which he was the youngest and last surviving, the eager if unwanted apprentice his grandma never had.

It was a scenario the doctor found depressing. He preferred to view the writings, his rightful inheritance, as an outwardly indecipherable puzzle the key to which lay in the whole, some intrinsic and perhaps obvious pattern woven into its deceptively random construct. Two hands, time and application were all he required to crack the code. And then? Then a cat brushed his leg, ginger, as had Mrs Fry, a sometime redhead.

3

It was dark when Scherzo left home, darker still by the time he reached the park and the big oak tree whose stygian branches lanced no crooked silhouettes through an absent moon. A match flared, was touched to a king-size cigarette, and Ruth's softened features coalesced out of the deeper solidity of wood.

'Pleased you could make it,' she commented, an orange glow illuminating her face. 'Thought I was going to have to put my knickers back on.'

He stood before her now, enveloped in her aura of smoke and perfume, his penis shifting uncomfortably in his pocket. Ruth was wearing a short skirt and a bike jacket several sizes too big for her, booty from a relationship past.

The cigarette turned to ash below her wistful eyes, ash that cooled and dropped like exotic silver leaves.

'When you were little,' she asked, 'did you ever steal from shops?'

'No,' said Scherzo. 'Never.'

'You weren't ever tempted?' she pressed, head to one side.

He nodded. 'Perhaps - I don't know...'

'But you held back. Why?'

'I didn't want to get caught,' he told her, curling his toes.

Ruth's expression altered. 'Not because you knew it was wrong to steal?'

Scherzo, as that morning, felt manipulated. 'That too.'

'But mostly because you were scared of being caught.' She drew long on the filter-tip, then exhaled. 'And punished.'

His head moved from side to side. 'Let's go for a drink. It's cold.'

'What if there was no way of being caught, no chance of discovery, no risk involved at all?'

She flicked the cigarette away and pushed from the tree, reaching to unbutton his jeans.

Scherzo no longer recognized her eyes. They weren't Ruth's, but another's, one belonging to uninhabited lands. The sensation gnawing at the base of his gums was a familiar caution, a harbinger of stranger things to come.

'The perfect crime?'

'Not crime,' Ruth amended, 'more caper.'

She was in his underpants now. 'And?'

'Scherzo...' seeking his cold lips with her own '...fuck me.'

'Here?' he squeaked.

'Perfect for it. Come on, don't chicken out now; I've seen the way you look at me.'

'It's freezing.'

'Scherzo - I won't ask again.'

'Shit...' Holding her buttocks, scraping bark, making crude prints, rubbings with knuckles and arse, her mouth wet against his ear, emptying pleasurable noises, encouragement and giggles, willing an erection as the dark closed about his mind and the woman about his penis.

Scherzo Trepan was powerless to countermand.

Besides, he was enjoying this.

They fell sidelong into the hard grass.

'I think you've cracked my balls.'

'The crying mouse,' Ruth intoned, 'has his cheese but wants his pickles.'

'What?'

'You're always complaining,' she said. 'Wasn't it fun?'

'Yeah; but aren't you aware of the temperature?'

'No. You're a lizard, you know that? You want to stretch out in the sun all day catching flies, taking a dip to cool off. Where's the adventure in that? Be daring. It feels good.'

What am I, he thought, a mouse or a lizard?

She bit his nose.

'Okay,' he said, 'what was it you had in mind?'

He had first encountered the perfect blackness beyond the circular door. Annie had taken him there. It was one of her dreams, she said, one of her expeditions. 'You pull the swimming cap down over your eyes, squeeze all the light out so you can see nothing, not even spots, and you lie in the bath with the water at just the right temperature up over your nose and ears, your whole body covered and still, like you were dead. Soon you lose all feeling in your arms and legs and they turn rubbery; the rest of your body, too, inside and out. Then you open the door. Not by the handle though; there is no handle. You just sort of focus your mind and it happens. But you have to be careful.' At this point she uncoiled from her chair and wandered teasingly around the room, as she was apt to do, keeping him waiting, primed on the edge of his seat, sat like a gnome on a toadstool. 'It was father who told me about it,' Annie continued. 'And that same night I dreamt the whole thing: how it worked, how to make sure I was doing everything properly.' Her hands held his shoulders, squaring them. 'If you don't do it properly, Scherzo, you might not be able to find your way back from wherever it is you've been. You understand what I'm saying? You can drown.'

That had frightened him, as Annie knew it must. But there was always reassurance in the eggshell vacuums of her eyes.

Another morning, Tuesday, and Scherzo was on his hands and knees among the litter of steam and insects, bodies deformed and mutated, searching for a lost spanner but finding only more corpses. He went deeper, the heat swelling in intensity by the second and the degree, threatening to peel, layer after sweltering layer, the skin from his bones. Preoccupied, he'd allowed the tool to slip out of his grasp. It had jangled off a succession of pipes, each clashing reverberation exceeding the last, dropping clean through the grating to the floor to end all floors, the sump. On no map or plan, the sump contained a submerged yet growing island of detritus, sediments hardening into crusty strata amid a sea of dust that moved in a billion separate directions on a zillion atomic legs. And this the one spanner, on loan, sunk in that false ocean, a two month waiting list behind it, he couldn't afford to lose.

Entrance to the basement was via a circular door. Unlike in Annie's dream it had a handle, ferrous and stuck. The hatch screamed when eventually Scherzo levered it open. A pall of shapeless mist slipped from the opening. He held his breath, shortly to be coaxed inward by the swirling fugue, the prone and the crushed, cadavers and the promise, gum-tingling, of secrets accumulated over years, secrets whose real meanings had their distant origins under a different sun.

Surfacing, buoyed again in physical time, he peered for counted minutes at the clinical walls, increasingly cognizant of white sheets and disinfectant, a water jug whose pretended innocence matched that of the fruit bowl, between them allowing the presence of flowers.

'You had a lucky escape,' said Wilson Hives in his best suit, or rather from it as Wilson liked a lot of starch. 'They tell me you nearly drowned in the river.' He was smiling, nearly not being good enough. The suit pressed, thought Scherzo, for a funeral.

He made no attempt at conversation. Falling spanners resonated in his skull.

Wilson raised one arm like the jib of a toy crane, winched his Stetson with the duck feather onto his slick pate and left.

As the big hand rested between two and three a male nurse called Morrison appeared at his bedside.

Morrison wore a plastic uniform. 'They always shit on me,' he explained, dragging his trolley behind. 'Every time \- shit, shit. There's just no let up.'

Scherzo saw his chance and grabbed it. 'What am I in for?' he asked.

Morrison regarded him suspiciously, stretching on a rubber glove. 'They haven't told you? You must be a special case. I shouldn't even be talking to you.'

'But I just woke up,' pleaded Scherzo.

'It makes no difference,' said Morrison. 'What can I say? I can't tell you. I don't know. I'm here to check your arse. I need you to turn over.'

'My arse is fine.'

'Yeah? What do you know about it? Come on, otherwise I hit my alarm button here and these men in white suits come rushing in and hold your face in the pillow.' He tapped his foot theatrically. 'I'm not kidding. I check the arses around here, okay? It's my job. I don't pretend to like it; but then who would?'

Scherzo complied.

'Okay,' Morrison told him, 'you're clean.'

'Thanks.'

'Don't mention it. All part of the service. See you in eight hours.'

There was a television set on a bracket in the corner farthest from the bed and a remote on the table by the now anxious looking fruit bowl, a combination of the two, TV and remote, providing him with potentially hours of healthy, fun, varied aural and visual stimulation.

He watched as aliens landed. There were graphics to assist the dumbest viewer, speculations and protestations to beat that same viewer into submission, and finally a live relay from somewhere in Greenland near the Arctic Circle. They'd cut a hole in the ice, our roving reporter informed us, and flown their ship into the freezing ocean, displacing, it was calculated by a government scientist, a Canadian working for the Americans on a field project labelled Top Secret, approximately 240 million gallons of water and eleven pilot whales, which, quipped the scientist, lived up to their name by piloting themselves an estimated fifty-three kilometres before coming down on an ice floe to the heat-engendering applause of sundry Eskimo.

The hole, like the one in his arse, the arses of the pilot whales and the Top Secret jokester who'd succeeded in occupying every channel much to the annoyance of his employers who were even now taking apart some Federal building, was circular. A perfect blackness could be found within.

4

Moses unzipped his tent, crawled forth onto dewy grass, washed his face and crawled back in again. There were seagulls in the morning air, their mosaic turds spotting the pale orange canvas, a magic-lantern slide - crude scene, cruder figures \- projected by the day's sun against his translucent flesh and at points through it, a mystery play whose non-static characters were roving insects. He took a pull of dead coffee from his flask and breakfasted on the remaining half of a cold beef sandwich. Then, once packed, it was off to the nearest pub for a dump.

Hours in the future, hitching north, he met Rosemary on a roundabout, picking flowers, her hair tied up and her feet bare as she strolled the fresh cut island amid otherworldly traffic. Light beating on her eyes and fracturing, Moses thought her a vision among concrete and litter, some hapless forest deity here trapped by roadworks and centuries, at one with the scrawny daffodils that absorbed her attention, which kissed the joint of her wrist as she plucked them.

Moses crouched low near the island's perimeter, hazarding his rear until she noticed him and smiled.

'Where are you headed?' he asked.

She wandered over, offered him a yellow blossom, went to fetch her shoes, socks and haversack.

He waited for her return. 'North?'

'Yeah. Newcastle, maybe.'

'Me too,' said Moses, surprising his inner consciousness. Was that city his intended target?

'Really? Do you know it at all? Only my father's from there. We moved when I was still a baby, so I don't remember. But I've always had this urge to visit; you know, like I left something behind.'

Moses nodded. 'Where are you from?' he inquired, completing the circle, his original question's second half.

'Now? London. You?'

He ate the flower, didn't answer her query.

'My name's Rosemary.'

He swallowed. 'Moses.'

'You're a pilgrim then, like me,' she said. 'How far do you think it is to Newcastle?'

'I don't have a map,' he told her truthfully.

'There're road signs.'

Moses shrugged. 'I don't read.'

She smiled again, broader this time, extending her Earthly realm. 'Me neither.'

Together they rode a bread delivery van as far as Sheffield, overcome by scents of cooling dough and chocolate éclairs, wrapped in odours of baked freshness, the driver either a jester or a torturer in whatever prior life had qualified him for this existence, as he furnished their rumbling stomachs with nothing more than a goodbye. The afternoon through evening to night they spent rolling about a golf course, fighting in the bunkers and hanging like windswept parachutists from the trees until the police arrived, spraying light-beams and forcing them to move on. They pooled their cash and counted it over and over before deciding on wholemeal buns, Gorgonzola and cider, the latter stolen from the same dingy corner store where they'd purchased the former. The cheese came from a supermarket shelf on special offer. Then, around two in the morning, the day blanked, a grey man in a green Sierra offered them a lift to the next service- station, which they accepted, Moses catching eye and ear of a large white plastic container under the driver's seat while Rosemary shared the rear with a pond-smelling array of bottles, petrol cans and resealed salvaged milk cartons full of sloshing water. She held her feet off the floor. Next to her on the back seat lurked a sack. Rough, like something coconuts came in.

The grey man drove erratically, as if unsure of the road, or his precise direction, swerving across lanes. He left them each with a gift, for her a tin opener, for him a shoe horn, a razor without blades returned to the sack with a shake of the head and a gurgle of liquids.

The service-station resembled any other. They took turns to wash and guard belongings, Moses returning to find a surly youth occupying his chair, spilling over it, Rosemary unconcerned by either his long, pungent cigarettes or his pot-bellied demeanour, afterward describing him as a friend of an enemy of a friend, a girl she'd known east of Clapham.

The youth gone they talked. Rosemary had no tent and had been sleeping rough, when she did sleep, which was eight nights out of ten, once in a waste container full of paper cups and cardboard boxes and once in a candy-striped shelter workmen had erected round a manhole, her dreams the dreams of sewage and rats. Her many adventures were related cheerfully. She had no regrets about leaving London. Her father had died when she was five and her mother's boyfriend abused her as a teenager. She was twenty now, had stabbed her mother in one chubby arm with a fork and run away, abandoning her Sunday dinner. Hitting the road and not looking back, she discovered herself chasing a forgotten past she hoped one day to reassemble. She talked for hours.

'What's your excuse, Moses? The Egyptians? Tell me.'

They'd bought tea, a pot of it, and staked claim to a chipped Formica table.

Moses was sleepy. They both were. A waitress nudged Rosemary. 'Could you move a moment, dear, for the cleaner?'

Moses came awake. 'It's six o'clock,' he said. 'Time we were leaving.'

She yawned, acknowledged the waitress, stood, said to him, 'You can read the time?'

He thought a moment. 'I dreamt it...'

'Okay - is the pot empty?'

Outside was twilit and hungry. Lorry drivers rumbled out of cabs and junctions, slid into seats and traffic. Moses toted Rosemary's haversack, his own gear stashed in it, while she swung his tent round by its orange nylon carry-handle.

Each of them stuck out a thumb. It worked like magic, eight times from ten.

By six-fifteen they were mobile. By seven in love.

5

Benedict leaned over the wooden rail and gazed at his dim reflection in the muddy waters of the swamp. It was early and the flies had yet to rise. Nevertheless, Rebecca had sprayed the awnings, a smell like candle wax. She came up behind him now and put her arms round his waist. Newly risen from the shower, she was damp against his shirt. Her soapy cleanness enfolded him. Her long hair spilled on his shoulder.

'Did you see something, Roy?' she asked, holding tighter.

'No. Just the trees, the water,' he replied. 'How did you sleep?'

'Oh, fine.' She disengaged, affirming the lie. 'I closed my eyes and drifted like flotsam.'

Benedict turned to face his wife, hands behind him gripping puffy wood. A lozenge of sunlight crept toward them along the veranda, colouring the slatted planks. The house was painted a vague blue. Draped with creepers, it mirrored shades of aquatic oblivion.

'I heard noises in the dark,' Rebecca said. 'I thought at first it was you.'

'Did they come from the water?'

'No - they were inside; it was as if the entire house was moving on its stilts. Scary.'

'Why didn't you wake me?'

She folded her arms, creased her robe. 'I listened,' she said. 'I put my ear to the floor in the kitchen and again in the bathroom. It sounded like a distant train. Or a boat maybe, an outboard motor. And then as I listened the sound grew more high pitched, like a scream.'

'You should have woken me,' Benedict said.

Rebecca turned and walked back into the house, her footprints quick to dry in the burgeoning heat.

6

'There's money to be made out of this. You agree?'

'You're not the first to suggest it, Tony. But yes, I agree.'

Tony Molhenny peered from the eighteenth floor office window of his friend and business associate, Hugo Lupid.

'You must know how many wild schemes are going around,' Hugo said, feet on his antique desk. 'Excursions, tours, fly-byes; that record deal Salami has supposed to have nailed. All kinds of scams. Most of them legal.'

Tony returned his glass to the revolving art-deco table, wondering where Hugo bought such garish items. 'Yeah,' he answered, stroking the fronds of a particularly well-balanced yucca plant. Engineered by a lady in Belgium, imported by Lupid & Molhenny. 'But has anybody yet produced an actual alien, in the flesh?'

Hugo laughed. 'What makes you think they have flesh, Tony? They could be anything. Balls of slime. Anything.'

'My point exactly, Hugo. No-one knows for sure. It's my guess no-one's going to find out, either.'

'And?'

'I think you know what I'm thinking.'

'The Loch Ness monster,' said Hugo. 'Yeti.' He got to his feet with a groan of supple leather. The ridges fell out of his suit.

'Live and kicking.'

'Concessions, sponsorship, personal appearances, that sort of thing?'

'Keep going, Hugo.'

'All rights held by Pulchritude Promotions - that's you and me.'

'The exclusive package.'

Hugo paced before his desk, hands out in front of him. 'Who do you have in mind, Tony?'

'I've someone on tap who I think fits the bill.'

'Reliable? Here, let me get you another.'

'Sure - brandy. A big one.'

'And you trust him to do the job?'

'Implicitly.'

'What about after the, eh, commission?'

Tony accepted his drink. 'Ah, Hugo,' he said, grinning, 'that part's easy.'

7

Doctor Mood answered the knock at his door. 'Rosalin, come in. How's your mother?'

'Fine, Doc, much better.' She shook her head, smeared wet hair over her skull.

'Raining?' observed Mood belatedly. 'I hadn't noticed.'

Rosalin smiled. 'Not more black magic, Doc. You should know better.'

He ushered the girl into the kitchen, its clinical whiteness, single chest-high horizontal strip of marbled aqua blue, stacked dishes, and handed her a tea-towel, which she refused, guessing as to the reason behind her visit. He'd recently treated her mother. Where conventional medicine had failed to rid the woman of an embarrassing skin condition the doctor had succeeded, first in reducing the number and size of her cysts, then eradicating them altogether with a straightforward injection, three times a week when the sun was highest, of sea salt and petroleum, for which he had charged a triple zero sum. A bonus for the grateful patient was that she had been obliged to give up smoking, an extra for which, unusually, Doctor Mood had levied no fee.

'Don't you ever wash up, Doc?' Rosalin asked.

'I've a housekeeper,' he explained.

'Oh,' said Rosalin. 'Is she sick?'

Doctor Mood ignored the jibe, good-natured and innocent as it was, fixing his eyes on the girl. What was she, fifteen? Sixteen?

'I need to ask a favour. I couldn't think of anyone else. It's kind of personal.'

'I'm a qualified physician,' he replied genially. 'You can tell me.'

Pregnant? A dose?

'I've got this friend, Doc. He...'

'Yes?'

Self-mutilation? Drugs?

Rosalin squirmed. 'I mean I...'

'Go on.'

'I, well, you know, broke it.' She shrugged. 'There wasn't any blood or anything,' she added. 'It's just...'

'You had a bit of an accident,' the doctor provided. 'A little too eager, aye?'

Rosalin uncurled from her developing slouch. 'Yeah! I knew you'd understand. Mother thinks you're wonderful.'

He wanted to laugh. As it was, she kissed him. On the lips, he thought, Jesus, those firm young breasts slotting rain-hardened nipples between his ribs.

'Rosalin,' Mood said, easing her away. 'Is this the first boy you've slept with? It is, right?' Sweat prickled his brow and the kitchen made him suddenly claustrophobic.

She chewed her lip. 'Aha. But I know all about safe sex and contraception and stuff.'

'That's fine, Rosalin. But listen; was it dark?'

'You mean when we did it?'

'Yes.' He nodded.

Her smile returned. 'Totally.' The word was imbued with power, like some schoolgirl mantra.

Mood briefly pondered its significance. Then, 'And after?' he prompted.

'He was okay, I think.'

'Undamaged?'

'Yes. It happened later. In the morning. We were messing about and I yanked it; a bit too hard, I think.'

'I see.' He scratched his nose, strangely raw. 'Was he in pain at all?'

'He must have been,' said Rosalin with certainty. 'I mean he yelped. And then I went down to kiss it. But when I saw what I'd done he went quiet. Had to be macho. He's outside in his car now. He didn't want to come but I persuaded him. Shall I tell him to come in?'

Mood regarded the girl with what he hoped was sympathy touched with humour and not vice versa. How could he tell her her boyfriend wouldn't be waiting, that it was highly unlikely she would ever see him again?

'Rosalin.'

'Doc?'

'Can I show you some pictures?'

'What kind of pictures?' she asked, suspicious. Had her mother warned her against such advances? But I'm a doctor, he told himself, this is a purely professional matter. It had just come out wrong.

'Rosalin.'

'Doc?'

'Do you trust me?'

She didn't answer verbally. It would have been yes ten minutes ago, he realized. He was out of practice.

'Rosalin.'

'Doc?'

'Will you talk to your mother about this?'

She shuffled. Toward the door? 'I don't know. Why? Should I fetch Dave?'

He gave up. 'Yes, yes, bring him in. We'll sort this out. Don't you worry.'

Poor bastard, Mood joked when she'd gone, not to return, as he'd presumed, that must be a significant angle you have there. He wiped his brow on the tea-towel and pulled a bottle of whisky from a drawer.

8

He allowed the boat to ride the current, its slowness appealing, drifting him beneath a variety of languid trees, colourful blossoms, creepers. The late afternoon gently stretched their shadows. He drank from a bottle, its former contents swirling in his head like the oars in the water, free of his control, beyond his physical self in a world of their own. His brain hurt, a hooked fish. He tossed the empty bottle into the sluggish water and watched it sink, rise, sink, rise once more. He tried to imagine what lay under the surface, what might cause the bottle to do that, rise and sink, in mockery of its weight and the weight of the water that had replaced the air that had replaced the spirit inside it. He'd slept a while earlier, smeared in unguents to keep the insects at bay, stretched out in the boat like a dead man. He wished he was asleep now; but he could never completely lose himself. Even abandoning his fate to the turgid water was hopeless. There was no escape from Rebecca, her death, the time and moment of it, no way of scaling that overhanging face. How hard and soft it was, changeable in every detail like a liquid jewel cut and cut again, flawed by one irrevocable fact. He had tried to kill himself. Failed. Something always went wrong. The gun would jam or the pills turn out to be iron tablets. The rope would snap...

He had yet to attempt drowning, though. But, 'Accept it, Roy, you don't want to die. Even the river knows it. See that bottle? That bottle's a sign. It won't sink to the bottom and neither will you. Your lungs might fill and your heart thunder, but you won't die, you'll bob right back up, spraying water, spraying blood, alive.'

He could only drift, it seemed.

'Aren't there crocodiles, Roy?'

'No - it's not Africa. Far from it.'

'Alligators then.'

'I told you,' he remonstrated, 'it's perfectly safe. Just a few flies. Nothing to worry about.'

'What kind of flies?' She trembled. 'I hate insects.'

'Flies aren't insects,' Benedict argued. He leaned across to the fridge and pulled a banana-shaped magnet off the glossy white door, which he next pretended to peel.

'What are they then?'

'Hmm?'

'Flies, Roy! Stop prevaricating.'

'Okay,' he admitted. 'So they're insects. But they are not dangerous, I promise. There are all kinds of sprays and creams, so they won't bother you. You'll hardly notice.'

'I'll bet.'

He flung the magnet at the fridge, chipping enamel. 'This is a big opportunity for me, Becky. You don't seem to recognize that.'

'I do. It's just...'

'What? Your family? Are they hassling you?'

'My condition,' Rebecca stated flatly, her eyes shut, one hand on her chest.

Benedict lay his hands flat on the cool table, outlining fine coronae of perspiration. 'Don't call it that,' he told her.

'What should I call it?' Tears began rolling down her cheeks, stinging his heart.

'It'll be okay,' he said. 'I can look after you there. We can be alone, away from everybody. It'll be just you and me. Doesn't that sound good?'

'But we'll be coming back?'

'Of course - six months, that's all. Think of it as a holiday.'

He dragged his fingers in the tepid water. The sun had dropped tree high, pausing in its descent upon this world of darkening greens, rising blackness, generating colour in the sky. It was Benedict's favourite time of day; everything still and quiet. Beautiful.

Suddenly birds exploded from the trees like in a Tarzan movie, filling the heavens with spangled wings and raucous sound. Benedict, startled, made a grab for the oars, lost one, started paddling frantically upriver with the remainder, kneeling like an Eskimo in a kayak.

He was drifting no longer.

Greeted by lamplight, Rebecca in her rocking-chair glimpsed through the screen doors.

'Rebecca?'

9

Rosemary lay picking her navel. What was that, semen? Moses was still asleep, breathing steady. She wondered about him, where he came from, his dogged reluctance to discuss his past. He behaved as if he'd been on the road all his life, like that was all he'd ever known, a life outside time, hemmed perhaps by fear of an unknowable kind, headed wherever his companion of the moment, male or female, young or old, was headed. Maybe never getting there, disappearing in the night and linking up with another, one whose direction was different. Maybe. Did he only exist for other people? Himself the companion, a semi-mystical guide? She dressed quietly and emerged into a light drizzle, a haze of fine water particles suspended in the wake of an earlier storm that had sagged the tent and made her skin clammy. They were camped near a road bridge by a river, traffic and current equally paced, unseen, harmonious, the bridge appearing to extend between the trees on either bank. Cast iron, stone arches. The trees wood, promising leaves and fruit. There was a swan on the water, quietly watching, sailing a survival course, negotiating rocks and branches, fishing-line and the half sunken remains of domestic appliances. Newcastle was eight miles downstream, this a tributary of the Tyne.

10

No matter how many times they explained it Scherzo failed to understand. They told him he was seriously ill, dying. He didn't believe them, felt okay, better than ever; but they persisted. 'Could go any moment,' they said, arms folded over double-breasted jackets. 'Night or day. There's no way of telling exactly, but you'll know.'

To the perfect blackness of the submerged elevator Scherzo Trepan had been refused admission. Hell and the incinerator plant were closed to him. He received a cheque each Thursday amounting to three quarters of his original wage, cashed this at the post office and was frowned upon in general. He still saw Ruth, if at a distance. It was as if she was frightened to come near him, held away by some invisible force. This intrigued Scherzo. He found significance in the stretches of grass and grids of paving she kept between them. He wondered if hers was a fear of contamination. But who was he kidding? Perhaps, he imagined, she was under Special Instruction.

He put his shoes on, ran from the house to the leaning ash trees, burst into sunlight. Two months had passed since the aliens' splash. Spring. The media was full of arrivals, what some termed invasions. Tulips and bug-eyed monsters dominated the news. In Glasgow a tulip had eaten a chocolate vending machine, a kiosk selling among other things cannabis resin and amphetamines, and an American tourist before being run-over by an underground train eyewitnesses described as long and orange, the bent-spine colour of some novels. Those people were sick, thought Scherzo. There were nuclear submarines patrolling the oceans, swimming to the North Pole.

Disappointingly, the alien vessel just sat in frigid water, quiet and inscrutable like a Japanese in a whale's belly among the ice and penguins, saying nothing, making no aggressive moves toward the protectorates of Norway and Britain, each with an eye on the haddock. They may have tried, the many navies, to provoke the unhuman, but any attempt, documented or falsified, had been unsuccessful.

Most of the world got along fine without the doors opening. The planet was well used to failure. Religious groups flourished, formed and reformed, attacked each other in the street with rolled up magazines, inspired by a steady flow of MIRACLES, from the shrinking holes in the ozone to the spectacular diversion of hurricane Roxanne off the east coast of Florida. Acts of God were attributable to the aliens. If there were any. Insurance companies chose not to set a precedent, being content to set a premium instead. But then nobody believed in them, either.

Scherzo overheard this conversation in a pub.

'They were in Kansas City and Sydney. A world tour, is what I think; checking places out for, you know, for possible...er...'

'Colonization?'

'Yeah. I read it. And everywhere they go people disappear; sometimes whole families.'

'They must collect 'em, all different species from around the galaxy. A zoo, like in that film. And perform experiments, that sort of thing. Makes your stomach turn. Whose round is it?'

'Right. My brother, in Canada, he saw one. Reckoned it looked like rubber. A man in a suit, he said. He thinks it's all a hoax, something dreamed up by ad-men to sell something.'

'What kind of something?'

'No-one knows. That's just it. But all this hype, that's to get us to buy it when it comes out.'

'Maybe they're going to resurrect the space program.'

'Could be. It's anyone's guess. Someone tried to shoot it.'

'What? The alien?'

'Yeah. In Ontario. My brother saw the man who did it. He was arrested and then released. Someone must've paid him to do it. The bullet bounced right off, he said, like it were some kind of special substance.'

'You don't think it's real?'

'Now, I didn't say that. I'm only telling you what my brother told me, and that's the impression he got, that it's rubber.'

'And there was just the one alien?'

'All he saw. I read there were six in Peking. The Chinese had a satellite link with the ship. Something about Chairman Mao...'

Scherzo neared the river. A couple of school kids, they story went, had dragged him from the murky water. Scherzo guessed that he'd passed out midst the decaying husks in the incinerator basement and the powers had fired him, ejected him for reasons only they understood. In the days immediately following his forced stay in the strangely empty hospital, where a host of ancient doctors had run endless, repetitive tests on him, he'd toyed with the idea of exposing the plant, stripping its cover, revealing its hidden depths and illegal activities and laying it prone before the clustered boots and gathered bayonets of the local environmental generals. It was a lingering affection for the massive ovens rather than any corporate loyalty which stayed him. If he closed his eyes and breathed deeply he could still smell the rubbish burning, see the fading after-image superimposed over retinae, feel the scalding furnace. The ash was monochromatic and powdery and the heat, stroking through his moulded helmet, cooked his brain. But Ruth, his locker, the few belongings in it, were as detached now from Scherzo as the moon.

To his left there was a faint splash. Someone was watching him, hunched on the far bank about thirty feet away, whipping a sapling in and out of the water. Scherzo peered intently at the figure in an effort to sex it. The figure stared back. Scherzo began walking slowly in its direction, the river dividing. The figure pulled its hood down over its eyes. Remained, but for the action of its wrist, unmoving.

Scherzo hunched opposite and smiled.

Downstream, the bridges grew in size and quantity, the traffic they bore making impossible any bird noise, throttling the sucked and compacted air. Moses and Rosemary wandered beneath the tallest, staring up through ironwork and masonry, glancing in reflection at the few boats moored or channelling the muddy water.

Scherzo, meanwhile, attempted a crossing. The river here had a different name, one of countless pseudonyms adopted at the behest of cartographers the world over, the liquid itself always happy to oblige: today a puddle, tomorrow an ocean, a party in the clouds. A short distance from where he and the figure had taken position on either shore was a haphazard ford, rocks adjusted years past to permit anyone willing a mostly dry passage. Only recently these steps had shifted, moved by flood and time, cracked and broken, fragments the offspring of meteorites and volcanoes - so they'll tell you, being old and grand; at any rate, loose teeth in rotten gums. Scherzo perched on the first, skipped to the second, stood and (they were all molars) examined the probable way forward. He glanced at the figure squatting, proceeded to the next rock and felt it wobble. The one after, its successor, was firmly, reassuringly rooted. Then a gap. He was in the middle. Could he jump to the following step and would he dislodge it? There were trees on either side, branches dangling in and above the bubbling flow. His situation altered his perspective greatly. He could see houses, terraced and detached, red brick and yellow, china chimney pots like hats or crowns. He could trace the curve of the field with an intimacy he hadn't suspected before, realize and appreciate the true folds of the land, witness how over the years man and nature had shaped it. The contours of the dread incinerator were clearly definable, buried in a latter-day cist to his left, enthroned beneath the earth like a forgotten king, one whose power never waned, although there were few (one was enough) to call him up. Scherzo dreamed of robbing that grave. Perhaps with Ruth's help? What they might steal...

A diving bird shattered the water and he fell in, was pulled out by the watcher who'd waded to his rescue, identifying himself as a native of warmer climes, a man of stocky build and tautened skin. He said nothing. Scherzo flapped wetly. The man kept the company of a large sack out of which he produced a fat ripe orange, wonderful and round, Scherzo thence staining thumbnails to peel, dripping juice and river on what appeared to be a map of roads but was in fact a map - crumpled and marked with slashes of vague pencil - of watercourses, brooks and streams, folded after a shake and a snort and returned to the sack from where it, like the marvellous fruit, had sprung.

'Thanks,' said Scherzo, wringing his shirt.

The figure reproduced our hapless swimmer's smile, accepted three bursting with goodness segments of orange, stuffed them as one into his silent mouth and rambled off. He wove erratically, Scherzo observed, as if in strict adherence to a bathymetric path.

Scherzo wondered how he was going to cross the river once more; why, indeed, he had crossed it in the first place.

He was stuck.

11

On the planet Formalhaut, tucked neatly into a hillside and smothered with amber blossom, the blue sun at its permanent zenith, one of a pair, and the yellow-green clouds spiralling languidly through the creamy firmament, Austin Pearce lay in his hammock composing songs and star charts, organizing the galaxy into units and segments, each a different size and shape to its neighbours, each unique in constitution, delineation, ethos.

Fat cat

sittin' on the windowsill,

doesn't know the time of day

pays no bills;

maybe chase a mouse later,

maybe a butterfly -

fat cat

watchin' the world go by.

He had been arranging and rearranging the universe, galaxy by galaxy, for years. Time was one thing he didn't measure, however. It was distance that mattered.

Fat cat

listenin' to the radio,

cannot sing the blues

rolls no dope;

maybe sleep an hour or two,

maybe three or four -

fat cat

ain't got no game to score.

He calibrated distance by a variety of means, employing an array of mathematical and ontological devices. And he was almost finished. Just one galaxy to go. His own. Austin felt reluctant to carve it up as he had the others, sad that his task neared completion. Apprehensive, but also excited, that he would be going home soon, back to Pulchritude. He'd make it time for the roses, he was sure.

Fat cat

stretchin' as the day grows long,

won't budge till food comes

waits like Death;

gonna run the wild later,

gonna prowl the dark -

fat cat

callin' on Moon's guiding heart.

He licked his pencil, a 4H, and wrote a note to himself. Life is a bone, the note said, and we, as dogs, are in the habit of burying them, lives that in the future can be dug up again.

Fat cat

risin' as the night creeps in,

stomach loud as a new shoe

tight as a coiled spring;

gonna raise hell over fences,

gonna fight till dawn -

fat cat

knows it's time to be born.

Austin stood by the yonderscope, toed its gilded pedals. The mirrors shone and the wires writhed, and it wasn't even plugged in.

He would be going back soon, home to blue-green Pulchritude.

12

Rosemary glared with shock at Moses and the fear in her eyes transmitted an icy chill to his heart, a seeming accompaniment to the high wailing sound emanating from the girl between her shoe'd and his naked feet. The child, for that's all she was, had fallen from the window of a speeding car. It's driver hadn't slowed or stopped, but sped on, drawing crude black initials on the tarmac. It was late afternoon and the city street appeared suddenly to have emptied, as if someone had announced curfew. Rosemary and Moses were left outside, ignorant of the decree, prey to the trigger-happy security forces in their patent leather uniforms and not knowing what to do, which way to turn, who to approach for a resident's permit, which queues to join and which to avoid, whether to agree to samples being taken, tests run, results classified. A light flickered up ahead, casting its shapes in a puddle, fractured red and yellow neon, gateway to some cheap, gaudy bar or unfashionable café-cum-restaurant. Moses knelt and raised the girl's broken head. Her cheeks were torn, lips and chin gashed, nose cut and bruised. He could feel her warmth leak into his hand. Rosemary ran back to where her haversack lay and dragged it over, panting, tears refracting vision. She witnessed the girl jerk, heard her wailing grow louder, then froze where she stood as the delicate creature lapsed and died.

Later, beside a lake, observed by ducks and rodents, they held each other, rocking. No ambulance had arrived to spirit the child away. Instead, Moses had wrapped her too small body in his wiry arms and walked with her to an overgrown, derelict graveyard with a view of the bridges. And there he'd set her, propped and quiet, with her distorted spine to the weather-eaten church wall, dim face against an ancient lattice whose spindly vines might chance her pasty limbs in a month or so, whose flowers might grow in her hair.

13

His bedroom was on the ground floor, its view mostly blocked by a misshapen hedge from the undulating road with its rusty autos and rotting lamp-posts, aerials and wires bent and sagging, paintwork and creosote in terminal decline, flaking and lifting tiny ears. During the strangest hours, before and after sunrise and sunset, those ears listened with curious fascination to the warbled conversation of birds, dogs and groping adolescents, all with procreation on the brain, striking matches, poses, sparking cigarettes, cocking brows and legs, shedding feathers and fur, spilling laughter and guts as the light switched - indeterminable light, a photographer's wet dream, the uncatalogued illumination of souls.

Someone kicked a can down a street. Virginity was lost, somewhere. It had rained from six in the morning when Scherzo woke till six that evening, washing litter and hair from the surface and locking it beneath, plaited in a sewer the direction of which was never certain, whose incline and depth were variable, a work of man imitating a work of nature. He'd tried to get back to sleep but by seven had risen. Wilson entered the kitchen just as Scherzo filled the kettle and began hunting in the drawers for smokes, loose or in packs of ten or twenty.

'You quit,' Scherzo reminded him.

Wilson paused. 'Why aren't you at work?' he asked, one hand lost amid bin-liners.

'I'm sick, remember? I haven't been to work for ages.'

Wilson grinned. 'The mystery illness, eh? Maybe it's what did your old man in. Did you think of that? Maybe it's so bad nobody wants to talk about it. Maybe that's what you've got; but you don't know.' His voice was slurred, pumping cheap vodka as he wandered off.

Scherzo ignored the man, mated the kettle flex to the kettle and switched it on. Wilson's odour would follow him around the house all day if he wasn't careful. And it would be worse upstairs. But there was no way of avoiding that. He needed the bathroom, wanted to shower. A slow pulse in his right temple encouraged him, guiding his feet rise by rise, each ten inches minus worn carpet. These brought him to the landing with its loose rail, and face to face with a monstrous woman whose naked breasts squatted on her ribcage like giant scoops of raspberry ripple. Her nipples were wide and stippled, obviously tooth-marked, even from eight or ten paces, the backdrop to a firing squad, upturned bowls out of which extinct quadrupeds might have drunk.

He could hear Wilson pissing. Not wanting to retreat down the stairs he walked, more reached by two long strides, his sister's vacated bedroom at the front of the house, looking upon the same vacated street, changed by height, as his room below. It smelled wonderfully clean, oddly free of dust as if in daily use. Scherzo charged his lungs and forgot his grime. He sat on the bed, the creases he impressed in the quilt the first for many years. He squeezed the mattress like it were flesh, a residual warmth held there, a heat surviving against time and pervasive winters. With the door closed, brass clothes' hook askew, he could hear nothing of Wilson and his woman. It was like he'd entered a newer world, his sister's realm of noiseless space. Around him books and sample cases awaited ghosted hands, pages and lids to be turned, words and contents exposed to light and eye, thought and scrutiny. Scherzo lifted a leather bound case from one shelf and carefully opened it. He sat once more on the bed, the precious item, when revealed, on his knee. It was Annie's favourite, a footprint that seemed almost deliberate, clawed and the size and spread of his palm, fixed into sediment on a beach, some muddy strand, in the bed of a swamp millions of years ago. There was a story that went with it, a story with every book and find, every fossil and piece of fragile bone; stories, but for those fragments lodged in Scherzo's brain, Annie had returned to the librarian. She was eighteen when she died, a bright young girl whose dreams had coloured his drab mind. Death took her one afternoon, still in a box, little brother wishing his goodbyes, rolled by wheel and belt to a place underground.

Scherzo gazed at that footprint for hours. He'd made it with a hoof of his own, aeons past, fleeing the lunchtime embrace of a precarious carnivore.

The rain plucked relentlessly at the tuneless window the sun-masked day through. The swelling heat and pressure of his bladder eventually brought Scherzo home, a failsafe of his time machine which manifested in a variety of ways, as may be seen in the future.

14

The moon rose out of the sea.

'It's a trick of the light,' said Poorman, rising creakily from his chair of white wicker, insulating tape and string. 'The ice does it, has that effect; the ice and the aurora. You'll soon get used to it. It'll grow on you like a luminous mould - get you stoned, that and the slow noise, it's proximity.'

'You mean to say the ship exaggerates these phenomena?' Dreep hugged his coat about him, afraid of what he might feel beneath, his own withered frame or some other's. It had been so long since he'd removed it that the spectral green mass of his parka had become, to Dreep's way of thinking, like a second, vital skin, an all over protection against an all over opposition.

By contrast, Poorman wore a T-shirt with the legend Jesus Saves Money, one of a pair, the twin yellow to this one's blue, reading Funky Uncle's Citrus Kangaroo. There had been a third, pink, which Poorman had set on fire a few by-the-clock days ago during a flare shooting contest; BACKSLIDER, its flame-written logo. 'Cold?' he asked Dreep, smirking, immune as he himself was to extremes of negative temperature. Poorman loved it up here; he even had a tan to go with his muscles.

The younger man hopped from foot to booted, fur-lined, zippered, buckled, Velcro'd foot.

'I can feed you coffee. Always plenty on the go. A shot of rum?'

'No, no,' replied the college journalist, panic washing his brow with thoughts of alcohol and retained body heat.

Poorman frowned.

'What I would like,' Dreep continued, gathering his skins and his glassy courage about him, 'is some sleep.'

Poorman shrugged, a spontaneous gesture which rattled the prefab on its floats. 'Okay,' he said obligingly, saving the boy for another moment, some later than usual breakfast. 'If you don't want to ask me any further questions I'll have one of my scientists tuck you in.'

Theodore Dreep loathed the Arctic, despised the big man, hated himself and his drooling eagerness to accept what was fast turning out to be the worst possible assignment. He'd already spent two days in a foul-smelling snow-cat due to adverse weather conditions making it impossible to fly, the tracked vehicle breaking down continuously, on average every sixty circuitous miles, its driver a crazed Nipponese who smoked cheroots and pilloried Dreep's unsophisticated senses with a constant barrage of lurid sexual detail; one man's unedited account, the whole of his warped concupiscence, the reality of experiments hungrily discharged.

His name was Shin. He had green eyes, brown lips (that's cheroots for you) and the kind of sickly purple-bruise stubble that gave Dreep an uncomfortable sensation in his rectum, his arse tightening as if in anticipation of his father, an overtly hairy man and a major reason, if he was honest, why Theodore had plumped for this most distant of escapes originally.

'Wait till you see the tits on this marine biologist,' Shin said north of Baffin Island, the ice disturbingly thin, the cat so obviously heavy. 'Talk about jugs! These babies'll shake your fillings. I tell you, if I could get my teeth into them it'd take fucking dynamite to shift me!'

Dreep just huddled deeper into his coat, blind and deaf and regrettably neither.

'I took some pictures a while back,' Shin was saying, lighting up. 'Me and Poorman. That's the commandant. We sneaked a camera into her quarters, wired for remote, and took a whole roll of this fat Finnish bastard's mollusc, blurred like a propeller fan he was banging so fast, screwing the top right off our preferred subject. Poorman was gutted. I'd loaded the camera with twenty-four exposures rather than thirty-six; so the final moments, when he glued it in her, were lost forever.'

'How far is it?' Dreep inquired weakly, voice squeaking.

Shin exhaled in his direction. 'We'll get it on video next time. Who knows, maybe you'll even get a front seat!'

And now he had to share a room with a black man. Theodore was beset by injustices.

Elsewhere on station Poorman turned over playing cards and peered

intermittently at the ranks of monochrome screens that cast flickering ghost lights around his office. He was thinking about sleep and pictured Ralph, his girl at present, two thousand miles away in Ottawa, bent now where he liked her, at the waist, thighs at ninety degrees, shoulders limp and hands trailing between ankles as Felix the fearless drove his cock inside her.

Forget sleep, he told himself, I need it sucked. 'Hey, Shin,' he called, finger depressing intercom button, 'get your skinny yellow neck in here, pronto!'

Dreep, meanwhile, made grunts and stretches.

'What's that you're doing, soldier?' the black man queried from the shadows.

'My exercises,' Dreep answered, tensing, sweat like old chewing gum in his armpits and slung like a hammock beneath his frozen gonads.

'Why not take your coat off; I'd be a lot easier.'

Sure, sure, thought the reporter, searching for his dog-eared notepad midst the gangrenous folds of his clothing. And what then, eh?

The black man rocked forward, snagging light, his eyes on stalks of pure whiteness.

Dreep manoeuvred sideways, out of their line of fire, slid quietly into his bunk, under the protective sheath (another defensive layer) of the covers. He was, not for the first time, reminded ominously of the irregular visitations of his hirsute sire, the pacification and buggery that followed.

'The name's Woodtoe,' said the black man. 'But you can call me Blinder.'

Theodore said nothing at all.

15

Affixing the final limb, glue tube between teeth, blue-green and yellow-white fumes ascending greedy nostrils, Taylor stood back to admire his work. He wasn't happy with the coloration, black shading upward through purple, red, turquoise, indigo, black once more at the pate, wrinkled and seamed like some Frankenstein spin-off - and too large, that head, anomalous to the careful balance and proportioning of the torso with its multi-jointed directional appendages. But he had his brief. And there were other considerations, not least among them his life, the cessation of which Taylor was promised should he not deliver.

In his cramped office, calendars layering the bare plaster walls, no adjoining shire horse or cute blonde thing displaying the same month or with the same day ringed, machine parts and kittens impaled by darts, a few not opened to January, February, March at all, covering a territory of years, Taylor picked the receiver from its cradle and punched Molhenny's number, that which had been beaten into him one rainy Friday (Tuesday?) afternoon as he sat in a squeaky chair in another office. Even seedier than this, the night air reeking of violence and gun-smoke, the heat oppressive, the pictures displayed on that occasion not mere fantasy but the representative stranglehold Tony Molhenny had on Taylor, a reality measured in goons. 'It's finished,' he said when his call was answered. 'You can pick it up right away.'

Molhenny put the phone down, licked his lips. He buzzed Rita, his secretary, and instructed her to meet him outside with the car.

'Where are you having me chauffeur you this time, Tony?' Rita wanted to know, voice trebled, quick. 'If this is another one of your surprises...'

She was playing hard to get. He said, 'Now, Rita, would I do anything to upset you?'

'You know you would. Frequently.'

'You're not intrigued?'

Silence. That's what worries me, he could imagine her thinking.

The door hinged inward and there she was, nineteen and superior, wearing a flower-print dress.

'I don't trust you, sir, Mr Molhenny; you pay me too much.'

'Just get the car, Rita.'

16

Doctor Mood was rapt in his garden. He hadn't realized it was so big. Surrounded by rhododendrons, having lost one shoe to the mud and the other in a drainage ditch full of manure, cut himself with the secateurs, torn his shirt and bruised his thumb, he had just about had enough. What had brought him out here in the first place amounted to a sudden bizarre craving, a thing mostly beyond his experience, which he could not explain, but a powerful desire to have freshly cut flowers, an arrangement he'd felt confident of gleaning, fern leaves and all, from what he now acknowledged to be a separate dimension. He wandered in useless circles, abandoned by brickwork and windows, house features of any recognizable sort, gazing sheepishly at the too yellow sun and wishing he owned a watch that worked as the face on his wrist had stuck at ten minutes to two. It smiled at him now like clocks do in jewellers, its spring, unlike the spring presently overawing Mood, having quit its function.

The elderly couple whose names the doctor could never remember, his housekeeper and gardener, had vanished mysteriously. Apparently no longer in need of his chiropody, their corns cured and gratitude limited, they'd given him over to the wilds of flora and domesticity, dust and season. Grimacing, he threw down the secateurs. He was already appreciably late to administer to horny Mrs Fry. Was that a rabbit? Did it carry a pocket watch and should he follow it? These questions taxed his mind. Doctor Mood was feeling unusually sullen. The world had deserted him. He'd lost his way and there was no-one near, no-one visible, to guide him back. Those who were invisible, crouched amid roots and suspended from branches, laughing into palms and up sleeves, were of no immediate assistance. Mood had long suspected their presence. They rode through the house on the backs of cats. Long suspected the presence of this other realm, too, inhabited by talking fish and pouting lilies, lugubrious moles and squirrels with gold fillings.

He decided, despite himself, to explore.

17

Scherzo Trepan met Lewis Charmer in the Odd One Out, where, coincidentally, both had travelled for a beer.

'There's this all girl band playing at Blood's,' Lewis informed him, moustache foamed, glasses steamed, nose pierced and jeans ripped. 'Want to go?' They'd attended school together on righteous days, blazer'd and tied, using their dinner money to buy cigarettes.

Scherzo was reluctant initially, a workable ploy to get Lewis to buy the drinks.

'What are they called, this band?'

'The Tyres,' Lewis answered. 'They're the rubber chicks from Hell.' He worked in the meat market, pimping on a part-time basis, managing bands and forging cheques whenever things got tough, the police too closely involved or his elder brother, Spike, drunk enough to want to beat the shit out of him Saturday nights.

'He's still doing that?' questioned Scherzo. 'Why don't you hit him back?'

Lewis shrugged. He would always shrug in response to such avenues of inquiry, a shrug residing at the bloated centre of his unwholesome existence, a universe pervaded by strings of indiscretion that radiated out from this obese core in countless directions. Lewis was content to float, unwilling to swim. 'And make him angry?' he replied. 'Are you kidding?' Like it were someone else's fault.

'Right,' said Scherzo, unable to cogitate, alcohol wearing through his mind-script at this point...

Blood's was floorless and packed. Lewis knew the doorman, so it cost them nothing to get in, although a swift body search deprived the spectacled man of sinsemilla, Rizlas and glowing pink pills.

'Sweet revenge,' muttered Lewis cryptically, the last coherent sound Scherzo was to hear for a while as the babble sucked them in.

Nobody could tell you whose idea it had been to take the floor out, but all agreed it was an improvement. You wandered the crowded balconies like mountain goats, packed the high-rise bars, arranged like gravel in flower-boxes, and clung on for dear life, no safety net to catch you if you dropped, eating the sugar glasses to boost your energy and sweating like microwaved chocolate as a result, losing what friends you may have arrived with and making fresh acquaintances this side of the oval doors, transient investments of saliva and attention you'd shed like old skin once you were washed back outside by the flood, those lingering couples ensconced in mountain niches hosed free by cleaning ladies in full combat kit. The place was huge and thronged like a bait bucket. The fire exits shone. Scherzo toted a Jack Daniel's in each hand so as to maintain his delicate equilibrium, hoping he wouldn't be required to visit the gents, which, it goes without saying, would be compact and intense, treacherous underfoot and stinking of diseased shellfish, vomit and dope.

He matched one glass to his lips just as the band exploded, falling out of the invisible ceiling, dancing on thin elastic wires and strumming wildly, possessed of writhing chords, all flailing limbs and vocals, lowered and raised and spun to the electronic whim of an evil computer whose program had originally been designed to create worst possible scenarios of nuclear desolation.

Cavorting with the lead guitar, enmeshed in its vibrant strings, was Ruth.

Scherzo leaned dangerously over the balcony rail, its metal warmth stolen from flesh along its entire snaking length, a wire between batteries that perhaps fed the lights. He caught Ruth's dizzy, revolving eyes, out of synch, with his oscillating own, and they were hooked.

'You went to school with Lewis Charmer?' she said later, on her elbows, wrapped in sheets, in bed.

He nodded, replied, 'And you play the guitar.' Groin abutting hip.

'Coffee, Scherzo?'

'Love one.'

'Three sugars? Right - you know where the kitchen is. Mine's black.'

Scherzo stood in his Pluto underpants waiting impatiently for the kettle to boil, listening while host to a puzzled expression as Ruth crashed out of bed and thumped a wall, disarranging more than hair, the previous night's gig no doubt catching up with her, affecting her inner-ear as she attempted a landing beyond the security of the mattress with the flowers on. Music arrived in Scherzo's head. He tried to shut it out, forgetting the cat-flap as he struggled with chain and lock. Thus occupied he spooned rich dark coffee into two chipped mugs and added milk to his own so as not to scald the instant, then poured boiling water, adding to Ruth's a little cold, before stirring in crystal motes.

Ruth was gone when he re-entered, forcibly removed from the premises. Neither did his giro arrive Thursday, a fact which shifted the abacus beads to the detriment of his former employers. He would gain access to the incinerator plant, he decided, unleashing desperate forces and effecting the lead guitarist's rescue.

Said guitar he first liberated, a symbolic dry run.

18

'Here, put this on.'

'What is it?'

'Radiation suit - hurry.'

The prisoner complied. He had no choice; they made his decisions for him, had since birth, the mundane and everyday as well as the more important if similarly attired vital hinges of destiny, his and others'. He was possessed of only sham discretion. When encased in white plastic, noded by yellow tubes and red valves, clear pipes containing graded powders, they opened, from a safe distance, the hatch. They wanted him to crawl down there for a purpose the importance of which was stressed. They instructed him to do it, perform this task like it were any ordinary duty, and he was powerless, unwilling even, to hang back. So over the edge the prisoner went. There was no true ladder, but a series of metal rungs embedded in slick and leafy concrete. The hatch closed above, locked automatically, sealing him in darkness.

A light came on. 'Okay, you can take the suit off now, you're through.'

'Uh?' The prisoner gazed around, astounded.

'You heard: take it off. Go ahead, this is it, what you've been preparing for all these years, a world outside the world. You're free. Free of freedom. Get it? We're releasing you to your task, child of adhesion; and luck to you.'

He took off the burdensome suit like they told him, wondering what his task might be.

The voice of years was no more in his skull. Beside him was a tree, a massive oak, and in the distance, lined in rows, were houses. Or, more accurately, homes.

The word gave him a strange feeling inside. This was it, he realized, the actual.

19

Scherzo could no longer ignore the pain in his sinuses, an escalating pang of zero hope that poured hot wax down his throat and melted his adenoids. He'd sat around for weeks as if waiting for a new month, a new moon, a new slant in the evening, the sun to hang limp in the sky and bleed for him. Lying flat on his bed he refused to answer or even tweak the curtains aside when Wilson hammered on the window. He thought about locking the man out altogether, throwing away the keys or moving house. Once, he'd taken a bus over to Ruth's; but her flat was empty, stripped of everything, bare to the boards and plaster which in places was fractured or missing chunks as if the emptying and stripping had been overly zealous. All trace of the girl was erased. Despite his avowal he had yet to approach the incinerator, deeming it too risky and making much use of increasingly suspect rationales.

'How do I know she's there? How can I be sure?' he demanded of the scratched guitar. It didn't answer, answer enough under the circumstances, the slackness of its strings testament to Scherzo's inexpertness and Ruth's absence, measured in greasy fingerprints and dust. 'Easy for you to say,' he accused the silent instrument. He emptied his piggy-bank and counted his money, toyed with the idea of pawning the guitar as he had his stereo (70's silver knobs and chrome trimmings), his record collection (no details) and photographic equipment, inclusive of camera, enlarger, developer, filters, tripod and lunar vehicle with optional fifth gear, anti-lock brakes, sunroof and air-conditioning, but without power-steering. It was the first of May and the day of judgement. He left via the back door, climbed the hedge, scaled the fence, discovering beyond these borders another, a set of railway tracks no ageing dipsomaniac with a painful gall-bladder had recently used for a pillow. Scherzo Trepan put his own ear to the rusting metal and heard a distant train, the host of it trembling his fillings.

20

The painter of exotic, transvisual landscapes slept next to his fitful wife. He dreamed of conversations with his agent, her office hung bright and square, steeped in moving and static canvasses, none of them Benedict's, her desk likewise tidy and fluid, composed of inky blue water. 'You need fresh experiences,' she was telling him. 'Go somewhere contrasting, Roy, chase the light and bring me colours I haven't seen before, colours that exist in forgotten corners and hidden realms, places where the natural balance has yet to be corrupted.'

'Yes,' he replied. 'I'll do that.'

'It's frustrating, Roy. What is it with you? What's this creative block? You paint rotting fruit and overturned dustbins spilling garbage and expect me to rummage among it for scraps of innovation, some nuance of brush only Roy Benedict can iron your shirt, Roy! How many times do I have to tell you? Iron your shirt!'

'Yes,' he replied. 'I'll do that.'

'So you say,' bleated his mother, tugging her beard. 'But does it ever, Roy, ever happen? Do those creases vanish? No, they accumulate, they look at all this shit and search for something polite to say, some way of avoiding the inevitable.' She folded her arms. Bubbles rose from her nostrils. 'What is this? they're thinking. What am I being asked to buy? Is this a joke? Has the real Benedict died?' His blue cotton was swept into the air. 'Creases!'

'I am trying,' he said. 'You have to believe me. It just keeps going wrong, right at the end.' He slapped at a liquid fly. 'Don't worry.'

'Worry?' responded his agent, exasperated, parts of her drifting away. 'Roy, I care about you. I care about your work. I care about my commission. I hate to see you like this.' But her words were gurgled.

'Yes,' he replied. 'I'll do that. Starting tomorrow.'

'Roy?'

'What is it?'

'I heard a noise,' Rebecca whispered. 'It came from the bathroom.'

Benedict got out of bed, naked, cloy with sweat, and padded out the door into a shaft of steel-blue moonlight. They were waiting for him, grabbed his arms and pushed a coiled length of string in his mouth. The frayed end slipped down his throat, his reflexive swallowing dragging more and more of it toward his already protesting stomach. Curiously, he was reminded of Indian Yogi, of how they would pass a strip of cloth through their digestive tracts as a means of (spiritual?) cleansing. Benedict, however, choked on acid bile and failed to meditate. He could see no faces around him, only dimly register hands, fingers sharp and strong, like children's, divorced from their parent limbs in the shadows. Rebecca screamed. Again, higher, and Benedict remembered his wife telling him mornings past of sounds she'd heard through the floor of the house.

When next his eyes opened all was quiet, the day perfectly still, the swamp and its insects sleeping, taking their turn as he had his. He lay on his side, feet dangling over water like bait, a second wetness in his ear. He didn't want to get up. He knew what he'd find. The night before had climaxed. Benedict hadn't expected it - it had surprised him. He grew forgetful prior to the event and yet recalled every lurid detail afterward: the brutality of the attack on his wife and the connection that assault had with her illness, the fact of her ailment displayed in the viciousness of her often protracted death. He didn't want to look, but knew he must; to look was necessary, if he wanted her back. Clawing at the planks he sat and blinked in the sunshine, stood and turned into the electric shade of the house. Rebecca was in the bathroom, face at a crazy angle, smashed, cut, slipped to her shoulder, hands broken and twisted, bunched, legs wrapped in the torn shower curtain, the shower's articulated hose round her collapsed throat. Benedict knelt beside her, brushed her hair, shorter now than yesterday, as if retracted, a doll's synthetic crown.

During the day he cleaned and fussed pointlessly about the house, and as night fell he finally relaxed in his favourite chair with the radio turned low and a plate of tuna and cress sandwiches together with a tumbler of iced tea on the coffee-table beside him on the veranda, both slowly diminishing as the stars rotated above, pins of light reflecting off the pale slatted roof. That paleness was somehow immune to age and mould, a beacon to any pilot lost in these forgotten parts, instructing him not to land. After a while he slept, untroubled by dreams, at peace with the perfect blackness, a respite, treasured and short-lived, from the soon to be reality of dawn. Benedict had a canvas prepared, and come the morning, joints stiff and mind reeling, numb from dislocation and the subsequent adjustment, he would begin the process of constructing a picture within its walls, its artificial frame, waiting, as always he'd wait, for the toilet to flush and his wife emerge, immaculate as ever.

21

It wasn't much, but for the next few months, the summer at least, it was home.

'Where can we get some furniture?' Rosemary wanted to know, posing the question not to Moses, who was absent, working, but to the paperless walls. She wandered in and out of the kitchen like a nervous hostess about to present (any minute now; I hope you're all hungry) her first executive troughing, split between small-talk, which she loathed, and gravy stirring, continuously opening the oven, paranoid over a soufflé, making vacuous excuses to the flatulent and porky.

The oven here was a Primus stove. They had between them a holed sleeping bag and a collection of weird and unknowable kitchen implements.

'We were lucky to get this place,' he'd said to her.

Rosemary was excited, wanting to share it, missing her man and his distinctive silences, craving his touch and desiring the penetration of his reproductive organ, suitably tumescent. She wondered what could be keeping him, forestalling his expected, anticipated return. Work for Moses was washing dishes, in one side and out the other, mash and dribble victim to pressured jets and detergent. By contrast Rosemary had spent the afternoon filling in forms at the social security office. She didn't feel too secure now. As the day grew older her excitement turned to trepidation; lava to stone. Where was he? May brightness lanced through the south-west facing windows and lit the bare floor, creeping toward her toes.

Somebody tried the door. They found it locked. Rosemary approached, unsure. He's lost his key, she thought. He's playing some practical joke. There was a rapping, fist on wood, shy noise. She asked, 'Who is it?'

'Me,' came the reply. 'Are you alone?'

Alone? What did he mean? She could feel cold springs unwind, soft and fragile.

'Me who?'

Nothing. No answer. Rosemary couldn't stand it. Grabbing the latch she twisted, turned, yanked the door wide and matched troubled gazes with a man not her own, this one thin and nervous, who practiced a smile.

'You're not her,' he stammered.

'You're not him,' she countered.

They stood two feet apart, diminished.

'I'm sorry,' he added.

'Yeah, me too.' And they parted.

At the bottom of the stairs Scherzo paused to catch his breath, the air having escaped his lungs when she'd spoken, the opening door setting his heart thumping like an alarm. Obviously the flat had a new tenant. But one bearing such a likeness to Ruth? He hadn't thought it Ruth for more than a second, but the resemblance, here, now, at this time, was frightening.

Rosemary sat cross-legged on the floor and cried till she emptied herself of tears and the light faded from the room, deserting her as Moses had deserted her. Abandoned in the city of her birth, the city she wanted so badly to know, to confide in and be part of, the city whose milieu had thus far offered her scant comfort, intent it seemed on exposing her worst fears, magnifying them as flaws, making her its property, its ward, a component to replace one burnt out or fused. Her inhibited self was marked from the outset, packaged and received, plugged into this gaseous soul.

She didn't think it romantic. She lay stretched out on her back and felt sorry for herself, disturbed come daybreak by milk bottles and car horns, the first real noises she had heard since setting foot inside the city's imperfectly reconstructed walls.

Scherzo was discovered by the outside door, supping cream like a lost and found kitten, observing her silently as she descended to claim her share.

'Arrivals can do strange things to a person,' Rosemary said, finding a place next to him on the chill concrete step. 'The problem is you don't always realize when you're there. Take me for example. I hitched from London, met a boy on the road, lost count of the days and arrived here.'

'Just like that?' queried Scherzo, drinking from a fresh bottle.

'Just like that,' she echoed. 'The more I think about it, about what actually happened, the less I seem to know.'

He sympathized, and they talked of dead ends and roundabouts and various sorts of junctions, among them T's and Y's, to which all roads led sooner or later.

22

The altered nature of the components puzzled her. Mackintosh had stated in his report that the satellite's reactor had failed, causing a terminal loss of power, but went only so far in explaining the orbital collapse, the spiralling in to earth. She walked round the wreckage a subsequent time, picking shapes from its sad heap. Shot down was a favoured interpretation. But why and by whom? Who on this planet had the capacity, the intent? Where lay the interest in destroying a harmless communications satellite? And those components, transmogrified; not by heat, she felt sure of that.

23

At the end of his shift, the machine switched off, gurgled empty, sprayed clean, the dishes stacked and the floor mopped, Moses left for home, his feet hot and fingers wrinkled, bloated and satisfied that his position in the world was presently secure, the lease good for a few unimaginable years. It was a sunny afternoon. He decided to walk through the park, a route which promised flower-beds and rioting children, laughter and the calls of diving kites, danger and the whistle of skimming Frisbees. Was there a pond? Boats and ducks? Moses liked the water. He felt nine years old again.

'Dad?' If I had one of those big blue balloons, he thought, smacking lips, I could fly like Winnie the Pooh.

'What...' dad replied, slowing, distracted by miniskirted school-girls and their full-roasted thighs, glazed with sun and youth, this the Easter holiday, late this year for reasons that were of no consequence to Moses.

'I want a balloon.'

'I thought you wanted an ice-cream?'

'I do.'

'Well,' dad said, dropping his hand, 'you can't have both; you'll have to choose.'

Moses sagged. What a choice!

Dad lit a cigarette, impatient with the boy, eyelids fluttering like the vanes of an Xpelair, breezing the grey smoke from his face.

Moses ran away. He ran straight and fast, charged across the new-mown grass, scattering people like the wind leaves, spinning them to either hand, making them dance a blurry dance, one he glimpsed in his mirrors, those streaming speed-tears. He threaded dangerously between ash and oak, beech and alder, crunched through picnics and sent flying bottles of warm lemonade, coke and cider, throats erupting in his wake, spittle and foam casting surf on the humid air, suspended for hours like toy clouds or wool snagged on fishing lines, the thunder of voices slow to materialize, fast to decompose as he broke from the storm his passage stirred and sped over the bowling green, nearly tripping. He out-rolled the weighted balls only to collide with a deck chair the far side of a tall hedge, tearing its striped fabric, tearing his hooped shirt, rushing next headlong into a shallow lake and vanishing like ice in boiling water, dropping from sight at the edge, sinking not three feet past the flaking cement border.

Was rescued, his older self, by a mermaid, a green girl with no fish's tail. No fins at all as it transpired. Her name was Rhoda. 'After the TV show,' she said.

Moses replied, 'My mother used to love that. All Mary Tyler Moore's stuff.'

'Mine too. I used to watch it with her, you know?'

He said he did.

Mam and dad. Mother and father. They went like this: mam a teacher's daughter, dad the son of a mechanic, mother in a rush to leave home and home's regime sees this leather-clad young buck straddling a purple-tanked Triumph come roaring with his desperadoes into town, one of those small places with leaky roofs, father with a cigarette behind each windy ear and a third wagging in his lips as he talked, conversation modelled on Elvis movies, slouch on Jimmy Dean, mam totally head over heels for this fast bad person, hot for his motorbike, dad only too pleased to take her for a ride, mother - before she even knew it - with those high-waisted knickers round her white-socked white ankles and flesh-padded not foam-packed leather between her bandy legs, father yet to slow down, motoring like crazy, this his first time but he'd never admit it, blood spotting the flattened grass, fake ladybirds beneath the sycamore tree mam had carved her initials in the weekend before, linking them with JG, JG the boy she was quietly, patiently hoping, despite herself, would turn into something other than a ridiculous plump baker's boy, the same that was sitting in the tree while the biker and the Saturday shop-assistant swapped fluids, dad grunting now, worried about grass stains on his knees, how cool or uncool they would look to his buddies, coming with a stiffening of the spine just as the boy JG landed on her hair and his jacket, mother screeching and father unplugging to rise and crack the interloper on his pug nose, eliciting a toylike squeak that mother would never forget, JG fleeing the woodland arena and his nameless rival to spread the tale of the teacher's daughter and the escaped lunatic, her ruination and his branding, a host of fathers and brothers to scour with rusted shotguns and polished implements of garden and shed sharp at one end, mam and dad making a run for it, life in his bike as they sped off into a corpulent sunset...

'And that's how you were conceived?' inquired the green girl, perhaps unbelieving, tossing her glassy green hair.

'Yes,' Moses said, with practised conviction.

The green girl came from a family of water wraiths, or naiads as they were more properly called. No-one realized she was green, she told Moses, her true identity only becoming obvious if she, as in this instance, was to share water with a non-fabulous being. She was on a quest, and he was bound to her until its completion, however long that might be.

'What kind of a quest?' queried Moses, edging away, his heart ahead of him, making for home and Rosemary, a girl with more than one colour in her spectrum, waiting for him now by a cracked window.

'The quest for a tale,' the green girl stated.

Moses misunderstood, found it difficult to move, to supplant himself with distance. 'A tail?' he said, aching to be gone, missing Rosemary already. 'So you can swim out to sea, is that it?' His skin crawled at different speeds, stretching and slacking. The park misted round him, the air's dampness a clinging drizzle.

'I must search till I find a story,' the green girl clarified, once more twirling her locks. 'I must wander the endless paths, pass through the countless doors, travel the roads and gaze into hollow trunks, under stones, beside the craters of shooting stars, between lovers and fighters, inside the shells of crabs and nuts, by the unsteady walls of burning houses and along the barely discernible banks of dried up rivers; over mountains, across deserts I must go, barren and manifold, always with my eyes and mind open, never sleeping, hunting below and above ground until I trace my story and capture it, returning then for that tale to be told.'

Moses saw his chance, an opportunity flimsy but maybe his last. 'I have a story,' he braved.

The green girl smiled. 'Is it about love?'

'Yes - love,' he confirmed. 'How did you know?' A powerful sense of loss crept down his arms, stretching them, limbs elongated now like a monkey's.

'You're human,' she answered tersely, 'and human stories are always about love, even when they're about hate.'

Moses had no reply to that. It was plain her story existed somewhere other than his newly refashioned head, plain that for him there would be no form of abstention, plain that he, in whatever guise, would join the green girl in her quest for a tale or a tail, the latter sprouting from above his blossoming anus, the former hidden in another world, a world as distinct from this as the last.

She took his lead, a strong thin leather band, and walked into the thickening pall, Moses knuckling at her lissom hip.

Time lapsed.

Exhausted, he lay supine not far from the hole. Night fell, threatening to crush him, and it grew colder, darker as Moses struggled to unseal his many eyes. Without moving he registered all round him a comforting, near perfect blackness, a heavy curtain wall that was deliriously familiar. He crawled away from the opening, toward some jumping lights in the distance, those that faulted his isolation, red and white and yellow and orange illuminations which gave off strange odours, like rotting fish, primordial gases housed these past aeons in ulcerous rocks, gastric buildings he understood to be flats and offices filled with self-combusting bipeds. People of a different ilk. This was a city up ahead. Moses could hear its approach. Cars zoomed by to his left while to his right a train screamed bloody abandon, scaring the few birds whose thankless task it was to keep the telegraph wires raised and thus the city's communication lines open. An off-duty contingent had circled him for languid hours in the false twilight, descending periodically to peck at his lacklustre carcass, that which had frequently changed, sailing away bad tempered each time he flinched. And this was only the outskirts, he reminded himself, hoping for a kind of sanctuary here, shelter from the avians who would rob him of silence.

Almost lifeless he came to an open door and crawled through it.

On the other side he slept, plagued by dreams of the green girl and their many adventures together in a land of tales that were not for the telling. Where was she now? he wondered. Would he start this adventure alone?

When he woke, stiff and hungry, dizzy from the polluted air, there were three people observing him, two male and one female, stood far off but impossibly close.

One of the men was grinning a grin of outsized triumph.

'Excellent work,' that man said.

Despite his weariness, Moses got to his feet. He looked down at his ungainly body. His head felt swollen. Had it, in these foreign climes, expanded?

'It's disgusting,' said the woman.

The grinning man turned his smile on her. 'Come on, Rita,' he said mockingly, 'have you no appreciation of genius?' His head appeared swollen, too. 'Taylor here's an artist; you'll hurt his feelings. Isn't that right, Taylor? You're of a delicate disposition.'

Fuck you, Taylor seemed to answer.

The grin was superseded by a gun, likewise smiling.

Bang, the gun said, and Taylor died.

Fuck you.

Moses, distracted, unprepared, was meanwhile experimenting with a host of multi-directional appendages.

'Oh, God, shit, Tony,' the woman said, caught in the smoke embrace, the warm pistol lifting her skirt, marking her goose-pimpled thigh, pressing her cotton-packaged sex.

Joints slackening, Rita shape-shifted as she spilled to the dusty floor, unconscious.

Oh, God...

Moses, distracted, surprised, watched as, blood running into her hair, the pistol man raped her.

He soon found he was unable to talk. He could make sounds with his tongue which his minder then interpreted, but they were not sounds he himself intended or understood. The translations grew increasingly complex. There were papers to sign, various contractual documents that blurred before his eyes, as there were rides on empty jets, a sensation the constricted Moses enjoyed, but with the inevitable city their destination, the unsettling, torpid reality of a news conference and glaring crowd. He would sit or stand at these protracted gatherings, depending on whether a suitable chair could be found. He'd wave his colourful limbs, aware of the wide stares and pointing fingers, his keeper becoming more and more agitated as the same questions were repeated, aimed at Moses even though Moses wasn't in.

'Which planet are you from, son?' His keeper had told them he was only a boy. 'Is your star visible from here? What does your world look like? Do you have much crime there? What about this invasion - it is an invasion, isn't it? Are we all gonna be wiped out? Do you like hamburgers? What do you think of the girls? Is it true you've signed a record deal with Salami?'

That again.

'There is absolutely no factual basis for that assumption which is entirely based on spurious and wrongful information of a sort unworthy of polite enquiry...'

And then there was the shooting in Ontario, another city much the same as the last.

Moses, distracted, scratching, barely noticed. The bullet bounced right off.

And then he escaped the clutches, ran from his keeper one moonlit night after watching a cartoon about an elephant. The newspapers were full of the story come morning, of the rift between the alien and his agents, Lupid & Molhenny. Speculation grew that the deal with Salami was on, that the alien was unhappy with some of the merchandising, that he failed to recognize the validity of his original contract and that Lupid & Molhenny were preparing to sue, that the sensation of the millennium had returned to space because the holidays were over and he was back at school, that he was considering a career in game shows and/or pornography.

Of course it was Taylor's legacy that freed him, Taylor's genius that served to unwind the knot of his brain, the potential his creator had installed and kept secret from Tony. Moses vanished, becoming what shape he pleased, shifting over grass and tarmac as his co-ordination blossomed inside the boneless frame of this being.

'Where are you headed?' the red girl asked from her island, sat with legs crossed.

She'd risen from the dead.

He didn't answer.

'I was murdered,' she told him. 'My mother killed me. We were driving for ages, me heaped in the back seat, my mother behind the wheel. I was dying slowly, bleeding inside where she'd kicked me. But that wasn't the worst. Once she stabbed me with a kitchen knife and I needed ninety-three stitches. That really hurt. This pain isn't bad. I don't mind being a ghost. It's just too quiet; you're unable to scream like you could and your hands pass through objects if you don't give a great deal of thought to picking them up. It can be a lot of fun though. Haunting, I mean. I stayed in this house once and the old couple who lived there got a priest in to do an exorcism. I was evicted, right? I used to have a great time turning the bath water cold moments after someone got in, warm and relaxed. Then there was the trick with the soap, filling it with blood or shit - or giving the old man a blow-job when he was half asleep, that was good. The old lady always seemed to have her legs closed, but I did manage to fuck her with a pound of sausage meat one night after she'd had too much sherry to drink. They had separate rooms, only I can see through walls, so I always knew when one or the other was awake; that was the best time to screw with the sleeping partner, when their better half was listening - sucking his wrinkled cock or plucking the coarse grey hairs from her nipples.' The red girl sighed. 'The best thing was television,' she continued. 'If I concentrated really hard I could get them in there. Or maybe I drew the picture out. I'm not sure how it works. Anyway I'd get them involved in comedies and dramatic productions, whatever was available. Adverts. They'd panic trying to sell toothpaste or soap. I'd even join them. We were the Three Musketeers, countless eternal triangles. Larry, Mo and Curly, that was us. And I forget how many episodes of Dallas we did.'

24

Scherzo was captivated by the glowing-on-pavement sun. A flightless bird, a gosling not long hatched, learning to fend for itself, he watched stoically as his shadow crept past like an amoeba.

'Let's get a coffee.'

'Yeah, okay.'

'We can tell each other our life stories,' Rosemary said. Standing, she brushed dust from her clothing.

Scherzo got up, picked his teeth. 'I already told mine.' He spat, stuffed his hands in his pocket and slouched off, hunching his shoulders.

Rosemary caught him in brisk, exaggerated strides. Grabbing his elbow she turned him to face her.

'What?' demanded Scherzo, inexplicably angry. 'Can't we just part, leave each other alone?'

She was puzzled. A bus moved noisily down the street, dragging litter in its wake, trampling asphalt.

It was time to wake up, Scherzo thought. This girl wished only to drift and dream. He'd had it with romance, been struck by a colder lightning. A silent moment of reflection had altered his mind. Light bounced on water and off cement. Buildings were nothing more than complex arrangements of branches. He was lost in a forest, and that forest was close and warm. The street was restless, some fantastic painting, a haunted cinema.

'Let go of my arm,' he whispered.

'Roy?' Her fingers trembled on his flesh.

'I said: let go of my arm.'

'Roy, what's got into you?' She held on. 'You've barely slept for days. What is it? Tell me, please.' Rebecca disengaged her eyes from his sallow, unhealthy features. 'Let's go home,' she said in false bright tones that were desperate. 'We've been away from people too long. It would do us both good...'

'No!' He pulled away and headed for the boat, its tilted oars and cracked paint.

'I'm not the one who's ill!' Rebecca shouted, words floating, heard by flies, insects to which she had become immune. They'd pestered Roy more than herself from the outset. Her fears had waned concerning their swarming proliferation. But she enacted the ritual spraying of interior and exterior. For his sake, although he would never admit it. The flies belonged to her husband. They glued themselves in their hundreds to his every canvas, bathed in pigment and ink. They existed in a world beneath the coloured oils, housed in air pockets and feeding on brush hairs and cultivated bacteria. Their days were spent in conflict and exploration, the sub-surface as the surface, prone to violent change when wet, becoming treacherous underfoot. The flies laced their boots tight and fitted crampons in an effort to cope with the ever shifting conditions, forcing themselves along routes of adaptation and mutation, behaving as true survivors should. One day they'd exceed the escape velocity of this landscape and colonize an adjoining sphere, a string of silvery eggs in tow.

25

Doctor Mood stroked the hair on his chest, the hair on his arms and legs, the hair on his face. He lay in a mound of damp leaves, speckled with pollen and shade, the forest moving about him like a giant lung, breathing deep two-strokes the mixed gases of which circulated the woodland glade of his slumber, plucking the wiry nerves of his new-fashioned skin, strumming his heart and liver.

There were footfalls. Next, silence. He was watched. A man's voice, bodiless, rang out. 'Hey, line-follower!'

And a second, female. 'Gatherer, are you asleep?'

They were close but he failed to see them, to pick them out from amid the overlapping trunks. He dragged his knees under him and stood. The leather pouches slung round his neck bobbed like pods of seaweed on the brown tide of his flesh.

'Do you have medicine?' the first voice inquired, its tone serious, concerned.

The silence repeated itself. The forest held its breath as if anticipating fire. A stirring in his belly proved the only motion. The smell of herbs and leaf-mould quietened his head.

But where was he? Was he there still? Trapped is too strong a word. He struggled to take it all in: the forest and its woven hues, its columns of imposing trees, the voices from invisible hosts that floated across the glade, out of nowhere, finding their way over grass and through sunbeams to his ears and skull.

26

Nothing happened; until that moment. Time dozed in the long summer, as the sun reluctant to move beyond the horizon. The occasional polar bear came to wrestle or gamble, folding stolen Eskimo dollars out of some ancient rucksack having the appearance of a frozen, mummified corpse, one wedged for decades in a glacial wrinkle or overturned kayak, booty dating from an age preceding snow-cats and heavy duty plastics, when the sweat on a man's brow built up in layers of silver-blue ice like a portable igloo. But still bold adventurers fished for their supper through holes sawn in the fleecy mantle. A weighted line was most effective, although the more skilful preferred - for heroic reasons and photographs hand tinted by penguins imported under the banner of scientific research - to spear their catch, eating it raw and wriggling, as instructed by the penguins who were doing research of their own, spitting out mouthfuls of clean bone. One such was Felix. He stretched like a icy salamander on the crystallized water and flexed his corrugated stomach. The penguins pulled their pom-pom hats down over their eyes and chewed their pens in confusion. Poorman's eyes flashed open. A gunshot.

Onto the loose station flooring rattled Shin's useless body, spilling blood thinned by paraffin and turpentine, steaming fluid that drained as if sucked to the prevailing whiteness below.

Dreep had murdered him. The fresh cadaver had a cheroot in its mouth, quietly smoking in grim mime of the pistol parka'd Theodore had employed to silence his tormentor. All was quickly peaceful. Poorman's eyes slid closed once more and his head shook imperceptibly. The marine biologist in her shower unit turned the water off, shivered into a towel newly softened by chemicals, sweetened in the spin, and lay across her teddy-sprinkled mattress.

Woodtoe ('...you can call me Blinder.') cut the head off a chicken and set it free.

The penguins booked plane tickets. The bird made a getaway through an opened vent, flapped clumsily to the packed snow, and following a circuit of the base set an erratic course for World's End.

The light was gently pulsating, it and the chicken exhibiting no fears of their own.

Where we all should go, mused the surgeon, bored by months of quietus. Were they forgotten? He smiled. Civilization, ensconced to the south, no longer cared for its peripheries, eh? Was that it? Out here, up here near the edge and the fabled monsters, he and the others, how many he'd never counted, slowly drained, like Shin, of significance. Like punctured fruit, he thought, turning bad. Aliens were yesterday's news. Old bananas. Watching the chicken shrink gave him an idea. Blinder was tired of sitting on his arse waiting for something. What, he didn't know. He'd walk the blood-spattered path himself, voluntarily. And the gunshot meant he would have company. So, free of past encumbrances, released from his head, he bound an unconscious college boy to a sled, selected his finest boots and axe, wished the penguins luck and set sail by foot to wherever it was the chicken had gone.

Felix too, Poorman, wearing jeans rolled up, bare chested, no shoes, did not look back. He was overdue relief as commandant. More soldiers, more scientists had failed to arrive. The pictures from outside grew dimmer on the ranks of screens. They'd fade totally soon. But he kept his distance from Blinder and the sled, naked feet slicing neat prints over those of the skids which in turn followed the delicate, wandering traces of the leader bird whose blood, together with Shin's, pooled now in hope of sunset.

The light thickened as the air was imbued with a gelatinous fog, a rich culture wherein reality might take root, a new world from an old world cutting, a preternatural mist that blossomed from the hard unyielding ice like steam off a hot pavement after brief summer rain. Spectres, tall, lithe and animate, flourished in this growth medium, grinning daytime wraiths striking up from the nadir to a union meeting in the sky, a vote of clouds, a show of perspiration, a count of heat. If invited, such normally transient guests of atmosphere (God's prepuce) would always linger; but they were shy creatures, of course, and required coaxing.

Blinder paused. He dropped the reins of the sled. Further progress required less baggage if he was to make it over the crevasse. Gripping Dreep's shoulder he rocked him, loosening the rime from the collegiate man's tongue.

'Urrgh,' Dreep said.

The sun, ever present, sat like a swollen tomato on the ample lap of a pregnant storm, one as yet to break water, awaiting its moment as must we all, gambling on the outcome of a game of charades, promising more than we can deliver; poised, forever taut, primed like a grenade, forever charged, an unflagging battery. The sun was an electric fire, its proper functioning necessitating an earth.

Theodore's eyes flickered open, exposing the vacuity of his brain, the skull there-around empty of much save whiteness and cold. Toes and fingers were moved in their respective housings, felt as surprises, almost drawing a smile across his disabled countenance. He had unfamiliar sensations of rational thought and control, felt in command for the first time in ages, a period both long and exhausting, both in and out of his father's powerful rectum, sweating crudely or in lost contempt, wondering, wondering, wondering...how?

He seldom asked why, our Theodore. He shivered insanely and then was still. Quiet.

27

He moved slowly left, fingered wood. The compelling dark moved with him. He moved slowly right, touched steel. The compelling dark moved with him. He broke into a gasping headlong run. The compelling dark smothered his senses. He crashed through branches, each with a voice of its own, rasping and snapping to every side, his vision negated, his hearing confused. It twisted about him, formed shapes all round; no matter where he looked, in which unknown direction, everything he descried was black. Death had surely claimed him. Death or the absolute, that halfway world of irregular dreams, the void which hung between oblivion and consciousness, fishing for non-committed souls, desperate as its victims in their joined plight: the room with no windows or doors, the room whose invisible parameters could be heard to decrease, breathing nails. For there was sound; no vacuum displaced. There was noise of trampled vegetation, dry and warm, cold and wet, of snatched breaths not your own, caught in your throat like a lover's semen, gargled messages of forgotten pain that crackled through the impenetrable night like flames across fields of stubble.

28

Doctor Mood leaned over the sick child and placed the broad palms of his hands either side of a small locked face. There arose a dull hue of life. The doctor stood, raising his stocky frame to the sky.

'Can he be saved, gatherer?'

'I must take him from you,' Mood replied, turning his gaze, finding little of human substance to fix on. 'There is a river to the north that may provide a cure.' He grimaced, words like thorns in his throat.

'Do as you must, healer. Take our son into your care.'

Doctor Mood indicated that he would.

'Should we prepare him for the journey?'

Doctor Mood shook his head.

Later, as dusk closed, he lifted the child by his heels and dropped him into a sack, which he next slung over one hairy shoulder. Then began the unpredictable trek north following the lines set by nature into soil and air, those some would describe as being like individual strands of an increasingly complex fate, woven by such trials into carpets of history, legend, magic, loss. But at this time no grand enigmas occupied the traveller. His mind was set upon the task to hand. He disliked, for reasons other than pride, performing autopsies. They spoke of failure, shouted their anger from wounds, gesticulated with limbs whose circulation had ended, brought to a premature close by disease or deliberate killing action. The path was sufficiently difficult without pressing for an explanation. This way there were no signs to misread. The road stretched before him, shifting like water over sand; a road for him to unravel. A thought rebounded: this a pharmacopoeia of apparent illogic and tormenting obtuseness, something to spend a lifetime searching and searching again, in a small space to come to understand and know. Not all of it. Not everything. Only a fool would dream of that. But enough to spare this child from the grave.

29

KNOCK! KNOCK!

'Who's there?'

'Livid.'

'Livid who?'

'Who livid here?'

'Bollocks,' said Scherzo Trepan, two years older, a few rainy days wiser. He thought it either the gas man or Wilson Hives as private detective, decked out in overcoat and beaten hat, stinking of cigarettes and bourbon whiskey. The gas man had called six months earlier, read the meter and left with a big smile on his face; so he definitely knew something. Something more than Trepan did, for Scherzo neither cooked or heated with gas, being an entirely electric individual. He had remained successfully aloof on that occasion, sat out on the unsuitable balcony with a can of beer in one hand and a stretched length of orange nylon string in the other, which he used to open the door. But not this time. He wouldn't be caught out again. He pulled on his trousers.

30

He lay on his side by the river. The trees around threw leaf shapes across the slow brown water. If he were to move as they, he might stop breathing. The light was the first he had known, truly experienced, since early childhood. He'd spent the intervening years (how many will always be unknown) in a rough hessian womb, tossed from shoulder to burly shoulder, passing wonder after wonder, witnessing each from inside, melding with animate and inanimate souls, barely escaping with his life. His head was full of imagery he had only the barest grasp of, dreams from outside, perhaps memories caught in lives as yet to be. His own among them? One thing he understood: he was hunted. As he opened his eyes to the liquid present, his realized he enemies were near. But what were their names?

What was his own?

31

Tom lay his gun down on the table, adding another invisible scratch to the matrix of years. His career. There was a phone call and he lifted the receiver.

'Hey,' the caller prompted.

'Hey what?'

'We need you upstairs; guard duty.'

'You're kidding - tonight?'

'Right away.' And hung up.

Tom picked his gun from the table, the metal barely cooled, adding another invisible scratch to the matrix of years; the vital one, a vector whose significance would remain unknown. He left his crowded apartment, his wife and her belongings, his son and daughter and theirs. Tom owned nothing. Even his gun was hired. He took the elevator up to the roof and waited.

Vacine emerged from the shadows, beard coiled like pubic hair, fingers busy with each other, fascinated by interior bones, knuckle joints and flesh-elastic. He wore a black suit and a skull cap a deep metallic grey. Tom saw his mouth work in silent deliberation. There arose a sympathetic itching in his own taut skin.

Tom had a dozen fingers.

A bird hovered overhead.

'Sorry to drag you out at this hour,' Vacine said, now rubbing his bristled jowls. He glanced skyward at the waiting craft. 'We've an important guest we need you to chaperon. You know, tag along. The usual.'

'The usual?'

'Just perform in your normal capacity. There's a bonus in this. Trust me.' He stuffed nervous hands in hidden pockets. The bird lowered, its hum stirring the fine hairs on Tom's ears. Vacine wasn't being honest with him, but he didn't mind, he was used to the run-around. They only told you things to confuse you.

'How much?' he asked.

'Enough for a new pair of shoes,' Vacine answered. 'You've a daughter near school age, right? You could use the extra.'

Yeah, thought Tom, I could.

The bird settled on the broad expanse of roof to his left.

Turning toward the machine, allowing Vacine room to exit, he waited, approaching as a door grew in the bird's oily side, spilling perfect blackness.

'Climb in,' he was instructed.

He did and they glided high over the dark city.

'So,' the voice resumed, without direction in the stygian interior, 'you're my escort.'

Tom said nothing. It wasn't his place to talk.

'Did they tell you who I am? No? Well, I suppose that's my secret. Some guess it, my true identity, and others bestow names upon me. I don't object to either; for what they believe becomes mine after a fashion. I take as they give. I grow solid as they decay and become hollow inside. I'm a criminal of sorts; an heroic one. An alien. An enemy. I'm from another world, and you and I, Tom, we're at war.' He paused. Continued, 'Does that surprise you? Not many know of our conflict, fewer still the reasons behind it, the primal cause. And just one or two realize the outcome. Of course, opinions differ, but all agree there will be an end. It's been going on for a long time and there have been many casualties on both sides. Costs cannot be accurately measured, material or otherwise. It would be useless to estimate. And peace, Tom, peace is still a long way off.' There was a shift in the black as eyes detected things besides displaced light. 'Do you know what peace is, Tom?' Mockery now. 'Have you experienced that gentle tranquility? In your mother's womb, perhaps. Or maybe not.'

Tom felt a stab in his mechanical heart. The jeering of this other's talk stained his mind, sent trembling messages of quiet desperation along his alloyed bones, through his synthetic flesh, across technologically engendered nerves. The planet Pulchritude was the only mother he'd known. His toes pressed into the floor, tensing him in his seat as the bird that had swallowed him cut a passage between vacuum and stone, above and below, the undeveloped future that was his to earn and the familiar past which, Tom abruptly realized, was either stolen or lost.

Had it ever been his to keep?

They cruised in silence for what seemed an age but was in fact an hour, then alighted on a shelf. Lights shocked the cabin. It was smaller than he'd imagined, the alien occupying a seat identical to his own, legs crossed, head at an angle, quietly winding his watch.

'I hope this is a pleasant prison.'

'I wouldn't know,' Tom answered.

'Naturally. You've yet to experience war, as I've said.'

Tom made no reply. He was luckless. The manufacture of his life and all that went with it, the lives of his children and wife, none of it had been his idea. He'd had no input. The door appeared and they stepped out.

This monster, his self-professed enemy, walked ahead. He appeared cognizant of the route to his cell. Tom had almost to jog to keep up. The shelf was one of hundreds spread like flakes of dead skin on the gaseous bath-water of the world. There was a peculiar damp smell reminiscent of a children's book dungeon. Sconces in the walls cast a smoky light. The narrow corridor down which they advanced turned in a series of random, subterranean curves. The ceiling lowered and the air grew hotter, more tightly compressed. The crude flooring was cracked and pocked. And there were thick bars, a stunted jailer. And there was dust. The chain-mailed dwarf jangled rusty keys, spinning one in a heavy lock and grinning about yellow teeth. He stank of rotting seaweed and decayed fish, the heads of which stared up from round his naked, blistered feet, peering at Tom as he clung hopelessly to the corroded bars, the ferric verticals of his cage.

Yes, this was a war he had become embroiled in. There was no escape. Peace, he recalled his enemy telling him, was a long way off.

In one lonely corner of the cell stood a television, its concave screen alive with colour, its ancient speaker pushing distorted sound.

It was raining on the television the day Vacine came to visit. 'Tom,' said the picture in the tube. 'How are the batteries? I hope you're getting enough food. No substitute for a balanced regimen. Now, don't get me wrong, I liked you, but we all have to change, to adapt to new circumstances, just as we all have to make sacrifices. The wife and kids are fine. You don't have to worry about them. Annie looks smart in her school dress and new shoes. I hear she's exceptionally able at history. So forget everything, Tom; concentrate on the job at hand. Trust me. This is important. Remember the war? You have a big part to play in it, Tom. You're going to be a hero. Imagine that! Your kids will be so proud of you. Especially Annie. She'll lecture her friends on how her daddy saved the world - but right at this minute we're experiencing a few minor technical problems, particularly concerning your attitude. It's wrong, misguided. You have to co-operate if we're to be successful. And you want us to be successful, don't you, Tom?'

Tom, starved of conversation involving him personally, hesitated, the words only half formed. 'What kind of problems?' he said eventually, magnifying the soreness in his ribbed throat, his cell chill and sweet with corrosion.

A flashing rectangle composed of alternate black and white bars showed in the right-hand corner of the screen. 'Ah,' replied his superior; 'no time to explain, Tom; must go. Don't forget to tune in the same time tomorrow.'

He sat numb before a commercial. He dreamed of his artificial children, of how they grew in erratic stages, as yet imperfect, an evolutionary step beyond himself, the woman who'd borne them a ghost in his bed each silver morning. The shortened years they'd spent together as a family unit seemed impossibly, even comfortably distant. Had he loved her? The children? He couldn't say. Like the chinking dwarf on the far side of these denials that caged him, he had no answers. So Tom, perplexed, turned on the hard floor and hummed like an electric motor.

The first day he sat in the chair his knees hurt. Presland Bill sat too, arms folded and heavy jowls dragging loose features toward a plain wooden table between them. Tom waited patiently for this enormous man to speak. The table had rocked when he'd shuffled gingerly into the vacant chair. The man's large hands steadied it. The floor like all floors was uneven. Then the knotted arms had folded, remaining such.

'We require your services as an assassin,' Presland Bill said. 'It won't be easy. This person understands death.'

The pain shifted from knees to hips.

'There's a situation that needs to be rectified. This person cannot be allowed to continue unchecked.'

'Who?' Tom asked.

'Your mother,' Presland Bill, his enemy, revealed.

'I have no mother.'

'Your mother. You're not all tin and plastic, Tom. The blood flowing through your veins is significantly more than hydraulic fluid.' The man smiled, articulating folds of skin. 'Superior of course, but still red.'

'My mother...'

'Right. And we need her eliminated, taken out.' Presland Bill's flesh was imbued with a sheen, a yellowish oily tinge. 'I'll tell you a story that should straighten things in your head. There was a tall house. A man and a woman lived there. Unexceptional, you might think, eh?'

The sun broke in the window and stole their sleep. She was exhausted and so rolled over to chase dreams fading fast while he climbed from under the sheets and dressed, washed, took a dump, polished his teeth, ate breakfast and set off on foot to work, a warehouse full of tiles and plaster dust, half an hour distant, uphill. The day was unexceptional, a day like any other. The dutiful husband drew an order from the pile in the tray by the door and set himself in motion. With a barrow and a pallet he entered the dim interior where yesterday's air still hung to assemble the sale. First came two hundred 8x4 ethereal blue, next one hundred and fifteen like-size cloud white, seventy rain soaked, twenty of the patterned border frieze. Straightforward enough. Then there was an ascent to the topmost stack of aisle D to collect a single precious bird's egg: nine-thirty of a Tuesday morning in May perched on an orange steel ledge supported by pegs and pins the size and shape of pulled teeth, disconcertingly flimsy in respect to the accumulated weight of tiles, a moment before the fall, the broken back, a moment wherein he learned the availability of dying an untrue, proxy death. The wind sang and the ocean pounded the cracked rocks below, swirling surf and brine, fish scales and microscopic submarines. The truth of the worlds had opened for him. The nest was a hand's breadth farther into the shade. He stretched for the silver globe and felt the ecstasy of its encompassing warmth, heard the idle chatter of gregarious penguins just returned from the North Pole, their endless complaints about how the sea-lions thereabouts had taken to disguising themselves as strands and ice floes, thus circumventing their more traditional predatory role, the old inefficiencies reduced through this unfair - as the penguins saw it - application of what was after all an alien technology to increase the penguin feast. The flightless themselves schemed in tight groups, nervous and edgy, peering ceaselessly between webbed feet for any intimation of whiskers and jaws, the birds as yet disagreeing as to the appropriate action, whether that action should include force of arms or simply jet-packs that they might swim, as evolution surely intended, above the sea, catching their food using projectile weapons, a stand the purists insisted ranked them no better than the secreted sea-lions and would ultimately lead to the fish taking retaliatory action. And what then? But Presland Bill was apart from this crisis, although no participant in the Great Atmosphere Quench could ever truly not be a part of inter-species negotiations, as those negotiations stood, i.e. on one leg. Electricity jerked him: that alternate death. In that instant he saw via another's eyes, a person unknown to him who stared out across an unfamiliar landscape, marshy, a vast area of black-green swamp set in an endless valley that reached forever toward no distantly perceptible horizon, broadening to occupy the crumpled space afforded by two dwindling mountain ranges whose slopes appeared eroded and smooth through perspective, whose shades altered in concord with the sky. The mountains extended like arms from a massive body, the body in reality belonging to that person from whose airy skull he gazed in wonder - he, Presland Bill, an ordinary fellow who had happened upon an unordinary and become one with this world, joined to it via a silver egg. These slopes and marshes were his.

'Stagnation and waste.' The arms unfolded. 'Struggle and toil for nothing, no gain, no glorious end in sight, only that same obscured horizon.' Palms flat on the rickety table. 'A little hope, but not much. This was a world lacking ambition, a world content simply to get up in the morning, and doze. Its inhabitants were listless, abiding in squalor because they understood nothing else, nothing of life beyond breath. They had no guiding star, no concept or direction or leadership that might guide them along richer, more lucrative paths. A sad place, you'll agree. I raised that sadness from between the stalks of sick weeds to an embrace with galaxies! I harvested technology. Yes, as the sea-lions, as the penguins. But the fish remained too weak. The fish were selectively bred, for quality of flesh, smallness of brain. They did not arm themselves and shoot the flying flightless birds from the sky. I fought and my side won. But one prize, a particularly coveted one, eludes me. History is nothing if not a search. It is no less than history I plan to defy. And I will. You are my latest weapon. With you I will draw a step nearer. How big a step, Tom, is up to you.'

Presland Bill sat back and the table rocked anew.

Shoes for Annie...

'The silver globes create and I destroy - we destroy. You are one of us. The silver globes circulate power of a greater magnitude than mere stars. Stars are motes in their storm. The silver globes are the seed, the root, the bloom of survival. And survival is destroyed, by me, by us, by all that would move and not stand still. Its power is harnessed to new ends. The power of one's adversaries, so used, is a potent force when turned against them. The silver globes are the fish in this scenario, you see?' There was a bubbling in the jowls. 'Ah, but I see you have no appreciation of the scale of the drama. Let me put it another way.'

There was fire and ashes.

'The face in the smoke, Tom, do you recognize it?'

Horns sprouted from Presland Bill's head.

'Evil, our evil, is inbred. We are purer than the globes. They are random profligates, uninvited do-gooders, whereas the likes of us, Tom, we are the true reflections of flesh and blood.'

32

He was rowing.

She rose from the brown water, shook drops from her spangled black crooks of hair.

The boat overturned.

Trees were subsumed by water and leaves by bubbled oxygen. She rescued his floundering body, pulled him by the shirt collar to the shore and left him coughing, spluttering once more to life on a different river bank in a different time. He stared glassily at the rusty armour provided him, as if dumped from a sack, and closed his stinging eyes.

They were prised open by morning.

Prisms shifted gear on the bright scales of metal. Steel and bronze shone as if magically burnished, imbued with wondrous lubricants like some solid-state engine.

The chosen climbed stiffly into this regalia.

As he walked, upright on two feet into the lightening jungle, plant fronds and insects were crushed in the hinges of elbow and ankle, further oiling with there small bodies the metal joints of neck and knee, enabling the steady release of his muscles' torpor while affording those same a mould of more suitably heroic proportions.

He lacked, as yet, an offensive capability. He headed north.

And she raced before him, lithe as a cat, agile as a monkey, fleet as a snake's jaws, illuminated by another name in this uncreated world.

33

Doctor Mood peered out the high window at the forest green and dappled beneath, polished and sustained by water from the spent afternoons of once saturated clouds, their memories having overflowed. The castle retained its cool without the need for rain. The walls surrounding, encasing him, were spliced from lustreless granite quarried from the heart of a secret mountain that had stood, aeons past, guard over this nascent globe. Prior to the surgery its volatility had nurtured civilizations, feeding them on the produce of its rich loam before destroying them, drowning the people in their own accreted filth, what they had fed it in the form of prayer. The mountain grew bored, even senile. They worshipped it through fear. Therefore the transplant, as the doctor could well understand, was a happy event. The stone contained a friendlier chill than the oven heat of the castle's foundations, which possessed a malicious spite; but such were young and perceived their burdens differently. A column of smoke rose in the distance, made to oscillate as a consequence of evaporation, shimmering like a petroleum lake. The pall dusted fine ash across a broad radius of trees. The castle lay a-slumber, breathing its own stillness, while outside, among the vegetation, was an abundance of organized cells. The whole vista represented the cover and pages of a book the doctor very much wanted to read; but he had first to master its language. He turned from the window and wandered, as he had many times, the castle's airy passages, looking into room after room, examining the sparse furnishings which shied behind the barest veil of dust, creasing his lower lip with thumb and forefinger as he thought again of the involute ways, the shadowy events that had led him to this Spartan if strangely comforting enclosure. There was meat aplenty - but who could guess the true nature of the animal from whence that meat came without a reliable contour map of bones? The castle had neither moat or drawbridge. There was no direct exit from its arid planes. Mood had climbed the vertical stone to gain access, feet and hands finding purchase on the merest strands of hapless moss, the cracked shells of pollen grains and the dried husks of spider shit, the dismembered limbs, brittle and hollow, of flies and ants and midges, avoiding the spider's silky web by concentrating with a stubborn rigidity upon the next lifeless shelf, gripping its time-cut wrinkles, clambering over the battlements by such means, the neck of the sack clenched in his determined teeth and the child within wriggling, perhaps afflicted by vertigo. They were pursued by a nemesis, one who wanted the boy dead, as his existence, however tenuous, cast a shadow of denial over the superficies of the strangled world, setting it a challenge, promising a negation of those forces which sought by whatever means to fashion the land and all it sustained into a hideous parody of fosterhood.

The doctor couldn't let that happen. He took to his new role as one familiar with bizarre remedies and unusual concoctions, the bare fact that he didn't believe in them proving, as always, no obstacle. For there was a romance in his heart that seized on the opportunity as a dreamer would on his pillow. He cared not if the answers were one day supplied or never. His passion for the arts of knowledge grew like an appendage from the mystery. They were integral parts of each other. Hunger, sated in the present, resided permanently in the past and future. He had come to realize this. And so he abided now in the castle's blocked limbo deciphering letters of wind and dust. The elements would tell him when, if ever, to leave. And meanwhile, as he waited, the child grew.

34

The yonderscope glittered musically, its many pulleys in commensurate motion. Austin Pearce, late of Formalhaut, lay surrounded by light and sound, the headset in place and the pedals newly lubricated after a test run to Mars. The Martians had greeted him strangely, drawing circles in the red sand with outsized stone nibs that may well have been the pulled teeth of mountains. He'd travelled by barge to Meridian, the planet's dusty capital, a languid journey beneath an orange-yellow sun. The sluggish water drew the craft, which resembled a huge walnut shell, to where the irregular city poked through the surface, trailing canals like antennae, hunched under the wispy armpit sky. His hosts, the sailors, fended off invisible monsters with their knitting-needle poles. He wrote in his tatty diary of this lax floating, of other barges and their mysterious, often pungent cargoes, of the tall Martians themselves, their sick grins and blind eyes. Despite appearances, he received nothing but kindness from them, a childlike eagerness to please the outsider, whereas in their own dealings little courtesy was shown. Austin guessed his status to approximate that of an imbecilic elder; they patronized him, but in a friendly way, although such friendship (perhaps a consequence of interpretation) brought with it the obligation to participate in the sometimes tedious charade.

He was able to explore the city at his leisure, impressed by its simplicity, wondering what the people of neighbouring worlds would make of such a dearth of resources. How would they fare on this limited diet? Memories aside, it was time to be elsewhere. Gently then, Pearce levered the delicate controls. Next stop Pulchritude. Late summer roses. Soap.

35

Blinder and Theodore cooked over an open fire. They hunched nervously under the trees listening to the dry crackle of logs and the movements of exotic animals. They had come a long way from the ice's glare. They had bypassed the pole, its candy stripes seals' blood, continued down the slope of the frozen ocean until they met an unfolding shelf of tundra, then on through the firs and the drizzle, across the steppe and into the unknown. Was the planet still turning? they wondered, holding down food and faces. Where were their enemies hiding? Something disturbed the night. Footfalls approached the fire. They swapped glances, hunkered lower, Theodore Dreep the college journalist in his zip-fastened parka, and Woodtoe the surgeon wearing a thick coat of moss-lined bark.

The flames snatched wholly gratuitous images from the void.

36

'There is a child.'

'A child?'
'A boy child. I read of his birth in the river-bed and had the news confirmed by an eagle.'

'Who was this eagle?'

'A bird. I mended its broken wing. It had been knocked from the sky and fallen heavily to earth, hobbling for days in search of rodents.'

'And did it find many?'

'No: the bird was too slow, too cumbersome with its damaged pinion dragging behind it, growing weaker until eventually it lay down to contemplate the expediency of expiration. I found it by chance one morning. I was out for a stroll, clomping through the bushes, taking a short-cut to the lake where I'd left my fishing tackle the previous evening. The poor eagle was near starved. As thin as a cloud! I stood before its dull eye and could barely see my reflection. There was no hint of its breath. Its wing was jammed between two boulders. The eye was cold and empty. It had almost given up. I fed it the apples I'd picked for my breakfast, then rushed back home to fetch bed sheets for use as bandages and a gallon of my thickest creosote for a poultice. Finally I bound the wing, employing tree trunks and three fifty foot lengths of rope.'

'And the break was fixed?'

'Yes. But more importantly, I filled the belly and eased the pain. You should have seen that eye brighten! It positively glowed with stars.'

'What of the child?'

'The eagle was a messenger. It carried warning of a plot to pervert good to evil. It seems this babe has many foes, some of whom had touched him.'

'The boy was hurt?'

'Sick; a venomous malady - a poison. He was taken north to a secret place and hidden in the hope of gaining time in which to locate the remedy.'

'The bird told you this? In truth?'

'The bird would not swear to it; but birds are less practised than men at lying. Perhaps it was afraid it had told me too much, for it next tried to sow doubt in my mind.'

'Only you saw through it.'

'Of course. I'm a thief and a poacher!'

'What is this child's name? Is it common or rare? Tell me that I might one day recognize him.'

'His name?'

'His name, yes.'

37

In a secluded wing of the hospital painted an unappealing white, Hammond sat reading a pornographic magazine. He searched for inspiration among the glossy vulvas, but tonight like so many nights found only perspiration in the unglossy leaves of his skin.

Suddenly made aware, he jerked coldly as the pearly bulb expired.

A faint blue light bubbled in a cracked porcelain sink, its sides steep and its chrome plug-hole corroded. The curved rim was licked with tongues of indigo. The light stained everything it touched. Hammond jumped to his feet. The blue glow detached itself from the chrome like a gas flame set too high; but rather than blow itself out this amorphous creation floated gently toward the ceiling like a slo-mo ball of fart to the surface of bath water or a coloured amoeba in one of those oil lamps popular in the seventies. A second globe took its place, coloured green. It rose also, converging with the first to form a larger globe of sunny yellow. Next there emerged from a stainless steel tap a thick orange mass, clinging like mucus as if the tap's volcanic innards had fallen victim to some igneous virus. Watching it, Hammond expected the mass to turn white and superheated, but the stubborn orange remained, growing steadily larger, until at about ten inches in diameter it detached itself completely and began to glide serenely across the room. The kitchen assistant was struck by its reflected beauty, its glow off knives and hobs, its swimming over work surfaces, chopping boards and pans of every shape and description, like joke fairground mirrors. It was the most appealing thing he had ever seen. All the naked gloss and paper fantasies which embellished his dreams, waking and sleeping, paled under the orange's sweeping luminescence. The blue and green combination yellow gave it centre stage. Through the window blinds was glimpsed a purple moon.

The kitchen door hinged open, flooding Hammond in stringent white tones, arriving late and undigested, a brilliance against which a shadow loomed, warped and sucking the extinguished bulb's consequential darkness. This negative illumination was made animate, engendered via death, vacuuming each hidden, recessed shade and drawing it into the silhouette's oblivion. The white tracked the visiting colours by their footprints extant in Hammond's locked shut eyes and expunged them, wiped them, tidal fashion, from the vulnerable sands of his flesh preoccupied mind, hunted them down and slaughtered them on the firm-buttocked, perk-breasted strand. But their memory escaped. The white slammed against the blinds, garish and total, rattling the thin slats in defiance of the moon cloaking its boastful shades in cloud.

'Hey,' said Morrison. 'What's up?'

Turning to face the shadow Hammond smiled. 'The bulb went, that's all,' he replied. The intruding male nurse seemed to expect more. Hammond struggled, sought equilibrium, felt self-conscious. 'You're working late. Me also.'

'Yeah,' Morrison said, straightening his plastic uniform. 'They shit twenty-four hours, you know? I don't need much sleep. I wanted to talk to someone about roughage.'

Hammond relaxed. 'Well, I'm your man.'

They sat on chairs in the passage, Morrison twirling strands of dark greasy hair, the kitchen assistant oily-eyed with visions, pristine images, fresh memories of orange nipples and yellow vaginas. Something terrible passed between the two men. Made physical, Morrison indented Hammond's thick skull with a red peeling fire bucket, emptying brains, litter and sand.

And thereafter made good use of a spatula.

'It's my job. I don't pretend to enjoy it. But then who would?'

The patient, the special case, complied.

'Okay,' Morrison told him, 'you're clean.'

He held the shiny bauble in his palm. Disbelief, buried in his mind, slowly surfaced, glowing hotly behind the doors of his deep-set eyes as his fingers closed round that fantastic, excreted ball. It was the size of a marble. It had, Morrison thought, taken leave of its host without the host knowing, rolled into his hand like some extraordinary gift from the rectal world, a sunlike pearl from between the pink cheeks of innocence; subjective innocence, half moons belonging to the reluctant patient before him.

And Morrison had witnessed its birth. More, he'd aided its passage, provided it with the means to continue its journey.

The ex-host regarded the television as he slipped away. A few seconds down the corridor, having abandoned his trolley, and Morrison was suddenly immersed in blackness, absolute even as he kept walking. Then reality flashed back in. He longed for the experience to repeat itself, for during that lapse he had sensed many secrets, wonders in the void. He gripped the marble tightly, licked his lips to moisten them, filling the cracks. He did not continue on his rounds as dictated by his schedule but locked himself instead in the farthest stall from the urinals and pissing hospital personnel. Trousers dropped to nervous ankles, heels perched on the toilet seat, one hand shifting genitals, Morrison peered for the first time since childhood curiosity at his own peculiar anus, alike and yet so different from the hundreds of others he observed in the course of his undervalued profession. It reminded him, his arsehole, of very little. The sight of it left him feeling strangely passive. Had he expected more? We all like to think we're unique. He rubbed the opening with the tip of his thumb. The muscles in the backs of his legs tensed uncomfortably, the hairs that sprouted from them curling like weeds at the bottom of a murky river. It was dim in the stall and the orange sphere glowed faintly. He rolled it in his palm, grinned and inserted it slowly. A growing sexual urge led him to masturbate. His own balls moved independently, contained in their wrinkled sack that shrank coldly, then loosened as the orange disappeared beyond reach of his finger, determined encouragement to his waning cock resting for a moment lazily against his thigh, held fast by Morrison's pronounced knuckles.

An hour later by his watch, its second hand counting, keeping tally, a fist rapped on the cubicle door.

'Is there someone in there?' the fist asked.

Morrison flushed. A pause - footsteps slunk away. Morrison emerged felling refreshed. He imagined the tiny world to have ascended his colon as far as his small intestine. Soon it would pass into his stomach, next up his trachea, climbing the wet length of his tongue like a mountaineer an ice wall, to that tongue's rooted summit, taking the slide in reverse, all the way to his mouth where it would rub shoulders with his filled teeth, artfully caressing the swell of his gums as if flirting at a party, inflating (it had to inflate) until it squeezed at last from the flaccid embrace of his lips to float in the weak night air above his bed, where he slept, where he dreamed of just such a moment and the possibilities it would, ideally, represent.

If only the excitement didn't keep him awake. Like Christmas, only ten times as good.

In the supermarket, car parked near the electric doors, white in the late sun, Morrison hefted cans of vibrant South American fruit, their logos brash stars, wondering if the globe he'd accessed needed to eat, and what. He pushed his trolley along every crammed-with-produce aisle in sequence, up and down their clustered lengths, labels and prices like symbols on a route map, finally making the checkout where he discovered all he had collected in his silver cage on wheels was a jar of wobbly bubble-bath and three frozen chicken wings, a frost on their packaging like the rime on a dead man's lips. The checkout girl cleared her gaunt throat and the icy landscape receded. Morrison shivered. It was as if he'd been there. And the dead man? He located his money in a pocket and paid, forgot his change, two of the chicken wings and the jar of wobbly bubble-bath. Maybe the checkout girl shouted after him, employing for the purpose her gaunt throat. He couldn't remember. Maybe he walked home and his car followed. That was likely; his car was obedient and did most everything he told it. The one time it had gone off on its own it had got as far as Durham, within honking distance of the cathedral whose stone mass made it feel metallic and small, before breaking down and phoning him. Morrison recalled the way his car had sounded over the line. It was sorry. It would make amends. It would never go off like that again. It had learnt its lesson. Please would he come and fetch it. It was frightened and alone. The cathedral was so beautiful, but it missed the architectural simplicity of its humble brick and timber garage.

Reluctantly, Morrison agreed, the rescue involving bus and taxi rides. He'd tried to persuade the errant vehicle to find its own way home; however, it was too emotionally overwrought, panicked and guilt-ridden to face the inevitable sneering traffic. His car was a big softy at heart, a timid machine whose dreams, like those of many, where a bit too awkwardly shaped to fit into the unforgiving puzzle of Father Reality, the old man stern and indifferent...

Inside his fridge was a stash of magic mushrooms concealed in a plastic ice-cream tub in the freezer compartment and outside his fridge was the kitchen and contents of Morrison's rundown flat. He kept his car keys here, among the ice, the better to wake his car come morning. He switched the kettle on and the news. There was a false report (all reports were false in Morrison's eyes) of alien activity at a working man's club on the outskirts of town. The report, which consisted largely of home movie footage and shaky soundtrack, detailed the supposed extraterrestrial cover version of an old Cliff Richard hit. Disgusted, he dragged the TV from the wall and tipped it on its back, buttoned for an empty, static channel (all those millions of ants, he believed in them) and imagined the orange like a queen in the centre of a pageant, her coronation, as she was the star in this production. And then the tea. Right, he thought, sipping mushroom. He squatted on the mantelpiece and filled his loosely fastened head.

It was a swimming pool, the orange a lilo. It was a city in space, a gaseous planet ball, the orange just gone nova. It was an eye, an unhuman eye, the orange the perfect image of a glimpsed and captured arsehole intelligence. It was inside him. Nothing alien. Forget that. Wherever he looked the orange centred his vision. He gazed out the window, through the twilight; descried a man in a call box, targeting him as if with a laser.

And Morrison then occupied what was left of that man's life.

38

'Renny? What? The car broke down. Listen...' The sound of the wire, the colour schemes of the red-framed street, the myriad scratched phone-numbers and the litter. 'No, I haven't. I'll be there; promise. Myrtle Grove; know it. I'll catch a bus...' The eerie sensation of speaking to yourself: so few replies. They might be echoes. 'Renny? I'm sorry. Red or white? White? Okay...' The fact he could have guessed. Why call at all? For an answer, an answer to a particular name.

Something burned in his skull. He cradled the receiver and pushed open the door on its creaking hinges and stepped onto pavement, glanced round like Doctor Who, this the oddest of worlds to find oneself in. Motionless by the curb was the car. He shrugged, wedged his hands in his pockets and with the left caressed the cold pistol whose previously incongruous touch now seemed natural enough. His right hand dipped into a bloody handkerchief. The handkerchief baffled him. He dragged it out. The blood wasn't his, he realized, smiling. The car wasn't his either.

It got darker and started to rain. There were seven people at the bus stop. Its roof leaked. He didn't have long to wait. He guessed the fare. Suppose this was the wrong bus? But he thought not, he'd been this way before. The bus pulled up at the next stop and six people alighted. He was alone, the driver invisible, the rain falling harder as it struggled to erase everything beyond the flat window glass. He needed a piss; all that water, and he needed a piss. How many more stops? He squeezed his cock and gritted his teeth. The invisible driver made a point of not looking at him when he advanced down the aisle. The vehicle halted coincidentally. His destination thus reached, he got off. Nobody got on. The invisible driver, he intuited, wished not to believe in him. The feeling was mutual. He watched the bus dissolve into the blackness and wetness. He pissed behind a hedge. He searched for the correct street and appropriate door, the latter yellow and ajar, rain bouncing off its hard gloss. Within, the party either hadn't happened or the record-player had died. The people appeared uncomfortable. They drank from a variety of plastic, metal and glass containers. Missed their mouths. The people looked scared. By the way they tried to ignore him and pretend he didn't exist, he knew that in truth they recognized his presence as solid, unshakeable fact. They had no choice but to believe in him.

And yet what did they see? He parked himself before a mirror to better find out.

'Mike?'

He made no reply.

'Mike, the wine. How could you forget the wine?' Renny tugged on his wet collar.

I'm her brother...

'Crap party, Mike. Even the aliens are boring. Why invite them at all? What ever happened to parties that started at midnight and went on till dawn?'

Wait a minute, reasoned the man in the mirror, didn't I just piss? Then how come I've wet myself? He produced the gun. 'This is mine,' he said. 'It belongs to me. There's a shop on the corner, yes? I can hold it up.'

'Mike?'

'Yeah?'

'Mike?'

Some fancy dress party; he had a craving for jelly.

Pushing past Renny he stumbled into the living-room at the exact moment the music sprang to life and the celebrants became flick-of-a-switch active. Out of control he circulated, using the cold pistol to salute people he knew only as strangers, their elongated smiles comical on such disproportionate faces.

He was okay, they said. Look, he hasn't come as himself after all. And doesn't the gun look real? Nice touch. A regular villain, the long and wide faces told him.

It was ten o'clock.

Got dark early?

'Mike?'

Where the hell was Arthur? Renny wondered. Angry, she went in search of her brother amid the party throng. Things were really swinging now, the alien dancing with the aboriginal and the sailors armwrestling the nuns who won four from five. She caught sight of a gangster, but it wasn't Mike. This gangster groped a zombie in a Pulchritude Promotions T-shirt soaked to cling. Nipples shone through black; too black, as if coloured with mascara. Renny headed for the kitchen where she arrived in time to witness an explosion of green bottle glass.

Instinctively, she ducked.

Mike shrugged.

'It went off,' an insect said. 'The gun went off.'

'Mike...'

He turned through the back door and Renny tripped after him, pausing to hitch up her cape, the red velvet lining damp, a flash of it disappearing Renny into a wash-house chill with concrete and suspended garden implements choked with last year's and the years' before garden detritus; more insects, these to scale and dead, victim to fist-sized spiders whose glittering webs drooped like net curtains in Renny's vampiric wake.

She found Mike leaning on a rusty mangle. He was shaking violently. She loosened the warmed pistol from his sweating grasp and watched him slide, as if released, down the wall, flaking paint, helpless with relief. He retrieved the blood-stained handkerchief from his right raincoat pocket. Art's handkerchief. Art's blood.

'Mike, what happened? Where's Arthur?'

Mike, dumb and empty, said, 'He killed him,' hoping he would be believed, not have his insane jealousy exposed. His sister loomed over him like a bird. Mike loved her terribly; wanted her; deserved her. Arthur did not, he told himself. Arthur did not.

'Mike.' Her tone was fatal. 'Tell me, Mike.'

The music belonged to another place entirely.

'We followed him, like you said to. He took a bus out of town.' Stray light glinted off her fangs. Renny, he'd done her a favour; but she wouldn't see it that way. He had to lie. Had to. 'Morrison,' he said. 'Morrison had it. You were right. He took a bus out of town and then walked into some woods. It was easy tracking him, he walked ankle-deep in mud by a stream. Other footprints crossed his, some even joined them. It got harder to tell what was what, and the ground turned marshy, like a swamp. Art lost a shoe. I was in front. I heard a noise, and he was dead, face down in the mud.'

It was a good story. He almost believed it.

Renny didn't. Standing over him, fangs aglow, she was hungry for his throat.

Mike had imagined being Arthur. He'd practiced for years, but to no avail. He couldn't pull it off. She wasn't fooled. It took more than a gun. Arthur had always looked down on him, wanted rid of him. Still, he obeyed Renny's orders, taking Mike along with him to spy on the nurse. They'd argued in the car and Art had threatened him with the pistol. It wasn't the first time, so Mike knew he wouldn't shoot. Art was all mouth - mouth that grazed on Renny every night. Mike hated that mouth. He punched Art in the gut and grabbed the gun, wedged its shiny barrel between Art's frightened gums, forced its machined snout against the roof of Art's drying aperture, squeezed the trigger that would, he believed, silence that aperture forever. The body he folded in the boot of the car parked opposite Morrison's flat. He managed to clean most of the blood off the windscreen using his shirt, but by no means all. He wiped his palms on the seat cover, his fingers on Art's handkerchief, adopted Art's persona and called Renny. Easy, he knew that swagger. But no.

Renny tossed the dread pistol in his lap and faded as if trapped unawares by morning. Mike was delirious; the party sucked him back. Abandoning himself to the swirl, the top of Arthur's skull blossoming constantly before his eyes, bone and brains impregnating the aptly named headlining, a percussion of atonal fragments through insulation. The windscreen was heavily smeared; the outside, where he couldn't reach, couldn't wipe. Blood dripped from the sky, thick heart-shaped drops he was powerless to dispel. The handkerchief was saturated. The shirt was locked in the boot with the corpse. People stared. They stared through the windows, their heads hideously stretched, as if the bullets fired upward into their deserving craniums had somehow failed to exit. These skulls were elastic. Bullet-proof, from the inside. They stood in the blood hail and stared at Mike. Aliens, sailors, gangsters, nuns; they indicated after their high-brow fashion his absolute guilt. He'd lost everything but the gun. Couched in his hand, its muzzle wavered as he moved about the house, always coming to the same exit, trying to find his way out and coming again and again to the same exit, its neon sign radiant, flashing on and off down the swollen barrel he pushed against his palate. The tall-heads gathered round and laughed. He was okay, they said. Watch, I've seen this done before, he pulls the trigger and all this fake blood and stuff comes streaming out of his nose and mouth along with half a dozen luminous false teeth and a cardboard tongue. Really, it's funny. Such a mess. I saw it on the telly a while back. Washes right out...

Got dark early?

Bang.

Renny shed her tears out of earshot of the prisoner. His machine sat where it had appeared on the carpet in her front room and didn't move a flap or lever. The yonderscope, it reminded her of a supermarket fair ride, some exotic carriage in which to speed through colourless air, never remaining long in one place, never coming completely to a stop. She didn't think it could. Even though outwardly solid the fantastic machine gave the impression of not being all there. Renny, who had read her Verne and Wells, guessed its purpose from the first. And its passenger, Austin Pearce? Not so simple. He'd come over friendly initially, as if he'd manifested in juxtaposition with her TV using all the art and precision of a seagull alighting on a bollard, in fact deliberately, as a result of inter-actuality manoeuvring. They'd stared at each other, both suspecting something amiss in the wider scheme of universal occurrences. And both were right. But were they right to suspect one another? They'd stared harder. Renny imagined there must be a fault with his machine. Pearce gauged her eyes, saw a nascent appreciation therein of subtler designs, a future flower of recognition, a bud presently collating the available evidence before deciding whether or not to open fully. A freak accident during final approach had landed him here, in her front room, abutting her television. He'd lost his bearings. Moreover, he'd lost that vital component without which there was no hope of securing a space/time exit. Renny understood that; she'd been startled by the obese orange cat as it chased a luminous string of green and blue beads from living-room to kitchen to bedroom, cornering them in the toilet bowl, the bowl of the toilet Renny, in a moment of rare panic, had then flushed.

Austin Pearce, on hearing, groaned the low groan of fatalism, whereupon Renny hit him over the head with the Hoover nozzle, bound him hand and foot and locked him in the cupboard under the sink. He was passive, resigned to his loss when eventually she let him out, pondering, he admitted, the unconnectiveness of connected, singular life.

A trying business, she concluded.

Now, tears long past, Renny sat musing, brooding over the disconnectiveness of his escape, on foot.

Things were mixed up, she was willing to concede that. She wasn't sure if she recognized the world anymore. The fact that there were aliens abroad no longer surprised her. She didn't care what shape they were, if there heads were too big and arms too many, or what they ate, was disinterested in the wild speculation concerning their sexual preferences and the rumoured dimensions of their extraterrestrial dongs. Renny just wanted to explore the space the yonderscope's sudden and very strange arrival had opened up. She had to be out of her mind, she realized. But how else?

Renny had been content to dream of Scherzo Trepan. There was a certain security, a reassuring quality to his floundering. The cat had been safe with him. And Pearce had supplied a number of grins; tacit agreement, honed and polished wiles. They had played draughts between commercials and made a single game last thirteen hours. Renny travelled back and forth, crushing the grass till she'd worn a path, Scherzo's blacked-out skull hers to visit, to dream in like he never could, his sole resource a memory stacked with images, a leading light in this cabaret his sister Annie, her thousand faces uplifted by daytime imagination, her flesh and scenery, costume and vocabulary, her every role, pose and adventure etched in his mentality, mostly in closed rooms, backstage, out of bounds to Scherzo who simply had not dared to venture this way, happy to view from afar what Renny revelled in. Pieces of everything, jumbled, noisy, the whole she'd chosen to understudy.

It was difficult, even now, to acknowledge her mistakes and confront the actuality that she was not the only player. Others laid claim to this subvisual territory. Other wholes. But she liked Scherzo; maybe too much to be really good at the toe-to-toe, to make her own sphere the fullest. She thought briefly of Art and brother Mike. Forgot them. The curtain had risen. She had her part. Annie had left the theatre. Renny sojourned in Scherzo's subconscious, always below the waves, the intangible surface. She longed to reach out and touch her unknowing audience; a fear of the consequences stopped her. She could no longer decide whose world was truer. Did she wallow in fiction? So be it: a true submariner.

The fiction was Trepan's. One day they'd meet, up there in the sun, in light or darkness, for between the conscious and the unconscious ran many rivers.

39

Then Renny had stood by the cream-coloured phone, which rang, and now as she picked the receiver up, swallowing, she knew it to be Arthur's ghost calling from a box.

'I can't get out,' he lamented. 'I'm stuck.'

She didn't pursue the fact.

'Have you seen Mike? What did he tell you? That Morrison bumped me off? The little shit. If he wasn't dead already I'd kill him myself.'

No way to bring him back.

'If you didn't watch, Renny, he blew his brains out like he did mine. I saw him pass on a bus; should be passing again in a while. Come and see. You could wave to him. I'm not going anywhere. Can't. I wouldn't mind some company. Renny, I'll be honest with you, a phone box isn't such a great place to haunt.'

'Art?'

'Mike shot me in my own car; with my own gun. What a mess! Ruined the upholstery. Then he dumped me in the boot. I'd still be there, only, not realizing I was dead, I floated out. Still, things could be worse; at least here I have use of the phone and people drop by from time to time. But it's lonely. They're strangers. I could almost envy Mike. The bus moves from place to place.'

'Art,' inquired a puzzled Renny, 'what do ghosts use for money?'

'Money? No need. Ghosts are electric. I plug straight in. I think after a little practice I'll be able to disseminate entirely and travel down the line. That'd be fun, listening in on people's conversations, bouncing round the globe. And who knows, in a year or two, if I get bored, I could head out into space, explore whole new galaxies...'

'Oh, Art.'

'Renny, I'm serious. So why not come down and let me inside you one last time?'

'I can't,' she replied.

'Why not? We did it in a phone box once before, remember? You cut your arse.'

'How could I forget. But that isn't it. I can't leave home.'

'You can't get out,' he lamented. 'You're stuck.'

'Pearce escaped last night.'

'With his machine? In it? What?'

'No, the machine's still here.'

'In that case he'll be back.'

She could imagine him nodding - sardonically? 'Exactly, so I have to stay put.' It sounded like an excuse. Renny caught the yonderscope's perplexing glimmer out of the corner of her eye, a flower-head of metal and glass, cloud and plastic.

Somewhere, someone hung up.

40

I'm drinking Rose's lime juice cordial. My granny always used to have a bottle in her larder. Probably the same bottle lasted years; self-filling, granny magic. It came wrapped in a glass bottle then, with moulded rose motifs; in a plain square plastic one now. If it were yellow, this splendid cordial, you might easily mistake it for cooking oil. Such is progress. My granny progressed via slow bone shrinkage into a wooden box which in turn advanced six feet (did anyone count them?) below ground. Grandfather later moved in alongside. They were married years. He had one arm. That's one less wing in this palace of worms.

41

There was war. Gunfire thundered about the room. Morrison bled over the crackling upturned television having switched channels with his nose. He was feeling vacant, but it took him a moment to remember why. He closed his eyes and sank into utter dark.

'Okay, Tom,' the TV was saying. 'Now it's your turn. Don't let us down.'

Morrison pressed the extinguishing button.

Morrison showered while the toast burned and then walked the two miles to work. Easy, he was early. His face hurt. It was eleven o'clock, however, before he dared admit the past twenty-four hours amounted to anything more than a mushroom lark. Sitting in the hospital canteen for caffeine dependants, dragging spoon through coffee, he let the whiplash of his mind appraise him of the pertinent facts. The orange globe, its wondrous access. Gone. He wanted it back.

His lips ached when he drank. His mouth tasted sticky. Nobody sat at his table. They never did.

42

Then Renny had been dozing and assembling glimpses of alien worlds from the schisms of light in her front room, now she was asleep.

Then Renny had been lying on her worn settee with the curtains drawn and the room aglow, now she was seated on a mountainside as dawn broke, spilling sunbeams, sluicing rainbows, spangling dew, a million birds in the sky and ten times that number in her head.

She was stuffed with feathers. Not just her skull but her whole body. She got to her feet, spongy limbs fickle in the early morning breeze, wobbling. She pressed soft fingers into soft flesh and giggled as both yielded a touch. At the sound of her surprise a figure bearing a large sack appeared to her left. He opened it, the sack, and reached inside. She couldn't see his face, but knew it had to be solid, cut from rock, for he was the only solid object in this place. Everything else - sunbeams, rainbows, dew - was stuffed.

The faceless man handed her a map.

43

No dreams in Scherzo's head. Who can say if Scherzo ever slept? His quest was as much for Annie's brother as Annie herself. Poor Scherzo, the focus of so much heat. He had to learn to swim in the world sweat, tread sticky water with his nostrils squeezed tight, wary of scented fumes. A white cloud one day and the next a black, he understood well the dangers of getting high on body odour. It was difficult enough finding a place to park, the ether was so busy. Few among the airy throng had any real purpose, which served to aggravate him further. He peered in windows, gazed at shop signs, looking for life's smallest mysteries in the curves of reflections and lettering. Immune as they were to time, the shops never shut. The traffic was equally interminable. A cool morning in the future, everything neat and green, he thought to catch sight of Rosemary in a department store. Scherzo called her name as he stepped off the escalator and she turned. It was her, rekindled, made to glow amid the kitchen appliances and associate utensils that occupied this basement. Their eyes met for perhaps a second and what was written in Rosemary's left stark impressions on Scherzo's mind. The lights flickered. Robots whose functions were manifold, sparked, placed extraneous parts, numerous extensions on the gleaming tiled floor and set about the business of buffing and polishing and wiping and shining and tidying each other and the bewildered customers while whistling in a variety of distinguishing notes a variety (depending on their country of origin) of patriotic songs from days of old, of historic mechanical sobriety, when, Sherzo recalled, having been there, countries and patriotism still found their way up onto the dusty blackboard. Two hundred years ago, years as measured by the old calendar, as the future had seen fit to slow itself down and set a new standard of 500 days per annum.

44

Austin Pearce, late of Formalhaut, removed the stub of pencil from behind his ear and drew its blunt grey point across the paper braced in his diminutive lap. He was thinking of the orange and constructing a graph, one of possibilities, probabilities, uncooked spaghetti straight lines and future conflagrations. He was sitting by a potted fern in a street closed to traffic, crowded with people, most of whom were lousy drivers, a chaotic steering of biological craft between shops, most of which openly flaunted goods. It was a Tuesday. The sun was bright, and between strokes of pencil Austin contemplated the axial tilt of heads. Shopping bags were another distraction. They bulged, strained, hinted at secrets, shapes disguised, metamorphosed into containers of fabulous produce, frozen fish and fruit juice, milk, cigarettes. This was Pulchritude, he reminded himself; maybe he'd been away too long. The potted fern never took its needle eyes off him. Austin smiled and its brown fronds turned green.

A child of perhaps five or six (Gregorian) pulled its mother up short as they were passing.

'Look, mummy, an elf.'

How the people had grown so.

'Don't be cheeky,' the child was admonished.

Grown so.

'But he's got pointy ears!'

How the people had grown so.

'I told you - now come on.'

Grown so deaf.

Pearce, benevolent old fart that he was, fired a gleam into the child's eyes and whispered a blessing as its mouth fell open. The five or six year old caught the gist of the message, sufficient to make its nose shine, but the child's impatient mother hauled the wonder-struck listener off to have its feet measured and thence encased in shiny plastic masquerading as something else.

Austin licked his pencil and concentrated once more on his graph. But what was the use of mapping the universe if that universe was missing a piece? It had to be here; only here, right now (potentially - a morbid curve) was everywhere else.

His graph swallowed its tail. Chased it, rather, never quite catching up. But on the verge, he was reminded, on the terrible verge, just moments, inches, layers, chances from the edge. And after the edge came the fall. And after the fall? He coughed and shrugged. The fall was terrible enough.

Fat cat

sittin' on the windowsill,

doesn't know the time of day

pays no bills;

He calibrated distance by a variety of means, employing an array of mathematical and ontological devices.

maybe chase a mouse later

maybe a butterfly -

fat cat

watchin' the world go by.

Austin Pearce was back home on blue-green Pulchritude in time for the roses. He was breathing people again. But they'd grown so big he thought he might choke.

45

The predatory creature languished in close proximity to death. The skittish watcher left its footprints in the shallows, but understood the danger of venturing deeper into the cooling waters of the lake. The sky darkened. Fear trickled through the dusty air and confusion emanated from the wavering dialogues of the swamp trees and dry-land grasses. Black clouds, absolute in hue and depth, lacking symmetry, slowly blocked out the orange sun. The days grew dimmer, less distinct, one from the next, night spreading between, and the frost on the earth grew heavier with each addition of fractured dew. The predator's fate was sealed. It was to become one with the mud in which it was trapped. The watcher's future, until recently lunch for the big fella, was no longer so sure, as the wind and the rain were no longer so sure, as the air became palpably thicker and the temperature dropped, bringing weight to hearts and limbs, installing ice where once roamed breath, reducing living things to bone hills too stupid to knit gloves. And the swollen night? In the night the mad howls of beasts whose tenure was up, whose necks were too long, whose feet were too big, whose eyes rolled, seized and popped...

Watching, the smaller, faster, suddenly better equipped animal ran to hide under a rime-laden bush as the absolute sky caved in, there chewing leaves and roots and finding a combination of these made a passable hat.

46

'You shot him dead?'

'Of course dead.'

'Shit!' Hugo Lupid scratched his nose, which itched, lit a cigarette, which glowed, stubbed it out in a gilt-edged ashtray, which rattled on the table-top. Molhenny was a fucking psychopath; he'd blow everything. 'And Rita? Where's she at, Tony?'

'Who?'

'Rita. Your secretary. The one you stole from me.'

'Oh, Rita's fine. Just wasn't feeling too well. Let me worry about her.'

Hugo was foaming at the mouth. 'You shot him dead?'

Tony shrugged. Pressing his feet into the lush carpet he answered, 'How else?'

47

Renny lowered her binoculars and sat down at his table. The nurse regarded her strangely.

'Hi,' she said. 'You work here?'

Morrison didn't care for the black glint in her eye. Or maybe it was the silver in her teeth he took exception to. Whatever, his first impulse was to vacate his seat. She disturbed him.

The young woman forestalled any action with a word. 'Mike,' she said, adding, 'He was spying on you, him and another man. But you'll know all that. I won't go into details. Am I right?'

Morrison thought she resembled a plucked bird. 'Yes,' he said. 'I work here.' Then, 'You're Renny.'

'Correct.' He heard her cross her legs. Stockings rasped. He'd been on a near empty train once when a woman had boarded and sat opposite, loaded with books. A teacher, he remembered thinking. She'd worn a loud red blouse that mirrored his shirt, similar to the one Renny was wearing now. Had stringy blonde hair and no tits. Morrison would never forget the sound her wrapped thighs had made when she'd crossed her legs. It still turned him on, that tight-netted swish, connecting the back of his mouth by a length of shortening elastic to his trembling groin.

'What do you want?'

'Oh, come on!' She leaned across the unstable table, spilling his thick coffee, feeling she'd done this numerous times before, in numerous prior, future or contemporary lives. The man on the other side was always this stubborn reliable type. 'I want what you want, what we've both lost.' So much she gleaned from his expression. 'And I mean to find it before somebody else does.' She allowed her hair to fall over her eyes, diffusing their glare. 'I want your help.'

So many partnerships...

Morrison couldn't believe his ears; but his skin tightened and every hair on his body turned into a compass point.

'You must have some idea where it went,' suggested Renny.

And, Morrison now realized, he did.

They left the canteen together, neither speaking, heading toward the rear of the hospital and Renny's parked car, a fatuous Mini the front end of which boasted many dents. She drove the car through town and Morrison through his seat, over a narrow box-section bridge, the river silent below, the sky clearing above, swung incautiously onto the bypass and continued west into greener country. Morrison relaxed and watched the trees multiply and the traffic thin out. He wondered at the time, not wearing his watch, took furtive glances at Renny's blurred wrist. But the hands twitched with temporal constipation, making it hard for him to get a fix. He'd replied to her last question in the canteen by saying, 'I need some air.' To which she'd answered, 'Yes - and ice-cream.' It was two-twenty when he leaned against the bonnet, found a dent to match his arse, and ritualistically shoved the Flake down into the cornet. The car was parked overhanging a wooded river valley. Snaking through the admixture of foliage were a number of wood-chip paths, arrowed walks for directional ramblers; that is, ones without a map. Renny yanked a crushed pack of cigarettes out of the jeans she'd changed into in the car, tip-toeing on the pedals and steering with her knees. 'Smoke?'

Morrison declined, satisfied as he was with his 99, the Flake cold and safe inside. Renny had wolfed hers already. No style.

'Okay, where from here?' She lit up, was on the verge of saying something more when the ice-cream van resumed its summery chimes, exhaust belching pollution as it lurched from the car park.

Renny waited for it to leave. 'What's your first name? You know mine.'

'Renata,' he said, eyebrows raised.

She frowned.

'Tom,' he said. 'My name's Tom.'

She smiled. Liking him? 'Pleased to meet you, Tom.'

No shake of hands.

Smoke drifted over the barren landscape. Shapeless greys rose like massive slugs into the day-lit canopy. Shadows twisted and doubled repeatedly, darkening vortices of gas and ash wrapping the yellow-orange heat of blossoming fires as they coursed upward from countless rumbling explosions, shrouding the bird. He gripped the seat webbing as the air shook, rattling bones in flesh, every man bleary-eyed. The fear tangible in the belly of the craft matched the fear knotted in his own soured gut. The pilot's voice raised itself along wires from the cockpit, calm but indistinct, as if removed from the turbulence by design.

'Cigarette?' offered the man next to him over the din.

'No,' Tom replied.

The man shrugged, grinned inside his protective helmet. 'Plenty of smoke down there, eh?' His lighted match seemed to draw the violence toward it, a Siren to the greater flames below. Tom read that the man's name was Franklin. Soon this Franklin's lungs would be seared, his helmet dented. No burial for him.

They landed two hundred metres from the nearest building. No cover. Tom dived out in turn and ran left, weapon pointed at a smashed window; only broken light behind it; no faces: masks this side and the enemy hidden. What was going on? Rebellion? Invasion? One hell of a party? It didn't really matter. He was instructed what to do, how to perform. The explosions had been no accident. So much wreckage. He fell prone and shuffled like a sand-crab, dusting his armour as gunfire streaked and clanged, Tom making himself as small a target as possible. No orders rushed in his ear. The straps of his backpack were over tight. Panic visited briefly. There'd been such hurry. And now? A noise that was almost quiet. The outside air throbbed. Dust and debris showered him. Forms dropped alongside, opened fire, exchanged looks that were unreadable plastic. The impression was one of confusion, genuine bafflement. One of the forms slumped, bloody, and Tom took shelter behind it. The smoke began to coil downward, smothering, displacing the unknown buildings. Some vague ghost returned to occupy the ruptured carcass. Shrillness, then static, then at last a voice in his ear. 'Get up, Tom, it's finished.'

'Already?'

'Don't be funny. And bring...'

That volume of silence.

'Renata,' she said, confirming. 'Renata Shelmerdine.'

She and Morrison both crunched wood-chips beneath their cautious feet; cautious, as the scene before them undulated with horror movie deliberacy. Renny's gauche blouse, far from seeming vivid and out of place among the prevalent greens, lent Morrison's eyes a reassuring focus. And Morrison, Renny had to admit, did look rather fetching in his white plastic nurse's uniform.

'Have you been here before?'

'No.'

'Me neither; I think.' The sudden doubt surprised her, an ephemeral ray through the heavy foliage of her waking mind. 'What do you think we're looking for?' she questioned, broaching his thoughts.

He smiled, wondering (equally briefly, the shifting light fickle) at the entry, so badly sign-posted, she had gained to his inner self. It was Renny he could feel moving around, getting comfortable, as if preparing for a long stay in some psychedelic cinema seat, adjusting to his volume, contrast, colour. The film showing was that which brought him here; brought them together. He knew she must be experiencing something similar. She'd known the orange too. And that roused a pang of envy.

But there were others. 'A trail,' he said, needing to speak, those words close to hand.

'Say again?' Renny kicked a stone and disturbed a pigeon. A flurry of wings beat the air. Her response, like the bird's, was a reaction, a reflex to the impossible, to the inherited confusion set deep in her brain.

She understood. The pigeon understood. The question was whose move was wisest.

'There must be a pond down here,' Morrison continued, forcing a passage through undergrowth, leaving their designated path. 'Smells like a swamp; not running water.'

Renny ducked under a branch. 'I can't swim.'

'But you can float.'

'If I have to.'

Morrison stopped and peered at her through a spider's web, an oiliness in his eyes as he held his breath.

His face behind the lattice of spun silk became more real, more definite to Renny in that moment than the memory of either Art or Mike. Memory was a habit of the past, she appreciated, and it was the future Morrison represented, what they both felt strongly about, the multiplex future a piece of which had manifested in her front room. That future, unlike the past, unlike the present, possessed an immediacy not found anywhere else, a rarefied taste having its source at the very roots of her teeth.

After some bramble scratching they came upon a river neither stagnant nor flat, but a rocky paradise secretly winding between trees, an old established route onto which the generous sun projected a maze of images, as if there were not a single river but many. Debris, refuse, bits of animal and vegetable floated down these channels, down those ages which conspired to form history. Things unheard of and unseen for millennia passed with impunity, borne along on the current or navigating tiny rafts. Most remarkable though was the discovery of a boat with two oars, its nose wedged into the soft bank, its boards the hue of ancient ivory, its odour that of long-drained seas, its seams oozing protective moss and its joints knotted like rope. Morrison suspected it contained no nails. The boat was a craft unnecessarily afloat. It had risen from below the ever-breaking waves and come to ground on innumerable sand-bars and estuary shores. It brought to Renny's cleared mind a dream of stuffedness, of an elevator crammed with pillows, of impractical reality, for this was a boat designed for one purpose only, and that, from aquatic floor to aquatic floor, beach to beach, was to sink.

48

Having dug non-stop for sixteen days through sixteen layers of concrete, clay times eleven, gravel, sawdust, and now a stone floor that was possibly a road (Roman), the unearther at last scraped his spade, which shone like the Milky Way and had cut more worms than any rotavator, he at last scraped his spade, the handle of which was worn to match thickness and the rivets of which had been replaced several times over by nails scavenged from the loam, mostly rusty, he at last scraped his spade, its shaft buckled and twisted like a witch's limb, at last scraped his spade, this extraordinary implement - for no ordinary tool could have taken such punishment - at last scraped his spade over the still solid lid of a - wait for it, focus and concentrate, do all those breathing exercises - lid of a lid of a coffin. He alone knew who was buried in it, an exaggerated number of metres beneath the sun. It was his sister, encapsulated in wood.

The lid was screwed down. Rather than hack away at it as he had the concrete, etc., he clambered back up the rickety ladder and stood unknotting rope beneath the stars, puzzled that one knot remained. What was that knot for? It was only small. He'd construct a wooden framework, he decided, find a block and tackle in the shed that was always nearby to suspend from it, and haul the coffin to the surface. But then the rain started and he recalled the meaning of that last small knot, the knot he'd chosen to ignore. He grew soft about the edges, as did the trench he had spent sixteen dry days digging. The unearther, the shed, the rescue were all demolished by pacifying globules of innocent water, dispersed on this or that subterranean byway. And the coffin? That wonder-filled capsule would be elsewhere, replanted and waiting to be discovered and dug up again.

49

He loosens his brocade scarf and tosses its tassels over a shoulder as he steps onto the grassy pavement. 'Good luck,' says a face through the window, red and white, its owner pink beyond glass like a lobster. Scherzo Trepan waves and the bus pulls away slowly, as befits such a vehicle, gaining speed, rolling on its black rubber tyres, turning the bend, shadowed by lesser cars and leafy trees, the latter shitting on the world, the former busy trying to catch it up, on this road or another, any of millions, determined that that world be flat, hoping for an opportunity to overtake the lumbering omni, skirting roundabouts with islands at their core, entire continents - gratifyingly level \- of daffodils in spring and council workmen with lawnmowers in summer, broken bottles in autumn and the purest snow in winter, the kind of snow where only the footprints of faeries and suchlike make any indentation. Islands where strangers meet to wander, oblivious of the moat of grey-black asphalt and the circling trucks lost for an exit, creating in-roads and out-roads, rediscovering old roads and forgotten roads, stopping jerkily at the lights. Islands over which the moon hovers, about which the horn-blaring stars turn, some of which have been known to fall, to crater the island's cambered superficies and knock over the odd bollard while the night-sun sits impervious atop its steely pole, safe in the knowledge of council workmen (its acolytes) and the availability of replacement bulbs, its pole bolted in concrete and bending in the wind. Nothing grows on this moon but mould, mould dead insects adhere to, as meanwhile Scherzo leans on a fence. His co-star in this production is none other that Roma Palmer, only begotten daughter of the well-known futurist, fish-eater and flautist, Ernest, whose works have inspired millions to ignorance. Roma is a blonde young thing with breasts like melons and a liking for Player's Navy Cut. It takes a team of horses to wash and dress her of a morning, to squeeze her into her Levi's prior to each performance. A nice girl, his agent has reassured him.

Scherzo enters via the gate where a stone security guard whose uniform is too small for him gives our hero the once-over, pokes him electronically and gestures.

'Trepan, eh?'

'Yep,' says Scherzo.

'Movie star, eh?' The guard isn't impressed, thinks our boy a weed.

'Yep,' says Scherzo, practising a few rapier strokes.

'Going to rescue the maiden, eh?'

'Yep.'

'Free her from the slimy aliens, eh?'

'Yep.'

Seen the play, eh? Saw the ad in the paper, eh? Think you can act, eh? Well, let me tell you somethin', buster...'

'Is there a problem, Sam?' Whoa, it's the director or some such; least ways, imagines Scherzo, adopting a stance, angered by this fellow's attitude, this oaf's resentment, bruised by his security manner, least ways some such as can lube the rails an' git this vehicle rollin'...

So what he do, our hero, when Rapunzel let down her hair?

50

The cat rises from its nap and hunts around the dark space. There's warm sweat between its furred cat cheeks, under its cat tail. There's warm sweat between its cat ears, enfolding its cat tongue. It hunts around the dark space for its underpants and T-shirt, jeans and training shoes of the Velcro sealing kind as the cat has yet to master laces. In the light, any light, its cat coat is unmistakably marmalade. And in the light, any light, it dreams of impossible sloth and perfectly slanted windowsills. Its cat name is Staples; just Staples for now, as we're on first name terms. Its cat hero, naturally, is Behemoth of Moscow flat fame, and its favourite foods, this marmalade cat's, are Sugarpuffs and chocolate.

Purring, betimes like a machine.

51

Scherzo Trepan stared long and hard at the address on the paper, printed in black ink and torn from the Evening Chronicle, handed to him by Wilson Hives who had not given up smoking and who still demanded to be let in via Scherzo's jammed window. Scherzo himself had moved out of the house on several occasions but always felt more comfortable and relaxed when he was in, being, he reasoned, closer to Annie, who had dropped dead, closer to his father who he could not remember. The bus pulling away wrapped him in choking blue-grey smoke. He felt like he was in a movie already, abandoned on a lonely station platform sometime in the forties, just back from the front, etched out in monochrome, the light of stars painted and the buildings scissored from cereal packets, reversed, vague doors and windows drawn on, a token drainpipe straw, some cotton-wool, the hero a shell-shocked soldier (say that fast) coming to terms with his life after death, weary of adventure, propelled by a wicked uncle into the unforgiving, celluloid night. There was a hum of electronic wizardry, cameras rolling, his train pushed out of shot to the sound of a tin whistle, his thoughts likewise receding round a bend - but perhaps when this day was over he might catch that same bus home.

The future was still there to be built. Scherzo did not agree with the obvious propaganda. What had the aliens done to deserve such a bad press? Newspapers were one thing; but a film, admittedly low budget, supposedly documenting their heinous crimes? Would he get to wobble about in a rubber suit raping virgins? Wow, cute.

He needed the job, the money. Since his cheques had dried up he'd lived off gold fillings accidentally swallowed, unknowingly evacuated by anonymous commuters onto the railway line situated in the wilds to the rear of his kitchen window, in that half-formed space yon side of the hedge which in places resembled an aeroplane and a walrus.

But what was here, about him now? Images of the incinerator plant stirred in his head. Derelict, a victim of recession, huge piles of contaminated rubble, metal and brick. Black dust of coals, closed worlds of compacted jungle, stood in the air like the shadows of ages past. Scherzo walked the fallen length of a rotten fence, wire-tangled and decomposing, releasing its soul of wood, ducked under a sign at a gate and knocked where the sign instructed. A stone security guard poked a square face out of a cracked window. 'You an extra?'

'Yes,' Scherzo replied, uncertain.

'Follow the yellow arrows. Don't touch anything. Shooting starts at nine.'

There had once been coke ovens, a furnace. Suppressed animosity, coaxed from its hole by these reminders, interfered with his forward vision.

Shaking loose the reverie, logging that animosity's burrow, he followed the yellow indicators, tripping once over a strung rope before finding himself sat one side of an unstable wooden table in a dingy, equipment-stacked tent.

'Name?'

'Trepan.'

'Age?'

'What's this movie about?'

'Do you play any instruments? Harmonica? Piano?'

'Guitar - a little.'

'No good. Pay's eight-fifty an hour.'

'Eight hours a day?'

The man on the other side of the table smiled. 'Seldom.' Then, 'Any infectious diseases? You'll appreciate we have to ask.'

'None.'

'Okay.' He chewed his pen, mumbled, said, 'You're on time; that's something. Follow the red arrows to the fitting tent.'

'Name?'

'Trepan.'

'Height?'

'What's this movie about?'

'A hero. What else?'

'And all the aliens get killed, right?'

'Right; they're the bad guys.'

'And the good guy?'

'He's tall, blond, tanned, muscular, looks great in shorts - if you know what I mean. Stand still will you. You here to act or rewrite? Troubles, troubles!'

This must be movie talk, thought Scherzo, as the tape-man rambled and jotted notes.

'Here, try this on.' A gangrenous mask, something that moved nosily in a bucket.

Scherzo peered out through gill slits, a cork bung wedged tight up each nostril and a mouth full of antiseptic chewing gum. His worst fears realized, but there was worse to come. The set afforded outlines of bloody invasion, was strewn with corpses in various states of disassembly, stinking (why so much odour for a movie?) of death illegal and imported. There were inflatable cars inflated with combustible gases. No-one was without matches. Scherzo kept his between his toes. Follow the blue arrows, they'd instructed, and stand on the X.

For five hours he waited to be run over by the hero in a smoking orange Transit van with the windows blacked out and the wheels sporting metal dentures.

And that was the end of Scherzo's film career. Maybe.

52

'Here, put this on.'

'What is it?'

'Radiation suit. Hurry.'

The prisoner complied. He had no choice; they made his decisions for him, had since birth, the mundane and everyday as well as the more important if similarly attired vital hinges of destiny, his own and other's. He was possessed of only sham discretion. When encased in white plastic, noded by yellow tubes and red valves, clear pipes containing graded powders, they opened, from a safe distance, barricaded behind thick glass, the hatch. They wanted him to crawl down there for a purpose the importance of which was stressed. They instructed him to do it, perform this task like it were any ordinary duty, and he was powerless, unwilling even, to hang back. So over the edge the prisoner went. There was no true ladder, but a series of metal rungs embedded in slick and leafy concrete. The hatch closed above, locked automatically, sealing him in darkness.

A light came on. 'Okay, you can take the suit off now. You're through.'

'Uh?' The prisoner gazed around, amazed.

'You heard: take it off. Go ahead, this is it, what you've been preparing for all this time, a world outside the world. You're free! Free of freedom. Get it? We're releasing you to your task, child of adhesion. And good luck to you.'

He took off the burdensome suit like they told him, wondering what his task might be and whether to bury it. The voice of years was no more in his head. Beside him was a tree, a massive oak, and in the distance, lined in rows, were houses; or, more accurately (the word gave him a strange feeling inside) homes.

This was it, he realized, the actual.

But where to go from here?

He started walking, at once excited and nervous, marvelling endlessly at his good fortune, at the blueness of the open sky and the greenness of the abundant grass. Never had he been sandwiched between two such things.

It must have been early morning when he arrived, as the sun climbed and the shadows shortened as he wandered, dragging the bulky radiation suit behind him like a security blanket. His feet became increasingly sore, not having shoes. He wore short trousers of blue cotton and a flouncy cream shirt. He walked through built up areas, the battered outskirts of an industrial town, new developments and old coagulating into streets that tasted first of brick dust, second turpentine. All this the ex-prisoner took in, absorbing light like a leech absorbs blood. Passers-by smiled at him as they would any small child. One old lady even went so far as to ruffle bony fingers through his curly brown hair. But none of these actions, unfamiliar as they were, puzzled him. What did puzzle him was Scherzo, who he found face down among some shrubs, apparently hiding from several tall men in black uniforms. The child was attracted by his frightened stare, the expression of sheer chaos that had moulded his unpleasant features into the semblance of a telephone. You could dial his teeth and lift his nose, the child thought, climbing alongside the prone, you could press his ear to your own and listen to the ocean.

'Sch...' Scherzo whispered, an index finger to his mouth. 'You'll give me away.'

After a while the telephone sighed and turned to regard the boy with X-ray eyes. 'What's your name, kid?'

'I don't have one.'

'That's too bad. Where do you live?'

'Inside - or I used to.' He scratched his head in much the same way as the old lady had.

So did Scherzo. 'How old are you?'

'I don't know.'

'You don't know?' By now, however, Scherzo had noticed the white suit and its yellow nodes. 'You must be a spaceman,' he said.

That sounded about right to the child, who nodded, satisfied that he'd discovered one sufficiently confused to be able to see the truth for what it was. 'Are those men after you?' he asked, making himself comfortable on the soil.

Scherzo frowned, a strange business for a telephone. 'I'll tell you later.'

'How do you know I'll be around later?' inquired the child, planting overheated toes.

'I don't,' Scherzo told him. 'Now go home.'

Tears welled to spill down those cherub cheeks.

Scherzo groaned.

But you can always cure a kid with a hamburger, and this kid proved no exception, gluing the meaty remains to his face and licking his greasy fingers. Then he farted. 'Animal protein, right? Never tasted anything like it.'

'You've never had a hamburger before?'

'Not that I remember,' the kid replied, gazing longingly at the counter with its menu board. 'I knew they were made from cows, but I'd never tasted one until now.'

Scherzo leaned back in his chair. He'd met weirdoes before; best not to act surprised. 'You want to try a kebab,' he said. 'They'll really blow your mind.'

'Well,' answered the kid, slurping his Coke, 'what are we waiting for? Let's go.'

53

Saturday arrived. Saturday April 20. Scherzo, whose favourite day had always been Saturday, awakened warm and stiff among cardboard, toilet roll, plastic bags and sundry - polystyrene and other - packaging, breathing hoarsely the wasted air that circulated through an entanglement of fish 'n' chip wrapping. Verily, he thought, a nest.

The light was pale and yellow and crept about him as if mixed with honey. His skin itched uncontrollably. He wasn't convinced his eyes were all the way open. He scratched, stabbing his flesh with blunt curls of nail. He sneezed and his bed, the brittle crust of it, disintegrated, turning in part to a crystalline powder, sugarlike sleep from a giant's eyelids, noiseless as it shattered minutely against the hard bare boards of the floor.

Scherzo Trepan chewed his nails and unplugged his ears and nostrils. Sound was mostly absent, but the smell, his smell, was moist and repugnant. He shook his head, sorting his senses, electrocuted his brain and made for the toilet. That out of the way, flushed unsuccessfully as the water had become one with everything green in the universe, Scherzo attempted to run a bath. The walls shook. There were no carpets, no furniture. All had been disconnected. He returned downstairs and sifted through the litter of his marathon hibernation. Newspapers lay inches deep behind the front door. He examined the latest, recognizing neither the language nor the composition; only the date. The words were alien, the pictures dark and confusing, the quality of both print and paper abysmal. Searching through back issues it was possible to trace the journal's depreciation over two decades, the earliest copies brown and faded, yet more legible than the latest. And they numbered in the thousands. There was a stack of colour supplements in the corner, the last edition unread like the first, now a stone tablet due to the sedimentary pressures above.

Scherzo moved to open the mildewed curtains. Taking one in each hand, the material tearing, he hesitated, then opened them a notch to view through grime and desiccated insects the imposing turbulence of the hedge. Craning his loud neck he saw this vegetation to be as tall as the house. At its base, boles like elephants' ankles rehearsing ballet steps, was a sludge of tinfoil take-away receptacles, dead cats, part consumed fruit, traffic cones, feathers and beer cans, boots, moccasins, flippers, two crash helmets and a tennis racket. The occasional coin glimmered in this omelette. Batteries, condoms used and unused yet stripped of their packets (parachutes that had failed to open), ring pulls, cigarette ends, baby soothers, sweet packets, cassette tapes, broken and unravelled, and even a viola made their home here among gnarled feet and wooden toes, the hedge obviously thriving on a rich mulch of cast-offs and imaginatively served up passers-by. No graveyard spruce of longbow-potential yew was better sited.

He closed the curtains, shutting that world out and giving closer scrutiny to this. There was only the bed, its mattress buried like late night shoppers and stray children midst the roots of the external fortifications, beneath layers of dire, productive rubbish. Nothing else. The air was dry. His was the sole occupying force. The chimney-breast was naked brick, the fire surround scraped of varnish, leaving painful scars in the oak. As if it had been decontaminated, Scherzo thought. Dressed in improbable pyjamas, he left to explore the rest of the house.

Annie's room was empty, missing footprints and shelves, fossils and books. He sat on the creaking floor and scratched his face. He had not grown a beard. The room he had last seen Wilson occupy possessed not so much as a door. A gust of wind rattled the window, loose in its square mooring, a bleak outward reality shaking itself in readiness for the full cloak of spring, the fragrance of daffodils, the splendour of damp foliage and the rising of ghosts.

He couldn't get the front door open and the back way seemed a poor bet, so, dressed in remnants pulled cautiously from the airing cupboard, Scherzo broke his downstairs window and exited through that, tackling the Great Hedge full on and sinking in it, a quagmire about his feet. But he found shoes large enough to skim across the swamp's thin veneer and a rusty spanner among the death which he employed in the dismantling of twigs and branches, assailing the hedge from its vulnerable, unarmoured rear. Skeletons of lost explorers lay herein, hanged on the scaffolding of cobwebs.

Much abused, he fell to the pavement and gazed round at the rubble. There was certainly a lot of it: houses collapsed onto cars, cars pinning plastic tricycles and once flesh and blood pets. Scherzo walked as if going to work at the incinerator plant, slipping clumsily through the metal fence, between the leaning ash trees, discovering concrete and tarmac where once had undulated school fields and teenagers drunk. New houses stood here, abutting the fallen old, occupying blocks of the once grassy space Scherzo had crossed countless times as a lad, both in uniform and singular employment, always working for some government he failed to understand, enjoying pilfered cigarettes and, he imagined, sophisticated gropes. Nothing else. He soon lost his bearings, unprepared as he was for this development, shoulders hunched and soles a-flap as he wound between spotless, de-personalized dwellings, eyes peeled for any visible landmark between smooth-walled garages and mock Tudor facades. Anonymous and somehow disturbing; due, he supposed, to the width of their doors. Finding a downward path he followed it to its conclusion at a blank wall eight or ten metres high and topped with shards of green bottle glass and gleaming razor-wire. There were no signs to suggest what lay beyond the frontier. The houses had been constructed in such a manner that even from a distance it had been impossible to see the wall for what it was, much less past it, say, if you had known it to be there and stood on a dustbin several hundred metres up the road. There was no gate, no opening. The barrier rose impassively at the edge of the world. The edge of human dominion? he wondered. Which side? It had to be negotiated. Scherzo had already seen off one impenetrable fortification that morning, his first in so long. It was still early and he was willing to bet no human or unhuman eye peered as yet at any emulsioned ceiling. Time had slowed to a crawl.

The wall stood before Scherzo, thick and defiant. How was he to get over? Pole vault? Stretch elastic between lamp-posts, the nearest glowing dimly, and catapult himself across? Tie springs to his new old shoes? No, he reasoned, too comic-book; too difficult. He wouldn't go over the wall, but under.

To that end Scherzo raised a manhole cover. Feet and hands to the metal rungs embedded in slick concrete he began a descent, dragging the metal cover back in place above and sealing his body in absolute blackness, iron blocking light, flesh adhering to cold steel as gingerly he made his way inward. The abrupt lack of anything tangible to focus on was disorientating. He was forced to pause more than once to convince himself of his body's direction, that gravity wasn't playing tricks on him. His fingers numbed. After a few minutes he had to slap the rungs in order to feel them. His feet seemed distant, as if they'd gone on ahead. He listened for water but heard none. He doubted the tunnel's verticality. Colours assailed his mind, glossy blotches which echoed the hedge and disturbed his stomach. He grew dizzy. Air left him in bubbles. The water he'd listened for had slipped unnoticed over his head.

54

Benedict heaved himself over the gunwale and flopped into the rocking boat, exhausted.

He'd tried to kill himself, by drowning. But there was no escaping Rebecca and her death, the time and moment of it, no way of scaling that overhanging face, the wall he hit and rebounded off. The river would always bring him back, pump him out, leave him alive.

Face it, Roy, you don't want to die, you just want to know if you killed your wife, if you're guilty of that crime. You want the memory returned, to be certain one way or the other if you had such a memory in the first place.

Missing an oar he paddled upstream. Multicoloured birds exploded from the crowded trees on either bank, the sun painting the tips of branches and wings.

To be greeted by lamplight, Rebecca in her rocking-chair glimpsed through the screen doors.

'Rebecca?'

'In here,' she called, reading.

'I had the strangest feeling,' Benedict told her, stepping wetly inside. 'I was on the river, drifting, when I suddenly felt something pass overhead; like a shadow, only denser. It shook the boat. I was scared for you.'

His wife peered over the rim of her book. 'You're soaked, Roy,' she said calmly; 'you're dripping.'

Benedict was frozen by her eyes, impaled on their haunted lustre.

'Why don't you take a shower,' she suggested.

'Will you come with me?'

Rebecca's eyes dropped once more to the page. 'Really, Roy, don't be such a baby.' Then, as he made his way to the bathroom. 'I'll bring you a clean towel.'

55

Doctor Mood stood in awe of the library. He had come upon it by accident, followed a draught through the normally draughtless castle, gathering up leaves. Something about the square room reminded him of his grandmother, its books wrinkled and its breath metallic, her spine prominent beneath leathery skin, her skull containing as many tight-printed pages as were assembled here, crammed into volumes of varying thickness like stained, ancient teeth on bowed, gumlike shelves. Was there a gap here corresponding to grandma's pharmacopoeia? Would he be held accountable for any fine, that book overdue by years? Lifetimes? The doors closing of their own accord the doctor walked to the library's centre where rested a writing desk distorted by age, replete with ink and pens. He perched on the adjacent stool and took a sheet of paper from a drawer. There was nothing specific he wished to write. Anyway, the dull gold nib tore the paper, which, on examination, appeared pressed from white sand, crumbling like a wafer biscuit under his thumb.

Lice shifted excitedly in his fur. That told him something; hinted, rather, as lice were notoriously unsure, not wanting to commit themselves short of indisputable fact. Sliding off the stool he strode along the shelves and picked a volume at random - although it was possible the book followed him about the room - gathering more leaves to his person. What use these might be had yet to be remedied; perhaps they would provide roofs for worms. The book's cover was a faded blue, its title unreadable. But on opening the fragile volume he discovered it to be a history of gods, their labours, loves, misfortunes, victories, arguments, sojourns, sonnets, betrayals. Greek and Roman were their names. Doctor Mood, however, saw them differently, gave them other features and affixed other epitaphs to their graves. He sat reading for hours, missing only his cigars. He sat reading aloud to the members of this splendid library, to the mites of flesh and floor, carpets long and shorn. And every one of them, from the surliest opus to the sprightliest tick, sat with him, listening attentively to his tale of Pluto and Persephone.

56

The mutants poked him with sticks that may once have been fingers. Mostly they wore heavy cowls. The few that displayed their faces did so either out of menace or sympathy. Not one of them said anything, but he guessed this to be a cell of the resistance.

Scherzo Trepan's ribs ached. They must have pumped several gallons out of him, the man who thought he was a fish.

Some of their number shuffled off down a conduit. Others melted to left and right, squat figures wrapped in balls of dreary yellow luminescence. Two remained, one grinning, visible as the second struck a match and lit a recycled candle, its colour thin and translucent, its shape undecided, its mellow flame softening the prevailing brick, lending it chalkier contours, whereas the oil lamps had provided a gritty illumination. The sewer appeared less hostile in this light, the walls less likely to collapse.

Scherzo was appreciative of the distinction.

'You took a bump on the head,' the grinning mutant stated.

'I did?' answered Scherzo. 'I don't remember.'

'You're lucky to be alive. If we hadn't found you, you'd have drowned.'

His companion the match lighter mumbled something incoherent.

The grinning nodded. 'If you're a spy,' he threatened, 'we may kill you yet.'

'And if I'm not?'

'Then we'll want to know your purpose.'

Fair enough. Scherzo explored his beardless features. There was stubble there now.

The candlelight exposed a shelf of slimy concrete about a metre wide on which the grinning and the cowled sat like schoolboys round an illicit fire. Scherzo half expected one of the other to spark up a dog-end and pass it between them, all chewed nails and crooked thumbs, leafing through a glossy magazine with pinched cheeks and creased torsos. He was situated on a similar shelf on the opposite shore of a murky channel, a narrow highway of capering rats and turds, the leap-frogging traffic of gutters and drains.

The place stunk. Perhaps it was his own stench which enabled him to remain in control, to remain alive. Perhaps his fantastic odour had persuaded the mutants of some latent worth, a potential comrade.

His shoes were missing. Stolen? He glanced at his inquisitors' feet. There were five, each buckled into a battered sandal.

'Where are you from?'

'Portland Road.'

'They demolished Portland Road.'

'Not my house they didn't.'

'What's your name?'

'Trepan - Scherzo Trepan.'

'And your mother's name?'

He made no reply, having forgotten. It came as a surprise, this lack of memory. He wondered how complete it was.

'Where'd you go to school, Scherzo Trepan?'

'I don't remember.'

'How old are you? Where do you work?'

'I don't know.'

'You don't know much. You know who I am?'

'No.'

'Good.'

The cowled figure whispered something in the grinning's ear.

'What are you doing down here?'

Scherzo recalled. 'Getting past the wall.'

'The wall?'

'I wanted to see what was on the other side.'

The grinning looked puzzled. 'Why?'

'The river used to be over there; the open country.' Adding, 'I haven't been around for a while.'

The grinning wiped his nose on his sleeve, bent it back into position. 'You expect us to believe that, that you haven't been around for a while? You know how preposterous that sounds? Tell him, Archie.'

The cowled bent forward, leaning over the quiet stream. 'You're lying.'

'See?' the grinning said. 'Archie reads minds.'

'Oh yeah?' responded Scherzo. 'In that case, if I'm lying, why'd you rescue me in the first place?' He hoped an answer was forthcoming.

The grinning cupped large hands round the flickering candle, releasing the dark. 'Because,' he related, 'Scherzo Trepan.' All but snuffing that flame. 'We believe you're mad...'

And madness is sacred.

The light was killed. Darkness crowded into Scherzo's head like a troop of Brownies into an elevator, their cymbal-like squawks and sticky digits unhooking the emergency telephone and blowing the fuses of his brain, their merit badges and petty rivalries the cause of blockages in his sensory apparatus, the blunt and sharp instruments upon which he relied. He settled on all fours, imitating the rodents (the turds were legless after all those curves), and felt the cold damp stone. He could no longer smell the candle, which led him to think the grinning and the cowled had abandoned him, mad or otherwise, to the vagaries of the absolute and the forced wisdom of the blind.

57

Sweltering in heavy green parka, Theodore Dreep, college journalist and murderer, decided to pause a while. The black man had vanished on an errand of his own, becoming invisible among the sturdy limbs, a non-stationary growth amid insatiable vegetable reproduction.

Dreep imagined he could hear the trees fucking, stripping one another of virginal bark. But it was only the breeze, a low, telegraphed soughing.

Nevertheless, deep in the folds of his clothing, Theodore possessed an erection.

The forest appeared to go on forever, the world turned over to acorns and blossom. It wasn't just a single blossom, either, but a complex, irregular blend of every wood and jungle that had ever existed. It had its cold areas and its warm, was an amalgam of temperatures and average rainfalls. The pair travelled roughly south, and as they did so the balance shifted in favour of broadleafs, exotic hardwoods increasing in volume whereas farther north these grew in isolated clumps or stood alone. This far south (it would be impossible to say what latitude or how long it had taken them to walk) there were only a handful of Douglas fir and other evergreens, most of which Dreep, with his limited arboreal knowledge, failed to recognize. Where ten or more grew together there was snow in the air; but such unwelcome reminders of his arctic nightmare were becoming less common. Instead, outsized insects buzzed at head height, as colourful as they were bizarre.

They'd followed the sun at approaching ninety degrees and daily the sun had slowed, the forest grown denser, stickier, more humid. Daily the animal life had thinned to extinction on the ground and the air become sluggish in their lungs. One creature stayed with them, however, glimpsed occasionally through misshapen branches. Poorman, the white shadow, raw, naked, stretching the cold, carrying it southward with him, the icicle man. His breath frosted, killing flowers, the onetime research station commandant. He floated like a ghost to their rear, working harder now to keep up, busier in the cool of night than during the metal day, circling the lonely hours before dawn when Dreep would habitually throw another log on the fire.

On the river bank that same Dreep hunched down, stared at his bulky reflection in the placid water and came to a decision. Poorman aside he knew himself to be alone, but still he gazed nervously left and right to confirm that no-one was watching before he began, slowly and painfully, to remove his clothing.

He lay supine in the tall grass and tugged firstly at the stubborn zip of his parka, feeling as if he was yanking the stitches from and unhealed wound. The zip gave a few teeth at a time. The fur lining yawned, spread its silver tentacles like the current-spun barbs of a sea-anemone, spines touched with orange, tickling the atmosphere whose heat lubricated the process by which the stiffened garment was levered from Dreep's forgotten body. The parka open, those spines turned a garish red as the light splashed across the sweater beneath, the whole resembling the slit guts and gills of an enormous fish. Colours moved like digestive juices, leaked and spilt. The rasping of his throat accompanied that of his upper limbs as he dragged his encumbered arms from their protective tubes. Theodore felt vulnerable without his armour, yet was cognizant of the fact that he had outgrown its usefulness. Next he loosened the belt of his trousers, leather and metal and plastic cracking, and carefully slipped them over his gaunt hips. The immediacy of flesh below knuckles was a curious sensation, the barriers reduced to thermal layers. He had to sit up to pull off his boots, their absence then allowing him to remove the cumbersome trousers altogether. Dreep tossed them away like the diseased pelt of some improbable mammal. The boots collapsed and died. Tiring, he wrenched the blood-red sweater from the grip of his chest, peeled it off his shoulders, eventually pulled it loose of his skull, the ears holding on till the last, stretched tall like antlers. He rested a short time in his stained underwear before crawling through the grass to the river's edge. Overlooking the water Theodore finally shed the last vestiges of his adopted skins, leaving himself bare and sore. Then he slithered like a newborn alligator into the depthless water.

He drank of it, let it fill his wasted body, bobbed on the bright surface as the renewing liquid permeated his dour flesh and bloated his starved organs. There could not have been more than six pints of consanguineous fluid in him. His muscles grew fat; his joints were oiled. He grazed the river. The gentle swell bore him downstream, while above him soared the endless canopy whose harboured birds were never seen to descend below tree height, fantastic glints among the greenery, spread wings of blue and yellow, amber and pink and orange, red and purple and gold, presenting to his eyes a parade of cloudy visions...

Woodtoe, known as Blinder, climbed the tallest tree he could find. To the south the forest darkened as if overhung by the anvil of a storm, hinting at a deceptive uniformity, while to the north the trees looked farther apart, wider spaced, more acutely defined, as if their presence were a detailed illusion, a painted background, a border to reality that was heading toward him. Also, southward, cutting a notch in the sky, a rocky prominence disturbed the verdant regularity of the horizon, its discernible crown dressed stone and its lofty station dominating the green world. An ideal place for a fortress. Blinder strained his eyes to the outcrop. The topmost branches to which he clung swayed as he moved. It was impossible for him to remain motionless. To do so would mean planting himself in the powdery earth and patiently stringing out the years in the hope that he might grow sufficiently tall to see over the massed heads of his woody brethren. A sacrifice he was not ready to make, the advantages of his present mobility far outweighing those of a life, however long, fixed permanently in the ground. He was about to descend when a silhouette, that of an ungainly bird, crossed the shallow, day-enhanced moon, heading for the fortress on its rocky plinth and alighting there in a commotion of metre-wide feathers. The aviator's flight and landing were clumsy, off-balance. Blinder smiled, for this was no ordinary roost. The huge bird was the affirmation he sought of the castle's occupancy.

Quickly he clambered down. Juggling fruits and cones, full of himself but with Poorman not far behind, Blinder rushed to locate Dreep and tell him the news. But all he could find of the skinny white man were the flaky casts of dead clothes.

58

An angel led our masked avenger to believe that the way ahead was fraught with danger and that only the brave might hope to survive, which did a lot for Scherzo's ego but little to boost his confidence in things inherently divine. By now he was sure he had passed beyond the wall and in doing so entered the underground realm of the transcendental. None of which was new to Trepan. The blackness he suffered served to goad his memory, that memory to produce images of death and Hellfire. Already he sensed a probing warmth caressing his bones. It would get steadily hotter. The sewer wound inexorably, but with the angel's help he managed three correct turns out of four. As did the mutant resistance tailing him. He wondered if they'd planned this expedition in advance or were simply taking advantage of his coming. Scherzo felt like some biblical figure - in reverse, as he was leading the rag-draped innocents into the stinking bowels of dread perdition. He couldn't think what they hoped to achieve by entering the furnace. Who knows, maybe they intended to extinguish it.

One thing was for sure; theirs was a volunteer workforce.

59

No wonder the sun stood still. Unlike blue-green Pulchritude upon which everything was forced to keep moving lest it be eaten, the planet itself vulnerable, forever enacting death on its lumpy surface in order to forestall the transfixing of its lonely heart, the sun, a G2 sub-dwarf, was a great butter churn just waiting to be dipped into, spread copiously on a variety of space-faring loaves and ultimately tongues, fuel for the stomachs and engines that thrived on such transportational plunder. Presland Bill, ensconced in his subterranean passion parlour, might mourn its passing, as it represented a splendid combustion, but as a casualty of war, his war, he would remain indifferent. Besides, there were more pressing matters occupying Pluto at that moment, like the mysterious disappearance of his beloved.

At which point the doctor stopped reading. The silence was short lived. The same draught he had followed here gently edged the library doors open. Dust motes gathered imploringly about his thick ankles and leaves green and gold joined the numerous tomes in a rustling agitation.

Grandma, he thought, is that you?

60

A dank mist slowly obscured the city. Twilight squeezed the mist to earth, the yellow street-lamps burning fitful holes through its clammy obstinacy. Lousy weather for cats, but there were plenty abroad.

Walking upright, in trench coat and Homburg, a singular tom dropped in at The Odd One Out for a jar and a gawp at the natives. He paid with money earlier stolen from a cigarette machine alone and unprotected in the train station foyer across several merging streets, his pockets satisfyingly full at this moment with dull gold coins. It was his first real opportunity to take a close look at the planet's indigenous life, having previously been too busy dodging Pearce and his globular flunkies. They were, all three, the man and his subordinates, still around somewhere. Of course, they could travel in neither space nor time without him.

For the immediate future then, Staples was free.

So he smiled his best cheesy smile, licked his whiskers and ordered another drink.

Back home on Formalhaut Staples spent his time in sleepy contemplation. There wasn't much else to do on a world nature had tamed to the point of removing all sharp edges and ensuring there was always a plentiful growth of Soft Landing Bushes under any precipice more than tail high. Life on Formalhaut was quiet, not to say boring. Nothing was born and nothing died; anything new had simply changed from being something else. Then Austin Pearce arrived. At first it was assumed Pearce was the altered condition of a resident, but that was before his peculiar behaviour attracted the attention of some of the more socially aware allotropes. Staples' curiosity became aroused when the newcomer began constructing a villa on his favourite hillside; moreover, on a large flat rock surrounded by complimentary amber blossoms, that, no matter the cloud cover and regardless of the presence of rain, was always just the right temperature. Clearly something had to be done. And yet, like most allotropes, Staples had never taken action on anything greater than a digestive scale. He was nonplussed. On Formalhaut there was no cause, as anything done could as easily be undone. The newcomer's villa, however, was fixed and permanent, alien to the landscape and existentially moored.

Someone nudged him in the ribs.

61

In his hotel room, 4H behind pointed ear, Austin Pearce, late of Renny's utility cupboard, cut a slice from his pie chart and placed it on the glass top of the coffee table. That left four slices: gravity 172 degrees, cosmic rays, primary 49 degrees, secondary 26 degrees, light, velocity of 108 degrees.

Average sectional divisions as far as the yonderscope and four-dimensional space were concerned. But the fifth slice, local phenomena, had risen to an unprecedented 93 degrees, wherein lay his difficulties. He was stuck. What was worse, the present he was stuck in was twenty years behind the actual present of Pulchritude. And the universe, he felt sure, was experiencing perturbations in his absence.

Pearce left the room and clomped down the marble steps with its brass-fettered carpet. He hit the smudged night through the revolving doors. The blue globe and the green, fused together in a mute yellow, bobbed to his rear like a helium balloon on a string. He'd called off their pursuit of the orange in the hope that that entity would return of its own accord. It would get hungry, he reasoned. It knew little of terrestrial supermarkets. He'd rather not think about the trouble it could find itself in. Right now Austin was headed back to Renny's and his machine, the malfunction of which had left him stranded and his chief transmogrifier on the loose. Anything could happen.

Taking a taxi to the remembered address he approached the door, picked the lock using a string of violet pearls, walked the short length of the hall, reading from the glinting dust that Renny had not been home for some days; confirmation of an earlier hunch, when, the previous morning, the sun had briefly ceased to move across the sky. The yonderscope shone dimly in the curtained rectangle of the front room. Thankful, Pearce adopted the position. He toed the levers and tugged the wires, breathed on the mirrors and tapped the dials, buffing one and all with his soft elbow patches. Everything appeared to be in order. Nothing had been tampered with. Relaxing in the fold of burgundy leather he patiently subtracted logarithms.

The phone rang.

Disgruntled, Pearce answered it in the hope of securing information, a clue to those phenomena by which he was bound to this lethargic continuum.

What he obtained from the anonymous caller was a lot of ear-splitting static and a bus route number.

Not much to go on, admittedly, but a beginning.

62

The world was upside-down, north was south and west east. He stood in a clearing, armour blazing, and gazed up at the sun. Down his left arm trickled dew spilled from cups of purple and white blooms. Jewels of pure water slid gracefully over the burnished silver of pauldron and vambrace. His right arm was coated from shoulder to wrist in rime. The clearing broadened, lush with grass till it met vertical stone.

Cast in every direction, the wanderer's shadow formed a circle round him. No curve or side of him was unlit, yet he stood in a pool of darkness.

He carried no weapon and spoke no word. Lowering his eyes he approached the cliff and began hammering with clenched metal fists upon the unyielding wall.

63

Nine inches from Scherzo's twitching nose the sandwich in its clear plastic bag brought him to a sudden and unexpected halt. The bag with the sandwich in it sat in a puddle of light so vivid he had to squint at the complex of shapes from an acute angle until his eyes adjusted to the unaccustomed. Nothing else was remotely visible, just the sandwich, the plastic bag whose interior shone with delicious condensation, and a disc of slick concrete two hand breadths across. The light came from a point far overhead, the merest pin-hole at the top of an invisible shaft. His stomach rumbled. When had he eaten last? What year? It took a considerable effort to pull back the hand that, unknown to Scherzo, had reached for the plastic. Teeth gritted, he sat cross-legged, contemplating the sandwich and whether or not in represented a legitimate meal. He dare not take the risk, he thought. Who had placed it there if not the Devil? For what purpose? It had to be a trap. He leaned forward, face nearly touching the alluring package. Sniffed. The bread was thick cut and liberally centred, the filling beef and salad. He could make out slices of tomato and cheese and pepper and onion. It was with a solemn reluctance that he passed.

The darkness closed, a perfect black. The image of the sandwich floated through his mind, almost as if it were still before his eyes. Scherzo was tempted to turn back. But he held fast.

A short time later he came upon a second puddle of light as smoothly beguiling as the first. Again the light had its source high above and again he squinted against its brightness. He approached with due caution, but there was no hostile movement. Magnificently illuminated was a swan-necked decanter of spangled vermilion wine and a matching bowl of plump fruit. Apple, orange, banana, pear, grape. Ripe. Juicy. Scherzo's throat could barely stand the onslaught. His mouth was dry and his tongue swollen. The wine blazed and the fruit gleamed. He could almost taste them. Tiny rainbows danced on the sparkling rim of a glass, begging his lips to join. The skins of apple, pear and grape implored his roughened teeth to slice them, to swim in their succulence. The orange and banana looked as if they would peel themselves, he had only to take them up.

Scherzo declined the offer. He carefully rounded this luscious obstacle and padded on his way, every organ of his body complaining, joining a grumbling symphony, every muscle of his frame that bit heavier, threatening an overtime ban. But he remained unflinching in the face of these enticements.

Pushing all thoughts of sustenance from his writhing brain, which had shrunk through dehydration and rattled in a tuneless cranium, Scherzo increased his speed in an effort to leave food and drink behind, beyond imperfect memory. He proceeded in a straight line, or so he imagined, as his blindness was absolute once more.

But then came the first hints of a weakening: stray photons exploded into his consciousness; a vague grey area intruded on the peripheries; and far off, in the subjective centre, glowed a further light, stronger than the others, radiating a starry corona of inducement. He couldn't ignore it. There was no way round. On drawing closer he shaded his eyes. A pot of gold kindled the pungent air, spreading the beam from above in countless fans of harmonious luminosity. Even the slime on the walls looked good. The shimmering gold improved everything it touched. Scherzo found himself next to it and the pot came up to his knees, as wide as a bathtub and overflowing with radiant doubloons. That it was a bribe was obvious. But one so generous? He had no wish to plunge his fingers into all that precious metal. So, eyes half shut, averted to combat the hypnotic glare of its millions, Scherzo Trepan braced himself against the concave brickwork and pushed with his naked feet the pot that promised so much, the sky and the earth, but could deliver neither, as he learned from its false bottom and profusion of steam. The promise was empty, illusory. The coins tipped into the silent water, damming the stream for less than a second as the spurious wealth quickly reverted, shooting violent gases. The pot collapsed like a paper tyre-iron, its contents dissolving like aspirin, welcome relief for Scherzo's equally tawdry headache.

He was jubilant. Jumping up and down on the spot he whooped and screamed at the dark he'd succeeded in diluting. Hunger vanished from his innards and thirst melted from his gums as if he'd sucked to oblivion a whole pound of toffees. He shouted defiance till his feet hurt and his head grazed the ceiling, the flood of relief a flood of adrenaline as he stretched his arms and rubbed his belly and continued on his way, accompanied by the fading chorus of his echo.

Nothing though could have prepared him for what came next, for it was aimed at his neither his head nor his heart, but at his insidious loins.

64

Blinder cut a fresh twig, loosened its green bark and fashioned a whistle, piped his way through the increasingly contorted wood. He kept a scalpel along with sundry needles and other surgical implements in a pouch sewn from a gumtree leaf in the lining of his moss-woven jacket that was paired, seamlessly camouflaged, with a kilt the tartan of banyan and eucalyptus. He hadn't forgone his profession, simply adapted it to present needs. His feet were hard and bare, their toes curling into earth if he remained standing in one place for long. His ankles knotty, his knees runed, his lips layered in cork, Blinder crashed through the tangled, thorned, florid undergrowth with the authority of a bear.

From the ground the castle was invisible; but he had no further need of sun to guide him. Since Dreep's riparian disappearance Blinder had given himself over completely to the strange tugging of his bones, the very thing - a crazy desire to be buried alive, to shelter birds and befriend worms - he had fled to the Arctic to escape. Yet there was no escaping the truth, the fate etched in his palms, and the closer he came to the castle the stronger and more certain were his feelings for a genealogy less human than arboreal. Blinder was ebony, sturdy mahogany, thousand-year cedar, the fabled black oak.

He emerged from a stand of alder, the ground softening underfoot. If Blinder followed anything he followed the river. Here the land flattened and water pooled, becoming stagnant insect-hung factories of fetid mud. He passed close to a line of stilted mangroves, dragged himself hand over hand along lacy vines where his body sank as he waded. He never once glanced over his shoulder. He already knew what lay behind; Poorman, whispering between the admixture of trees like a fog. The surgeon cared little. He was interested solely in reaching his goal. True, he had a score to settle with the commandant, but that could wait. Everything had its time, its appointed hour. Distance alone separated them.

He took to the branches when the ground became impassable, swinging on creepers like his boyhood hero, Tarzan. The growing swamp exuded a sticky mist, a noxious cloud that made his head spin. But his grip was sure and he avoided falling, making it to firmer ground within sight of the towering edifice.

There was a clearing, an aisle of sweet blades leading up to the rock, its sudden eruption from the torn earth like a fist through glass.

Blinder stood before the vertical face, eyes rising to it, flesh stiffening the while. He felt a sharp pain in his groin, the bunch of it hanging like ripe forest fruit. The wall seemed impossible to climb. At the second stab he dropped to his knees, crying out. Fingers dug into his thighs. The grey-black stone loomed over him, dispassionate. Blinder raised his kilt. Between his legs was a fresh inflorescence scar. His genitals lay in the grass. He toppled, Woodtoe, the ligneous man of the north, the fast wasting tegument of his body to leak nutrients into the soil, aiding his ascent from seed up the precipice, there to conquer the battlements and dust leaves in the halls.

65

It was raining at the bus stop. The street was quiet. Austin pivoted impatiently on his toes, the dampness eating into him, the advancing night gloomy, the bus yet to show its flat nose round the suggested bend in the road. He stood with hands in pockets beneath the leaky shelter roof, corrugated iron and scratched Perspex rattling at each brief gust of wind, that same wind whipping the backs of his legs. Pearce was ignorant of the bus time-table. Not that such knowledge would make any difference. He was, however, beginning to sense ripples and trace their effects, tiny aberrations in the terse fabric of established reality as perceived at any one time, he estimated, by 93% of humanity. A host of unsolicited permutations were muscling in, like a number of people in the same suit of clothes. Disaster threatened. He flicked rain off his nose. Lights illuminated the crystal downpour and he stuck out an arm.

This was it, the bus.

Austin boarded, only mildly surprised at the lack of a driver. The pneumatically operated doors hissed shut and the bus rumbled off. He grabbed a buffed rail, steadied himself, advanced between empty seats. Peering out the rear window rewarded him with a view of endless spangled water. Someone tapped him on the shoulder and invited him to sit down.

Pearce sat.

'Not too warm, is it?'

'Quite,' said the yonder person, gazing at the figure with difficulty, its head with a hole like a chimney. 'And you are?'

'Mike,' Mike answered. 'It's nice to have somebody other than the conductor to talk to.'

The conductor? The way Mike spoke of the conductor spawned an array of half-legendary thoughts. 'I don't mean to be rude,' Austin inquired, 'but are you...'

'Alive? No, no - dead as a doornail. Blew my brains out. That was after I killed Art. See...'

'Art?'

'Yes. Arthur Mulligan, my sister's boyfriend and my chief rival.' He gave a I-can-laugh-about-it-now chortle. 'Poor Art haunts a phone box!'

Austin struggled to assemble the pieces. The man with the hole in his head fidgeted constantly, as if waiting for Pearce to ask him to explain, eager to indulge his rusted conversation.

The double-decker made for an odd confessional. It drove through the night and the rain without stopping, with barely a turn, the city malformed beyond pearly windows.

Mike was a child, a simple-minded child, his loves as his hates, tragically uncomplicated. At a sign from Austin, his elfin guest, a gesture of wrist, Mike spoke in engine tones, exhaust vibrations, seat thrums and drink's can rolls, his spirit diffused throughout this cumbersome vehicle. The bus was part of him, part of the rain, a phantom world unto itself. Pearce's attention was assured by the name Renata Shelmerdine. As he listened, focused on the ghost of brother Mike, he became more and more aware of a familial element to his (the universe's) predicament. The broadening picture to which Mike contributed (and ghosts cannot lie) seemed increasingly to embrace a finite number of individuals. But every number was finite; he needed to trace the leaves back to the twigs back to the boughs, and narrow those individuals down, boughs to trunk, trunk composed of rings, cylinders if you took the long view, slow telescopic shafts. And beyond the trunk lay the roots, each tendril and ganglion about which the world became the anti-world, perfectly mirrored, wherein lay the danger, as events reversed might grow equally complex.

Austin silenced Mike, joining lips and finger. Rising, he pressed the bell once.

'I have to go now, Mike.'

The ghost shrugged. 'That's okay.'

'Thanks for the story. I'm sorry you had an unhappy life. Better luck next time, eh?' He walked down the aisle and stood by the doors.

Mike looked away, distracted.

The bus stopped. The passenger stepped to the wet pavement. The bus rumbled from the curb, Mike waving.

Austin Pearce, late for every appointment, early for those that remained, tapped his chin as he made his way back to the hotel.

66

In Poorman's eyes the world was monochromatic and flat. He could press the palm of his pale hand against the screen. The screen was the ground he walked on, the sky above his head, the muted jungle to every side. He travelled in a hollow onion of clear ice. The ice insulated him from the burgeoning heat without, dampening that extreme to a tolerable sweat. It had taken Poorman several days and nights to accommodate himself thus. The black and white trees blurred together in a graduation of silvers and greys, smeared in places like action in an old photograph. The birds flapping in the bright canopy cast exaggerated shadows, themselves magical crows and ravens. Swarming insects registered on Poorman's sphere as interference. He would pass through their avid congregations adjusting his aerial.

Dreep taking to the river puzzled him. Saliva had collected in his mouth as he watched the collegiate newshound undress. It was the birth of a skinny, wingless moth. A bleached bug had killed Shin. The commandant's stained and yellow buddy had been murdered by a pupa. He would have liked to have avenged the cheroot smoker, but his quarry lay elsewhere. He was powerless in that respect.

The castle rose above Poorman, alabaster and charcoal, a complex of shades, steel and iron mimicking stone. It hunched on the earth amid the trees it dwarfed, as if sleeping, tantalizingly erect, a berg of weather-pocked granite, a spaceship, an alien transport the greater part of which was sunk below, concealed from casual inquiry. Poorman viewed the mass with suspicion. The image it presented somehow struck him as false, a sham of ink and chalk sketched on the upright wall of the world. Standing at its wide base he placed the flats of his hands against the cliff, palms as rock, sheer and hard, the proximity making of his globular screen a window. He pushed with all his strength, convinced he had the power to move it, positive that if he were to apply sufficient force, enough to overcome the mountain's inertia, he would be able to exploit his advantage, eventually driving the castle and its foundations over the lip of the obtainable horizon, to give to the void this gift.

Gritting his teeth, he felt it give. Listening to the cracking, the straining, Poorman was sure it had budged - sudden, a fraction, with a jolt. His frozen breath beat a drum roll. His frozen heels were anchored, fixed as he moved into the mass, concentrating the whole of his muscular frame. No sweat trickled far down his hoary brow. Arms locked, knees clicked, the actions of cog and sprocket, tensioning his spine, flexed like a piston. The rock stared at Poorman through his window, who held its placid gaze. If either should blink, or relax for a moment, the balance might tip. There was no way of stopping, no way of letting go.

He could feel the mountain tremble. Dust loosened from between strata danced like iron filings near a magnet and the light probing ever deeper revealed the pressures building within.

Just a little more, he told himself, pushing, shoulders proud, buckled tight.

And then a break...

67

She reclined, pink, white, red and vacant, golden eyes varnished to a high gloss, lips parted in supplication, tugging at Scherzo whose head lolled disconcertingly, whose conscious mind had its doors slammed shut. Breasts silken, nipples erect, thighs smooth, firm, belly flat, contoured, legs sinuous, long, feet and hands tools of arousal, stimulation, cunt moist and perfumed and Scherzo intoxicated.

Slim hips gesticulated. Scherzo knew, at the back of his congested skull, he was in trouble. He could not remove his eyes from this vision.

She lifted soft curls of dark hair behind ears sculpted from mother-of-pearl. Her cheek bones, the structure of her nose, the shape of her brow, the line and set of her chin, the delicate curve of her neck, the slope of her ribcage and the rhythm of her breathing; all took their toll.

She arched her back and groaned...

Her sisters, copper and sorrel, loosened his cock, impossibly hot and painfully tumescent, slipping it from the confines of his filthy trousers. It was they who guided him forward as she swung feet to floor, legs apart, taking him first in the mouth, from which steam rose, coiling his pubic beard into springs, the sisters joining her on the chaise longue on the very edge of which she perched, their tongues entwined, labia spread with fingers, glistening from tooth to toe as Scherzo wished to die.

She brought him to his knees. Leaning back among her siblings' bronzed limbs and coiling torsos her eyes fell closed and her scent was amplified. His penis throbbed, and copper and sorrel, a hand to each of his sweaty buttocks, wearing triumphal smiles, manoeuvred the dumb prick, his swollen ruby head into that perfect noose of dreams, only for the rope to be cut, the scaffolding torn down, the chaise longue kicked away, the sisters attacked as ugliness transpired in the shape of mutants, cloaked and berserk, quick with fists and blades, hacking with a maniacal glee the graceful flesh and modestly flushed throats of these succulent Sirens, slicing their gleaming bodies and severing their matchless digits that had groped and probed, bruising and rending and tearing till all that remained of the beauteous threesome was a pile of distended beef, lamb, pork, veal, liver, heart and kidney. This a butcher's shop window.

'Lucky we got here in time,' one mutant said, wringing blood from the hem of his robe.

Another poked among the carnage. 'Have you seen the eyes?' he said. 'Where's an eye? Ah, got one. Watch.' He gently pressed the point of his reddened blade into the eye which obligingly popped life a golf ball in a fire. The mutants laughed, high on lust and victory.

'And the intestines,' another added. 'They make great bungy ropes. My old man used to tell me how he jumped off over the furnace with one tied to his ankle.'

She arched her back and groaned...

'Hey, Scherzo!' A grinning face wafted before him. 'Hey, you can get up now, it's over. We saved your life again!'

'Leave him alone; you'll never reach him in that limbo.'

The lights extinguished.

'Fucking witches.'

'Mind your language.'

'Ugh?'

'There are ladies present.'

The curtains drawn.

'Best not to hang around here too long.'

'Right, there'll be more where this came from.'

'You can say that again.'

The imperfect blackness, the darkness flawed.

'Do we carry him?'

'Suppose we'll have to.'

'No, he'll walk. Somebody get behind and push.'

The fabulous deformed.

68

Staples' hideout was a fifth floor attic on Westgate Road. I knew this from sources, namely starlings, who arranged themselves on ledges and windowsills and so had a natural empathy, in all but cuisine, with fat cats. The starlings in winter assembled in defoliated trees, lending them, sunk in graveyards, sweating souls, the silhouettes of summer leaves.

At grave risk myself I clambered up a cast-iron drainpipe once painted green and peered through the gritty dormer window. Inside was a mattress stuffed with feathers (which the starlings hadn't mentioned, having little sympathy for ducks) and a candle. The orange was nowhere visible, not to be seen, but on advice from the aviators I climbed to the roof proper, discovering there a forest of chimneys, skylight lakes, slate mountainsides. Weeds grew in ragged profusion under the early spring sunshine and the traffic sounds were muted. Straddling an old tyre I inadvertently stepped on something that crunched with the volume of plastic cups. I grimaced, expecting I'd betrayed my existence. I cautiously raised by runner beans, and there, smashed on the bubbled felt, was a Sugarpuff. From the crunch it made I guessed the cat to be nearby; it was that fresh, this cereal bauble since defunct. I had no wish to speak with Staples, not being able, in all conscience, to put words in his mouth. No, I merely wished to eavesdrop on his thoughts.

Dozing, car sounds transmuted into bumble-bees. Austin Pearce had brought with him to Formalhaut cardboard boxes full of paperback novels, plastic bin liners full of old postcards, imitation leather suitcases full of 45's. There was nowhere to plug the record player in. He could run it off the ship's battery and did for a while, but was understandably nervous of draining its vital power, as he had no spare and the only way of charging the battery was to blast round the solar system two or three times, which used precious fuel. Staples, disguised as a pot plant on the villa's cluttered balcony, observed the newcomer in his dilemma. The orange, who'd made a discreet tour of Pearce's belongings to ascertain their various fixed functions, saw himself as the obvious solution, but had decided to wait and watch before interrupting. After all, it was disconcerting to find objects of a single purpose attached to your favourite hillside. The idea of such permanence Stapes had still to digest. But, regardless of non-axial/orbital rotation, Staples had plenty of time.

On the rooftop the cat yawned, a bar of Galaxy in one paw and chocolate stains on his T-shirt.

A starling lit on his furred shoulder and stuck its curious beak in his ear. I'd asked the bird this favour, interested to learn what went on in that transmogrified skull.

The starling glanced in my direction, puzzled. I gestured to the bird and it swooped across the tiles to land on my upraised knee.

'Well?'

The starling shuffled uncomfortably. I wasn't going to like what it had to report.

I stared at the bird impatiently.

We had a problem here. It lifted its speckled wings. There was a monkey in there, it told me, eating peanuts.

69

Scherzo Trepan's mind poked its metaphorical head round the figurative jamb at the instigation of strong coffee.

'Three sugars,' the grinning said. 'Drink.'

The pounding in his ears was external. Grateful for that, he sipped the restorative brew. 'Don't tell me...' he began, losing track.

The grinning grinned. 'You didn't ask.'

They were alone in a cramped room of machinery. Aluminium ducts and copper wires intertwined, passing through four walls, ceiling and floor. A single muggy oil lamp hung from the door handle. The grinning scraped his three feet.

'Wow,' said Scherzo; 'that was something.'

'That was Hell,' qualified his companion. 'Ever read Dante?'

'The Inferno? Never.'

'The Divine Comedy,' whispered the mutant. 'It has a happy ending - in Heaven, that is.'

'I didn't know.' Scherzo was perplexed.

The grinning nodded sternly. 'Trash,' he said. 'More coffee?'

'Thanks.'

A Thermos was produced. 'Archie got a fright, peering in your skull while you were out.'

'Hmm?' He drank, the pounding machinery familiar. 'This is a pumping station.'

'And you've been in one before,' stated his host. 'I know; that much Archie was able to tell me before the vacuum between your ears threatened to suck him in.'

Scherzo licked his teeth.

'You don't exist,' the mutant explained. 'At least not when you're unconscious. Sleeping, say. It's my guess you slip off somewhere. Perhaps a double life?'

Scherzo inflated his cheeks. 'I don't follow.'

'You wouldn't.'

Scherzo drained the moulded plastic cup. His gums were sore. 'What else did Archie find out?'

'Only that you're a seasoned traveller, whether you know it or not. Archie finds it easier when you're half awake, drowsy at best, like when we pulled you from the storm drain that first time. But you talk in your sleep.'

'I do? What about?'

'Oh, all kinds of things. Nonsense, mostly: monsters, jungles, spaceships, penguins. All kinds of things.'

Scherzo didn't know what to think. Did he dream in words? 'I never knew that,' he said quietly. 'No-one ever told me.'

'What's to tell? We all do it.'

'Yeah, but it's strange; like having someone else inside you trying to get out. Makes you wonder who you're betrayed.'

The grinning rolled his eyes. Scherzo had to look away. The door cracked along its imperfect seam, disturbing the lamp, shifting patterns of light (yellow) and shade (brown). A blistered hand held a folded piece of paper which the grinning mutant accepted. Reading, his rubber lips moved.

Scherzo asked what was in the note.

The mutant showed him, but he couldn't decipher the symbols.

'Time to go, Scherzo.'

'Whatever you say.'

A contorted expression of surprise. 'I thought you were in charge?'

'Me?'

'So the note says.'

Scherzo tugged on his chin. The machinery hummed.

Scherzo opened the door and stepped outside.

But he wasn't outside. There were no trees, no birds, no clouds and no sky; instead, a soot-walled corridor, a mesh catwalk, ductwork and electrical insulation. There was no sign of the mutants. The grinning emerged with the lamp, uncowled. Scherzo wondered who or what he was supposed to be in charge of. Faintly, in the metal distance, could be heard mechanical sobs and lamentations. Echoes rippled through uprights, pushed along by blurred fans, mixed with burnt odours from the furnace. He failed to recognize the corridor. The pumping station was one of many, a number for which Scherzo had no total. His memory of the incinerator plant was patchy. And the incinerator plant, he felt sure, had grown.

Or maybe it was always larger than he'd realized. Was it even possible to appreciate such dimensions?

'This way,' he asserted, walking.

The resistance extinguished the lamp and followed close behind, happy enough with the weak undersea light provided by the caged bulbs of the grimy ceiling. He kept one eye on Scherzo while the other roamed freely, checking their surroundings. A few brothers had volunteered to go on ahead; striplings mostly, young and hot-headed, brought up on stories of luminous vampires and water-shy malignant spirits. The witches had been their first kill. Drunk now on the ease of that victory they were eager for more, impossible to restrain, bug-eyed and desperate to confront bigger prey, to pare those same down to pocket size that they might keep them to impress their girlfriends, part of the age old route of finding one's way into one's belle's knickers. The grinning knew better, having ventured closer to the edge than any living. He comprehended the luminosity as few others did. You weren't required to be brave. You needed no thirsty sword or axe forged by dwarfs in the crystal-lined bowels of mountains. No white-bearded sorcerer was of any practical use in a tight corner. No, you just had to be sufficiently crazy or stupid in the first instance to even attempt such a perilous undertaking; and in the second, lucky enough to escape with just your trousers on fire, your skin unflayed and your wits no less intact. To that end, accompanying Scherzo Trepan seemed like a reasonable bet. Anyway, it was a family obligation. His grandfather's grandfather, so his grandfather said, had once succeeded in tying together the scorching shoelaces of Satan, stealing one of his horns when the father of lies fell flat on his face. The grinning carried that horn with him now. There were holes bored in its hollow length and a silver mouthpiece attached. To sound that horn in Lucifer's ear, he was told, was to deafen the goat fiend and lay him vulnerable.

Vulnerable to what, this mutant was at a loss to add. Neither had his father's father known, as his grandfather's father, the son of that great hero, had been deaf himself, and his father had omitted the detail from his death scroll. Such mysteries were part and parcel of legend. Another was how the horn contrived to remain in the family's possession, for it was borne away with each son at the time of his choosing and presumably lost with that son, the eldest, in the pit. Yet somehow it was always found under the pillow of the adventurer's heir; a sure sign of the father's failure, that this latest quest for vanquishment had come to an end in presumably grisly circumstances, that it was now up to the succeeding generation to make vulnerable the polluter of liberty and progenitor of injustice, the loathsome Eater Of Souls.

Successive defeats, however, bred rumour. It was suggested by some, this legend, to be a gross untruth, that not one of his forebears had ever journeyed to the deeper levels. More likely, they argued, these so called heroes had left for the surface to perform as extras in film and television dramas, having first stashed the horn, an obvious fake, under their son's pillow, that their fame and their family's status might endure. This argument was substantiated with vague photographs and old movie posters washed down the sewers. But the grinning would not be swayed by such detractors. He had the utmost faith in the perspicacity and truthfulness of his illustrious ancestors and was not about to be convinced otherwise. No amount of spurious information would keep him from his weird. And so he marched in three-time, fingering the unnatural instrument stuffed through his belt, confident, despite the burgeoning heat, of a successful conclusion to this latest outing and the eternal gratitude of his brothers.

Scherzo halted at a stair and peered down. The grinning joined him and saw that it wound down forever. To every side of them bar one rose a wall. The stair did not climb above this level, making Scherzo's first decision since being - on the strength of a piece of paper, source unknown - put in charge of the resistance - presently numbering two, himself included - simple.

'What do you think?' he asked.

The grinning said nothing.

The mad man, for surely he was, our Scherzo, who wasn't at home when the mind-reader last knocked, shrugged. The mesh of the catwalk waffled the soles of his feet; a welcome change then, to mount a stair whose steps were merely pimpled and hatched.

It was an attractive red glow into which they descended. An indeterminable mist billowed up the well. Scherzo was undecided whether the gentle air-stream bore the scents of spring or the pungent odour of machine oil. The grinning's sandals rapped a strange tune, whereas his bulging mouth was silent.

Scherzo set aside his thoughts and wandered.

Once, as a child, before Annie's death or Wilson's arrival, he had been taken with the uncontrollable urge to fly. For weeks, every day after school, he'd searched the streets, the fields, the park, the woods for feathers, collecting thousands of bright and dull plumes, varied in pattern and size. Then during the Easter holiday, Scherzo had sat for hours in his wardrobe painstakingly gluing the feathers to his small white body, until he was completely covered, head to foot in variegated aerial fronds. Around four o'clock he sneaked out the back door hidden under a blanket, two holes cut for his eyes. He pushed his bike along the rubbish-strewn side passage (windscreen, pallets, traffic cones) and rode off up the road, careful not to get any ankle feathers caught in the chain. He headed in the direction of the water tower from whose giddy heights it was possible on a day like this to see clear across the city to the shimmering blue line of the ocean. He planned to circle Grey's monument, take in the football ground, weave between the five bridges, buzz the Co-op and land back in his garden in time for Blue Peter and jam sandwiches. And if he was especially good and remembered to say please and thank-you and not put his knife in his mouth his mother might let him stay up to watch the Goodies while she did the ironing. Perfect. Absolutely. The wind was ideal, Scherzo reckoned. The sky hung invitingly. He climbed outside the railing and perched on the concrete ledge, his heart thumping in his chest, reverberating through the cast-iron painted green over grey over blue over green, etc. Far below his bike resembled an insect, the blanket with the holes cut in a moth the insect had captured in its spokes and crossbar. Pigeons alighted. Clouds shaped into crocodiles and lizards. It grew cooler and the first drops of rain speckled his eyelids. Scherzo braced himself, toes curled, lips moistened, arms outstretched. He made a few trial wafts, flapped his second-hand wings, not noticing the displaced feathers, the loosening of his flour and water adhesive. This was it, the culmination of weeks of studious research and development, the actualization of his fondest desire. Scherzo Trepan took a last deep breath and prepared to fly.

But didn't.

Neither did he fall.

'Chicken,' said a voice behind. 'Want a push?'

Scherzo was frozen, glue dripping, feathers leaving him behind on the ledge as they fluttered blithely away.

'Come on, kid, let's go home,' Annie said, ruffling his slicked-down hair. 'I've got some new rocks to show you. Stories, too. I fell asleep in the woods and had the strangest dream.'

Annie smuggled her little brother upstairs on their return, running the bath and fetching his clothes. She even let him have the extra sandwich, although in cutting the orange cake she had made the largest slice her own.

Now, tramping the endless steps, Scherzo was painfully aware of just how much he missed her. He'd come to rely on his sister and her colour-laden tales, the way she would always have some ready excuse for him or could be relied on without prompting to produce a convincing alibi. Annie had forged his sick notes and clipped his toenails, made sure he said his prayers. But her later mistrust of Wilson Hives had marked a division between them.

And then she'd died.

And then there was only Scherzo and Wilson, Wilson banging on the window and Scherzo working underground.

And then there was Scherzo out of his mind, whether in or out of his head, in the river, on his way to hospital, watching television as aliens landed, plants grew, as rain fell and crops thrived, as deserts turned lush and green, people fat, governments itchy...

And what else? Scherzo's was a fragile existence, depending as it did on the verifiable craziness of others.

He might go at any time, the doctors told him. He didn't believe them. Night or day, at any hour, they added dourly, these self-styled experts, already plotting his post-mortem, exercising their purple crayons. He was ill, dying.

But survived.

He could see no end to this spiral stair, either.

'Stop a while,' suggested the mutant. 'Think about it.'

Scherzo thought.

'Something's amiss. I'm sure of it.'

'What do you mean?'

The mutant shut his eyes and gazed inside his head a while, looking for inspiration, sought and found an idea, captured it.

Scherzo, meditating with equal vigour, was none the wiser.

The grinning leaned over the rail, indicating Scherzo to do likewise. Rummaging in his loose robe he located and removed the Thermos. 'What do you suppose will happen if I drop this?'

'Nothing,' Scherzo answered. 'It'll vanish,' he added, unsure. The thickening red illumination transformed his companion's nose into a plump strawberry.

The flask was dropped. It didn't fly. It bounced and broke internally on the unseen floor.

The expedition leader, Scherzo Trepan, frowned contemptuously at the blushing plastic cylinder, the Thermos having clattered, spun and slowed a scant two feet below his blunted toes.

The grinning's grin was enlarged. 'I knew it!'

'Knew what?' Scherzo wasn't happy; he felt left behind.

'The stair doesn't wind on forever, it just appears to.' This new grin stretched from ears to ears.

'You mean it's an illusion?'

'No,' the mutant replied; 'it just appears to be, inasmuch as the steps are actually here.'

Scherzo folded his arms impatiently.

'The stair's turning like a corkscrew,' clarified the mutant resistance fighter. 'As we walk down it turns in the opposite direction. Slowly at first, till we near the bottom, thereafter matching our pace exactly, while the red light deepens and the mist obscures the view above. Quite clever really.'

Scherzo wasn't amused. Without a word, dreamed or not dreamed, he clambered over the rail, determined on this occasion to see it through.

He dropped like the Thermos.

And here, beneath the turning steps, was a circular door.

The door was closed. Orange light outlined it.

Scherzo opened the door and stepped inside.

But didn't.

70

The altered nature of the components puzzled her. Mackintosh had stated in his report that the satellite's reactor had failed, causing a terminal loss of power, but went only so far in explaining the orbital collapse, the spiralling in to earth. She walked round the wreckage a subsequent time, picking shapes from its sad heap. Shot down was a favoured interpretation. But why and by whom? Who on this planet had the capacity, the intent? Where lay the interest in destroying a harmless communication's satellite? And those components, transmogrified. Not by heat, she felt sure of that.

Someone paged her, freed her from its gaze, the thing behind the glass possessed of an unnatural, pseudo-organic life.

She ran to the phone. 'Hello.'

'Rhiann?'

'Yes - what's up?'

'Come away from the satellite, Rhiann.'

She turned to stare...

'Rhiann!'

'Sorry, Mack, got to go.'

So what was this hold it had over her? The glass wasn't thick, serving only to contain any chemical leakage. The reactor had disengaged and burnt up on re-entry, the expected fate of the bulk of the satellite. But for some reason, as yet unexplained, the greater mass had survived.

That shouldn't happen, Rhiann knew. She touched the glass, felt its warmth. A door slammed in the distance, the sound reverberating through the hangar. She was able to identify from the rushing footsteps the accelerated approach of Mackintosh, whose insistent paging Rhiann had left by the phone, the phone off the hook.

Stepping back from the glass she had misted with her breath, Rhiann removed her shoes. The heels were steel tipped and might have been designed specifically for the purpose she put them to.

'Rhiann!'

Goodbye, Mack. Another time.

FATHER

That's my girl! She how pretty she looks? I do wish she'd stop shuffling though; makes me nervous, and I can't afford that. Not long to go now. Car's all ready, bridesmaid's stuffed into her dress, mother's stayed off the drink. Yes, so far so good. Oh, happy day! Is this the right tie, do you think? Don't want to fall down on the details, not at this late stage, that'd really screw things up. I should go look for the kid; but if he's anything like me he won't be found. It's only a ten minute drive through the woods. Plenty of time. No rush. Where's my handkerchief? Is that a stain on the carpet? Seems familiar somehow. Strange. Must be about the same age, bride and carpet. When it was sloughing pile she was cutting teeth. Its colour has faded while hers has grown. Beetroot, I reckon, it has that unwashable sheen.

MOTHER

Look at him sitting there; you'd think he'd won the lottery or something. What does he get out of this? And here's my baby, off into that monster's arms, never to be heard from again. If only I had strangled her at birth, wrapped the umbilical cord round her tiny gasping throat. But what am I thinking? If anyone needed strangling at birth it's him. Still wearing odd socks I see. The lying two-faced bastard! What did I ever see in him? More fool me. At least she's going somewhere hot for her honeymoon.

BRIDESMAID

Bitch! I hope your ovaries swell and you die! You thought I'd refuse; you must have hoped I would, that I'd be too fucking embarrassed to squeeze into this ridiculous dress. Oh, but your mother the lush asked. How could I say no? Fucking whore! I should've drowned you when we were kids. Remember? I tricked you into jumping onto that rock in the river that wasn't a rock but a brown paper bag. You were so gullible then. I laughed so much I wet myself. And there you were, underwater, face all puffed out. You thought I was crying for help, but I wasn't, I was laughing, waiting for the stream of little bubbles to come out of your mouth. I wanted to see what colour you'd turn, blue or green or grey. I was all ready to count the bubbles as they burst at the surface. I could've caught them in a jam jar, like frog-spawn. But you must've had strong lungs because you lasted an awfully long time. You didn't splash, you just stared at nothing. I hated you then and I hate you now. You were always so clever, so polite, so likeable, so good at everything. My own mother preferred you to me. I cried myself to sleep at night wishing I was you. And that knowing glint in your eye after the monk (I'll always think of him as a monk as I thought he'd come for your dead body to bury it in the ground - he had a sack with him to put you in) pulled you out. You shook yourself and smiled. It was years ago but that smile hasn't changed. The monk gave you a footprint and me a toffee-apple. A toffee-apple! You an object of interest and worth, a fossil reflecting your superior mind, and me a sticky treat, a shut-me-up reflecting my fat little cheeks and pug nose. I hope you drop dead.

FATHER

And where is Scherzo? And who's this Wilson bloke? Ran off after breakfast, she tells me; does it all the time. Not answer the door to his dead father, he doesn't. Nothing to worry about. He can look after himself. He'll be sitting in a tree somewhere, I suppose, wondering what happened to the world he used to get up to every morning, the world he'd learned to expect, had just begun to understand. And now that world was suddenly erased, transformed, rewritten, his father alive and his sister to marry. She might have told him sooner. Poor lad; must've come as a shock to him, thinking me bones in the desert. Divorces are such catastrophes. If I'd known, maybe me staying around a while, within telephone distance, would have made some difference. But who am I kidding? Too late now. And anyway, it was perfect cover. She liked me dead. It suited her. Always was selfish. Scherzo was much too young to know the truth. And Annie? Annie was pushing nine and had a mind of her own, a mind involved in pure mathematics, embroiled in astrophysics. And look at her now, the bride of brides, a match with my promotion written all over...

CUT TO:

Benedict in the shower.

Hot water ran over his face and body, streamed down his naked sides, pooled round his feet mixed with soap-suds and skin-flakes and hair-balls and mucus. He washed away the river, its colours and flavour, scraping his flesh with coarse bristles until it reddened and became sore to touch. His eyes shut tight against the visible pounding the water discovered new ways of investing its liquid ciphers in Benedict's aching skull. Heat read his skin like fingers Braille. Fingers keyed his muscles, tapped messages onto the vacant screen of his mind. The fear he had lived with for so long enraptured him, held the artist firm within the shower, locked behind steel threads of water. The canvas of his wrapped head was stretched flat and bare, exposed to the knives and brushes and imaginary pigments, there to delineate fantastic landscapes, a painting both harsh and exact, crude and precise in its interpretation of the facts. And those facts, known and unknown, presented in such a fashion as to be themselves fluid, running, mixing, offering different perspectives, forming new alliances of colour and shade, refighting old battles wearing different uniforms, bearing different devices emblazoned on reconstituted shields, screaming the bloody names of different gods to whom they made sacrifice. Always a place of ideas, the shower. Benedict sensed a presence behind him, behind his back, a different lust than any he'd known, that which seared his corporal self, a once distant compulsion drawn near by the wrist action of his mental veneers, those which peeled and those he cut away to reveal the hidden truth of his fractured creation. He tried to open his eyes but couldn't. He spun round in the shower and lost his balance, fell, bruising his spine. The feel of his body was different; smooth, as if he'd scrubbed it of hair, polished it of definition, blunted its angles and softened its edges. Fear loomed over him, tall and hard, and he was blind to it, ignorant beneath it, helpless before it, despite the factual picture he'd constructed, the picture of himself in his head: desperate, maddened, inflamed, twisting the shower hose in his hands, preparing to do murder. Benedict wanted to scream but had no voice. He fought the rigid hands pinning him, but lacked their determined strength. His body was weak, that of a woman. The cheek that was smashed by a fist, that of a woman. The flesh that was battered, abused, a woman's. This was his wife he was killing. This was the moment he looped the metal hose round her throat, his throat, and pulled, raising that thrashing body and dropping it violently in the stall, water spraying everywhere, soaking floor and walls, darkening tiles and wood, pumping steam into the already saturated air. This was the precipice he wished to step back from but was unable. This was the monster he'd created. This was Roy Benedict crushing a life. He alone was responsible for this aberration. And he was enjoying it, enjoying the pain. The agony and the ecstasy, they were his. Experienced separately, but his. Rebecca was simply a form, a dumb mound of unthinking nature, something he had conjured from the stiff clay of the river, shaped with thumb and wood. She did not exist. Benedict had no wife. His wife had no illness. It was all inside him. He'd conceived her, her weight and height, sculpting her anew each morning. It was perfectly safe then, to administer this cure.

MOTHER

I'll go in my own car, thank-you. Yes, I know the way. I'll be there long before you; don't worry. Everything's fine. God am I glad to get out of that house! He turns up out of nowhere and suddenly it feels like the place isn't my own, that most of the furniture and all of the hard work isn't mine, that none of it belongs to me. What did he ever do to stake such a claim? Paint? Decorate? Not an inch! He never budged from his chair. The first thing he did when he arrived was sit in it and expect a cup of tea, like he'd never been away. Nothing existed for him between that chair and my bed - my bed, where he thrust two children into me, children he abandoned along with his wife, who was pleased to see him go, the eldest blaming me and the youngest his sister's pet. What did that leave me with? The bottle, and Wilson, both of whom I found in a bar, from both of which I took comfort. I wish Wilson was here now. He could've driven me. I could've reached into the glove compartment and settled my nerves; if that's possible. He deserves nothing and he'll get nothing, my prodigal husband. But I must not cry. I don't want him to see me defeated. I'll burn that chair when I get home. Burn that carpet, too, worn and stained by his bleeding feet. As soon as he goes I'll call Wilson and get him to carry the chair outside, the carpet with it, and I'll cover them in petrol and set them alight and watch the past go up in flames. Should have done it years ago. Should never have married the man. That wedding, like this, was a mistake.

BRIDESMAID

She looks peculiar, like a clothes-peg in a doily. I'm glad she's wearing a veil. At least my posy's nice. I think I'll stand plucking it all through the ceremony. That ought to get their backs up. Where's the brat? Is it him we're waiting for? Why doesn't somebody go find him? I can hardly breathe. My legs itch. Is he staring at my crotch? Maybe I should stare at his. That would really piss her off, me and her old man on the floor, pulling on each other while she watched. Yes, I like that idea. Don't think he'd go for it somehow. But if I offered to find Scherzo, would he get the hint? We could fuck on her bed, on her whiter than white sheets. Or maybe he'd rather fuck his daughter. Then I could watch the juices spill. Yes, I like that idea, like it a lot. I could hold her down, spit on her while she was raped.

FATHER

Commissioner of Gates, perhaps. Or I hear there's a vacancy at Solar Affairs. Either would do. What's blubber bones gawking at? Where's Scherzo? Not long now. We'll just have to leave the boy. His sister doesn't appear concerned, so I guess he's okay. It's his future I'm worried about; it all seems a little too vague. Have to watch out for that. Dangerous to let things go astray. Find him a nice girl, the daughter of some field agent, someone with connections I can trust. Yeah, there's what's-her-name, one of my own bastard whelps, her mother works down in quality control. Damned if I can remember her name, either. Not that it matters; shouldn't be too difficult to sniff her out. And then relax, put my feet up, let somebody else do the hard work for a change.

MOTHER

Now, was it left or right at the crossroads? Since when was this wood so full of trees? Trees: the necessary verticals of a structurally sound environment, as Wilson might put it. Left, I think. Here goes. No road signs, but I can always turn around. I don't want to be late - he'd laugh at me, Little Red Riding Hood. And who's the Big Bad Wolf? And what would Annie say? I need a drink. Oh, Wilson, why aren't you here when I need you? No, right! Right at the crossroads; I should've turned right! Where's reverse gear? Get in there. There isn't room to turn in the road. Or is there? Just, yes, if I'm careful. Don't want to get stuck in a ditch and have to walk to the nearest phone. I mean, who could I call but him? Wilson doesn't own a car and there are no buses through here and it'd be too far for him to walk simply to give me a push, so I'd better not get stuck in the first place or else I'm in trouble and will you stop panicking; you're in control. Relax. Don't let him get to you. Good. Okay, reverse gear; see, where it always was. And behind you, just over the brow of the hill, is the crossroads. Reverse to it, turn up the road you came on, then take a right. Easy. But it can't be that far, surely? Must be the next rise. Not to worry. I hope nothing's coming the other way. I should be there by now. People I don't even know will be milling around shaking their heads and passing judgement. They'll be calling me a terrible mother. They'll get to talking and decide by a majority vote that I got drunk and forgot my own daughter's wedding. Or that I crashed. Too much booze in the system and...serve...her...right. What? This can't be. I hadn't driven so far and I couldn't have missed it. Well - shit! The road looks a bit wider here; I'll have a go. Light a cigarette first, that'll take my mind off the flask. It might even be empty. Okay, nearly there. No - shit! I knew it! I fucking knew it! Now I am stuck. I'm going to have to walk the rest of the way. I'm going to be late and my shoes are going to be dirty and if I cry my face will look a mess. How can I let him do this to me? All the years he's been gone I've held it together, and yet the moment he walks through my door I fall to pieces, the world crumbles around me, I don't know which hand to hold my fork in, I slap Annie so hard she despises me and Scherzo runs away. Like his father did, moments after he was born, as soon as he was satisfied it was a boy. What is it about him that makes me foam at the mouth and mumble incoherently? Must he humiliate me? What did I do wrong? Why must he punish me? Did I make him hit me? Did I chase him from my bed? No, no, he rejected me. I don't deserve this guilt. I'll walk there if it takes all day. I'll show him; he can't dominate my life. I won't let him.

CUT TO:

Renny and Morrison.

'Are you awake?'

'No.'

He poked the dying embers of the fire. 'I was just thinking,' he said. 'If for some reason one of us doesn't make it, you know, to where it is we're going, maybe the other should have something of that person with them.'

'Like a token?' The tightening in her gut was suspicion. He'd been stirring air into that dead fire too long. What was it he saw in there?

Morrison's eyes followed the pattern of the stick he dragged through the carbonated remains of other sticks, burnt in their time, ligneous corpses outlining - what? 'Yes, something like that, something personal, that you personally value, that you feel says something about who and what you are.'

Quietly, Renny sat up. The cave was dark but she had no difficulty picking out his shape from amid the countless stone and root tangles. He rested on his haunches, Morrison, captivated by the faint glow at his feet, methodically arranging the coals. A much larger stick lay within his easy reach. She hadn't noticed it earlier.

'I've nothing to give,' she replied. 'Nothing with me, at least. Anything I had I left in the car. How about you?' She studied the profile of his skull, the disordered mass of hair at its crown. His shoulders were tight and hunched, his spine curved like a dog's.

'Me neither,' he said, gruff.

So why the suggestion?

'Tom?' He no longer answered to that name. 'Hey, Morrison?' Nor that either; just raked the coals, moved the stick round and round obsessively, building a glowing wall of ashes.

'From here I go on alone,' the hunched man stated, silently rising. But his head did not graze the roof as before.

Renny prepared herself mentally for the expected confrontation. She obliterated all thoughts of pity from her mind. The world turned cold, void of compassion. This was to be a harsh game, she realized. No favours could be given as none would be returned, and she had no wish to be on the losing side. It was time to be cruel, not kind.

While he had yet to face her, yet to stoop further and raise the larger stick intended to crush her, Renny sidled, crouched, ascended a narrow shelf in the cave wall. From this angle she could clearly read the pain of his blackened features, the brow and chin protruding, the nose and lips flattened, the face a crescent moon's. His chest tightened the buttons of his once immaculate white plastic uniform. But it was the fire which commanded her attention. Morrison had raked its embers into a perfect circle on the stony ground, the orange circumference radiating a baleful hue. She felt it pulse through her, felt it compromise her heart, felt it at home in her wiry body as she leapt, the she wolf, lashing at Morrison.

And then she was through, bearing his token, his strangled cry, as she had torn the scream from his throat.

BRIDESMAID

Yes, the veil suits her. She might already have died behind it, died and remained living, like some zombie. Hers is a lucky fate. She has everything beautiful and clean, crisp and perfumed, all laid out neatly for her and labelled with her initials. And here I am, crumpled and uncertain, expecting more of the same. Jealous? Of course I'm jealous! What have I got to look forward to? Gropes in the back seats of rusty cars, bad breath, love-bites, Pilsener laced with vodka, kids, bingo and varicose veins. It isn't fair. This is the only Rolls I'll ever ride in. If only Fords had back seats as plush and wide having your knickers stretched wouldn't be so bad. How could we have ever called ourselves friends when we're so obviously different? True, we're the same age, went to the same schools, sat in the same classes at neighbouring desks, live in the same street, but we've barely spoken a word since puberty; mine, as hers was naturally later, less dramatic, more gentle, afflicted with fewer side effects. There's nothing tangible to link us save that our mothers' shopping trolleys raced down the same aisles. They chatted in the street, conspiring, summer-dressed daughters in tow, hidden behind plastic bags stuffed with tinned fruit and live foliage, me sucking sweets, her sucking thumbs, thrown together through geography, playmates from an early age, associated through parents and habit. Our mothers' fault, then. She hasn't spoken a word for nearly an hour. She looks poised, cool and straight, while I sit and sweat in this frilly cake-band desperate to change my tampon. And her weird father; I feel uncomfortable around him now.

FATHER

I wonder if he'll want to replace her vital organs as she grows older or simply allow her to wear out and die? The former, probably; he seems quite enamoured. But it's impossible to say how long that may last. Maybe he has plans for her augmentation. Mine too? I suppose it'll necessary in my case, if I'm to fulfil the duties of a higher office. It doesn't pay to ask too many questions. Not of He That Knows Best. Still, it wouldn't hurt to make her a bit more talkative. Unless it's that quiet superiority he's taken with. You never can tell, and speculation invites error. You never know who's listening; best not to think out loud. Certainly not till the ceremony's over. Best to give the bride away without expecting anything in return. Best to grovel.

MOTHER

I'll kill him if I so much as lose a shoe. If there's a ladder in my tights, he's dead for real, cold stone real. But I can see it now, looming over the trees like a low grey cloud. Not a place of worship; more a fortress, the seat of some complacent lord. Living? Who cares. Mouldy and stagnant, awaiting this new blood, the child I so humbly deliver, a bride from the village, a sacrifice designed to assuage the hungry feudal dragon. And I let her go without a fight. But she's old enough to know what she's doing; old enough, too, to know better. There was no love in her eyes this morning. That struck me. She looked as she does when sleeping. That vacant, far away expression. Is this all some dream to her? Outside reality? Am I part of your dream, Annie? Is this your imagining? Then leave me out of it. But not, these trees are genuine, solid and abundant, the year's heat trapped between them in a twisting maze of thermals. A small mercy there, as I thought to put deodorant in my bag along with lighter and cigarettes.

BRIDESMAID

What's that secret government place she works at? Did she meet him there? I bet she's still a virgin. How could she be anything else being who she is and in that Snow White dress? She'll bleed, I can tell. I hope she bleeds buckets. I bet she's tighter than the skin on a melon. So tight she'll tear. Probably hasn't even dipped her fingers, she's so pure. But bleeding on silk sheets is no torture.

CUT TO:

The doodler.

That's what Austin Pearce had come to, cartoons on scraps of paper.

Morning came, twenty years too soon.

He had sat up all night in front of a jerky television screen, sorting through his mind, scribbling figures with arms and legs and smiles. Not his usual fare, but it kept his fingers occupied, a pencil in each digited paw while his brain indexed back and forth like a manic VCR, exploring its own far distant regions and projecting its odd mix of findings via the vacuum tube. He searched for clues among the geometry, pointers in the guise of welds in the likenesses of links in the hints of chains, a weak joint he might exploit, evidence of signs. Sighing, disappointed with these archives, Austin leafed through the sheets of white note paper he'd despoiled, the pictures thereupon caricatures, features assembled from a variety of often disparate sources and composed into rough approximations of individuals, kidneys he failed to recognize but knew by name. Renata Shelmerdine gazed out of the page. Tom Morrison, of whom Mike had talked. The orange had lodged with him a while, before him Scherzo Trepan whose house the elfin man had visited only to find no-one home, the hour early and not even a ghost from whom to squeeze information. And here was himself, looking gaunt. And Presland Bill, face reversed, eyes uncanny, a large purple bruise on his chin.

Gathering the many drawings into a pile Austin sifted them into a semblance of order (the same way up) and holding one edge between thumb and forefinger flicked through them to create the illusion of motion.

What he saw surprised him. Rearranging several sheets he flicked the pile again, a third and fourth time, repeating this process of clumsy animation until he was satisfied he had the correct sequence. They seemed to be trying to tell him something. But what? He read the lips as the images blurred into one. The pencilled mouths formed round silent words, the sketched hands expressed ideas and actions, each with its source in his crowded mind, a message submerged in the charnel house of his skull, exiting by a rear door while he had been focused on the grainy display of the externalized TV.

If he were to measure the distance separating himself from any of these characters, Pearce understood, then he might take part in their waking dreams, imagine their surroundings and visualize that information (a fiction) needed to influence future events. It wasn't necessary to physically travel. Time, as demonstrated by the sun's daily hesitancy, was of no direct consequence. Time came afterward. It was distance that mattered, and calibrating distance was a doddle.

FATHER

This is the place. Just a few minutes more, a few minutes in which to straighten my tie and pick the fluff off my trousers. Right. I wish the fat girl would sit still. Annie seems composed, however, which is the important thing; she looked as if she were having second thoughts earlier, like she was arguing with herself. But that's over and done with. I don't see her mother's car. No surprises there. She's best out of the way. The boy too; no point in upsetting him further. So that's it. Everything in its place and a place for everything, as Vacine's fond of saying. Got the cigars in my pocket, my keys on a chain, the usual assortment of poisons and antidotes in the usual ampulla in my metal legs. A degree of quiet, not smug, satisfaction in the lines of my face. There. Splendid.

MOTHER

I can't believe I'm lost, that the fortress looming over the trees like a low grey cloud was nothing but. I can't believe this convoluted wood, or that I'm being followed. But I must.

BRIDESMAID

You'd think we could at least get out of the car. Not that I'm moving anywhere while he watches me in the mirror. Not that he's scowling or appears cross or anything; just the opposite. But his eyes seem dead and black in the silvered glass. I can't believe I just touched Annie's hand. For what? Comfort? It was quite cold. She didn't pull away or say a word. I don't think she could. She's in some kind of deep trance. Maybe it's a religious thing. Or nerves. He's fingering his lip now. Adjusting it? His teeth are too white. This place is huge. What is it? Just goes to show, you live in a place your whole life so that you think you know it pretty well and yet all along there's something like this lurking in the woods, big and imposing and impossible to miss. Weird. He's staring at me. Maybe I should lean over and suck his cock. That would wake her up. Imagine if the vicar or the priest or whoever came out the door - not that I can see a door. There's windows, high up, and what must be battlements. Very weird. I doubt if Annie would blink. Fuck this. I'm going to stretch my legs. I need a piss.

FATHER

It might be a good idea to lose the pig. Who is she anyway? A friend of Annie's? Hard to believe she'd associate with such a slob. Well, she won't for much longer. He'll see to that. He'll take care of everything. He never forgets.

CUT TO:

Another space.

The hard stone walls hurried her along the passage, the corridor separating them four feet wide. Grey and paved, worn.

So she had finally made it across, thanks to the satellite, a piece of this world in that. Her fleeting visits had become more of an irritation than a pleasure as she grew older. No longer a child, Rhiann demanded more from her dreams than bright colours and pleasing sounds. Having established a bridge she could linger. Although there were risks. She might die in this world, on this side, and on the other, remain.

Conversely, she might die over there, in that world. But it wouldn't be bad to stay.

Once in the library she would learn her fate. The books there were more than books of tales.

71

Scherzo Trepan was dreaming. He was running flat out through a forest that only came up to his knees, bare feet crushing centuries-old poplars and beech, birds scattering like dust motes as he ducked under clouds. Ahead of him the stern of a massive stone ship churned plumes of leaves and bark, cutting a groove like a lawnmower, a silvered chunk of the ploughshare moon here dragging its keel through the loam. At first it seemed he was catching up, but as the world turned this proved otherwise, either because he was tiring or the ship was gaining speed, the very breaths he spluttered filling its sails and tautening its rigging. Exhausted, he stopped amid the woody ruin of its wake, chest heaving as the great ship disappeared over the curve of the green horizon, shrinking into the sun which poured butter-gold rays upon his lidless eyes, so that he could neither blink nor turn away.

Transfixed by barbs of yellow and orange, he fell to his knees and dammed a river severed like a vein by the ship's granite rudder.

And the forest world flooded, drowning him.

'If you're going to make a habit of this,' reproached the mutant; but didn't finish.

'She was waving from the taffrail,' Scherzo said.

'Who was? What are you talking about?' He disliked the way the crazy man, his passport through Hell, was smiling. 'Get out of the water,' the grinning added testily.

'Annie,' the dreamer replied. 'My sister.'

Emerging after dark from two doors down's garden shed with its bath-tub and corrugated iron, Scherzo crept on all fours through the rose bushes marking the disputed boundary between that garden and Mrs Fry's, melding with the aforementioned as a curtain twitched, wary of discovery, imitating foliage and washing as he neared the crumbling brick wall separating Mrs Fry's well maintained flowerbeds and lawn from his disordered own.

The old lady's ginger tom brushed past him, its greater silence catching Scherzo unawares. He followed the cat into dense shadow at the wall's base where it formed a right-angle with the manicured (this side) hedge and squeezed after it through a shapeless opening bordered in nettles and cement. Scherzo could see nothing but the cat's marmalade tail. Choked and stung he slithered on his belly, surfacing within sight of the back door. The house it gave access to was silent and dark, although the door itself shone as if its peeling white gloss concealed a radioactive undercoat. The door's was a beguiling illumination, more so as the surrounding kitchen facade fell away as he stared, willing that lambency ajar. Its dull silver handle turned, causing the frame of the kitchen window to shake, the glass rattling like teeth in a soup tureen as the vibrant door shook loose from its jamb.

The ghost of his father, made acutely solid, had appeared at this door's brother, the front, his car occupying a disproportionate area of the street. Scherzo had screamed noiselessly, feet burning as he accelerated up the stairs and locked himself in the bathroom, later to make good his escape via the pebbled window when his mother threatened to break down the door, an interior cousin of front and rear and god-parent to that facing Scherzo's hideaway cupboard. His first instinct was to run to his sister, but having had such little faith in the power of her prayers he was too scared now to meet either the realization of all those forced Amens or their dedicated source, Annie, whose laughter permeated her bedroom door, the bathroom's uncle, terrifying him, as Annie was not a laughing girl.

Scherzo fought with the window latch and secured his exit, charged blindly through the enforested garden having rapidly shinned down the drainpipe, crashed the hedge-cum-fence, continued in the direction of the railway line, reassured that although it was possible to hear distant trains, few if any ever arrived to disturb the equilibrium of your eight fragile years.

Later Scherzo crossed back to reconnoitre. He witnessed nebulous shapes behind misty glass, and then the house of his upbringing was empty, silent, which opportunity he grabbed to make himself a peanut butter sandwich.

The rest of the day, morning and afternoon, he spent walking the tightrope steel, drawing comfort from its vibrations, climbing ancient trees, too quick to join their conversation, breaking into the shed whose rusted lock was a rusty deterrent. A weasel darted between his legs as he levered open the bath-tub door.

Inside a bench crudely nailed supported a bizarre array of clockwork and electronic components, cogs and wheels, springs and transistors illuminated by thin Christmas tree lights. There were biscuit tins full of dismantled unknowables, some bits quietly humming, others smashed to pieces by the engineer's hammer standing on its scratched metal head in the centre of the bench, daring these various innards to defy its solemn authority and make riotous assembly, fusing and connecting and joining and sparking and co-ordinating and downloading, pulsing coded messages to electric organs and mechanical appendages, waiting for the hammer to doze that together they might bind their overseer in brightly coloured wire and suspend it like spider booty from a rafter, dropping thereafter to the crowded floor of the shed-womb and sneaking out into the cool fresh night disguised as a young boy, but in reality a machine with a mission.

Scherzo toyed with an assortment of brass, ceramic, plastic and jewelled parts, turning them this way and that, biting his lower lip as he struggled to unite any two, to construct a finger, consolidate a hand, articulate knuckles and tendons, fitting tiny screws. He had some success with a thumb, which nodded whirringly, dimming a row of red lights in a control box. But the hammer glared angrily, so as he tried to move it, only to find it immovable, rock hard and steady. Dependable, as a hammer should be. Scherzo then chose to ignore its promised destruction, painstakingly adding an index and middle finger while his lip grew fat and sore from chewing; a ring finger, his throat completely dry, a little finger and a sixth finger which he attached back to front as the light in the shed dimmed to a soft red glow. The hand flexed and stretched, curled into a fist to threaten and fanned out to wave hello. To make it independent of wires Scherzo fitted a battery. He had no wish to leave the hand on the bench though, fearing its destruction. Neither could he take it with him, for he felt it belonged to another, one in probable need of its metal and plastic.

Unbiting his lip, the upper nudging his nostril, Scherzo attached the hand to the hammer shaft and withdrew stealthily.

'What now?' said the mutant, clutching himself.

The red glow had followed Scherzo from the shed.

The pair of them hung like negatives, unsure of the ground they walked on, not trusting the red ice veined with black, the red walls leaning inward, the hot breath of the furnace a sticky fur collar about their throats.

They occupied a corridor the dimensions of which became fluid in the red light.

The sound of machinery married to the current of wasted air offered just one direction. Scherzo proceeded in it, hair crackling with electricity, nose flared to suck the oxygen, competing thus for the food of countless ovens. He recognized the distant belt of a conveyor, the polished robot shoulders that organized its precipitous loading tinted green and blue, the robot yellow-eyed beyond a confused lattice of pipes from whose seams and valves issued clouds of steam the hue and perfume of star corpses. Their diffusing atoms packed into Scherzo's lungs, reaching his brain with a sudden manifest brilliance. This was his true home, here amid the noise and smell of world litter, the burning of waste, the incineration of old clothes, odd shoes, unwanted vegetable scrapings, banana peel, dead wood, paper and polythene containers. Forgetting the mutant Scherzo wandered into this swirling half-made realm of disruption, taking the red steps two at a time to the red floor, absorbed by the twin actions of sorting and shredding, hungry as the robots were hungry, obsessed as they were obsessed with finding items and markers of expended lives, alien existences of which they knew all and nothing, intimate details in the semi-dark, clues to the flesh world, remnants of the mechanical framed in the red-shifted velocity of recession. Their broken cousins were dragged clear and gently set aside for later assessment and reclamation. Also pulled from the immolatory fires were the small bodies of animals, the larger of men and women, some with limbs and heads missing, others crudely joined to washing machines and stereos.

Scherzo was happy for the robots. They went about their mundane tasks with deliberate satisfaction, efficient and uncomplaining, programmed to be so by superior minds whose superior purpose was known only to a select few.

The grinning caught up with him, flustered, sweating. The heat was oppressive, his red face demonic; like Scherzo's, at home in the house of the furnace.

They ducked under a conveyor heavy with refuse, burdened with various relations of Death, and found themselves, whether with eyes closed or open, in a place where many sets of steps converged, sweeping in a twisted downward helix, the red of each knotted stair transmuted via spectral deformation into greens and violets, ambers and blues, the mass effect a colour vortex, the floor as if melted and sunk, moulded through heat into a spiralling chimney of living metal. It glowed with the promise of rooms and worn carpets, furniture and cabinets, lamps and pictures.

'What now?' said the mutant, flapping his arms. These mixed tones reminded him of his father's peepers, their depth, glint, proximity, seeming to stretch from his skull as the story unfolded, his telling of ventures deep into the broiling anti-heavens.

Scherzo, having passed the oven, approached the fridge and its blue-white enamel. The kitchen was full of sounds he made himself: churning of stomach and pumping of heart, the incessant roar of air through passages, the disturbing creak of bones. Muscles squeaked in his eight-year-old body. He paused at the fridge, imagining its contents and the likelihood of oiling. Before him sank the hallway, purged now of its father ghost, black and grey. The indistinct wallpaper, composed as it was of vertical stripes and interlinked vines, offered cages from between whose evenly spaced bars shadow creatures might pounce. But Scherzo disregarded them, his imagination, stubbornly anchored to a chaise longue, being uncontaminated by the less subtle inhabitants of bad dreams. Benign chimeras accompanied him daily, mischievous faces in seat-covers and coffee-stains, and these held the more pernicious at bay. Any fears he had centred on the front door and the very real possibility of it opening to admit a man of wealth and substance, alive and present, not remembered on a conscious level, yet whose majestic image lurked all the same, snapped like a fish from the murky depths of Scherzo's foetus days the instant that man's reflection sought to invert itself through the vitreous medium of his eyes and travel the optic nerve to his stalled cerebrum, banging a gong along the processional way.

He didn't trust that door. The red ice, blue ice, black ice merged to form plateau, headless islands clothed in volcanic ash upon which were raised paradoxical armies of denial, those same armies engaged in a conflict of worlds, the debris of combat filtering down to stuff the ever busy ovens, the dead employed in the construction of mausoleums. Each man was a block, a slab, pillowed on heels and spine to spine or fixed upright (the gauche generals) with the weight of others distributed through their flattened skulls. The hallway contained them. The front door revolved too quickly to see, opening on worlds and spheres at random and marching the armies to battle. But Scherzo was oblivious, untainted by ideals, free not to think or closely scrutinize, and therefore aloof to these struggles. He wasn't interested in power, in holding the door and opening or closing it as he chose. Deaf to pleas and blind to slaughter he descended grey steps having washed them of colour by his refusal to judge, to intervene on one side or another, continuing down through successive layers, numbed by impossible offers, descending until the greyness fashioned into walls, an interior free of ectoplasm and spilt guts, a room of ceremony and ritual at whose far end shuffled a hairy man at a desk.

'Name?'

Scherzo declined to answer. Examining the walls he found them malleable, soft.

The hairy man tapped his pencil.

'What now?' said the mutant, scratching his face. His grin was lopsided, engaged in bewilderment.

The parlour was silent, the coffin perched on two chairs, its lid resting against the wall by the fireplace, brass plate struck with brass words.

Scherzo approached the wooden box casually. He ran his fingers over the smooth and varnished pine, spun the butterflies which flew in circles, up and down threads that were hinged. The coffin, like a walrus, was narrower at one end, tapering from the shoulders.

It was not yet time to look inside. Anyway, it was too dark. What he needed was a candle, some matches.

Suddenly they were wrapped in flame, scorched and stripped of flesh so that only bones remained, glowing hotly like the wire-coiled elements of electric fires, twisted as a magician twists balloons into the likenesses of swans and gorillas, giraffes and penguins. The grinning danced without a tune, his radiant skeleton composed of letters of the alphabet, A to Z, aleph to taw, letters written in many styles, jumbled together and meaning different things, instructions his sometime flesh interpreted as left and right, up and down, heavy and light, a complex genetic code, arguably warped. The mutant was possessed of apostrophes and exclamation marks, the former as the latter, suspended in purposeful rows like the slats of a fence beneath his multi-jointed arms, the bones of leathery wings previously concealed from all but his mother, flapping uselessly as they were roasted, weakened, played as grisly xylophones by red-orange hammer-tongues whose music was no music but the disembodied strains of damned souls, their silent combustion activated by the mournful bellows of those same souls' baked and percolated lungs. Plucked one by one from the flames, their desiccated carcasses turned to white ash, the calcinated bones of the damned were crumbled into cardboard tubes and sold as fireworks, the main ingredient of a pyrotechnic enterprise, the crime of these powdered contents being a banality, a surfeit of the ordinary. Not for them the much dangled rewards of a life of evil; they were surplus to requirements, merely your average rapists, killers and fraudsters. Lacking imagination they had the flesh burned from them and their bones ground, tight-packed, fused and dispatched as sardonic messages in the sky over wedding parties and centennial celebrations, subliminal advertisements for the pit, the meanings of which lured others, in their eager redness, greed and faithlessness, to the appetite of the pyre...

Scherzo, meanwhile, glowed like a neon sign, flashed on and off, his bone filament poorly connected, in danger of shorting altogether if not quickly insulated. Caring little for such informative distractions as his ribs and pelvis, he forced a protracted descent through the devouring flame to where the miscreant souls were shovelled in, wriggling like maggots as the fire reawakened them and flayed them repeatedly, unravelling their specially grown skins. Knee deep in powdery remains, naked toes gripping the sieving mesh, Scherzo felt around for bolts. The grinning spluttered overhead, struggling to keep in touch, fending off clinker-pocked penitents with his third leg that had become detached. Both man and mutant came under sustained assault, each being representative of a ladder. Scherzo, who was equipped with the spanner he'd discovered in the mighty hedge outside his window, cracked a number of pulsating skulls, their crusty brains spilling like salt. With his free hand he found what he was looking for and returned the spanner to its proper use, creating an opening in the grate through which the grinning and himself passed. They entered a realm of sooty clamour, noxious industry, the white ash adhering to their bones casting them as figures of pale uniformity, a bloated, doughy texture soon coloured as they progressed into the vaults of iron and steam, shaped by sound waves and moulded by memory currents, formed into individuals not unlike their original selves. One still clutching his spanner, the other his limb, the pair slid along greased corridors, negotiating bend upon circuitous bend, rattling foot-wide bridges whose rails were razor sharp, tripping through tunnels with no discernible floor, assailed from every quarter by winged beasts that ripped unleavened chunks from thigh and shoulder, smoke wraiths whose favourite trick was to lurk in the abundant mouths and vents of the air-conditioning system and spring noisome ambushes, smothering their pasty miens and so compelling them to run blind, risking a fall, or else stumbling head first into the belching workings of a resident machine. The noise was tremendous. They blocked their doughnut ears, but had to lower their hands in order to dislodge leechlike creatures from their swollen bellies before those creatures could burrow their way in and multiply. Pistons hissed and whistles blew, gears whined and presses slammed; bells chimed, and out spat more demons, imps and ghouls of every taint and odour. The heroic twosome sweated globules like ball-bearings with each breath, slick beads that proved hazardous underfoot, squeezed from their reconstituted bodies like fruit from compacted fruit cakes. Soon, thought Scherzo amid the mayhem, there won't be enough of us left to carry on. But far from feeling despondent he gripped his spanner firmly and laid about him with vigour, wreaking havoc to the everlasting delight of the laughing, hysterical machines, who sent forth their wireless subordinates to tidy up the myriad pieces and redeposit them in the machines' raw material bins that they might crunch, labour, heave, strain, retch and eject these foul assemblages once more into the fray. The fight was desperate, the cycle endless. The grinning took a sharp blow in the abdomen. Scherzo had an idea. Ignoring the imps and ghouls he attacked the free-ranging machine subordinates, aiming blows at their vacuum nozzles and extendable claws, denting their glinting scoops and rearranging their remote control aerials, buckling their tyreless wheels, bending their hooked tails and destabilizing their spinning gyros before dumping them in the yawning bins to be churned out as different engines, frenzied and paranoid, spring-driven and steam-powered, in this hybrid state useless, mongrels of steel and plastic with a hunger their superiors hadn't programmed, a frame of reference disorder which resulted in their imminent breakdown, thus engineering a window of opportunity our heroes had only to wade through...

They itched in the wake of this latest debacle and had to remove the whole of their tattered ash skins, stripping their bodies to the bare essentials, retaining a minimum of levers for perambulation.

It slowed them considerably. Scherzo, short-ribbed, made an unfavourable assessment of the situation.

'What now?' said the mutant, reduced to two legs and one hand. The vital instrument, the horn his grandfather's grandfather had stolen, borne by the eldest son of that grinning line, was tucked like a forage cap between clavicle and scapula.

The underworld became liquid and sticky.

Scherzo walked round the coffin three times for luck, a fourth for the angels, eyes elevated to the minutely rippled ceiling. If he were to shed a tear it would fall upward and splash a brief crown on that black and white surface. His head ached, full as it was of distant worlds, crammed with images of farther places. A part of him wanted to climb into the coffin and join his sister, dragging the lid over and somehow fastening it down. But he understood this to be impossible. He had not yet peered beyond the pine lip. There was no doubt in his mind as to the box's contents. Her name was engraved on the brass plate and the brass plate screwed resolutely, raised from the grain of the wood.

Annie had died without telling him. Scherzo felt aggrieved. Perhaps she had been angry; he couldn't say, knowing only that she'd gone.

Formless, they struggled against the viscous current. Not wishing to be separated they'd linked hands, joined wrists, connected arms, ultimately melded along one side, the mutant facing slightly backward so that no matter which way they were thrown they would always have some idea where they were going. Progress, in whatever direction, was swift, Scherzo levering them between root girders, stretching them like elastic bands, the mutant kicking his two feet like flippers.

Eventually they made it to solid ground; but even here they were denied respite, for the island whose shore they'd fortuitously encountered, dragging their candle-wax body ashore among the charred stumps of once spindly trees, rose like the nose of a massive submarine, one of a pair of domed buttocks whose muscle contractions flung them through layer upon layer of tissue-paper air, through a streaked succession of floors that dropped under them like the stratified remains of playing cards, aces and diamonds separating, clubs and hearts peeling beneath, allowing the jokers to drop, the below-decks sky fleeced with clouds of pure machine odour, thick clumps of oily red faeces tumbling as they, at increasing speed toward the round disc of the planet whose own velocity through the disputed black medium would soon to matched.

Regardless of the laws of physics, Scherzo Trepan expected the giant turds to hit first. Pessimism necessitated a suitable patch to land in. And he had his flesh back, making the envisioned impact worse. The sound of a zip-fastener opening announced his restored singularity. The grinning turned in the rushing atmosphere and spun like an acrobat without a fear of heights, the grin circling his entire face.

The planet grew more green than blue, suggesting they would be impaled on stiff vegetation before meeting with the turds, a rendezvous with raw nature Scherzo was in need of a solution to.

He smelled the inevitable. It stuck to his cheeks.

They fell past the sun. And now the mutant appeared relaxed, confident, for unlike Scherzo he had experience of dreams (more so than one), which he was convinced this was, and knew that he would wake up moments before impact in the cosy safety net of his bed.

Annie's face held a dull sheen in the candlelight. Scherzo had found the candle along with one of his mother's discarded lighters in the sideboard, a drawer full of such things as doll's heads and old marbles, broken watches and leaking fountain pens. Setting flame to wick he'd dripped hot wax on the mantelpiece and pressed the candle's base into the pool. Dragging a third chair through from the dining room he positioned it by the side of the coffin, and standing on this, hands clasped, he stared at his sister in her wedding dress, and smiled. She was married to Death, he thought, knowing it to be true. Annie was the bride of ghosts and doomed sailors. Very carefully he rolled back her eyelids and peered inside. Her flesh retained a warmth that seemed quite natural. In her eyes fluttered tiny moths. Something more. He leaned over to the mantelpiece and snuffed out the candle. A perfect blackness arrived, taking over, absolute in its rule, erasing all trace of colour and contour. And yet, if he lowered his face to hers, finding her nose with his own, Scherzo could see that the moths were in reality hosts of tiny globes, each a dancing sphere of potential, the seed of exploded stars, cells dividing green or grey where they fell, on metal of organic culture...

They penetrated, the redness with them, stopping abruptly inches above the stone floor of the room.

'Name?' inquired the hairy man with the pencil.

Scherzo Trepan placed his feet beneath him and stood. The floor was hard.

The grinning, bemused, walked up to the desk.

The hairy man resolved not to torment him further. 'Yes,' he said, 'it's me.'

Whereupon the mutant resistance blew the horn in his ear, rendering him vulnerable.

72

It's not easy learning to fly, but I have a good teacher. Strapped into the yonderscope, familiarizing myself with buttons and levers, I wait while Staples makes some last minute adjustments to the suspension, a Polo mint impressed on his tongue. Satisfied, the fat cat jumps in my lap, his holstered Browning digging me in the balls, and we're off to Formalhaut via Rosemary's. She has requested the sack, a tool to employ in the search for her love, disappeared Moses, last seen in a strange rubber suit.

Staples is pleased to be headed home. Pulchritude was fine, he tells me, while it lasted.

