Underlay

It rained, like winter melting into spring. Daily the temperature rose, melting the ice lakes and frozen roof-top vistas. Tundra thawed and flowed, pouring from gargoyles and off window ledges, bright streams that evaporated before reaching the ground. Wraiths were dissipated by the warm updraughts of engines, human and mechanical, the opening and closing of doors and mouths.

  Witness to such events, hungry still for others, experiences both inside and outside time, behind the wallpaper and under the carpet, Henry Eels sat in quiet reflection of a search that had taken on parameters surprising even to himself. He was having trouble keeping up. Losing the Ventura was a significant headache. His documentary was lost, crushed, impounded, torched, censored, expunged, deleted, in the hands of the enemy, whoever they might be. Henry really wasn't interested in taking sides, in politics. The fact of his absent love remained uppermost, her cold heart and soft throat.

  The fact he was close.

  Driving this Ventura, pleasantly chilled, in mind as in body, propelled by ice-cream and surrounded by empty space, steeped in the charred perfume of cigarette ash and shaping his arse to an unfamiliar seat, he practised a victory smile, all cheekbones and teeth. There was none to see it though, if you discount the odd pigeon. The city at present was underfoot, gleaming like a cutlery tray fresh out of the dishwasher, knives and forks, spoons vertically arrayed, the metal hair of a planet grown hirsute.

  Among the beer bottles in the footwell were several opened packs of Woodbines, from which he helped himself, depressing the cigar lighter and the clutch, slowing amid a brief hail-storm, frozen debris ringing off the Ventura's much damaged bodywork. Henry steered toward a roof garden with a miniature golf course, came to rest in a water hazard and stepped out.

  ‘Am I late?’

  ‘Early.’

  That bothered him, although he couldn't say why. Perhaps his watch was fast. But he wasn't wearing one.

  ‘What've you got for me?’

  The demon Byamol scratched an armpit. ‘Depends,’ he grunted. ‘I'm freelance these days, you know?’

  ‘So Thorp says.’

  ‘How is the old bastard?’

  ‘Barely sober...’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Thinking of retirement,’ Henry went on, expressing thoughts that Thorp himself might not have room for in his skull. The demon was crafty, he'd said, short-tempered and pedantic. Diversionary tactics were a must.

  ‘Pity,’ said Byamol, in a tone suggesting his own future was undecided. Unknown, at least, which put him on the Ark with everyone else. ‘I kind of liked him. We had a mutual trust. I was his first assignment, you know? Blew my brains out with a shotgun.’

  Henry sucked on the Woodbine while the demon rooted out a handkerchief and emptied his snout.

  ‘It wasn't a brotherly thing to do,’ Byamol said.

  Henry was confounded. ‘You’re...’

  ‘Oh shit, no. Not what you think. I was a novice; just couldn't stomach the absence of God.’ He was dewy-eyed now, recalling the seminary. ‘They fucking excommunicated me. Can you believe it? Those fucking priests. What choice did I have but to go underground - at least dead I had some time to think.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There is a God,’ he stated without pause. ‘Why else should anything exist?’

  Henry was happy to leave it at that. His ultimate goal was to discover a prerequisite to life, some meaning to existence beyond self that would prove a divinity; a purpose other than survival, which served no end, only the intermediacy of struggle.

  The demon was staring hard at him, a flicker of recognition in his heavily lidded eyes.

  They had something in common, that look said. It was just taking a while to sink in.

  ‘To the matter at hand,’ Henry prompted. ‘Three ladies of your acquaintance?’

  ‘What about payment?’

  ‘Where can I find them?’

  ‘Here, in Ileum.’

  Where else? Henry elected to play his trump card, half knowing the demon was expecting it. Thorp had been reluctant to give him his former contact’s mobile number, finally relenting under mild hypnosis...a little monkeying of Henry’s own.

  ‘Will an IOU suffice?’

  Byamol frowned; not a pretty sight.

  ‘Index Ophidian Ust,’ murmured Henry Eels, sweat cooling between his toes. Win or bust.

  Byamol began drawing a map.

  Pursuing a rainbow, ears popping with the drop in altitude, Henry allowed himself a peek behind that particular door in his mind he'd closed long ago. Byamol was right, he acknowledged, even if that truth remained unspoken. Between brothers the recognition was tacit, necessarily subtle. Either might be mistaken. Exposure confounded the idea of a chapter, a brotherhood that was anything more than myth. There were no secret handshakes here, just a blithe respect. Loneliness was part of it, too. They were all hermits, hopeless outsiders with a perspective born of selflessness and maintained through non-observance. No doctrine. No dogma. No bright robes or clandestine meetings. No grand designs or intricate plots. Only transient definitions, their uncounted number always busy, always somewhere else. Thus the door, a portal always closed but never locked.

  Gravity, thought Henry Eels, it was like gravity. His guiding force was an invisible consequence of mass, omnipresent yet possible to nullify, even temporarily escape.

  Shaking his head he braked.

  He was parked outside a hotel.

  There was no question of him driving up the facade, he figured, that defied the logic of the place. He would have to enter at ground level and work his way to the roof.

  Contemplative, he lit another Woodbine.

  He opened the door and got out.

  The hotel extended for hundreds of metres in either direction, its corners lost in an insubstantial blur of pedestrian and vehicular traffic; like the buildings they veered between, warped by the intrusive structure that had seemingly pushed through from beneath, stretching the skein of reality about its edges without destroying the surface - rather displacing it, moving it aside as if it, Ileum, was liquid. The images Henry gleaned of the city about the hotel's vague peripheries were contorted and out of proportion, steel and flesh sliding, reflections in a breath-misted spoon-back.

  Inside was utter darkness.

  Outside, the Ventura stood motionless in an empty street. Not even the litter moved. No light braved the interior. It was like staring at a photograph, one that slowly dissolved, leaving only memory and the shuffle of unseen dancers to fill the void. Henry listened as dresses swirled, shoes hinged, shirt sleeves rustled. He thought it a polka. He walked toward the sound but found nothing, no obstructing limbs or tripped over toes. His infra red camera was lost along with his car, leaving him blind, unable to record events he couldn't see. All he'd saved from the crashed Ventura was the video camera he'd used to record Cherry Molasses, number seventy-six in his series culminating in the woman he sought, a rendezvous with whom motivated his soul. But even that was abandoned, left with Thorp as he'd run out of tape. No time to visit the nearest convenience store. Henry hadn't thought he'd miss it, not at this juncture. Death and Romance was little more than a scrapbook, a visual notepad whose function was to organize the disparate threads of his quest, enabling him to focus on his next objective, that which manifested through a lens of detailed observation and meticulous research; a process gradually sharpened by experience, culminating, he'd thought, in the eventual redundancy of the very enabling hardware. But it wasn't easy to let go. The camera kept him at a distance, not personally involved. Danger was rationalized, impatience, frustration tempered by glass and plastic, the displacement of occurrences - fact and fiction - onto film.

  He walked into an elevator, rooted in his pockets for a match, found several that were damp. Only wet sparks came of his attempts at establishing some visual reference, so he pressed a button at random, about in the middle of the briefly glimpsed brass plate. The car lurched, then seemed to mov
e sideways. Someone, he imagined, was fooling with that much treasured gravity, his primum mobile.

  There was applause. Music. Conversation he caught the odd snatches of, drowned on the verge of making sense by the creaking elevator as it shifted in every direction, leaving Henry clueless as to which, if any floor...

  Byamol's map, such as it was, had brought him this far. Vernon’s three wives were his goal. Everything pointed to their inclusion in his quest. The unlit car clanked on, like it was on rails, some fairground ride. Funhouse or Ghost Train? Depends on your definition of humour, he supposed. Right now, it was as if he was being shuffled through an infinity of hotels, the possibility of countless foyers and corridors looming. Every transient room.

  It might go on forever. He shrugged, scratched his chin. He might be lost in a labyrinth, this his damnation, his reward for having stalked a preternatural lover. He needed a shave. He scratched under one arm, twisted a finger in his right ear. There were bolts of light, vertical snatches like the slits in a zoetrope. Henry leaned his head toward them, hoping to spy the moving picture inside the revolving drum.

  Re-entry

  Nancy watched Swene brush his teeth.

  ‘I can still taste you,’ he said, mouth foaming.

  ‘How do I taste?’

  ‘Minty.’

  They exchanged conversation like a longstanding couple, she thought, words that didn't mean much, but spoken with a familiarity beyond their brief tenure. They were happy, she realized. Content. She shivered as if someone had opened a window, rubbing her arms and twisting on the balls of her feet, naked under a slip. It was odd. Never before had she needed someone the way she needed him. All the men in her life had failed to somehow cross the bridge separating Nancy as body, flesh, hungry and holed, from Nancy as...what? Herself? Hidden away? That was a strange idea, her hiding. She was still getting used to the idea of Jones and his manipulations, her family and its secrets, being that they were all...if not dead, then somehow expired, past their sell-by dates and yet still fresh. Her father at least. Although not as ancient as Jones, Pa had started life as prentice to an apothecary in Pergamum, a city in Asia Minor circa 200 BC. Famed for its library, Jones told her, a jewel of Hellenist architecture. And Jones himself? The father of her children, be they living or zombified, had been a goatherd in Persia around the time of Alexander the Great. His role model, she thunk.

  ‘What's up?’

  He wasn't asking her directly, more the air itself.

  ‘We have to leave.’

  Swene nodded and proceeded to dress. He hadn’t got around to telling Nancy about his supposed Avenging Angel status. They had this connection, was his excuse, telling himself that she knew already and it was of no moment, not to one whose rape was the cause of all the upheaval in the world to begin with, the submersion of the everyday by the extraneous organism that was Ileum. Swallowed - beyond the event horizon otherwise known as Hell. It came with the territory, this need to be constantly on the run. To remain one step ahead of...

  They took the lift, carried no luggage, arrived in the lobby, there to be greeted by a chorus of several noisome Pekinese and a woman haranguing a bell-boy in an unintelligible language wearing lace up boots and a large feathered hat. The bell-boy, a pubescent Buttons, was leaning back, face turned to one side at the lambaste.

  Dogs and woman then fell abruptly silent.

  Somebody pointed. Whatever it was marking them as fugitives blazed in capitals on their foreheads. He guessed they didn’t have much choice hereafter. Either Ileum would masticate them, digest them, or be forced to spit them out.

  Wishful thinking perhaps. But Swene was phlegmatic.

  Nancy gazed over her shoulder as the lift doors shut.

  The next sound was that of a telephone receiver being dropped, a moustachioed gentleman at reception fumbling with it, fingers struggling to locate the correct numbers through the telephone's brass dial. He recovered the receiver from the polished desk top, held it cable topmost, briefly mumbling into the ear-piece before turning the bulky instrument the right way up.

  Calling the police, Nancy supposed. A Bonnie and Clyde end-game surfaced in her head.

  Taking Swene's thankfully dry palm she walked with him through the lobby, patrons sneaking looks over newspapers and from behind pot plants, men and women whose sole concern was to be somewhere else, yet taking secret pleasure in the closeness of the threat, such as it was, the fugitives a highlight in their otherwise dull existences. Something to tell the grandchildren, in which future scenario Nancy and Swene would each possess a swagger and be armed to the teeth.

  Stepping carefully between tables laden with silver trays and china, all frills and little cakes, she marvelled at the level of detail, distracted by intricate doilies and the patient application of tiny icing rosebuds.

  The doorman tipped his hat.

  Nancy, unperturbed, hailed a cab.

  ‘How much money have you got?’

  Swene emptied his pockets. Change.

  ‘Shit...’

  ‘I'll just drive, shall I?’ the driver asked.

  ‘You'll just shut the fuck up!’

  They moved into traffic, stopped at a light.

  Nancy opened her door, opened the driver's and dragged him out.

  ‘Hey!’

  Drove herself. There really was no point in hanging about. It might all be over by the time they got to the start line, wherever that was.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Swene questioned, slithering on the back seat, denim and leather in a low-friction environment of manmade fibres and erratic course adjustments.

  Nancy replied by putting her foot down. A long way in a short time, this seemed to say.

  Ileum bled, smeared through the translucent medium of the car windows. The faster she went the less difficulty she had in negotiating traffic. The highway was crammed, yet vehicles shifted, as if pulled to one side, the cab electrically charged, repelling other road users who then slotted in behind. Buildings leaned in their wake, distorted by velocity and the intervening air. Colours melted from facades and floated free, suspended like globules of wax or oil. The cab's meter, glowing in the dash, kept flashing NO FARE.

  Nancy let go of the wheel and climbed in the back with Swene.

  ‘This is all my fault.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don't mention it.’

  She wiped her nose.

  ‘Did you have a nice life?’

  ‘Mostly.’

  ‘So it wasn't all bad...’ She wasn’t sure, inwardly apologizing for the platitude, but felt perhaps there ought to be a critical speed that, once reached, enabled them to progress beyond the bounds of reality itself, past the ordinary and into the extraordinary, as much as those words meant.

  Bits of the car began flying off, pieces of rubber and metal that spun into the vortex at their tail. The windscreen turned orange and sagged. Flames licked round the dials.

  Now what? thought Swene.

  He was at a loss for words. There wasn’t the air to express them. The zipper on his jacket winked at him and he winked back. Avenging Angel? More his brother’s calling, he protested, watching the sum of his visual cortex being consumed like an ignited crisp packet.

  He felt himself shrink, then slip down the plughole of existence...

  Nancy let go of Swene, who breathed for the first time, breath in his lungs a reflexive shock. His teeth stung, tasted of lead. The temperature dropped. The half dozen small fires about and under the dash winked out, as if their combustible supply had been turned off. Smoke meandered, forming a cloud base just shy of the headlining. She returned to the driver's seat. It spilled foam, ruptured. The steering wheel was buckled from some invisible impact. The engine had stalled. She failed to start it. A flick of the wipers cleared snow from the windscreen, revealing a fractured landscape.

  ‘We're in a drift,’ she stated. ‘It put the fire out.’


  Swene thought: lucky us.

  ‘Come on, it's freezing in here.’ Nancy pushed at her door, found it stuck, tried with her feet on the passenger side, which budged. Slush fell wetly to the sill. The door swung back under its own weight, slamming shut. Angrily she gave it a kick, snapping it open and bracing it with a heel while she slid across to that side of the car, all the time glaring at Swene for not helping.

  Outside it was night. They were off the road, in a ditch, in a sodden puddle of ploughed ice particles and pale illumination, the sodium lamp overhead flickering, teasing the shadows about her feet, millions of them drawn from crevices as the light briefly waned, only then to be expurgated. Nancy opened the back door and motioned to Swene. ‘I think we walk from here. Anyway, it looks safe.’

  Swene wasn't sure what she meant.

  It was somehow less cold outside the vehicle.

  Nancy threw her arms round his neck.

  Kissing her, he was reminded of another girl, one whose features refused to coalesce, as if surfaced via a dream, the memory of her painful and thus stowed deep. What was her name? A quiet, fluttering moth, her eyes had spoken, peering up at him as Nancy was now, deep glittering pools of conversation, questions for which no answers were asked. A childhood sweetheart, he had no memory of an epithet. Hadn’t she moved away? Just those eyes, deep and lustrous, that tongue, sweet and sharp, writhing magically behind teeth.

  A love lost. A destiny gained?

  ‘So, where do you suppose we're at?’

  Not the same place they were before, that was for sure. The realization of space, a horizon, even one only dimly visible, came to Swene in a rush. If this was a park it was a park smelling of cow dung and rotting fence posts, a landscape of hedgerows and gorse bushes and farm machinery, rusting hay-rakes like exotic skeletons made redundant by the season, come summer to collect grasses between their sharpened ribs and weave each strand diametrically. Swene remembered such fields from childhood, he and his brother with limbs flailing, kicking up storms of harvested debris. But the heat of those days, past and future, seemed far removed - yet closer, as it appeared they had departed Ileum.

  ‘Maybe we're somewhere we shouldn't be,’ he commented.

  ‘Ooh,’ she said mockingly; ‘I like the sound of that.’

  ‘Maybe we're nearer the beginning.’

  Her head tipped to one side, blonde hair falling away from her face like fine gauze.

  Swene watched the sun rise through it.

  ‘Look over your shoulder.’

  Nancy did so, briefly, smiling as she looked at him again. ‘I don't see anything but reds and greens. It's like a memory.’

  He agreed. But who’s?

  Brown earth and pink sky. He could see the snow melting, like frost off a lamb chop bunged in the microwave.

  They walked along the road a way before turning down a deep-rutted farm track, mud and puddles in abundance, but no sign of human life. The farm itself, when they came upon it, was empty, derelict in parts as if vacated over a period of years. The barns and animal pens were worst affected, roofs fallen in and railings powdery with corrosion. The house and associate buildings, those designed for human occupancy, were less dilapidated; but much of the furniture was removed or broken, pulled apart by rats and dragged into a thousand stinking corners. Swene and Nancy only gazed through the windows. A black cat stalked them defensively, as if they were about stealing chickens.

  From the farm they continued cross-country, avoiding the worst of the ground conditions, a circuitous path across fields sloped and hummocked, under which lay centuries of ploughing. All were fallow. The last crops had rotted. And the people? Nancy thought they'd escaped to the city, to a better standard of living. Swene didn't agree. His imagination had X-ray vision. There were no grave markers, but it was only a matter of time before they came upon an excavation. Where once the ground had yielded turnips and potatoes, now the soil was occupied by corpses; new and old, the graves revisited. Clothes and flesh were still recognizable, lying among older bones, a gruesome compost of generations, each hummock perhaps a family tomb, opened here to accept the latest in a long line of guilt and innocence. There was no clue to the burial party, no upright spades or footprints. The earth might have opened of its own accord, ready to draw breath exhausted from bodies, closing again over flesh still cooling. Swene didn't believe the past and future occupants of these burial mounds were all victims, rather he saw a cycle of life and death, destruction and creation that was the very essence of the earth itself, organic and indestructible. Fathers and mothers begat sons and daughters. The bodies of grandparents returned to the nurturing soil to feed via their corporal selves the busy worms of the underworld, whose industry produced children of a likeness, a family resemblance, manufacturing human beings in an endless chain of succession; semen leaked amid clays and ovaries wedged up the nostrils of slender invertebrates. To be buried in the wrong hole offered diversity, a practice considered perverse, yet widespread, as each tried to better the lot of their siblings, cuckoos whose spent vessels were interred alongside the remains of the more talented and beautiful in the hope of improvement. Of course, such interlopers, if discovered, faced certain destruction. The chance lay in them remaining undetected; being, via putrescence, accepted into the mulch.

  So, for the betterment, was many a bastard born, ejected come spring and subsequently harvested, children whose identity it was for them to discover and make apparent. Their lives were spent searching, seeking others of their kind that they might die happy, safe in the knowledge of the genetic continuum,

  Nancy shook him. ‘You're wool-gathering.’

  ‘I am? Sorry.’

  ‘Look over there,’ she instructed. ‘What do you see?’

  Swene held a hand over his eyes, shading them. Slowly winding down a hillside, mud-spattered and approaching, was a yellow wedge of metal.

  ‘That's my car,’ said Nancy. ‘I'm certain.’

  They'd left this field and two others, climbing over stiles and limboing under barbed wire before the car finally met them. The road it was on was narrow and falling away at the edges. Its wipers fanned once, clearing a brown sludge from the windscreen, revealing an interior of green check and zero occupants.

  Nancy jumped up and down, whooping and punching the air before bending to gently stroke the Triumph's bashful headlamps, each in its raised pod of aluminium. The door hinged for her and she got in, waving to Swene who had to pull hard on the opposite handle to get it to budge. The car was perhaps jealous, he thought, wanting Nancy alone in its compartment, ensconced in a warm dry womb of plastic and carpet.

  ‘All I need now is my camera,’ she said excitedly. Adding, ‘It is nice to be back. Do you think we'll find anyone alive in the city?’

  ‘Which one?’ Swene was trying to move his seat. Failing, he reached behind him, twisting to pull a heavy bag free. The bag came loose like a tooth, at the same time unzipping. The subsequent pain was numb and final. There could be none, he imagined, to beat it.

  Even Nancy grimaced. That's got to hurt, she was thinking, the bowling ball in Swene's lap like a huge fishing weight or a tiny planet.

  And they were mobile again, travelling and breathing as people should, learning and growing while sometimes standing still, becoming more of themselves and each other, adopting the characteristics of their fixed and transient surroundings, extant through the medium of motion. A whole new adventure over the hill.

  Rabbit Hole

  Henry stood well back. Owen had calculated, by means he wasn't able to explain or Henry understand, that they were under Parliament. He was using Mickey's cycle shorts as a source of ignition.

  Owen was convinced that creating a big enough disturbance in whatever temporal or spacial framework they were trapped in was the only way of escaping it. With no cover, the suggested detonation, its rapid expansion, would look like suicide to any sane person. Henry understood the rationale, however, and was prepare
d to gamble. Science had never been his strong suit.

  The elevator had rattled on for fifteen minutes or so before jarring to a sudden halt, a square of brilliant light round its sliding doors suggestive of a destination. As good a place to start as any, he reckoned. His parents had run a hotel. He had the strange feeling he’d be stepping back in time when the doors finally opened. Instead, he stepped out into a white expanse, a space without temperature or readily definable walls. It reminded him of the inside of a fridge, oddly neutral, the light on as no-one was looking, believing it to be dark in there with the door shut, dark and cold.

  Sitting on a pile of boxes were a couple of mischievous-looking individuals, who, far from expecting him, seemed relieved he’d arrived.

  ‘I'm Owen and this is Mickey.’

  ‘Henry Eels.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Henry. Going far?’

  A peculiar question.

  ‘I like to think so,’ he answered truthfully. ‘Depends on the company.’

  Owen nodded. ‘We've fallen in with some rash types ourselves, haven't we Mick?’

  The giant nodded. His pink and yellow jarred beautifully with the all-pervading white. That which they were about to disturb.

  Robbed of his lycra pants there was, observed Henry from an uncertain distance, something extraordinary about his genitalia.

  Owen waved, he and Mickey strolling over. Only as they neared they appeared to be getting smaller, shrinking as if through distance, their proximity contradicted by their proportions. The pair vanished before they reached him, dropping from sight as if descending a receding escalator. Henry found himself alone with the dynamite, cases arranged in a crude pyramid. Panicked, he ran toward it, convinced now that the closer he was to the epicentre the more likely he was to survive the accelerated chemical process. There was no way he could hide or outrun the explosion; it would occupy every possible vector. He might though cash in on its vacant centre, put himself where it had been, his momentum carrying him beyond the here and now and into the dynamite's missing volume.

  Underlay

  Byamol had long questioned the veracity of experience. Back at the seminary, prior to the launch of his tonsils, he'd argued with the monks on the rightness and wrongness of any given situation, engendering much spittle and red faces, a diet of bread and water and a lot of “downtime” at the feet of the Abbot. Faith simply wasn't for him, not the way the fathers taught it. The lone of a shotgun was an invitation to join another order. An extreme form of recruitment. What he was to then experience, the absence of time, the dichotomy of flesh and spirit, he found no more convincing; but inherent in death, and specifically damnation, was the perspective of mimicry. The dead parodied the living, their institutions, their conventions, their hopes, fears and passions. Ultimately, they had nothing to lose; they could only gain, and so they needn't take any of it seriously. That Jones had imposed a solution on a problem satisfactorily invisible until then was absurd. To blur a boundary was to impose one, make it recognizable. It was suddenly necessary to argue once more, to vie for position within a rigid hierarchy, to reopen old wounds and fight the fight of rightness and wrongness in full view of the facts, as stated, as experienced by religious men and scientists, as argued and fought over for centuries - in the living world. And now the dead also, whose pits and towers and torture chambers were illuminated not by 40W or 100W bulbs, but by the screaming incantations of those housed there, radiant in anticipation of whatever. Details didn't matter. Or hadn't.

  Jones had made everything real. Now the fake was better than the original, subsuming it, a changeling reality, constantly devouring and disgorging itself, no longer sure of where or what it was, at which point in the eating or puking cycle, whether this was an accurate re-creation or a poor verisimilitude, ironically void of anything imitable, as the original was no more, usurped by a copy inferior inasmuch as it was born not a larva but an imago, and therefore had never been a pupa.

  No place for a God here, ever. Jones' space was not infinite.

  The missing chapter, those that belonged to it, had no role in such a macrocosm: a seeming contradiction. They had no role anywhere, as Byamol understood things. Or they hadn't. Circumstances had changed, opening an avenue for them, a passage through denial and negation that might eventually led to a divinity. God in person, tall or short or girlish, mannish in voice and proportion and yet inherently feminine, shaving face and legs and shedding tears of both joy and sadness, loving and uncaring of sinners...

  Some kind stranger bought him another beer.

  The demon attempted to focus, to identify his benefactor.

  Thorp, un-shaded, the collars of his trenchcoat stained with ash and curled at the edges like old money.

  ‘You look terrible.’

  ‘I am terrible,’ said Byamol. ‘What made you suppose different?’

  Thorp shrugged and tipped his Pilsener. He had some catching up to do.

  ‘There's no justice in it,’ Byamol whimpered. ‘Jones always dealt direct with those beyond the grave.’

  Whereas I found it necessary to engage a third party, interpreted the sometime collector of souls. Was the demon, in his cups, blaming him? He laughed and lit a cigarette. The image of Jenny Pith on a rooftop filled his mind. Found and lost, soulless Orangepeel, made warm then cold.

  Her occupancy still disturbed him, the entity that had moved into her vacant shell a predatory unknown. She was alive yet. He sensed it, reading the ether, as yet attuned to fluctuations in the sublime.

  But what was she? His initial attraction to her was surely, with hindsight, no coincidence. A suicide, she'd changed her mind. Skipping on a roof ledge, talking of friends who'd died, Jenny Pith had not taken that last step into oblivion, had forced him to question the nature of his own existence, making Thorp doubt his calling. She was the precursor, he thought, an avatar of change. And he'd fallen in love with her. Not surprising given his track record. He'd been gulled that day, dreaming of apple trees, awash in sepia tones; the future laid out for him like a picnic, with himself seated nearest the wine.

  It came back to the Joneses. Their immortal kith and kin. Not a nuclear family by any stretch of the imagination, rather one whose members made a habit of forgetting all their yesterdays and recognizing only those allegiances that were present, in the moment. The future was something they craved, whereas the past was full of mistakes. Why remind yourself of them? So much opportunity to get things wrong! It made for short tempers and selfishness. They were spoilt, he thought. Even bored. Thorp, like many others, had been seduced by their immediacy, their sense of the present and all that might be squeezed in. They lived beneath the surface, were not worn down by the constant passage of time. Beyond and behind the fabric of history, they lingered, protected, under the very carpet whose weave depicted the events of centuries. Triumph and disaster in its pattern, but only sameness in theirs. The underlying. The desirous. For continuity, immortality, sameness was a damnation. To be forever excluded was their fate; neither living or dead. In that place of politics gone mad.

  There he was, riding his bicycle along a country lane, circa 1916. Not a care in the world, the fact of a puncture approaching like the first rumble of an earthquake. The Kowolski’s, Anna and John, passed him a few minutes later, Thorp walking now his rear tyre was deflated. They stopped, offered him a lift, and that was when he first set eyes on the succubus...

  What man could resist? Her husband smiled and waxed his beard. She was a collector, he knew, whether it be Homo sapien or Lepidoptera. She’d deflowered princesses and lain with kings.

  Her brother was civil at first; the perfect host.

  ‘Do you play?’ Wafting a racquet, Jones smiles, sips his champagne and tamps his cigarette.

  Thorp has a week’s leave from the artillery. What he lobs are explosives, but he supposes tennis balls aren’t much different. They streak through the sky, blurred white projectiles against a pale grey background. He in khaki, t
aking quickly to a game requiring a discerning eye, where the monochromatic Thorp perhaps has an advantage. One Jones finds unreadable, convinced as he is of this guest’s ordinary credentials. It is, after a few shaky opening games, a massacre.

  Anna is beside herself, her brother having broken not one but two racquets and stormed off hugging a bottle of Bombay gin.

  ‘How extraordinary! I’ve never seen him so...thrashed!’ She throws her arms round his neck and sucks his tongue into her mouth. ‘You do realize he’ll never forgive you?’

  Thorp shrugs. He finds it easy to fix his gaze on a moving object, judge its speed and trajectory.

  ‘Well...’ she adds. ‘And handsome, too.’

  He’s not so good at billiards, or cards. Fencing? Jones appears set on his humiliation, and Thorp is too polite to make excuses; only Anna chooses then to step from her French lace pantaloons, twirling them provocatively round a finger.

  The rest (as daughter Nancy would say) is history.

  Byamol brought him back, opening a bag of crisps.

  ‘Ready salted?’

  Thorp shook his head.

  ‘Please yourself...’

  He tapped out a Woodbine.

  ‘Those things’ll kill you,’ the demon said, laughing through fried potato slices. ‘That and the drink.’

  Thorp had never lacked willpower. So there and then, he quit.

  ‘She will be impressed.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know who.’

  Yes, he thought, he did. Too late now though. The carpet was up.

  Cherry appeared at their table, having spent long minutes in the ladies. The demon stopped munching. Somewhere she’d found a complete change of wardrobe and a manicurist.

  ‘Ready?’

  Thorp dropped his pack of Woodbines in the ashtray. He regarded her strangely, one eye flicking to Byamol, who looked not so much terrible now as kittenish.

  ‘Come on then,’ she harried. ‘Let’s be going!’

  If there was a dialogue bubble over her head, thought Thorp, almost seeing it, it would contain the word MEN! in exasperated capital letters.

  He got up and they left.

  ‘I made a few calls,’ she said. ‘Called in a few favours.’

  What wasn’t she telling him?

  ‘Where’s your car?’

  ‘Henry took it.’

  ‘Hmm...’

  A vein in his temple pulsed.

 

  Chaos Descending

  Nancy expected to see the ocean any moment now. As a child the waves had frightened her. They looked so big and out of control, crashing one over another in an endless race to the shore. Needless to say she'd got over it. Swene had gone quiet. She began whistling as they crested the rise.

  The sea was blue and green and white, ordinary, lit by a sun momentarily unencumbered by cloud. Rays of light poured in through the windscreen, shocking them both. Nancy swerved reaching for the visor, but there was no other traffic. She could have driven on the opposite side of the road, and thinking it did, drawing a puzzled stare from the puzzled man next to her. They came to a roundabout and she turned left instinctively, not wishing to circumnavigate such a random universe. Heading inland, following the river toward a rendezvous with (drowned in its own waters; existentially hungover or plain post-apocalyptic?) Palmersville, Nancy turned on the radio. Just static. Perhaps the aerial was broken. Electrical interference from overhead lines. The latest offering from the latest band. It didn't seem important, she could sing herself anyway, this time eliciting a smile from her puzzling passenger, who ran his palm up her thigh.

  The first signs of human habitation came in the shape of burnt out cars, charred and black at the roadside. These were numerous, some still smouldering, paintwork only visible about the front and rear, as if the fire had been most intense in the passenger compartment, completely gutting the interior. Sprays of glass lay across bonnets and boot lids, pushed outward by the heat of flaming upholstery. Few were obviously crashed. Most appeared to have been pushed off the highway, nudged aside by other, angrier drivers.

  Nancy's mood deflated at the sight of a bus-load of incinerated school children, teeth visible in skulls and eye sockets empty, seated in orderly pairs. Their gaseous consumption had been sudden and final, like each was primed, stoked, fuel for breakfast that morning. No time to scream, a split second of shock and fear before dying, roasted like turkeys too long in the oven. Packaged in aluminium, posed in grisly imitation, carbonised boys and girls in a burlesque of state education, being all alike, similarly uniform.

  A motorbike cruised past in a sweeping overtaking manoeuvre, the figure astraddle naked but for a chemise skid lid. Boy or girl, she couldn’t say. Two, three cars followed in quick succession, the last with red lights flashing. Slip-roads joined the main carriageway, and where there had been no traffic now there were vehicles nose to tail. The yellow Triumph was sucked along, through an underpass whose lights were mostly extinguished, a black tunnel from which they emerged squinting, road signs and direction indicators ablaze with spring sunshine, radiating a spectrum of colours; hues of meat, every shade of bacon, fresh and foul. The city was a mass of concrete and pedestrians, an urbanized amalgam of stone and flesh, as if a peculiarly gifted, light-than-air glacier had rolled over, instituting these geographic features. Nancy recognised her surroundings, but felt lost, unable to change lanes or even decelerate. Road users waved fists and roared expletives behind glass clear and tinted, leaned on horns and flooded her senses with full beam. Brake lights flared ahead of her like spattered blood on the windscreen, ahead of the lights the burning mass of a half dozen automobiles, some still pumping exhaust fumes, about which the traffic had to swerve.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ muttered Swene, one hand braced against the dashboard.

  Nancy engaged panic steering.

  They clipped a postal van, which veered off into an oncoming lane.

  A thick grey cloud hung in the rearview mirror.

  ‘We need a place to park,’ he asserted.

  She growled, twisting her hands on the wheel. Why didn’t he just shut up?

  ‘There's a multi-storey near here...’

  Nancy dropped a gear, put her foot down. The car lurched sideways to a chorus of horns, which she ignored, having learned the rules of the game.

  ‘Over there!’ directed Swene, stubbing a finger, his contribution to the mayhem.

  Nancy though, was way ahead of him. She braked hard, spun the rear wheels and drove on through a barrier. Barely slowing, she corkscrewed up wrongly numbered levels, side-swiping shopping trolleys and generating dust devils, spun out onto the roof of a department store and circled nervously before sliding the TR7's shark nose under a tubular railing.

  ‘Think we should get a ticket?’

  ‘I don't see a machine.’

  ‘No, me neither.’

  They got out, shivering despite the impinging exhaust-pipe heat, the pervasive unease of the internally combusted once-living. They exchanged condemned looks, rueful, what-the-fuck half smiles, then loped toward a stairwell. People pushed past them on the landing, each carrying four of five large shopping bags.

  ‘Must be a sale,’ commented Nancy excitedly. She danced down the stairs and through the first set of double doors. Ready and willing.

  Swene wished she'd slow down, fully aware as he was of the importance of momentum. They’d merged, bonded, become one; but that eclipse couldn’t last, was a perspective thing. A trick of geometry. That they’d come unstuck, and soon, was inevitable. Necessary even. It was simply a matter of when. He nearly lost her behind a display of bedding, duvets and pillows, mattresses metamorphosing into sofa chairs and Welsh dressers, sideboards into stereo equipment, computers, TVs, each displaying a video image. Her face appeared on a phalanx of screens, large and small, Nancy's features smeared on one set and on another tightly focused. Here she was badly coloured, there pin-sharp, her head turning
, eyes roaming, widening with surprise. It was all he could do to keep up, his own face displayed momentarily before slipping aside. She turned to wave from amid racks of CDs. A fight broke out behind her, an argument over a receipt. Guns were pulled. Swene dived for cover. Nancy though witnessed events erect, watching heads explode and chests disgorge, the combatants going at each other till only one was standing, sweat oozing, urine puddling, blood spraying across the floor. There was a moment's silence. The victor put her gun away and shopping resumed.

  Swene was hauled to his feet.

  ‘No rest for the wicked,’ Nancy joked, enjoying this, not caring at the moment to question her taste in otherworldly entertainment. These were consenting adults, she supposed.

  Damned ones. They were, for want of a better description, beyond geography.

  A sales assistant's body was dragged away, legs and torso disappearing behind a counter. Pulled there by unseen hands, like a carcass into a cave.

  They proceeded apace, utilizing escalators and stairs.

  Stepping off, they found themselves among perfume and aftershave. Garishly made-up staff prowled, faces luminous above white cotton blouses and severe buttoned dresses, red skirts tight round thighs, black stockings and eyes, gold-rimmed, silvered, brooch'd and ringed. This was a dangerous place, a safari park of exotica, odours gleaned from hidden orifices and bottled, atomized...extracted jewels for girls and squeezed juices for boys. Alluring and sensitive to climatic change, the slightest drop in temperature registered with these circling harpies, who swooped as one to draw from veins.

  Nancy pushed her breasts together and Swene bit his tongue, held his terrified penis via one trouser pocket and took her offered hand.

  A concourse, a burger joint was visible the far side of this terrible maze.

  Silently they argued over a route, deciding on a central path, dodging between Pestilence and Bestiality, fragrances wafted by fans, skirmishing with plastic plant fronds and shying from gilt-edged advertisements for lip colour. A turquoise victim of brushes homed in, floating shoeless on a carpet that squelched. And she wasn't alone. Other women, their wrists bent backward, smiled obscenely as they closed, the trap sprung and no way now to avoid a confrontation. Nancy and Swene were caught by a rack of eye pencils, two high chairs conveniently stationed, nearby a table bearing implements of facial torture and a battery of hand mirrors.

  A make-over...

  Rather than be reinvented, Swene wielded one of the steel-framed chairs after the fashion of a lion tamer. Nancy copied his example, and back to back they inched toward the relative sanctuary of the concourse.

  Turquoise woman got on her two-way radio and the metal shutters began to close. It was a race against time.

  Bellowing madly, Swene brought his chair round into the ribs of a gaudily painted teenage acolyte, clearing a counter of effervescent body-puff boxes with the follow through. The girl collapsed, spewing the remains of an unfortunate tuna and cress sandwich, some of which spotted turquoise woman's shoes. Nancy, aware of the moment, speared one chair leg up the short skirt of a particularly gruesome saleswoman, whose shock cracked her foundation and whose knees came together with a sound like eggs breaking, these combined acts affording them a breach through which they pressed, skidding on the fragrance-saturated carpet and rolling under the jerky portcullis with seconds to spare.

  In the burger joint, customers threw milkshakes at one another and wrestled over strips of lettuce and globs of mayonnaise.

  Swene and Nancy ran for the open air. Perhaps it wasn’t wise to breathe it, especially with that brimstone haze, but they had little choice. Beyond the shopping mall, in full view of a twisted stomach-pain kind of sky, they had more room for manoeuvre. And they used every inch, ducking under bloated, hydrogen filled camels and diving over tiny, ambulant, swollen-headed babies whose fuses spluttered, whose brains and shit exploded moments later, further complicating the atmosphere.

  ‘Couldn’t we have stayed in the countryside!’ bellowed Swene, scraping varicoloured entrails off his shoes.

  Not a bad idea, she conceded. Nancy Kowolski, a lifelong city girl.

  If only...

  She crossed her ankles and fingers and closed her eyes. Everything went deathly quiet.

  ‘Hey,’ whispered Swene. ‘Did you do that?’

  Nancy, breath held, couldn’t speak. She was imagining them elsewhere. Her father had taught her, the surrogate one. That it had never previously worked seemed unimportant now. The world, already close to melting, swept round the pair, cocooning them. It felt warm and safe, she thought. Like a womb. But she had no idea where they were going. Her car? Yes...no, it was missing. Taken.

 

  Countdown

  The same numbers kept coming up. He grew familiar with fractions and decimals, indicators of chance, powers negative and positive, characters the orientation of which hinted at their place in formulae. Sometimes one value was uppermost, trailing an equals sign in its wake; sometimes another, one equally valid, the answer at that moment eating a tin of beans or sleeping childlike in an enlarged refrigerator icebox. Everything was black and white, outside his eyes, numbers entertaining ideas of which they themselves were the building blocks.

  Owen didn't understand what was occurring. He and Mickey sat on a park bench, Owen wearing no shoes and Mickey with his T-shirt stretched and tied between his legs.

  Not far away, rolling on the thin grass like a child's football, the round box pulsed and throbbed.

  ‘What's it doing?’ Mickey asked, shoulders hunched against the cold.

  ‘How should I know?’ Owen replied. ‘It looks as if it's about to hatch.’

  ‘You think it's an egg?’

  ‘Maybe...’

  ‘What do you suppose will come out of it?’

  Owen refused to speculate. The same numbers did cartwheels and back-flips, made human pyramids.

  ‘A baby world,’ said Mickey. ‘That would be nice.’

  Owen's brain pounded in horror. If it was the creation of a world they were about to witness, then the mathematics he was experiencing took on a new significance. There could be no room for mistakes. And the program was being downloaded through his head.

  ‘You gulped,’ the man with no pants told him.

  ‘Yeah - let's get drunk; it's ages since we did that.’

  ‘Watch some videos, smoke some cigarettes.’

  ‘Make obscene phone calls.’

  ‘Eat cereal from the box.’

  ‘There's never anything good on TV.’

  ‘We don't know any girls.’

  ‘Game of darts?’

  ‘Nah, you always win.’

  ‘I've lost my membership card.’

  ‘Porn then.’

  ‘All at Swene's.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Ring him up.’

  ‘He'll be at work.’

  ‘Right; I forgot.’

  ‘Hey, look over there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘By those trees. See?’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘I don't know, but it's coming this way.’

  ‘Maybe it's after the egg.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Right...’

  ‘It went straight past.’

  ‘Must have been after something else.’

  They got up off the bench, picked the round box from the hard earth, and walked along a concrete path toward some iron gates. It started to drizzle. Their escape from the whiteness was entirely the result of luck, Owen conceded. Or else they'd successfully called a bluff. It made no real difference at the end of the day. Somebody always got frightened. Simply a matter of whom, that was all. Finding themselves back out on the street, undamaged beneath a weathered awning, the establishment’s name smeared in bird shit and sun bleached, they’d simply looked at each other. Had they succeeded in their mission? Owen didn’t know and Mick d
idn’t care one way or the other. His brain had shrunk. Owen’s no longer had room for complicated personal issues. He wondered what Egon would have made of it.

  He found money in his pocket and they shopped for appropriate attire, doubling up on footwear.

  They came upon a corner shop that sold nothing but guns, teabags and peanuts, and armed themselves with the accoutrements of a battalion. A climax was imminent, the light told them, swirling round in 3D with strobe effects.

  The nuts made them thirsty.

  Occupying a booth in a pub, the two drank foul-smelling whisky and played cards with women whose tattoos shed tears and blood.

  Knives were thrown across the room, amid much laughter, baying, heckling, screaming and protestation. Occasionally a patron fell down the cellar steps or unwittingly tripped into the fire, breaking bones that refused to mend, oozing pus that boiled from wounds.

  It was Saturday night. The cards were marked. A tongue wound its way through Mickey's cranial space, in one ear and out the other.

  Owen was nostalgic for bygone days.

  The impending world jerked fitfully, radiating its magnificence by the jukebox in the corner. Perhaps it was an antidote, some almighty downer planet Earth, infested with a bad case of the wobblies, must needs swallow. In which case doctors O and M had, he hoped, succeeded in administering the dose.

  Whatever, it didn’t hurt to put a good slant on past events. Maybe future generations might appreciate their efforts.

  Words like lickerish entered Mickey's vocabulary.

  Owen sensed the end. It was closing in. The credits couldn’t be far behind. Things, everything, was nearly over. Then to begin again under an assumed name.

  Part deux.

  This was the Last Chance Saloon. They’d played their full part. All that remained was the denouement...

  In walked nine black-clad wrongbodies, graverobbers of the greyest ilk, pale and gaunt, bandannas tied over their noses, silverware hanging jauntily from hips, steely gazes freezing everything, heads turning like radar as they made a visual sweep. Safe for the moment in their booth, Owen and Mickey chewed matchsticks and squeezed tits. Breaths held, cards laid flat on the table, cigarette smoke and tanning oil obscured their presence; the latter a pungent cloud, the former a skunky mist.

  It was bar-room brawl time.

  John Wayne nudged up the brim of his hat.

  ‘Ready?’ queried Owen. ‘Okay then; after three.’

  Butch and Sundance let rip.

  The wrongbodies, wrong-footed, took rounds in the head and chest, spurting liquids and solids in a dance of fractured steps. Lead poured forth in every direction, some of it catching our heroes, who fought on regardless, trigger fingers pumping in reflex, eyes aiming down barrels invisible through noise. A thick tide of sound came up to their necks, waves of its crashing into their ears, over rocky lobes and into caves filled with stalagmites, coastal features in flood. And the more they shot the more arse-freezing, corpse-buggering bad guys there were, streaming in through the swing doors, clambering atop their comrades, slipping and dying in a slowly sinking quagmire of guts. Owen was so full of holes most of the shots fired at him went straight through, filling the booth he and Mickey had left. Mickey was a ghost of his former self, sculpted anew, attacked as if with a chisel, the over zealous artist whittling him down till he was little more than a twig. But still the battle raged. The dead were manifold, causing the boards to sag. The weight of flesh and munitions splintered the beams supporting the pub floor. The destruction wrought on the walls and ceiling brought their inevitable collapse.

  Everything was silenced, buried in dust...

  That showed them, thought Owen, whose number was zero. He reached underneath him for the remote but it had slipped down the back of the chair.

  Mickey belched.

  ‘Let’s go out.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Side.’

  ‘Oh...’

  Jones held the world in his hands. It was oddly shaped, distended and flaking. Perhaps it was broken. It was a world of contradictions. Some of them wonderful, some of them disgusting. He prised it open with his thumbs, stretched it over his head like a crash helmet. Wriggling his arms up into it, rolling his narrow shoulders, he slowly disappeared inside, kneeling and pulling the world down over his hips and eventually his feet, until there was nothing left sticking out but his tie. The yellow bone clip had come adrift, leaving the tie dangling from the Atlantic like a gargantuan black tongue. But soon the waves closed about it. Storms raged above, volcanoes erupted below, and Jones’ necktie sank like a failed continent.

  Still, he cranked the barrel-organ handle.

  Shibboleth

  Luckily for Henry Eels, he remembered the words; but there was still a moment there when he wondered if he'd pronounced them correctly. If there had been an explosion he hadn’t heard it. Felt it perhaps, like some internal fart. And here he was in no place with a bunch of people who by all rights shouldn’t be meeting like this. The missing chapter, or representatives thereof. They didn’t appear to have missed many meals. Not exactly front line troops. They looked like they were born to, if not in, those seats.

  Hands were shook. He let out a breath. It was quite a relief, all told...but he still wasn’t sure why he was here. Summoned? Nay...that last breath of his had invoked this assembly, manifested the trestle table with its embroidered cloth and serviettes. Those magic words had delivered him, spared him, got him out of jail free. It was his own doing and they didn’t looked altogether pleased.

  ‘How do you take your tea?’

  ‘Uh, cream and two sugars.’

  ‘Now...’ The brothers grinned, arranging themselves after some fidgeting, smiling like alligators and raising an eyebrow each. Forced polite. ‘You really must tell us all about your book.’

  Henry swallowed, chewed his lip. ‘It's a film - a documentary.’

  ‘Oh?’

  The level of expectancy was daunting. His excuse, when it arrived, had better be good.

  ‘It isn't finished yet,’ he confessed.

  As a man they laughed, gut-wrenching guffaws and raucous, belly-wobbling convulsions, accompanied by much finger pointing, tonsil rattling and spittle, either ejected open-mouthed or dribbling chinward in foamy rivulets.

  Blushing, Henry held tight to his cup. Would he have his membership revoked? If he’d breached the rules, used the words unwisely...

  After several minutes the mirth dissipated sufficiently for another question to be asked, punctuated by dabs of handkerchiefs to various facial cavities.

  ‘And...this documentary...what's it called?’

  The humour among them was barely suppressed, boiling like a cartoon geyser under the surface. He was terrified to open his mouth, felt small and awkward in their presence. The man quizzing him, round-faced like a blackcurrant, had his lips pressed tightly together. So tight, Henry imagined he could see juice.

  ‘Death and Romance,’ he said, wincing like a schoolgirl before a whole room of headmistress types.

  Their disappointment manifested in awful frowns, jowls drooping like basset-hounds, eyelids sagging under ton weights. Equally as humiliating as their previous jocularity, he somehow found this easier to handle. Whatever his excuses, it was unlikely they’d mitigate. He’d pushed the Big Red Button and was here to explain his actions. But the words had come to him in that instant. Surely that warranted his using them? Why else would he have remembered?

  Saturation point, Mr Sponge.

  ‘You'd better get on with it then,’ he was instructed, eyebrows raised, lids hoisted, heads turned askance, teaspoons jangling on saucers, handkerchiefs soiled and inspected. ‘Can't have you dallying. After all, a man's calling is his duty.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed a much relieved Henry Eels, nodding. ‘Thanks for the tea.’

  A penguin wearing a pom-pom hat showed him the way out.

  Chapter Eight: Some Sort Of Resolution
To Crises Run Amok