Books Of Blood Vol 1
by
Clive Barker


Original copyright year:1984

ISBN  0 356 20229 1  (Hardback)

Also by Clive Barker in Macdonald:

CLIVE BARKER'S BOOKS OF BLOOD
Volume Two
CLIVE BARKER'S BOOKS OF BLOOD
Volume Three

CLIVE BARKER'S
BOOKS OF BLOOD
Volume 1

CLIVE BARKER

Every body is a book of blood;
Wherever we're opened, we're red.

To my mother and father

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks must go to a variety of people. To my English tutor in
Liverpool, Norman Russell, for his early encouragement; Pete Atkins,
Julie Blake, Doug Bradley and Oliver Parker for their good advice; to
Bill Henry, for his professional eye; to Ramsey Cambell for his
generosity and enthusiasm; to Mary Roscoe, for painstaking translation
from my hieroglyphics, and to Marie-Noelle Dada for the same; to Vernon
Conway and Bryn Newton for faith, Hope and charity; and to Nanndu Sautoy
and Barbara Boote at Sphere Books.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
By Ramsey Cambell

THE BOOK OF BLOOD

THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN

THE YATTERING AND JACK

PIG BLOOD AND STARSHINE

IN THE HILLS, THE CITIES

INTRODUCTION
by Ramsey Campbell

THE CREATURE HAD taken hold of his lip and pulled his muscle off his
bone, as though removing a Balaclava.' Still with me?

Here's another taste of what you can expect from Clive Barker: 'Each
man, woman and child in that seething tower was sightless. They saw only
through the eyes of the city. They were thoughtless, but to think the
city's thoughts. And they believed themselves deathless, in their
lumbering, relentless strength. Vast and mad and deathless." You see
that Barker is as powerfully visionary as he is gruesome. One more
quote, from yet another story: 'What would a Resurrection be without a
few laughs?" I quote that deliberately, as a warning to the
fainthearted. If you like your horror fiction reassuring, both unreal
enough not to be taken too seriously and familiar enough not to risk
spraining your imagination or waking up your nightmares when you thought
they were safely put to sleep, these books are not for you. If, on the
other hand, you're tired of tales that tuck you up and make sure the
night light is on before leaving you, not to mention the parade of Good
Stories Well Told which have nothing more to offer than borrowings from
better horror writers whom the best-seller audience have never heard of,
you may rejoice as I did to discover that Clive Barker is the most
original writer of horror fiction to have appeared for years, and in the
best sense, the most deeply shocking writer now working in the field.

The horror story is often assumed to be reactionary. Certainly some of
its finest practitioners have been, but the tendency has also produced a
good deal of irresponsible nonsense, and there is no reason why the
whole field should look backward. When it comes to the imagination, the
only rules should be one's own instincts, and Clive Barker's never
falter. To say (as some horror writers argue, it seems to me
defensively) that horror fiction is fundamentally concerned with
reminding us what is normal, if only by showing the supernatural and
alien to be abnormal, is not too far from saying (as quite a few
publishers' editors apparently think) that horror fiction must be about
ordinary everyday people confronted by the alien. Thank heaven nobody
convinced Poe of that, and thank heaven for writers as radical as Clive
Barker.

Not that he's necessarily averse to traditional themes, but they come
out transformed when he's finished with them. 'Sex, Death and Starshine'
is the ultimate haunted theatre story, 'Human Remains' is a brilliantly
original variation on the doppelganger theme, but both these take
familiar themes further than ever before, to conclusions that are both
blackly comic and weirdly optimistic. The same might be said of 'New
Murders in the Rue Morgue', a dauntingly optimistic comedy of the
macabre, but now we're in the more challenging territory of Barker's
radical sexual openness. What, precisely, this and others of his tales
are saying about possibilities, I leave for you to judge.

I did warn you that these books are not for the faint of heart and
imagination, and it's as well to keep that in mind while braving such
tales as 'Midnight Meat-Train', a Technicolor horror story rooted in the
graphic horror movie but wittier and more vivid than any of those.

'Scape-Goats', his island tale of terror, actually uses that staple of
the dubbed horror film and videocassette, the underwater zombie, and
'Son of Celluloid' goes straight for a biological taboo with a
directness worthy of the films of David Cronenberg, but it's worth
pointing out that the real strength of that story is its flow of
invention. So it is with tales such as 'In the Hills, the Cities' (which
gives the lie to the notion, agreed to by too many horror writers, that
there are no original horror stories) and 'The Skins of the Fathers'.

Their fertility of invention recalls the great fantastic painters, and
indeed I can't think of a contemporary writer in the field whose work
demands more loudly to be illustrated. And there's more: the terrifying
'Pig-Blood Blues'; 'Dread', which walks the shaky tightrope between
clarity and voyeurism that any treatment of sadism risks; more, but I
think it's almost time I got out of your way.

Here you have nearly a quarter of a million words of him (at least, I
hope you've bought all three volumes; he'd planned them as a single
book), his choice of the best of eighteen months' worth of short
stories, written in the evenings while during the days he wrote plays
(which, by the way, have played to full houses). It seems to me to be an
astonishing performance, and the most exciting debut in horror fiction
for many years.

Merseyside, 5 May 1983

THE BOOK OF BLOOD

THE DEAD HAVE highways.

They run, unerring lines of ghost-trains, of dream-carriages, across the
wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed
souls. Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of the
world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity.

Their freight, the wandering dead, can be glimpsed when the heart is
close to bursting, and sights that should be hidden come plainly into
view.

They have sign-posts, these highways, and bridges and lay-bys. They have
turnpikes and intersections.

It is at these intersections, where the crowds of dead mingle and cross,
that this forbidden highway is most likely to spill through into our
world. The traffic is heavy at the cross-roads, and the voices of the
dead are at their most shrill. Here the barriers that separate one
reality from the next are worn thin with the passage of innumerable
feet.

Such an intersection on the highway of the dead was located at Number
65, Tollington Place. Just a brick-fronted, mock-Georgian detached
house, Number 65 was

unremarkable in every other way. An old, forgettable house, stripped of
the cheap grandeur it had once laid claim to, it had stood empty for a
decade or more.

It was not rising damp that drove tenants from Number 65. It was not the
rot in the cellars, or the subsidence that had opened a crack in the
front of the house that ran from doorstep to eaves, it was the noise of
passage. In the upper storey the din of that traffic never ceased. It
cracked the plaster on the walls and it warped the beams. It rattled the
windows. It rattled the mind too. Number 65, Tollington Place was a
haunted house, and no-one could possess it for long without insanity
setting in.

At some time in its history a horror had been committed in that house.

No-one knew when, or what. But even to the untrained observer the
oppressive atmosphere of the house, particularly the top storey, was
unmistakable. There was a memory and a promise of blood in the air of
Number 65, a scent that lingered in the sinuses, and turned the
strongest stomach. The building and its environs were shunned by vermin,
by birds, even by flies. No woodlice crawled in its kitchen, no starling
had nested in its attic. Whatever violence had been done there, it had
opened the house up, as surely as a knife slits a fish's belly; and
through that cut, that wound in the world, the dead peered out, and had
their say.

That was the rumour anyway.

It was the third week of the investigation at 65, Tollington Place.

Three weeks of unprecedented success in the realm of the paranormal.

Using a newcomer to the business, a twenty-year-old called Simon Mcneal,
as a medium, the Essex University Parapsychology Unit had recorded all
but incontrovertible evidence of life after death.

In the top room of the house, a claustrophobic corridor of a room, the
Mcneal boy had apparently summoned the

dead, and at his request they had left copious evidence of their visits,
writing in a hundred different hands on the pale ochre walls. They
wrote, it seemed, whatever came into their heads. Their names, of
course, and their birth and death dates. Fragments of memories, and
well-wishes to their living descendants, strange elliptical phrases that
hinted at their present torments and mourned their lost joys. Some of
the hands were square and ugly, some delicate and feminine. There were
obscene drawings and half-finished jokes alongside lines of romantic
poetry. A badly drawn rose. A game of noughts and crosses. A shopping
list.

The famous had come to this wailing wall - Mussolini was there, Lennon
and Janis Joplin - and nobodies too, forgotten people, had signed
themselves beside the greats. It was a roll-call of the dead, and it was
growing day by day, as though word of mouth was spreading amongst the
lost tribes, and seducing them out of silence to sign this barren room
with their sacred presence.

After a lifetime's work in the field of psychic research, Doctor
Florescu was well accustomed to the hard facts of failure. It had been
almost comfortable, settling back into a certainty that the evidence
would never manifest itself. Now, faced with a sudden and spectacular
success, she felt both elated and confused.

She sat, as she had sat for three incredible weeks, in the main room on
the middle floor, one flight of stairs down from the writing room, and
listened to the clamour of noises from upstairs with a sort of awe,
scarcely daring to believe that she was allowed to be present at this
miracle. There had been nibbles before, tantalizing hints of voices from
another world, but this was the first time that province had insisted on
being heard.

Upstairs, the noises stopped.

Mary looked at her watch: it was six-seventeen p. m.

For some reason best known to the visitors, the contact never lasted
much after six. She'd wait 'til half-past then go up. What would it have
been today? Who would have come to that sordid little room, and left
their mark?

'Shall I set up the cameras?' Reg Fuller, her assistant, asked.

'Please,' she murmured, distracted by expectation.

'Wonder what we'll get today?" 'We'll leave him ten minutes." 'Sure."

Upstairs, Mcneal slumped in the corner of the room, and watched the
October sun through the tiny window. He felt a little shut in, all alone
in that damn place, but he still smiled to himself, that warm, beatific
smile that melted even the most academic heart. Especially Doctor
Florescu's: oh yes, the woman was infatuated with his smile, his eyes,
the lost look he put on for her.

It was a fine game.

Indeed, at first that was all it had been - a game. Now Simon knew they
were playing for bigger stakes; what had begun as a sort of
lie-detection test had turned into a very serious contest: Mcneal versus
the Truth. The truth was simple: he was a cheat. He penned all his
'ghost-writings' on the wall with tiny shards of lead he secreted under
his tongue: he banged and thrashed and shouted without any provocation
other than the sheer mischief of it: and the unknown names he wrote, ha,
he laughed to think of it, the names he found in telephone directories.

Yes, it was indeed a fine game.

She promised him so much, she tempted him with fame, encouraging every
lie that he invented. Promises of wealth, of applauded appearances on
the television, of an adulation he'd never known before. As long as he
produced the ghosts.

He smiled the smile again. She called him her Go-Between: an innocent
carrier of messages. She'd be up the stairs soon - her eyes on his body,
his voice close to tears with her pathetic excitement at another series
of scrawled names and nonsense.

He liked it when she looked at his nakedness, or all but nakedness. All
his sessions were carried out with him only dressed in a pair of briefs,
to preclude any hidden aids. A ridiculous precaution. All he needed were
the leads under his tongue, and enough energy to fling himself around
for half an hour, bellowing his head off.

He was sweating. The groove of his breast-bone was slick with it, his
hair plastered to his pale forehead. Today had been hard work: he was
looking forward to getting out of the room, sluicing himself down, and
basking in admiration awhile. The Go-Between put his hand down his
briefs and played with himself, idly. Somewhere in the room a fly, or
flies maybe, were trapped. It was late in the season for flies, but he
could hear them somewhere close. They buzzed and fretted against the
window, or around the light bulb. He heard their tiny fly voices, but
didn't question them, too engrossed in his thoughts of the game, and in
the simple delight of stroking himself.

How they buzzed, these harmless insect voices, buzzed and sang and
complained. How they complained.

Mary Florescu drummed the table with her fingers. Her wedding ring was
loose today, she felt it moving with the rhythm of her tapping.

Sometimes it was tight and sometimes loose: one of those small mysteries
that she'd never analysed properly but simply accepted. In fact today it
was very loose: almost ready to fall off. She thought of Alan's face.

Alan's dear face. She thought of it through a hole made of her wedding
ring, as if down a tunnel. Was that what his death had been like: being
carried away and yet further away down a tunnel to the dark? She thrust

the ring deeper on to her hand. Through the tips of her index-finger and
thumb she seemed almost to taste the sour metal as she touched it. It
was a curious sensation, an illusion of some kind.

To wash the bitterness away she thought of the boy. His face came
easily, so very easily, splashing into her consciousness with his smile
and his unremarkable physique, still unmanly. Like a girl really - the
roundness of him, the sweet clarity of his skin - the innocence.

Her fingers were still on the ring, and the sourness she had tasted
grew. She looked up. Fuller was organizing the equipment. Around his
balding head a nimbus of pale green light shimmered and wove -She
suddenly felt giddy.

Fuller saw nothing and heard nothing. His head was bowed to his
business, engrossed. Mary stared at him still, seeing the halo on him,
feeling new sensations waking in her, coursing through her. The air
seemed suddenly alive: the very molecules of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen
jostled against her in an intimate embrace. The nimbus around Fuller's
head was spreading, finding fellow radiance in every object in the room.

The unnatural sense in her fingertips was spreading too. She could see
the colour of her breath as she exhaled it: a pinky orange glamour in
the bubbling air. She could hear, quite clearly, the voice of the desk
she sat at: the low whine of its solid presence.

The world was opening up: throwing her senses into an ecstasy, coaxing
them into a wild confusion of functions. She was capable, suddenly, of
knowing the world as a system, not of politics or religions, but as a
system of senses, a system that spread out from the living flesh to the
inert wood of her desk, to the stale gold of her wedding ring.

And further. Beyond wood, beyond gold. The crack opened that led to the
highway. In her head she heard

voices that came from no living mouth.

She looked up, or rather some force thrust her head back violently and
she found herself staring up at the ceiling. It was covered with worms.

No, that was absurd! It seemed to be alive, though, maggoty with life
pulsing, dancing.

She could see the boy through the ceiling. He was sitting on the floor,
with his jutting member in his hand. His head was thrown back, like
hers. He was as lost in his ecstasy as she was. Her new sight saw the
throbbing light in and around his body - traced the passion that was
seated in his gut, and his head molten with pleasure.

It saw another sight, the lie in him, the absence of power where she'd
thought there had been something wonderful. He had no talent to commune
with ghosts, nor had ever had, she saw this plainly. He was a little
liar, a boy-liar, a sweet, white boy-liar without the compassion or the
wisdom to understand what he had dared to do.

Now it was done. The lies were told, the tricks were played, and the
people on the highway, sick beyond death of being misrepresented and
mocked, were buzzing at the crack in the wall, and demanding
satisfaction.

That crack she had opened: she had unknowingly fingered and fumbled at,
unlocking it by slow degrees. Her desire for the boy had done that: her
endless thoughts of him, her frustration, her heat and her disgust at
her heat had pulled the crack wider. Of all the powers that made the
system manifest, love, and its companion, passion, and their companion,
loss, were the most potent. Here she was, an embodiment of all three.

Loving, and wanting, and sensing acutely the impossibility of the former
two. Wrapped up in an agony of feeling which she had denied herself,
believing she loved the boy simply as her Go-Between.

It wasn't true! It wasn't true! She wanted him, wanted him now, deep
inside her. Except that now it was too late.

The traffic could be denied no longer: it demanded, yes, it demanded
access to the little trickster.

She was helpless to prevent it. All she could do was utter a tiny gasp
of horror as she saw the highway open out before her, and understood
that this was no common intersection they stood at.

Fuller heard the sound.

'Doctor?' He looked up from his tinkering and his face - washed with a
blue light she could see from the corner of her eye - bore an expression
of enquiry.

'Did you say something?' he asked.

She thought, with a fillip of her stomach, of how this was bound to end.

The ether-faces of the dead were quite clear in front of her. She could
see the profundity of their suffering and she could sympathize with
their ache to be heard.

She saw plainly that the highways that crossed at Tollington Place were
not common thoroughfares. She was not staring at the happy, idling
traffic of the ordinary dead. No, that house opened onto a route walked
only by the victims and the perpetrators of violence. The men, the
women, the children who had died enduring all the pains nerves had wit
to muster, with their minds branded by the circumstances of their
deaths. Eloquent beyond words, their eyes spoke their agonies, their
ghost bodies still bearing the wounds that had killed them. She could
also see, mingling freely with the innocents, their slaughterers and
tormentors. These monsters, frenzied, mush-minded blood-letters, peeked
through into the world: nonesuch creatures, unspoken, forbidden miracles
of our species, chattering and howling their Jabberwocky.

Now the boy above her sensed them. She saw him turn a little in the
silent room, knowing that the voices he heard were not fly-voices, the
complaints were not insect-complaints. He was aware, suddenly, that he
had

lived in a tiny corner of the world, and that the rest of it, the Third,
Fourth and Fifth Worlds, were pressing at his lying back, hungry and
irrevocable. The sight of his panic was also a smell and a taste to her.

Yes, she tasted him as she had always longed to, but it was not a kiss
that married their senses, it was his growing panic. It filled her up:
her empathy was total. The fearful glance was hers as much as his their
dry throats rasped the same small word: 'Please -" That the child
learns. 'Please -, That wins care and gifts.

'Please -" That even the dead, surely, even the dead must know and obey.

'Please -, Today there would be no such mercy given, she knew for
certain. These ghosts had despaired on the highway a grieving age,
bearing the wounds they had died with, and the insanities they had
slaughtered with. They had endured his levity and insolence, his
idiocies, the fabrications that had made a game of their ordeals. They
wanted to speak the truth.

Fuller was peering at her more closely, his face now swimming in a sea
of pulsing orange light. She felt his hands on her skin. They tasted of
vinegar.

'Are you all right?' he said, his breath like iron.

She shook her head.

No, she was not all right, nothing was right.

The crack was gaping wider every second: through it she could see
another sky, the slate heavens that loured over the highway. It
overwhelmed the mere reality of the house.

'Please,' she said, her eyes rolling up to the fading substance of the
ceiling.

Wider. Wider -The brittle world she inhabited was stretched to breaking
point.

Suddenly, it broke, like a dam, and the black waters poured through,
inundating the room.

Fuller knew something was amiss (it was in the colour of his aura, the
sudden fear), but he didn't understand what was happening. She felt his
spine ripple: she could see his brain whirl.

'What's going on?' he said. The pathos of the enquiry made her want to
laugh.

Upstairs, the water-jug in the writing room shattered.

Fuller let her go and ran towards the door. It began to rattle and shake
even as he approached it, as though all the inhabitants of hell were
beating on the other side. The handle turned and turned and turned. The
paint blistered. The key glowed red-hot.

Fuller looked back at the Doctor, who was still fixed in that grotesque
position, head back, eyes wide.

He reached for the handle, but the door opened before he could touch it.

The hallway beyond had disappeared altogether. Where the familiar
interior had stood the vista of the highway stretched to the horizon.

The sight killed Fuller in a moment. His mind had no strength to take
the panorama in - it could not control the overload that ran through his
every nerve. His heart stopped; a revolution overturned the order of his
system; his bladder failed, his bowels failed, his limbs shook and
collapsed. As he sank to the floor his face began to blister like the
door, and his corpse rattle like the handle. He was inert stuff already:
as fit for this indignity as wood or steel.

Somewhere to the East his soul joined the wounded highway, on its route
to the intersection where a moment previously he had died.

Mary Florescu knew she was alone. Above her the

marvellous boy, her beautiful, cheating child, was writhing and
screeching as the dead set their vengeful hands on his fresh skin. She
knew their intention: she could see it in their eyes - there was nothing
new about it. Every history had this particular torment in its
tradition. He was to be used to record their testaments. He was to be
their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of
blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood. She thought of the
grimoires that had been made of dead human skin: she'd seen them,
touched them. She thought of the tattooes she'd seen: freak show
exhibits some of them, others just shirtless labourers in the Street
with a message to their mothers pricked across their backs. It was not
unknown, to write a book of blood.

But on such skin, on such gleaming skin - oh God, that was the crime. He
screamed as the torturing needles of broken jug-glass skipped against
his flesh, ploughing it up. She felt his agonies as if they had been
hers, and they were not so terrible.

Yet he screamed. And fought, and poured obscenities out at his
attackers. They took no notice. They swarmed around him, deaf to any
plea or prayer, and worked on him with all the enthusiasm of creatures
forced into silence for too long. Mary listened as his voice wearied
with its complaints, and she fought against the weight of fear in her
limbs. Somehow, she felt, she must get up to the room. It didn't matter
what was beyond the door or on the stairs -he needed her, and that was
enough.

She stood up and felt her hair swirl up from her head, flailing like the
snake hair of the Gorgon Medusa. Reality swam - there was scarcely a
floor to be seen beneath her. The boards of the house were ghost-wood,
and beyond them a seething dark raged and yawned at her. She looked to
the door, feeling all the time a lethargy that was so hard to fight off.

Clearly they didn't want her up there. Maybe, she thought, they even
fear me a little. The idea gave her resolution; why else were they
bothering to intimidate her unless her very presence, having once opened
this hole in the world, was now a threat to them?

The blistered door was open. Beyond it the reality of the house had
succumbed completely to the howling chaos of the highway. She stepped
through, concentrating on the way her feet still touched solid floor
even though her eyes could no longer see it. The sky above her was
prussian-blue, the highway was wide and windy, the dead pressed on every
side. She fought through them as through a crowd of living people, while
their gawping, idiot faces looked at her and hated her invasion.

The 'please' was gone. Now she said nothing; just gritted her teeth and
narrowed her eyes against the highway, kicking her feet forward to find
the reality of the stairs that she knew were there. She tripped as she
touched them, and a howl went up from the crowd. She couldn't tell if
they were laughing at her clumsiness, or sounding a warning at how far
she had got.

First step. Second step. Third step.

Though she was torn at from every side, she was winning against the
crowd. Ahead she could see through the door of the room to where her
little liar was sprawled, surrounded by his attackers. His briefs were
around his ankles: the scene looked like a kind of rape. He screamed no
longer, but his eyes were wild with terror and pain. At least he was
still alive. The natural resilience of his young mind had half accepted
the spectacle that had opened in front of him.

Suddenly his head jerked around and he looked straight through the door
at her. In this extremity he had dredged up a true talent, a skill that
was a fraction of Mary's, but enough to make contact with her. Their
eyes met. In a sea of blue darkness, surrounded on every side with a

civilization they neither knew nor understood, their living hearts met
and married.

'I'm sorry,' he said silently. It was infinitely pitiful. 'I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.' He looked away, his gaze wrenched from hers.

She was certain she must be almost at the top of the stairs, her feet
still treading air as far as her eyes could tell, the faces of the
travellers above, below and on every side of her. But she could see,
very faintly, the outline of the door, and the boards and beams of the
room where Simon lay. He was one mass of blood now, from head to foot.

She could see the marks, the hieroglyphics of agony on every inch of his
torso, his face, his limbs. One moment he seemed to flash into a kind of
focus, and she could see him in the empty room, with the sun through the
window, and the shattered jug at his side. Then her concentration would
falter and instead she'd see the invisible world made visible, and he'd
be hanging in the air while they wrote on him from every side, plucking
out the hair on his head and body to clear the page, writing in his
armpits, writing on his eyelids, writing on his genitals, in the crease
of his buttocks, on the soles of his feet.

Only the wounds were in common between the two sights. Whether she saw
him beset with authors, or alone in the room, he was bleeding and
bleeding.

She had reached the door now. Her trembling hand stretched to touch the
solid reality of the handle, but even with all the concentration she
could muster it would not come clear. There was barely a ghost-image for
her to focus on, though it was sufficient. She grasped the handle,
turned it, and flung the door of the writing room open.

He was there, in front of her. No more than two or three yards of
possessed air separated them. Their eyes met again, and an eloquent
look, common to the living

and the dead worlds, passed between them. There was compassion in that
look, and love. The fictions fell away, the lies were dust. In place of
the boy's manipulative smiles was a true sweetness - answered in her
face.

And the dead, fearful of this look, turned their heads away. Their faces
tightened, as though the skin was being stretched over the bone, their
flesh darkening to a bruise, their voices becoming wistful with the
anticipation of defeat. She reached to touch him, no longer having to
fight against the hordes of the dead; they were falling away from their
quarry on every side, like dying flies dropping from a window.

She touched him, lightly, on the face. The touch was a benediction.

Tears filled his eyes, and ran down his scarified cheek, mingling with
the blood.

The dead had no voices now, nor even mouths. They were lost along the
highway, their malice dammed.

Plane by plane the room began to re-establish itself. The floor-boards
became visible under his sobbing body, every nail, every stained plank.

The windows came clearly into view - and outside the twilight street was
echoing with the clamour of children. The highway had disappeared from
living human sight entirely. Its travellers had turned their faces to
the dark and gone away into oblivion, leaving only their signs and their
talismans in the concrete world.

On the middle landing of Number 65 the smoking, blistered body of Reg
Fuller was casually trodden by the travellers' feet as they passed over
the intersection. At length Fuller's own soul came by in the throng and
glanced down at the flesh he had once occupied, before the crowd pressed
him on towards his judgement.

Upstairs, in the darkening room, Mary Florescu knelt beside the Mcneal
boy and stroked his blood-plastered head. She didn't want to leave the
house for assistance until she was certain his tormentors would not come
back.

There was no sound now but the whine of a jet finding its way through
the stratosphere to morning. Even the boy's breathing was hushed and
regular. No nimbus of light surrounded him. Every sense was in place.

Sight. Sound. Touch.

Touch.

She touched him now as she had never previously dared, brushing her
fingertips, oh so lightly, over his body, running her fingers across the
raised skin like a blind woman reading braille. There were minute words
on every millimetre of his body, written in a multitude of hands. Even
through the blood she could discern the meticulous way that the words
had harrowed into him. She could even read, by the dimming light, an
occasional phrase. It was proof beyond any doubt, and she wished, oh God
how she wished, that she had not come by it. And yet, after a lifetime
of waiting, here it was: the revelation of life beyond flesh, written in
flesh itself.

The boy would survive, that was clear. Already the blood was drying, and
the myriad wounds healing. He was healthy and strong, after all: there
would be no fundamental physical damage. His beauty was gone forever, of
course. From now on he would be an object of curiosity at best, and at
worst of repugnance and horror. But she would protect him, and he would
learn, in time, how to know and trust her. Their hearts were
inextricably tied together.

And after a time, when the words on his body were scabs and scars, she
would read him. She would trace, with infinite love and patience, the
stories the dead had told on him.

The tale on his abdomen, written in a fine, cursive style. The testimony
in exquisite, elegant print that covered his face and scalp. The story
on his back, and on his shin, on his hands.

She would read them all, report them all, every last syllable that
glistened and seeped beneath her adoring fingers, so that the world
would know the stories that the dead tell.

He was a Book of Blood, and she his sole translator.

As darkness fell, she left off her vigil and led him, naked, into the
balmy night.

Here then are the stories written on the Book of Blood. Read, if it
pleases you, and learn.

They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards
unknown destinations. Few will have to take it. Most will go peacefully
along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses.

But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors will come, skipping to fetch
them off to the highway of the damned.

So read. Read and learn.

It's best to be prepared for the worst, after all, and wise to learn to
walk before breath runs out.

THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN

LEON KAUFMAN WAS no longer new to the city. The Palace of Delights, he'd
always called it, in the days of his innocence. But that was when he'd
lived in Atlanta, and New York was still a kind of promised land, where
anything and everything was possible.

Now Kaufman had lived three and a half months in his dream-city, and the
Palace of Delights seemed less than delightful.

Was it really only a season since he stepped out of Port Authority Bus
Station and looked up 42nd Street towards the Broadway intersection? So
short a time to lose so many treasured illusions.

He was embarrassed now even to think of his naivety. It made him wince
to remember how he had stood and announced aloud: 'New York, I love
you." Love? Never.

It had been at best an infatuation.

And now, after only three months living with his object of adoration,
spending his days and nights in her presence, she had lost her aura of
perfection.

New York was just a city.

He had seen her wake in the morning like a slut, and pick murdered men
from between her teeth, and suicides from the tangles of her hair. He
had seen her late at night, her dirty back streets shamelessly courting
depravity. He had watched her in the hot afternoon, sluggish and ugly,
indifferent to the atrocities that were being committed every hour in
her throttled passages.

It was no Palace of Delights.

It bred death, not pleasure.

Everyone he met had brushed with violence; it was a fact of life. It was
almost chic to have known someone who had died a violent death. It was
proof of living in that city.

But Kaufman had loved New York from afar for almost twenty years. He'd
planned his love affair for most of his adult life. It was not easy,
therefore, to shake the passion off, as though he had never felt it.

There were still times, very early, before the cop-sirens began, or at
twilight, when Manhattan was still a miracle.

For those moments, and for the sake of his dreams, he still gave her the
benefit of the doubt, even when her behaviour was less than ladylike.

She didn't make such forgiveness easy. In the few months that Kaufman
had lived in New York her streets had been awash with spilt blood.

In fact, it was not so much the streets themselves, but the tunnels
beneath those streets.

'Subway Slaughter' was the catch-phrase of the month. Only the previous
week another three killings had been reported. The bodies had been
discovered in one of the subway cars on the AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS,
hacked open and partially disembowelled, as though an efficient abattoir
operative had been interrupted in his work. The killings were so
thoroughly professional that the police

were interviewing every man on their records who had some past
connection with the butchery trade. The meat-packaging plants on the
water-front were being watched, the slaughter-houses scoured for clues.

A swift arrest was promised, though none was made.

This recent trio of corpses was not the first to be discovered in such a
state; the very day that Kaufman had arrived a story had broken in The
Times that was still the talk of every morbid secretary in the office.

The story went that a German visitor, lost in the subway system late at
night, had come across a body in a train. The victim was a well-built,
attractive thirty-year-old woman from Brooklyn. She had been completely
stripped. Every shred of clothing, every article of jewellery. Even the
studs in her ears.

More bizarre than the stripping was the neat and systematic way in which
the clothes had been folded and placed in individual plastic bags on the
seat beside the corpse.

This was no irrational slasher at work. This was a highly-organized
mind: a lunatic with a strong sense of tidiness.

Further, and yet more bizarre than the careful stripping of the corpse,
was the outrage that had then been perpetrated upon it. The reports
claimed, though the Police Department failed to confirm this, that the
body had been meticulously shaved. Every hair had been removed: from the
head, from the groin, from beneath the arms; all cut and scorched back
to the flesh. Even the eyebrows and eyelashes had been plucked out.

Finally, this all too naked slab had been hung by the feet from one of
the holding handles set in the roof of the car, and a black plastic
bucket, lined with a black plastic bag, had been placed beneath the
corpse to catch the steady fall of blood from its wounds.

In that state, stripped, shaved, suspended and practically

bled white, the body of Loretta Dyer had been found.

It was disgusting, it was meticulous, and it was deeply confusing.

There had been no rape, nor any sign of torture. The woman had been
swiftly and efficiently dispatched as though she was a piece of meat.

And the butcher was still loose.

The City Fathers, in their wisdom, declared a complete close-down on
press reports of the slaughter. It was said that the man who had found
the body was in protective custody in New Jersey, out of sight of
enquiring journalists. But the cover-up had failed. Some greedy cop had
leaked the salient details to a reporter from The Times. Everyone in New
York now knew the horrible story of the slaughters. It was a topic of
conversation in every Deli and bar; and, of course, on the subway.

But Loretta Dyer was only the first.

Now three more bodies had been found in identical circumstances; though
the work had clearly been interrupted on this occasion. Not all the
bodies had been shaved, and the jugulars had not been severed to bleed
them. There was another, more significant difference in the discovery:
it was not a tourist who had stumbled on the sight, it was a reporter
from The New York Times.

Kaufman surveyed the report that sprawled across the front page of the
newspaper. He had no prurient interest in the story, unlike his elbow
mate along the counter of the Deli. All he felt was a mild disgust, that
made him push his plate of over-cooked eggs aside. It was simply further
proof of his city's decadence. He could take no pleasure in her
sickness.

Nevertheless, being human, he could not entirely ignore the gory details
on the page in front of him. The article was unsensationally written,
but the simple clarity of the style made the subject seem more
appalling. He couldn't help

wondering, too, about the man behind the atrocities. Was there one
psychotic loose, or several, each inspired to copy the original murder?

Perhaps this was only the beginning of the horror. Maybe more murders
would follow, until at last the murderer, in his exhilaration or
exhaustion, would step beyond caution and be taken. Until then the city,
Kaufman's adored city, would live in a state somewhere between hysteria
and ecstasy.

At his elbow a bearded man knocked over Kaufman's coffee.

'Shit!' he said.

Kaufman shifted on his stool to avoid the dribble of coffee running off
the counter.

'Shit,' the man said again.

No harm done,' said Kaufman.

He looked at the man with a slightly disdainful expression on his face.

The clumsy bastard was attempting to soak up the coffee with a napkin,
which was turning to mush as he did so.

Kaufman found himself wondering if this oaf, with his florid cheeks and
his uncultivated beard, was capable of murder. Was there any sign on
that over-fed face, any clue in the shape of his head or the turn of his
small eyes that gave his true nature away?

The man spoke.

'Wannanother?" Kaufman shook his head.

'Coffee. Regular. Dark,' the oaf said to the girl behind the counter.

She looked up from cleaning the grill of cold fat.

'Huh?" 'Coffee. You deaf?" The man grinned at Kaufman.

'Deaf,' he said.

Kaufman noticed he had three teeth missing from his

lower jaw.

'Looks bad, huh?' he said.

What did he mean? The coffee? The absence of his teeth?

'Three people like that. Carved up.' Kaufman nodded.

'Makes you think,' he said. 'Sure." 'I mean, it's a cover-up isn't it?

They know who did it." This conversation's ridiculous, thought Kaufman.

He took off his spectacles and pocketed them: the bearded face was no
longer in focus. That was some improvement at least.

'Bastards,' he said. 'Fucking bastards, all of them. I'll lay you
anything it's a cover-up." 'Of what?" 'They got the evidence: they're
just keeping us in the fucking dark. There's something out there that's
not human." Kaufman understood. It was a conspiracy theory the oaf was
trotting out. He'd heard them so often; a panacea.

'See, they do all this cloning stuff and it gets out of hand.

They could be growing fucking monsters for all we know.

There's something down there they won't tell us about.

Cover-up, like I say. Lay you anything.' Kaufman found the man's
certainty attractive. Monsters, on the prowl. Six heads: a dozen eyes.

Why not?

He knew why not. Because that excused his city: that let her off the
hook. And Kaufman believed in his heart that the monsters to be found in
the tunnels were perfectly human.

The bearded man threw his money on the counter and got up, sliding his
fat bottom off the stained plastic stool.

'Probably a fucking cop,' he said, as his parting shot. 'Tried to make a
fucking hero, made a fucking monster

instead.' He grinned grotesquely. 'Lay you anything,' he continued and
lumbered out without another word.

Kaufman slowly exhaled through his nose, feeling the tension in his body
abate.

He hated that sort of confrontation: it made him feel tongue-tied and
ineffectual. Come to think of it, he hated that kind of man: the
opinionated brute that New York bred so well.

It was coming up to six when Mahogany woke. The morning rain had turned
into a light drizzle by twilight. The air was about as clear-smelling as
it ever got in Manhattan. He stretched on his bed, threw off the dirty
blanket and got up for work.

In the bathroom the rain was dripping on the box of the air-conditioner,
filling the apartment with a rhythmical slapping sound. Mahogany turned
on the television to cover the noise, uninterested in anything it had to
offer.

He went to the window. The street six floors below was thick with
traffic and people.

After a hard day's work New York was on its way home: to play, to make
love. People were streaming out of their offices and into their
automobiles. Some would be testy after a day's sweaty labour in a
badly-aired office; others, benign as sheep, would be wandering home
down the Avenues, ushered along by a ceaseless current of bodies. Still
others would even now be cramming on to the subway, blind to the
graffiti on every wall, deaf to the babble of their own voices, and to
the cold thunder of the tunnels.

It pleased Mahogany to think of that. He was, after all, not one of the
common herd. He could stand at his window and look down on a thousand
heads below him, and know he was a chosen man.

He had deadlines to meet, of course, like the people in the street. But
his work was not their senseless labour, it was more like a sacred duty.

He needed to live, and sleep, and shit like them, too. But it was not
financial necessity that drove him, but the demands of history.

He was in a great tradition, that stretched further back than America.

He was a night-stalker: like Jack the Ripper, like Gilles de Rais, a
living embodiment of death, a wraith with a human face. He was a haunter
of sleep, and an awakener of terrors.

The people below him could not know his face; nor would care to look
twice at him. But his stare caught them, and weighed them up, selecting
only the ripest from the passing parade, choosing only the healthy and
the young to fall under his sanctified knife.

Sometimes Mahogany longed to announce his identity to the world, but he
had responsibilities and they bore on him heavily. He couldn't expect
fame. His was a secret life, and it was merely pride that longed for
recognition.

After all, he thought, does the beef salute the butcher as it throbs to
its knees?

All in all, he was content. To be part of that great tradition was
enough, would always have to remain enough.

Recently, however, there had been discoveries. They weren't his fault of
course. Nobody could possibly blame him. But it was a bad time. Life was
not as easy as it had been ten years ago. He was that much older, of
course, and that made the job more exhausting; and more and more the
obligations weighed on his shoulders. He was a chosen man, and that was
a difficult privilege to live with.

He wondered, now and then, if it wasn't time to think about training a
younger man for his duties. There would need to be consultations with
the Fathers, but sooner or

later a replacement would have to be found, and it would be, he felt, a
criminal waste of his experience not to take on an apprentice.

There were so many felicities he could pass on. The tricks of his
extraordinary trade. The best way to stalk, to cut, to strip, to bleed.

The best meat for the purpose. The simplest way to dispose of the
remains. So much detail, so much accumulated expertise.

Mahogany wandered into the bathroom and turned on the shower. As he
stepped in he looked down at his body. The small paunch, the greying
hairs on his sagging chest, the scars, and pimples that littered his
pale skin. He was getting old. Still, tonight, like every other night,
he had a job to do.

Kaufman hurried back into the lobby with his sandwich, turning down his
collar and brushing rain off his hair. The clock above the elevator read
seven-sixteen. He would work through until ten, no later.

The elevator took him up to the twelfth floor and to the Pappas offices.

He traipsed unhappily through the maze of empty desks and hooded
machines to his little territory, which was still illuminated. The women
who cleaned the offices were chatting down the corridor: otherwise the
place was lifeless.

He took off his coat, shook the rain off it as best he could, and hung
it up.

Then he sat down in front of the piles of orders he had been tussling
with for the best part of three days, and began work. It would only take
one more night's labour, he felt sure, to break the back of the job, and
he found it easier to concentrate without the incessant clatter of
typists and typewriters on every side.

He unwrapped his ham on whole-wheat with extra mayonnaise and settled in
for the evening.

It was nine now.

Mahogany was dressed for the nightshift. He had his usual sober suit on,
with his brown tie neatly knotted, his silver cufflinks (a gift from his
first wife) placed in the sleeves of his immaculately pressed shirt, his
thinning hair gleaming with oil, his nails snipped and polished, his
face flushed with cologne.

His bag was packed. The towels, the instruments, his chain-mail apron.

He checked his appearance in the mirror. He could, he thought, still be
taken for a man of forty-five, fifty at the outside.

As he surveyed his face he reminded himself of his duty. Above all, he
must be careful. There would be eyes on him every step of the way,
watching his performance tonight, and judging it. He must walk out like
an innocent, arousing no suspicion.

If they only knew, he thought. The people who walked, ran and skipped
past him on the streets: who collided with him without apology: who met
his gaze with contempt: who smiled at his bulk, looking uneasy in his
ill-fitting suit. If only they knew what he did, what he was and what he
carried.

Caution, he said to himself, and turned off the light. The apartment was
dark. He went to the door and opened it, used to walking in blackness.

Happy in it.

The rain clouds had cleared entirely. Mahogany made his way down
Amsterdam towards the Subway at 145th Street. Tonight he'd take the
AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS again, his favourite line, and often the most
productive.

Down the Subway steps, token in hand. Through the automatic gates. The
smell of the tunnels was in his nostrils now. Not the smell of the deep
tunnels of course. They had a scent all of their own. But there was
reassurance

even in the stale electric air of this shallow line. The regurgitated
breath of a million travellers circulated in this warren, mingling with
the breath of creatures far older; things with voices soft like clay,
whose appetites were abominable. How he loved it. The scent, the dark,
the thunder.

He stood on the platform and scanned his fellow-travellers critically.

There were one or two bodies he contemplated following, but there was so
much dross amongst them: so few worth the chase. The physically wasted,
the obese, the ill, the weary. Bodies destroyed by excess and by
indifference. As a professional it sickened him, though he understood
the weakness that spoiled the best of men.

He lingered in the station for over an hour, wandering between platforms
while the trains came and went, came and went, and the people with them.

There was so little of quality around it was dispiriting. It seemed he
had to wait longer and longer every day to find flesh worthy of use.

It was now almost half past ten and he had not seen a single creature
who was really ideal for slaughter.

No matter, he told himself, there was time yet. Very soon the theatre
crowd would be emerging. They were always good for a sturdy body or two.

The well-fed intelligentsia, clutching their ticket-stubs and opining on
the diversions of art - oh yes, there'd be something there.

If not, and there were nights when it seemed he would never find
something suitable, he'd have to ride downtown and corner a couple of
lovers out late, or find an athlete or two, fresh from one of the gyms.

They were always sure to offer good material, except that with such
healthy specimens there was always the risk of resistance.

He remembered catching two black bucks a year ago or more, with maybe
forty years between them, father and son perhaps. They'd resisted with
knives, and he'd been

hospitalised for six weeks. It had been a close fought encounter and one
that had set him doubting his skills. Worse, it had made him wonder what
his masters would have done with him had he suffered a fatal injury.

Would he have been delivered to his family in New Jersey, and given a
decent Christian burial? Or would his carcass have been thrown into the
dark, for their own use?

The headline of the New York Post, discarded on the seat across from him
caught Mahogany's eye: 'Police All-Out to Catch Killer'. He couldn't
resist a smile. Thoughts of failure, weakness and death evaporated.

After all, he was that man, that killer, and tonight the thought of
capture was laughable. After all, wasn't his career sanctioned by the
highest possible authorities? No policeman could hold him, no court pass
judgement on him. The very forces of law and order that made such a show
of his pursuit served his masters no less than he; he almost wished some
two-bit cop would catch him, take him in triumph before the judge, just
to see the looks on their faces when the word came up from the dark that
Mahogany was a protected man, above every law on the statute books.

It was now well after ten-thirty. The trickle of theatregoers had begun,
but there was nothing likely so far. He'd want to let the rush pass
anyway: just follow one or two choice pieces to the end of the line. He
bided his time, like any wise hunter.

Kaufman was not finished by eleven, an hour after he'd promised himself
release. But exasperation and ennui were making the job more difficult,
and the sheets of figures were beginning to blur in front of him. At ten
past eleven he threw down his pen and admitted defeat. He rubbed his hot
eyes with the cushions of his palms till his head filled with colours.

'Fuck it,' he said.

He never swore in company. But once in a while to say fuck it to himself
was a great consolation. He made his way out of the office, damp coat
over his arm, and headed for the elevator. His limbs felt drugged and
his eyes would scarcely stay open.

It was colder outside than he had anticipated, and the air brought him
out of his lethargy a little. He walked towards the Subway at 34th
Street. Catch an Express to Far Rockaway. Home in an hour.

Neither Kaufman nor Mahogany knew it, but at 96th and Broadway the
Police had arrested what they took to be the Subway Killer, having
trapped him in one of the up-town trains. A small man of European
extraction, wielding a hammer and a saw, had cornered a young woman in
the second car and threatened to cut her in half in the name of Jehovah.

Whether he was capable of fulfilling his threat was doubtful. As it was,
he didn't get the chance. While the rest of the passengers (including
two Marines) looked on, the intended victim landed a kick to the man's
testicles. He dropped the hammer. She picked it up and broke his lower
jaw and right cheek-bone with it before the Marines stepped in.

When the train halted at 96th the Police were waiting to arrest the
Subway Butcher. They rushed the car in a horde, yelling like banshees
and scared as shit. The Butcher was lying in one corner of the car with
his face in pieces. They carted him away, triumphant. The woman, after
questioning, went home with the Marines.

It was to be a useful diversion, though Mahogany couldn't know it at the
time. It took the Police the best part of the night to determine the
identity of their prisoner, chiefly because he couldn't do more than
drool through his shattered jaw. It wasn't until three-thirty in the
morning

that one Captain Davis, coming on duty, recognized the man as a retired
flower salesman from the Bronx called Hank Vasarely. Hank, it seemed,
was regularly arrested for threatening behaviour and indecent exposure,
all in the name of Jehovah. Appearances deceived: he was about as
dangerous as the Easter Bunny. This was not the Subway Slaughterer. But
by the time the cops had worked that out, Mahogany had been about his
business a long while.

It was eleven-fifteen when Kaufman got on the Express through to Mott
Avenue. He shared the car with two other travellers. One was a
middle-aged black woman in a purple coat, the other a pale, acne-ridden
adolescent who was staring at the 'Kiss My White Ass' graffiti on the
ceiling with spaced-out eyes.

Kaufman was in the first car. He had a journey of thirty-five minutes'
duration ahead of him. He let his eyes slide closed, reassured by the
rhythmical rocking of the train. It was a tedious journey and he was
tired. He didn't see Mahogany's face, either, staring through the door
between the cars, looking through for some more meat.

At 14th Street the black woman got out. Nobody got in. Kaufman opened
his eyes briefly, taking in the empty platform at 14th, then shut them
again. The doors hissed closed. He was drifting in that warm somewhere
between awareness and sleep and there was a fluttering of nascent dreams
in his head. It was a good feeling. The train was off again, rattling
down into the tunnels.

Maybe, at the back of his dozing mind, Kaufman half-registered that the
doors between the second and first cars had been slid open. Maybe he
smelt the sudden gush of tunnel-air, and registered that the noise of
wheels was momentarily louder. But he chose to ignore it.

Maybe he even heard the scuffle as Mahogany subdued the youth with the
spaced-out stare. But the sound was

too distant and the promise of sleep was too tempting. He drowsed on.

For some reason his dreams were of his mother's kitchen. She was
chopping turnips and smiling sweetly as she chopped. He was only small
in his dream and was looking up at her radiant face while she worked.

Chop. Chop. Chop.

His eyes jerked open. His mother vanished. The car was empty and the
youth was gone.

How long had he been dozing? He hadn't remembered the train stopping at
West 4th Street. He got up, his head full of slumber, and almost fell
over as the train rocked violently. It seemed to have gathered quite a
substantial head of speed. Maybe the driver was keen to be home, wrapped
up in bed with his wife. They were going at a fair lick; in fact it was
bloody terrifying.

There was a blind drawn down over the window between the cars which
hadn't been down before as he remembered. A little concern crept into
Kaufman's sober head. Suppose he'd been sleeping a long while, and the
guard had overlooked him in the car. Perhaps they'd passed Far Rockaway
and the train was now speeding on its way to wherever they took the
trains for the night.

'Fuck it,' he said aloud.

Should he go forward and ask the driver? It was such a bloody idiot
question to ask: where am I? At this time of night was he likely to get
more than a stream of abuse by way of reply?

Then the train began to slow.

A station. Yes, a station. The train emerged from the tunnel and into
the dirty light of the station at West 4th Street. He'd missed no stops
...

So where had the boy gone?

He'd either ignored the warning on the car wall forbidding transfer
between the cars while in transit, or else he'd

gone into the driver's cabin up front. Probably between the driver's
legs even now, Kaufman thought, his lip curling. It wasn't unheard of.

This was the Palace of Delights, after all, and everyone had their right
to a little love in the dark.

Kaufman shrugged to himself. What did he care where the boy had gone?

The doors closed. Nobody had boarded the train. It shunted off from the
station, the lights flickering as it used a surge of power to pick up
some speed again.

Kaufman felt the desire for sleep come over him afresh, but the sudden
fear of being lost had pumped adrenalin into his system, and his limbs
were tingling with nervous energy.

His senses were sharpened too.

Even over the clatter and the rumble of the wheels on the tracks, he
heard the sound of tearing cloth coming from the next car. Was someone
tearing their shirt off?

He stood up, grasping one of the straps for balance.

The window between the cars was completely curtained off, but he stared
at it, frowning, as though he might suddenly discover X-ray vision. The
car rocked and rolled. It was really travelling again.

Another ripping sound.

Was it rape?

With no more than a mild voyeuristic urge he moved down the see-sawing
car towards the intersecting door, hoping there might be a chink in the
curtain. His eyes were still fixed on the window, and he failed to
notice the splatters of blood he was treading in. Until - his heel
slipped. He looked down. His stomach almost saw the blood before his
brain and the ham on whole-wheat was half-way up his gullet catching in
the back of his throat. Blood. He took several large gulps of stale air
and looked away - back at the window.

His head was saying: blood. Nothing would make the word go away.

There was no more than a yard or two between him and the door now. He
had to look. There was blood on his shoe, and a thin trail to the next
car, but he still had to look.

He had to.

He took two more steps to the door and scanned the curtain looking for a
flaw in the blind: a pulled thread in the weave would be sufficient.

There was a tiny hole. He glued his eye to it.

His mind refused to accept what his eyes were seeing beyond the door. It
rejected the spectacle as preposterous, as a dreamed sight. His reason
said it couldn't be real, but his flesh knew it was. His body became
rigid with terror. His eyes, unblinking, could not close off the
appalling scene through the curtain. He stayed at the door while the
train rattled on, while his blood drained from his extremities, and his
brain reeled from lack of oxygen. Bright spots of light flashed in front
of his vision, blotting out the atrocity.

Then he fainted.

He was unconscious when the train reached Jay Street. He was deaf to the
driver's announcement that all travellers beyond that station would have
to change trains. Had he heard this he would have questioned the sense
of it. No trains disgorged all their passengers at Jay Street; the line
ran to Mott Avenue, via the Aqueduct Race Track, past JFK Airport. He
would have asked what kind of train this could be. Except that he
already knew. The truth was hanging in the next car. It was smiling
contentedly to itself from behind a bloody chain-mail apron.

This was the Midnight Meat Train.

There's no accounting for time in a dead faint. It could have been
seconds or hours that passed before Kaufman's eyes flickered open again,
and his mind focussed on his new-found situation.

He lay under one of the seats now, sprawled along the vibrating wall of
the car, hidden from view. Fate was with him so far he thought: somehow
the rocking of the car must have jockeyed his unconscious body out of
sight.

He thought of the horror in Car Two, and swallowed back vomit. He was
alone. Wherever the guard was (murdered perhaps), there was no way he
could call for help. And the driver? Was he dead at his controls? Was
the train even now hurtling through an unknown tunnel, a tunnel without
a single station to identify it, towards its destruction?

And if there was no crash to be killed in, there was always the Butcher,
still hacking away a door's thickness from where Kaufman lay.

Whichever way he turned, the name on the door was Death.

The noise was deafening, especially lying on the floor. Kaufman's teeth
were shaking in their sockets and his face felt numb with the vibration;
even his skull was aching.

Gradually he felt strength seeping back into his exhausted limbs. He
cautiously stretched his fingers and clenched his fists, to set the
blood flowing there again.

And as the feeling returned, so did the nausea. He kept seeing the
grisly brutality of the next car. He'd seen photographs of murder
victims before, of course, but these were no common murders. He was in
the same train as the Subway Butcher, the monster who strung his victims
up by the feet from the straps, hairless and naked.

How long would it be before the killer stepped through that door and
claimed him? He was sure that if the slaughterer didn't finish him,
expectation would.

He heard movement beyond the door.

Instinct took over. Kaufman thrust himself further under the seat and
tucked himself up into a tiny ball, with his sick-white face to the
wall. Then he covered his head with his hands and closed his eyes as
tightly as any child in terror of the Bogeyman.

The door was slid open. Click. Whoosh. A rush of air up from the rails.

It smelt stranger than any Kaufman had smelt before: and colder. This
was somehow primal air in his nostrils, hostile and unfathomable air. It
made him shudder.

The door closed. Click.

The Butcher was close, Kaufman knew it. He could be standing no more
than a matter of inches from where he lay.

Was he even now looking down at Kaufman's back? Even now bending, knife
in hand, to scoop Kaufman out of his hiding place, like a snail hooked
from its shell?

Nothing happened. He felt no breath on his neck. His spine was not slit
open.

There was simply a clatter of feet close to Kaufman's head; then that
same sound receding.

Kaufman's breath, held in his lungs 'til they hurt, was expelled in a
rasp between his teeth.

Mahogany was almost disappointed that the sleeping man had alighted at
West 4th Street. He was hoping for one more job to do that night, to
keep him occupied while they descended. But no: the man had gone. The
potential victim hadn't looked that healthy anyway, he thought to
himself, he was an anaemic Jewish accountant probably. The meat wouldn't
have been of any quality. Mahogany walked the length of the car to the
driver's cabin. He'd spend the rest of the journey there.

My Christ, thought Kaufman, he's going to kill the driver.

He heard the cabin door open. Then the voice of the Butcher: low and
hoarse.

'Hi." 'Hi." They knew each other.

'All done?" 'All done." Kaufman was shocked by the banality of the
exchange. All done? What did that mean: all done?

He missed the next few words as the train hit a particularly noisy
section of track.

Kaufman could resist looking no longer. Warily he uncurled himself and
glanced over his shoulder down the length of the car. All he could see
was the Butcher's legs, and the bottom of the open cabin door. Damn. He
wanted to see the monster's face again.

There was laughter now.

Kaufman calculated the risks of his situation: the mathematics of panic.

If he remained where he was, sooner or later the Butcher would glance
down at him, and he'd be mincemeat. On the other hand, if he were to
move from his hiding place he would risk being seen and pursued. Which
was worse: stasis, and meeting his death trapped in a hole; or making a
break for it and confronting his Maker in the middle of the car?

Kaufman surprised himself with his mettle: he'd move.

Infinitesimally slowly he crawled out from under the seat, watching the
Butcher's back every minute as he did so. Once out, he began to crawl
towards the door. Each step he took was a torment, but the Butcher
seemed far too engrossed in his conversation to turn round.

Kaufman had reached the door. He began to stand up, trying all the while
to prepare himself for the sight he would meet in Car Two. The handle
was grasped; and he slid the door open.

The noise of the rails increased, and a wave of dank air, stinking of
nothing on earth, came up at him. Surely the Butcher must hear, or
smell? Surely he must turn -But no. Kaufman skinned his way through the
slit he had opened and so through into the bloody chamber beyond.

Relief made him careless. He failed to latch the door properly behind
him and it began to slide open with the buffeting of the train.

Mahogany put his head out of the cabin and stared down the car towards
the door.

'What the fuck's that?' said the driver.

'Didn't close the door properly. That's all." Kaufman heard the Butcher
walking towards the door. He crouched, a ball of consternation, against
the intersecting wall, suddenly aware of how full his bowels were. The
door was pulled closed from the other side, and the footsteps receded
again.

Safe, for another breath at least.

Kaufman opened his eyes, steeling himself for the slaughter-pen in front
of him.

There was no avoiding it.

It filled every one of his senses: the smell of opened entrails, the
sight of the bodies, the feel of fluid on the floor under his fingers,
the sound of the straps creaking beneath the weight of the corpses, even
the air, tasting salty with blood. He was with death absolutely in that
cubby-hole, hurtling through the dark.

But there was no nausea now. There was no feeling left but a casual
revulsion. He even found himself peering at the bodies with some
curiosity.

The carcass closest to him was the remains of the pimply youth he'd seen
in Car One. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the
rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene dance
macabre.

Its arms dangled loosely from the shoulder joints, into which gashes an
inch or two deep had been made, so the bodies would hang more neatly.

Every part of the dead kid's anatomy was swaying hypnotically. The
tongue, hanging from the open mouth. The head, lolling on its slit neck.

Even the youth's penis flapped from side to side on his plucked groin.

The head wound and the open jugular still pulsed blood into a black
bucket. There was an elegance about the whole sight: the sign of a job
well-done.

Beyond that body were the strung-up corpses of two young white women and
a darker skinned male. Kaufman turned his head on one side to look at
their faces. They were quite blank. One of the girls was a beauty. He
decided the male had been Puerto Rican. All were shorn of their head and
body hair. In fact the air was still pungent with the smell of the
shearing. Kaufman slid up the wall out of the crouching position, and as
he did so one of the women's bodies turned around, presenting a dorsal
view.

He was not prepared for this last horror.

The meat of her back had been entirely cleft open from neck to buttock
and the muscle had been peeled back to expose the glistening vertebrae.

It was the final triumph of the Butcher's craft. Here they hung, these
shaved, bled, slit slabs of humanity, opened up like fish, and ripe for
devouring.

Kaufman almost smiled at the perfection of its horror. He felt an offer
of insanity tickling the base of his skull, tempting him into oblivion,
promising a blank indifference to the world.

He began to shake, uncontrollably. He felt his vocal cords trying to
form a scream. It was intolerable: and yet to scream was to become in a
short while like the creatures in front of him.

'Fuck it,' he said, more loudly than he'd intended, then

pushing himself off from the wall he began to walk down the car between
the swaying corpses, observing the neat piles of clothes and belongings
that sat on the seats beside their owners. Under his feet the floor was
sticky with drying bile. Even with his eyes closed to cracks he could
see the blood in the buckets too clearly: it was thick and heady, flecks
of grit turning in it.

He was past the youth now and he could see the door into Car Three
ahead. All he had to do was run this gauntlet of atrocities. He urged
himself on, trying to ignore the horrors, and concentrate on the door
that would lead him back into sanity.

He was past the first woman. A few more yards, he said to himself, ten
steps at most, less if he walked with confidence.

Then the lights went out.

'Jesus Christ,' he said.

The train lurched, and Kaufman lost his balance.

In the utter blackness he reached out for support and his flailing arms
encompassed the body beside him. Before he could prevent himself he felt
his hands sinking into the lukewarm flesh, and his fingers grasping the
open edge of muscle on the dead woman's back, his fingertips touching
the bone of her spine. His cheek was laid against the bald flesh of the
thigh.

He screamed; and even as he screamed, the lights flickered back on.

And as they flickered back on, and his scream died, he heard the noise
of the Butcher's feet approaching down the length of Car One towards the
intervening door.

He let go of the body he was embracing. His face was smeared with blood
from her leg. He could feel it on his cheek, like war paint.

The scream had cleared Kaufman's head and he suddenly felt released into
a kind of strength. There would

be no pursuit down the train, he knew that: there would be no cowardice,
not now. This was going to be a primitive confrontation, two human
beings, face to face. And there would be no trick - none - that he
couldn't contemplate using to bring his enemy down. This was a matter of
survival, pure and simple.

The door-handle rattled.

Kaufman looked around for a weapon, his eye steady and calculating. His
gaze fell on the pile of clothes beside the Puerto Rican's body. There
was a knife there, lying amongst the rhinestone rings and the imitation
gold chains. A long-bladed, immaculately clean weapon, probably the
man's pride and joy. Reaching past the well-muscled body, Kaufman
plucked the knife from the heap. It felt good in his hand; in fact it
felt positively thrilling.

The door was opening, and the face of the slaughterer came into view.

Kaufman looked down the abattoir at Mahogany. He was not terribly
fearsome, just another balding, overweight man of fifty. His face was
heavy and his eyes deep-set. His mouth was rather small and delicately
lipped. In fact he had a woman's mouth.

Mahogany could not understand where this intruder had appeared from, but
he was aware that it was another oversight, another sign of increasing
incompetence. He must dispatch this ragged creature immediately. After
all they could not be more than a mile or two from the end of the line.

He must cut the little man down and have him hanging up by his heels
before they reached their destination.

He moved into Car Two.

'You were asleep,' he said, recognizing Kaufman. 'I saw you.

Kaufman said nothing.

'You should have left the train. What were you trying to do? Hide from
me?"

Kaufman still kept his silence.

Mahogany grasped the hand of the cleaver hanging from his well-used
leather belt. It was dirty with blood, as was his chain-mail apron, his
hammer and his saw.

'As it is,' he said, 'I'll have to do away with you.' Kaufman raised the
knife. It looked a little small beside the Butcher's paraphernalia.

'Fuck it,' he said.

Mahogany grinned at the little man's pretensions to defence.

'You shouldn't have seen this: it's not for the likes of you,' he said,
taking another step towards Kaufman. 'It's secret." Oh, so he's the
divinely-inspired type is he? thought Kaufman. That explains something.

'Fuck it,' he said again.

The Butcher frowned. He didn't like the little man's indifference to his
work, to his reputation.

'We all have to die some time,' he said. 'You should be well pleased:
you're not going to be burnt up like most of them: I can use you. To
feed the fathers." Kaufman's only response was a grin. He was past being
terrorized by this gross, shambling hulk.

The Butcher unhooked the cleaver from his belt and brandished it.

'A dirty little Jew like you,' he said, 'should be thankful to be useful
at all: meat's the best you can aspire to." Without warning, the Butcher
swung. The cleaver divided the air at some speed, but Kaufman stepped
back. The cleaver sliced his coat-arm and buried itself in the Puerto
Rican's shank. The impact half-severed the leg and the weight of the
body opened the gash even further. The exposed meat of the thigh was
like prime steak, succulent and appetizing.

The Butcher started to drag the cleaver out of the wound, and in that
moment Kaufman sprang. The knife sped towards Mahogany's eye, but an
error of judgement buried it instead in his neck. It transfixed the
column and appeared in a little gout of gore on the other side. Straight
through. In one stroke. Straight through.

Mahogany felt the blade in his neck as a choking sensation, almost as
though he had caught a chicken bone in his throat. He made a ridiculous,
half-hearted coughing sound. Blood issued from his lips, painting them,
like lipstick on his woman's mouth. The cleaver clattered to the floor.

Kaufman pulled out the knife. The two wounds spouted little arcs of
blood.

Mahogany collapsed to his knees, staring at the knife that had killed
him. The little man was watching him quite passively. He was saying
something, but Mahogany's ears were deaf to the remarks, as though he
was under water.

Mahogany suddenly went blind. He knew with a nostalgia for his senses
that he would not see or hear again. This was death: it was on him for
certain.

His hands still felt the weave of his trousers, however, and the hot
splashes on his skin. His life seemed to totter on its tiptoes while his
fingers grasped at one last sense.

Then his body collapsed, and his hands, and his life, and his sacred
duty folded up under a weight of grey flesh.

The Butcher was dead.

Kaufman dragged gulps of stale air into his lungs and grabbed one of the
straps to steady his reeling body. Tears blotted out the shambles he
stood in. A time passed: he didn't know how long; he was lost in a dream
of victory.

Then the train began to slow. He felt and heard the brakes being
applied. The hanging bodies lurched forward as the careering train
slowed, its wheels squealing on rails that were sweating slime.

Curiosity overtook Kaufman.

Would the train shunt into the Butcher's underground slaughterhouse,
decorated with the meats he had gathered through his career? And the
laughing driver, so indifferent to the massacre, what would he do once
the train had stopped? Whatever happened now was academic. He could face
anything at all; watch and see.

The tannoy crackled. The voice of the driver: 'We're here man. Better
take your place eh?" Take your place? What did that mean?

The train had slowed to a snail's pace. Outside the windows, everything
was as dark as ever. The lights flickered, then went out. This time they
didn't come back on.

Kaufman was left in total darkness.

'We'll be out in half-an-hour,' the tannoy announced, so like any
station report.

The train had come to a stop. The sound of its wheels on the tracks, the
rush of its passage, which Kaufman had grown so used to, were suddenly
absent. All he could hear was the hum of the tannoy. He could still see
nothing at all.

Then, a hiss. The doors were opening. A smell entered the car, a smell
so caustic that Kaufman clapped his hand over his face to shut it out.

He stood in silence, hand to mouth, for what seemed a lifetime. See no
evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.

Then, there was a flicker of light outside the window. It threw the door
frame into silhouette, and it grew stronger by degrees. Soon there was
sufficient light in the car for Kaufman to see the crumpled body of the
Butcher at his feet, and the sallow sides of meat hanging on every side
of him.

There was a whisper too, from the dark outside the train, a gathering of
tiny noises like the voices of beetles. In the

tunnel, shuffling towards the train, were human beings. Kaufman could
see their outlines now. Some of them carried torches, which burned with
a dead brown light. The noise was perhaps their feet on the damp earth,
or perhaps their tongues clicking, or both.

Kaufman wasn't as naive as he'd been an hour before. Could there be any
doubt as to the intention these things had, coming out of the blackness
towards the train? The Butcher had slaughtered the men and women as meat
for these cannibals, they were coming, like diners at the dinner-gong,
to eat in this restaurant car.

Kaufman bent down and picked up the cleaver the Butcher had dropped. The
noise of the creatures' approach was louder every moment. He backed down
the car away from the open doors, only to find that the doors behind him
were also open, and there was the whisper of approach there too.

He shrank back against one of the seats, and was about to take refuge
under them when a hand, thin and frail to the point of transparency
appeared around the door.

He could not look away. Not that terror froze him as it had at the
window. He simply wanted to watch.

The creature stepped into the car. The torches behind it threw its face
into shadow, but its outline could be clearly seen.

There was nothing very remarkable about it.

It had two arms and two legs as he did; its head was not abnormally
shaped. The body was small, and the effort of climbing into the train
made its breath coarse. It seemed more geriatric than psychotic;
generations of fictional man-eaters had not prepared him for its
distressing vulnerability.

Behind it, similar creatures were appearing out of the darkness,
shuffling into the train. In fact they were coming in at every door.

Kaufman was trapped. He weighed the cleaver in his hands, getting the
balance of it, ready for the battle with these antique monsters. A torch
had been brought into the car, and it illuminated the faces of the
leaders.

They were completely bald. The tired flesh of their faces was pulled
tight over their skulls, so that it shone with tension. There were
stains of decay and disease on their skin, and in places the muscle had
withered to a black pus, through which the bone of cheek or temple was
showing. Some of them were naked as babies, their pulpy, syphilitic
bodies scarcely sexed. What had been breasts were leathery bags hanging
off the torso, the genitalia shrunken away.

Worse sights than the naked amongst them were those who wore a veil of
clothes. It soon dawned on Kaufman that the rotting fabric slung around
their shoulders, or knotted about their midriffs was made of human
skins. Not one, but a dozen or more, heaped haphazardly on top of each
other, like pathetic trophies.

The leaders of this grotesque meal-line had reached the bodies now, and
the gracile hands were laid upon the shanks of meat, and were running up
and down the shaved flesh in a manner that suggested sensual pleasure.

Tongues were dancing out of mouths, flecks of spittle landing on the
meat. The eyes of the monsters were flickering back and forth with
hunger and excitement.

Eventually one of them saw Kaufman.

Its eyes stopped flickering for a moment, and fixed on him. A look of
enquiry came over the face, making a parody of puzzlement.

'You,' it said. The voice was as wasted as the lips it came from.

Kaufman raised the cleaver a little, calculating his chances. There were
perhaps thirty of them in the car and many more outside. But they looked
so weak, and they had no weapons, but their skin and bones.

The monster spoke again, its voice quite well modulated, when it found
itself, the piping of a once-cultured, once-charming man.

'You came after the other, yes?" It glanced down at the body of
Mahogany. It had clearly taken in the situation very quickly.

'Old anyway,' it said, its watery eyes back on Kaufman, studying him
with care.

'Fuck you,' said Kaufman.

The creature attempted a wry smile, but it had almost forgotten the
technique and the result was a grimace which exposed a mouthful of teeth
that had been systematically filed into points.

'You must now do this for us,' it said through the bestial grin.

'We cannot survive without food." The hand patted the rump of human
flesh. Kaufman had no reply to the idea. He just stared in disgust as
the fingernails slid between the cleft in the buttocks, feeling the
swell of tender muscle.

'It disgusts us no less than you,' said the creature. 'But we're bound
to eat this meat, or we die. God knows, I have no appetite for it." The
thing was drooling nevertheless.

Kaufman found his voice. It was small, more with a confusion of feelings
than with fear.

'What are you?' He remembered the bearded man in the Deli.

'Are you accidents of some kind?" 'We are the City fathers,' the thing
said. 'And mothers, and daughters and sons. The builders, the
law-makers. We made this city." 'New York?' said Kaufman. The Palace of
Delights? 'Before you were born, before anyone living was born.' As it
spoke the creature's fingernails were running up under the skin of the
split body, and were peeling the thin elastic layer off the luscious
brawn. Behind Kaufman, the

other creatures had begun to unhook the bodies from the straps, their
hands laid in that same delighting manner on the smooth breasts and
flanks of flesh. These too had begun skinning the meat.

'You will bring us more,' the father said. 'More meat for us. The other
one was weak." Kaufman stared in disbelief.

'Me?' he said. 'Feed you? What do you think I am?" 'You must do it for
us, and for those older than us. For those born before the city was
thought of, when America was a timberland and desert." The fragile hand
gestured out of the train.

Kaufman's gaze followed the pointing finger into the gloom. There was
something else outside the train which he'd failed to see before; much
bigger than anything human.

The pack of creatures parted to let Kaufman through so that he could
inspect more closely whatever it was that stood outside, but his feet
would not move.

'Go on,' said the father.

Kaufman thought of the city he'd loved. Were these really its ancients,
its philosophers, its creators? He had to believe it. Perhaps there were
people on the surface -bureaucrats, politicians, authorities of every
kind - who knew this horrible secret and whose lives were dedicated to
preserving these abominations, feeding them, as savages feed lambs to
their gods. There was a horrible familiarity about this ritual. It rang
a bell - not in Kaufman's conscious mind, but in his deeper, older self.

His feet, no longer obeying his mind, but his instinct to worship,
moved. He walked through the corridor of bodies and stepped out of the
train.

The light of the torches scarcely began to illuminate the limitless
darkness outside. The air seemed solid, it was so thick with the smell
of ancient earth. But Kaufman smelt

nothing. His head bowed, it was all he could do to prevent himself from
fainting again.

It was there; the precursor of man. The original American, whose
homeland this was before Passamaquoddy or Cheyenne. Its eyes, if it had
eyes, were on him.

His body shook. His teeth chattered.

He could hear the noise of its anatomy: ticking, crackling, sobbing.

It shifted a little in the dark.

The sound of its movement was awesome. Like a mountain sitting up.

Kaufman's face was raised to it, and without thinking about what he was
doing or why, he fell to his knees in the shit in front of the Father of
Fathers.

Every day of his life had been leading to this day, every moment
quickening to this incalculable moment of holy terror.

Had there been sufficient light in that pit to see the whole, perhaps
his tepid heart would have burst. As it was he felt it flutter in his
chest as he saw what he saw.

It was a giant. Without head or limb. Without a feature that was
analogous to human, without an organ that made sense, or senses. If it
was like anything, it was like a shoal of fish. A thousand snouts all
moving in unison, budding, blossoming and withering rhythmically. It was
iridescent, like mother of pearl, but it was sometimes deeper than any
colour Kaufman knew, or could put a name to.

That was all Kaufman could see, and it was more than he wanted to see.

There was much more in the darkness, flickering and flapping.

But he could look no longer. He turned away, and as he did so a football
was pitched out of the train and rolled to a halt in front of the
Father.

At least he thought it was a football, until he peered more attentively
at it, and recognized it as a human head, the

head of the Butcher. The skin of the face had been peeled off in strips.

It glistened with blood as it lay in front of its Lord.

Kaufman looked away, and walked back to the train. Every part of his
body seemed to be weeping but his eyes. They were too hot with the sight
behind him, they boiled his tears away.

Inside, the creatures had already set about their supper. One, he saw,
was plucking the blue sweet morsel of a woman's eye out of the socket.

Another had a hand in its mouth. At Kaufman's feet lay the Butcher's
headless corpse, still bleeding profusely from where its neck had been
bitten through.

The little father who had spoken earlier stood in front of Kaufman.

'Serve us?' it asked, gently, as you might ask a cow to follow you.

Kaufman was staring at the cleaver, the Butcher's symbol of office. The
creatures were leaving the car now, dragging the half-eaten bodies after
them. As the torches were taken out of the car, darkness was returning.

But before the lights had completely disappeared the father reached out
and took hold of Kaufman's face, thrusting him round to look at himself
in the filthy glass of the car window.

It was a thin reflection, but Kaufman could see quite well enough how
changed he was. Whiter than any living man should be, covered in grime
and blood.

The father's hand still gripped Kaufman's face, and its forefinger
hooked into his mouth and down his gullet, the nail scoring the back of
his throat. Kaufman gagged on the intruder, but had no will left to
repel the attack.

'Serve,' said the creature. 'In silence." Too late, Kaufman realized the
intention of the fingers -

Suddenly his tongue was seized tight and twisted on the root. Kaufman,
in shock, dropped the cleaver. He tried to scream, but no sound came.

Blood was in his throat, he heard his flesh tearing, and agonies
convulsed him.

Then the hand was out of his mouth and the scarlet, spittle-covered
fingers were in front of his face, with his tongue, held between thumb
and forefinger.

Kaufman was speechless.

'Serve,' said the father, and stuffed the tongue into his own mouth,
chewing on it with evident satisfaction. Kaufman fell to his knees,
spewing up his sandwich.

The father was already shuffling away into the dark; the rest of the
ancients had disappeared into their warren for another night.

The tannoy crackled.

'Home,' said the driver.

The doors hissed closed and the sound of power surged through the train.

The lights flickered on, then off again, then on.

The train began to move.

Kaufman lay on the floor, tears pouring down his face, tears of
discomfiture and of resignation. He would bleed to death, he decided,
where he lay. It wouldn't matter if he died. It was a foul world anyway.

The driver woke him. He opened his eyes. The face that was looking down
at him was black, and not unfriendly. It grinned. Kaufman tried to say
something, but his mouth was sealed up with dried blood. He jerked his
head around like a driveller trying to spit out a word. Nothing came but
grunts.

He wasn't dead. He hadn't bled to death.

The driver pulled him to his knees, talking to him as though he were a
three-year-old.

'You got a job to do, my man: they're very pleased with you." The driver
had licked his fingers, and was rubbing Kaufman's swollen lips, trying
to part them.

'Lots to learn before tomorrow night ..." Lots to learn. Lots to learn.

He led Kaufman out of the train. They were in no station he had ever
seen before. It was white-tiled and absolutely pristine; a
station-keeper's Nirvana. No graffiti disfigured the walls. There were
no token-booths, but then there were no gates and no passengers either.

This was a line that provided only one service: The Meat Train.

A morning shift of cleaners were already busy hosing the blood off the
seats and the floor of the train. Somebody was stripping the Butcher's
body, in preparation for dispatch to New Jersey. All around Kaufman
people were at work.

A rain of dawn light was pouring through a grating in the roof of the
station. Motes of dust hung in the beams, turning over and over. Kaufman
watched them, entranced. He hadn't seen such a beautiful thing since he
was a child. Lovely dust. Over and over, and over and over.

The driver had managed to separate Kaufman's lips. His mouth was too
wounded for him to move it, but at least he could breathe easily. And
the pain was already beginning to subside.

The driver smiled at him, then turned to the rest of the workers in the
station.

'I'd like to introduce Mahogany's replacement. Our new butcher,' he
announced.

The workers looked at Kaufman. There was a certain deference in their
faces, which he found appealing.

Kaufman looked up at the sunlight, now falling all around him. He jerked
his head, signifying that he wanted to go up, into the open air. The
driver nodded, and led him

up a steep flight of steps and through an alley-way and so out on to the
sidewalk.

It was a beautiful day. The bright sky over New York was streaked with
filaments of pale pink cloud, and the air smelt of morning.

The Streets and Avenues were practically empty. At a distance an
occasional cab crossed an intersection, its engine a whisper; a runner
sweated past on the other side of the street.

Very soon these same deserted sidewalks would be thronged with people.

The city would go about its business in ignorance: never knowing what it
was built upon, or what it owed its life to. Without hesitation, Kaufman
fell to his knees and kissed the dirty concrete with his bloody lips,
silently swearing his eternal loyalty to its continuance.

The Palace of Delights received the adoration without comment.

THE YATTERING AND JACK

WHY THE POWERS (long may they hold court; long may they shit light on
the heads of the damned) had sent it out from Hell to stalk Jack Polo,
the Yattering couldn't discover. Whenever he passed a tentative enquiry
along the system to his master, just asking the simple question, 'What
am I doing here?' it was answered with a swift rebuke for its curiosity.

None of its business, came the reply, its business was to do. Or die
trying. And after six months of pursuing Polo, the Yattering was
beginning to see extinction as an easy option. This endless game of hide
and seek was to nobody's benefit, and to the Yattering's immense
frustration. It feared ulcers, it feared psychosomatic leprosy (a
condition lower demons like itself were susceptible to), worst of all it
feared losing its temper completely and killing the man outright in an
uncontrollable fit of pique.

What was Jack Polo anyway?

A gherkin importer; by the balls of Leviticus, he was simply a gherkin
importer. His life was worn out, his family was dull, his politics were
simple-minded and his theology

non-existent. The man was a no-account, one of nature's blankest little
numbers - why bother with the likes of him? This wasn't a Faust: a
pact-maker, a soul-seller. This one wouldn't look twice at the chance of
divine inspiration: he'd sniff, shrug and get on with his gherkin
importing.

Yet the Yattering was bound to that house, long night and longer day,
until he had the man a lunatic, or as good as. It was going to be a
lengthy job, if not interminable. Yes, there were times when even
psychosomatic leprosy would be bearable if it meant being invalided off
this impossible mission.

For his part, Jack J. Polo continued to be the most unknowing of men. He
had always been that way; indeed his history was littered with the
victims of his navet. When his late, lamented wife had cheated on him
(he'd been in the house on at least two of the occasions, watching the
television) he was the last one to find out. And the clues they'd left
behind them! A blind, deaf and dumb man would have become suspicious.

Not Jack. He pottered about his dull business and never noticed the tang
of the adulterer's cologne, nor the abnormal regularity with which his
wife changed the bed-linen.

He was no less disinterested in events when his younger daughter Amanda
confessed her lesbianism to him. His response was a sigh and a puzzled
look.

'Well, as long as you don't get pregnant, darling,' he replied, and
sauntered off into the garden, blithe as ever.

What chance did a fury have with a man like that?

To a creature trained to put its meddling fingers into the wounds of the
human psyche, Polo offered a surface so glacial, so utterly without
distinguishing marks, as to deny malice any hold whatsoever.

Events seemed to make no dent in his perfect indifference. His life's
disasters seemed not to scar his mind at all. When, eventually, he was
confronted with the truth

about his wife's infidelity (he found them screwing in the bath) he
couldn't bring himself to be hurt or humiliated.

'These things happen,' he said to himself, backing out of the bathroom
to let them finish what they'd started.

'Che sera, sera." Che sera, sera. The man muttered that damn phrase with
monotonous regularity. He seemed to live by that philosophy of fatalism,
letting attacks on his manhood, ambition and dignity slide off his ego
like rain-water from his bald head.

The Yattering had heard Polo's wife confess all to her husband (it was
hanging upside down from the light-fitting, invisible as ever) and the
scene had made it wince. There was the distraught sinner, begging to be
accused, bawled at, struck even, and instead of giving her the
satisfaction of his hatred, Polo had just shrugged and let her say her
piece without a word of interruption, until she had no more to embosom.

She'd left, at length, more out of frustration and sorrow than guilt;
the Yattering had heard her tell the bathroom mirror how insulted she
was at her husband's lack of righteous anger. A little while after she'd
flung herself off the balcony of the Roxy Cinema.

Her suicide was in some ways convenient for the fury. With the wife
gone, and the daughters away from home, it could plan for more elaborate
tricks to unnerve its victim, without ever having to concern itself with
revealing its presence to creatures the powers had not marked for
attack.

But the absence of the wife left the house empty during the days, and
that soon became a burden of boredom the Yattering found scarcely
supportable. The hours from nine to five, alone in the house, often
seemed endless. It would mope and wander, planning bizarre and
impractical revenges upon the Polo-man, pacing the rooms, heartsick,
companioned only by the clicks and whirrs of the house as

the radiators cooled, or the refrigerator switched itself on and off.

The situation rapidly became so desperate that the arrival of the midday
post became the high-point of the day, and an unshakeable melancholy
would settle on the Yattering if the postman had nothing to deliver and
passed by to the next house.

When Jack returned the games would begin in earnest. The usual warm-up
routine: it would meet Jack at the door and prevent his key from turning
in the lock. The contest would go on for a minute or two until Jack
accidentally found the measure of the Yattering's resistance, and won
the day. Once inside, it would start all the lampshades swinging. The
man would usually ignore this performance, however violent the motion.

Perhaps he might shrug and murmur: 'Subsidence,' under his breath, then,
inevitably, 'Che sera, sera." In the bathroom, the Yattering would have
squeezed toothpaste around the toilet-seat and have plugged up the
shower-head with soggy toilet-paper. It would even share the shower with
Jack, hanging unseen from the rail that held up the shower curtain and
murmuring obscene suggestions in his ear. That was always successful,
the demons were taught at the Academy. The obscenities in the ear
routine never failed to distress clients, making them think they were
conceiving of these pernicious acts themselves, and driving them to
self-disgust, then to self-rejection and finally to madness. Of course,
in a few cases the victims would be so inflamed by these whispered
suggestions they'd go out on the streets and act upon them. Under such
circumstances the victim would often be arrested and incarcerated.

Prison would lead to further crimes, and a slow dwindling of moral
reserves - and the victory was won by that route. One way or another
insanity would out.

Except that for some reason this rule did not apply to Polo; he was
imperturbable: a tower of propriety.

Indeed, the way things were going the Yattering would be the one to
break. It was tired; so very tired. Endless days of tormenting the cat,
reading the funnies in yesterday's newspaper, watching the game shows:
they drained the fury. Lately, it had developed a passion for the woman
who lived across the street from Polo. She was a young widow; and seemed
to spend most of her life parading around the house stark naked. It was
almost unbearable sometimes, in the middle of a day when the postman
failed to call, watching the woman and knowing it could never cross the
threshold of Polo's house.

This was the Law. The Yattering was a minor demon, and his soul-catching
was strictly confined to the perimeters of his victim's house. To step
outside was to relinquish all powers over the victim: to put itself at
the mercy of humanity.

All June, all July and most of August it sweated in its prison, and all
through those bright, hot months Jack Polo maintained complete
indifference to the Yattering's attacks.

It was deeply embarrassing, and it was gradually destroying the demon's
self-confidence, seeing this bland victim survive every trial and trick
attempted upon him.

The Yattering wept.

The Yattering screamed.

In a fit of uncontrollable anguish, it boiled the water in the aquarium,
poaching the guppies.

Polo heard nothing. Saw nothing.

At last, in late September, the Yattering broke one of the first rules
of its condition, and appealed directly to its masters.

Autumn is Hell's season; and the demons of the higher dominations were
feeling benign. They condescended to speak to their creature.

'What do you want?' asked Beelzebub, his voice blackening the air in the
lounge.

'This man ...' the Yattering began nervously.

'Yes?" 'This Polo ..." 'Yes?" 'I am without issue upon him. I can't get
panic upon him, I can't breed fear or even mild concern upon him. I am
sterile, Lord of the Flies, and I wish to be put out of my misery." For
a moment Beelzebub's face formed in the mirror over the mantelpiece.

'You want what?" Beelzebub was part elephant, part wasp. The Yattering
was terrified.

'I - want to die." 'You cannot die." 'From this world. Just die from
this world. Fade away.

Be replaced." 'You will not die." 'But I can't break him!' the Yattering
shrieked, tearful.

'You must." 'Why?" 'Because we tell you to.' Beelzebub always used the
Royal 'we', though unqualified to do so.

'Let me at least know why I'm in this house,' the Yattering appealed.

'What is he? Nothing! He's nothing!" Beelzebub found this rich. He
laughed, buzzed, trumpeted.

'Jack Johnson Polo is the child of a worshipper at the Church of Lost
Salvation. He belongs to us." 'But why should you want him? He's so
dull." 'We want him because his soul was promised to us, and his mother
did not deliver it. Or herself come to that. She

cheated us. She died in the arms of a priest, and was safely escorted to
-" The word that followed was anathema. The Lord of the Flies could
barely bring himself to pronounce it.

'- Heaven,' said Beelzebub, with infinite loss in his voice.

'Heaven,' said the Yattering, not knowing quite what was meant by the
word.

'Polo is to be hounded in the name of the Old One, and punished for his
mother's crimes. No torment is too profound for a family that has
cheated us." 'I'm tired,' the Yattering pleaded, daring to approach the
mirror.

'Please. I beg you." 'Claim this man,' said Beelzebub, 'or you will
suffer in his place." The figure in the mirror waved its black and
yellow trunk and faded.

'Where is your pride?' said the master's voice as it shrivelled into
distance. 'Pride, Yattering, pride." Then he was gone.

In its frustration the Yattering picked up the cat and threw it into the
fire, where it was rapidly cremated. If only the law allowed such easy
cruelty to be visited upon human flesh, it thought. If only. If only.

Then it'd make Polo suffer such torments. But no. The Yattering knew the
laws as well as the back of its hand; they had been flayed on to its
exposed cortex as a fledgling demon by its teachers. And Law One stated:
'Thou shalt not lay palm upon thy victims." It had never been told why
this law pertained, but it did.

'Thou shalt not ..." So the whole painful process continued. Day in, day
out, and still the man showed no sign of yielding. Over the next few
weeks the Yattering killed two more cats that Polo brought home to
replace his treasured Freddy (now ash).

The first of these poor victims was drowned in the toilet bowl one idle
Friday afternoon. It was a pretty satisfaction to see the look of
distaste register on Polo's face as he unzipped his fly and glanced
down. But any pleasure the Yattering took in Jack's discomfiture was
cancelled out by the blithely efficient way in which the man dealt with
the dead cat, hoisting the bundle of soaking fur out of the pan,
wrapping it in a towel and burying it in the back garden with scarcely a
murmur.

The third cat that Polo brought home was wise to the invisible presence
of the demon from the start. There was indeed an entertaining week in
mid-November when life for the Yattering became almost interesting while
it played cat and mouse with Freddy the Third. Freddy played the mouse.

Cats not being especially bright animals the game was scarcely a great
intellectual challenge, but it made a change from the endless days of
waiting, haunting and failing. At least the creature accepted the
Yattering's presence. Eventually, however, in a filthy mood (caused by
the re-marriage of the Yattering's naked widow) the demon lost its
temper with the cat. It was sharpening its nails on the nylon carpet,
clawing and scratching at the pile for hours on end. The noise put the
demon's metaphysical teeth on edge. It looked at the cat once, briefly,
and it flew apart as though it had swallowed a live grenade.

The effect was spectacular. The results were gross. Cat-brain, cat-fur,
cat-gut everywhere.

Polo got home that evening exhausted, and stood in the doorway of the
dining-room, his face sickened, surveying the carnage that had been
Freddy III.

'Damn dogs,' he said. 'Damn, damn dogs." There was anger in his voice.

Yes, exulted the Yattering, anger. The man was upset: there was clear
evidence of emotion on his face.

Elated, the demon raced through the house, determined to capitalize on
its victory. It opened and slammed every door. It smashed vases. It set
the lampshades swinging.

Polo just cleaned up the cat.

The Yattering threw itself downstairs, tore up a pillow. Impersonated a
thing with a limp and an appetite for human flesh in the attic, and
giggling.

Polo just buried Freddy III, beside the grave of Freddy II, and the
ashes of Freddy I.

Then he retired to bed, without his pillow.

The demon was utterly stumped. If the man could not raise more than a
flicker of concern when his cat was exploded in the dining-room, what
chance had it got of ever breaking the bastard?

There was one last opportunity left.

It was approaching Christ's Mass, and Jack's children would be coming
home to the bosom of the family. Perhaps they could convince him that
all was not well with the world; perhaps they could get their
fingernails under his flawless indifference, and begin to break him
down. Hoping against hope, the Yattering sat out the weeks to late
December, planning its attacks with all the imaginative malice it could
muster.

Meanwhile, Jack's life sauntered on. He seemed to live apart from his
experience, living his life as an author might write a preposterous
story, never involving himself in the narrative too deeply. In several
significant ways, however, he showed his enthusiasm for the coming
holiday. He cleared his daughters' rooms immaculately. He made their
beds up with sweet-smelling linen. He cleaned every speck of cat's blood
out of the carpet. He even set up a Christmas tree in the lounge, hung
with iridescent balls, tinsel and presents.

Once in a while, as he went about the preparations, Jack thought of the
game he was playing, and quietly calculated

the odds against him. In the days to come he would have to measure not
only his own suffering, but that of his daughters, against the possible
victory. And always, when he made these calculations, the chance of
victory seemed to outweigh the risks.

So he continued to write his life, and waited.

Snow came, soft pats of it against the windows, against the door.

Children arrived to sing carols, and he was generous to them. It was
possible, for a brief time, to believe in peace on earth.

Late in the evening of the twenty-third of December the daughters
arrived, in a flurry of cases and kisses. The youngest, Amanda, arrived
home first. From its vantage point on the landing the Yattering viewed
the young woman balefully. She didn't look like ideal material in which
to induce a breakdown. In fact, she looked dangerous. Gina followed an
hour or two later; a smoothly-polished woman of the world at
twenty-four, she looked every bit as intimidating as her sister. They
came into the house with their bustle and their laughter; they
re-arranged the furniture; they threw out the junk-food in the freezer,
they told each other (and their father) how much they had missed each
other's company. Within the space of a few hours the drab house was
repainted with light, and fun and love.

It made the Yattering sick.

Whimpering, it hid its head in the bedroom to block out the din of
affection, but the shock-waves enveloped it. All it could do was sit,
and listen, and refine its revenge.

Jack was pleased to have his beauties home. Amanda so full of opinions,
and so strong, like her mother. Gina more like his mother: poised,
perceptive. He was so happy in their presence he could have wept; and
here was he, the proud father, putting them both at such risk. But what
was the alternative? If he had cancelled the Christmas

celebrations, it would have looked highly suspicious. It might even have
spoiled his whole strategy, waking the enemy to the trick that was being
played.

No; he must sit tight. Play dumb, the way the enemy had come to expect
him to be.

The time would come for action.

At 3.15 a. m. on Christmas morning the Yattering opened hostilities by
throwing Amanda out of bed. A paltry performance at best, but it had the
intended effect. Sleepily rubbing her bruised head, she climbed back
into bed, only to have the bed buck and shake and fling her off again
like an unbroken colt.

The noise woke the rest of the house. Gina was first in her sister's
room.

'What's going on?" 'There's somebody under the bed." 'What?" Gina picked
up a paperweight from the dresser and demanded the assailant come out.

The Yattering, invisible, sat on the window seat and made obscene
gestures at the women, tying knots in its genitalia.

Gina peered under the bed. The Yattering was clinging to the light
fixture now, persuading it to swing backwards and forwards, making the
room reel.

'There's nothing there -" 'There is." Amanda knew. Oh yes, she knew.

'There's something here, Gina,' she said. 'Something in the room with
us, I'm sure of it." 'No.' Gina was absolute. 'It's empty." Amanda was
searching behind the wardrobe when Polo came in.

'What's all the din?" 'There's something in the house Daddy. I was
thrown out of bed."

Jack looked at the crumpled sheets, the dislodged mattress, then at
Amanda. This was the first test: he must lie as casually as possible.

'Looks like you've been having nightmares, beauty,' he said, affecting
an innocent smile.

'There was something under the bed,' Amanda insisted.

'There's nobody here now." 'But I felt it." 'Well, I'll check the rest
of the house,' he offered, without enthusiasm for the task. 'You two
stay here, just in case." As Polo left the room, the Yattering rocked
the light a little more.

'Subsidence,' said Gina.

It was cold downstairs, and Polo could have done without padding around
barefoot on the kitchen tiles, but he was quietly satisfied that the
battle had been joined in such a petty manner. He'd half-feared that the
enemy would turn savage with such tender victims at hand. But no: he'd
judged the mind of the creature quite accurately. It was one of the
lower orders. Powerful, but slow. Capable of being inveigled beyond the
limits of its control. Carefully does it, he told himself, carefully
does it.

He traipsed through the entire house, dutifully opening cupboards and
peering behind the furniture, then returned to his daughters, who were
sitting at the top of the stairs. Amanda looked small and pale, not the
twenty-two-year-old woman she was, but a child again.

'Nothing doing,' he told her with a smile. 'It's Christmas morning and
all through the house -" Gina finished the rhyme.

'Nothing is stirring; not even a mouse." 'Not even a mouse, beauty." At
that moment the Yattering took its cue to fling a vase off the lounge
mantelpiece.

Even Jack jumped.

'Shit,' he said. He needed some sleep, but quite clearly the Yattering
had no intention of letting them alone just yet.

'Che sera, sera,' he murmured, scooping up the pieces of the Chinese
vase, and putting them in a piece of newspaper. 'The house is sinking a
little on the left side, you know,' he said more loudly. 'It has been
for years." 'Subsidence,' said Amanda with quiet certainty, 'would not
throw me out of my bed." Gina said nothing. The options were limited.

The alternatives unattractive.

'Well, maybe it was Santa Claus,' said Polo, attempting levity.

He parcelled up the pieces of the vase and wandered through into the
kitchen, certain that he was being shadowed every step of the way. 'What
else can it be?' He threw the question over his shoulder as he stuffed
the newspaper into the waste bin. 'The only other explanation-' here he
became almost elated by his skimming so close to the truth, 'the only
other possible explanation is too preposterous for words." It was an
exquisite irony, denying the existence of the invisible world in the
full knowledge that even now it breathed vengefully down his neck.

'You mean poltergeists?' said Gina.

'I mean anything that goes bang in the night. But, we're grown-up people
aren't we? We don't believe in Bogeymen." 'No,' said Gina flatly, 'I
don't, but I don't believe the house is subsiding either." 'Well, it'll
have to do for now,' said Jack with nonchalant finality. 'Christmas
starts here. We don't want to spoil it talking about gremlins, now do
we." They laughed together.

Gremlins. That surely bit deep. To call the Hell-spawn a gremlin.

The Yattering, weak with frustration, acid tears boiling on its
intangible cheeks, ground its teeth and kept its peace.

There would be time yet to beat that atheistic smile off Jack Polo's
smooth, fat face. Time aplenty. No half-measures from now on. No
subtlety. It would be an all out attack.

Let there be blood. Let there be agony. They'd all break.

Amanda was in the kitchen, preparing Christmas dinner, when the
Yattering mounted its next attack. Through the house drifted the sound
of King's College Choir, '0 Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see
thee lie ..." The presents had been opened, the G and T's were being
downed, the house was one warm embrace from roof to cellar.

In the kitchen a sudden chill permeated the heat and the steam, making
Amanda shiver; she crossed to the window, which was ajar to clear the
air, and closed it. Maybe she was catching something.

The Yattering watched her back as she busied herself about the kitchen,
enjoying the domesticity for a day. Amanda felt the stare quite clearly.

She turned round. Nobody, nothing. She continued to wash the Brussels
sprouts, cutting into one with a worm curled in the middle. She drowned
it.

The Choir sang on.

In the lounge, Jack was laughing with Gina about something.

Then, a noise. A rattling at first, followed by a beating of somebody's
fists against a door. Amanda dropped the knife into the bowl of sprouts,
and turned from the sink,

following the sound. It was getting louder all the time. Like something
locked in one of the cupboards, desperate to escape. A cat caught in the
box, or a -Bird.

It was coming from the oven.

Amanda's stomach turned, as she began to imagine the worst.

Had she locked something in the oven when she'd put in the turkey? She
called for her father, as she snatched up the oven cloth and stepped
towards the cooker, which was rocking with the panic of its prisoner.

She had visions of a basted cat leaping out at her, its fur burned off,
its flesh half-cooked.

Jack was at the kitchen door.

'There's something in the oven,' she said to him, as though he needed
telling. The cooker was in a frenzy; its thrashing contents had all but
beaten off the door.

He took the oven cloth from her. This is a new one, he thought. You're
better than I judged you to be. This is clever. This is original.

Gina was in the kitchen now.

'What's cooking?' she quipped.

But the joke was lost as the cooker began to dance, and the pans of
boiling water were twitched off the burners on to the floor. Scalding
water seared Jack's leg. He yelled, stumbling back into Gina, before
diving at the cooker with a yell that wouldn't have shamed a Samurai.

The oven handle was slippery with heat and grease, but he seized it and
flung the door down.

A wave of steam and blistering heat rolled out of the oven, smelling of
succulent turkey-fat. But the bird inside had apparently no intentions
of being eaten. It was flinging itself from side to side on the roasting
tray, tossing gouts of gravy in all directions. Its crisp brown wings
pitifully flailed and flapped, its legs beat a tattoo on the roof of the
oven.

Then it seemed to sense the open door. Its wings stretched themselves
out to either side of its stuffed bulk and it half hopped, half fell on
to the oven door, in a mockery of its living self. Headless, oozing
stuffing and onions, it flopped around as though nobody had told the
damn thing it was dead, while the fat still bubbled on its bacon-strewn
back.

Amanda screamed.

Jack dived for the door as the bird lurched into the air, blind but
vengeful. What it intended to do once it reached its three cowering
victims was never discovered. Gina dragged Amanda into the hallway with
her father in hot pursuit, and the door was slammed closed as the blind
bird flung itself against the panelling, beating on it with all its
strength. Gravy seeped through the gap at the bottom of the door, dark
and fatty.

The door had no lock, but Jack reasoned that the bird was not capable of
turning the handle. As he backed away, breathless, he cursed his
confidence. The opposition had more up its sleeve than he'd guessed.

Amanda was leaning against the wall sobbing, her face stained with
splotches of turkey grease. All she seemed able to do was deny what
she'd seen, shaking her head and repeating the word 'no' like a talisman
against the ridiculous horror that was still throwing itself against the
door. Jack escorted her through to the lounge. The radio was still
crooning carols which blotted out the din of the bird, but their
promises of goodwill seemed small comfort.

Gina poured a hefty brandy for her sister and sat beside her on the
sofa, plying her with spirits and reassurance in about equal measure.

They made little impression on Amanda.

'What was that?' Gina asked her father, in a tone that demanded an
answer.

'I don't know what it was,' Jack replied.

'Mass hysteria?' Gina's displeasure was plain. Her father had a secret:
he knew what was going on in the house, but he was refusing to cough up
for some reason.

'What do I call: the police or an exorcist?" 'Neither." 'For God's sake
-" 'There's nothing going on, Gina. Really." Her father turned from the
window and looked at her. His eyes spoke what his mouth refused to say,
that this was war.

Jack was afraid.

The house was suddenly a prison. The game was suddenly lethal. The
enemy, instead of playing foolish games, meant harm, real harm to them
all.

In the kitchen the turkey had at last conceded defeat. The carols on the
radio had withered into a sermon on God's benedictions.

What had been sweet was sour and dangerous. He looked across the room at
Amanda and Gina. Both for their own reasons, were trembling. Polo wanted
to tell them, wanted to explain what was going on. But the thing must be
there, he knew, gloating.

He was wrong. The Yattering had retired to the attic, well-satisfied
with its endeavours. The bird, it felt, had been a stroke of genius. Now
it could rest a while: recuperate. Let the enemy's nerves tatter
themselves in anticipation. Then, in its own good time, it would deliver
the coup de grace.

Idly, it wondered if any of the inspectors had seen his work with the
turkey. Maybe they would be impressed enough by the Yattering's
originality to improve its job prospects. Surely it hadn't gone through
all those years of training simply to chase half-witted imbeciles like
Polo. There must be something more challenging available than

that. It felt victory in its invisible bones: and it was a good feeling.

The pursuit of Polo would surely gain momentum now. His daughters would
convince him (if he wasn't now quite convinced) that there was something
terrible afoot. He would crack. He would crumble. Maybe he'd go
classically mad: tear out his hair, rip off his clothes; smear himself
with his own excrement.

Oh yes, victory was close. And wouldn't his masters be loving then?

Wouldn't it be showered with praise, and power?

One more manifestation was all that was required. One final, inspired
intervention, and Polo would be so much blubbering flesh.

Tired, but confident, the Yattering descended into the lounge.

Amanda was lying full-length on the sofa, asleep. She was obviously
dreaming about the turkey. Her eyes rolled beneath her gossamer lids,
her lower lip trembled. Gina sat beside the radio, which was silenced
now. She had a book open on her lap, but she wasn't reading it.

The gherkin importer wasn't in the room. Wasn't that his footstep on the
stair? Yes, he was going upstairs to relieve his brandy-full bladder.

Ideal timing.

The Yattering crossed the room. In her sleep Amanda dreamt something
dark flitting across her vision, something malign, something that tasted
bitter in her mouth.

Gina looked up from her book.

The silver balls on the tree were rocking, gently. Not just the balls.

The tinsel and the branches too.

In fact, the tree. The whole tree was rocking as though someone had just
seized hold of it.

Gina had a very bad feeling about this. She stood up. The book slid to
the floor.

The tree began to spin.

'Christ,' she said. 'Jesus Christ." Amanda slept on.

The tree picked up momentum.

Gina walked as steadily as she could across to the sofa and tried to
shake her sister awake. Amanda, locked in her dreams, resisted for a
moment.

'Father,' said Gina. Her voice was strong, and carried through into the
hall. It also woke Amanda.

Downstairs, Polo heard a noise like a whining dog. No, like two whining
dogs. As he ran down the stairs, the duet became a trio. He burst into
the lounge half expecting all the hosts of Hell to be in there,
dog-headed, dancing on his beauties.

But no. It was the Christmas tree that was whining, whining like a pack
of dogs, as it spun and spun.

The lights had long since been pulled from their sockets. The air stank
of singed plastic and pine-sap. The tree itself was spinning like a top,
flinging decorations and presents off its tortured branches with the
largesse of a mad king.

Jack tore his eyes from the spectacle of the tree and found Gina and
Amanda crouching, terrified, behind the sofa.

'Get out of here,' he yelled.

Even as he spoke the television sat up impertinently on one leg and
began to spin like the tree, gathering momentum quickly. The clock on
the mantelpiece joined the pirouetting. The pokers beside the fire. The
cushions. The ornaments. Each object added its own singular note to the
orchestration of whines which were building up, second by second, to a
deafening pitch. The air began to brim with the smell of burning wood,
as friction heated the spinning tops to flash-point. Smoke swirled
across the room.

Gina had Amanda by the arm, and was dragging her towards the door,
shielding her face against the hail of pine needles that the
still-accelerating tree was throwing off.

Now the lights were spinning.

The books, having flung themselves off the shelves, had joined the
tarantella.

Jack could see the enemy, in his mind's eye, racing between the objects
like a juggler spinning plates on sticks, trying to keep them all moving
at once. It must be exhausting work, he thought. The demon was probably
close to collapse. It couldn't be thinking straight. Overexcited.

Impulsive. Vulnerable. This must be the moment, if ever there was a
moment, to join battle at last. To face the thing, defy it, and trap it.

For its part, the Yattering was enjoying this orgy of destruction. It
flung every movable object into the fray, setting everything spinning.

It watched with satisfaction as the daughters twitched and scurried; it
laughed to see the old man stare, pop-eyed, at this preposterous ballet.

Surely he was nearly mad, wasn't he?

The beauties had reached the door, their hair and skin full of needles.

Polo didn't see them leave. He ran across the room, dodging a rain of
ornaments to do so, and picked up a brass toasting fork which the enemy
had overlooked. Bric-a-brac filled the air around his head, dancing
around with sickening speed. His flesh was bruised and punctured. But
the exhilaration of joining battle had overtaken him, and he set about
beating the books, and the clocks, and the china to smithereens. Like a
man in a cloud of locusts he ran around the room, bringing down his
favourite books in a welter of fluttering pages, smashing whirling
Dresden, shattering the lamps. A litter of broken possessions swamped
the

floor, some of it still twitching as the life went out of the fragments.

But for every object brought low, there were a dozen still spinning,
still whining.

He could hear Gina at the door, yelling to him to get out, to leave it
alone.

But it was so enjoyable, playing against the enemy more directly than
he'd ever allowed himself before. He didn't want to give up. He wanted
the demon to show itself, to be known, to be recognized.

He wanted confrontation with the Old One's emissary once and for all.

Without warning the tree gave way to the dictates of centrifugal force,
and exploded. The noise was like a howl of death. Branches, twigs,
needles, balls, lights, wire, ribbons, flew across the room. Jack, his
back to the explosion, felt a gust of energy hit him hard, and he was
flung to the ground. The back of his neck and his scalp were shot full
of pine-needles. A branch, naked of greenery, shot past his head and
impaled the sofa. Fragments of tree pattered to the carpet around him.

Now other objects around the room, spun beyond the tolerance of their
structures, were exploding like the tree. The television blew up,
sending a lethal wave of glass across the room, much of which buried
itself in the opposite wall. Fragments of the television's innards, so
hot they singed the skin, fell on Jack, as he elbowed himself towards
the door like a soldier under bombardment.

The room was so thick with a barrage of shards it was like a fog. The
cushions had lent their down to the scene, snowing on the carpet.

Porcelain pieces: a beautifully-glazed arm, a courtesan's head, bounced
on the floor in front of his nose.

Gina was crouching at the door, urging him to hurry, her eyes narrowed
against the hail. As Jack reached the door, and felt her arms around
him, he swore he could

hear laughter from the lounge. Tangible, audible laughter, rich and
satisfied.

Amanda was standing in the hall, her hair full of pine-needles, staring
down at him. He pulled his legs through the doorway and Gina slammed the
door shut on the demolition.

'What is it?' she demanded. 'Poltergeist? Ghost? Mother's ghost?" The
thought of his dead wife being responsible for such wholesale
destruction struck Jack as funny.

Amanda was half smiling. Good, he thought, she's coming out of it. Then
he met the vacant look in her eyes and the truth dawned. She'd broken,
her sanity had taken refuge where this fantastique couldn't get at it.

'What's in there?' Gina was asking, her grip on his arm so strong it
stopped the blood.

'I don't know,' he lied. 'Amanda?" Amanda's smile didn't decay. She just
stared on at him, through him.

'You do know." 'No." 'You're lying." 'I think ..." He picked himself off
the floor, brushing the pieces of porcelain, the feathers, the glass,
off his shirt and trousers.

'I think ... I shall go for a walk." Behind him, in the lounge, the last
vestiges of whining had stopped. The air in the hallway was electric
with unseen presences. It was very close to him, invisible as ever, but
so close. This was the most dangerous time. He mustn't lose his nerve
now. He must stand up as though nothing had happened; he must leave
Amanda be, leave explanations and recriminations until it was all over
and done with.

'Walk?' Gina said, disbelievingly. 'Yes ... walk ... I need some fresh
air.' 'You can't leave us here." 'I'll find somebody to help us clear
up.' 'But Mandy." 'She'll get over it. Leave her be." That was hard.

That was almost unforgivable. But it was said now.

He walked unsteadily towards the front door, feeling nauseous after so
much spinning. At his back Gina was raging.

'You can't just leave! Are you out of your mind?" 'I need the air,' he
said, as casually as his thumping heart and his parched throat would
permit. 'So I'll just go out for a moment." No, the Yattering said. No,
no, no.

It was behind him, Polo could feel it. So angry now, so ready to twist
off his head. Except that it wasn't allowed, ever to touch him. But he
could feel its resentment like a physical presence.

He took another step towards the front door.

It was with him still, dogging his every step. His shadow, his fetch;
unshakeable. Gina shrieked at him, 'You son-of-a-bitch, look at Mandy!

She's lost her mind!" No, he mustn't look at Mandy. If he looked at
Mandy he might weep, he might break down as the thing wanted him to,
then everything would be lost.

'She'll be all right,' he said, barely above a whisper. He reached for
the front door handle. The demon bolted the door, quickly, loudly. No
temper left for pretence now.

Jack, keeping his movements as even as possible, unbolted the door, top
and bottom. It bolted again.

It was thrilling, this game; it was also terrifying. If he pushed too
far surely the demon's frustration would override its lessons?

Gently, smoothly, he unbolted the door again. Just as gently, just as
smoothly, the Yattering bolted it.

Jack wondered how long he could keep this up for. Somehow he had to get
outside: he had to coax it over the threshold. One step was all that the
law required, according to his researches.

One simple step.

Unbolted. Bolted. Unbolted. Bolted.

Gina was standing two or three yards behind her father. She didn't
understand what she was seeing, but it was obvious her father was doing
battle with someone, or something.

'Daddy -' she began.

'Shut up,' he said benignly, grinning as he unbolted the door for the
seventh time. There was a shiver of lunacy in the grin, it was too wide
and too easy.

Inexplicably, she returned the smile. It was grim, but genuine. Whatever
was at issue here, she loved him.

Polo made a break for the back door. The demon was three paces ahead of
him, scooting through the house like a sprinter, and bolting the door
before Jack could even reach the handle. The key was turned in the lock
by invisible hands, then crushed to dust in the air.

Jack feigned a move towards the window beside the back door but the
blinds were pulled down and the shutters slammed. The Yattering, too
concerned with the window to watch Jack closely, missed his doubling
back through the house.

When it saw the trick that was being played it let out a little screech,
and gave chase, almost sliding into Jack on the smoothly-polished floor.

It avoided the collision only by the most balletic of manoeuvres. That
would be fatal indeed: to touch the man in the heat of the moment.

Polo was again at the front door and Gina, wise to her father's
strategy, had unbolted it while the Yattering and Jack fought at the
back door. Jack had prayed she'd take

the opportunity to open it. She had. It stood slightly ajar: The icy air
of the crisp afternoon curled its way into the hallway.

Jack covered the last yards to the door in a flash, feeling without
hearing the howl of complaint the Yattering loosed as it saw its victim
escaping into the outside world.

It was not an ambitious creature. All it wanted at that moment, beyond
any other dream, was to take this human's skull between its palms and
make a nonsense of it. Crush it to smithereens, and pour the hot thought
out on to the snow. To be done with Jack J. Polo, forever and forever.

Was that so much to ask?

Polo had stepped into the squeaky-fresh snow, his slippers and
trouser-bottoms buried in chill. By the time the fury reached the step
Jack was already three or four yards away, marching up the path towards
the gate. Escaping. Escaping.

The Yattering howled again, forgetting its years of training. Every
lesson it had learned, every rule of battle engraved on its skull was
submerged by the simple desire to have Polo's life.

It stepped over the threshold and gave chase. It was an unpardonable
transgression. Somewhere in Hell, the powers (long may they hold court;
long may they shit light on the heads of the damned) felt the sin, and
knew the war for Jack Polo's soul was lost.

Jack felt it too. He heard the sound of boiling water, as the demon's
footsteps melted to steam the snow on the path. It was coming after him!

The thing had broken the first rule of its existence. It was forfeit. He
felt the victory in his spine, and his stomach.

The demon overtook him at the gate. Its breath could clearly be seen in
the air, though the body it emanated from had not yet become visible.

Jack tried to open the gate, but the Yanering slammed it shut.

'Che sera, sera,' said Jack.

The Yattering could bear it no longer. He took Jack's head in his hands,
intending to crush the fragile bone to dust.

The touch was its second sin; and it agonized the Yattering beyond
endurance. It bayed like a banshee and reeled away from the contact,
sliding in the snow and falling on its back.

It knew its mistake. The lessons it had had beaten into it came hurtling
back. It knew the punishment too, for leaving the house, for touching
the man. It was bound to a new lord, enslaved to this idiot-creature
standing over it.

Polo had won.

He was laughing, watching the way the outline of the demon formed in the
snow on the path. Like a photograph developing on a sheet of paper, the
image of the fury came clear. The law was taking its toll. The Yattering
could never hide from its master again. There it was, plain to Polo's
eyes, in all its charmless glory. Maroon flesh and bright lidless eye,
arms flailing, tail thrashing the snow to slush.

'You bastard,' it said. Its accent had an Australian lilt.

'You will not speak unless spoken to,' said Polo, with quiet, but
absolute, authority. 'Understood?" The lidless eye clouded with
humility.

'Yes,' the Yattering said.

'Yes, Mister Polo." 'Yes, Mister Polo." Its tail slipped between its
legs like that of a whipped dog.

'You may stand." 'Thank you, Mr. Polo."

It stood. Not a pleasant sight, but one Jack rejoiced in nevertheless.

'They'll have you yet,' said the Yattering.

'Who will?" 'You know,' it said, hesitantly.

'Name them." 'Beelzebub,' it answered, proud to name its old master.

'The powers. Hell itself." 'I don't think so,' Polo mused. 'Not with you
bound to me as proof of my skills. Aren't I the better of them?" The eye
looked sullen.

'Aren't I?" 'Yes,' it conceded bitterly. 'Yes. You are the better of
them." It had begun to shiver.

'Are you cold?' asked Polo.

It nodded, affecting the look of a lost child.

'Then you need some exercise,' he said. 'You'd better go back into the
house and start tidying up." The fury looked bewildered, even
disappointed, by this instruction.

'Nothing more?' it asked incredulously. 'No miracles? No Helen of Troy?

No flying?" The thought of flying on a snow-spattered afternoon like
this left Polo cold. He was essentially a man of simple tastes: all he
asked for in life was the love of his children, a pleasant home, and a
good trading price for gherkins.

'No flying,' he said.

As the Yattering slouched down the path towards the door it seemed to
alight upon a new piece of mischief. It turned back to Polo, obsequious,
but unmistakably smug.

'Could I just say something?' it said.

'Speak."

'It's only fair that I inform you that it's considered ungodly to have
any contact with the likes of me. Heretical even." 'Is that so?" 'Oh
yes,' said the Yattering, warming to its prophecy. 'People have been
burned for less." 'Not in this day and age,' Polo replied.

'But the Seraphim will see,' it said. 'And that means you'll never go to
that place." 'What place?" The Yattering fumbled for the special word it
had heard Beelzebub use.

'Heaven,' it said, triumphant. An ugly grin had come on to its face;
this was the cleverest manoeuvre it had ever attempted; it was juggling
theology here.

Jack nodded slowly, nibbling at his bottom lip.

The creature was probably telling the truth: association with it or its
like would not be looked upon benignly by the Host of Saints and Angels.

He probably was forbidden access to the plains of paradise.

'Well,' he said, 'you know what I have to say about that, don't you?"

The Yattering stared at him, frowning. No, it didn't know. Then the grin
of satisfaction it had been wearing died, as it saw just what Polo was
driving at.

'What do I say?' Polo asked it.

Defeated, the Yattering murmured the phrase.

'Che sera, sera." Polo smiled. 'There's a chance for you yet,' he said,
and led the way over the threshold, closing the door with something very
like serenity on his face.

PIG BLOOD BLUES

YOU COULD SMELL the kids before you could see them, their young sweat
turned stale in corridors with barred windows, their bolted breath sour,
their heads musty. Then their voices, subdued by the rules of
confinement.

Don't run. Don't shout. Don't whistle. Don't fight.

They called it a Remand Centre for Adolescent Offenders, but it was near
as damn it a prison. There were locks and keys and warders. The gestures
of liberalism were few and far between and they didn't disguise the
truth too well; Tetherdowne was a prison by sweeter name, and the
inmates knew it.

Not that Redman had any illusions about his pupils-to-be. They were
hard, and they were locked away for a reason. Most of them would rob you
blind as soon as look at you; cripple you if it suited them, no sweat.

He had too many years in the force to believe the sociological lie. He
knew the victims, and he knew the kids. They weren't misunderstood
morons, they were quick and sharp and amoral, like the razors they hid
under their tongues. They

had no use for sentiment, they just wanted out.

'Welcome to Tetherdowne." Was the woman's name Leverton, or Leverfall,
or -'I'm Doctor Leverthal' Leverthal. Yes. Hard-bitten bitch he'd met at
-'We met at the interview." 'Yes." 'We're glad to see you, Mr. Redman."

'Neil; please call me Neil." 'We try not to go on a first name basis in
front of the boys, we find they think they've got a finger into your
private life. So I'd prefer you to keep Christian names purely for
off-duty hours." She didn't offer hers. Probably something flinty.

Yvonne. Lydia. He'd invent something appropriate.

She looked fifty, and was probably ten years younger.

No make-up, hair tied back so severely he wondered her eyes didn't pop.

'You'll be beginning classes the day after tomorrow. The Governor asked
me to welcome you to the Centre on his behalf, and apologise to you that
he can't be here himself. There are funding problems." 'Aren't there
always?" 'Regrettably yes. I'm afraid we're swimming against the tide
here; the general mood of the country is very Law and Order orientated."

What was that a nice way of saying? Beat the shit out of any kid caught
so much as jay-walking? Yes, he'd been that way himself in his time, and
it was a nasty little cul-de-sac, every bit as bad as being sentimental.

'The fact is, we may lose Tetherdowne altogether,' she said, 'which
would be a shame. I know it doesn't look like much ..." '- but it's
home,' he laughed. The joke fell among thieves. She didn't even seem to
hear it.

'You,' her tone hardened, 'you have a solid (did she say sullied?)
background in the Police Force. Our hope is that your appointment here
will be welcomed by the funding authorities." So that was it. Token
ex-policeman brought in to appease the powers that be, to show willing
in the discipline department. They didn't really want him here. They
wanted some sociologist who'd write up reports on the effect of the
class-system on brutality amongst teenagers. She was quietly telling him
that he was the odd man out.

'I told you why I left the force." 'You mentioned it. Invalided out." 'I
wouldn't take a desk job, it was as simple as that; and they wouldn't
let me do what I did best. Danger to myself according to some of them."

She seemed a little embarrassed by his explanation. Her a psychologist
too; she should have been devouring this stuff, it was his private hurt
he was making public here. He was coming clean, for Christ's sake.

'So I was out on my backside, after twenty-four years.' He hesitated,
then said his piece. 'I'm not a token policeman; I'm not any kind of
policeman. The force and I parted company. Understand what I'm saying?"

'Good, good.' She didn't understand a bloody word. He tried another
approach.

'I'd like to know what the boys have been told." 'Been told?" 'About
me." 'Well, something of your background." 'I see.' They'd been warned.

Here come the pigs.

'It seemed important." He grunted.

'You see, so many of these boys have real aggression problems. That's a
source of difficulty for so very many

of them. They can't control themselves, and consequently they suffer."

He didn't argue, but she looked at him severely, as though he had.

'Oh yes, they suffer. That's why we're at such pains to show some
appreciation of their situation; to teach them that there are
alternatives." She walked across to the window. From the second storey
there was an adequate view of the grounds. Tetherdowne had been some
kind of estate, and there was a good deal of land attached to the main
house. A playing-field, its grass sere in the midsummer drought. Beyond
it a cluster of out-houses, some exhausted trees, shrubbery, and then
rough wasteland off to the wall. He'd seen the wall from the other side.

Alcatraz would have been proud of it.

'We try to give them a little freedom, a little education and a little
sympathy. There's a popular notion, isn't there, that delinquents enjoy
their criminal activities? This isn't my experience at all. They come to
me guilty, broken..

One broken victim flicked a vee at Leverthal's back as he sauntered
along the corridor. Hair slicked down and parted in three places. A
couple of home-grown tattoos on his fore-arm, unfinished.

'They have committed criminal acts, however,' Redman pointed out.

'Yes, but -, 'And must, presumably, be reminded of the fact." 'I don't
think they need any reminding, Mr. Redman. I think they burn with
guilt." She was hot on guilt, which didn't surprise him. They'd taken
over the pulpit, these analysts. They were up where the Bible-thumpers
used to stand, with the threadbare sermons on the fires below, but with
a slightly less colourful vocabulary. It was fundamentally the same
story though, complete with the promises of healing, if

the rituals were observed. And behold, the righteous shall inherit the
Kingdom of Heaven.

There was a pursuit on the playing field, he noticed. Pursuit, and now a
capture. One victim was laying into another smaller victim with his
boot; it was a fairly merciless display.

Leverthal caught the scene at the same time as Redman.

'Excuse me. I must -" She started down the stairs.

'Your workshop is third door on the left if you want to take a look,'
she called over her shoulder, 'I'll be right back." Like hell she would.

Judging by the way the scene on the field was progressing, it would be a
three crowbar job to prize them apart.

Redman wandered along to his workshop. The door was locked, but through
the wired glass he could see the benches, the vices, the tools. Not bad
at all. He might even teach them some wood-work, if he was left alone
long enough to do it.

A bit frustrated not to be able to get in, he doubled back along the
corridor, and followed Leverthal downstairs, finding his way out easily
on to the sun-lit playing field. A little knot of spectators had grown
around the fight, or the massacre, which had now ceased. Leverthal was
standing, staring down at the boy on the ground. One of the warders was
kneeling at the boy's head; the injuries looked bad.

A number of the spectators looked up and stared at the new face as
Redman approached. There were whispers amongst them, some smiles.

Redman looked at the boy. Perhaps sixteen, he lay with his cheek to the
ground, as if listening for something in the earth.

'Lacey', Leverthal named the boy for Redman.

'Is he badly hurt?"

The man kneeling beside Lacey shook his head.

'Not too bad. Bit of a fall. Nothing broken." There was blood on the
boy's face from his mashed nose. His eyes were closed. Peaceful. He
could have been dead.

'Where's the bloody stretcher?' said the warder. He was clearly
uncomfortable on the drought-hardened ground.

'They're coming, Sir,' said someone. Redman thought it was the
aggressor. A thin lad: about nineteen. The sort of eyes that could sour
milk at twenty paces.

Indeed a small posse of boys was emerging from the main building,
carrying a stretcher and a red blanket. They were all grinning from ear
to ear.

The band of spectators had begun to disperse, now that the best of it
was over. Not much fun picking up the pieces.

'Wait, wait,' said Redman, 'don't we need some witnesses here? Who did
this?" There were a few casual shrugs, but most of them played deaf.

They sauntered away as if nothing had been said.

Redman said: 'We saw it. From the window." Leverthal was offering no
support.

'Didn't we?' he demanded of her.

'It was too far to lay any blame, I think. But I don't want to see any
more of this kind of bullying, do you all understand me?" She'd seen
Lacey, and recognized him easily from that distance. Why not the
attacker too? Redman kicked himself for not concentrating; without names
and personalities to go with the faces, it was difficult to distinguish
between them. The risk of making a misplaced accusation was high, even
though he was almost sure of the curdling eyed boy. This was no time to
make mistakes, he decided; this time he'd have to let the issue drop.

Leverthal seemed unmoved by the whole thing.

'Lacey,' she said quietly, 'it's always Lacey."

'He asks for it,' said one of the boys with the stretcher, brushing a
sheaf of blond-white hair from his eyes, 'he doesn't know no better."

Ignoring the observation, Leverthal supervised Lacey's transfer to the
stretcher, and started to walk back to the main building, with Redman in
tow. It was all so casual.

'Not exactly wholesome, Lacey,' she said cryptically, almost by way of
explanation; and that was all. So much for compassion.

Redman glanced back as they tucked the red blanket around Lacey's still
form. Two things happened, almost simultaneously.

The first: Somebody in the group said, 'That's the pig'. The second:
Lacey's eyes opened and looked straight into Redman's, wide, clear and
true.

Redman spent a good deal of the next day putting his workshop in order.

Many of the tools had been broken or rendered useless by untrained
handling: saws without teeth, chisels that were chipped and edgeless,
broken vices. He'd need money to re-supply the shop with the basics of
the trade, but now wasn't the time to start asking. Wiser to wait, and
be seen to do a decent job. He was quite used to the politics of
institutions; the force was full of it.

About four-thirty a bell started to ring, a good way from the workshop.

He ignored it, but after a time his instincts got the better of him.

Bells were alarms, and alarms were sounded to alert people. He left his
tidying, locked the workshop door behind him, and followed his ears.

The bell was ringing in what was laughingly called the Hospital Unit,
two or three rooms closed off from the main block and prettied up with a
few pictures and curtains at the windows. There was no sign of smoke in
the air, so it clearly wasn't a fire. There was shouting though. More
than shouting. A howl.

He quickened his pace along the interminable corridors, and as he turned
a corner towards the Unit a small figure ran straight into him. The
impact winded both of them, but Redman grabbed the lad by the arm before
he could make off again. The captive was quick to respond, lashing out
with his shoeless feet against Redman's shin. But he had him fast.

'Let me go you fucking -''Calm down! Calm down!" His pursuers were
almost there. 'Hold him!" 'Fucker! Fucker! Fucker! Fucker!" 'Hold him!"

It was like wrestling a crocodile: the kid had all the strength of fear.

But the best of his fury was spent.

Tears were springing into his bruised eyes as he spat in Redman's face.

It was Lacey in his arms, unwholesome Lacey.

'OK. We got him." Redman stepped back as the warder took over, putting
Lacey in a hold that looked fit to break the boy's arm. Two or three
others were appearing round the corner. Two boys, and a nurse, a very
unlovely creature.

'Let me go ... Let me go ...' Lacey was yelling, but any stomach for the
fight had gone out of him. A pout came to his face in defeat, and still
the cow-like eyes turned up accusingly at Redman, big and brown. He
looked younger than his sixteen years, almost prepubescent. There was a
whisper of bum-fluff on his cheek and a few spots amongst the bruises
and a badly-applied dressing across his nose. But quite a girlish face,
a virgin's face, from an age when there were still virgins. And still
the eyes.

Leverthal had appeared, too late to be of use.

'What's going on?"

The warder piped up. The chase had taken his breath, and his temper.

'He locked himself in the lavatories. Tried to get out through the
window." 'Why?" The question was addressed to the warder, not to the
child. A telling confusion. The warder, confounded, shrugged.

'Why?' Redman repeated the question to Lacey. The boy just stared, as
though he'd never been asked a question before.

'You the pig?' he said suddenly, snot running from his nose.

'Pig?" 'He means policeman,' said one of the boys. The noun was spoken
with a mocking precision, as though he was addressing an imbecile.

'I know what he means, lad,' said Redman, still determined to out-stare
Lacey, 'I know very well what he means." 'Are you?" 'Be quiet, Lacey,'
said Leverthal, 'you're in enough trouble as it is." 'Yes, son. I'm the
pig." The war of looks went on, a private battle between boy and man.

'You don't know nothing,' said Lacey. It wasn't a snide remark, the boy
was simply telling his version of the truth; his gaze didn't flicker.

'All right, Lacey, that's enough.' The warder was trying to haul him
away; his belly stuck out between pyjama top and bottom, a smooth dome
of milk skin.

'Let him speak,' said Redman. 'What don't I know?" 'He can give his side
of the story to the Governor,' said Leverthal before Lacey could reply.

'It's not your concern."

But it was very much his concern. The stare made it his concern; so
cutting, so damned. The stare demanded that it become his concern.

'Let him speak,' said Redman, the authority in his voice overriding
Leverthal. The warder loosened his hold just a little.

'Why did you try and escape, Lacey?"

"Cause he came back." 'Who came back? A name, Lacey. Who are you talking
about?" For several seconds Redman sensed the boy fighting a pact with
silence; then Lacey shook his head, breaking the electric exchange
between them. He seemed to lose his way somewhere; a kind of puzzlement
gagged him.

'No harm's going to come to you." Lacey stared at his feet, frowning. 'I
want to go back to bed now,' he said. A virgin's request.

'No harm, Lacey. I promise." The promise seemed to have precious little
effect; Lacey was struck dumb. But it was a promise nevertheless, and he
hoped Lacey realised that. The kid looked exhausted by the effort of his
failed escape, of the pursuit, of staring. His face was ashen. He let
the warder turn him and take him back. Before he rounded the corner
again, he seemed to change his mind; he struggled to loose himself,
failed, but managed to twist himself round to face his interrogator.

'Henessey,' he said, meeting Redman's eyes once more. That was all. He
was shunted out of sight before he could say anything more.

'Henessey?' said Redman, feeling like a stranger suddenly.

'Who's Henessey?" Leverthal was lighting a cigarette. Her hands were
shaking ever so slightly as she did it. He hadn't noticed that
yesterday, but he wasn't surprised. He'd yet to meet a head shrinker who
didn't have problems of their own.

'The boy's lying,' she said, 'Henessey's no longer with us." A little
pause. Redman didn't prompt, it would only make her jumpy.

'Lacey's clever,' she went on, putting the cigarette to her colourless
lips. 'He knows just the spot." 'Eh?" 'You're new here, and he wants to
give you the impression that he's got a mystery all of his own." 'It
isn't a mystery then?" 'Henessey?' she snorted. 'Good God no. He escaped
custody in early May. He and Lacey ...' She hesitated, without wanting
to. 'He and Lacey had something between them. Drugs perhaps, we never
found out. Glue-sniffing, mutual masturbation, God knows what." She
really did find the whole subject unpleasant. Distaste was written over
her face in a dozen tight places.

'How did Henessey escape?" 'We still don't know,' she said. 'He just
didn't turn up for roll-call one morning. The place was searched from
top to bottom. But he'd gone." 'Is it possible he'd come back?" A
genuine laugh.

'Jesus no. He hated the place. Besides, how could he get in?" 'He got
out." Leverthal conceded the point with a murmur. 'He wasn't especially
bright, but he was cunning. I wasn't altogether surprised when he went
missing. The few weeks before his escape he'd really sunk into himself.

I couldn't get anything out of him, and up until then he'd been quite
talkative." 'And Lacey?" 'Under his thumb. It often happens. Younger boy
idolizes an older, more experienced individual. Lacey had a very
unsettled family background."

Neat, thought Redman. So neat he didn't believe a word of it. Minds
weren't pictures at an exhibition, all numbered, and hung in order of
influence, one marked 'Cunning', the next, 'Impressionable'. They were
scrawls; they were sprawling splashes of graffiti, unpredictable,
unconfinable.

And little boy Lacey? He was written on water.

Classes began the next day, in a heat so oppressive it turned the
workshop into an oven by eleven. But the boys responded quickly to
Redman's straight dealing. They recognized in him a man they could
respect without liking. They expected no favours, and received none. It
was a stable arrangement.

Redman found the staff on the whole less communicative than the boys. An
odd-ball bunch, all in all. Not a strong heart amongst them he decided.

The routine of Tetherdowne, its rituals of classification, of
humiliation, seemed to grind them into a common gravel. Increasingly he
found himself avoiding conversation with his peers. The workshop became
a sanctuary, a home from home, smelling of newly cut wood and bodies.

It was not until the following Monday that one of the boys mentioned the
farm.

Nobody had told him there was a farm in the grounds of the Centre, and
the idea struck Redman as absurd.

'Nobody much goes down there,' said Creeley, one of the worst
woodworkers on God's earth. 'It stinks." General laughter.

'All right, lads, settle down." The laughter subsided, laced with a few
whispered jibes.

'Where is this farm, Creeley?" 'It's not even a farm really, sir,' said
Creeley, chewing his tongue (an incessant routine). 'It's just a few
huts. Stink, they do sir. Especially now."

He pointed out of the window to the wilderness beyond the playing field.

Since he'd last looked out at the sight, that first day with Leverthal,
the wasteland had ripened in the sweaty heat, ranker with weeds than
ever. Creeley pointed out a distant brick wall, all but hidden behind a
shield of shrubs.

'See it, sir?" 'Yes, I see it." 'That's the sty, sir." Another round of
sniggers.

'What's so funny?' he wheeled on the class. A dozen heads snapped down
to their work.

'I wouldn't go down there sir. It's high as a fucking kite."

Creeley wasn't exaggerating. Even in the relative cool of the late
afternoon the smell wafting off the farm was stomach turning. Redman
just followed his nose across the field and past the out-houses. The
buildings he glimpsed from the workshop window were coming out of
hiding. A few ramshackle huts thrown up out of corrugated iron and
rotting wood, a chicken run, and the brick-built sty were all the farm
could offer. As Creeley had said, it wasn't really a farm at all. It was
a tiny domesticated Dachau; filthy and forlorn. Somebody obviously fed
the few prisoners: the hens, the half dozen geese, the pigs, but nobody
seemed bothered to clean them out. Hence that rotten smell. The pigs
particularly were living in a bed of their own ordure, islands of dung
cooked to perfection in the sun, peopled with thousands of flies.

The sty itself was divided into two separate compartments, divided by a
high brick wall. In the forecourt of one a small, mottled pig lay on its
side in the filth, its flank alive with ticks and bugs. Another,
smaller, pig could be glimpsed in the gloom of the interior, lying on
shit-thick straw. Neither showed any interest in Redman.

The other compartment seemed empty.

There was no excrement in the forecourt, and far fewer flies amongst the
straw. The accumulated smell of old faecal matter was no less acute,
however, and Redman was about to turn away when there was a noise from
inside, and a great bulk righted itself. He leaned over the padlocked
wooden gate, blotting out the stench by an act of will, and peered
through the doorway of the sty.

The pig came out to look at him. It was three times the size of its
companions, a vast sow that might well have mothered the pigs in the
adjacent pen. But where her farrows were filthy-flanked, the sow was
pristine, her blushing pink frame radiant with good health. Her sheer
size impressed Redman. She must have weighed twice what he weighed, he
guessed: an altogether formidable creature. A glamorous animal in her
gross way, with her curling blonde lashes and the delicate down on her
shiny snout that coarsened to bristles around her lolling ears, and the
oily, fetching look in her dark brown eyes.

Redman, a city boy, had seldom seen the living truth behind, or previous
to, the meat on his plate. This wonderful porker came as a revelation.

The bad press that he'd always believed about pigs, the reputation that
made the very name a synonym for foulness, all that was given the lie.

The sow was beautiful, from her snuffling snout to the delicate
corkscrew of her tail, a seductress on trotters.

Her eyes regarded Redman as an equal, he had no doubt of that, admiring
him rather less than he admired her.

She was safe in her head, he in his. They were equal under a glittering
sky.

Close to, her body smelt sweet. Somebody had clearly been there that
very morning, sluicing her down, and feeding her. Her trough, Redman now
noticed, still

brimmed with a mush of slops, the remains of yesterday's meal. She
hadn't touched it; she was no glutton.

Soon she seemed to have the sum of him, and grunting quietly she turned
around on her nimble feet and returned to the cool of the interior. The
audience was over.

That night he went to find Lacey. The boy had been removed from the
Hospital Unit and put in a shabby room of his own. He was apparently
still being bullied by the other boys in his dormitory, and the
alternative was this solitary confinement. Redman found him sitting on a
carpet of old comic books, staring at the wall. The lurid covers of the
comics made his face look milkier than ever. The bandage had gone from
his nose, and the bruise on the bridge was yellowing.

He shook Lacey's hand, and the boy gazed up at him. There was a real
turn about since their last meeting. Lacey was calm, even docile. The
handshake, a ritual Redman had introduced whenever he met boys out of
the workshop, was weak.

'Are you well?" The boy nodded.

'Do you like being alone?" 'Yes, sir." 'You'll have to go back to the
dormitory eventually.' Lacey shook his head.

'You can't stay here forever, you know." 'Oh, I know that, sir." 'You'll
have to go back." Lacey nodded. Somehow the logic didn't seem to have
got through to the boy. He turned up the corner of a Superman comic and
stared at the splash-page without scanning it.

'Listen to me, Lacey. I want you and I to understand each other. Yes?"

'Yes, sir." 'I can't help you if you lie to me. Can I?" 'No." 'Why did
you mention Kevin Henessey's name to me last week? I know that he isn't
here any longer. He escaped, didn't he?" Lacey stared at the
three-colour hero on the page.

'Didn't he?" 'He's here,' said Lacey, very quietly. The kid was suddenly
distraught. It was in his voice, and in the way his face folded up on
itself.

'If he escaped, why should he come back? That doesn't really make much
sense to me, does it make much sense to you?" Lacey shook his head.

There were tears in his nose, that muffled his words, but they were
clear enough.

'He never went away." 'What? You mean he never escaped?" 'He's clever
sir. You don't know Kevin. He's clever.' He closed the comic, and looked
up at Redman. 'In what way clever?" 'He planned everything, sir. All of
it." 'You have to be clear." 'You won't believe me. Then that's the end,
because you won't believe me. He hears you know, he's everywhere. He
doesn't care about walls. Dead people don't care about nothing like
that." Dead. A smaller word than alive; but it took the breath away.

'He can come and go,' said Lacey, 'any time he wants." 'Are you saying
Henessey is dead?' said Redman. 'Be careful, Lacey." The boy hesitated:
he was aware that he was walking a tight rope, very close to losing his
protector.

'You promised,' he said suddenly, cold as ice.

'Promised no harm would come to you. It won't. I said that and I meant
it. But that doesn't mean you can tell me lies, Lacey." 'What lies,
sir?" 'Henessey isn't dead." 'He is, sir. They all know he is. He hanged
himself. With the pigs." Redman had been lied to many times, by experts,
and he felt he'd become a good judge of liars. He knew all the tell-tale
signs. But the boy exhibited none of them. He was telling the truth.

Redman felt it in his bones.

The truth; the whole truth; nothing but.

That didn't mean that what the boy was saying was true. He was simply
telling the truth as he understood it. He believed Henessey was
deceased. That proved nothing.

'If Henessey were dead -" 'He is, sir." 'If he were, how could he be
here?" The boy looked at Redman without a trace of guile in his face.

'Don't you believe in ghosts, sir?" So transparent a solution, it
flummoxed Redman. Henessey was dead, yet Henessey was here. Hence,
Henessey was a ghost.

'Don't you, sir?" The boy wasn't asking a rhetorical question. He
wanted, no, he demanded, a reasonable answer to his reasonable question.

'No, boy,' said Redman. 'No, I don't.' Lacey seemed unruffled by this
conflict of opinion. 'You'll see,' he said simply. 'You'll see."

In the sty at the perimeter of the grounds the great, nameless sow was
hungry.

She judged the rhythm of the days, and with their

progression her desires grew. She knew that the time for stale slops in
a trough was past. Other appetites had taken the place of those piggy
pleasures.

She had a taste, since the first time, for food with a certain texture,
a certain resonance. It wasn't food she would demand all the time, only
when the need came on her. Not a great demand: once in a while, to
gobble at the hand that fed her.

She stood at the gate of her prison, listless with anticipation, waiting
and waiting. She snaffled, she snorted, her impatience becoming a dull
anger. In the adjacent pen her castrated sons, sensing her distress,
became agitated in their turn. They knew her nature, and it was
dangerous. She had, after all, eaten two of their brothers, living,
fresh and wet from her own womb.

Then there were noises through the blue veil of twilight, the soft
brushing sound of passage through the nettles, accompanied by the murmur
of voices.

Two boys were approaching the sty, respect and caution in every step.

She made them nervous, and understandably so. The tales of her tricks
were legion.

Didn't she speak, when angered, in that possessed voice, bending her
fat, porky mouth to talk with a stolen tongue? Wouldn't she stand on her
back trotters sometimes, pink and imperial, and demand that the smallest
boys be sent into her shadow to suckle her, naked like her farrow? And
wouldn't she beat her vicious heels upon the ground, until the food they
brought for her was cut into petit pieces and delivered into her maw
between trembling finger and thumb? All these things she did.

And worse.

Tonight, the boys knew, they had not brought what she wanted. It was not
the meat she was due that lay on the plate they carried. Not the sweet,
white meat that she had asked for in that other voice of hers, the meat
she could, if she

desired, take by force. Tonight the meal was simply stale bacon, filched
from the kitchens. The nourishment she really craved, the meat that had
been pursued and terrified to engorge the muscle, then bruised like a
hammered steak for her delectation, that meat was under special
protection. It would take a while to coax it to the slaughter.

Meanwhile they hoped she would accept their apologies and their tears,
and not devour them in her anger.

One of the boys had shit his pants by the time he reached the sty-wall,
and the sow smelt him. Her voice took on a different timbre, enjoying
the piquancy of their fear.

Instead of the low snort there was a higher, hotter note out of her. It
said: I know, I know. Come and be judged.

I know, I know.

She watched them through the slats of the gate, her eyes glinting like
jewels in the murky night, brighter than the night because living, purer
than the night because wanting.

The boys knelt at the gate, their heads bowed in supplication, the plate
they both held lightly covered with a piece of stained muslin.

'Well?' she said. The voice was unmistakable in their ears. His voice,
out of the mouth of the pig.

The elder boy, a black kid with a cleft palate, spoke quietly to the
shining eyes, making the best of his fear: 'It's not what you wanted.

We're sorry." The other boy, uncomfortable in his crowded trousers,
murmured his apology too.

'We'll get him for you though. We will, really. We'll bring him to you
very soon, as soon as we possibly can." 'Why not tonight?' said the pig.

'He's being protected." 'A new teacher. Mr. Redman." The sow seemed to
know it all already. She remembered the confrontation across the wall,
the way he'd stared at her

as though she was a zoological specimen. So that was her enemy, that old
man. She'd have him. Oh yes.

The boys heard her promise of revenge, and seemed content to have the
matter taken out of their hands.

'Give her the meat,' said the black boy.

The other one stood up, removing the muslin cloth. The bacon smelt bad,
but the sow nevertheless made wet noises of enthusiasm. Maybe she had
forgiven them.

'Go on, quickly." The boy took the first strip of bacon between finger
and thumb and proffered it. The sow turned her mouth sideways up to it
and ate, showing her yellowish teeth. It was gone quickly. The second,
the third, fourth, fifth the same.

The sixth and last piece she took with his fingers, snatched with such
elegance and speed the boy could only cry out as her teeth champed
through the thin digits and swallowed them. He withdrew his hand from
over the sty wall, and gawped at this mutilation. She had done only a
little damage, considering. The top of his thumb and half his index
finger had gone. The wounds bled quickly, fully, splashing on to his
shirt and his shoes. She grunted and snorted and seemed satisfied.

The boy yelped and ran.

'Tomorrow,' said the sow to the remaining supplicant. 'Not this old
pig-meat. It must be white. White and lacy.' She thought that was a fine
joke.

'Yes,' the boy said, 'yes, of course." 'Without fail,' she ordered.

'Yes." 'Or I come for him myself. Do you hear me?" 'Yes." 'I come for
him myself, wherever he's hiding. I will eat him in his bed if I wish.

In his sleep I will eat off his feet, then his legs, then his balls,
then his hips -,

'Yes, yes." 'I want him,' said the sow, grinding her trotter in the
straw.

'He's mine."

'Henessey dead?' said Leverthal, head still down as she wrote one of her
interminable reports. 'It's another fabrication. One minute the child
says he's in the Centre, the next he's dead. The boy can't even get his
story straight." It was difficult to argue with the contradictions
unless one accepted the idea of ghosts as readily as Lacey. There was no
way Redman was going to try and argue that point with the woman. That
part was a nonsense. Ghosts were foolishness; just fears made visible.

But the possibility of Henessey's suicide made more sense to Redman. He
pressed on with his argument.

'So where did Lacey get this story from, about Henessey's death? It's a
funny thing to invent." She deigned to look up, her face drawn up into
itself like a snail in its shell.

'Fertile imaginations are par for the course here. If you heard the
tales I've got on tape: the exoticism of some of them would blow your
head open." 'Have there been suicides here?" 'In my time?' She thought
for a moment, pen poised. 'Two attempts. Neither, I think, intended to
succeed. Cries for help." 'Was Henessey one?" She allowed herself a
little sneer as she shook her head.

'Henessey was unstable in a completely different direction. He thought
he was going to live forever. That was his little dream: Henessey the
Nietzchean Superman. He had something close to contempt for the common
herd. As far as he was concerned, he was a breed apart. As far beyond
the rest of us mere mortals as he was beyond that wretched -"

He knew she was going to say pig, but she stopped just short of the
word.

'Those wretched animals on the farm,' she said, looking back down at her
report.

'Henessey spent time at the farm?" 'No more than any other boy,' she
lied. 'None of them like farm duties, but it's part of the work rota.

Mucking out isn't a very pleasant occupation. I can testify to that."

The lie he knew she'd told made Redman keep back Lacey's final detail:
that Henessey's death had taken place in the pig-sty.

He shrugged, and took an entirely different tack.

'Is Lacey under any medication?" 'Some sedatives." 'Are the boys always
sedated when they've been in a fight?" 'Only if they try to make
escapes. We haven't got enough staff to supervise the likes of Lacey. I
don't see why you're so concerned." 'I want him to trust me. I promised
him. I don't want him let down." 'Frankly, all this sounds suspiciously
like special pleading. The boy's one of many. No unique problems, and no
particular hope of redemption." 'Redemption?' It was a strange word.

'Rehabilitation, whatever you choose to call it. Look, Redman, I'll be
frank. There's a general feeling that you're not really playing ball
here." 'Oh?" 'We all feel, I think this includes the Governor, that you
should let us go about our business the way we're used to. Learn the
ropes before you start -" 'Interfering." She nodded. 'It's as good a
word as any. You're making enemies."

'Thank you for the warning." 'This job's difficult enough without
enemies, believe me." She attempted a conciliatory look, which Redman
ignored.

Enemies he could live with, liars he couldn't.

The Governor's room was locked, as it had been for a full week now.

Explanations differed as to where he was. Meetings with funding bodies
was a favourite reason touted amongst the staff, though the Secretary
claimed she didn't exactly know. There were Seminars at the University
he was running, somebody said, to bring some research to bear on the
problems of Remand Centres. Maybe the Governor was at one of those. If
Mr. Redman wanted, he could leave a message, the Governor would get it.

Back in the workshop, Lacey was waiting for him. It was almost
seven-fifteen: classes were well over.

'What are you doing here?" 'Waiting, sir." 'What for?" 'You, sir. I
wanted to give you a letter, sir. For me mam. Will you get it to her?"

'You can send it through the usual channels, can't you? Give it to the
Secretary, she'll forward it. You're allowed two letters a week."

Lacey's face fell.

'They read them, sir: in case you write something you shouldn't. And if
you do, they burn them." 'And you've written something you shouldn't?"

He nodded.

'What?" 'About Kevin. I told her all about Kevin, about what happened to
him." 'I'm not sure you've got your facts right about Henessey." The boy
shrugged. 'It's true, sir,' he said quietly,

apparently no longer caring if he convinced Redman or not 'It's true.

He's there, sir. In her." 'In who? What are you talking about?" Maybe
Lacey was speaking, as Leverthal had suggested, simply out of his fear.

There had to be a limit to his patience with the boy, and this was just
about it.

A knock on the door, and a spotty individual called Slape was staring at
him through the wired glass.

'Come in." 'Urgent telephone call for you, sir. In the Secretary's
Office." Redman hated the telephone. Unsavoury machine: it never brought
good tidings.

'Urgent. Who from?" Slape shrugged and picked at his face.

'Stay with Lacey, will you?" Slape looked unhappy with the prospect.

'Here, sir?' he asked.

'Here." 'Yes, sir." 'I'm relying on you, so don't let me down." 'No,
sir." Redman turned to Lacey. The bruised look was a wound now open, as
he wept.

'Give me your letter. I'll take it to the Office." Lacey had thrust the
envelope into his pocket. He retrieved it unwillingly, and handed it
across to Redman.

'Say thank you." 'Thank you, sir."

The corridors were empty.

It was television time, and the nightly worship of the box had begun.

They would be glued to the black and white set that dominated the
Recreation Room, sitting through the pap of Cop Shows and Game Shows and

Wars from the World Shows with their jaws open and their minds closed. A
hypnotized silence would fall on the assembled company until a promise
of violence or a hint of sex. Then the room would erupt in whistles,
obscenities, and shouts of encouragement, only to subside again into
sullen silence during the dialogue, as they waited for another gun,
another breast. He could hear gunfire and music, even now, echoing down
the corridor.

The Office was open, but the Secretary wasn't there. Gone home
presumably. The clock in the Office said eight-nineteen. Redman amended
his watch.

The telephone was on the hook. Whoever had called him had tired of
waiting, leaving no message. Relieved as he was that the call wasn't
urgent enough to keep the caller hanging on, he now felt disappointed
not to be speaking to the outside world. Like Crusoe seeing a sail, only
to have it sweep by his island.

Ridiculous: this wasn't his prison. He could walk out whenever he liked.

He would walk out that very night: and be Crusoe no longer.

He contemplated leaving Lacey's letter on the desk, but thought better
of it. He had promised to protect the boy's interests, and that he would
do. If necessary, he'd post the letter himself.

Thinking of nothing in particular, he started back towards the workshop.

Vague wisps of unease floated in his system, clogging his responses.

Sighs sat in his throat, scowls on his face. This damn place, he said
aloud, not meaning the walls and the floors, but the trap they
represented. He felt he could die here with his good intentions arrayed
around him like flowers round a stiff, and nobody would know, or care,
or mourn. Idealism was weakness here, compassion and indulgence. Unease
was all: unease and -Silence.

That was what was wrong. Though the television still popped and screamed
down the corridor, there was silence accompanying it. No wolf-whistles,
no cat-calls.

Redman darted back to the vestibule and down the corridor to the
Recreation Room. Smoking was allowed in this section of the building,
and the area stank of stale cigarettes. Ahead, the noise of mayhem
continued unabated. A woman screamed somebody's name. A man answered and
was cut off by a blast of gunfire. Stories, half-told, hung in the air.

He reached the room, and opened the door.

The television spoke to him. 'Get down!" 'He's got a gun!" Another shot.

The woman, blonde, big-breasted, took the bullet in her heart, and died
on the sidewalk beside the man she'd loved.

The tragedy went unwatched. The Recreation Room was empty, the old
armchairs and graffiti-carved stools placed around the television set
for an audience who had better entertainment for the evening. Redman
wove between the seats and turned the television off. As the silver-blue
fluorescence died, and the insistent beat of the music was cut dead, he
became aware, in the gloom, in the hush, of somebody at the door.

'Who is it?" 'Slape, sir." 'I told you to stay with Lacey." 'He had to
go, sir." 'Go?" 'He ran off, sir. I couldn't stop him." 'Damn you. What
do you mean, you couldn't stop him?" Redman started to re-cross the
room, catching his foot on a stool. It scraped on the linoleum, a little
protest.

Slape twitched.

'I'm sorry, sir,' he said, 'I couldn't catch him. I've got a bad foot."

Yes, Slape did limp. 'Which way did he go?' Slape shrugged. 'Not sure,
sir.' 'Well, remember." 'No need to lose your temper, sir." The 'sir'
was slurred: a parody of respect. Redman found his hand itching to hit
this pus-filled adolescent. He was within a couple of feet of the door.

Slape didn't move aside.

'Out of my way, Slape." 'Really, sir, there's no way you can help him
now. He's gone." 'I said, out of my way." As he stepped forward to push
Slape aside there was a click at navel-level and the bastard had a
flick-knife pressed to Redman's belly. The point bit the fat of his
stomach.

'There's really no need to go after him, sir." 'What in God's name are
you doing, Slape?" 'We're just playing a game,' he said through teeth
gone grey.

'There's no real harm in it. Best leave well alone." The point of the
knife had drawn blood. Warmly, it wended its way down into Redman's
groin. Slape was prepared to kill him; no doubt of that. Whatever this
game was, Slape was having a little fun all of his own. Killing teacher,
it was called. The knife was still being pressed, infinitesimally
slowly, through the wall of Redman's flesh. The little rivulet of blood
had thickened into a stream.

'Kevin likes to come out and play once in a while,' said Slape.

'Henessey?" 'Yes, you like to call us by our second names, don't you?

That's more manly isn't it? That means we're not children,

that means we're men. Kevin isn't quite a man though, you see sir. He's
never wanted to be a man. In fact, I think he hated the idea. You know
why? (The knife divided muscle now, just gently). He thought once you
were a man, you started to die: and Kevin used to say he'd never die."

'Never die.' 'Never." 'I want to meet him." 'Everybody does, sir. He's
charismatic. That's the Doctor's word for him: Charismatic." 'I want to
meet this charismatic fellow." 'Soon." 'Now." 'I said soon." Redman took
the knife-hand at the wrist so quickly Slape had no chance to press the
weapon home. The adolescent's response was slow, doped perhaps, and
Redman had the better of him. The knife dropped from his hand as
Redman's grip tightened, the other hand took Slape in a strangle-hold,
easily rounding his emaciated neck. Redman's palm pressed on his
assailant's Adam's apple, making him gargle.

'Where's Henessey? You take me to him." The eyes that looked down at
Redman were slurred as his words, the irises pin-pricks.

'Take me to him!' Redman demanded.

Slape's hand found Redman's cut belly, and his fist jabbed the wound.

Redman cursed, letting his hold slip, and Slape almost slid out of his
grasp, but Redman drove his knee into the other's groin, fast and sharp.

Slape wanted to double up in agony, but the neck-hold prevented him. The
knee rose again, harder. And again. Again.

Spontaneous tears ran down Slape's face, coursing through the minefield
of his boils.

'I can hurt you twice as badly as you can hurt me,' Redman said, 'so if
you want to go on doing this all night I'm happy as a sand-boy." Slape
shook his head, grabbing his breath through his constricted windpipe in
short, painful gasps.

'You don't want any more?" Slape shook his head again. Redman let go of
him, and flung him across the corridor against the wall. Whimpering with
pain, his face crimped, he slid down the wall into a foetal position,
hands between his legs.

'Where's Lacey?" Slape had begun to shake; the words tumbled out. 'Where
d'you think? Kevin's got him." 'Where's Kevin?" Slape looked up at
Redman, puzzled.

'Don't you know?" 'I wouldn't ask if I did, would I?" Slape seemed to
pitch forward as he spoke, letting out a sigh of pain. Redman's first
thought was that the youth was collapsing, but Slape had other ideas.

The knife was suddenly in his hand again, snatched from the floor, and
Slape was driving it up towards Redman's groin. He sidestepped the cut
with a hair's breadth to spare, and Slape was on his feet again, the
pain forgotten. The knife slit the air back and forth, Slape hissing his
intention through his teeth.

'Kill you, pig. Kill you, pig." Then his mouth was wide and he was
yelling: 'Kevin! Kevin! Help me!" The slashes were less and less
accurate as Slape lost control of himself, tears, snot and sweat sliming
his face as he stumbled towards his intended victim.

Redman chose his moment, and delivered a crippling blow to Slape's knee,
the weak leg, he guessed. He guessed correctly.

Slape screamed, and staggered back, reeling

round and hitting the wall face on. Redman followed through, pressing
Slape's back. Too late, he realized what he'd done. Slape's body relaxed
as his knife hand, crushed between wall and body, slid out, bloody and
weapon less. Slape exhaled death-air, and collapsed heavily against the
wall, driving the knife still deeper into his own gut. He was dead
before he touched the ground.

Redman turned him over. He'd never become used to the suddenness of
death. To be gone so quickly, like the image on the television screen.

Switched off and blank. No message.

The utter silence of the corridors became overwhelming as he walked back
towards the vestibule. The cut on his stomach was not significant, and
the blood had made its own scabby bandage of his shirt, knitting cotton
to flesh and sealing the wound. It scarcely hurt at all. But the cut was
the least of his problems: he had mysteries to unravel now, and he felt
unable to face them. The used, exhausted atmosphere of the place made
him feel, in his turn, used and exhausted. There was no health to be had
here, no goodness, no reason.

He believed, suddenly, in ghosts.

In the vestibule there was a light burning, a bare bulb suspended over
the dead space. By it, he read Lacey's crumpled letter. The smudged
words on the paper were like matches set to the tinder of his panic.

Mama, They fed me to the pig. Don't believe them if they said I never
loved you, or if they said I ran away. I never did. They fed me to the
pig. I love you.

Tommy.

He pocketed the letter and began to run out of the building and across
the field. It was well dark now: a deep, starless

dark, and the air was muggy. Even in daylight he wasn't sure of the
route to the farm; it was worse by night. He was very soon lost,
somewhere between the playing-field and the trees. It was too far to see
the outline of the main building behind him, and the trees ahead all
looked alike.

The night-air was foul; no wind to freshen tired limbs. It was as still
outside as inside, as though the whole world had become an interior: a
suffocating room bounded by a painted ceiling of cloud.

He stood in the dark, the blood thumping in his head, and tried to
orient himself.

To his left, where he had guessed the out-houses to be, a light
glimmered. Clearly he was completely mistaken about his position. The
light was at the sty. It threw the ramshackle chicken run into
silhouette as he stared at it.

There were figures there, several; standing as if watching a spectacle
he couldn't yet see.

He started towards the sty, not knowing what he would do once he reached
it. If they were all armed like Slape, and shared his murderous
intentions, then that would be the end of him. The thought didn't worry
him. Somehow tonight to get off of this closed-down world was an
attractive option. Down and out.

And there was Lacey. There'd been a moment of doubt, after speaking to
Leverthal, when he'd wondered why he cared so much about the boy. That
accusation of special pleading, it had a certain truth to it. Was there
something in him that wanted Thomas Lacey naked beside him? Wasn't that
the sub-text of Leverthal's remark? Even now, running uncertainly
towards the lights, all he could think of was the boy's eyes, huge and
demanding, looking deep into his.

Ahead there were figures in the night, wandering away from the farm. He
could see them against the lights of the sty. Was it all over already?

He made a long curve around

to the left of the buildings to avoid the spectators as they left the
scene. They made no noise: there was no chatter or laughter amongst
them. Like a congregation leaving a funeral they walked evenly in the
dark, each apart from the other, heads bowed. It was eerie, to see these
godless delinquents so subdued by reverence.

He reached the chicken-run without encountering any of them face to
face.

There were still a few figures lingering around the pig-house. The wall
of the sow's compartment was lined with candles, dozens and dozens of
them. They burned steadily in the still air, throwing a rich warm light
on to brick, and on to the faces of the few who still stared into the
mysteries of the sty.

Leverthal was among them, as was the warder who'd knelt at Lacey's head
that first day. Two or three boys were there too, whose faces he
recognized but could put no name to.

There was a noise from the sty, the sound of the sow's feet on the straw
as she accepted their stares. Somebody was speaking, but he couldn't
make out who. An adolescent's voice, with a lilt to it. As the voice
halted in its monologue, the warder and another of the boys broke rank,
as if dismissed, and turned away into the dark. Redman crept a little
closer. Time was of the essence now. Soon the first of the congregation
would have crossed the field and be back in the Main Building. They'd
see Slape's corpse: raise the alarm. He must find Lacey now, if indeed
Lacey was still to be found.

Leverthal saw him first. She looked up from the sty and nodded a
greeting, apparently unconcerned by his arrival. It was as if his
appearance at this place was inevitable, as if all routes led back to
the farm, to the straw house and the smell of excrement. It made a kind
of sense that she'd believe that. He almost believed it himself.

'Leverthal,' he said.

She smiled at him, openly. The boy beside her raised his head and smiled
too.

'Are you Henessey?' he asked, looking at the boy.

The youth laughed, and so did Leverthal.

'No,' she said. 'No. No. No. Henessey is here." She pointed into the
sty.

Redman walked the few remaining yards to the wall of the sty, expecting
and not daring to expect, the straw and the blood and the pig and Lacey.

But Lacey wasn't there. Just the sow, big and beady as ever, standing
amongst pats of her own ordure, her huge, ridiculous ears flapping over
her eyes.

'Where's Henessey?' asked Redman, meeting the sow's gaze.

'Here,' said the boy.

'This is a pig." 'She ate him,' said the youth, still smiling. He
obviously thought the idea delightful. 'She ate him: and he speaks out
of her." Redman wanted to laugh. This made Lacey's tales of ghosts seem
almost plausible by comparison. They were telling him the pig was
possessed.

'Did Henessey hang himself, as Tommy said?" Leverthal nodded.

'In the sty?" Another nod.

Suddenly the pig took on a different aspect. In his imagination he saw
her reaching up to sniff at the feet of Henessey's twitching body,
sensing the death coming over it, salivating at the thought of its
flesh. He saw her licking the dew that oozed from its skin as it rotted,
lapping at it, nibbling daintily at first, then devouring it. It wasn't
too difficult to understand how the boys could have made a mythology of
that atrocity: inventing hymns to it, attending

upon the pig like a god. The candles, the reverence, the intended
sacrifice of Lacey: it was evidence of sickness, but it was no more
strange than a thousand other customs of faith. He even began to
understand Lacey's lassitude, his inability to fight the powers that
overtook him.

Mama, they fed me to the pig.

Not Mama, help me, save me. Just: they gave me to the pig.

All this he could understand: they were children, many of them
under-educated, some verging on mental instability, all susceptible to
superstition. But that didn't explain Leverthal. She was staring into
the sty again, and Redman registered for the first time that her hair
was unclipped, and lay on her shoulders, honey-coloured in the
candlelight.

'It looks like a pig to me, plain and simple,' he said.

'She speaks with his voice,' Leverthal said, quietly. 'Speaks in
tongues, you might say. You'll hear him in a while. My darling boy."

Then he understood. 'You and Henessey?" 'Don't look so horrified,' she
said. 'He was eighteen: hair blacker than you've ever seen. And he loved
me." 'Why did he hang himself?" 'To live forever,' she said, 'so he'd
never be a man, and die." 'We didn't find him for six days,' said the
youth, almost whispering it in Redman's ear, 'and even then she wouldn't
let anybody near him, once she had him to herself. The pig, I mean. Not
the Doctor. Everyone loved Kevin, you see,' he whispered intimately. 'He
was beautiful." 'And where's Lacey?" Leverthal's loving smile decayed.

'With Kevin,' said the youth, 'where Kevin wants him.' He pointed
through the door of the sty. There was a body lying on the straw, back
to the door.

'If you want him, you'll have to go and get him,' said the boy, and the
next moment he had the back of Redman's neck in a vice-like grip.

The sow responded to the sudden action. She started to stamp the straw,
showing the whites of her eyes.

Redman tried to shrug off the boy's grip, at the same time delivering an
elbow to his belly. The boy backed off, winded and cursing, only to be
replaced by Leverthal.

'Go to him,' she said as she snatched at Redman's hair. 'Go to him if
you want him.' Her nails raked across his temple and nose, just missing
his eyes.

'Get off me!' he said, trying to shake the woman off, but she clung, her
head lashing back and forth as she tried to press him over the wall.

The rest happened with horrid speed. Her long hair brushed through a
candle flame and her head caught fire, the flames climbing quickly.

Shrieking for help she stumbled heavily against the gate. It failed to
support her weight, and gave inward. Redman watched helplessly as the
burning woman fell amongst the straw. The flames spread enthusiastically
across the forecourt towards the sow, lapping up the kindling.

Even now, in extremis, the pig was still a pig. No miracles here: no
speaking, or pleading, in tongues. The animal panicked as the blaze
surrounded her, cornering her stamping bulk and licking at her flanks.

The air was filled with the stench of singeing bacon as the flames ran
up her sides and over her head, chasing through her bristles like a
grass-fire.

Her voice was a pig's voice, her complaints a pig's complaints.

Hysterical grunts escaped her lips and she hurtled across the forecourt
of the sty and out of the broken gate, trampling Leverthal.

The sow's body, still burning, was a magic thing in the night as she
careered across the field, weaving about in her

pain. Her cries did not diminish as the dark ate her up, they seemed
just to echo back and forth across the field, unable to find a way out
of the locked room.

Redman stepped over Leverthal's fire-ridden corpse and into the sty. The
straw was burning on every side, and the fire was creeping towards the
door. He half-shut his eyes against the stinging smoke and ducked into
the pig-house.

Lacey was lying as he had been all along, back to the door. Redman
turned the boy over. He was alive. He was awake. His face, bloated with
tears and terror, stared up off his straw pillow, eyes so wide they
looked fit to leap from his head.

'Get up,' said Redman, leaning over the boy.

His small body was rigid, and it was all Redman could do to prize his
limbs apart. With little words of care, he coaxed the boy to his feet as
the smoke began to swirl into the pig-house.

'Come on, it's all right, come on." He stood upright and something
brushed his hair. Redman felt a little rain of worms across his face and
glanced up to see Henessey, or what was left of him, still suspended
from the crossbeam of the pig-house. His features were incomprehensible,
blackened to a drooping mush. His body was raggedly gnawed off at the
hip, and his innards hung from the foetid carcass, dangling in wormy
loops in front of Redman's face.

Had it not been for the thick smoke the smell of the body would have
been overpowering. As it was Redman was simply revolted, and his
revulsion gave strength to his arm. He hauled Lacey out of the shadow of
the body and pushed him through the door.

Outside the straw was no longer blazing as brightly, but the light of
fire and candles and burning body still made him squint after the dark
interior.

'Come on lad,' he said, lifting the kid through the flames. The boy's
eyes were button-bright, lunatic-bright. They said futility.

They crossed the sty to the gate, skipping Leverthal's corpse, and
headed into the darkness of the open field.

The boy seemed to be stirring from his stricken state with every step
they took away from the farm. Behind them the sty was already a blazing
memory. Ahead, the night was as still and impenetrable as ever.

Redman tried not to think of the pig. It must be dead by now, surely.

But as they ran, there seemed to be a noise in the earth as something
huge kept pace with them, content to keep its distance, wary now but
relentless in its pursuit.

He dragged on Lacey's arm, and hurried on, the ground sun baked beneath
their feet. Lacey was whimpering now, no words as yet, but sound at
least. It was a good sign, a sign Redman needed.

He'd had about his fill of insanity.

They reached the building without incident. The corridors were as empty
as they'd been when he'd left an hour ago. Perhaps nobody had found
Slape's corpse yet. It was possible. None of the boys had seemed in a
fit mood for recreation. Perhaps they had slipped silently to their
dormitories, to sleep off their worship.

It was time to find a phone and call the Police.

Man and boy walked down the corridor towards the Governor's Office hand
in hand. Lacey had fallen silent again, but his expression was no longer
so manic; it looked as though cleansing tears might be close. He
sniffed; made noises in his throat.

His grip on Redman's hand tightened, then relaxed completely.

Ahead, the vestibule was in darkness. Somebody had smashed the bulb
recently. It still rocked gently on its

cable, illuminated by a seepage of dull light from the window.

'Come on. There's nothing to be afraid of. Come on, boy." Lacey bent to
Redman's hand and bit the flesh. The trick was so quick he let the boy
go before he could prevent himself, and Lacey was showing his heels as
he scooted away down the corridor away from the vestibule.

No matter. He couldn't get far. For once Redman was glad the place had
walls and bars.

Redman crossed the darkened vestibule to the Secretary's Office. Nothing
moved. Whoever had broken the bulb was keeping very quiet, very still.

The telephone had been smashed too. Not just broken, smashed to
smithereens.

Redman doubled back to the Governor's room. There was a telephone there;
he'd not be stopped by vandals.

The door was locked, of course, but Redman was prepared for that. He
smashed the frosted glass in the window of the door with his elbow, and
reached through to the other side. No key there.

To hell with it, he thought, and put his shoulder to the door. It was
sturdy, strong wood, and the lock was good quality. His shoulder ached
and the wound in his stomach had reopened by the time the lock gave, and
he gained access to the room.

The floor was littered with straw; the smell inside made the sty seem
sweet. The Governor was lying behind his desk, his heart eaten out.

'The pig,' said Redman. 'The pig. The pig.' And saying, 'the pig', he
reached for the phone.

A sound. He turned, and met the blow full-face. It broke his cheek-bone
and his nose. The room mottled, and went white.

The vestibule was no longer dark. Candles were burning, it seemed
hundreds of them, in every corner, on every edge. But then his head was
swimming, his eyesight blurred with concussion. It could have been a
single candle, multiplied by senses that could no longer be trusted to
tell the truth.

He stood in the middle of the arena of the vestibule, not quite knowing
how he could be standing, for his legs felt numb and useless beneath
him. At the periphery of his vision, beyond the light of the candles, he
could hear people talking. No, not really talking. They weren't proper
words. They were nonsense sounds, made by people who may or may not have
been there.

Then he heard the grunt, the low, asthmatic grunt of the sow, and
straight ahead she emerged from the swimming light of the candles. She
was bright and beautiful no longer. Her flanks were charred, her beady
eyes withered, her snout somehow twisted out of true. She hobbled
towards him very slowly, and very slowly the figure astride her became
apparent. It was Tommy Lacey of course, naked as the day he was born,
his body as pink and as hairless as one of her farrow, his face as
innocent of human feeling. His eyes were now her eyes, as he guided the
great sow by her ears. And the noise of the sow, the snaffling sound,
was not out of the pig's mouth, but out of his. His was the voice of the
pig.

Redman said his name, quietly. Not Lacey, but Tommy. The boy seemed not
to hear. Only then, as the pig and her rider approached, did Redman
register why he hadn't fallen on his face.

There was a rope around his neck.

Even as he thought the thought, the noose tightened, and he was hauled
off his feet into the air.

No pain, but a terrible horror, worse, so much worse than pain, opened
in him, a gorge of loss and regret, and all he was sank away into it.

Below him, the sow and the boy had come to a halt, beneath his jangling
feet. The boy, still grunting, had climbed off the pig and was squatting
down beside the beast. Through the greying air Redman could see the
curve of the boy's spine, the flawless skin of his back. He saw too the
knotted rope that protruded from between his pale buttocks, the end
frayed. For all the world like the tail of a pig.

The sow put its head up, though its eyes were beyond seeing.

He liked to think that she suffered, and would suffer now until she
died. It was almost sufficient, to think of that. Then the sow's mouth
opened, and she spoke. He wasn't certain how the words came, but they
came. A boy's voice, lilting.

'This is the state of the beast,' it said, 'to eat and be eaten." Then
the sow smiled, and Redman felt, though he had believed himself numb,
the first shock of pain as Lacey's teeth bit off a piece from his foot,
and the boy clambered, snorting, up his saviour's body to kiss out his
life.

SEX, DEATH AND STAR SHINE

DIANE RAN HER scented fingers through the two days' growth of ginger
stubble on Terry's chin.

'I love it,' she said, 'Even the grey bits." She loved everything about
him, or at least that's what she claimed.

When he kissed her: I love it.

When he undressed her: I love it.

When he slid his briefs off: I love it, I love it, I love it.

She'd go down on him with such unalloyed enthusiasm, all he could do was
watch the top of her ash-blonde head bobbing at his groin, and hope to
God nobody chanced to walk into the dressing-room. She was a married
woman, after all, even if she was an actress. He had a wife himself,
somewhere. This tte--tte would make some juicy copy for one of the
local rags, and here he was trying to garner a reputation as a
serious-minded director; no gimmicks, no gossip; just art.

Then, even thoughts of ambition would be dissolved on her tongue, as she
played havoc with his nerve-endings. She wasn't much of an actress, but
by God she was quite

a performer. Faultless technique; immaculate timing: she knew either by
instinct or by rehearsal just when to pick up the rhythm and bring the
whole scene to a satisfying conclusion When she'd finished milking the
moment dry, he almost wanted to applaud.

The whole cast of Calloway's production of Twelfth Night knew about the
affair, of course. There'd be the occasional snide comment passed if
actress and director were both late for rehearsals, or if she arrived
looking full, and he flushed. He tried to persuade her to control the
cat-with-the-cream look that crept over her face, but she just wasn't
that good a deceiver. Which was rich, considering her profession.

But then La Duvall, as Edward insisted on calling her, didn't need to be
a great player, she was famous. So what if she spoke Shakespeare like it
was Hiawatha, dum de dum de dum de dum? So what if her grasp of
psychology was dubious, her logic faulty, her projection inadequate? So
what if she had as much sense of poetry as she did propriety? She was a
star, and that meant business.

There was no taking that away from her: her name was money. The Elysium
Theatre publicity announced her claim to fame in three inch Roman Bold,
black on yellow: 'Diane Duvall: star of The Love Child." The Love Child.

Possibly the worst soap opera to cavort across the screens of the nation
in the history of that genre, two solid hours a week of under-written
characters and mind-numbing dialogue, as a result of which it
consistently drew high ratings, and its performers became, almost
overnight, brilliant stars in television's rhinestone heaven. Glittering
there, the brightest of the bright, was Diane Duvall.

Maybe she wasn't born to play the classics, but Jesus was she good
box-office. And in this day and age, with theatres

deserted, all that mattered was the number of punters on seats.

Calloway had resigned himself to the fact that this would not be the
definitive Twelfth Night, but if the production were successful, and
with Diane in the role of Viola it had every chance, and it might open a
few doors to him in the West End. Besides, working with the
ever-adoring, ever-demanding Miss. D. Duvall had its compensations.

Galloway pulled up his serge trousers, and looked down at her. She was
giving him that winsome smile of hers, the one she used in the letter
scene. Expression Five in the Duvall repertoire, somewhere between
Virginal and Motherly.

He acknowledged the smile with one from his own stock, a small, loving
look that passed for genuine at a yard's distance.

Then he consulted his watch.

'God, we're late, sweetie." She licked her lips. Did she really like the
taste that much?

'I'd better fix my hair,' she said, standing up and glancing in the long
mirror beside the shower.

'Yes." 'Are you OK?" 'Couldn't be better,' he replied. He kissed her
lightly on the nose and left her to her teasing.

On his way to the stage he ducked into the Men's Dressing Room to adjust
his clothing, and dowse his burning cheeks with cold water. Sex always
induced a giveaway mottling on his face and upper chest. Bending to
splash water on himself Galloway studied his features critically in the
mirror over the sink. After thirty-six years of holding the signs of age
at bay, he was beginning to look the part. He was no more the juvenile
lead. There was an indisputable puffiness beneath his eyes, which was

nothing to do with sleeplessness and there were lines too, on his
forehead, and round his mouth. He didn't look the wunderkind any longer;
the secrets of his debauchery were written all over his face. The excess
of sex, booze and ambition, the frustration of aspiring and just missing
the main chance so many times. What would he look like now, he thought
bitterly, if he'd been content to be some unenterprising nobody working
in a minor rep, guaranteed a house of ten aficionados every night, and
devoted to Brecht? Face as smooth as a baby's bottom probably, most of
the people in the socially-committed theatre had that look. Vacant and
content, poor cows.

'Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice,' he told himself.

He took one last look at the haggard cherub in the mirror, reflecting
that, crow's feet or not, women still couldn't resist him, and went out
to face the trials and tribulations of Act III.

On stage there was a heated debate in progress. The carpenter, his name
was Jake, had built two hedges for Olivia's garden. They still had to be
covered with leaves, but they looked quite impressive, running the depth
of the stage to the cyclorama, where the rest of the garden would be
painted. None of this symbolic stuff. A garden was a garden: green
grass, blue sky. That's the way the audience liked it North of
Birmingham, and Terry had some sympathy for their plain tastes.

'Terry, love." Eddie Cunningham had him by the hand and elbow, escorting
him into the fray.

'What's the problem?" 'Terry, love, you cannot be serious about these
fucking (it came trippingly off the tongue: fucking) hedges. Tell Uncle
Eddie you're not serious before I throw a fit.' Eddie pointed towards
the offending hedges. 'I mean look at them.' As he spoke a thin plume of
spittle fizzed in the air.

'What's the problem?' Terry asked again.

'Problem? Blocking, love, blocking. Think about it. We've rehearsed this
whole scene with me bobbing up and down like a March hare. Up right,
down left - but it doesn't work if I haven't got access round the back.

And look! These fucking things are flush with the backdrop." 'Well they
have to be, for the illusion, Eddie." 'I can't get round though, Terry.

You must see my point." He appealed to the few others on stage: the
carpenters, two technicians, three actors.

'I mean - there's just not enough time." 'Eddie, we'll re-block." 'Oh."

That took the wind out of his sails.

'No?" 'Urn." 'I mean it seems easiest, doesn't it?" 'Yes ... I just
liked ...

'I know." 'Well. Needs must. What about the croquet?" 'We'll cut that
too." 'All that business with the croquet mallets? The bawdy stuff?"

'It'll all have to go. I'm sorry, I haven't thought this through. I
wasn't thinking straight." Eddie flounced.

'That's all you ever do, love, think straight ..." Titters. Terry let it
pass. Eddie had a genuine point of criticism; he had failed to consider
the problems of the hedge-design.

'I'm sorry about the business; but there's no way we can accommodate
it." 'You won't be cutting anybody else's business, I'm sure,' said
Eddie. He threw a glance over Galloway's

shoulder at Diane, then headed for the dressing-room. Exit enraged
actor, stage left. Calloway made no attempt to stop him. It would have
worsened the situation considerably to spoil his departure. He just
breathed out a quiet 'oh Jesus', and dragged a wide hand down over his
face. That was the fatal flaw of this profession: actors.

'Will somebody fetch him back?' he said.

Silence.

'Where's Ryan?" The Stage Manager showed his bespectacled face over the
offending hedge.

'Sorry?" 'Ryan, love - will you please take a cup of coffee to Eddie and
coax him back into the bosom of the family?" Ryan pulled a face that
said: you offended him, you fetch him.

But Galloway had passed this particular buck before: he was a past
master at it. He just stared at Ryan, defying him to contradict his
request, until the other man dropped his eyes and nodded his
acquiescence.

'Sure,' he said glumly.

'Good man." Ryan cast him an accusatory look, and disappeared in pursuit
of Ed Cunningham.

'No show without Belch,' said Galloway, trying to warm up the atmosphere
a little. Someone grunted: and the small half-circle of onlookers began
to disperse. Show over.

'OK, OK,' said Galloway, picking up the pieces, 'let's get to work.

We'll run through from the top of the scene. Diane, are you ready?"

'Yes." 'OK. Shall we run it?" He turned away from Olivia's garden and
the waiting actors just to gather his thoughts. Only the stage working
lights were on, the auditorium was in darkness. It yawned at him
insolently, row upon row of empty seats, defying

him to entertain them. Ah, the loneliness of the long-distance director.

There were days in this business when the thought of life as an
accountant seemed a consummation devoutly to be wished, to paraphrase
the Prince of Denmark.

In the Gods of the Elysium, somebody moved. Galloway looked up from his
doubts and stared through the swarthy air. Had Eddie taken residence on
the very back row? No, surely not. For one thing, he hadn't had time to
get all the way up there.

'Eddie?' Galloway ventured, capping his hand over his eyes. 'Is that
you?" He could just make the figure out. No, not a figure, figures. Two
people, edging their way along the back row, making for the exit.

Whoever it was, it certainly wasn't Eddie.

'That isn't Eddie, is it?' said Galloway, turning back into the fake
garden.

'No,' someone replied.

It was Eddie speaking. He was back on stage, leaning on one of the
hedges, cigarette clamped between his lips.

'Eddie..

'It's all right,' said the actor good-humouredly, 'don't grovel. I can't
bear to see a pretty man grovel." 'We'll see if we can slot the
mallet-business in somewhere,' said Calloway, eager to be conciliatory.

Eddie shook his head, and flicked ash off his cigarette.

'No need." 'Really -" 'It didn't work too well anyhow." The Grand Circle
door creaked a little as it closed behind the visitors. Galloway didn't
bother to look round. They'd gone, whoever they were.

'There was somebody in the house this afternoon."

Hammersmith looked up from the sheets of figures he was poring over.

'Oh?' his eyebrows were eruptions of wire-thick hair that seemed
ambitious beyond their calling. They were raised high above
Hammersmith's tiny eyes in patently fake surprise. He plucked at his
bottom lip with nicotine stained fingers.

'Any idea who it was?" He plucked on, still staring up at the younger
man; undisguised contempt on his face.

'Is it a problem?" 'I just want to know who was in looking at the
rehearsal that's all. I think I've got a perfect right to ask." 'Perfect
right,' said Hammersmith, nodding slightly and making his lips into a
pale bow.

'There was talk of somebody coming up from the National,' said Galloway.

'My agents were arranging something. I just don't want somebody coming
in without me knowing about it. Especially if they're important."

Hammersmith was already studying the figures again. His voice was tired.

'Terry: if there's someone in from the South Bank to look your opus
over, I promise you, you'll be the first to be informed. All right?" The
inflexion was so bloody rude. So run-along-little-boy. Galloway itched
to hit him.

'I don't want people watching rehearsals unless I authorize it,
Hammersmith. Hear me? And I want to know who was in today." The Manager
sighed heavily.

'Believe me, Terry,' he said, 'I don't know myself. I suggest you ask
Tallulah - she was front of house this afternoon. If somebody came in,
presumably she saw them." He sighed again.

'All right ... Terry?" Calloway left it at that. He had his suspicions
about Hammersmith. The man couldn't give a shit about theatre, he never
failed to make that absolutely plain; he affected an exhausted tone
whenever anything but money was mentioned, as though matters of
aesthetics were beneath his notice. And he had a word, loudly
administered, for actors and directors alike: butterflies. One day
wonders. In Hammersmith's world only money was forever, and the Elysium
Theatre stood on prime land, land a wise man could turn a tidy profit on
if he played his cards right.

Galloway was certain he'd sell off the place tomorrow if he could
manoeuvre it. A satellite town like Redditch, growing as Birmingham
grew, didn't need theatres, it needed offices, hypermarkets, warehouses:
it needed, to quote the councillors, growth through investment in new
industry. It also needed prime sites to build that industry upon. No
mere art could survive such pragmatism.

Tallulah was not in the box, nor in the foyer, nor in the Green Room.

Irritated both by Hammersmith's incivility and Tallulah's disappearance,
Galloway went back into the auditorium to pick up his jacket and go to
get drunk. The rehearsal was over and the actors long gone. The bare
hedges looked somewhat small from the back row of the stalls. Maybe they
needed an extra few inches. He made a note on the back of a show bill he
found in his pocket: Hedges, bigger?

A footfall made him look up, and a figure had appeared on stage. A
smooth entrance, up-stage centre, where the hedges converged. Galloway
didn't recognize the man.

'Mr. Galloway? Mr. Terence Galloway?"

'Yes?" The visitor walked down stage to where, in an earlier age, the
footlights would have been, and stood looking out into the auditorium.

'My apologies for interrupting your train of thought." 'No problem." 'I
wanted a word." 'With me?" 'If you would." Galloway wandered down to the
front of the stalls, appraising the stranger.

He was dressed in shades of grey from head to foot. A grey worsted suit,
grey shoes, a grey cravat. Pisselegant, was Galloway's first,
uncharitable summation. But the man cut an impressive figure
nevertheless. His face beneath the shadow of his brim was difficult to
discern.

'Allow me to introduce myself." The voice was persuasive, cultured.

Ideal for advertisement voice-overs: soap commercials, maybe. After
Hammersmith's bad manners, the voice came as a breath of good breeding.

'My name is Lichfield. Not that I expect that means much to a man of
your tender years." Tender years: well, well. Maybe there was still
something of the wunderkind in his face.

'Are you a critic?' Galloway inquired.

The laugh that emanated from beneath the immaculately-swept brim was
ripely ironical.

'In the name of Jesus, no,' Lichfield replied.

'I'm sorry, then, you have me at a loss." 'No need for an apology."

'Were you in the house this afternoon?" Lichfield ignored the question.

'I realize you're a busy man, Mr. Calloway, and I don't want to waste
your time.

The theatre is my business, as it is yours. I think we must consider
ourselves allies, though we have never met." Ah, the great brotherhood.

It made Galloway want to spit, the familiar claims of sentiment. When he
thought of the number of so-called allies that had cheerfully stabbed
him in the back; and in return the playwrights whose work he'd smilingly
slanged, the actors he'd crushed with a casual quip. Brotherhood be
damned, it was dog eat dog, same as any over-subscribed profession.

'I have,' Lichfield was saying, 'an abiding interest in the Elysium.'
There was a curious emphasis on the word abiding. It sounded positively
funereal from Lichfield's lips. Abide with me.

'Oh?" 'Yes, I've spent many happy hours in this theatre, down the years,
and frankly it pains me to carry this burden of news." 'What news?" 'Mr.

Galloway, I have to inform you that your Twelfth Night will be the last
production the Elysium will see." The statement didn't come as much of a
surprise, but it still hurt, and the internal wince must have registered
on Calloway's face.

'Ah ... so you didn't know. I thought not. They always keep the artists
in ignorance don't they? It's a satisfaction the Apollonians will never
relinquish. The accountant's revenge." 'Hammersmith,' said Galloway.

'Hammersmith." 'Bastard." 'His clan are never to be trusted, but then I
hardly need to tell you that." 'Are you sure about the closure?"

'Certainly. He'd do it tomorrow if he could."

'But why? I've done Stoppard here, Tennessee Williams - always played to
good houses. It doesn't make sense." 'It makes admirable financial
sense, I'm afraid, and if you think in figures, as Hammersmith does,
there's no riposte to simple arithmetic. The Elysium's getting old.

We're all getting old. We creak. We feel our age in our joints: our
instinct is to lie down and be gone away." Gone away: the voice became
melodramatically thin, a whisper of longing.

'How do you know about this?" 'I was, for many years, a trustee of the
theatre, and since my retirement I've made it my business to - what's
the phrase? - keep my ear to the ground. It's difficult, in this day and
age, to evoke the triumph this stage has seen ..." His voice trailed
away, in a reverie. It seemed true, not an effect.

Then, business-like once more: 'This theatre is about to die, Mr.

Galloway. You will be present at the last rites, through no fault of
your own. I felt you ought to be .

warned." 'Thank you. I appreciate that. Tell me, were you ever an actor
yourself?" 'What makes you think that?" 'The voice." 'Too rhetorical by
half, I know. My curse, I'm afraid. I can scarcely ask for a cup of
coffee without sounding like Lear in the storm." He laughed, heartily,
at his own expense. Galloway began to warm to the fellow. Maybe he was a
little archaic-looking, perhaps even slightly absurd, but there was a
full-bloodedness about his manner that caught Galloway's imagination.

Lichfield wasn't apologetic about his love of theatre, like so many in
the profession, people who trod the boards as a second-best, their souls
sold to the movies.

'I have, I will confess, dabbled in the craft a little,"

Lichfield confided, 'but I just don't have the stamina for it, I'm
afraid. Now my wife -" Wife? Galloway was surprised Lichfield had a
heterosexual bone in his body.

'- My wife Constantia has played here on a number of occasions, and I
may say very successfully. Before the war of course." 'It's a pity to
close the place." 'Indeed. But there are no last act miracles to be
performed, I'm afraid. The Elysium will be rubble in six weeks' time,
and there's an end to it. I just wanted you to know that interests other
than the crassly commercial are watching over this closing production.

Think of us as guardian angels. We wish you well, Terence, we all wish
you well." It was a genuine sentiment, simply stated. Galloway was
touched by this man's concern, and a little chastened by it. It put his
own stepping-stone ambitions in an unflattering perspective. Lichfield
went on: 'We care to see this theatre end its days in suitable style,
then die a good death." 'Damn shame." 'Too late for regrets by a long
chalk. We should never have given up Dionysus for Apollo." 'What?" 'Sold
ourselves to the accountants, to legitimacy, to the likes of Mr.

Hammersmith, whose soul, if he has one, must be the size of my
fingernail, and grey as a louse's back. We should have had the courage
of our depictions, I think. Served poetry and lived under the stars."

Galloway didn't quite follow the allusions, but he got the general
drift, and respected the viewpoint.

Off stage left, Diane's voice cut the solemn atmosphere like a plastic
knife.

'Terry? Are you there?" The spell was broken: Galloway hadn't been aware
how

hypnotic Lichfield's presence was until that other voice came between
them. Listening to him was like being rocked in familiar arms. Lichfield
stepped to the edge of the stage, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial
rasp.

'One last thing, Terence-" 'Yes?" 'Your Viola. She lacks, if you'll
forgive my pointing it out, the special qualities required for the
role." Galloway hung fire.

'I know,' Lichfield continued, 'personal loyalties prevent honesty in
these matters." 'No,' Galloway replied, 'you're right. But she's
popular." 'So was bear-baiting, Terence." A luminous smile spread
beneath the brim, hanging in the shadow like the grin of the Cheshire
Gat.

'I'm only joking,' said Lichfield, his rasp a chuckle now. 'Bears can be
charming." 'Terry, there you are." Diane appeared, over-dressed as
usual, from behind the tabs. There was surely an embarrassing
confrontation in the air. But Lichfield was walking away down the false
perspective of the hedges towards the backdrop.

'Here I am,' said Terry.

'Who are you talking to?" But Lichfield had exited, as smoothly and as
quietly as he had entered. Diane hadn't even seen him go.

'Oh, just an angel,' said Galloway.

The first Dress Rehearsal wasn't, all things considered, as bad as
Galloway had anticipated: it was immeasurably worse. Cues were lost,
props mislaid, entrances missed; the comic business seemed ill-contrived
and laborious; the performances either hopelessly overwrought or
trifling. This was a Twelfth Night that seemed to last a year. Halfway
through the third act Galloway glanced at his

watch, and realized an uncut performance of Macbeth (with interval)
would now be over.

He sat in the stalls with his head buried in his hands, contemplating
the work that he still had to do if he was to bring this production up
to scratch. Not for the first time on this show he felt helpless in the
face of the casting problems. Cues could be tightened, props rehearsed
with, entrances practised until they were engraved on the memory. But a
bad actor is a bad actor is a bad actor. He could labour till doomsday
neatening and sharpening, but he could not make a silk purse of the
sow's ear that was Diane Duvall.

With all the skill of an acrobat she contrived to skirt every
significance, to ignore every opportunity to move the audience, to avoid
every nuance the playwright would insist on putting in her way. It was a
performance heroic in its ineptitude, reducing the delicate
characterization Galloway had been at pains to create to a single-note
whine. This Viola was soap-opera pap, less human than the hedges, and
about as green.

The critics would slaughter her.

Worse than that, Lichfield would be disappointed. To his considerable
surprise the impact of Lichfield's appearance hadn't dwindled; Galloway
couldn't forget his actorly projection, his posing, his rhetoric. It had
moved him more deeply than he was prepared to admit, and the thought of
this Twelfth Night, with this Viola, becoming the swan-song of
Lichfield's beloved Elysium perturbed and embarrassed him. It seemed
somehow ungrateful.

He'd been warned often enough about a director's burdens, long before he
became seriously embroiled in the profession. His dear departed guru at
the Actors' Centre, Wellbeloved (he of the glass eye), had told Galloway
from the beginning: 'A director is the loneliest creature on God's
earth. He knows what's good and bad in a show, or he should if he's

worth his salt, and he has to carry that information around with him and
keep smiling." It hadn't seemed so difficult at the time.

'This job isn't about succeeding,' Wellbeloved used to say, 'it's about
learning not to fall on your sodding face." Good advice as it turned
out. He could still see Well-beloved handing out that wisdom on a plate,
his bald head shiny, his living eye glittering with cynical delight. No
man on earth, Galloway had thought, loved theatre with more passion than
Wellbeloved, and surely no man could have been more scathing about its
pretensions.

It was almost one in the morning by the time they'd finished the
wretched run-through, gone through the notes, and separated, glum and
mutually resentful, into the night. Galloway wanted none of their
company tonight: No late drinking in one or others' digs, no mutual
ego-massage. He had a cloud of gloom all to himself, and neither wine,
women nor song would disperse it. He could barely bring himself to look
Diane in the face. His notes to her, broadcast in front of the rest of
the cast, had been acidic. Not that it would do much good.

In the foyer, he met Tallulah, still spry though it was long after an
old lady's bedtime.

'Are you locking up tonight?' he asked her, more for something to say
than because he was actually curious.

'I always lock up,' she said. She was well over seventy: too old for her
job in the box office, and too tenacious to be easily removed. But then
that was all academic now, wasn't it? He wondered what her response
would be when she heard the news of the closure. It would probably break
her brittle heart. Hadn't Hammersmith once told him Tallulah had been at
the theatre since she was a girl of fifteen?

'Well, goodnight Tallulah."

She gave him a tiny nod, as always. Then she reached out and took
Galloway's arm.

'Yes?" 'Mr. Lichfield ...' she began.

'What about Mr. Lichfield?" 'He didn't like the rehearsal." 'He was in
tonight?" 'Oh yes,' she replied, as though Galloway was an imbecile for
thinking otherwise, 'of course he was in." 'I didn't see him." 'Well ...

no matter. He wasn't very pleased." Galloway tried to sound indifferent.

'It can't be helped." 'Your show is very close to his heart." 'I realize
that,' said Galloway, avoiding Tallulah's accusing looks. He had quite
enough to keep him awake tonight, without her disappointed tones ringing
in his ears.

He loosed his arm, and made for the door. Tallulah made no attempt to
stop him. She just said: 'You should have seen Constantia." Constantia?

Where had he heard that name? Of course, Lichfield's wife.

'She was a wonderful Viola." He was too tired for this mooning over dead
actresses; she was dead wasn't she? He had said she was dead, hadn't he?

'Wonderful,' said Tallulah again.

'Goodnight, Tallulah. I'll see you tomorrow." The old crone didn't
answer. If she was offended by his brusque manner, then so be it. He
left her to her complaints and faced the street.

It was late November, and chilly. No balm in the night air, just the
smell of tar from a freshly laid road, and grit in the wind.

Galloway pulled his jacket collar up around

the back of his neck, and hurried off to the questionable refuge of
Murphy's Bed and Breakfast.

In the foyer Tallulah turned her back on the cold and dark of the
outside world, and shuffled back into the temple of dreams. It smelt so
weary now: stale with use and age, like her own body. It was time to let
natural processes take their toll; there was no point in letting things
run beyond their allotted span. That was as true of buildings as of
people. But the Elysium had to die as it had lived, in glory.

Respectfully, she drew back the red curtains that covered the portraits
in the corridor that led from foyer to stalls. Barrymore, Irving: great
names and great actors. Stained and faded pictures perhaps, but the
memories were as sharp and as refreshing as spring water. And in pride
of place, the last of the line to be unveiled, a portrait of Constantia
Lichfield. A face of transcendent beauty; a bone structure to make an
anatomist weep.

She had been far too young for Lichfield of course, and that had been
part of the tragedy of it. Lichfield the Svengali, a man twice her age,
had been capable of giving his brilliant beauty everything she desired;
fame, money, companionship. Everything but the gift she most required:
life itself.

She'd died before she was yet twenty, a cancer in the breast. Taken so
suddenly it was still difficult to believe she'd gone.

Tears brimmed in Tallulah's eyes as she remembered that lost and wasted
genius. So many parts Constantia would have illuminated had she been
spared. Cleopatra, Hedda, Rosalind, Electra..

But it wasn't to be. She'd gone, extinguished like a candle in a
hurricane, and for those who were left behind life was a slow and
joyless march through a cold land. There were mornings now, stirring to
another dawn,

when she would turn over and pray to die in her sleep.

The tears were quite blinding her now, she was awash. And oh dear, there
was somebody behind her, probably Mr. Galloway back for something, and
here was she, sobbing fit to burst, behaving like the silly old woman
she knew he thought her to be. A young man like him, what did he
understand about the pain of the years, the deep ache of irretrievable
loss? That wouldn't come to him for a while yet. Sooner than he thought,
but a while nevertheless.

'Tallie,' somebody said.

She knew who it was. Richard Walden Lichfield. She turned round and he
was standing no more than six feet from her, as fine a figure of a man
as ever she remembered him to be. He must be twenty years older than she
was, but age didn't seem to bow him.

She felt ashamed of her tears.

'Tallie,' he said kindly, 'I know it's a little late, but I felt you'd
surely want to say hello." 'Hello?" The tears were clearing, and now she
saw Lichfield's companion, standing a respectful foot or two behind him,
partially obscured. The figure stepped out of Lichfield's shadow and
there was a luminous, fine-boned beauty Tallulah recognized as easily as
her own reflection. Time broke in pieces, and reason deserted the world.

Longed-for faces were suddenly back to fill the empty nights, and offer
fresh hope to a life grown weary. Why should she argue with the evidence
of her eyes?

It was Constantia, the radiant Constantia, who was looping her arm
through Lichfield's and nodding gravely at Tallulah in greeting.

Dear, dead Constantia.

The rehearsal was called for nine-thirty the following morning. Diane
Duvall made an entrance her customary half hour late. She looked as
though she hadn't slept all night.

'Sorry I'm late,' she said, her open vowels oozing down the aisle
towards the stage.

Galloway was in no mood for foot-kissing.

'We've got an opening tomorrow,' he snapped, 'and everybody's been kept
waiting by you." 'Oh really?' she fluttered, trying to be devastating.

It was too early in the morning, and the effect fell on stony ground.

'OK, we're going from the top,' Galloway announced, 'and everybody
please have your copies and a pen. I've got a list of cuts here and I
want them rehearsed in by lunchtime. Ryan, have you got the prompt
copy?" There was a hurried exchange with the ASM and an apologetic
negative from Ryan.

'Well get it. And I don't want any complaints from anyone, it's too late
in the day. Last night's run was a wake, not a performance. The cues
took forever; the business was ragged. I'm going to cut, and it's not
going to be very palatable." It wasn't. The complaints came, warning or
no, the arguments, the compromises, the sour faces and muttered insults.

Galloway would have rather been hanging by his toes from a trapeze than
manoeuvring fourteen highly-strung people through a play two-thirds of
them scarcely understood, and the other third couldn't give a monkey's
about. It was nerve-wracking.

It was made worse because all the time he had the prickly sense of being
watched, though the auditorium was empty from Gods to front stalls.

Maybe Lichfield had a spy hole somewhere, he thought, then condemned the
idea as the first signs of budding paranoia.

At last, lunch.

Galloway knew where he'd find Diane, and he was prepared for the scene
he had to play with her. Accusations, tears, reassurance, tears again,
reconciliation. Standard format.

He knocked on the Star's door.

'Who is it?" Was she crying already, or talking through a glass of
something comforting.

'It's me." 'Oh." 'Can I come in?" 'Yes." She had a bottle of vodka, good
vodka, and a glass. No tears as yet.

'I'm useless, aren't I?' she said, almost as soon as he'd closed the
door. Her eyes begged for contradiction.

'Don't be silly,' he hedged.

'I could never get the hang of Shakespeare,' she pouted, as though it
were the Bard's fault. 'All those bloody words.' The squall was on the
horizon, he could see it mustering.

'It's all right,' he lied, putting his arm around her. 'You just need a
little time." Her face clouded.

'We open tomorrow,' she said flatly. The point was difficult to refute.

'They'll tear me apart, won't they?" He wanted to say no, but his tongue
had a fit of honesty. 'Yes. Unless -, 'I'll never work again, will I?

Harry talked me into this, that damn half-witted Jew: good for my
reputation, he said. Bound to give me a bit more clout, he said. What
does he know? Takes his ten bloody per cent and leaves me holding the
baby. I'm the one who looks the damn fool aren't I?"

At the thought of looking a fool, the storm broke. No light shower this:
it was a cloudburst or nothing. He did what he could, but it was
difficult. She was sobbing so loudly his pearls of wisdom were drowned
out. So he kissed her a little, as any decent director was bound to do,
and (miracle upon miracle) that seemed to do the trick. He applied the
technique with a little more gusto, his hands straying to her breasts,
ferreting under her blouse for her nipples and teasing them between
thumb and forefinger.

It worked wonders. There were hints of sun between the clouds now; she
sniffed and unbuckled his belt, letting his heat dry out the last of the
rain. His fingers were finding the lacy edge of her panties, and she was
sighing as he investigated her, gently but not too gently, insistent but
never too insistent. Somewhere along the line she knocked over the vodka
bottle but neither of them cared to stop and right it, so it sloshed on
to the floor off the edge of the table, counter pointing her
instructions, his gasps.

Then the bloody door opened, and a draught blew up between them, cooling
the point at issue.

Galloway almost turned round, then realized he was unbuckled, and stared
instead into the mirror behind Diane to see the intruder's face. It was
Lichfield. He was looking straight at Galloway, his face impassive.

'I'm sorry, I should have knocked." His voice was as smooth as whipped
cream, betraying nary a tremor of embarrassment. Galloway wedged himself
away, buckled up his belt and turned to Lichfield, silently cursing his
burning cheeks.

'Yes ... it would have been polite,' he said.

'Again, my apologies. I wanted a word with-' his eyes, so deep-set they
were unfathomable, were on Diane '- your star,' he said.

Galloway could practically feel Diane's ego expand at the word. The
approach confounded him: had Lichfield

undergone a volte-face? Was he coming here, the repentant admirer, to
kneel at the feet of greatness?

'I would appreciate a word with the lady in private, if that were
possible,' the mellow voice went on.

'Well, we were just -" 'Of course,' Diane interrupted. 'Just allow me a
moment, would you?" She was immediately on top of the situation, tears
forgotten.

'I'll be just outside,' said Lichfield, already taking his leave.

Before he had closed the door behind him Diane was in front of the
mirror, tissue-wrapped finger skirting her eye to divert a rivulet of
mascara.

'Well,' she was cooing, 'how lovely to have a well-wisher. Do you know
who he is?" 'His name's Lichfield,' Galloway told her. 'He used to be a
trustee of the theatre." 'Maybe he wants to offer me something." 'I
doubt it." 'Oh don't be such a drag Terence,' she snarled. 'You just
can't bear to have anyone else get any attention, can you?" 'My
mistake." She peered at her eyes.

'How do I look?' she asked.

'Fine." 'I'm sorry about before." 'Before?" 'You know." 'Oh ... yes."

'I'll see you in the pub, eh?" He was summarily dismissed apparently,
his function as lover or confidante no longer required.

In the chilly corridor outside the dressing room Lichfield was waiting
patiently. Though the lights were better here

than on the ill-lit stage, and he was closer now than he'd been the
night before, Galloway could still not quite make out the face under the
wide brim. There was something - what was the idea buzzing in his head?

- something artificial about Lichfield's features. The flesh of his face
didn't move as interlocking system of muscle and tendon, it was too
stiff, too pink, almost like scar-tissue.

'She's not quite ready,' Galloway told him.

'She's a lovely woman,' Lichfield purred.

'Yes." 'I don't blame you ..." 'Um." 'She's no actress though." 'You're
not going to interfere are you, Lichfield? I won't let you." 'Perish the
thought." The voyeuristic pleasure Lichfield had plainly taken in his
embarrassment made Galloway less respectful than he'd been.

'I won't have you upsetting her -" 'My interests are your interests,
Terence. All I want to do is see this production prosper, believe me. Am
I likely, under those circumstances, to alarm your Leading Lady? I'll be
as meek as a lamb, Terence." 'Whatever you are,' came the testy reply,
'you're no lamb." The smile appeared again on Lichfield's face, the
tissue round his mouth barely stretching to accommodate his expression.

Galloway retired to the pub with that predatory sickle of teeth fixed in
his mind, anxious for no reason he could focus upon.

In the mirrored cell of her dressing-room Diane Duvall was just about
ready to play her scene.

'You may come in now, Mr. Lichfield,' she announced. He was in the
doorway before the last syllable of his name had died on her lips.

'Miss. Duvall,' he bowed slightly in deference to her. She smiled; so
courteous. 'Will you please forgive my blundering in earlier on?" She
looked coy; it always melted men.

'Mr. Galloway-' she began.

'A very insistent young man, I think." 'Yes." 'Not above pressing his
attentions on his Leading Lady, perhaps?" She frowned a little, a
dancing pucker where the plucked arches of her brows converged.

'I'm afraid so." 'Most unprofessional of him,' Lichfield said. 'But
forgive me - an understandable ardour." She moved upstage of him,
towards the lights of her mirror, and turned, knowing they would
back-light her hair more flatteringly.

'Well, Mr. Lichfield, what can I do for you?" 'This is frankly a
delicate matter,' said Lichfield. 'The bitter fact is - how shall I put
this? - your talents are not ideally suited to this production. Your
style lacks delicacy." There was a silence for two beats. She sniffed,
thought about the inference of the remark, and then moved out of
centre-stage towards the door. She didn't like the way this scene had
begun. She was expecting an admirer, and instead she had a critic on her
hands.

'Get out!' she said, her voice like slate.

'Miss. Duvall -" 'You heard me." 'You're not comfortable as Viola, are
you?' Lichfield continued, as though the star had said nothing.

'None of your bloody business,' she spat back.

'But it is. I saw the rehearsals. You were bland, unpersuasive. The
comedy is flat, the reunion scene -it should break our hearts - is
leaden." 'I don't need your opinion, thank you." 'You have no style -"

'Piss off." 'No presence and no style. I'm sure on the television you
are radiance itself, but the stage requires a special truth, a
soulfulness you, frankly, lack." The scene was hotting up. She wanted to
hit him, but she couldn't find the proper motivation. She couldn't take
this faded poseur seriously. He was more musical comedy than melodrama,
with his neat grey gloves, and his neat grey cravat. Stupid, waspish
queen, what did he know about acting?

'Get out before I call the Stage Manager,' she said, but he stepped
between her and the door.

A rape scene? Was that what they were playing? Had he got the hots for
her? God forbid.

'My wife,' he was saying, 'has played Viola -" 'Good for her." '- and
she feels she could breathe a little more life into the role than you."

'We open tomorrow,' she found herself replying, as though defending her
presence. Why the hell was she trying to reason with him; barging in
here and making these terrible remarks. Maybe because she was just a
little afraid. His breath, close to her now, smelt of expensive
chocolate.

'She knows the role by heart." 'The part's mine. And I'm doing it. I'm
doing it even if I'm the worst Viola in theatrical history, all right?"

She was trying to keep her composure, but it was difficult. Something
about him made her nervous. It

wasn't violence she feared from him: but she feared something.

'I'm afraid I have already promised the part to my wife." 'What?' she
goggled at his arrogance.

'And Constantia will play the role." She laughed at the name. Maybe this
was high comedy after all. Something from Sheridan or Wilde, arch, catty
stuff. But he spoke with such absolute certainty. Constantia will play
the role; as if it was all cut and dried.

'I'm not discussing this any longer, Buster, so if your wife wants to
play Viola she'll have to do it in the fucking street. All right?" 'She
opens tomorrow." 'Are you deaf, or stupid, or both?" Control, an inner
voice told her, you're overplaying, losing your grip on the scene.

Whatever scene this is.

He stepped towards her, and the mirror lights caught the face beneath
the brim full on. She hadn't looked carefully enough when he first made
his appearance: now she saw the deeply-etched lines, the gougings around
his eyes and his mouth. It wasn't flesh, she was sure of it. He was
wearing latex appliances, and they were badly glued in place. Her hand
all but twitched with the desire to snatch at it and uncover his real
face.

Of course. That was it. The scene she was playing: the Unmasking.

'Let's see what you look like,' she said, and her hand was at his cheek
before he could stop her, his smile spreading wider as she attacked.

This is what he wants, she thought, but it was too late for regrets or
apologies. Her fingertips had found the line of the mask at the edge of
his eye-socket, and curled round to take a better hold. She yanked.

The thin veil of latex came away, and his true

physiognomy was exposed for the world to see. Diane tried to back away,
but his hand was in her hair. All she could do was look up into that
all-but fleshless face. A few withered strands of muscle curled here and
there, and a hint of a beard hung from a leathery flap at his throat,
but all living tissue had long since decayed. Most of his face was
simply bone: stained and worn.

'I was not,' said the skull, 'embalmed. Unlike Constantia." The
explanation escaped Diane. She made no sound of protest, which the scene
would surely have justified. All she could summon was a whimper as his
hand-hold tightened, and he hauled her head back.

'We must make a choice, sooner or later,' said Lichfield, his breath
smelling less like chocolate than profound putrescence, 'between serving
ourselves and serving our art." She didn't quite understand.

'The dead must choose more carefully than the living. We cannot waste
our breath, if you'll excuse the phrase, on less than the purest
delights. You don't want art, I think. Do you?" She shook her head,
hoping to God that was the expected response.

'You want the life of the body, not the life of the imagination. And you
may have it." 'Thank ... you." 'If you want it enough, you may have it."

Suddenly his hand, which had been pulling on her hair so painfully, was
cupped behind her head, and bringing her lips up to meet his. She would
have screamed then, as his rotting mouth fastened itself on to hers, but
his greeting was so insistent it quite took her breath away.

Ryan found Diane on the floor of her dressing-room a few

minutes before two. It was difficult to work out what had happened.

There was no sign of a wound of any kind on her head or body, nor was
she quite dead. She seemed to be in a coma of some kind. She had perhaps
slipped, and struck her head as she fell. Whatever the cause, she was
out for the count.

They were hours away from a Final Dress Rehearsal and Viola was in an
ambulance, being taken into Intensive Care.

'The sooner they knock this place down, the better,' said Hammersmith.

He'd been drinking during office hours, something Galloway had never
seen him do before. The whisky bottle stood on his desk beside a
half-full glass. There were glass-marks ringing his accounts, and his
hand had a bad dose of the shakes.

'What's the news from the hospital?" 'She's a beautiful woman,' he said,
staring at the glass. Galloway could have sworn he was on the verge of
tears.

'Hammersmith? How is she?" 'She's in a coma. But her condition is
stable." 'That's something, I suppose." Hammersmith stared up at
Galloway, his erupting brows knitted in anger.

'You runt,' he said, 'you were screwing her, weren't you? Fancy yourself
like that, don't you? Well, let me tell you something, Diane Duvall is
worth a dozen of you. A dozen!" 'Is that why you let this last
production go on, Hammersmith? Because you'd seen her, and you wanted to
get your hot little hands on her?" 'You wouldn't understand. You've got
your brain in your pants.' He seemed genuinely offended by the
interpretation Galloway had put on his admiration for Miss. Duvall.

'All right, have it your way. We still have no Viola." 'That's why I'm
cancelling,' said Hammersmith, slowing down to savour the moment.

It had to come. Without Diane Duvall, there would be no Twelfth Night;
and maybe it was better that way.

A knock on the door.

'Who the fuck's that?' said Hammersmith softly. 'Come." It was
Lichfield. Galloway was almost glad to see that strange, scarred face.

Though he had a lot of questions to ask of Lichfield, about the state
he'd left Diane in, about their conversation together, it wasn't an
interview he was willing to conduct in front of Hammersmith. Besides,
any half-formed accusations he might have had were countered by the
man's presence here. If Lichfield had attempted violence on Diane, for
whatever reason, was it likely that he would come back so soon, so
smilingly?

'Who are you?' Hammersmith demanded.

'Richard Walden Lichfield." 'I'm none the wiser." 'I used to be a
trustee of the Elysium." 'Oh." 'I make it my business -, 'What do you
want?' Hammersmith broke in, irritated by Lichfield's poise.

'I hear the production is in jeopardy,' Lichfield replied, unruffled.

'No jeopardy,' said Hammersmith, allowing himself a twitch at the corner
of his mouth. 'No jeopardy at all, because there's no show. It's been
cancelled." 'Oh?' Lichfield looked at Galloway.

'Is this with your consent?' he asked.

'He has no say in the matter; I have sole right of cancellation if
circumstances dictate it; it's in his contract. The theatre is closed as
of today: it will not reopen."

'Yes it will,' said Lichfield.

'What?' Hammersmith stood up behind his desk, and Galloway realized he'd
never seen the man standing before. He was very short.

'We will play Twelfth Night as advertised,' Lichfield purred. 'My wife
has kindly agreed to understudy the part of Viola in place of Miss.

Duvall." Hammersmith laughed, a coarse, butcher's laugh. It died on his
lips however, as the office was suffused with lavender, and Constantia
Lichfield made her entrance, shimmering in silk and fur. She looked as
perfect as the day she died: even Hammersmith held his breath and his
silence at the sight of her.

'Our new Viola,' Lichfield announced.

After a moment Hammersmith found his voice. 'This woman can't step in at
half a day's notice." 'Why not?' said Galloway, not taking his eyes off
the woman. Lichfield was a lucky man; Constantia was an extraordinary
beauty. He scarcely dared draw breath in her presence for fear she'd
vanish.

Then she spoke. The lines were from Act V, Scene I: 'If nothing lets to
make us happy both But this my masculine usurp'd attire, Do not embrace
me till each circumstance Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump
That I am Viola." The voice was light and musical, but it seemed to
resound in her body, filling each phrase with an undercurrent of
suppressed passion.

And that face. It was wonderfully alive, the features playing the story
of her speech with delicate economy.

She was enchanting.

'I'm sorry,' said Hammersmith, 'but there are rules and regulations
about this sort of thing. Is she Equity?" 'No,' said Lichfield.

'Well you see, it's impossible. The union strictly precludes this kind
of thing. They'd flay us alive." 'What's it to you, Hammersmith?' said
Galloway. 'What the fuck do you care? You'll never need set foot in a
theatre again once this place is demolished." 'My wife has watched the
rehearsals. She is word perfect." 'It could be magic,' said Galloway,
his enthusiasm firing up with every moment he looked at Constantia.

'You're risking the Union, Galloway,' Hammersmith chided.

'I'll take that risk." 'As you say, it's nothing to me. But if a little
bird was to tell them, you'd have egg on your face." 'Hammersmith: give
her a chance. Give all of us a chance. If Equity blacks me, that's my
look-out.' Hammersmith sat down again.

'Nobody'll come, you know that, don't you? Diane Duvall was a star; they
would have sat through your turgid production to see her, Galloway. But
an unknown ... Well, it's your funeral. Go ahead and do it, I wash my
hands of the whole thing. It's on your head Galloway, remember that. I
hope they flay you for it." 'Thank you,' said Lichfield. 'Most kind.'
Hammersmith began to rearrange his desk, to give more prominence to the
bottle and the glass. The interview was over: he wasn't interested in
these butterifies any longer.

'Go away,' he said. 'Just go away."

'I have one or two requests to make,' Lichfield told Galloway as they
left the office. 'Alterations to the production which would enhance my
wife's performance." 'What are they?" 'For Constantia's comfort, I would
ask that the lighting

levels be taken down substantially. She's simply not accustomed to
performing under such hot, bright lights." 'Very well." 'I'd also
request that we install a row of footlights." 'Footlights?" 'An odd
requirement, I realize, but she feels much happier with footlights."

'They tend to dazzle the actors,' said Galloway. 'It becomes difficult
to see the audience." 'Nevertheless ... I have to stipulate their
installation." 'OK." 'Thirdly - I would ask that all scenes involving
kissing, embracing or otherwise touching Constantia be re-directed to
remove every instance of physical contact whatsoever." 'Everything?"

'Everything." 'For God's sake why?" 'My wife needs no business to
dramatize the working of the heart, Terence." That curious intonation on
the word 'heart'. Working of the heart.

Galloway caught Constantia's eye for the merest of moments. It was like
being blessed.

'Shall we introduce our new Viola to the company?' Lichfield suggested.

'Why not?" The trio went into the theatre.

The re-arranging of the blocking and the business to exclude any
physical contact was simple. And though the rest of the cast were
initially wary of their new colleague, her unaffected manner and her
natural grace soon had them at her feet. Besides, her presence meant
that the show would go on.

At six, Galloway called a break, announcing that they'd begin the Dress
at eight, and telling them to go out and enjoy themselves for an hour or
so. The company went their ways, buzzing with a new-found enthusiasm for
the production. What had looked like a shambles half a day earlier now
seemed to be shaping up quite well. There were a thousand things to be
sniped at, of course: technical shortcomings, costumes that fitted
badly, directorial foibles. All par for the course. In fact, the actors
were happier than they'd been in a good while. Even Ed Cunningham was
not above passing a compliment or two.

Lichfield found Tallulah in the Green Room, tidying.

'Tonight.. 'Yes, sir." 'You must not be afraid." 'I'm not afraid,'
Tallulah replied. What a thought. As if-" 'There may be some pain, which
I regret. For you, indeed for all of us." 'I understand." 'Of course you
do. You love the theatre as I love it: you know the paradox of this
profession. To play life. ah, Tallulah, to play life ... what a curious
thing it is. Sometimes I wonder, you know, how long I can keep up the
illusion." 'It's a wonderful performance,' she said.

'Do you think so? Do you really think so?' He was encouraged by her
favourable review. It was so gaffing, to have to pretend all the time;
to fake the flesh, the breath, the look of life. Grateful for Tallulah's
opinion, he reached for her.

'Would you like to die, Tallulah?" 'Does it hurt?" 'Scarcely at all."

'It would make me very happy." 'And so it should." His mouth covered her
mouth, and she was dead in less than a minute, conceding happily to his
inquiring tongue. He laid her out on the threadbare couch and locked the
door of the Green Room with her own key. She'd cool easily in the chill
of the room, and be up and about again by the time the audience arrived.

At six-fifteen Diane Duvall got out of a taxi at the front of the
Elysium. It was well dark, a windy November night, but she felt fine;
nothing could depress tonight. Not the dark, not the cold.

Unseen, she made her way past the posters that bore her face and name,
and through the empty auditorium to her dressing-room. There, smoking
his way through a pack of cigarettes, she found the object of her
affection.

'Terry." She posed in the doorway for a moment, letting the fact of her
reappearance sink in. He went quite white at the sight of her, so she
pouted a little. It wasn't easy to pout. There was a stiffness in the
muscles of her face but she carried off the effect to her satisfaction.

Galloway was lost for words. Diane looked ill, no two ways about it, and
if she'd left the hospital to take up her part in the Dress Rehearsal he
was going to have to convince her otherwise. She was wearing no make-up,
and her ash-blonde hair needed a wash.

'What are you doing here?' he asked, as she closed the door behind her.

'Unfinished business,' she said.

'Listen ... I've got something to tell you..

God, this was going to be messy. 'We've found a replacement, in the
show.' She looked at him blankly. He hurried on, tripping over his own
words, 'We thought

you were out of commission, I mean, not permanently, but, you know, for
the opening at least ..." 'Don't worry,' she said. His jaw dropped a
little. 'Don't worry?' "What's it to me?" 'You said you came back to
finish -, He stopped. She was unbuttoning the top of her dress.

She's not serious, he thought, she can't be serious. Sex? Now?

'I've done a lot of thinking in the last few hours,' she said as she
shimmied the crumpled dress over her hips, let it fall, and stepped out
of it. She was wearing a white bra, which she tried, unsuccessfully, to
unhook. 'I've decided I don't care about the theatre. Help me, will
you?" She turned round and presented her back to him. Automatically he
unhooked the bra, not really analysing whether he wanted this or not. It
seemed to be a fait accompli. She'd come back to finish what they'd been
interrupted doing, simple as that. And despite the bizarre noises she
was making in the back of her throat, and the glassy look in her eyes,
she was still an attractive woman. She turned again, and Galloway stared
at the fullness of her breasts, paler than he'd remembered them, but
lovely. His trousers were becoming uncomfortably tight, and her
performance was only worsening his situation, the way she was grinding
her hips like the rawest of Soho strippers, running her hands between
her legs.

'Don't worry about me,' she said. 'I've made up my mind. All I really
want ..." She put her hands, so recently at her groin, on his face. They
were icy cold.

'All I really want is you. I can't have sex and the stage There comes a
time in everyone's life when decisions have to be made."

She licked her lips. There was no film of moisture left on her mouth
when her tongue had passed over it.

'The accident made me think, made me analyse what it is I really care
about. And frankly -' She was unbuckling his belt. '- I don't give a
shit -" Now the zip.

'- about this, or any other fucking play." His trousers fell down.

'- I'll show you what I care about." She reached into his briefs, and
clasped him. Her cold hand somehow made the touch sexier. He laughed,
closing his eyes as she pulled his briefs down to the middle of his
thigh and knelt at his feet.

She was as expert as ever, her throat open like a drain. Her mouth was
somewhat drier than usual, her tongue scouring him, but the sensations
drove him wild. It was so good, he scarcely noticed the ease with which
she devoured him, taking him deeper than she'd ever managed previously,
using every trick she knew to goad him higher and higher. Slow and deep,
then picking up speed until he almost came, then slowing again until the
need passed. He was completely at her mercy.

He opened his eyes to watch her at work. She was skewering herself upon
him, face in rapture.

'God,' he gasped, 'that is so good. Oh yes, oh yes." Her face didn't
even flicker in response to his words, she just continued to work at him
soundlessly. She wasn't making her usual noises, the small grunts of
satisfaction, the heavy breathing through the nose. She just ate his
flesh in absolute silence.

He held his breath a moment, while an idea was born in his belly. The
bobbing head bobbed on, eyes closed, lips clamped around his member,
utterly engrossed. Half a minute passed; a minute; a minute and a half.

And now his belly was full of terrors.

She wasn't breathing. She was giving this matchless blow-job because she
wasn't stopping, even for a moment, to inhale or exhale.

Calloway felt his body go rigid, while his erection wilted in her
throat. She didn't falter in her labour; the relentless pumping
continued at his groin even as his mind formed the unthinkable thought:
She's dead.

She has me in her mouth, in her cold mouth, and she's dead. That's why
she'd come back, got up off her mortuary slab and come back. She was
eager to finish what she'd started, no longer caring about the play, or
her usurper. It was this act she valued, this act alone. She'd chosen to
perform it for eternity.

Galloway could do nothing with the realization but stare down like a
damn fool while this corpse gave him head.

Then it seemed she sensed his horror. She opened her eyes and looked up
at him. How could he ever have mistaken that dead stare for life?

Gently, she withdrew his shrunken manhood from between her lips.

'What is it?' she asked, her fluting voice still affecting life.

'You ... you're not ... breathing." Her face fell. She let him go.

'Oh darling,' she said, letting all pretence to life disappear, 'I'm not
so good at playing the part, am I?" Her voice was a ghost's voice: thin,
forlorn. Her skin, which he had thought so flatteringly pale was, on
second view, a waxen white.

'You are dead?' he said.

'I'm afraid so. Two hours ago: in my sleep. But I had to come, Terry; so
much unfinished business. I made my choice. You should be flattered. You
are flattered, aren't you?" She stood up and reached into her handbag,
which she'd

left beside the mirror. Galloway looked at the door, trying to make his
limbs work, but they were inert. Besides, he had his trousers round his
ankles. Two steps and he'd fall flat on his face.

She turned back on him, with something silver and sharp in her hand. Try
as he might, he couldn't get a focus on it. But whatever it was, she
meant it for him.

Since the building of the new Crematorium in 1934, one humiliation had
come after another for the cemetery. The tombs had been raided for lead
coffin-linings, the stones overturned and smashed; it was fouled by dogs
and graffiti. Very few mourners now came to tend the graves. The
generations had dwindled, and the small number of people who might still
have had a loved one buried there were too infirm to risk the throttled
walkways, or too tender to bear looking at such vandalism.

It had not always been so. There were illustrious and influential
families interred behind the marble faades of the Victorian mausoleums.

Founder fathers, local industrialists and dignitaries, any and all who
had done the town proud by their efforts. The body of the actress
Constantia Lichfield had been buried here ('Until the Day Break and the
Shadows Flee Away'), though her grave was almost unique in the attention
some secret admirer still paid to it.

Nobody was watching that night, it was too bitter for lovers. Nobody saw
Charlotte Hancock open the door of her sepulchre, with the beating wings
of pigeons applauding her vigour as she shambled out to meet the moon.

Her husband Gerard was with her, he less fresh than she, having been
dead thirteen years longer. Joseph Jardine, en famille, was not far
behind the Hancocks, as was Marriott Fletcher, and Anne Snell, and the
Peacock

Brothers; the list went on and on. In one corner, Alfred Crawshaw
(Captain in the 17th Lancers), was helping his lovely wife Emma from the
rot of their bed. Everywhere faces pressed at the cracks of the tomb
lids - was that not Kezia Reynolds with her child, who'd lived just a
day, in her arms? and Martin van de Linde (the Memory of the Just is
Blessed) whose wife had never been found; Rosa and Selina Goldfinch:
upstanding women both; and Thomas Jerrey, and -Too many names to
mention. Too many states of decay to describe. Sufficient to say they
rose: their burial finery fly born, their faces stripped of all but the
foundation of beauty. Still they came, swinging open the back gate of
the cemetery and threading their way across the wasteland towards the
Elysium. In the distance, the sound of traffic. Above, a jet roared in
to land. One of the Peacock brothers, staring up at the winking giant as
it passed over, missed his footing and fell on his face, shattering his
jaw. They picked him up fondly, and escorted him on his way. There was
no harm done; and what would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?

So the show went on.

'If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that,
surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die -" Galloway could not be
found at Curtain; but Ryan had instructions from Hammersmith (through
the ubiquitous Mr. Lichfield) to take the show up with or without the
Director.

'He'll be upstairs, in the Gods,' said Lichfield. 'In fact, I think I
can see him from here." 'Is he smiling?' asked Eddie.

'Grinning from ear to ear." 'Then he's pissed."

The actors laughed. There was a good deal of laughter that night. The
show was running smoothly, and though they couldn't see the audience
over the glare of the newly-installed footlights they could feel the
waves of love and delight pouring out of the auditorium. The actors were
coming off stage elated.

'They're all sitting in the Gods,' said Eddie, 'but your friends, Mr.

Lichfield, do an old ham good. They're quiet of course, but such big
smiles on their faces." Act I, Scene II; and the first entrance of
Constantia Lichfield as Viola was met with spontaneous applause. Such
applause. Like the hollow roll of snare drums, like the brittle beating
of a thousand sticks on a thousand stretched skins. Lavish, wanton
applause.

And, my God, she rose to the occasion. She began the play as she meant
to go on, giving her whole heart to the role, not needing physicality to
communicate the depth of her feelings, but speaking the poetry with such
intelligence and passion the merest flutter of her hand was worth more
than a hundred grander gestures. After that first scene her every
entrance was met with the same applause from the audience, followed by
almost reverential silence.

Backstage, a kind of buoyant confidence had set in. The whole company
sniffed the success; a success which had been snatched miraculously from
the jaws of disaster.

There again! Applause! Applause!

In his office, Hammersmith dimly registered the brittle din of adulation
through a haze of booze.

He was in the act of pouring his eighth drink when the door opened. He
glanced up for a moment and registered that the visitor was that upstart
Calloway. Come to gloat I daresay, Hammersmith thought, come to tell me
how wrong I was.

'What do you want?" The punk didn't answer. From the corner of his eye
Hammersmith had an impression of a broad, bright smile on Galloway's
face. Self-satisfied half-wit, coming in here when a man was in
mourning.

'I suppose you've heard?" The other grunted.

'She died,' said Hammersmith, beginning to cry. 'She died a few hours
ago, without regaining consciousness. I haven't told the actors. Didn't
seem worth it." Galloway said nothing in reply to this news. Didn't the
bastard care? Couldn't he see that this was the end of the world? The
woman was dead. She'd died in the bowels of the Elysium. There'd be
official enquiries made, the insurance would be examined, a post-mortem,
an inquest: it would reveal too much.

He drank deeply from his glass, not bothering to look at Galloway again.

'Your career'll take a dive after this, son. It won't just be me: oh
dear no." Still Galloway kept his silence.

'Don't you care?' Hammersmith demanded.

There was silence for a moment, then Galloway responded. 'I don't give a
shit." 'Jumped up little stage-manager, that's all you are. That's all
any of you fucking directors are! One good review and you're God's gift
to art. Well let me set you straight about that -" He looked at
Galloway, his eyes, swimming in alcohol, having difficulty focussing.

But he got there eventually.

Galloway, the dirty bugger, was naked from the waist down. He was
wearing his shoes and his socks, but no trousers or briefs. His
self-exposure would have been comical, but for the expression on his
face. The man had gone mad: his eyes were rolling around uncontrollably,

saliva and snot ran from mouth and nose, his tongue hung out like the
tongue of a panting dog.

Hammersmith put his glass down on his blotting pad, and looked at the
worst part. There was blood on Galloway's shirt, a trail of it which led
up his neck to his left ear, from which protruded the end of Diane
Duvall's nail-file. It had been driven deep into Galloway's brain. The
man was surely dead.

But he stood, spoke, walked.

From the theatre, there rose another round of applause, muted by
distance. It wasn't a real sound somehow; it came from another world, a
place where emotions ruled. It was a world Hammersmith had always felt
excluded from. He'd never been much of an actor, though God knows he'd
tried, and the two plays he'd penned were, he knew, execrable.

Book-keeping was his forte, and he'd used it to stay as close to the
stage as he could, hating his own lack of art as much as he resented
that skill in others.

The applause died, and as if taking a cue from an unseen prompter,
Calloway came at him. The mask he wore was neither comic nor tragic, it
was blood and laughter together. Cowering, Hammersmith was cornered
behind his desk. Galloway leapt on to it (he looked so ridiculous,
shirt-tails and balls flip-flapping) and seized Hammersmith by the tie.

'Philistine,' said Galloway, never now to know Hammersmith's heart, and
broke the man's neck - snap! - while below the applause began again.

'Do not embrace me till each circumstance Of place, time, fortune, do
cohere and jump That I am Viola." From Constantia's mouth the lines were
a revelation. It was almost as though this Twelfth Night were a new
play, and the part of Viola had been written for Constantia

Lichfield alone. The actors who shared the stage with her felt their
egos shrivelling in the face of such a gift.

The last act continued to its bitter-sweet conclusion, the audience as
enthralled as ever to judge by their breathless attention.

The Duke spoke: 'Give me thy hand; And let me see thee in thy woman's
weeds." In the rehearsal the invitation in the line had been ignored:
no-one was to touch this Viola, much less take her hand. But in the heat
of the performance such taboos were forgotten. Possessed by the passion
of the moment the actor reached for Constantia. She, forgetting the
taboo in her turn, reached to answer his touch.

In the wings Lichfield breathed 'no' under his breath, but his order
wasn't heard. The Duke grasped Viola's hand in his, life and death
holding court together under this painted sky.

It was a chilly hand, a hand without blood in its veins, or a blush in
its skin.

But here it was as good as alive.

They were equals, the living and the dead, and nobody could find just
cause to part them.

In the wings, Lichfield sighed, and allowed himself a smile. He'd feared
that touch, feared it would break the spell. But Dionysus was with them
tonight. All would be well; he felt it in his bones.

The act drew to a close, and Malvolio, still trumpeting his threats,
even in defeat, was carted off. One by one the company exited, leaving
the clown to wrap up the play.

'A great while ago the world began, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done And we'll strive to please you
every day." The scene darkened to blackout, and the curtain descended.

From the gods rapturous applause erupted,

that same rattling, hollow applause. The company, their faces shining
with the success of the Dress Rehearsal, formed behind the curtain for
the bow. The curtain rose: the applause mounted.

In the wings, Galloway joined Lichfield. He was dressed now: and he'd
washed the blood off his neck.

'Well, we have a brilliant success,' said the skull. 'It does seem a
pity that this company should be dissolved so soon." 'It does,' said the
corpse.

The actors were shouting into the wings now, calling for Galloway to
join them. They were applauding him, encouraging him to show his face.

He put a hand on Lichfield's shoulder.

'We'll go together, sir,' he said.

'No, no, I couldn't." 'You must. It's your triumph as much as mine.'
Lichfield nodded, and they went out together to take their bows beside
the company.

In the wings Tallulah was at work. She felt restored after her sleep in
the Green Room. So much unpleasantness had gone, taken with her life.

She no longer suffered the aches in her hip, or the creeping neuralgia
in her scalp. There was no longer the necessity to draw breath through
pipes encrusted with seventy years' muck, or to rub the backs of her
hands to get the circulation going; not even the need to blink. She laid
the fires with a new strength, pressing the detritus of past productions
into use: old backdrops, props, costuming. When she had enough
combustibles heaped, she struck a match and set the flame to them. The
Elysium began to burn.

Over the applause, somebody was shouting: 'Marvellous, sweethearts,
marvellous."

It was Diane's voice, they all recognized it even though they couldn't
quite see her. She was staggering down the centre aisle towards the
stage, making quite a fool of herself.

Silly bitch,' said Eddie.

Whoops,' said Galloway.

he was at the edge of the stage now, haranguing him.

Got all you wanted now, have you? This your new lady-love is it? Is it?"

he was trying to clamber up, her hands gripping the hot metal hoods of
the footlights. Her skin began to singe: the fat was well and truly in
the fire.

For God's sake, somebody stop her,' said Eddie. But she didn't seem to
feel the searing of her hands; she just laughed in his face. The smell
of burning flesh wafted up from the footlights. The company broke rank,
triumph forgotten.

Somebody yelled: 'Kill the lights!" A beat, and then the stage lights
were extinguished. Diane fell back, her hands smoking. One of the cast
fainted, another ran into the wings to be sick. Somewhere behind them,
they could hear the faint crackle of flames, but they had other calls on
their attention.

With the footlights gone, they could see the auditorium more clearly.

The stalls were empty, but the Balcony and the gods were full to
bursting with eager admirers. Every row was packed, and every available
inch of aisle space thronged with audience. Somebody up there started
clapping again, alone for a few moments before the wave of applause
began afresh. But now few of the company took pride in it.

Even from the stage, even with exhausted and light dazzled eyes, it was
obvious that no man, woman or child in that adoring crowd was alive.

They waved fine silk handkerchiefs at the players in rotted fists, some
of

them beat a tattoo on the seats in front of them, most just clapped,
bone on bone.

Galloway smiled, bowed deeply, and received their admiration with
gratitude. In all his fifteen years of work in the theatre he had never
found an audience so appreciative.

Bathing in the love of their admirers, Constantia and Richard Lichfield
joined hands and walked down-stage to take another bow, while the living
actors retreated in horror.

They began to yell and pray, they let out howls, they ran about like
discovered adulterers in a farce. But, like the farce, there was no way
out of the situation. There were bright flames tickling the roof-joists,
and billows of canvas cascaded down to right and left as the flies
caught fire. In front, the dead: behind, death. Smoke was beginning to
thicken the air, it was impossible to see where one was going. Somebody
was wearing a toga of burning canvas, and reciting screams. Someone else
was wielding a fire extinguisher against the inferno. All useless: all
tired business, badly managed. As the roof began to give, lethal falls
of timber and girder silenced most.

In the Gods, the audience had more or less departed. They were ambling
back to their graves long before the fire department appeared, their
cerements and their faces lit by the glow of the fire as they glanced
over their shoulders to watch the Elysium perish. It had been a fine
show, and they were happy to go home, content for another while to
gossip in the dark.

The fire burned through the night, despite the never less than gallant
efforts of the fire department to put it out. By four in the morning the
fight was given up as lost, and the conflagration allowed its head. It
had done with the Elysium by dawn.

In the ruins the remains of several persons were discovered, most of the
bodies in states that defied easy identification. Dental records were
consulted, and one corpse was found to be that of Giles Hammersmith
(Administrator), another that of Ryan Xavier (Stage Manager) and, most
shockingly, a third that of Diane Duvall. 'Star of The Love Child burned
to death', read the tabloids. She was forgotten in a week.

There were no survivors. Several bodies were simply never found.

They stood at the side of the motorway, and watched the cars careering
through the night.

Lichfield was there of course, and Constantia, radiant as ever. Galloway
had chosen to go with them, so had Eddie, and Tallulah. Three or four
others had also joined the troupe.

It was the first night of their freedom, and here they were on the open
road, travelling players. The smoke alone had killed Eddie, but there
were a few more serious injuries amongst their number, sustained in the
fire. Burned bodies, broken limbs. But the audience they would play for
in the future would forgive them their pretty mutilations.

'There are lives lived for love,' said Lichfield to his new company,
'and lives lived for art. We happy band have chosen the latter
persuasion." 'There was a ripple of applause amongst the actors.

'To you, who have never died, may I say: welcome to the world!"

Laughter: further applause.

The lights of the cars racing north along the motorway threw the company
into silhouette. They looked, to all intents and purposes, like living
men and women. But then wasn't that the trick of their craft? To imitate
life

so well the illusion was indistinguishable from the real thing? And
their new public, awaiting them in mortuaries, churchyards and chapels
of rest, would appreciate the skill more than most. Who better to
applaud the sham of passion and pain they would perform than the dead,
who had experienced such feelings, and thrown them off at last?

The dead. They needed entertainment no less than the living; and they
were a sorely neglected market.

Not that this company would perform for money, they would play for the
love of their art, Lichfield had made that clear from the outset. No
more service would be done to Apollo.

'Now,' he said, 'which road shall we take, north or south?" 'North,'
said Eddie. 'My mother's buried in Glasgow, she died before I ever
played professionally. I'd like her to see me." 'North it is, then,'
said Lichfield. 'Shall we go and find ourselves some transport?" He led
the way towards the motorway restaurant, its neon flickering fitfully,
keeping the night at light's length. The colours were theatrically
bright: scarlet, lime, cobalt, and a wash of white that splashed out of
the windows on to the car park where they stood. The automatic doors
hissed as a traveller emerged, bearing gifts of hamburgers and cake to
the child in the back of his car.

'Surely some friendly driver will find a niche for us,' said Lichfield.

'All of us?' said Galloway.

'A truck will do; beggars can't be too demanding,' said Lichfield. 'And
we are beggars now: subject to the whim of our patrons." 'We can always
steal a car,' said Tallulah.

'No need for theft, except in extremity,' Lichfield said. 'Constantia
and I will go ahead and find a chauffeur."

He took his wife's hand.

'Nobody refuses beauty,' he said.

'What do we do if anyone asks us what we're doing here?' asked Eddie
nervously. He wasn't used to this role; he needed reassurance.

Lichfield turned towards the company, his voice booming in the night:
'What do you do?' he said, 'Play life, of course! And smile!"

IN THE HILLS, THE CITIES

IT WASN'T UNTIL the first week of the Yugoslavian trip that Mick
discovered what a political bigot he'd chosen as a lover. Certainly,
he'd been warned. One of the queens at the Baths had told him Judd was
to the Right of Attila the Hun, but the man had been one of Judd's
ex-affairs, and Mick had presumed there was more spite than perception
in the character assassination.

If only he'd listened. Then he wouldn't be driving along an interminable
road in a Volkswagen that suddenly seemed the size of a coffin,
listening to Judd's views on Soviet expansionism. Jesus, he was so
boring. He didn't converse, he lectured, and endlessly. In Italy the
sermon had been on the way the Communists had exploited the peasant
vote. Now, in Yugoslavia, Judd had really warmed to his theme, and Mick
was just about ready to take a hammer to his self-opinionated head.

It wasn't that he disagreed with everything Judd said. Some of the
arguments (the ones Mick understood) seemed quite sensible. But then,
what did he know? He was a dance teacher. Judd was a journalist, a
professional pundit.

He felt, like most journalists Mick had encountered, that he was obliged
to have an opinion on everything under the sun. Especially politics;
that was the best trough to wallow in. You could get your snout, eyes,
head and front hooves in that mess of muck and have a fine old time
splashing around. It was an inexhaustible subject to devour, a swill
with a little of everything in it, because everything, according to
Judd, was political. The arts were political. Sex was political.

Religion, commerce, gardening, eating, drinking and farting - all
political.

Jesus, it was mind-blowingly boring; killingly, love deadeningly boring.

Worse still, Judd didn't seem to notice how bored Mick had become, or if
he noticed, he didn't care. He just rambled on, his arguments getting
windier and windier, his sentences lengthening with every mile they
drove.

Judd, Mick had decided, was a selfish bastard, and as soon as their
honeymoon was over he'd part with the guy.

It was not until their trip, that endless, motiveless caravan through
the graveyards of mid-European culture, that Judd realized what a
political lightweight he had in Mick. The guy showed precious little
interest in the economics or the politics of the countries they passed
through. He registered indifference to the full facts behind the Italian
situation, and yawned, yes, yawned when he tried (and failed) to debate
the Russian threat to world peace. He had to face the bitter truth: Mick
was a queen; there was no other word for him. All right, perhaps he
didn't mince or wear jewellery to excess, but he was a queen
nevertheless, happy to wallow in a dream-world of early Renaissance
frescoes and Yugoslavian icons. The complexities, the contradictions,
even the agonies that made those cultures blossom and wither were just
tiresome to him. His mind

was no deeper than his looks; he was a well-groomed nobody.

Some honeymoon.

The road south from Belgrade to Novi Pazar was, by Yugoslavian
standards, a good one. There were fewer pot-holes than on many of the
roads they'd travelled, and it was relatively straight. The town of Novi
Pazar lay in the valley of the River Raska, south of the city named
after the river. It wasn't an area particularly popular with the
tourists. Despite the good road it was still inaccessible, and lacked
sophisticated amenities; but Mick was determined to see the monastery at
Sopocani, to the west of the town and after some bitter argument, he'd
won.

The journey had proved uninspiring. On either side of the road the
cultivated fields looked parched and dusty. The summer had been
unusually hot, and droughts were affecting many of the villages. Crops
had failed, and livestock had been prematurely slaughtered to prevent
them dying of malnutrition. There was a defeated look about the few
faces they glimpsed at the roadside. Even the children had dour
expressions; brows as heavy as the stale heat that hung over the valley.

Now, with the cards on the table after a row at Belgrade, they drove in
silence most of the time; but the straight road, like most straight
roads, invited dispute. When the driving was easy, the mind rooted for
something to keep it engaged. What better than a fight?

'Why the hell do you want to see this damn monastery?' Judd demanded.

It was an unmistakable invitation.

'We've come all this way ...' Mick tried to keep the tone
conversational. He wasn't in the mood for an argument.

'More fucking Virgins, is it?"

Keeping his voice as even as he could, Mick picked up the Guide and read
aloud from it ... 'there, some of the greatest works of Serbian painting
can still be seen and enjoyed, including what many commentators agree to
be the enduring masterpiece of the Raska school: "The Dormition of the
Virgin."' Silence.

Then Judd: 'I'm up to here with churches." 'It's a masterpiece."

'They're all masterpieces according to that bloody book." Mick felt his
control slipping.

'Two and a half hours at most -, 'I told you, I don't want to see
another church; the smell of the places makes me sick. Stale incense,
old sweat and lies ..." 'It's a short detour; then we can get back on to
the road and you can give me another lecture on farming subsidies in the
Sandzak." 'I'm just trying to get some decent conversation going instead
of this endless tripe about Serbian fucking masterpieces -, 'Stop the
car!" 'What?" 'Stop the car!" Judd pulled the Volkswagen into the side
of the road. Mick got out.

The road was hot, but there was a slight breeze. He took a deep breath,
and wandered into the middle of the road. Empty of traffic and of
pedestrians in both directions. In every direction, empty. The hills
shimmered in the heat off the fields. There were wild poppies growing in
the ditches. Mick crossed the road, squatted on his haunches and picked
one.

Behind him he heard the VW's door slam.

'What did you stop us for?' Judd said. His voice was edgy, still hoping
for that argument, begging for it.

Mick stood up, playing with the poppy. It was close to seeding, late in
the season. The petals fell from the receptacle as soon as he touched
them, little splashes of red fluttering down on to the grey tarmac.

'I asked you a question,' Judd said again.

Mick looked round. Judd was standing the far side of the car, his brows
a knitted line of burgeoning anger. But handsome; oh yes; a face that
made women weep with frustration that he was gay. A heavy black
moustache (perfectly trimmed) and eyes you could watch forever, and
never see the same light in them twice. Why in God's name, thought Mick,
does a man as fine as that have to be such an insensitive little shit?

Judd returned the look of contemptuous appraisal, staring at the pouting
pretty boy across the road. It made him want to puke, seeing the little
act Mick was performing for his benefit. It might just have been
plausible in a sixteen-year-old virgin. In a twenty-five-year-old, it
lacked credibility.

Mick dropped the flower, and untucked his T-shirt from his jeans. A
tight stomach, then a slim, smooth chest were revealed as he pulled it
off. His hair was ruffled when his head re-appeared, and his face wore a
broad grin. Judd looked at the torso. Neat, not too muscular. An
appendix scar peering over his faded jeans. A gold chain, small but
catching the sun, dipped in the hollow of his throat. Without meaning
to, he returned Mick's grin, and a kind of peace was made between them.

Mick was unbuckling his belt.

'Want to fuck?' he said, the grin not faltering.

'It's no use,' came an answer, though not to that question.

'What isn't?"

'We're not compatible." 'Want a bet?" Now he was unzipped, and turning
away towards the wheat-field that bordered the road.

Judd watched as Mick cut a swathe through the swaying sea, his back the
colour of the grain, so that he was almost camouflaged by it. It was a
dangerous game, screwing in the open air - this wasn't San Francisco, or
even Hampstead Heath. Nervously, Judd glanced along the road. Still
empty in both directions. And Mick was turning, deep in the field,
turning and smiling and waving like a swimmer buoyed up in a golden
surf. What the hell there was nobody to see, nobody to know. Just the
hills, liquid in the heat-haze, their forested backs bent to the
business of the earth, and a lost dog, sitting at the edge of the road,
waiting for some lost master.

Judd followed Mick's path through the wheat, unbuttoning his shirt as he
walked. Field-mice ran ahead of him, scurrying through the stalks as the
giant came their way, his feet like thunder. Judd saw their panic, and
smiled. He meant no harm to them, but then how were they to know that?

Maybe he'd put out a hundred lives, mice, beetles, worms, before he
reached the spot where Mick was lying, stark bollock naked, on a bed of
trampled grain, still grinning.

It was good love they made, good, strong love, equal in pleasure for
both; there was a precision to their passion, sensing the moment when
effortless delight became urgent, when desire became necessity. They
locked together, limb around limb, tongue around tongue, in a knot only
orgasm could untie, their backs alternately scorched and scratched as
they rolled around exchanging blows and kisses. In the thick of it,
creaming together, they heard the phut-phut-phut of a tractor passing
by; but they were past caring.

They made their way back to the Volkswagen with body-threshed wheat in
their hair and their ears, in their socks and between their toes. Their
grins had been replaced with easy smiles: the truce, if not permanent,
would last a few hours at least.

The car was baking hot, and they had to open all the windows and doors
to let the breeze cool it before they started towards Novi Pazar. It was
four o'clock, and there was still an hour's driving ahead.

As they got into the car Mick said, 'We'll forget the monastery, eh?"

Judd gaped. 'I thought -, 'I couldn't bear another fucking Virgin -"

They laughed lightly together, then kissed, tasting each other and
themselves, a mingling of saliva, and the aftertaste of salt semen.

The following day was bright, but not particularly warm. No blue skies:
just an even layer of white cloud. The morning air was sharp in the
lining of the nostrils, like ether, or peppermint.

Vaslav Jelovsek watched the pigeons in the main square of Popolac
courting death as they skipped and fluttered ahead of the vehicles that
were buzzing around. Some about military business, some civilian. An air
of sober intention barely suppressed the excitement he felt on this day,
an excitement he knew was shared by every man, woman and child in
Popolac. Shared by the pigeons too for all he knew. Maybe that was why
they played under the wheels with such dexterity, knowing that on this
day of days no harm could come to them.

He scanned the sky again, that same white sky he'd been peering at since
dawn. The cloud-layer was low; not ideal for the celebrations. A phrase
passed through his mind, an

English phrase he'd heard from a friend, 'to have your head in the
clouds'. It meant, he gathered, to be lost in a reverie, in a white,
sightless dream. That, he thought wryly, was all the West knew about
clouds, that they stood for dreams. It took a vision they lacked to make
a truth out of that casual turn of phrase. Here, in these secret hills,
wouldn't they create a spectacular reality from those idle words? A
living proverb.

A head in the clouds.

Already the first contingent was assembling in the square. There were
one or two absentees owing to illness, but the auxiliaries were ready
and waiting to take their places. Such eagerness! Such wide smiles when
an auxiliary heard his or her name and number called and was taken out
of line to join the limb that was already taking shape. On every side,
miracles of organization. Everyone with a job to do and a place to go.

There was no shouting or pushing: indeed, voices were scarcely raised
above an eager whisper. He watched in admiration as the work of
positioning and buckling and roping went on.

It was going to be a long and arduous day. Vaslav had been in the square
since an hour before dawn, drinking coffee from imported plastic cups,
discussing the half-hourly meteorological reports coming in from
Pristina and Mitrovica, and watching the starless sky as the grey light
of morning crept across it. Now he was drinking his sixth coffee of the
day, and it was still barely seven o'clock. Across the square Metzinger
looked as tired and as anxious as Vaslav felt.

They'd watched the dawn seep out of the east together, Metzinger and he.

But now they had separated, forgetting previous companionship, and would
not speak until the contest was over. After all Metzinger was from
Podujevo. He had his own city to support in the coming battle. Tomorrow
they'd exchange tales of their adventures, but

for today they must behave as if they didn't know each other, not even
to exchange a smile. For today they had to be utterly partisan, caring
only for the victory of their own city over the opposition.

Now the first leg of Popolac was erected, to the mutual satisfaction of
Metzinger and Vaslav. All the safety checks had been meticulously made,
and the leg left the square, its shadow falling hugely across the face
of the Town Hall.

Vaslav sipped his sweet, sweet coffee and allowed himself a little grunt
of satisfaction. Such days, such days. Days filled with glory, with
snapping flags and high, stomach-turning sights, enough to last a man a
lifetime. It was a golden foretaste of Heaven.

Let America have its simple pleasures, its cartoon mice, its
candy-coated castles, its cults and its technologies, he wanted none of
it. The greatest wonder of the world was here, hidden in the hills.

Ah, such days.

In the main square of Podujevo the scene was no less animated, and no
less inspiring. Perhaps there was a muted sense of sadness underlying
this year's celebration, but that was understandable. Nita Obrenovic,
Podujevo's loved and respected organizer, was no longer living. The
previous winter had claimed her at the age of ninety-four, leaving the
city bereft of her fierce opinions and her fiercer proportions. For
sixty years Nita had worked with the citizens of Podujevo, always
planning for the next contest and improving on the designs, her energies
spent on making the next creation more ambitious and more life-like than
the last.

Now she was dead, and sorely missed. There was no disorganization in the
streets without her, the people were far too disciplined for that, but
they were already falling behind schedule, and it was almost
seven-twenty-five. Nita's daughter had taken over in her mother's stead,

but she lacked Nita's power to galvanize the people into action. She
was, in a word, too gentle for the job in hand. It required a leader who
was part prophet and part ringmaster, to coax and bully and inspire the
citizens into their places. Maybe, after two or three decades, and with
a few more contests under her belt, Nita Obrenovic's daughter would make
the grade. But for today Podujevo was behindhand; safety-checks were
being overlooked; nervous looks replaced the confidence of earlier
years.

Nevertheless, at six minutes before eight the first limb of Podujevo
made its way out of the city to the assembly point, to wait for its
fellow.

By that time the flanks were already lashed together in Popolac, and
armed contingents were awaiting orders in the Town Square.

Mick woke promptly at seven, though there was no alarm clock in their
simply furnished room at the Hotel Beograd. He lay in his bed and
listened to Judd's regular breathing from the twin bed across the room.

A dull morning light whimpered through the thin curtains, not
encouraging an early departure. After a few minutes' staring at the
cracked paintwork on the ceiling, and a while longer at the crudely
carved crucifix on the opposite wall, Mick got up and went to the
window. It was a dull day, as he had guessed. The sky was overcast, and
the roofs of Novi Pazar were grey and featureless in the flat morning
light. But beyond the roofs, to the east, he could see the hills. There
was sun there. He could see shafts of light catching the blue-green of
the forest, inviting a visit to their slopes.

Today maybe they would go south to Kosovska Mitrovica. There was a
market there, wasn't there, and a museum? And they could drive down the
valley of the

Ibar, following the road beside the river, where the hills rose wild and
shining on either side. The hills, yes; today he decided they would see
the hills.

It was eight-fifteen.

By nine the main bodies of Popolac and Podujevo were substantially
assembled. In their allotted districts the limbs of both cities were
ready and waiting to join their expectant torsos.

Vaslav Jelovsek capped his gloved hands over his eyes and surveyed the
sky. The cloud-base had risen in the last hour, no doubt of it, and
there were breaks in the clouds to the west; even, on occasion, a few
glimpses of the sun. It wouldn't be a perfect day for the contest
perhaps, but certainly adequate.

Mick and Judd breakfasted late on hemendeks - roughly translated as ham
and eggs - and several cups of good black coffee. It was brightening up,
even in Novi Pazar, and their ambitions were set high. Kosovska
Mitrovica by lunchtime, and maybe a visit to the hill-castle of Zvecan
in the afternoon.

About nine-thirty they motored out of Novi Pazar and took the Srbovac
road south to the Ibar valley. Not a good road, but the bumps and
pot-holes couldn't spoil the new day.

The road was empty, except for the occasional pedestrian; and in place
of the maize and corn fields they'd passed on the previous day the road
was flanked by undulating hills, whose sides were thickly and darkly
forested. Apart from a few birds, they saw no wildlife. Even their
infrequent travelling companions petered out altogether after a few
miles, and the occasional farmhouse they drove by appeared locked and
shuttered up. Black pigs ran unattended in the yard, with no child to
feed

them. Washing snapped and billowed on a sagging line, with no
washerwoman in sight.

At first this solitary journey through the hills was refreshing in its
lack of human contact, but as the morning drew on, an uneasiness grew on
them.

'Shouldn't we have seen a signpost to Mitrovica, Mick?" He peered at the
map.

'Maybe ..." '- we've taken the wrong road." 'If there'd been a sign, I'd
have seen it. I think we should try and get off this road, bear south a
bit more - meet the valley closer to Mitrovica than we'd planned." 'How
do we get off this bloody road?' 'There've been a couple of turnings
...' 'Dirt-tracks." 'Well it's either that or going on the way we are.'
Judd pursed his lips.

'Cigarette?' he asked.

'Finished them miles back." In front of them, the hills formed an
impenetrable line. There was no sign of life ahead; no frail wisp of
chimney smoke, no sound of voice or vehicle.

'All right,' said Judd, 'we take the next turning. Anything's better
than this." They drove on. The road was deteriorating rapidly, the
pot-holes becoming craters, the hummocks feeling like bodies beneath the
wheels.

Then: 'There!" A turning: a palpable turning. Not a major road,
certainly. In fact barely the dirt-track Judd had described the other
roads as being, but it was an escape from the endless perspective of the
road they were trapped on.

'This is becoming a bloody safari,' said Judd as the VW began to bump
and grind its way along the doleful little track.

'Where's your sense of adventure?" 'I forgot to pack it." They were
beginning to climb now, as the track wound its way up into the hills.

The forest closed over them, blotting out the sky, so a shifting
patchwork of light and shadow scooted over the bonnet as they drove.

There was birdsong suddenly, vacuous and optimistic, and a smell of new
pine and undug earth. A fox crossed the track, up ahead, and watched a
long moment as the car grumbled up towards it. Then, with the leisurely
stride of a fearless prince, it sauntered away into the trees.

Wherever they were going, Mick thought, this was better than the road
they'd left. Soon maybe they'd stop, and walk a while, to find a
promontory from which they could see the valley, even Novi Pazar,
nestled behind them.

The two men were still an hour's drive from Popolac when the head of the
contingent at last marched out of the Town Square and took up its
position with the main body.

This last exit left the city completely deserted. Not even the sick or
the old were neglected on this day; no-one was to be denied the
spectacle and the triumph of the contest. Every single citizen, however
young or infirm, the blind, the crippled, babes in arms, pregnant women
- all made their way up from their proud city to the stamping ground. It
was the law that they should attend: but it needed no enforcing. No
citizen of either city would have missed the chance to see that sight to
experience the thrill of that contest.

The confrontation had to be total, city against city. This was the way
it had always been.

So the cities went up into the hills. By noon they were gathered, the
citizens of Popolac and Podujevo, in the secret well of the hills,
hidden from civilized eyes, to do ancient and ceremonial battle.

Tens of thousands of hearts beat faster. Tens of thousands of bodies
stretched and strained and sweated as the twin cities took their
positions. The shadows of the bodies darkened tracts of land the size of
small towns; the weight of their feet trampled the grass to a green
milk; their movement killed animals, crushed bushes and threw down
trees. The earth literally reverberated with their passage, the hills
echoing with the booming din of their steps.

In the towering body of Podujevo, a few technical hitches were becoming
apparent. A slight flaw in the knitting of the left flank had resulted
in a weakness there: and there were consequent problems in the
swivelling mechanism of the hips. It was stiffer than it should be, and
the movements were not smooth. As a result there was considerable strain
being put upon that region of the city. It was being dealt with bravely;
after all, the contest was intended to press the contestants to their
limits. But breaking point was closer than anyone would have dared to
admit. The citizens were not as resilient as they had been in previous
contests. A bad decade for crops had produced bodies less
well-nourished, spines less supple, wills less resolute. The badly
knitted flank might not have caused an accident in itself, but further
weakened by the frailty of the competitors it set a scene for death on
an unprecedented scale.

They stopped the car.

'Hear that?" Mick shook his head. His hearing hadn't been good since he
was an adolescent. Too many rock shows had blown his eardrums to hell.

Judd got out of the car.

The birds were quieter now. The noise he'd heard as they drove came
again. It wasn't simply a noise: it was

almost a motion in the earth, a roar that seemed seated in the substance
of the hills.

Thunder, was it?

No, too rhythmical. It came again, through the soles of the feet -Boom.

Mick heard it this time. He leaned out of the car window.

'It's up ahead somewhere. I hear it now.' Judd nodded.

Boom.

The earth-thunder sounded again. 'What the hell is it?' said Mick.

'Whatever it is, I want to see it -, Judd got back into the Volkswagen,
smiling.

'Sounds almost like guns,' he said, starting the car. 'Big guns."

Through his Russian-made binoculars Vaslav Jelovsek watched the
starting-official raise his pistol. He saw the feather of white smoke
rise from the barrel, and a second later heard the sound of the shot
across the valley.

The contest had begun.

He looked up at twin towers of Popolac and Podujevo. Heads in the clouds
- well almost. They practically stretched to touch the sky. It was an
awesome sight, a breath-stopping, sleep-stabbing sight. Two cities
swaying and writhing and preparing to take their first steps towards
each other in this ritual battle.

Of the two, Podujevo seemed the less stable. There was a slight
hesitation as the city raised its left leg to begin its march. Nothing
serious, just a little difficulty in co-ordinating hip and thigh
muscles. A couple of steps and the city would find its rhythm; a couple
more and its inhabitants would be moving as one creature, one perfect

giant set to match its grace and power against its mirror-image.

The gunshot had sent flurries of birds up from the trees that banked the
hidden valley. They rose up in celebration of the great contest,
chattering their excitement as they swooped over the stamping-ground.

'Did you hear a shot?' asked Judd.

Mick nodded.

'Military exercises ...?' Judd's smile had broadened. He could see the
headlines already - exclusive reports of secret manoeuvres in the depths
of the Yugoslavian countryside. Russian tanks perhaps, tactical
exercises being held out of the West's prying sight. With luck, he would
be the carrier of this news.

Boom.

Boom.

There were birds in the air. The thunder was louder now.

It did sound like guns.

'It's over the next ridge ...' said Judd.

'I don't think we should go any further." 'I have to see." 'I don't.

We're not supposed to be here." 'I don't see any signs." 'They'll cart
us away; deport us - I don't know - I just think -, Boom.

'I've got to see." The words were scarcely out of his mouth when the
screaming started.

Podujevo was screaming: a death-cry. Someone buried in the weak flank
had died of the strain, and had begun a chain of decay in the system.

One man loosed his neighbour

and that neighbour loosed his, spreading a cancer of chaos through the
body of the city. The coherence of the towering structure deteriorated
with terrifying rapidity as the failure of one part of the anatomy put
unendurable pressure on the other.

The masterpiece that the good citizens of Podujevo had constructed of
their own flesh and blood tottered and then -a dynamited skyscraper, it
began to fall.

The broken flank spewed citizens like a slashed artery spitting blood.

Then, with a graceful sloth that made the agonies of the citizens all
the more horrible, it bowed towards the earth, all its limbs dissembling
as it fell.

The huge head, that had brushed the clouds so recently, was flung back
on its thick neck. Ten thousand mouths spoke a single scream for its
vast mouth, a wordless, infinitely pitiable appeal to the sky. A howl of
loss, a howl of anticipation, a howl of puzzlement. How, that scream
demanded, could the day of days end like this, in a welter of falling
bodies?

'Did you hear that?" It was unmistakably human, though almost
deafeningly loud. Judd's stomach convulsed. He looked across at Mick,
who was as white as a sheet.

Judd stopped the car.

'No,' said Mick.

'Listen - for Christ's sake -, The din of dying moans, appeals and
imprecations flooded the air. It was very close.

'We've got to go on now,' Mick implored.

Judd shook his head. He was prepared for some military spectacle - all
the Russian army massed over the next hill - but that noise in his ears
was the noise of human flesh - too human for words. It reminded him of
his childhood imaginings of Hell; the endless, unspeakable torments his

mother had threatened him with if he failed to embrace Christ. It was a
terror he'd forgotten for twenty years. But suddenly, here it was again,
fresh-faced. Maybe the pit itself gaped just over the next horizon, with
his mother standing at its lip, inviting him to taste its punishments.

'If you won't drive, I will." Mick got out of the car and crossed in
front of it, glancing up the track as he did so. There was a moment's
hesitation, no more than a moment's, when his eyes flickered with
disbelief, before he turned towards the windscreen, his face even paler
than it had been previously and said: 'Jesus Christ ...' in a voice that
was thick with suppressed nausea.

His lover was still sitting behind the wheel, his head in his hands,
trying to blot out memories.

'Judd ..." Judd looked up, slowly. Mick was staring at him like a
wildman, his face shining with a sudden, icy sweat. Judd looked past
him. A few metres ahead the track had mysteriously darkened, as a tide
edged towards the car, a thick, deep tide of blood. Judd's reason
twisted and turned to make any other sense of the sight than that
inevitable conclusion. But there was no saner explanation. It was blood,
in unendurable abundance, blood without end -And now, in the breeze,
there was the flavour of freshly - opened carcasses: the smell out of
the depths of the human body, part sweet, part savoury.

Mick stumbled back to the passenger's side of the VW and fumbled weakly
at the handle. The door opened suddenly and he lurched inside, his eyes
glazed.

'Back up,' he said.

Judd reached for the ignition. The tide of blood was already sloshing
against the front wheels. Ahead, the world had been painted red.

'Drive, for fuck's sake, drive!"

Judd was making no attempt to start the car.

'We must look,' he said, without conviction, 'we have to." 'We don't
have to do anything,' said Mick, 'but get the hell out of here. It's not
our business ..." 'Plane-crash -, 'There's no smoke.' 'Those are human
voices." Mick's instinct was to leave well alone. He could read about
the tragedy in a newspaper - he could see the pictures tomorrow when
they were grey and grainy. Today it was too fresh, too unpredictable
-Anything could be at the end of that track, bleeding -'We must -" Judd
started the car, while beside him Mick began to moan quietly. The VW
began to edge forward, nosing through the river of blood, its wheels
spinning in the queasy, foaming tide.

'No,' said Mick, very quietly, 'please, no .. 'We must,' was Judd's
reply. 'We must. We must."

Only a few yards away the surviving city of Popolac was recovering from
its first convulsions. It stared, with a thousand eyes, at the ruins of
its ritual enemy, now spread in a tangle of rope and bodies over the
impacted ground, shattered forever. Popolac staggered back from the
sight, its vast legs flattening the forest that bounded the
stamping-ground, its arms flailing the air. But it kept its balance,
even as a common insanity, woken by the horror at its feet, surged
through its sinews and curdled its brain. The order went out: the body
thrashed and twisted and turned from the grisly carpet of Podujevo, and
fled into the hills.

As it headed into oblivion, its towering form passed between the car and
the sun, throwing its cold shadow

over the bloody road. Mick saw nothing through his tears, and Judd, his
eyes narrowed against the sight he feared seeing around the next bend,
only dimly registered that something had blotted the light for a minute.

A cloud, perhaps. A flock of birds.

Had he looked up at that moment, just stolen a glance out towards the
north-east, he would have seen Popolac's head, the vast, swarming head
of a maddened city, disappearing below his line of vision, as it marched
into the hills. He would have known that this territory was beyond his
comprehension; and that there was no healing to be done in this corner
of Hell. But he didn't see the city, and he and Mick's last
turning-point had passed. From now on, like Popolac and its dead twin,
they were lost to sanity, and to all hope of life.

They rounded the bend, and the ruins of Podujevo came into sight.

Their domesticated imaginations had never conceived of a sight so
unspeakably brutal.

Perhaps in the battlefields of Europe as many corpses had been heaped
together: but had so many of them been women and children, locked
together with the corpses of men? There had been piles of dead as high,
but ever so many so recently abundant with life? There had been cities
laid waste as quickly, but ever an entire city lost to the simple
dictate of gravity?

It was a sight beyond sickness. In the face of it the mind slowed to a
snail's pace, the forces of reason picked over the evidence with
meticulous hands, searching for a flaw in it, a place where it could
say: This is not happening. This is a dream of death, not death itself.

But reason could find no weakness in the wall. This was true. It was
death indeed.

Podujevo had fallen.

Thirty-eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-five citizens were spread
on the ground, or rather flung in ungainly, seeping piles. Those who had
not died of the fall, or of suffocation, were dying. There would be no
survivors from that city except that bundle of onlookers that had
traipsed out of their homes to watch the contest. Those few Podujevians,
the crippled, the sick, the ancient few, were now staring, like Mick and
Judd, at the carnage, trying not to believe.

Judd was first out of the car. The ground beneath his suedes was sticky
with coagulating gore. He surveyed the carnage. There was no wreckage:
no sign of a plane crash, no fire, no smell of fuel. Just tens of
thousands of fresh bodies, all either naked or dressed in an identical
grey serge, men, women and children alike. Some of them, he could see,
wore leather harnesses, tightly buckled around their upper chests, and
snaking out from these contraptions were lengths of rope, miles and
miles of it. The closer he looked, the more he saw of the extraordinary
system of knots and lashings that still held the bodies together. For
some reason these people had been tied together, side by side. Some were
yoked on their neighbours' shoulders, straddling them like boys playing
at horse back riding. Others were locked arm in arm, knitted together
with threads of rope in a wall of muscle and bone. Yet others were
trussed in a ball, with their heads tucked between their knees. All were
in some way connected up with their fellows, tied together as though in
some insane collective bondage game.

Another shot.

Mick looked up.

Across the field a solitary man, dressed in a drab overcoat, was walking
amongst the bodies with a revolver, dispatching the dying. It was a
pitifully inadequate act

of mercy, but he went on nevertheless, choosing the suffering children
first. Emptying the revolver, filling it again, emptying it, filling it,
emptying it -Mick let go.

He yelled at the top of his voice over the moans of the injured.

'What is this?" The man looked up from his appalling duty, his face as
dead-grey as his coat.

'Uh?' he grunted, frowning at the two interlopers through his thick
spectacles.

'What's happened here?' Mick shouted across at him. It felt good to
shout, it felt good to sound angry at the man. Maybe he was to blame. It
would be a fine thing, just to have someone to blame.

'Tell us -' Mick said. He could hear the tears throbbing in his voice.

'Tell us, for God's sake. Explain." Grey-coat shook his head. He didn't
understand a word this young idiot was saying. It was English he spoke,
but that's all he knew. Mick began to walk towards him, feeling all the
time the eyes of the dead on him. Eyes like black, shining gems set in
broken faces: eyes looking at him upside down, on heads severed from
their seating. Eyes in heads that had solid howls for voices. Eyes in
heads beyond howls, beyond breath. Thousands of eyes.

He reached Grey-coat, whose gun was almost empty. He had taken off his
spectacles and thrown them aside. He too was weeping, little jerks ran
through his big, ungainly body.

At Mick's feet, somebody was reaching for him. He didn't want to look,
but the hand touched his shoe and he had no choice but to see its owner.

A young man, lying like a flesh swastika, every joint smashed. A child
lay under him, her bloody legs poking out like two pink sticks.

He wanted the man's revolver, to stop the hand from touching him. Better
still he wanted a machine-gun, a flame-thrower, anything to wipe the
agony away.

As he looked up from the broken body, Mick saw Grey-coat raise the
revolver.

'Judd -' he said, but as the word left his lips the muzzle of the
revolver was slipped into Grey-coat's mouth and the trigger was pulled.

Grey-coat had saved the last bullet for himself. The back of his head
opened like a dropped egg, the shell of his skull flying off. His body
went limp and sank to the ground, the revolver still between his lips.

'We must -, began Mick, saying the words to nobody. 'We must ..." What
was the imperative? In this situation, what must they do?

'We must -'Judd was behind him. 'Help -' he said to Mick.

'Yes. We must get help. We must -, 'Go." Go! That was what they must do.

On any pretext, for any fragile, cowardly reason, they must go. Get out
of the battlefield, get out of the reach of a dying hand with a wound in
place of a body.

'We have to tell the authorities. Find a town. Get help -" 'Priests,'
said Mick. 'They need priests." It was absurd, to think of giving the
Last Rites to so many people. It would take an army of priests, a water
cannon filled with holy water, a loudspeaker to pronounce the
benedictions.

They turned away, together, from the horror, and wrapped their arms
around each other, then picked their way through the carnage to the car.

It was occupied.

Vaslav Jelovsek was sitting behind the wheel, and trying to start the
Volkswagen. He turned the ignition key once. Twice. Third time the
engine caught and the wheels span in the crimson mud as he put her into
reverse and backed down the track. Vaslav saw the Englishmen running
towards the car, cursing him. There was no help for it - he didn't want
to steal the vehicle, but he had work to do. He had been a referee, he
had been responsible for the contest, and the safety of the contestants.

One of the heroic cities had already fallen. He must do everything in
his power to prevent Popolac from following its twin. He must chase
Popolac, and reason with it. Talk it down out of its terrors with quiet
words and promises. If he failed there would be another disaster the
equal of the one in front of him, and his conscience was already broken
enough.

Mick was still chasing the VW, shouting at Jelovsek. The thief took no
notice, concentrating on manoeuvring the car back down the narrow,
slippery track. Mick was losing the chase rapidly. The car had begun to
pick up speed. Furious, but without the breath to speak his fury, Mick
stood in the road, hands on his knees, heaving and sobbing.

'Bastard!' said Judd.

Mick looked down the track. Their car had already disappeared.

'Fucker couldn't even drive properly." 'We have ... we have ... to catch
... up ...' said Mick through gulps of breath.

'How?" 'On foot ..." 'We haven't even got a map ... it's in the car."

'Jesus ... Christ ... Almighty." They walked down the track together,
away from the field.

After a few metres the tide of blood began to peter out. Just a few
congealing rivulets dribbled on towards the main road. Mick and Judd
followed the bloody tyre marks to the junction.

The Srbovac road was empty in both directions. The tyre marks showed a
left turn. 'He's gone deeper into the hills,' said Judd, staring along
the lonely road towards the blue-green distance.

'He's out of his mind!" 'Do we go back the way we came?" 'It'll take us
all night on foot." 'We'll hop a lift." Judd shook his head: his face
was slack and his look lost.

'Don't you see, Mick, they all knew this was happening. The people in
the farms - they got the hell out while those people went crazy up
there. There'll be no cars along this road, I'll lay you anything except
maybe a couple of shit-dumb tourists like us - and no tourist would stop
for the likes of us." He was right. They looked like butchers -
splattered with blood. Their faces were shining with grease, their eyes
maddened.

'We'll have to walk,' said Judd, 'the way he went." He pointed along the
road. The hills were darker now; the sun had suddenly gone out on their
slopes.

Mick shrugged. Either way he could see they had a night on the road
ahead of them. But he wanted to walk somewhere - anywhere - as long as
he put distance between him and the dead.

In Popolac a kind of peace reigned. Instead of a frenzy of panic there
was a numbness, a sheep-like acceptance of the world as it was. Locked
in their positions, strapped, roped and harnessed to each other in a
living system that allowed for no single voice to be louder than any
other, nor any back to labour less than its neighbour's,

they let an insane consensus replace the tranquil voice of reason. They
were convulsed into one mind, one thought, one ambition. They became, in
the space of a few moments, the single-minded giant whose image they had
so brilliantly re-created. The illusion of petty individuality was swept
away in an irresistible tide of collective feeling - not a mob's
passion, but a telepathic surge that dissolved the voices of thousands
into one irresistible command.

And the voice said: Go!

The voice said: take this horrible sight away, where I need never see it
again.

Popolac turned away into the hills, its legs taking strides half a mile
long. Each man, woman and child in that seething tower was sightless.

They saw only through the eyes of the city. They were thoughtless, but
to think the city's thoughts. And they believed themselves deathless, in
their lumbering, relentless strength. Vast and mad and deathless.

Two miles along the road Mick and Judd smelt petrol in the air, and a
little further along they came upon the VW. It had overturned in the
reed-clogged drainage ditch at the side of the road. It had not caught
fire.

The driver's door was open, and the body of Vaslav Jelovsek had tumbled
out. His face was calm in unconsciousness. There seemed to be no sign of
injury, except for a small cut or two on his sober face. They gently
pulled the thief out of the wreckage and up out of the filth of the
ditch on to the road. He moaned a little as they fussed about him,
rolling Mick's sweater up to pillow his head and removing the man's
jacket and tie.

Quite suddenly, he opened his eyes.

He stared at them both.

'Are you all right?' Mick asked.

The man said nothing for a moment. He seemed not to understand.

Then: 'English?' he said. His accent was thick, but the question was
quite clear.

'Yes." 'I heard your voices. English." He frowned and winced.

'Are you in pain?' said Judd.

The man seemed to find this amusing.

'Am I in pain?' he repeated, his face screwed up in a mixture of agony
and delight.

'I shall die,' he said, through gritted teeth.

'No,' said Mick, 'you're all right -" The man shook his head, his
authority absolute.

'I shall die,' he said again, the voice full of determination, 'I want
to die." Judd crouched closer to him. His voice was weaker by the
moment.

'Tell us what to do,' he said. The man had closed his eyes. Judd shook
him awake, roughly.

'Tell us,' he said again, his show of compassion rapidly disappearing.

'Tell us what this is all about." 'About?' said the man, his eyes still
closed. 'It was a fall, that's all. Just a fall ..

'What fell?" 'The city. Podujevo. My city." 'What did it fall from?"

'Itself, of course." The man was explaining nothing; just answering one
riddle with another.

'Where were you going?' Mick inquired, trying to sound as unagressive as
possible.

'After Popolac,' said the man.

'Popolac?' said Judd.

Mick began to see some sense in the story.

'Popolac is another city. Like Podujevo. Twin cities. They're on the map
-" 'Where's the city now?' said Judd.

Vaslav Jelovsek seemed to choose to tell the truth. There was a moment
when he hovered between dying with a riddle on his lips, and living long
enough to unburden his story. What did it matter if the tale was told
now? There could never be another contest: all that was over.

'They came to fight,' he said, his voice now very soft, 'Popolac and
Podujevo. They come every ten years -" 'Fight?' said Judd. 'You mean all
those people were slaughtered?" Vaslav shook his head.

'No, no. They fell. I told you." 'Well, how do they fight?' Mick said.

'Go into the hills,' was the only reply.

Vaslav opened his eyes a little. The faces that loomed over him were
exhausted and sick. They had suffered, these innocents. They deserved
some explanation.

'As giants,' he said. 'They fought as giants. They made a body out of
their bodies, do you understand? The frame, the muscles, the bone, the
eyes, nose, teeth all made of men and women." 'He's delirious,' said
Judd.

'You go into the hills,' the man repeated. 'See for yourselves how true
it is." 'Even supposing -' Mick began.

Vaslav interrupted him, eager to be finished. 'They were good at the
game of giants. It took many centuries of practice: every ten years
making the figure larger and larger. One always ambitious to be larger
than the other. Ropes to tie them all together, flawlessly. Sinews ..

ligaments ... There was food in its belly ... there were pipes from the
loins, to take away the waste. The

best-sighted sat in the eye-sockets, the best voiced in the mouth and
throat. You wouldn't believe the engineering of it." 'I don't,' said
Judd, and stood up.

'It is the body of the state,' said Vaslav, so softly his voice was
barely above a whisper, 'it is the shape of our lives." There was a
silence. Small clouds passed over the road, soundlessly shedding their
mass to the air.

'It was a miracle,' he said. It was as if he realized the true enormity
of the fact for the first time. 'It was a miracle." It was enough. Yes.

It was quite enough.

His mouth closed, the words said, and he died.

Mick felt this death more acutely than the thousands they had fled from;
or rather this death was the key to unlock the anguish he felt for them
all.

Whether the man had chosen to tell a fantastic lie as he died, or
whether this story was in some way true, Mick felt useless in the face
of it. His imagination was too narrow to encompass the idea. His brain
ached with the thought of it, and his compassion cracked under the
weight of misery he felt.

They stood on the road, while the clouds scudded by, their vague, grey
shadows passing over them towards the enigmatic hills.

It was twilight.

Popolac could stride no further. It felt exhaustion in every muscle.

Here and there in its huge anatomy deaths had occurred; but there was no
grieving in the city for its deceased cells. If the dead were in the
interior, the corpses were allowed to hang from their harnesses. If they
formed the skin of the city they were unbuckled from their positions and
released, to plunge into the forest below.

The giant was not capable of pity. It had no ambition but to continue
until it ceased.

As the sun slunk out of sight Popolac rested, sitting on a small
hillock, nursing its huge head in its huge hands.

The stars were coming out, with their familiar caution. Night was
approaching, mercifully bandaging up the wounds of the day, blinding
eyes that had seen too much.

Popolac rose to its feet again, and began to move, step by booming step.

It would not be long surely, before fatigue overcame it: before it could
lie down in the tomb of some lost valley and die.

But for a space yet it must walk on, each step more agonizingly slow
than the last, while the night bloomed black around its head.

Mick wanted to bury the car-thief, somewhere on the edge of the forest.

Judd, however, pointed out that burying a body might seem, in tomorrow's
saner light, a little suspicious. And besides, wasn't it absurd to
concern themselves with one corpse when there were literally thousands
of them lying a few miles from where they stood?

The body was left to lie, therefore, and the car to sink deeper into the
ditch.

They began to walk again.

It was cold, and colder by the moment, and they were hungry. But the few
houses they passed were all deserted, locked and shuttered, every one.

'What did he mean?' said Mick, as they stood looking at another locked
door.

'He was talking metaphor -, 'All that stuff about giants?" 'It was some
Trotskyist tripe -' Judd insisted.

'I don't think so." 'I know so. It was his deathbed speech, he'd
probably been preparing for years." 'I don't think so,' Mick said again,
and began walking

back towards the road.

'Oh, how's that?' Judd was at his back.

'He wasn't toeing some party line." 'Are you saying you think there's
some giant around here someplace? For God's sake!" Mick turned to Judd.

His face was difficult to see the twilight. But his voice was sober with
belief.

'Yes. I think he was telling the truth." 'That's absurd. That's
ridiculous. No." Judd hated Mick that moment. Hated his naivet, his
passion to believe any half-witted story if it had a whiff of romance
about it. And this? This was the worst, the most preposterous .

'No,' he said again. 'No. No. No." The sky was porcelain smooth, and the
outline of the hills black as pitch.

'I'm fucking freezing,' said Mick out of the ink. 'Are you staying here
or walking with me?" Judd shouted: 'We're not going to find anything
this way." 'Well it's a long way back." 'We're just going deeper into
the hills." 'Do what you like - I'm walking." His footsteps receded: the
dark encased him. After a minute, Judd followed.

The night was cloudless and bitter. They walked on, their collars up
against the chill, their feet swollen in their shoes. Above them the
whole sky had become a parade of stars. A triumph of spilled light, from
which the eye could make as many patterns as it had patience for. After
a while, they slung their tired arms around each other, for comfort and
warmth.

About eleven o'clock, they saw the glow of a window in the distance.

The woman at the door of the stone cottage didn't smile, but she
understood their condition, and let them in. There seemed to be no
purpose in trying to explain to either the woman or her crippled husband
what they had seen. The cottage had no telephone, and there was no sign
of a vehicle, so even had they found some way to express themselves,
nothing could be done.

With mimes and face-pullings they explained that they were hungry and
exhausted. They tried further to explain they were lost, cursing
themselves for leaving their phrase-book in the VW. She didn't seem to
understand very much of what they said, but sat them down beside a
blazing fire and put a pan of food on the stove to heat.

They ate thick unsalted pea soup and eggs, and occasionally smiled their
thanks at the woman. Her husband sat beside the fire, making no attempt
to talk, or even look at the visitors.

The food was good. It buoyed their spirits.

They would sleep until morning and then begin the long trek back. By
dawn the bodies in the field would be being quantified, identified,
parcelled up and dispatched to their families. The air would be full of
reassuring noises, cancelling out the moans that still rang in their
ears. There would be helicopters, lorry loads of men organizing the
clearing-up operations. All the rites and paraphernalia of a civilized
disaster.

And in a while, it would be palatable. It would become part of their
history: a tragedy, of course, but one they could explain, classify and
learn to live with. All would be well, yes, all would be well. Come
morning.

The sleep of sheer fatigue came on them suddenly. They lay where they
had fallen, still sitting at the table, their heads on their crossed
arms. A litter of empty bowls and bread crusts surrounded them.

They knew nothing. Dreamt nothing. Felt nothing.

Then the thunder began.

In the earth, in the deep earth, a rhythmical tread, as of a titan, that
came, by degrees, closer and closer.

The woman woke her husband. She blew out the lamp and went to the door.

The night sky was luminous with stars: the hills black on every side.

The thunder still sounded: a full half minute between every boom, but
louder now. And louder with every new step.

They stood at the door together, husband and wife, and listened to the
night-hills echo back and forth with the sound. There was no lightning
to accompany the thunder.

Just the boom - Boom - Boom - It made the ground shake: it threw dust
down from the door-lintel, and rattled the window-latches.

Boom - Boom - They didn't know what approached, but whatever shape it
took, and whatever it intended, there seemed no sense in running from
it. Where they stood, in the pitiful shelter of their cottage, was as
safe as any nook of the forest. How could they choose, out of a hundred
thousand trees, which would be standing when the thunder had passed?

Better to wait: and watch.

The wife's eyes were not good, and she doubted what she saw when the
blackness of the hill changed shape and reared up to block the stars.

But her husband had seen it too: the unimaginably huge head, vaster in
the deceiving darkness, looming up and up, dwarfing the hills themselves
with its ambition.

He fell to his knees, babbling a prayer, his arthritic legs twisted
beneath him.

His wife screamed: no words she knew could keep this monster at bay - no
prayer, no plea, had power over it.

In the cottage, Mick woke and his outstretched arm, twitching with a
sudden cramp, wiped the plate and the lamp off the table.

They smashed.

Judd woke.

The screaming outside had stopped. The woman had disappeared from the
doorway into the forest. Any tree, any tree at all, was better than this
sight. Her husband still let a string of prayers dribble from his slack
mouth, as the great leg of the giant rose to take another step -Boom
-The cottage shook. Plates danced and smashed off the dresser. A clay
pipe rolled from the mantelpiece and shattered in the ashes of the
hearth.

The lovers knew the noise that sounded in their substance: that
earth-thunder.

Mick reached for Judd, and took him by the shoulder.

'You see,' he said, his teeth blue-grey in the darkness of the cottage.

'See? See?" There was a kind of hysteria bubbling behind his words. He
ran to the door, stumbling over a chair in the dark. Cursing and bruised
he staggered out into the night -Boom -The thunder was deafening. This
time it broke all the windows in the cottage. In the bedroom one of the
roof-joists cracked and flung debris downstairs.

Judd joined his lover at the door. The old man was now face down on the
ground, his sick and swollen fingers curled, his begging lips pressed to
the damp soil.

Mick was looking up, towards the sky. Judd followed his gaze.

There was a place that showed no stars. It was a darkness in the shape
of a man, a vast, broad human frame, a

colossus that soared up to meet heaven. It was not quite a perfect
giant. Its outline was not tidy; it seethed and swarmed.

He seemed broader too, this giant, than any real man. His legs were
abnormally thick and stumpy, and his arms were not long. The hands, as
they clenched and unclenched, seemed oddly-jointed and over-delicate for
its torso.

Then it raised one huge, flat foot and placed it on the earth, taking a
stride towards them.

Boom -The step brought the roof collapsing in on the cottage.

Everything that the car-thief had said was true. Popolac was a city and
a giant; and it had gone into the hills.

Now their eyes were becoming accustomed to the night light.

They could see in ever more horrible detail the way this monster was
constructed. It was a masterpiece of human engineering: a man made
entirely of men. Or rather, a sexless giant, made of men and women and
children. All the citizens of Popolac writhed and strained in the body
of this flesh-knitted giant, their muscles stretched to breaking point,
their bones close to snapping.

They could see how the architects of Popolac had subtly altered the
proportions of the human body; how the thing had been made squatter to
lower its centre of gravity; how its legs had been made elephantine to
bear the weight of the torso; how the head was sunk low on to the wide
shoulders, so that the problems of a weak neck had been minimized.

Despite these malformations, it was horribly life-like. The bodies that
were bound together to make its surface were naked but for their
harnesses, so that its surface glistened in the starlight, like one vast
human torso. Even the muscles were well copied, though simplified. They
could see the way the roped bodies pushed and pulled against each other
in solid cords of flesh and bone. They

could see the intertwined people that made up the body: the backs like
turtles packed together to offer the sweep of the pectorals; the lashed
and knotted acrobats at the joints of the arms and the legs alike,
rolling and unwinding to articulate the city.

But surely the most amazing sight of all was the face.

Cheeks of bodies; cavernous eye-sockets in which heads stared, five
bound together for each eyeball; a broad, flat nose and a mouth that
opened and closed, as the muscles of the jaw bunched and hollowed
rhythmically. And from that mouth, lined with teeth of bald children,
the voice of the giant, now only a weak copy of its former powers, spoke
a single note of idiot music.

Popolac walked and Popolac sang.

Was there ever a sight in Europe the equal of it?

They watched, Mick and Judd, as it took another step towards them.

The old man had wet his pants. Blubbering and begging, he dragged
himself away from the ruined cottage into the surrounding trees,
dragging his dead legs after him.

The Englishmen remained where they stood, watching the spectacle as it
approached. Neither dread nor horror touched them now, just an awe that
rooted them to the spot. They knew this was a sight they could never
hope to see again; this was the apex - after this there was only common
experience. Better to stay then, though every step brought death nearer,
better to stay and see the sight while it was still there to be seen.

And if it killed them, this monster, then at least they would have
glimpsed a miracle, known this terrible majesty for a brief moment. It
seemed a fair exchange.

Popolac was within two steps of the cottage. They could see the
complexities of its structure quite clearly. The faces of the citizens
were becoming detailed: white, sweat-wet, and content in their
weariness. Some hung dead from

their harnesses, their legs swinging back and forth like the hanged.

Others, children particularly, had ceased to obey their training, and
had relaxed their positions, so that the form of the body was
degenerating, beginning to seethe with the boils of rebellious cells.

Yet it still walked, each step an incalculable effort of coordination
and strength.

Boom -The step that trod the cottage came sooner than they thought.

Mick saw the leg raised; saw the faces of the people in the shin and
ankle and foot - they were as big as he was now - all huge men chosen to
take the full weight of this great creation.

Many were dead. The bottom of the foot, he could see, was a jigsaw of
crushed and bloody bodies, pressed to death under the weight of their
fellow citizens.

The foot descended with a roar.

In a matter of seconds the cottage was reduced to splinters and dust.

Popolac blotted the sky utterly. It was, for a moment, the whole world,
heaven and earth, its presence filled the senses to overflowing. At this
proximity one look could not encompass it, the eye had to range
backwards and forwards over its mass to take it all in, and even then
the mind refused to accept the whole truth.

A whirling fragment of stone, flung off from the cottage as it
collapsed, struck Judd full in the face. In his head he heard the
killing stroke like a ball hitting a wall: a play-yard death. No pain:
no remorse. Out like a light, a tiny, insignificant light; his death-cry
lost in the pandemonium, his body hidden in the smoke and darkness. Mick
neither saw nor heard Judd die.

He was too busy staring at the foot as it settled for a moment in the
ruins of the cottage, while the other leg mustered the will to move.

Mick took his chance. Howling like a banshee, he ran towards the leg,
longing to embrace the monster. He stumbled in the wreckage, and stood
again, bloodied, to reach for the foot before it was lifted and he was
left behind. There was a clamour of agonized breath as the message came
to the foot that it must move; Mick saw the muscles of the shin bunch
and marry as the leg began to lift. He made one last lunge at the limb
as it began to leave the ground, snatching a harness or a rope, or human
hair, or flesh itself - anything to catch this passing miracle and be
part of it. Better to go with it wherever it was going, serve it in its
purpose, whatever that might be; better to die with it than live without
it.

He caught the foot, and found a safe purchase on its ankle. Screaming
his sheer ecstasy at his success he felt the great leg raised, and
glanced down through the swirling dust to the spot where he had stood,
already receding as the limb climbed.

The earth was gone from beneath him. He was a hitchhiker with a god: the
mere life he had left was nothing to him now, or ever. He would live
with this thing, yes, he would live with it - seeing it and seeing it
and eating it with his eyes until he died of sheer gluttony.

He screamed and howled and swung on the ropes, drinking up his triumph.

Below, far below, he glimpsed Judd's body, curled up pale on the dark
ground, irretrievable. Love and life and sanity were gone, gone like the
memory of his name, or his sex, or his ambition.

It all meant nothing. Nothing at all.

Boom -Boom -Popolac walked, the noise of its steps receding to the east.

Popolac walked, the hum of its voice lost in the night.

After a day, birds came, foxes came, flies, butterflies, wasps came.

Judd moved, Judd shifted, Judd gave birth. In his belly maggots warmed
themselves, in a vixen's den the good flesh of his thigh was fought
over. After that, it was quick. The bones yellowing, the bones
crumbling: soon, an empty space which he had once filled with breath and
opinions.

Darkness, light, darkness, light. He interrupted neither with his name.

