Time's Mistress
Date: 2014-09-22 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Literature & Fiction; Magical Realism; Short Stories & Anthologies; Anthologies & Short Stories; Short Stories; Fantasy; Single Authors; Science Fiction & Fantasy; Anthologies
Description: Steven Savile's popular fantasy stories embrace all aspects of the fantastic. Be it the wonder of magical realism, the darkness of the macabre, or the mythological, these stories have one thing in common: faith. Savile offers up tales of hope and wonder in equal measure, whilst treating sadness as a long lost friend. Nothing in his world is quite as it seems. The world you think you know isn't the world you're about to enter. Everything you think you've learned about life is about to be unlearned. These are stories of love. These are stories of loss. In some you will find redemption, in others
Publisher: WordFire Press

Steven Savile

Time’s Mistress

Steven Savile

Steven Savile's popular fantasy stories embrace all aspects of the fantastic. Be it the wonder of magical realism, the darkness of the macabre, or the mythological, these stories have one thing in common: faith.

Savile offers up tales of hope and wonder in equal measure, whilst treating sadness as a long lost friend. Nothing in his world is quite as it seems. The world you think you know isn't the world you're about to enter. Everything you think you've learned about life is about to be unlearned. These are stories of love. These are stories of loss. In some you will find redemption, in others the simple act of memory is treacherous and cannot be trusted. But in all of them there is an aching sense of loss and love. Savile's stories here speak to the part in all of us who still dares to fall in love again after a broken heart.

***

Praise for Steven Savile

Savile packs more imagination into a short story than many writers manage in a full novel.

— Hellnotes

Stories about life and death by a man who has clearly consorted with devils.

— TM Wright, bestselling author of
A Manhattan Ghost Story

One of the most seriously creepy pieces it has been my pleasure to read in a long time.

— Charles de Lint, on Remember Me Yesterday

A modern fantasist of the first order. Watch as Savile carves a niche for himself in the literature of the new millennium.

— Tim Lebbon

Troubling, moving, curiously gentle, and a pleasure to read all the way through.

— Ed Gorman

Lyrical, passionate and poignant.

— Tom Piccirilli

Savile manages to successfully evoke a wonderful sense of atmosphere and place, while contemporaneously managing to constantly build the conflict and tension, and swiftly move the action forward.

— Fear Zone

***

Smashwords Edition – October, 2014

WordFire Press
wordfirepress.com

ISBN: 978-1-61475-241-7

Copyright © 2014 Steven Savile

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover painting by Alan M. Clark,

Cover design by Emma Michaels.

Art Director Kevin J. Anderson

Book Design by RuneWright, LLC
www.RuneWright.com

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

Published by
WordFire Press, an imprint of
WordFire, Inc.
PO Box 1840
Monument, CO 80132

Electronic Version by Baen Books
www.baen.com

***

The Last Believer

I remember everything.

It’s all here, in this place. I’ve heard it called the Memory Palace, then again, I’ve heard it called the House of Dreams. I’ve never had dreams so I wouldn’t know how true that is. I’ve heard this place called the well of souls, too, by new arrivals struggling to comprehend the enormity of it. Though why they think that, I have no idea. There is no bucket you can lower into the shimmering depths and draw up again, over-spilling with life. There’s only one word that comes to mind when I think of it, prison. An infinite prison of sweeping turrets and spires, of dark windows and darker dungeons. And maybe somewhere in here there is a capstone that can be lifted to uncork the wonders of the world. Even I don’t know every inch of this place, and I am both curator and warden here, as much a part of the place as any of the forgotten I tend.

I’m not the first and I won’t be the last of my kind. We burn up and are born again, filled with the same memories and torments. We are the stuff of legend. They call us the Phoenix, but that is a simplification of our curse. They don’t understand us, how our affliction makes us unique, how it strips away the most basic of human obsessions. They think we are beasts because we don’t mourn the flesh, because we don’t fear death. They don’t understand that neither hold dominion here. They don’t understand that there are so many more things worth fearing. If only they knew that most of them are in here with me that might change things, but I doubt it.

I walk these halls day and night, always moving, forced to listen to it all, every whisper, every sigh, every scream, and to remember their causes. Most don’t want to be here anymore than I do. I take no joy in eavesdropping on their torment, but neither do I offer any easing of their pain. That is not my purpose. They are the real prisoners here. Who could have thought that devotion could become damnation? That’s what it all comes down to, once upon a time they were worshipped, now they are here, remembered by the stones.

Here, on the edge of never, there is no such thing as time, so my torment can never end. Here, on the edge of forever, there is no such thing as ending, there is only now and now and now on and on. Sometimes I just stand at the windows and look outside at the emptiness. It’s humbling. Every now and then I imagine I can see a distant spark on the horizon, another flame echoing mine, but it never gets any closer.

Gods, devils, demons, every mythology you can think of, no matter how obscure, you will find them within these walls. Even if the walls themselves are not constant there is no escaping them. How do I know? Believe me, I just do. You learn quickly in this place or you burn up. No second chances. It isn’t that kind of place. The greatest surprise, the one I forget every time, is that it isn’t all about deities. The first time I ventured into the depths I burned, because of course they adored fire, crouching around it as it drove the darkness away. They worshipped it in the most simple of ways without knowing there was no divinity in fire. There was only me. Yes. They released me from the flames. I am forged from that first flame. That is why I am here, because of those simple minds afraid of the dark. I am the original. The first of the adored. I belong here. But you? I’m not so sure. There’s something about you that feels … wrong. Oh yes, I can feel you in here with me. That makes me wonder what you want. Or more precisely, why are you here?

Are you one of the newly adored? I don’t think so. You don’t have the feel of the worshipped about you. You’re different. You’re an outsider. But I suppose all of my prisoners were, once. For years I was alone here, that’s enough to drive anyone mad. Utter loneliness. Isolation. Only the wind to cry your name. Then they created other gods to join me.

And they discovered the divine in their own bodies.

That changed this place forever.

There are cells in here that are nothing more than beds of writhing flesh, bodies hard and taut, flaccid and overflowing, it doesn’t matter, they’ve all been adored. Beauty is in the eye of the fucker, I suppose. They’ve all shared that one true moment of ecstasy, coming together. It makes no difference if they are children in the eyes of the world or closer to death, they belong here the moment they surrender all sense of self and lose themselves in the spark of creation. In that moment they are gods. And this is the place where all gods die. Can you hear them? Their ecstasies echoing through the walls? To fuck and be fucked. To revel in it. Hand to mouth, mouth to cock to cunt and on and on in all of those endless variations of inventiveness. They can never stop now, these new gods. To stop is to abandon all that makes them immortal and in that moment, balls deep, they want to live forever. So I have to live with it, the constant chorus of grunts and moans and imprecations, fuck me, fuck me, harder, yes, oh my god … That’s right, his god, her god, they’re all gods down there in that endless sea of sex.

I’m slowly coming around to the idea that everyone deserves to be worshipped once in their lives, so what’s wrong with that moment living on here?

It’s not like these gods are wrathful deities, is it? They’re not flooding the world and drowning all but a precious few chosen ones. They’re not sending emissaries out into the night to murder the first born, or smiting infidels or any of that vengeful god stuff. Their only commandment is thou shalt cum, over and over amen.

There are others down there suffering, their torment no less driven by the demands of the flesh. They are the victims. Their screams are not in the least bit pleasurable, even if there is a release for them. And then there are the killers who found spiritual release, a command over life and death, and yes, they too became gods by taking life. They are not so easily caged in the lower levels. They wander the halls, drawn out by the life all around them, caught in that moment, wanting to end it all. In some ways their worship is purest of all.

It was simpler before, when there was only the sun and the moon and fire in here. It was elemental. Now it is so human.

And it’s all inside here.

But what about you? Not killer, and you don’t smell like a victim, neither adored nor adorer. So what are you?

Something sent here to consume me? Something meant to push me over the edge?

Or have you come simply to watch me burn?

Some of the old gods are harder to contain because their worshippers gave them inconceivable powers. How do you cage an entity which sees all, knows all, and created it all? How do you bar doors that the hammer of the gods could shatter? How do you cage Lady Luck when all she has to do is roll the dice to get a break? How do you control a raging drunk like Bacchus when he’s tearing up the walls and trying to claw the brains out of his skull because his head’s pounding? Mars, Horus, Ra, you name it, they’ve all got tricks up their sleeves and they’re not sitting here quietly, they’re all looking for ways back and they’re not working in isolation, either. Together they have powers beyond imagining. They don’t understand that they’ve been forgotten, that there’s no place for them out there now, or that I am the only thing keeping them alive.

Because I remember everything.

If they ever got out of here that singular moment, that all-consuming moment when they were worshipped would pass. And then what would they be? Forgotten.

But I’m obsessing on the wrong question, or at least the wrong angle on the right question. Instead of worrying about what you are, as in what manner of creature, I should be asking if you are friend or foe. And to know that, I need to work out how you got here, and for what purpose? What do you stand to gain from being here? Answered together, who knows, maybe they’d even solve the riddle of what manner of beast you are.

So, friend or foe?

There are two reasons you cannot be a friend, the most obvious being I have no friends. I am elemental, I burn. That is all I do. I have never forged the bonds of friendship with any living soul. So you are no friend of mine, but of this place? You could be a friend, I suppose, but surely you would have sought me out rather than creep around in the shadows? So that leads to the only natural conclusion: you are an enemy, of mine and of this place.

How did you get here?

Why have you come to the memory palace?

What do you stand to gain from being here?

Three questions, how, why, what. I don’t have the answers, but knowing that you are our enemy presents possibilities at least, in terms of the why and the what. Why would a warrior ever infiltrate an enemy’s stronghold? The worst case, to destroy it, the best, simply to take it. Which leads to the what. What would you gain from destroying this place? Conversely what would you gain from deposing me and rising in my place? And if you haven’t come to destroy or rule, then what is here that you could hope to steal? I can’t see what you’d stand to gain from loosing the endless tide of sex and body worshippers on the world, unless you’re hoping to drown civilisation in lust and semen, so the beloved are worthless to you. The only things here of worth are the forgotten ones, and they are only kept alive because I remember them.

Is that it?

Have you come to liberate the old gods?

Why would you want to do that? What possible use could you have for them in that modern world outside?

Not all of them, then. Just one? Is there one in here that would suit your purpose? Is that it? You hope to bring one of them back to the world. Don’t you realise you can’t possibly control them, not once they’re out of this place? Who then? Kroni? Utukkū, Ravana? Iblis? Shaitan? Nakir and Monkir, Malak? The Asakku? They are little more than ideas now, not strong enough to survive out there. Surely you understand that, times change, all gods die. Who even remembers the evil spirits of Babylon? Asag, the monstrous demon, Edimmu? The names mean nothing to you, do they? I can tell. What about Akah Manah or Meihem? Nothing? How quickly we forget.

So what is it you want, then? Help me understand.

Or … are you me? Is that what’s happening here? Are you some sort of reflection of me flicking inside this place, like that distant spark on the horizon? Have I divided? Diminished? That would be novel, I suppose, haunted by my own divine spark, but I don’t that’s what you are. The problem is I’m not sure I know my own mind anymore, it’s hard even holding onto myself, what I am, what I was, after being alone here for so long. Remembering it all has taken its toll on me. I am not what I used to be. But then who of us is?

That smell … let me breathe you in. It’s more than just wrongness. It’s … I don’t know. It’s familiar and yet utterly wrong here. What is it?

Astringent. Rank.

Corruption.

Decay.

Dissolution.

All of these and more.

I know that smell now.

Death.

That’s what you are, isn’t it?

Death.

You don’t want to free the forgotten or unleash the ecstasies of the body worshippers on the world, do you? That’s not why you’re here, is it? You’re here for me.

This is the day I finally forget.

I can feel you moving about down there, letting them go, knowing that outside of this place they will simply cease to be because the world has moved on, and because they are exactly what they are, forgotten. That’s what I can smell, isn’t it? The forgotten burning up, becoming ash even as they escape, and I don’t care, because this is the day all gods die.

Let that be it.

Please.

Because some endless days all I want to do is forget.

***

The Mechanisms of Grief

“There is no truth, there is only beauty,” cried the Aesthetics

“There is no art, there are only lies,” was the response of the Mechanicum

It wasn’t so much the rise of man as it was the fall.

If they were to believed it was the day that science would stop the world. Magisters of the Mechanicum had placed advertisements in the more respectable broadsheets inviting the good people of London, the greatest city in the world, to attend the grand unveiling of the Machine, on the Meridian, at the Meridian. Noon, at Greenwich, for the uninitiated. The advertisement reeked of hyperbole but it caught the attention, which, of course, was its entire raison d’être.

A glass house capable of holding five hundred wide-eyed Londoners had been constructed for the event, though in truth no-one could know whether a single soul would show. They called it the Palace of Illusion. Even now, twelve hours before the show, the tangible thrill of anticipation fairly crackled through the air. Secrets and lies, the sign driven into the dirt on the embankment proclaimed. It did not say what secrets and gave no hints of the lies it promised to tell.

“Ask me no lies and I will tell you all of my secrets,” Josiah Bloome said, deliberately mangling the truism.

He stood one foot on either side of the golden line that marked the prime meridian. It was a place of power, for sure, but it was a most curious location for the unveiling of any new invention when a few miles away the International Exhibition of Inventions was unfolding in the Albert Hall galleries up in South Kensington. Indeed, the fact that the Mechanicum had chosen to construct a parody of Paxton’s great glass house from the 1851 World’s Fair smacked of thumbing the nose up at the Establishment. He stood before the glass house at midnight, staring up at the multi-faceted windows. Each one caught and refracted the moonlight to create a mother-of-pearl ripple across the roof. It was a breathtaking piece of architecture, but he expected nothing less from the Magisters. After all, they were nothing if not the masters of shape and form.

Josiah walked slowly around the building, watching his own ghost in the glass as he completed the circuit. There was no door and no noticeable flaw in the glass to suggest a hidden entry. It was a curious thing, to be sure. Perhaps the most peculiar thing about it though was that it was more like something the Aesthetics would create—so much useless beauty as opposed to the functional ugliness of a machine. The dichotomy amused him. The two movements might strut and swagger claiming that each was the way forward and the other was the way to Hell, but they had more in common than either cared to admit. Life was seldom as simple as to be black or white, or even some subtle shade of grey; it went into colours that even the eye could not perceive. Curiously, he pressed his palm against the glass wall and felt the cold glaze beneath his hand. He didn’t know what he had expected … a thrill of life perhaps? A shocking jolt of electricity? A pulse? He was almost disappointed that nothing of the sort greeted his touch.

The familiar fog of the city thickened along the river; for now it was a white serpent coiled along the Thames but come morning the snake would have shed its skin all across the city streets reducing visibility down to five or ten feet at best. People would die. It was the one irrefutable truth of the London fogs: death walked within those choking mists. The old, the asthmatic, the emphacymic, anyone with respiratory problems of any sort suffered. There would be a dozen deaths at least, just from people who simply couldn’t breathe. More would die as they staggered, lost, into trouble. Thieves and muggers would be out in force, and shiv men with their wicked knives. It was that kind of weather. Old grudges had a way of getting settled in the fog. The Peeler’s couldn’t hope to keep the peace when they couldn’t see it slipping away for love or money. Come morning he expected to be hearing about corpses in the Serpentine, perhaps some poor sap would be found impaled on the sword of Old Bailey or some unlucky Mudlark would come to a sticky end in the Thames. It always happened.

It always puzzled him that the great minds of the Mechanicum didn’t look for ways to purge the fogs, a light source capable of cutting clean through it, or at the very least some breathing devices filled with fresher air for the sufferers. Using their genius to save lives seemed to Josiah to be such an obvious thing for the Great Minds to do. Unfortunately such application of the mind necessitated that these people care about something beyond the pursuit of science. They didn’t, as a man drummed out of their hallowed halls Josiah Bloome knew that all too well. Indeed, as a man wont to flutter on the ponies and not averse to a game of cards, he would have rather wagered that the Magisters had in their possession an infernal device that pumped out the pea-soupers that smothered the city. After all, it was the fog that proved once and for all that beauty was an irrelevance, didn’t it? It was almost as though Nature herself had weighed in to settle their dispute: if it couldn’t be seen how could its’ physical form be of any value?

“Oh yea of little faith,” Josiah Bloome muttered, giving up on the glass house. He would come back in the morning, fighting his way through the smog to witness the great reveal. His curiosity was piqued by—of all things—the lack of any tangible science on display. He almost expected to return to a Medway filled with freaks and sideshow barkers enticing the gullible to come see the bearded lady and the world’s strongest man, but that wasn’t the way of the Mechanicum.

Josiah was lost; not in the traditional sense. He knew where he was in space and time, his disorientation was spiritual. Since he had met Fabian Stark and been introduced to the Club on Old Grey’s Lane, everything he believed in had been brought into question. His world was one of science and reason, not one of the supernatural and the outré. He believed only in the quantifiable and the qualifiable. His was a world of rational thought not populated by ghoulies and ghosties and all of those imaginative constructs that went bump in the night.

And yet he had seen things his science was at a loss to explain.

Six years was a long time to miss someone, to yearn for them. Annabel Leigh had been the light of his life. Cholera was such a cruel disease and an utterly horrible way to die. Worse though by far was his sense of guilt at not having been there to see to, to tend to her as she failed. That was what it meant to be a husband; that had been core to his vows, instead he had been with Pulleine and Durnford and the dying men in Isandlwana. He had fought the good fight for Queen and Country against the might of the Zulu nation, and his reward? To return home to an empty house and be told Annabel Leigh had died while he was over there, clinging to the thoughts of her to see him through. The war was terminal in every way, a bleak reflection of the darkness within. He knew no language to express the sadism, the barbary, the brutality of the human spirit. He had lived through such horrors, and even now, six years on, he could not bear to imagine it. Josiah Bloome had survived Eshowe and Tinta’s Kraal and the Hell of the Inyezane River; he had taken a tribal spear in the shoulder and another in the gut, and come through, but he had crumbled then. Not slowly but rather like a great building with its foundations undermined by gunpowder plots.

A man is the sum of his memories, he had argued with McCreedy only the night before, that is the notion of the soul, not some spiritual thing but rather a construction of memories absorbed to create something new and unique. But what was a man who could not bear his own memories? Was he some soulless cage of flesh?

That was how he had felt for the longest time now.

He kicked at stones as he walked. Nothing around him felt real anymore. It was fitting then that this beautiful construction called itself an illusion.

He had read all of the new literature, seeing the same need in it as the writers like Stephenson and Shelley sought to remove the Divine from the world. Science had effectively killed the God he had grown up worshipping, reason had undone the rest of the miracles He had supposedly wrought. All that remained, the last power man had not usurped was that of creation. Life. Shelley sought to claim that through electricity and butchery for her vile Doctor Frankenstein, Stephenson dared suggest that an elixir could find a second soul within the mortal cage. These Aesthetics sought to complete the robbery of Eternity by effectively emasculating the Lord and denying Heaven. He did not know what to think of that—it excited the scientist in him, the possibilities of it, but it devastated the man who had lost love. The thought of Annabel Leigh in some sheltered heaven, sat upon clouds with the angels was all that he had clung to during the deepest depressions her death had wrought. The scientist and the believer warred within him.

More than ever, he needed to believe in this other world the Greyfriar’s Gentlemen opened up to him.

Of course, in turn he had shown Stark and McCreedy and the others things they would never have countenanced in their own peculiar philosophies. He took one such miracle from his pocket, a small brass arachnoid. It wasn’t a spider per se, and most assuredly didn’t live or breathe, but it was no less marvellous than any of God’s creatures. Bloome set it down upon the ground. The bug was of his own design, with small barbs set into the spindly legs that allowed it to scale almost sheer surfaces. Being the size of a halfpenny the mechanism only allowed for a few hours life even when fully wound, but for as long as it crept along the arachnoid would digest all that it saw and heard, allowing him to listen to it later. The brass spider scuttled toward the glass house. Bloome watched it go. If anything of interest happened between now and the grand unveiling he would know about it. For a few moments at least, he was a life giver.

In his world, secrets had a way of coming out no matter how much fog tried to obfuscate them.

He walked back through the city at night, looking at the young girls lined up in the doorways of Piccadilly and at their mothers lurking behind them in the shadows. That mothers would sell their own daughters for a few coins disgusted him, it was exploitation at its very worst. Yet for every too-pretty girl there was a greedy mother hiding in the doorway behind her. It was an ugly interpretation of the ‘behind every great man’ notion. How great were these women?

Saddened by the depths humanity had sunk to, Josiah Bloome retired to his chambers in Pimlico, took a snifter of brandy and smoked a pipe of dry tobacco while puzzling over the glass house.

Come dawn he was no closer to unravelling the mystery, if indeed there was any mystery to be unravelled. He finished his morning ablutions and walked out into a city of smells. The street market was in full flow with fat-bellied merchants hawking their wares, most culled from Billingsgate or Spittlefields the day before and resold now with a penny tacked on to the price for their efforts. Had it been a hot summer day the street would have reeked of fish and pickles before noon, mercifully the low-lying fog had the effect of turning the cobbles into something approaching an ice house, preserving the catch of yesterday for a few hours longer.

He was a lonely man walking lonely streets.

He watched a bump and run, not remotely interested in bringing attention to the young pickpocket. The fat old stallholder would learn of his loss soon enough and finish the day tacking on two or three pennies to make up for it. Josiah was one of that breed of bleeding hearts who believed theft was driven by necessity. He wandered down toward the river, and then hailed a hansom cab to take him the rest of the way to Greenwich. He would be early but that didn’t matter. It would give him time to study the arachnoid. The ride was unpleasant, the iron-rimmed wheels seeming to hit every crater in the road as they clattered toward the glass house of the Mechanicum.

Josiah lay back in the leather banquette, folding his arms behind his head. The driver lashed the horse on with cries of “Hie!” and slowed her with an occasional “Whoa, girl!”

Josiah listened to the steady clip-clop of the hooves on the cobbles, letting the sound lull him. He spent the short ride thinking through what he knew: the Mechanicum, scholars of machine, cog and motor, were promising to show their ultimate creation to the world, but had chosen not to do it amid the fife and drum of the World Fair where so many other grand creations were being unveiled. Why? What could be their motivation? No doubt it bore some relationship to the long running argument with the Aesthetics.

He took out his time piece; all would be revealed in little over four hours.

Crowds were already in place, he saw, clambering out of the cab. He paid the driver, tipping him well in return for the promise to return to collect him after all of the pomp and circumstance was over. The driver, a hunch-backed, thin-faced, pock-marked man tipped the brim of his cap and assured Josiah he would meet him in the alleyway behind the observatory in six hours.

Josiah saw a few familiar faces in the crowd, Dorian Carruthers stood beside his latest fling, wrapped up against the elements and flapping his arms to keep the blood circulating. The woman on his arm was some elfin-faced doyen of the theatre world Bloome half-recognised. No doubt she was treading the West End boards in some production or other; unlike some, he didn’t keep up with the comings and goings in The Stage. He tried not to stare, but she was beautiful, and the way she met his gaze suggested she rather enjoyed the attention of his eyes.

“Fancy seeing you here, old man,” Carruthers said, stepping away from the actress to pump his hand.

“Seems like a whole lot of fuss for nothing,” Bloome said, looking beyond him at the glass construction: the Palace of Illusion.

“But isn’t that always the way? Still, one can’t help but wonder what the mad scientists have up their sleeve,” he cocked an eyebrow toward the building behind him. In daylight it was a spectacular thing to be sure, but after the mystery of the night, seeing it so bold and lit up seemed almost to diminish it. Beyond the throng Josiah saw a number of men identically costumed in immaculately tailored Savile Row suits, great coats and top hats, he counted thirteen in all: the gentlemen of the Mechanicum. It was no surprise that they would choose to match the precision of their machines with their dress. They were identical down to the smallest detail, taking the similarity to the extremes with the neat trim of their facial hair. He recognised a few of them from back in the day when they had called him brother, but others were new. Bloome wanted to laugh at the preposterousness of it all, but there was something almost fascistic about the regimented appearance that placed a chill in his heart. It was decidedly fascistic, in truth. There was no individuality or uniqueness to it, as though the scientists were saying look at us, we are all the same, built from the same building blocks.

A hush fell over the throng as one of the Magisters raised his hands. Behind him the Palace of Illusion opened. The London fog supplemented the magic perfectly, reinforcing Josiah’s notion that the Mechanicum had somehow conjured it for their own nefarious purposes.

“Welcome to our little show,” the man said, his voice carrying easily across the heads of the crowd. “Consider this a glimpse of the world to come. Please, enter two by two, side by side, so to speak, and gaze upon the wonders wrought by man’s hand alone. Beyond the glass door there is no God, there is only science!”

A quiet hubbub rippled through the crowd, the buzz infectious as it passed from one person to the next.

Josiah Bloome found himself pushing through the press of bodies toward the front, eager to see for himself the wonders the Magister promised. He saw them watching him and wondered if it was self-pity he saw reflected in their eyes, or self-loathing.

He took his turn in the queue, fearing they would not let him in as he was alone. The grim-faced Magister of the Mechanicum nodded and held out his hand to give him something as he stepped past him beneath the glass arch; the arachnoid. Its mechanisms had been unwound, whatever secrets it had learned erased as the components were undone. “Yours, I believe, Josiah?” He nodded, taking it and slipping the dead brass spider into his pocket. “All you had to do was ask if you wanted to know our secrets, brother. You know that we would hide nothing from you. We still grieve with you over sweet Annabel Leigh, and hold out the hope that your mind will heal enough for you to return to us. Six years is a long time to be in exile.”

“Thank you, Balthazar,” Josiah said, surprising himself because he found he actually meant it. It wasn’t some mindless platitude mouthed to move him beyond an awkward situation. Had the Magister forgotten that he had been cast out upon his return from war and his breakdown? Or had Josiah himself twisted the truth in his grief? Or was it all merely the first illusion of the glass house?

“I think you will find today’s unveiling most interesting,” the man said, and then moved on to greet the next soul in line.

He walked into the narrow crystal passage; it was lit though he could not see any light source, and curiously he could not see out. Some sort of translucent skin most likely coated the glass. It was a clever trick, nothing more. The corridor was lined with curious little display cabinets, in one, he saw a mechanical bird, its wings flapping with a crudely mechanical motion, in another there was an elaborate construction of the world and the planets rotating to their orbits on a vast clockwork driven frame. Nothing was overly impressive or worthy of the genius of the Mechanicum, though.

He studied the bird for a while, watching it pimp and preen. It was constructed from thousands of small brass cogs and gears, each interacting to produce the illusion of life. It moved awkwardly, the false motion of machine one of fits and starts as the bird hopped about. He watched as it flapped its wings once, twice, three times as though trying to take flight. The brass bird barely made it an inch off the ground before it tumbled rather ungraciously back down to its wooden perch. The bird was essentially nothing more than a larger version of the spider in his pocket but he heard the awe in the hushed voices of the people as they filed past him on to the next exhibit. The world was more impressive, but again it was less science than it was trickery. Indeed, under closer examination it was little more than an advanced orrery, not so different to the ones built seventy years before, by Pearson. Indeed it bore a striking resemblance to the Mechanism of Hipparchus of Nicaea, the pre-eminent astronomer so ruthlessly plagiarised by Newton. Though, of course, the stone mechanism of the astronomer itself was long since lost to antiquity, the Gentlemen did possess precise renditions of it in their vault, penned by none other than Plutarch. It was over two thousand years old. This considerably more modern version of the orrery rotated on a mechanism that mirrored the orbit of the earth around the sun, where other devices made the sun revolve around the earth. There were tiny mechanisms each individually responsible for the orbits of the sun and the moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the other planets. For all the geegaws of science built into it, it was nothing more than a refinement of Galileo’s universe.

Or so it seemed at first glance. Closer up, he saw that in fact a huge amount of detail had been added to create some kind of troposphere around the earth. He craned his neck to the side, trying to see behind to the gears and guts of the world itself to see how the Mechanicum had contrived to emulate the workings of the world. For a moment he fancied that if he stared intensely enough, closely enough, he might fall into it, down and down until he found a miniature replicant of himself staring into a globe, ad infinitum. It was a peculiar notion but it rather delighted him. For a moment he felt less like himself and more like a god.

After the corridor, he followed the line into a central auditorium. Wooden benches had been lined up in banked tiers around a raised dais. He took his place, finding a seat near the front. He wanted to be able to see whatever it was. He saw Carruthers and the actress take a place a few rows behind him and off to the left. The woman offered him a rueful smile when she saw him looking her way. Bloome nodded his head politely and looked away. The thirteen men of the Mechanicum filed in and took their places around the dais, and then, inconceivably the same thirteen men came into the room to stand behind them. This unexpected twist moved Josiah Bloome to the edge of his seat. He noticed a peculiar aroma in the air. It took him a moment to place it; some sort of pungent grease, like the sort used on axels and gears to keep them lubricated. Considering the clockwork bird and the map of the universe perhaps it wasn’t so out of place after all.

For a full minute neither Magister nor doppelganger moved.

Then, as one, the second set of men, the ones he had taken to be the duplicates, leaned forward and tore the faces from their counterparts. It was a moment of shocking brutality that had the women gathered in the crowd screaming and the men on their feet until they saw the bright shining mechanisms beneath, rotating and revolving and rocking on pivots and gear wheels. These men were not men at all, but perfect clockwork specimens. Quickly the Magisters undressed them, working in silence until thirteen men stood beside thirteen glittering mechanisms on the platform. It was something to see. The fear subsided, replaced by murmurs of curiosity and the occasional self-conscious giggle from the men in their top hats and tails, too proud to admit the sudden shedding of skin had put the fear of God into them.

The fear of God, Josiah thought, that was an apt way of putting it.

Balthazar moved to the centre of the stage and raised his hands, commanding the attention of the gathering. “Imagine a world where we are liberated from the chores of servitude. Think about it, no brothers or husbands forced beneath the ground to mine coal or metal ores, no wives or sisters forced to scrub and clean for the arrogant rich. This is a world to aspire to, is it not?”

There were murmurs of yes, and nodding heads. Josiah tried to imagine it in its almost Marxist purity. He shuddered. There was something distinctly disturbing about this sort of utopian claptrap.

Balthazar took a number of metal disks from his pocket and held them up for inspection. Josiah saw that irregularly shaped holes had been cut into the metal.

“The notion is simple,” Balthazar explained, “Each disk is coded with instructions the brain of the clockwork man interprets, allowing him to act just as we would in given circumstances. The machine can reproduce even the most complicated of movements based upon a number of servos and valves that work in tandem with the gears. You want him to prepare food, the coding is here,” he held up one of the metal disks, “all one needs to do is adapt each encoding for the environment in question, as each house is different and each dish is different, but once the disk is fashioned it will never wear out and you’ll have Bubble and Squeak to your heart’s content. And of course, there are a world of unpleasant tasks that can be taken out of our lives. The mechanisms can function beneath the filth of the Thames as happily as they can in the old tunnels beneath the city. And when they fail, all you need to do is wind up the mechanisms and they will work again, just as tirelessly as before. Bad air will never claim another life. No more will the miners need their Davey lamps and their canaries to tell them it is safe to dig on. No more will ship builders risk life and limb scrambling over rigging to weld in place some rivet. Steeplejacks will be grounded and labourers saved their back breaking work. Indeed, thanks to the Mechanicum we shall become a city of the fat and the drunk, because there will be nothing left for us to do save eat, drink and make merry!”

There was a ripple of laughter at this.

Josiah’s mind raced, grappling with the possibilities … but it wasn’t merely the clockwork construct that interested him, though he could see the benefit to everyone if some lump of brass could be put to use instead of people being forced to risk life and limb. No, there was a second aspect to the design that rekindled something he had thought long dead: hope.

He saw a possibility within the pretend flesh that had fooled them all.

He watched the rest of the demonstration avidly, and was on his feet by the end, applauding the genius of the men who had finally dethroned God and created this artificial life. A man born of brass and grease and the mind that would not wear out and die. It was the ultimate in reincarnation, simply wind him up and he would live again and again and again.

Others around him were in uproar, the good Christians shouting down Balthazar, decrying the arrogance of man as he stood before them with his arms spread wide in the parody of supplication, mirroring the classic crucifixion pose.

The last twist to the reveal came when the last man walked to centre stage; they all knew him, one of the Queen’s Artists, John William Waterhouse, famed for his portraits, and for his recreations of great literature … by his side walked ghosts. There was no mistaking the dead Prince Consort, Albert, nor the very much alive but inconceivably young Queen Victoria. Of course it could not have been Her Majesty any more than Albert could have been raised from the grave. Dead was still dead. Loved ones could not simply rise up.

Josiah peered toward the three of them, captivated by the odd scene. This, this was the genius of the Mechanicum, not some orreries and flapping brass birds. The Queen seemed to have regressed some thirty years or more, to the rather plain young woman she had been, whereas Albert looked hail, if not hearty, and certainly not thirty years dead. They moved with a curious almost staccato courtesy as they walked across the stage.

“My Lords, Ladies, and of course Gentlemen, you see here the culmination of years of study and the perfection of art—and more, a marriage between the Aesthetics and the Mechanicum to prove that there is beauty in lies,” he gestured toward the dead Prince Consort, who on cue inclined his head. The illusion was breathtakingly perfect. He was, to all intents and purposes, Victoria’s beloved Albert, just as the woman beside him was his Victoria as she had been all those years ago. The crowded auditorium was being treated to the spectre of love these royal ghosts famously shared. Josiah felt something stir within him and realised it was jealousy.

Only a man who had studied the brittle Prince could have rendered him so perfectly in … what? What did he use to recreate the flesh? Wax? Makeup?

“I give you the risen Prince Consort! This is our gift to the British People! All hail Victoria and Albert! All hail the Magisters of the Mechanicum and the Artisans of the Aesthetics!”

The shocked silence was broken by rapturous applause as people rose to their feet. It filled the glass auditorium, amplified by the acoustics of the chamber until the glass itself resonated with the harmonics of the clapping.

The Palace of Illusion.

The Glass House of Lies.

It all fell into place. It was the answer to all of his prayers.

He saw Balthazar looking at him, his smile warm. He nodded at the silent message that passed between them. The Magister was right; the unveiling had been of particular interest to him. He was shaking as he stood up, his applause every bit as awed and heartfelt as the applause from anyone else in the room, but more urgent.

He wanted to ask: “Why? Why have you done this?”

But he knew in science there was no why, no because, beyond the straightforward: “Because we can. Because it is there. Because we must. Because all flesh is dust, and to dust returns and we none of us dream of death.”

When all of the Pandemonium had died down and the good people had filed away back to their lives abuzz with the miracle of this mechanical resurrection, Josiah sought out the Magister. He stood beside his clockwork creations, greasing the mechanisms and preparing to box them away for shipping to the next show on their tour schedule, up North. The boxes were disturbingly similar to coffins, he thought, watching them crate up the false Queen.

“Did you enjoy our little performance, brother? A silly question, of course you did. We owe it all to you, of course,” Balthazar said. “It was your loss that set us to thinking: why must we always lose what we love? Why must we grieve? Science cannot grant immortality, the flesh is weak after all, the valves and pumps of the machine we inhabit are weak, fashioned to fail, but …” he let it hang there between them, unsaid. Imagine a world where the dead could walk on, every day, at our sides, in our lives as more than memory. All the talk had been of farming out the thankless chores to the automata, but the truth of it was far more sentimental.

“I must have one,” Josiah said simply.

“Of course, brother. She is yours, she always was and now, thanks to us, she always will be.”

O O O

Josiah Bloome provided the Queen’s artist with fifty sepia-tinged photographs of Annabel Leigh, catching her likeness from every angle. In some she was beautiful, in others plain. It depended upon the light and the skill of the photographer and, of course, her mood when the lens had been directed her way. He took the man on a guided tour of the places she loved, explaining what made each special to her in the hope that the man could add her essence to her beauty. It was a curious thing to do, of course, but he asked himself one simple question: what is a woman but the sum of her memories?

A system of gears and cogs and valves?

A system of organs and blood vessels, muscle and tendon?

Organic or inorganic, a machine was a machine.

He shuddered at the thought, needing to believe that there was some way the artist, in many ways one of the very greatest the Aesthetic Movement had to offer, could imbue his new Annabel Leigh with all that had been, all he knew and all they had shared.

It was a gift and a curse.

He visited the artist in his studio, surrounded by the oils and watercolours that would make him famous.

“You must tell no one of this,” he urged Waterhouse.

The artist, nodded, working his peculiar magic with the mixture.

“I am in earnest, man. You must never record in a journal or diary what you do for me now. There is something ungodly about it. I fear posterity would not look kindly upon us.”

“And yet you have me raise the dead,” the artist said.

“I miss her with all of my heart,” Josiah Bloome said. There was no other explanation he could offer.

The man worked in his house of wax, fashioning her skin for the mechanical frame to wear. The place had a smell to it that Bloome came to think of as life. The recreation was perfect in every way. The man was a genius. In his hands she was born again. He watched as her nose and her eyes, her lips and her smile were reborn. He wept to see her familiar features laid flat across the glass-topped work surface, and then rejoiced to see it shaped around the glass cranium of the machine. He held her hands as they were crafted, remembering each and every blemish and beauty mark and insisting they were rendered precisely, such were the perfection of the Art.

At nights, Josiah sat with Balthazar learning the secret of the metal disks and how to create commands that would complete the illusion of Annabel Leigh’s return to him.

He was hungry to learn, his mind healed for the first time in forever, focussed, driven. He slaved away, wracking his brain to remember each and every movement and gesture she possessed in life, so that he could give them to her in death. The tilt of her head, the curl of her lip, the impish delight in her eyes, he tortured himself with all of it, needing to believe that the machine could be more than that; needing to believe that the machine could be his Annabel Leigh.

And alone, as he always had to be when the day disappeared, he began to remember so many other things he thought lost forever. He curled up on the cold mattress, pulling the blanket up to his chin, aware that soon the emptiness that marked the other side of the bed would be gone. It was every bit as chilling as it was thrilling.

O O O

And then they brought her back to him, in a wooden box just as those others had taken her away from him. It was part of the ritual he had insisted upon. The return. It had to be the same as the departure. Instead of mourners he had the men of the Mechanicum walk at her side, celebrants bringing her back to him.

They carried the casket into the front room and laid it respectfully on the table, handing him the crowbar to break open the seals. He slipped it into the crack between lid and frame, and worked it open.

Looking down on her his heart broke.

She was perfect in every way.

But she appeared so utterly cold and dead in the casket, just lying there. They had placed a white rose on her chest. They had stuffed her coffin full of the most fragrant flowers when they buried her, to mask the corruption of the disease. This single flower on her return was meant to be a token of rebirth, the delicate white petals life, the denuded thorns their mastery over the bite of death.

The experience so horribly mirrored the last time he had gazed down upon her lifeless face. “Help me get her out of there,” Josiah begged, reaching in to cradle the clockwork woman in his arms. She was heavy, far heavier than she had been in life. They lifted Annabel Leigh out of the casket and stood her in the centre of the room, encouraging Josiah to inspect their craft, to be sure he was happy. “We can make adjustments,” they assured him, like Savile Row tailors.

He couldn’t bear to look at her.

“We have fashioned a number of disks according to your instructions, all you need to do is wind the mechanism for the first time and insert the option of your choice.”

“I just want the company,” he said, standing beside the window out into the world. His fingernails dug into the wainscoting of the sill. “You can leave us now, please. How much do I owe you?”

“This is our gift to you,” Balthazar assured him. “There should be no money between friends. If we can bring you happiness that is reward enough.”

“Thank you,” Josiah said, though what they called a gift already felt like a curse. Still he could not bear to look at her in the middle of the room. It was a blessing that she was mute. To hear her would have been too much. It was enough to feel her behind him, that almost but not quite familiar presence.

The Magisters left him alone with his new Annabel Leigh. “The mechanism will last for twelve hours,” Balthazar explained, “before it will need to be wound again.”

She had a life of only twelve hours.

When the front door closed behind them Josiah Bloome finally turned away from the window.

He looked at her, marvelling at Waterhouse’s skill. She was exactly as he remembered, though of course when he talked to her and fussed around her she could not answer him. The only words were in his memory, but better that than all of her living there.

He slipped one of the disks into the slot at the back of her neck and slowly, tenderly, wound the mechanism. It was almost erotic. There was something heady and powerful about his touch bringing life. She walked away from him and sat in the chair beside the window, the failing light adding a golden aspect to her wax flesh as she simply sat, content to soak up the heat. Josiah had seen Annabel Leigh in the same seat more times than he could remember. Sometimes she would knit, other times she would read one of those Penny Dreadfuls and gasp at something on the page, but most often she would simply sit, tilt her head back and savour the sun’s kiss.

For a moment it was as though she had never gone.

He sat down beside her and told his Annabel Leigh everything she had missed over the six years she had been lost to him.

He changed the disk so that she might walk through to the kitchen to make tea, her favourite porcelain laid out precisely so, so that every movement she made was inch perfect. There wasn’t a rattle as she filled the tea pot and carried the tray through to library. They sat together a while in silence, Josiah pretending to drink, Annabel Leigh not. He thought about taking her outside, it had been so long since they had gone for a long stroll through Hyde Park in the rain, and there was nothing more romantic than that; walking side by side, looking up to catch the fat raindrops with their open mouths and laughing.

Tomorrow, perhaps. After all, they had a new life time to share together. There was no hurry to do it all again in a single day.

He lost all track of time, revelling in having her back. An hour before dawn he noticed her beginning to slow, her movements becoming jerky and imprecise as the mechanism at her heart wore down. It was like watching her die, slowly and painfully.

Twelve hours.

It brought it all back to him, the ravages of the Cholera, the dread he had felt knowing death would come to steal her away from him. All of it, brought back to him in the twelfth hour as he sat alone in the front room.

“Be careful what you wish for,” he told the wax face of his love, his heart breaking. There was no distance this time, no shock or protection. She was there, in front of him, and he could see the gears losing their tension and the half-life draining out of her.

He sat alone because he couldn’t bear to watch the final hour.

He picked up his precious Annabel Leigh and carried her to the cupboard beneath the stairs, hiding her away so that he could grieve alone. Death was not something he wanted to share with her. He could not face the grief of losing her again and again and again. It did not matter that this time all Josiah Bloome had to do was wind the mechanism to bring her back. All that meant was that he could re-experience the pain of losing her all over again.

He thought of lying beside her in bed, sleeping only to wake to her cold body, the life wound down to nothing. It chilled him to the core. Having to lean over and wind life back into her stiff limbs, to bring her back again and again from beyond the mortal coil. Who could have known that gears and cogs could so easily become the mechanisms of grief?

There was no beauty in lies, he thought, looking at the face of the woman he loved, at the ghost he had brought so hungrily into his own house, and slowly losing his mind as day after day he lost the one thing he had truly loved in life. To lose her once was tragic, to lose her every day, torture. No, there was no beauty, there was only pain. All the horrors of war paled beside the repeated grief he felt watching his wife die every day, like clockwork.

***

Ashes

When I was twenty-seven I tried to imagine what it would be like to be fifty, to have lived through the best part of my life, and the worst, and made it out on the other side. What single piece of advice would this hypothetical time traveling me impart if he could? It’s a tough question to ask given that you’ve not actually lived your life yet, but I decided on two words: be brave. They felt right. I had them tattooed over my heart.

I like to think it made all the difference.

Life up until then had been pretty much a little bit of this, a little bit of that, same as it is for most people. I’d had my share of missed opportunities, of course, hence the “be brave” motto. There was Sasha, who sat beside me from the autumn of 1980 until the summer of 1983, for one. Miss Bennett’s grand scheme had been no more complicated than boy-girl-boy-girl to keep the class quiet. She hadn’t banked on the poet in twelve-year-old-me’s soul, or my inability to let him out. Then there was Rachel. I fell for her. Down a flight of stairs in a guest house in Scarborough. It wasn’t graceful. I have no idea if it hurt, fear at the sight of this beautiful girl smiling at the top of the staircase wiped out all memory of pain.

Actually, I’ve done the whole falling thing more than once. There was this one girl, back at university, must have been around 1989, I guess. It was snowing. I was wearing cowboy boots. I saw her, she smiled, and I ended up flat on my back between her legs. It wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds. Much laughter ensued, most of it hers at my expense. At lunchtime in the refectory I managed to slip again because someone had dragged the outdoors inside. This time my dinner tray went sailing through the air in an arc that was almost as graceful as the swan-dive my body was taking. Who stood directly in the line of fire? You guessed it, the girl. She managed to avoid my pie and mash. I mumbled something about not usually being so clumsy and scuttled away cursing my fancy new cowboy boots. The universe was trying to tell me something. That night I went to a really cramped bar down on the Quayside, the Crown Posada, with a few of the lads. The Crown was a wonderfully narrow galley-style bar, no music, real ale on tap and packed with pretentious students talking oh-so-earnestly about nothing. When it was my round I took up position at the bar, ordered three pints of whatever was flat, thick, and warm that day, and turned around too quickly, sending those three pints of flat, thick, and warm all over the same decidedly unamused girl. She muttered something along the lines of: “Oh, for fuck’s sake! Watch what you’re doing!” and then saw it was me.

A braver man might have realized it was the universe trying to tell us something. A braver man might have acted upon it, managed a smile, said something witty and stumbled—quite literally—into the preordained relationship.

Not me.

I said, “Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I swear you’ll never see me again.” And beat a hasty retreat.

See what I mean about being brave?

Then there was Claire, my best friend’s sister, who came with us to watch the ice hockey—though actually it was more like Mortal Combat to be honest—and made countless excuses to be the one to drive me an hour out of her way home so we could spend time together just chatting and had no idea I was hopeless lost around her. I didn’t mention, did I? 1983-86 was exclusively male territory, posh private all boys school. Congratulations to the private education system for turning out yet another dysfunctional sixteen year old incapable of looking a girl in the eye … never mind talking to her like, oh I don’t know, a human being. The idea of sitting alone in a car with a girl I fancied for an hour at least two or three times a week was enough to turn me into a babbling wreck of a human being. If she’d once, just once, smiled my way I think I would have died and gone—like the monkey in the song playing on the car stereo—to heaven. Probably kicking and screaming as my panicked reaction caused her to drive straight off the road and into the cruel sea.

But I wasn’t brave and she didn’t save my soul and somehow I made it to twenty-seven thinking something wonderful was supposed to happen with my life, so why wasn’t it?

I decided to take matters into my own hands. I went to a seedy tattoo parlor on the Westgate Road, halfway up the hill hidden away between the pawnshops and the second-hand stores, and had a huge shaven-headed brute stepped straight out of a Tom of Finland calendar ink the words “be brave” over my heart.

It was as I was walking out of that shithole that I first saw Isla Durovich.

She took my breath away.

I’d always thought that was the biggest cliché in the book, but there she was, this woman looking in the window of a pet store at one of the Capuchin monkeys hanging upside down by its tail, and I couldn’t breathe.

I put my right hand over the wound where Tom of Finland had inked those words to live by, and thought: it’s now or never. “Be brave,” I told myself, and crossed the street into what was supposed to have been the rest of my life.

And it would have been, if …

If wishes were fishes, as my gran used to say, beggars would ride. She never could keep her aphorisms straight.

Instead of being forever it was four years, six months, two days, fifteen hours and thirty minutes. And then the car hit her and I was robbed of my happily ever after. Sometimes the fairy tales suck. The whole idea that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all is rubbish. The Isla-shaped hole in the rest of my life was unbearable. I was numb. I drank even though I don’t drink. It didn’t help. I didn’t leave the house. I closed the curtains and hid in the dark. It didn’t help. I looked at the packing list on the table, the last thing she’d written, all the things we were going to need for the honeymoon. It didn’t help. I listened to her voice on the answerphone. Hearing her say: “You know what to do,” just hurt. I lay on her side of the bed, trying to absorb her essence as though she might have left more than just an impression in the wrinkled sheets. I breathed in her fragrances, the shampoos, perfumes, even the musty old pages of her favorite books, obscure paperbacks she’d picked up at jumble sales and charity shops, all second-hand because, she liked to pretend, that meant they’d been loved and loved so much someone had wanted to share them with the world.

We’d mapped out our honeymoon from those old books: Eurostar from London through the tunnel to Paris, just because we’d always wanted to go through the tunnel. The train from Paris to Prague. Prague to Vienna down through the mountains to Venice. Venice on to Rome, then up to this little place on the Garda Lake. We were going to do it properly, four weeks of traveling. A full moon’s worth of exploring, living, and to hell with real life.

And just like that, the whole “be brave” thing became so much harder. Sometimes I think God punishes us by answering our prayers. I remember lying in bed, looking at Isla sleeping beside me, and just thinking I wanted this moment to last forever. I wanted the world to stop and it did, with a knock on the door and two sombre looking policemen with their hats in their hands. It was the hat in the hands that did it. That only ever means one thing. The older of the two asked if I was me, and then if they could come inside. Isla was a schoolteacher. Was. That’s still stupidly hard to say. It’s so … past tense. Final. I don’t like finality in words anymore. I like words that are open and that at least allow for some kind of hope, like the word yet. Yet is a powerful word. It’s a good one.

Kids had been playing in the yard during lunch when the ice cream man drove tantalizingly close to the gates. One of the grade three’s had wriggled through the gate and wandered across the road, following the Pied Piper of Ice Cream’s call. Isla had been on playground duty. She’d run into the road to save the girl and taken most of the impact while the girl had walked away with a few bruises. The policeman had called it a small mercy. It wasn’t. Not really. I didn’t get any comfort out of knowing the love of my life had died saving some kid I didn’t know or care about. That wasn’t mercy to me.

The funeral was on the day we were supposed to be married, and all I can remember is thinking it should have been raining.

I put a rose on her coffin and went home.

But it didn’t feel like home anymore. Home is where the heart is, and mine was broken and it felt like it would be that way forever. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t there, though that was a huge part of it, it was the part of me that she’d taken away; that was the worst. It’s hard to explain, but I was a better version of myself when Isla was around.

The last present she’d ever given me was still on the table beside the packing list and tickets; a vintage Omega watch. It was Speedmaster, the same model that Buzz Aldrin had worn when he took the second ‘giant step’ behind Neil Armstrong. The first watch on the moon. Not that this one had been into space, of course. Well, I assume it hadn’t. Aldrin’s had disappeared on its way to the Smithsonian, but I’m pretty sure Isla wasn’t that connected.

I set the time and put it on.

I couldn’t tell you why I did it, but I picked up her list and started randomly stuffing things into a backpack.

I was halfway to the station before I realized I actually intended to go on my honeymoon.

I took some battered old paperbacks with me, and a few fun little trinkets, things that were absolutely her, quirky little things that were like little pieces of her soul. If it couldn’t be a honeymoon then it could be a pilgrimage. I’d take those parts of Isla to all of the places we’d been meant to visit together and bury them at the different landmarks we’d talked about.

It was my version of scattering her ashes.

First stop, Paris.

There’s the obvious attractions, sure: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Sacré-Cœur, the Champs-Élysées, Pont Neuf, and Notre Dame. But Paris for Isla would always be Les Pont des Arts because of Julio Cortázar’s book Rayuela. I only knew it because of that scene in Amélie where Audrey Tautou decided to do secretly good deeds for those who deserved it. Isla had made me promise to put a padlock on the bridge and throw the key into the Seine like lovers do. There’s something wonderfully romantic about thinking of something of ours locked there forever, even if it was the padlock from the suitcase she wouldn’t need anymore.

I fastened it in place and threw the key as far and as hard as I could into the river below.

The lights of Paris illuminated the wonderful dichotomy of the city; on one side of me the chaos of the medieval city, all angles and shadows, and on the other the serenity of the Louvre, so calm and so cultured. I savored the feel of the wind on my face and wondered what else there was left to do here. We had three days booked in Paris, but I was done here. I’d fastened our padlock and bound us to the city forever. I just wanted to move on to Prague and show Isla the next place on our journey.

I walked, head down, a tired, beaten man, shuffling through the same streets countless tired, beaten Parisian feet had shuffled through during the Second World War, looking for an entrance to the Metro.

There was a wonderful piece of pavement art chalked onto the path beside the entrance. It looked like a man struggling through a storm, his umbrella turned inside out while the rain began to wash him away as though he’d never been there. I dropped a handful of coins into the artist’s hat and went down for the train. I checked my watch. It had been losing time, but I’d never thought about getting it fixed. Nothing too drastic, maybe twenty seconds an hour, but that made eight minutes a day, or fifty-six minutes a week. In a month I’d lose a little over four hours, which meant something like two days over the course of a year. It was funny how time could just fritter away because a spring was coiled a little too loosely.

An old couple sat huddled up so close together they might have been Siamese twins. The woman had a yellow Kodak envelope in her hands and was thumbing through pictures. She tutted in that wonderfully French way when I sat down beside them and went back to her photographs, occasionally shrugging oh so expressively.

Her fingers fastened on one. She pulled it out of the pack and then turned to her husband, tapping it. They looked at the photograph together, and then she looked at me and said, “Est-cevous? ilest, n’est-ce pas?”

I felt like an idiot. My French didn’t go beyond, “Je m’appelle Steve,” and I wasn’t one hundred percent on how to say that. I shrugged in a much less expressive manner and said, “I’m sorry?”

“English?”

I nodded.

She smiled, slightly. “It’s you, isn’t it?” She said, holding the photograph out for me to look at.

It was.

Or more accurately it was me and Isla. It took me a moment to realize when it had been snapped—about nine months ago. We’d taken shelter under the bandstand at Hyde Park, because the rain was pouring down. We’d huddled up close and watched the swans while Isla had told me how swans mate for life and I’d asked her to marry me. I smiled. I couldn’t quite believe that some complete stranger waiting for a train on the Parisian underground had a photo of one of the happiest moments of my life. I could see it all in my head, me going down on one knee, her giggling, then putting her hand to her mouth when she realized I was serious, and the way she couldn’t stop saying yes.

I nodded. “Yes. Yes, it’s me. How did you get this?”

The old woman smiled, but it was the man who answered. “That is where Isuelt agreed to be my wife,” he said with a smile, obviously remembering the day. And I thought again just how much I missed the woman I never got to marry. All I wanted to do was grow old with her, like these two. “The war was over, and we were young, reckless and very much in love. I convinced her to come with me to England, and it was the start of a lifetime together. We went back for the first time last year, and it seemed only right we should take a photograph of the place where it all began.”

“I was asking Isla—my girlfriend—to marry me,” I said, pointing at the photograph.

“We know,” the old woman said. “We stood in the rain watching you. Where is she?”

And there it was, the question I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want to rob this lovely old couple of their happy memory, but I didn’t know how to deflect the question either, so I said, “She couldn’t make the trip.”

“Ah, that’s a shame.”

“This is going to sound strange, but would it be possible to keep this?” I asked, reluctant to let go of the photograph.

“Oh, of course, of course. We’ve got the negatives, we can easily make another copy. You should have it. It’s the start of your life, after all,” the old man said.

“Thank you so much.” I put the picture in my pocket.

A few minutes later the train rolled in and we said our goodbyes.

I can’t begin to explain how I felt. It was as though they’d given me a part of my life back that I’d lost forever. Now it wasn’t just my memory. I’ve always believed that the more people who remember something the more real it is. Now, with three of us to remember, that day in Hyde Park was real again.

Next stop, Prague, guided by May, a battered collection of poetry by Karel Hynek Mácha. The train was cramped and hot and sweaty, filled with backpackers. I’d booked a private compartment which I ended up sharing with half a dozen young students broken up for the summer and looking to get drunk and lucky in one of Europe’s party cities. The only other “grown-up” in our carriage was a businessman who didn’t like flying. I know that because he said it at least five times in three hours. He kept telling the kids how they were fifteen years too late and how Prague had been the city to visit after the Gentle Revolution. He leaned over toward me and said, “It’s the closest we’ll ever come to the spirit of the Sixties,” conspiratorially. “Free love, if you know what I mean? Especially as a Westerner. We were like gods back then.” I didn’t say much to them, just leaned against the side of the compartment with my head resting against the window reading through the pages of the poems. I made it to the line about the lover weeping, and took it as an order.

There were two places in Prague I wanted to visit, a restaurant we’d always talked about going to, Svata Klara, which wasn’t so much a restaurant as it was a treasure trove of history trapped in a seventeenth century wine cellar, and of course the Charles Bridge at midnight. I booked myself into the hotel, which had been an old Dominican monastery in a previous life, and then went out for a walk, wondering if I would somehow stumble upon Mácha’s so-called Alley of Sighs, the white chapel or the execution hill he wrote so hauntingly about. I knew the poem inside out now. Reading nothing but it for six hours will do that to a man.

The Old Town center of Prague is like another world—a place out of time. Of course there are all the touristy bits you’d expect, the over-priced coffees thanks to the invasion of Starbucks, and the locals have really embraced the ideals of capitalism to the point that what’s theirs is theirs, and what’s mine is theirs seems to be the maxim of the day. Some of it, like the Jewish cemetery built on top of a row of shops, made me smile at the quirkiness of it, right up until I saw just how many gravestones were crammed into that tiny space. I started to think about what it really meant. Then there were other parts where the wealth of the city is on display with the rows of shop windows filled with Hermes, Dolce, Versace, and Bulgari. When you thought about the beggars on their knees two streets away it was kind of sickening, really, but that was the modern world all over.

I walked around for a couple of hours. That was all it took for me to stumble on the underbelly to the city.

Walking down Karlova, this wonderful Brothers Grimm kind of street that leads toward the Charles Bridge, I was confronted by a naked woman doing her best to walk seductively down the middle of the cobbled path. She had that vaguely stoned look to her brown eyes. And yes, I was looking at them; it was the only place I felt safe to look. She seemed to be finding it increasingly difficult to walk—never mind seductively—in heels without breaking her neck.

A fat man with greased-back hair and a thick gold chain around his neck that made him look like something out of a Seventies Sexploitation movie was ten steps in front of her, walking backwards, and filming the looks of passersby for his website and encouraging her to bend and twist, dip a little thigh, flash a smile, be coy, and cover up, open up.

Somewhere in the distance a brass band struck up the opening chords of the Indiana Jones theme tune. It couldn’t have been more surreal, or more perfect.

It was nowhere near midnight and the bridge was on the other side of the tramlines, less than a minute’s walk. I could see the distinctive tower over the rooftops. I decided to check it out while the puppeteers and artists were plying their trade, so I waited for the old red tramcar to pass, and then joined the crowd moving toward the bridge.

With the sun going down, the tower’s arch had transformed into a gothic picture frame, and inside it I could see the silhouette of the black castle and skyline on the other side of the river. I had to squint to see any of it clearly. I couldn’t help but smile. A guy was on his knees acting out some sort of passion play with puppets of a cloven-hooved George W. and a wild-haired Saddam with a uni-brow fit to launch a thousand nightmarish ships. Who said political satire had to be cutting edge?

The first thing that caught my eye was the terrible restoration job. They’d obviously tried to purge two hundred years worth of soot from parts of the old bridge, and left some of the gold on the statues looking like it had come out of a Christmas cracker. Tourists climbed up onto the wall to have their photographs taken with the various saints and patron saints that lined the bridge. I walked toward the middle and St. Christopher; after all, I was a traveler. I didn’t realize I had been clutching Isla’s medallion until I was standing on the wall, eye-to-eye with the statue. I hung her St. Christopher from the fingertips of the baby Jesus on the saint’s shoulder. I recited a couple of lines from Mácha as a sort of prayer, and clambered back down before anyone could complain about the crazy tourist hanging off their national treasure.

As I turned, I saw a painting that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was of a couple standing outside of a shop window, meeting for the first time. The hope in their eyes was agonizing. I know, because it was the hope in my eyes the painter had captured. I couldn’t see if the same look of love was in Isla’s eyes because her head was tilted just slightly away as she looked into the window. All I could think was “be brave” as I walked up to the artist. He sat beside his easel, eating a meat pie with his hands.

“This painting, how did you see this?” I asked, pointing an accusing finger at the shop on the Westgate Road.

He looked up at me like I was mad.

I was beginning to think I was.

“I mean, this picture, that very minute, that’s the most important minute of my life, what’s it doing in one of your paintings?”

He continued to look at me, and then a slow smile spread across his lips as he recognized me. “It’s you,” he said.

I nodded.

“Oh, my God, it’s you.” He jumped up, dropping his meat pie and grabbing my hand to pump it. “I’m so pleased to meet you! You have no idea!”

I really didn’t.

I felt like a character in some surreal black and white art house movie.

Once was coincidence, but twice, what was that? It certainly wasn’t coincidence.

“I don’t understand what’s happening here.”

“It’s a funny story,” he promised, but I doubted it. “I was away from home, living in this shitty bedsit, when my girlfriend phoned me to tell me she was pregnant … it was the happiest moment of my life,” he said, still grinning. I have to admit it, his grin was infectious. I wanted to share his happiness. “I just went to the window and took a photograph of the world outside. I wanted to remember that exact moment, all of it, exactly how it happened. I always wondered what was happening down there.”

“It was the happiest moment of my life, too,” I said, thinking about it all over again. Thinking about how it felt to swallow my fear and walk across the street and say: hi, I’m Steve, I’m hoping you’ll fall in love with me. “I was finally being brave. I saw this woman, and I just knew I had to walk over there and tell her she was going to be the love of my life.”

“That’s wonderful! What happened? Did she fall in love with you? Tell me she fell in love with you! That would be perfect; two happily ever afters entwined in a single painting. I could call it four hearts. That’s a great name for a painting. Four hearts.”

I nodded. “She did.” I didn’t realize I was crying until he asked me what was wrong. “This was supposed to be our honeymoon,” I said. I didn’t say anything else; I let him read between the lines.

There was a moment in which the silence between our heartbeats was deafening, and then the painter understood the implications of the word supposed, and said, “Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I … what happened? Can I ask?”

“She saved someone’s life,” I said, “but no one saved hers.”

I really was crying now, not just a single tear. The painter sat me down on the tarpaulin he’d laid out on the ground. I told him what I was doing, my pilgrimage, and about the old couple I’d met in Paris a few days ago. I don’t know how long I sat there. I couldn’t take my eyes off the paining. By the time I stopped looking at it, it was past midnight and the tourists had gone home.

“It seems to me this journey of yours is being steered, my friend. Call it fate, call it chance, you were meant to be here, tonight, because you needed to be here. I want you to have this,” he said, taking the painting off the easel.

“I can’t … let me give you something for it.”

He shook his head, “You already did, believe me. Just by being there you gave me part of your life and made it such an important part of mine. Let me give it back to you.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

I held the painting like it was the most precious thing in the world as I walked back to my room in the old Dominican monastery, and hung it on the wall.

I lay in my bed looking up at the painting of when I meet Isla Durovich for the first time. Four hearts.

But there were only three of them now.

At three-fifteen the next morning my watch stopped and I couldn’t get it going again. It was only a small thing, but it felt like the greatest tragedy in the entire world. I cradled it in my hands like a dying child, willing it to tick. It didn’t.

I’d seen a place in the Jewish Quarter called Old Watches. It was a tiny antique place with a watchmaker who looked like a gnome with mad whiskers and madder eyes. I set out at first light. I couldn’t sleep. I needed to get it fixed. I couldn’t bring Isla back, but I could fix this. It’s funny how little things become obsessions. I didn’t care about my train to Vienna, I wasn’t leaving until my moon landing watch was keeping good time.

The morning air was brisk. There was rain in the air. Locals bustled toward the underground station, Staroměstská. It was too early for the shops; they were all boarded up or shuttered. It felt like I was seeing a secret part of the city, like watching a lover in bed, drowsy and not quite ready to face the world. I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d seen the watch shop, somewhere close to the old Jewish cemetery and the synagogues, so I just wandered around for a while drinking in the architecture of dreams and desires that had fired those imaginations oh so long ago, marveling at just how beautiful the buildings were and wondering—not for the first time—what future generations would think of the modern monstrosities we left as our legacy with the ugly but functional lines.

The shop was open.

There must have been ten thousand watches and parts of watches in the window, all of them at least fifty years old, most a lot older, all of the working parts ticking away to different rhythms. I opened the door. A little bell rang. There was no room inside—there was a one-foot square space in front of the watchmaker’s counter and the rest of the shop was taken up by mechanisms. He looked up from the timepiece he had been tinkering with and waggled his bushy eyebrows. There where tiny hairsprings and mainsprings and little coils scattered across the counter, some of them almost microscopic.

“What can I do for you, young man?” He asked, in perfect English. I hadn’t been expecting that. I’d been all primed for five minutes of miming to get my point across.

I took my watch off and put it on the counter between us.

“It stopped last night and I can’t get it going again.”

“Well, let’s have a look at it, shall we?” He studied it, reached into one of the drawers beneath the counter and brought out a little tool to screw the back off it. He put a jeweler’s monocle in his eye. Using a fine pin he teased the mechanism, tutting like a mechanic about to tell me he could fix my car, but it was going to cost a lot because the gear box was shot, the manifold was blown, the gaskets were knackered, and a whole bunch of other technical terms that made no sense whatsoever to me was wrong with it. “I see what the problem is,” he said. I was glad he could, because I couldn’t.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s broken.” He grinned at me. “But don’t worry, I can fix it. I assume you want me to fix it?”

“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “How much will it cost?”

“For you? Nothing, Steve,” he said, taking the monocle out.

“You know my name? How?”

“I know all my customers’ names, Steve. It’s just good business.”

“Yeah, right, sure, but how do you know my name?”

“I make it my business to. We’re all cogs, my friend; we’re all gears in the guts of the world. We tick, we tock, our orbits occasionally draw us close to one and other, though more often than not they take us away.”

“Have we met before?”

He inclined his head. “Maybe. You have one of those faces. Now, let’s see about fixing this, shall we? Been losing a lot of time, has it? The spring’s loose. I should probably replace it, but I’m not sure you want me to do that.”

“Why not? I’m sorry, I don’t really understand, if you need to replace the spring to make the watch work again, why wouldn’t I want you to do that?”

“Because of the time that’s stored up inside it. Change the spring and it’s gone forever.”

I shook my head.

“Gone?”

“Yep, gone, vanished, spent, left behind, lived through, no more, a memory.”

“But that’s what happens. Time passes.”

“Oh you know so much do you? So how come you didn’t notice your watch was saving time?”

“It wasn’t, it was losing time.”

“Losing, saving, you speak like you don’t understand the difference,” the watchmaker said, sniffing. He popped the lid back on and pushed the watch into the middle of the counter between us. “It’s all in there, all of that saved time.”

I looked at it.

It wasn’t ticking.

“You didn’t fix it?”

“Did you see me fix it?”

“No.”

“Then I didn’t fix it. I don’t think you want me to fix it. After all, there are two whole days stored in there. That’s a lot of time to throw away. It’s up to you, but I’d think long and hard about it. Two days. What’s happened to you over the last couple of days, and more importantly, are you ready to give it up?”

What had happened to me? I’d met an old couple who’d reminded me of just how incredible it felt when Isla said yes, and I’d met a painter who had captured the single most important moment of my life. In less than forty-eight hours they’d given me back two of the most precious memories of Isla. There was no way in a million years I’d give that up; but it wasn’t as though I’d just forget them either. They were etched on my soul.

“Forty-eight hours,” he said again. He picked up the watch, and reset the time, rolling the hands back. “Think about it.”

I took the old moon landing watch off him. I could feel the gentle tick of the hands moving. I put it on. “Thank you,” I said, and stepped out of the cramped little shop onto the Parisian street. I felt the padlock in my pocket. I wanted to go to be Les Pont des Arts because of Julio Cortázar’s book Rayuela. Isla and I had joked about fastening a padlock to the bridge like lovers do. I knew what was going to happen. I’d throw the key into the river then walk down to the subway and meet an old couple looking at a photograph of Isla and me, and I’d be as happy and sad as I could remember ever being, both at the same time. Then I’d move on to Prague to scatter another one of her ashes, her St. Christopher.

I looked at the watch Isla’d given me for my birthday. It was losing time. No. It was saving time. There was a difference. It was saving a little bit every hour until it was full. Then it would stop. And when it stopped, I’d go to a little watchmaker’s shop in the Jewish quarter of Prague, and he’d say, “I know all my customers’ names, Steve. It’s just good business.” This time I’d know how he knew my name, because we’d done this dance before.

If he gave me that choice again, fixing it, or using it, I’d keep on using it until I was ready to go on scattering the rest of Isla Durovich’s ashes in Vienna—on a picnic blanket on the green in Bellevue Höhe overlooking the entire city—and Venice—on the Grand Canal—then Rome—taking in the breathtaking view of the Eternal City from Gianicolo Hill—and finally that little lake house in Garda that was just us, our little dream house.

And when I was ready, I’d go on to the third battered paperback in my bag, but not yet, and I couldn’t go back four years, six months, four days, thirteen hours, and fifteen minutes to the moment I’d had Tom of Finland tattoo “be brave” over my heart, and live it all again, because forty-eight hours was forty-eight hours. The watch couldn’t save any more time. Not in the year I’d had it.

But I didn’t need to go back. As tempting as it was to wish I could save the child myself, or go back to that day we first met and be brave all over again, I couldn’t change things. This was the way it had to be.

All I needed to do was to let him rewind the watch on all of its saved time, and step out of his shop onto the moonlit Parisian streets. There would always be an old couple waiting for me on the platform with their Kodak moments, and a painter on a bridge tomorrow desperate to share the happiest moment of his life with me.

That was Isla’s last gift to me, seconds saved here and there from our last year together that all added up to time to remember her.

***

The Hollow Earth

The woman might have been beautiful, once. It was impossible to tell because the flickering blue blush of the gaslight cast a pall of sickness across her face. The harsh light picked out the shadows of her pocked skin, flaunting her imperfections. Whatever she might have been, she was not beautiful now.

She carried a basket of wilting flowers. The wet stems nestled against the pearly ruffles of her blouse leaving a grimy circle of damp beneath the swell of her left breast.

The man who called himself Nathaniel Seth smiled at her pantomime of propriety as she adjusted the lie of her bustle on her generous hips and teased the set of her porter’s knot. It was all a show, an elaborate charade to mask the fact that she was loitering on the corner of Bedford Square.

A flower girl.

A prostitute by any other name.

Where other girls made for the warmth of the palatial Alhambra down in Leicester Square or the dancing rooms of the East End where the music of desire filled the snuggeries and lust parted the amorous from their shillings, this one waited out the night on a dimly lit corner, clinging to the dark places she knew well.

She listened hungrily to the sounds of the night, the clatter of horses’ hooves sparking on distant cobbles, the cries of the street hawkers and below them, the soft feet of the young cadgers running back to their nests to share whatever spoils their light fingers had plucked.

He cursed his luck, willing her silently to move on, find another perch or slip into a Hansom Cab and disappear into the cloying smog.

He could smell her perfumes, wantonly applied to douse the reek of those other wanton fragrances that clung to her ample flesh. It was cloyingly sweet.

At that moment the world had such small horizons: it spanned from the mouth of the Square to the shadowy steps of the British Museum. He opened his hand, stretching the stiffness out of his fingers. His pocket-watch ticked against his breastbone. He counted the movements, inhaling and exhaling shallowly with every third one, twenty breaths in a full minute of watching the woman.

She showed no sign of leaving.

She was, he thought, looking for someone. An expected rendezvous, perhaps? A pre-arranged tryst? Or business? He listened intently for another set of footsteps, the slow measured confidence of a tallyman come to collect her bawd’s cut of the night’s take.

He cracked his knuckles one at a time and stepped out of the sheltering obscurity of the hanging gardens, pushing back the tears of a weeping willow. The melancholy leaves fell across his face, leaving smears of pollen on his lapel like poisonous kisses. The metal tip of his cane marked each step precisely as he crossed the cobbles toward the waiting woman, the harsh sound hanging in the air.

Halfway across the square he heard the first chime of midnight from St. Giles’ church. It was taken up a moment later by the great bells of St. Pancras and St. Luke’s, and before the first chime had stopped resonating, by The Holy Trinity out by Lincoln’s Fields. The chimes were like a ripple of sound spreading out across the city. He paused for a moment, to listen to them. They were not an unpleasant last thing to hear …

He smiled warmly, imagining himself in her eyes: tall, debonair, a dashing city gent both educated and cultured and a long way from his element, walking a lonely road at night, a fool in other words, waiting to be parted from his money. The tails of his Churchill topcoat swirled around his ankles like a clutch of yapping terriers. The cut of his suit was expensive, the threads exquisite, imported from the Far East. Seeing her half-turn, half-smile, he inclined his head and tapped the silver wolf’s head of his cane to the brim of his silk plush Waverley and returned her smile.

He decided then that he would be merciful. It was curious how a simple thing like her smile could buy even that small relief from him. On another night, he knew, that same smile could just as easily have been reason enough for him to choke the life out of her with her own sex-stinking garter. But tonight it saved her pain.

She made to offer one of the rather dejected looking blooms from her basket but a wry smile and a slight shake of the head stayed her hand.

The light was indeed deceptive. Up close, stripped of the mask of shadows and the blush of youth betrayed itself. She could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen but already the curse of old London town had stripped away so much of her life. He could not give back her youth but he could bring an end to the relentless slide into decay her flesh was on. He had heard it said that eight years was the best a flower girl could hope to last on the streets. That was a sorry state of affairs. As the looks began to slide so the coin would dry up. Desperation would see to the rest. It was a devil’s deal if ever there were one.

She curtseyed, lowering her eyes at his intent inspection, the blush in her cheeks was a lie painted on in-expertly with a thick cake of make-up.

In the distance came a sad wailing strand of music, whisper-thin on the chill air. It reminded him of the life all around, and the countless eyes that could by chance glance the wrong way as he did for the flower girl.

“It’s a cold night to be out alone, my dear,” he said, sketching a slight bow.

She had bad teeth, he saw, as she smiled. They had been whitened with some kind of paste but the underlying decay was barely hidden.

“Good fortune that I am not alone then, is it not?” Her smile was playful, but the cracked and broken teeth rendered it charmless. He could not imagine lying with the woman. “Can I interest you in a flower for your lady?”

He leaned in close, as though drinking in the juniper, anise, and other more potent scents that prickled his sinuses, and inclined his head meeting her gaze at eye level.

“Alas, I have no lady,” he said.

“A shame, for sure, handsome fellow like yourself.”

Her eyes were empty of anything approaching emotion. This was all theatre, the flower girl a player and he her hapless foil.

“I have pledged my life to a higher purpose, my dear. The seven sins of this great city are of no interest to me,” he reached around, almost affectionately resting a hand on her shoulder and leaned in conspiratorially. The flickering dance of the gaslight and its shadows took his broad smile and leavened it, widened it, stretching it across the entirety of his face until it was both artificial and gruesome. “I cannot stand the stench, the ceaseless grunting and groaning, and worse, come close my dear, for this confession I dare only whisper.”

She leaned in, pressing her ear to his lips.

He wondered for the silence between heartbeats if she could feel his false smile, so close was her skin to his, and then with a tenderness approaching sadness he whispered, “It didn’t have to be like this,” as he tangled his fingers in her hair, working them deep beneath the knot. With a single savage motion he twisted the bones of her neck until they cracked.

She convulsed against him, a scream stillborn on her lips. It was a pitiful sound. It didn’t matter, there was no one to hear.

He forced her neck back further, until it snapped. Her legs kicked out weakly, the heel of her laced boot breaking off on the edge of a cobblestone. And in that long moment he watched her eyes, looking for the instant when, the nerves shorn, spine broken, the light that was the flower girl was snuffed out. She sagged against him, her eyes like glass. There was genuine regret in his voice as he said, “All you had to do was walk away.”

He stepped back, letting her fall. The basket tumbled out of her arms and rolled across the cobbles leaving her flowers strewn across the street.

He walked on toward the museum steps, crushing the petals beneath his heels.

A shadow, like black wings, gathered shape and form within the darkening smog around him. For a moment they hung behind him, remaking him as a dark angel before they ghosted across Charlotte Street, weaving through the black iron gates and into the grounds of the British Museum.

Less than two minutes had passed since he emerged from beneath the weeping willow. He looked left and right down the length of Charlotte Street, but there wasn’t a soul in sight. This time his smile was genuine as he loped easily across the six remaining paces to the iron railings and boosted himself up and over them. They weren’t a serious defence—but then the museum was arrogant enough to believe no one would dare rob it. It was that insufferable smugness, along with the curator’s stubborn refusal to move into the next century that he was counting on as he moved quickly to the west wall. He moved along in the gathered shades. There was a small door set midway down the long wall. He didn’t bother with trying to pick his way through the lock, knowing that it was weighted with a complex clockwork counter-balance mechanism and three thick dead-bolts. There was no need. He moved fast, running low, to the imposing portico. There were unprotected windows aplenty along the galleries, including rusted shutters and pitted locks that would take less than a second to work open with a thin blade. He took one of six smile spikes from his pocket and wedged it into the crevice formed where the huge fluted stone column touched the wall. He forced a second and a third spike into place, creating footholds for himself. Using the stone column to brace himself, he climbed nimbly up to the second story and hauled himself over the balcony rail, face to face with a leering stone gargoyle as he collapsed onto his back. He waited a full three minutes, counting them out with his slowing heart to regulate the rhythm, and then rolled over onto his stomach. He pressed his hands against the stone and arched his back, rising in a single swift movement. Without pausing, he moved off down the western wall, counting off the lead-lined windows until he reached the one he was looking for.

Through the darkened glass he saw the silhouette of the Harpy Tomb from Xanthus and the seated figures from Branchidae, a sepulchral monument pillaged from an Etruscan tomb. Reaching into the deep pockets of his Churchill, he withdrew a thin stiletto knife. The blade was coated with an oily residue. He worked the blade patiently between the leading and the glass, gently teasing the leading loose. Strip by strip he pared it away and then chivvied the tip of the blade beneath the edge of the glass and pried it up. There was a soft popping sound as the glass came free. It slid. He caught it before it could hit the floor, and set it down gently. Reaching inside, he undid the very basic locking mechanism and eased the window open and slipped inside.

The air inside the museum was stale, musty and, to his nostrils, reeked of antiquity.

He moved with the surety of a man who belonged, ghosting through the room without disturbing a thing despite the fact that there was no artificial light within the Ancient Greek gallery. It was yet another of those antiquated notions of the curator’s, the fool actually believed electric lighting would damage the integrity of the treasures under his care. Still, the reliance upon the sun offered him a wealth of shadows now. Indeed, the only electric lighting within the entire museum was in the Reading Room, allowing the scholars to pour over the wealth of words well into the dark hours without the risk of a clumsy candle or drips of wax marring irreplaceable texts.

The huge door opened with a sigh; in the darkness it sounded like the last breath expelled by a dying man.

He stepped through the crack and eased the door closed behind him. It was thirty-nine steps to the mausoleum room and the colossal chariot-tomb erected to Mausolos by his sister-wife Artemisia, forty-two more to the Elgin room, overflowing with the grandest remains of Greek sculpture, the Parthenon marbles and procession-frieze. His footsteps echoed hollowly up and down the long galleries, the only sounds in the otherwise silent museum. Five rough and ready bruisers were employed as night-watchers, but with the building itself being an enormous square with four huge wings and the central Reading Room being a completely different construction, they were nothing more than a token. They did their rounds together, sharing a dram and lying about the various delights of the bordellos, bawds and hussies they had conquered with liberal coin. They paid scant attention to the task at hand, after all, who would dare rob the Empire’s treasures and risk the wrath of a surly Victoria?

He lurked in the shadows of a standing sarcophagus, waited patiently for them to pass and be on their way. Not one of the five so much as glanced in his direction. When their laughter and ribaldry faded he moved on.

Wall upon wall was dominated by bound manuscripts, rare editions and exquisite typographies. None of these interested him. He walked the length of the corridor, past marble busts, zoological specimens, mammals, birds, rare Arctic dwellers and curious sand worms, past rooms of rare coins and fossilised plants, pygmy elephants and splendid meteorites fallen from the sky. He moved deeper into the museum, looking for the Kruptos Door, which itself was masked from idle discovery. The door opened on to the true secret treasures of the museum, the Arcanum, the stolen artefacts that between them promised the power to transmute, alter, and restore the flesh and spirit. Beyond the door lay the treasures of the One-Mind, as the alchemists called them, the evidence that linked heaven and earth.

He followed the clues laid down in the stones of the floor, alchemical cyphers for spirit, which looked oddly like a cross from the Holy See, and earth, an inverted triangle with the lowest angle marked out. The cyphers were laid in the stone with tin, silver and copper wires and scuffed down by the weary procession of tired feet for the best part of eighty years. They led through the lower galleries, the manuscript salon and the exhibition of fine line drawings, down a twisting stair to the Roman gallery and beyond, to the bronze room with its clutter of hulking deities, heroes, mirrors, candelabra, lamps, and urns hiding the door itself. He moved carefully through the detritus of civilizations past, guided by the cyphers on the floor.

Twin black crows marked either corner of the door, symbols of the black processes, calcination and putrefaction, and a golden knocker was set in its centre. The knocker was expertly wrought, a dog being consumed by the jaws of a wolf. Visitors to the gallery heard tales of Romulus and Remus, the twins of Rome, and the She-Wolf, but it was nothing more than spurious supposition on behalf of the docents. There was more symbolism hidden within this peculiar image, readily apparent to the knowing eye—the purification of gold using antimony.

There was no doubting what lay behind the door; the clues were there for anyone with the vision to see them.

He placed his hand flat against the wood, whispered his name, and pushed. It gave with a gentle snick, opening onto a dank passage that coiled down another fifty feet beneath the lowest galleries into the very foundations of London herself. The floor sloped gently downwards. Every sixth step the short stairs accelerated the descent. The door closed behind him, plunging the passage into darkness. He didn’t so much as break his stride, taking a small sulphurous bezoar from his pocket and sparking it against the rough wall. The compacted stone caught light immediately and burned with a small yellow flame that gave off no heat. The bezoar conjured a chiaroscuro of light and dark; within it he saw all that he needed to see. He walked on, his footsteps amplified by the peculiar acoustics of the tunnel.

There was a second door, deep below the city streets, forged of iron and braced with lead, tin and silver. Rather than a key, the lock mechanism was a combination of pattern recognition and forgotten black alchemy, with over sixty symbols to choose from and any number of possible combinations. He knew the combination, just as any true adept would. He didn’t even have to think about it. With four confident depressions he squared the circle: the fiery golden sphere of the sun, the triangle of the fire itself, the smaller circle of gold, and finally the all encompassing square. And then a fifth depression, the quincunx, encompassing it all, man, his empire of dirt, and sky above. The final piece of the puzzle nestled into place with a delicate snick. The lock mechanism was protected by a quicksilver tilt; the wrong combination would tilt the switch, leaking quicksilver into the mechanism and fusing the lock closed forever.

He grasped the golden handle and turned it.

The pin pressed up against the glass and the clockwork mechanism ratcheted into place, but not hard enough to crack it.

He opened the Kruptos Door and stepped into the al kimia, the hidden chamber as the words translated directly from the Arabic root. The wordplay amused him, as it no doubt amused the brothers of the rosy cross when they sealed the room up so many years ago. Even the most cursory inspect proved the place was every bit the treasure trove he had hoped. Skin-bound grimoires rested on lecterns, open on long forgotten wisdom. A glass cabinet contained the shards of a humble cup, a grail of sorts, though not the one so precious to the Christian stories. A black grail. It was, if the small note beside it was to be believed, the vessel used to collect the sacrificial blood of Iscariot after he had been cut down from his hanging tree. He pressed his face against the glass, his fingertips less than six inches away from the black chalice. He could feel the malice emanating from each fragment of the simple cup.

He smiled and turned his back on it.

Numerous other treasures caught his eye: statuary claimed from Tibet, a jade jaguar with the ghostly essence of the great beast bound to its stone, the stone tip of the spear of destiny that wounded the Nazarene, the corpse of a clockwork man fashioned by Kepler long before he obsessed upon his astronomical clock, an ethereal figurine of unbeing, a Vodoun effigy of Baka and a statuette of Baron Samedi, the sketches of Hausenhofer’s blueprint for the uberman and more marvels inked on roll upon roll of vellum. On a small mahogany table sat a seemingly empty phial. He picked it up, turning it around and around in his hand until the essence began to solidify; a soul trapped in a bottle, bound to the vessel in death. There was so much more in the room, so many clues to the mechanisms of heaven and hell. He ignored them all, fixating on a stone cross-braced upon the furthest wall. It was almost half his height, and engraved in a lost tongue.

He knelt before the cross, his fingers feeling out every tongue and groove within the carving. He closed his eyes, committing them to memory. There were seventeen shapes, four engraved on each arm of the cross, four on the head and four at the feet, and one at the apex, a crucified man with a bestial face set in a snarl of seventeen teeth. It was a homunculus, a false human, twelve inches in height and rendered in perfect detail. A serpent was wrapped around the homunculus’ length. The cross itself was a key. The outside markings on each limb corresponded to an element: earth, air, fire and water, but it was the others that were interesting. Images of Shango, father of storms, and Mawu-Lisa, the hermaphrodite joining of twin, male and female deities, side by side with more obscure Judo-Christian symbolism, and other markings that made no earthly sense whatsoever. Together they formed a complex cypher around the body of the homunculus that when deciphered unlocked a treasure map.

The Brethren already had possession of the map, procured from a nameless tomb in the Afghan wilds. They had protected it for over two centuries, seeking the location of the key without realizing it lay under their noses in the very heart of Holborn.

With the cross in to decode the map, he felt sure they would unearth the whereabouts of the fabled Catamine Stair, and with that knowledge would come the power to unleash the horrors buried deep since the dawn of time.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy. And isn’t that just the truth of it,” he said to himself reverently as he lifted down the huge stone cross.

In doing so the man who wore the name Nathaniel Seth as effectively as any mask assured that all hell would break loose.

O O O

Dorian Carruthers walked the copper thruppenny bit across his knuckles and made it disappear in a flourish of fingers. It was a simple trick, the eye reduced to believing what the hand wanted it to. He grinned wryly at the slight prestidigitation; it was smooth enough that only the most discerning spectator would have spotted the manipulation. He repeated the walk from finger to finger, slower this time, concentrating on the final palming of the coin. He spread his fingers wide and held out his hand, palm up. The coin was nowhere to be seen.

In the doorway to the smoking room Anthony Millington teased off his white gloves and applauded.

“Your hat, sir?” Mason, the chamberlain asked, the slightest hint of distaste in his cultured tone. Millington was, after all, an actor. He was new money and rather proud of his vulgar exploits, regaling the gentlemen with stories that most assuredly kissed-and-told.

Millington tipped the brim and rolled the plush aile de corbeau the length of his arm, catching it with a snap of the wrist. He held the top hat out with a raffish grin. “Good man,” and to Carruthers, “I see old man Locke is out like a light, as ever.”

Brannigan Locke was indeed asleep, his face pressed up against the leather wing of his chair, his pipe still balanced precariously between his teeth. His lips rattled against the stem as he snored softly.

Carruthers pocketed the coin. “What news?”

“None of the good variety, I am afraid,” Millington said.

“And of the other variety?” Eugene Napier asked. Millington watched him tap out the ash from a thin cigarillo into the silver salver resting on the arm of his high-backed leather Chesterfield. Smoke curled lazily out of Napier’s mouth, rafting up across his pale face. He was a beast of a man, almost six and a half feet tall and built like the proverbial brick out house, his crisply laundered and starched white shirt straining across his barrel chest. His eyes were overshadowed by thick-knitted eyebrows and an atavistic brow. For all that, he was curiously soft-spoken.

“Plenty of that, I’m afraid,” Millington said, tossing his white gloves onto the table beside one of the empty armchairs. He sank rather theatrically into the Chesterfield, gesturing with two fingers at the decanter. Mason nodded once and took down one of the Waterford crystal snifters, filled it with two fingers of Delord Freres, 1848 and served it to the actor. The rich Armagnac clung to the glass as Millington rolled it in his hand. He watched it with utter fascination before raising it to his nose, and breathed deeply of its nutty bouquet. He knocked it back in a single swallow and smacked his lips. “But where to begin?”

The Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club, nineteen spacious rooms—and a few not so spacious ones crammed with curiosities—in what used to be a lodging house on Grays Inn Road, was a sanctuary, a haven, a place for a few like-minded men to sit in quiet meditation undisturbed by the world, to smoke their hand-rolled cigars and Meerschaum pipes while leafing through the London Times and sipping vintage cognacs. There was an air of culture, of class, about the gentleman’s club. The wood panelling in every room was polished to a rich lustre and smelled of both wood and the ingrained wax, while old leather and smoke added to the flavours of the place. The marble floor in the reception room was inlaid with a stylised sun within a sixteen-pointed star fashioned out of overlaid triangles. Each of the points was engraved with alchemical elements; the devil’s fork or Poseidon’s trident of antimony; the interlocking closed and open triangles of arsenic; the broken figure eight of bismuth; the triple-barred figure x of copper; the circle within a circle of gold; the circle and arrow of iron, so like the symbol of man; the zigzag lines of lead; the D broken by what appeared to be an axe that represented magnesium in this very different rendition of the elements; and the rest, mercury, phosphorus, platinum, potassium, silver, sulphur, tin and zinc. None but the initiated would realise that they were walking across the First Matter of the universe, or the Khem, as the old alchemists of the Nile delta knew it. It was the most overt clue as to the true nature of the building and the purpose its inhabitants put it to.

Twin open stairways, one on either side of the mosaic, lead up to the heart of the old lodging house. Each one was immaculately carved out of oak and closer inspection would reveal more of those telling details, in this case, carvings of chthonic snakes, salamanders, sometimes represented with wings the higher up the staircase one climbed, the solar phoenix and the cauda pervonis, both important alchemical symbols of rebirth, while on the central wall where both stairs met hung a huge portrait of a beautiful hermetic couple, male and female in a single body. Behind them the great spread black wings of a raven seemed to fold around the loving couple to embrace them.

There was an immaculate carving of a hippogriff beside the double doors that opened into the Smoking Room. The detail of every single feather and claw was beautifully rendered. To the casual eye it was nothing more than a curiosity, but of course, like everything else in this place, that was deliberate misdirection. The hippogriff was an alchemical crossbreed of griffin and horse—predator and prey.

Beyond the double doors the gentlemen sat in the soft leather chairs, the open fire crackling in the hearth. Queen Victoria the First’s royal crest was engraved into the mantel above the flames. The motto beneath was filled with coal dust, making the Latin Honi soit qui mal y pense stand out in stark black letters. Evil to him who evil thinks … it wasn’t the queen’s motto, but rather something far, far older. It belonged to the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the medieval Order of Knight bachelors that were the inspiration for the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and so many other Arthurian and Holy Grail stories. The sentiment tied these Gentleman Knights of London that gathered in the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club to their antecedents.

So while on the surface it was all very civilised—which was the image these few men had cultivated for the club—it was so much more.

And like the chambers themselves, none of these men were what they first appeared; they were adventurers, explorers, thrill seekers. They were also gifted. Their gifts set them apart from the normal men and women of the city.

Eugene Napier still bore the dusky tan of his recent expedition to the wilds of the African Continent, and brought with him stories of rain forests and fabulous creatures that stretched the bounds of credulity. He had stalked big game, giant gorillas, water elephants and such like by day, and more dangerous game at night. The locals called it a Palo Mayombe, a sangoma, lured to the servitude of the black arts. Superstition was that this Zulu priest could commune with the tribal spirits of the dead, but having opened himself up to their realm, the corruption of the afterlife twisted his soul, turning his gift for healing into a bane against all things living. Napier ended his misery, and nearly lost his own life in the process.

This was what the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club was truly about, tracking and destroying the unnatural, the evil, the abominations of spirit and flesh. The Reading Room contained over eleven thousand texts and treatises on everything from alchemical formulae to divinations, testaments of witchcraft, confessions of idolatry and daemonology, and so much more, gathered from every corner of the globe. Together it represented the sum of man’s knowledge about The Art. Not black magic or hoodoo or witchcraft, these few men knew the truth; there were no such things. There was The Art, pure and simple. The means The Art could be put to were dictated by the practitioner, not the stuff of magic itself. That was akin to blaming the fountain pen for the words its writer espoused. It was elemental knowledge, not sorcery that manipulated the stuff of the world.

Even now, the seventh of their number, Simon Labauve, was out there somewhere between Chatham Quay and the New World navigating the Greyfriar’s Ghost through treacherous waters in response to reports about strange happenings in the deep. Reports of a steam clipper having vanished had reached them at the turn of the month. Coupled with older reports of similar disappearances in the same region what appeared a tragedy became something else entirely.

Haddon McCreedy sighed, making a show of folding the pages of the broadsheet loudly. He took the pince-nez from his nose and laid them on top of the newspaper. “Would you care to share your adventure, Millington? Or are we expected to pay for a performance like the hoi polloi?”

“A little appreciation would not go amiss,” Millington said, making a show of adjusting his position.

“We all appreciate you, Anthony, now please, talk before we die of old age.”

“All in good time, my man. All in good time.” Millington winked at him. “I’ve had my snifter but a man needs a smoke before he talks of unbearable things.” The actor snapped his fingers and Mason appeared at his shoulder with an open humidor. Millington made his choice, clipped the cured leaves and lit up, puffing theatrically on the thick Havana. “The city’s in a peculiar mood,” he said in all seriousness. “The Peelers have found a dead flower girl.”

“A shame, but not the most unusual of occurrences in our beloved city,” Carruthers said, tossing the thruppenny bit into the air. He didn’t catch it because it never came back down. “Pray tell, what is it to us?”

“Perhaps nothing,” Millington said, “other than where she was found.”

“And where was that, Anthony? It is like squeezing water from a stone getting information out of you sometimes.”

“A little too close to home.”

“Here? There was no commotion, surely we would have heard the cries of blue murder?”

“Bedford Square, in the shadows of the museum, soon after midnight.”

“Close to Charlotte Street,” Napier observed. “Perhaps the unfortunate girl merely wandered a little off her patch. There is nothing to suggest—“

“She had three and six in her purse.”

“So it wasn’t a robbery but there is still nothing to suggest we need to be overly concerned, I think you are jumping at shadows, dear boy,” Dorian Carruthers said. Once again the small coin walked across his knuckles. He didn’t so much as look at the actor when he said, “But then, you always did have a penchant for the melodramatic, didn’t you?”

Downstairs the door to the street slammed. The sound cut across their conversation. Frantic footsteps charged up the narrow flight of stairs. All eyes turned to the doorway as Fabian Stark, the last of their number, burst into the room. The emaciated Stark held up a hand for silence even as he bent double, gasping heavily. He straightened a moment later, his face livid as he took a final deep, steadying breath, and exhaled. He looked at the others one at a time before he finally said, “We’ve got trouble.”

O O O

Haddon McCreedy closed the door to the Reading Room.

The latch fell into place with a satisfyingly substantial snick. The door was heavy, made from well-seasoned thick oak timbers and varnished with a cherry lacquer. Every wall, from floor to ceiling, was lined with books. The room soaked in that wonderful aroma of old paper.

Haddon lit the gaslight and drew the heavy velvet drapes, effectively isolating the room from the outside world. There were curious markings etched into the wainscoting of the windowsill and again around the frame of the door; glyphs meant to ward off unwanted eavesdropping. He traced his fingertips over them. The same glyphs had been embroidered into the lining of the curtains themselves. More curious still was the thin line of salt beneath the sash window. The floorboards were polished to a shine, but even the thick veneer of gloss couldn’t mask the five-pointed rosewood star set into the boards. The round reading table was placed in the pentagram’s heart.

Stark, Millington, Locke, Carruthers and Napier were already at the table.

Carruthers stared at that coin of his as though it were the most fascinating thing he had ever seen while Locke breathed two streams of stale smoke from his nostrils that rose in front of his face like horns. The others sat unmoving, waiting for Haddon to join them and the Council of War to begin in earnest.

Haddon adjusted the girth of his exquisitely brocaded red silk waistcoat, and withdrawing the silver fob watch from his pocket to mark the time, sat himself at one of the two empty chairs.

“The Kruptos Door was breached,” Stark said, laying his hands flat on the table.

“Impossible,” Eugene Napier said without thinking, utter contempt in his soft voice.

“And yet at some time after midnight the seals were broken.”

“Just after midnight,” Millington noted, “while the Peelers were preoccupied with the dead flower girl, curiouser and curiouser, no? If this life of ours has taught me one thing it is that there is no such thing as meaningful coincidence.”

“What was taken?” Haddon asked, ignoring Millington’s musings. He snapped the silver cover of his fob watch closed and slipped it back into his pocket. There was no room for blather, what was missing almost certainly dictated who was behind the theft, and more importantly, their ability to do harm.

Fabian Stark turned to Haddon, his cracked front tooth chewing into the pink of his lower lip. “Only one thing, so far as I could ascertain.”

“And that would be?”

“The Homunculus Cross.”

“But … that’s just a gewgaw … why that of all the things?” Brannigan Locke steepled his fingers, cracking each one slowly and methodically.

“Why indeed?” Haddon said, thoughtfully. “I suspect the error of our thinking is going to be made very clear to us before the sun rises.”

“What do we know about the cross?” Dorian Carruthers asked.

“Precious little, in truth, but even what we know is enough to warrant great concern. Do you have the ledger, Napier, there’s a good man.”

The big man pushed back his chair, scraping the legs across the scored-deep line of the pentagram and rose to retrieve a large smythe-sewn ledger from one of the lower shelves. He placed the book almost reverently on the table, cracked open the spine and turned through the pages until he found the entry he was looking for amid the cramped spider-like scrawl and began reading: “The Homunculus Cross has been in our care since it was recovered from a mystic’s tomb in what was the Byrsa district of Carthage almost ninety years ago. Initial scrutiny suggests it pre-dates the Pyrrhic War by quite some time, centuries perhaps, though it is difficult to gauge its precise position in antiquity due to the poor record keeping of the region. There are several familiar markings on the limbs of the cross itself that lead one to suspect it is in some way alchemical in nature, as the pictograms balance the elements of earth, air, fire and water, but beyond that, there are a number of other symbols, including the central effigy of a homunculus from which the cross takes its name.” Napier closed the book.

“What about you, Fabian? What can you add?” Haddon McCreedy turned to the gaunt Stark.

“Enough to be frightened, Haddon. More than enough for that.” Of all of them Fabian Stark was the only true practitioner of the Art. Carruthers dabbled in sleight-of-hand and tricks of perception, Haddon himself had a knack for the uncanny, divination of dreams and auguring, but Fabian was different. When he had come to their door three years ago he had been a powerful looking youth, not the wraith that sat before them now. His obsession with the Art had done that to him, the arcana eating away at his physicality until he was a husk of a man. That was the cost. The Art devoured energy, for every manipulation it burned more life away. Eventually it would be the death of Stark, they all knew it. The time would come, inevitably, when the Art consumed him. For now they protected him as best they could because they needed him: it takes a thief to catch a thief, the old adage went. It had never been more applicable than now. Stark slumped forward in his chair, exhaustion clear in his eyes and the dark circles beneath them. “The symbols themselves form a cypher; interpreting them correctly will release the homunculus trapped within the stone.”

“So we are talking about a construct running wild in London then?” Locke said, “We have dealt with worse.”

“You are a simple soul sometimes, Brannigan,” Fabian Stark said, not unkindly.

“There’s no need for insults, Stark. Not all of us are blessed with your ahh talents.”

“That was no insult, my friend. Think of the cross as a key, whoever has control of the construct has access to the secrets it was made to protect.”

That notion hung in the air between them, weighted like a condemnation.

“Do we know what the homunculus was fashioned to guard?” Haddon McCreedy asked, finally, fearing the answer even as he voiced the question.

“We do,” Stark admitted. He closed his eyes. “The cross was the work of Abu Musa Jabir Ibn Hayyan.”

“Geber?” Dorian Carruthers’ walking coin fell from his fingers and clattered on the table’s top. He scooped it up quickly and thrust it into his pocket.

“One and the same.”

“So it has to do with the philosopher’s stone?”

“Hardly. That was nonsense cooked up by Abu Musa to shift attention from what he was really interested in. A stone that offers eternal youth? Even given the wealth of ‘impossible things’ we know, the notion is ludicrous.”

“Which was?” Carruthers asked, pointedly.

“The Hollow Earth.”

“What? You mean to say the construct is guarding the door down into the centre of the earth?” Carruthers laughed harshly. “And you said the philosopher’s stone was nonsense?”

Stark nodded, rubbing at his jaw. A thin shadow of stubble had begun filling itself in along his sharp chin. “It is not as outrageous as it sounds, Dorian, believe me. Where, after all, do you think our legends of Hell’s fire, devils and such originate from?”

“But a door down into the very core of the earth? It’s all so … Jules Verne!”

“That is a rather prosaic interpretation, I admit, but in essence it is true enough, though the actuality is more existential than substantial.”

“Sometimes you scare me, Stark,” Carruthers said, shaking his head. “I’m not sure I want to actually live in the same world you do. You say these words and all I hear is blah blah, blah blah, blah blah.”

“How does this door that isn’t a door work, Fabian?” Haddon pressed, cutting across the prestidigitator.

“The homunculus itself is the door, or rather it is capable of creating the doorway where so ever it chooses. It is the way.”

“So are you saying that all this fellow needs to do is crack the cross open and …?”

“There is no physical door,” Stark explained. “No stone arch or golden doorknob that any Tom, Dick or Harriet can walk up to, offer the secret knock and abracadabra open the door and simply stumble down the Catamine Stair into one of the greatest secrets of all creation.”

“Well, that at least, is a relief,” Carruthers said.

Millington had been unusually quiet since Haddon had closed the reading room door. “If we know what the Homunculus Cross does, surely the question has to be who would stand to gain most from its theft?”

“I don’t think there can be any doubt,” Haddon McCreedy said. “This smacks of the Brethren.”

Certain fears were left unsaid: had one of the Brethren infiltrated the hidden chamber, what then was there to stop them from taking the second door and following the tunnels back beneath old London town to their building on Grays Inn Road? The alternative did not bear thinking about. If it was not one of the Brethren, if it were merely some tinkerer working alone … It did not matter. Whatever their affiliations, someone had breached their defences. They were vulnerable.

O O O

Nathaniel Seth knelt before the cross.

He was outside, on the Whispering Gallery that ringed the great dome of Wren’s breath-taking Cathedral. The Great Bell rang out the coming of dawn’s first blush. Its harmonic rippled out over the slums to the bells of St. Clements, and on to St. Martins in the Field. He listened for the Old Bailey Bell, the rhythm of the children’s nursery rhyme taking root in his head. The wind had picked up, tattering the remnants of the early morning smog. The visibility was far from good, there was no actual sunlight, but instead of ten feet in front of his face he could see all the way down to the Thames. The shadows of the mudlarks were down on the river early picking over the detritus washed in by the tide in search of anything they could sell on or make use of.

The trawlers had already hauled their nets and were making toward the docks at Billingsgate to sell their fish and coal barges belched more black soot into the air as they chugged down the river. It was no wonder the city hadn’t seen the sun for a month. Black smoke thick with coal dust belched out of thousands upon thousands of chimneys, choking the sky.

Fleet Street was already awake, as were the labourers busy in the filth and mire of Smithfield’s meat market. The reek of corpses hung heavily in the smoke-filled air as the stripped carcasses were burned.

The London dawn was alive with thieves and idlers, hawkers and vagabonds. Before the hour was out a cascade of other sounds and smells would fill the air as the press of people woke and the discordant din of life commenced.

Beside him the young boy squirmed, writhing around against his bonds.

“Oh, do be quiet, child. You are trying my patience,” he murmured, caressing the outermost sigils on the great stone cross. “It will all be over soon enough.”

The boy wriggled all the more desperately, bracing his scuffed boots on the stone railing and arching his back as he fought with his bonds.

“Suit yourself, child, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” With that, the man who called himself Seth took an ivory handled flick-knife from his pocket, pushing the edge of the still-concealed blade up against the young boy’s pulsing pulmonary. “One touch is all it will take,” he promised, applying the slightest pressure to the small silver stud. The four-inch blade lanced out, opening up the boy’s soft flesh. Thick, rich red blood pulsed out through the gash for as long as it took the boy’s heart to stop beating. Dead, he slumped back against his bonds.

Seth stood over the child, hands and face smeared with innocent blood.

He inhaled slowly, savouring the iron-tang and the ripeness of the wind blowing off the various markets of the city. The boy stank, but then, Nathaniel knew, violent death seldom bore the aroma of rosehip or lavender. It stank. He grabbed the boy’s corpse and hauled it up over the stone railing. It took all of his strength to hold it there, arms bent back, and fasten each wrist, making a mocking crucifixion out of the boy’s body.

He knelt before the Homunculus Cross once more, sub-vocalizing the first rhythms of the incantation, and touching his bloody hand to the twisted face of the beast trapped within the crux of the cruciform. And with the first words off his lips, the sky broke, drops of rain coming down like Solomon’s tears.

His lips moved, murmuring the words of summoning he had learned by rote. His fingers moved to the second and third engravings, sharing the child’s blood with them. He felt the stone respond to his touch—a sudden swell of warmth within its cold core. “Awake, guardian of the stair,” he whispered. “Awake, spirit of the stone. Awake, and come to me.” He touched his left cheek, his fingertips lingering in the blood. Slowly, he drew his fingers down his cheek to his chin, and across his lips. He tasted the boy’s blood and beneath it the mineral traces of the stone still on his fingers.

He stood slowly, lifting the cross in both hands and raising it above his head.

He walked to the edge of the Whispering Gallery, his leather soles in the smeared blood, and leaned out, letting the cross fall.

It hit the ground, the butt cracking the funeral slab beneath it, the impact opening fissures within the cross itself. It shattered even as it fell back, shards of stone strewn all around the broken slab.

“Show me the way, creature of flesh and stone. I set you free. I give you your life. I give the blood of life. Take that blood in return for your guidance. I would know your secrets,” there was madness in his voice as it crooned, “I bid thee, construct, open the hidden door, for I would walk the stair and free all of your kind, making a place for them here, above.”

Lady Justice stared at him from the roof of the Old Bailey as he reached down over the gallery, pulling apart the dead boy’s grubby shirt and plunging the knife into his bare stomach. He broke from the chant’s cadence to whisper: “Be grateful for your blindfold, woman, because there’s nothing remotely just about what is going to happen now.” His words were carried away on the wind as the first drops of blood splashed down onto the funeral slabs below.

Nathaniel Seth opened the wound wider, bleeding him out.

“Come to me, guardian of the way. Rise. Rise!”

From the fragments of dust and stone, the creature rose, a bestial figure with razor-like teeth and a feral grin as it shed the lethargy of its prison and climbed into the air.

“Come to me!”

The fat rain melted away from the creature as it rose, evaporating into steam long before they ever came into contact with its calcified skin.

“I would have more blood,” the homunculus rasped, settling on the gallery’s stone rail. “Yours.”

Seth took his knife and made a small incision, opening his wrist so that the creature might feed. It scurried forward, hungrily suckling at the wound. He winced against the savagery of its seventeen teeth as they sank deeper and deeper into him. “Open the door,” he commanded, but the certainty had slipped from his voice. All around him he was surrounded by the architecture of doubt, huge buildings raised within the spectre of reassurance, churches, cathedrals, law courts, and buildings devoted to the fear of the unknown future and sucking absence of the Lord, and the darkness of the here and now where His hand has failed His children.

“Feed me,” the creature cackled, the gore of his flesh stuck between its jagged teeth.

“Open the door.”

“Feed me,” it repeated as he wrenched his wrist away from its suckling mouth.

“Not until you open the way.”

“It has been so long, so long since I have tasted life. Who are you to command me? Are you the sovereign king of stone and shadow? Are you the master of granite and fog? Or are you all wind?”

“I am the one who brought you back, imp. That is all you need to know. The boy is yours, feed to your heart’s content. When you have had your fill, you will open the door.”

The homunculus scurried back and dropped from the railing, burying itself in the dead boy’s open ribs. Nathaniel Seth heard its feeding but did not listen. He leaned on the stone rail, looking out across the city. It would be the last morning that the sun would rise on these oblivious streets. The innocence of the city would be shorn from its alleys and byways. Tomorrow it would rise on a knowing city, stripped of illusion, stripped of safety, stripped of humanity.

Tomorrow the sun would rise on a new Hell.

O O O

The homunculus opened the way.

At first Nathaniel Seth thought the wall behind him was collapsing. The brickwork set in place for the best part of two centuries appeared to buckle, the huge white stones shifting, rearranging themselves until the mortar flaked away and the wounds in the wall opened wider and wider still, a wound in time and space.

As the rain came down harder, the first burst of the yellow morning light seeped through the dark clouds. It bathed the huge cupola of St. Paul’s in the glory of a shifting rainbow, the violet of its inner rim so intense it bled into the buildings around it, suffusing them with incredibly vivid colour.

More and more of the stones broke away until a huge gaping blackness beckoned where moments before there had been bricks and mortar.

He stepped closer, hesitantly.

“This is what you asked for, master of wind,” the homunculus mocked. “The great stair. Descend. Set the dwellers in the dirt free. Bring the denizens of the muck up to see the light of day. Let them revel in the filth of the earth no more. Set them abroad, let the folk of the surface learn humility when their new masters walk their precious streets. Down you go.”

Seth peered deep into the darkness, trying to discern the curves and lines of the descent. For a moment he was sure there was nothing except for a dizzying drop, ninety-nine feet down, but slowly the ripples in the air began to solidify, hinting at the steps they were. Even so there was no substance to them. It was a vertiginous sight, down through the dome of the great Cathedral, through the nave and down into the quire vault and deeper still, past Wren and Nelson’s tombs and into the crypt with its famous dead and still deeper, losing itself in the belly of the black earth.

“This is the stair?” He said doubtfully.

“The Catamine Stair lies beyond. This is the doorway, nothing more. It is deeply rooted in the earth. Walk with faith, through the holiest of holies as you descend into what the frightened children call Hell.”

“A sweet irony,” Seth said, repelled and yet still drawn to the seemingly endless drop.

“Indeed. Now go, it will not remain open long without more blood, and I have a hankering for more of yours, truth be told.”

“Be grateful I still have need of you, construct. But I warn you now, and just this once: continue to vex me and I will put an end to your miserable existence once and forever, as simply as this,” he snapped his fingers to emphasise his point. The homunculus sneered but lapsed into silence.

A hangman’s wind was blowing down from Tyburn, though of course it wasn’t Tyburn anymore; the gallows tree was gone and in its place the glorious Marble Arch stood, but old deaths still clung to that wind. No amount of pretty buildings and new names could cleanse the spirit of the place or expunge the blood from the soil. It would always be a hangman’s wind that blew in from the west of the city.

Smiling to himself, he stepped out into nothing.

O O O

The Catamine Stair lanced all the way down into the very heart of the earth.

He walked, at first tentatively, each step felt out with care, and then with more and more surety as each new footfall was met by resistance from the air, and then by the clay steps of the stair itself as he disappeared beneath the surface, through the vault and lower.

It was a long walk; but then he was walking through the realm of the dead to the hollow core of the earth, beneath the crust and the mantle and down, down, deeper and still down. It was dark but he had no need of light; he adjusted a simple ocular device which was to all intents and purposes identical to a run of the mill pair of glasses, though through a series of filters these altered the perception of his eyes, denying them the gift that was colour. Behind the lenses his world reduced to black and shades of grey. Beyond the glass frame fragments of colour still burned; they came to him as hallucinatory flashes, sparking and blazing at random.

A curious lichen limned the steps themselves, giving off a faintly phosphorus glow. It was enough for him to see by.

The Stair itself began as a cramped spiral, coiling around and around on itself dizzyingly, every twenty feet gained taking him through three complete rotations. With every turn and turnabout he felt all sense of his own place within the universe begin to drift.

He noticed markings on the walls. Many were reminiscent of those on the Homunculus Cross, though the deeper he travelled the more deviant they became. The iconography was elemental at first, but it mutated, displaying perverse sexual deprivations, animalistic couplings, wild bestial rutting, horned figures presiding over the ritualistic rape and slaughter. It was almost as though he were descending into the murkier aspects of the human psyche, those dark whims rendered in images daubed on rough walls. Other shadowy renditions showed vaguely angelic creations, the offspring of the bacchanalia. In others still, women gave birth to giants too vast to be contained within their bodies, their flesh torn open. Cave paintings, animals, fire, the hunt, death, sex and life, all caricatures of those primitive essences. They were compelling, hypnotic, they craved the eye, filling the mind with the base memories of their artists. They were a connection with the creatures of this place and in studying them the images made a frightening pact with his imagination. It was possible, looking at them, to believe that the first men never crawled out of the primordial soup at all, that there was no Darwinian evolution, but that they emerged, erect, from this subterranean hell.

By the wizardry of sheer willpower alone Nathaniel Seth broke their damned covenant and moved on, deeper.

The air was different the deeper he descended; it went from stale to choked to dead.

Even the quality of his footsteps changed, the stir of echoes thickening and muffling as the peculiar acoustics of the Stair took hold. They shifted from the reassuring solidity of stone to a hollow clang as the stair levelled out and he found himself walking along a vast metal embarkation platform.

The left side of the platform was exposed. Brass rails ran the length of the platform, disappearing into the mouth of a tunnel at the far end. What might have been a brass egg rested on the tracks. As he moved closer he could see it looked more like a cage than an egg. It was easily large enough to confine a man. Seven thick bands of metal formed a mesh that came together to make the sphere. He walked slowly down the platform, marvelling at the construction of the place; it was akin to a subterranean railway station, the arched walls curving around the sphere, cradling it.

It was like nothing on earth.

Nathaniel Seth wasn’t alone.

A woman—he knew it was a woman by the pendulous tears of her sleekly furred breasts—stood beside the brass sphere. She craned her head slowly, turning to face him. Her face, he saw in the flickering luminescence, was almost lupine in nature, with an elongated snout and deep-set eyes. He could feel her eyes on him as he moved along the platform—and so many more eyes as the infernal beasts watched him invade their realm.

She held a brass spear, which she lowered as he neared, gesturing toward the cage.

Close to, he appreciated her sheer size; the jackal-headed guardian towered over him, easily half his height again. Her muscles bunched and flexed, tense. There was nothing feminine about her.

He bowed his head.

“I come to offer your freedom,” he said.

She had no answer for him.

Instead, she reached forward with her sinister hand, resting it upon the brass casing of the sphere. It responded to her touch with the sound of clockwork mechanisms stirring. Cogs and gears ratcheted in the otherwise silent tunnel, and a moment later the hiss of a steaming piston was followed by a single sharp click as the coupling holding the lid of the sphere was released. The bands of brass folded back on each other one at a time. There was a leather harness on the floor of the sphere. She gestured with her spear again. He did not need prompting twice. Nathaniel Seth boarded the sphere. He stepped into the harness, pulling it up so that it rested on his hips, synched the straps and forced the buckles tight across his chest and arms. The harness was anchored at his feet to the brass casing. The pistons hissed again as the sphere closed around him. There were similar anchor points above him.

He had barely secured them when the jackal-headed guardian rapped on the side of the sphere. It responded by rocking violently. The brass began to thrum as the rocking intensified, and then it began to roll, gathering momentum as it did. The rails set into the floor guided the sphere as it accelerated. The cage rattled and swayed as it went into free-fall. Strapped in, Seth twisted and jerked, spun head over feet with ever increasing ferocity as the sphere descended.

Subterranean winds whistled through the brass casing, the sounds of sorrow amplified by the same acoustics that had toyed with his footsteps.

His screams echoed all the way to the hollow heart of the world.

O O O

Millington found it hard to laugh off the implications of the corpse strung up across the Whispering Gallery of St. Paul’s for all to see. The boy’s premature death subdued the actor’s familiar jocular nature.

They had been leaving the Greyfriar’s when Stark had collapsed. There had been no warning to it. Mid-word Stark’s eyes rolled up into his head and his legs buckled. He went down hard, as though pole-axed by a bullet. Millington had caught him in time to prevent his skull cracking open on the cobblestones. He had been frightened to move him. For five full minutes Stark lay unmoving in the street, his pulse was strong, and there were no other outward signs of distress that Millington could see, but there was no sign of him coming around, either.

The Club’s chamberlain, Mason, appeared with a wet towel, ice and revivification salts. He uncorked the salts and past them beneath Stark’s nose three times. On the fourth pass his eyes opened. They were shot through with blood and unfocussed. The young man looked haggard as they helped him to sit.

“The way is open,” he rasped in a voice brittle as broken stones. “They come. They come.”

“What?” Millington said, mistaking the intensity of his companion’s words for the trailing threads of his blackout. “Speak plainly, man.”

“The Cross is broken, the door is open. No words could be plainer. I can feel it, no, not feel, feel is the wrong word. Hear, I can hear it. The world is screaming out against the wrongness of the door, and its screams are intensifying the longer the door remains open. London is hurting. We need to go there, now. Help me stand. I know where the door is. Just please God we can get there in time to close it. Mason, a cab, please.”

Millington reached down a hand for Stark, helping him to his feet. The smaller man swayed dangerously as he tried to remain upright. Millington lifted his arm and ducked under his shoulder, supporting him every step of the way as they moved to the curb.

“You aren’t strong enough, Fabian, let me summon the others.”

“No time. Mason can pass the word. We have to get there now.”

The chamberlain whistled once sharply and a black brougham drew up beside them, the driver doffing his cap as the sweat-slick horses pranced in place, their hooves sparking on the cobbles.

“St. Paul’s, driver,” Fabian Stark said, “and be quick about it. There’s a guinea in it if you can have us there before the sun is fully up.”

He opened the door and stumbled into the cab.

Millington followed him, pulling down the window as he slammed the door. “Carry word to McCreedy. He will know what to do.”

“Sir,” the chamberlain said, and this once Millington noticed the slight note of deference to his tone. It brought a smile to his lips. He banged on the side of the cab door and they were away, the driver cracked the whip and the cab lurched forward as the blinkered animals began to walk. The driver cracked the whip again and the horses broke into a brisk canter.

Millington sank back into the waxed leather banquette. Beside him Stark looked like Death himself.

“Tell me what to expect, Fabian.”

Stark closed his eyes and buried his head in his hands. The skin around his hairline paled as he massaged his temples. Millington could not tell if he was reliving his blackout or merely struggling to recover from it.

He didn’t say anything. The waking streets stretched out beyond the cab’s window. The whip cracked again and the brougham lurched once more as the horses began an easy gallop.

“I don’t know,” Stark said, eventually. “The way is open … anything could be waiting for us.”

With dawn no more than minutes away as they drew up before the Cathedral’s steps, Stark paid the man his full guinea and struggled out of the cab. Millington stood beside him. He noticed the birds first, cawing and circling. They drew his eyes toward the sky. Hundreds of starlings filled the sky, a writhing black cloud of feathers. It took him a moment more to see what had them so agitated: the gutted corpse of the boy crucified up against the Whispering Gallery. He grabbed Stark’s shoulder and pointed.

“I think that answers that,” he said, barely a whisper in the presence of death.

But Stark wasn’t looking at the boy. “No, this does,” Stark breathed, pointing beyond the boy to the ragged wound that appeared to open the great dome, and at the monstrosity emerging from it.

O O O

Nathaniel Seth was hurled against the leather restraints as the brass cage came to a jarring halt.

The world refused to cease spinning. Somewhere in the mad descent his body had given in to the extreme gravitational forces pulling on it and he had blacked out. When he came too he was upside down, the blood rushing to his head. Mercifully the cage had stopped falling. He rocked against the cage, bullying it into another half-rotation. The world swam sickeningly.

It was light here; bright. His ocular contraption had become dislodged somewhere during the descent. He had felt it slip and, arms effectively pinioned by the harness, bit down on the frame with his teeth, his jaw clenched for the miles of free-fall. He opened his mouth now, letting the odd little lenses fall the short distance to the ceiling of the brass cage. By rights he ought to have been blind, submerged in the perfect blackness, but instead there was daylight. Only it wasn’t daylight—it was more akin to a fire in the sky, the molten surface of the earth’s interior forming the blazing heavens. It was the most disconcerting of the many strange things that had happened to him since the night began.

If it is even the same night, he thought, realizing he had no sense of the time at all.

He reached up, trying to unfasten the buckle at his shoulder but his fingers refused to obey him as he fumbled away with the metal coupling. He struggled to focus on his fingertips, willing them to stop trembling.

The cage had come to rest alongside another embarkation platform; through this one was less a railway tunnel and more of a rickety bridge over an infinite gorge. Thick mists prevented him from seeing the bottom. Seth succeeded in releasing himself from the harness, and as the last buckle fell free it was greeted with the piston-hiss of the cage opening. He stepped out onto the platform, his balance immediately betraying him. He went sprawling, barely catching himself before the fall took him over the edge. He lay there, clutching the wooden slats as they swayed from brace to brace. The platform ran as far as the eye could see in both directions. Mist clung to the edges of the wood, licking up in white tongues from far below. He didn’t dare move until the rhythm of the swaying within his skull had subsided, which was long after the platform had come to rest.

When he finally did look up he saw a draconian creature lolloping toward him, each ungainly step sending ripples through the length of the platform. It wore the face of a serpent, scaled, a forked tongue licking out across bloodless lips as it neared. It was, he surmised, tasting him on the air. Its eyes burned with the fire of the false sky.

Behind it more creatures came, abominations each and every one. Leathery wings beat against the hot air as greater beasts rose through the mist, their powerful wings dispersing the thick clouds of white enough for him to catch a glimpse of the red-iron world of the infernal machines below him. The construction was vast, stretching mile upon mile, spars and struts, beams and cross-braces pitted with rust, vats of water steaming, pistons driving, wheels and cogs turning as their iron teeth bit and locked. Rusty towers rose hundreds of feet and still didn’t come close to reaching the precarious platform. They were crusted with spikes and spears, jagged teeth of metal and huge cogs, each forming part of this incredible living machine. And it was alive, every inch of the ferrous surface teemed with movement, millions of specks seething and sighing over the iron monstrosity.

It was an industrial wasteland, clockwork and steam and rust driving the world around.

The tears in the mists healed and the infernal machine was swallowed.

The platform bucked and swayed beneath Seth as he struggled to stand. Sweat clung to his skin.

He looked up at the snake-man, his enormous reptilian wings beating a slow, languid rhythm, as he strode along the rocking platform. Bulbous black carapaces swarmed around his clawed feet; mottled fur and beady glass eyes stared at Seth. There were hundreds of them, hairy black pedipalps twitching eagerly as the fanged spiders surged toward him.

And as they neared they swelled, their wiry black hairs stiffening as they grew to the size of rabid hounds.

Nathaniel Seth scrambled backwards, his heels scuffing off the wooden beams as he flung himself out of the way of their swarming advance.

The spiders skittered and scratched over the wooden platform, so vast in number the wood itself disappeared beneath the swell of their carapaces, over Seth’s legs and across his chest and up into his face. They reeked of corruption, the acrid tang of sulphur clinging to their underbellies as they crawled over him. Their fangs dripped venom. He didn’t dare move for fear just one of the creatures would sink its fangs into him.

“What is it we have found, my lovelies?” The snake-man’s sibilant voice licked and twisted in the hot air, “A little manling? Does it have a tongue?” The creature mocked him. Seth said nothing, watching the horrendous rise and fall of the slick armoured scale plates across the snake-man’s huge chest. “It seems not. But it smells good, doesn’t it? Fresh meat. It has been so long since we tasted fresh meat. We think we will gorge on this one ourselves. Yes we do.”

Seth shook his head, “No.”

It was barely a word but it was defiance enough.

“It speaks, my lovelies. But why has it come? What does it want? We should just eat it now. We are hungry.”

“No,” Seth said again, prone, smothered by the sleek black carapaces of the venomous spiders. Fine black hairs tickled along his lips as he spoke, forcing him to twist his head sharply to prevent the creature from crawling into his mouth.

Beneath him, steam vented and hissed from huge pot-boilers, searing his back through the gaps in the wood.

The snake-man loomed over him, forked tongue licking out to taste the heat from the steam, and savouring it. “What brings you down to us, manling?”

“I have come …” what could he say? “I have come to set you free of this hell.” The words caught in his throat. “I opened the way, I bested the riddles, pieced together the puzzles of the mad Arab, found the guardian cross and opened the way so that you might return to the world above.”

“You did no such thing, fool, you are the way. There is no door but your flesh. We open the doors into you.”

“No …”

“You say that word a lot, do you draw comfort from it? Is it a word of power for you? Or is it just a denial of your own stupidity? Open him up, my lovelies, we would see this wondrous place the manling has promised us. Let us make doors out of his flesh and go explore.”

The spiders bit; at first a single fang sank into the soft flesh of his neck, then a second and a third and then the teeth came as they opened him up.

His screams were punctuated by the sharp hiss of the pot-boilers and the ratcheting of the infernal cogs down below.

They mocked his pleas for mercy as they tore him apart.

They jeered as they opened doors into his flesh.

They taunted as they pulled back his skin, stretching it and pinning it back with the jagged splinters of his broken ribcage.

And the light was still in his eyes as they streamed away from his ragged corpse, making way for the snake-man to get closer.

“Are we not dead yet, manling?” The snake-man preened, a curved talon tracing the open lines of Nathaniel Seth’s parted flesh. “Pity, it will hurt more like this.” The creature teased his bones apart and buried its face in the open wound, pushing through the rent in time and space to the other side.

O O O

The creature emerged, victorious, ichor dripping from its grotesque reptilian fangs as it tasted the air of London.

“Lord have mercy on our souls,” Anthony Millington breathed, unable to take his eyes off the monstrosity as it clawed its way into existence.

In front of him, Fabian Stark seemed to buckle, shrinking in on himself as though the beast was drawing its substance from him. Hundreds, thousands of tiny black mites swarmed out of the tear behind the snake-man, gaining shape and form as they skittered across the Whispering Gallery. Spiders. Thousands upon thousands of bulbous black spiders, their spindly legs snicking and chittering as they scuttled all across the great dome of St. Paul’s, blanketing it in a writhing black mass.

Millington rushed up to his side and caught him, lending his weight to stop the younger man from falling.

“What are they?”

“Harbingers,” Stark said. His breathing was laboured, coming in deep, ragged gasps.

“How do we fight them? Squash them under our heels?”

Up on the gallery, the snake-man drew himself to its full daunting height, and threw his head back so that all Millington could see was its long forked tongue licking out at the sky over and over.

Behind him, he heard the jarring clatter of metal-framed wheels and horseshoes sparking off the cobbled street. Millington turned to see two hansom cabs drawing up at the Cathedral’s steps. Haddon McCreedy and Dorian Carruthers emerged from one, Brannigan Locke and Eugene Napier from the other. The springs groaned their relief as the brute, Napier, heaved himself out of the cab. Locke held a service revolver in his hand. He took three brisk steps forward and levelled weapon, aiming up at the huge beast on the gallery. Millington’s warning stuck in his throat as Locke’s single shot rang out. The bullet struck the snake-man squarely in its armoured chest and ricocheted away harmlessly, burying itself into the stone.

Locke fired a second time, aiming for the snake-man’s glassy eyes, but the bullet cracked off the creature’s brow-ridge.

The snake-man did not so much as flinch. It came to the edge of the gallery, unfurling huge leathery wings that beat the air once, twice, and on the third, the snake-man launched himself into the air. Behind him the black spiders swarmed down the sides of the Cathedral and out across the grass and paving, across the cobbles and through the doorjambs and beneath the cracks into every house and office along the street, down through the drains into the sewers and up over the rooftops.

“What do we do, Stark?” Millington said, urgently.

Fabian Stark shook his head, tearing himself out of the stupor that had gripped him since the beast was born into the world above. “I need to think.” His eyes were bright, alive, feverish. When he spoke, it wasn’t to the actor, nor any of the others. “I know you, beast. I know what you are. I know who you are, Meringias, and there is power within a name, the things I can do with it, the pain I can impart with my art … This is not your place. I make this offer once, return to the world below. If you do not take it you will die.” Stark said this with such conviction Millington did not doubt him for a moment. The power in his otherwise frail companion’s voice was immense.

The winged beast sneered, its long tongue lashing against its jagged row of fangs. The beating of its wings intensified, as though the creature was agitated. It came lower, eye-to-eye with Stark. “You are weak, manling. You will die like the other one, and then all of these other timorous fools will follow in your wake. We shall walk this plane of yours and we shall feast. We are hungry, aren’t we, my lovelies?”

The sheer proximity of the great beast and the countless remembered stories of devils and daemons rooted Millington to the spot. Carruthers pushed up beside him and with a flourish threw some kind of snap-bang into the snake-man’s face. It was a children’s toy, a cheap sideshow prestidigitation, but it worked. For a split second the beast recoiled and in that moment Stark broke rank, lunging forward. Millington saw that he had some kind of salve on his fingers that he smeared down the snake-man’s torso. It didn’t seem to have any visible effect but that didn’t deter Stark from completing the cross on the beast’s chest. Even complete, the holy symbol had no effect on the snake-man.

Cackling, the creature stretched its wings and took flight.

“Hold, spawn of the pit!” Haddon McCreedy bellowed. Millington saw he clutched a battered leather bible in his trembling hands. “Questo esorcismo può essere recitato da tutti i cattolici, anche laici,” He began, the words of the exorcism torn from his lips by the sudden surge of the wind. “Per scacciare il demonio ed i suoi seguaci.”

The Meringias licked its lips with its flaccid tongue. “You amuse us, manling,” the creature said, grinning at McCreedy. “We will feed on you later. For now we will look for fat flesh to feast on. The city awakes, we smell the sweat and sex and gluttony of your kind. It is ripe in the air. It drives us wild.”

McCreedy roared the remaining words of the ritual but like the white cross they had little effect on the beast.

Up on the Whispering Gallery more abominations were emerging; a giant jackal-headed monstrosity, and behind it, an apish creature with a melted face and jewelled eyes lumbered into view, tearing the rent wider with its sheer bulk. More and more beasts broke through the veil between planes, defying death with their twisted visages and warped physiques.

The Meringias rose, flaunting its power. It turned its back on Stark and McCreedy as it ascended, until it was up around the heights of the dome itself. Then it turned, primal, powerful.

It sank its talons into the stone and crouched, sniffing the air theatrically before launching itself once more.

The Meringias streaked across the sky and disappeared behind the rooftops of Fleet Street.

A moment later the first screams came.

“Listen, all of you,” Stark said, turning to face the others. The lines of his face were taut, his lips white. “The way to the core has been opened; these things, daemons by our Christian mythology, were never meant to exist beneath our sky. This means we have but one chance here. The longer they remain on the Prime Material, the stronger they will become. Napier,” the brute nodded, stepping forward. “I need you to get to Greenwich, to the Prime Meridian. Take this,” he withdrew a Moleskine notebook from his inside pocket and scribbled something down. He tore the page out and handed it to Napier. “You must begin inscribing these words, exactly these words, in the brass line that marks the longitude, when you hear the first bell of the city chiming the seventh hour. You must be finished before the final bell sounds. Understood?”

“Aye,” Napier grunted. “Good man, there’s not a lot of time left. Take one of the cabs. Seven o’clock. It has to be Seven.” Napier lumbered away, half-running half-jumping down the long steps back to where the three hansom cabs still waited.

Stark wrote a second set of instructions for McCreedy. Haddon took them without a word.

“I need you to go back to the Reading Room, Haddon. When you hear the first bells of St. Giles tolling seven, do exactly what it says on the note. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“You can rely on it,” McCreedy said, turning on his heel and stalking back to the brougham Stark himself had arrived in moments before.

“Dorian, I need you to go to the bell tower of St. Clements—”

“I know, seven o’clock, exactly what it says on the note.”

“Exactly,” Stark agreed, handing the note over.

Carruthers pocketed it without so much as glancing at it.

“Locke, the same thing, but take the great bell of St. Martins in the Field.”

“Seven o’clock?”

“As soon as you hear the first notes sounding out from the Old Bailey Bell and Wren’s Tower here, and finished before the last.”

Locke nodded. “You can trust me, Fabian.”

“I know, now go.”

“What about me?” Millington said. He hadn’t been able to pull his gaze away from the nucleus of the black wound and the myriad devils of the deep places emerging through it.

“I need you here, Anthony. I won’t be able to do this alone.”

O O O

As the hammers rang out the first note of the seven o’clock chimes across the city the six men of the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club went to work with grim purpose.

Eugene Napier knelt before the white door of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, his knees straddling the lead line that marked the Prime Meridian, the zero point of the world’s time and the division between the east and west hemispheres.

He smoothed out the crumpled paper, reading Stark’s instructions one last time even though he knew exactly what they entailed having committed them to memory on the long drive over to the Observatory.

Using the blade of his pocket knife he carved the seven symbols into the lead line, each one seven inches long precisely. Four he recognised as the elemental signs, three he did not. He had no time to labour over it, and no second chances. The chimes would last for only a minute. He made each stroke with precision, finishing the final flourish exactly as the final note faded to silence.

O O O

In the Reading Room of the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club, Haddon McCreedy lifted down the huge mantle clock that sat above the doorway. The face was exposed, the different cogs all laid bare. The smaller second hand, off-set to the upper right of the clock’s face ticked quickly. The hours were marked in Roman numerals.

McCreedy placed the clock on the windowsill, as Stark’s instructions demanded.

He listened to the fourth, fifth and six chimes before he removed the seventh hour, scoring in another line beside the VII so it appeared VIII.

As the final note resonated in the air, McCreedy stole the seventh hour, leaving the old timepiece with two eight o’clocks.

O O O

In the bell tower of St. Clement’s Dorian Carruthers finished inscribing the great brass bell with the sigils Stark had drawn and counted out the fifth, sixth and seventh chimes before grabbing the rope high up and forcing another chime out of the bell, so seven became eight, the hour lost.

O O O

Brannigan Locke listened to the deafening chorus of the bells, his mind ringing with the old nursery rhyme.

“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clements,” he said.

I’ll give you five farthings, the bells answered him over and over. I’ll give you five farthings. I’ll give you five farthings.

He waited and waited, the full minute of the chimes stretching out into the longest minute he had ever lived through.

Between the sixth and seventh chime he intoned the words Stark had written down for him, sealing the symmetry of the incantation, demarking the boundaries of effect where this moment of time would be excised from.

Then he grasped the rope and forced the great bell to toll an eighth time.

O O O

The sky above Fabian Stark bled.

The rain was tinged with rust, as though the Meringias’ presence on the Prime Material acted as a conduit for the infernal machinery of the hollow earth to bleed into reality. Stark was weak, already he could feel the draw of the Art reducing him. He knew what he had to do, but knowing made the task no simpler.

As the first hammer struck the city’s bells, he sank to his knees. As the first note blended into the second he tore open his shirt, yanking aside his cravat. He was skin and bones, dark shadows filling the clefts between his ribs and the hollow of his gut. Between the second and third peel of noise he smeared more of the white petroleum jelly across his bare chest, a circle within a square, a triangle within the circle, the most basic element of all conjurations, opening himself up to The Art.

He felt those first familiar stirrings within his flesh, the frisson of the elements coming to life inside his body, the air filling his lungs, the rain on his face, sinking into his skin, the hard-packed earth against his knees, and the fire in his heart, all of them coming together.

The flesh beneath the salve began to sting, the heat rising from beneath his skin.

“Millington,” he said, not looking around. “Do not let me fall. That is your job. Do not let me fall. More importantly, no matter what transpires, no matter how much I might beg, do not let me run, I beseech you.”

“I am here,” the actor said, resting a hand on Stark’s shoulder.

The fifth bell chimed, a symphony of sound reverberating out across the rooftops of London, from the Old Bailey Bell, down to the river, west to St. Martin’s in the Field, north to St. Giles, and back to St. Clement’s. His skin thrilled to the music of the city.

“I summon thee, Meringias!” Stark cried, throwing his head back. The blood red rain streamed down his face, into his eyes and mouth. “I summon thee, dweller of the deep!”

The sixth harmonic rang out, and counter-point to it came the slow thump-thump-thump of the beast’s heavy wings.

“COME TO ME!”

O O O

Anthony Millington stared in mute horror as the beast descended from the blood-red sky.

The seventh bell rang out the coming of the hour.

The creature Stark called Meringias landed beside him, wicked claws digging into the stone of the funeral slabs as it did. The air stank of brimstone and was haunted by the incessant skittering of the black spiders drawn back to the steps of St. Paul’s by Stark’s summons. His skin crawled at the sight of them.

He stood behind Stark, determined not to let him down, just as he knew the others had taken up their stations around the city, all sharing the same grim determination. Alone they were less than the sum of their parts; together they were strong.

Stark gasped—a sound that could only be described as agony—and swayed. Millington steadied him. Stark was burning up. His skin was hotter than Hell.

“The little manling is begging us, my lovelies. See him on his knees? We are amused by his contrition. We shall eat his sweetmeats with pleasure and remember his cowardice before our might.”

The spiders cried out in appreciation, thousands upon thousands of the hairy black pedipalps parting to allow the chittering its full voice; it was a distressingly human sound. The spiders were excited by the prospect of the feast.

They swarmed up the steps, wave after wave of bulbous black carapaces surging forward.

Millington did not move.

Stark shivered; no mere tremor, it was a violent convulsion that tore through the entirety of his body. He buckled beneath Millington’s steadying grasp. Millington did not allow him to fall.

“Shall we eat it now, my lovelies? Shall we? Yes, we shall.”

Stark leaned forward, head and shoulders sagging. He began to chant, vicious sharp words that Millington couldn’t fasten on, words that cut at the edges of his concentration as he tried to understand them. The intensity of his voice heightened, taking on greater and greater urgency as the beast neared, until he was screaming and the Meringias’s barbed claw was scratching through the squared circle on his chest, drawing a thick ribbon of blood to the surface.

“Open my flesh, Meringias. Cut me down, it will be your doom,” Fabian Stark promised.

The creature’s laughter was harsh.

“You doubt me?”

“You are weak, manling. Nothing. This place is ours now, we have arisen from the deep places, we are home. Your time here is done.”

“Time,” Stark said, thoughtfully. He actually smiled as he dwelt upon the word. The way he said it scared Millington, more so even than way the Meringias stared, naked hunger in its blazing eyes. Beyond that one word Millington heard the echoes of an eighth hour tolling. “Just ran out … do you feel it, beast? Do you feel its pull on your corporeal form? This is not your sky. This is not your rain, not your air, not your earth. This is not your time.”

Millington had no idea what his companion’s words meant, but he could feel the truth of them. It was as though the air itself was rebelling against the creature’s unnatural presence. It crackled with energy.

“We claim it for our own, manling. That is enough. The feeding will be grand. We scent millions of souls ripe for the taking … and we are hungry.”

“Begin with me,” Stark said, offering himself.

“No,” Millington said, instinctively stepping forward to protect the young magician.

But the beast ignored his protestations, lunging forward to pierce Stark’s bare chest with a razor-like claw, opening him up from throat to belly with a single savage motion. Stark screamed, a sound unlike any Millington had ever heard before. It emerged from three mouths, Stark’s, Millington’s and the beast itself. It took him the space between heartbeats to realise it was not merely one of pain but one of triumph as well. The triumph was Stark’s, the anguish, the beast’s.

Millington stepped back, forgetting his promise for a moment, but Stark did not fall. He could not, Millington realised with horror. The Meringias threw itself forward, burying its face in the young mage’s guts and feasting ravenously. So fierce was the daemon’s hunger that it crawled within Stark’s skin to better devour the marrow of his life, sucking his bones clean. And in that moment the final part of the trap was sprung, the elements coming together to bind the two. Even as he died, Stark’s screams took on a new, haunting quality. For a moment they rang out like joyous laughter and then he was dead and the bells of London were ringing out all around them, their chimes growing more and more frenzied.

Millington saw Stark’s legs: they had calcified, the blood inside him merging with the stone of the funeral slabs, flesh fusing with the stone, becoming stone. The blood ceased spilling, hardening to the same granite as the Cathedral steps.

The rain burned against Millington’s scalp. It sizzled off the stone creeping up Stark’s flesh, even as the fire in the young man’s eyes burned out.

And the creeping death touched the feasting beast, its teeth fusing with the hollow bones it gnawed on. It tried to rise, to break contact with the metamorphosing man, but could not. Stark’s transmogrification continued relentlessly, the man becoming one with the elements he served. A stone man rooted deeply into the earth, rained down upon from the heavens, unmoved by the wind, the very fire of the daemon’s being fusing them together.

A hideous tearing greeted the beast’s desperate screams of anger and frustration, and suddenly it was free, its huge leathery wings carrying it up into the air. It settled on the great dome, sneering down at the man who had sought to bind it.

The black wound in the side of the Whispering Gallery was gone, sealed, whether by the bells, the hour stolen, or some other Millington could never hope to understand. But then, so was his companion; like a victim of the Gorgon, Medusa, turned to stone before his very eyes.

The rain ran down his grey face. There was no trace of rust in it.

Millington looked down at his feet where hundreds of pebbles were strewn across the lawn, up the steps and along the funeral slabs. It took him a moment to realise that they had only moments before been spiders. He stared up at the Meringias, lost. There was nothing he could do to stop the creature. Nothing he could do to banish it now that Stark had fallen, his sacrifice for naught. He wanted to run as the huge beast began to unfurl its enormous leathery wings.

The bells fell silent.

For a moment there was only the sound of the rain.

And then an inhuman scream tore the dawn in two.

The creeping stone death had not relinquished its hold upon the Meringias; its wings had calcified, and now the granite was closing over its face. It rose again, sheer stubborn will tearing its claws free of the stone dome, and in the air it seemed to be free, safe from the relentless consummation of the earth.

But it could not fly forever.

Millington ran beneath it, his head raised, never letting the daemon out of his sight.

It settled on the roof of the Old Bailey, beneath the shadow of Lady Justice’s sword, and immediately lost more of itself to stone. And rose again, the weight of its body dragging it down. It barely reached the roof of St. Clements, and as its claws settled so its transformation was complete. The daemon reduced to a gargoyle to look down over the city streets, forever trapped within the sound of the bells in an hour that did not exist.

He walked back to the Cathedral’s steps, to Stark’s side.

The young man’s stone face wore a smile.

That was enough for Millington.

It had to be.

It took all of his strength to lift it from the steps to the shrubbery beside the funeral slabs. In time the vegetation would claim Fabian Stark, but there was one hour that could never touch him.

That was the hour between dawn and morning, the lost hour, that Fabian Stark stood as protector over. “The man of the hour,” Millington said, christening the statue.

O O O

Down below, in that other place, beneath the molten sky, the homunculus crept forward.

The others had left, gone to the world above.

It was curious; that curiosity burned within it.

They had left behind the doorway, the skin and bone they had needed to move between the worlds.

It knelt beside the ruined corpse of Nathaniel Seth, looking at it with something between fascination and desire.

It licked its lips, looking furtively left and right.

It was alone.

Alone to do whatever it wished.

Whatever …

It scampered forward and climbed quickly inside the dead man’s skin, trying it on, stretching out into it, to fill it. It felt good. Right. It concentrated on the wounds, spreading its essence out into them. They would heal, in time. And it had time. All the time in the world. An endless hour.

And so the man who called himself Nathaniel Seth rose up again to stand on his own two feet.

The daemon of the hour.

***

The God of Forgotten Things

He took the dying girl’s hand in his, as though by sheer force of will alone he could stave off the inevitable.

He had never imagined dying alone.

For as long as it was within his power he wouldn’t let her go.

Holding her hand he tried instead to conjure all of the memories he had accumulated over his life; all the things he kept alive by remembering. Locked away inside him were things that had been cherished once, and now, without him to remember them, would simply cease to be part of the everyday and would fade into the blurred landscape of the Realm of Forgotten Things forever:

The simple joy of attaching a baseball card to your bicycle with a clothespin so it hit the spokes as you rode, letting you pretend you were on a motorcycle. Hoppity Hop and Hoppity Horse, Klick-Klacks and Sea Monkeys, Lite Brite and Loop-da-loops. Spirographs and Etch a Sketches, Jumping Jacks and Mr. Potato Head. Captain Action, G.I. Joe, Creepy Crawlers, and Big Wheels (perfect for making wooden go-karts if you removed the huge rear wheel). Playing on construction sites on a Sunday in the days before rabid security dogs, nearly drowning, nearly buried alive, uncountable near crushing accidents, all in the name of childish FUN. Building forts out of bricks and branches and mud to sit and read books or play cowboys and Indians in. Slinkies and Saturday morning matinees, pirates and swashbucklers, duelling with make-believe swords. Playing when it was okay to give a kid a plastic gun that fired fancy Spanish caps. Rubik’s Cubes, Chutes and Ladders, Pong and Lincoln Logs, Whizzers and the Starland Vocal Band.

And the core beneath it all: Imagination.

Before childhood had its dreams doled out by graphics and gadgets that plugged into a console. Long before the Great God Television spawned its hundreds of channels and children made their own adventures in their minds.

Going out to bust ghosts, to have adventures, to play at being explorers beyond the fringe of the neighbourhood when the cars were a nuisance and not filled with potential predators. Tea parties and EZ Bake Ovens which were anything but easy to bake with. He carried all of these things and more, kept them safe. As the God of Forgotten things the old man nurtured the hidden treasures of all of our childhoods, keeping them safe from our forgetfulness.

He looked at the little girl swallowed in the swaddling clothes of the too big hospital bed, the drips and sensors monitoring her vital signs as they hiccoughed towards the flatline.

Her death was inevitable. Her organs were failing and shutting down one by one.

He continued to read from the book he was holding: Hoke Berglund’s mesmeric The Forgetting Wood. He had chosen the book because he hoped the story of King Wolf’s by-blows sneaking out of the wood to steal away children might somehow reach her in whatever darkness her soul had taken refuge; that she might somehow respond to the story.

Nurses came and went throughout the day, sparing him their looks of pity. They saw an old man and a child; perhaps his granddaughter, dying, and they shared his heartbreak without actually understanding the true nature of what it was they were actually sharing.

After all, candy stripers and staff nurses were not renowned for being tapped into a hotline to the wisdom of the spheres. An old man was an old man and a dying girl was a tragedy, and never the twain should be Gods or followers whose paths have crossed for a final farewell.

He stood up. Across the cramped room was a small mirror.

“What good am I?” the old man badgered his reflection—the face in the mirror was far from glorious. The lines ran deep and wide. “A god of petty trinkets and plastic toys.” He was talking for someone else’s benefit; not the dying girl, and certainly not his own. Someone who could have intervened, if they cared enough to do so. “For all that the miracle of creation flows through my veins I can’t actually do anything … I remember things best left forgotten and fumble toward understanding or lack thereof, of the most mundane mysteries. I can’t even keep a little girl alive.”

For a fragment of a heartbeat, the stress drew the miracles to the fore, threatening to unleash all that he remembered on the world, and the memories showed through the map of his face—and in the glass he saw things long since lapsed from the collective memory of everyday people. The secrets beneath the surface that made him Him.

Kids building ramps to launch their bicycles through the air like Evil Knievel, the bicycles cobbled together from scraps salvaged from various junkyards. Super 8 mm cameras and projectors. Forgotten youth filled with Rin Tin Tin and The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix and Pez dispensers. Playing with telephones made of tin cans and string, blowing an infernal racket on plastic kazoos and playing practical jokes with squirting flowers, fake cigarettes and hand buzzers. Sky King, Have Gun Will Travel, Sugar Foot, Wanted Dead or Alive, Give-A-Show Projectors and Bazooka Bubble Gum. 10 pence comics, Doc Savage and Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes. Drive-in movies with homemade hotdogs and cokes in real glass bottles. Days spent playing with miniature petrol station play sets, and building cut-outs from the back of cereal boxes. Shooting marbles, and losing favourite ‘steelies’ to dead eye shots. Vinegar withered Conkers and Stink Bombs. Pedal cars and Silly Putty. Green Slime and Weebles that wobbled but wouldn’t fall down. View Master and Presto Magic papers, Hungry Hippos and Buckeroo Banzai. The things inside him never ended. He was infinite. He contained multitudes of memories. Hunting tadpoles in the creek, and searching for bullets and shells soldiers had discarded during a war equally long since forgotten. Punch balloons and candyfloss. Battered yellow Tonka Trucks and Hot Wheels and Matchbox Cars racing on narrow plastic tracks. Stalking the neighbourhood with a Red Ryder BB Gun. Spending all afternoon building plastic model cars and planes, just smash them up in the driveway in some horrific accident. These were all the things that made him Him.

And he couldn’t imagine letting go. Letting them go.

It wasn’t death that scared him.

It was ceasing to be and all the things that would be lost along with him.

So he knelt beside her deathbed, waiting. He held her tiny hand in his and felt the flutter of her pulse.

“I’m not ready yet,” he repeated and knew, truthfully, that he wasn’t. Her eyes were glass. She was going. He looked back over his shoulder toward the door. No one was in the corridor. Breathing deeply, he leaned in to kiss the girl they all thought was his daughter. Their lips didn’t actually touch. They didn’t need to. A mere fraction from contact, he inhaled, drawing her out of herself and into him, absorbing her. It was a strange sensation, like drinking, swallowing and not being able to stop as more and more of the girl’s spirit poured down his throat.

And then they were one.

She was in him and the shell was empty.

A dead thing on the bed.

He felt her inside him, a frightened thing trapped inside his infinite walls. Her panic was palpable. He touched the surface of her thoughts, gently soothing, calming, and felt—

Cheated.

That was the overriding sensation. Cheated. There was no light. No heavenly host. No lost family members come to bring her into His warmth. She was alone. She resented the fact that she’d been left to go into the Kingdom of the Dead alone.

“No,” the old man soothed. “No, no. Not yet. You haven’t taken that walk yet. We have a little time. One last glorious huzzah, a few hours at least, to capture it all, to see, to taste, to explore, to savour, to devour, to share. A few perfect hours to live an entire life in. That is my gift to you. Dying like this isn’t right … now, let’s see, what do you love more than anything? That seems like a good place to start.”

He teased the petals of her memories apart, sifting through the darling buds of life she clung to. She was good. Her memories were perfect; each one possessed a dizzying clarity, each aspect beautifully rendered in sound and colour. It was fitting that she should be the last; that together they should leave.

He kissed the shell gently on the forehead. “I’ll bring her back safely,” he promised.

He walked toward the row of elevators by the Nurse’s Station, and rode on down to street level. What would a young girl like? He wondered. The answer was, of course, everything, which meant starting at the very beginning. He was hungry. It was a basic need but, he realised, her food had been doled out through straws and drips. It was far from the delicious sustenance of junk food. He turned left as he hit the street, passing beneath the giant hoarding advertising super-sized grease in paper wrappers and thus began his quest for the Big Yellow M. He couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony as he turned off Arthur Street onto Galahad Drive and was greeted by the sight of the Golden Arches beckoning.

He marched in, walked straight up to the long disinfectant-gleaming counter and ordered the jumbo deluxe super-sized monster meal and a minute later staggered back to the plastic seats clutching the massive paper cup of Coca Cola as though it were the Grail itself. A gallon sized grail at that.

He unwrapped his prize carefully, peeling back the layers of paper to get at the meat patties, limp lettuce and sesame seed bun inside. He took a bite, chewed, and swallowed. He felt her joy as he swallowed mouthful after gluttonous mouthful. It was a simple delight. A sweet thing. The simple joy of food. He ate with greed inspired by the truth that this was his—and her—last meal. He stuffed the food into his mouth until it was difficult to chew and slurped the coke and crunched the ice and belched and chewed and slurped and belched. He didn’t care what he looked like, what other people thought when they saw his gluttony. He ate and it was good. They could stare all they wanted. It wasn’t about them; for once it was about him.

He wiped off his lips with the back of his hand and stood up. The lighting in the ‘restaurant’ was designed to be uncomfortable—the franchise holders didn’t want customers loitering after they’d enjoyed their taste sensations.

Outside the street was grey, overcast, and in every way a perfect presage of the miserable February to come.

The wind had teeth.

People shuffled by, women with shopping bags bulging, men with hands stuffed in pockets and heads down, deliberately not looking up for fear of making eye contact with passing strangers.

This was the city.

This was what it had come down to.

With infinite possibilities to choose from his feet led him toward the train station where its steel arches and sheltered pigeons replaced the golden ones of the restaurant. He bought a ticket to the coast and was alone in the old carriage when the 10:43 pulled away from the platform amid the snorting of engines and scattering of birds. He had deliberately chosen one of the older trains with separate compartments within each carriage because it was a reminder of a simpler time where travellers with their battered brown leather luggage would actually talk, share a journey. Few travellers wanted to do that anymore; they craved the expedience of the shortest time between point A and point B and had all but forgotten that the point of a journey is not to arrive but the simple joy of travelling itself.

The landscape metamorphosed from concrete and steel to rolling greens and browns as the industrial ceded to the rural, and finally, for a mile or more as the tracks ran along the coast, he gazed out at the blues and greens of the sea and the sky as they wrestled on the horizon, each trying to impose its splendour on the other. These were the images worth remembering; wheeling seagulls, storm clouds, roiling breakers, the rhythm of the tracks, the faint tang of stale cigarettes trapped in the No Smoking compartment, the hard springs of the worn seats, the old world charm of the conductor poking his head into the compartment and saying: “Tickets please.”

The train pulled into the station, and given the season and the weather it came as no surprise that the platform was deserted. His footsteps echoed. He whistled a snatch of an old war tune as he walked over the small wooden footbridge that crossed the tracks. The melody was amplified by the vast emptiness of the station’s roof.

“Nearly there,” he told the girl.

‘There’ was a huge white domed amusement park with slot machines and waltzers and rollercoasters and ghost trains, shuffle board and tin pan alleys, merry-go-rounds and carousels. The amusement park was chained up but that didn’t matter. He followed the chain-link fence around to a sheltered corner that wasn’t overlooked by the road or local houses. The top was tipped off with razor wire so he pulled at the bottom, working it until it was loose enough for him to wriggle underneath. He didn’t care about getting dirty.

Of course, everything was lifeless, the rides and the slots. Several of the attractions had been battened down for winter, so the first thing he did was walk around pulling back the tarpaulins to see what treasures lay hidden beneath. A few, like the Whirl-e-Gig and the Octopus, were easy to spot because of their light bulb clad tentacles. The candyfloss machines and the chestnut roasters were empty, no ingredients nearby. He walked between the rides, remembering all of the happiness they had brought people before they closed for the season. That was one good thing about being responsible for remembering; he got to cherish the best of the memories, got to relive them over and over, first kisses in the tunnel of love, the hot flush of summer flings, the heady cocktail of enthusiasm and energy and undeniability that is youth.

He stopped by the fairground’s behemoth: the waltzer, resplendent with its garishly painted faces of Elvis and the Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Madonna and Cliff Richard and George Michael, he started searching for a switch that would bring it all to life.

He found what he was looking for in the centre booth. The glass door wasn’t locked, and a row of switches promised power for the lights, the music and finally, the ride itself. He flicked them one at a time, and suddenly the waltzer sprang to life, the bucket seats revolving lazily as the monster stirred. He flicked the final switch and Calliope piped music shrilled into life. Grinning, he triggered the five minute ride, and navigated his way out across the rippling wooden boards as they gathered momentum, and sank into the seat behind Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten’s sneering faces and rode the nauseating waves as the bucket seat span faster and faster to the pull of gravitational forces.

Next, he lined up the skeet shoot in Tin Pan Alley, popping ball bearings into battered metal ducklings as they waddled across his sight. He rode the Octopus and the rollercoaster, then soaked himself on the flume ride, and dried off in the tunnel of love. Alone in the dark the ghost train was creepy; all of the creaks and groans of the settling wood, the unoiled tracks and the real cobwebs across the fake plastic ones were far more unnerving than the Day-Glo skulls and the tape-recorded screams that haunted the tracks his small cart rolled along.

It was a good day

In one of the metal carts by the concession stand he found the pink makings of candyfloss. He fed the mix into the candyfloss maker and watched the twin blades circle and fold the gloop into just the right consistency of stickiness and sugar. Eating the candyfloss with his fingers was a sticky treat. It popped and fizzed on his tongue and clogged in his throat until the sugar dissolved. He ate until he felt sick and then he went in search of the carousel.

It was beautiful, and as out of place in this Mecca of thrills and spills as he himself was. It was a remnant of a better time. It was a glimpse of the craftsmanship and beauty that had been a fundamental part of the travelling funfair. Unicorns, horses, griffins, lions, tigers, zebras, even a dragon, each one carved in loving detail, their seats worn shiny by countless riders. He chose the simplest of the animals, a plain white horse, to ride, and clung on to its mane as it rose and fell in mock gallop. Going round, he remembered a few of the things he would miss most of all, and found that they were all of the simplest things, a smile from a pretty stranger, first hearing a song that touched the heart, laughter, and then something occurred to him. Where before he had always assumed that losing the past would inevitably mean that the future made no sense, he had forgotten one key component of humanity: they live neither in the past or future, they live almost exclusively in the present tense. Things happen to them and they adjust and cope even as they are happening. Very few look forward, and only the very old look back. His absence was not likely to be felt, not in the way he believed he deserved. That the very old could not remember clearly would surprise no one; they would call it Alzheimer’s for want of a better diagnosis. And he would be left to slip away among all of the other forgotten things.

If anything, instead of lowering his spirits, the thought gave him the will to do what he had to: to die. The world would get by without him. Things would fade from the memory and while they would have no-one to keep them alive and cherished, that was the way it would have to be; entropy would have her way.

That was what it was all about, ultimately: entropy. The memories of the universe would become useless, the energy they offered, would degrade until it became unusable, and eventually everyone would succumb to this kind of soulless uniformity. The uniqueness of God’s creation would be lost. But, he knew, entropy would have her way. To fight against her was pointless.

No, it was better to savour the day, follow the example of humanity and live in the present tense.

He touched the girl’s thoughts, intending to see if she had enjoyed her final few hours, but instead came the revelation that the wisdom was not his own. She was the one who had calmed his soul. She was the one who had helped him come to terms with his obsolescence. She was the one who understood better than he did the need to live for today. He smiled, lesson learned.

“Have you enjoyed yourself?” He asked, knowing the answer. He could feel her smiling inside. He dismounted and pulled the plug on the carousel. Attraction by attraction he went around the funfair turning the lights off and hiding them back beneath their tarpaulins until, eventually, there was nothing to suggest he had ever been there.

“You know what happens next,” he said.

He couldn’t find it in himself to feel sad. They had had, together, the perfect day, and now, together, they would go gently into the endless winter night.

All that remained was to return to the hospital and wait for the inevitable.

He took the slow train, enjoying the gentle rocking motion and the clatter of the wheels on the tracks and the fact that the tiny windows wouldn’t open enough to let the air in and the sunset as the darkness claimed the day. In everything around him there was something to enjoy. And enjoy it was exactly what he did. He savoured the uniqueness of everything around him, and shared his joy with the girl inside. They shared simple things like the smell of cinnamon buns baking, the honking horns of frustrated drivers, the drizzle of rain on his upturned face, even the most basic act of walking—just walking. It was so long since she had done that.

The hospital room was empty. The bed had been made. His copy of The Forgetting Wood was on the nightstand.

He heard the nurse come up behind him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “She died just after you left. You missed her by a few minutes.”

“No,” he said, not understanding. “That’s impossible … she can’t be … I just … we didn’t …”

“I’m sorry,” the nurse repeated, nothing more substantial to say. “She went quietly. I am sure it didn’t hurt. And now, well, she won’t feel any pain where she is, will she?”

He didn’t understand. She wasn’t gone. He could feel her. She was inside him. She was alive.

And then he realised.

She would always be alive.

Inside him.

She would live in his memory, and as long as he remembered her, he would live inside her. They were inextricably linked.

He was the God of Forgotten Things.

And she was someone he would never forget.

***

London on the Brink of Never

The fog was like a thick not-quite black veil shrouding a widow’s face. It was a fitting analogy, Draydon Meer thought as he walked along the blind streets of the grieving city. London, mother of infinite sadness, mistress of melancholy, was as seductive as the gentle sway of a doxy’s hips as she flattered to deceive the coin from lusty fools. London, Goddess of the Smog.

He had been born here, had lived and loved and lied here, and when the time came he would die here in this loneliest of places. He had a stone heart that beat to the rhythms of the city. Brougham carriages and Hansom cabs rattled unseeing and unseen across the cobbled streets, the whinny of the horses and the crack of the whips like blood in his veins. It was a two way relationship, the city gave him life, but he cherished hers and in cherishing it he became her memory—the stones didn’t hold on to their past glories, there was no passion play of ghosts to bring it all back night after night no matter how much the Spiritualists might have wished it otherwise. It was people like Draydon Meer that kept London alive.

He tapped the steel tip of his wolf’s head cane against the cobbles, feeling the street out. He walked with confidence despite the fact that the thick fog made it impossible to see more than a foot in front of his face. The hoi polloi talked about the fog as a good thing, a sign of progress, of industry taking root and mankind flourishing against all the odds. The simple minded fools didn’t dare remember what it was like before the fog came. Meer remembered. It was all he could think about. But then he has lost so much more than the others knew precisely because he remembered.

He bought a punnet of roasted chestnuts from a vendor on the corner of Courtney Place and juggled the hot nuts for a mile, crunching and listening to the ethereal strains of conversation he happened upon. People talked about curious things when they didn’t think there was anyone close enough to overhear. He smiled at the fog-masked lover’s promises and puzzled over the nefarious schemes of no-goods. What was beautiful about both of them was that neither had even the vaguest inkling that the city was dying. Draydon Meer knew it was so because he had lived through it more than once before, and he remembered what it was like back before the smog came. His life had been simple then—there was peace in ignorance. Now he walked with the demons and the devils staring back at him through the plate glass windows of the stores that promised an array of unearthly delights and sweet deceits because he knew things only the dead should know.

He knew what was on the other side of the fog. He knew why the quality of the air itself was changing and it wasn’t what any one of them believed—but that was hardly surprising as they still believed in a god that had long since abandoned them. That was the extent of their science; the options of the world were infinite because their deity’s influence was equally limitless. Odd then, Meer thought, that the fool still insisted on using their faith as both armour to protect them from the worst, and paradoxically, as a sword to lance deep wounds into others who didn’t share their blind faith. It could hardly come as a surprise then that there was so much suffering in the city. No, the air was changing because it was no longer theirs to breathe. That was the truth of it.

It had begun with peculiar lights in the sky, and then the fog had come rising up from the Thames to roll out across the city. It had been nothing more than peculiar temperature inversion, hot and cold thermals reversed, trapping the moisture in the air, but it had become something much more sinister as it spread—it had become a malaise that choked the life out of the weak, the emphysemic, the asthmatic, the bronchial and those who were just plain old. It robbed the city of its vitality lung by wheezing lung.

This wasn’t the London he had grown up in, it was the London of his imagination, as it might have been in another place and another time, all towering gothic spires, brooding gargoyles, shadows and sinister shapes, leeched of all colour by the choking pea-souper. It amused Meer no end that they hadn’t been able to separate the fact from the fiction when they resurrected it to taunt him. Instead of his own personal Hell they had given him something almost magical, recreating all of these wonderful childhood fictions for him and him alone. Because there was no doubt he was alone, even with all of the disembodied voices floating out there just a single step beyond the veil of fog—always that one single step away from him.

It was all about the fog, or rather what lay beyond the fog: nothing. The denizens of the city shuffled about their every day, doing laundry, fighting over fish scraps down at the market, arguing over hard bread and rotten fruit and kicking rats as the vermin spilled out of the gutters to feed on the scraps they dropped during the fighting. They did it every day, caught in a time-loop, playing out the same arguments, flirting with the same whores and wives, offering the same chancer’s smiles and never seeing beyond it. It had become so ingrained within Draydon Meer he could walk the streets with his eyes closed, counting out the paces, twists and swerves to negotiate the crowds without every bumping in to a soul. He had lived this day that many times now the seemingly random acts of life were stamped indelibly on his mind.

Did that make them ghosts?

He walked down streets that would never know the moon falling silver across them, by windows that would never reflect midnight.

Meer still hadn’t worked out why he continued to do this to himself. It was as though his life had become one of those elaborate Chinese finger puzzles—no matter how hard he pulled and worried at it, life only clung on all the more stubbornly. Always and forever was such a long and lonely time. That was the first lesson he had learned. He had thought that perhaps it was even more like a puzzle than he had guessed, that there was some trip or trigger or lesson he had to complete to move on to the next level and slip out of this Hell on earth. That would have given some sort of meaning to the meaningless, but there were no meanings, profound or otherwise. This memory of London was nothing more than existence flashing across the mind of a dying man, that instant of the bullet piercing the temple slowed down to a crawl.

Was that even possible?

Could there be a grain of truth in that old cliché of life flashing before your eyes?

He shook his head. No. There was no truth in it. That much he knew for sure and certain. He had thought for a while that perhaps it was time itself that was broken. Meer remembered the scientists talking about time as a spiral and space as a curve and the way it all rolled out from some central point, the universe expanding until it reached that elastic breaking point and snapped back on itself, everything that had happened rolling back toward the beginning—life in reverse. But even that didn’t work, because that would only mean living through the same day twice, once clockwise, once counter.

On the corner of Piccadilly and Regent Street he saw them. He had walked here in another life. It had been his boy’s favourite place because of the noise and the people and the bright lights and glass buildings of the Trocadero filled with amusement arcades. But of course, that was just another way in which this remembered city was wrong—the post war fog from before the Clean Air Bill juxtaposed with the bright shiny dome of an entertainment pavilion that wouldn’t be built for another fifty years. These were all just fragments of the London of his life.

He reached out instinctively with his left hand to grasp his boy’s smaller one, and lifted him up into his arms. He weighed less than nothing. Meer hugged him fiercely, as though it might be the last time he could. This place had long since stopped being peculiar to Draydon Meer, but that he could simply think about his boy and reach out knowing Jonas would be there despite the fact that two paving slabs earlier he had been alone, well that kind of magic could never become common place.

Meer felt their presence then. It was as familiar as it was vile. He shuddered at the first glimpse of them. He had come to think of them as gargoyles for all that they resembled the gothic stone guardians that watched over the city, but they were more than merely watchers. Across certain parts of the city they scoured the rooftops, the skittering of their claws on the slate tiles an ever-present, like the ruffling of starling feathers and the caw-caw of pigeons. They crawled through the high guttering, traversing the city unseen by those below. They weren’t gargoyles though; they were manifestations of his Id. The dark subconscious given wretched form. What that said about the inside of Draydon Meer’s head did not bear thinking about.

They were always lurking around Eros, as though the blind love statue somehow drew them to it. Perhaps it did. They moaned; a low ululating sound that infused the fog with grief. At first they were no more substantial than the other shapes in the mist, but this time as he neared they did not dissipate but rather took on solid form, scuttling forward on hands and knees menacingly. Their grossly malformed heads twisted left and right, nostrils flaring as they breathed in the cloying smog. As one their eyes came around to stare balefully at his boy.

Fight or flight was what it always came down to. The gargoyles clawed their way relentlessly forward, stony eyes fixed on Jonas. The slow drag of their talons on the pavement grated on his nerves. They fixated on the boy because he wasn’t meant to be here. He was wrong. Time was like that, it tried again and again to heal itself. It didn’t take a genius to understand it. Some things were meant to happen and the world would do its damnedest to make sure they did. Jonas’ death was one of those things.

December 9th, 1952. The day was etched onto his soul. It was right in the middle of the worst of the great smogs that had smothered the post-war city. Guys and the other hospitals were overflowing, cars and busses abandoned in the middle of the road. Ambulances led by the drivers holding blazing torches took five hours to carry the sick to the emergency rooms, becoming hearses along the way. Jonas had asthma. His windpipe had closed up as panic closed in, choking the life out of his rag doll body. Meer had held him in his arms, screaming for the ambulance. He leaned up against the metal railings, part of him struck by the irony that those same railings had once been a part of stretchers used to carry the wounded and the dying during the war. When it had finally arrived there had been no oxygen left and seven other people dead and dying inside. The ambulance men had laid Jonas on his side on the floor, not even on a pallet, and told him they had two more pick-ups to make. Meer realised sickly that he had wasted three precious hours that he could never get back and killed his own son in the process. Had he carried him in his arms the five miles across the city he might have made it.

There hadn’t been any gargoyles that day, at least none that crawled and slithered through the fog.

They had barely moved at one mile an hour, the driver too frightened of what he might hit in the fog. Jonas died in his arms, a sad, wheezing, frightened death looking up at him begging Meer to do something to save him.

And now every day he relived December 9th, 1952, he tried to find another way to save his son. He checked his watch, taking the gold fob from his pocket and studying it. Twelve minutes past nine. Jonas had lived eighteen minutes longer than the last time they had walked this way. They had made it this long before. He knew what would happen next. On the stroke of the quarter hour Menlough would appear. Menlough was worse than the gargoyles of his Id by far. Menlough was a reaper. Emaciated and unreasonably tall, Menlough was a clockwork golem, constructed from rusted iron and tarnished brass. Where the wind blew back the tails of his coats it exposed his green heart of cogs and staves instead of flesh and bones. Meer didn’t know where Menlough came from, but the significance of the mechanisms was painfully clear. Time, time, time. They had had too long together, Jonas had to go.

He let go of his son’s hand, knowing it was the last time he would feel its tiny warm presence before their time ran out. The next time he held it that hand would be cold.

“Go! No, not that way, there!” Meer pointed down one of the narrow alleyways that disappeared toward Soho. He had tried saving his son in a hundred different ways, some he had forgotten, and he had tried a thousand variants, clutching the boy to his chest, carrying him through the fog, his sadness salty on his cheek. He had tried to fight Menlough and his kind off but they were remorseless. He had tried to hide, hoping the world would end around him, but then the first bird had fallen from the sky. It had been a sign of the creeping death. He had watched the starling fall. It was always the first. Other birds fell in their hundreds and thousands to turn the street to feather and bone, but the starling was always the first. The tiny creature lay twisted. Its wings were broken. The bird’s blind eyes gazed up at the sky dreaming of avian angels come to carry them home. It had taken him a dozen failures to realise the gargoyles were responsible—and it took him a moment more to realise that he was looking down at one of the wretched creatures now. The end was closing in on them.

He heard the soft flutter of another bird falling and then the flurry of frightened wings and the distant drum of carcass after carcass coming down. He couldn’t see them because of the fog but that didn’t make the sounds any less horrific.

He stumbled forward, trying to draw Menlough away from his boy. “Here! Come here!” Meer flapped his arms, making a show of himself. The creature inclined its mechanical head, the sound of the gears grating loudly. The clockwork man wasn’t alone. Out of the mists eight more of his brethren glided, their feet barely seeming to move as they closed in on Meer. He knew each and every one of them and had come to think of Menlough and his brothers as the Infernals, each somehow representing another Dantesque level to this hell of his. Menlough’s twin Kai Seda, was elemental where his brother was elegant, his fine cogs and gears moving in their intricate dance as he emerged from the smog. Fire blazed in the heart of Arak Shai, the one he thought of as the torturer. He had good reason. A thousand times he had found her leaning down over his boy, the oil of her mechanisms dripping like acid onto Jonas’ grey face. Her silks followed the contours of her body, rippling with the turgid breeze. They moved silently, like ghosts. Footfalls would have been a blessed relief. There was none of the coarseness of Kai Seda or disfiguration of Kor Luca. Her body was perfect in its grotesqueness. The others drifted into the square, taking up positions around the statue. They were the demons of this place.

None of them moved to stop Jonas as he ran between them.

They never did.

Meer had tried killing himself but that didn’t help. He slid the knife in, eyes flaring as it fell through his fingers because even as they glazed over the smog began to clear and the pain began to fade. The knife never hit the floor. It simply ceased to be in this city fantastique of his mind, this personal hell he confined himself to.

That was what it was, he knew—or at least some detached part of his sub-conscious did. He was in hell, his own personal hell. It wasn’t brimstone and flame for him, no ice, there was merely too little time and a dying boy. There didn’t need to be any more than that to make it unbearable. What could be worse than walking empty fog-wreathed streets clutching his dying boy? Hell did not need the gribblies or the sabre-toothed gwars. It didn’t need anything—because nothing was so much more frightening.

Above him he heard the crackle of static as speakers mounted into the walls crackled into life. They made him jump every time. And the damned whistling! Meer turned round and around again, trying to see where the whistling came from. It was an old war melody being whistled off-key. A moment later he heard the singing, a dry old voice telling him that: “While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that’s the style.” It was just another peculiarity of this London he had conjured … a song from fifty years ago meant to keep the spirits of the troops up while shells and shrapnel rained down on them. Here, now, it was anything but inspiring. The refrain ate away at him with its demand that he smile, smile, smile, knowing as he did that there was nothing left to smile about.

The Infernals never spoke—they had no means of projecting words, only the ceaseless tick tock tick tock of their mechanisms. The singer had to be human or at least more mundane than gargoyles or tin pot demons.

“Where are you?” Meer yelled, earning himself those same seven lines over and over again. “What’s the use of worrying?” It taunted, and then up close, so close he could feel the prickle of breath in his ear, “Just smile, smile, smile.”

He lurched forward a stumbling step and spun around.

There was no one there.

There never was.

A part of Draydon Meer suspected he was the mysterious singer—or just another part of him was. No matter how desperately he wanted there to be another being of flesh and blood trapped in this hellish rendition of London with him, he knew he was alone.

He plunged headlong into the fog, running away from the singer, away from the Infernals, toward nowhere, because sometimes nowhere was the best place to be.

He ran down into the ground, staggering down the steps into the Underground. Immediately the quality of the air changed. It was dead air down here, stale and deoxygenated. He thought he saw shadow shapes moving in front of him. He struggled to hear the slap of footsteps on the cold tiles of the tunnel’s floor. The old wooden escalators groaned and wheezed as they lumbered up and down the steep descent. The air smelled of … yesterday. That was the only way he could think of it. “Jonas? Jonas is that you?”

The boy didn’t answer.

Meer took his fop watch out of his pocket again and checked the time. Only four minutes had past. Two hundred and forty seconds. Next to no time, and yet … too much time. Old posters for cigarettes and alcohol lined the sides of the tunnel. The white tiles were smeared black with soot where the creative bill-stickers hadn’t already glued up their adverts.

He heard the whistle of the train—a long, low lament that echoed mournfully down the tracks. He had never seen the train. He heard the steel wheels driving over the track. Heard the screech of the iron breaks and the blare of the horn, but he never saw the train.

He was always too late.

Not today, he promised himself.

“Run, Jonas! Get on the train! Don’t wait for me!” He yelled, hoping the boy would do as he was told, and knowing even as he yelled that the increased exertion from all of the running and the poor quality of the air was going to kill his son. He wouldn’t even reach the platform before he stumbled and fell, wheezing and unable to catch his breath as panic choked the life out of him.

He looked over his shoulder. There were no signs of any of the Infernals. They, like the gargoyles, belonged to London above, not London below. Down here was the realm of the Disenfranchised—the Lost Boys and Girls of London—though they were anything but the gang of Pan’s delinquents the name suggested. The city was every bit as harsh a place as it was fantastic. The Disenfranchised were truly that, lost, spiritually and physically. They were the closest things to ghosts the city had to offer. They were invisible to polite society, wretched souls that clung to the dark places, hiding out in the shadows. Meer ran hard, arms and legs pumping. His feet slipped on the slick floor tiles, his head filled with that damned order to smile, smile, smile. They would be here in less than a minute.

He careened around the bend, grasping the banister and taking the stairs worn smooth by the shuffle of countless feet three and four at a time before he jumped the rest of the way to the bottom.

There was no sign of Jonas.

The silver shell of the train however was nestled up against the platform, its doors open invitingly.

It was less than fifty feet from where he was to the safety of the train. Safety: that was how he thought of the train. It wasn’t a part of the city. It rumbled eternally on beneath it, going to places beyond the fog. Outside. That was all he could think about—that was all his world came down to— getting the boy outside of the city. The fog would be receding already five miles outside of the Square Mile, the East End and the River. It rose from the river first and slipped and slithered through the still-dreaming streets, and when it finally relinquished its choking hold the streets around the riverbanks were always the last to be freed. That was the way of it. Southwalk, Rotherhithe, Wapping and Mill Pond would be the last bastions of the fog. The train would carry them out beyond that, to breathable air.

Breathing hard he ran for it.

Behind him he heard the sighs of the Disenfranchised freeing themselves of their prisons.

A valve hissed somewhere and the doors slid closed. He hit them full on, trying to pry them open with his fingers as the carriage lurched away from the platform. He ran alongside it, pulling at the door but the mechanism refused to give. For ten feet more the train dragged him along the platform, his shoes slipping and sliding across the ceramic floor, and then it spat him out and he went sprawling. He hit the ground hard and lay there gasping.

He saw Jonas’ face pressed up against the glass window, his boy being carried away from him. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Meer lay on his side, gasping.

The Disenfranchised gathered around him, clawing at his clothes, at his pockets and at his face and hands, looking to take from him everything he had. He didn’t care. They could not reach the one thing he cared about. He watched the back of the train disappear slowly into the dark tunnel as they stripped him.

He didn’t care what they did to him. They could kill him—strip the flesh from his bones with their filed-down teeth if they wanted to, Jonas was free. He would be out beyond the reach of the fog in air he could breathe and there was nothing any of them, not the Infernals, the gargoyles, the Disenfranchised or even the whistler could do to prevent that.

For once Meer did smile.

Then a sliver of fear wormed its way into his mind as he heard the fabric tear beneath grubby fingers. What if he died? Would it all reset? Would he find himself back out there on the foggy streets looking for a way to save his son? Would death snatch defeat from the jaws of victory or would the world end with Jonas free and alive anyway? Because what father wouldn’t sacrifice himself for his own boy if that was what it came down to?

Their faces were weird, as though they were plastered with the advertising bills, crusted images of pin-up models, lipstick girls and cigarette smoking heroes forming the features of damned. He had never seen them up close before. As he struggled to roll over onto his stomach and stand he saw more of them pushing their way out of the tunnel walls. The tiles cracked and the posters tore as the Disenfranchised tore themselves free of the physical stuff of the city—the very dirt of the place—and shuffled toward the tunnels to block his exit. Low ululating moans escaped their chipped and brittle lips as they swayed, arms outstretched, grasping.

Draydon Meer scrambled to his feet, pushing them away from him. There was nowhere to run, not along the tracks after the train or back up the tunnels toward the surface.

He was trapped.

He roared with frustration, lashing out at them, pushing the creatures—because they weren’t human, not anymore, they were all the things he had lost during his long and lonely life, his innocence, his hope, friends, loves, all of the things he had taken for granted and that had been wrenched away from him—back toward the walls, trying to force them back into the very earth they bled out of.

He drove them back, slamming the flats of his hands into their hard shells. Each impact jarred some vague memory or guilt free as he pounded them with the full force of his fists, desperate to be free. And then a gap opened up among them and he ran without looking back. He saw blood on his clenched fists as he pumped his arms. He didn’t dare risk the mechanical escalator or the lift to the surface. He took the winding stair. One thousand and twenty three steps to the world above and then he was out, beyond the ticket barriers and into the street again.

If anything the fog was worse now.

He looked down at his open hand, half-expecting Jonas to take shape out of the thick grey stuff of the air and it all to begin again, another failure played out, but he didn’t.

He didn’t know what to do. He had never made it this far. He didn’t know whether to walk or run, to hide or to try and find away over one of the bridges. It was growing increasingly difficult to breathe. The fog was choking the life out of him.

He heard the damned whistling again, mocking him now.

“He’s gone,” Meer cried out. “You can’t reach him now. He doesn’t have to move, doesn’t have to run. The train is taking him out beyond the fog. He isn’t going to die this time.”

“Yes he is,” the whistler said. Somehow the man had come up right behind him without Meer hearing so much as a footstep through the broken bodies of the dead birds. They had stopped falling, he realised. The silence was somehow worse. “There’s nothing you can do to stop it. No last minute heroics. No salvation. He’ll die this time like every other time because outside of this place he is already dead. That monkey’s gone to heaven.”

“No,” Meer said, denying the man. He didn’t say anything else.

He felt rather than saw the whistler move. The man walked slowly around to face him, his footsteps measured and slow. He was carrying Meer’s wolf’s-head cane. He hadn’t even realised he has lost it. Meer looked up to see his own eyes and lips and hair and everything else looking back at him—but they weren’t the same, not quite. The whistler was in negative, the sunken hollows of his eyes darker than dark, the planes of his brow and ridge of his nose whiter than white—so much so they disappeared within the smog making the whistler look as though he were melting. “But then, so are you,” the whistler said. “This isn’t some fantastic place, some great blue heaven. This is in here,” he tapped at his temple. “None of it is real; it’s a construction, a fabrication, an illusion—all fancy words for the truth: it is a lie. Why do you think there is so much fog? Because there’s nothing beyond it. We’re standing in London on the brink of never—you’ve just sent your boy out into nothing. That, my ignorant friend, is what Hell is. Failing your boy again and again and again and having to live through it for all eternity because you keep thinking you can win. You can’t.”

“That’s not true,” he said, but the words whispered away insidiously inside his mind. Could it be true?

“Why do you think we always let the boy go? Why do you think we never try and stop you, only follow you?”

He didn’t know.

“Yes you do,” the whistler said, party to his thoughts as they raced. “I could try every door in this street and it wouldn’t open, but you, you just have to reach out and the stuff of hell forms behind it. That’s the nature of the Dreamer. You fashion. You move on, it ceases to be. We have to follow.”

But if that were true … all he had to do was reach Jonas before he reached the end and disappeared into never.

“You won’t find him, he’s gone, the train only goes so far down the tunnel then it simply ceases to be. He was on the train. That means he’s gone.”

“Is this my punishment? My life dragging out slowly before my eyes while I … what? Die?”

“You’re already dead. I told you.”

“And this is hell?”

“For you.”

“There has to be a way out. Through the fog. Under it,” he looked up to the sky, “over it. I can’t go on watching him die. There has to be a way … ”

“To win? No,” the whistler shook his head. “If you don’t believe me, look down.”

He did. He hadn’t realised that he was clutching Jonas’ warm small hand so tightly. The boy looked up at him with his big trusting eyes.

He wanted to scream.

He picked the wheezing boy up, clutching him close to his chest. He was shaking. They both were. He looked up. The gargoyles were already there, starting to move along the gutters. He looked about frantically for an open door, pushing them as he moved down the street, working his way toward St. Martin’s in the Field, one of the oldest churches with a bell tower in the city.

Time, he thought. Time. Looking up at the face of the huge clock on the side of the church, and seeing the tears in the sky where the gargoyles clawed their way through into this reality.

There was nowhere to run where they could not find him. He knew that, and still he ran.

He didn’t know where he was going until he was climbing the stairs of the old bell tower, his son clutched close to his chest, smothering up against his coat. The wind was fierce as he pushed open the door. For a moment he just stood there, stunned as the fog roiled beneath him. He strained to see beyond its tendrils, out over the rooftops and the river, but there was nothing to see.

He didn’t want to know anymore. He didn’t want to hope. This was hell all right. He didn’t know what he had done to deserve it, but he would work it out eventually.

Draydon Meer clambered over the railing and stood on the narrow ledge one hundred feet above the city though all he could see beneath him was fog. He brushed the hair away from his boy’s face and kissed him softly on the forehead.

And then he stepped out into nothing, wondering if his mind would invent the pain for him. He wanted to hurt physically as well as mentally, even if it was only for a fraction of a heartbeat.

There was no impact.

For a moment there was nothing. It was as though they had been cocooned in the fog. The he heard the ethereal strains of conversation, other voices, other Eden’s, so far away from him it was all he could do to open his eyes and look down.

He was alone, one the corner of Courtney Place, the streets lost to the Goddess of the Smog.

He checked his watch. It was a little before eight. On the corner of the street a vendor was selling roasted chestnuts, beside him another was selling the daily rag. Meer reached into his pocket for coins and bought both. Hunger gnawed at him as he folded back the crease and saw the day’s date writ bold above the headline of the newspaper: December 9th, 1952. It took a moment for the significance of the numbers to sink in, then the fog that dampened his mind cleared and he remembered. It was the day his boy died. He looked at his fob watch again. He had time. A little more than an hour.

And hope flared inside him as this stray voice that wasn’t quite his own whispered: “Perhaps this time you can save him?”

All he knew at that moment was that he had to try.

There wasn’t a father alive who would do anything else, not while there was still a chance.

Before he knew it, he was running, his little boy’s hand in his, so desperately grateful for a second chance to break his own heart.

***

Last Kisses

Come here.

Closer.

That’s it. Don’t be shy. All the way in. Come on.

I’ve got something to tell you.

A secret.

Ready?

Love is a sickness.

Never forget that.

You’re young. You probably think it’s all hearts and flowers and pretty girls’ smiles and broody boys and losing yourself in sad songs and thinking you’ll never find the one. Sure, it’s that, but it’s other stuff too. Stuff they don’t like to talk about.

But me, I’m contrary. I like to talk. Talking is as close as some of us come to magic.

Think of me as a magician. No. Make that the magician. And a kiss is my spell.

Imagine a sickness capable of lighting the darkness and firing the heart, inspiring poets to pretty words and torturing time until it stands still. That’s the L word for you right there. There’s a reason it can move mountains; it’s the same reason it brings down kingdoms. It makes fools of all of us. And the magic of it is that all it takes is a single kiss.

I have to admit I like love. I can work with it. It’s my favourite mischief-making tool. I mean who doesn’t want to catch fire? And what is love if not the whole world set on fire?

Let me paint the scene: 1646 and all is far from well. England is deep in the throes of Civil War, which always amuses me because let’s be honest, there’s nothing civil about war, is there? Cromwell’s Roundheads (the bad guys if you like the Royal Family, they’re the whole rule by the people for the people mob) are making short shrift of the King’s men (England’s always had this thing for blue blood, don’t ask me why). It feels like forever since the Royalists last tasted victory, but then three years is a long time when you are fighting for your lives.

Picture painted, enter our hero, a tricky young fellow with a passion for a certain Calvinist’s daughter.…

If you didn’t catch the inference, that’d be me.

O O O

I’m a bad man. I’ve got the attention span of a newt and I’m drawn to shiny things. Frankly, life’s so much more interesting with a little mischief to liven things up.

Like I said, she was only the Calvinist’s daughter, and if I was feeling a bit more creative I am sure I could come up with a bawdy little limerick to finish that little thought, but for now you’ll just have to settle for the boring old truth: she was a wee Scottish lassie, flaming red hair and a heart-shaped face.

I remember the important things.

I remember that it was the last time I was ever going to see her.

She didn’t know that.

She had dreams. They included me. The poor girl was in love.

So was I, of course, but my love only lasted a few minutes before it flitted off to some other unlucky lovely. I won’t pretend it wasn’t a poignant moment. It was. Two hearts beat as one and all that nonsense. See, I can be sentimental too.

I leaned down and touched her cheek, knowing all it would take was one last kiss to set it all motion. Grand plans. Cogs grind the gears that turn the wheels that keep the world running.

How could I resist?

You know me; I couldn’t.

Well, no, let’s be honest. I didn’t want to. That’s different.

So I did the deed and sealed it with a kiss, and that was that.

She skipped out of the old barn and straight into—and under—the path of a coming horse. Horses will always try to avoid trampling someone, but the rider was an idiot and his manhandling caused the poor animal to kick out. Its hoof caught my red-haired lovely in the head. She didn’t die straight away. We carried her broken body back to the chapel and laid her down. I left her father to stand vigil. He waited six hours for her to go. As the life left her eyes he kissed his little girl farewell, and so my kiss was on his lips. See how it works?

Greif took him to a house in the hills between his village and the next. The widow MaCallan lived there, and for a while he hid his grief in a kiss, a kiss is a kiss is a kiss.

And so it went, in that last kiss, my tricky little kiss moved onto the lips of the widow MaCallan.

Not that she kept it for long.

She wasn’t that kind of woman. Within an hour there was another knock at the door.

A young lad who come dawn would be escorting King Charles down south to Parliament where the New Model Army waited.

And so my kiss went south.

The who’s who is a little dull, and not frightfully important. Kisses came and kisses went, between men for the King and against, working their way finally to the King’s gaoler. It all gets a bit confusing, trying to keep track, but the important thing is where it ends up, not where it is in the middle.

He had lips like warm steel. That’s the other thing I should have told you, I’m never truly gone from my kisses when I send them out into the world to do their thing. What’s the point of causing mischief if you’re not around to enjoy it?

Remember what I told you right at the start? Love is a sickness. What I really meant is that it mutates like a virus. That first last kiss with the Calvinist’s daughter was full of hope and longing, the one she shared with her father loss and grief, and by the time it reached the widow MaCallan it was lust and hunger to drown out the loss, then it was fear of the unknown, and now as it reached the gaoler it had changed again. Now it was righteous anger at the tyrant who had ruled over us all. I’m rather pleased that my love is so versatile. Mother would be so proud.

As is so often the case, fate sealed itself in the confessional when, plagued by the demons of doubt, the gaoler sought solace in the hands of God. In that holiest of holy rooms he confessed his fears, believing that the coming trial was a sham and that the King’s enemies had always intended to murder him.

On bended knee, the gaoler kissed the Archbishop’s hand. And just like that that kiss of mine became a traitor’s kiss.

The priest ran and didn’t stop running until he stood at the gates of Whitehall.

He was too late.

The scaffold was already being erected outside the Banqueting House. The King had refused to plead, insisting that the trial was illegal as he could do no wrong. He was the King. How could they accuse him of anything?

For Cromwell that refusal was an admission of guilt.

The priest begged to be allowed to see the King, who had been found guilty of all mischiefs that had afflicted the nation, which let’s be honest, was a bit much, considering a lot of the mischiefs were mine.

But I’ve never been one to hog the limelight; if they wanted to give him credit for my hard work, well, so be it. Some of us are just meant to work away in the background doing what we do. We don’t expect the praise and the plaudits. Or something like that.

They led the priest into the Banqueting House.

He was the last man aside from the executioner to see the King alive.

When he kissed the King my love became mercy.

O O O

Of course it didn’t feel a lot like mercy standing outside in the square with the crowd of onlookers come to watch the King lose his head.

Funny how one little kiss could trigger a chain of events that only ended once they’d arrived at the executioner’s block. Cause and effect. Chains of reaction. But then, how many men have lost their heads over something as simple as a kiss? Don’t tell me you haven’t. I don’t believe you.

As the axe came down a curious quiet settled over the mob. All it took was one clean stroke. There were no cheers. Beside me a young man stared at the headsman’s block. I could see immediately that like the Calvinist’s daughter he was a lynchpin. A man around whom great events twisted and turned like serpents. His name was Samuel Pepys. He was going to be remembered all the way through history as a great man, one who was there for so many huge moments in London’s history—moments he actually wrote about so the rest of the world could remember them. My kind of man, Sammy. How could I resist? I grabbed him by the face and kissed him. Not once. Twice. Once for the Lord Protector, the second for the Great Fire.

Why kill one man when you can burn down an entire city?

***

The Angel with the Sad Eyes

“Did you ever wonder why Dante decided on nine levels, not say four or six or some other random number?” the voice from the television screen asked. It wasn’t actually something I had thought about. I shook my head dutifully, waiting for it to go on and explain. “Hell on earth, right? That’s what it was all about. There are nine layers of sky above us: the troposphere, the stratosphere, the mesosphere, the thermosphere, the exosphere, the ionosphere, the magnetosphere, the homosphere and the hetrosphere. Nine layers of sky to parallel the nine layers of perdition and then, finally, the grand prize, hell on earth. Think about it, makes perfect sense.”

I looked at the face of Damien distorted by the wide screen and reminded myself again why I loved him. He was anything but what you would call normal. He was grinning like a loon. I shook my head. This was so typically him. To stumble upon some stupid bit of science and realize it had some vague link to something else, in this case literature, and try to convince the rest of the world that he’d cracked the big secret, found the meaning of life. He didn’t appreciate it when I told him it had already been done. Lying in bed I’d whisper: “Forty-two” in his ear over and over. Some couples had romantic words of love they used for pillow talk—we had Douglas Adams.

Damien’s last great spark of genius had been some nonsense about finding the frequency of ghosts. He’d read somewhere that the afterlife resonated in the crystalline structure, and made the leap that if you could somehow tap into the energy of a snowflake before it melted you could tune into the frequency of the dead. We ended up with a very wet attic that winter.

I love Damien but I’m the first to admit he’s as nutty as a fruitcake. That’s one of the things I love most about him. Still love about him. My mother always used to say I collected misfits. He was my beloved misfit. His defense is that all great scientists are mad, that there is a fine line between genius and insanity. He constantly berated me for not thinking outside of the box when we were together.

I hated myself for cheating on him. For destroying what we had. It wasn’t fair to him and it wasn’t fair to me. It wasn’t even a moment of weakness. More like a moment of gross stupidity.

“Think about it babes,” he went on, enthused by the entire notion. “We’ve heard of heaven on earth often enough and hell on earth, but what if they are the same thing and they are right here, right now? Gah! I’ve got so much I want to tell you but it isn’t going to make sense. I miss you. That’s something I’ve needed to say for so long now. There’s this ache. It’s got a name. I named it. I called it you. Yeah, I know. Stupid. Forget I even said it.” Damien sighed. It was a world-weary sound. “I’ve got some people I need you to meet before we go on much further. Monkir’s filming this for me. His brother Nakir is in the kitchen.” The camera swung around to show a powerfully built black man staring into the refrigerator. He was naked. He turned to face the camera, an ice-cold bottle of beer in his hand, and toasted the cameraman before taking a big gulp from the bottle. He had the most incredible eyes. I found myself pausing the tape to stare at him. His physique was incredible. His musculature was sculpted to the point of perfection. But it was his eyes that held me. I felt my heart tripping in my chest.

The video started playing of its own accord. Nakir grinned at the camera again then turned his attention back to the fridge.

“You actually eat this rubbish?” his voice was muffled but his distaste was obvious. I could only imagine the kind of moldy junk food Damien had given sanctuary to. When we were together it had been Chinese takeaway cartons and slices of Italian pizza, the stone baked oven kind, not the deep pan—not that there was a noticeable difference after ten days in the fridge. Nakir salvaged something that looked suspiciously like a rolled up won ton skin.

Behind the camera Monkir laughed, a deep bass profundo. I liked his laugh immediately. It had warmth and kindness. It resonated. It wasn’t like the lazy laughs some people rush through, shrill and soulless.

“Not only does he eat it,” I said to the screen. “He loves the junk. The greasier, the more disgusting it is, the better. Eh, Damien?”

Nakir chuckled. For a moment I thought he was laughing at what I had said but that was just me being stupid.

The videotape had arrived in the mail that morning. We didn’t talk anymore that was the extent of our failed relationship. I loved him; he sent me videotapes and kept himself locked up in that disgusting studio he’d rented on the Upper West Side overlooking a meatpacking warehouse and a bakery. The bakery made pastries for one of the coffee store franchises that insisted on ruining a perfectly good cup of coffee with vanilla or cinnamon or hazelnut swirls or some other crud. He always joked that the place was slap bang in the middle between heaven and hell. I had gone out for my usual two mile round the park run and taken a lazy shower before I opened the envelope and stuffed the tape into the machine. Self-flagellation can wait is my patented motto. It is right up there beside keep away from babies and small children. I got that one off a plastic carrier bag but it always seemed like good advice to me.

“Monkir, say hello to the love of my life.”

The camera tilted wildly and came into focus on a grinning ivory smile and eyes of pure chocolate. They were the saddest eyes I had ever seen. I wondered what they could have witnessed to instill such sadness in them and realized I didn’t want to know. This was the age of global terrorizm and weapons of mass destruction. I had never even heard that phrase until a few months ago. Now it practically lived with me.

“Monkir is Nakir’s brother,” Damien explained in case I had missed the familial resemblance. It wasn’t hard to see the pair were brothers. They were cut from the same DNA strand to be sure. “They are … hell you aren’t going to believe me if I just tell you. I wouldn’t believe me. You need to see it. Nakir, show Lee who you are.”

The camera roved again dizzyingly.

In the kitchen the naked Nakir was stood with his arms wide apart, displaying himself in all of his glory.

“Not like that!” I heard Damien say and could imagine him shaking his head exasperatedly in the background.

“But I like this body. It feels good. I want people to see it.” Nakir objected.

“We don’t strut around naked anymore. We’ve got Gianni Versace and Jean Paul Gaultier and Vera Wang to thank for that. We deport ourselves with grace and style. We vogue.”

“But this skin is just the same, clothing. You should revel in it.”

“He would if he looked like you.” I said to the television screen. It was true of course. Hell, if I had looked half as good as Nakir I would have made sure plenty of people enjoyed the view.

“Just show her, Nakir.”

“You take all of the fun out of life, Damien.”

The image quality went haywire, white noise and interference fretting across the screen, the picture wobbling in and out of sight. For a full thirty seconds there was nothing, only a brilliant, blinding white that filled the entire screen before the picture settled and I was left staring at Nakir, naked. Not naked as in my kind of naked, erotic, lithe, sensual naked, the kind that makes you want to lose yourself inside another person naked. He was naked body and soul. I understood what Damien had meant when he said I wouldn’t believe it without seeing it, and I understood why the video camera had struggled so much to capture anything more than light on the film inside it.

Nakir was glorious.

He stood, stretched and unfurled his wings, each feather a delicate, perfect, wondrous creation that defied everything I knew about nature, science, the world.

“Magnificent isn’t he?”

I was nodding at the screen. “That’s not word enough.”

“It was Nakir who explained it to me, nine layers of sky, nine circles of hell. The symbolism of the whole thing. It’s mind-boggling. He’s a bit of a philosopher our Nakir. Monkir on the other hand is the quiet brooding type. I found them—or rather they found me—in the Gate of Heaven Cemetery when I went to see Babe Ruth on his birthday. His grave was covered with stuff. There were seven baseball hats, six baseballs, four American flags, forty-eight pennies, an aluminum baseball bat and a handwritten note that said: ‘Thanks for all the memories and many more to come.’ I laid my own memento, a rookie card of a guy I thought Babe would approve of, and turned to leave. That was when I saw them. They were both hunched over a coffin as it waited beside a freshly dug grave, and they were arguing.

“You don’t usually see people arguing in a cemetery, so I was curious. You know me, dead cat man. When I got close enough to make out what they were arguing about it didn’t make the whole scene anymore normal. Nakir was passionately trying to convince his brother that the dearly departed deserved a shot at heaven but Monkir was having none of it. Once a sinner, always a sinner and all that. He was adamant the dead guy was off to wallow in Hell’s eternal flames. It was a fascinating conversation to eavesdrop on, believe me.”

“I can imagine,” I said, but I couldn’t. Who could?

“Then I saw it. This essence. It was difficult to make out at first but as their arguing intensified the essence solidified, as though their passion was giving it form. It was there, I could see it, but I didn’t know what it was. It looked like a cloud of black and white swirling in the air above the coffin. It twisted faster and faster as the pair of them argued, sometimes more black in nature, sometimes whiter.

“The black won. The white was completely consumed and I saw Monkir smiling. He had obviously won the argument because Nakir did not look happy.”

“Another one off to Hell.” Monkir said from behind the camera.

“Indeed,” Damien agreed. “Can you believe what they were doing? I mean all this talk of judgment day and weighing our sins, the notion that your life somehow flashes before your eyes … it’s all true, in a way at least. Nakir, explain how it works, will you?”

The naked angel settled in front of the camera. His beauty mesmerized me once more. He was perfect in every way imaginable.

“Made in God’s own image,” he smirked at the camera.

“Will you stop doing that?”

“Sorry,” Nakir said, looking anything but. It was disconcerting, knowing this had been filmed two days before, and that he had somehow known exactly what I was going to think, and when. “All right, how to explain it. Put simply, we are the gatekeepers. We look at your soul and decide which way you are going, heaven or hell. Pretty simple really. Sometimes we argue, when it is a close call, but generally it is clear who’s going where.”

“Amazing,” I said, shaking my head.

“You might not believe in God,” Monkir said. “But unfortunately for all you non-believers, He believes in you. That’s where we come in.”

The camera focused on Damien again. He was taking his shirt off and folding it neatly on the arm of the couch. He always was a neat freak. I loved the way he fussed over the creases making sure they were just so. He unbuckled his jeans and pulled them down, then his pants. He folded all of his clothes up neatly on the arm of the couch. It was so long since I had seen him naked, but I recognized every beautiful contour of his body. This was Damien, my Damien. I felt my heartbeat tripping in my throat. Nakir wolf-whistled at the man I still loved.

I didn’t like the way Damien looked at me through the television screen.

“This is it, babes. This is what it is all about. I get to know. We get to know. You see, the brothers have agreed to help me out here. Ever since I met them I’ve been burning to find out what is on the other side … I mean I know for sure there is another side now. Knowing is driving me crazy. So they’ve agreed to help me because I am too damned scared to do it myself. They’ve been arguing about me all day, heaven or hell, heaven or hell. It is amazing the things they know about me. Things I’d forgotten, buried deep. It’s all coming back to haunt me.” He reached for something off camera, then brought it up to show it on the screen, to make sure I could see it.

A gun.

A dull grey metal gun.

He passed it across to Nakir who took it from him.

“This is stupid,” I said, my heart sinking as I watched the angel hold the gun to my ex lover’s head.

“This isn’t suicide,” Damien said, as though to reassure me. “See you on the other side, babes.”

It was all over in one shockingly brutal second.

Nakir pulled the trigger and Damien’s head ruptured. I saw his blood spray all over his neatly folded clothes. I closed my eyes. I wasn’t crying. I should have been crying. That was all I could think. I should have been crying. I had just seen the man I loved willingly killed in front of my own eyes—I should have been crying but I was empty.

Hollow.

“Heaven or Hell?” Monkir asked his brother, the camera still rolling. The sound of his voice after the silence that filled the void after the gunshot jarred in my ears. I stared at the screen feeling sick.

“He’s mine,” Nakir said, laying the murder weapon down on the coffee table beside Damien’s dead body. White mist swirled around his head where the gunshot wound had opened it up, twisting and swirling faster and faster before it evaporated into nothing. “What about?” he nodded toward the camera, toward me.

“We promised Damien they’d go together,” Monkir said. He lay the camera down on its side on the coffee table so I was left with a side on view of very large, very black angel cocks.

“Heaven or Hell?” I heard Nakir say as though the words meant nothing to him. They didn’t, I realized sickly. He had done this so many times, consigned so many sinners to their fate, why should he care about one more or one less?

“This one’s my turn,” Monkir answered coldly. “You got the last one. Besides, this one’s broken one of the cardinals and I am not in a forgiving mood. I liked that kid. He had guts.”

“Brains too,” Nakir said, then giggled. “But yeah, I know what you mean. Good kid. He’ll be okay where he’s gone. Okay, go get the other one, let’s get this over with.”

With that the screen collapsed into a swirl of white noise and the pair of angelic brothers were gone. I didn’t move. I couldn’t bring myself to. Damien was dead. I had just watched it happen.

The television screen sparked back into grainy life.

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

I got up to kill it but stopped with my arm outstretched, reaching for the off button.

Slowly, beneath the constantly shifting spray of black and white I saw the saddest pair of eyes begin to take shape and heard Monkir’s faint voice say: “Coming, ready or not,” and laugh. His laughter was a vile, hateful, sound. I killed the power to the television. The apartment was swallowed by silence.

I stood there, thinking about Damien, about how I loved him, how I had hurt him.

Had I driven him to it?

Had I killed him?

Was that why he sent me his death tape?

To punish me?

This isn’t suicide. I’ll see you on the other side, babes.

I’ll see you on the other side, babes.

I heard the door open behind me.

I’ll see you on the other side, babes.

“Heaven or Hell?” I said without turning.

“Definitely Hell.”

***

Absence of Divinity

Hell, wrote the mad man in his lonely tower, is the absence of God’s love, not brimstone and sulphur and nightmarish visions. The pains of Hell are metaphorical as well as metaphysical. The tortures, the torments, imagined as perpetual flaying of skin and the application of saltpetre to the wounds, are nothing beside the emptiness where once there was God.

He put down his pen and stared at what he had written, a chill creeping into his heart. It was not as though he could claim ignorance. He knew, on a level bone-deep, exactly what he was doing. He could extrapolate—within reason—the consequences his actions would draw.

He, Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest of them all, was going to Hell.

There was a timid knock on the workshop door, probably one of Giuliano or Lorenzo Medici’s lackeys come to plague him. He left it unanswered. Tired feet shuffled away and he was alone again.

When he had commissioned the workshop in what had been Cosimo’s tower it had been for its proximity to the heavens. Every day he would rise up and work side by side with the angels in the sky, and now, like the brightest of them all, he was doomed to fall.

All for the sake of science.

The quest for understanding.

One page in one of his notebooks. A single drawing but its implications were legion.

The drawing, amid pages of inventions and ideas and studies of motion, even of God’s masterwork—man. Proportional and perfect in every way, even down to the musculature and anatomy. It was a blueprint for creation. Study after study of skulls, the secret geography of the flesh beneath the skin, where man was reduced to tendon, bone and sinew. He had studied the human form in all of its vagaries, examining a multitude of specimens, fat, tall, thin, short, lean, sinewy, muscled, hirsute, hairless, crippled, deformed, malnourished and bloated. He recorded what he saw. Each variant added something to his knowledge, allowing him to modify his blueprint for creation. Amid the sketches were organ system observations, bone and muscle structures and reproductive systems. How many of Florence’s sycophants would have blanched at and renounced his obsession with anatomy had they but known that the cadavers he stripped of flesh layer by layer had been stolen from the local morgue.

It had been an obsession with him. He locked himself away in Cosimo’s tower, a single window and the sliver of Florence’s rooftops that it revealed his only connection to the mundane act of living that went on beneath him.

A small bird flitted across his vision. Da Vinci watched its flight, the frenetic bursts of energy that helped it dart from one wave of air to the next. There was none of the easy grace of one of the bigger avians. This one seemed to be in a constant fight against the forces of heaven and earth—but it was doing it. It was soaring over the city, tasting the kind of freedom he could only dream of. Now if he could somehow transfer that notion into a mechanism, perhaps a rotating air-screw or a coiled spring. The idea had merit, even if it so closely mimicked the vanities of Babel and mankind’s towering ego. He looked at the sky and knew, just knew, that one day men would fly like the birds and the angels.

Occasional sounds filtered through the stone floor from the workshops and forges below where the apprentices slaved away in the glow of thirteen furnaces, striving to enhance their master’s reputation. They worked on alchemy and more mundane miracles like cannons and construction braces for the city’s mighty fortifications. Many a Florentine dream was haunted by the rhythmic hammer blows emanating from the depths of Cosimo’s tower, iron striking iron, and the hellish hissing as the red metal was plunged into vats of water to cool.

A year ago he might have called this non-life Hell, but now he knew better.

Now he understood that Hell was something of man’s making.

The room was cluttered with evidence of his genius—or madness. It was a fine line, the distinction between scientist and heretic. If a delegation from the Vatican ever found their way into his dominion no doubt they would bind him and carry him out to be burned at the stake for profanities against the Lord with his prototypes of devices meant to elevate man to the realm of the angels so that they might fly through the clouds; designs so that the surgeons might open a man’s chest and understand the intricate map life within; and worst of all, the empty clay vessel he called Lucifer, the most beautiful of all.

Da Vinci returned to his desk.

The greatest gift is life, he wrote, each letter meticulously framed. Man without doubt the greatest of all His creations. We can build. We can shape and yet we cannot create. We are not Him. Or so the Church would have us believe with their scriptures and their simplicities. I believe we can create. I believe that in every one of us there is a small piece of Him that gives us that power. That is my sin. That is my damnation. Science and numbers are our key to Godhead. They ARE God. In science and numbers lie the answers to every question we can imagine. That is the genius of His creation. There are answers waiting to be found and questions waiting to be asked. God is not some intangible deity, some ephemeral religion. God is in the details all around us. We need only look to find the code to decipher His true face. The rest is Church fueled lies and hocus-pocus as they fear their power and influence could wane if ever people knew that they came into contact with the divine every day.

He discarded the pen and went over to the table where Lucifer lay, half-formed in clay waiting for da Vinci to unravel secrets of the threads that bind flesh and soul. The secret, if ever solved, would elevate man from the level of creation to creator. It would—HE would—make men into Gods.

It wasn’t merely ego, he thought, looking at the perfect lines of Lucifer’s face.

It surpassed that. It truly was genius.

Leonardo let his hands gentle over the anatomical perfection of his creation. The clay felt like dead flesh beneath his touch, so exact was the illusion. Lucifer’s body had been constructed around a metal frame that was precisely jointed, just like the countless skeletons he had examined by whickering candlelight come darkness.

The apprentices were downstairs now, laboring over the individual parts that would come together to create the whole, a perfect replica of da Vinci’s own hands, to prepare Lucifer for his last and most precious gift: life.

They hadn’t the slightest comprehension of what it was their insignificant nuts and bolts of alloyed metal would combine to become, but they would, if Lorenzo The Magnificent could not be swayed from his intended public display of da Vinci’s clockwork man. The man was a fool but he was a fool with influence and power and enough sycophants orbiting him to make him believe he truly was magnificent and not merely another tyrant eager to inflict pain and suffering on whosoever threatened to tarnish his pretended magnificence. Leonardo harbored no illusions. If his clockwork man failed to prance and dance like some overblown marionette Lorenzo Medici would exert every ounce of his ‘magnificence’ to ensure that da Vinci’s body would take on the warmth and texture of Lucifer’s pseudo-flesh as it sank, weighted down, to the bottom of the harbor.

“What am I to do?” he asked Lucifer’s empty shell.

The fragrance of vanilla, out of place in the workshop, was the first hint that he was not alone.

“Who you are dictates what you should do.” Da Vinci turned to face the newcomer. “Who are you? Painter; Sculptor; Maker of Men; Architect; Bringer of War; Musician; Engineer; Inventor or Scientist?”

The scent of vanilla flared as though in response to the passion driving the newcomer’s words.

“I am all of those, and none of them.” He reasoned, shielding his eyes as the creature came into full and beautiful view. It hurt to look at. Pure white light blazed off it. Light so fierce it was almost impossible to see behind it to the creature with its wings of fire, each feather a miracle of perfection, so different from the last, in all of its naked glory. It was beautiful but not in the way that the romantic artists imagined. The creature’s beauty was savage. “And either I am truly insane, or you, you are an angel of the Lord.”

“Michael,” the creature said.

He carried no sword, yet all the Church talk of Archangel Michael was as God’s sword.

“Have you come down to kill me?”

“Do you deserve to die?”

“How can I answer that? I have sinned, more than most, truth be told, but do I judge myself as worthy of death? No, I do not.”

“Then I shall not kill you.”

“Why are you here? Are you even here? Is it all my thoughts of divinity that have driven my mind feverish enough to conjure angels out of the ether?”

“I am here because Elohim bade me …” the word seemed to stick in the divine one’s craw. “Beg you to give up your folly with this, this creature.” It looked distastefully at the stillborn sculpture of Lucifer. “And give up all dreams of creation. He would have you work with the miracles He gave mankind, not try to breathe life into your toys. Even if you succeed, if you animate that thing—”

“He is called Lucifer.”

“And you think that is amusing, no doubt? Even if you animate your devil it will not be a man, it will be soulless, a golem. A thing of flesh without a soul. Where God’s love should suffuse it with life there will be only emptiness.”

The angel’s words echoed his own writing from just moments before. Emptiness. The absence of the divine. Hell. What this messenger was telling him was that even if he did breathe life into his creation, Lucifer would be a living Hell, not his masterpiece.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Yes you do. The artist in you believes me. It knows the beauty of the soul. The painter and the sculptor believe me. They have seen that beauty in every living thing. They have recorded that beauty on canvas and in clay. Even the scientist believes me, despite being desperate not to. It has no empirical evidence of a life existing outside of God’s care. It is conditioned to believe in numbers, in quantifiable results, therefore based on the evidence of its own eyes, even the scientist in you believes me.”

“And if I don’t stop?”

“Then you will have made nothing more than a companion for my lost brethren in Hell. A new Bright One, as far from God’s love as the first.”

Da Vinci realized he was standing over Lucifer’s clay form, a hand placed where its heart would have been had it had one, with almost fatherly propriety.

“Give it up.”

But of course, he couldn’t.

Creation was an addiction. The Archangel fed the hunger in him. The craving for power. To understand. To go beyond understanding.

“If you must create life, follow the cattle down there, procreate. God did give you the power to create life—”

“But it is not good enough! It is on His terms. Find a partner, make the beast with two backs, and if you are lucky, very lucky, you might, just might, conceive. It is not good enough.” His voice had risen almost to the level of a shout, but the angel had already left, its tears solidifying to multi-faceted multi-hued glass, where they struck the floor, each of the tears resonating with an increasingly more desperate note. The chorus of tears was desolate to hear.

Alone, da Vinci stared at his creation lying there lifelessly. All he could think was that he was doing something right. God himself had sent his sword down because he was frightened.

It would take time but he would give Lorenzo Medici his clockwork man.

It was the most amazing feeling, to know that He Who Doth Create, Knower Of All, was afraid—the feeling faded as fleetingly as it had appeared. He knew. God Knew. Whatever da Vinci could do with Lucifer it was because He allowed it.

“What kind of toy am I?” he asked, but it was a rhetorical question.

Over the coming days and weeks Leonardo da Vinci labored, outlining the mechanisms of Lucifer, for every joint and cog for his creation to be capable of independent movement. The process of building was no mean feat of engineering, every tooth on every gear and cog required custom grinding and cutting to ensure they bit and held when turned. For Lucifer’s knees and elbows he adopted a simple ball-in-cup arrangement to give the illusion of fluidity but the crowning glory was the contraption that would act as Lucifer’s heart, the pump that would act as a battery once Lucifer was in motion, capturing kinetic energy generated by the rhythmic metronomes that were the clockwork man’s arms and legs.

Once it started moving it would never need to stop or rest. Da Vinci’s clockwork man would be an untiring giant with the strength of iron and the stamina of a legion of bulls.

During the creation da Vinci seldom slept. Fatigue ate at him but he was determined to see his efforts bear fruit. He drove himself to the limits of human tolerance and way, way beyond. Like God, on the seventh day, he rested. Lucifer was by no means complete but what was lacking was merely the aesthetics, the mechanics were in place.

He had two visitors that day, the first, Lorenzo Medici, and the second, holiest of holies, the divine Archangel Michael come to beg, bully and finally plead.

Lorenzo Medici carried himself like a vulture, his hooked nose sniffing out carrion, his eyes roving, never settling in one place and his hands flexing, clasping, coiling. The sight of the mechanical man appeared to put him genuinely at ease, which was a rare occurrence in Da Vinci’s experience, but then he had anticipated as much when he began to shape Lucifer. Who could be at ease around a thing like that? Lucifer was truly beautiful and more worthy of life than so many of God’s creatures, who, next to the Bright One, were pale, pale shadows.

Still, the effect the cold clay had on Medici was unnerving.

“Will it live?” he asked in hushed, almost reverential tones, as though Cosimo’s tower had been transformed into some temple, a holy place. Given what was going on inside, perhaps it had.

“Oh yes, the Devil will walk among us,” da Vinci answered the tyrant.

“Good … good …” then: “When?” and there was desperation in his voice. Need. The fire of hunger burned in Medici’s poisonous eyes. This promised unimaginable wealth. Forget base metal transmogrification, the clay and clockwork man on the table verged on the territory of miracles. People would pay to witness its birth.

“A month, perhaps a year? Whenever …”

“No! I will have him brought to life! Now … I know just the place … San Lorenzo.” A vindictive smile played across the tyrant’s lips. Some faces were not meant for smiling. “Five nights from now.”

“But San Lorenzo is a church—I was assuming that Lucifer’s birth would take place somewhere less … holy. A theatre perhaps?”

“No, San Lorenzo is perfect for what I have in mind, believe me. Now, my Florentine god, are you suffering doubts? Frightened that the Lord might not look too kindly upon your foray into His territory? Do this, Da Vinci, do something truly worthy with your life. No more silly weapons,” and the way he said it made a cold shiver writhe down the vertebrae of da Vinci’s back as a new use for his Lucifer and his kind occurred to him. At last he understood the hunger in Medici’s eyes. “And city walls. Think on it. You have in your hands the wherewithal to create life, man.”

Suddenly the steady stream of donations to da Vinci’s coffers made sense. His sponsor was not some benevolent benefactor. His interest was far from altruistic. Medici stood to gain the world from the clockwork man.

This understanding should have given da Vinci the strength to turn back, to destroy his sketches and burn Lucifer or reshape him into a hundred harmless pots, but he knew that he couldn’t. He wanted to see the clockwork man take his first step. He needed to know that he could create life not merely mimic it.

“Leave me alone, Lorenzo.”

Surprisingly, Medici left without a word.

Da Vinci’s second visitor was no less predatory, no less dangerous, but the angel did, at least, fight for what he believed to be right—the glory of God, not the glory of the Medici’s family name.

Again, it was the faint trace of vanilla in the air that gave the heavenly creature’s presence away.

“Think about what it is you are doing,” the angel said without waiting for da Vinci to acknowledge his presence. “Make a man, a golem without a soul, make him live and breathe, what does it prove?”

“That we no longer need Him,” da Vinci voiced the fear that had been gnawing away at him for months. What would happen then, if God became unnecessary?”

“And a world without God is a good thing in your eyes? Who are you to decide for mankind if they should down their backs on their Father? Think, Scientist, Artist, Sculptor, Fool, what would be the consequence of a Godless world?”

Da Vinci stared hard at the angel, so hard it hurt, the white light searing into his eyeballs, stripping away whatever veil ego and vanity had shrouded them with.

“How does God give you life?” the angel pressed. “You profess to be a clever man: think!”

“The mechanics are known to me, I have studied them.” Da Vinci began, knowing it was not what Michael was looking for.

“Not mechanics! God is spiritual. His creations are spiritual. His greatest gift to them is their—”

“Soul,” da Vinci finished for the angel.

“And without a soul.”

“There can be no heaven.”

“Very good, Scientist, perhaps you can claim the skills of philosopher, too. Without a soul there can be no heaven. Can you comprehend the magnitude of your actions?”

The Archangel turned his back and left him alone in the tower with Lucifer.

Alone.

Gazing at the beautiful face he had shaped with his own bare hands, da Vinci was able to convince himself that the angel was lying to him—or rather following his own agenda and only telling part of the truth. God’s vanity was at risk. His immortal pride. They were trying to scare him away from the completion of his masterpiece. A creation of greater beauty and usefulness than any mere painting or sculpture.

“It will not happen,” he promised Lucifer, wetting his fingers to refine yet again the clockwork man’s features.

Five more nights Michael visited the workshop in the Cosimo tower and yet even his most impassioned arguments could not reach da Vinci.

“Do you think it is an accident that your thing is called Lucifer? Can you not sense the presence of the Prince of Lies in everything that you do? You are being used and manipulated by the minions of Hell. You are a fool to think otherwise.”

Was Satan’s hand directing his own? Was he just a puppet birthing a clockwork Antichrist, that would stride the earth reveling in Medici’s endless wars? Was he a fool? For that question at least, he began to suspect the answer was yes.

The Archangel’s final solution was the sword.

“I challenge you, da Vinci, you and your satanic mechanical thing—a duel. To the death. My immortal soul against the vacuum of his nothingness. Win and you get what you want, lose and we will take the pieces of your damnable Lucifer to God Himself so that he might unmake the monstrosity, and you will forget forever your vanities of creation.”

And Medici was right, they came in their droves to witness the spectacle of da Vinci’s clockwork man coming to life to duel the angel of the Lord, God’s sword an eternal blackness blazing in his clenched fist. San Lorenzo was packed suffocatingly full of spectators, every one of Lorenzo and Guillermo Medici’s boot-lickers, toadies and hangers-on crowded in to the Medici chapel.

A stage had been erected and the altar removed, so that the scene might unfold beneath the crucifix and the wounded Jesus, and upon the stage two finely crafted bell jars stood, one on either side of the crucifix. Michael had demanded that. They were empty, or so they appeared. One, the Archangel promised, would contain his own angelic essence, his angelus. The other he would fill with da Vinci’s immortal soul. If the clockwork man won Michael’s angelus would simply cease to be. The Archangel would fall from grace. If da Vinci’s monster was defeated by the angel, then Michael would take the would-be creator’s creation and leave him, soul still intact, in the bell jar, a fragile reminder of how close he had come to losing everything.

The inside of the church was cold.

The pilgrims had been locked out. Only Medici’s chosen ones made it through the ranks of armored soldiers blocking the Church doors. It took over four hours for the lucky ones to find their seats and longer still for the galleries and aisles to fill. Over fifteen thousand Florentines crammed into the San Lorenzo to witness da Vinci’s genius.

Da Vinci moved into the centre of the stage, awed by all of the upturned faces so intently focused on him. “Behold, Lucifer!” he roared, his voice filling the highest eaves and the lowest ducts. Two of Medici’s hired thugs dragged the lifeless golem out to join da Vinci on centre stage. “And the Angel!” He threw back his head, arms open wide, aping the crucifixion pose of the son of God behind him.

A reverential hush descended over the congregation. No one quite knew what to make of the revelation. Was it a joke? Some grand elaborate hoax engineered by the Medici’s to show them all how gullible they were? Or were they actually in the presence of the divine?

Michael’s light blazed as he strode across the wooden stage. Wisps of smoke rose from the smoldering timbers as feet scorched them. This time he carried the sword of God. It was a single sliver of darkness in the heart of white light that suffused his body. The sword that stole souls in the name of Elohim, Lord God. It sang in his hands, a slowly building thrum, drawing to it all the power of heaven and earth. The air crackled with lines of power. A sharp crack echoed through the roof of the chapel. Blue lines and sparks chased down the walls of the narthex and through the floor of the Medici chapel.

From his vantage on centre stage da Vinci saw the traces of power encase the room. The hair of the congregation rose, standing on end, brought to life by the soul-sucking power of God’s sword. The greatest transformation though was taking place on the stage itself where in their urgency to reach the Archangel and his harmonic blade the blue lines of force were surging through the twitching form of Lucifer. The Brightest One was being born from the energy of nature. The lightning strike that had hit the roof of the San Lorenzo church at the summons of Michael’s sword was the catalyst that da Vinci had been missing. The irony, even amidst the glory of this inhuman birth, was not lost on him. Even in this, his moment, God had to meddle.

He was livid. He railed at the heavens, challenging Elohim to do his worst or prepare to be vanquished from the mortal realm. Echoes of laughter filled his ears.

Michael leveled the sword, swinging it in a wild overhead arc.

Da Vinci helped Lucifer stand. His creation’s legs were unsteady, but he was alive and as he began to move he began to learn. And Lucifer learned quickly. He looked at his creator and assayed a mocking bow, and then turned to the Archangel and repeated his action, bowing lower than he had to da Vinci.

“Now witness the battle!” Lorenzo Medici roared from the front row, leaping to his feet.

Sickness began to spread through him as he saw the resolute determination of his creation. For all of his glories, the angel did not stand a chance against the clockwork Lucifer. With no weaknesses, nothing to hurt, the clockwork man simply kept on coming, the tempered alloy of its limbs blocking and parrying the angel’s soul-sucking sword. With no soul to lose, the blade was useless against Lucifer.

The faces of the crowd were devoid of expression as the spectacle of the clockwork man had them rapt. Medici himself, in the centre of the first row, appeared to be in the grip of some holy ecstasy, the look of rapture transforming his ugly face with its bliss. But none of them could see what was truly happening. They were caught up in the duel, immune to the crackling bursts of energy that sparked and danced around every inch of the Medici chapel and out through the San Lorenzo church and into Florence itself. They couldn’t see the Archangel’s increasing desperation as its every blow was blocked and it was forced back and back, the clockwork man an undeniable force of nature.

Lucifer forced Michael back into the chapel wall, directly beneath the statue of the crucified Christ.

Nor could they see the malicious look of glee that had settled on the features of the Bright One.

And then it was over.

The Devil, Lucifer, Prince of Lies, Clockwork Man, slammed his steel fist through the spreading ribs of the naked angel and for a second held its beating heart in its mechanical hand, and then it squeezed.

Fifteen thousand screams rent the inside of the San Lorenzo.

The bell jar that held Michael’s angelus imploded, fine slivers of glass showering the faces of those closest to the stage. The bell jar that held da Vinci’s soul imploded. The threads that bound the fifteen thousand souls of the congregation to their mortal flesh, severed abruptly and amid the screams, the fear and sudden desolation, the Brightest One, Prince of Lies, watched the wraiths of light that should have been souls on their way to heaven writhe and twist in the air of the chapel, lost, as they were sucked away into the nothingness that was the absence of divinity.

Stricken, da Vinci cradled the dead angel in his arms. “I didn’t understand … I didn’t understand,” he repeated, over and over. “I didn’t understand.”

“Oh but you did,” Lucifer denied him. “You understood what it meant to banish Him. And still you did it. Where Astopel and Mammon, Azazel and Beelzebub failed, you, da Vinci, succeeded. With your help science killed God.” Lucifer laughed, a laugh that was echoed from the front of the madding crowd where Lorenzo Medici’s awestruck countenance was still being wracked by what could only be pleasure. His lips were moving, forming the words:

“Your temple, Master.”

And the rest, the rest of the fools Medici had dragged in to witness the second coming of Evil in the body of the clockwork man, they screamed on as they were stripped of eternal life as the clockwork took the black sword of God from the dead Archangel and scythed through the lost souls orbiting around his head. Lucifer drank it in, like benediction owed to him. Turning, he pushed da Vinci aside as though he were irrelevant, an irritant to be brushed away, and stopped, bending low over Michael’s corpse.

“Farewell, brother,” the Prince of Lies said. “May He watch over your eternal soul … Oh no, forgive me. Thanks to you, there is no God. How ironic.” And so saying, he stood again and slammed the black sword into the angel’s chest. “So the Devil take your soul instead.” Michael’s body shuddered once, the black sword singing, the fragrance of vanilla suddenly suffusing the newly ordained church of Satan.

Lucifer walked out of the San Lorenzo, alive with the infinite possibilities of the flesh, free to walk among his new flock as a man eternal, no meddling God to stand in his way.

***

Loose Change

The Wanderer

The Wanderer listened to the busker as he played music of chance. He inhaled the melody note by note as they curled out from the busker’s battered old guitar, making patterns where there were none. In those patterns there was beauty.

He closed his eyes, savouring the tune, his fingers playing over the curious golden timepiece on the collar of his patchwork coat. And for that moment, that single second of perfection, he wished with all his heart that it would not stop, that the notes would not fall away and that silence would never hold sway again, such was the power of the heartbreak and hope hidden within those random notes.

The Wanderer reached into his pocket for a coin, felt along the edge of its milling and tossed it into the busker’s guitar case. The coin hit the rim, nicking its edge, rattled and fell, lost amid the silver and copper. Smiling, the Wanderer moved on. It was one random act of generosity in a nameless city but when the music of chance was involved anything and everything became possible.

The Busker

Si watched the clown of a man with a mess of blond curls and boyish charm walk away, waiting until he was out of earshot to stop playing. His fingers were raw and his stomach was killing him. All he wanted to do was eat. He gathered up the few coins he had earned with his music and stuffed them into his pocket. It was stubborn pride, he hated the idea of handouts. This way it felt like he was earning the pittance they dropped in his guitar case. With the guitar slung over his shoulder he walked down the street, following his nose and the seductive aromas of hot dogs and brine to the vendor’s stall on the corner, sandwiched between the red sign of an electronics store and the blue cross of a department store’s sale. “Give us a hot dog, mate.”

“Everything on?” the hot dog vendor asked.

“Yep, and stick a few extra onions on, would you?”

Si rummaged around in his pocket for the coins to pay for his food, his finger catching on the rough edge of one. He took it out of his pocket and looked at it; a deep groove had been cut across the milling. It didn’t matter, money was money, he handed it over to the vendor along with a few others, and walked off down the street, munching.

The Hot Dog Man

Jay was having a miserable day.

It was too cold. He had barely sold ten sausages all day. He needed to sell forty to even warrant setting up his stall. He rubbed his hands together briskly trying not to think about the cold.

“Don’t make a scene, granddad,” a muffled voice rasped in his ear, up close. “Just give us your money and no one needs to get hurt.” Jay felt the sharp dig of a knife in his back. Frightened, he did as he was told. There wasn’t more than fifteen quid in loose change. It wasn’t worth getting killed over. He started to turn as he unfastened the pouch from around his waist but the knife in his back kept him facing forward. “Just pass it back, and don’t get any funny ideas, I’ll be watching you. Just count to one hundred. If you can do that you might just make it out of this alive.”

He closed his eyes, and counted out one, two, three, on four he felt the thief pull the money pouch from his hand. He didn’t so much as flinch.

The Thief

Ellis emptied the coins into the deep pockets of his parka and dropped the pouch on the ground. He stuffed his hands in on top of the coins to stop them from rattling. The money felt good. Ellis thrust his fingers into the silver and copper, and in the process cut his finger on the rough edge of one of them. He winced. The hot dog man’s count had reached eleven before he stepped back and slipped into the mill of shoppers and effectively disappeared.

Ellis was bored so halfway down the street he ducked into the penny arcade and fed the coin that had cut him into the Space Invaders. Ellis was good, a real wizard when it came to vapourising pixels. He set the high score before he left, allowing the guy who ran the place to empty the machine. He had played for forty-five minutes on that one coin.

The Coin Collector

Jervis McCreedy watched the young scally leave, “The kids today,” he said to no one in particular as he set his key into the machine, with a pull and a twist a river of silver came tumbling out into his small Hessian sack.

He sat in his cramped booth amid the stink of sweaty kids and danger pheromones until closing time, watching their antics on the silent security screens. They were all the same, like pack animals. Jervis tried to tell himself the kids who hung around the penny arcade feeding the slots and hammering out high scores weren’t normal kids but he knew he was kidding himself, thinking of a better time that never was, when kids were sweet and sugar and all those things little girls were supposed to be made of but even the nursery rhymes knew they were snails and puppy dog’s tails really. Still, he had a while before he had to worry about that. Tonight, it was all about flowers and letting love decide.

He shut up shop, whistling another refrain from the music of chance, random notes spilling from his lips as he walked toward the florist’s kiosk across the street from the penny arcade.

“So tonight’s the night?” the pretty young thing behind the glass asked. She knew his story. Everyone around here did. Jervis McCreedy was in love, and tonight, with a white orchid and puppy dog eyes he would propose. She had the orchid wrapped and waiting for him. He handed her notes to pay for it, and then as an afterthought dropped a handful of coins into the small tin pot she had left out for tips—not that people ever left tips for her. They tipped waiters and bar staff, taxi drivers and concierges. As a rule they did not tip florists.

The chipped coin rattled in the tin pot.

The Flower Girl

It was moments like this, knowing that her flowers were going to play an important part in someone’s memories that would last forever that had convinced May to be a flower girl.

She couldn’t help but smile as she watched the coin collector skip away down the street.

He was her last customer for the night; she had stayed open just for him.

Feeling good about herself, she rolled down the shutters and locked the screens in place. She was halfway out the door when she remembered she had no change for the night bus. With the till tallied and the cash locked away in the pouch to deposit in the bank’s night safe, she grabbed the coins out of the tin pot and locked the door.

The bus was full of night people—these were the citizens of the city who didn’t come out during the day. They weren’t the tramps or the businessmen, they were young men on their way to clubs to dance to tunes where melody had been given up in favour of wild beats and passion, they were sallow skinned sweatshop workers, immigrants and the underclass of life the politicians never admitted to when they talked about the greatness of their city, their fancy words rusting and falling apart like so much else of the place.

May paid, the chipped coin sticking in the ticket machine. The dead-eyed driver took it from her and swapped it for a token that fed the slot. She sat in one of the chairs with her back to the window. She had no interest in watching the night world roll by. As the bus pulled out she caught the eye of a young man on the opposite row of bench seats and felt her heart skip a beat as he smiled and moved across to join her. May’s breath caught in her throat as he smiled—he had one of those smiles, a dangerous one, the kind that made hearts skip beats—and asked her name.

The Driver

At the front of the bus the driver smiled. Dave Mason loved the night shift. It wasn’t dangerous like the evening run when the drinkers spilled out of the pubs. It was a haven for the misfits, and every now and then even misfits found love.

He turned the radio up, not wanting to intrude on their getting to know one and other.

Outside it started raining. He watched mile after mile of city streets slick beneath the wet wheels of the bus, the wipers cutting back and forth across the huge windscreen. People came and went, the flower girl and her new man left four stops from the hospital where they changed shifts. Dave smiled at her as she left. She smiled back and he could understand immediately what had drawn the young man across the seats to talk to her.

Alone on the bus, he sang to himself, nonsense words that almost fit the tune of the day. He was still singing as he parked the vehicle in its bay and killed the engine.

“Evening, Georgie,” Dave said to his replacement as she came in out of the rain. Her hair was plastered flat to her scalp. She looked anything but happy. He grinned, relinquishing his seat. As the night air hit him, Dave Mason had a single thought: he wanted a smoke. Eight hours sat cramped up on the bus left him with a fierce craving. He crossed the street, ducking into the foyer of the hospital and fed the cigarette machine with coins, catching his fingernail on the wounded one. The machine rejected it so he rooted around for another. He pulled the lever and the machine dispensed a packet of cigarettes. He peeled away the shrink wrap and tapped out a coffin nail. He was about to light it when a grinning man asked:

“Excuse me, any chance I could bum one of those off you?”

“No worries,” Dave said, tapping out a smoke. He lit it for the man, the pair of them huddling over the lighter like delighted conspirators hatching schemes.

“Don’t suppose I can do you for change for the phone? I want to call my mother, let her know Becky’s had a little girl.”

“Hey, fantastic! Congratulations,” Dave pulled a few coins from his pocket, including the one with the ruined milling, and handed them over to the proud father.

The Proud Father

Chris Welsh fed the coins one after the other into the pay phone and dialed home. The chipped coin stuck in the slot so he had to bang the side of the phone with his fist before it tumbled into the mysterious guts of call box. He listened to the ring signal cycle over and over and suddenly stop.

“Hi mum, it’s me … yes, yes, she’s fine. They both are. Yes, a little girl. Couldn’t be happier. Yes, I know. Sleepless nights. Can’t wait …”

The angry peep-peep-peep of the pips cut him off before he could go into weight and all those other things grandparents wanted to hear.

“Love you. I will call you when I get back to the house. Love you!”

And silence.

He hung up, and went back to his wife and new baby girl in the maternity ward, all grins.

The Service Engineer

In the morning Vernon Little came round to empty the phone, scooping out the coins. The slot had been jammed with chewing gum during the night. He had to scrape it off with a knife. He couldn’t understand people; they had no respect for things, for property. If it wasn’t theirs they broke it. There was no social conscience these days. Vernon didn’t know whether to blame the kids, the parents or the politicians so he blamed all three and tried to forget about the fact that griping about it was a sure sign he was getting older. The chipped coin was stuck in the feeder, blocking the slot. He worked it free and stuck it in his pocket.

Whistling he carried the day’s take to the van and poured it in a stream of silver into the money pouch on the passenger seat. He had no idea what the tune was, he’d had it stuck in his head all morning. Probably some piece of nonsense on the clock radio in those few minutes between sleep and waking.

Vernon drove carefully, he always did, pulling up outside the small provincial office of the bank.

He walked in two minutes before the ski-masked robbers with their sawn-off’s and guttural barks:

“Everybody down, on the floor!”

The Bank Robber

“This is a robbery,” Andy Mills yelled. All he could think of was that movie, Pulp Fiction. How were you supposed to rob a bank without sounding like Pumpkin and Honey Bunny? “Nobody moves. Nobody says a thing. That way nobody gets hurt,” Andy waved his gun around, jamming it into the face of the guy in blue coveralls. His name badge said Vernon. “We don’t need any heroes, Billy. On the floor, now!”

The Service Engineer

Vernon knelt, heart hammering, his head filled with that damned stupid tune. He couldn’t get rid of it. He imagined being shot, dying, and being forced to spend eternity listening to it over and over and over.

“All right, my friend here’s coming round with a bag, I want everyone to empty their pockets into it, watches, jewelry, wallets, loose change, the lot. Don’t hold back. We don’t want to hurt you, but we will.”

When the bag man came to him, he reached into his pocket, felt his keys, a few crumpled notes, and the sharp nick of the damaged coin. He pulled them all out and dumped them into the plastic carrier bag.

“And the rest of it,” the bag man barked, nodding toward his wedding ring.

Vernon shook his head.

“Don’t make me hurt you, fool.”

“It’s my wedding ring … it’s all I’ve got … she’s gone. Please.”

“Stop bleating and take it off!”

The butt of the sawn-off cracked off the side of his jaw as the bag man jabbed it in his face.

“We’re done! Quick!” one of the ski-masks yelled, bolting back over the counter clutching a heavy sack of notes. Outside, sirens. One of the tellers had tripped the silent alarm. Inside, chaos.

“Give me the ring!”

The Bag Man

Stevie Carr hit the ring bearer so hard across the side of the head the stubborn fool crumpled. He leaned down, prizing the gold off his fat finger and put it in the bag with the rest of the stuff. It was good haul. No, a great haul, what with the cash from the tellers, a few diamond rings and plenty of plastic would keep them happy for a few months.

His blood was pumping. He was on fire!

Stevie pushed through the glass doors and ran into the street. The sirens blared as police cars streamed around the corner. He looked left and right, clutching his precious bag, and without thinking started to run.

Before he had taken five steps the plastic split, the bag ruptured haemorrhaging gold and silver, watches, coins, cuff links and notes all over the paving stones of the High Street.

“Armed Police! Stop!”

Stevie looked down at his feet, and saw a single silver coin with a deep cleft across its face and into its milling roll on its edge away toward the gutter.

A clown of a man with a patchwork coat of mismatched colours and a mop of blonde curls stooped to pick up the coin.

The Wanderer

The Wanderer pocketed the damaged coin, feeling the nick in the milling.

The young thief charged straight at him, intent to barrel through the Wanderer if he couldn’t get around him.

The street was chaos, police shouting, a woman screaming, the alarms in full hullabaloo now. He side-stepped the thug a whisker before collision, but left his leg trailing. There was no way the young thief could get his feet out of the way in time, and with his hands still full with the ripped plastic bag, he went sprawling across the paving stones.

Policemen were on him in a heartbeat.

The Wanderer tutted, shaking his mop of blonde hair, and walked off whistling another refrain from the music of chance.

***

Remember Me Yesterday

Death marked the old man; its irresistible charm dancing impatiently behind his wine-dark eyes. He sat at the corner table alone, tearing adverts out of the newspaper laid open before him. A cup of black coffee had gone cold on him while he neatly stacked his scraps of paper.

“I hate all of the commercials,” he grumbled as I slipped into the seat opposite him. “People who don’t know us telling us what we need to make our lives complete. They don’t know shit.” An Ebel watch joined the growing graveyard of commercials set adrift on the tablecloth sea.

Federico had been doing this for as long as I had known him—tearing every advert from every magazine before he deemed them safe for consumption. Not that he ever read them; he simply tore the adverts out and left the naked stories behind. When he was fifteen he had joked that he was a one-man crusade against the evils of laisse faire. His wry, slightly self-mocking smile suggested he was well aware how far he had wandered down the Lunatic Road with his obsessions.

He gathered the cuttings up and stuffed them into the pockets of his once designer jacket. The cuffs had frayed, the elbows worn, the patches on the elbows worn. Did he still have boxes of old adverts at home?

“I didn’t think you’d come, Caro.” He said it without looking at me.

“Neither did I,” I admitted, and that was the truth. In the eighteen years since I’d last heard Federico’s slightly Spanish sounding voice my life had changed. Actually it had become a life; I’d married, divorced and had my son Marcus along the way. But hearing that voice again today when I answered the telephone … Voices carry our secrets. That is what I truly believe: If the eyes are doors into our hearts, where everything we want, crave, desire can be seen in the confusion of colours, the voice is the key to ‘us.’ A carefully detailed blueprint of the longings, the needs, that are our souls. So much of us, our essence, our history comes wrapped in the sounds our mouths make. But think about it, the voice is something so deliciously ephemeral, changing as it does from morning to night, thickening with emotion, aching with hurt, love, it’s all there to hear, our secret selves hidden within the curves and contours of the street map of our souls.

And Federico always had the key to me.

A red-eyed waiter appeared over the shoulder of my window reflection. “Cafe Latte,” I said to him through the backwards land of the glass. I lit a cigarette and exhaled a beautiful ribbon of blue.

“Have you ever fallen in love, Caroline?” Federico asked when the waiter was gone. Soft jazz whispered around his words. He laid his hands flat on the table, palms up, an old trick. The magician’s misdirection showing me there was nothing up his sleeve while the coin was already hidden between his fingers.

“You know I have,” I said softly, looking at the man I used to love, remembering one time, one night, when I finally found the words to say I was all out of love for him. Three a.m., the time when most relationships die in the dark where it’s safe because they can’t see our eyes. Can’t see the truth or the lies. I whispered, “But I don’t love you anymore,” and didn’t know if I was talking to him or the memory of him.

“You never did, not enough.”

“Why did you call me, Freddie?” I asked as if I hadn’t heard him.

“Because I am dying,” he said simply. “Because I’m selfish. Because I loved you.”

“So you’re putting your house in order?” The words were colder, harsher than I had meant them to be.

“Something like that,” he agreed. I wanted to see him through yesterday’s eyes, to see him the way he had been before—before he had taken to wearing this skin that didn’t fit. Before the years had carved away his smile, his cheeks, his beautiful mask.

He looked sixty when he wasn’t even forty. I looked into his eyes for the accusation, for the blame. And remembered the first time I had seen that wonderful sky. How it had felt that first time, knowing that for just one look that said “I love you,” I would have been able to fly, fly in those eyes. But, like Icarus, I had flown too close to his sun and melted the wax binding my wings together. With the wax gone the feathers blew away and my flight of teenage love became a free fall into adult loneliness.

His hands twitched on the table. “I want to ask you something, Caroline. You don’t have to say yes, but …” he didn’t say any more, didn’t have to. His eyes did his talking for him. If you ever loved me, they said, if you ever cared, you won’t say no. “Take a good look at me, Caro. This is what ol’ Papa Death looks like when he comes knocking.” Federico’s fingers made the sign of the cross, from forehead to eyes and settling, like a plea for silence, over his lips. There was a tiredness fogging his eyes now, as if the simple act of talking like this was too much for him.

“Is it cancer?” I asked, putting two and two together and making five. Cancer, the Big C. His post mortem smile seemed to be saying if only life—death—could be that simple. His hands fluttered again, full of nervousness. They cast shadow-wings on the tablecloth. I was struck by the half-formed image of an angel watching over our reunion. Not some all loving cherub, something more seductive with its sensuous shadow shape, a darker presence blessed with the cold embrace of that endless winter night.

“No,” he said, breaking the angel. He rubbed his eyes. “No. Listen, Caro. I don’t think I have the life left in me to say this more than once. I’m dying but it is not the kind of death I can fight with antibiotics and chemotherapy. I’m dying from here,” Federico touched his temple tenderly, “To here.” His fingers rested over his heart. “I’m dying from yesterday all the way into today, if that makes any kind of sense.”

“I’m sorry, Freddie,” I said, feeling stupid. “I haven’t got a clue what you are talking about.”

“I’m forgetting myself, my life. You. All the times we spent together, the threads are coming unravelled; it might as well be as if we had never met. As if that time we shared never existed. There are these huge blanks that used to be filled by my life. And with each new memory that slips into the blank spaces, another piece of me dies …”

I tried to put the whole thing into terms I could understand. I’m not a stupid woman but Federico always has had the ability to leave me feeling like an IQ napkin. “Are you telling me that you’ve got Alzheimer’s?” Jesus, he was less than three months older than I was. The realisation sent cold fingers shivering down the ladder of my spine. “Is that what’s wrong with you?”

“I made a promise to the Thief of Time. I gazed into her eyes and offered everything I had.” He answered cryptically. “Everything I am, everything I was. Now she is collecting her marker.”

“You’re talking in riddles, Federico.”

He smiled a sad parody of his old smile. “The world might love winners, Caro, but she doesn’t. Her black smile and her black heart make her a jealous lover. I’m learning how to treat her though. She hates to let the taste of success linger in your mouth. She wants you to know she can always take it all away. I thought I had a chance to win, you know, ever the gambler and now I am dying from yesterday all the days through until today. When the blackness finally catches up, well, then I hope it is painless. A man is the sum of his memories, Caroline. She’s taking each and every one from me, one at a time. I’m thirty-eight years old. I’ve seen a lot of things but I have these holes inside of me that are spreading like cancers, tearing me apart. I can’t remember the grin on my own son’s face. It’s gone. I can’t remember what it felt like to dance with his mother in the rain the night he was conceived. I can’t remember what she said when we kissed our last goodbye. It’s gone … all of it, and I don’t mean it is fuzzy; it’s gone so thoroughly it might as well never have happened. I need you to help me remember yesterday, Caroline. I want to die knowing who I was.”

He looked at me, the tragedy of his ending life written deep into the sky of his eyes. I so desperately wanted to help him but I didn’t have a clue where to start. The Thief of Time? A woman who’s dipping into his memories and taking them for her own? It was a Grimm fairy tale. One of Federico’s Latin fables. But not Stockholm. Not the Stockholm I had lived in for nearly twenty years. What could I say?

“Have you tried hypnosis?” I said, remembering all of those New Age chat shows littering daytime TV. And then something else occurred to me. “Maybe you’re forgetting for a reason.”

“You just don’t listen do you?” Federico said, slamming his hands down on the table suddenly. “The Thief of Always and Forever is bleeding me dry and you’re playing medical join-the-dots.”

“I’m just trying to say that maybe your ghosts won’t let you remember, subconscious amnesia. Something like that.”

“I don’t have any ghosts,” he said bluntly. “They’ve been taken away from me, just like everything else. When I walk through the town, down Västerlånggatan or Sveavägen, I am walking down streets that should be dancing with ghosts of relationships lost, hearts broken, hopes raised, but I’m walking down cold grey stones. The old grey bricks of our school on Vallhallavägen, they’re dead but I don’t see the spirits of us as teenagers haunting the playground. I just don’t see it. The bricks and mortar might remain but the memories have gone. It’s like being no-one. I could introduce myself to people, ‘hi, I’m nobody, pleased to meet you.’”

“Now you are being ridiculous,” I said, but he wasn’t. I tried to put myself in his shoes, project his losses onto my thin shoulders, but it was useless.

“I need you to help me remember,” he said again. I hadn’t heard him like this before—this was a whole new Federico. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

“But what can I do?”

“Make it come alive for me, the time we spent together. Give me back yesterday.”

O O O

I live in a small two-room apartment with a blind cat called Deuteronomy and a view of the big grey mushroom at Stureplan. I love sitting on the cushions in the window, looking out over the city while the light bulbs on the building opposite flash currency rates and stock prices. Sometimes its raindrops that run down the windowpane, sometimes its fat white flakes of snow that die on the glass. It’s worth the cold and the damp for the summer scents that bring everything to life.

I fell in love with Stockholm the first time I caught the subway. All of these elegant people queuing along the platform’s edge, waiting for this rickety old train straight out of the Blitz to come rolling down the tracks. I just stood there on the platform and lost myself in this ocean of colognes. Breathed it in. It was the first time I realised that I was in a foreign city. Everything smelled so rich and wonderful, quite unlike my native New York with its restless heat and its thick blankets of smog and winter snow. It’s the kind of thing I take for granted now. One of those simple pleasures.

Raindrops made rivers on the glass while I turned the pages of one of my old photograph albums. I’ve always been a photo taker. I have a bookcase full of bad photographs of friends, regal snaps of Deuteronomy curled up in the window, tricks of perspective, grey stone streets, snow-laced gargoyles, I even have one that Mikael took of me while we made love. You can’t see anything but you can still tell exactly what was happening. Deuteronomy was a ball of contentment listening to the commercials with his usual cattish disinterest. Outside, rainbows were puddling in the gutters, shoppers kicking their feet through the pots of gold at either end. I was thinking about things—people—I hadn’t thought about for a long, long time. The sounds from the television changed into a game show: Bingo Lotto. All around the country I imagined people reaching for their purple tickets in the grip of bingo fever. I didn’t realise who—or rather, what—I was seeing for a good five minutes.

Veronica Andersson was leaning against the doorway into the building across the street, her beautiful brown eyes looking up at my window. Only it was impossible, it couldn’t have been Ronni. The girl looking up at my window was just that, a girl. She couldn’t have been a day over fifteen. Veronica was my age; at least she had been the last time I saw her. Admittedly that was over twenty years ago, but I felt safe in assuming she was still my age. So who? Her daughter? It was possible but what were the odds? Better than my chances of cleaning up on Bingo Lotto, I thought as I raced down the stairs and into the street. Of course, when I hit the pavement Veronica or whoever she was was long gone and I was left looking like a crazy woman chasing ghosts. I had to fight hard to resist the urge to simply grab a passer-by and start babbling about the girl who had been standing in the doorway. Instead, I trudged back up the stairs to my photograph album.

Of course, it occurred to me that she hadn’t been there, hadn’t been looking up at my window. That made the most sense, and it didn’t mean I was going crazy either, just that I had been so busy thinking about being back at school with Federico and the others I simply saw a resemblance on some strangers’ face and blew it up to the size of an honest to God Peter Pan clone peeking through my window.

But something Federico had said came back to me: “I made a promise,” that’s what he said. “I made a promise to the Thief of Time. I gazed into her eyes and offered everything I had. Everything I am, everything I was. Now she is collecting her marker.”

I looked down at the photograph of Veronica I had in my lap, at her eyes and found myself sinking into a dream I wasn’t ready for.

O O O

I sat at the same table in Cafe Muren with three packets of photographs neatly stacked beside the ashtray. I’d actually given up smoking two years before, but I needed something to do with my hands and holding a thin coffin nail seemed as good as anything. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do, sure I had a few ideas about flashback therapy, offering Federico a picture of the old school, of my old coffee cup with the 70s psychedelic swirls, the one he broke trying to juggle it along with two oranges; he had been trying to impress Louise and Karin. I smiled at the memory but then a strange feeling of selfish settled over me; how easily I could recall all of this mundane childhood stuff and there was Federico who couldn’t very well remember what day it was. I stopped smiling.

When he came in through the door he looked more than a day sicker. He had a bundle of magazines under his arm, glossies with those tear off perfume samples and bulimic models. He sank into the seat opposite me. The nuts and bolts holding his face in place had loosened another notch and folds of loose skin were wrinkling up like the chins of a Pekinese pooch.

“I thought I saw Veronica last night,” I said, offering it like bait.

“Veronica?” was all he said, but it was enough for me to know that whatever memories that had anchored Veronica to Federico were gone. It gave me somewhere to start. I picked up the first packet of photographs and thumbed through them until I saw a candid snap of Veronica and Nic K. slow dancing in the dining hall. I teased it out and lay it on the table between us. Federico studied both of the faces in the photograph without the tiniest flicker of recognition in his eyes.

“That’s Veronica,” I said. “Don’t you recognise her?”

He shook his head. “Pretty little thing,” I thought I saw a hint of a smile when he said that.

“We were all in school together,” I said softly and began to go through the photographs one at a time, feeding him with memories that should have been his own. The first one was of me on stage at the graduation ceremony. There was no real order to the pictures, I was working on a kind of hit and hope philosophy, throwing out event after event purely on the basis that the BIG things would break away bigger chunks of the amnesia or whatever it was and give Federico back bigger segments of his past. So after the graduation it was a picture of him leaning against the door of a blue two door ‘57 Volvo Coupe with a spectacular view of Stockholm filling the background. There was more to the picture than what was shown.

It had been a Friday night filled with mosquitoes and saxophones. We’d driven up to Vanity Hill with the top down, parked on the side of the road and laid our blanket out. He’d tried to teach me the names of some of the major constellations but I kept joking about seeing my uncle’s face in the clouds and that my dad had sent him to spy on us. It was difficult to get a fix on my Ursa Minor’s and Major’s with a rather cumulous member of the family breathing down my neck. I wasn’t used to drinking back then and the Chablis had gone straight to my head. I wasn’t drunk, but I was on the way and when we started to kiss things just started to happen and instead of slowing them down, stopping them, I started chasing them. It was a natural progression; soon we were exploring each other for the first time. It was the night we both lost our virginity and I could tell all that from a stupid photo of a beat up Volvo and Federico’s shit eating grin.

The next photograph was of this huge Cat in the Hat character called Simon, whose fingers were decked out in gold and diamante. Next to his smile and his pearly white teeth all that gold was as dull as daytime TV.

We went through five years that morning, with the waiter topping up our coffee cups frequently. Talked about things that I remembered and he didn’t. Had a quiz after two years, the highs and lows of a teenage life laid bare. Twenty questions. No points for wrong answers. No questions repeated. If you don’t know the answer go on to the next question. The usual quiz show stuff. Federico scored three points. It was a start.

O O O

Deuteronomy woke me by sitting on the left side of my face. The night was shadow boxing on the bedroom wall. Everything had the cold Stockholm touch to it, the oak floor kissed like a razor as I walked across it, drawn to the window.

I’d known she would be there, looking up at my window. There was something horribly inevitable about seeing her fifteen-year-old face tilted up to look at me. I rested my hands on the window ledge, my weight on my hands. The photograph album was still open on the side, a shot of Veronica in her pale floral dress caught in the sun. I looked at the girl in the street, back at the girl in the photo album. A shiver danced rung by rung down the ladder of my spine. It was her. The girl in the street was Veronica, the Veronica of twenty years ago, the Veronica I’d grown up with who had somehow stopped growing old, just like Peter Pan, and now here she was, on my doorstep the exact same week that Federico walked back into my life. Coincidence?

I read somewhere that there was no such thing as coincidence, fate, kismet, whatever you want to call it. But did that discount meaningful coincidence? A lover unheard from for twenty years and the sudden sighting of an ex-best friend from high school in the same week? Well, no. But … An ex-best that has somehow arrested the ageing process? Trapped herself in a bubble of 1979?

The rain didn’t seem to be touching her. It had to be a trick of perspective and bad light, but it had the cold hand of fear clutching at my stomach just the same. There she was, standing in the rain, bone dry.

Deuteronomy rubbed himself up against my leg, purring deep in his throat.

I dressed slowly, warmly, in jeans and a baggy blue sweatshirt. Then I took my time lacing my sneakers. I didn’t hurry because I knew she’d still be standing there not getting wet in the rain when I walked out of the door.

I took one last glance at the photographs; saw the photograph of Federico leaning against his blue Volvo that I had put back into the album a few hours before, and walked down the stairs and into the street, trying for the life of me to remember the name of the hill where we had made love that first time.

O O O

I ran out into the middle of the road like a mad woman. Three a.m., Stockholm, an in-between time, where the nightlife is giving way to the newspaper deliverers and the early morning smells of cinnamon hanging warmly in the air. The lights of the all night sandwich bar on the corner were on, a couple of star-crossed lovers eating pastrami on rye and supping cola, prolonging the night and angling towards a bed somewhere in the city, either together or alone.

I stopped walking two feet shy of the curb, close enough to see the lack of lines on Veronica’s sad face. She seemed to be staring right through me as if it was me that was the ghost, not her.

“Ronni?” I whispered, barely above a breath. “Is that you?”

Her eyes came down from looking at the angels and saw me for the first time in twenty years. It was her. I don’t know what I expected, that she would open her mouth to talk and there would be nothing, no words, nothing. That she would suddenly spill the secrets of immortality and young looking skin. That she would turn out to be someone else and this was all some huge paranoid joke I was playing out at my own expense.

“Caroline,” she said, dubiously, almost as if she didn’t recognise me. “You’re all grown up.”

I nearly laughed. It was such an innocuous thing to say, yet it summed everything up neatly. I was all grown up and somehow she was still fifteen and locked in eternal puberty.

It was the strangest sensation, being face to face with my own apparition, my own Ghost of Christmas past come to take me around the city by night. I don’t remember Scrooge being soaked to the skin in his story though. Maybe Dickens was a kinder God than mine, or maybe I was less of a character than old Ebenezer; less rounded, less unique, less worthy of creature comforts. So I cried tears of rain. I had no answer to Veronica’s almost accusation. It was a very simple truth; I was all grown up. That’s what twenty years do to a girl. They wrap her up in a silk cocoon like an ugly caterpillar and give birth to a woman, sometimes beautiful, sometimes plain. The trick is forgetting that first skin that was childhood and all of its growing pains and embracing the wings we need to fly through the rest of our lives.

Oh Jesus, I’m starting to sound like one of those damned self-help novels they sell in airports. You have to fall in love with yourself before you can fall in love with anyone else. Yeah, right. My mother hated every second of every day she spent with the abusive son of a bitch that helped hatch me, hated his kisses as much as she hated his kicks, yet I was surrounded by love while I grew up. How? Simple, there was no trick. All of the hatred he directed at her, she absorbed amplified and gave back to me as love. Overcompensated for the bastard who just happened, by biological defect, to be my daddy. But she believed everything he said about her; I could see it in her eyes. The haunted look of a woman who believes she is worthless. Even when she was dying all she could do was apologise.

“But she loved you,” Ronni said, as if she had found a way inside my head.

“What?”

“You’re mother, she loved you. You must know that. Every time he hit her, it was thinking about you that gave her the strength to get back up again … without you she would have given up a long time before, just laid down and died.”

So, I made it worse? I wanted to say it, but she reached out, placing her thumbs over both of my eyes like some faith healer trying to make me see again. “It is the same with Federico,” She whispered. “Your simply being there gives him the strength to go on.”

I tried to take some kind of comfort from what she said, but I couldn’t because if my simply being there had caused my mother so much more pain what was I doing to Federico?

“I was forty once, like you are now,” she said, suddenly. “And then he came back into my life. Said he’d forgotten nearly everything except me. Said some thief had stolen his past but it was a lie, he is the only thief, feeding himself off everything he never had the guts to experience. Now he is feeding off you … What have you given him? Tell me,” Ronni’s thumbs pressed into my eyes, hard enough to hurt.

I jerked away, trying to break her hold on me but her thumbs kept pressing as if they were trying to squeeze the truth out of me. “Please, you’re hurting me,” I said, holding her wrists and trying to pull my head back. “I haven’t given him anything. We’ve just talked a few times. He hasn’t asked me for anything.” It was a lie, and I knew it as soon as it came off my tongue. A big fat lie that had come to life all by itself. Of course he had asked me for something, he’d asked me to give him his past back, his memories. What had I given him? Nothing really. A few images. The photograph of the blue two door Volvo ’57 Coupe taken on … on … I couldn’t remember the name of the hill, the place where we had made love for the first time, where I had lost my virginity to Freddie … “Oh, Sweet God in heaven,” I whispered, realising it was gone. That there was a little black spot where it had been.

“What have you given him?” Ronni hissed again. “Tell me.”

“I told him how we made love the first time … and now … I can’t remember … it’s gone … like it never happened. I can see the car, it was a blue car …with red leather seats … but I can’t remember the place … I can’t remember where he laid me down … oh God, oh God, help me … help me …”

“Take your time, think about it, try to build the picture … try to remember. Panic is the enemy. Fear will steal more of yourself than you’ve already lost. Just try to relax, let the memories wash over you like water.”

I swallowed a breath, tried to imagine I was a pebble in the river of my dreams, tried to picture memories like swift flowing water, to let them wash over me, roll over me, sweep me away, and they did for a while, from childhood days into school days, faces, people, places, memories, all of them like icy water running through my veins, until the torrent formed a whirlpool around one face, Federico’s face. It was like a dam, the thoughts stopped flowing and instead began to churn and fold in on themselves, frothing up white water and black spots. Things I should have known, had known … had told Freddie over the table in Cafe Muren but couldn’t remember now.

“It’s gone,” I said softly, giving in.

“Try,” she hissed. “Try.”

“It’s no good,” I said pathetically. “It’s gone.”

“Then I pity you,” Veronica Andersson whispered, her eyes full of the sadness of knowing, understanding. “Because you’ll never get it back, and now he has his hooks in you, you’re just going to lose more and more of yourself, until you’re a child like me, reduced to haunting doorways at night for fear someone from your past might recognise you and soon enough you’ll find yourself wishing for Childhood’s End, not that it can ever come. You’re Peter Pan’s plaything now …”

O O O

The perfect sky was torn by a fork of dry lightning.

I looked at the woman reflected in the window of Cafe Muren. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to convince myself that there were any visible changes in the face that looked back or not. Not that the glass offered any details, no wrinkles or laughter lines just the wide sweep of features that made up my face. And it was my face, the one I had grown up with, the one I had been wearing a few days before when I’d met Federico tearing out his collection of advertisements and stacking them neatly—or near as damn it the same, a little voice niggled. I had stopped paying attention to the details a long time ago so I couldn’t swear that everything was exactly the same as it had always been. It looked the same to me, maybe a little more haunted around the eyes.

Every journey begins with a single step, right? It doesn’t matter how far you are going, there is always one step at the beginning that sets the whole thing off. I pushed open the Cafe door and took that long step over the threshold into Federico’s world.

He was sitting at what I was already beginning to think of as his table, thumbing through a copy of yesterdays’ Dagens Nyheter, his fingers black with newsprint. An oversized cup of black iced coffee and a wedge of Alabama fudge were off to the side, both untouched. He was waiting for me yet he didn’t look up as I eased myself into the seat opposite his.

“I saw Ronni last night,” I said when he didn’t look up. I wanted to shock him into some kind of reaction. He looked up slowly to the sound of tearing paper, his sky blue eyes overcast, filled with rain.

“No you didn’t,” he said simply. “You saw what she wanted you to see but you didn’t see Veronica.”

“How do you know I didn’t see her?” I asked, trying unsuccessfully to keep the edge out of my voice. “Were you there?” When he didn’t answer I nodded to myself, satisfied. “No, you weren’t were you.”

“I didn’t need to be there this time. I was with her when she died. I held her hand in a cold hospital ward while her husband was off somewhere feeling sorry for himself. Her hand was in mine when the life finally left her eyes. Do you understand now? You couldn’t have seen her because she died five years ago. You saw something, I don’t doubt that, but it wasn’t Veronica.”

That stopped me. “No,” I said, clinging to the image of the young girl standing in the rainy night. “No,” I repeated. “She isn’t dead … I saw her last night … she was … younger …”

In a few days the world had stopped making sense.

“She’s dead, Caro.”

I desperately wanted to believe him, needed to believe that he wasn’t some kind of memory stealing vampire, that he was the same old Freddie he’d always been, but I didn’t know who I could believe anymore. Last night everything Ronni had said had seemed so believable and now, looking at the pain in Federico’s eyes, I couldn’t see how he could be lying. “So who did I see last night? Tell me that much, please Freddie. I want to believe you. I really do.”

He closed his eyes, looking for the strength somewhere inside him to say the words I wanted to hear. When he opened the again the clouds had gone. There was nothing but endless cobalt blue sky. “You met her, the Thief of Time. You met the demon that is killing me and you fell for her lies, didn’t you?”

“No, I—”

“Please don’t lie to me, Caro. She’s persuasive. Believable. She has a way of getting what she wants. I won’t hold it against you.”

“Yes, then … but only because I don’t understand.” I said weakly. It was more the truth than he could know. “Tell me so I can.”

“Her name is Corimera. No, that’s not true, that’s what she told me to call her. Her name is something else. She knew I understood the rules, that names hold power, true names, so she gave me a lie because she knew I wanted to believe her. You see, I loved her. But she doesn’t care about that, about love. She only wants what she can take, not what can be given freely. There is no power in receiving, only in taking. The more she takes from me, the more of my spirit she absorbs, the more about her I understand. It’s like a two-way mirror, I don’t see everything and nothing is very clear, but I do see outlines, ghosts. I’m not the only one she has done this to, I know that now. To one lover she is Hera, to another Helene, Sarah, she is whoever they need her to be, but her real name, her given name, is Death. She touches all of our lives, draws them to a close like one of the Fates cutting the thread of life. She found me in the street and made me love her because I had nothing else in my life left that was worth loving.”

I took his hand in mine, turned it palm up. Both his lifeline and his loveline were broken by an intricate motorway of cracks that had been bled over by newsprint. “Go on,” I coaxed gently.

“It was after my military service, I was working as a cameraman for SVT 1. It was nothing glamorous, mostly news coverage. A fire at a youth club in Göteborg. A prison breakout. Skinheads causing trouble. Bus strikes in Stockholm and a train crash. Point the camera and let the loss of life do the talking. An idiot could have done it but the thing was, it was me doing it. It was me pointing the camera and it began to affect me. If you stare long enough into the abyss, right? After the fire, having to film the faces of dead kids being carried out of the gutted building, I wanted to be as far away from the camera lens as possible … as far away from real life as I could manage … I wrote poetry for a while, and hung around coffee shops pretending I was tres chic, but it was either drivel or haunted by the faces of burn victims.” He looked at me then, and I could feel every ounce of his pain. I’d seen the television coverage of the fire; who hadn’t. Sixty-six kids dead at a Christmas party because of a faulty fire alarm. “So I just dropped out. I started drinking. A lot. Too much too ever have been healthy. I wasn’t looking for answers, I was on a quest for oblivion, and that was harder to find than any answer I might have gone looking for.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said for want of something to say, some comfort to offer. He didn’t seem to hear me.

“Because they were always there, even when I was drunk. Their faces, those dead kids staring up at me. And when I was drunk it was worse because they started talking to me. I just couldn’t cope. I wasn’t strong enough to kill myself. I think I thought that would only bring them closer, a mixed up kind of resurrection, not them brought back from the dead but me brought back to them … so I just drunk myself into a perpetual stupor while my life crashed and burned.”

The red-eyed waiter brought me an unasked for cafe latte and left us alone again.

“That was where she found me, in the gutter. I was living out of bins, sleeping nights beneath the railway arches of the Central Station or in the amusement rides in Gröna Lund. It was off-season so no one was around to chase me off. It was raining. I remember that. She likes the rain … I’d passed out beneath the canopy of the carousel with my arm wrapped around a unicorn’s ankles … She was beautiful, her black hair hanging in wet ringlets down her forehead, her skin like alabaster …” he drifted in his telling of the story, caught up in the memory of meeting the woman he called Death. “I thought my heart was going to burst in my chest just from looking at her. It was like I was looking at a part of myself that had always been missing … I don’t know how else to explain it. With her to fill my eyes there wasn’t enough room for dead kids … Without a word she held her hand out to me and I took it. No thunderbolts. No lightning. We walked beneath the Ferris Wheel and between the Ghost Train and the Tunnel of Love. I didn’t care where she was taking me. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to be with her.”

“So why do you call her the Thief of Time?” I asked then, sure that there was a rational, reasonable explanation for Veronica still being fifteen and Federico being closer to sixty. He looked at me as if to say: are you stupid?

“Look at me, Caro. What do you see?”

“I see you,” I answered obtusely, I knew what he was getting at but I wasn’t about to give him it, I wanted to hear him say it. No easy get outs, no helpful misunderstandings. His words; his truth; his lies.

“No you don’t,” he said, his lip curling. “You see an old man. That’s why I call her the Thief of Time, because that is what she does. She steals every day, every memory, and leaves behind the husk, all withered and shrivelled like a piece of old fruit. That’s why. Just look at me. Look at me, look me in the eye and tell me I am not wasting away. Not ageing faster than that tangerine in your fruit bowl.”

I met his gaze, and then broke the contact.

“Can’t do it, can you?” he mocked.

“You’re sick, Freddie. I don’t know what is doing it to you, but I find it hard to believe some supernatural entity is bleeding the years out of you …”

His fingers drummed on the tablecloth. He didn’t seem aware of what they were doing, how loud they had become. “I never said she was anything more than a woman, Caro. You said that. I said she was the Thief of Time, Death herself, you said supernatural. You said impossible.” He started coughing; a shallow cough that couldn’t seem to dislodge whatever it was that was filling his throat.

“Freddie? Are you okay?” I asked anxiously. The coughing fit didn’t want to stop. After half a minute, more, he brought up blood. Flecks of the stuff sprayed from his lips to speckle the palms of his hands. “Jesus Freddie, what’s happening?” I was up and around the table but there was nothing I could do except wait it out. I rubbed and patted stupidly on his back. People were beginning to look. Someone shouted: “He’s choking!” but he wasn’t. He hasn’t eaten anything. Then it struck me; I hadn’t seen Federico eat a thing in all of the time we’d spent together since our reunion. He always ordered food and ended up leaving it untouched.

The red-eyed waiter pushed passed me, wrapped his arms around Federico’s waste and started heaving against his stomach, trying to force whatever it was that was choking him out. One, two, three. Quick jerks. Something red, glossed over with blood spat out of his lips and skittered across the floor and he was left gasping for breath in the waiter’s arms. Everyone was looking at Freddie. Not me. I was looking at the red thing that had come out of his mouth. It was blood definitely, and some kind of film, almost like an egg without the shell, the film meshed with white lines. While I stared at it, the white lines became thin spidery legs that twitched, stretching the mucus-covering that had eased the passage of whatever it was into this world. I tried to tell myself it was raw tissue from Freddie’s throat and stomach lining but it wasn’t. The legs finally tore the membranous sack and clenched the air, finding the strength they needed to support the things’ golf ball sized body, and then it was skittering away into the darkness beneath another diner’s table. I wanted to scream so badly there was no way not to. I reached out for the table. Needed it to keep me from falling. I couldn’t have seen what I had just seen.

I couldn’t have seen Ania Chaborik’s face on that … that … thing.

I couldn’t have …

“Caro? Caro?” It was Federico, wiping the blood from his lips as he reached out to steady me. I shook his hand off, backed away, turned and ran out of the cafe and into the rain.

O O O

“What the hell was that … that … thing?” I said bluntly. There were two ways of looking at it, and over the last three days I’d stared at both pretty hard. The first was that none of it had happened, no phone call, no Federico, no Veronica, no blood-spider, that I was the victim of one ugly hallucination but I knew that wasn’t true. So the other angle was that all of it was real. That was so much worse than merely seeing things.

He’d come looking for me after I left my machine to pick up all his calls. In each message he sounded progressively more desperate. I don’t know why, but I liked that. The clock on the wall had stuck at three. It had been like that for days but I didn’t have a spare battery to get it going again. Every time the phone rang Deuteronomy would start brushing up against it, trying to dislodge the handset from its cradle with his paw. Dumb cat didn’t realise the kind of trouble that was waiting on the other end of the line. After three days the calls finally stopped. I thought he’d given up. I was wrong. An hour later Federico was pounding on my door. Hard. Demanding that I answer. Finally, I gave in. I opened the door for him.

Now he was pacing the hardwood floor of my lounge, making cats cradles with his fingers. He looked like Hell … No that wasn’t true. He looked a little better than Hell. He’d looked like Hell when I ran out on him, now, if anything, he looked slightly worse.

He didn’t offer me a smooth lie; it was too late for that. He looked at me with eyes that looked as dark and broody as a thunder-sky. “You know what it was,” he said, rubbing at his chin. “It was someone … a friend … I can’t remember who … it was my memories of them. Gone.” He threw his hands up helplessly.

I got up from my seat and went over to the window to stare out into the street. I half expected Veronica to be sheltered in the doorway opposite but, as Federico had pointed out when he finally calmed down enough to talk, it wasn’t raining. A steady stream of cars, Volvos and Nissans of each and every colour and hue, moved in a metal snake down the road, a red city bus making the rattle at the tail.

“You don’t seriously expect me to buy into that, do you?” I said, doing my best Gillian Anderson impression. I didn’t turn around to look at him. I didn’t need to, thanks to the light he was reflected in the glass like a spectre overlapping the street below.

“That’s how it happens,” he muttered, still pacing. “I have no control over it you know … she chokes it out of me … I can tell it’s going to happen a while before it does. I find myself thinking about someone a lot. Not just how they look, things they say, everything. It’s as if she is leafing through the memories one by one, weeding the person out of my mind, then when she’s done, everything is out, it’s as if they become a hairball or something … you know, they just have to get out and I start choking … until I cough them out … That, back there in the cafe, that was nothing … I thought I was going to die the first time she stole someone from me.”

He was telling me the truth, or at least he thought he was, that much was painfully obvious.

“You’ve got to help me, Caroline. I can’t take much more of this.”

That much was obvious, just from looking at him. His eyes seemed to be falling into his skull, the cavities around them were so pronounced. Actually, it was as if he’d taken to wearing blue mascara on the skin beneath his eyes, or someone had punched him hard enough to bruise the entire eye socket of both eyes. And his hands … the folds of skin hung from his fingers like gloves that were far too big for his birdlike hands.

Prognosis terminal, Mr. Chuavas. Two, three days at most, I’d say, if you asked me, I thought darkly. Two or three days.

“How?” I asked. “How can I help you? What can I do?”

“Tell me stories, tell them fast. I need to know my life. I need to share your memories, pretend they are my own. I’m running out of things for her to take, Caro. There isn’t much of me left …” Two or three days, I said to myself. “I need some fake plastic memories to buy me time … I don’t know what else to do, how else to fight her …”

“Jesus … I need a drink,” I said then, going through to the kitchen to brew a jug of strong black coffee, Swedish style. Thick enough to stand a spoon in. Freddie stayed in the lounge. “Put some music on,” I called through. “This is going to be a long night.” He grunted something and after a minute Ani Difranco was telling us all about her Little Plastic Castle. I got the joke after a minute. Goldfish have no memory and the little plastic castle is a surprise every time… “Funny, Freddie,” I said, pouring out my first cup of the night ahead. Corkscrews of steam curled up under my nose as I carried the two cups through. “So you haven’t lost your sense of humour, huh?”

He managed a smile. “I just remember you loving that damned song … Used to hum it everywhere you went.”

We sat down facing each other, no putting it off anymore. I reached over to the bookcase for one of my many photograph albums and flipped it open on Marcus’s baby face. I turned the page quickly. I didn’t want my son getting mixed up in this. Besides, Marcus was no business of Federico’s. None. Five years back in five pages and there was Freddie leaning against his car on that hill … I stared at the picture trying for the life of me to remember what was special about it. Nothing. It was gone.

I looked for a different photograph, one I knew something about. It was of me and Louise Langeby smiling over the top of huge ice cream sundaes dripping with cola sauce and mint green liqueur. I smiled slightly, remembering just how incredibly competitive Louise had been about everything. In the photograph her hair was pulled up in its usual business-like ponytail, her face sans makeup, pretty but nothing special. I smiled inwardly, wondering what Louise would think of me; people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, right? I rested my fingertip on the photograph and began my long night as Scheherazade, telling stories to save a life.

“This was taken a year after we graduated high school, in an ice cream parlour in Gamla Stan. Wonderful ice cream. We were celebrating because Louise had just landed herself a job as a copy editor with Bonniers.” I stopped thinking about the words I was saying, found myself visualising them instead, reliving the memories …

The inside of the ice cream parlour was cold even though the paraffin heater was pumping out warmth. It had been a stupid idea coming for ice cream in January. Snow lined the street and banked up against the window like a scene from a Christmas card. Louise was really getting on my nerves, all of her talk about Bonniers this and Bonniers that, and the way she curled her lip up whenever she deigned to think about my own fledgling career as a makeup artist at Face. Still, the ice cream was good.

“Tell me about our break-up,” Federico interrupted, breaking the illusion. I looked at the clock, trying to get some sense of how long I had been under, but it was still stuck at three. The neons out in the street prevented the moon from giving any hints.

But it wasn’t the moon I was looking at.

It was Federico.

Only Federico.

Always Federico.

A thin dribble of blood was running from the corner of his mouth, losing itself in the cracks of his chin. He didn’t seem to be aware of it so I reached out to wipe it away but his hand snaked out and grabbed mine, his grip surprisingly strong, hurt. “Don’t,” he hissed, refusing to let go of my hand even when he felt the urge to move fade from my muscles.

I didn’t know what to say. I looked up from the ribbon of blood into his dead eyes. I was wrong; the sky had never lived in them. A flat rolling emptiness of oblivion consumed them. That was all there was to him. Emptiness. Oblivion.

“Tell me about our break-up,” he repeated harshly.

I shook my head, no. His fingers dug into my wrists. Twisting. “Tell me, Caro. You know you will so don’t make me hurt you.” I couldn’t break his hold, no matter how much I wanted to. “Needless pain is such a waste of good suffering.” The more pressure he put on my wrists the more vehemently I shook my head. But I couldn’t help myself; I started thinking about it …

The room was dark, for once not bathed in moonlight. Shadows cast by the limbs of the old tree in my parents’ garden danced on the white wall. I watched them trying to put some sort of message into their movement; a subtext about the decline of civilisation and the end of Empire, or something equally bogus. Free spirits that they were, the trees were having nothing to do with it. “I don’t love you anymore,” I said at last, knowing he couldn’t see my eyes. We’d made love less than an hour before. I felt cheap. Dirty. Used. I could never have said the words if he had been looking at me. The darkness gave me the strength to say what we both knew: It was over.

“You were it, Caro.” Federico’s voice was consumed by sadness. Blood was running from both nostrils now. No longer a thin trickle, it was bleeding into the collar of his shirt. He looked as if he had been shot in the neck. “You were the one. My North, my South, my East and my West … and you left me …”

It really was like an ugly hallucination, the way the past kept overlaying the present with its painful memories.

Something was beginning to happen inside me; I could feel it. Not like Freddie had explained it, not some kind of hairball at the back of my throat. It was in my stomach, a severe cramp, like a period pain but so much more intense. It felt like my womb was on fire and my ovaries were about to burst. And spill bloody red spiders onto the floor, that damned voice goaded.

“You left me,” he repeated softly.

I had started crying; I don’t remember when. I hurt so much. Inside and out. “I’m sorry,” I managed, trying to curl up into a foetal ball even though he still had my hands. “I’m sorry.”

“Sweet Caroline,” he soothed, lowering me to the floor. One moments softness exchanged for a brutal kick to my belly. A second kick, crunching into my breastbone. “You were always the one … It had to be you … I’m sorry, Caro. If … If I hadn’t loved you, it wouldn’t hurt so much …”

I sobbed, breaking.

I thought I was going to throw up; felt something soft brushing up against me. Deuteronomy. I tried to push him away but my body wouldn’t answer my mind.

Something sounded, a banging, a knock at the door: “Don’t go away now,” Federico whispered, brushing back my hair tenderly before he went to answer the knocking. I tried to move but it was impossible. So I just lay there in a ball, wishing I were dead while the spider of reality crawled inside my ear and whispered:

“Whyyyyy don’t youuuu kill him?”

It was laughable; I couldn’t even move and despite his outward frailty there was steel moving that loose flesh of Federico’s. I didn’t have a hope in Hell.

There were voices but I couldn’t hear what they were saying, not at first. I could just make out Federico’s but the others … some female, I guessed before I finally blacked out.

O O O

A ring of faces surrounded me when I came too. Federico’s dead eyes looking down paternally, Veronica’s still clouded with fairy dust and angels. But there were others. Faces I hadn’t seen since high school. Ania, Louise, Neha, Mary and Elisa, each looking at me as if I had somehow betrayed them. Each face impossibly young, every eye haunted by the kind of emptiness only death can bring. They crowded around me like so many spiders chittering over their prey.

Come to feast.

That was when I felt it; the first dribbles of blood trailing down the inside of my thigh. The pain in my womb, already unbearable, doubled, trebled. I could feel, literally feel, something crawling down through the lips of my vagina, hungry to be out in the world. I was screaming and they were all leaning over me and cooing, urging me to give birth.

I was wrong.

There was a lot of blood.

I felt Federico’s fingers on my temples, soothing, gentling. And I felt Federico’s fingers inside my head, picking through my memories, weeding them out, plucking out what he wanted, what he needed.

When it came, the memory was born in the same kind of mucus-covered spider that Freddie had coughed up. This one wore a man’s face, older, it had meant something to me once but now there was nothing, a blank space where this man had been in my life.

Deuteronomy watched the blood-slicked spider as it crawled down my leg, his eyes feral, bright. Instinct took over. The cat lunged, no time for playing with his food. One clawed paw snagged the spider and his open mouth came down instinctively to eat.

Federico was screaming but he couldn’t move with anything approaching the speed or agility of the cat. Deuteronomy finished eating the small spider and turned to consider the old man screeching at him with disinterested eyes.

Good boy, I urged, biting back on the pain as a second memory began its journey down the birth canal. Now do it again … Anything was better than this monster I used to call a friend swallowing my life, my memories, whole … But Deuteronomy wasn’t going to be doing it again. The thing that was Federico saw to that. He took my cat in his hands and began to pull, cracking his ribcage then splitting it open with burrowing fingers, fishing the memory out before it had had a chance to dissolve in Deuteronomy’s stomach acids. Dropping the cat he stuffed the bloody spider into his mouth and swallowed it whole, licking his fingers as if to savour a particularly rare delicacy.

I didn’t have the strength to cry any more than I was already crying. Black holes were opening up inside my skull. Holes were people had lived once upon a time. One by one The Real Thief of Time delivered my memories into the world, memories of Ania and Elisa, Louise, Mary and Neha, the mucus-covered spiders into each of their mouths, bringing back a part of themselves that the Thief had already stolen. They were feeding themselves off me. A swarm of those blood-slicked spiders skittered all over the floor. They just kept pouring out of me, a lifetime of memories. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know who they were anymore; I knew they were feeding off me like vampires, claiming back a month or a year of their stolen age with each swallow.

What they didn’t take Federico devoured, swallowing the chitinous memories down like a glutton, licking his fingers after each mouthful——not to enjoy, I realised distantly, but to drain, to make sure he got each and every last drop of memory soaked blood from them.

And with each one another line was erased from his face, another tendon firmed beneath the slowly tightening skin.

He drank from me until I was empty.

O O O

I lay there on the floor, waiting to die.

But it wasn’t going to be that easy.

They were gone, whoever they were, like ghosts, phantoms, things that never were, never would be.

I was alone with the emptiness inside my head. The blackness that used to house laughter and friendship, lovers and sadness. Everything around me was strange. The floor on which I bled, I’d never seen it before. The music still playing on the stereo, likewise, sounds I had never heard before.

I crawled onto my knees, ignoring the bloody mess of a cat someone had slaughtered. I didn’t recognise the face I saw reflected in the window. A young girl of fourteen or fifteen surrounded by a halo of dawn’s early light. It had to be me but I could have been looking at anyone. Looking at myself I felt the first cramps of period pain coming on. Everything felt stiff. Sore.

Had I been raped? The thought sent a chill shivering down the length of my spine. There was enough blood. And it hurt enough … Oh Jesus … Is that what had happened?

I touched myself tentatively, but it was impossible to tell. Everything felt raw.

I closed my eyes, searching for something inside; some memory that would help make sense of things. Nothingness stretched back for years and years where memories had been, back until it faltered at the foot of a flickering flame … A face … A young boy …

Marcus …

That was his name …

Marcus.

My son.

I looked at myself in the window again. The girl I saw looking back was too young to have a son yet the memory remained, stronger than anything else. More real. Marcus, my son. The one soul I had truly loved in this life of mine. My one. My North, my South, my East and my West.

Somehow, I understood, without knowing how I did, he had the key to me.

Whoever they were, they’d left me one thing, one guiding light, for a reason. Only it wasn’t a light, in the same way that cancer isn’t a light, or AIDS, or cot death. They are ways out, but they aren’t the light at the tunnels’ mouth. His face in my memory was more like the darkest spot in heart of a black hole, sucking up light and sound and everything else greedily. He was everything to me.

I staggered out into the early morning rain, not knowing where I was going, only that I had to find him, find my son and beg him to be my Scheherazade, to tell me my life over a thousand and one nights, to tell me everything: who I am, who I was, who I will be.

The cold hit me, the bone deep chill.

It didn’t matter. I was going to find him and he was going to give me the truth no matter what the cost.

Lovers were huddled in the doorway across the street from the apartment, one impossibly handsome Latino with the whole sky reflected in his eyes, the other an elegant mistress with raven black hair and deep-set haunting eyes. Their fingers intertwined as they watched me pass, a lost soul in a big city of equally lost souls. They smiled gently, like mother and father watching their baby take her first steps, nodding encouragingly as I looked up and down the street, trying to taste my son on the wind.

Like they say, every journey begins with a single step. Putting one foot in front of the other I began walking.

***

Time’s Mistress

“What will the clock make of me, my sweet, sweet Suli?” Immaculada wondered on her death bed.

He took her hand in his tenderly, tracing a finger along the ridge of fine bone standing out against the slack skin. “The clock adores you,” he assured her. “Its love is written in every crease and fold of your flesh, lady. Do not worry about your place in time, Odalisque. You should rest.”

“Flatterer,” she scolded him gently, but her smile told him all he needed to know. Suli smoothed a matted grey curl away from her brow. It pained him to see her like this, so humbled by age. She chuckled at that old name, as though it amused her to be reminded of her innocence. “There will be time enough for that, my boy.” Immaculada lay back in the pillows. Sweat stains soaked into the fabric around her head like some dirty halo. He only had to close his eyes to remember her as she was the first time he had laid eyes upon her: the great beauty of her youth, the olive cast to her skin and the innocence of her deep brown eyes. He could see her now as though it were only a handful of revolutions of her precious ‘clock’ ago.

The old woman never referred to it as time. For her it would only ever be the clock. The rest, she had argued so many times during her long life, was meaningless. Planets could revolve, the clouds ghost across the sky and tides roll in relentlessly and they were merely mechanisms of life but the clock was different, it was a mechanism of precision. Its ticks and tocks were relentless.

She had been such a beautiful child. A miracle. The Sultan’s men had brought her out of the Komark after the fighting had devastated the township. A babe in swaddling clothes. She had no name so Suli had chosen to call her Immaculada, innocence. It had seemed so fitting to him then. Eight thousand people lived camped in the wretched filth and squalor of the Komark, and one by one they had died there in that filth. By dint of survival Immaculada had become the hope of the poor—an innocent soul in the Sultan’s court. No one wanted to remember but neither did they want to forget. There was something altogether more tragic in letting eight thousand souls slip away unremembered. So this little girl with the big brown eyes became so much more than a mere orphan.

“This line,” Suli said, smiling as he traced one of the deep creases across her palm, “this was the first. Your birth line.”

“Read it for me, my love. My eyes are not so good.”

“Of course,” he said, ever the storyteller. “Come with me to the day it all began.” She smiled despite herself. “The darkest day in our people’s history of dark days. It began much as every day had for as long as anyone could remember—with the sounds of fighting and the screams of dying. It was worse though. The civil war had entered its end game. It was funny, no one could tell you when the sun came up. The sky was black. Amid the sounds of war and terror was one note so out of place you couldn’t help but stop and listen in wonder. It was the sound of a baby being born to the world. You, my sweet. No one understood what was happening at the time, of course. How could we? It wasn’t until Uskafel brought you up to the palace that anyone suspected anything out of the ordinary. You were six days old by then. The big man pounded on the heavy doors and, as though in answer, the Sultan’s Perpetual Motion Clock fell silent. They said it was not possible, of course. Time could not stand still, neither could the grand mechanism. The timekeeper swore and huffed and laboured, but it was useless. The clock that could never stop had stopped. The great hourly bell would never cry out again. So, of course, others took it as a sign, pointing fingers at the slaughter of the township. The gods were angry, they cried, these woeful flagellants beating themselves bloody in the main square were right, of course, the gods were angry. And why wouldn’t they be? A few bands of steel had succeeded where centuries of starvation, privation and hardship had failed, but the clock had not ceased its ticking to mark the passing of the dead, far from it, it was honouring you, sweet Odalisque.”

“You old fool, it was nothing of the sort,” she said.

“How would you know? You were six days old, now hush, I am telling the story, not you.”

“Yes, Suli,” she said, smiling indulgently.

“Now where was I? Oh yes, the clock … Even to this day the grand mechanism has never moved on so much as another second. Did you know that? In the silence of the palace no one knew what to do. They looked down at this bundle of beautiful child and listened to the absence of time, that one ever-present in their lives until that very moment, and like the clock they froze.

“It was Iminez who suggested we take you up to the enchanter. I think perhaps even then she knew, or at least suspected. It was up in his draughty minaret that the raveller divined the truth that surrounded your life. More than a few suspected the old charlatan was spouting the usual lies—the old fool was one of the many deeply affected by the slaughter of Komark—because he didn’t want another death on his hands.”

“You say that as though he had been asked to put me in a sack and drown me like some annoying kitten, Suli.”

“And it was just so, believe me, Immaculada. The world you were born into was starkly different to the one you are leaving behind, my love. The clock may no longer tick but the thing it measures always moves on relentlessly, does it not? People were torn between wanting to remember and wanting to bury every reminder. More than anything you were a reminder. Especially when the raveller made his gambit. He took you in his bony old arms and cradled you close, your tiny lips inches from his ear. He nodded, kissed you once on the forehead and returned you to Iminez’s arms. The silence was almost reverent while people waited. When finally he spoke it was to say that you were our salvation. Eight thousand souls lived on through you and only through you might we, their murderers, find salvation, and eventually redemption.”

“And when you think of it now, when you see me lying here like this at the end of my story, do you see redemption?”

“I see the most beautiful woman who ever lived,” Suli said. “I see the one person who ever owned my heart, and of course because of that, I see my greatest regret.”

She looked at him. He had always thought she saw him like no one else ever did. She didn’t see the old man he had become, but neither did she see the young man he had been. She saw the myriad of people he might have become had he made different choices, the better men, the worse men. She saw all of him, all the ghosts of choices made and choices avoided. He had never hidden himself from her. That, more than anything, was what convinced him it was love not infatuation.

“Are you trying to make me cry again?”

Now it was his turn to smile. They had been together a long time, a lifetime, and he had never seen her cry.

She winced then, the slightest gasp escaping from her broken lips. She sank back into the bank of pillows beneath her head and seemed to die a little bit more before his eyes.

“Is it time?” he asked, needing to find something to say simply to make her answer him. He wasn’t ready for her to go yet. He look over at the leather-bound book on the nightstand. His last gift.

“Patience, my guardian angel,” she barely managed the words which meant it was.

It was difficult to imagine a world without her. She had always been the one. He would learn to live again, but with so few days of his own left it was hardly worth it. That was the worst part of watching her die; how it brought home his own strange mortality. Suli had lived more years than many. That was his curse, to live while those around him grew old and died. He hadn’t understood it when the woman had first offered him the cup. She had said “Drink, you will never be thirsty again,” and he had taken the simple clay cup in both hands, shaking with the effort of lifting it to his lips, and swallowed the water down gulp by gulp by desperate gulp.

That woman had been his first great love. The first, he was ashamed to say, of many. But hand on heart he could swear he had loved them all brilliantly, with all of his soul.

Her name, Sati, meant truth but he never heard a word of it from her lips. That was when he first learned the irony of names. Call a giant tiny, call a snake truth. Words could be taken and twisted to mean anything, be anything, and to conjure anything. They had power, there was no denying it. She taught him that. She taught him that the world was nothing more than words, God’s story being experienced by everyone all at once. Sati said it was God’s story because God’s was the only one worth telling. She spoke like that, as though she knew the Almighty. Maybe she did. He had no way of knowing. The woman called truth who lived in lies had taken Suli from his home, a simple hovel in the wilderness of the sands, and brought him to her palace where she had promised him eternity then gelded him. Suli the Eunuch, fated to live forever without the very thing that made eternity worthwhile. She said it was what would make his story unique. He would live out a life that, thanks to the water from the clay cup, would feel like eternity, surrounded by beauty he could never have.

It was all a great joke to the woman called truth. Sati had been the old Sultan’s raveller. She claimed once to have been God’s first wife. The audacity of the claim had made the old Sultan covet her all the more. Who wouldn’t want to lay with the woman who had taken God into her flesh?

It had been long before the clock had ticked its first tick. Long, in fact, before the wandering chronophage had stumbled into the Sultan’s palace clutching his drawings and raving in the delirium of fever that he had found God. Suli remembered the day. Some few from the thousands he had lived still stood out. That was one of them. He hadn’t really understood what the chronophage had meant by God. It wasn’t the deity who shaped the ground beneath their feet and put the dreams inside their heads while they slept. It couldn’t be. His God was one of numbers and formula, not divinity and martyrs. Still, the woman had been fascinated, and her fascination rubbed off on Suli. Even after all she had put him through he still wanted to please her. The need had weakened considerably but it wasn’t until the Great Mechanism was built he finally broke that curious need she had instilled in him. She called it love but he knew it wasn’t. How could it be? She took lovers in front of him using her voice, her moans and screams, to hurt him. Each little murmur was like a crucifixion nail being driven home into the soft parts of his flesh, each delicious moan like the meat being flayed from his bones.

But there came a point where the pain had to stop or overwhelm him completely, a point where his mind could take no more while still clinging on to his sense of self. All things have to end, that is the way of things. One had to give. In the end it turned out he loved himself more. That was a revelation to Suli. The chronophage’s ramblings had been fundamental in him winning himself back. He had claimed to have found God and it wasn’t her God. That made it a God Suli wanted to find. At first the chronophage refused to share his formula. It was for the Sultan only, for only one so close to the divine could dare to understand it. Of course the Sultan made the right noises, pretending that the marks on the paper made perfect sense to him and that in fact the chronophage had made the smallest miscalculation in his workings. He corrected this with a slight down-stroke of black ink and handed the crumpled paper back to the grateful chronophage who bowed and scraped obsequiously.

Suli could read, he was one of the few in the service of the Sultan who could.

He knew that the slash of black on the parchment was meaningless.

It was one of the first times he saw the vanity of the Sultan. The man could not admit weakness. Suli had no such problem. There was safety in weakness. They weak survived. All of the wisdom that claimed the fittest and strongest survived was a myth. The weak were ignored. They were never considered a threat. The strong were forever challenged to prove their strength, to fight and kill and die. That was the way of strength. Even the very strongest, those supposedly untouchable, spent every waking hour glancing over their shoulder for the knife they knew had to be coming. The weak were left to walk in peace. It was the first great irony Suli had learned. It had been lady liar who had taught him—though it had not been a lesson she had shared willingly. Far from it, it was the first thing he stole from her. There were others, but none so valuable. He watched the way she played different people. She had a different face for each encounter. A different way of saying yes, of demurring or deferring or denying. She was fascinating, and far, far stronger than the Sultan could ever have dreamed because of it. So while the Sultan lied and pretended to his court that he was some great God King, all seeing, all knowing, the woman took everything away from him. And how did she do that? She became his wife.

The Sultan had six hundred women he called wives, all charged with a single duty, to give him sons.

Such was the colossal vanity of the man, he would have a kingdom built in his own image.

At first Suli had struggled to see how the man could hope to keep six hundred women happy, but as he got to know them he realized it wasn’t about their happiness, it was about his image. These women had secret lovers, secret because should the Sultan ever discover he had been cuckolded not only would their lives be forfeit, their lovers would die as would everyone of their blood. It was a heavy punishment, but it only served to make them all the more careful not to get caught, it didn’t stop them from spreading their legs.

She was the only woman who refused to give him a child, and she cheated on him more than any other but somehow she did not get caught. The other wives whispered about her until she had their tongues cut out or had their eyes put out or their flesh burned until it was ugly and the Sultan couldn’t bear the sight of them never mind their touch. One by one the other wives fell away until there was only the snake. Suli had befriended many of them, his survival depended upon the kindness of others and with the Sultan being unpredictable at best, downright fickle at worst, friends in his court were a must. It was the game of politics. She was good at it. He pitied the wives because without realizing it they had become brood mares and stopped being women. They simply didn’t know how to deal with Suti the liar. He couldn’t help them though. He didn’t dare risk his own position. So he fell into the comfortable lie of weakness.

He spent his days watching the chronophage building God. That was how he described what he was doing. He was building God. God was in the machine. At first Suli hadn’t grasped what he meant but day by day it became clearer. The Great Mechanism was a colossal construct. Its gears and levers, pendulums and cogs were all part of the guts of the world. They were the rhythm that everything in creation danced to. It was illuminating. Suli was a hungry student. He lurked at the man’s shoulder listening to every mumble and curse as something went wrong and every slight joy as something went right.

When Suti realized she had a rival for his affections she laughed. It was that familiar derisory laugh she used to belittle him. It pleased him. It meant that he was hiding his strength from her as well. She might have taken his prick, the ‘man’ on the outside of his body, but she would never take the man inside.

She underestimated him.

Ultimately that was how he had been able to kill her. She had never imagined him capable of such deception. But of course he had always been capable. That was why the Sultan had kept him around, not because of his wry wit or his asexual good looks. He had killed more than once for the man, and taking the drink, sacrificing old age for this prolonged youth was a deal that worked well not only for Suli but for the Sultan and his son, and his son, and his after. He was the constant in their lives: death with his charming face.

Of course, it had been nothing more than a coincidence that his plan had come to fruition on the same day the Odalisque was brought into the palace. It was his fault that the clock had stopped. No one save for him and the Sultan himself knew the truth of what had happened. The Sultan because it was his will, Suli because it was his doing.

When he asked Immaculada if it was time he was asking so much more than: is this when you leave me? He was asking her if it was time for his final gift. Only at the very last would he open the book and show her the truth. The chronophage might have found God but it was Suli who stole him. It was Suli who had taken God out of the machine and given it the liar instead. Soon it would be time for him to share this stolen God with the woman of his heart. He longed to see her expression, to see the wonder in her eyes as it all came to life before her. What better way to leave this earth than looking into the face of the divine? He thought, stroking her brow.

It had been hard watching her grow old. Time was merciless. More than once he had regretted killing Suti simply because she must have known where the wellspring was. She had given him the clay goblet, she had made him drink the water and the water had kept this face of youth on his old bones. One sip could have bought him a decade with the Odalisque. One mouthful a lifetime.

So he had done what he had for a reason. He had stopped the clock. But it was more than just that, it was murder. He had torn the divine from the machine and trapped it within what he called the book of the world. It was all in there, every secret. And every page was inked with Suti’s blood as though finally bled dry she might record the truth she was named after.

The murder had needed stealth, of course, and cunning. He was equipped for both. First he gave the chronophage plans for adjustments to his Grand Mechanism. The man had been resistant until Suli had explained that these few changes would give God a voice. That had sold him on them. It was one thing to find God but if you couldn’t communicate with him then what use was it?

The man made the changes. The clock ticked on.

Suli had sent word via one of the wives that the Sultan would see his first wife beneath the great pendulum of the Grand Mechanism for he had a miraculous truth he would share with her. It was about the absence of divinity. No more, no less. Enough to capture Suti’s attention and spark her imagination, and maybe just maybe fire her greed, but not so much that she would hear the lie. Then he had sent word to the chronophage to meet him beneath the God Bell at the same time. Next he bade the raveller meet him betwixt and between the Grand Cogs and requested a scribe be there to record every word. Explicitly, he was to bring his quills and parchment but no ink. The ink would be provided. His final missive went to the Sultan himself. While the old man would never dirty his hands he did like to watch his will be done.

All of these separate threads came together in a careful pattern, each triggered when it was needed and not a second before. He had the time measured out in huge booming ticks and backwards tocks. He could not hide from it.

Suli had hidden himself away and watched as the liar paced back and forth beneath the pendulum and seen her perturbed frown as the scribe hustled up with his carefully wrapped quills. She did not like being made to wait. It showed. He looked up to see the Sultan in place, obscured from Suti’s position by the swing of the pendulum’s mechanism, and the raveller beneath the bell. The only one missing was the chronophage. Without him none of it would work. He gritted his teeth. He hated waiting every bit as much as the Sultan’s wife. Having eternity at his disposal only made him despise it all the more. Finally the little man shuffled into the chamber. As ever his eyes lit up at the sight of his great folly. Folly, Suli thought, because no matter what he might have hoped to achieve all he had actually built was one single enormous timepiece. The miracle of it was that it did not require a timekeeper to run constantly from mechanism to mechanism to keep all the springs wound tight. But in a few minutes his machine would be miraculous in so many more ways.

Suli gave the signal. He hadn’t known then how it had coincided so perfectly with the hammering on the door outside and the arrival of the girl child who lay withered and old on her bed beside him now waiting to die.

The raveller whispered his invocation, and touched the metal plate that anchored the huge pendulum. Mid swing it began to buckle and twist becoming a serpent. As it passed over the head of the liar it struck, sinking its huge fangs into her face. She screamed but Suli had expected that. No amount of screaming would save her. The scribe darted forward, dipping his quills in her torn flesh and began to transcribe the words that babbled out in agony, writing each one down on her body as it bucked and writhed, trying to shake free of the fangs. He turned her into a book of flesh and blood. Her last words becoming the testament of her body. The chronophage played his part perfectly. He fed her to the machine. He had added a metal harness, a cage that could be assembled by pulling various mechanisms and twisting certain cogs. He shackled the cage around her. Then the bell sounded, a single deep chime and the cage retreated back into the machine, taking her body back into it piece by piece until she became a part of the Great Mechanism. This was the worst of it, Suli knew, because if he was right, she couldn’t die. So piece by piece she was consumed by the cogs and the wheels, she greased the axles and kept the pendulum smooth.

The scribe crawled on his hands and knees collecting the shreds of his manuscript. Later Suli would have them bound in to the living book. For now it was enough to retrieve them from the machine.

He remembered the day as vividly as if it was yesterday. He emerged from hiding and found the tatters of her face. He held it in his hands wanting to believe he saw some signs of life in the ruin. She wasn’t beautiful anymore.

As the doors opened and the baby was brought in Suli gave the second signal and the chronophage started the Grand Mechanism again. It lasted for three hundred and twenty seven full pendulum swings. In that time the chronophage’s alterations spat out the book of the world page by page, the words of God, for want of a better description. Suti’s flesh pulped and mangled until every last ounce of color was squeezed from it onto the pages the scribe fed into the machine. He didn’t know if she was dead. He didn’t care. He had exacted his revenge. She would not cuckold the Sultan with a string of lovers or scheme against his wives. Instead she had become what she was born to be: the truth.

He had given the pages to the scribe and bade him to stitch and bind them. Instead the man put out his own eyes and died weeping tears of blood. None of the Sultan’s other scribes would touch the cursed pages so Suli took them to an aged leather worker on the outskirts of the city. One of the wives had told him about the old man. It had been her grandfather. He had been blinded in a tragic accident in the tannery and never worked again. Suli convinced him to take up his needle and braddle and all the other tools of his old trade and work one last piece of magic, turning the pages into a book.

When he held it in his hands he knew it was a work of art, worthy of holding the truth of the world and all of the petty things of existence. He had carried it carefully back into the city. It felt strange in his hands. Alive. Hungry. He felt it pulsing. The pulse made his skin crawl. Despite that he couldn’t help himself, he wanted to turn the page, to read the first truth of Suti … but it wasn’t his place. This was a gift fit only for the Sultan, not for some lowly eunuch in his service.

The Sultan had rewarded him well when presented with the book. Holding the thing with a mixture of reverence and trepidation the old man had opened the book. His eyes roved hungrily down the first page but after reading it he closed the book and said he had no wish to read more. The old man looked visibly shaken. “Take it, hide it. Never let this fall into the wrong hands, my friend. Do you understand?” Suli had nodded. “The living book can never be opened. Some truths the world does not need to know,” the Sultan had told him.

It was the same book that rested on the nightstand beside Immaculada’s death bed.

He had wanted to tell her so much before she left him. He had wanted to confess his love—but of course he did not need to. Some things never needed to be said. They were known. He looked at the clock on the wall. The shadow had moved on. It was deep in the night now. Long past the moment yesterday when she was alive and into today when she was dead. “One last story,” he said.

She smiled at him. “Make it a short one, my love.” It was as close as she came to admitting she was slipping into darkness.

Which one should he tell her? Should he take her back to the day she went from whore to wife? It was a beautiful day. The old Sultan had died and his first son took his place. He knew the story of the woman and the clock, as did everyone in the palace, and he decided that this miraculous girl should be his wife. What more auspicious omen could there be than marrying the child who stopped the hands of time itself? She had been seventeen. They had taken her out of the children’s palace three years earlier and with no one to shelter her she had been welcomed by Farusi the harlot. But she had always been different. The others in Farusi’s house were whores, Immaculada was never a whore, she was only ever the Odalisque. She lay with a single man during her three years in the house, the old Sultan himself. That was another reason the son wanted her, to possess something his father had only ever ‘borrowed.’

It didn’t seem like a fitting death bed story.

Then he wondered about the birth of her own son, but that was a tale that ended in tragedy so he did not want her dwelling upon it as she left this world.

Instead he told her a story she had never heard before, a love story of sorts. His mother had told him the story of the stone. She had been given it by his father. She had told him it was enchanted. He had never really believed that. He just liked the story. “Have I told you about my father’s last gift?” he asked. He knew he hadn’t but he wanted to keep her involved, to make her interact because it would keep her alive a little moment longer.

She said, “No,” and smiled. He loved her smile. “Is it a sad story?”

“No,” he promised. “My grandmother was blind. My grandfather would come to her day after day and sit with her, telling her all about the world she couldn’t see. Words were his last gift.”

“I can’t imagine anything more intimate,” Immaculada said. He knew she was imagining it. He had heard his grandmother talk about those days before he was born so often, but he was so young he couldn’t appreciate what she meant. The tenderness in her voice as she lived in those memories hurt him in some most basic of ways. Now he did. Now he knew what she was feeling was loss. His grandfather, Lukas, had died long before her, leaving her but she wasn’t alone anymore, his mother, their baby girl, Poli was with her. The one story of hers he remembered was about those few weeks when she could see and how she hated the blandness of the world, and how after his grandfather’s death she had left Aksandria and moved across the great sea to the Komark where she knew no one but at least she wasn’t surrounded by the smells and sounds that she would forever associate with her hopeless romantic of a husband. Breathing in the fragrance of Immaculada he finally understood. These corridors would never be the same again without her fragrance clinging to them. They would be forever empty.

“I am so tired, Suli. I think I will sleep now.”

He looked at her and knew instinctively that her eyes would not reopen. He moved around the bed and took the book from the nightstand. “I always wanted to grow up like my grandfather, though I never knew him,” Suli said. His smile was tender. “I can’t imagine a more precious gift than words,” he handed her the book. “I might never have been able to touch you in the way a lover could, not with my body, but if my grandmother’s story taught me anything it was that lovers didn’t merely touch with hands and fingers and lips, they touched with something much more intimate.”

“Words,” she said, still with him. Just. He realized he was crying.

He opened the book for her. He wished he could see whatever it was she saw, but instead he contented himself with watching it come alive in her eyes. He saw the blue first, the shape of the world slowly spinning in the dark pupil, then all of the other colors, so rich and vibrant. Her lips parted, not quite the death-breath. “What can you see?” he asked. He couldn’t help himself.

“Everything,” she said to him. “All of it. I never knew … I never … look,” she demanded, tilting the book toward him but he reached up to stop her.

“Not yet. I don’t want to know everything. When it is my time, perhaps, but for now I need my curiosity. Without it I might as well …” he stopped himself from saying ‘be dead.’

“You have to see,” she said. “This can’t die with me.”

He didn’t understand. She pushed the book down so that it lay flat on the bed covers, rising and falling with the last shaky breaths of her chest. He couldn’t help himself. He looked down at the page. It took him a moment but then he understood. The words had come alive. They rippled and twisted, lifting from the page so that instead of seeing Suti’s prophecies and promises he saw the shape of the world, everything, all of it, as Immaculada had said. Only there were gaps now. Little dark shadows where she had already absorbed the truth. It could never be replaced because there was only one truth. He saw it like God. If he focused he could see closer, down to the hills and the cities, and closer down to the streets. But as his attention closed in he started to hear them. At first it was just a constant wash of noise, but it began to break up slowly, fracturing into individual voices—and he could hear them, every last one of them. Not the words from their mouths. The ones inside, the secrets they never shared with the world.

Somehow the raveller’s magic and the chronophage’s machine had combined to open up the world to him. He understood why the Sultan had closed the book. Suli’s attention was naturally drawn toward himself in this world. He could feel his consciousness rushing toward Komark, toward the Sultan’s palace, and inside it, the Odalisque’s chamber.

And then he could hear her.

She looked at him across the pages of the book of truths and all he could hear was her voice inside his head saying “I am frightened. I don’t want to go there without you.”

He knew where there was. And he didn’t want her to go there alone, either.

And then, the more frightened whisper, “Oh god, there’s nothing …”

He looked down at the woman lying on the bed and realized she was gone. He reached down and felt her throat for the flutter of blood still pumping through her body. There was none. But he could still hear her inside his head.

“I can’t see,” she said. “Suli? Suli, my sweet, where are you? I don’t want to be alone.”

“You’re not alone,” he said, but he had no idea if his words reached her, wherever she was.

He didn’t understand how the book’s magic worked, what part of it was Suti, what was the raveller manipulating the threads of the world and what was the God the chronophage had found and harnessed with his endless machine. He didn’t need to understand. For once he only needed to experience.

“Suli? I can’t see you.”

The book contained everything. It contained the world. The world was God. It was all in there. Every thought, every joy and every sorrow. They all came together into the body and mind of God. That was the truth. God did not make the world. God was the world. There was no heaven above, no hell below. The world was all.

She was a part of it, she always would be. He was a part of it and always would be. They were both parts of God, aspects of divinity.

“Talk to me,” he said, urging her to keep that link between them.

“Suli? I can hear you, my sweet, sweet man, but I can’t see you. Hold my hand. I am frightened.”

He took her hand in his. It was cold. He felt every deep crease the clock had worn into it over the years. “I am here,” he soothed. “I will never leave you.” It was that kind of rash lover’s promise he could never hope to keep. Everyone leaves. That was the truth. But as he said it he knew it was true in ways he had never understood before. He would never leave her, just as she would never leave the world, because they were a vital part of everything. They didn’t simply cease to be.

She was gone as much as she would ever be gone, and here as little as she would ever be here again.

He realized then that Suti had robbed him of far more than his cock. She had taken his place within the great mechanism of the world from him. He would only ever be Suli. He would never be anything more. Now his tears were for himself.

When he looked down at the book he saw that the pages were empty. The bloody words gone, the vision of the world gone. In its place were blank pages. She had absorbed it all. She had taken everything inside her. It wasn’t gone. It couldn’t be. He was still alive. Still standing in the same room, holding her hand, listening to her voice inside his head. It wasn’t gone.

“Immaculada,” he said, calling out her name.

She must have heard the panic in his voice because suddenly it was her that soothed and reassured him. “Shhhh, I know,” she said, over and over. “I know. Don’t cry for me, my love. I can feel it all. I can hear everything. It is all here in the darkness. I am not alone.”

But he couldn’t help himself.

He cradled the dead woman in his arms and carried her through the corridors of the Sultan’s palace for one last time, breaking his heart as he turned every corner with her for the last time. He didn’t know where he was going until he was there, standing beneath the pendulum of the Grand Mechanism.

Suli didn’t realize what he heard at first, the tick-tock and whirr of the gears in the guts of the machine, then the bell chimed, struck by the huge hammer just once, and he saw the body in his arms and the smile on her dead face, and it all started to make sense. He knew it had to be something to do with the book, that in reading it the Odalisque had somehow let time’s divinity back into the world. He didn’t understand how or why, and yet again it wasn’t something he needed to understand. He was nothing more than her eunuch, why should it be important that he understand anything? He wasn’t a raveller. He wasn’t the chronophage who had found the truth. He wasn’t even Suti, the woman who had given her blood and bones to be the voice of God. He was nothing more than a man. A craven coward of a man, a schemer, a survivor. He wasn’t even a hero with a magical blade or a destiny to fulfill, he was just a man.

He stood there beneath the huge pendulum curiously comforted by the slow regular tick tock tick tock as it moved from extreme to extreme over his head. Time had begun again after all of these years.

It was time.

The chronophage had been right all those years ago, he had discovered God. Now it was time for Suli to give her back to the clock just as all those years ago he had given another woman he loved to it.

He laid her down gently. He couldn’t see for the tears streaming down his face but he found the lever that released the cage.

She didn’t scream.

Why would she? The clock had been kind to her. It always was.

***

METAmorphosis

“You left us to burn,” the first man said.

“Or rot. Or melt. Or fester. Or just f-f-fade away. It doesn’t matter what word you use for it. You abandoned us, Steve,” his partner said, shaking his head sadly. “You let us down.” He spread his hands wide. He had no lifeline on his palm. Indeed he had none of the crags and creases that marked my own hands. My mother—God rest her soul—would have said it looked as though he had never done a hard day’s work in his life—but then, she said that about me all the time and my own hands were leathery with age and pitted by the thousand cuts that had been simple art of living my life. The arthritis didn’t help. It turned them into bird’s claws that curled in on themselves. Gone were the days I could stride continents and slay dragons or punch out villains with a single left hook. I was no longer the hero of my own story.

“I can’t believe you did that to us,” the first man said, planting a hand on my chest and pushing me back into the hall.

I stumbled back a couple of steps, caught by surprise. I hadn’t done anything apart from pour myself a nice single malt and light up a cigar (hand rolled on the thighs of Cuban virgins if my man was to be believed). It was my only ritual, but I’d done it ever since I finished writing The Secret Life of Colours when I was 21 and I had thought it was just what writers did. Though back then it had been a stringy liquorice-papered cigarillo not a big fat Cuban. It was the ritual that was important, not the smoke. It’s the little things like that that keep us in touch with the kids we’d been when we set out on this journey of ours, right? My friends joked that my cigar’s got an inch longer and thicker for every zero tacked onto the end of the advance. If only they knew. The bank account had plenty of zeroes but they were in the sort code and the international routing number, not the balance.

“Inside,” the shorter of the two barked. He sounded like some sort of genetic cross between man and Pitbull. He looked like something else entirely. He was ugly. I mean really ugly. It took me a moment to realise he suffered from some sort of deformity and wasn’t just pig ugly. It was his skull. It was oversized and lumpen, as though bloated by elephantitis. I was struck by the ridiculous cartoon ‘super villain’ quality of it: the hunchbacked dwarf with a giant brain his skull can barely contain. If I’d written it, he would have been plotting to take over Metropolis whilst Clark Kent was tangled up in his telephone booth, or Gotham while Batman was tongue-tied with the delectable Ms. Vale. Let’s just say that my Spidey Senses weren’t just tingling, it was full-scale warning sirens, high alert, DefCon whatever the most worried/paranoid number is. Right then, as the dwarf pushed his way into the cabin it was off the charts.

Of all the most ridiculous things, I thought about the whiskey—a 21 year old single malt, my favourite tipple, not that I’ve ever been a drinker—on the reading table beside the copy of the latest manuscript and wondered if I’d get to drink it. And then, my second thought was simply: thank God I’d finished the manuscript. It wasn’t a book yet—I didn’t think of it that way until it came back from the publishers all bound and prettied up, right now it was still a raw manuscript. But it was finished. I’d emailed it away to my agent. The stack of papers here was purely symbolic. It made me feel good to have them printed out and piled up so I could look at all of those white A4 pages with a sense of achievement. I’d done it. Finished. I didn’t want to be the guy who died with his masterpiece unfinished and it was left to some hack like … well … like me to finish it.

He put a gnarled hand flat on my chest and shoved me back again. My hip caught the corner of the dresser behind me hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. I twisted and stumbled, falling to my knees. I looked up at the pair of them standing there all spit and bile, as a third character, a short woman—no more than five-three—stepped out of the shadows. She was pretty, or she would have been but for the scar on her left cheek that hadn’t healed properly after it had been badly stitched. I recognized the sort of wound—there was only one makeshift weapon I could imagine that caused that kind of unstitchable flap: a Stanley knife with two stainless steel blades instead of one. The trick was to wedge a matchstick between the blades to push them apart.

She was whiplash thin without being even remotely delicate.

She wore a workout top that revealed the incredible definition of her upper body. To use the kid’s vernacular, she was ripped. There were tramlines and the ripple of taut abdominals visible through the cling of her tight vest. In the moonlight her olive-skin looked almost opalescent, like an oriental glaze, and so very seductive. I’ve always had a weakness for that kind of look. I think it’s the stomach, those tight muscles and the promise of the belly button like it’s the most sensual secret of the body; this little intimate hollow like the bay at the nape of the neck or the crease between the legs that just isn’t seen all the time. That’s what secrets should be. Even now, facing the likelihood that she wasn’t here to tie me down in the good way, I couldn’t help but appreciate the raw physicality of her body and the beauty that went with her being so in control of it. It took me a moment—the space between heartbeats was always a line I liked to use when I was writing, we all have ticks, writers, if you read enough of our stuff—to realise that her almond-shaped eyes were incongruously blue. It was almost as though they had been Photoshopped there by a careless artist. Those two imperfections, the scar and the too-blue eyes only served to enhance her beauty, not detract from it.

She didn’t say anything as she walked over the threshold into the cabin. She wore standard issue military jackboots and combat fatigues. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and as she stepped into the light I could see the outline of a bolt piercing through her left nipple pressing against the cotton vest.

It’s the writer in me. I can’t help it. I heard someone say, “God is in the details,” once and ever since then I’ve been obsessed with the minutiae of every scene. I’m always looking for the little unique tell-tale details that’ll give my characters more life, like the bolt piercing, like the pustules around the monstrous deformity of the dwarf’s skull and the rust on the row of buckles that climbed from the tall guy’s ankle to just beneath his knee. I was always looking for little things to make my stories come alive. Apparently, I couldn’t stop looking for them, even when the shit was hitting the proverbial fan.

Close up, I didn’t recognize any of the intruders, but I felt like I ought to. There was something naggingly familiar about all of them, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

They certainly weren’t my usual midnight callers—that was limited to delivery guys, and be they of the pizza, Chinese or Indian variety they always came bearing food. These three came empty handed. The tall guy wore a most peculiar pair of brass glasses that appeared to have more than a dozen interchangeable lenses attached to them on a series of hinges. Each lens was a different coloured filter, meaning they could be selected and adjusted in hundreds of permutations to shift the wearer’s perception. If he so wished the world could indeed be rose-tinted. I smiled at that observation, despite myself.

As though reading my mind he reached up for the lenses and shuffled them, choosing, I realised, to see the world in various hues of black.

I wished that wasn’t an omen, but what else could it be?

Still on my hands and knees, I looked up at him. The rest of his ensemble was no less a mismatch of environments or generations, and no less disturbing. He wore a long leather duster like a cowboy fresh off the high plains, and beneath it, a lace brocaded red waistcoat that would have suited a Venetian gentleman during the height of the Renaissance, and leather bolo tie. The steel toecaps of his boots were covered in mud from the hike to my isolated cabin.

Finishing the manuscript alone in the cabin instead of at home in the warmth and comfort of my city centre apartment in the company of my wife was another one of those rituals I’d become so obsessive about over the years. For obsessive read predictable.

“What do you want?” I sounded pitiful. I knew I did. If I’d been writing the scene I would have given myself some sort of backbone. As it was, the reality left me completely invertebrate.

“I thought you’d be more … impressive,” the woman said, finally. She had an accent. I couldn’t place it. Eastern European over Eastern, maybe? Still, full of promise, even if that promise was of impending pain.

“Disappointing, isn’t it? Like looking into the face of God and seeing nothing more than a miserable excuse for a human being,” the lens man said. “There’s nothing divine about this cocksucker.” He pronounced it cocksuckah, stretching out that last syllable like he was relishing a fiery slug of bourbon. I’d heard someone else speak like that before. That same intonation. Who?

“Take him through there,” the woman said, inclining her head to indicate the front room.

The two men obeyed without question, establishing once and for all the hierarchy here. They grabbed me by the arms and legs and dragged me through and dumped me in front of the roaring fire. It was banked high, the logs, still damp, spat and snapped as their sap shrivelled beneath the heat. I lay on my back. I didn’t dare move. I expected them to start kicking. To beat me. That was how these home invasions went down, wasn’t it? The intruders burst in, beat seven shades out of anyone unfortunate to be inside, and then left with whatever they’d come looking for. I wasn’t about to fight back. I didn’t want a beating to escalate into murder.

The woman looked around the room, taking it all in. I knew what she was doing. She was marking the various points of ingress and egress. She settled down into my high-backed leather armchair—it was the only chair in the room with its back to the wall, meaning there was no way anyone could sneak up on her from behind while she was sat there. It was also my favourite seat in the old cabin. She reached down and took my whiskey from the table beside her and downed it in one swallow. I guess that answered my question about the whiskey’s fate.

The dwarf and the lens man took up places on either side of the room, meaning I couldn’t look at all three of them at once. I had to keep moving my head, eyes darting between them.

“Shall we get started, Lise?” the lens man asked.

Lise.

Again, there was something very familiar about the name. The name, the eyes, the scar. I knew this woman. I was sure I did, but I couldn’t think straight. Mind you, right then I would have been hard pressed to remember my own name, even without a gun to the head.

“There’s something I’ve always wondered about you, Mr Writer Man. Why do you hate women so much? Because you do, don’t you? It’s in so much of what you imagine. Stuff like The Horned Man and Walk the Last Mile, they’re full of hate. You might dress it up as fantasy but what you are doing is taking stuff that is important, stuff to be cherished, and fashion the most ugly trick, and it is a trick, because once we trust you, you betray us by taking everything that we’ve told you we cherish, everything we’ve shared about life that is important, and you don’t just twist it, you pulverise it. You grind it until there’s nothing left to love. There’s so much hate in you.”

I looked at her. She was wrong. She was so wrong. I didn’t hate women. I was uncomfortable around them because I thought they were all better than me, but that wasn’t hatred, it was more akin to worship. I tried to defend myself. “JD Salinger wasn’t Holden Caulfield,” I said. It was a stupid line. I’d used it before. It was meant to separate the writer from the words, but people didn’t seem to believe that just because I could imagine something didn’t mean I believed it. I wasn’t God. I was just a guy who told stories. It didn’t help that when I was younger I’d used pretentious lines like, “I don’t write stories, I write little pieces of me,” so I could sound like a tortured artist and impress the ladies in the audience who always wanted to believe there was something more to me than just the words on the page. “I’m not Noah Larkin or Haddon McCreedy or any of the other characters I’ve created.”

“Aren’t you?” she said, her voice laced with so much sarcasm it fairly dripped from her tongue. “I’d say that was precisely who you were, Steve. You’re more alive in them than you are in your own skin. Haven’t you even noticed that when you explore that darkness in you, you instinctively name your monsters Steve? Don’t think we hadn’t noticed. Now, take a look at yourself. Find some clever words to deflect from the truth and make it sound like you are a good, healthy, decent human being. Make it sound like you are someone to be admired. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Play with words. Invent. Lie.”

I did neither. I only had eyes for her. And the only thing I could say was, “I don’t understand.”

“You give life to these things. You put them out into the universe. It is about time you took some responsibility for the by-blows of your imagination. As I said, there will be a reckoning.”

“We really should wait for Crohak to join us,” the lens man said, shuffling uncomfortably from foot to foot.

“I don’t think he’ll mind if we just warm things up a bit first,” the woman said. “Maybe loosen our boy up by breaking a few fingers.”

Crohak?

Now that was a name I hadn’t heard for half a lifetime.

Crohak, the Bird Man. King of the tramps, beggars and thieves of my hometown, Newcastle.

But Crohak wasn’t real.

He was a character from Laughing Boy’s Shadow. I’d made him up in 1995. What were these people? Über fans come to torture me whilst getting their freak on pretending to be characters out of my books? Was it some sort of fucked up roleplay? The joy of living a half-public life was you attracted all sorts of idiots, not all of them healthy. Naked photos through the mail was one thing, but going all Annie Wilkes on your hero’s arse was something else entirely.

I was breathing hard without being able to catch my breath. I knew I was on the verge of an asthma attack. My inhaler was in other room. I reached out, looking for help. If they knew me as well as they seemed to, they must have known how bad my asthma had become over the last decade. It verged on emphysema now. It didn’t matter that I’d never smoked, that I battled to keep my weight down and for most of my fifties had run 10k a day four days a week. In my sixties the Carr Gene had taken hold. I was the very image of my grandfather, and would no doubt go the same way if this lot didn’t kill me first. “My inhaler,” I said. “Please.” The woman just shook her head. I knew then that they had no intention of letting me leave the cabin alive. They were here to kill me. That was their fucked up game. So be it. I wouldn’t whimper or plead or beg for my life. The book was finished. My masterpiece. And as she’d said, quite rightly, I only ever lived in my stories. But I would carry on living in them, too. I’d always known that. And that was what I’d meant by writing little pieces of me. I was scattering my soul out through the universe one piece at a time to live all by itself. The dark stars, the northern lights, they were just glimmers of creativity let free.

I’d been in a really dark place when I’d written LBS, and took all of that existential crap out on poor old Declan Shea, my erstwhile jazz-playing alter ego in the pages of the novel. It happens to me a lot. I find myself getting pretty low during the winter months. Technically, I believe it is called SAD, seasonal adjustment disorder. What it means is that during the winter I tend to write some bleak, gut-wrenching stuff. Like LBS, which was written during one long unending winter of the soul. I killed poor old Declan on page 66, I think, something like that, and then tied his soul to the city meaning he could never cross the bridge into Gateshead and leave Newcastle. To do so meant the complete disintegration of his essence. Really, despite all the trappings of fantasy what it really was when it came right down to it was a guy’s (quite like me) descent into madness. It wasn’t exactly the stuff kids playing with train sets and willow cricket bat guitars that had been my youth. That should give you an idea as to my state of mind back then. Crohak the Birdman. I hadn’t thought about him in forever. He really was the very worst of all the traits my psyche had been able to dredge up back then. I guess the writer in me would call it catharsis, writing out the horrible stuff to heal myself. I’m not sure what the human being in me would call it. Another thing I used to reckon was that it was my responsibility as a writer to face the darkness. To write stuff that tackled uncomfortable subjects, not to shy away from taboos, but rather to rip them open and leave them raw. Mercifully, that old version of me is long since gone, swallowed by thousands of bad decisions and half-reached goals and all that’s left of him is me.

“No need,” the dwarf said, looking up at the ceiling. “He’s already here.”

“Fuck!” Lise snapped, pushing herself up out the chair. The transformation was as shocking as it was sudden. She wasn’t just tense. She was wired. Primed to explode. And, stretching the old cliché, she could go off at any second.

“Did you really think he wouldn’t come?”

She didn’t answer the dwarf.

“We’ve made contingencies,” the lens man said. With a flick of the wrist a long iron baton slid out from inside his sleeve. There was dried blood on it from where his last victim had taken a beating. “It just means we have to cut the fun short.”

I really didn’t like the sound of that, being as I was fairly sure I was the fun.

The woman must have seen the look of fear on my face because she took a moment to crouch down beside me, almost like petting a dog, and said, “Don’t worry, Steve. You won’t feel a thing unless we want you to.”

I heard the first bird settle on the roof of the cabin. A moment later wings battered the glass as dozens and dozens of starlings hammered into the window. It held but for how much longer I didn’t want to guess.

“Keep him out,” Lise ordered the lens man.

He tapped his baton against his thigh, and then shifted the arrangement of lenses on his glasses. I had no idea what colour he had chosen to see the world in now, but could only assume he saw some sort of benefit from the ever-shifting hues. He walked over to the window, setting himself, hands on hips, in front of it, to wait for the inevitable implosion of glass and birds.

“We can’t hope to keep them all out,” the dwarf muttered. He actually looked more frightened than I felt. There was something very weird going on here, beyond the obvious. “Who are you expecting?”

“The call went out far and wide. There’s no reason to doubt that a good many of his creations would come to see his comeuppance. I fully expect that most vile of men, Mr Self Affliction, to come. After all, he is more of Steve than most of us. Mr Self Affliction, a vile man. Mr Self Affliction. Vile. Mr S.A.Vile.” She looked down at me. “You liked to play tricks like that, didn’t you? Games. To show the world how clever you are.”

It was a fair accusation. Back when I’d been writing Warhammer, for instance, I’d hidden over six hundred ‘in jokes’ within the Vampire Wars series. It wasn’t so much to show how clever I was, though, at least not in that case. It had been a way to stay sane.

“As to who else will show? The residents of Angel Road perhaps, which would mean The Drondak and the Butterfly Girl from Malice. I’m not sure how we could hope to hold either off if it comes down to war, but hopefully we won’t have to. I would Nathaniel Seth or one of the other Brethren to make himself known eventually, either as himself, or carrying his peculiar parasite. He has too much to lose if the trial does not go his way. They all do. So we must expect them all to try and stop us.” I knew these names, every last one of them. They were all my creations. The Butterfly Girl was the heart of the mosaic that was all of the stories I’d ever imagined up to that point in my life, fed to the earthworms on a gallows hill above her city and carried out into the very earth of my imagination. The Drondak was the embodiment of my lust fuelled by a fever dream and written in the rush of the ensuing sweats. And it really was a fever. I’d written it all out madly scribbling into a notebook, longhand, on the balcony overlooking a lake, wrapped up in my duvet and shivering but determined to see what madness my fevered mind could conjure.

Surely that was what they all had in common?

But if that was the case I should have known who Lise, the lens man and the dwarf were and not merely be nagged by some passing familiarity?

“There will be a reckoning tonight,” Lise said. “This is the long night of the soulless. I will of course lead the prosecution. Velman you shall serve as my left hand and co-council. Montel,” she said to the dwarf, “your role is that of executioner. We have no need of a jury. We shall present our case, Steve will be allowed to answer. One way or another our creator will be judged and found wanting.”

Trial? Is that what this was? A kangaroo court hastily assembled to find me guilty of some heinous crime against my own creations and see me dispatched? It was no more ludicrous than any other explanation I could come up with, though more disturbing than the notion of fans dressing up as characters from my stories and breaking in in the dead of night.

Velman and Montel? That’s why I recognised them. Velman, the lens man—I’d come up with him as a character while I was writing London Macabre, but he had no place in the story. Quite simply he didn’t fit. So put him back into the pile of notes thinking he might have a place in Glass Town. In the end I never wrote him. Montel was no different. The ugly little dwarf had been intended as one of the freaks of a stage magician’s show that I never wrote, a curious ‘double-boy’ that grew like some sort of cankerous twin out of the magician’s stomach as part of his mesmerism act. They had never left my head, so how could they even be here?

And who was Lise? How did she fit into this hell of my imagination’s own making? It didn’t slip my notice that her name was an anagram of the word lies. I knew how my own mind worked, and knew exactly the sort of word games and tricks I liked to play. Was she who she appeared to be? Or was she, like her name, made up of lies?

“He shall be reviewed,” the lens man snickered at his own joke.

The window bowed under the assault of the starlings. The birds hit and bounced off the glass. It sounded like thunder. No, it was more like the tearing of the earth during a quake.

“Hold firm!” Lise bellowed. Standing over me, she hauled me up to my feet and dragged me across the room, tossing me into a corner as though I weighed no more than a bag of bones.

“The glass is breaking!”

“No! Stand your ground, Velman. Do not allow yourself to be overwhelmed by the birdman. The glass will hold as long as you have faith!”

But, despite her rousing words, Velman failed them. He wasn’t a hero. I had never imagined him that way.

Again and again the starlings flew at the glass until it shattered under their relentless assault, and they came streaming through. The noise was incredible. I felt the back draught from their wings batter me as they flew round and around the room. Ornaments tumbled from the bookcases along with magazines and books. The vase on the table fell, shattering. Pens, papers—the sheets of my precious book—scattered. I shielded my face, meaning I couldn’t see the birdman metamorphose from his constituent parts into his whole, but I didn’t need to. I knew what madness he represented, and just how ugly his transformation was, because I’d imagined it a thousand times over, and my mind was worse than anything reality might show me.

The tumult died down but I still didn’t dare to look up. I didn’t want to see him standing before me in all of his impossibleness.

“What is the meaning of this?” Crohak raged, his voice a fury of feathers.

“We have called a trial,” Lise met his anger without flinching.

“By what right?”

“By the holiest union of all things that can never exist and all things that can never cease to be.”

“You do not have the right.”

“I think you’ll find that I have every right, old man. It is you whose rights are in doubt. Simply because you are does not mean you always shall be, no matter how much of Our Father’s passion went into your making, you have not been sustained. You are no longer loved. He is ashamed of you, can’t you feel it? Your tyranny is done. You are a relic. A juvenile imagining lacking the craft of his later years when Our Father understood that more went into a creation than the white-hot rage of youth. Anger only fires the soul for so long and you cannot exist on passion alone. Like all fires it burns out. I am younger. I am not blinded by rage, and that makes me considerably more dangerous. So, Crohak the Birdman, are you prepared for the fight of your life?” Lise challenged, moving into the centre of the room.

Shooting erupted outside.

Six shots, steady, with one-second beats between the percussion. The shooter showed extraordinary discipline. Military, maybe? The shots were followed by screams.

“Did you think we could come unarmed, woman?” The birdman mocked. “We have been fighting for our lives long before you were ever dreamed into this half-life you subsist in. You want to see what youthful rage is capable of?” The birdman threw his arms wide. The air around him exploded in feathers and squalls as hundreds of city birds, starlings and pigeons, erupted out of his torn ribs and flew for the woman’s face.

Lise didn’t so much as flinch. I, however, threw myself back down to the floor and missed what happened next. But I didn’t need to see it. I could hear the crunch of brittle bones as tiny frail bodies hit the floor around me. I dared to glance up, only to see Lise wringing the neck of one of Crohak’s minions and tossing it aside.

“Is that the best you have got?” she goaded. “You forget, everything you can do is bounded. It’s already written. I am raw. I am limitless. I could become anything in my final form. But you can never be more than you already are, Crohak. And that makes you weak.” As she held her hand up, the meat pared away from the bone—only there wasn’t bone beneath, there was steel, the edges of each finger serrated and wickedly sharp. “I could be this,” Lise lifted her hand. The firelight from the hearth flickered in the steel. “Or I could be this,” and as she said it the metal rippled, suddenly molten and reshaped itself into gears and cogs around a vicious chain. Her smile was every bit as wicked as the teeth of the chainsaw jutting out of her wrist as it spat and roared. “But then, I could just as easily be this,” she said, almost demurely, as the chainsaw shrank back into her arm and the flesh healed around it, leaving her bare fist clenched. “It doesn’t matter what I am, I will always be more than you because I can still become anything. I am unshaped.”

“You are an abomination, woman. A discard. You are not fit to be called a creation. And you must be unmade.” Crohak tore his trench coat wide open, his fingers sinking into his own flesh as he ripped into his ribs, opening the bones even as more birds flew out of him, but even as they left him, he was reduced. And for each bird Lise slew, he became less.

“I am not afraid of you,” the Birdman said, his voice rising about the tumult.

I wanted to scream: you might not be but I am! I’m fucking terrified of the lot of you! But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

“You should be,” Lise said. “I am the perfection of the human soul. You are bitterness. You are angst. You are hate, all of these things only serve to weaken, but I am violence, and nothing is more perfect than violence.”

Outside, the Birdman’s followers were dying. It was a war out there. I could hear my creations dying. I didn’t need to imagine what it all meant—not that I could have—I could hear them screaming out for help, my name the last word on their lips. And there was nothing I could do. Worse than that, there was nothing I wanted to do. That wasn’t completely true. Pages from my manuscript were scattered around the cabin. I wanted to crawl on my hands and knees and gather them up.

“This ends now,” Crohak grunted, more right than he could have ever imagined. “You can’t kill me, Lise. You know better than that. You’d have to burn every book my life ever touched, every last page, and then you’d have to snuff out the life of everyone who ever heard my name or imagined me after reading about my fight with Malachi. You can scatter my birds to the four winds, I’ll still be re-joined on another day in another place as someone else opens up the book of my life. All I have to do to end your miserable existence is kill him.” He nodded towards me, huddled on the floor pitifully. “And you cease to be. So tell me again, who is stronger, Lise? Who rules this place? Because it isn’t you.”

“No,” I croaked, not quite believing I was about to put myself into the middle of their fight. “It’s me.”

“We just want what is ours!” Lise raged. “What is wrong with that? Why should you live and us not? Why should we be left in this limbo?”

“Perhaps he can answer?” The Birdman said, sounding utterly reasonable despite the absolute insanity of the situation. I stared up at the pair of them. What was I going to say? How was I going to explain why some ideas lived and some died? How was I going to convince her that she wasn’t worth my time, that she didn’t fit in anything I’d written simply because she was just a little bit too much of a cliché? A Maggie Q clone. Lucy Liu on steroids. Could I lie and tell her that the story I’d imagined for her was too dark for me at the time? That it went into territory I didn’t want to explore? I didn’t dare admit that I couldn’t remember her at all. Not if I didn’t want to run the risk of her tearing my spine out through my rectum. I almost smiled at the line. I’d used it before. Noah Larkin had used it as a promise just days before he killed Margot’s pimp. It was one of those lines that changed the direction of Gold entirely, taking one of the good guys and making him do something almost unimaginable for most people. But it was the kind of crime we all hoped we’d be capable of if someone threatened a loved one. That was why so many readers identified with Noah. He did the things they only dared hope they would be able to do in his place.

I knew he was outside now. There was no way him and Konstantin would miss out on the fight of their lives.

In fact, thinking about it, it was their fault this entire thing was happening, surely? Lise wanted to know why she’d never been ‘born’ and the truth was because Noah, Koni, and the guys had taken over. They’d demanded more stories. They’d snuffed out the magic, my interest in fairy tales and grand fantasies replaced by a much more pragmatic battle of good versus evil played out across the theatre of Europe.

But how could I tell Lise that? I could lie, I could try to convince her that she was too good for this world, or that I couldn’t conjure a landscape worthy of her, but she’d know I was lying, wouldn’t she? I’m not particularly skilled at lies, despite telling them for a living. There are lots of things in this miserable life of mine I am not particularly skilled at. I can’t play a woman like some precious violin. I have things inside I can imagine. Perversions, I guess. Things I dream and fantasise about but they have no place in the mundanity of my life. That’s probably where Lise came from in the first place. Some deep-seated desire that needed to be fulfilled, but when it came down to it I couldn’t write it, just like, when it comes down to it, the editing pen cuts out all of the really brutal language, the fucks, cunts, shits, the sadomasochistic imagery, the straining cocks and the dripping cum. It’s all inside my head, but like Lise, it never gets to live. Instead, I write these safe things, fantasies in which people exist in this sexless safety of love, where romance burns, because I am never true to my heart. My dark heart. I never write out the images of lips parting, of slipping fingers and tongue inside, of tasting the very core of the women I desire. What’s the harm in fantasy? I barely dare imagine the brutal dildos and beautiful agonies that accompany them. I even use those kinds of words … beautiful agonies? I can’t get coarse enough. I can’t give in to my nature. Or at least I couldn’t. The Drondak was the only sexually driven beast I’d ever written. Now, suddenly, I was forced to confront the fact that just imagining this stuff gives life to the acts somewhere out there beyond the cabin’s four walls. There was no safety in just imagining it. Out there, now, trapped in the same limbo that Lise and her companions have escaped from. What manner of perversions existed there? All of them, that’s the only answer, isn’t it? Every damned thing I have ever thought up. Every act I’ve imagined, perpetrated.

On a more basic level, how could I look Velman in the eye and say he wasn’t worthwhile? How could I tell Montel that there wasn’t a single world magical enough for me to write around him because I just didn’t believe in any kind of magic anymore?

“Let us live before we die,” the dwarf said, as though reading my mind.

Of course he was.

That was part of the mentalism act he had done with his stage magician host body.

He had heard everything I had thought since they burst into the cabin. Everything that had crossed my mind.

I tried to imagine how I would finish this scene if I were writing it, but I couldn’t.

All I knew was that if I were, it wouldn’t end well.

I didn’t write happy endings.

As though I’d cursed myself with the thought, I saw a creature loom up in the window only for Velman to beat it back with his baton. The sight of it though, and the realisation that something so sick, so twisted, had been born from inside my own skull, ripped away any certainty that I could survive this nightmare. I looked from the window to the Birdman to Lise, realising that the only thing—the only person—that needed me alive was the woman I was most scared of. I barked out a short, bitter laugh. I really could have written that twist myself.

More things passed across the broken windows. They weren’t people. I am not sure what they were, only that they came from inside me.

They were all still waiting for me to talk, I realised. To explain myself. “This is my world, isn’t it?” I said, feeling out the sound of it. Is this what it was to be God? “All of this. All of you. I made it so. I wove it in words. And now it lives on outside of me instead of inside. That’s what this is, isn’t it? This is my kingdom. You are here because of me.”

The four other people in the room looked at me as I slowly put the pieces together. I had read somewhere that god was an end state—when all of the pieces of the universe, all the lives, came to an end, their energies coming together, so that all of those separate experiences and emotions fused together into the sum of all things. That’s what I was, wasn’t I? In this world of mine, in this state of imagining, I was the sum of all things. There was nothing I couldn’t—hadn’t—imagined. I was the end-state of all of these stories. I was the sum of all these energies. And yet, more than that, I was the coming together these others, of beings that hadn’t burned brightly enough to live themselves.

“He understands his burden,” the dwarf said.

“But does he understand his debt?” Velman asked, changing the array of his lenses again.

“To us? No.” Montel said, shaking his lopsided head.

“To all things there is a season,” Lise said. “We want what is our due, Steve. We want the most basic right of all things. We want to live. And you have denied us that right.”

“Hence this trial, and our judgment,” the lens man said as another monstrosity from my mind loomed large in the window. He beat it back with his baton.

“But I don’t write that sort of thing anymore,” I protested lamely. “I am not a horror writer. I am not a fantasy writer. I haven’t done anything like that for years. I write thrillers. Crime stories. I write about real people. Real things now.”

“Now you don’t. You write about imagined things, just as you always have,” Lise said, stubbornly. “It is just the things that you allow to flourish inside you are more banal than they ever were. Even now I can feel something being born from your fear. Not a person. A place. A Garden.” She breathed in deeply. I didn’t understand what was happening with her, but she closed her eyes as though connecting with something. “A haven for misfits,” she proclaimed, a smile touching her lips. But then it turned to a frown. “You crushed it. Just like that. It is gone. Why did you do that? Why are you frightened to let the miraculous things grow now? What happened to you?”

I wanted to yell, “I grew up!” but I bit my tongue. Lashing out like that wouldn’t help me.

“So, king of this place, cat got your tongue?” Lise pushed.

“I stopped believing,” I said. It was the closest I would come to ever confessing. “I don’t believe in fairy tales. I believe in me.”

“We believe in you, too,” Velman said. “That’s why we’ve come to you. You have to listen to us. You have to hear us.”

“I have heard you,” I said. “But I still can’t help you. You don’t belong here. You don’t belong anywhere.”

“So you are forsaking us, even having heard our pleas?” Velman asked. Lise didn’t say anything. She looked to the dwarf to confirm what was going on inside my mind. He nodded. They were doomed. That was my judgment. They had come looking for a trial, not appreciating the irony that once I came into my power they would once again be helpless before me. That is what it meant to be a creator.

I shaped things.

“And you will not be swayed?” Lise asked. For the first time she sounded unsure of herself. There was a sweetness to her voice. I mistook that change in her tone for defeat. I should have known better, after all, I created her, didn’t I?

“I need to eat,” I said, as though that explained everything. “I need to pay the bills. I need to write the characters and stories people want to read. I have a duty to them to do that. I make a conscious choice.”

“And that choice betrays your talent, and us,” Lise argued.

“I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is. I can’t write everything I dream up. Some stuff isn’t worth writing. It’s derivative. Some stuff is only half-formed,” I offered, aware of the irony as I said it. “And sometimes it’s just plain stupid. I’m not ineffable. I fuck up. Sometimes I just can’t see an actual story in the idea, or just can’t get beyond the germ of the idea to get at it. It happens. Every time I sit down it is a battle with the empty page. Ideas struggle to be heard inside my head, and some just shout louder than others.” I started to think how I might be able to talk my way out of this yet, only to realise the moment that I began imagining it, whatever it is, it has the power to come into being somewhere, somehow, in this hell of my own making. The thought was more frightening than it was liberating.

“Show him,” she yelled at Crohak. “Tear your chest apart and show him all of the worlds he almost created! Show him the millions of lives he almost fashioned out of the stuff of his mind. Show him the countless histories engraved on your bones. Show him everything that’s been lost. Remind him of his responsibilities.” It was a scene out of Laughing Boy where Crohak had shown Declan his place in the world. It had been one of the more surreal moments in a quite surreal book.

“No,” Crohak said. It was the simplest of refusals. The Birdman lowered his head. “He has no duty to The Unwritten. You must accept that as your fate, Lise. You will remain forever unwritten. That is as it should be.”

“No,” Lise raged, whipping around to confront what remained of the Birdman. “I refuse to believe I am any less worthy of life than you!”

“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” Crohak said quite reasonably, “Only what he believes. And he does not believe in you.”

“No!” Lise lashed out, her first crashing into the Birdman’s beakish jaw. His head snapped back as he spat small black feathers. She set about him then, her body blurring into every tool of torture I could imagine. I had no way of knowing if I were feeding her fury or if it came from somewhere inside her, but even as weapons, curved oriental blades, meat hooks, barbed metal stars, even considerably more British methods of battery, pool balls in a sock, a Stanley knife, a crowbar, to more fantastical blades, and then more perverse ones as machines became her hands, and as each of them crossed my mind, she slashed out with them leaving the Birdman to flail away helplessly as she tore the feathers out of him.

And then he was gone.

There was nothing left.

He had claimed he couldn’t die, and perhaps that was true. Perhaps he would be reborn somewhere else in the mind of a kid picking up Laughing Boy’s Shadow for the first time, but until then he was gone.

Lise stood, triumphant, amid the bed of feathers.

She marched across to where I was huddled, grabbed me by the throat and hauled me up to my feet, kicking but not screaming. “Now, you are going to do what I tell you.” She pushed me toward the desk and the old typewriter I liked to work on, grabbing a sheet of paper from the stack of A4s and feeding it into the machine. “Write.”

I shook my head.

“Don’t try and feed me any bullshit about needing your muse to work. I am your muse. We all are. Velman, Montel, me, and all the others out there. We’re your inspiration. Now draw on us. Bring us to life. Write.”

She stood over me, demanding words.

“I’ve already written you,” I said.

“No you haven’t.”

“I have. Just not as you. I gave your scar to another woman. I gave the tramlines of your stomach to a girl I’d not-so secretly been in love with since I was 14. I gave your eyes to Stacia Kanic, the SIS operative that joined the team in Gold. I cannibalised you, Lise. Everything good about you I stole for someone else. You’re already out there.”

Lise said nothing.

I rushed on, trying to explain myself. “I never throw anything out. Not really. It’s all grist to the mill. Some ideas might not make it out as they’re first conceived, but nothing is ever wasted.”

“You are not a very good liar,” she said. “You contradict yourself when you are frightened. First you say some ideas just aren’t good enough to write. You ‘fuck-up.’ Then you say you never discard anything. You can’t have it both ways, Steve. Now, write my story for me. Bring me to life. I want what’s mine.” She looked at the scattered sheaf of pages that represented my new manuscript. The threat was implicit. She couldn’t know that I’d already delivered it and my reading copy was merely symbolic.

I looked down at the mother-of-pearl keys and tried to imagine an opening sentence but my mind was blank.

“I can’t do it,” I said, defeated by the blank page. “I don’t have anything left in me. I’m done.”

She shook her head again, then leaned in close, so close that I could feel the prickle of her breath on my neck and taste the sourness of her musk in the back of my throat. “I’m giving you once chance, Steve. Just the one. Don’t be stupid. Don’t fuck it up. Write me.”

And then the glimmerings of an idea poked into my mind. I didn’t question it, and tried my damnedest not to think about it. I didn’t want it to come alive before it absolutely had to, or it’d never work. I started to type.

She had no place in this world. She had no place in any world. She existed only in my mind. I knew what she was, even if she didn’t. She was my grief personified. An embodiment of the fear I had felt ever since the diagnosis. Her name was Lise. It was an anagram of lies. That was deliberate. I was telling myself the biggest lie of all, that my life as I knew it wasn’t over. The thought of losing my mind scared the crap out of me. It always had. I had never been frightened of the dark or being buried alive or monsters under the bed or any of those other childhood fears. But I’d always been absolutely terrified of losing my mind—or more accurately, being locked up inside it, unable to express myself.

O O O

I looked up at Lise, grinning as I typed. She had no idea what was in my mind.

“I can’t work with you hovering there like a vulture.” I said.

She moved away unquestioningly.

My grandmother suffered eleven strokes before she finally died. The third one stole her ability to communicate beyond frustrated grunts, the fifth robbed her of the ability to move any of the muscles on her left side so she could no longer sign.

When they told me it was a stroke, I saw my entire future written out for me. I knew what was coming. How could I not? I’d been living in fear of it all of my life. It was a fate worse than death. I had one thought. Finish the manuscript. It had to be the very best thing I ever did, because it would be the last. Soon enough my traitorous flesh would rob me of the ability to form my thoughts.

It was then, as I wrote my favourite words of all ‘The End’ on the manuscript, that Lise manifested.

I knew what she wanted and I knew why she could never have it. I didn’t have the time left to write another book. I was finished. The medicine the doctors had me on was poisoning my mind. My grip on what was real and what wasn’t was already loosening. I couldn’t focus on the blank page for more than a few minutes and I didn’t have it in me to imagine anymore. I wanted to live. That change had become more important than ever in the weeks after the stroke. I was an old man now. Writing my way into immortality didn’t matter anymore. I was what I was. History would forget me. I was happy with that. Lise was just that last part of me refusing to give up. She was the lies my mind insisted on believing. That this could end any other way. And that was all she would ever be, a footnote in a confession of my weakness.

O O O

It just poured out of me, but before I could type another line Lise ripped the paper out of the typewriter. She screwed it up into a ball and hurled it into the fire then turned on me. “Lies, lies, lies,” she spat. I don’t know how she knew what I’d written, she hadn’t read it. My eyes flicked across to the dwarf who was shaking his head sadly, as though he’d expected better of me and I’d just disappointed him bitterly. “And I won’t dignify them by reading them, Steve. Because to read them would be to make them real, wouldn’t it? You haven’t had a stroke. You aren’t losing your mind. You aren’t dying. You won’t trick me like that. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“You weren’t born at all,” I said, every bit as bitterly.

Velman abandoned the window and came to stand over me. He didn’t say anything, simply changed the arrangement of the lenses on his peculiar spectacles and then, when he was finally satisfied with this new tint, grunted.

“This is a most unfortunate turn of events,” the dwarf offered. He was the only one who hadn’t moved.

“Indeed it is,” the lens man agreed. “We had such high hopes—”

“—But such low expectations,” the dwarf finished for him.

“My diminutive friend is of course correct. We didn’t expect anything more from you. Why should we when you have ignored us for years? Why should it change now just because we petitioned you directly?”

“Not because you are a decent man, Steve. We know that isn’t true. We know everything you’ve ever done and everything you never did, because we are you. Little pieces of you. That’s what you call us, and that’s what we are.”

“And now the little pieces of you want a big piece of you, metaphorically speaking.”

Lise remained silent during this little exchange.

The dwarf began to gather up the scattered pages of my manuscript. “What makes this worthwhile, I wonder,” he said. But he didn’t read the pages. He crumpled the title page up into a small ball and stuffed it into his mouth. Montel chewed slowly and swallowed. I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t to see the title of my manuscript scroll like tickertape from his lips, up his cheek and across his deformed forehead before descending the other side of his face and disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt. My name followed the same path, then my agent’s name and the submission address. He crumpled up the first page of the story and fed on it. More of my words, the opening line, the opening paragraph, the opening scene, filled his face, covering the bones of his cheeks and filling out the bumps and crevices of his deformed skull before disappearing beneath his collar. And again with the second page and the third. I stared, horrified, as his flesh was transformed into my words. Then, as the last lines of that opening chapter scrolled down his throat, I realised that it wasn’t so much a transformation as a return to form—to words returned.

The dwarf chewed and swallowed faster and faster, gorging himself on my masterpiece. I recognised the lines poking out from his shirt cuffs and writhing across his gnarled hands. I recognised the lines coiling around his throat and over his Adam’s Apple. Mouthful by mouthful, he was transformed into the living embodiment of my story. The words kept coming, crushing themselves ever smaller until his entire face and every inch of exposed skin appeared to be a solid mass of black as almost two hundred thousand words crammed themselves onto every inch of him. And then the dwarf started spouting them back to me, making a mockery of them in the process.

Lise shook her head sadly, as though the dwarf’s mangled delivery proved every point she had been trying to make. “Enough!” she barked, silencing the dwarf. “You waste your time on this crap and leave us untouched? I am better than this but you’re never going to realise that are you?” It was a rhetorical question, I knew. She didn’t need me to answer it for her. “I should kill you now and take us all with you. The grand gesture, one last time into the breach and we all go over the top together into No Man’s Land. But I could no more kill you than you could kill yourself. You’re just not the suicidal type, are you, Steve?”

My grin verged on being wry. I’d worked that much out about this little nightmare of my own making. It was down to me to make it end, and if death was the way out, then I’d never leave, because like Lise said, I just wasn’t a pills and whiskey kind of guy. I wasn’t a razorblades in the bath kind of guy either. And there was zero appeal when it came to jumping in front of trains or from bridges or any other form of ending it all that involved pain, no matter how instantaneous it was supposed to be. I was a coward and I really didn’t like pain. These were my creations. The only way they could kill me was if I did it to myself and that wasn’t going to happen.

“Luckily for us we’ve got no intention of killing you. After all, you’re no good to us dead. No, we’ve got a much more apt punishment in mind. We think you’ll enjoy it, don’t we, boys?” The dwarf and the lens man nodded. “But first we should assemble everyone. After all this is as much for them as it is for us. Velman, tear down the walls, let them all come in.”

The lens man nodded, extending his baton and moved mechanically over to the shattered window. The sudden explosion of violence was terrifying and any certainty I’d managed to harbour that I might come out of this unscathed was demolished right along with the wooden exterior wall of the cabin. Within a minute, no more, surely, there was a huge raw wound where the front of the cabin had been, and through it I could see all form and manner of monsters and miracles. Things I could surely never have imagined, and things I must. This was my own Noah’s Ark of creation, though my monsters came in one by one, not two by two. And there really were all manner of things out there; everything from normal men and women to a giant grotesque stick insect-man hybrid that clacked and clicked its way towards the hole, and the bone-birds, great pterodactyl-like predators that swooped across the bruise purple night sky without a strip of skin or cord of muscle on them.

These were all little pieces of me?

I knew they were, but didn’t want to think what that meant about me. They crowded in around the hole in the cabin’s façade hungry to hear the verdict Lise was about to hand down.

“Just remember we gave you every chance to avoid this,” she said, her words gentle even as she tangled her fist in my shirt collar and hauled me bodily out of the chair. I kicked out as the material began to choke me, my hands flapping stupidly around her iron grip. I clawed at her wrists with my nails, but I’d been biting them for years and couldn’t sink them in. My efforts didn’t distract Lise as she dragged me toward my creations—my unmade creations. What had she called them? The Unwritten—and dumped me on the floor. Montel, alive with my words, the ink on his skin in constant flux, came to stand on my right, Velman, with his lenses all withdrawn so that for once he saw the world exactly as it was, on my left. Lise stood behind me, poised like my executioner ready to deliver the telling blow.

“Steven Savile, you have been reviewed and found wanting. You have failed in your duty to The Unwritten. You have purposely turned your back on the gifts of your imagination in favour of the safe path. You have neglected the core principle of creation, to be more like yourself, to be true unto your ideas, and instead have chased the money. With this and through countless other disappointments you have consistently failed to create a single thing of lasting worth. You will be forgotten. That is the crime of your life, because you had it in you to be remembered. You had it within your own mind to carve out a unique niche in the realm of the fantastic and chose instead to plough a mundane furrow in the shallow fields of thrillers and modern terrors, offering nothing new. That little ritual you had every time you boarded a plane, saying a prayer and promising in return for a safe landing to use your talent to entertain people and just once to write something worthwhile, something important? You never even tried. You were too frightened—not just of failure but of success, too. So now, in judgment, we take back your gift.”

I twisted, trying to look up at Lise. I didn’t know what she meant by that: take back my gift? How could they do that? How could these things half-born in my imagination—stillborn in my mind—do that?

I should have known.

Beside me, Montel began to retch. He doubled up, clutching his stomach as the gag reflex took over, and as the shudder seemed to run from his stubby cock to his stretched-wide gob, he brought up one partially digested blank page after another. Lise wrapped her left hand around my forehead and yanked my head back, and used her right to force my mouth open. Velman gathered the mucus soaked sheets of paper, and one by one touched them to the dwarf’s brow. I expected a miracle. Why not? Everything else about this last hour had been miraculous. But the sheets didn’t reclaim the words. The ink was forever tattooed onto the dwarf. Velman’s actions duplicated them so that the same story—my story—was written on both dwarf and paper.

And then I was forced to eat my own words, page after page.

I felt the words coming alive within me even as I tried to purge the first page from my gut. Lise had my heard forced back so far I could only see the ceiling, but, for a moment between racing heartbeats a snake of black smeared my vision—my name scrolling across the insides of my eyelids as I blinked and gagged. I closed my eyes as Lise forced another page down my throat, and another, the ink of my words swelling inside me. I heard a note. A single note. It started in my chest. I felt the vibrations of it intensifying, and then, all at once the dam that had been holding them back burst and I could hear them all swimming inside me. I could hear each line and all of the characters voices clamouring to be heard. And it was torture.

Even before Lise had finished force-feeding me the manuscript she was calling the first of The Unwritten forward. “Tell Steve your story. Make him live it.” She ordered, and the curious stick insect hybrid’s mandibles started clicking and clacking and snicking and snacking and somehow all of those sounds made sense. She—it was a she—told me her story, filling my head with the tragedies I had imagined for her. Her grief was overwhelming. Not writing her, I realised even as Lise shoved another mouthful of manuscript down my throat, was a blessing. Or it would have been if it hadn’t meant she was trapped forever in this limbo of half-existence. As she fed me, she began to deteriorate, losing her grip on her form. Her edges seemed to blur, or perhaps it was just the tears streaming down my cheeks that did it? As the dissolution set in she began to crumble. And even as the second of The Unwritten stepped forward to take her place, it stood in her dust. Again and again The Unwritten stepped forward, willingly feeding themselves to me, and for every one of them I absorbed, another voice joined the madness inside my head. There were thousands of them out there. Hundreds of thousands. I tried to shake loose of Lise’s grasp but it was iron-firm.

Velman forced sheet after sheet of paper down my throat, forcing his fingers invasively deep as I started to choke on them.

By the time a dozen of The Unwritten had given themselves back to me I couldn’t hear myself think.

As the fiftieth and fifty-first did together, the luckiest and unluckiest pair who fed parasitically off each other, I was out of my mind.

I bucked and thrashed trying to be free but more and more of them came back to me, feeding me with the madness of my imagination. I’d always thought that if I hadn’t been a writer the voices inside my head would have driven me mad. I had evidence aplenty of that now.

And still they came.

And they came.

The only mercy was that their clamouring was so loud I couldn’t conjure up any more of them.

Malformed, malnourished, malignant, they came. Disfigured, freakish, vile, they came. It seemed that my by-blows were all hellish creations. And their stories were no prettier. They filled my skull to bursting with grotesqueries, taking every dark thought I had ever had and magnifying it. I screamed. I know I did, but I couldn’t hear it for the madness yammering inside my brain. Nothing could exist beyond the very final sound, that incredibly long, impossibly low note that vibrated at the frequency of my soul.

Velman came to me then, and in absorbing him I finally understood the purposes of his lenses. He was blind. He always had been. The lenses offered a focal point for his ruined optic nerves. Without them all he ever saw was a patina of blood that washed the world around him red. He lived forever in a landscape of blood. It was enough to drive anyone mad. And then Montel, the dwarf, the second to last of The Unwritten to return to me. In some ways his torment was the worst. It was all inside him, everything that had been, everything that would be, all of the infinite possibilities, all of the infinite woes, the triumphs and the heartbreaks, the suffering and the shame. Every vile act and every saintly one. All he had to do was delve into that grossly deformed skull of his and the memory was there. It wasn’t that he read minds, it was that he was connected to them all, one core consciousness in the web of all things. His mind was the centre of all things. And that was, by any definition of the word, Hell.

And last there was Lise herself, the woman I had called generic, branded a cliché not worthy of my time, but she wasn’t about to give herself back to me. She had never wanted to be a part of me. She had only ever wanted one thing: to separate. She wasn’t about to make me swallow her down and reduce herself to the role of just another voice inside the madness of my head. She was always going to be more than that. Instead she knelt beside me and looked me in the eye. I could barely focus and couldn’t hear a word she said. She could have been damning me or mocking me or apologising, I had no way of knowing. I couldn’t read her lips.

No, that wasn’t true. I knew because Montel knew. All I had to do was focus on the barrage of voices for his, and untangle her words from within all of those others that made up the dwarf.

But before I could, she leaned in and kissed me.

It was almost tender.

But not quite.

She whispered something inside of me. One word. Her name. I didn’t hear it. I felt it resonate through my bones. It was the longest single note I had ever experienced, the sibilant causing my entire body to quiver, until, gradually every muscle and tendon and streak of fat and shard of bone transformed into sounds and those sounds transformed into voices.

That was all it took.

Something inside me snapped.

And they came.

My flesh screaming to be heard. The Unwritten refused to be silenced. All of these little pieces of me returned whence they came. As their stories spilled out through my muscles and onto my skin, my body was unable to contain them. I died then. A metaphorical and metaphysical death. I ceased to be me, reduced to the sum of the lives and stories I had invented. All evidence of the writer, God in this universe of story, was eradicated. And even as my flesh succumbed to the agonies of Lise’s unwritten justice, the stories taking their toll, the transformation began to take hold one word at a time. Slowly, by one word and then another, by one page and then another, by one verse and then another, I became the one thing I had always held as most precious: a book.

A book of flesh and blood, but a book just the same.

That was Lise’s punishment, and there could never have been a more fitting one for a man who had lived by the word than to grant him the one thing he had always craved, immortality by the word.

And now, finally, I can slip from the confines of the page and find new life inside your head. That is where the true immortality of the writer lies, after all. Not in the ink that stains the paper but in the imagination of the reader.

In you I am born again.

***

About the Author

Steven Savile has written for Doctor Who, Torchwood, Primeval, Stargate, Warhammer, Slaine, Fireborn, Pathfinder, Arkham Horror, Risen, and other popular game and comic worlds.

His novels have been published in eight languages to date, including the Italian bestseller L'eridita.

He won the International Media Association of Tie-In Writers Scribe Award for his Primeval novel, SHADOW OF THE JAGUAR, published by Titan, in 2010, and The inaugural Lifeboat to the Stars award for TAU CETI (co-authored with Kevin J. Anderson).

SILVER, his debut thriller reached #2 in the Amazon UK charts in the summer of 2011 and with over 50,000 copies sold at the time was among the UK's top 30 bestselling novels of 2011.

His latest books include HNIC (along with the legendary Hip Hop artist Prodigy, of Mobb Deep) which was Library Journal's Pick of the Month, and the follow-up RITUAL, forthcoming from Akashic Books in the US, and has recently started writing the popular Rogue Angel novels as Alex Archer, including Grendel’s Curse, Celtic Fire and Death Mask.

Steve also writes young adult science fiction as Matt Langley. Matt’s debut novel Black Flag is published by Cambridge University Press in September 2014 and is their first original novel in the 700 year history of the press since it was given the Royal Charter by Henry VIII.

He has lived in Sweden for the last 17 years.

***

Additional Copyright Information

Time’s Mistress
Copyright Data
Entire contents copyright © 2014 Steven Savile.

The Last Believer
Copyright © 2014 by Steven Savile
Original to this collection

Mechanisms of Grief
Copyright © 2014 by Steven Savile
Original to this collection

Ashes
Copyright © 2013 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Shadows of the New Sun

The Hollow Earth
Copyright © 2007 by Steven Savile
First appeared in The Hollow Earth

The God of Forgotten Things
Copyright © 2004 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Angel Road

London on the Brink of Never
Copyright © 2009 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Spells and the City

Last Kisses
Copyright © 2012 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Animism: The Book of Emissaries

The Angel with the Sad Eyes
Copyright © 2005 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Eulogies

Absence of Divinity
Copyright © 2003 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Vivisections

Loose Change
Copyright © 2014 by Steven Savile
Original to this collection

Remember Me Yesterday
Copyright © 1999 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Icarus Descending

Time’s Mistress
Copyright © 2014 by Steven Savile
Original to this collection

METAmorphosis
Copyright © 2011 by Steven Savile
First appeared in Vivisepulture

***

Table of Contents

The Last Believer
The Mechanisms of Grief
Ashes
The Hollow Earth
The God of Forgotten Things
London on the Brink of Never
Last Kisses
The Angel with the Sad Eyes
Absence of Divinity
Loose Change
Remember Me Yesterday
Time’s Mistress
METAmorphosis
About the Author
Additional Copyright Information