a little boy in Lambeth, waiting for his father to get home from work. All day long the October rain’s been falling from the broken guttering to spatter noisily upon the lavatory’s slate roof, down at the bottom of the yard outside. John Vernall, two years, getting on for three years old, sits by the hearth and rubs his palms together until the mysterious rolled-out threads of liquorice muck appear for him to brush away or play with. He’s been watching droplets on the century-old windowpane that has a faint green in its thickness, studying the form of the slow-crawling diamonds, an enthralled spectator at a liquid horserace. Some of the wind-driven beads go down at the first hurdle, failing to complete their long diagonal trajectory over the glass, their fluid substance dwindled and exhausted long before they reach the distressed wooden frame that is their finish line. Then there are plumper globules that appear to be more predatory and competitive, that hungrily absorb the hydrous leavings of their fallen colleagues and, with mass replenished and increased momentum, roll majestically across the glistening field to easy victory. When finally this inconclusive water-derby ceases to be entertaining, John squats on the homemade rug beside the fire and turns his wandering attention to the monumental Bible illustrations flaring into momentary being, engraved Doré vistas down between the sulking coals. Gomorrah’s doom lifts in a grey veil from the splitting anthracite, while on those wood or paper remnants used to start the blaze the twisting black flakes are recanting simonists, adulterers or virtuous pagans suffering their disparate arcs of the Inferno. In the coruscation and the crinkling ruby light, ash-bearded prophets work their scorch-mark lips unfathomably, their warnings snatched away into the chimney’s whistling throat, and somewhere in another land his mother and his grandmother are snapping at each other over where the money’s to be found for this or that. His baby sister Thursa grizzles, fitful in her wicker-basket crib, her strawberry shrunken monkey face clenched to a fist, disconsolate and anxious even in her sleep, cowed by the world and all the startling sounds it makes. There’s something queer about the dreary flavour of the instant and the small boy finds himself caught in a fog of indistinct presentiment that’s indistinguishable from a daylight-faded memory, the details bleached out like the pattern on their tablecloth. Hasn’t he had this darkening afternoon before, with Thursa making those specific noises in her crib, with Shadrach and the plagues of Egypt in the firelight, then a sizzling cat, then a volcano? Just before she utters them, John knows his grandmother’s next angry words to his and Thursa’s volubly upbraided mother will contain the puzzling phrase “no better than you should be”, and he is uneasily aware that the most thunderous element of these precisely synchronised and rapidly coagulating circumstances is not yet in place. That wondrous and terrible event, he thinks, unwinds from out the complicated click and rattle of his father’s latchkey which he can hear even now off down the passageway, commencing its insidious tinkle in the front door’s mechanism as a prelude to the coming symphony, the irrevocable unlocking of a new and cataclysmic world. His mother leaves her confrontation in the kitchen to find out what’s happening and the avalanche of the occasion smashes through their East Street home; reduces all the order of their lives to an undifferentiated panic matchwood. There is a commotion in the passage, with his mother’s voice ascending from a confused and uncomprehending mumble to a gasping, devastated wail. The uproar bursts into the living room accompanied by John’s sheet-pallid mother and two men the child has never seen before, one of whom is his father. It’s not just the flour-spill hair where once were copper bedsprings that has made a stranger of his parent, more the change in what he says and how he stands and who he is. There’s lots of gesturing and drawing circles in the air. There’s an unreeling list of madcap topics that the silent child somehow already knows before they’re spoken, a tirade of chimneypots, geometry and lightning, troubling phrases that nobody seems to pay attention to: “It’s mouth was moving in the paint.” John’s grandmother emerges from amongst the steaming saucepans, shouting angrily at the rotund and florid bald man who’s returned her son to her in this dismantled state, as if sufficient indignation might still somehow put her offspring back the way he was; as if insisting on an explanation could force such a thing into existence. In the embers now John notices a crumbling sphinx on fire, a martyring, a poppy banquet. Everyone except for him is weeping. Haltingly and incompletely, it begins to dawn upon him that nobody save for he himself and possibly his baby sister was expecting this to happen. The idea is as inconceivable as if John were the only person in the whole of London who could hear, the only person who had ever noticed clouds or realised that night follows day. The people and the furniture and voices in the peeling-paper Lambeth living room are like an indoor hurricane of tears and waving hands, with at its epicentre John’s new white-haired father standing and repeating the word “torus” dazedly, the shape of things to come. Returning his attention to the fire he has the fugitive impression of red light and trailing darkness

in a sunset arbour following the world and Snowy’s weathered, almost corrugated thighs are dappled by sliding and elongated rose ellipses, an elegiac radiance filtering through sculpted voids in the waxed dinner-plate leaves of the canopy above him. With his darling burden he strides on into a reprised cryptozoic, all of history in his blisters. For a period they travel in the midst of an inquisitive and scuttling company: the amiable shades of table-crabs who seem to be endeavouring to communicate by tapping an adapted fore-claw on the moss-occluded boards of the immortal boulevard, an inarticulate crustacean Morse. Riding her grandfather as if atop a howdah the grave eighteen-month-old prodigy quotes Wittgenstein, to the effect that even if a lion could speak, mankind would not be capable of understanding it. As if in mute acknowledgment of this persuasive observation presently the entourage of furniture-sized arthropods abandon their attempts at conversation, losing interest, clattering away en masse between the monstrous bolls of that terminal orchard. Everything is doomed with beauty. Later there are further whale-goats and a huge tree-mimicking variety of octopus that they’ve not previously encountered, with impassive garnet eyes easily missed in the surrounding column of bark-patterned skin, and liv

er-coloured suckers on what first seem to be overhanging boughs. May formally proposes they should call the species Yggdrasil after the Nordic world-tree, given that taxonomy itself will surely be extinct by now and that the splendid creature thus must otherwise go nameless in eternity. The motion, after a debate and vote, is passed unanimously whereupon the baby and her wrinkled steed persist with their excursion through the final foliage, amongst incurious monsters. After wading in the magma of four thousand serial dawns Snowy and May elect to make their temporary bed amid the shivering mimosas of a twilight mile somewhere in the next century, if indeed there are centuries anymore. As the old man remarks while fashioning a shelter from the shirking greenery, the base-ten counting system and conceivably the whole of mathematics must have surely disappeared from the inferior territories downstairs by now. From this point on, where science and faith and art and even love are only fossil memories, he and his granddaughter must venture past the end of measurement itself, perhaps even beyond the unavoidable demise of meaning. The unlikely pair consider this new, unsuspected lower register of desolation whilst they messily devour their last remaining specimens of snow-queen Bedlam Jennies, prudently expectorating the pink eyeball-pips into the flinching and fastidious vegetation trembling about them. At the bottom of their wolfskin tucker-bag there are now only a few snapped-off chorus girl limbs much like shapely and anaemic doll-parts, with a sparkling dragonfly debris of wings. Above, cut into slices and trapezohedrons by the silhouetted branches, an unfolded constellation that is possibly hyper-Orion – Snowy notices three displaced repetitions of the famous belt – is stretched across the settling indigo, a malformed tesseract of ancient lights. Replete and comfortably sluggish after their fungal repast, the juice of tiny women sticky on their chins, they slide into the hypnagogic drifts of ghost-sleep mumbling and holding hands. Around their hide are brittle crunches, fracturings, reports distantly audible beyond the blurred peripheries of their awareness, probably the cringes and contractions of the cowering shrubbery within which they are nested and so swiftly filtered out by a receding consciousness. Gorged upon visionary arctic truffles both the baby and her ancestor are borne on an eidetic surf of faerie imagery, unwinding madhouse dioramas with a miniaturist intricacy that is bottomless and sometimes borders on the terrifying: at hallucinatory Elizabethan frost-fairs stand bare-breasted ladies in preposterously large hooped crinolines with decorative motif snowflakes made of lace around the hems. Each has a flattened palm raised to face level for inspection, smiling in delight at the scale reproduction of herself that seems to balance there, complete in every detail, beaming down approvingly at the almost infinitesimal homunculus perched on her own hand, peering into a vertiginous regression of excruciating and exquisite pulchritude, a mesmerising vortex of wan femininity. These are the dreams the dead have when they’re Puck-drunk. After an incalculable interval they shrug away their gem-encrusted drowse, refreshed despite the Midsummer Night alkalis that have been coursing through their slumbering ethereal systems. Waking, unsurprisingly, to the same shade of dusk in which they bedded down, not until Snowy lifts their wolf-pelt satchel do they realise with bewilderment that while they napped the previously almost-empty sack has been mysteriously replenished, filled now to its brim with an unusually picturesque mass grave of conjoined Thumbelinas. Still more inexplicably these are not the albino strain responsible for their nocturnal visitations, but are rather the more ruddily-complexioned type familiar from the traveller’s own now-remote home century. Not wishing to examine their gift horse’s dentistry the bony veteran ties the pixie-bag about his shoulders, crouching while May climbs aboard. It calls to mind

him and his young ’un Thursa chuffing through the Lambeth chill to see their father, locked away in Bedlam, with the siblings’ warm breath crystallising to grey commas in their wake. Being at ten years old the senior of the two John is in charge, towing his crooning and distracted younger sister down the fogbound lanes by one sweat-slippy hand. They skirt around the Temperance revivalists and ne’er-do-wells, the clustered corner conferences about the Kaiser or Alsace-Lorraine, avoiding those insanities they’re not immediately related to. November scalds his sinuses and Thursa drags annoyingly, winding her dreary half-a-song in a damp skein amongst the toughs and gas-lamps. “Shut up, you, or I shan’t take you to see Dad.” The eight-year-old is loftily indifferent, screws her nose into a little concertina of distaste: “Don’t care. Don’t wunner see ’im. This is when he tells us about all the chimneypots and numbers.” John doesn’t reply but only drags her with more force, across the cobbles with their ochre archipelagos of shit, between the rumbling wagons, from miasma to miasma. Though he hasn’t had a conscious thought about the subject before Thursa speaks those exact words, they fall upon him with the gavel-weight of a harsh sentence, long anticipated, indisputable. He knows she’s right about this being the occasion when their father shares some sort of secret with them, can almost recall the countless previous times she’s told him this, on this same night and halfway over this specific road, avoiding this precisely-contoured patch of horse muck, on their way to the asylum. Furrowing his freezing, aching brow John makes an effort to remember all the cataclysmic things their father will be telling them. Something to do with lifebelts, and the special flowers made of bare ladies that are all the dead can eat. This outrageous curriculum sounds eerily familiar, although for the life of him he can’t see how it can be, not in the same world where the trudged-smooth slabs of Hercules Road are so immediate and hard beneath his worn-through soles. They carry on past Autumn-bare front yards with waist-high walls, through a green dark that the infrequent lamps only accentuate, towards the mist-wreathed shores of Kennington. Ahead their future footsteps are arranged like unseen slippers running off along the vapour-shrouded pavement, waiting patiently to be tried on, however fleetingly; waiting here on this side street for them since before the world began in their inevitable and ordained procession to the madhouse gates. His sister’s hand is hot and horrible the way it always is tonight, adhesive with a barley-sugar glaze. A cab whose hoarding advertises Lipton’s tea clops by on cue as their incipient prints lead them around a corner, up the way a bit and suddenly the wrought-iron bars and flanking posts of rain-gnawed stone are only a few moments, a few feet away. The hospital and the impending hour which it contains drag themselves eagerly across the intervening space and time, approaching through the churned murk like a plague boat or a prison hulk, crushing the kids to specks with brute proportion, piss and medicine on its breath. The keeper standing guard beside the gated entrance on its far side recognises them from other evenings and unlocks with a begrudging attitude. It seems to John not so much that the gateman doesn’t like them, rather that he doesn’t like them being there where grown-ups act like frightening children. Every time they turn up here he tells them they’d be better off not coming and then lets them in, gruffly escorting them across the walled-in grounds to the front doors in case of wandering stranglers or buggers. Once inside the building, swallowed by the stern administrative hush of a reception area with its austere high ceilings lost from sight to a gas-mantle glow of insufficient reach, Thursa and John’s reluctant shepherd hands them over to another warden, a stone-faced and somewhat older man whose head is all grey bristle. “They’re for Vernall. It’s not right, them being here with all o’ this, but there you have it and there’s nothing to be done.” The words have a faint echo, have a ring to them as if spoken before. Still holding hands, although for comfort rather than compulsion, they accompany their mute chaperone down creaking corridors that crawl with whispers and the memory of incontinence. A dusty, miserable residue of pipedream empires and bewilderment accumulates in phantom drifts against the skirting boards where their stilt-walker shadows list precariously, teetering abreast with them on this subdued and strangely formal outing. Bolted doors slide by, and contrary to popular opinion nowhere is there any laughter. Led into a dimly-lit hall of intimidating scale reserved for visitors, the urchins are confronted by an umber lake in which perhaps a dozen table-islands float suspended, juddering hemispheres of candlelight where inmates sit like stones else gaze enraptured into empty air while relatives stare wistfully at their own shoes. Marooned on one such islet is their father, the white hair grown out as if his head’s on fire with gulls. He asks them if they know about tonight and John says “Yes” while Thursa starts to cry. An oddly reminiscent litany begins, lightning and chimneypots, geometry and angles, spectre-food and the topology of starry time; the widening hole in everything. He tells them of the endless avenue above their lives where characters called

May and Snowy stumble down forever, brazenly displaying their bare arses to each new extinction as they pass among its signs and markers. Soon there are no sylvan octopi or flickering hyper-squids, no séance-rapping crabs or pond-sized hoofmarks left by grounded whales. Above, the crumpled-paper diagrams of cloud seem scarcer and when visible less complex, having fewer folds and facets. The old man surmises that the world downstairs is drying, dying, and they travel on through the gigantic thinning trees, the great majority of which are dead with some entirely petrified. In their decade-devouring canter they devise a means of eating without pausing: the uncanny toddler intermittently retrieves one of the puzzling vintage Puck’s Hats from the inexplicably full wolf-bag that she bounces on, handing it with great ceremony down to her grandfather who ingests it as he runs, noisily spitting eyes and pubic fur-balls into the deteriorated woodland mulch beneath his slapping feet. While they don’t have their mouths full they discuss the lingering enigma of their restocked rations without ever reaching a conclusion that’s remotely credible. When Snowy ventures the hypothesis that possibly the amiable crustaceans back along the time-track are responsible for this display of clandestine benevolence, May counters with a theory that it is in fact their own selves from some juncture of the future who are their true benefactors. Both proposals founder on the issue of the fungi’s blatantly anachronistic provenance, and meanwhile there’s less vegetation to be seen with each fresh furlong. Far away to either side the walls of the protracted thoroughfare can once more be discerned, their shifting dream-veneer fallen away or atrophied for want of anything still capable of dreaming in the territories beneath. Without their astral substance being constantly renewed and reinvigorated by an influx of novel imaginings, the distant boundaries can no longer recall the shapes or colours that were previously their own, the contours softening and gradually subsiding into waxy incoherence, hue a runny paint-box marbling with the greasy fever-sheen of rain-stained petrol, sacred architecture lapsing into a prismatic slobber. Past those faltering margins there are only the confounding depths of an expanded firmament as realised in more than three dimensions, intimating that beyond the Attics of the Breath the further reaches of Mansoul themselves are levelled. Like some hybrid chimera of age and youth, a generational centaur, May and Snowy gallop onward through what seems to be a final curtain falling on biology. Running pink caterpillar fingers idly through the locks of her gerontic charger as though grooming him for nits, the sombre cherub muses on the fragile existential nature of a world completely unobserved while all around them the last oaks and eucalyptuses are toppling unnoticed into history. At intervals of a duration lengthier than empires the pair pause in their apocalyptic marathon, to snooze after their fashion under lean-tos made from sloughed-off bark or dine on their diminishing supply of Bedlam Jennies. It is after breaking camp on one of these occasions and making the relatively short walk to the morning following, when they’ve long given up on the idea of sapient life in the terrestrial neighbourhood beneath them, that they come across the firs

t of the peculiarly geometric mineral cacti. A three-sided pyramid as tall as Snowy, an elaborate beige stud erupting from the shrivelled moss and kindling litter carpeting the great emporium, each of its smoothly manufactured faces has a further half-sized pyramid projecting from it. These in turn sprout similarly scaled-down reproductions of the central form, and so on to the limits of perceptibility. The overall impression is that of a Cubist Christmas-tree sculpted from sand or some fine-grained equivalent, spiky and in its own way beautiful. The infant and her bronco ancestor trot in a slow investigative circle, orbiting the startlingly precise extrusion at a cautious radius and speculating on the nature of its composition. After some few circuits Snowy kneels so that May can dismount in order to inspect this strange apparent artefact at closer quarters. Waddling barefoot on a rug of desiccated splinters the deceased toddler approaches the suspiciously well-engineered phenomenon with the intrepid curiosity characteristic of the age at which death has arrested her development. She pokes a small exploratory bore-hole in the unexpectedly yielding and permeable exterior of the oddity, and attempts a preliminary analysis of its constituent matter by the straightforward expedient of putting some into her mouth. After an apprehensive period of mute consideration the unnerving paediatric sibyl turns with wonderment to her intrigued grandparent and announces “It’s an anthill.” Stepping closer to the enigmatic polyhedral solid, the gaunt patriarch sees for himself the colony’s immediately despatched repairmen skittering like beads of ink as they efficiently patch up the damage caused by May’s intrusive digit. Having no desire to further inconvenience the first-recorded insect presence to have been discovered on that upstairs tier of existence, the baby remounts her famously deranged and silver-crested relative and they continue with their world’s end picaresque. There is still evidence that life prevails. Snowy thinks back to when

the fever cart performs a muted drum roll, more a cymbal whisper as it dwindles with the family’s hopes, trickling away down Fort Street. Sitting on the cold throne of his doorstep since the grey hours of that morning, waiting with his seat reserved for the forthcoming drama, the old troublemaker watches passively while the appalling scene is acted. All its awful flourishes are at a distance to his heart, affecting only in the sense evinced by the much-thumbed engravings of a penny dreadful that have forfeited the frisson of crude shock accompanying their first appraisal. Somewhere off amidst the bubble-and-squeak vapours down the passageway behind him he can hear Louisa cautioning their other children still at home, their Cora and their Johnny, telling them they’re not to go outside and stick their noses in. Out in the smothering hush of Sunday the dismal scenario proceeds through its traditional component stages; the inevitable feet of its exacting meter. Big May, Snowy Vernall’s eldest daughter, stands there in the middle of the rudimentary road and shudders in the arms of her chap Tom as if trying to wring her very life out through her tear-ducts, unavoidably caught in the brutal and indifferent mangle of the moment. Moaning in a universal Esperanto of mammalian bereavement, the young mother with her hair a ginger fizz throws out her freckled arms to the receding wagon while her husband shuts his eyes against this terrible defeat and says “Oh no, oh no”, holding his wife back from the abyss of broad daylight that has claimed their daughter. Squatted on his draughty front-row perch Snowy is gazing down the tunnel-length of continuity to his earliest glimpse of the grown woman whose life is disintegrating there before him, crimson-faced and weeping in a gutter, then as now. More than a score of years back down the track he wobbles on the camber of a Lambeth rooftop, fishing in his jacket pockets for the rainbows he intends to shower upon his firstborn, the confetti spectra that will be her welcome to these fields of light and loss, her memorable and reeking stained-glass debut. Telescoped in Snowy’s baggy eye the howling infant is become the shattered parent bellowing her grief along the church-quiet terraced row, the operatic staging underlined as suddenly a lone orchestral voice from offstage in the wings reprises note-for-note May Warren’s heartsick aria, but in a lower octave. Crouching on his stoop like a presiding gargoyle on cathedral guttering her father shifts his sad gaze and his first-night audience attention from the disappearing horse-drawn ambulance, from the diphtheria bus back to the crowding side-street’s nearer end and the anticipated source of this unkind and inappropriate accompaniment, this mocking counterpoint. His owl-eyed sister Thursa has appeared from nowhere at the elbow of the lane, the corner bending to a contour of the all-but-vanished castle’s previous fortifications. With accordion slung around her stringy neck as though some portable variety of Maxim gun and hair that of a senile gollywog, her entrance is electrifying. Her translucent fingers resting on the false-tooth rows of ivory triggers, Thursa dominates the brick amphitheatre for all of its classic tragedy and pouring radiance. Her older brother understands by the transported smile which plays about his broken and dissociative sibling’s lips that she is listening to the multiplying echoes of May’s scream and her squeeze-box response as propagated in an auditorium with concealed depth and volume, the sounds ricocheting in a supplementary space. He knows that she’s attempting to embed her tribute to May’s dying baby as a sonic solid in the glassy stuff of time, as an exquisite aural headstone for the Fiends and Builders to appreciate at their considerable leisure. His anguished daughter, on the other hand, can only see Thursa’s demented smirk, a silver thread of spit depending at one corner from between the browning molars. Thus provided with an opportune receptacle for her tremendous sense of unacceptable injustice, Snowy’s eldest wheels upon her aunt to vomit noise, a venting of unspeakable emotions from a place where language holds no jurisdiction. The tear-streaked tomato of May’s face ripens towards its bursting point. Her pole-axed soul is audible, its higher frequencies curdling the grubby air while Thursa, beaming and delighted at the thought of being joined in a duet, adjusts her placement on the keys and milks a further repetition of the devastated mother’s utterances out of her asthmatic instrument, once more at a descended pitch from the original. At this renewed affront May’s personality collapses visibly upon itself. She slumps in Tom’s grip, whimpering, and Thursa’s bird-claw hands dance on the keyboard mimicking every despairing vocal flight or fall. Snowy remembers that this is his cue to rise from his worn stone theatre seat and take his part in the eternally reiterated masquerade. Steering his sibling gently by her worsted sleeve he takes her to one side and solemnly informs her that her improvised performance is upsetting everyone; that little May has taken ill and will most likely soon be gone. At this point in her scolding Thursa giggles disconcertingly, recalling the largely-untroubled eight-year-old of near three dozen long winters ago. Eyes gleaming, she excitedly confides that far above mortality and at that very moment little

May rides her grandfather’s shoulders, the agreeable face of their ambulatory totem pole, along the narrow avenues of what amounts to an extended city of the pyramidal, modernistic anthills that the duo have encountered, singly and at wide-spaced intervals, during the last few decades of their stampede through the biosphere’s decline. The mathematically self-referential shapes, repeating their own neatly pointed structure at progressively reducing scales, surround the travellers on every front in mesmerizingly exact and ordered chessboard rows, each geometric edifice perfectly equidistant from its fellows in a dizzying grid that reaches to the vast emporium’s eroding edges. The uninterrupted blue concavity of sky that’s presently surmounting this optically challenging expanse contains only the unpacked golden ingot of an ageing sun which shrivels the remaining crumpled tissue scraps of hypercloud to nothing. Picking their way daintily like a two-headed Gulliver through the thorny metropolis of an insectile Lilliput, the pair attempt a disquisition on the subject of the obviously highly adapted mounds and their significance. As the most senior member of the family present, it is Snowy’s firmly held contention that the ants are in all likelihood still-living creatures that have blundered physically into this spatially enhanced domain much as the pigeons and occasionally the

cats do, back in those now-distant reaches of the temporal overpass where cats and pigeons still exist. Conversely, as the longest-dead of the two Armageddon tourists, May asserts her own belief that in all probability the oddly regular protrusions represent a posthumous extension of the hierarchically-arranged and combinatory awareness corresponding to each individual construction. Further, she suggests that the collective consciousness of every hill has seemingly evolved to a condition where it can imagine a continuation after its destruction or eventual dismantling. This evolution is implied, the baby reasons, by the arithmetically sophisticated alterations to the hills’ basic design. Being himself numerically inclined, her grandfather finds that he is reluctantly persuaded to this point of view. Begrudgingly he posits that the markedly self-replicating property displayed by these arresting figures indicates a calculating system of considerable sophistication and complexity, which in its turn perhaps denotes a level of mentation able to conceive of a hereafter, as his infant passenger maintains. The ever-smaller reproductions of the overall configuration would at least appear to demonstrate a grasp of algorithms, Snowy postulates, and in this manner their debate goes back and forth as they progress amongst the man-sized alien sandcastles. The azure lens of afternoon floods bloody as the human dray strides on through a declension of rich iris, tarry purple, and so forward to another of the subordinate planet’s nights. The couple tiptoe down a formic acid-fragranced boulevard beneath the radically extended risen moon, a compound of eight separate lunar spheres fused to a single brilliant cluster with its light a colloidal suspension silver-plating the hushed ranks of polyhedral bill-spikes stretching off in all directions. They go by the treasure-fountain of another daybreak and the soot-fall of a further dark, and there is no abatement to the neatly regimented ranks of prickly ziggurats that are distributed so as to occupy the floor-space of the chronologic causeway most efficiently. Snowy is gradually becoming apprehensive: “I don’t fancy bedding down between these buggers much, but I expect we’ll have to. It most probably runs on like this for centuries while this lot have their time Downstairs, with all these rows like cemetery markers and nowhere that we can stretch out and be comfortable.” After a pensive silence, his granddaughter shakes her catkin locks in disagreement. “I think that they might have had their time Downstairs already. Carry on another day’s length and we’ll see.’ Though doubtful, her antique conveyance does as he’s instructed. They continue through the paradise of ants while over them the cloudless stratosphere adjusts its palette, moon-chromed darkness burnishing to salmon dawn and thence to the monotonous, oppressive lapis of a world that’s dying for want of bad weather. Trudging through a lap approximately corresponding to mid-afternoon, May issues a reconnaissance appraisal from her elevated vantage: up ahead the dense-packed lattice is now chequered, every second pismire monument removed to leave a square of empty space. This gradual depopulation is persistent, and when they at last attain the violet outreaches of dusk there are no more ochre assemblies to be seen. The toddler theorises that an advanced species of ant may have been extant for a millennium or more without conspicuously manifesting at these altitudes of being, since colony-organism anthills are effectively immortal unless wiped away by some external force. The recently traversed apparent city, May believes, might be more properly perceived as indicator of a mass extinction, one concluded in only a day or so. They contemplate this as they make their camp, devour their last few Puck’s Hats and retire. On rising, they discover that the wolfskin bag is once more inexplicably refilled, and while they march on Snowy thinks of how

the darkness over Fort Street is at least to some degree particulate the day his grandson Tommy calls, seeking assistance with his sums. The pall above the terrace is, he thinks, as much a product of his mood as of the waste-destructor tower in Bath Street, though the two aren’t wholly unconnected. The Destructor is no more than the most obvious sign of a voracious process chewing up the district in the decade since the end of the Great War. The earliest demolitions have left shocking absences amongst the area’s tilting byways, white cement-dust blanks on his internal map which line up worryingly with the hyphenations he has lately noticed in his memory. He’s halfway through his sixties and, even without the powers of calculation that his twelve-year-old descendant is depending on, has got a good idea of how all this is starting to add up. He’s going cornery, forgetting things, imagining things as he nears the terminus. Another four or five years if he’s lucky, though he might not have the faculties to count that high by then. His death, of course, does not discourage him; is just one more familiar station on his line. He’s seen it all before, the endless corridor and the convulsing old man with – what, paint? – Paint in his beard, those scraps of colour? Something like that, anyway. It doesn’t bother him. What bothers him are these slow increments of the Destructor and the meaningful world’s end commenced in Bath Street. As the beneficiary of a demanding Bedlam education Snowy knows what chimneys signify, knows the devouring nothingness potentially contained by every terracotta shell’s circumference. The greater part of the catastrophe he fears lies not in the material aspect, brown breath curling in the waste incinerator’s fifty-foot brick throat, but rather in the immaterial immolations that proceed unchecked; invisible. Symbols and principles are going up in the same billowing black cloud as shit and bacon rinds and jam-rags. Much as he resents the smutty thunderhead at present overshadowing his neighbourhood, his family, his shabby people, he is actively afraid for all those things if he should contemplate their gutted Heaven or their surely uninhabitable fire-sale future. It’s so dear to him, his world. Louisa offstage in the dripping-scented kitchen, humming something that might be “Till All the Seas Run Dry” with both raw fists around the handle of her spoon, churning the lumpy and reluctant fruitcake mixture. His embarrassed grandchild turning redder than a beetroot trying to conceal his pride when complimented on his aptitude for mathematics, his astute grasp of the underlying symmetries implicit in ten simple digits. Snowy cherishes the day’s every last atom, each translucent grease-spot on the paper spread across the elbow-polished tablecloth. He cannot bear the thought of all this human consequence become waste-matter and assigned to the Destructor, emptied onto the annihilating bonfire of selective English memory. Barely aware of what he’s doing he directs his pencil-stub into loose orbital trajectories, skimming the surface of the unfurled meat-wrap and describing two concentric circles, a toroidal outline seen in elevation or a pigeon’s-eye view down the barrel of a smokestack. Filling in the figures nought to nine at intervals around the ring, each numeral laterally opposite its secret mirror-twin, he makes the round band into the perimeter of an outlandish clock-face with its numbers disarranged, as though the medium of time itself were made abruptly unfamiliar. He begins explaining all of this to the eleven-year-old boy beside him, but can see already how the child’s attentive frown is shifting on a gradient from concentration to wary anxiety, starting to grow afraid both for and of his grandfather. From Tommy’s face Snowy assumes he must be shouting, though he can’t remember turning up the volume and knows anyway that it’s too late to stop. Under his winter wilderness of hair ideas are racing, are accelerating dangerously towards a fugue and skidding in collision. In his hands the drawing turns from skewed clock to cross-sectioned chimneypot and then at last into the pitiless, negating glyph of a distended zero, grown so fat on vacuum that its curving boundaries struggle to restrain it. He screws up the butchers’ paper to an angry ball, propels it overarm into the blazing hearth just as the presciently alert Louisa leaves her baking to announce that the maths lesson is now done, dismissing their unnerved and apprehensive-looking grandson, sending him off home out of harm’s way, out into Fort Street where it’s snowing filth. Fascists in Italy, the new chap with the big moustache in Russia and they reckon everything began out of a dirty great explosion. Turning like a bull about the fragile matchbox living room he knows they’re right, but that they have not yet absorbed what their discovery implies regarding time. The primal detonation is still going on, is here, is now, is everyone, is this. We are all bang, and all the thoughts and doings of our lives are but ballistics. There are neither sins nor virtues, only the contingencies of shrapnel. In his wheeling trample, Snowy is brought short by the reflection in a looking glass above their fireplace: an ancient mariner, ranting and staring back from an uncannily extended space. He breaks the mirror with a paperweight. It’s all too much like his recurring premonition, where

the geriatric pony snorts and capers in a passageway of aerodrome enormity, undressed and cherub-ridden. Those untrammelled trees which once erupted from the many vents set in this upper storey’s base are gone with not even their petrifying hulks remaining, whereby shadow is made into a diminishing resource rarer than tanzanite. Above, the over-sky’s daunting expanse is now unmitigated by the least intruding bough or spar and seems infected by a faintly greenish tinge. It is May’s supposition that this might result from altered planetary atmospheric composition in the absence of both water and biology, the varying wavelengths of sunlight scattered differently as consequence. The old man, slobbering gob filled with the succulent ghost-fungi that his thoughtful rider feeds to him like sugar-lumps as they continue their ridiculous safari, cannot disagree. The leagues of day are a thin soup of peridot, entirely unrelieved by cloud or crouton, while the leagues of night are clearer than an icicle and bursting with schematic star, unfolded comet. Underfoot the granular sawdust detritus of pulverised forests is at last exhausted, and the eon-treading couple are astonished to discover that beneath this carpet of organic litter the pine floorboards of Mansoul are no more to be seen. At some unnoticed demarcation point of the icebound or overgrown millennia already travelled the planed planks have been replaced by – or have otherwise reverted to – coarse and uneven rock, a two-mile broad promontory of randomly amalgamated limestone, flint and hard chalk reaching off into a lifeless deep where only astrophysics and geology endure. The bordering arcade walls are now a smooth igneous tumble of liquescent dream-material, though still high enough to adequately mask whatever flattened remnants of the Second Borough yet exist beyond the strip’s extensive margins. Stepping like a mummified flamingo, Snowy circumspectly navigates their way about the numerous irregularly contoured apertures that perforate the former boardwalk’s rugged mineral flooring. Lacking animated creatures to provide the snaking jewellery forms that previously typified the lower realm as seen from this superior elevation, now the holes look uniformly onto ragged patches of bare desert. Nothing moves, nothing respires, the attics having finally outstripped the breath. They carry on through brownish dawns, green days, blood-orange sunsets and wide onyx stripes lit by a sickle moon expressed as eight such crescents interlinked, a puzzle-ball in silver. Pushing forward into centuries untenanted they while away their trek with self-invented travel games, compiling lists of things that are no more, like consciousness, or pain, or water. When they tire of this pursuit they try a variation listing those phenomena that yet endure, such as the periodic table, certain anaerobic species of bacteria, and gravity. This second set of items, while extensive, is more readily exhausted than the first and therefore does not entertain them for so long. If they become fatigued by either their perpetual transit or the unremitting sense of end they doze on stone beneath a hyperbolic zodiac, the naked man sprawled like a pile of sticks, an unlit fire, beside the almost empty wolf-pouch in which he insists the clever baby snoozes. Waking, walking through night’s residues to breakfast in the burning sepia of a colour-shifted daybreak they could almost be a pa

ir of bronzes struck to represent the old year bearing in the new. With vegetation no more than a memory and memory itself forgotten, May and Snowy’s view along the corridor ahead is no longer curtailed by obstacles. Their ocular abilities, enhanced by death, should offer them an unrestricted prospect of the everlasting hall, this being straight in its construction and entirely unaffected by the curvature of the terrestrial world beneath. However, as they plod the towpath ages both remark upon their inability to see beyond a certain point of the great lane before them. This, they reason, must imply a contradictory bend in the plumb-line precision of the avenue’s geometry, or else exemplify the rounded bulge of the continuum itself, their sightline limited by spacetime’s intervening humped meniscus. Further down the road the overreaching heavens are striated into varicoloured stripes of dark or day, bandwidth compressing with proximity to the unnervingly remote horizon. Doggedly the wizened Atlas perseveres, hefting his blonde encumbrance through the barren minutes and evacuated hours, reducing their still-unexplained reserve of Bedlam Jennies as they go. When May reports two distinct specks in the far distance her grandfather is at first inclined to scepticism, a position subsequently modified after they’ve traipsed a few more land-weeks and the vanishingly tiny dots have swollen and resolved themselves into a man and woman wearing fashionable 1920s clothing, more outrageous in their way than any of the super-ants or sunlight-fed replacement men thus far encountered. The anachronistic couple stand their rough-hewn ground, patiently watching the extraordinary infant and the time-tramp she is riding in their slow approach, and Snowy notes that the impeccably dressed pair are holding hands. Of the extinguished things that he and May have previously listed, the romance and sex are what he misses most. He thinks about the way

Earth’s scudding satellite outruns filleted clouds above the cattle market, keeping pace with Snowy and the landlord’s bonny daughter from the Anchor, a celestial chaperone for their first proper evening out. He doesn’t know the town that well as yet except through an amalgamated sense of premonition and nostalgia, so has no idea where she’s taking him. The mellowing bouquet of cow-manure along Victoria Promenade is somehow intimate, and even though he hasn’t seen Louisa for the six long months that he’s had work in Lambeth, he is firm in his presentiment that by the time tonight is done with he’ll have had her knickerbockers down over those shapely ankles and will also have proposed his sex-damp hand in marriage. Overhead the July stars are diamond pepper grinded from the mills of space and at his side, night-amplified, the metronome tock of her heels is music he will set his life to. Talking in low voices so as not to dissipate the atmosphere he lets her warm, demanding counterweight on his right arm steer both of them into the reaching black of the Cow Meadow, giggling and unsupervised to where the only jurisdiction is of tactful shadow. Caught in resin by the gaslight near the lavatories two working men exchange a bristly kiss and fumble with each other’s buttons, while girls coo from out the rustling bushes like nocturnal pheasant eager for their beaters. Whispering, Louisa and her beau pass on into the gasping dark as all around another Friday ends in moonlit joy and jetting seed and grass-stain; in the peerless and abiding silver luxury of dogs or paupers. Rolled out on benighted pasture in a carpet grey as beaten tin, their path delivers them unto a gravel walk beside the tinkling river, crawling away east between tall undertaker trees towards tomorrow morning. Upstream a reflected moon puffs pockmarked cheeks and holds its breath beneath the tinsel surface but here, overlooked by conifers, an iron bridge arcs across obscure torrents that are made from only sound, a gush of metal syllables like small change jingling in a wishing well. At the halfway point of the creaking span a breeze unpins one strand of her sienna hair, and in his tender stretch to tuck it back their lips fall upon one another as though feuding sea-anemones until Louisa says “Not here” and leads him, blind, onto a starlight-painted island bifurcating the onrushing waters. Worn by countless feet down to its sandstone nub, a track lassoes the land’s perimeter. They walk around it to the isle’s far side, attempting casualness at first, then hurrying, then laughing as they each abandon all pretence and break into a run. The worn turf bank, moulded by love across the course of several smelly-fingered centuries, has overlaid impressions of ten generations’ breasts and buttocks visible to fancy as a palimpsest in the slope’s contours. An accommodating sycamore spreads out its knuckled roots for the forthcoming game of jacks, and current catches on stout reeds, and sky snags on the clawing branch-tops. Standing, kneeling, lying down, they sink by stages in the foaming clover with tongues jousting and their hands at war with fastenings, with elastic. Blouse discarded and the rudimentary flesh-tone camisole displaced, Louisa wears her tits with necessary pride, white lionesses slumped magnificently on their ridge above the hollow of her ribcage. An innovative, ambitious tamer without either whip or chair, sequentially he takes their heads into his mouth. Sweat-savoury, the nipples swell as if about to hatch fritillaries and Snowy and Louisa are both thrilled and gasping kids at the perennial circus. Underneath the marquee linen of her skirt warm thighs part like some tight-pressed crowd granting admission to a secret sideshow, where his callused digits are allowed ingress two at a time. Like undecided customers they hover at the velvet entrance, venturing inside before withdrawing only to push in once more, unable to make up their minds. The hem goes up like curtains and the drawers go down like lights and there, there is the never-before-seen exotic animal; there is the slippery slapstick stage. A cat crouched at its saucer, hunching there between her legs he laps and tries to savour like a connoisseur but in the end gives up to guzzle like a costermonger. Gnawed ferociously she spends and screams and then is glazed with acquiescent shock, a downed and shuddering wildebeest and when he takes his prick out of his trousers it’s like iron, newly cast and ready to be quenched, immersed, with a great rush of steam. She reaches awkwardly to steer it home by hand and he is launched into her, an exquisitely slow slide on an oiled gantry, sinking into warmth up to his curly waterline. The scent of cunt and river curving to a lime-sharp edge of pressed mimosa fires him, and he understands their furious coupling in the engineering sense, both of them functioning as one rapturous lubricated moving part, hissing and racketing in time’s invisible machinery. Slick mercury boils over from its bulb and he ejaculates inside her, spurts their daughter May into a Lambeth gutter and their same-name granddaughter into the fever cart. He squirts a thousand names and histories, spunks Jack into a foreign grave and Mick into a steel-drum reclamation yard and Audrey into an asylum. He comes grief and paintings and accordion music, as he knows he must, to guarantee that several million years away in the abandoned ruins of paradise

the nude berserker and his piggybacking conscience start to gradually decrease their frightful pace when they are some three geographic days from the two well-dressed strangers, coming finally to a standstill, eye-to-eye in the miscoloured furnace of another post-organic dawn. The woman, short and shapely, wears a dress of shimmering viridian to her knees with dove-grey stockings and jade court shoes, hair an auburn tumble to her bare and handsome shoulders. Her escort has the appearance of a late Victorian dandy clad in just-discovered mauves and wistful violets, his immaculate frock-coat ensemble topped incongruously by a battered junk-shop bowler hat that looks like someone might have died in it. Against the tangerine effulgence of a compound sunrise their contrasting hues affect a lurid harmony of the kind sometimes found in dreams. Beside the duo, covering a gingham tablecloth unfolded on the petrifactive arcade floor is a mouth-watering heap of fresh-picked Puck’s Hats. “My name’s Marjorie Miranda Driscoll while this is my consort, Mr. Reginald J. Fowler, and I must say it’s a privilege to meet the pair of you. You’re in a book I’m writing – I hope that’s alright – and we’ve been tunnelling through the ghost-seam to keep you supplied with food. I don’t think we can do it anymore, though. There’s not much left of Mansoul beyond this point, so there’s no way of climbing up here. I’m afraid there’s no more rations after this, so I thought that we’d take the opportunity to introduce ourselves and tell you where the Bedlam Jennies have been coming from.” Her voice and her delivery, though adult and well-spoken, have a quality like that of a child playing dress-up or an actress who’s still settling into her role, so that Snowy surmises neither she nor her companion have been attired in their current semblances for very long. The young man seems especially discomfited by his well-heeled apparel, running a censorious finger round inside his high starched collar and occasionally expectorating a dismissive wad of ecto-phlegm, more as a statement than for any decongestant purpose. At their feet the barren stone is wet with citrus light where their stilt-walking shadows are stretched tight behind, like rubber bands nearing the limit of Hooke’s law. Having shook hands in formal introduction and with May dismounted, the unusual quartet arranges itself comfortably about the square of linen for a fungal picnic under skies abandoned save for blinding apricot. Convivially, they interrogate each other. May enquires after the seemingly ongoing dissolution of this upper realm, beyond the causeway’s distant and subsided bounding walls, and learns that there is nothing left: even the Works is a deserted shell, with its remaining crook-doors made progressively more inaccessible by the continuing collapse. Next, the demure Miss Driscoll asks if Snowy and his granddaughter, as the protagonists of her forthcoming second novel, are expecting to encounter the Third Borough anywhere between here and the end of time. After a thoughtful pause, the white-haired veteran replies that no, he’s not anticipating any such convergence. “Although if we haven’t stumbled over him by then, at least we’ll have a good idea of where he’s not.” Out of a satin cloche-bag that she carries the young authoress produces a slim tome with green cloth boards, inlaid with a gold illustration and the volume’s title, which is “The Dead Dead Gang”. This, as she explains, is a signed presentation copy of her debut that she would be deeply honoured were they to accept. Turning the offering over in his starved spider-crab hands Snowy admires the binding, wondering aloud if Mr. Blake of Lambeth was not in some measure an accomplice to its manufacture. Both their world’s-end guests nod eagerly at this and Mr. Fowler breathlessly recounts, with the excitability of a far younger man, how he and his intended have gone all the way along the Ultraduct from Doddridge Church out to the higher regions up above Hercules Road, soliciting advice on publishing from the pugnacious and inflammatory divine. “ ’E wiz a smashing bloke. I really liked ’im.” Equally enthusiastically, May tells how she and her bedraggled nag have called upon the roughneck visionary and his wife when they themselves essayed the dazzling overpass along its length from Chalk Lane to terrestrial Jerusalem. “When we met with them they were being Eve and Adam, reading Mr. Milton’s verses to each other in the nude. That’s really why we thought we’d go without clothes on this longer expedition. It just seemed like something that the Blakes might do.” Miss Driscoll scribbles something in an oyster-tinted notebook at this juncture, yet when asked about it blushes crimson and explains that she is merely jotting brief descriptions as to both the timbre and the colouration of the marvel-baby’s voice. “Melt-water trying to be serious” is all she’ll let them read. “It wizn’t very good. I’ll more than likely change it.” They trade anecdotes in the unwavering amber of the dead world’s daybreak and then load all the remaining Puck’s Hats into May and Snowy’s predatory haversack, along with the donated book, before making their last farewells. Sartorially splendid in the fires of Earth’s unmaking the young couple wander hand in hand towards the avenue’s far margins. Taking May once more onto his shoulders, Snowy reminisces about

how the world appears to dance with youth and shape itself to youthful expectation and requirement, at least to the young. At seventeen the gale-tossed trees that fringe his many roads are making supplication but to him and Lambeth is his ornament, meaningful only when included in his gaze, not there if he’s not. Women of the borough make their beauty visible exclusively in his vicinity, a colour which they emanate beyond that spectrum readily discernible to other men, apparent solely to the chosen pollinator. Hedgerows fruit with breasts miraculously at his passing. There are secret tide-pool lilies opening in lace undergrowth along his path as though he’s Spring itself, brimful of birdsong and forever on the bone with pretty windfall arses everywhere. He has more sperm in him than he knows what to do with and the planet circling about his axis seems to share the same promiscuous excitement, shooting lightbulbs, telephonic apparatus and the annexation of South Africa in glossy rivulets across the mundane counterpane. The hands of history are deep in sticky pockets, rummaging, and Britain rules a moment which it has mistaken for the globe. Even in Queen Victoria ascendant as Empress of India he sees all the components of a subsequent decline, even if one not culminated in his lifetime. There will be resentment; massacre worse than Bulgaria; futile Satsuma rallyings against inevitable change; ghouls dressed in newspaper who wait a little further down the empire’s as yet only partially unrolled red carpet. Grinding rhythmically against the ancient and incurious alley wall, wearing a squeaking breastplate made of girl and a tight belt of legs, he is exultant in the mechanism, throws his head back barking at the stars and knows the future’s jests and injuries to be already acted. Standing in a hammering South London downpour is the ruffian John Vernall, rumoured to be touched, aware that all the individual droplets in their pounding vertical descent are actually unmoving, are continuous liquid threads that reach from storm-front down to street in long parabolas through solid time. Careening like some Hindu god or stroboscopic photograph amidst the static crystal floss, only the motion of his mind in the concealed direction makes it rain. Nothing, excepting the involuntary forward momentum of his consciousness from one half-second to the next, transmutes the angry martial statuary of a pub yard into the yapping brawl with settled scores and noses blossoming to bloodflowers. The process of his attentions turns the sky, and otherwise the clouds and zodiac are still. Rogue Elephant Boys, unafraid of anybody, swerve in their stampede to keep out of his way for fear that his condition might be catching, terrified lest they end up as human spiders more contented with the vertical than with the horizontal, railing from a rooftop about arseholes, lifebelts and geometry. He strolls between the bloody, arcing billhooks of their confrontations unconcerned, a prescient pigeon strutting carelessly amongst the dropping hooves and crushing carriage wheels. The ructions and the razors cannot kill him; cannot hinder him in his eventual appointment with the tulips and the looking-glasses, fifty years from here and in another town, another century. He’d like to meet a Spring-Heeled Jack, one of the phantom clan prolific in the city throughout the preceding decade, leaping flea-like over bar

ns and middens with their fireball breath reflecting in the circular glass lenses of their eyes. Even should they prove to be marsh-gas or else Pepper’s Ghosts, theatric spectres conjured in an angled pane, still he believes he’d find an easier berth in that outrageous troupe than with the flightless company abroad upon the avenues and bridges, harnessed by the flattened limits of their Ludo-token days. Sore pimples bubble in the creases of his nose and dirt silts on the webbing in between his fingers, a saliva-born black residue cast up by near-incessant self-pollution. Beer is the brown blanket that he pulls over his head to muffle a cajoling world on those occasions when he feels his tender age, when understanding raw apocalypse in every, every, every instant is too much for him. At night he hears the herald angles bellowing fierce imprecations in their queer exploding language and he huddles with his daffy sister, who can hear them too. “Don’t cry, Thurse. It’s not you they’re after.” While this isn’t true it sets the bird-thin fifteen-year-old’s echoing cathedral mind to rest, at least until the next time that the builders who knocked up the sun dance on the roof in thunder-boots and shout their terrible imperatives. They’re after everyone, that’s the plain fact of it, but save their energies for those who are not deaf to their deranging voices, him especially. Sometimes he looks for solace on the pleasure-hills, amidst the million lamps and cancan thighs of Highbury with all the other freaks and acrobats, and even there he hears their typhoon remonstrations telling him to bed this woman but not that one, telling him to hobble sixty miles northwest or shin a hundred feet directly upwards. Unsolicited they show him tableaux from a little further down his individual fleshy tunnel as it worms its way into futurity. There is a marriage in a fine hall with a builder watching from the rooftop’s crest. There is a grandchild born then born away, and even when he’s dead, when everyone and everything are dead, he knows that

the old warhorse charges naked on a final highway, baby-ridden under gradually migrant galaxies. The doomsday ramblers pause less frequently along the featureless rock ribbon to make camp and feast on their decreasing fungal rations, spitting out the optic pips in hope of thriving Puck’s Hat colonies as food caches for their eventual homecoming. When they approximate sleep, Snowy settles for a bed of stone and curls his knobbly spine about the infant mumbling in her wolfskin bag while space and time are steadily unpicked above. During the daylight miles it is apparent that the Earth has cloud once more, furled ochre cellophane which May surmises may be chlorine in an admixture with methane. During dark the half-moon multiplies into a Deco abstract wreathed in vapour, with its light a spectrographic halo-stain on evening’s filter paper. All this change and distance, Snowy thinks, and they’ve not left the Boroughs. Little Cross Street and Bath Passage are still down beneath them somewhere, albeit in a state of chemical and geological deterioration. They continue. When the sack of Mad Apples is finally all but exhausted they experience what first seems to be a mirage born of starvation, a peculiar mirror-fluke of the great alley’s atmospherics: racing down the barren strip towards them from its far end comes an old man with a baby on his shoulders. So exact is the reflection that the travellers half-expect an imminent collision with some monstrous pane hereto invisible, both knocked unconscious, leaving a Daguerreotype of their spread-eagle impact printed on the glass in feather-residue. They are surprised, then, when their doppelgangers turn out to be as substantial as themselves; turn out indeed to be themselves on the return leg of their legendary journey. Both the Mays dismount and hug each other while the old men merely shake each other gruffly by the hand. “Well, now. How has this business come about?” “It’s hard to say. It strikes me that the end of time is like the last day of a school term, when the non-essential rules may be somewhat relaxed and minor paradoxical infringements are occasionally permitted.” “Did you reach the end of time, then?” “Oh, most certainly, but you’ll appreciate that it would be improper of us to convey more than the scantest details.” “You don’t want to push your luck with all the paradox and that?” “That’s it exactly. I can tell you that you’ll do all right for Puck’s Hats, though. Only a few weeks west of here we’ve lately passed the place where you will shortly spit your last few seeds out, and there’s a fine patch of fairy-blossoms already established. Some way further on you’ll find another, probably resulting from the spat-out eyeballs of the colony just mentioned, and so forth until you reach the point where I am now and find yourself explaining all this claptrap to a slightly younger fellow. It occurs to me that we have possibly had our behaviour controlled by Bedlam Jennies so that they may propagate their species to the very limits of spacetime’s duration.” “Put like that it sounds like an outlandish notion, but upon reflection I’ll allow that it provides a stronger motive for our visit to the end of time, which until now has only been to find if such a thing is there or not, and what it looks like if it is.” “Oh, it’s a sight, you can be sure of it. By then, of course, the mass of things is gone and taken with it all the gravity. Likewise the nuclear forces are by then retired and put to bed, but still, for saying there is very little substance it’s a most substantial show. Ah, well. We’ve dallied long enough, and I do not recall our conversation having had a great deal more to it than this. Might I suggest we shoulder our respective babies, taking great care not to mix them up and thus cause an insoluble controversy, following which we shall both be upon our separate ways, as I recall this puzzling but not unwelcome incident.” The two Mays, who have been conversing quietly throughout all this, are lifted back up onto their respective steeds. After an unexpectedly emotional farewell both duos once again continue with their journeys, bare feet slapping on the causeway’s rugged stone, heading in opposite directions on their tightrope over time until in only a few hours of distance they are mutually invisible. Progressing inexorably towards the end of everything, the end of even endings, Snowy’s nominally earlier incarnation asks his passenger what passed between her and the other May during their unanticipated meeting. “I made sure that I remembered everything she told me so that I could say it back correctly by the time I’m her. The most important thing she said was, ‘We have come back from Jerusalem, where we found not what we sought.’ I asked her what she meant, but she just shook her head and wouldn’t tell me.” Pounding down the hard miles to finality, Snowy considers this. Other than an obscure suspicion that the comment might have some connection with the same Professor Jung who failed to fathom Lucia Joyce, he is no nearer to a resolution by the time he and his rider reach the paradoxical expanse of Puck’s Hats that their future selves have told them to expect. They dutifully eat the last of their existing rations, spitting out the pretty eyes before they go on to collect a sack-full of the mature blossoms that those seeds will grow or have already grown into. Dining upon impossibilities the old man can still picture how

his earliest encounter with the food that ghosts eat comes when he’s aged twelve and drunk on ale for the first time, a brimming jug he’s swiped from home and swiftly emptied in the fornication-scented alleyways of Lambeth. Reeling full of bravery and poison past the walls of the old Bethlehem, his stumble is arrested by the sight of flickering colour dancing just above the darkened paving slabs ahead. In the same way that floating shapes behind the eyelids often crystallise into coherent images when on the brink of sleep, so too does the prismatic shimmering resolve into an insubstantial coterie of tiny ladies with no clothes on. Through the intervening folds of beer and murk he marvels at their tits and fannies, being the first proper ones he’s seen, and can’t believe his luck. The women waver and there is a sound they make that is initially like individual voices giggling, and yet after a time these seem to merge into a high-pitched whine at the periphery of the young drunkard’s hearing. He stands leaning with one palm against the mossy stone of the asylum gatepost, wondering muddily if this means he’s about to die, and is not reassured when passing strollers seem to only laugh or voice their disapproval at his obvious inebriation while they kick obliviously by or through the haze of nake

d manikins cavorting at their feet. He understands with a dull pang of apprehension that these manifested fantasies are visible or audible to him alone, perhaps a vision presaging his own internment in the institution he is currently propped up against, made an apprentice madman to his own incarcerated father, both off with the fairies. Swallowing warm spit he thinks about the inmate that he saw on his last visit with his sister, elderly and scabby-faced from the repeated self-inflicted beating of his head against a door. The stolen booze and scalding bile erupt into John Vernall’s throat and he is copiously, blasphemously sick over the gossamer-winged little people swirling unconcerned about his ankles. Undulate as weed in water the translucent nymphs ignore slivers of fish-flesh from his supper, part-dissolved and steaming, and continue with their lazy sway as if moved by a breeze or current rather than their own volition. Sweat streams down his forehead. Foot-long threads of dribble dangle trembling from his panting mouth, his sagging chin, and the damp pavement is on fire with girls. Their perfect pink-white faces are identical and make him think of sugar mice, the features blank and motionless with no more human feeling than if he were scrutinising some ingeniously camouflaged variety of insect, horrid beetle thoughts concealed behind the painted icing of their eyes. The mere idea precipitates a second surge of vomit and the unconcerned minuscule females, stood in its foul spatter as though showering in some crystal waterfall, elicit yet a third. Distantly he becomes aware that other passers-by are drawing closer and prepares for further mockery, only to look up in surprise when this is not forthcoming. Even through the filter of his reeling senses he immediately realises that there’s something wrong with the approaching onlookers. Drifting unhurriedly towards him along the inadequately gas-lit street come two men and a woman, shabbily attired and without any colour whatsoever, figures carved from smoke. They seem to be in agitated conversation but the noise of this is muffled, as if come from far away or else as though his ears are plugged with wax. The trio pause when they draw level and regard him, albeit with a less judgemental eye than the nocturnal stragglers who passed him earlier. One of the men says something to the oddly dressed old woman, evidently with regard to the inebriated urchin, but it’s much too faint to hear. Shivering now and drenched in icy perspiration, he is disappointed to discover that these unobtrusive newcomers are no more able to perceive the pixies pirouetting in his spew than were their raucous predecessors. Something else, however, seems to have attracted their attention: silvery and grey like a Daguerreotype, the crone in her old-fashioned skirts and bonnet is now pointing to the upper reaches of the pillar that the boy is slumped against. Her lips are moving as though under glass, her utterances only audible to her two male and monochrome companions, one of whom steps forward now and reaches up to fumble under the eroded, jutting lip of the post’s capstone. As he does, one of his sooty arms slips through John’s own outstretched and trembling limb as if it isn’t there. The tall and spindly man seems to be prising something blurred and indistinct from off the madhouse gates, and simultaneously the pretty miniatures are guttering like candle flames. The shrill hum that he had at first mistaken for their voices rises to a maddening whistle and then shuts off altogether, at which point the pygmy dancers vanish into scintillating dust and he is staring only at a pool of his own recent stomach contents upon which the iridescent meat-flies are already settling. The lofty wraith is lifting something down, some shadowy and writhing octopus or hydra, tearing off its limbs and sharing them amongst his phantom colleagues as the three fade gradually from sight. Surrendering, the wayward youth closes his eyes. The liquid shapes bloomed from that private dark are truant stars above a ceaselessly unreeling scroll of path where

the relentless bag of bones runs on, hunchbacked with innocence. The barren avenue that vanishes beneath him is entirely featureless save for the welcome clusters of chronology-defying Bedlam Jennies, so much so that these oases, blossomed from the bedrock at roughly millennial intervals, become the travellers’ only clock or calendar. Even the apertures that once looked down on the terrestrial First Borough are now mostly gone, healed over with what seem to be volcanic sediments, and other than celestial dramas acted on the canopies of night or daylight overhead their expedition is without event. At their infrequent rest-stops they read chapters from Miss Driscoll’s book to one another and attempt to calculate, from the configurations of the sky, how many billion years they are from home. Snowy thinks two but May seems relatively certain that it’s three. In the nocturnal stretches of their journey into afterwards the overhanging firmament seems crammed with hyper-stars, a lot more than there used to be. The learned infant speculates that this stellar profusion has resulted from the Milky Way commencing its collision with another astronomical array, most probably Andromeda. Her theory is corroborated after seventy or eighty further Puck’s Hat patches have been passed, by which point the immeasurable dark above them is a chaos of crashing suns, a catastrophic ballet staged in extra mathematical dimensions. The appalling centrepiece of this performance is a struggle to the death between two fields of nothingness, hungry immensities which May informs her grandfather are said to lurk unseen at each star-system’s heart, their frightful mass responsible for turning the jewelled nebulae. The spheres of blackness are made visible by radiating silver halos of what the eighteen-month-old believes to be unfolded X-rays spindling out to fill the heavens, the twin auras overlapping in a terrifying moiré of annihilation. Further scrutiny reveals that both monstrosities are wearing trophy-belts of dust accumulated from the helpless interstellar bodies they have whirled around at inconceivable velocities and smashed together, pulverised on impact. Inexorably the dark giants make their mutual approach, cannibal emperors unwavering in their determination to devour each other there in the arena of a ruined cosmos. Trying not to look at the deranging spectacle above them, Snowy and his granddaughter pass on. Years in their thousands are left trampled underfoot. The warring midnight absences presiding over that bare strip of track appear to be attempting some tremendous fusion into one light-swallowing colossus, with the rioting stars about them gradually resolved into a new merged galaxy that Snowy dubs Milkdromeda but May refers to as the Andy Way. The travellers persevere, amusing themselves by inventing names for the unrecognisably collided constellations, birth-signs for an era without births: the Great Chrysanthemum, the Bicycle, the Little Tramp. They carry on, and during the diurnal reaches of their passage observe that the unpacked fireball about which the planet spins is noticeably larger, an effect that can no longer be attributed to atmospheric vagaries. The white-gold orb’s engorgement worsens and when they have hiked another million or so years there is above them nothing but inferno from horizon to horizon, Mercury and Venus both engulfed already in the bloody solar bloat. For what seems an unending distance the intrepid pair are journeying in flame and settling down to sleep on ember stones that pulse red and translucent even through the ectoplasm of the couple’s eyelids. Both agree that slumber on a burning bed is contrary to every human instinct and thus offers little in the way of respite, though of course they are no more discomfited by the apparent heat than by the icebound floorboards of what now seems an eternity ago. To their considerable relief, the fairy-fungus that sustains them seems alike impervious to such perceived amendments of the temperature, and at their next stop they discover an extensive colony of the exquisite radiating doll-forms thriving on that furnace-bright terrain. Soldiering on, when May and Snowy have at last become accustomed to incessant conflagration so that pyrotechnic vistas are no longer cause for comment, it takes countless centuries before they realise that the elderly and swollen sun is dwindling by steady increments in the long, shamefaced aftermath of its infanticidal binge. A near-incalculable distance later it has been reduced to a discarded cigarette-end, winking out of being in the universe’s lightless gutter. Solemnly aware that they are witnessing the death of day, the old man and the child proceed with their excursion into unrelieved immortal night. As they progress the dark above them is evacuated of its last illuminations when even the starlight is extinguished, Arcturus and Algol either snuffed like candles or else relocated by a constantly expanding universe to somewhere out beyond the curvature of spacetime; over the continuum’s horizon and too far away for even radiance to travel. Navigating with their dead-sight they move through a landscape with its contour outlines stitched in tinsel. Finally disoriented by his own duration, Snowy wonders if the whole adventure is another of his fabulous delusions, flashing momentarily through his disordered mind as

he goes wandering from his Fort Street home, uncertain of what year it is or where he lives. Shuffling lost down Moat Street he remembers it as being filled with water once and wonders when they had it drained. The fish must have looked dreadful, flopping and asphyxiating in the gutters. It all changes in a wink these days, everything vanishing or turning into something different. Following a path of least resistance, a well-trodden street-plan crease, he rolls up Bristol Street and down Chalk Lane where there are poppies squirting out of brown-gold crevices in the old burial ground’s limestone wall. Across the way the turquoise paint on the Blue Anchor’s signboard peels and curls beguilingly beneath the sharpened Wednesday morning sunshine, every detail of its scabby surface limned in fire. He knows they’ve got a lovely girl behind the bar there at the Anchor, beautiful Louisa who he got his oats with down in Beckett’s Park a while ago. He only hopes his missus never learns of it. Beneath a fleeting cloud of muddled guilt he shambles on through summer, heading for Black Lion Hill and Marefair down the dappled lane. Carthorses nod in passing to each other on the blinding cobbles and he weaves his passage cautiously between them to the sanctuary pavement outside Peter’s Church while all the crumbling monsters of its stonework gape at him in outrage. When he makes his way along a hairline alley to the building’s rear the Saxon chapel seems to him ablaze with moment and significance as if he’s looking at it for the first time or the last, and in Narrow Toe Lane he finds he cannot see for tears although he doesn’t know what they’re in aid of and within a dozen paces has forgotten them. White cumuli slide down the sky like foamy spittle over Green Street. Underfoot the York stone flags carry the scars of ancient rivers, fossil fingerprints that he supposes were made several hundred million years ago when only trilobites and ammonites lived in this little row of terraced houses, slithering out to sit and chat on their front steps during the warm Precambrian evenings. The ancestral buildings, crouched and tired and leaning on each other, have an aura of familiarity as if the millipede of his true form expressed through time has on countless occasions doubled back and forth upon itself along these weathered slabs, and it occurs to him that he has family here. Doesn’t he have a daughter living somewhere round these parts, a girl named May? Or is it May who died of the diphtheria when she was just a baby? Snowy trudges past a sequence of ill-fitting wooden doors, their numbering up in the high eighties, and at last finds one he thinks he recognises right at the far end, Elephant Lane, down that way, next door to the builder’s merchants with the painted gate. Unpolished and thus slowly darkening, the old brass doorknob squirms reluctantly against his sweaty palm then yields. The heavy slab of pitch-stained black swings open with a whinny from its hinges to reveal a passageway, its weak illumination and tea-brown obscurity conflated in the old man’s senses with its bouillon scent of rising damp and sagging flesh. He sees the human odours, smells the light and cannot recall ever having done things otherwise. Shutting the door behind him without looking he moves down the cramped hall, calling out a speculative greeting to the darkness squatting halfway up the stairway but the dark has clearly had enough of him, like everybody else, and doesn’t answer. Nobody’s a

bout, his entrance to the silent living room confirms, excepting for a cat that he believes might be called Jim, asleep before an unlit fireplace, and three bright viridian meat-flies that he doesn’t know the names of. A south-facing window ladles rays across the room in strictly rationed measures, smearing yellow honey on the glazed bulge of a flower-vase or along the varnished curve of the piano-lid and suddenly it comes to him that he’s known all of this before, the cat, the flowers, the angle of the sun, the same three nameless flies. He’s known this moment all his days, down to its most excruciating detail. Part of him has always been here in this half-lit cubicle while he’s been otherwise engaged with swaying on the Guildhall’s slates and walking in a trance to Lambeth, visiting his father in the madhouse, copulating on the riverbank or being sick over the little folk. By the same token he knows he’s still there in all those other places even now and doing all those other things, still wavering on the brink of that tall rooftop; that short woman. He is teetering now upon the speckled hearthside rug, finally overcome by vertigo at the sheer drop of his own continuity. Exhausted by it all he sinks into a battered armchair and the window-shine behind him turns his thinning hair to phosphorous. The chained dog in his stomach growls reproachfully and he’s forgotten the last time he ate, along with all his other vital details. This is where he dies, he understands that. These walls that enclose him are his last ones and the world beyond this square of carpet is a world he’ll never tread again. He feels remote from his own creaking frame, hungry and aching in the chair, as if his circumstances were all something happening in a play, a well-known closing act repeated line for line, night after night; life a recurring dream the dead have. The old nuisance can’t tell if he’s really here, the unnamed flies impatiently anticipating his demise, or if

he’s sprinting through the final night that has no dawn with his dead grandchild yanking at his ears to spur him on. Above, the void disorganises. Heat is fled save for those vestiges at the reactive cores of cosmic halo objects, vast accumulations of dark matter only rendered visible by a decreasing pulse of infrared until this too is ceased. The muffled metronome of padding feet on stone is their accompaniment in straits where universal darkness and frigidity are made inseparable; where black is just cold’s colour. Doggedly they journey on, spacetime’s last spectres running blind towards a limit that they only know is there because they’ve met themselves returning from it. This is the one certainty they cling to through the endless, lightless distances, and it only when they are beginning to doubt even this that from her human crow’s nest May reports a fleck of radiance at the vanishing point of their all-but vanished highway. By the time they’ve drawn a few millennia closer, this scant spark has swollen to contain the empty skies above in their entirety, a shimmering butterfly corona from horizon to horizon, a display of shifting marbled hues which the two pilgrims have all but forgot the names of. Stood against this dazzle where the road appears to end abruptly in an iridescent nothing is what seems to be a single silhouetted figure of unusual height and girth, positioned as though waiting patiently for Snowy and his granddaughter to reach it. Both adventurers can feel the hairs raise on their necks as simultaneously they reach the same conclusion with regard to the obscure shape’s probable identity. They’ve each thus far reacted with a studiedly dismissive flippancy to the idea that their peregrinations might entail such an encounter, but with its reality almost upon them the old man and baby girl alike become uncertain and, for the first time, afraid. May’s voice beside his ear is an uneasy whisper. “Do you think it’s him?” His own reply is hoarse and strangled, a constricted rasp he’s never heard before. “Yes, I suppose it is. I had a lot of things to say to him, but I’m so frit I can’t remember what they were.” The confrontation they have privately longed for and dreaded, whilst a terrifying prospect, is significantly less unbearable than the alternative of turning round and running back the way they came. They carry on in their approach of the inevitable form which looms at the conclusion of their path, naked into that presence, and John Vernall grows increasingly confused about which segment of his caterpillar continuity he’s currently experiencing. All his moments fall upon him in a pack, coterminous, a fugue as complex and disorienting as his sister Thursa’s compositions, bringing an unprecedented yet somehow familiar sense that

he’s about to meet his maker. Catapulted from the armchair by a fear that death should find him sitting down he stands there swaying in the cluttered room his universe has been reduced to. Woken by this sudden flurry of activity the cat weighs up the situation and decides to exit by the window, open on its sash, leaping from ledge to garden wall to rain-butt and descending by instalments to the sunken yard outside. The flies attempt to follow but are insurmountably confounded by frustrating panes. Reeling with one hand clutching at the chair-arm for support, Snowy appreciates only too well the impetus behind this animal and insect exodus: the damp and crowded chamber, with careening ice-rink scratches on the sideboard’s varnish and with gold fruit softening in its bowl; this is the end of the time. Who could have thought that it would be so little? His gaze darts around his final vista as he tries to cram his eyes full with its details and make a last meal of their significance, eventually alighting on the mantelpiece where something glints intriguingly. The single halting step he takes towards the hearth for a closer inspection is as jittery as any that he took upon the slippery rooftops of his youth. The item that has captured his attention turns out to be a medallion, a Saint Christopher that he believes might be the one he wore for all his Lambeth-to-the-Boroughs marathons so long ago. He scoops it up within one liver-speckled and vibrating hand, only to instantly forget that he has done so as his wandering awareness is next seized by the decrepit fellow staring at him from the glass above the fireplace. There is something in the haggard features that he recognises, and it comes to him that this is Harry Marriot from the next house along. He looks much older than he used to, but it’s been a little while. Lifting the hand containing the religious talisman Snowy gesticulates in greeting to the other man, obscurely reassured when the same gesture is immediately returned. He’s glad that Harry, at least, still seems pleased to see him. Peering into what he takes to be the similarly furnished house next door he notices what seems to be a further window in its far wall. This affords a view into another Green Street domicile with yet another old boy – possibly Stan Warner from a little further down – facing the other way and waving through a subsequent portal at what might well be Arthur Lovett from just up the road. Turning to glance behind him, Snowy spots the aperture on his own room’s far side that looks onto a similar procession of frosty-haired veterans in endlessly receding parlours. He appears to be stuck in a queue of ancients lining up for their demise, all waving to each other amiably, their individual domestic spaces reconfiguring into a single tunnel. It’s as if

he’s in a relatively narrow channel of near-infinite extent, finally close enough to the imposing shape that blocks his path to see that it is actually a pair of nine-foot giants who are stood shoulder to shoulder. Both are barefoot, clad in plain white linen smocks, and each one holds a snooker cue proportionate to their tremendous size. The figure on the left has hair as colourless as Snowy’s, and is instantly identifiable as Mansoul’s trilliards champion, Mighty Mike. His curly-haired and russet-bearded counterpart has mismatched eyes, one red, the other green. This latter rumbles with amusement at the human couple’s tremulous approach. “Look at the faces they’ve got on them! Why, you’d think they were expecting the Third Borough!” Perched atop her grandsire, May’s smooth forehead corrugates to a suspicious frown. “Perhaps we were. But aren’t you Asmoday, the thirty-second spirit? What are you dressed as a Master Builder for?” The erstwhile fiend raises his bristling brows in mock surprise. “Because that’s what I am. I served my sentence and got my old job back. At this point in time,” he gestures to the cosmos-spanning spectrographic backdrop, “all the scores are settled and the falls are far behind us. We can let bygones

be bygones, surely, here where everything’s a bygone?” As the infant chews this over, her grandfather at last finds his voice

“Why isn’t God here, and what are these lights and colours?” He is shouting at the empty room, no longer capable of understanding his own utterances. The pensioners in all the other dimly lit compartments seem as agitated as himself, all waving their Saint Christophers and bellowing the same unfathomable questions in a maddening roundelay. His world subsides to disconnected jigsaw shapes as names and meanings drift out with the ebb-tide of his ragged breath. Barely aware of his own body or identity, only a distant clenching of his gut reminds him that he’s hungry. He should eat some food, if only he can call to mind what food is. The locale rotates, its articles of furniture all circling him like merry-go-round horses, and it comes to him that when he ran down the long road through time with his dead grandchild on his shoulders they survived by eating blossoms which were somehow made from shrunken women. Snowy notes a vase of luscious tulips on the table as this glides past in its dawdling fairground orbit, and it seems to him that fairy-fruits and flowers are as like as makes no difference. With his free hand, unencumbered by the quite forgotten medal, he commences greedily to stuff his rotten mouth with petals while the neighbouring patriarchs in their adjacent rooms all ill-advisedly follow his lead. Choking on glory he is elsewhere, and a devil dressed in white is saying

“Oh, he’s here alright. Or at least, here is him. The fireworks are what’s left after the gravity and nuclear forces pass away. Only electromagnetism is left standing.” Snowy groans. “So this is all we get, then? But we’ve come such a long way.” The rehabilitated demon smiles and shakes his head. “Not really. You’ve not yet set foot outside the Boroughs. You’ve just both been running on the spot for several billion years.” Beyond the two colossi is the precipice that marks the highway’s end in tumbling veils of brilliance. Raised up from that awful cliff-edge as a marker is the rough stone cross he last remembers seeing set into the wall down at Saint Gregory’s. Growing around and on it are a colony of succulent, ripe Puck’s Hats. His mouth floods with salivary ectoplasm but he finds that

he can’t swallow, stringy throat obstructed by amazing Easter colours. In their never-ending file of parallel apartments, he observes that all of Green Street’s other elderly male occupants are doing just as badly as himself, walking in circles with their eyeballs bulging and bright scraps of masticated tulip flesh that turn their straggly beards to painters’ aprons. It’s a rotten turn of luck that they should all be in such straits at the same moment, when in normal circumstances they’d see what was happening and pop next door to slap each other on their backs. He’s breathing a bouquet, he’s breathing wreath, the panic in his lungs cascading to his heart. He can feel something clutched in his left hand but can’t remember what it is, and all the time

he’s waiting for the arch-builder to tell him something vital and conclusive. At last Mighty Mike turns to enquire, “Vernalimt whorey skung?” Vernall, what limit are you seeking? Unprepared, Snowy considers and replies, “The limit of my being.” Here the titan offers him a sympathetic look. “Tenyhuafindot.” Then you’ve found it. The time-vagrant nods. He understands that

Tags: Alan Moore Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net