People were forever announcing things he didn't notice. He would arrive in empty classes, miss organized games, arrive at school on days when everyone else had gone home. Sometimes he felt as if he lived in a different world to everyone else.

He went off to play football, Tarzan at the Earth's Core Tarzan at the Earth's Core shoved down the back of his scratchy blue football shorts. shoved down the back of his scratchy blue football shorts.

He hated the showers and the baths. He couldn't understand why they had to use both, but that was just the way it was.

He was freezing, and no good at games. It was beginning to become a matter of perverse pride with him that in his years at the school so far, he hadn't scored a goal, or hit a run, or bowled anyone out, or done anything much except be the last person to be picked when choosing sides.

Elric, proud, pale prince of the Melniboneans, would never have had to stand around on a football pitch in the middle of winter, wishing the game would be over.

Steam from the shower room, and his inner thighs were chapped and red. The boys stood naked and shivering in a line, waiting to get under the showers, and then to get into the baths.

Mr. Murchison, eyes wild and face leathery and wrinkled, old and almost bald, stood in the changing rooms directing naked boys into the shower, then out of the shower and into the baths. "You, boy. Silly little boy. Jamieson. Into the shower, Jamieson. Atkinson, you baby, get under it properly. Smiggins, into the bath, Goring, take his place in the shower ..."

The showers were too hot. The baths were freezing cold and muddy.

When Mr. Murchison wasn't around boys would flick each other with towels, joke about each others' penises, about who had pubic hair, who didn't.

"Don't be an idiot," hissed someone near Richard. "What if the Murch comes back. He'll kill you!" There was some nervous giggling.

Richard turned and looked. An older boy had an erection, was rubbing his hand up and down it, slowly, under the shower, displaying it proudly to the room.

Richard turned away.

Forgery was too easy.

Richard could do a passable imitation of the Murch's signature, for example, and an excellent version of his housemaster's handwriting and signature. His housemaster was a tall, bald, dry man, named Trellis. They had disliked each other for years.

Richard used the signatures to get blank exercise books from the stationery office, which dispensed paper, pencils, pens, and rulers on the production of a note signed by a teacher.

Richard wrote stories and poems and drew pictures in the exercise books.

After the bath Richard toweled himself off, and dressed hurriedly; he had a book to get back to, a lost world to return to.

He walked out of the building slowly, tie askew, shirt-tail flapping, reading about Lord Greystoke, wondering whether there really was a world inside the world where dinosaurs flew and it was never night.

The daylight was beginning to go, but there were still a number of boys outside the school, playing with tennis balls: a couple played conkers by the bench. Richard leaned against the red-brick wall and read, the outside world closed off, the indignities of changing rooms forgotten.

"You're a disgrace, Grey."

Me?

"Look at you. Your tie's all crooked. You're a disgrace to the school. That's what you are."

The boy's name was Lindfield, two school years above him, but already as big as an adult. "Look at your tie. I mean, look look at it." Lindfield pulled at Richard's green tie, pulled it tight, into a hard little knot. "Pathetic." at it." Lindfield pulled at Richard's green tie, pulled it tight, into a hard little knot. "Pathetic."

Lindfield and his friends wandered off.

Elric of Melnibone was standing by the red-brick walls of the school building, staring at him. Richard pulled at the knot in his tie, trying to loosen it. It was cutting into his throat.

His hands fumbled around his neck.

He couldn't breathe; but he was not concerned about breathing. He was worried about standing. Richard had suddenly forgotten how to stand. It was a relief to discover how soft the brick path he was standing on had become, as it slowly came up to embrace him.

They were standing together under a night sky hung with a thousand huge stars, by the ruins of what might once have been an ancient temple.

Elric's ruby eyes stared down at him. They looked, Richard thought, like the eyes of a particularly vicious white rabbit that Richard had once had, before it gnawed through the wire of the cage and fled into the Sussex countryside to terrify innocent foxes. His skin was perfectly white; his armour, ornate and elegant, traced with intricate patterns, perfectly black. His fine white hair blew about his shoulders, as if in a breeze, but the air was still.

-So you want to be a companion to heroes? he asked. His voice was gentler than Richard had imagined it would be. he asked. His voice was gentler than Richard had imagined it would be.

Richard nodded.

Elric put one long finger beneath Richard's chin, lifted his face up. Blood-eyes, thought Richard. Blood-eyes.

-You're no companion, boy, he said, in the High Speech of Melnibone.

Richard had always known he would understand the High Speech when he heard it, even if his Latin and French had always been weak.

-Well, what am am I, then? I, then? he asked. he asked. Please tell me. Please? Please tell me. Please?

Elric made no response. He walked away from Richard, into the ruined temple.

Richard ran after him.

Inside the temple, Richard found a life waiting for him, all ready to be worn and lived, and inside that life, another. Each life he tried on, he slipped into, and it pulled him further in, further away from the world he came from; one by one, existence following existence, rivers of dreams and fields of stars, a hawk with a sparrow clutched in its talons flies low above the grass, and here are tiny intricate people waiting for him to fill their heads with life, and thousands of years pass and he is engaged in strange work of great importance and sharp beauty, and he is loved, and he is honoured, and then a pull, a sharp tug and it's ...

... it was like coming up from the bottom of the deep end of a swimming pool. Stars appeared above him and dropped away and dissolved into blues and greens, and it was with a deep sense of disappointment that he became Richard Grey, and came to himself once more, filled with an unfamiliar emotion. The emotion was a specific one, so specific that he was surprised, later, to realize that it did not have its own name: a feeling of disgust and regret at having to return to something he had thought long since done with and abandoned and forgotten and dead.

Richard was lying on the ground, and Lindfield was pulling at the tiny knot of his tie. There were other boys around, faces staring down at him, worried, concerned, scared.

Lindfield pulled the tie loose. Richard struggled to pull air, he gulped it, clawed it into his lungs.

"We thought you were faking. You just went over." Someone said that.

"Shut up," said Lindfield. "Are you all right? I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. Christ. I'm sorry."

For one moment, Richard thought he was apologizing for having called him back from the world beyond the temple.

Lindfield was terrified, solicitous, desperately worried. He had obviously never almost killed anyone before. As he walked Richard up the stone steps to the matron's office, Lindfield explained that he had returned from the school tuck-shop, found Richard unconscious on the path, surrounded by curious boys, and had realized what was wrong. Richard rested for a little in the matron's office, where he was given a bitter soluble aspirin, from a huge jar, in a plastic tumbler of water, then was shown in to the Headmaster's study.

"God! But you look scruffy, Grey," said the Headmaster, puffing irritably on his pipe. "I don't blame young Lindfield at all. Anyway, he saved your life. I don't want to hear another word about it."

"I'm sorry," said Grey.

"That will be all," said the Headmaster, in his cloud of scented smoke.

"Have you picked a religion, yet?" asked the school chaplain, Mr. Aliquid.

Richard shook his head. "I've got quite a few to choose from," he admitted.

The school chaplain was also Richard's biology teacher. He had once taken Richard's biology class, fifteen thirteen-year-old boys and Richard, just twelve, across the road, to his little house opposite the school. In the garden Mr. Aliquid had killed, skinned and dismembered a rabbit, with a small, sharp knife. Then he'd taken a footpump and blown up the rabbit's bladder like a balloon, until it had popped, spattering the boys with blood. Richard threw up, but he was the only one who did.

"Hmm," said the chaplain.

The chaplain's study was lined with books. It was one of the few masters' studies that was in any way comfortable.

"What about masturbation. Are you masturbating excessively?" Mr. Aliquid's eyes gleamed.

"What's excessively?"

"Oh. More than three or four times a day, I suppose."

"No," said Richard. "Not excessively."

He was a year younger than anyone else in his class; people forgot about that sometimes.

Every weekend he traveled to North London to stay with his cousins, for barmitzvah lessons taught by a thin, ascetic cantor, frummer frummer than than frum frum, a cabbalist and keeper of hidden mysteries onto which he could be diverted with a well-placed question. Richard was an expert at well-placed questions.

Frum was orthodox, hardline Jewish. No milk with meat, and two washing machines for the two sets of plates and cutlery. was orthodox, hardline Jewish. No milk with meat, and two washing machines for the two sets of plates and cutlery.

Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk.

Richard's cousins in North London were frum frum, although the boys would secretly buy cheeseburgers after school and brag about it to each other.

Richard suspected his body was hopelessly polluted already. He drew the line at eating rabbit, though. He had eaten rabbit, and disliked it, for years before he figured out what it was. Every Thursday there was what he believed to be a rather unpleasant chicken stew for school lunch. One Thursday he found a rabbit's paw floating in his stew, and the penny dropped. After that on Thursdays he filled up on bread and butter.

On the underground train to North London he'd scan the faces of the other passengers, wondering if any of them were Michael Moorcock.

If he met Moorcock he'd ask him how to get back to the ruined temple.

If he met Moorcock he'd be too embarrassed to speak.

Some nights, when his parents were out, he'd try to phone Michael Moorcock.

He'd phone directory enquiries, and ask for Moorcock's number.

"Can't give it to you, love. It's ex-directory."

He'd wheedle and cajole, and always fail, to his relief. He didn't know what he would say to Moorcock if he succeeded.

He put ticks in the front of his Moorcock novels, on the By The Same Author page, for the books he read.

That year there seemed to be a new Moorcock book every week. He'd pick them up at Victoria station, on the way to barmitzvah lessons.

There were a few he simply couldn't find-The Stealer of Souls, Breakfast in the Ruins,-and eventually, nervously, he ordered them from the address in the back of the books. He got his father to write him a cheque.

When the books arrived they contained a bill for twenty-five pence: the prices of the books were higher than originally listed. But still, he now had a copy of The Stealer of Souls The Stealer of Souls, and a copy of Breakfast in the Ruins Breakfast in the Ruins.

At the back of Breakfast in the Ruins Breakfast in the Ruins was a biography of Moorcock that said he'd died of lung cancer the year before. was a biography of Moorcock that said he'd died of lung cancer the year before.

Richard was upset for weeks. That meant there wouldn't be any more books, ever.

"That fucking biography. Shortly after it came out I was at a Hawkwind gig, stoned out of my brain, and these people kept coming up to me, and I thought I was dead. They kept saying You're dead, you're dead.' Later I realised that they were saying, 'But we thought you were dead'."-Michael Moorcock, in conversation. Notting Hill, 1976 There was the Eternal Champion, and then there was the Companion to Champions. Moonglum was Elric's companion, always cheerful, the perfect foil to the pale prince, who was prey to moods and depressions.

There was a multiverse out there, glittering and magic. There were the agents of balance, the Gods of Chaos, and the Lords of Order. There were the older races, tall, pale and elfin, and the Young Kingdoms, filled with people like him. Stupid, boring, normal people.

Sometimes he hoped that Elric could find peace, away from the Black Sword. But it didn't work that way. There had to be the both of them-the white prince and the black sword.

Once the sword was unsheathed it lusted for blood, needed to be plunged into quivering flesh. Then it would drain the soul from the victim, feed his or her energy into Elric's feeble frame.

Richard was becoming obsessed with sex; he had even had a dream in which he was having sex with a girl. Just before waking he dreamed what it must be like to have an orgasm-it was an intense and magical feeling of love, centred on your heart; that was what it was, in his dream.

A feeling of deep, transcendent, spiritual bliss.

Nothing he experienced ever matched up to that dream.

Nothing even came close.

The Karl Glogauer in Behold the Man Behold the Man was not the Karl Glogauer of was not the Karl Glogauer of Breakfast in the Ruins Breakfast in the Ruins, Richard decided; still, it gave him an odd, blasphemous pride to read Breakfast in the Ruins Breakfast in the Ruins in the school chapel, in the choir stalls. As long as he was discreet no-one seemed to care. in the school chapel, in the choir stalls. As long as he was discreet no-one seemed to care.

He was the boy with the book. Always and forever.

His head swam with religions: the weekend was now given to the intricate patterns and language of Judaism; each week-day morning to the wood-scented, stained-glass solemnities of the Church of England; and the nights belonged to his own religion, the one he made up for himself, a strange, multicoloured pantheon in which the Lords of Chaos (Arioch, Xiombarg and the rest) rubbed shoulders with the Phantom Stranger from the DC Comics and Sam the trickster-Buddha from Zelazny's Lord of Light Lord of Light, and vampires and talking cats and ogres, and all the things from the Lang coloured Fairy books: in which all mythologies existed simultaneously, in a magnificent anarchy of belief.

Richard had, however, finally given up (with, it must be admitted, a little regret), his belief in Narnia. From the age of six-for half his life-he had believed devoutly in all things Narnian; until, last year, rereading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for perhaps the hundredth time, it had occurred to him that the transformation of the unpleasant Eustace Scrub into a dragon, and his subsequent conversion to belief in Aslan the lion, was terribly similar to the conversion of St. Paul, on the road to Damascus; if his blindness were a dragon ... for perhaps the hundredth time, it had occurred to him that the transformation of the unpleasant Eustace Scrub into a dragon, and his subsequent conversion to belief in Aslan the lion, was terribly similar to the conversion of St. Paul, on the road to Damascus; if his blindness were a dragon ...

This having occurred to him, Richard found correspondences everywhere, too many to be simple coincidence.

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualism; it was not that Richard had any problems with believing in ghosts-Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything everything-but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innocent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.

At least the Elric stories were honest. There was nothing going on beneath the surface there: Elric was the etiolated prince of a dead race, burning with self-pity, clutching Stormbringer, his dark-bladed broadsword-a blade which sang for lives, which ate human souls and which gave their strength to the doomed and weakened albino.

Richard read and re-read the Elric stories, and he felt pleasure each time Stormbringer plunged into an enemy's chest, somehow felt a sympathetic satisfaction as Elric drew his strength from the soul-sword, like a heroin addict in a paperback thriller with a fresh supply of smack.

Richard was convinced that one day the people from Mayflower Books would come after him for their twenty-five pence. He never dared buy any more books through the mail.

J.B.C. MacBride had a secret.

"You mustn't tell anyone."

"Okay."

Richard had no problem with the idea of keeping secrets. In later years he realized that he was a walking repository of old secrets, secrets that his original confidantes had probably long forgotten.

They were walking, with their arms over each other's shoulders, up to the woods at the back of the school.

Richard had, unasked, been gifted with another secret in these woods: it is here that three of Richard's schoolfriends have meetings with girls from the village, and where, he has been told, they display to each other their genitalia.

"I can't tell you who told me any of this."