He cursed and left the tea-room, paying the nightmare waitress; she worked the old-fashioned cash register as if she were issuing tickets for a dubious show in that other part of London he sometimes frequented. Being in so much of a hurry, he even forget to retrieve the large gratuity he had left under the bone china saucer: it had been intended of course for the waitress with the sunny smile who, like him, had taken such a sudden departure into the gloom of dusk. Perhaps intent on catching a train before it left. Air-raid sirens permitting.

The view through the c.o.c.kpit window-as the vast Circular-Saw penetrated the cavity-walls of Inner Earth-was not so much a panorama of the reality beyond the window but of a moment of strobe-history that the pilot who peered through the window was undergoing as he instinctively tussled with the controls.

His dream of strobe-history showed twin Earths that were on a collision course-through the wide vista of his vision. Instead of creating a huge explosion, they blended or merged in the same way that, once upon a time, the legendary man-city, having begun to bury itself beyond its own foundations, eventually encountered another city with initial splintering ricochets of architecture and hard core but then blended with it-thus making two places the same place but different.

The pilot of the Saw quickly regathered his present moment uncorrupted by any dream of strobe-history just in time to address the situation of a Drill making towards him.

My custom was to explore secondhand bookshops at the slightest opportunity. It needed guile to shake off Beth and the children-but, one day in Whof.a.ge, I had a rare success in subterfuge. We were about to traipse around a toy museum and, without giving them a chance to reply, I told them that I would be back in half an hour to conduct them onwards to the various amus.e.m.e.nts in the 'Klaxon City' amus.e.m.e.nt arcade that needed coins in the slots.

I had indeed spotted a wondrous curiosity shop on the approach to the toy museum, hidden to the view of my wife and children (and of most other visitors, too). But my expert tunnel vision having picked it out down a Sunnemo-less alley, I was convinced by my instinct that it would purvey a veritable trove of dusty books. And I was not mistaken. However, it proved not very different from what I imagined the toy museum to be, since in every corner there seemed to reside many ancient jacks-in-the-box, china dolls, jingle-jangly shoes, pop-up nursery rhyme books and colourful whips and spinning-tops-but here they were for sale rather than show. If I had known, I could have killed two birds with one stone by bringing my family here.

The books themselves were a dream. First editions galore with lightly pencilled prices on the fly-leaves, some even within the range of my purse. Others, of course, not. Many were Victorian, but mostly hardbacks (with original dust-wrappers) from the twenties, thirties and forties, children's dreams and adults' fancies.

I was surprised to discover an old stamp alb.u.m: full of colourful squares, oblongs and triangles (and even one large colourful trapezium of a stamp from Agraska), carefully affixed with sticky paper hinges. I imagined a child (now grown into an adult more long in the tooth even than myself) meticulously wielding tweezers, positioning his prize specimens at the optimum angle and sitting back sighing with pride. This boy would have eschewed even birdsong or playtime in the sunshine for such a close-ordered activity.

My surprise was generated by the fact that such an article was stacked with the secondhand books, bulging as it was with well-hung stamps. Some of the stamps looked "rare", but many must have been gathered together from a lucky-dip selection which children used to obtain by sending off a coupon from the Tiger or Lion or Eagle comics. The stamps used to come "on approval". But there were some examples of stamps in this alb.u.m that I had not been able to even dream about when I was that age.

I covetted that alb.u.m more than anything I could recall covetting before. I held a whole childhood between my fingers. But there was no price pencilled, presumably because the fly-leaf was covered with a highly stylised map of the surface world. So, that was where Saar was. And Andorra, San Marino, British Honduras, Monaco and St Helena. n.o.body ever seemed surprised that most of these small places had outlandishly large postage stamps. I looked round for the shop counter, fully expecting a wizened old man to be stationed behind it-one with pipe, toothbrush moustache and eyes bleary from poring over small print. But this was a day full of surprises-since a girl of surpa.s.sing beauty smiled at me from behind the counter, appearing as cool as her flowingly diaphonous dress of white...

I collected my family who were impatiently kicking their heels outside the museum. Apparently, it was a natural history exhibition. Why I had originally thought it was a toy museum, I could not now fathom. What was abundantly clear, my wife and children had been bored and decidedly crotchety at my lengthy absence from their party. I blamed it on having been cut short and the nearest convenience a fair step away. And it had not been a particular pleasure, I a.s.sured them, standing next to all those sweaty individuals and the many 'nervous little people' who followed us around in Whof.a.ge. But my family soon oozed forgiveness when I changed my remaining ten bob note for 120 pennies at the 'Klaxon City' arcade. The old wizened fellow who sat behind the towers of copper quarter p coins in the change booth actually winked at me. He looked decidedly unhinged.

As I tried my luck on the fortune-wheel, which was supposed to give some inkling into one's future love-life and luck, I suddenly wondered why stamp collections always used to be conducted by short-a.r.s.e boys who did not have many friends with whom to go scrumping apples or building dens. I could not possibly imagine those unattainable angelic girls of my lonely childhood abandoning their china dolls and dressing-up hampers for such close-ordered activities as mounting stamps.

The fortune-wheel did not record any romance in store for me. In fact, the bad luck it indicated seemed to start with me somehow losing the stamp alb.u.m soon afterwards. Like the beautiful ghost who sold it to me, it must have slipped through my fingers.

For an indeterminate period, Greg, Beth and their two children, Arthur and Amy, toured the streets of Whof.a.ge, but instead of relaxing during this interlude in their train journey they were beset with an antipodal angst which involved thoughts that they may not get back to the station before the train left for Sunnemo. This was an undercurrent that made all their activities fraught with an anxiety, an anxiety that soon grew tentacles (giving new worries leg room) including one significant nagging doubt that they had already travelled to Sunnemo before and finished their lives there during a dream-but now the anxiety became more relevant because they feared that that was no dream and the real dream was this their seemingly endless temporary stay-over in Whof.a.ge. If the latter is a dream, why worry? Dreams can't hurt you. Or so the parents told the children.

Other factors lengthening the tentacles of angst included the so-called 'nervous little people' that seemed to plague them at every turning of the city. They were seeking ident.i.ties and, if this were a dream after all, then ident.i.ties could be stolen and used elsewhere. So one remedy of an angst as a dream had soon created a new angst! These creatures-of human persuasion-nevertheless chirruped like chickflicks on continuous strobe. One or two even sported beaks instead of lips.

Another tentacle of angst: Sunnemo was looming closer and if it grew even closer as a dull light source or even a surrogate nemo-moon, then there would be no need to return to the train to reach their destination at all! Greg decided to shrug off the angst and ensure he and his family at least pretended to themselves that they were enjoying their stay-over. Pleased, too, to see that Sudra's Shoes Inc. had a branch here as well as in Klaxon.

Edith sat in the Proustian arbour, holding the stalk of a flower pressed between the backs of her hands, the red bloom of involuted petals held at eye-level.

She posed for both painting and photograph, unsure as yet which of them would do her full justice. She held the angles of her body at their optimum level whilst masking the ugly birthmark on her forehead with the bloom.

The painter was standing by an easel at the far end of the inner garden, the long brush held aloft, his artistic thought processes apparently taking their time to percolate, and the palette upon his other arm mounted with wormcasts of corruptive colour, all chosen for Edith's complexion.

Further over to the side, where the neatly manicured topiary began, there was a tall tripod bearing an instrument with a retractable snout and a black cape flowing from its rear and the legs of a man curved over from under the cape and a bulb to squeeze and a flash like lightning and...

Arthur, as a small boy, shut the pop-up book with a crack. He twiddled with his left ear absent-mindedly.

The front of the board covers was decorated with the only abstract image in the whole volume and, with the dying light of the nursery fire, he discerned a pattern more suitable for carpets than murals.

The book had been left with him as a peace offering by his parents who had departed in a horse-drawn carriage for an evening at the opera. He had heard the clatter of hooves disappearing into the echoey Klaxon distance, leaving him alone in the house-or worse than alone, since the only other person left behind under the same roof was the family's ancient nanny. She sat in the corner by the fitful log fire, knitting-needles clicking, her asthmatic lungs rasping. He watched the sometimes insect-like, sometimes bird-like silhouette moving only very slightly in unfaithful rhythm to her deft st.i.tching.

He wanted to be a dare-devil. He wanted to stir her into realising that it was too dark in the nursery, since she could have blindly knitted on forever-and that her little charge was in danger of being s.n.a.t.c.hed by the Angel Megazanthus who, to the boy's certain knowledge, lurked up the chimney.

So he broke wind. And a distant siren fortuitously boosted the noise.

She jolted in her wicker chair. Her neck creaked, turning a stern gaze upon him.

"Ptcha! There are places for such noises."

"I know, Nanny Edith, but my tummy-ache-and the fire's going out-and I'm worried sick about the darkness."

"I know what will sluice out your belly, young man, a good dose..."

At that moment, soot billowed from the chimney, as silently as an army's secret striking of camp at the dead of night. It caught his eyes, so he heard no more of her mad ramblings. She did however absent-mindedly brighten up the end of a candlewick.

He returned to the pop-up book to bury himself in its pages, whilst yearning to hear the hooves which bore his parents homeward from the Klaxon opera. He kept at least one ear p.r.i.c.ked, despite the utter dread of what he expected to hear with it. Nanna's bones cracked loudly as she lifted herself from the wicker-claws of the chair to attend to the fire, perhaps to entice a few more flames from the glowing ruby embers...

...and Edith, elsewhere, elsewhen, had by now lowered the glowing bloom and positioned it between the points of her bosom.

That part of the face bearing the stain of the birthmark lacked features and, possibly, substance, too.

It was as if one could look straight through her head at the point which oriental mystics had once believed to be the site of man's invisible Third Eye or, at least, an optical illusion of one. And through it, could be seen the blacker eye approaching from behind.

The hair of the painter's brush was known intuitively to be manufactured from a dictator's moustache. He had dipped it in a generous mix of strange paints. It formed a colour but at the same time not any colour under the Zodiac.

The tripod camera had lifted the photographer's legs into the air like wings and was in the violent process of flapping around the garden, a huge insect-bird of a creature, clicking insanely. Nowhere to go, it could not bring itself to halt the wild careering-until it became entangled in the ivy trellises of the arbour. There it flinched for a few seconds, with fitful bursts of fire from its black beak and the squeezings of purple venom for a naughty boy's tummy, until it died...

...like the fire in the grate.

Nanna Edith had by now lit the oil lamp hanging above the boy's cot. He could vaguely see the remains of a dead ent.i.ty woven in and out of the wire fireguard. In disgust, he threw the book towards the fire and, despite falling short, it proceeded to pop and crack. He made his way to the cot to crawl between the covers. And, then, while he dozed, he imagined he heard hooves clopping on distant cobbles.

As Nanna bent down to give him a little peck on his petally cheek, he heard her churning, phlegm-clogged breath and saw straight through her head-and through this head he saw a bloated spider-bird glistening in the crook of the ceiling. The little boy squeezed his eyes tight, praying for sleep; even nightmares would be preferable to such reality...

...and the man into whom Arthur was eventually to grow woke with a start. It was freezing in the garret and he had a job to do. Not before fulsomely farting, he quickly dressed in darkness, picked up his heavy-duty paintbrushes and departed into the shivering Klaxon square, to await the arrival of the bosses with the ladders. He stamped his feet to rid himself of pins and needles. He felt along his hardening top lip-yes, coming on nicely. Even rind-growth was, in itself, a would-be ent.i.ty.

The Sunnemo dawn, when it painstakingly arrived, was colourless and cold. The hooves of the decorators on the cobbles could just be heard.

The man's ambition was to paint on palace walls in the manner of Hieronymous Bosch, whilst a thousand Popes screamed inside.

And nurseries exploded within him as the brain bloomed red. A bogus waking fetched the thud of his parents' hooves clopping up the stairs. He prayed they couldn't have fruited each other with him in the first place. The real frighteners, however, would come when the little boy stopped dreaming.

Though I never lived during that kingdom of war-the one that blitzed London-I could easily imagine the colourlessness (or, rather, variegated brown) in every wet afternoon, prefiguring the contrast of night's man-made lightning. Seances were being held amid the chintz of every blitz-free sitting-room; tears being shed in every outhouse; tender hands held, over and over again, in every beach hut and every park.

Well, for every every, amen. I shook my shoulders-not a shrug as such; more of a shudder. I tramped the back-end streets, wondering if I had been transported in time to those very afternoons when shapes emerging in fragile freedom from the night's shelters (the Underground included) became the slowly nudging together of lightly-fleshed ghosts in the hope that something worthwhile or tangible would emerge by this serendipity of touch. Ghosts, I guessed, were to be everybody, even you and me.

This was to have been a poem. But it felt like prose fiction, with all the trappings of a plot, albeit missing a beginning, a middle or an end, if not all three. I could have gutted this fiction of its protagonists, but then n.o.body would have been there to report its waywardness.

I met Sudra in one of the many parks where courting couples were more colourless than most, if less tearful. She was someone with whom I a.s.sumed an immediate mutuality. She smiled, wiping away her tears with a burnt hankie. Collateral damage, she said, from last night's bombs. I didn't take umbrage at her false modernity. I knew she joked; this was then, not now.

A fleeting image of an evening when Sudra and I did walk under a fleet of doodlebugs-and suddenly a thing like a plum-pudding bursting with a fiery sauce came down and a lot of gla.s.s fell out of the windows on to us.

"Good job we were not there": my first ever set of words to Sudra upon meeting in the park. My second: "Ghosts were simply the future."

"Ghosts will forever be the past," were my sweet Sudra's last.

But truth told no rhymes.

Crazy Lope's head was a camera, or it seemed like it to him; he saw everything as if framed for a motion picture. As a film, he had been given an adult certificate when he reached a relatively young age, but now, with the years piling up on top of each other, even that was not sufficient to cover the scenes he sought out.

One day, Lope discovered a backstreet of his home town he had not previously explored in which there was a tall disused warehouse with a faintly glowing signboard on the vestigial gantries. He could just peer through the misted up lens and see the letters spelling out SUDRA'S SHOES INC. He tried to pan round but his feet were rooted to the crumbling pavement and his neck had stiffened: he felt a movement on his shoulders as if a creature had lodged there, squinting through a slot in the back of his head. Whatever it was, claws were penetrating his overcoat and, finally, his flesh... fastening on to the blade bones like steel. He tried to shake it off. It was all well and good to imagine being a camera but here he was actually being used as one by some frightful inhabitant of the night.

His eyeb.a.l.l.s revolved in the sockets, and the warehouse sign flickered out of freeze frame, scrolling like an old-fashioned black & white TV of the fifties. He desperately needed vertical hold: but that was the least of his worries: before long, he found himself going into cinemascope and edges of the scene he had previously not been able to view encroached and fluttered in from the sides: things like wriggling hairs and, then, insect feelers which often used to blemish projections upon the flea-pit screens of the sixties; the technicolor oozed back, and a blood-red haze gave the whole vista a dream-like quality; like speech bubbles in comic strips, this was a token of dissolving ready-reckoner reality, a symbol of beliefs being suspended.

The whole vistavision screen was now acrawl with translucent bird-wings beating faster than the strobe of the frames. He could no longer make any a.s.sumptions about his own sanity. He turned his eyes downwards as far as they would go without detaching the optic nerve, to see his cylindrical nose extending forth from his face: zooming in on the entrance of the warehouse: where he saw a camera filming him filming it: but surely it couldn't be a real one, because it seemed to grow wonky and misshapen the more he stared back at it. However, he was pleased on discovering eventually that it was a female camera: but, as their noses came together across the street in some primitive ritual of a kiss, all he could see was the utter emptiness of his own backscreen soul.

That's when the thing on his back extricated itself from Crazy Lope's bones and scuttled off somewhere, abandoning the tickertape of the film to flap uselessly... as it reeled off the spool and tangled up the inside of his skull. Since it left no other room in there, his brain slithered out of the ear like a white worm in search of a bird.

The Saw circled: seeing the nightmare of ident.i.ties and words blurring upon Inner Earth's texture of vexed text.

Angevin angevin sudra sunnemo agraska sunnemo mike amy arthur alter-nemo off-detritus man-city whof.a.ge klaxon siren-yellow angevin core hawling hawling hawling horla susan sudra hilda ogdon edith clare amy dognahnyi lope lope G.o.dspanker ogdon nemo sunnemo balsam clacton klaxon london weirdmonger blake swift dylan thomas mike jules verne proust sunnemo nemo-moon lovecraft hataz tho azathoth king in yellow angevin.

And gradually, as Greg and Beth (and their two children) concluded their stressful stay-over tour holiday of Whof.a.ge, not only their own human shape of deep and realisable characterisation emerged from the shuttling semantics, phonetics, graphology of that very italic list but also they saw-within the circular silhouettes of these laconic words-the emerging spectre of the halting-station and its still steaming burnished train of ratcheted carriages ready to take them on to Earth's Core via the customised hawling-tunnels. The antipodal angst.

If only one looked properly at any form emerging from traditional childish scribble, one would see the Angel Megazanthus also beginning slowly to glide from the adumbration or limning of meanings even if the very words 'Angel Megazanthus' were not overtly included as part of that once pencil-annotated list. They were, as words, however, contained in previous and later syntactical blocks of vellumed vexture.

Stub of pencil: "Most memories are false, but when I am faced with the only true memory, which is death, I have then no need of it."

My wife Beth and I have been married happily for as long as my receding memory stretches. Although being overbearingly carpet-proud, she actually forgot to empty the vacuum.

Now, in the quiet evening of our years, she has taken to strange doings. They are obviously harder to explain than merely to describe, so I shall only attempt the latter in the hope of finding a key to the mystery in the fullness of time.

Recently, with us both fast asleep following the customary early nights, she has woken up and extended her housework through the small hours, only to tell me in the mornings that daylight can only reveal the normal jobs. At night, she maintains, different dust emerges, slops and moulds gone unnoticed during standard waking hours.

"But, my dear, you're being absurd. I've heard of housewives spending all their days making everything spick and span, but disturbing your valuable beauty sleep...!"

"You think I'm mad, I know, Greg."

"No, of course I don't. But there's not nearly enough to be done in this house to keep you busy, anyway. It's only a two-up-two-down, after all. There's no need at all to get up in the dark when all G.o.dfearing people are asleep."

Then she repeats her claims about the night being more suitable for seeking out the otherwise unseen corners where real dirt worth its salt collected... not your mealy-mouthed daytime muck which masqueraded as encrusted food or merely as motes stirred by sunbeams.

So, I have decided to see for myself.

Often, she has been up and about without me having even broken the rhythm of my snores. Tonight, though, I tried to prop up my eyelids with the matchsticks of will-power, listening to her breaths becoming heavier and with longer gaps between. I heard the church clock striking ten which was more often than not the hour that acted as alarm for the Angel Megazanthus to spread its wings upon us both.

I pinched my lips between the teeth, almost to the gums... also attached a length of thread between one of her big toes and one of mine. She tossed fitfully, making the job harder than it would otherwise have been. Eventually, we were tethered in dreams...

It was no dream, however, when she awoke within the death-lull that night creates between both margins of nothing. My toe almost parted company with the bone which held it out like a stringless puppet. I followed her on the tips of my feet, wincing away the anguish in them.

Firstly, she proceeded to the broom cupboard under the stairs, whilst I remained on the landing looking down at her black felt house-cap. Several jointed broom-handles came out like giant spider-legs kicking.

Abruptly, I had the crazy notion that she must always spend the small hours crazily hoping to earn pin-money as a chimney-sweep in the neighbouring back-to-backs. That would explain everything, except the craziness itself.

Before I returned desultorily to our bed, she had bustled into the front parlour, cooing with delight at the layers of minced shadow she expected herself to sweep up.

I now lie cross-limbed, unmercifully awake. I can discern the still dented pillow next my own, for there is a dimness thrown by the street light feebly flashing outside the bedroom window in makeshift pleas for repair.

Almost without thinking, I lift up my own pillow and retrieve the old toothbrush I keep under there for lost fairies. I poke this into one of my ears and out the other, thus scattering dust in the air like dirty Angevin powder.

There is nothing I would not do for my dear wife, in these her days of crazy old age. In this way, I at least keep my own brain bright as a b.u.t.ton while I leaf through the alb.u.m of memories of our honeymoon in Whof.a.ge.

The train for Sunnemo eventually careered (as from a blowpipe version of the deadly sound-torch) through and out of the final tunnel into the empty light of Earth's most inward terminus: a train with many names on board, if not the people attached to the names. Absent or present, however, all of them managed to scream in sheer terror while each name was peeled from their skin along with the feathers themselves... and the pomegranate rind of the Core was penetrated by the final steaming thrust of forward rocket-motion from the front of the Hawler-train's spinning saw-drill.

Hataz and Tho yearned between the tears with which their eyes stared each other out before the Core's final implosion sucked them towards a nostalgic state of birdsong and childhood where they'd first fallen in love: he amid his own self-mixed music and she wearing, for the first time, her beautifully new overland shoes. Tricking the Above, the Below and the Across.

I cried more than most-as even these young lovers had become nervous little people.

Azathoth, the real name of the Angel, smiled.

Then laughed...

They all had names, but none knew any but his own. So, when one of them was accidentally lost in the dark, the others wondered what to call out.

And the lost one wondered whether to answer. It happened after one of those early frosts that often took sun-worshippers by surprise.

There was a summer which childhood made endless, when shafts of sunshine slanted across the meadows like the golden eye-sight of Ancient G.o.ds. But this particular summer became accused of issuing a false promise akin to everlasting youth-until one among the disporters, called Lope de Vega, said that he knew all along that such sunny days could never have lasted, despite their seeming endlessness.

The questions with which Lope de Vega was consequently faced came thick and fast. Why had he not warned the others, if he knew? Surely, the unexpected frost had taken him by equal surprise? No, he maintained, since he had not considered it necessary to taint their holiday in the bright warm sun. Would they have otherwise raced between the makeshift see-saws and the prehistoric elfin hidey-holes, with such carefree spirit? Would they, indeed, have been able to make their laughter heard above the tree-tops? The sky could never be blue, Lope de Vega maintained, unless it had thermals of real laughter to feed upon and help it clear the clouds. And he laughed, as if to prove that he at least could still raise such laughter.

The others stared back at him, victims of their own hopes... until, from within, as it were, they reacted to the burgeoning need to work their joints, not in play, but in labour. Shelter was the byword, but none of them actually knew the implications of its meaning. They possessed some inkling that they needed to study the ramshackle hidey-holes which had previously been simple ingredients of their adventure playground. They cl.u.s.tered chatterless within the leaning shadows of cross-section chimneystacks which, for some odd reason, had originally been built taller than the trees. Many pointed and gesticulated-but none knew the reason for their own excitement. It was merely a component of their thought patterns which everyone accepted without the one obvious next step of asking... why?

Then Lope de Vega, who had known all the time that this would happen, started to scale the nearest chimneystack, adopting a courage which should become a legend if any were left to remember it. The brickwork groaned as he neared the bright orange pots ranked along the rim of the stack, the climber's actions reminding many of the onlookers about games which they had once played amid the branches of the trees. His shape cast a lengthening shadow across the meadow. Once aloft, he straddled the pots and called out his own name... as if n.o.body had heard it before. The others called back and received only echoes for their pains.