Lurching in my seat, a sense of vertigo; a hole opened in the world, pitching me down into its depths...

Grasping the keyboard, nonsense smearing itself across the page. Shivering, so cold...

A sensation of frost at my fingertips, sealing them to the keys. Laughing, slumping back in my chair. Not the first time I've allowed my work to run away with me; so deep, so immersed in it; sometimes dreaming more real than waking.

Several pages of work, though I don't recall half of them. Glancing at my phone. No missed calls; still twenty minutes before I have to meet Trevor. Good.

Aching to be back there; to know where my child is going and why; who it will meet, what it will find in the desolation.

Soon, sweetheart; I swear.

                                                                                                         *

I swear.

A cursory rummage through cupboards and freezer; enough raw material to prepare a Rogan Josh: a pair of lamb shanks, a tuperware box of my own spice mix, tomatoes, onions, coconut milk. Setting it singing; to slowly render down through the day (the prospect of him coming home, luxuriating in the scent of spices, roasting lamb juices, the pleasure that will come...enough to rouse a smile, and far more).

Like my imagined Winter, like the child that wanders there; something I lose myself in; the processes of peeling and chopping, of cooking out the spices, of setting the lamb to slow-roast...allowing me to drift; not to return, not yet, for fear I can't find my way back through the snow.

Other places; other whens and wheres...

Trevor, waiting at his flat, no doubt watching the clock every other second, counting down to when I buzz at his door.

Trevor, with his desperate, unspoken hopes; his obsessions and adorations.

Sweating, breathing hard; in need of air by the time I step back from the stove. Scribbled notes in case Alistair comes home early or for some lunch:

Lamb slow-roasting. DO NOT turn off oven.

Endless kisses.

Endless.

                                                                                            *

Winter still calling, its chill in my thoughts; Autumn at my lips, my fingers. Not a bright day; no real dawn broken: heavy and overcast, clouds beaten blue by some celestial violence. Spots of rain in the air.

Wandering, lost as my sexless, story-devouring child, despite knowing my destination.

A beautiful day; dank and chill, a slurry of red and gold leaves in the gutters, swirling down the streets.

Rows of old, three storey town-houses, set back from the street on hillocks of earth and grass, many boarded up, in states of advancing disrepair. Weather-beaten “For Sale” or “For Rent” signs rising from their overgrown gardens, some torn up from their moorings or hacked down, left to sprawl amongst the weeds. Desirable properties, once upon a time; when people could afford such things.

Alistair and I lucky beyond belief; learning of the house from a friend of a friend; an estate agent, the current owner: Sophia Cawsen, letting us rent the place for a song and the promise of a few renovations, Alistair already in talks with her to arrange buying the place.

Buying a home. Waiting for my husband to get home from work. Impossibilities; fairy tales that my self of three years ago would have rejected for their absurdity. The dreams of others; never mine, never worthy or wanting of them.

Park and forest land across the way; paths that wind between trees and through fields to distant farms, across or beneath motorways and train tracks...paths known and alien; always a new way to walk, always calling.

A longer way to Trevor's, but unable to resist it; fishing my phone from my pocket as I cross the road, thumbing a brief text:

Might be a few mins later than expected. See you soon!

XX

Trevor's kisses far from endless.

                                                                                                 *

Not the only one chasing ghosts; sharing the path with other wanderers, no joggers or dog-walkers here. Only those in search of something even they likely can't name or define; avoiding my eyes, silently begging me not to say hello, to disrupt their communions of one.

More distinct, more real than these shades; these hollow-eyed and hooded strangers, my own ghosts; those that play and run and tumble between the trees, away from the path; that whimper and cry at the sting of nettles, the bites of thorns, the sight of their own blood.

The older species moving more slowly, more stiffly; not so bright to imagination's eye; grey where their former selves are lightning blue and burning amber; smeared and flickering where they flare and flow. Almost faceless; echoes of what once was; the strange, strange boy who came here to be away from the eyes and noise of all around him; away from the demands of friends and family and all the other stinking, bleating animals that confused him so. To walk unabashed and dreaming; to wonder at his own strangeness, the absurdities that tumbled from his every waking and dreaming thought. Those fantasies...flocking to me, now; clearer and more distinct than any shade of their creators:

Forgotten; the great dragon, coiled between the trees, molten stone and silver seeping from beneath its scales, from its great maw, slicking its worm-like way, its length winding from tree to tree, around the entire heights of some, its eyes half-lidded, flickering, smoke issung from its nostrils as it dreams. I remember...seeing it so clearly; the same species of projection that I stopped talking about to Mom and Dad, my sister...to anyone, for fear of what they might do; where they might send me. So clear, then as now; not flimsy and ephemeral, like an imagined thing, but as real as the fallen boughs in my path, as the magpies in the trees; the squirrels darting to and fro in the rain. Light seeping from beneath its eyelids, running in fluid rivulets down its horned cheeks. Not something merely encountered; something desired, that my adolescent self conjured, aching for his awkward, twisted, itching and too-tight human skin to be the delusion, the projection; the unwanted dream, for the dragon to be real, to wake and realise itself at last...

Others; a hunched, loping shape; a shadow against shadows, ragged and trailing tatters of its own densely furred hide...eyes swollen harvest moons in its lupine face, far too many, blazing in the surrounding air, orbiting its head as Lunar does the Earth. Many limbs, twitching and chittering like a spider's, its attention on me, as I trudge through the sludge and undergrowth, away from the path, inviting its suicidal hunger...

A lambent figure, striding upon great, goatish legs, the armour clasped to portions of its body seeming somehow grown rather than forged; too elaborately worked, too curvaceous and organic, to be anything crafted by human hands. A mane of silver hair trailing from beneath its beaked mask, multiple antlers breaking from its scalp, strung with dew-beaded spider webs, their weavers scurrying and dancing to the same rhythm as the entity itself, in its slender, jewelled hands, a wand or sceptre, every motion trailing light, its laughter echoed by others in the woods; others that come to dance, drawn by its joy...

So beautiful; all me and mine.

Smiling, almost laughing as I walk, hands in the pockets of my jacket, barely seeing the world, feeling the rain...

Snow. Still, silent cold. Sky blind and swollen, threatening another gale that might at last bury the world.

This park. These trees. These footworn pathways through the weeds and bracken. No wanderers here; no shades of reluctant humanity. Only statues of them; carcasses frozen in place, hands reaching up from beneath the snow like strange flowers, clutching at the sky, at the angels that were never there and will never come.

Barely feeling the cold, despite its lack of clothing. Whispers on the wind, rolling over the white, carrying suggestions of storms, stories of the dead but far from departed...

Fuck.

The walk supposed to clear my head; give me some respite. Barely feeling the rain, the grass softening to sludge beneath my feet, hearing the dogs that bark as I pass. The world a faded water colour, dim and distant; the shades that inhabit it impressionistic to the point of being indiscernible. Barely even recalling my way; destination as hazy as the rest. Grateful to be out, regardless; away from storms and whispers, away from...

Never. Of course, never. No way I can exorcise or divorce myself from it, any more than my blissfully ignorant child can the winter it was born to, that maybe it dreamed into being, maybe it precipitated; that maybe is its other, unwitting parent.

Knowing, in the strangest way; feeling me; a moth fluttering at its ear, a mote of pyre-ash orbiting its skull. Tossed on the currents of its confusion; the delirious curiosity at its own nature, the empty, ended world it has woken to.

Beyond the fields, now; stumbling as my sludge-slick feet make contact with concrete. The rain vicious, hammering against my head, streaming down my face.

Even those sensations vague, as though dreamed or remembered, rather than experienced here and now. Echoes of echoes of experience; some lingering thread of frayed childhood dreams, a rainy day lost in my sixth year of being, somehow embedded, resurging now, memory and fantasy and waking reality colliding: rain on my face, frost and snow in my mouth, cold fire behind my eyes.

Beyond the park, into the streets and neighbourhoods where the ghosts of my childhood still play. Hearing him, as I walk, the old streets and lanes and back alleys not much changed, since those times; new fencing, new coats of paint, gardens and houses more sealed away, now, more forbidden and fortress-like, the streets themselves quieter, less welcoming. My own ghosts agitating other memories, their games here, their flights and panics and strange fantasies giving way to returns home, to darkening evenings, to that evil, black pressure in the dead boy's mind...his Father's face, not flushed, but pale and still with fury, his Mother's...slack on the skull, eyes watery. Those of a terrified doe.

The child laughing as it finds them, protruding from the snow it kicks up, as though laid down out here together, in surrender to the inevitable winter. No longer furious, no longer vapid, but frozen in despair, tears shimmering like jewels on their cheeks.

Better. Away from proscribed paths, beneath trees, through long grasses, the air here...less tainted by civilisation, exhaust and frying fat and filthy concrete giving way to damp growth, old wood, rotting leaves...the funk of something dead and left to moulder amongst weeds and briars.

Others like the dead boy's Mother and Father; parents themselves, curled around the bodies of their babes, clutching them tight, as they never did until their hearts began to slow, until my winter claimed them. Siblings, cousins, lovers; perfect strangers clinging together in terror and despair. Frozen here, silent and unseen testaments to a world that was, that will never be again, for the lack of their love. Glittering pearls and jewels in place of their eyes, crystal tears on their cheeks. Whatever value they might have boasted beyond the aesthetic long since dissolved, gone the same way as the world they once believed so absolute, that they assumed unending; that nothing could undo.

The blonde-haired girl, on her knees in the snow, eyes upturned to the swollen Heavens, faint traces of a smile caught at the corners of her lips, star-dust sparkling in her hair, almost the same hue as the snow.

A wiry man whose torso is bared to the elements, mahogany skin rippling with acrobat's muscle, his crossed legs and bowed head lending him a priestly quality, as though he welcomed the winter that froze the blood in his veins, the thoughts in his shaved-bald head.

Pausing, catching my breath, laughing at my own absurdity; the sickness my imagination vomits up. Where the fuck does it come from? As though there's been a rupture in my mind since birth (maybe even before); an opening into other states and places, where the grey laws of this hold no sway. Where my stories seep from; not merely by-products of fevered mind, expressions of concern and neurosis I can't otherwise articulate, but living and alien things, parasites using me as their gateway into the world.

Ridiculous. I know, and yet, part of me refuses to entirely deny the notion...certainly how it sometimes feels, especially with pieces that obsess me like this one, that refuse to let me go, even beyond the bounds of the study where they're born.

Thirty five. Longer than he'd expected or hoped to live, at one time, not something he harped on or bemoaned. How many died before they even drew breath? Before they even fully coalesced in the womb?; How many more in the hours or days after sunlight, after cold, after pain?; More than any history could record, he was certain of that. Thirty five years... a miracle; five more than Christ. He wasn't certain he could have born any more; another year, another round of the same uncertainties and disappointments. Perhaps if he'd stayed out there, in the world, things would be different. Perhaps if...

A knock at the door, cushioned by the shower's patter, so like the rain, like the children, as though they'd finally eroded away the glass with their endless, endless tapping, now seeking entry to his skin and skull.

“Amber? Can I come in..?”

Aldwin, more familiar than Vanessa from the start; nowhere near as attentive, as technically competent; too much in his own head. Amber had always enjoyed his company the more; letting slide the little lapses; the tasks left undone, the checks left unmade. His company and conversation were enough.

“Come in.”

The man peeked his head around the door, eyes travelling over the small bathroom as though not knowing where to settle. Not for the first time, Amber wondered how the Hell he'd fallen into nursing.

“Hey, man... you got a...visitor out here.”

Amber raised his head, the water sluicing over him, over-long hair clinging to his face.

“A what?”

Aldwin had already retreated, the door clicking shut behind him. Amber's shoulders sagged. A visitor? Since when had they been allowing them outside of designated hours? Since when had they been allowing them without his say? Someone come to build bridges he'd taken pains to burn, no doubt. Who was it? Lydia? Trothero? So much left undone; projects and interests and deals...all left to flail, bleed out, whatever money might have come from them not a concern; the relationships that soured nowhere near as lamented as he might have thought.

Whoever the Hell it was, they could wait; he refused to go to them stinking.

Breathless by the time he'd finished, skin raw, scalp feeling half flayed by the fury with which he'd massaged it. Where the fuck were Vanessa and Aldwin? He couldn't call for them; lacked the breath, the spittle, the pins in his chest having become sea-urchin spines, the venom they pulsed far from anaesthetic.

The button. He'd never had cause to press it before; never slipped or lost his balance. He wasn't a fucking old man; could at least do this himself.

Rising from his seat, he fumbled along the wall until he came to the railing. Leaning his weight against it, he stepped out of the shower, onto the mat that had been supplied. Towels, talc, a comb for his hair. He made some effort to make himself look halfway presentable, though the horror story in the mirror could scarcely be made so without extensive special effects.

Dressed in one of the silken bathrobes he'd brought from home (much to the hospital's chagrin), he made his way to the door, steam issuing out as he opened it.

“Vanessa..?”

A figure at the window, a slender hand pressed to it, as though to comfort the ghosts in the rain. Almost enough to stop his breath, to tear his heart in two at last. He hadn't forgotten...not entirely. Those memories, that time...he'd buried them, waiting for her, not wanting to see, to know...not when he couldn't touch and taste what she'd shown him.

“Amber.”

Almost a whisper, not turning to look at him, her voice deep and resonant with an accent he couldn't place; different from the last time, not French, but faintly Arabic, like the skin she wore.

No words; those that rose in his throat strangling themselves in their banality, their absurdity. Only one; the only question that mattered:

“Why?”

She sighed, her fingers slipping down the window, trailing runnels through condensation. He staggered to the bed, unable to hold himself upright any longer. Sinking down onto it, he lay back, raising it so that he might sit up and see.

“I'm sorry...I heard you; I had to come.”

Beautiful, as ever; the face he glimpsed beneath hair that streamed like spun tar down her back and shoulders severe, not desirable by fashion model or movie star standards; too sculpted, too statuesque, but to him?; The only woman he'd ever desired, the only woman...

She turned away from the window, rubbing moisture between her fingers. Her hair shimmered, a scent filling his nostrils; spice and running water; frost on Autumn leaves...deep, deep wood.

Le Gevaudan...God, sweet Christ...he remembered her there; the first time he saw her; something...something that ruptured the world, that dissolved all presumption of it he'd ever held...

Green eyes, olive painted skin, elaborate rings and jewellery decorating her wrists and fingers. She wore a dress the same colour as the leaves she danced through in his mind; deep browns, muted ochres; ambers and yellows. She'd loved the Autumn; rain, frost; the promise of winter...

A smile, playing at the corners of her lips, no part of her still, as though she were constantly fighting the urge to break, to hurl herself through the glass, join the ghosts that danced beyond.

“Fifteen...years.”

Faint fire in her eyes, dark brows rising. “I know. I'm sorry; I never meant...”

He shook his head, closing his eyes.

“It doesn't matter...I don't have time for it, now.”

She drew closer, seating herself in the armchair beside the bed, her skirts whispering around her. He couldn't help himself from picturing the body beneath; how different it must be from the one he'd known; dark where that was pale, fulsome where the other was...

The painting smeared, becoming tatters and scribbles in his mind. A wasted effort, clearly; nothing about her still or certain; not even memories of her.

“Arienne.”

The smile blossomed, the fire in her eyes flaring. He'd seen that before; something familiar, when she'd first caught his eye, when he refused to run, when he didn't look away.

“It's...been a long time since anyone called me that.”

Names; as temporary and ephemeral as faces for her; things she wore and sloughed off whenever the potential or novelty softened. Despite her insistences, he'd always called her by the first he'd known her by; the first she'd sung to him, though not through words or breath.

The scent...deeper, now she was closer; not some applied perfume or bottled essence; her own, that she breathed and sweated; the sacred perfume of her body, her soul. Deep wood; Autumn rain, mist and chill...wandering, lost. Something in the mists; dark eyed, not black, like a wolf, but white, so pale as to be almost nothing...

“Who...are you, now?”

The smile died, her eyes closing. She looked to the closed door.

“Arienne will do; I always liked her.”

“So...did I.”

Miracles. Art. That's how he'd come across her; in the midst of them; sweating, breathing; shatting and swathed in them. The memory of it...simultaneously intense and distant; something he recalled more acutely than his Mother's face, then his eighteenth birthday; than the aftermath of his first fuck, cigarette, glass of wine. Insubstantial as a dream:

The wood, Le Gevaudan. He'd wandered there, much against the warnings of the locals -the residents of nearby villages, the monastery where he'd been given bed and board; from which he'd taken all that he could carry, and a little more besides-, losing himself.

There. Singing, though not to him; a song that seemed so familiar, but that he'd never heard before. Something that snared in him, tangling in his entrails, drawing him deep, deep...

Stumbling over rocks, through the trees, he found her. No attempt to hide or conceal himself. Why would he? Why would he not wish to be seen as he saw, though every, animal instinct; every conditioning of culture, of law, insisted that he should? No. He stumbled to her, through the freezing shallows of the small stream on whose banks she stood, reaching for her, murmuring snippets of her song...

Fingers at the window, more urgent, more desperate; the rain hammering down furiously, as it sometimes did for whole days; softening as he stirred, attention returning to the present.

He raised his hand. She hesitated, looking at it as though she might somehow contract the genetic abnormality unweaving the fibre of his heart. In truth, he was as reluctant, knowing what a touch from her could mean.

Warm, faintly trembling; nothing of the contact he'd once known. Why? Why did she hold herself back..?

“I can't stay. They...are close.”

Always, always; every day, every night he'd spent with her, moving; fleeing. Occasionally, they caught glimpses of those who followed; little more than men and women to his eye, but so much more to her. She'd made no effort to describe or explain them, insisting that it would be better for him if he didn't know. He'd not pressed her, content to be in her company; to be shown a little of what he'd witnessed on the riverbank, in the woods.

“Still...running?”

A sigh, a smile. “Forever. Until they or I stop. I won't; not ever.”

“Is that why..?”

She gripped his hand, silencing him.

“I couldn't...couldn't let you go, not without asking..?”

Time, shearing away; every moment she spent here, a risk, allowing them to draw closer. The question; hanging unspoken in the air between them.

He'd not even considered it; not in the most desperate moments following his prognosis, when he'd courted every quack and magician he could contact: That she might return to him; that she might somehow smell or hear his distress and come with her miracles, her Art...impossible. She was gone; the absence she'd left still raw, sucking like a wound.

He smiled, almost laughing for the first time in many months. He'd begged her, even long after she'd gone, abandoning him; calling into the night, in his own dreams, begging her to come and make him like her.

She could; he knew it, but had always refused; in the aftermath of lovemaking, in the midst of argument or confession...always.

No. You don't understand what you're asking for...

Undoubtedly; he could barely accept, let alone comprehend, the fact of her; that something could have stepped from nightmares, from the fevered fantasies of his adolescence, into waking reality. Before her, he would have condemned the very notion; insisted that sanity would slip and shatter before it allowed him to accept it. Not so; he'd acclimatised with surprisingly little in the way of trauma; no sputtered denials, no fits or catatonia; only escalating awe, a sense as of blooming behind his eyes, new contexts flowering with every moment he spent in her company.

The world, which she called The Waking, so much stranger than it had ever allowed him to believe; beyond the remit of any myth or conspiracy theory; any potential he'd read of in metaphysical or science fiction.

She'd done that to him; torn open his eyes, his mind; the briefest of glimpses, the most momentary taste, before abandoning him to old delusions, leaving him to wonder whether it had ever been experienced, or if he'd simply slipped into momentary delirium; a state so acute, so richly detailed, it couldn't be discerned from reality.

Perhaps the same occurred now, with body and mind on the precipice, waiting for one or both to fail.

He understood no better; nothing of her mystery, nor of the world that allowed her to be. The very thought of walking there, with her, again...beautiful, but terrifying. Another year, another decade...no. To Hell with it; he didn't want it anymore; not ghosts or rain or wandering or mystery. Not Art or love.

She knew, her hand leaving his, drawing away. He resisted the urge to call her back, his fingers closing on empty air, ragged nails biting into his palms.

A moment, a heartbeat longer; a look. He held it, suspending her as long as he could, not even daring to blink. Questions, so many that he ached to asked her; that he'd called or scribbled or painted, in the throes of drunkenness or fever; in chemical ecstasy. No more answers now as then.

He let them go, let her go, the absence she left behind more traumatic than the holes widening in hs heart.

Welcome lies, calling me home. Forgotten 'til now; this path, these shadows, this moonlight.

A figure bent over the fire, staring into it, extending a hand to run fingers through the flames. Remembering, after so long forgotten.

“Mother.” Straightening, sighing. My bastard brothers and sisters whispering in the shadows.

“Don't call me that. Not ever.” The fire in her hand, illuminating eyes in the night.

“What else should I call you?; It's what you are.” Never before, never so brave.

She laughs, glancing over her shoulder, the same fires in her eyes, hair rising and falling as though caught up in ocean tides.

A smile, shadows playing over her face, reducing it to a crone's sagging skin mask; leathery, densely lined, eyes little more than sunken pits.

Turning away, to the flower of blue and emerald flame in her clawed hand. Whispering to it; the same songs that once kindled me. Or similar.

Returning the bloom to the fire before it can swell, before what she has dreamed can be born. “I never should have been. You know that better than most.”

The first; her original mistake, her beloved abomination.

“No, you shouldn't.” Defiance; no longer a child. No longer afraid, though I know what she can do; that she'll turn me inside out with a thought, if the inclination takes her.

“You've grown. You've loved. I have...grandchildren, now?”

Three; Edmund, Samuel, Lucius. All brilliant, all dreamers.

“Do they...walk here?” Unable to keep the tremor from my voice, the thought of it almost too terrible to bear.

A smile, my siblings stirring in their nests of shadow. “Sometimes. I can't stop them, you know that.”

No, she can't, and neither can I. “But you can watch. You can make sure they wake again.”

The thing she consigned to the fire writhing, swelling; a mewl emerging from the flames. Reaching into them, caressing its barely substantial form. Hisses and chitters of welcome from the dark.

“I can. Assuming that's what they want. You've always had a...conflated sense of what I can do here. The wood is not mine, child; it isn't anyone's.”

Old fury, old resentments; the same that drove me from here the first time, when I was barely a youth. A bitter wind stirring the leaves and grass beneath my feet. My brothers and sisters recoiling, hissing in sudden hostility. Eyes alight, teeth glinting.

“I won't let them come to harm, you understand me?”

The woman seeming to flicker like the flames; a reflection on water. Many faces, many facets: the crone, the fertility idol, the storm goddess.

All of them known; all Mother to me, in their own fashions. The thing in the fire reaching for her with boneless, gelid limbs, demanding her embrace.

“I thought you said you should never have been..?” Others approaching, shedding the shadows cloaking them, exposing themselves in the firelight. Reflections of what I might have been, given other Fathers: children of rain and frost and wind; of flame and fungus, of beasts and shadows. Children born of little more than her own idle dreams, nightmares that seeped out, polluting and transforming the wood, making it perilous for all that wander there.

Beasts, beauties; monsters and miracles. Creatures seemingly stitched together from the shadow they emerge from, others from wet sludge and mouldering leaves. A worm-thing, knotted and writhing on itself, a loping, black-pelted lycanthrope. Others less defined; elemental, ephemeral; aspects of the wood itself. A figure of smoke and embers, shifting form and sex as it stalks to the fireside. Another of rain and mist, causing the soil to fruit where it walks. Many-limbed, swollen bulks descending on silken threads from the boughs above, worm and beetle-like kin erupting from the soil.

The beat of wings, gusts of breeze through the boughs, greater specimens descending; coiled, silver-scaled, many-headed, spewing blue flame at the sight of me.

The unwanted, never born bastards of a reluctant Goddess; my brothers and sisters, the spawn and subjects of nightmares since humanity first began to dream.

Fathers as various as their forms; known, in some instances, lost in most: demons and angels; men and beasts. Elementals, born of the winds or rains; from sludge, blood and honey. Children of the ocean and deep woods, of the sky and darkness beneath the earth. Fungal and floral broods, the children of storms and mist and frost. Things born of engines; children of metal and plastic and clockwork; of strange, alien systems that fruit from their bodies like fungus, that infest them in the manner of parasites.

None quite so immaculately conceived as me, at least, if the myths she sang over my cot are true; none quite so close to her in nature or potential.

Surrounded by them, the woods wretched with them. Flocks and tribes and nurseries; dreaming nations that mostly know nothing of the waking worlds beyond.

Save what she allows them; what myths and fables she spins. Why I ran; why I became the prodigal child; her beloved self-abortion.

In love with waking, ever since her first tales of it; stories that she allowed no other, that she forbade me from telling, save in her presence: tales of concrete and disappointment, of time and love lost, of life lamented.

Aching to be there, always, even knowing how much she laments it; how earnestly she wishes for humanity to join her in dreams.

“No, I should never have been Mother. To you or any. But I am; what I was made, for better or worse. And you, my lost and lonely sweetheart, what are you, after all these years?”

Beyond years, beyond lifetimes; beyond all the idiot feuds and grudges; the fratricides she forced me to commit, that she hated me for. The hurts we unthikingly inflicted on one another: Idiot wars, lost and wasted and abandoned lives; my own loves taken in spite; drawn into the depths, lost to dreaming...children likewise.

And still I can't hate her; still I can't deny the ache that has drawn me here, beyond any purported concern for my wandering children.

Her child, still, after so long; the hurts and betrayals, the cruelties and abandonments. Still.

“I'm...” The answer choking in my throat, on the eager eyes in the surrounding darkness. What is she asking? What does she mean?

So many things; a husband, a Father; a cook, a gardener. A lover of ciders and horses, a walker, a wanderer; in love with silence, isolation...

“I'm nothing.” Laughter, hisses; growls of contempt. Wordless pleas to be let loose; to tear me apart for my blasphemous joke. She holds them back without a word, with barely a thought. Smiling with many mouths, her many eyes ablaze.

What swells in the fire no longer mewling and formless, its hand taking hers, a contradictory chorus greeting it as it she draws it into being.

Stumbling, trailing tatters of azure flame. Knowing before the fires die, before its form settles...what she has done, why she allowed me back into her presence.

“Vile bitch.” Smiling still, her masks and aspects in rare, rare accord. The newborn taking its first breath, raising its perfect face to the canopy, to its siblings clustered and calling there.

“You swore...you swore there'd never be another...” Our last meeting, an uneasy truce, drawn amongst the blood and moans of our almost murdered young.

“I did. Just as I swore to serve and adore my husbands forever. Just as I swore to be as my Maker demanded the moment It dreamed me. Haven't you learned anything out there, child?”

I thought I had. I thought perhaps that, after everything, we'd finally come to some semblance of understanding; that there might be peace...

Straining, their eyes burning cold, their hate and hunger and despair seething in the surrounding air, barely held back from flaying me on the spot.

Held back by her; no blood spilled on these grounds without her desire. Certainly not mine.

The newborn blinking, the fire in its hair, around its fingers, fading; the lambent lines tracing beneath its translucent skin likewise. Embers on its first breaths. Its eyes; pits of luminous fluid, tears streaming up over its brow to burst at its hairline. Such knowing in them, such passion.

“Not my choice, this time, boy; I would not have broken the peace between us. Not for all the world.” An idiot for believing, perhaps, but I do.

“Then what is this?” The new born smiling, closing its eyes, the soil and ash at its feet fruiting with strange weeds.

Barely able to look at it, shying away as if pained by its light. Never before; never so fragile or afraid.

Its light flickering over her, the fires of its birth burning low. Our siblings flocking to it, swarming around its ankles, descending from the boughs above to twine fingers and talons in its hair.

The newborn indulgent; gifting each and every one with its caresses, with coos and songs of welcome. Our Mother watching, not radiant with maternal pride, but withered, as though exhausted from the act of birth.

“This...this is everything you could never be, child; this is one that will never abandon or make war on us... one who will lead us from dreaming.”

My laughter breaking through the celebrations, disrupting song and hymn; the wood itself seeming to waver; an image painted on wind-swept curtains.

All eyes on me again, blazing at my blasphemy, cold light prickling my skin like frost. Its eyes the only source of warmth; its smile one of incestuous welcome.

“Is that what you think? That you're going to walk in the daylight? That this...thing will somehow show you the way?”

Two smiles; one indulgent, affectionate, the other cold, cruel. Newborn brother and ancient Mother; love and spite searing me with their contradiction. The others crawling close, breaking their communion with the newborn to silence me, to slit my blaspheming throat, to put out my lying eyes.

Held back, even now; wickering and whimpering at not being able to lay tooth or talon on me. “Why did you come, child? Why did you answer?”

Laughing, turning my eyes to the dark sky between the boughs. Stars flickering there; strange moons swelling. My sisters, or so she used to tell me; those that never took breath, dreaming or waking. Dreaming there, now; in the heavens beyond, lost in their own dances, their bizarre games. Knowing them as she never could; having heard their songs and stories; having walked in their strange gardens.

Not merely miscarried but aborted, by our Mother's own hand, for fear that they might, in time, swell to challenge or supplant her; new Mothers of the Dreaming, new Godesses in the Wild Wood.

Swollen; fat and heavy with their own broods. Never before; never having known Motherhood, until this moment.

Amber and pink and emerald, their contradictory lights shearing down, upon me, upon my brothers and sisters. Our Mother blanching beneath it, trembling as though strained by its weight.

The smile fading from my newborn brother's exquisite lips,  light fading from its eyes. No more welcomes, no more invitations; from this moment, only murder; a myth that would weave itself throughout the expanse of humanity's dreaming.

“What...have you done?” The shadows swathing her blazed away beneath her daughter's moonlight, her aspect no longer shifting, but stilled in a state of bent and withered decrepitude.

Luxuriating in the same radiance, its touch not unambiguously kind, but invigorating as storm rain in desert heat. Old urges, old uncertainty, my dreaming state no longer contained, no longer an echo of waking...

Laughing, laughing as they scream; the howling of storms, the roars of cosmic maelstroms, calling my unborn nieces and nephews from their slumber, down into the state their Mothers were denied. Answering, as my skin splits and sloughs away, as my play of humanity goes to filth and dregs. Another condition; one she has never seen, that none of them know:

Swelling, swelling beyond the confines of the canopy, trees sighing as they bend and break, as they wither at my touch.

A state never occupied before; not in her presence, cultivated in conspiracy with the split and spilling bodies above; with the moons that howl agonsied laughter, even as their young rain down.

Vast, coiled and heaving; smoke and molten stone seeping from beneath my scales. Blood that blazes, a furnace in my mind and belly: An old monstrosity; one that once stalked my nightmares, that pursued me through the woods, before I found her, before I realised myself, and learned that the nightmare had my face, my voice.

No longer denying my siblings, the umbilici holding them back abruptly severed, allowing them to fall on me from every quarter: Talons raking, fangs piercing, stumps of blade-like bone attempting to spill me out amongst the leaves and wildflowers. Not one biting deep enough to draw blood, those that so much as score me eliciting arterial springs of burning matter; lashed away into the woods before they can inflict deeper hurts.

My sister's children falling amongst them, riding the light they bleed; monstrosities of another state and order, made alien to this dream by their exile:

Silver-skinned, translucent; things of mist and starlight, amorphous anatomies, shifting and swelling as they plummet; congeries of bubbling organs, their purpose ineffable, bursting to give birth to the next configuration. Flocks of the drifting boneless; bag-like bodies swollen with flickering star-fragments, tendrils leaving behind trails of colour that paint the night sky. Many-winged entities whose pyramidal bodies swell and contract, every rhythmic pulse issuing tinted smoke and swarms of shimmering parasites. Shoals of darting, luminous, piscine forms, swimming as though in ocean tides, their irridescence leaving after-images against the darkness.

Smiling up at them, into the depths of my aborted sister's anger and bitterness; a rain of newborns falling, the first already upon the Dreaming's soils.

A blow, the first to shudder me, cracking my great head aside, bringing burning blood to my lip. Lowering my gaze, so many siblings retreating, withering beneath its light, finding my Mother and her new child, the woman glaring up at me, stars reflected in the sunken sockets of her eyes, a staff trembling in her hand, held up in defiance where it previously helped her to stand.

As for my new sibling, it weeps on its knees, the blue fire of its birth pouring from its eyes, causing the sludge below to fruit with strange growth.

“If my children must walk here, Mother, then you and yours cannot.” My sisters singing, my nieces and nephews celebrating as they tumble and swarm throughout the Dreaming.

The newborn raising its face, features molten with grief, our siblings wailing all around, agonised by my attention; in conflict with their Heaven-sent cousins.

A wordless expression; an elegy that lances through screams and storms. Invisible swords puncturing my hide, burning with cold poison.

Many falling, squirming in the dirt and filth at the sound, raking at themselves in guilt, in horror, in disgust at what they are.

An agony beyond any that waking can contrive; the cold fire inside, burning my mind with unwanted memory, with stories of days that never were or could be: Stories of what we might have made, together; my siblings, Mother and I: my own children, told the stories of their ancestry and allowed to walk unfettered, to know themselves...

“Never. They'll never know. Even if I have to smother them in their beds...” No idle threat; an oath, to her, to myself. To this nightmare she birthed me to.

The bitch knowing, my bastard sibling the same; seeing through the scales and shadow in which I cloaked myself, into the cold furnace of my soul. Seeing my capability for infanticide; my history of it, in old, abandoned lives; in sloughed off states and skins.

Long forgotten children,  wandering too deep, drawing too close to her and my kin. In danger of knowing themselves too intimately, of becoming bridges between dream and waking.

What she wants; what she's always wanted: not to love us, to know us, but to walk on our backs, for us to be her path from this Dreaming prison, into waking day.

That ambition dying around her, now; infested, twisted, transformed by her murdered daughter's young, what they'd make in its place an entirely other state; a new nightmare for humanity to walk and forget in the sun.

“I should have strangled you before you were born; burst your heart when I felt its first beat...” Slurred and spit-flecked regrets, more vicious than knives; a hail of black darts and needles pattering against me. Some finding the wounds already carved, burrowing inside; parasitic agony, entire acres of the Dreaming dashed to ash and splinters in my writhing.

My breath oblivion; a gout of black, smouldering flame, bursting from me, engulfing them both, obliterating the surrounding wood. My pain, my hate; my fear and contempt; everything she'd fostered in me, poison fomented throughout every life I'd lived and lost...hers, now, as it was always meant to be.

The eruption emptying me, withering the creature I wove, leaving it shrivelled and insubstantial, peeling away in the alien winds.

On my knees in the ash and sludge, gasping for breath. The black inferno raging; a mass of swirling shadow, of liquid darkness; of blood and fire and bile.

Around me, the Dreaming fraying, acres breaking apart, collapsing; drifting away, becoming ash. My sister's bastards swarming amongst the ruin and emptiness, already weaving their own Edens; the price for my Sister's aid.

Columns of light shearing down from above; amber, silver, emerald. My eyes drawn up, to the moons themselves, that break apart, imploding, dissolving, forms emerging from their destruction, descending in the light, carried by tides of their adlring young:

My Sisters. The murdered and lost, who've hated me as much as they hated her, in the past; with whom I've shared wars just as bitter.

Setting foot in the Dreaming for the first time since their exile, their expulsion from the womb; a trespass that undoes and transforms it; grass and wildflowers withering, soil erupting with new and alien species.

Ghosts; shades only of what they might have been; of the Powers that our Mother feared: nameless, never baptised in blood and rain, like the rest of us, accruing their own states and aspects through the dreams they touch and infest:

Emerald first: a slender, willowy form, her painted, tattooed skin bared, rippling with bestial muscle, as though there's wolf somewhere in her ancestry. Her eyes burning wild; pale fires alight in her skull, rising amongst the horns crowning her head.

Amber next; a thing of dusk and Autumn; a fulsome harvest Mother, wrapped around in elaborate skirts of purple and scarlet that shift around her like leaves in the breeze.

Finally, Silver; a knife in the dark, her angular frame swathed in robes woven from the emptiness between stars, her coldness a wound all but bled dry; a surgeon's scalpel, a corpse's kiss, howls and the flutter of raven's wings accompanying her.

My sisters, my enemies, my allies; our histories long, our wars almost too many and too bitter to recall. Nothing I can do, now, if they choose to betray me; too weak, too wounded.

Struggling to rise, the monster I was all but gone, now; whisps and tatters clinging to my bleeding limbs.

Their eyes not for me; attentions that might have been enough to murder me here, drive me from the Dreaming, were they to fall on me in concert.

No; every ounce of their fascination for the inferno I vomited, for the forms still flickering and writhing at its heart:

A scream of utter fury, of infanticidal rage, a hurricane wind bursting from within, carrying the black flames out across the surrounding desolation.

My Sisters wavering, shrouded by their veils of light and darkness, I and their children carried from our feet, cast towards the edge of what little Dreaming remains. Beyond?; Delirium, a miasma of light and shape and motion; the potential of all Dreaming, from which our Mother and we all are born.

Tearing my eyes away from it, resisting the siren summons to swim there; to not merely dream the dragon, but become it, and every monster, every nightmare; every state or form or possibility ever imagined.

My Sisters already in flight, screaming hollow war cries as they sweep and dance around what remains of our fire-born brother; a molten, almost fleshless thing, belching and bleeding its own blue flame:

Perfection desecrated, transforming before my eyes; limbs stretching, multiple maws bursting from the ruins of its face, skeletals wings erupting from its back. Our Mother's work, pouring her poisoned poetry into it, her dying dreams; making a monster of her perfect son, just as she made ghosts of her daughters, an exile of me. The beast lashing about itself with fire-wreathed talons, snapping at its murdered siblings with mirror-shard teeth.

One of our Sisters screaming; the fire kindling in her Autumnal skirts, flaring as she flails, frost-laden winds howling around her. Her children bearing her away, swathing her burning form, suffocating the flames with their own bodies.


The beast howling in frustration, its cries those of starving, abandoned children, of wild animals caught in snares and hunter's traps.

My emerald sister dancing around it, every motion leaving after-images drawn in sunlight on the air, a spear of bone twirling in her hands, jabbing out to pierce our brother in the throat, breast and back.
Howls of agony as her sunlight invades its wounds, burning, igniting its insides; as her children sweep in to aid her.

Braver than the rest, more vicious; flocks of burning birds, wolves woven from sunlight. Things that seem born from the dying Wild Woods themselves; dryad-like, willowy and ephemeral like their Mother or immense, hulking, battering the newborn with sweeps of branch-like limbs.

The thing still burning, still shifting; our Mother still singing her lullabies to it; every poisoned dream, every venomous nightmare she's ever hosted, made manifest in its flesh. No longer beautiful; a ragged, pulsing, seeping thing; spider or centipede like by turns, every state burning with the element of its birth. My remaining sisters wounding it over and over, suffering its reprisals in their turn.

Bitch. The rising growl of a dragon, the roar of a pyre growing fat on martyred flesh. Stalking to her through the ruin, through the ash and filth.

The woman glancing my way, scenting my intent; her focus on the newborn, on remaking it beneath my sister's violence, sustaining it long after it should have frayed to nothing.

A blow that snaps her head aside, that severs the umbilicus. A keening wail, the newborn collapsing where it stands, its rags and tatters twitching and lashing around it, my Sisters and their young descending on it.

A howl of grief, my Mother raking at her dessicated features, sloughing the flesh away beneath ragged nails. A spillage of tainted light from within; ichor like luminous pus.

No. Taking her, holding her fast with hands and thought, snaring her as she once snared me; around the throat, stopping her breath.

Hate. An explosion of contempt that bursts her hide; black blisters and tumors forming across her every inch, exploding to unleash spatters of tainted white, curls of hissing, snarling smoke. Nothing that can touch me; not any more. Insulated against her, over long years of separation. The poison having only one target; the same that inspired its expression.

Too late; her attempts to reign herself in, to hold the poison back: abortive intent, dreams of infanticide, flying from her, as the newborn raises its wounded, bestial face, as its remaining eye weeps and blazes.

A choir of sorrow, from child and Mother both; from the siblings that brought it to this state. Then it comes apart, the remaining flesh flayed from its bones by the murder intended for me, but that could find no purchase.

The death of perfection, of the one who might have shown her the way to waking. Mother sagging in my arms, all volition draining from her. A mire of filth and blue embers all that's left of her final dream.

“Mine will never walk here, and they will never know you.” The last abandonment, the creature in my arms shrivelling, becoming weightless, black and white dust pouring between my fingers, rags flittering away in the air.

The new dream barely born, already fading; collapsing where I stand, sunlight and birdsong invading my skull, sisters smiling, singing their thanks to me, promises of what the next night will bring.

A cold dawn, feet on the landing carpet. Muffled voices, clanking pipes. Rain at the window. The scent of blood and burning still in my nostrils, Mother's ashes still on my fingers.

Rising, pale light filtering through the window, the barks and bleats of waking humanity, so few remembering, so few realising the ancient dreams that almost made them slaves.

Fool. What they think; what I am. A road to nowhere. Warned, again and again: the woods too cold, too dark, so deep in winter. None left now to show me the way.

Warmth. A dream, forgotten in the dark, where the trees whisper, the shadows smile. Shivering, entranced by the fire...by faces I once knew, the lie of kindness.

Whispers on the wind, laughter beneath the earth. A hole in the path, eyes in the dark below. Flying, though eyes and laughter follow, though the dark will never let me go.

Flying, a phantom himself; something ragged, something bleeding. “Get out of here, fool.” The shadows follow.

They see. Light dying at my back, day a forgotten dream. The shadows I trail; the blood and pain; what the wild will love me for, when all else is gone.

Tomorrow...if tomorrow ever comes; if there ever was such a thing as dawn or light, maybe they'll find me. Or the night and the woods will go on forever, until I'm just another shade; bones in the boughs.

“No one would dare,” he said. Now I know why; the spirits of the Wild Wood following, mad invitation in their eyes.

“Soon you shall forget...” So the cold moon sings. How can I believe her, after what her children have become, the feasts they hold in her name..?

Rising...a frozen, breathless thing. Laughing with the shadows, no longer afraid. A new terror for the meek to tell tales of, to appal the children of day.

Feet sinking, sliding, soles burning. Ashes barely cooled, plastic splinters and bone shards, burrowing beneath her skin.

Every breath choked, tasting of holocaust, ashes in her mouth, ashes in her eyes, scouring her face and fingers.

Clutching at her, whispering to her; the ghosts that ride them, spectral faces smearing themselves across her sight, spectral hands raking at her arms and legs. Brusing, scratching, making her bleed.

Stumbling, stumbling to where it fell, the lip of the crater it carved, not knowing who or how or why; where it came from, other than beyond the sky it tore to shreds.

One of the few spared, the last whole, glimpsing them, now; staggering and streaming eyed, bloody-faced, like her. All children, some older; on the edge of adolescence, some younger, barely into double digits.

Ragged and wasted, bloodied and smeared.

Indistinct, here, at the edge of atrocity, called by the same song; the same barbed hymns in their thoughts.

So few, all wounded; many far more profoundly than her, the scratches and bruises she bears nothing compared to the gaping, red and black tears in the sides and bellies of some, the limp, twisted limbs of others.

None weeping for their hurts, long past that. None mourning the ghosts in the ashes; those that have been long dead to them.

Their tears not of pain or sorrow, but of incredulity; abandon beyond comprehension, at the death of a world that would have seen them mutilated, murdered over the period of a lifetime, of days that demanded their misery, as though it were a fee for the boon of being born, that none of them had ever asked for.

Here, now; over miles and miles, weak and shivering with old sickness, gnawed by old hunger, come to meet the singer, the wounder of sky and soil, the source of all fire.

Going to her knees as it rises, from the smoke, the flames, as its tendrils blot out what little sun seeps through the sceptic sky.

Bowels and bladder containing nothing to betray. Instead, a scream; a howl that the others take up, one by one, a choir of wolf-children, calling to their alien step-parent; the only one that might suckle them, lick their wounds clean, and tell them stories of why they remain.

Others. Others that hear; the strange, outside children; the shadow-chasers, the unsmiling. They don't love us; they can't. Too beyond them; too different. It's all right, for me. Not for everyone; my brothers and sisters. Some...their strangeness too much; they hurt for it; bruised and split open, screamed at and condemned. I hear those stories, too, often before they've begun to play out.

We don't come together; no strange little tribe, no outcast theatre. Alone; not like the rest; deaf and blind, scurrying, cockroach things, not realising, not even knowing their own stories...we don't need closeness, comfort; warmth and light. We sing so loud, the ones who hear, it hurts to be near one another.

I know; the first time I found her, it hurt so much, I sobbed and sobbed, Mom and Dad calling it tooth ache, growing pains...any lie, where there was nothing to know.

But her...the instant I saw her face, heard her voice: knives in my mind, opening the way for screaming ghosts; the spectres of her future, so vivid I didn't just hear, but experienced:

Choking to death on my own vomit at the age of twelve, left to wallow in a fever that my parents thought to be faked; a means of getting off school in the morning. The black lightning, the weightless agony; the broken glass inside my skin: flung in the air by a speeding white van, age fifteen, flying for what seemed hours, suspended in a place where I came apart, where I frayed and fell like blood rain on the up-turned faces below. Hands around my throat, hot tears on my face; seventeen, something between my legs, more painful, more vile, than what stopped my breath. A face, blurred to almost nothing; a molten Halloween mask, a voice that I knew, but distorted, as though bubbling through bath water.

Sweeter threads: the revelations of twenty and the decade that follow; falling in love, shedding myself, realising my passions, making art and infamy from them...somehow muted, less vivid and intense than their viler cousins, but agony still.

The first. The same; screaming likewise, agonised by me, my stories, which she teased out and devoured like strands of spaghetti from a densely tangled fork.

Put to bed, given a sleeping pill from Mom's drawer, told to be quiet; there were guests downstairs.

I still know her...perhaps better than anyone, as she knows me. Sometimes, we come together; we've learned, since then; how to shield ourselves, how to contain ourselves. It's...difficult; an effort of concentration, but we manage; whispering every word, every thought.

Others; at school, the ones chasing shadows in Summer, the ones shying away from noise and sunlight...the ones avoiding other children's eyes, other children's games. We can't bear them; the stories too dense, still too clotted to discern anything clear; just clamour, chaos. Unless we sit with them; unless we...

But no; not yet. I can't tell you that.

                                                                                          *

The end of innocence; a story I can tell; one we all know: fever and trembling obsession, the prayers to anonymous gods, carnal angels: Please, please let her be mine.

They answer, for the first time in my life, a story I've known since infancy coming to be:

I fall in love with her stories; not with who or what she is , but the possibility of what she might be. They sing, beautiful, even in their ugliness. I want them; to bathe in them, to wrap myself up in and be part of them, forever and ever:

...an operation to remove polyps from her throat at the age of twenty nine, the surgeon having an unexpected episode, slicing her open, severing nothing essential, but mutilating her beyond repair...

...the man she has called husband, the Father of her children, for over a decade, ignoring her in the dark; taking her denials as part of an old game, not played for many years, but one he is happy to resume...the tears that follow, the violence, enough to send him bleeding from the bed, a red trail to the bathroom where she finds him, slumped down, in an expanding pool...

...knocks and demands at the door; demands to know where her teenage son is. Knowing, even before they tell her; the truth a jagged, living stone in her entrails, slowly twisting, turning, reducing them to pulp: a brawl on the school field; her boy, the girl he hates and obsesses over. She knows; has read the scribbled diaries under his bed, the bleak, nihilist poetry; seen the drawings and sketches; enough to express, she hoped, enough to vent the poison inside...

...tomorrow, never waking; her corpse already cold before morning; a ruptured gas-pipe, slowly seeping, lulling her down into dreamless sleep...

...tomorrow, woken by the roar and lap of flames, orange and scarlet tongues licking up between the floorboards, already proliferating across her bed, the curtains, in her night-shirt. Screams, door and window blocked, smoke in her throat, stinging her eyes, the fire already blistering, charring her skin...

...tomorrow, barely woken by the kiss of silver, the shiver of cold as it trails kisses between her breasts. My breath, my whispers; professions of love that hitch and stutter, more fervent than any she will ever know. Down, down, to her pubis, meeting the wound that nature has already carved; whose ambition I help realise. Welling, ruby beads decorating her front, wet expressions of shock, of surprise, maybe even delight...

I tell her, in the aftermath of love, in the heat and sighing and sweat of it; through the music that rings in my ears, that un-spools behind my eyes: what I hear, what I see.

Knowing. Knowing that she's as blind and deaf as the rest; in love with the condition. Knowing how she'll respond before she so much as blinks, opens her mouth:

“...I don't like this. Stop it.”

“Just being honest. You said you wanted everything; here it is.”

Already up, already out of bed; still heaving, still seeping, her eyes wide, those of a prey-thing, shimmering and watery in the murk.

“...fucking mental-case. Stay the fuck away from me.”

I smile, laugh, unable to help it. History unsettled, the stories I told severed, made impossible by being known. A temporal fit, the darkness lurching, shuddering around us, though she doesn't see, can't possibly know. Lingering longer than instinct demands, part of her -buried, sublimated since before birth-, wanting this: to know, to see; to no longer be blind to her own possibility. Whispering, chattering; the walls, the shadows: stories re-arranging, editing themselves to cope with the paradox: the character that somehow becomes aware of its own plot, of the conclusions its author proscribes.

Breaking, head shaking, eyes half closed as she makes for the door.

In that moment, as she stumbles away from me, half dressed, still heaving, as the room tremors and distorts around us, I see. A moment, only; a temporary tearing: the wound that I open with my honesty:

What waits, what lingers, barely a fingernail's thickness away:

A place of screams. A place of certainties. A place of blood and breaking and great, great fires. A moment, the faces I glimpse so torn, so twisted, I can barely see what they are, screaming their stories; testimonies of pain and abuse that obliterate all else; the flailing, idiot variety of probability; the pointless potential to which we are born, in which we will die.

That place...I know stories of it; heard them in the screaming confessions of men and women on the street, on buses and trains; that I've shared tables with in cafes and restaurants. At school, university; at work.

Grotesque fairy tales; sadomasochistic fantasies, the accrued myths of BDSM dungeons and exotic sex cults...all true; waiting for us beyond the world; for the stories to play out, to fray apart. Waiting to write new parables, on our backs, our bellies; our flayed-off faces. Tales tattooed, tales scarred and burned and scored upon us. Tales painted in the flow of our veins, accrued in collage form from our wet bone, our divested organs.

I see it. I hear it. I smell it. The ones that linger there, forgotten to themselves, the only stories they know those they carve or that are carved from them. No imposition, other than what they invite; no proscribed narratives or destinies to fulfil. I shudder, still coming, wanting to be there, wanting to see and hear and know...

It closes before I reach it, sealing over, the room still, the cockroach chatter of Hell's gospels seething in the darkness, drowning out my despair.

                                                                                                *

Nowhere. Out in the dirt, the delusion: all it really is; the plaster over the wound, the holding pattern. Inevitable unravelling... what waits for all of us, at the end: even those that make a temporary Heaven from their moments, that spin little joys for themselves...it never lasts; we all come to the same impasse, the same confusions: those with which we entered the world, no wiser, for all our suffering.

                                                                                                *

She's home, though she doesn't answer her mobile, doesn't come to the door.

“Annie! It's...”

I stop. She knows. Of course she knows.

So I wait. It'll be a while, yet. The mobile...still echoing, still ringing in my ears. Something about electronics, especially communication devices...they channel and emphasise the stories. As a boy, it was TV, radio. As a man, it's mobile phones, computers. I stay away from them, as much as I can.

Scratching, behind the door; a chain being drawn away, a lock disengaging. I hear; I feel them, scraping at my skull, the barriers in my mind. Stronger, more insistent than I remember. It's been a while.

She doesn't ask me in, stepping away from the door, leaving it open. I go inside, following her down the hallway. Pictures lining the walls; paintings and charcoal sketches: her way of getting it out, most of them abstract things, apparently scrawled in moments of fury or despair sufficient to tear the paper or canvas. All familiar, despite their impressionistic nature; images I know, having had them described to me, more than once.

A cat, curling around my ankles, its eyes pleading, meows plaintive, as though I can give it something that its lunatic mistress can't.

Jardis, twenty years old, heart stopping in her sleep. Unless she escapes through the half open doorway. Unless she chokes on a stray biscuit in two months time. Unless she's poisoned by the bleach her mistress scrubs the bathroom floor with. Unless, unless, unless.

A kettle boiling, cups being stirred. The scraping at my skull...no longer blunted fingers, but surgical hooks, attempting to wear their way through. Nothing they can tell me; nothing I haven't already heard, a hundred times.

She doesn't say hello as I seat myself, moving with utter confidence around her kitchen, following steps she knows to the slightest, as I do; a surety that alienates more than it attracts; the same that my parents identified when I was a child, and hers; that seems almost animal to others, repellent as a spider's skittering.

This close...it hurts. It hurts.

I almost want to laugh, it seems so absurd: we know, we hear; everything else and one another, the radio turned high in the kitchen window, scratchy, tinny rendition of '80s power ballads barely even disturbing the flow of stories through it. The kitchen threatens to flow, wavering around us, flickering between various states, decors...stories, both fulfilled and potential, seeped into its wood and plaster.

A child runs through, spectral, slipping and cracking his head against the corner of the breakfast bar. Blood in blonde hair, so vivid it almost glows, faint screams, weeping. A black, shaggy haired dog, greying around the mouth and nose, nuzzling the elbow of its mistress, who lies all but still on the tiles, one leg twitching, the stroke that claimed her almost five minutes old. Pasts and potentials; stories that might never have been, that always were and are, somewhere, somewhen.

A mug of steaming coffee, white, three sugars. Tea, black. Fruit juice. Nothing.

She shirks back before our fingers can make contact. That has happened before, once or twice; usually when we don't know, we don't recognise. Always traumatic; whatever strange devices our minds contain amplified by the presence of another, as though they weave out of our heads, forming invisible conduits in the air. The effect is...well, the last time, I was in hospital for a little under two weeks. From what I hear, it can be worse than that; several of our number in comas from the shock of it, others straight jackets.

She watches, as I sip; the stories swarming around us, swirling between us, her form shimmering like a mirage. And yet, we are still; at the eye of the storm, all possibility whispering around us, intent on confession.

A smile, a breathless laugh.

“You fucking idiot.”

You retard. You Moron. Imbecile. What the fuck do you think..? What the Hell are you doing..?

“I know. I'm sorry. I had to...”

She knows; the story already told, several thousand times, in a million different ways and forms.

“What can we do, Annie? How do we break it?”

She slumps against the kitchen counter, uncaring that her bathrobe parts, that my eyes stray.

“We can't. Why are you even asking? There isn't a story like that; none that I've ever heard.”

“There must be. There must be.”

She laughs, turning from me, distracting herself with the dishes.

“So what? What if there is? What will you do, if you find it?”

“If we find it. Don't you know?”

She stops, shoulders sagging, staring out of the window.

“You'll try to make it real. You sick fuck.”

Yes. And she will help me, because there is nothing else.

                                                                                                  *

Nothing but this:

Drawn back more readily, this time, as I was before the world poisoned and smothered me; when the stories were everything, when I could listen and live and breathe them.

A new depth, a new way: sailing, carried over the great wastes beyond; the desolations of shattered not-quite-stone, the ruptured, seeping flesh, plains heaving and rippling like the backs of fevered, mating titan, red and black rain falling from grey and yellow storms.

Endless; the plains of nothing, where Abarise stands; the ruins of others, less enduring, still littering the deserts and valleys: places that once arose to lend humanity some meaning, forged from common stories; from collective hope, desire, inspiration.

All failed, decayed and collapsed in on themselves.

Only Abarise endures.

Whatever calls me, whatever seeded me in my Mother's womb, planted the devices in my mind and soul, it wants me to see; what humanity is without it, all it will come to: the witless, wandering things; lost, mad, scabrous tribes, gnawing on their own leprous limbs, on one another, weeping en masse in the rain, cowering from the winds, beating themselves senseless against the walls of cliffs or the fragments of ruins...no release; not in life, not in death; despair and deprivation, continuing, escalating, after the grave. A worse notion than any Hell; any promise of oblivion.

Abarise...rising in the distance, beyond the storms; sweating them, its great spires and minarets impossible in their elaboration; structures that could not exist in waking life: vaster, more various in design and substance than the greatest city on Earth, structure sprouting structure sprouting structure, clusters resembling immense, continent-scale fungi, conical or trumpet-like, spewing ashes, smoke...less identifiable vapour, naked, skinless things riding the thermals, shrieking as they scald, laughing as they emerge blistered, bleeding, but alive. Others broken; great eruptions and conglomerations of shards, metallic, rusted, gleaming; crystalline or stone-like, grinding against one another in strange, tidal or mating motions, lubricated by those carried and dropped into their masses, bodies ground and pulped into paste, the effluent they become sluicing down into the lower regions, there to be further refined, fed upon, shat out; synthesised and refashioned. A cloister whose spires flicker and distort as though nothing more than projections on the ether they vomit, though the howls from within seem real enough, another that quivers and whips as though sewn from the most delicate of silks or cloths, its inhabitants carried on the same tides, tumbling and hurtling, snared before they can fall into the reaches below.

Great bridges bind the various towers and cloisters together; a web-like network of pathways, many vast enough to admit armies or nations at a time, some intact, others long since collapsed, numerous smaller threads and branches breaking away from the main boughs, some leading nowhere, others inverting, in defiance of themselves, leading back to where they begin or other portions of the complex.

I know this... have been here, so many times; born here; where all stories end, all stories begin; in blood, in pain; where we learn our true poetry.

Yes. They call to me; the lucky ones, who have already passed and found their way; the ones like me, who have fulfilled their waking purpose, and now live secrets of another order. I grasp out, trying to reach them, though I have no hands with which to do so, call, shrieking for them to find me, though I have no mouth or throat.

Please, not again...don't let me wake again...

The oldest prayer, always denied.

The winds carry me, scented of burning, of great pyres and charnel pits alight upon the plains below. Barely beyond the outskirts; the ancient, outer walls and clustered settlements, many of which stand in ruin, abandoned, save for those that have wandered in from the outer wastes; the failed and forgotten, those hoping to be plucked up and carried within...closer than I am, maybe than I'll ever be, however wretched, however lost...

Nothing; the same winds that carried me this far sweeping me up and away, ash and smoke obscuring my momentary vision, roaring sufficiently to drown out the choirs, the screams, the summons and seductions, the only Fathers I'll ever love or pray to...

                                                                                                    *

I know this story.

Waking, slick and cooling, trembling in the aftermath.

Hissing, yowling, the animal responsible keeping its distance, knowing better. One of us...always one of us. I wake; the one the stories swarm to, now that her skull is open, now that her eyes have been put out.

She begged me, begged me to dig it out of her; the machinery in her mind, the devices that Abarise implanted. I couldn't; the very concept beyond blasphemy. She came at me, then, knowing how it had to be. Always one; why I came, how the world will know.

What will you make of this, Doctor Weathers? Not that it matters; you'll be seeing much worse, doing much worse, before long.

The knife...still in my hand, trembling, my fingers biting into the wooden handle. Voices outside, knocks at the door. They'll come, soon, take me, or kill me. Either way, I've only just begun.

Rain streaming down the windows, pattering from concrete pavements, flowing down clogged gutters. Figures hurrying with heads bowed, coats pulled tight, cursing the fact that they'd ever been born. The rest...those with nowhere to go; no destination or hope of shelter, shivered where they sat, huddled in alleyways, against boarded up store-fronts, not looking to those who passed for any pity; knowing better, most of them having been amongst the walkers, once.

“Floods across the country, apparently.”

Increasingly empty suburbs. Entire neighbourhoods of vacant houses, “for sale” or “for rent” signs faded, smeared with dirt and growth. Many abandoned; windows smashed, blacked out, boarded over, ceilings collapsed, doors hanging off their hinges.

A familiar sight, these days.

“So I understand.”

An implication, hanging in the air, making it silently seethe.

“What?”

“Some are saying it's...unnatural.”

Dumolo turned away from the window, eyes moving over Esther's features as she drove. How long had it been, now? Ten years, twenty? So easy to lose count.

He smiled, sighing. “They might be right.”

Faint whisperings and intimations... some new Art? Some weapon? The phenomena certainly baffling the experts (at least publicly; those paraded on television or quoted in news paper articles expressing hypotheses that ran from some unanticipated effect of climate change to one produced by the recent spate of quantum experiments occurring at CERN and similar facilities throughout the world). For his part, Dumolo considered it irrelevant, at least until such time as it revealed itself pertinent to their business.

And yet...

“I used to love the rain.”

A strange pronouncement, one that raised the hairs on his arms and neck. There'd no doubt been much that they'd both loved. None of it mattered, now.

“We're almost there. Are you ready?”

No answer. An idiot question. Of course she was ready; she'd been so since the moment of her severance, as they all had.

“Alexia Martin...has she had any contact?”

“Not that we know of. Likely a spontaneous case.”

A flicker, passing across her features like a ripple across a still pond; the breath of a storm. A moment only, familiar stasis returning in a heartbeat.

“I'm sorry. I've been thinking about them, lately.”

Ah, the children. Her demons; what made her simultaneously so perfect and so...problematic in her current role.

“I can't remember their names, their faces...”

Suburban streets; regular, red brick houses, punctuated by the odd older town house, situated further back from the road. Hardly anyone; no dog walkers, no runners; no roving packs of youths sharing cigarettes and cheap cider.

“That's as it should be.”

“I know, but... I think of them. I can't help it. I wonder...what it must be like, for this girl, for those like her...”

Dumolo reached across, a hand on her shoulder. Spontaneous; a strange gesture of comfort, that he instantly found himself puzzling over, the emotion that drove it dimming almost the instant it flared.

“That's good; that pity. It helps you to see them for what they are; why we do this. I...”

I envy you.

                                                                                               *

The Father, Caleb Martin, was waiting when they arrived, standing inside the open entrance of the council terrace that, until recently, he'd shared with his wife, his daughter.

Stepping out of the car, Dumolo looked up into the rain, its chill spattering his features, running down beneath the neck of his shirt and jacket. No sign...nothing that he could see or taste that the phenomena was fuelled by Art; a product of stray inspirations. Only churning cloud, tumescent, black as the skin of overripe fruit, pellucid sunlight seeping through rents and ruptures in its underbelly.

He sensed it the instant he stepped out of the car; an irritation, like the whine of a dentist's drill, electronics on the verge of burning out; agitation in the air, as though it were filled with invisible, swarming insects, settling on his face and fingers to bite.

There. The bedroom window above the entrance, curtains drawn, sealed against the rain, but not sufficiently to contain what lay within.

“Mr. Martin? My name is Dumolo, this is my partner, Esther. We spoke on the phone, I believe?”

A familiar face; the same they all wore; pale and slack, as though about to slough from the bone beneath, eyes dark and sunken from lack of sleep, wet with worry. A cigarette between the man's fingers, trembling.

“You can help her? My Alex?”

“We believe so. May we come in?”

An interior that smelled of dust and stale bread; clearly not having been cleaned or tidied in some time. Martin led them through to the living room, clearing a space on the sofa, which was piled high with discarded laundry.

Stubbing out his cigarette, he stood before them, pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace, as though struggling with the fact of their presence.

Esther spoke, so much better at this part than him:

“It's all right, Mr. Martin; please, take your time. And don't be afraid; we have...extensive experience with this sort of case.”

A crooked smile, an eyebrow rising. “You do? This...happens a lot, does it?”

“More so than you'd imagine. When did all this begin?”

“Have you spoken to Shirley?”

The girl's Mother, left in the night some months back, taking their youngest, a nine month old boy by the name of Ben, with her.

“We...attempted to find her. No luck, I'm afraid.”

A snarl, tears welling. “No, nor the police, either. I've lost them...”

He pressed a hand to his eyes, sobbing quietly for almost a minute. They allowed him that moment; taking it to assess the situation.

The house was rank with it; stray inspiration, the irritation they'd experienced outside now waxed to painful degrees; a drill boring through their skulls, ragged blades scraping across bone. All around; echoes of it; the expressions that had moved Martin to seek their help. Dumolo saw, albeit vaguely; the girl who was the source of disturbance; tall, for her age, wiry, like a ballet dancer, long hair almost reaching her waist, trailing down over her eyes. What some might have considered pretty, no doubt.

He saw her...sat cross legged on the carpet, fingers trailing through the air, leaving tinted ripples and distortions, as though in water or oil. Saw her convulsing in the chair opposite the television, her Mother screaming, scurrying away as she hurled her head back, vomiting strands of black matter that coiled and elaborated through the air, seeking out points on furniture and ceiling by which to anchor themselves and take root. Saw her naked and crawling, splayed out across the wall like a vast lizard or spider, the wallpaper melting, crawling at her touch, floral patterns taking on a semblance of faces; dancing and mating forms, before dissolving once more.

The Mother, Shirley, reaching for her daughter, scorched by blue fire that broke across the girl's skin, recoiling with a hiss more of betrayal than pain, fleeing from the room, from the house, taking the barely born brother with her.

“We'll do everything we can, for both of you.”

The man's eyes suddenly widened, clearing, as though seeing them for the first time.

“Who...who are you, anyway? How did you..?”

Dumolo inclined his head. “We are... in contact with local police forces and other agencies. You might say that these affairs are our...speciality.”

The man blinked, twitching.

“I can't...I can't...”

He seated himself, collapsing in an adjacent chair, burying his head in his hands. Dumolo turned to Esther. She barely nodded, barely blinked.

“Mr. Martin? Esther will help you, now. Do we have your consent?”

The man raised his face, unconcerned by the tears staining it.

“Consent..?”

“It's quite all right, Mr. Martin; just a standard procedure...something to help you cope.”

She'd already risen, going to him, kneeling on the carpet before him.

“Do we have your consent?”

The man hesitated for a moment, then nodded, his affirmation growing more furious by the second.

“Anything. Anything. Just...help us.”

Esther nodded, raising her hands, placing them to either side of Martin's head. The man didn't protest, hardly murmured. Like so many, likely sensing the relief that would follow. A faint pulse, a building sense of pressure in the room, a crackle of blue. The man convulsed in his chair, croaking.

Dumolo rose, leaving Esther to her business as he sought out the source of this household's suffering.

                                                                                               *

“Alexia? My name is Dumolo. Don't be afraid; I'm here to help you...”

Silence, though not one in which any peace might be found. He often found himself wondering how they endured it; the presence of something so diseased. The air rank with it; filled with invisible carrion flies, whispering and buzzing in his ears, at his lips. Subtle distortions; the landing seeming to swell and subtly shift around him, the carpet crawling as though with ash blown in a gentle breeze, with minute spiders hatching from the forest of its fibres.

The girl's bedroom door was shut, its lintel stretched, one corner massively distorted in comparison with the rest, a smeared photograph or child's painting. White wood, its grain flowing and rippling. Familiar disturbances; of a kind he'd encountered day in, day out since his own Severance. Since before, back when he himself had been a vector for them; sicker than the girl beyond would mercifully ever know.

“Alex? Your Father is very worried about you. I'm sure you're afraid. Please, let us...”

A sudden shuddering, the entire landing shaking around him as though in the throes of an earthquake. The spiders darted and scurried across the carpet, the floral patterns on the walls suddenly animated like those in the lounge below. The bedroom door softened, its distorted corner dissolving back into a semblance of its true state, another swelling out of true to replace it. From around the lintel seeped silvery vapour, a voice whispering on its coils:

Go away...go away...go away...

A child. Unlike Esther, he didn't regard his function with much sentiment; not having come to it as a result of family or for the sake of love. Even so, he couldn't deny a pang of pity for the girl. So young, as so many of them were, uncomprehending of the sickness that consumed them...so many of them in love with it, not realising the damage they did.

Reaching into his jacket, Dumolo produced a small device; a simple circle of metal, dulled as though with age, no markings or motifs apparent. The touch of it numbed his fingers; a pleasant sensation, though sadly not one that lasted. Pressing it to the door with his thumb, he sensed an immediate dissipation of the disturbances from beyond; its grain stilling, its dimensions slowly returning to some semblance of normality. Turning it clockwise, he heard the wood groan, as though under immense pressure, the vapour seething from around it hissing.

Stop it...

“I can't, Alex; I have to help you. It's why I'm here...”

The door abruptly clicked open, swinging inward. No blast or eruption, as he'd anticipated; no sudden surge of energies. Instead, he found himself peering into darkness, as though the girl's bedroom were a subterranean cavern or abandoned mine, walls of wet stone, ribbed and pitted, crawling with faintly luminous veins, as though the gold and silver they contained were molten, pumping like blood. Shapes in the darkness; swimming things, like fish or snakes beneath the surface of oily waters, barely suggestions of their bodies breaking surface. The device clattered to the ground, smoking and spent.

A miscalculation; sentiment clouding his judgement. Had they known that the sickness had taken this deep a hold, they'd have come better prepared.

Holding onto the lintel, he peered into the darkness, the things within seeming to dart and slither from beneath his gaze, as though pained by it. Stepping forward, he reached into the murk, his fingers disappearing into it as though it were liquid.

Pain, the stuff burning like acid, but he didn't pull away. Ripples ran out from where he touched, carrying silvery light, like the reflection of the moon. The things within swarmed upon him, lashing, biting, stinging; some reaching through, the darkness parting to emit jellyfish tendrils, segmented, bony limbs, their tips barbed, stinging blindly at the air. Yes, they'd underestimated, but he'd seen the like before, many times. Had shat and sweated similar, during the days of his own fever.

Reaching deeper, he closed his eyes, allowing himself to flow; his own veins opening, skin parting, what pulsed beneath bleeding out, polluting the darkness. The stuff began to bubble and evaporate, blistering before his eyes, the things within recoiling, attempting to retreat into its depths before the cleansing influence found them. With a wrench, he pulled himself free, taking a moment to assess the damage done to his arm. Skin blistered and sliced open; sloughing away in places, the musculature and tracery of veins beneath not of any pattern a surgeon or mortician would recognise. Blue-black fluid pulsed from the wounds, already solidifying, coaxing his skin to reknit itself.

The darkness receded down the tunnel, peeling back across the stone walls, until barely a curtain of it remained, flapping frayed around what it had been sewn to conceal.

The girl sat cross legged, head bowed, fingernails scratching at the ground. The air around her swarmed; things coalescing there, seeming to rise as smoke and vapour from her skin, from beneath her hair; her eyes and mouth, congealing in the darkness to take on shape and substance. Nightmares...what those who worshipped the disease never saw, or refused to acknowledge.

“Alex.”

The girl shuddered, shaking her head, the things that previously infested the darkness clustering about her, battening upon her; burrowing into her back, her arms, her belly.

“They're nothing, Alex; nothing at all. Burn them; think of fire, think of light. Burn them.”

She shook her head, moaning, the things flailing about her, biting deeper, as though threatening the very host whose fever they depended on.

Dumolo approached, stepping into the tunnel, though the fact of it pained him. Vapour rose from where his feet met the ground, every brush of the tunnel wall against his shoulders or fingers eliciting spasms not only of pain, but of sympathetic sickness; memories of his own time in love with it; wandering insane and without clarity.

“Look at me. Your Father called us; we can help you...”

Her head abruptly snapped up, eyes blazing through a veil of matted hair.

Leave. Us. ALONE.

A sudden blast of air, what remained of the darkness crystallising, becoming jagged shards that flew on the gale, some finding their marks, lacerating his arms and legs, others flying wide, dispersing.

“You don't want to hurt me, I know you don't.”

Sobs, shudders, the parasites swarming across her, all but eclipsing her wasted frame. Dumolo focused, breathing deep and slow. Around him, the stone cracked and flaked away, the tunnel itself dissolving, leaving behind suggestions of the room it had been dreamed to eclipse.

“What...what are you doing? Don't...”

He reached out, brushing the tunnel wall with his fingers, dissolution spreading from every caress; cracks coruscating throughout, letting in pale light, the patter of rain.

“I can't help it, Alex, anymore than you can; this is what I do, what I dream of. The nightmares...we can stop them, for good. How does that sound?”

The girl's eyes flared, her breath coming quicker. “No...please. Go away...”

She started to scrabble back, but the dissolution had already gone too far; its cracks reaching behind her, into whatever depths she'd imagined, peeling them away, leaving them little more than ancient and flaking paint. As he drew closer, she convulsed, the things parasitically bound too and battened on her squirming, attempting to burrow deeper or peel themselves away, bursting open and spilling, crumbling to dust and smoke that curled away in the air.

Soon enough, there was little to mark they'd ever been; only a naked, weeping girl, clawing at her bedroom wall as though to burrow through it and hurl herself into the rain.


                                                                                                     *

“Are you done?”

Esther rose from where she knelt, peeling her hands away from Martin's face. The man slumped, burbling nonsense, drooling over his shirt.

She nodded, standing, retrieving the instruments she'd utilised and stowing them away in her bag. He'd worked with others who'd completed the operation in less than half the time; treating it as no more consequential than lancing a boil or extracting a rotten tooth. Esther... hers were always longer, often to the chagrin of their superiors; she didn't merely leave them with some patchwork confusion; always taking time to repair the damage to their lives; leaving them with something to be happy for; something that might lend them meaning. Initially, he'd been sceptical of the efforts, regarding them as inefficient; a waste of time and resources, but the results spoke for themselves.

The girl followed as they made their way to the car, slumping and docile, eyes fluttering as though suspended somewhere between dreams and waking. Esther came after, ushering her into the back seat, strapping her in.

“Will you drive?”

He held up his arm for her perusal. A flicker of emotion? Concern? Of course...such was her nature; the foundation of her service to The Loom.

Easing into the driving seat, she assessed his wounds, her fingers moving over them, pressing and probing, the anaesthetic numbness that spread from every point of contact eliciting sighs of gratitude.

“She did this?”

“Her disease did this. She's further gone than we anticipated.”

Esther nodded, turning away, starting the car. It didn't need to be said; only one possibility; one chance for her to be whole again:

Severance.

                                                                                               *



Some took a degree of pleasure in this...almost fetishised satisfaction. Not him; a necessary evil, one he felt obliged to witness, being its author.

Esther had done what she could for the girl, along the way. Sways and sutures; the devices they'd brought painfully inadequate. Even focused on the road as he was, the girl's sickness beat upon him like fever heat, filling the car with its stink, his skull with its symptoms.

Bad enough that he'd once suffered the same; to be reminded of the condition so acutely, to feel it, even vicariously...vile, his insides squirming, his skin unclean. Protocol demanded that he take Communion as soon as possible, to prevent possible contamination...he would, as soon as he was certain she had some peace.

“Esther is waiting.”

A silver mug, pressed into his hand. He accepted, swilling the mercurial liquid it contained from side to side. Unlike most, he'd never developed a taste for it, though he appreciated its properties.

Fleischer...a trace of the man's original German still lingering at the edge of his words, but a trace only. Drawing alongside Dumolo, he sipped from his own mug, eyes wandering over the scene beyond the glass.

“I know. This won't take long.”

The man nodded. Dumolo sipped from his own Neph, the stuff almost tasteless, faintly metallic at the back of his tongue. Chemical calmness; the ease of anaesthetic spreading through his body. Another sip and another, each bringing a greater degree of stillness, of clarity.

“More problematic than we anticipated, yes?”

The man gestured to the window, flickers of a smile at the corner of his lips. One of those whose company he'd once found irritating to the point of unbearable, when he still suffered from such weakness. Fleischer enjoyed his work; had never made a secret of it, a fact for which their superiors appreciated him. For his part, Dumolo found it distasteful; a distraction from duty.

Beyond the glass, the girl, Alexia, shuddering, straining against her bonds. So frail, now that the sickness swathing her had been peeled away, her adolescent body wasted to the point of malnutrition, criss crossed with scratches, old scars. Self harm; hardly uncommon amongst the Inspired, especially those with no framework for their condition. Esther had managed to keep her relatively docile until they arrived. Even so, the sickness had done everything its power to express itself, as was its nature, her croaks and convulsions hideous, what issued from her lips and eyes; from her quivering fingers, worse.

Traces of it played about her, even now, even here; the air around her shimmering, unsettled, filaments crawling and coruscating across her skin, threatening to burst the scars and scratches, have her spill out at the seams. She cried, murmured, calling out for her parents, for friends and companions she'd imagined, in her fits and fevers. Surgeons worked to pacify her, manipulating the machinery to which she was bound, subtly altering the quantities of chemicals it pumped into her system; pipes and tubes piercing her wrists, her temples, her spine...

This particular configuration he'd never seen before; an eruption from beneath the cell floor, a great throne upon which she sat, its needles and extrusions prodding, pressing her, paring away the matter that she breathed and sweated; that coalesced in the air about her. She strained; a rabid animal at the leash, willing to strangle itself for want of freedom.

“You need Communion...I can smell her stink on you.”

So could he; feel it worming over him, beneath his clothes; carrion seeking out cold flesh in which to make their nurseries.

“I know, and I'll take it, when I'm sure the assignment is done.”

Fleischer sighed through his nostrils, whatever else he had to say swallowed back.

The Surgeons began their work, the instruments that served them in place of fingers, that extruded from their swollen heads, moving over the girl, every lick, every caress, opening wounds, probing deeper, seeking out the very roots of the sickness she'd carried since her first cells coalesced. She sagged where she sat, shuddering at the violation, her screams growing muted, becoming little more than strangled whimpers.

Dumolo himself didn't remember...none of them did; the trauma equivalent to that of birth; something that sanity couldn't sustain, which it therefore simply ejected from memory. Even so, he couldn't suppress a pang of sympathy for the girl; a fleeting wish that there was another way.

Fleischer turned to him, one eyebrow raised.

“You disapprove?”

Dumolo shook his head. “No, of course not. It's a mercy...”

Breathless gasps, the girl straining almost enough to tear her arms and legs from their sockets, for her skull to press through her stretched taught features. What the Surgeons pared from her manifested as it came free; coalescing in their fingers as worms of smoke and light, the flailing roots of some sentient cancer. Receptacles opened in the cell floor to receive it, funnelling the redundant matter away, to where Dumolo didn't know, his function not requiring such knowledge.

“No. It is a privilege. So many die not knowing this; their own purity, their purpose. What we give her now...it will be more than dreams could ever provide.”

He knew. Why else would he bring her here, to suffer this..? Perhaps she would be like him; one of the lucky ones that survived the process. So many didn't; minds and bodies surrendering under the strain, the sickness murdering its host rather than seeing it purged.

Even so, he knew first-hand how profoundly it distorted perception; how much in love with it they could be. She would hold on to the last; even when there was little left of it, of herself. He could help her; help her to see the wisdom of surrender...the joy it could bring...

“So many...do you think Isaac can cope with them?”

Fleischer laughed.

“Of course; it was what he was built for...”

A note of uncertainty, masked almost before he could detect it.

“Has there been any change? Has the Loom met..?”

The smile disintegrated, giving way to a faintly distasteful frown. “Would it make any difference if they did?”

As close as he'd come to dissent within these halls, or perhaps a subtle attempt to gage his own? Fleischer, like all of them, watched perpetually for signs of disturbance amongst their own; a factor not unheard of, but not something he'd ever encountered himself.

The Loom...how long had it been since they last met? Since anything filtered down from them but the same, automatic imperatives? In truth, he and others had come to regard them as little more than ceremonial fixtures; too distant, too divorced from the realities they faced every day to even begin to engage with them.

All except Hazelgarth, of course.

“Perhaps not. But they must be aware of the situation, surely..?”

Fleischer shrugged, draining the last of his Neph. “Perhaps they are, perhaps not. Most of them wouldn't care, either way.”

No longer dissent; outright blasphemy, though nothing that Dumolo himself hadn't thought, in his own private doubts. For Fleischer to give it voice...a certain sign that change was in the air, for good or ill.

Through the glass, the girl, Alexia, no longer straining, bloodied now, quivering as she wept, as the Surgeons probed deeper, beyond flesh, beyond bone, into more abstract anatomy...

The sickness surged in its own defence, her wounds suddenly gaping, black matter spooling from within. One of the Surgeons staggered back, the stuff coiling about her wrist, its touch causing her to blister.

No...no! Don't resist, please! Let it be...let it take you...

He'd hoped, prayed, that she wouldn't reach this crisis. Resisting the urge to enter the chamber, to go to her, calm and contain her, he watched as Isaac burrowed into her, the engine's hypodermics draining as they flooded her system with ink-like matter. The Surgeons recovered, the tendrils flailing at them sloughing away, growing insubstantial as smoke.

Fleischer heaved a heavy breath, having already decided how this would end, his lament for the girl written before she'd even ceased breathing.

Not without reason; both of them had seen this play out before, countless times, those that ended with anything more than the subject's death so few and far between, lodged like nails in memory's meat; a connection akin to that of parent and child, that Dumolo himself had known only once...the child calling for him now, though he declined to go to her.

The Surgeons scurried more urgently, coaxing devices to extend from the cell's walls, from the floor; limb-like protuberances that they directed with frantic motions of their bladed fingers over the girl's shifting anatomy. Little of her left, now; her body a pulsating mass, neither vapour nor flesh nor fluid; a thing of storms and bruises, of overripe fruit, on the verge of bursting. Her pain...she called for her Father, for the Mother who'd abandoned her. She called for God and Christ; any divinity that might hear. No answer; nothing save the whirring of instruments, the growl of engines.

Over so quickly, what bond might have existed between them; that he'd already begun to foster, giving way; a snap in his mind like the severing of an umbilical chord, the sudden give of a swelling tumour. The Surgeons backed away, the cell's machinery descending to contain her, something of the original girl momentarily surfacing from the conflux, features swollen and swimming, matter seeping from her wounds. Did she see? Did she sense him beyond the wall, the window? He might have reached for her, had he the means; were he still afflicted by the same disease. Nothing he could do; no comfort he could provide. She gave out with a sigh, sagging where she lay, her protean body coming apart, sluicing away from bones similarly agitated, the matter caught and siphoned away by various sluices and devices set around the chamber. Would part of her survive, would she wake to find herself assimilated into the machinery, granted at least a semblance of life, of purpose..? No; not even enough left for that. No waking; only emptiness, a waste of such potential.

Dumolo turned away, the corridor seething with activity. Opposite, those that had been more fortunate; forms taken during infancy, before they could begin to fruit -unwanted and abandoned; strays and street-born- stretched and yawned in exhaustion, the circuitry woven throughout their bodies pulsing, technicians moving to repair that which burst or sputtered. A familiar sight, these days; the state and the engine that sustained it driven almost to breaking point.

Fleischer's condolence chilling the air between them, muting the black fire behind his eyes. A hand on his shoulder, the numbness that flooded from it welcome.

“More peace than she's likely ever known.”

Truth, no less welcome for its coldness.

                                                                                          I.

Of course I could. So easy, at least in the telling; a few words, silence after. Lingering, lingering; waiting for the storm that would never come.

Nothing, the book closed; wordless apocalyse that we both ached for, that we both denied...

Why? Why couldn't I just tell the damn story, have it done with..?

Footsteps on the landing outside, soft, stealthy; an assassin's tread, come to put me out of my misery. The door sliding open almost silently. Almost.

“Hey. You want some coffee?”

“Oh, bloody Hell, yes.”

Milk, three sugars; frothed to dessert sweetness. He knew; his hand on my shoulder, the other setting a steaming mug on my desk. A chaste peck on my cheek, a rasp of stubble.

“What's the plan for today?”

“This; got to get this fucking manuscript done.”

“The serial killer thing? I enjoyed that one...”

“No; no. That more or less wrote itself; Cam's already looking over it. Just waiting for him to get back with the edit, you know?; This one...”

Fits and starts, feverish; inspired by its own winter chill.

“...I don't quite know, to be honest.”

A nameless thing, waking in a bed of snow; an empty world...save for ghosts; echoes of those whose neighbourhoods it wandered, whose homes and memories it invaded. Old songs, old whispers; confessions so desperate to be heard, as though they might be absolved in the telling; released from the Hell of remembering.

“Don't those ones usually turn out the best?”

“Usually.”

What career I'd carved out for myself founded on them; random scraps, scribbled during more desperate years; before Alistair, before his money gave me time, space; freshly ground coffee in my mug, a centrally heated study; a consistent roof over my head. On buses, at cafes, waiting for trains; many unrelated, or seemingly so, when they first manifested on paper; their relations becoming apparent later, when I took time to type them up, expand them into something half coherent...

“I might be a bit later than usual tonight; we've got a staff meeting about some stupid fucking thing. I'll try to get away as early as I can...”

Turning to him, into a kiss that continued, tasting of bon fires in frost.

“Okay, I think that's enough. Or neither of us will get anything done.”

So easy; a telephone call, a text; the computer set to stand by. A day together, closed curtains; on the sofa, a season of something mindless. Too much, in recent days; too much than is good for either of us.

“What do you fancy for dinner?”

“I don't know. We still got enough stuff to make a Rogan Josh?”

“Yeah, I think so. If not, I'll pop into town for an hour or two; you know, blow the cobwebs away.”

He loved it; this world he created; the home, the profession; the boyfriend; a published author, a cook; a pretty, younger thing to flaunt.

I loved it, too. Impossible, barely a couple of years ago; a dream of others, a fairy tale, that I would never know.

The thought of it ending...enough to make me nauseous.

A staff meeting.

Sudden lightning inside, illuminating an image behind my eyes: he and one of his students; a boy barely beyond high school, sweating and grunting over a classroom desk...

A trick of old anxieties, that he'd done so much to help me exorcise.

Standing, going to him, not even showered this morning; still stinking of sleep, dreams; last might's sex. Arms around his neck, a closer, longer kiss.

Breaking from me, laughing through hitched breath.

“I've got to go. Tonight, yeah?”

Tonight.

                                                                                                  *

A shower, before it started again; Winter calling.

The empty room; my room. A gift; renovated, decorated, before I moved in, outside my knowing, until he first ushered me through the door.

Book cases lining the walls, most laden, sagging with ill-organised volumes, folders; files and piles of loose notes. Toys and figurines and ornaments; brick-a-brack of childhood; of the waking now. The desk my favourite part; in front of the far window, which looked out over the back garden (untended, save for the herb and vegetable patches that were his pride and joy), elaboratly carved; deeply stained, scratched and marked from its pevious use. An antique, by all accounts; the most expensive piece of furniture in the house.

Mine.

An especial shelf separated from the rest, lined with copies of my published work (a detail that he always made a point of showing guests).

His precious, pretty, clever boy.

Waiting for me; document still open, computer singing.

Snow and cold and emptiness; a void that made me smile and shiver. Where was he? Who was she?; My androgyne wanderer, my lost and naked child, padding through the snow, unknown, even to itself, following whispers; distant, faded things, echoes of a time long gone. Lights and faces flickering in darkened windows, shapes dancing at the edges of sight, dissolving into snow and static nonsense beneath its eyes. Children playing, whimpering; singing secrets and confessions that their parents would shudder to hear.

Where are you going, sweetheart? What is this world..?

Not knowing, any more than I did; walking it together, discovering through one another's eyes. My strange, sexless child; no clue as to its nature in its face, the proportions of its body; from one perspective, more masculine, from another, decidedly feminine...shifting with every step, every flicker of expression. Between its legs..?; Shadow nonsense; a state that my eyes slipped from like fingers scrabbling at a puzzle box of polished ice, not able or willing to define; sometimes seeming to protrude, others to flower and gape; not both, never entirely one or the other. A flux that might madden, if fixated on overlong...

An insect buzz, a bone rattle, tearing me from the cold; our communion. Far longer than it felt; the day already swollen, cold sunlight streaming through the window at my back.

My mobile phone, buzzing its demands against the stained wood. Baring my teeth, a wolf snarl; silent curses for whoever called me from the cold; from intimacy with my lost and strange babe.

Worse, far worse; the reluctant gratitude, to be back in the warmth and waking.

Plucking up the hated device (one that Alistair insisted on, since we first became lovers), a familiar name and face painted across its screen.

Trevor. Fuck.

Almost not answering, returning to the white and the wastes. Old anxieties demanding otherwise; poisonous whispers swarming behind my eyes:

Do it; leave it 'til tomorrow. You know what might happen...

How would that make you feel? What would that do to you, knowing all you had to do was pick up the fucking phone..?

Snatching up the phone. Hating myself; the indulgence of it, the surrender.

“Hey...hey, Trev. How are things?”

A momentary burst of demon-babble; some static interference, Trevor's voice emerging from the nonsense:

“...Pat? I'm...I'm sorry; I know you're working.”

Perpetual apology; a status the man had worked so hard to break, but so ingrained; his default condition; to be alien and absurd in any situation, any company; an irritant, endured rather than enjoyed.

Often a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Don't worry about it; I could use a break, truth be told.”

Nervous laughter, crackling that makes it sound as though he's lying on a bed of crisp packets.

“That's...kind of convenient. I was going to ask...”

Breathless, the conversation no doubt rehearsed ten times or more before he called, the lines coming in ahrythmic, unbroken stream:

“...you maybe want to come over? I can make us lunch...”

Refusals risng like vomit in my throat: I'm sorry, sweety; I'd love to, but I can't: I have other plans; in the wastes, with my lost creature, my nether-child.

Nothing else, until Alistair got home: alone in the wastes. That was okay; I liked it there, in the snow and silence, the strange lights, the whispers...

Wondering, wondering: what had murdered humanity, in that state? What had undone the cycle of seasons, made Earth a cemetery Eden, a garden of ghosts?; Perhaps some military or cosmological experiment gone awry; some engine designed to peer into undisclosed dimensions or probabilities; to provide perpetual energy or to hurl us to the very edges of known creation...maybe cosmological phenomena; something never known or perceived in all of humanity's history, ending us as suddenly as we began. An occult rite, an arcane spell; alien or extra-dimensional influence...

Maybe not quite so clear cut; any and all, none that I or my creature or those that follow us would ever know.

Swallowing the filth back, needing a little respite; a place in the warm; familiar humanity.

“That sounds good. About what time?”

A sigh of relief, another burst of demon-chatter. “...about an hour?; I can have something ready by then.”

“About an hour it is.”

Call ended, a brief wander in the snow and emptiness.

                                                                                                  *

Away. Away from conern and confusion; away from worry and jealousy and yearning. A ghost, trailing its child's footsteps.

Whispers on the wind, calling it to where they played; where they fell on one another. Where they scrabbled and sang and wept; where they lay, frozen in their flights and mournings; their confusion, their wittering pleas for salvation from the coming snow (none hearing, none answering, until now).

My child going to them, drawn by their whispers; clusters of black, withered forms, half buried in the snow, so densely entwined with one another as to seem like parts of the same anatomy; parents fused with children in an attempt to insulate them against the cold, lovers now more one than they could have ever dreamed in ephemeral love making. Many seemingly caught in the act of flight; attempting to outrun the apocalyptic cold or whatever first brought it down. Others on their knees, faces raised to the sky. Statues of frozen flesh, testaments to an end that none foresaw. Some in their cars, crashed to a halt; murdered by their own hands before the cold could find them. Others in their homes; sat in front of long dead TV sets or computers, in bed, their quilts and covers welded to their bodies by frost more completely than by any fire. Following as it went to them, drawn like a magpie to shimmers of silver; a moth to bonfires.

The dead far from inert, here; certainly not to its sight or mine; blazing with blue and green flame, some pale to the point of colourless, others deep and bright; rising high into the grey and swollen sky. Forms in the flames; flickering, flimsy; child's scrawls, stretching and distorting in the wind, endlessly whispering; broken, fractured stories; of their lives before winter, of the world that was.

As though confession might absolve them, as though our hearing might somehow open a way to salvation.

The secrets they told...accounts that might or not have been true; things imagined, things wanted or dreaded or dreamed, all presented in the same, fretful, desperate manner; the actual and imagined having no distintion:

Here, what was once the car park of a sink-estate flat block, now a small desert of pale drifts and dunes, a sexless, shrivelled thing at the wheel of an old fashioned mini-cooper, hands fused with the plastic, another, smaller form in the back seat, head thrown back, as though seeing angels through the ceiling.

Father and daughter, the former howling, voice thin and distant, as he chased the latter endlessly, reaching to embrace her only for their insubstantial forms to disperse, pass through one another. The Father slowing at my own child's approach, staring at it with hollow, ragged eyes.

The stories coming without greeting, without context; of the wife he treated as a second Mother; his maid, his sex-doll; seceretary and chaperone; unabashed in his self-condemnation:

...no wonder she left us. No wonder...

The girl laughing as she paused, perched on a nearby dune, waiting for Daddy to follow.

...wait...wait for Daddy, sweetheart...

Laughing, laughing as Daddy crawled, as Daddy slipped and slid after her. Such knowing in her eyes as they found us; such conscious cruelty.

Elsewhere, a once-park that had become a desert of snow, littered with the frozen forms of dogs; their masters, children at play. Contradictory fires, rising high; great conflagrations like witch's bon fires, fed by the powdered bones of murdered babes. The children still at play, some, at least; a small gaggle screaming and barking laughter as they chased a weaker specimen through the snow, the diminutive one burning brighter than all the rest combined, flaring to drive them back, turning on them with high-pitched harpy-shrieks, a voice like metal claws running over the strings of an ill-turned violin. Smiling at us, as they scampered back, as they fled from it, gathering form and substance as it approached.

The others; the cowering and animal pursuers, scattering, dispersing into cold-condensed tatters of breath and weeping, pathetic threats.

Hello.

More coherent than most; able to speak, able to hold itself. My child not answering; not with its spoken voice, at least.

A smile, the child laughing; a child no longer; transforming before our eyes; warping in the fire that wreathed it, limbs lengthening, neck elongating, its face becoming almost crocodilian; a black-eyed, saw-toothed beast; an echo of one that the girl used to dream, back when she lived.

They used to chase me; Billy and his friends. He got sick when the cold came.

She liked that; hating him, hating him; liked watching him cough and moan, liked watching him shiver.

Calling to her, trying to speak, though I had no mouth or voice here; though I was less than a mote of snow or dust.

The creature she became bounding away through the snow, sniffing out the traces and tatters; raking them from the air, into the dunes, where they coalesced, shivering; children still, lacking the wit or imagination to dream themselves other. Whimpering not only in fear, but in jealousy of their victim's new state, of her solidity; pleading with my child to lend them a little of the same.

Happy to, with a glance, with a breath. The one that the former girl pinned down in the snow suddenly screaming like a wounded pig, the others flocking to it, swarming around the pair as we watched. My child smiling, tendrils of silver vapour seeping between its teeth, the shadowed uncertainty of its sex disturbed, rippling and distorting. All of them kindling in sudden, common conflagration, their stories, their desperate confessions, merging as one; a single, contradictory tale that seethed and elaborated into surreal nonsense. As for the spectres themselves, swelling in their own pale fires, like their victim before them; the one she pinned down in the snow with a many-fingered, spidery talon swelling and bubbling, its swine-screams congealing around it into a bloated, gelatinous form, many eyes rolling in its folds and recesses, a porcine mouth biting at its captor.

The others dancing, laughing even as they kindled; knots of matter like wax in the flames, but swelling rather than melting, taking on form and substance beneath our fascinated and appalled attentions.

Soon, a new menagerie; something far beyond ghosts and echoes running wild in the desolation.

Maybe our business here; why I dreamed the child into being: to populate tomorrow; to make something new from the filth and sorrow of yesterday.

An hour...

Yes; idiot insistance; the paranoid twittering of an alarm clock in the back of my mind. Timeless, here; an hour meaning nothing.

Wandering, following in the child's wake; through parks and fields, streets and market squares and neighbourhoods.

Magpie fascination drawing her; the fires and embers, the stories and songs.

The beaten-senseless Mother, frozen in the process of being dragged along behind her husband, bleeding and half-delirious from her last transgression; a new crime that she'd not known of before, that she hadn't understood would hurt him so. Bodies fused at the hands beneath the snow, the child in her arms all but featureless; a black tumor, a knot of nothing, tears long since gone to crystals and dust.

Their polluted fires blazing; the Father's belching black smoke, the Mother's thin and pellucid, almost nothing. The child?; A stuttering light, brilliant blue and green, shifting and flaring in its Mother's smothering embrace.

The day winter came like any other, for them; an unwanted waking, tip-toeing around the house, hardly a whispered word, for fear of waking Daddy. Daddy, who'd been working all night. Daddy, who'd played with his trains, with her, most of yesterday; who'd let her work them at the controls. Daddy, who was so sad so much of the time; so tired.

Daddy, who sometimes swelled out of his skin and became something black and wild-eyed; who sometimes called her name in nightmares, slurred and growling, as he sometimes did Mommy's. How she knew; that Mommy had been bad again; had done something stupid again. Not understanding; money and loans and bank accounts. Bills and telephone calls and men on the doorstep, calling Daddy home from work...

The same story, told in so may ways; from so many points of view. Lingering with my empty one as it went to them, the Mother and Father screaming, bellowing at it to stay away, even as they congealed under its attention; as its sweat and breath, as its tears and the seepages from the nonsense between its legs threaded through them, weaving matter from lies and nothing.

The daughter, the child, flaring, the Mother wailing as she tumbled from her arms, reaching for her, calling...the child laughing as she skittered away; swelling to something new, something ragged and many limbed, that others flocked to; children murdered by the sudden winter, enraptured by her transformations, begging for some semblance of their own.

Over and over; following, lacking any choice in the matter; a mote orbiting my own child's skull, tethered to it by demands beyond gravity, beyond parental adoration (though I did; it and every one it found, whose story it consumed and provided the means of reshaping itself).

Here, this dark and quiet house, frost and ice on the carpets, the ceiling; on the bannisters and photographs lining the walls. Echoes here wailing a different species of lament; weeping accusations that raked though my child like rusted, steel talons in her entrails:

Clinging together, shuddering on the sofa; their pale fires flaring as one, immolating them; more coherent than most; shades that boasted some detail and distinction; a half-naked woman, swollen breasts punctured and bleeding, wounds at her throat, her flanks, her heart. The man trying to comfort her weeping red tears, his eyes put out, his placations hitched and trembling with despair.

The ones responsible for their murder watching, basking in their pain; nourished by it, swelling to parasitic substance without my child's input:

Two boys, teenagers only; sixteen, seventeen at the oldest; the one wiry, whippet lean, handsome, in a wan and ephemeral way, the other taller, broader; already hirsuite, rugby-player's frame pelted in wiry, dark hair, the thick glasses perched on his nose incongruous, lending him the look of something pieced together.

The pair of them shivering in one another's embrace, painted in blood, the apologies they once sang long since run dry. Now, revelling in the suffering of those that would have murdered them for the sin of their affection, that almost did, not realising how strong they'd become together; how much more they were than the frightened and retiring children they'd once been.

A story that seethed on the air; in every shadow, every frozen ruby droplet decorating the room:

The best of friends; more like brothers than children of separate households; hardly apart, since they were three years old. Every weekend, every Summer; every Easter and Winter and New Year: together.

Knowing from so young; in ways that I never did; knowing also that they'd be condemned for the kisses they occassionally shared; for the touches that had grown more intense and intimate as their bodies swelled to adolescence.

Not hating themselves, like so many; not denying; hating the world around them for its ignorance and condemnations, for its idiocy and judgement.

These two; the parents of the skinnier boy; his natural effeminacy drawing grunts of disgust and cruel eyes from Father and Mother both since he began to swell into his own state.

Never physical; the two of them too cowardly for that; their cruelty in looks and words; in the questions they'd never dare ask.

Learning to hate them.

The other...cruelties of a different shade; marked out for his size, his retiring nature; a nerd born, more at home in the darkness of his own room, on the computer or buried soul-deep in the books that had come to predominate his existence...endlessly harangued; both at school and at home: Why don't you go out once in a while?; Get some fresh air. Meet some girls, maybe...

The answer he gave earning him silence; a coldness that stabbed into his very depths, murdering whatever love their might have once been.

Fantasies of emptiness; of waking to find the world barren of humanity, just themselves; a playground in which they could wander and laugh and be.

A playground that we'd made for them here; beyond all blood, beyond all judgement; the flesh they once wore frozen as one in their bed upstairs, those that would have murdered them for it going first; less than a day before winter fell and gave them the world they ached for.

Such beautiful boys, my child going to them; drawing their eyes away from the wittering, weeping things that would never know, never see. Drawing them out, out into the pale day, the grim light. No longer merely ghosts, but growing more solid by the moment; not the boys they once were, but as they dreamed themselves; wild things, running and howling in the snow.

Black lightning, a hideous wrenching; my child feeling it too, trembling, almost losing its feet as I was torn away; an echo of that original expulsion, in all its trauma, no denying it, no matter how desperately I clawed and wept; no matter what prayers I silently cried.

Ghosts here, welcome apparitions, playing in Summer dusk. Light like I haven't seen since they were born; dense, syrupy, gold and auburn and scarlet. The first whisper of night's chill on the air, cooling the kiln-day.

Sweat and sweet grass, old wood and the peaty ripeness of compost. Flower plots dripping with jewels after a brief shower, three minutes worth of rain so violent, I was afraid it might hammer through the ceiling, drown us all where we sat.

Out here, away from TV and sofas, from carpets and comfort. Out here, away from familiar faces, finding those I've forgotten:

Spectral children, dancing and darting through the bushes, rolling across the grass, shrieking at one another as they hang from yellow-leaved willow branches.

Hearing her, in my thoughts: the woman shrieking, barking at us from the kitchen window: “Keep it down! The neighbours don't want to hear your bloody noise!” “Get down from the damn tree. I'm not gonna drive you to hospital if you break your damn necks!”

An unfair potrait, perhaps, but the most enduring: the woman red, swollen and bellowing, the way her jowls flushed and quivered, the way her eyes seemed to shrink, burning in their pits.

Not afraid of her; not after a time. Realising early that her bluster was exactly that: just noise, empty threats, no more consequential than the wheezing of a punctured balloon.

“Such a little shit...”

Not at the beginning, not here: this ghost, this boy, with his azure eyes and white-blonde hair, his striped “pirate's” shirt, his ragged denim jeans.

Laughing, crying in the dirt, quivering at the sight of splinters in his fingers, of grazed knees, of cut shins. Laughing at those that suffered likewise, who wept in his place.

Closing my eyes, inhaling: the perfume of dead Summers, this...nothing in comparison; echo of an echo, copy of a copy, bled of colour and texture and meaning 'til it might as well be translucent, a sketch scratched on clear acetate.

But where the ghosts play...

So dense, so sensory, so real. I can be there, with them; see and feel as they see and feel: what it is to be weightless, fearless; to tumble and roll in filth, to bruise and swell and cut and not care, after the initial tears; to climb trees and have no notion of falling,breaking arms or legs or fracturing skulls.

Happy idiots, blissful animals, one and all. Dead as the Summers I remember, now. Dead as the one I walk. This garden...a cemetery, as I am: one I should have left behind, stopped mourning at, years ago.

Still here, the man who maintained it; who watered the plants, who trimmed the bushes, who clipped back the coniffers, when they grew too rampant: a thinner ghost, one not so in love with the light and colour; a stretched and weary thing, slumping where the children run and gambol, frowning and fretting where they laugh. Muttering to himself, as he casts rainbows across the flower plots, sad-eyed, frowning; a face about to slough from the bone beneath, leaving him with a smile he can't deny.

So like him, despite myself; seeing him and more and more with every passing day. Some possessing ghost, some hideous, hereditary virus: always assuming I'd be more like my Mother, resembling her side of the family throughout childhood, adolescence, my university years.

Now? The mirror a tragedian, telling me stories sorry enough to make me weep; the same mask, growing slacker and looser with every day, waiting for the moment it will tear and peel, leaving my despair naked.

They don't know. How can they?; They don't know me, any more than I knew him. A stranger to them, as they sit and slump on their beds, in front of their computers, over their phones and tablets. Hardly speaking to me, with such contempt, on the rare occassions they do. What am I to them?; Some stranger in the house; some befuddling, confusing intruder. I see it in their eyes, every time they turn my way: that worm of disgust, a reflection of what they see: a lost, weary, pointless thing, awaiting a time it no longer has to sustain eating shit.

Not here. Here, I belong again; here, I am welcome, where the world melts, were cemeteries meet sunlight, and memory bleeds into waking.

Calling me, inviting me to play. So many ghosts; not just children, but more ragged species: lightning-eyed, wild-haired; the older tribes, as feral as their appearance suggests, coming here as I do; to mourn the escalating decay of childhood, to gnaw over the betrayals and disappointments of the world, unasked metamorphoses of mind and body.

Knowing him, this feline-faced, emerald-eyed youth, with his predator's smile, his wiry, reptilian frame. Knowing him, in all of his secret bitterness, his sly contempt: the cruel fantasies he basks in: of those who disappoint him combusting, skinning themselves before his eyes; of daily apocalypses: tsunamis of blood, rains of liquid fire, undoing the systems and routines that abuse and bludgeon and beat him more and more every day, not knowing how long he'll survive.

So sad, not like the children; not running or laughing, but swapping conspiracies and secret cigarettes with another; oaths of suicide, before they reach twenty, when they know life will be over for them; stories of how they'll do it, what the world will think when they're found: that maybe they'll become martyrs to their generation, inspire similar self-murders.

If only, if only they had the courage of it! The disgust in their eyes, as they find me; wordless refutations, as though I'm a spectre of sickness, stinking and fly-blown, that they can't bear to be near.

Driving me back, away from children, away from ghosts; away from the point where we might play together. I can't...not like this. I can't let them see, be with them. Maybe, if that boy had been braver; if he'd not been so timid, allowed a little pain, a little blood, I could be there, another ghost in the molten sunlight.

But no...chill deepening, light bleeding away as the sun melts. Stars already in the sky, the spectre of a cruel moon.

Wandering back, almost weeping, to that place where I'm a phantom, and all mourn my lack of passing.

                                                                          The Twisted Path

Late winter chill, early morning dark. Frost and concrete and exhaust fume. Paths of glittering black, bushes festooned with dark, ragged blades. The way twisting beneath my feet, alive, despite its pelt of ice, a serpentine way, stirring, waiting for dawn to melt away its nightmares, so that it might devour the parasites upon its back.


                                                                             Phantom Gardens

Roadside sweetness, cutting through bitter sweat and petrol, sludge and cement. Sudden, intense, no discernible source; a synthetic spring. Pausing on the path, bearing the confuesed, judgemental glances of passing dog-walkers, cyclists, motorists, trying to find this phantom garden, with its ghost and plastic flowers, somehow sweet in the depths of winter, when all around has gone to rot.


                                                                                The Lonely Child

Alone, strange and twisted in her thick, white coat. Azure eyes staring past, staring through, somehow reptile, seeing what I cannot. Painted face, flawless as sculpture, a carved idol, whisps of cobweb hair protruding from the depths of her hood. Barely moving as I approach, seeming to wait, to gaze longingly down the path behind. For who? For what? Something that follows, that has always been my shadow. A story I'm not part of. Head twisted at a peculiar angle, as though her neck is deformed or broken, poorly set. Aching to speak as I pass, for her to twitch or glance my way; anything, anything to undo her dead and terrible quiet, to make her more than a wind-up doll in absence of its key.


                                                                                     The Way Angel

Not stopping, barely slowing at sight of him; dark, gaunt, camouflaged from most eyes, unfurling beside the path, a figure of leaves and shadows, of twisted trees and broken boughs. Long-limbed, stretch-bodied, swollen-headed: a forgotten one, my own Changeling, blood and innocence starved faery-thing, hungering in this world of plastic and process.

Afraid? Oh, yes! More than I've ever been, more than I can say. But enraptured, enraptured, whatever it might do, whatever salvation from banality it brings. No refusals or refutations, if it plucks me up and impales me on a broken bough, if it drags me into its shadow-realm to peel me naked and pluck me hollow...all welcome, if only for the chance to see and be touched by a monster, a manifest miracle.

Anything but this; slow dissolution in rain and early morning murk, this lie of illusions, perspective undoing it as I draw close, revealing it as nothing more than a play of shadow, a child of imagination's sadism, leaving me bereft in the grey Hell of a waking day.


                                                                                  The Broken Gate

A child of tree and architecture, its absurdity raising smiles as I draw close, pausing on my way, to admire its strangeness; boughs weighted with dark leaves, even in this late and frost-bitten season, curving into the sky, casting deep shadows across the path. The arch it forms broken, as though shattered in some great war, a natural calamity: no bodies or debris left to mark it (save perhaps those entangled in its roots, their rot feeding its younger incarnations). Standing on the lip of its shadow, gazing down into it; an abyss, a black sea, into which I might plunge, those drowned or drowining still rising from its depths to drag me down, into whatever alien Hell awaits.

Cursing concrete's solidity as I hurry by.


                                                                         The Unwanted Friend

Seeing, from the corner of my eye; plastic smile, desperate eyes. Paint cracked and flaking; glare of a frightened child in an old woman's face. Sparrow and magpie words, twittering, high-pitched, nervous and demanding. Hooks and chains of anxiety, attempting to find purchase on me, to snare and infest. None. My allegiance already given, my time not my own; certainly not hers.  Idiot answers, the briefest I can muster, cracked, painted smile dying, hooks retreating as she finds me frictionless, a thing of cut and polished ice.


                                                                               The Stolen Moon

Bus-journey malaise, mind and patience withering beneath the banalities of already dead things. A flash of silver through the window, weary eyes snared, drawn to a passing house in which the moon burns, a cold captive, plucked from the night sky. Theives of miracles, none of those wittering around me -sick and bitter men, weary and defeated women- sparing it a glance, not noticing; not concerned, even if they do. Miracles never mattering to them, stolen or otherwise. Why they drown, now, why they smother in their own skulls, in filth that silver will never pierce.


                                                                                 Goblin Children

Returning along the twisted path, the serpent sated now, sleeping in the weak sun, undisturbed by the black and ragged things that caper and run over its back: the goblin-children, unleashed from subterranean asylums, pale-faced and dead-eyed, to bark and bleat their filth at one another, at passers by, to kick up clods of earth and frozen shit, to revel in their own hopelessness, a dance of despair that will last until they part, until the cell doors slam shut again, and they allow themselves to weep for humanity they'll never know.


                                                                                      The Alone King

Key to the kingdom, grinding in its lock. The portal opening; long neglected way. The dreamed and promised kingdom, yearned for in exile, only shadows and warm promise to welcome, the scents of bread and incense, of spice and old, old books.

A lonely paradise, a quiet Eden. All he's ever asked for, if only for a dream's span.