DEAD ROMANCE

Then it turned its head. Swung its big brontosaurus-neck

towards me. Letting me see the muscles rippling under its

skin, with every move it made setting off a kind of fleshy chain

reaction, sending out ripples all over its body. Something huge,

black, and flat swung towards me, and I remember ducking,

even though the shape – the wing? – stopped before it reached

my head.

It had been in the shop. It had stretched its wings there, for

the first time on Earth. It had forced its way out through the

shop door, breaking the glass as it went, probably deciding

that I wasn’t worth finishing off. Then it had come straight

here to find the blond man.

T

H

E

N

E

W

A

D

V

E

N

T

U

R

E

S

DEAD ROMANCE

Lawrence Miles

First published in Great Britain in 1999 by

Virgin Publishing Ltd

Thames Wharf Studios

Rainville Road

London W6 9HT

Copyright © Lawrence Miles 1999

The right of Lawrence Miles to be identified as the Author of this Work

has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act 1988.

Bernice Summerfield was originally created by Paul Cornell

Cover illustration by David Wyatt

ISBN 0 426 20532 4

Typeset by Galleon Typesetting, Ipswich

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham PLC

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real

persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade

or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the

publisher‘s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other

than that in which it is published and without a similar condition

including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Note for continuity purists, and nobody else: the universe in

which much of Dead Romance takes place - the universe of

the Gods, the planet Dellah and Bernice Summerfield - is the

same universe in which the events of Christmas on a Rational

Planet, Down and indeed every other New Adventure takes

place. However, this absolutely and positively isn‘t the same

universe in which any other books I might have written are

set. Believe me.

With thanks to Camille Wesner, who supplied the material

for the ‗research‘.

-LM

FIRST NOTEBOOK

[128 PAGES.]

NOTES ON A PROLOGUE

1

All right. Let‘s start with the basics, and see where we can go

from there.

This book is called Dead Romance. That‘s what I‘m going to

put on the cover, anyway, although it wasn‘t the first name I

thought of. I was going to call it Living Space, but then it‘d

have ‗space‘ in the title, and you might expect it to be all

about little bubble-headed rocket men, like you used to see

on the covers of those old SF magazines before everybody

started dropping acid and seeing Starchilds everywhere. I did

think about calling it Real Life, but then you‘d probably want

me to tell you exactly what ‗real life‘ is sometime before the

end and, let‘s face it, it‘s not going to happen.

So. Dead Romance it is. Not the most exciting title in the

world, but it means something to me. And I‘m the important

one, seeing as nobody else is ever going to read this. I think

the word for what I‘m doing is ‗therapy‘. It‘d be nice to think

that, someday, the archaeologists are going to be digging up

these notebooks and treating them like important historical

documents, or even like holy scriptures from a lost

civilization. To be honest, though, I don‘t think the next

people who come here are going to care much about English

literature.

So. The first thing I‘d better do is invent my audience. I‘ll

pretend there are thousands of you out there, and I‘ll pretend

you‘re all just like me: young, smart, pretty, and sarcastic

(NB: I‘m probably being ironic here, although I‘m not really

sure any more). Just so we‘ve got some common ground, I‘ll

pretend you were born sometime in the late 1940s... No, sod

that. I‘ll pretend you were born on 15 August 1948. All of

you.

Well, why not? If you‘re going to invent an audience, why

not invent one in your own image?

2

I‘ve never written a book before. Come to think of it, I‘ve

never met anyone who‘s written a book, either, even though

I‘ve spent most of the last five years of my life hanging

around with people who think they‘re artists. Or at least

people who think they‘re the kind of people who‘d be close

friends of Oscar Wilde if they‘d been born nearly a hundred

years earlier.

Thought they were the kind of people who‘d be close friends

of Oscar Wilde. Past tense. Must remember that.

In fact, the only person I ever knew who came close to the

world of publishing was Dorian. Three years ago, in summer

‗68, Dorian suddenly decided to tell everybody that he was

one of the great modern poets of our time, on the grounds

that he‘d been to university and had an ode to some South

American revolutionary or other published in the student

magazine. So, in the year when the rest of us were all

pretending to hate pop music and claiming to be deeply,

deeply into jazz, Dorian spent most of his time hanging

around cafes in Covent Garden, standing on tables and

reading out poetry to anyone who‘d listen, until the

waitresses came and told him to stop, at which point he‘d tell

them that they were just pawns in an imperialist conspiracy

to stifle freedom of expression. Then they‘d tell him to piss

off, and Dorian would forgive them, in an act of Christlike

benevolence. So there.

3

At this point, I‘d just like to say that I‘m writing all this from

memory. I‘m not making any guarantees that these memories

are accurate, all right?

4

The reason I‘m mentioning Dorian is that he did get a book

published, although it was just a collection of his stupid

poems. He spent about six months telling us how a major

(‗and I mean, you know, major’) publishing house had picked

up on his work, and was going to unleash it on an

unsuspecting world early in ‗69. When he finally showed up

one day carrying two dozen ‗author‘s copies‘ in a Tesco bag,

they were all held together with staples, and the ink came off

on your fingers whenever you touched them. We decided that

these ‗author‘s copies‘ were probably the only copies in

existence, but we never said anything, not even when Dorian

tried to sell them off. He managed to unload a couple on to

tourists, but the rest ended up getting stuffed under his bed,

where they stayed for almost two years until they were

(presumably) destroyed along with the rest of London.

So, who‘s more pathetic? Me or Dorian? After all, at least

two other people got to read his masterwork, even if neither

of them could speak English properly. I‘m telling myself this

is therapy, but who‘s to say that what Dorian did wasn‘t? In

the end, I‘m writing this for the same reason he wrote his

poems: because everyone likes to imagine they‘re the centre

of attention, even when they‘re talking to themselves.

5

Anyway. Those ‗basics‘ I was talking about.

First, the world ended on 12 October 1970. That wasn‘t the

final end, of course, not the very last day. Most of the

property damage was after that - the big cities, the Tokyos

and the Berlins and the Riyadhs, they didn‘t get torn out of

the ground until a few days later - but 12 October was when

it all started. (Note how I put it in italics, just so you know

how big and scary it was. Just you wait - I‘ll be underlining

things next.)

I was in London when the end came, which makes me

unique, I should think. I don‘t suppose anyone else from my

neighbourhood is still alive by now. Nobody human, anyway.

London. Let me tell you about London.

6

London was the capital city of England, which was a country

that liked to tell itself it was the cultural heart of the whole

world, on the grounds that it had invented all the things that

were great. Like Shakespeare, and the British Broadcasting

Corporation, and even the Beatles (who came from Liver-

pool, which was a small suburb of London, according to all

the tourist guides). In 1970, there were about seven and a

half million people in London, although I think most of them

would‘ve liked to be somewhere warmer.

What was it like? Well... there were gutters stuffed full of

old chip papers, and there were roads packed with taxis,

driven around by men with bad complexions who stank of

cheap cigarettes. There were streets full of people who

complained when nobody was listening and who shut up

again whenever anybody was. People who said the

government should bring back national service. People who

wanted something Ted Heath and his gang couldn‘t give

them, even though they couldn‘t remember what. There were

pensioners wherever you looked, talking about the war and

slobbering on to the pavements (yes, I know it‘s cruel, but I

was only twenty-two, so I had the God-given right to take the

piss out of old people whenever I felt like it). It was a dull,

wet, piss-down-the-walls kind of city, that smelt of grease

and closed-down cafeterias. And I hope this has given you a

good feel for the place, because it‘s taken me hours to get this

paragraph right.

That wasn‘t the city where we lived, though. Me, and Cal,

and Dorian, and all the others. We didn‘t live in London. We

lived in LONDON!.

LONDON! was different. LONDON! was the place you

heard about in all the Sunday papers, the place you saw

every time you watched the news on the BBC and heard the

posh presenters talking about the Latest Fashions of Today‘s

Youth. The place that was famous, all over the world, for

being the city that had invented everything new and shiny

and exciting, from Carnaby Street to the Beatles. (And, if

there are any Americans left alive, they probably still think

Ringo Starr was a cockney... If any human beings ever

crawl out of the wreckage to restart their civilization, I hope

to God they dig an idol of Ringo out of the ruins and worship

him as their messiah, because it‘d be kind of fitting.)

Oh yes. It was LONDON! for us, all right. We ignored the

soggy people, we ignored the soggy food, we ignored the dog

shit on the streets and the germs in the underground. In fact,

I‘m not really sure what we didn‘t ignore. I don‘t know what

we thought LONDON! actually was. Half a dozen shops on

Oxford Street and a jazz club in Soho, probably.

7

Another good reason for not calling this book Real Life. Six

pages in, and it sounds like a bad joke already.

So, this was the way things were in the last few months

before the end. It was, according to the hippies, the dawning

of the Age of Something-or-Other (and we were never, ever

hippies - we thought we were much too sophisticated and

bohemian for that kind of thing). Which meant it was a good

tune for putting things into your body that weren‘t supposed

to be there, basically.

Sex? There was plenty of sex, most of it in dingy little cafe

back rooms, although we‘d heard orgies were supposed to be

fashionable in Rolling Stone high society (I‘m trying to

imagine getting into an orgy with the people I used to live

with, but I don‘t think I can do it without giving myself

nightmares).

Drugs? Obviously, although all the boys used to lie about

the number of trips they‘d had, the same way they used to lie

about the number of women they‘d slept with. There was a

kind of subspecies of girl in WC2 that had been specially

bred by the boys in the LSD crowd, just so they‘d have

someone to offload all their post-beatnik bullshit on to. Girls

who‘d take as many tabs of acid as they were told to take and

then lie down with their eyes and legs wide open, with big

stupid I-can-see-through-time smiles on their faces. Girls like

that must be extinct now, I suppose. I wonder what

happened to them, when it came to the world. They must

have just stood there, staring at it as it flooded into the city,

smiling and giggling and -

No. Now I‘m just fantasizing.

8

I hope you‘ve got the message by now. I am not, repeat not,

the kind of woman who‘s likely to drop one tab of acid

and end up staring at the carpet for six hours, looking for

the hidden Jesus-faces in the pattern. Which is important,

because of what I‘m going to tell you next.

What I‘m going to tell you is that, at eleven o‘clock p.m.

on 27 September 1970, I wouldn‘t have been able to tell you

who I was, where I‘d come from, or why I even bothered

getting up in the mornings. And the first thing I can

remember about the night is being stuffed into the back of a

police car.

I only remember that much because of the smell. Police

cars used to smell like no other car on Earth, like every-

one who‘d ever been arrested had left sweat marks on the

upholstery. I was lying on my side on the back seat, with the

weight of two police officers (neither of them women) pressing

my face down into whatever it was police car seats had

instead of leather.

The reason the policemen were sitting on me was that I

was trying to throw myself out of the rear door of the car.

This wasn‘t a good idea, seeing as the car must have been

swerving along the Strand at the time, but what can you

expect? Logic? I was screaming like a baby, kicking my

skinny little legs, probably shouting, ‗Get off get off, you

fascist bastard scum‘ or something. Full-on paranoia. Full-on

bad trip. Which was kind of surprising, seeing as I hadn‘t

taken any acid, but we‘ll come to that later.

9

I was sane again by the time I got to the station. Sane and

miserable. Just some skinny, badly dressed dropout girl with

spit dribbling down her chin, staring at her plimsolls like a

guilty six-year-old.

The desk sergeant was a big square-faced man with whale

meat for skin, and he looked like he‘d been moulded that

way. One of those people who get stuck in a dead-end job for

so long that they end up changing shape to fit the office

furniture better. You could tell, you could just tell, that he‘d

gone into the police force because he‘d expected it to be

exciting. He‘d probably seen Z-Cars when he‘d been a

teenager, and thought, Thai‘s the job for me. Poor sod.

Judging by the look on his face, I must‘ve been the eight

millionth burden-on-society who‘d been pushed in front of

him that week.

‗Name?‘ he said.

‗Christine,‘ I told him. I tried to sound sorry about it.

‗Christine what?‘ he asked. He said it like it was a question

on the official form, like everyone who came to the station

(jot asked ‗Christine what?‘

‗Mmmuh-muh-muhh,‘ I said.

‗What?‘

‗Summerfield,‘ I said. I felt stupid saying it out loud, for

some reason. As if I‘d only just decided to be Christine

Summerfield, and still didn‘t really believe it yet.

Then the arresting (meaning: sitting-on) officers gave him

nil the facts. Apparently - and I had to believe this, seeing as

I didn‘t remember any of it - I‘d been found hanging around

a building site near the Embankment, in the middle of a

space that was going to grow up to be an office block one

day. According to the official report, I‘d been walking around

in circles and making gurgling noises. One of the officers told

the desk sergeant that my pupils had been dilated, so as far

as lie was concerned I had to be on drugs. (Fact: whenever

the police arrested someone on a drugs charge, they always

said the victim‘s pupils were dilated, even though most of the

force didn‘t even know what ‗dilated‘ meant.)

I tried to tell them. I tried to tell them that I wasn‘t on

drugs at all, that I was actually having a nervous breakdown,

I hut I was suffering from stress and that my family had a

long history of manic depression. But they weren‘t interested.

Besides, it was a lie anyway.

10

It‘s only just struck me. What I told you about London,

earlier on: it doesn‘t make sense, does it? We used to say we

were living in the pop culture capital of the world, where all

the boys were in rock‘n‘roll bands and all the girls had Union

Jack knickers. We used to say our city was the hippest

place on Earth. But it‘s only now, now London/LONDON!

doesn‘t exist any more, that I‘ve spotted the big lie.

London wanted to be great by being just like New York.

It‘s true, isn‘t it? We‘d read all those stories about Greenwich

Village in the New Musical Express, and we thought we

could be exactly like that, like a little community of artists

and dropouts, protesting against the Establishment (that‘s

the actual Establishment, not the club) by doing fuck all with

our lives. Let‘s face it, even Dorian‘s useless poems were just

bad Bob Dylan lyrics in a Hampstead accent.

We thought we were part of the best make-believe city on

Earth, because we were English, and we were Londoners,

and we were great. But we were trying to prove how great we

were by being New Yorkers.

Why didn‘t I spot that before?

11

All right. Seeing as I‘ve started talking about America, I might

as well go all the way, and tell you exactly what was

happening to LONDON! in 1970. Because this is where

things get all twisted and sinister, and it‘s pretty much down

to one man, plus a few of his friends. Ladies and gentlemen, I

give you the one, the only, the unforgettable Charles Milles

Manson.

We did some of the most embarrassing things on Earth in

the last couple of years before the end, just because we‘d

found out that we could. The stupid clothes, the stupid sex,

the stupid drugs, the stupid everything. It was the dawning

of the Age of Whatever-It-Was-I-Said-Before, and if we wanted

to live in dirty stinking communes wearing no clothes and

writing love letters to the Dalai Lama, then that‘s what we‘d

do. Even the TV programmes that were in black and white

had gone psychedelic on us.

The Californians were telling us that this was a whole new

step in mankind‘s evolution, that we were turning into a new

kind of super-species, a race so advanced it could stare at

pink-and-green wallpaper for hours on end without freaking

out. Everywhere we looked - the music papers, the record

sleeves, the boutiques (because, let‘s be honest, those were

the only places we did ever look) - the message was the

same. We weren‘t sure what the message was, but it had

something to do with tomorrow being a better day, probably.

Manson changed all that. Like all the other important icons

in our lives, he was an American. He looked like a guru, he

had a big black Jesus-beard, and he lived on a ranch some-

where on the West Coast, where he built up a whole family of

followers, until he had what people liked to call a ‗cult‘. And,

let‘s face it, on the surface he wasn‘t that different from the

rest of us: if we‘d had a ranch of our own, then we‘d have

hung around, taking drugs and getting naked as well. Or at

least that‘s what we liked to tell each other we‘d do, but we

were still pretending that a ground-floor flat off Endell Street

could be the HQ of some kind of revolutionary social

movement, so what did we know?

In August 1969, a bunch of five nearly-famous people in

Hollywood all got killed off in one night, and at the time

everyone said it was down to one of those American guerrilla

groups we always used to get excited about, like the Weather-

men or the Black Panthers. A few months later, though, the

papers told us all about Charles Manson, who was exactly

like the kind of supercharged super-hip personality we all

looked up to, but who‘d ordered his ‗family‘ to hack people

to bits for no good reason at all.

12

Everyone felt a bit down after that.

It wasn‘t just us, me and Cal and all the others. The whole

of LONDON! (which, let‘s not forget, wanted to think it was

a major - ‗and I mean, you know, major’ — American city)

felt it. Suddenly, all the big acid-coloured shopfronts and the

smiley-face badges started to look... well, I can‘t think of a

better word, so let‘s just say ‗sick‘.

Manson finally went on trial in 1970. By that time, we

were still pretending to be the beautiful people, but none of

us were talking about turning into higher beings any more.

We weren‘t talking about LSD much, either. Cocaine, yes.

LSD, no. In 1970, LONDON! wasn‘t Day-Glo: it was turning

brown. Brown and orange. In a way, maybe it‘s a good

thing that the world ended when it did. The 1970s would

have been too ugly to live through. Or is it in bad taste,

saying a thing like that?

In Covent Garden, there used to be a big piece of graffiti

on the side of the Kean Street library, which had been there

ever since late ‗68. It said, in huge psychedelic green letters:

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE

Then, sometime in early 1970, someone wrote a second

message underneath it in no-nonsense black. The second

message said:

NO

As far as the beautiful people were concerned, the writing

was on the wall. If you see what I mean.

13

Incidentally, Charles Manson‘s trial never ended. Events got

in the way, really. I should think he‘s dead now, or turned

into something even less human than he was to start with.

The trial started in July 1970, and we all followed it in the

papers. The prosecution lawyer was a man called Vincent

Bugliosi, which is something I remember without having to

look it up, because at the time I thought it was exactly the

kind of name a big American lawyer should have had.

Vincent Bugliosi told the whole world about the helter-

skelter, about how Manson and his followers wanted to

kick-start the revolution, and none of us back in London (it

didn‘t feel like LONDON! that day) knew where to look.

We felt like we‘d helped, I think. We didn‘t exactly feel

guilty, but we were all on coke by then, so it didn‘t take long

for the paranoia to kick in. We were paranoid about getting

blamed, about the CIA sending special agents to England to

round us all up and have us all shot. Then the papers started

talking about the risk of the ‗family‘ coming to England, and

people started turning up dead even in London... but I‘ll get

to that later.

Wouldn‘t it be funny if it turned out that Manson was

innocent all along? If his defence had been planning on

pulling out some breathtaking piece of evidence at the last

minute, proving that everything had been a terrible mistake

and saving him from the electric chair? Well, it might have

happened. We‘ll never know, now.

14

I just pulled a scrapbook out of my rucksack, and something

fell out from inside the back cover when I did it. It‘s a

newspaper, a whole one, not just a clipping. The Daily

Mirror, dated 12 October 1970.

I‘d forgotten all about that. There weren‘t many of them

printed, and I picked one up on the morning after the end,

just because I was one of the few human beings in London

who had time to think about things like that. I should think

most of Fleet Street stopped existing just after the first few

issues came off the presses.

There‘s no story on the cover, but there‘s a great big

photograph and a great big headline. The end of the world

must have been a real hold-the-front-page kind of event, and

the journalists couldn‘t have had much time to rewrite the

issue, so all the pages inside are full of snippets they already

had lined up, things so stupid and trivial that it‘s almost

funny reading them now. Only page two says anything about

the lead story, and it was obviously written by people who

didn‘t actually know what was going on.

But I like the front page. There‘s a photo of the sky over

London, taken just after it split open. The picture isn‘t great,

probably because the cameraman was somewhere around

Holborn, which was much too close to the centre of the

action to get a good view of it all. But you can make out the

basics. The shapes. The shadows. The hole in the world.

It‘s the headline I like, though. Well, what would you

write, if you had to come up with a headline for the last day

of your planet? The editors of the Mirror decided to try

summoning up what they used to call the Old Dunkirk Spirit,

which was named after a battle in World War Two that the

British lost horribly, I think. The idea of the headline was to

tell the people of the world that however bad things got there

was always a chance of living through it.

The headline, which doesn‘t look like it‘s got anything at

all to do with the photo underneath it, is this: NEVER GIVE

UP.

15

Oh, the irony.

I‘ve just realized why I like that headline so much. It‘s

because it sums up this whole story. Or, rather, it sums up

what this whole story isn‘t.

This is a story about giving up. Giving up your life, giving

up your world, giving up on everything you‘ve ever had. Am

I being too pessimistic here? Well, I don‘t have anything to

prove. There‘s nothing clever about coming up with a tragic

ending, just because you want to look laid-back and cynical.

But we already know what the ending is, don‘t we?

The Dunkirk Spirit. Never give up. Not even if you know

your whole planet‘s finished.

Is that a moral, d‘you think?

Maybe. We‘ll see. For now, let‘s get back to the police

station.

NOTES ON THE STATION

16

Ending up in a police cell was a whole new experience for

me. I wasn‘t naturally the kind of person to get into trouble,

which is kind of ironic, bearing in mind what was happening

to me in the last couple of months before the end. Or what I

remember happening, anyway. Yes, I‘d been on the LSD, and

I was still on the hash (who wasn‘t?), but that didn‘t count.

You didn‘t get arrested for that. Not usually.

If it gives you some idea of the kind of law-abiding citizen

we‘re talking about here (for ‗law-abiding citizen‘, read

‗someone too scared to do anything much in a public place‘),

try this for size: after the graffiti on Kean Street got changed,

I found another Day-Glo message, this time outside the queer

toilets in Leicester Square. The graffiti was probably the

work of the person who‘d scrawled the GIVE PEACE A

CHANCE slogan, and it said:

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

I came up with my own side-splitting reply to this. I even

went as far as buying the spray-can, so I could add the

words:

AND A FEW BASIC PROTEINS

But I didn‘t. I got as far as the entrance to the Square, then

bottled out. Can you imagine that? There was me, one of the

crowd who wanted to overthrow the fascist machine that

controlled the freethinking people of the world, and I was too

scared to even add a couple of words to some graffiti that was

already there. That‘s so pathetic, even I‘m impressed.

So how had I ended up in the middle of that building site,

bawling my head off? What had pushed me over the edge and

into screaming bloody delirium, to the point where I couldn‘t

have cared less who was listening, or how many panda cars

there might have been in the area?

Well, if you‘d asked me that night, I‘d have told you that

the answer was simple. It was the cocaine.

17

I won‘t go into details. I won‘t bother. Back in the late 60s -

oh yes, all those long, long months ago - the shops were full

of books about drugs, about drug subcultures, about how

drugs would turn people into supermen (but never super-

women, funnily enough), about how any number of happy

little journalists had taken peyote on the side of a mountain

and suddenly turned into American-Indian shamans. I‘m

mentioning this only because it might just turn out to be

important to the story. Possibly.

Cocaine doesn‘t make you see things. It doesn‘t make you

want to fly, either; I‘m telling you this because, according to

the newspapers, all drugs make you want to jump out of the

nearest window. But if you‘re under stress, if you‘re in the

right frame of mind, then maybe, just maybe, a couple of

lines of coke are going to be enough to push you that one

step further, enough to make you decide that all the things

you‘ve been brought up with in your life are worth next to

nothing, enough to make you drop all your defences and get

you crying like a baby. Like something in you suddenly

breaks open, and makes you realize how hard it‘s been,

pretending to be a living, thinking, grown-up human being all

these years. The same kind of shock you get when you realize

that nobody’s really listening when you talk to yourself, even

if you think you‘re being really witty and clever. Nobody

cares, and nobody‘s there to hear you.

Is that the reason I ended up in the cell?

Well, what do you think?

18

There was another woman in the cell with me. There were

plenty of empty cells at Charing Cross police station, so I

don‘t know why they made me share. Cal used to say it was

some kind of policeman game, like when schoolchildren play

with conkers. The police hang around outside the cells,

putting bets on which of the prisoners is going to end up with

the top bunk, and then moving the winner to another cell

where there‘s an even harder nutcase to deal with... You get

the idea.

I don‘t remember much about the way the woman looked.

I remember her wearing a lot of black, and having a lot of

pockets. She was probably overweight. All I remember for

sure is that she‘d been taken in for some kind of theft.

She kept telling me, over and over again, how she‘d been

arrested. But the details changed every time, as though the

story was evolving inside her, until it was just the right shape

to fit into my head properly.

‗There‘s so much stuff in the world,‘ the woman said, more

than once. ‗You wouldn‘t think they‘d care, y‘know? You

wouldn‘t think they‘d care how much of it I‘ve got in my

pockets.‘

She isn‘t important to the story. But I think about her a lot

these days, like Cal, and Charles Manson, and all the others.

I wonder what happened when it came, and turned her into

just another piece of ‗stuff in the world.

19/20

I‘m sitting in the middle of some ruins as I write this,

although I‘m not sure what they‘re the ruins of. I‘m a long

way from London now, but I brought some things with me

when I came here. To remind me of home? I don‘t think so. I

don‘t think I care enough any more.

One of the things I brought is the scrapbook. It belonged to

someone who used to be my boyfriend, and he let me have it

when the end came, on the grounds that he was never going

to find any use for it once he‘d left Earth.

There‘s a cutting from the London Evening Standard on

the first page. The headline reads THE MOST GROTESQUE

TRIAL OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, and there‘s a big

picture of Charles Manson in the middle of the text, staring

up at the God in the ceiling and trying his best to look like

Christ.

There are more clippings from the Manson trial after that,

most of them taken from the London papers. Then, after a

while, things change.

There‘s a piece from another copy of the Standard, dated 1

September: a front-page piece this time, with the head-

line CULTS IN LONDON‘ WARN POLICE. Which isn‘t the most

respectful headline ever, seeing as the story‘s about a

murder. I won‘t bother copying out the text, although the

details are pretty straightforward. Girl, aged about twenty,

found dead near Constitution Hill. Face slashed. Hands

slashed. No identifying features left. The police are calling the

murder ‗ritualistic‘, an idea that obviously gets the reporters

excited. Suddenly, the story ‗girl found dead‘ turns into ‗look

out, Charles Manson‘s bunch have got to England‘. The

Standard starts warning everybody that this could be the

work of a cult, even though there‘s not one shred (oh, nice

word to use, very tasteful) of evidence.

More front-page stories, after that. A second murder, two

weeks after the first one. Same MO, like they used to say on

Dragnet, and the same kind of weapon. As far as the papers

are concerned, two deaths is a crime wave, so the

conclusion‘s simple. There really is a cult at work on the

streets of London. Forget the fact that the Manson family

never bothered with ‗ritual‘ killing, whatever that‘s supposed

to mean. Forget the fact that Charlie himself is up in court in

LA, denying he‘s got any interest in black magic at all. This

is obviously the work of some kind of Satan-worshipper, like

in Rosemary’s Baby. Maybe, say the papers, this is the real

reason why nobody‘s reported the dead girls missing. Maybe

they were both members of cults, who‘d cut off all

connections with their real families.

You‘re probably wondering whether I was scared, that

September. Being a woman in her early twenties, with the

same kind of build as the two victims (they were both size

nine, one bigger than the size I told everybody I was), wasn‘t

I paranoid about walking through London on my own?

Don‘t be stupid. There were three and a half million

women in London, for God‘s sake. How was I to know I‘d be

the next in line?

21

Wait a minute. I‘m getting ahead of myself.

22

Also, I‘ve just remembered who was in Rosemary’s Baby. Is

that in bad taste, d‘you think?

23

I didn‘t spend more than an hour in the police cell before the

big square-head desk sergeant came to let me out. To be

honest, I don‘t think they could be bothered charging me.

They must have guessed I was on something, and I suppose

they had blood and urine tests that could have told them

what, but why bother messing around with a girl‘s urine if

there isn‘t a major crime involved?

But there was another reason why they let me go, and it‘s

this: they had better things to think about. I found that out

when the sergeant led me back to the main desk, down the

big sweaty corridor that joined all the cells together. I kept

my eyes fixed on my plimsolls while I shuffled along by his

side, still feeling kind of embarrassed about ending up here.

We were halfway down the corridor when I heard the noise

from the front desk. Men grunting. Furniture being shoved

around. I‘d been hanging out in South London pubs since I

was too young to legally be there - too young to legally be in

South London, I should think - and you didn‘t have to tell

me what a fist fight sounded like. The sound of men trying to

out-tough each other by pushing chairs over.

The sergeant didn‘t speed up when he heard it. I got the

feeling he was happy to let the other policemen deal with the

problem, whatever it was.

‗We‘ve got the fucker,‘ he told me.

‗Mnuh,‘ I said. (That was me trying to sound interested.)

It took me a while to figure out what he meant by that.

Like I said, you could tell he‘d had it with his job. You just

knew he‘d have given anything to go after real criminals for a

change, instead of having to process scrawny little coke-

heads going in and out of his station. So there was really only

one person that ‗the fucker‘ could have been. After all, how

often was there a celebrity killer on the loose in that part of

London?

24

I‘ve seen the police report on the suspect who was brought

into the station that night, the man who was arrested ‗in

connection with‘ the two murders around Constitution Hill

and Regent‘s Park. Obviously, I didn‘t see the report at the

time, but I was shown it later on, after... well, we‘ll come to

that.

The report says that at around a quarter to twelve on 27

September a group (herd?) of three police officers spotted a

man behaving suspiciously in the Embankment area, not far

from the building site where they‘d found me drooling in the

rubble. The suspect looked like he was searching the streets

for something although, when the police questioned him, he

wouldn‘t say what. When the officers pressed the point, the

man got aggressive and had to be ‗restrained‘. When he

was searched, he was found to be (and note the quote

marks) ‗carrying several electronic components of uncertain

manufacture‘. The officers took this as evidence that the man

was mental.

There‘s a reason for that. In the early days of the trial,

some of Manson‘s would-be disciples in California had

started saying that their guru was transmitting instructions

to them whenever he was on TV, using some kind of special

hippie radio technology that only the Children of the

Revolution could understand properly. Ever since then,

there‘d been stories about mad deadheads walking around

with radio parts strapped to their ears, so they could hear

any messages that might have been sent by whatever icons

they believed in. And, when it came to technology, the

suspect on the Embankment was loaded.

He was carrying what looked like a weapon as well. The

report didn‘t say exactly what it was, but - another quote - it

‗had a sharp edge, and could well have caused injuries

consistent with the wounds from which the two victims died‘.

In other words, as far as the police were concerned, they

had the fucker.

25

And there he was, in the police station, being mauled at the

front desk by his three arresting officers. I stopped looking at

my feet when I got there, because, if there‘s one thing you

ain‘t look away from, it‘s a fight.

Yes. That was my first sight of him. I‘m going to stop for a

few moments‘ thought here, because this is important.

My first impression? He was powerful, for a start. Built.

All three of the policemen were on top of him, pulling at his

arms, trying to wrap themselves around his neck. Most of

what I saw was blue, the colour of the uniforms, and the

same colour as the suspect‘s suit. He was right in front of the

desk, holding on to the edge of it, to stop the officers dragging

him off to the cells. One of the policemen dropped to the

ground al about the time I came in, clutching his stomach

(although you couldn‘t tell exactly who‘d hit him, not while

there were so many arms flying about all over the place). The

other men were grunting and swearing, telling their victim to

calm down, telling him it was no use struggling, telling him

that - C hrist, Jim, this is a sodding live one - there was

nowhere he could go.

The suspect wasn‘t listening. He was making a lot of noise

as well, shouting over the grumbling sound the policemen

were making. His teeth were clenched, you could tell.

26

‗You‘ve got to let me go,‘ he was saying. (Yes, whole

sentences; so much more eloquent than the people who were

attacking him, don‘t you think?) ‗You don‘t understand.

You‘ve got to let me go.‘

27/28

I remember reading a book about Jack the Ripper when I was

fifteen, a crap old paperback in the school library back in

Manchester (the book had ended up in the library by

accident, and I only read it because all the other kids said

the pictures were really sick, so I thought I‘d better take a

look before the teachers figured everything out and took it

away from us). I can‘t remember what the book was called. I

remember the point, though. The writer said he was sure

that Jack the Ripper was the leader of some black magic cult

or other. The murders were part of a ritual, meant to call

forth demons from the pits of hell and so on and so on.

That‘s why Our Jack took the wombs out of some of his

victims, because wombs were an important part of the

ceremony, apparently. The writer talked about the ceremony

a lot, although it sounded to me like he‘d made the details up

off the top of his head. More therapy writing, maybe.

The pictures were sick, like everyone said. There was a

police photo, the one they took of the final murder scene

back in the 1880s. There was a woman sprawled out on a

bed, but she‘d been pretty much turned into dog food. Parts

of her body had been hacked off, and her head had been

ripped up until all you could see of her face was a big grey

smudge. And this was, according to the caption, something

that had been a walking, talking human being, just one day

before the photo had been taken.

You had to laugh. Not at the photo, obviously: you had

to laugh at the idea that the person who‘d done this was

some kind of voodoo magician. The idea that he‘d planned

all this out, as part of a plot to call up whatever spirits he

was supposed to believe in. I keep thinking about the

murderers who were around when I was younger, the ones

whose faces kept turning up on the BBC for months

after they were caught. Men like John Christie. Scrawny,

wrinkly little men with ugly glasses and too many personal,

problems. Would anyone ever have written about them as,

being magicians?

But the rules were different, if you were talking about

things that happened a hundred years ago. Why? Because

there‘s something about that point in time, the way you see it

in all the Hammer Horror movies, that makes you believe

things might have been different then. That there really could

have been bad magic in the middle of London.

And 1970 was the same. Probably only the second time in

the city‘s history when people could seriously think there

were devil-worshippers on the move. It was like the killer

had been born out of all the dead skin left over from the 60s,

like those two women had been killed by the culture instead

of by a mad bastard with a knife.

(By the way, if you think I‘m starting to sound cynical...

let‘s not forget, you‘re talking to someone who must have

been to a couple of dozen different planets by now, and not

just in the marijuana-and-astral-projection way. You‘re

talking to someone who spent her last days in London

sharing a flat with a spaceman. Someone who‘s held a whole

universe In her hands, a whole miniature universe, squeezed

into a liny magic bottle by the people who made it. Once

you‘ve seen all the little galaxies spinning around between

your fingers, you start to get different ideas about what it

means to be realistic‘. That‘s all I‘m saying.)

29/30

Where was I? Let me look. Oh yes. The man in the police

station, with all the blue uniforms around him.

Just for a second, the policemen backed off, enough to let

me see the suspect from head to foot. He was tall, although

lie was buckled up, so he‘d obviously been kicked about by

the policemen even before he‘d arrived here. He was thin, but

not sick-thin - there were big knots of muscle under that suit

of his, you could see it. A suit! And since when did mass

murderers wear suits, anyway? I could see his face, all pale

mid covered in bulging veins, with big scary teeth between

his lips. I could see hair, short blond hair, sticking up in

prickles all over his head. What else? Oh... a little gold

earring, just a stud. His face was so twisted up, there was no

way of saying how old he was, but you could tell he was

young just by the earring. Young, or a bit on the camp side.

The next thing I knew, someone was prodding me in the

back. The desk sergeant. We were still standing at the end of

the cell corridor, just spectating.

‗Go on,‘ the sergeant told me. ‗Sod off.‘

I didn‘t argue. I headed for the doors, between all the

chairs that had been scattered across the floor in the fight.

‗You‘ve got to let me go,‘ the suspect kept shouting. ‗It‘s

going to happen again. There‘s going to be another killing.

You‘ve got to let me go.’

You‘ll notice the emphasis I‘ve put on that word - go.

Why? Because on that word, the blond man decided to use

up what must have been the last of his strength, and make a

break for it. I didn‘t even know it was happening, seeing as I

was only watching out of one eye, and trying not to trip over

any of the chairs. (I might have been coming down from the

coke, but I wasn‘t exactly light on my feet.) There were yelps

from the policemen. A grunt of something like ‗Get the

bastard!‘ That‘s when I turned to look at the desk full-on, and

that‘s when I saw the face of the blond man, hurtling towards

me. Just the face. At that exact moment, the rest of the body!

didn‘t matter much. Just the face, the teeth, the earring...

Then the hand. There were fingers, reaching out for me.

Not going for the throat, though. It was more like he was

reaching out for help. I didn‘t even jump. I could feel the tips

of his fingers brushing against my face.

‗Please -‘ he said.

He didn‘t say anything else. He couldn‘t, not with the first

of the policemen getting an arm around his throat, the

second one pulling his elbows behind his back, the third

getting up off the floor and swearing at him. And me? I just

stood there, staring like an idiot, watching him being

punched in the stomach and dragged to the ground.

Then the desk sergeant told me to sod off again. I did.

31

This is the kind of story that used to get you on chat shows,

or at the very least got you column inches in the News of the

World. How I was the first woman to stare into the face of the

Butcher of Buckingham Palace and live. (The first killing

hadn‘t actually been anywhere near Buckingham Palace,‘ of

course, but Constitution Hill was close enough for the

papers.) You can just see my story, sitting there on page

four underneath the topical cartoon. How the killer reached

out and touched me, with hands that had been rummaging

through God knows what kind of offal. So I‘d like to be able

to say that I was shocked, or stunned, or that the experience

made me understand how brief and fragile life on Earth could

be.

It didn‘t, though. In fact, the only thought that went

through my head when his fingers brushed against me was

this:

Wow!

Which probably isn‘t the right reaction, ethically speaking.

So you might think it was some kind of cosmic karma that

less than an hour after it happened, somebody tried to kill

me.

32

I‘ve been wondering, recently, what London must be like

these days. It can‘t all have been destroyed, can it? The

intelligence that runs the city now is... well, intelligent.

Cultured. I can‘t imagine the new ownership clearing away

the ruins under the rubble, any more than I can imagine

Lady Diamond clearing her shelves. (And yes, I‘ll explain that

in a minute.) The ruins were still there on the day I walked

out of the city, anyway.

So, this is how I see London now: I imagine a whole part

of the city that‘s been walled off and left intact, or at least, as

intact as it was the last time I saw it. I imagine the Houses

of Parliament with their towers broken off, and St Paul‘s

Cathedral cracked open like an egg. I imagine all the cars

that were in the capital, piled on top of one another in the

wreckage of Leicester Square, set alight and turned into a

bonfire that never goes out. I imagine a sky that‘s the colour

of smoke, where the air‘s been burning for so long that it‘s

been stained brown for ever.

And then what happens is this. The spectators let humans

loose in the ruins, inside the walled-off battlefield. They‘ve

chosen the humans carefully, these spectators: they‘ve

picked all the big icons, all the best madmen we ever came

up with, but the icons have been pumped up with drugs and

machines to make them pretty much indestructible. They

come from all over the world, the way I imagine it. I can see

Chairman Mao, and Ian Brady, and John Christie, and —

yes, all right - Charles Manson, stalking the streets with

knives in their hands and spit all over their clothes. The

spectators start placing bets, trying to guess who‘ll be the

last man standing.

Even the dead get the chance to play. Even Jack the Ripper

might mm up as a special guest star. Finally, when only one

of the humans is left, the spectators settle the bets and start

the game again, bringing the bodies back to life and patching

up the holes. Icon-warriors in a fight that never ends. Let‘s be

honest, it‘s not much different from the way we did things

when we still ran the world. It‘s just more direct, that‘s all.

This is the way I imagine things, anyway. I‘ve got no way

of knowing if any of it might be true. But I‘m starting to

wonder whether the end of the world was really such a big

thing, when you think about it.

Anyway. Back to 27 September. Or rather, the early hours

of 28 September.

NOTES ON LADY DIAMOND’S SHOP

33

By now, the question you‘re asking yourselves is: What was

she doing, anyway? What was she doing coked out of her

head in the middle of a building site, at that time of the

night?

If you‘d asked me that at the time, I probably would have

answered by staring at you. Blankly. Well, why shouldn‘t I

have been there? That was the way we were, before the end.

Me, and Cal, and Dorian, and all the others. No job, no

routine, just starting my fourth year at an art college I‘d

actually been to only once. (My family had been middle-

class for only a couple of decades, in case you were

wondering, and none of them had ever even seen London.

They didn‘t have a clue how higher education worked, which

is why I could get away with telling them that it could take

me anything up to ten years to get my diploma, and why they

kept sending the money for whatever it was that art students

were supposed to need. Yes, it worked. Really.) The point is,

I didn‘t have any reason to be anywhere. I was a goddess of

the new bohemian age, remember?

No, the important thing wasn‘t where I‘d been. It was

where I was going to go next. Just think how I was feeling

when I stepped out of that police station, and into the

freeze-your-tits-off air of Charing Cross. Confused; coming

down from a buzz; excited, seeing as I‘d just come face to

face with the man who‘d probably end up being called ‗the

I English Charles Manson‘ in the Sunday papers; and, most

of all, itchy. The way I saw it, the police had got in the way of

what might have been a perfectly good cocaine experience. II

you could ignore the screaming. What I needed was to

find someone I knew, preferably somebody with a good

coke stash of their own, and tell them all about what hail

happened.

How civilized. ‗Darling, you wouldn‘t believe what I‘ve

been through.‘ (Snort.) ‗The police were positively every-

where. It was an absolute nightmare.’ (Snort.) ‗And, darling,

guess what I saw while I was at the station...‘ (Snort,

snuffle.)

34

Halfway along Henrietta Street in Covent Garden, there used

to be a shop owned by a woman called Lady Diamond. Once

upon a time it‘d been a bookshop, but it had changed over

the years, until the windows were full of Laughing Buddhas

and psychedelic zodiac charts, while the glass in the door

wail covered with little bits of card advertising palmistry and

tarot-reading sessions. I can‘t remember what the shop was

called in September 1970, because it changed every couple

of weeks. It was probably Mysteries or Secrets of the Light

or something. (Lady Diamond was her real name, by the way.

Her family were the last great English Colonials in India, and

they‘d come up with the title ‗Diamond‘ a couple of

generations earlier, to make themselves sound like they‘d

been in India as long as the rocks. I don‘t know why they‘d

called one of their daughters Lady, though. Maybe it was a

social-climbing kind of thing.)

Lady Diamond was the most accurate fortune-teller in the

city, according to the woman herself. Anybody could make

guesses, she used to say, but she claimed that, when she

saw into the future, she always - always - saw what was

realm there. She was even on television, once. A man from

ITV came to her shop, asking about the ‗new resurgence in

spiritualism‘ or something. Lady went through her usual

routine, and ended up doing the reporter‘s horoscope, for the

entertainment of all the country.

She told him he was destined for great things in

broadcasting, which is kind of funny, because a couple of

months later he was in a head-on car collision, lost the use of

his legs, and had to retire from TV (they didn‘t let cripples he

celebrities back in England, they thought it‘d look cheap).

Lady Diamond wasn‘t put out by that at all.

‗When I look into the future, I always see what‘s really

there,‘ she said, when she heard about the crash. ‗But that

doesn‘t mean I have to tell the truth about it.‘

Right up to the last time I remember seeing her, she was

still claiming her visions were 100 per cent accurate. After

all, as she kept telling her customers, she‘d predicted the

death of Bobby Fuller two weeks before it had happened, and

had personally tried to warn the man about it. Which was a

pretty safe claim to make, seeing as Bobby Fuller himself

wasn‘t going to be arguing with her. But, by 1970, hardly

anyone could remember who Bobby Fuller was, until in the

end all he was famous for in LONDON! was being the

subject of Lady Diamond‘s most accurate prediction.

35

Bobby Fuller was an American rock‘n‘roll singer. He died in

the mid-60s, when he tried flirting with a Mafia don‘s girl-

friend in a nightclub, and ended up having his lungs pumped

full of petrol by the don‘s bodyguards.

36/37

The reason Lady Diamond was so popular was that she kept

adding new ideas to her repertoire. When Buddhism was

fashionable, she started using Buddhist chants in her

readings. When the Beatles went to India, she painted Indian

letters (or things that looked like Indian letters, anyway) on

her tarot cards. When LSD was popular - and when wasn‘t

it? - her holy guardian spirits suddenly turned into psychic

aliens, who were trying to speed up humankind‘s cosmic

evolution. She kept throwing new bits and pieces into the

window of the shop, until it turned into a kind of jungle,

where natural selection could get on with its work as usual.

The interesting-looking religions ate up the boring ones, until

what was left was a kind of super-faith, ready to chew up and

spit out any other beliefs it ran into. Laughing Buddha with

pointy teeth and armour plating. (Remember what I said

about what London must be like now, with all the icons

fighting it out in the ruins? Same principle.)

And as for the inside... The shop took up the bottom two

levels of the building, but Lady had taken out the ceiling of

the ground floor (something the council probably wouldn‘t

have approved of, but there you go) to turn the place into a

kind of well, with the bookcases set all around the walls and

the roof a long, long way overhead. The wall space over the

bookcases was taken up by Lady‘s ‗collection‘, leftovers

from all the cultures she‘d absorbed over the years, some of

the items nailed to the brickwork, some of them resting on

little shelves and balconies.

There were animal skulls from India and Africa, with

blotchy red glyphs painted right between their eyes. There

were candles that never got lit, carved into the shapes of

Chinese women in ‗erotic‘ poses. There were Victorian

anatomical charts, telling you the best places to drill holes to

cure people‘s madnesses. There was a grubby white robe that

had been singed around the edges, which Lady claimed had

been worn by one of the men who‘d burnt Joan of Arc (NB:

obviously a lie). There was even the foetus of a kitten

preserved in a jar, which should have looked pathetic and

embarrassing, like that rock star in LA who had a jacket

made out of donkey embryos, but somehow it looked right

there in Lady‘s shop. And everywhere, whichever way you

turned your head, there was a smell like dust and old

grandfather clocks, like Lady had sprayed the place with

something to make it feel older than it was.

The rule in the shop was this: when you went in, you didn‘t

look up. If you looked up, your eyes tried to focus on the

ceiling, but the ceiling was too far up for you to find. You just

kept raising your head, and raising it and raising it, taking in

all the bones and the charts and the dead things, until you

started to feel dizzy. Like you were standing at the bottom of

some kind of archaeological dig, looking at centuries of

history all pressed together. Most people gave up before they

could get as far as the roof. Then they had to sit down for a

bit, usually on one of the big fat karma-friendly beanbags

that‘d been arranged in the middle of the floor.

Clever Lady. She knew how to get people in the mood for

business. She knew how to make you feel vulnerable. But the

shop was supposed to be her home as well as her workplace,

so it‘s kind of impressive that she had a crypt for a living

room and still stayed pretty sane.

38

The shop was the first place I went after I left the police

station, for a couple of reasons. First, it was close. Secondly,

Lady was just the kind of person I wanted to tell about my

run-in with the (alleged) almost-mass-murderer, seeing as I

knew she‘d have to pretend not to be impressed. She was

getting on for twice my age, so there was always a lot of

posing going on between us, what with her claiming to have

once had tantric sex with Brian Wilson and everything,

‗thirdly, there was the cocaine.

Just as a matter of course. Lady kept stashes of all the

fashionable drugs in the shop, in case a client wanted a

lull-on head-trip reading with all the 2001 special effects. As

I knew full well, she kept half a dozen Chinese puzzle-boxes

on one of the lower bookshelves, each one full of a different

illegal substance. She knew she didn‘t have to worry about

the police. Even if the Met felt like raiding the place, there

wasn‘t a policeman alive who‘d bother messing with a

Chinese puzzle-box to get hold of the evidence.

Cocaine again. Am I starting to sound like an addict?

Maybe I‘m just missing the comforts of home.

39

The shop was closed when I got there, and there weren‘t any

lights on inside. That wasn‘t much of a setback. The front

door might have been locked, but there was a rear door at

basement level behind Henrietta Street. The lock had been

broken for months, and Lady had dealt with this by shoving

a pile of old DH Lawrence paperbacks (where did they come

from?) up against the door. Anyone who was a friend of hers

knew that all you had to do was give the door one big shove,

and send the copies of Sons and Lovers flying.

I didn‘t have any problem with the idea of ‗breaking into‘

Lady‘s place. It‘s not like I was the only one doing it. Lady

was famous (notorious?) for the number of skinny, hairy men

she managed to end up in bed with, and most of her lovers

and ex-lovers used the shop as a crash-house sooner or later.

Lady had forgotten who a lot of them were. They just ended

up hanging around the back rooms, spending their lives

smoking dope and sleeping on old mattresses. She lost track

of her partners the way most people lose track of spare

change. Dig your hand down the back of a sofa in Lady‘s

place, and you were bound to find a hippie toy boy or two. !

I didn‘t see anyone in the back rooms when I ‗broke in‘,

although the light was on in the back passage, and there was

the smell of cannabis and dead skin everywhere. I didn‘t

bother poking my nose into any of the spare rooms. By that

time, the need to finish off the evening‘s coke experience was

a damn sight more important than the need to find Lady and

tell her about the police station, so I headed straight up the

stairs and into the main part of the shop.

40/41

I‘m thinking of starting a magazine, for people just like me.

Seeing as I‘m the only human survivor of London (I think),

I‘ll be the only one who actually reads it, but that doesn‘t

matter. The magazine‘s going to be called It Might Never

Happen: The Journal of Mindless Optimism, and I‘m going

to fill it with all the things I tell myself to make me feel better

about the world. I must have come up with millions, over the

last few months. All the way down from ‗at least I‘m alive‘

to ‗it wasn‘t much of a planet, anyway‘.

What do you think I should make the cover story of the

first issue, then? Should I go with ‗there‘s always drugs‘, or

should I just stick with the Dunkirk Spirit?

Anyway. It didn‘t take me long to crack the ‗coke‘ puzzle-

box, because practice makes perfect, and on Henrietta Street

you could always spot a user by the astonishing puzzle-

solving skills he or she had picked up from hanging around

Lady‘s shop. In the end, I was disappointed.

There was no stash there. A couple of empty paper wraps,

and some white gunk in the corners of the box. Sure signs

that someone had beaten me to it.

So I did what I had to do. I started scraping the stuff out of

the corners, using my fingers, my nails, and - when all else

failed - the amazing suction power of my nose. I ended up

squatting on one of the beanbags, tilting my head back with

the puzzle-box in front of my face, snuffling like a pig.

Which wasn‘t a good idea. I‘d turned the lights on when I‘d

walked into the room, and the lights were right up there in

the ceiling. Which meant that, when I lay on my back and

looked up, I could see all the dead things leering down at me,

casting their big spiky shadows on the walls. I was staring

straight at the animal skulls, things that had died in India

and never been buried, covered in horns and hieroglyphs.

There was the front part of some kind of lizard, mounted like

the head of a moose. And - yes - there was that inevitable

foetal kitten.

Don‘t look up. That was the first rule. The second rule

was: Especially not if you‘re on coke. Coke doesn‘t make

you hallucinate, but it gets you paranoid. Paranoid enough to

make you think that you‘re going to hallucinate, that the

walls are going to start moving in on you any second. No,

there wasn‘t much in the box, but taking just one sniff was

enough to remind me of all the times I‘d taken more, and that

was it, the trigger, the thing that made the paranoia kick in.

All of a sudden I was staring into the eye sockets of a gazelle,

waiting for it to move, or to blink, or to speak, or anything

else that‘d push me over the edge. Waiting for the lizard to

crawl down from the wall with its hindquarters missing,

waiting for the kitten to turn its head and look me in the eye.

The gazelle. The lizard. The kitten. The dead bodies on the

Victorian charts, getting ready to bleed for me. Buddha

smiling down from a print of some old Tibetan painting,

grinning like death, psyching himself up to grab one of Lady

Diamond‘s fake sacrificial daggers and -

And then something moved. I didn‘t see it, but I heard it,

mid that was enough. Feet shuffling. A noise that could have

been anything - someone clearing his throat, someone

scratching an itch, anything - but that sounded, just for a

moment, like the scampering of little tiny feet.

That was all it took, really. That one sound. Suddenly I

was seeing movement out of the comer of my eye, out of the

comers of both eyes, the things crawling across the walls just

out of my vision, then stopping dead whenever I turned to

look at them. And I was pulling myself up off the floor, and

yelling, and stamping my feet, and clawing at the dead

kittens that I was sure were clawing and sucking at me,

crawling around under my T-shirt, or nuzzling their way up

my legs.

At some point, I must have realized I wasn‘t alone in the

room. I must have figured out that I had company, even

apart from the dead things. I‘m not sure what that point was.

42

I just remembered something else about Lady Diamond. You

know how I said earlier on that Dorian was the only person I

ever knew who (kind of) got a book published? Well, Lady

Diamond used to write as well, although she never had

anything in print, and she never tried to read any of her stuff

to waitresses. In fact, nobody ever got to read the things she

wrote, because she used to burn them as soon as they were

finished.

It was what Lady called sympathetic magic. It‘s like in

those old black magic movies, when the voodoo man makes

a little doll of someone, then starts mutilating it. The idea is

that if you kill someone‘s image, part of that person dies as

well. Lady used to say that there was no way you could do

any real damage to someone with just a doll, because a doll

wasn‘t detailed enough. Even if you made it look exactly like

your victim, it didn‘t say anything about the kind of person

the victim was. How was the bad magic supposed to know

who to target, out of all the billions of people in the world?

Lady Diamond had a solution to that. She used to write

stories, but the lead characters in the stories were all based

on real people. She‘d make likenesses, just like the voodoo

men in the old movies did, but she did it with words instead

of Plasticine. She‘d describe her victims in full, all the details

of who they were and why she thought they had to suffer.

Then, at the end of each story, she‘d make sure something

bad happened to them, which was (she said) just as good as

sticking pins in a doll.

finally, Lady would burn the story in a little bowl, keeping

the fire burning with herbs and lighter fluid. Filling the air

with the smell of incense and cheap fiction.

Sympathetic magic for literate people,‘ she‘d say.

43

I wonder sometimes if proper writers do that. If, when

publishers pay them to write books, they‘re actually being

hired as assassins. Who can say?

But it‘s funny, really. Here I am writing my first ‗novel‘, and

it turns out that the only other writers I‘ve ever known also

wrote things they knew nobody would ever read. Why do we

artistic types do these things? Is it really therapy, like I said,

or are we just doing voodoo? Am I trying to change the way

things happened by writing about them, by some kind of

magic that only Lady Diamond would have understood

properly?

44

I here was a man standing in the doorway - the doorway

between the main part of the shop and the stairwell, that is,

so you could see the cannabis smoke wafting up the steps

behind him. The bulb-light was making the little puffy

clouds sparkle around his head. Looking back on things, I

suppose it must have been him I‘d heard, moving up the

stairs and into the room. This wasn‘t the way I saw it at the

time, though. As far as I was concerned, he was probably in

league with all the dead things.

You can just see me there, can‘t you? Eyes open wide,

lungs ready to burst with all the heavy breathing I‘d been

doing, scummy bits of white powder dribbling down my lips.

Clothes a mess. Hair a mess, all the big black strands

tangled

up around my ears. I think I remember putting my hands up

in front of my face, like a boxer would have done. I must

have looked ridiculous.

I didn‘t recognize the man. He was thin, and he was white,

and he had too much hair sprouting out of his face, so I must

have thought he was one of Lady Diamond‘s lost-property

boyfriends. But he was too clean for a hippie. Not clean like

you‘re clean after you‘ve just washed, but clean like a piece of

paper‘s clean before you write on it, before you‘ve even left

any of your dirty fingerprints behind. He looked too tall to be

real, but then, everything looked bigger than it should have

done at that point (even the kitten was puffing itself up in its

jar; although it was doing this behind my back, I was sure of

it). And as for his face...

There are two kinds of expression you see on people‘s faces

when they‘re going out of their minds. There‘s the surprised,

baby-faced look, when the LSD kicks in and they realize that,

Jesus Christ, the world really is a beautiful place underneath

it all, if you ignore stupid little details like ‗matter‘. Then

there‘s the other look. The dangerous one. The staring-dead-

ahead one. The man‘s features were pretty grim anyway, with

all those wrinkles and scars hidden behind the bushes of

black hair on his face, but at that point in time it was much,

much too easy to imagine him pulling out a Stanley knife and

carving the words FEAR ME, FOR I AM THE BEAST on his

forehead. In capitals, even.

Come to think of it... doesn‘t it strike you, after what I‘ve

just said, that I‘m describing a kind of second-hand Charles

Manson? Even his clothes, the ripped (but clean) jeans and

the cheap (but clean) vest, made him look like he‘d been

living out in the desert with the coyotes for a month. Not like

he belonged in the middle of London at all. Or is that just

how I‘m remembering him, in the light of what happened

afterwards?

45

The man didn‘t say anything, not straight away. He stared

and he stared and he stared, so I started wondering whether

he was really looking at me, or just watching the atoms

dancing around my aura.

‗You‘re not supposed to be here,‘ he said, in the end. His

voice was so ordinary, I don‘t even remember what kind of

accent he had. There was no feeling there, though.

I didn‘t have an answer to that. After all, he was right,

kind of. I remember wiping my nose. Hiding the evidence,

maybe?

‗I‘m a friend of Lady‘s,‘ I said.

The man didn‘t say anything. He just kept staring.

‗Are you staying here?‘ I asked. Which was a polite way of

asking if he was Lady Diamond‘s current sleeping partner.

Still no answer. Instead, the man stepped forward, heading

right for me, and when he moved I saw little echoes of

himself in the space behind him, as if parts of him were

sticking to the air when he walked through it. That didn‘t

surprise me. Like I said, coke doesn‘t make you hallucinate.

But it pumps up your senses to the point where you some-

times end up seeing things that have stopped being in the

space where you‘re looking.

This was kind of distracting, which is why I missed the

fact that the man was still heading straight for me, and also

why I didn‘t do anything to get out of his way, even when it

should have been obvious that he was getting ready to reach

out and throttle me.

46

I‘ve just read through the last couple of paragraphs and, no,

it doesn‘t look right to me either. I‘m sure there should be

more to it than that. More suspense, while the two of us face

each other across the shop. More of a confrontation. More

drama.

But who am I kidding? I was a stupid, paranoid, coked-up

cripple, who could hardly move without having a panic

attack. And him? He just wanted to kill me.

Maybe I should rewrite it. So you genuinely think I‘m

being attacked by the dead things in the shop, and just when

you think it‘s all a red herring, and I‘m perfectly safe...

ta-daah! The real danger turns up. What do you think?

Also, you‘re probably thinking that this is a bit of an

unlikely plot twist. I leave the police station, where they‘ve

lust arrested a man for being the English Charles Manson (I‘d

patent that line, if there was any point now), only to stumble

Into a building where there‘s a real-life psychopath waiting

for me. You‘re right. It doesn‘t look good. For now, though,

you‘ll just have to believe me when I say that even if I‘d gone

somewhere completely different, the same thing would have

happened. I mean, I was the chosen victim. Not that I knew it

then.

47

Judging by the cannabis smoke in the passage, there was at

least one hippie hanging around in the back rooms, but I

suppose he must have been too far away from Earth to hear

the struggle when the man went for my throat. And Lady

Diamond herself? I never did find out where she was, when

her shop was wrecked and somebody tried to kill me. I saw

her again only once after that night, and by then I was

already mixed up in the events that were leading up to the

end of the world, so I never got round to asking her about it. I

suppose it‘s all academic now. For all I know. Lady looked

into the future, saw the danger coming, and made sure she

was out of the shop that night.

NOTES ON THE KILLER

48

This is the way violence works, in the real world. One minute

you‘re getting on with your life - say, imagining there are

dead kittens crawling up the leg of your jeans - and the next

thing you know there‘s a flurry of arms and legs, and there‘s

spit raining down on your face, and the only thing you can

feel is the breath of some maniac who smells like he‘s been

chewing on raw eggs.

There‘s that ‗real world‘ thing coming into the picture

again. I‘ll have to watch out for that.

49

So. At half past one on the morning of 28 September 1970,

you would have found me hobbling down the side streets of

Covent Garden, bleeding on to the pavements from the

wound in my leg. The roads were pretty much empty by that

time, so there weren‘t any crowds gathering around me,

nobody listening to me screaming and blubbering while I

dragged myself along the street. I must have seen a couple of

passers-by on the way, people who were too slow to figure

out that it was well past closing time, but so what if I did?

London was like any other city on Earth. Everything was

contagious there. If you saw someone on a bad trip, you

crossed the road to get away from them, in case the little

pixie-demons jumped straight from their head to yours. If

you saw someone with a bloody great hole in their leg, you

stayed away from them as well, in case it turned out to be

catching.

I remember the wound being huge. I remember looking

down through the gap in my shredded-up jeans, and being

able to see all the way to the bone, where the man in the

shop had bitten a whole chunk of flesh out of me. But I‘m

sitting here now, looking down at my right thigh, and I‘m

tracing the scar tissue where the skin grew over the hole later

on And it looks tiny. Hardly a mouthful. Is that because of

the way the wound healed? Or does blood just make

everything look worse than it is?

50/51

So how did I get the wound in the first place?

Picture me splayed out in the middle of the shop again,

with my back pressed against Lady Diamond‘s all-purpose

therapeutic beanbags. Imagine a pair of hands around my

windpipe. Not trying too hard to strangle me, not even trying

to break my neck, but just keeping me pressed down, maybe

hoping I‘ll get swallowed up by the beanbags if I stay down

long enough.

Now see things from my point of view. I‘m looking up, up

towards the lights in the roof of the shop. (Don‘t look up,

remember? That was the rule.) But I can‘t see the source of

the light, because hovering over me is the head of the man

who these days I remember as looking like a cross between

Charles Manson and Long John Silver. That‘s all I can focus

on: the shape of his head, all black and hairy, until the pain

doesn‘t matter any more, and I start thinking about those

stories you hear from people who‘ve had near-death

experiences, who say they saw Jesus Christ waiting for them

in the light at the end of the tunnel. And that‘s what I can see

now, just a big shaggy face wearing a halo that‘s been

supplied by the London Electricity Board, and suddenly all I

can think about is how confusing it‘d be if he killed me,

because how would I tell the difference between this and the

afterlife?

Then he shifts his weight. He tries to get a better grip on

my throat. He still isn‘t trying to kill me (much), just keeping

me still, although that makes me wonder what he‘s keeping

me still for. At this point, I‘m thinking: It‘s not murder: it‘s

rape. And the thought‘s annoying, more than anything,

because it makes my whole lifestyle feel worthless. Here I

urn, modern cosmopolitan woman, always telling her friends

that she knows how to look after herself, but when the big

horror comes to get her it‘s the best she can do to hold up

her fists like a five-year-old and squeal like a pig. The panic

gets worse after that, because when he shifts his weight he

moves his head, just a little to the side. So all of a sudden I

can see right the way up to the ceiling, and see all the layers

of dead things hanging over me. I‘m not worried about the

dead things moving any more: this time they‘re the

spectators, waiting for the man to turn me into just another

dead thing, or maybe even to get me pregnant with a dead-

thing baby.

Then everything changes again. It‘s not until after it‘s all

over that I work out why. My arms have been flapping

around by my sides, working on automatic. My hands have

seen that bit in Dial M for Murder with Grace Kelly and the

scissors, and they‘ve got a hunch that they‘ll find a weapon if

they flap hard enough. So far, they haven‘t. They‘ve just been

tearing at the beanbags, ripping them open, feeling those

little polystyrene balls popping between their fingers. Now the

man‘s shifted his balance, my body‘s starting to roll over, no

the arms can reach out further. Finding something solid, but

not that all-important pair of scissors, sadly.

My fingers grab it before I even know what‘s going on. I

pull at it. Try to bring it towards me. It‘s round about now

that my hands figure out what it is: it‘s a table, the one Lady

Diamond keeps her teacups on in the middle of the room, so

it‘s not exactly the weapon I‘ve been hoping for.

I can‘t stab the man with it. Or even hit him over the head

with it. They‘ve got nothing better to do, so my hands just

tug harder, and pull it over. Teacups are smashing against

the floor. I can feel papery things falling on to my bare arm,

and I guess that there were tarot cards on the table. All of a

sudden It‘s raining wands and cups and discs and swords,

and they‘re all made of cardboard.

Finally, the man lets go of my neck. There‘s something

heavy on the side of my face, twisting my head to one side,

pushing my cheek against Lady Diamond‘s best Persian rug.

This is when he bites me.

52

The cards, as it turned out, weren‘t tarot cards at all. They

were Zener cards.

You might have seen Zener cards on TV at some time; at

least, you might have done if you‘re the way I‘ve imagined

you. They‘re like a set of playing cards, but each one‘s

marked with a different symbol in thick black ink. There‘s a

star, there‘s a square, there‘s a circle, there‘s a bunch of

wavy lines. Scientists (at least, the kind of scientists who

thought they had better things to do with their lives than

stare at amoebas) used to use Zener cards in special lab

tests, to see whether or not people had telepathic powers.

They didn‘t, usually.

But Lady Diamond‘s Zener cards were different. Let‘s

not forget: she‘d reached the point where she didn‘t see

any difference between magic, psychic powers, Buddhism

spiritualism and drug abuse. As far as she was concerned,

the only reason magic worked was because people were

scared shitless of it, so, when she decided to make Zener

cards part of her routine, she went out of her way to draw the

scariest cards she could come up with.

When the man in the shop twisted my head to one side, the

first thing I saw, lying on the floor in front of my eyes, was a

black line drawing of a naked man being hanged. The second

thing I saw was a picture of a syringe, with something nasty

dripping from the end of the needle. The third thing I saw

was a swastika. The fourth thing I saw...

You get the idea. Try reading my mind, and you‘ll have

the shock of your fucking life.‘ That‘s what Lady Diamond

told the people she did her own telepathy ‗experiments‘ on.

53

A hanging man. A syringe. A swastika. A cartoon phallus. A

Black Power symbol. A hammer-and-sickle emblem.

These were the things I saw, lying there on the floor of the

shop with my neck being broken. Like a kind of breadcrumb

trail of cards, leading across the rug. And there, right at the

end of the trail, was the skull. A great big carved candle, the

centrepiece of Lady Diamond‘s table, never meant to be lit. It

was just sitting there with its jawbone missing, trapping the

last of the cards under its teeth. All those symbols, all those

little pictures of human culture, all ending up in that big

bony mouth.

You can read what you like into that. You can say it‘s

symbolic if you like. A couple of hours earlier I probably

would‘ve agreed with you, but at that point I‘d just started

screaming, seeing as I‘d lost a good amount of flesh from my

right thigh.

54

There are a lot of symbols in this book. Then again, I suppose

that‘s what you‘d expect. Everything was symbols, back in

LONDON!. A couple of years earlier, the only posters you

could get in the shops had photos of pop stars on them, but

now Lady Diamond was doing good business selling cheap

four-colour prints of Buddha and Jimi Hendrix, not to

mention a couple of cartoons showing Jesus as a pot-head in

khakis. You could buy portraits of foreign revolutionary

leaders in Woolworth‘s. Wool worth‘s, for God‘s sake!

Sometimes I think that was why the world ended when it

did. Because the human race had reached its limit. We‘d

spent thousands of years making things, designing things,

coming up with symbols to keep ourselves happy, and now

the symbols were taking over. We were building a world

where only the icons mattered, and the people were a kind of

embarrassing side effect. Humankind was bound to die out,

because it wasn‘t needed any more, because it wasn‘t as

important as all the bits and pieces it‘d left behind. If

everything hadn‘t come to a stop, we probably would‘ve

ended up living in a country run by smiley-face badges.

The smiley faces are another thing it saved us from, like

decimalization and another four years of Tory government.

Why am I telling you all this? Oh yes. Because there‘s

something I want to share with you. I want to tell you exactly

what I was thinking, when I dragged myself out of the shop,

after I‘d finally got away from the maniac.

What I was thinking, at half past one on the morning of 28

September, was this...

55/56

We ‘re all dead things. We ‘re all dead things, but the fact that

we’re still moving stops us seeing it.

My mother used to tell me something about the night I

was born. She told me that in the maternity ward, in the

bed right next to hers, there was a woman whose baby

came out sick. She couldn’t remember what kind of ‘sick’,

but it was something bad, something the doctors couldn’t

spot before the actual birth. All she could remember was the

mother screaming. The woman somehow managed to keep

quiet right the way through the delivery but, when the baby

finally came out the way it did, something just snapped. That

was when she started screaming. Screaming and screaming

and screaming, until the doctors had to wheel her out of the

ward. But she was still there when my mother started having

the contractions, so I suppose the screaming could’ve been one

of the first things I ever heard. I wonder if that’s important?

The baby next door was definitely alive the day after the

birth. Not that I remember this, but I know it slept in the cot

next to mine in the hospital. I can’t help thinking of all those

babies, all lined up in their little boxes. All of them crying, all

bald and slimy, but one of them different from the rest. Sick.

Maybe dying.

Look, this is what I’m getting at. We’re like the things in

Lady Diamond’s shop, like the skulls of all those animals

from India. We’re collections of bones, which have been

given skin and fat for a little while, just so we can move

around. And why do we move around? So the bones are

spread about a bit after we die, sorted into pretty pat-

terns, just like Lady’s relics. The things we come up with

while we ‘re walking around, the symbols and the smiley-face

badges, they’re all part of the collection as well. We stop

moving, the fat falls off our bodies, and the other dead things

in the world lay us out in the ground, making sure we look

nice for the archaeologists.

Think about it. How long do we move around for? Seventy

years? Eighty? No time at all, in the big picture. But how

long do the archaeologists need us for? How long do we stay

useful, once we’ve been stripped down to the bone? Centuries.

Thousands of years. Forever.

So which is more likely? That we were put here to live? Or

that we were put here as part of the bone collection, and just

don’t know it yet?

That’s why I keep thinking about the maternity ward. All

the babies in their little boxes, just like that kitten, pickled in

Lady’s jar. Let’s not kid ourselves - it’s the baby in the cot

next to mine who’ll be the prize of the collection, not me. The

little mutant. The little curiosity.

Which makes me wonder: who’s the collection being

assembled for? I can just imagine them, the curators and the

collectors, stalking the world whenever they think we ‘re not

looking. Making sure we’re all still breeding and dying,

taking inventories of us on the quiet. Changing the world

around behind our backs, to make room for the exhibits.

Giving us more space to fill up with symbols and bones.

Is that how the world’s going to end? When they decide

there are enough exhibits, and take all the skin and fat away

from us in one go?

57

That was what I thought while I was running, anyway. But I

was confused, and I was upset, and I was coming down from

a coke buzz. So don‘t think it‘s a lifetime philosophy or

anything.

But I suppose some parts of it are close to the truth. Let‘s

go back in time again, just a few minutes. Back to the shop.

Ready?

58/59

I‘m looking into the face of the wax skull. I‘m staring at the

Zener cards under its teeth, because they‘re the only things I

can focus on. I can feel the blood on my leg, and there‘s a

kind of pain I‘ve never felt before, stinging like acid, like

somebody‘s injected floor-cleaner into my leg (in fact, the

flesh that‘s hurting isn‘t really there any more, but I don‘t

know that yet). I‘m keeping my eyes on the cards, wondering

if the picture right under the edge of the skull really is a

porno version of a drawing from Alice in Wonderland,

which is what it looks like from here. With the pain shutting

off most of the rest of the world, this is all I can think

about.

I definitely don‘t have the presence of mind to ask the

obvious questions: Who is this man? Why has he bitten me?

If his mouth‘s all the way down there, then what part of his

body is he using to crush my head against the floor?

I can‘t move my left arm. It‘s pressed against my body,

against my ribcage, with all the man‘s weight on top of it. My

right arm‘s twisted under me now, but the fingers are still

moving, crawling across the rug, looking for the weapon

that‘s never there when you need it. My legs are kicking,

although my feet feel like they‘re a world away, and I can‘t

say I care about them much anyway. No, I‘m more interested

in the noise I can hear, over the heavy breathing that could

either be his or mine.

A slapping noise. Wet. To hell with the pain, to hell with

the cards: this is the important thing now. That sound. Like

a tongue, rolling around inside somebody‘s mouth.

Christ. He‘s tasting me. He didn‘t bite me to hurt me, or to

get some kind of sex kick. He wants to know what I taste

like. This man, who came out of nowhere and attacked me

for no good reason (because it‘s starting to look unlikely that

he‘s one of Lady Diamond‘s sleeping partners), is in fact a

cannibal.

For the first time, I start to think about the other murders.

I try to remember what I‘ve seen in the papers. Whether the

victims had any bite marks on their bodies. Would the police

mention it if they did?

The pain isn‘t important. It‘s like when you‘re a kid, and

the antiseptic goes into your cut, and it feels like you‘re

going to sting for ever, but after a while you face up to the

fact that you‘re going to be in agony for the rest of your life.

All of a sudden, there isn‘t so much weight on the side of

my face. I turn my head, because I can. Not all the way, just

enough to be able to see the killer out of the corner of one

eye. His halo makes my eyes burn. There are tears, although

I don‘t remember crying. I can‘t see properly. There‘s just a

silhouette, as the man lifts up his head on the end of a long,

long neck.

I realize that I can‘t see the dead things any more, because

the man‘s big enough to blot them out, taking up too much

light for a skinny thing like him. He pulls his head back even

further, until I can see the outline of the lump in his throat.

There‘s a howling sound. No, ‗howling‘ makes it sound

like a mammal noise, like a wolf noise; this is more primal,

more basic. Give an amoeba a set of vocal cords, and this is

the sound it‘d make. It isn‘t him. It can‘t be him. It‘s not

human. I decide it must be the dead things, complaining that

they can‘t see me dying. My arms are still flapping, and my

legs are still kicking, and I can feel the man‘s weight shift

again, so the lower part of my body comes free underneath

him. My body starts to realize that all it‘d take is one good

shove, and -

And suddenly my left arm‘s free, and before I can tell it

what to do it‘s curling up into a fist, punching the air. I try to

follow it with my eyes, but my eyes are full of water. I feel

my knuckles press against him. He feels like leather. I don‘t

remember him wearing anything made of leather, so I start to

wonder if it‘s his skin I‘m touching.

It takes me a while to notice that all the weight‘s gone. The

man isn‘t on top of me any more, and I‘m free, and I‘m

rolling on to my back, pushing all my limbs into the air,

kicking and clawing like a baby (this is when I first start

thinking of the maternity ward, natch). I feel my hands brush

against him. I feel my legs kick his stomach. Something in

the back of my mind tells me that, if all four of my limbs have

touched him, then he must be bigger than I thought.

The dead things are furious. The howling‘s getting worse.

Also, I can hear something else, like rippling air. Like a great

big pair of wings, flapping around inside the shop. I don‘t

remember any of the dead things having wings, but I can

imagine. Some kind of stuffed vulture, maybe, one of Lady

Diamond‘s relics I‘ve never spotted before. I think about it

ripping itself off the wall, and circling overhead, waiting for

the cannibal man to finish his job.

Except that there isn‘t a man at all. I can‘t feel him now,

not even with my fingertips. I keep kicking, even though the

howling‘s stopped, and even though nothing‘s touching me.

There‘s just the stinging in my leg, so I start to get angry

with that part of my body, blaming my leg for trying to put

me off.

60

The next sound I heard was cracking glass.

In and out. Over in a few seconds. One minute he was

trying to kill me, the next he was gone. At the time, I didn‘t

really care why he‘d left me. I must have thought I‘d been

too much of a struggle. I must have thought I‘d fought him

off, with all that kicking and clawing. If I‘d been thinking, I

would have realized how ridiculous that was.

And if I‘d been thinking, I would have guessed that he just

hadn‘t liked the way I‘d tasted. Which would have been a lot

closer to the truth, really.

61

I once saw a documentary on BBC2, about a man who said

he remembered fighting in the English Civil War, even

though it had finished about three hundred years before he‘d

been born. He had all these memories about the places he‘d

been and the weapons he‘d used, and he even remembered

the name he‘d had (I can‘t remember what it was, so we‘ll

just say Davy Jones, like the boring English one out of the

Monkees). Researchers from the BBC went through the old

museum records, and found out that there really had been a

Davy Jones (or whatever) fighting in the English Civil War.

Also, he‘d fought in all the battles the man had talked about.

The people who made the programme said this was good

evidence of reincarnation. Which makes you think, doesn‘t

it? Whoever you are, however unimportant your life is, just

remember this: hundreds of years from now, your name

could be all over TV, and your birth certificate could be dug

out of the libraries by researchers whose names you‘ll never

even get to hear. Because it‘s not just your bones you leave

behind. All that rubbish, all those possessions, all those

symbols and bits of paperwork - it doesn‘t matter how deep

you bury them, somebody‘s bound to dig them up and

rearrange them sooner or later.

62

The window of the shop was cracked right across, so it

looked like the posters on the glass were the only things

holding it together. The front door was open, and the panels

there were smashed - not just cracked, but smashed - so I

guessed that the man, whoever he‘d been, had made straight

for the exit after he‘d let go of me. He‘d thrown himself at the

door, broken the lock and shattered the glass on his way out.

No, I didn‘t stop to think about that, either. About the logic

of someone, even a madman, forcing open a locked door

instead of taking the back way out. It can‘t have mattered to

me much. The next thing I remember is moving along

Henrietta Street, grunting and whimpering, with my hand

pressed against the hole in my leg to stop the blood flow. I

hadn‘t even bothered trying to find help in the back rooms of

the shop. You can‘t trust a hippie in an emergency.

I was going back the way I‘d come. I was heading for the

police station. Because, in a crisis, even an anti-

Establishment waste of space like me isn‘t too proud to go to

the police.

63

By the way, I know not much of this will be making sense to

you yet. There are too many questions. So, although I didn‘t

know any of the answers at the time, I‘ll give you some clues

now.

I wasn‘t the hairy man‘s main target, not really. Think back

to what I said about the police station. Think back to the

moment when the big blond man reached out for me, and I

thought I‘d been touched by the English Charles Manson

(pat. pending). Suppose I told you that it was the big blond

who‘d been the real prey of the man in the shop. Suppose I

told you that the man had ways of ‗sniffing out‘ his target,

and that he‘d just happened to pick up Blondie‘s scent on my

skin. Suppose I said that he didn‘t realize his mistake until

he‘d taken a good bite out of me.

It probably wouldn‘t help you much. After all, it sets up as

many questions as it answers. You‘d just say that no human

being could possibly have a sense of smell that good, and

you‘d be right. Besides, wasn‘t the blond man supposed to be

the Butcher of Buckingham Palace, according to the police?

So how come he‘s the victim all of a sudden?

Answers. More trouble than they‘re worth, that‘s what I

say.

NOTES ON THE THING IN THE CELL

64

Really, it‘s a miracle I got as far as the police station. I fell

over at least once on the way, ending up face down in a

gutter somewhere off the Strand, bleeding on to the papers

and Pepsi cans in the road.

Not that I want to keep reminding you of this, but I still

had the coke in my system, and coke‘s got a way of boosting

your senses. Just then, it was boosting my sense of drama

more than anything else. Even while I was making my way

up the station steps, I was imagining the big entrance.

Throwing the double door open. Standing there in the door-

way, all wounded and windswept. I was thinking about the

faces of the policemen inside, looking shocked and startled,

amazed that I‘d made it there alive. I was thinking how

surprised and sorry they‘d be, when they figured out that the

girl they‘d arrested for being a useless junkie was, in fact, the

victim in this story. Yes, you fascist bully-boy pigs, that’s

right. Look embarrassed. Then they‘d rush towards me,

catching me just as the last of my strength gave out...

But there wasn‘t anybody in the station. At least, not in the

foyer.

The foyer was a kind of waiting room, painted in the same

greys and greens you saw in waiting rooms everywhere. The

front desk was on the other side of the floor, half a universe

away from where I was standing, a great oblong piece of tack

that was pretending to be old, expensive wood, just to give

offenders that up-before-the-beak feeling. There was the

smell of disinfectant on the floor, and there were neon strip

lights flickering in the ceiling, but there weren‘t any signs of

life. The cartoon posters on the walls were telling me to

fasten my seat belt and watch out for pickpockets, and that

was all anybody was saying.

I must have stood there for a while, dripping blood on to

the tiles. I was standing in the exact spot where I‘d been

planning on passing out. Frankly, I was pissed off that I

wasn‘t going to get the chance.

In the end, I managed to stagger over to the other side of

the room, still clutching the gash in my leg (‗gash‘, she says;

see how I make it sound smaller with every page?). The

chairs were still scattered across the floor, more higgledy-

piggledy than they had been before. I remember thinking that

the big blond man must have kept struggling, which made

me wonder if maybe he‘d won the fight, if the reason the

was nobody here was that all the staff had been torn limb

from limb. I tried not to let it worry me.

65

Keep one thing in mind here: about an hour earlier, I‘d met

the alleged killer face to face, and he‘d made a lunge for me

(or at least that was how I was starting to remember it). My

very first meeting with a possible mass murderer, and yet,

almost immediately afterwards, I‘d been half strangled by

another one. You can imagine how paranoid I was about

that, with my head in the state it was in. If you‘d told me at

the time that something had happened to the world while I‘d

been looking the other way, and that 50 per cent of the

human race had suddenly turned psychotic in order to finish

the species off once and for all, I would have believed you.

The theory fitted all the facts, let‘s be honest.

66

And I‘d just like to say sorry for using the term ‗higgledy-

piggledy‘ earlier on. I can‘t stand that.

67

There was somebody behind the front desk at the police

station. I hadn‘t seen him from the door, because he was

slumped down on the other side of the desk, with his back to

the wood and his legs stretched out in front of him. I didn‘t

spot him until I headed for the corridor where the cells were.

It was the desk sergeant, the one who‘d told me to sod off

earlier on. His skin was covered in sweat, so thick and gooey

that it made him look as if all the fluid inside his skull had

started seeping out of the pores, and he was staring dead

ahead at the blank wall in front of him. His face wasn‘t

square any more. It had gone all blubbery. Also, I remember

that the phone on the desk was off its hook, and the receiver

was dangling from the cord, swinging backward and forward

next to the man‘s head. Like he‘d started to make a call, but

had given up.

It took him a while to notice me standing there. When he

did, he turned his head towards me, very, very slowly.

‗Name?‘ he said.

‗Christine,‘ I told him. Automatic reaction, that.

‗Christine what?‘ he asked.

‗Mmuh-mnuh-mnuh,‘ I said.

The sergeant nodded, but carefully, making sure the

movement didn‘t make his eyeballs drop out.

‗Name?‘ he said.

68

I‘ve heard people talk like that before, but usually only when

they‘ve been on amphetamines. They get caught up in a kind

of cycle. They get fixed on one single part of their lives, and

keep going through it again and again, building whole rituals

out of it until it‘s the only thing that matters to them.

It‘d be nice (‗nice‘ as in ‗interesting‘) to say that the sergeant

had gone mad. That he‘d seen something so horrible that

he‘d lost his mind right there and then. It‘d be nice, but it

wouldn‘t be true. In fact, he‘d seen something so horrible

that he‘d run away from it the only way he could. He‘d dug a

little trench for himself, and covered himself over with his

paperwork. In shock, yes. Mad, no.

I know this for two reasons. First, it was only a couple of

minutes later that I saw what he‘d seen, so I know how he

must have felt. Secondly, I know for a fact that the sergeant

recovered, retired from the police force, and tried to find a

new career for himself in Hertfordshire, a career that was cut

tragically short when the concept of ‗Hertfordshire‘ stopped

meaning anything on 12 October. It was in one of the local

papers, although the reporter was smart enough not to print

the details of what had actually happened at the station. I‘ve

still got the cutting. It‘s in the scrapbook I brought with me

from London. Am I the only person left who cares about these

little historical details, d‘you think?

And, by the way, his name was Elliot Bishop. If that helps

give him any kind of personality.

69

‗I need help,‘ I told the man who was actually called Elliot

Bishop. I took my hand away from my leg when I said it, and

help up my fingers, to show him all the blood that had dried

over the wound. The sergeant nodded again.

‗Christine what?‘ he said.

70

Now I‘m writing all this down, I‘m wondering about the

telephone, dangling by his ear. Did he try to call somebody,

when the bad thing came to the police station? If he did, then

who? And why did he give up?

I think I can answer that last one, anyway. I could have

dialled 999 from Lady Diamond‘s shop, but I never even

thought about it. I mean, by then I‘d convinced myself that

the world was run by dead things, and that the only reason

we were all still walking was so we could scatter our bones

around for artistic effect. And I know I needed medical help,

but phoning the emergency services would have felt pathetic,

almost a joke. ‗Hello, operator? The world‘s just stopped

working, and all life on Earth is effectively meaningless. Is it

police, ambulance or fire brigade I need?‘

Sergeant Elliot Bishop must have felt the same way. How

English can you get? Scared to make an emergency call,

because of how stupid he thought he‘d sound.

71

I headed down the cell corridor after that, and the sergeant

didn‘t try to stop me, although I could hear him shouting

after me while I walked away from him. Asking, ‗Christine

what? Christine what?‘ over and over again. I didn‘t listen. I

was going to find the other policemen in the station, and

make them help me whether they wanted to or not. (Yes,

that‘s right: by this point, I was sure the desk sergeant had

lost his mind just to make things harder for me.)

My leg was numb by now, the same kind of numb you used

to hear arctic explorers talking about in radio interviews.

That you‘ll-be-dead-soon-so-stop-worrying kind of numb. I

knew I didn‘t have long before I fell over again, but even the

cell-block corridor was against me, getting half a step longer

every time I took a step forward. I tried counting off the cell

doors as I walked past them, making sure the building wasn‘t

stretching out the passage to slow me down, but I kept losing

count and having to start back at one again. Then I tried

counting footsteps, the number of times my plimsolls

squeaked on the tiles. Then I tried counting the number of

times I heard the words ‗Christine what?‘ from behind me.

Nothing helped, and nothing made the corridor any shorter.

It could have been paranoia, of course. And it‘s a fact that,

the more tired you are, the longer things look; it‘s probably

all part of the theory of relativity. But remember what I told

you before? There were things in the world, things that came

out of the shadows only when our backs were turned, things

that - and here‘s the important bit - moved space around

when we weren‘t looking, making sure we had just enough

room to bury our leftovers. And there, in that grey, squeaky

cell-block corridor, they were making sure I had too far to

walk. Making sure my bones were going to drop to the

ground exactly where they wanted them.

Again, I‘m not claiming any of this was literally true.

72

Halfway along the corridor (can something that doesn‘t have

an end have a halfway point, d‘you think?), I stopped. All the

cell doors had little hatches at eye level, sliding peepholes the

policemen could use to stare at the prisoners, just to get

them extra-tense. And one of the hatches was open. I think

most of the cells must have been empty, but that one wasn‘t.

You could tell. There was a pair of eyes behind the peephole.

It was the cell I‘d been in, an hour or so earlier, and the

eyes belonged to the woman I‘d shared it with. The ‗stuff‘

woman.

‗It won‘t work,‘ she said, when she saw me. The door made

her voice go all muffled, so she sounded like she was talking

through a gag.

‗Uh,‘ I said. I was too tired to put proper sentence together.

‗They‘re trying to freak me out,‘ the woman told me. ‗That‘s

why they‘re making all the noise. They‘re going to try and

make me sign a confession.‘

‗Noise,‘ I repeated.

The woman nodded. Her eyes bobbed up and down on the

other side of the hatch. ‗The pigs. They‘ve got someone next

door. Screaming, y‘know?‘ Her eyes wobbled to the left, just

in case I couldn‘t work out what ‗next door‘ meant. ‗One of

them. One of the pigs. Screaming. They reckon it‘ll mess our

heads up.‘

‗Screaming,‘ I said.

‗Screaming,‘ she said. ‗But it‘s not going to work.‘

73

I never found those other policemen; the desk sergeant was

the only uniform in the building, as far as I could tell. The

local papers never said anything about any police officers

going missing, or any of them apart from Sergeant Elliot

Bishop retiring for health reasons. And I‘m sure somebody

would have said something, if they‘d all been killed rights

there in the station.

Perhaps they just ran for their lives when the bad thing

came, and let Sergeant Bishop deal with things on his own.

But that‘s not what I like to think. I like to think I was right,

about the corridor being stretched. I like to imagine that the

bad thing just made the corridor so long that nobody could

ever reach the end of it. I like the idea of all those policemen,

running past an infinite number of cells, trying to get back to

the front desk but never quite making it.

Still, I suppose that would have got a mention in the papers

as well, wouldn‘t it? Never mind. We‘ve got to dream.

74

The cell next door wasn‘t locked. I didn‘t realize that straight

away, not until the ‗stuff‘ woman rolled her eyes at it.

The door was open only a crack. The corridor was lit by the

kind of strip lighting that had brightened up the foyer, by

tubes of neon that were the same colour as varicose veins,

but there was no light coming through the gap from behind

the door. The lock was broken, though. Bits of metal latch all

over the floor.

‗Have a look,‘ said the woman. ‗There‘s one of the pigs in

there. Bet you any money.‘

Screaming, the woman had said. Screaming from the cell. I

mean, I didn‘t seriously believe the police were torturing

suspects in there. This was WC2, for God‘s sake. They might

have beaten the shit out of the occasional drunk outside

Tottenham Court Road tube station, but since when had

English policemen used professional torture? And I didn‘t

believe it was one of the officers making the noise, either, just

to wind up the prisoners. No, I was remembering what had

happened back at Lady Diamond‘s shop.

There‘d been that sound. The sound the Jesus/Manson

lookalike had made, after he‘d got fed up of throttling me. I‘d

told myself it‘d been the dead things making the noise, on the

grounds that it couldn‘t have come from a human being, but

all of a sudden that theory was starting to look a bit on the

shaky side. I was remembering the man rearing up over me,

just before the window had cracked. I was remembering his

head, being lifted up on a neck that looked much, much too

long for his body. Like his skin had been stretching in front

of my eyes.

Had that actually happened, though? Or was I starting to

imagine things now it was all over?

‗Name?‘ said the desk sergeant, from the end of the

corridor. He‘d obviously given up asking ‗Christine what?‘,

and gone back to the start of the loop.

And there was something else. Another sound. Not the

sergeant, not the woman, but a voice from inside the open

cell. Someone talking, or muttering, on the other side of the

door.

75

It wasn‘t much of a shock for me, finding out that there really

were dark, slippery, scary things in the world. Everybody

knows it, and everybody pretends they don‘t, in case they get

put on medication. If you pretend hard enough, you even get

to be a psychiatrist.

I remember believing in fairies when I was younger,

remember believing that the world was full of beautiful shiny

little winged people, who worked magic while the rest of us

weren‘t looking, and who lived in all the places where nobody

else could go. Then I grew up, and went through puberty,

and got cynical.

After that, I believed that fairies were totally malevolent,

and utterly inimical to all human life. I wasn‘t far wrong,

either.

76

What I heard from the other side of the door was the voice of

a man, reading what turned out to be poetry. I couldn‘t make

out most of the words at the time, but since then I‘ve heard

the poem again - actually, I‘ve learnt most of it off by heart -

so I know that what the voice was saying was this:

Dank roofs, dark-entried, closely clustered walls,

Murder-inviting rooks, death-reeking gutters;

A boding voice from your foul chaos calls -

When will men heed the warning that it utters?

‗See?‘ the woman in the other cell was saying, through the

hole in the door. ‗He‘s praying, y‘know? They reckon it‘s going

to put the shits up us.‘

‗Name?‘ shouted the desk sergeant.

I remember lifting up my hand. Holding back for a second.

Then putting my fingers on the door of the cell, ready to

open up the crack. I could hear somebody moving inside,

shuffling across the floor. And the voice was still speaking,

carrying on with the poem:

There floats a phantom on the slum’s foul air.

Shaping, to eyes which have the gift of seeing,

Into the Spectre of that loathly lair.

Face it; for vain is fleeing!

I pushed the door open. By that time, I couldn‘t remember

what I was supposed to be doing, or even why I‘d gone to the

police station in the first place.

77

And if I‘d known? If I‘d known I was about to come face to

face with the worst thing in the world, and see the real shape

of the ‗cannibal‘ who‘d attacked me in Lady Diamond‘s shop?

If I‘d known that, by walking into the cell, I‘d be walking into

the middle of a war that didn‘t even belong on my planet?

If I‘d known, would I still have done it?

Well, let‘s not pretend I had a choice.

78

There was a man in the corner of the cell, crouching on a bed

that had been stripped of just about everything except the

springs. The blond man. The suspect. His legs were curled up

under him, with his feet on the edge of the bed, so it looked

like he was getting ready to leap off and into the air. But his

eyes were shut, and he wasn‘t moving. The blue suit looked

wrong here, like it was too neat for the cell, like it didn‘t

match either the moonlight from the tiny little window or the

neon from the corridor. The man looked smaller than he‘d

looked before. Less powerful. Less aggressive.

Of course, it‘s not hard to figure out why. It was because of

the other thing in the cell, so much bigger and so much

worse than a (supposed) maniac-cult killer that it‘d probably

make Charles Atlas look small. If Charles Atlas was still alive.

To begin with, I didn‘t know what it was. It was just a heap.

A lump. Something the colour of rotting meat, so my first

guess was that it was a pile of bodies. And that made me

jump, thinking that maybe I was looking at the corpses of all

the policemen, that the blond man had dragged them into his

cell and torn them apart with his bare hands. But it was one

thing, not lots. All the bodies were joined together.

Then it turned its head. Swung its big brontosaurus-neck

towards me. Letting me see the muscles rippling under its

skin, with every move it made setting off a kind of fleshy

chain reaction, sending out ripples all over its body.

Something huge, black, and flat swung towards me, and I

remember ducking, even though the shape - the wing? –

stopped before it reached my head.

It had been in the shop. It had stretched its wings there, for

the first time on Earth. It had forced its way out through the

shop door, breaking the glass as it went, probably deciding

that I wasn‘t worth finishing off. Then it had come straight

here to find the blond man, the person it had been after all

along. It had moved through the streets of London, keeping

out of sight the way these things always kept out of sight,

finally pushing its way into the station and forcing open the

cell door with its sheer weight.

How it had squeezed through the door, I didn‘t ask. Its

body could have been made of putty for all I knew. I‘d heard

it shuffling around the cell from the corridor, moving in what

little floor space there was, with its wing tips scraping the

walls. Purely by accident, it had pushed the door half shut

behind it. I don‘t think it cared much about privacy.

79

There‘s another memory I‘ve got that I‘m not too sure about. I

didn‘t mention it earlier, because the more I think about it

the more it feels like something I imagined afterwards, or

maybe even dreamt about. But it‘s like this...

I remember looking up from the floor of Lady Diamond‘s

shop, and seeing the Manson clone just before he flew off. I

remember his skin splitting open, and his clothes splitting

open as well, as if they were just another part of his body. I

remember wings tearing out of the hole in his back, even

though I know I couldn‘t have seen his back from where I

was lying. Of course, I didn‘t have this memory in my head

when I arrived at the police station so, if it‘s real and not just

u dream, then I must have blotted it out of my head after it

happened. Can you blame me?

80

The blond man opened his eyes when I peeked in through the

door of the cell. That‘s one of those little details I probably

didn‘t pick up on at the time, what with everything else that

was happening. Another ‗little detail‘ is that some of the

electronic parts he‘d been carrying (remember those?) were

scattered around him on the bed. The police must have let

him keep them when they‘d put him in the cell. They‘d

probably thought it couldn‘t do any harm.

If I‘d been thinking things through, those electronic bits

and pieces would have reminded me of something. The way

they were arranged around him, like some kind of chalk

circle, Dennis Wheatley style. Like a barrier against the thing

that had come to get him in his cell. And the poem? All part

of the ritual. The thing must have got to the police station a

long time before I did, but the blond man had been keeping it

at bay all that time.

Now I‘d interrupted him. Broken the spell? Probably. The

thing finished swinging its neck around, until its head was

just a couple of inches away from mine, and I could see its

face in full. The features were kind of vague, but at least they

were human. Dark eyes. Haven‘t-slept-in-days eyes. Bad

skin, a wide open gawping mouth, skinny cheeks that were

much too narrow for its big head. Dark hair on its scalp,

stuck together in ugly, sweaty clumps.

‗Can you see them?‘ shouted the woman next door.

‗Name?‘ asked Sergeant Elliot Bishop.

The second-to-last thing I remember was realizing that I

was staring at a reflection. It was my face I was looking at,

because where the thing in the cell should have had its eyes

and mouth there was just glass. A great big lens that had

grown in the middle of its head like... I don‘t know. Like a

pearl inside an oyster? A shiny oval, as smooth and blank as

a TV screen with the power off. And the last thing I remember

was the sound of the thing screaming at me.

Which, along with the shock, the terror, the exhaustion,

and the fact that I was only a couple of minutes away from

dying of blood loss, was more than enough to make me pass

out.

NOTES ON THE FLAT

81

This is what I dreamt about, after I passed out.

Space. Space looks full, when you see it on The Sky at Night. The

stars are all clustered together, so you can imagine taking

taxi rides from one planet to another. It‘s not until you‘re

right in the middle of it, swimming through a vacuum with

your lungs tearing themselves into little pieces, that you

realize the truth. However hard you swim, and whichever way

you turn, none of the stars are going to get much closer.

Except that it‘s not a vacuum, not really. Space is made up

of black winged things, all locking together like the

salamanders in that MC Esher picture Cal used to have on

his bedroom door, so you can‘t see any gaps between their

bodies. They are space. Living space. You‘re trying to claw

your way through them, looking for oxygen and choking on

the black putty-flesh. The planets and stars? They‘re not

solid at all: they‘re just the spaces the winged things haven‘t

filled yet. The spaces where they keep their odds and ends.

From here, in the dream space, you can see all the planets

the way they see them. All those cultures, all those races,

leaving behind their bones and icons in interesting patterns.

Each of the planets makes its own kind of relics. Some

planets build big spiky ships to nuzzle their way through

space; some planets build great big cities or great big

graveyards - if there‘s any difference, from this point of view.

You can‘t see Earth, for some reason, although you can bet

that its contributions to space culture are its murderers and

T-shirts. And there, close to the centre of the galaxy - ‗galaxy‘

being the collective noun for the winged things - you can see

a world that‘s way ahead of all the others, where the people

have invented machines for taking time apart. The people

probably hope the machines are going to be enough to hold

off the winged things, to stop the darkness swarming over

their homeworld. They‘ve got to live in hope, I suppose.

The surface of their planet is dusty and dry, and all the

cities are empty. The locals have gone underground, where

they‘re breeding special soldiers for the fight ahead, stitching

the time travel machines right into the soldiers‘ skins. The

only living thing on the surface is the blond man, the one

from the police station. He‘s standing in a circle of computer

parts, looking up at the sky, with a frozen look on his face

and something that may or may not be a knife in his hand.

You can tell what he‘s thinking. He‘s thinking: You‘re not

getting past me, you bastards.

82

What‘s the point of dreams, anyway? I mean, the human race

is supposed to have evolved over millions of years, and

ditched all the parts it doesn‘t need. So why‘s evolution left

the dreams behind? They don‘t do anything, except make you

feel itchy and give you clues about who you‘re supposed to

want to sleep with. (And don‘t tell me they‘re a way of

clearing out your short-term memory. Why would all the

pictures be held together with stories, just to do that?)

Maybe evolution‘s getting us ready for some kind of future

technology, not that my planet‘s ever going to develop it now.

Maybe it thinks that, if we keep dreaming, we‘ll be kept on

our toes, and be ready when people really do start turning

into talking dogs. Or whatever.

83

I woke up in a strange man‘s bed in a strange man‘s flat.

This wasn‘t exactly a new experience for me, so to begin with

I didn‘t panic.

The bedroom wasn‘t big, and there wasn‘t much in the way

of furniture. The bed against one wall, a bookcase against

another, orange curtains pulled across the window.

You could still smell the splinters on the bare floorboards,

as if whoever owned the place hadn‘t lived here for more than

u month or so, hadn‘t finished unpacking his things and

unloading all his old scents into the building. There was a

duvet pulled over me, but even the duvet didn‘t have a cover.

I could hear dogs and cars from outside the window.

The way I saw things was this: I‘d taken cocaine, and the

cocaine had sparked off something in my head, maybe some

old acid that had got stuck in the middle of my brain (NB: I

have no idea whether this is actually possible), setting off a

complete paranoid breakdown. So, I‘d been arrested. So, I‘d

met someone while I wasn‘t thinking straight, and ended up

in bed with him, not that he was here to welcome me back to

the world with a cup of coffee or anything. Everything in

between...

Everything in between made sense, as long as you looked

at it in a kind of psychiatric way. That thing in the police

station. The great long neck, the shiny bulb of a ‗face‘ on the

end - if that wasn‘t Freudian, what was? It was so obvious, it

didn‘t even count as a hallucination.

84/85

There were a lot of people seeing Freudian monsters in 1970.

In the scrapbook, which I can‘t be bothered getting out of my

rucksack again right now, there‘s a clipping from a magazine

called Fate, which used to be the journal of choice for the

kind of people who wanted to believe that there were giant

owl-monsters living out in the wilds of Canada. According to

the article, asylum inmates ‗all over the world‘ had been

having weird visions in the early months of 1970. If that‘s

true, then it must have been something to do with the things

I‘m describing in this book, although I‘m sure Fate always

used to say that asylum inmates had been having weird

visions. But this particular crisis reached its peak in a

mental hospital in India, sometime in June.

A ‗dangerous psychopath‘ there started developing strange

symptoms - changes in the texture of his skin, changes in

body temperature, that kind of thing - which the staff at the

hospital thought must have been psychosomatic. The

electric-shock treatment didn‘t work, though, and what

happened next is harder to swallow. According to the one

surviving doctor at the hospital, the patient went through a

complete physiological (did I spell that right?) mutation. The

skin on his face stretched out of shape. His hip bones shifted

around, so he almost looked like he was supposed to walk on

four legs instead of two. Finally, the skin on his back split

open - sound familiar, this? - and wings grew out of his body,

making some of the doctors give up their medical training

and turn back to religion.

All of this was bad enough, but it turned out to be

contagious. It happened that way in mental institutions,

apparently. If one of the lunatics came up with a new

symptom, it got spread around the place. Once the inmates

in India heard about the man with wings, they all started

showing signs of change as well, until the staff couldn‘t tell

which ones were faking it and which ones were really growing

scales. Just picture it: all those little cells, all those madmen

and mad-women, twisting out of shape one after another.

Why does that make me think of the maternity ward again?

Eventually even the staff gave in to it, until one night the

whole institution exploded into a fleshy, bony mess. One of

the doctors, the one who ended up being the only survivor,

reacted in the only way he could. He took out a gun – Fate

doesn‘t tell us where he got the gun from, so maybe we‘re

supposed to believe that Indian asylum staff are armed

around the clock - and started to put the creatures out of

their misery. He said he had to shoot some of them through

the head three or four times before they stopped screaming.

Of course, as the things magically changed back to their

normal human selves once they were dead, the authorities

had only the doctor‘s word that any of this had happened.

Just like we‘ve only got Fate’s word that the hospital ever

really existed.

86

Somehow I managed to get out of the bed, and headed

straight for the window. Pulled back the curtains. Looked

out. I was a couple of floors up, but I didn‘t recognize the

neighbourhood. Backstreets, parked cars and council

dustbins, stretching out as far as the eye could see. Could

have been any part of London.

The next stop was the bookcase. You could tell a lot about

someone by the books they kept. I mean, I had my pride to

think about. Suppose I‘d ended up in bed with someone who

still read Allen Ginsberg, and took him seriously. How could I

have lived with that?

Some of the titles on the bookshelf were: Life Under Glass,

by Marion Reardon; Ozma of Oz, by L Frank Baum, or Frank

L Baum, or whatever it is; Dawson’s Concise English

Dictionary, The Final Programme, by Michael Moorcock (!!!);

Confessions of an English Opium Eater, by Thomas de

Quincey (yum); and the script of Pygmalion, by George

Bernard Shaw. (Of course, these are just the books that stick

in my mind, so the list probably says more about me than

the person who owned them.)

It looked like someone had bought the bookcase, then

realized he didn‘t have anything to put on it. Like he‘d gone

around all the second-hand bookshops in the city, buying up

any cheap paperbacks he could find and stuffing them on to

his shelves in no real order. Like he thought that‘d be the

best way to find out about modem culture. (Funnily enough,

that was exactly what he had done, but it took me a while to

find that out.)

There was also a scrapbook on one of the shelves, although

I didn‘t notice it then. Which is a good job, because it was full

of press cuttings about famous murderers, and I might have

got the wrong idea.

87/88

The other thing I noticed about the bookcase was the

cardboard box on top of it, full of bits of grey plastic. A model

kit, made by Airfix. According to the label on the side of the

box, it was a (quote) GENUINE SHIP IN A BOTTLE, modelled

on some Tudor warship or other that had made history by

sinking without trace in record time.

It wasn‘t a proper ship in a bottle, of course. Real ships in

bottles are more complicated than the kits you used to get in

Hamley‘s. With the Airfix sets, they gave you a see-through

plastic bottle in two halves, which you were supposed to glue

together around the finished ship. That was cheating, in my

book. And I guessed the owner of the kit must have felt the

same way, because the ship was only half finished. A few

parts had been glued together, but you could tell he‘d given

up out of boredom, as if he couldn‘t see the point in anything

so simple.

I stood there for a while, looking at the cracked spines of

the old paperbacks, trying to get a grip on the person who‘d

put them there. My leg was itching, so I started scratching it,

not taking my eyes off the books until one of my nails slipped

into the hole in my leg.

The hole in my leg. Eventually, it clicked.

I looked down. There was a wound in my leg all right,

where the Freudian thing had bitten a chunk out of me. The

wound had been cleaned, so there was no blood, although I

could see lots of red under the skin where it‘d been broken

open. The hole must have been about an inch and a half

across (again, I could be misremembering this), so the thing

that had been planted there was about the same shape and

size as a small boiled potato.

Let‘s go over that again. Someone had planted what looked

like a small. Boiled. Potato. In the hole. In my leg. I could

even see tiny shoots coming out of it, working their way into

the flesh. The little bastard was taking root. In. My. Body. The

thing was turning pink around the edges, like it was trying to

hide in the middle of all the other cells, hoping I wouldn‘t

notice that it wasn‘t part of me. It was itching, the way

wounds always itch once you notice how bad they are, and I

wanted to scratch the lump right out, but I could see the

shoots either pumping something into me or sucking

something out. I wondered how much blood I‘d lose if I took it

away.

My jeans were folded up at the end of the bed. Folded

badly, the way only a man could have done it. Next to them

were my shoes, my socks, my belt.

I didn‘t bother taking any of them. A T-shirt and a pair of

pants were all I needed to face the world. I just headed

straight for the door.

89

The hallway of the flat was a lot like the bedroom. Bare

boards, no carpet, although an old rug had been stretched

across the floor near what looked like the front door. There

was a phone nailed to one wall, and plenty of doors leading

away from the hall, most of them closed. All of them

unmarked. No cutesy little plates saying things like JOHN‘S

ROOM, nothing to give me any clues.

Not that I had to do much exploring. I heard the voice as

soon as I walked into the hall.

It was coming from the far end of the passage, from behind

a door that had been left half open, so bright daffodil-colour

daylight could pour into the hall from the other side. The last

time I‘d heard that voice, it‘d been reciting poetry. The voice

was in the middle of a conversation, maybe even an

argument, although I couldn‘t make out who the owner was

arguing with. I guessed he was on the telephone. The fact

that the telephone was right next to me in the hall didn‘t put

me off. The voice sounded young, but a bit croaky, like an

eight-year-old who‘s been smoking fags on the quiet. He even

went up and down at the end of words so, however serious he

was trying to sound, you could imagine him asking you to

buy him an ice cream at any second.

I‘ll tell you what the voice was saying, or at least, as much

of it as I can remember. I‘ll fill in the blanks myself. Call it

creative writing.

90

‗No, of course not. Of course we won‘t. We don‘t want a war.

We‘ve got enough enemies already, we don‘t want to...

‗No. No, that‘s not what I‘m saying. We don‘t want to end

the treaty completely. Really. We just want to change a

couple of the clauses, that‘s all. Listen, it‘s in your favour. All

I‘m saying... No, listen... All I‘m saying is that we‘re ready to

change the bits about... about you not being allowed to have

time technology. That‘s all.

‗Yeah, I know. I know, but... Look, we always sound like

we‘re up to something. It‘s not like that. We‘re scared, you

know? We need all the friends we can get, and... the way we

see it, if your people get time-active, that makes you stronger.

That‘s what we‘re talking about here. Making your people

stronger...

‗No, I‘m not saying that. We don‘t want you to get involved

in any, um, in any military action or anything. All we‘re

saying is, we‘ll let you have time-tech, but if we get into some

kind of face-off then you won‘t side against us. I mean, you

don‘t have to side with us. Just as long as you don‘t make

any deals with... with anyone we might be at war with.

‗Trust me. We‘re going to make the offer in a couple of days.

I mean, officially. I‘m just telling you now because... I thought

you should know how things are going, that‘s all. Right?‘

91

None of this will mean anything to you yet. It all comes

together in the end, though. Wait and see.

92-4

It was the living room of the flat, and it was big. You could

tell it must have cost a fortune to rent the place. The ceiling

was higher than any ceiling in London had a right to be, and

the whole of the far wall was made up of windows, so you

could see several miles‘ worth of tower blocks and

backstreets whichever way you looked. Soho. Definitely Soho,

with a view like that. There was sunlight, plenty of it, shining

through the rain clouds (any minute now, the sky was

saying, any minute now it‘ll piss down) and lighting up the

old wooden floorboards.

Just about everything in the room was made of wood.

There weren‘t any chairs, just a handful of wooden bunk

beds pushed against some of the walls, as if the person who‘d

decorated the place was still enough of a kid to think bunk

beds were a really smart idea, and he‘d furnished the whole

of his living space with them even though he knew hardly

any of them would ever get used. There was a colour TV

opposite the door, against the big bright windows, stuck

inside a fake wooden cabinet. The furnishings were pretty

new, you could tell. You could still smell the packaging

material on them.

And then there were the ships. Ships in bottles. Not like the

Airfix kits, but proper ones, some of them anything up to two

foot long, things you knew must have come from antiques

shops. They were arranged around the walls, or nesting on

the mattresses of the bunks, or even hanging from the ceiling

on skinny wires. A couple of the ships weren‘t bottled - it was

like they‘d escaped, or maybe they were too complicated to

get squeezed into the glass. Some of them even had oars, like

Viking ships, and some of them...

Some of them had engines. But even the spaceships in

bottles were carved out of wood. That was it, wasn‘t it? That

was why there was wood everywhere, because whoever had

decorated the place wanted to feel like he was inside one of

the bottles himself. From here, looking out across the city,

you could almost believe that London was the world outside

the bottle, the world you‘d see if you could stare out past the

cork. Or maybe London was the world inside the bottle,

depending on where you were standing.

The first moving thing I saw was Bill Grundy, reporting live

from the Labour Party conference on ITV. The sound was

turned right down, so for a second I thought he was the one

talking about treaties and time travel. It took me a while to

take in the rest of the room, and to see the blond man, lying

sprawled out on one of the bunks in the corner. He was the

only other person in the room, but somehow he still managed

to look really pleased that he‘d ended up with the top bunk.

He stopped talking when he saw me. There was a shocked

kind of expression on his face. He was holding something

dark and plasticky next to his ear, which I must have

thought was a telephone, even though it didn‘t have a cord

and wasn‘t connected to anything.

‗I‘ll call you back,‘ the man said. With that, he stuffed the

might-have-been-a-phone under the mattress of the bunk,

then turned back to look at me. He smiled. You could tell he

was forcing it.

‗Hi,‘ he said.

I looked around the room. Nobody was there to give me any

cues. Even Bill Grundy didn‘t look like he wanted to help.

‗Hullo,‘ I said. ‗Where am I?‘

The blond man opened his mouth to say something, then

changed his mind, and closed it again. He sat upright on the

bunk, so I could see all the sinews flowing under that blue

suit of his. Yes, he was still wearing it - dark-blue jacket,

dark-blue trousers, white shirt. It didn‘t look like he‘d slept

in it, though. Eventually, he hopped down off the bunk, and

there was a heavy thump when his huge bare feet hit the

floorboards.

I jumped. He must have seen this, because he decided

against coming any closer.

‗Um,‘ he said. ‗Um. This is where I live. I mean, I‘ve only

just moved in and everything. Just been here a few weeks.‘

He shrugged. ‗Sorry, look. This is really difficult. I know how

you must be feeling, and... maybe we‘d better start from the

beginning, yeah?‘

‗You‘re not the killer, are you?‘ I asked. God knows why I

thought I‘d get an honest answer to that.

He looked embarrassed when I said it. He glanced down at

his feet, but his toes just wiggled up at him, so he looked up

again. ‗Er. I think you‘re getting confused.‘

‗OK,‘ I said. ‗You‘re right. Let‘s start from the beginning.‘

He smiled then, a great big baby kind of smile. That‘s when

I noticed how old his face looked. In the police station, I‘d

thought he was young, maybe my age. Why? Because of his

hair, all short and spiky, like he wanted to look exciting and

dynamic. Because of that earring. But he was older than I

was, at least a decade older. Even so, he still looked

uncomfortable in that suit, as if his body wanted to prove

how young it really was by squirming out of his ‗proper‘

clothes and running around half naked.

Half naked. Was I thinking about what he‘d look like half

naked, even then? (No. I don‘t think I was.)

He took a step towards me, but just the one. ‗My name‘s

Chris,‘ he said. ‗Chris Cwej. And I‘m, um. friendly.‘

‗What a coincidence,‘ I said, trying to pretend I was at some

dinner party or other. ‗My name‘s -‘

‗Christine Summerfield,‘ the man who called himself Chris

Cwej said. I must have looked surprised, because he

shrugged and grinned, the way (as I‘d later find out) he

always did when he thought he‘d said the wrong thing. ‗It

was in the records,‘ he told me. ‗At the police station.‘

The police station. Oh yes. I decided it was probably time to

face the ugly truth, and ask the big question.

‗What the fuck is happening to me?‘ I asked.

Chris Cwej sighed. His lungs were huge, so it took him a

while to fill them up and empty them again.

‗That‘s really complicated,‘ he said. ‗Look, are you hungry?

Only I haven‘t had any breakfast yet.‘

95

There was a lot of embarrassment in Cwej, that first day I

spent with him. Even before I‘d got to know him, I‘d figured

out why. He was embarrassed that I‘d ended up involved in

things. And he used to apologize a lot, for getting me into

this. For messing up my life. That was what I thought,

anyway.

As he told me later on, it was him who‘d planted the potato

thing in my leg. ‗Copycat tissue,‘ he said. ‗Best way of healing

that kind of damage.‘ I‘m sure he could have given me a

proper scientific explanation, but to be honest I couldn‘t have

cared less about the details.

One question‘s got to be asked, though. Cwej said he look

me back to his flat because I was injured, because he didn‘t

think he could leave me in the hands of the local authorities

without them finding out too much about the winged things

(yes, we‘ll come to that in a minute). But the policeman.

Sergeant Elliot Bishop, was hurt just as badly as I was, even

though most of the damage was psychological. Why didn‘t

Cwej take him home? Why wasn‘t the sergeant given some

‗copycat tissue‘ that could heal over the cracks in his head?

Cwej never gave me an answer to that, but I came up with

one pretty quickly. It was because Cwej didn‘t fancy Sergeant

Elliot Bishop. Somewhere in every human male (and Cwej

was human, at least to start with), there must be something

that makes them do whatever they can to look after the

skinny women, but leave the wounded men for somebody

else to deal with.

96

I remember this girl who used to beg for spare change

outside Tottenham Court Road tube station. Cal always used

to give her money, even though he never had anything for the

other sixty million beggars in London. I asked him about that

once. Why he gave money to only that one girl.

‗Cause she‘s cute,‘ he told me.

That made me angry, at the time. I asked him if he thought

this was a fair way of deciding who should have money and

who should be left to starve in the gutters. So Cal shrugged

at me.

‗You give money to fucking Save the Whales,‘ he said.

‗So?‘ I said.

‗You don‘t bother giving any money to cancer research, do

you?‘

‗So?‘ I said.

‗You do the same as me,‘ he said. ‗You just give money to

the causes you like the look of.‘

And, all in all, that‘s what I felt like while I was around

Cwej. Just a cause he liked the look of. But you‘ll want to

hear his explanation, about why my life had suddenly turned

to shit and everybody wanted to kill me. I think it‘s about

time I got round to that.

NOTES ON CWEJ

97

We were both sitting on the floor of the living room with our

legs crossed, poking at identical bowls of cornflakes. Cwej

had picked the cereal that came with the free plastic toy.

Very into toys, Cwej. You could tell, just by looking at the

living room, with all its bottled ships and model starfighters

or whatever they were called.

The TV was still switched on, but Cwej had turned the

sound up a little. I think he wanted to give me some kind of

normal background noise, to make me feel more at home. I

had my eyes fixed on the cornflakes, while the room filled up

with the theme tune of Pogle’s Wood.

‗I know this is going to be kind of hard to deal with,‘ Cwej

was saying. ‗It was hard for me as well, you know?‘

It was almost funny, hearing him trying to be all caring and

sensitive. He sounded like a five-year-old, saying sorry for

bursting someone else‘s balloon. His face still looked too old

for his body. For the way he acted. Was that why the aliens

used him as their agent, maybe? Because they knew all they

had to do was show him a piece of their super-technology,

and he‘d go ‗wow, cool!‘ and not ask any more questions?

‗How old are you?‘ I asked. I didn‘t have anything better to

say.

Cwej shrugged. He kept tapping his soggy cornflakes with

his spoon, like he was trying to wake them up and make

them do something more interesting. ‗I‘ve kind of lost track.

I‘ve been living outside linear time for the last couple of

years.‘

‗Mmm,‘ I said.

98

Cwej was the kind of person who‘d never throw away his old

washing-up-liquid bottles, just in case he saw a piece on Blue

Peter about how to turn them into rocket ships. (I‘m

exaggerating, but not much. Even people with their own time

machines get the urge to make things out of squeezy bottles

sometimes.)

I‘d tell you in full what Cwej told me about his ‗employers‘,

but there wouldn‘t be much point. I told you about my

dream, didn‘t I? Well, most of it was right. That happened a

lot around Cwej. I‘d wake up in the mornings and know stuff

about his world that he‘d never actually told me. I‘d say he

was the kind of man to make my dreams come true, but

that‘d be missing the point, I think.

Just like in the dream, there really were planets all over

space where people had crawled up out of the dirt and built

things to keep themselves happy. I‘m talking about people

here, with arms and legs and proper faces. Cwej‘s people had

been around longer than anyone else, so they‘d got the jump

on the rest of us. They‘d been the first ones to come up with

time travel, which made them the most powerful people in

space, or at least that was what they liked to tell everybody.

Yes, I know: there‘s a point in every acid-head‘s life when

he or she starts to think that maybe the real world isn‘t real,

that maybe the hallucinations are the real thing, that by

stuffing more tabs down his or her neck he or she can go all

the way and see what‘s really there, behind the dirt and

matter that clogs our lives up most of the time. The point

when you can either call it a day and move on to something

else (like, say, cocaine), or do what your instincts tell you and

run away to live with the hippie machine-elves in hyperspace.

There in the flat, I knew I must have reached the point of no

return, and not even noticed it. Which is why I believed,

without asking too many difficult questions, that the man

called Chris Cwej really was working for a bunch of old alien

wizards who thought they ran the galaxy. If I‘d been thinking

straight, I would have just told myself it was the world‘s

biggest and stupidest practical joke. Ever.

There‘s a lot to be said for not thinking straight.

99/100

On the TV screen, the puppet people were still going through

the motions of life in Pogle’s Wood, scratching their heads

and looking surprised while the narrator explained what was

happening to them. In the ‗real‘ world, I was going through

pretty much the same thing.

‗But you‘re human,‘ I said.

Cwej nodded. ‗I was born on Earth, yeah. I just work for

them, that‘s all.‘

Them. He said them. In all the time I knew him, I never once

heard Cwej call his employers by their name. I think he was

scared to. Like some kind of magic was going to kick in if he

did, like all he had to do was say the word and they‘d appear

right there in the room with him, all blood and fire and

thunder.

‗Why?‘ I asked.

‗Why do I work for them?‘ Cwej looked surprised. I don‘t

think he thought it was a decent question to ask. ‗You mean

how did I end up getting together with them?‘

‗Yes,‘ I said. It wasn‘t really what I‘d asked, but it was close

enough.

Cwej put on his ‗serious‘ face, which was never very easy to

take seriously. ‗I didn‘t have a choice. I got kidnapped.

Abducted.‘

‗So these employers of yours... they‘re not nice people.‘

‗No, you don‘t get it.‘ He shook his head, and waved his

spoon around, getting wholesome flakes of wheat and corn all

over the floorboards. ‗They‘ve got rules, where they come

from. Laws. You‘ve got to have really strict laws, if you‘ve got

time travel. Otherwise you can mess the whole universe up.

They‘re not allowed to get involved in other people‘s cultures.

They can watch, and they can make notes, and maybe if

there‘s a crisis they can step in to stop the whole galaxy

blowing up or something, but they can‘t mess around with

humans. Normally. It‘s the rules.‘

This wasn‘t making a lot of sense, and I said so.

‗There are renegades,‘ Cwej told me. He tried to make his

voice sound all dark and sinister when he said it. ‗They‘re like

criminals. They steal the time-travel capsules, and they go on

the run.‘ He leant forward then, poking his big face over the

top of the cereal packet I‘d put between us. It was the last

line of defence I had. ‗They‘re mad, you know?‘

‗Right,‘ I said. ‗So you were abducted by...?‘

‗He was one of the renegades. One of the worst. We‘d been

chasing him for years. I mean, his people had been chasing

him. He was kind of a mad scientist, yeah?‘

‗With a stolen time machine,‘ I said.

Cwej nodded. ‗You know what he called himself?‘

‗No,‘ I said.

‗He called himself the Evil Renegade. With a capital E and

everything. Like he wanted everyone to know he was this...‘

‗Mad scientist,‘ I suggested.

‗Yeah. He used to go around the universe kidnapping

people. He‘d take them on board his timeship, and he‘d... do

things with them. Play with their heads. Make them think

they were having exciting adventures. He had all these

laboratories on board the ship.‘

‗So, this time machine,‘ I said. ‗Was it... big?‘

‗Oh, yeah.‘

‗And that‘s what he did to you? Experiments and things?‘

Cwej shuddered. No, I‘m serious. He really shuddered. ‗I

think so. He must have done. I don‘t remember much of it.

There were a couple of others on the ship while I was there.

One of them came from the same place as me. She died. I

had to watch her die. The Renegade... he sent her out into

the middle of a war, just to watch what she‘d do.‘ He was

getting upset now, you could tell. ‗She was lucky, though,

next to some. When he got fed up with us, he just left us

wherever he felt like. Anywhere in space-time. Just for a

laugh.‘

‗Sounds like a big road trip,‘ I said. ‗Very sixties.‘

‗He was mad,‘ snapped Cwej.

It was scary, the way he said that. It‘s like when you‘re

combing a cat or a dog, and for a while it‘s line, it‘s enjoying

the attention, but then you get the comb snagged on its

testicles and suddenly, bang, you‘re in trouble. (Have I really

just compared Cwej to an animal with snagged testicles?)

101

I looked down at my bowl. Cwej looked down at his.

‗Sorry,‘ he said.

‗Uh-huh,‘ I said.

‗It just gets to me, you know? What he did to my life, it‘s

just...‘ He started shrugging again. ‗I don‘t want to think

that‘s what I‘m doing to you. That‘s what I‘m saying.‘

‗Uh-huh,‘ I said.

‗The thing is, I got lucky, in the end. My people... I mean,

his people... they caught up with him. Brought him back to

the homeworld. They were good to me, you know? They gave

me a choice and everything. Either they could put me back in

my own time, and blank out all the memories of what he‘d

done, or I could stay with them. I think I did the right thing.‘

I risked looking back up at him. ‗But you didn‘t think...

after what had happened...‘ (I wasn‘t sure how close to his

testicles I could get here.) ‗You didn‘t think it‘d be better to

forget it all?‘

‗It would‘ve been a cop-out,‘ said Cwej.

102

I wonder, now. I wonder how much of Cwej‘s memory was

real. But, then, I spend most of my life wondering how much

of my memory‘s real, so what can you expect?

His employers knew how to play around with people‘s

memories. Cwej said they left his mind in one piece, but I

can‘t help thinking of the way he‘d snap, when I came

anywhere near saying good things about the Evil Renegade.

Why was that? Because Cwej had really suffered, or because

the aliens wanted him to think he‘d really suffered, so they

could be sure he was on their side?

Also, I don‘t believe anyone would choose a name like the

Evil Renegade. It sounds silly. If that isn‘t a faked memory, I

don‘t know what is.

103

Two weeks later, I was lying under a night sky that was a

totally different colour from any of the night skies you used

to see on Earth, looking at constellations I knew I‘d never

remember the names of. Blue grass under my head. Cwej‘s

face next to mine, close enough for me to be able to feel the

warm air every time he breathed out.

‗Tell me something,‘ I said, trying to sound wacky just so

Cwej knew I was joking with him (he was never very good

with irony). ‗Why do aliens have funny names, Cwej?‘

I felt him frown, rather than seeing it.

‗They don‘t,‘ he said. Then a pause. ‗Do they?‘

‗Cal used to have all these old sci-fi novels,‘ I told him. ‗And

the alien characters always had stupid names. It‘s like, on

Earth, we get proper names. We‘ve got Christian names and

surnames and middle names. But aliens get these one-word,

four-letter names, like ―Darf‖ or ―Vrij‖ or ―Gorp‖ or something.

Any idea why that is, Cwej?‘

He finally got the point. ‗Cwej is a good name,‘ he said. ‗It‘s

Polish.‘

‗So what about Khiste?‘

I felt the frown get deeper. ‗I don‘t know where Khiste

comes from. I don‘t think he‘s from Earth.‘

‗He‘s not... one of your employers.‘

‗No. Just an agent.‘ He turned his head, so his lips were

nearly touching my cheek. ‗Christine?‘

‗Mm?‘

‗Why do you call me ―Cwej‖ all the time?‘

‗Because you‘re an alien,‘ I said. ‗I told you. Aliens don‘t

have first names.‘

104

In fact, Cwej was a bit sensitive about how human he was. I

knew he‘d been born on Earth, but his employers had given

him ‗biological advantages‘ when he‘d signed up with them.

The aliens were so advanced, they‘d even made machines

they could sew into the cells of their bodies. Things that let

them time-travel more easily. Things that helped them heal if

they got hurt. Things that sharpened up their senses. Cwej

always started mumbling whenever I asked him about that,

so I never found out exactly how un-human they‘d made him,

although towards the end I started to get some idea of what

they‘d done to his body.

I didn‘t think his genes were very important, really. I mean,

I didn‘t know him for long enough to think about having kids.

Besides, what was the difference between shoving machines

into your body so you could see in the dark, and shoving

chemicals into your body so you could see the pretty colours?

Maybe that‘s what really defines a culture: the way its people

mess around with their own bodies. Ask anyone who‘s ever

had a tattoo done. Or anyone who‘s ever had an ear pierced.

God. Have I really written over a hundred pages already?

105

Anyway. All this was in the future. On 28 September, when

we sat there in the living room with a big fat yellow sun

crawling over Soho, Cwej was still trying to explain who his

people were and why they‘d sent him to London. I told him I‘d

heard him on the phone, which confused him, until he

figured out that I was talking about the thing he‘d shoved

under the bunk bed mattress. I told him I‘d heard him

talking about some kind of face-off. He tried to look serious

again.

‗It‘s a busy kind of universe out there,‘ he said. ‗Look... my

people are the oldest civilization, yeah? They‘re the most

powerful race there is, because they worked out time travel

first. Right?‘

(‗My people‘, that‘s what he said. See what I mean, about

my not being sure how human he was?)

‗There are things that are even older, though,‘ Cwej went

on, once he saw me nodding dumbly. ‗Not people. Not

civilizations. Just... things.‘

‗Yeah,‘ I said. Which meant: you mean, like the thing in the

cell?

Cwej waved his arms around, to make sure I knew he was

talking about things that were big and scary. ‗They‘re like

gods. I mean, I‘m not saying they are gods, but they‘re like

gods. For all we know, they‘re, um... they‘re fundamental

parts of the universe. Like they‘re parts of the universe‘s

framework. They might have been there since the beginning

of time, we don‘t know. But we‘ve always kind of assumed

they‘d never wake up. That they‘d never show themselves.

All the civilizations in the universe - like my people, like the

humans, like whatever - they‘ve kind of been growing up in

the shadow of these god things. Is this making sense?‘

Obviously it was making sense. I was remembering the

dream, where I‘d seen space, made up of all the winged

things. Where I‘d seen the people, building their homes in the

gaps between the spaces. The way I saw it, the Gods were the

ones who shifted our bones around, the ones who were

making collections out of our leftover bits and pieces.

106

Later on, I found out that things weren‘t as simple as Cwej

had made them sound. It wasn‘t a two-way fight between the

Gods and the people, for a start. The people were split up

into factions, and so were the Gods, and you could never be

sure who was working for who, like a big James Bond story

stretched over the whole of space. And there were a hundred

and one theories about where the Gods had come from, as

well, although most of the popular stories said the Gods were

just figments of someone‘s imagination. The rumours said

the Gods had been made millions and billions of years

earlier, by a bunch of super-aliens so powerful that even

their ideas were dangerous. Still, nobody seemed to know

where these super-aliens had gone, or why they hadn‘t left

behind any records of why they‘d done what they‘d done.

The Gods were there. Whatever the reason, it was one of

those things you just had to deal with. Why were there gods?

Well, why was there anything? Why was there gravity? Why

was there a universe?

107

Come to think of it... why is there a universe?

108

Another thing I‘ve got in my rucksack is a newspaper, dated

30 March 2596. I‘ve already told you that Cwej‘s people

weren‘t stuck in one time like the rest of us, so this shouldn‘t

surprise you much. I say ‗newspaper‘, although to be honest I

don‘t think there‘s any paper involved. I don‘t know what the

thing‘s made of. All I know is that when you poke the little

photos of the columnists with your finger, they start talking,

in case you can‘t be bothered reading the words.

(Interesting fact: at least twice, I saw Cwej poking

photographs in the newspapers of 1970, and scowling when

they didn‘t talk to him. But that‘s beside the point.)

The front-page story in the 2596 ‗paper‘ is about a planet

called Dellah, which, like the story says, is a colony planet on

the gloomy side of the Earth empire. That‘s right: the human

race leaves Earth one day, and scatters its bones across

space for all the universe to see. Not bad, for a race that died

out in 1970, but we‘ll deal with these paradoxes later. The

point is that in March 2596 something happened to Dellah,

something the Earth authorities didn‘t know how to deal

with. The reporters didn‘t know how to deal with it, either.

The story‘s a bit vague about what the catastrophe might

have been, but one columnist calls it an ‗infection‘, and the

feeling is that Dellah‘s going to have to be off limits to human

beings for a while.

What actually happened to Dellah was this: the Gods took

over. It was the second planet they sank their teeth into, the

first being a planet nearby called Tyler‘s Folly, another Earth

colony nobody ever really cared about until things started

going wrong. The takeover on Dellah upset just about

everybody. It upset the Earth authorities, who wondered

whether they should try launching missiles at the planet, but

never got round to it. It upset Cwej, who just happened to

have friends there (I asked him whether time travellers were

like sailors, with a girl in every year, but he didn‘t know what

I was talking about). Above all, it upset Cwej‘s employers,

who hadn‘t been expecting the Gods to show themselves like

that. It made them feel a bit helpless, I think.

I‘ll get back to the story in a moment. Right now, I feel like

poking the faces of the columnists. Poking all of them at

once. Hearing them arguing and talking over each other,

until the ruins are full of their stupid whining voices. It‘ll feel

like being in London again. Like being in a pub in Tottenham

Court Road.

109/110

‗They‘ve found something out,‘ Cwej told me, over the

cornflakes.

‗Who have?‘ I said.

‗My people. They‘ve been kind of ignoring the Gods for

years. We always thought they weren‘t important. I mean, a

couple of them have shown their faces every now and then,

but there are just so many other hostile powers in the

universe, you know? People powers. Nobody ever thought the

Gods were going to be turning up again. Not like they did.‘

I tried to look all serious and thoughtful.

Cwej folded his big fingers in front of his face. ‗We‘ve been

putting all our research people on this. Finding out what the

Gods are, where they really come from, that kind of thing.

Just in case they spread. In case they‘re a major threat.‘

‗And are they?‘ I asked.

‗Um...‘ said Cwej.

The truth is, he didn‘t know. I didn‘t figure that out until

later. Cwej‘s employers had found something out from their

research, something crucial about the Gods, but they‘d never

bothered telling Cwej what it was.

Actually, we never did find out what it was, although I can

make a few guesses. I know it must have been something

bad, something about the Gods‘ powers that got the time

travellers on edge. Cwej‘s employers always thought they had

a chance of fighting the Gods, if it ever came to that. I think

they must have worked out that they couldn‘t.

They were scared. That‘s what I‘m saying. And, at the end

of the day, that was the reason they‘d sent Cwej to Earth.

‗All right,‘ I said. ‗I‘m going to see if I‘ve got my head round

this. First off, your employers are worried about the Gods.‘

Cwej opened his mouth to say something. I didn‘t let him.

‗Let me finish,‘ I said. ‗Please. Your employers are worried

about the Gods. Because the Gods are trying to take over the

universe or something, five or six hundred years in the

future. So. They‘ve sent you back in time to 1970. They want

you to change time, or something like that. They want you to

get rid of the Gods now, so they won‘t be a problem in the

future. That thing in the police cell was one of the Gods. It

followed you back here to stop you, but you killed it off

somehow, after I blacked out. Which is lucky, because it‘s

been going around London killing people. Right?‘

Cwej looked worried. ‗Are you sure you‘re feeling OK?‘

‗Fine. Am I right?‘

He cleared his throat, and started counting off points on

his fingers. ‗Well, to start with, I haven‘t been sent back in

time. It‘s not that simple.‘

‗Simple,‘ I muttered.

‗Also, you can‘t change time. It doesn‘t work. The whole

universe falls apart if you try it, I think. That‘s not why I‘m

here. Three, the thing in the cell wasn‘t a God. It was just a

sphinx. Gods are bigger. Four, I didn‘t kill it. I just shut it

down.‘

‗OK,‘ I said. ‗But apart from that, how did I do?‘

‗I don‘t know,‘ said Cwej. ‗I‘ve lost track.‘

111

I don‘t remember all the details about the conversation,

obviously. Writing it all out now, I‘m probably filling in more

details than were really there. Cwej didn‘t give me all the

answers, not at once.

The truth was, there were things he didn‘t like to talk

about. For example, stuck in that scrapbook I keep

mentioning there‘s a letter, dated September 1970 and

written (in an ugly, scrawly kind of handwriting) on

notepaper headed with the name of a prison in Los Angeles.

It‘s an answer to a question, which Cwej had asked the writer

a couple of weeks earlier.

The writer tells Cwej that, yes, he does think the fall of

civilization is imminent - except that he doesn‘t use the word

‗imminent‘, and he‘s spelt ‗civilization‘ wrongly. There‘ll be a

time of reckoning, when all the ‗pigs‘ and ‗niggers‘ will wipe

each other out in a war of blood and fire. While all this is

going on, the lucky few are going to be in hiding somewhere

underground, ready to build a new, white, police-free Utopia

once the bloodshed‘s over.

I don‘t know how Cwej managed to get in touch with the

letter writer, although I suppose anything‘s possible if you‘re

working for aliens. But I do know why Cwej asked the

question in the first place. It was because he wanted to

understand. He wanted to know all about Earth, and about

all the things we thought were going to happen to it. Cwej

must have decided that the writer was the right kind of

person to ask, even if he was a complete paranoid maniac.

(The writer, that is. Not Cwej.)

The letter isn‘t signed, although it‘s pretty obvious who

wrote it. And it‘s easy to see why Cwej didn‘t like to talk

about it, why he didn‘t want me to know exactly who his

friends were. Scared to talk too much, that was Cwej.

NOTES ON THE BOTTLE

112

Ancient Egypt was always popular with Lady Diamond‘s

customers. Let‘s face it, it was the perfect civilization. Old

enough for Lady to pretend that the Egyptians had passed

down all kinds of ‗lost secrets‘ to fortune-tellers, but big

enough to have left a bunch of bloody great pyramids behind.

As far as Lady was concerned, the reason they‘d built the

pyramids was so people like her could use them as props,

thousands of years later.

‗There‘s a whole city in Egypt that used to belong to the

priests,‘ Lady Diamond once told me, in the days before she‘d

figured out that I wasn‘t going to be impressed. ‗A whole

walled-off city. And nobody else ever found out what they did

in there. Orgies, they said. Sex magic. Can‘t you just

imagine?‘

‗Have you been there?‘ I asked.

‗Darling, of course I‘ve been there,‘ said Lady Diamond, the

woman who‘d also claimed to have been in the bedrooms of

every male rock‘n‘roll star who‘d had a top ten hit between

1963 and 1968. ‗There are dirty pictures all over the walls.

There’s something they don‘t show you in the Natural History

Museum. The Egyptians invented mathematics, you know.‘

I didn‘t see what that had to do with orgies or dirty

pictures. Besides, it sounded like she‘d made it up. I nodded

anyway.

‗It was all about geometry,‘ Lady went on. ‗The priests knew

they could get in touch with their gods through the power of

maths. That‘s why they made so many great buildings. All

those straight lines and angles. That‘s where the masons get

their ideas from.‘ She tapped the side of her nose, like she

wanted me to think that she‘d been having sex with masons

for most of her adult life.

Oh,‘ I said.

‗They used to sacrifice slaves to their buildings. They used

to use their crushed-up bodies as mortar. Did you know

that?‘

I didn‘t know that, mainly because Lady had got the idea

from watching The Ten Commandments.

‗I mean, you can just imagine, darling,‘ Lady told me. ‗The

things they must have found out, locked away in that city of

theirs. The things they must have built. What kind of devices

must there have been, hmm? What kind of diabolical

engines, fed by the blood of their followers?‘

‗They didn‘t have engines, did they?‘ I asked. Although if

she‘d said that the first steam train had been invented by

Tutankhamen, I probably would have just shrugged.

113/114

By two o‘clock on 28 September 1970, I was standing in the

kitchen of Chris Cwej‘s flat, scraping my leftover cornflakes

into a plastic pedal-bin. I felt like I hadn‘t eaten properly

since the day I‘d been born, but somehow my mouth didn‘t

feel up to chewing.

‗It was a sphinx,‘ Cwej said. At long last, he‘d decided to tell

me all about the thing I‘d seen in the police cell. ‗They‘re like

the Gods‘ servants. We think.‘

The kitchen was tiny, hardly big enough for two people.

There was no fake wood panelling here, just smooth shiny-

white surfaces, tiles that had been splashed with the juice of

old tea bags. You could tell it was a man who owned the flat.

Nobody had even tried to decorate the room. The forks and

spoons were lying in a messy heap by the sink, and under

the bare lightbulb (there weren‘t any windows) you could see

every blob of grease on every piece of metal.

Cwej stood in the doorway, with his big lanky body leaning

against the frame. He‘d scooped up a jar of peanut butter

from a sideboard, and now he was busy running his finger

around the rim.

‗Sphinx, as in Egypt?‘ I asked.

‗Er, not really. People call them sphinxes because... it kind

of fits them. We‘ve known about them for years.‘

‗I thought you said the Gods had only just woken up.‘

‗Um. The thing is,‘ said Cwej. Then he stopped, and sucked

the peanut butter off his hands.

‗The thing is, the Gods aren‘t all the same,‘ he went on.

‗They fight with each other, just like we do. We think – we

think - they‘ve all got different agendas. Most of the Gods

have been, er, asleep for the past few million years. But

there‘ve been sightings. We think a few of them have been

slumming it around the universe. Exploring. Finding stuff

out about the other races.‘

‗Like your Evil Renegade did,‘ I said. Cwej immediately

stopped slapping his tongue around his gums.

‗I suppose so,‘ he said. ‗Dellah - that‘s the planet I was

talking about, the one the Gods took over - it wasn‘t the first

place the Gods have popped up on. There‘s another planet,

on the edge of the galaxy. The other edge from Earth, I mean.

It‘s kind of been a colony for the Gods for as long as anyone

can remember. We think it belongs to one of the ren-, to one

of the rogue Gods. I mean, most of this is guesswork, seeing

as nobody‘s ever been there and come back again. We‘re not

even sure it‘s a planet.‘

‗You can‘t tell whether something‘s a planet or not?‘ I

asked. Cwej shrugged.

‗Space goes funny around the Gods,‘ he said. ‗The usual

laws don‘t work properly. Listen, you said something about

Egypt, right? Do you know anything about the old Egyptian

priests?‘

‗Ah,‘ I said.

115

Bear with me here. We‘re getting close to the part of the story

where I tell you the secret of the universe.

116

I could write a whole thesis now, about the biology of the

sphinxes. Most of it would probably be wrong, mind you, but

it‘d still be a thesis.

The one thing you‘ve got to remember is this. Sphinxes

aren‘t ‗natural‘. They didn‘t evolve. I mean, just look at the

things: big sharp wings, bones that move around under their

skins so you can‘t tell whether they‘re supposed to walk on

two legs or four legs, and bloody great TV screens popping

out of their faces. They look like TV screens, anyway,

although I suppose they‘re just lenses, maybe to help them

focus on what they‘re doing.

The Gods made the sphinxes for a reason. They‘re not like

slaves, they‘re like tools. Because sphinxes can make space.

I‘ve read the books, all the theories written down by Cwej‘s

employers. Sphinxes feed on stuff from outside normal

space-time, although apparently you‘d have to have eyes that

see in five dimensions to guess what this stuff might actually

look like. The important thing is, sphinxes eat material from

outside the ordinary universe, then excrete it again as raw

space-time. I‘ll never, as long as I live, forget the way Chris

Cwej described this process to me.

‗They poo reality, basically,‘ he said.

That was why Cwej‘s employers couldn‘t even be sure

whether the part of space owned by the renegade Gods was a

planet. Because the Gods had been adding to it for

thousands of years, getting their sphinxes to make more

space in the area, almost like they were building their own

little microcosm universe on the edge of the real one. The

sphinxes had been there for thousands of years, beavering

away like nobody‘s business, stopping only to kill off any

travellers stupid enough to get too close to their territory.

117

‗Microcosm‘. I‘ve decided to make that the word of the day,

mainly because I just flipped through my dictionary to check

the spelling, and by pure chance I ended up opening the

book at the exact page that starts with (ta-daah!)

‗microcosm‘.

Just luck, really, but it happens a lot. Cwej once said that

it‘s because all dictionaries are a bit telepathic, although he

could have been joking. He was the one who bought me this

dictionary, by the way. It‘s a twenty-sixth-century edition,

packed with all the latest words from the far-off corners of

the Earth empire, and it‘s about the same size as a Mars bar,

with letters so small you need a special mini-computer to

read them.

On the day Cwej bought it for me, the first word I saw, after

a random flip through the pages, was ‗fake‘. Just bear that in

mind when you read these next few pages, that‘s all.

118

‗Listen, you said something about Egypt, right? Do you know

anything about the old Egyptian priests?‘

‗Ah,‘ I said. I didn‘t know whether to mention what Lady

Diamond had told me, seeing as I knew she‘d made most of it

up.

‗They were more than just priests,‘ Cwej said. ‗They were

like masons. Mechanics. They built -‘

‗Engines,‘ I said. ‗Fed by the blood of their followers.‘

Cwej blinked at me. ‗Really?‘ he said. He sounded

impressed.

‗Never mind,‘ I said. ‗Carry on.‘

Cwej put the peanut butter back on the sideboard,

although he didn‘t bother screwing the top back on. I did it

for him, without thinking. ‗What I‘m saying is, that‘s what the

Gods‘ followers are like. That‘s what we‘ve heard from Dellah,

anyway. We think it‘s probably the same in the part of space

where the renegade Gods live. We think they‘ve got human

worshippers there. We think the humans are the ones who

look after the sphinxes. They use the sphinxes to build things

for the Gods. Like I said. Masons.‘

That made sense to me. The worshippers were doing what

the rest of us do all the time, building things to keep the

Gods happy and telling themselves they were doing

something important and noble.

‗Can you imagine -‘ I said, trying to remember what Lady

Diamond had asked me, ‗- the things they must have built?‘

‗Yeah,‘ said Cwej. ‗That‘s it. That‘s the problem.‘

119/120

And now, a story. Are you sitting comfortably, children? Then

I‘ll begin.

Once upon a time, there was an alien called the Evil

Renegade, who used to kidnap people and carry them off

through time just to see what would happen. The Evil

Renegade was proud of his reputation, as a reckless,

dangerous adventurer who‘d run away from his people and

was quite happy to spend his whole life running. To prove to

everyone how fearless he was, he challenged just about every

other race in the universe, and he never lost, because he was

as much a criminal mastermind as he was a mad scientist.

But there was one kind of monster the Evil Renegade

hadn‘t ever taken on, and that annoyed him. He‘d never gone

head to head with the Gods. So, one day, the Evil Renegade

decided to do something about it.

Along with his human slaves, the Evil Renegade took his

time machine to the place where the sphinxes lived, the

world that the runaway Gods had been building for

themselves on the edge of the galaxy. Nobody else has ever

come back from sphinx space alive, so it‘s hard to say what

happened to the Evil Renegade in the Gods‘ world. There are

stories, although nobody‘s sure where the stories come from.

All the rumours say there was a big fight, with the Evil

Renegade waging a one-man war against the Gods, just for

the hell of it. The cities where the Gods‘ worshippers lived

were wrecked. The Gods themselves were injured, and their

blood rained down over whole countries. Astronomers,

watching the home of the Gods from a billion trillion miles

away, sat and stared while the whole of sphinx space lit up

with fire.

(By the way, you should hear Cwej tell this story. He

somehow manages to squeeze in a couple of dozen spaceship

battles along the way. Believe me, this is the edited version

you‘re getting.)

In the end, the Evil Renegade was beaten. The Gods were

too strong even for him, so he made his escape while he

could, leaving his doomed human slaves behind and getting

away in his time machine. But he didn‘t go away empty-

handed. He stole something from the rogue Gods, one of the

‗devices‘ their worshippers had built in their honour. The Evil

Renegade spirited it away, and hoarded it in his trophy room,

along with all the other things he‘d taken from the worlds

he‘d visited, all the stolen relics and severed heads of his

enemies.

The thing he stole was a bottle. A very special kind of bottle

that had been built by the sphinxes, working to the plans of

the Gods‘ followers. And the bottle stayed on the Evil

Renegade‘s time machine for years, until finally the

Renegade‘s own people caught up with him, and the relic

ended up in the hands of Chris Cwej.

121

I‘ve seen that bottle, of course. I saw it not long after the

conversation in the kitchen. It was sitting on a velvet

cushion, being treated like the king of the world by Cwej‘s

people. I remember seeing it for the first time, looking

through the glass and gawping at what was inside.

There‘s no way of saying how it feels, to see something like

that in front of you. To see whole stars, whole star-systems,

spinning around inside a bottle not much bigger than a foot

long. To see all those galaxies, squeezed into a space about

the same size as your own head.

‗It‘s true,‘ I remember saying. ‗It‘s fucking true.’

‗Sorry,‘ Cwej mumbled.

‗A whole universe,‘ I said. Behind me, I heard Khiste - who I

haven‘t told you about yet, but we‘ll get there, don‘t worry -

snorting to himself under his breath, like he thought I was

too stupid and primitive to understand anything that

important.

‗A whole universe,‘ Cwej agreed. ‗In a bottle.‘

122

‗A whole universe,‘ said Cwej, some time before that. ‗In a

bottle.‘

We were still in the kitchen of his flat, and I was putting

the milk back in the fridge, on the grounds that Cwej

probably wasn‘t going to bother. I was starting to feel itchy,

like my body didn‘t think it could take in any more of this

without chemical help.

‗You‘re kidding,‘ I said. ‗The sphinxes can do that? They

can build something that big, and just...?‘

‗Yeah,‘ said Cwej. ‗Cosmic, isn‘t it?‘

I got the feeling he only said ‗cosmic‘ because he‘d heard

the hippies saying it. ‗But it‘s not a real universe,‘ I said. ‗Not

like this one. I mean, it‘s only like a model universe, yeah?‘

Cwej frowned. Then he looked down at his feet. They were

still bare, and they still weren‘t giving him any answers.

‗Hard to say,‘ he said.

‗Are there people in it? Living inside the bottle?‘

‗Um, yes.‘

‗Do they know, though? Do they know they‘re not real?‘

Cwej was still toe-staring. ‗I didn‘t say they weren‘t real.

They were just made by the sphinxes. That‘s all.‘

I didn‘t argue. ‗Don‘t the Gods want it back?‘

‗I should think so,‘ said Cwej, looking up at last. ‗I think

that‘s why the sphinxes are following me.‘

‗You mean, you‘ve got it here?‘ I said. ‗You‘ve brought this

universe-in-a-bottle thing with you? To London? In 1970?‘

‗Not exactly,‘ said Cwej. ‗Look, I haven‘t made a report to

the homeworld yet. I‘m not sure I should be telling you

everything this soon...‘

123

A few more memories, which may be real, or may just be

things I‘ve imagined after the fact:

1. It was something I‘d thought of while I‘d been running

away from Lady‘s shop with the wound in my leg, when I‘d

first worked out (or just imagined?) that there were things

moving around in the shadows, shifting our bones into

patterns even the priests of Egypt would have been proud of.

I‘d imagined that these monsters, whatever they were, had

been changing space so we all had enough room to die in.

Was that a premonition, or what?

2. The corridor of the police station had gone on for ever.

Earlier on, I‘d put it down to the pain and the coke. It‘s easy

to imagine, looking back on it, that the sphinx had shat out

raw space when it had gone through the station, stretching

out the corridor behind it. Does that make sense?

3. A definite dubious memory, this. Think about the man

who‘d attacked me in Lady Diamond‘s shop, the man who by

now I knew had been a sphinx, somehow disguised as a

human being (by changing its own private body space,

maybe?). Sometimes, I remember turning around and seeing

him already standing there in the doorway, staring at me.

Sometimes, I remember it another way. I remember him

stepping out of the shadows. Literally, I mean: stepping out

of the shadows. Moving out of spaces in the building that

shouldn‘t have been there. Did I really see him/it doing that,

or am I fantasizing again?

124

Not long now until the secret of the universe. Hold your

breath.

125/126

Cwej led me out into the hallway of the flat. I thought we

were going back into the living room, but instead he just

stood there with his back against the wall, sticking his hands

into the pockets of his suit as if he didn‘t know what else to

do with them. There were still three or four doors in the

hallway I hadn‘t been through, although I guessed that most

of them led to spare rooms. One of the doors had a big

padlock fixed to the handle, which I thought was odd.

Mysterious locked rooms. How gothic. What horrors could

have been waiting for me on the other side? Well, that‘s not

important right now.

‗My people are scared,‘ Cwej said. He practically whispered

it, so I started thinking about conversations in spy movies,

wondering if we were standing in the hall only because the

rest of the flat was bugged.

‗Scared,‘ I repeated. ‗You mean, of the Gods?‘

Cwej nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on the grubby

floorboards.

‗So there‘s going to be a war?‘ I asked. I couldn‘t even

imagine what a war on that kind of scale might be like,

although I guessed there‘d be a lot more to it than just

spaceships shooting at each other.

‗No,‘ said Cwej. ‗My employers - they know they‘re

outgunned. They know they can‘t beat the Gods. I don‘t know

how they know it, but they know.‘ Then he sighed, and lifted

up his head, letting it thunk back against the wall. ‗It‘s

stupid. Really, really stupid. We always thought we were the

best. Tougher than anybody else. Smarter. I never thought I‘d

ever see them scared.‘

Note the way Cwej swung between saying ‗us‘ and ‗them‘

when he was talking about his employers, like he wasn‘t sure

whether he was one of them or just one of their servants.

Personally, I didn‘t know what to say, so I just shuffled my

feet.

‗The Gods don‘t just take over planets,‘ said Cwej. ‗They

take over whole cultures. Can you imagine what that‘s like

for my people? Their culture‘s the oldest in the galaxy. I think

so, anyway. They don‘t want to lose that. We don‘t want to

lose that. We have to make sure the Gods don‘t take it away

from us. We have to make sure there‘s something left, even if

the Gods take over. Something left of our world.‘

‗You mean, your new homeworld,‘ I said. ‗Where your

employers come from. Yeah?‘

Cwej looked at me, at last. His eyes were like shiny little

blue buttons.

‗We‘re going to send some of our people inside the bottle,‘

said Cwej. ‗That‘s what all this is about. We‘re going to put

together a survival team. Just a few of my people. They‘re

going to take all our secrets, all our technology, and they‘re

going to set up new lives for themselves inside the bottle

world. That way, our culture‘s going to be able to live. Even if

most of us get taken over by the Gods. There‘ll be a... a kind

of colony. Like a time capsule. Inside the model universe.‘

‗I don‘t get it,‘ I said. ‗Your people can go anywhere in

space, can‘t they? Anywhere. So why not just find a new

planet for yourselves?‘

Cwej shook his head. ‗You don‘t understand. The Gods

aren‘t just threatening us. They‘re threatening everything. All

of space. All of time. It doesn‘t matter where we go.‘

The obvious question finally struck me. ‗Wait a minute.

Does that mean... they‘re going to take over Earth as well?‘

Cwej didn‘t give me a yes-or-no answer, which annoyed me.

‗Nowhere‘s safe, that‘s what I‘m saying. Nowhere real,

anyway. But the bottle‘s different. The model universe isn‘t a

perfect copy of the real one. It‘s a lot simpler. There aren‘t

any Gods there. There aren‘t any really hi-tech cultures.

There‘s a version of Earth, but there isn‘t a version of the

homeworld. No time travellers. It‘s supposed to be safe.

That‘s the theory, anyway. We hide our team inside the

bottle, then hope the Gods never think of looking there, even

if they manage to find the bottle again.‘

There was something I didn‘t like about the way he‘d said

that. Something about there being a version of Earth inside

the bottle. So I started wondering: Is there a little model

version of me there, or isn‘t the detail that good?

‗Getting into the bottle‘s not easy,‘ Cwej went on. He was

droning now, like he didn‘t want to have to tell me this. ‗Our

people spent years trying to work out how to get in and out

without the two universes leaking. In the end, we had to copy

the sphinxes. We had to copy their rituals. And even then, we

could only get one person inside the bottle.‘

‗Who volunteered?‘ I said.

‗I did,‘ said Cwej.

I‘ve got to admit, I was impressed. ‗You‘ve been inside the

bottle?‘

‗That was the plan,‘ Cwej told me. ‗For me to get into the

bottle world. To find a decent planet. To find a decent time

period. Somewhere our people could blend in. Then I was

supposed to open up the bottle from the inside, so the rest of

the survival team could make it through.‘

‗And did you do it?‘ I asked.

‗Not yet,‘ said Cwej.

127

And that was it. The exact moment when everything clicked

together: what Cwej was really doing in London, and what

he‘d meant when he‘d said that he ‗hadn‘t exactly‘ travelled

through time to get here, even though he came from the

twenty-sixth century. The secret of the universe. The secret of

my universe, anyway.

‗Oh, Christ,‘ I said.

Cwej just stood there, wiggling his toes.

‗Oh, Christ, no,‘ I said.

128

And I‘ve just reached the end of this notebook. Anyone would

think I‘d planned it that way.

SECOND NOTEBOOK

[128 PAGES, 12 MISSING.]

NOTES ON THE SPHINX

1

First page of a new notebook. I feel like scrawling something

in big letters on the paper. THIS BOOK BELONGS TO

CHRISTINE SUMMERFIELD, or maybe a dedication. Who

should I dedicate it to, d‟you think? I‟ll have to think about

that.

2

Where were we?

Well. At about four o‟clock in the morning on 29 September

1970, I was on my hands and knees in the bathroom of

Chris Cwej‟s flat, head down over the toilet bowl, with my

hands sliding around in a puddle of spilt disinfectant. I‟d

been trying to stick two fingers down my throat, but I‟d

bottled out (ha ha) before they‟d got all the way down.

People aren‟t built to make themselves sick. Me, I never had

the nerve to argue with nature like that.

I‟d been trying to sleep, in the room where Cwej kept

the spare bed, but it hadn‟t worked. I‟d just lain there, with

the cramp getting worse and worse in my stomach, feeling

the sweat building up on the duvet. There on the bathroom

floor, with the magic healing potato in my leg and a

desperate need for cocaine, for Valium, for anything to

make all of this go away and leave me alone, I‟d told

myself that the only way to make life better was to throw

up. Like I thought that shedding my stomach lining would

make the whole world easier to swallow.

3

Later on, when we were walking through one of the cities his

employers had built, Cwej told me that he didn‟t understand

how I could ever have believed my world was the „real‟ one.

He sounded almost embarrassed, telling me that. In his

universe, in the „real‟ universe, things were different. The

pyramids had been built by aliens. There was life on Mars.

There were „lost planets‟ inside Earth‟s solar system, covered

with the ruins of old Inca-style civilizations. Humans were

meant to start taking over other planets by the end of the

twentieth century.

There was none of that in my world. Things were a lot

simpler there, inside the model universe the sphinxes had

made. „I mean, where you come from, the pyramids were

actually built by humans,‟ Cwej said, shaking his head in a

disbelieving kind of way. „That‟s just... stupid.‟

4

But all that was in the future. Let‟s go back to the afternoon

when Cwej, for whatever reason, decided to tell me the truth.

Or some of it, anyway.

I was sitting in the living room of the flat again, huddled

up on the floor in the corner, next to the window wall. The

TV had been switched off, so everything was quiet, apart

from the sound of tiny little hailstones splattering against the

glass. I was looking out at London, at Soho, trying not to

notice that from here it looked exactly like the world in a

bottle Cwej had told me about. Cwej had bought himself a

few packets of cigarettes, more to blend in with 1970 than for

any other reason, so I‟d helped myself to a couple.

Cwej sat opposite me, on the other side of the smoke

cloud, folding his big limbs into the smallest space he could.

He was pretending he wasn‟t staring at me.

We sat like that for a long, long time.

„Um...‟ he said, in the end.

It took him about five minutes to follow that up.

„Are you going to be OK?‟ he asked.

I shrugged.

Another long pause.

„Am I human?‟ I asked, in the end.

I could see Cwej squirming, out of the corner of my eye.

„Er, I‟m not sure what you mean,‟ he said.

„Am I human? Do I count as a person?‟ I nodded at the

window, at all the tiny make-believe people, shuffling along

the streets of their little bottled world. „Do any of them

count? Or are they just...?‟

I didn‟t bother finishing the question. I guessed Cwej

would know what I meant.

„I‟m sure you‟re human,‟ he said. „You look human.‟

That was his idea of a compliment. Maybe even a chat-up

line.

„You didn‟t have to tell me, did you?‟ I said.

„You got involved,‟ Cwej said. He was almost whining

now.

„Why? Because I know too much? Because I saw that

bloody sphinx thing, is that it?‟

„No, no.‟ Cwej shook his head, and waved some of the

smoke out of his face. I wondered if they had cigarettes

where he came from. He didn‟t look used to the air pollution.

„It‟s the ritual. You kind of got caught up in the ritual. That‟s

all.‟

5

Cwej taught me a lot about ritual, in the two weeks before the

end. He even taught me the poem, the one he was chanting

in the prison cell. I can still remember most of it. „There is no

light among those winding ways,‟ etc., etc.

The practice would go something like this: I‟d sit in the

middle of a circle, scratched into the floor of one of the spare

rooms in the flat. The electricity would be turned off, so

there‟d be no light apart from the candles (Lady Diamond

would‟ve done the same thing, I‟m sure). Then the computer

parts would be laid down in patterns around me. The parts

were junk, bits and pieces of old hardware from Cwej‟s

homeworld, just there to help me focus.

The sphinxes were controlled by rituals. Well, obviously.

They were owned by people who were just like „the

priest-architects of ancient Egypt‟, remember? When the

sphinx had broken into Cwej‟s cell at the police station, all

those billions of years ago, Cwej must have had just enough

time to scatter the computer parts around him, props to help

him fix his mind on the „spell‟, the chanting of the poem.

Cwej had chosen the poem himself; it was nineteenth

century, he told me, all about night-time and cities and

ghosts and murder. A prayer to Jack the Ripper, or Charles

Manson, or John Christie, or any other maniac-icon you

might want to think of.

The words of the poem weren‟t important. The point was,

the sphinx knew what it meant. Cwej called this

„programming‟ the sphinx, which was supposed to be

something to do with computers (they had thousands of

computers where Cwej came from, not just a handful like we

had on Earth). In the cell, Cwej had managed to „program‟ the

sphinx to stay where it was, instead of ripping him to pieces.

Sitting in that circle, staring at those pieces of junk, I

started to work out what he meant when he‟d said that I‟d

been caught up in the ritual. I‟d distracted the sphinx, while

it had been trying to break out of its „programming‟ and

attack Cwej. So, I‟d become part of that „program‟. It was only

after it‟d been distracted that Cwej had managed to get

deeper into its internal workings, and shut it down

completely.

Could I have done that to a sphinx, after what Cwej taught

me? I‟d like to think so, although I never got the chance to

try. I‟d like to think I could squeeze one into any shape I

liked, the same way the sphinx that had attacked me had

squeezed itself into the shape of a mass murderer, before it

had decided that there just wasn‟t any point in pretending.

But I don‟t suppose I‟ll ever know now.

6

„That‟s how you got rid of the sphinx?‟ I asked. I dropped the

cigarette butt on to the floor, and Cwej winced, but he didn‟t

say anything.

„With the ritual,‟ he said. „Yeah.‟

„So what did you do? Make it go back to... wherever it

came from?‟

Cwej looked uncomfortable again. I was getting used to

that.

„Not exactly,‟ he said.

„What do you mean, “not exactly”?‟ I asked.

„Are you sure you want to know?‟

„No. What do you mean, “not exactly”?‟

„It‟s in one of the spare rooms,‟ Cwej admitted. „It‟s been

there since last night. I didn‟t tell you before. I mean, I

thought it‟d freak you out.‟

7

It wasn‟t in the room with the padlock on the door, which

surprised me. I remember thinking at the time, You mean,

whatever‟s in the locked room, it‟s worse than the sphinx?

Jesus Christ.

Yes, I wanted to see the sphinx again. Why? Because the

sphinx was, at the end of the day, the best proof I had that

Cwej was telling the truth, that this wasn‟t all part of a

desperate chat-up technique, or a way of getting me into

some weirdo hippie-cult or other. („The Children of the

Bottle‟ - it‟s got a kind of ring to it, I‟d say.)

Cwej stopped at the door of one of the spare rooms, with

his hand on the knob. He looked over his shoulder at me.

„Are you sure you want to see this?‟ he said.

„Huh,‟ I told him.

So he shrugged, and opened the door.

8

It took me a while to fix my eyes on anything inside the

room. There weren‟t any windows, and Cwej didn‟t turn on

the lights. I could make out candles near the door - this was

the room where I‟d learn the rituals myself, later on - but the

candles weren‟t lit. It didn‟t look like there were any

furnishings around, either. There was one solid wedge of light

from the hallway outside, but Cwej‟s body blotted most of it

out, so I could just see...

Well, I could see something moving. I remember jumping.

And all of a sudden there was the smell of something wet and

leathery in the air, a deliberate kind of smell, like it had been

chosen rather than being a natural animal scent.

„It‟s all right,‟ Cwej told me. „It‟s under control.‟

The thing was turning to look at me, swinging its big fat

head on the end of its skinny neck. The light hit the lens at

the front of its skull. I saw Cwej‟s face reflected in the glass,

all cold and blurry and yellow.

Then it stretched its wings. I got the feeling I was standing

in front of something huge, like a great big tidal wave rising

up in front of me. Suddenly, I felt very, very dizzy. I took a

few steps back, and ended up stumbling against the wall.

„Christ,‟ I said.

„D‟you want me to turn on the lights?‟ Cwej asked.

„Hell, no.‟

The sphinx moved its neck again. I could see the whole

length of it in the shaft of light, long and grey-brown, with

big solid muscles stretching under the skin. It was looking

down at the floor, and in the big glass eye I could see the

reflections of chalk lines, scratched into the floorboards.

It was inside a circle. The circle must have been a good

twelve feet across, so every part of the sphinx‟s body was

stuck inside the chalk line. I got the feeling it was trying to

remind Cwej about that, waiting for him to let it go.

„Does it do what you say?‟ I asked.

„I‟m not sure,‟ said Cwej. ‘Do you?‟

ANSWER: THIS UNIT RESPONDS TO APPROPRIATE

STIMULI,‟ said the sphinx.

9

No. I don‟t like the way that looks. It didn‟t talk in capitals; it

wasn‟t that loud. It didn‟t sound like it was speaking

normally, though. How can I put this? It was like the thing

was rebuilding the space around it, so the air in that space

just happened to have sound waves in it, sound waves that

were the same shape as words. If that makes any sense.

Capitals just look silly. If I was better at this handwriting

business, and wasn‟t just scribbling these notes in ballpoint

pen, then I‟d invent a special kind of... what‟s the word?

Typeface, that‟s it. God knows the sphinxes deserved one.

10/11

Actually, I‟ve just thought of a comparison for what the

sphinx‟s voice sounded like. But it‟s not a comparison that‟ll

mean much to you, not yet.

If you were still wondering, I‟ll tell you now: yes, I did go

to other planets with Cwej. Planets in his universe, that is,

planets in the „real‟ universe, because nothing much was

going on inside the bottle (where there were no Gods,

remember, and no time travellers). One of the worlds that

really sticks in my mind is the one we visited four or five

days after we first met. I don‟t remember what the planet was

called, so we‟ll just call it the Inside-Out World.

The visit was a big occasion, all arranged by Cwej‟s

employers. I won‟t bother describing the planet in detail,

except to say that it was inside out only because the people

who lived there wanted it that way. It had a great big yellow

sun in the middle, and all the people lived on the inside of

the shell, where it was warm. This was a miracle of

engineering, Cwej told me, and that was kind of the problem.

For years, Cwej‟s employers had been envious of the people

in the Inside-Out World, who were smarter than just about

everyone in the universe, apart from the time travellers. So

Cwej‟s employers had a treaty with these people, which said

the people weren‟t allowed to invent time travel, because

Cwej‟s kind wanted some secrets of their own.

Cwej was there to end that treaty. Or at least, to change it

a

bit. The ceremony was held out in the open air, if anything in

the Inside-Out World could happen in the open air. I

remember these two huge lines of soldiers, the honour guard

Cwej‟s employers had sent, dozens and dozens of men in

armour, except that the armour looked like it had been

stitched to their bodies. Cwej walked between the two lines

with his head held high, dressed in a long red robe which

was supposed to be traditional on „his‟ homeworld, but which

his long gangly legs kept tripping up on.

He let me walk by his side. I don‟t know why. It‟s not like I

had anything to do with things.

So we both marched across the grass, until we reached the

podium in the middle of the field. There were aliens waiting

for us there, two of the locals. Their skins were all shiny

and colourful, like aliens from the covers of crap old SF

magazines, and their eyes were huge. You could tell they

looked that way only because they‟d decided to. There were

two scrolls on the podium in front of them, new copies of the

treaty, covered in letters too small for anyone to read. Cwej

picked up the quill pen they‟d left there, and put his

signature on both copies, as an official agent of the time

travellers.

Then a second signature appeared on the treaties. The

planet signed on the dotted lines, as if the ink had just

coalesced (new word of the day) out of thin air. The aliens

must have been there as witnesses. Even though they tried to

keep staring dead ahead, you could tell the men in the

honour guard were getting itchy - and who could blame

them? Their employers had just signed away their monopoly

on time travel.

„OK,‟ said Cwej, with a sigh. „That‟s it. How long d‟you

think it‟ll be before you build your first timeship?‟

„We‟ve only got a population of about two trillion,‟ said a

voice. „I shouldn‟t think we‟ll have a working model in

operation until, oh, about tomorrow lunchtime.‟

I didn‟t know where the voice had come from, and neither

did the men in the honour guard, although Cwej didn‟t look

surprised. It was like the whole planet was talking to us. And

maybe it was, who knows? Maybe the Inside-Out World

knew so much about its people that it even spoke for them.

That was the way the sphinx sounded, as well. Like it was

the air speaking, not the sphinx itself. But the Inside-Out

World sounded like the kind of person you wouldn‟t mind

talking to, if you met it in a pub. On the other hand, the

sphinxes were just machines, and they talked like machines.

(Cwej once said they sounded like „Grel on morphine‟,

although I don‟t know what he meant by that.)

12

„I‟ve been letting it squirm for a bit,‟ said Cwej, while the

sphinx shuffled around inside its circle. „It was getting kind

of aggressive. I thought it needed time to calm down.‟

The sphinx didn‟t have anything to say to that. In the

shadows, you could see its head bobbing up and down, like it

was sniffing at the architecture. Looking for weak points it

could slip through.

„Can‟t you kill it?‟ I asked.

The sphinx turned its lens towards me. I pressed my back

against the wall, for no good reason. „I don‟t want to,‟ Cwej

said. „If I can figure out how to program it, I can use it to

open up the bottle.‟

He took a step forward then, probably because he didn‟t

want to look like he was scared. „Sphinx,‟ he said, and he

sounded for all the world like Aladdin giving orders to his

genie. „How did you get here? Did you follow me into the

bottle?‟

The sphinx rested its front paws on the ground, and turned

into a four-legged thing again. „Reply: this unit has always

been

in operation within this environment. Summarization: no.‟

You could tell Cwej was confused, even without seeing his

face. „You mean... you‟ve always been inside this bottle?‟

This was my whole world Cwej was talking about, of

course. I thought about reminding him of this, but I couldn‟t

figure out how to say it. Sometimes English just isn‟t enough.

„Clarification: yes,‟ said the sphinx.

Cwej clicked his fingers. „Got it. You‟re here as a kind of

monitor. You‟re part of the operating system of the bottle.

Part of the software. Right?‟

„Reply: yes. Observation: your terminology is inadequate.‟

„Good. Great.‟ Cwej was nodding to himself now, so his

neck looked almost as long as the sphinx‟s. „Are there any

more like you inside the bottle?‟

„Reply: no.‟

„And you wanted to kill me because...?‟

The sphinx didn‟t answer. It didn‟t even flap.

„That was a question,‟ Cwej pointed out.

„Reply: it‟s the procedure of this unit to remove all alien

matter from this environment,‟ said the sphinx.

13

Or words to that effect, anyway. You‟re not expecting me to

be word-perfect, are you? Just be thankful I‟ve got a memory

this good. I must have been made that way.

Also, you‟ll notice that I‟m still describing the sphinx as

being slippery and phallic-looking. That happens, apparently,

when people have to come face to face with alien things for

the first time. The only way your brain can deal with it is by

seeing everything the way Sigmund Freud would have seen

it, like it‟s all been dredged up from your own subconscious.

I suppose that‟s why UFOs always used to look either

tit-shaped or cigar-shaped.

14

„You‟re like an antibody,‟ Cwej was rambling, if anything

comes in from the real universe‟ (he gave me a funny look

when he said that, so I suppose he was embarrassed he‟d

reminded me that I wasn‟t „real‟) „you try to kill it off.‟

„Affirmation: yes.‟

„What about the other killings?‟ I asked. It was the only

question I could ask that was on my level.

Cwej opened his mouth to say something, but the sphinx

cut him off. „Requirement: specify “other killings”.‟

I was starting to get the hang of this now, although I got

the feeling Cwej would have preferred me to stay quiet.

„Have there been other, erm, “alien matter” things around

here recently?‟

„Reply: yes.‟

„Like what?‟ asked Cwej.

„Record of relevance: this unit has recorded disturbances

to the fabric of this environment. Elements from the

environment outside the bottle are emergent.‟ (I remember

this line exactly, because I‟d never heard anyone seriously

use the word „emergent‟ before.)

„You mean, apart from me?‟ said Cwej.

„Affirmation: yes.‟

„Wait a minute,‟ I said. „Never mind that. Why did you kill

those two other women?‟

„Statement of fact: this unit has killed no “women”.‟

„Look, I don‟t think -‟ Cwej began.

I ignored him. „You mean, you haven‟t killed anybody in

London? Apart from trying to kill Cwej?‟

„Affirmation: this unit has not yet killed anybody.

Affirmation: this unit attempted to kill the unit “Cwej”.

Exposition: this unit has been recording other disturbances

in this environment. These disturbances are subtle, and

beyond the scope of this unit‟s sensory systems. The attempt

to kill the unit “Christine” and the attempt to kill the unit

“Cwej” were this unit‟s first direct actions.‟

I looked at Cwej. Cwej looked at me.

„So who killed those women?‟ I asked.

The sphinx reared up on its hind legs inside its circle, like

it was getting restless, even if it was just supposed to be a

machine with skin. „Reiteration: other disturbances to this

environment have been recorded.‟

„Something‟s followed me here,‟ said Cwej. „Something

else has gotten into the bottle. Something the sphinx can‟t

get a fix on.‟

15

These days, I know what Cwej was worried about. Now I‟ve

met some of the other races in the universe, and learnt about

the history of galactic civilization. If you can call a bunch of

big bangs and invasions a „civilization‟.

Cwej‟s employers had a lot of enemies. Even apart from

the Gods, there were plenty of people who had grudges

against the time travellers. As far as Cwej was concerned,

any of them could have followed him into the bottle, to beat

his people to their safe haven. Over the next couple of weeks,

Cwej visited a lot of those old enemies, to try to smooth

things over now his people had a bigger threat to deal with.

I usually stayed in bed while he went on these missions.

Once, I remember him coming home (if you could call the

flat inside the bottle „home‟) with a horrible shocked

expression on his face. His features had gone all pale and

hard.

He told me he‟d been to the home planet of one of his

employers‟ oldest enemies, a race of machine people who,

when they died, left their world littered with scraps of tin

instead of bits of bone. These machine things were supposed

to be the nastiest killers in the „real‟ universe, and you could

tell it had shaken Cwej up, having to meet with them face to

face. It was the thought, I suppose, that now the Gods had

turned up these things were meant to be his allies.

„They said my people had dealt with them before,‟ he was

muttering, when he climbed back into bed with me. „We

made a deal with them. Years ago. We even let them build

time machines. I mean... I mean, it‟s just..

„Mmm,‟ I said, without opening my eyes.

„We didn‟t even keep to the deal,‟ he said. „We tried to

wipe them out. Genocide. Can you believe that?‟

But I wasn‟t really paying attention.

16

Yes. That‟s who I‟ll dedicate this book to. The machine

people. Whatever they‟re doing now, this story‟s for them,

even if they‟re nothing but a bunch of mass murderers.

Because the time travellers double-crossed them, and they

survived anyway. Good for them.

I just wish them luck, when the Gods try to take their

planet apart.

NOTES ON KHISTE

17/18

I remember having this dream, back when I still dreamt

about things apart from collapsing cities, dead children, big

fleshy winged things, etc., etc. I used to dream about an old

house. Not a real house, not one I‟d ever actually been to, but

a house made out of bits and pieces of all the other buildings

I‟d ever seen, so there were all kinds of chunks and points

and spikes sticking out of the walls.

The house had more floors than you could ever count, all

joined together by balconies, sloping passages, and spiral

stairways. There were no windows, and no lights; the lit parts

were just the parts the shadows hadn‟t closed in on yet.

Whole floors of the place were walled off by those shadows.

The dungeons, the libraries, and especially the rooms that

belonged to the older members of the family.

Oh yes. The family. After all, this dream house was

occupied. Owned by one family, who‟d been intermarrying

and interbreeding there for so long that now they were just

the house‟s caretakers, a whole race specially bred to see

to whatever needs the house had. They‟d shuffle through

the corridors, great dusty skeletons in rags and monocles,

redecorating the house the way it wanted to be redecorated.

The people were different every time I had the dream, so if

I‟d bothered to write anything down I probably could have

put together a whole family tree of the bone people. There

was always a family resemblance, though. Sharp pointed

smiles, as if the skin around their mouths had been cut away

with a Stanley knife.

In the beginning of the dream, I‟d be trying to escape,

trying to find my way through the shadows to some kind of

exit, but all the time I just ended up getting higher and

higher, even though I knew the chances of finding a door to

the outside got smaller every time I went up a level. By the

end of the dream, everything would have changed. I‟d forgot-

ten where I was trying to get to. Because - and here was the _

surprise Tales from the Crypt punchline - by that time I was

part of the house, and I was one of the family too. I‟d wake

up with my fingers in my mouth, just testing to see whether

my lips had been taken away.

Chris Cwej never talked about his home, in the fortnight or

so that I knew him. So I never found out what kind of house

he had on the homeworld, or who he might have lived with.

But every time we got anywhere near the subject, every time

he said the word „home‟, I‟d start thinking about the dream.

About how Cwej might have looked as one of the family.

Cwej told me about the changes his employers had made

to his body, those „biological advantages‟ of his, although he

never went into the details. I suppose that means he was tied

to his new homeworld by blood. His people were supposed

to be able to bring themselves back from the dead, and

rebuild their bodies from scratch if they had any kind of

nasty accident, so if that had ever happened to Cwej, and

he‟d ended up with a new body built by his employers...

Well, that‟d make him family, wouldn‟t it?

19

I was in the kitchen again, on my own this time. Cwej had

sent me... no, Cwej had made a suggestion that I should go

and make some toast. When I‟d left him, in the room with the

captured sphinx, he‟d been starting a new ritual to control

the thing. He‟d said the sphinx would help him do what he‟d

come here to do, to open up the bottle to his own universe,

and let his employers‟ survival team in.

„Won‟t they be noticed?‟ I‟d asked. „I mean, it didn‟t take

you long to get arrested.‟

Cwej had almost looked hurt. „Everything‟ll be OK. They‟re

not stupid. They can learn to fit in. We‟ll work something

out.‟

I guessed he‟d sent me - no, suggested that I make toast -

just to get me out of the way, while he did whatever bad

magic he had to do to reprogram the sphinx. I didn‟t argue,

although I had a horrible feeling it might all turn out to be

part of a great big wind-up. I had this image of Cwej and the

sphinx waiting for me to shut the door behind me, and then

both bursting out laughing.

„You‟re going to open the bottle?‟ I‟d asked him, just before

I‟d left. „Now?‟

Cwej had nodded. „I‟ve got to talk to the others. If some

kind of third party‟s got into the bottle, we could have

problems. If they turn out to be hostile -‟

„Hostile,‟ I‟d repeated. I hadn‟t bothered pointing out that

„they‟ had already killed two human beings on the streets of

London, for whatever reason. After all, that would have

made me face the question of whether those people, being

parts of a world that wasn‟t even real, actually mattered at

all.

„If they turn out to be hostile,‟ Cwej had persisted, „we

could have a full-on war to deal with.‟

„But if the worst comes to the worst...?‟ I‟d asked.

„Then it‟ll be the end of the world, probably,‟ Cwej had

told me. Trying to sound casual again.

20/21

The end of the world. Of course, back then it was just an

expression.

Making toast wasn‟t as easy as I‟d hoped. For a start, Cwej

had a very definite place for keeping the bread, and that

place

was „wherever I put it down last‟. Also, there was a muffin

jammed inside the toaster, one that had got stuck there and

never been taken out. Leaving me to scrape away the mould

with whatever tools I could get my hands on.

I was just putting the first piece of bread into the toaster

when everything changed.

There are some things us human beings can sense, even

though we can‟t say exactly how. Like the way you can tell if

a TV set‟s switched on or switched off, even if the volume‟s

down and you‟ve got your back to it. All of a sudden, I was

standing in the kitchen with my ears popping, and my skin

prickling, and a kind of buzzing feeling in my skull.

Was that it? Was that the bottle opening?

Or was it just the end of the world?

I left the toaster to get on with its job, then headed back

along the hall to the room with the sphinx. Whatever it was

that had changed, this was where it had happened. All the

pressure I could feel was coming from behind that door.

So I opened it. Really, I should have known better than to

do something like that.

The spare room was the same as it had been, only...

different. All the walls were in the same places, but one of

them, the one on the other side of the room, looked further

off than it had done. The perspective had changed, even

though the architecture hadn‟t. The wall was suddenly at the

end of a tunnel, miles in the distance, even though it was still

attached to the two walls on either side of it, and neither of

them had grown any bigger.

I‟m told this is what happens when universes get locked

together. The sphinx obviously wasn‟t bothered by it. Even

Cwej looked like he was used to this kind of thing.

And there was a third shape in the room, on the other side

of the chalk circle. I got the feeling the man had just finished

walking down the tunnel, as if the wall had been shifted so

far into the distance that whole worlds had been squeezed

into the space between here and there, and the new arrival

had walked straight out of one of those worlds.

That‟s how long it takes, I suppose, for your universe to fall

to pieces and show you what‟s underneath. Less time than it

takes to make breakfast. Faster than the speed of toast.

As I found out later, the man‟s name was Khiste. He was a

friend, or at least a colleague, of Cwej‟s.

22/23

A word about Khiste here, seeing as this is the point when he

starts to matter.

Like Cwej, he‟d been born human (or something like it)

and adopted by the time travellers, who were using him as

one of their off-world agents. He‟d been working for them

longer than Cwej had, though, and he‟d had a lot more

accidents. His body had rebuilt itself several times over,

from the inside out. And, every time it had been rebuilt, it

had evolved a little, with his cells working out the weak

points in his genes and coming up with new twists on his

normal shape. It was like his body was building up whole

layers of scar tissue around his skin - high-technology

scar tissue. It happened like that, apparently, when Cwej‟s

people gave their „advantages‟ to less advanced races like

us. Cwej‟s employers could regenerate their cells in safety,

sure that they‟d always end up more or less the same shape

as before, but „lesser beings‟ had less control. The things

the aliens put in their agents‟ blood tended to get a bit

overexcited.

By the time I met Khiste, he was hardly a human being at

all. He looked more like a knight in armour. There were

plates of hard skin across most of his body and, even

though he sometimes wore great big suits over it all (out of

decency?), he obviously didn‟t need to. His flesh was like

armour now, blue-grey and smooth as a baby‟s backside,

although little wrinkles would pop up whenever you touched

it. His arms and legs were as heavy and powerful as the rest

of his body, more like tank parts than limbs. I still don‟t

know, to this day, whether his hands really were as strong as

they looked, or whether he was just wearing gauntlets. I

know he could crush rocks between his pincer-fingers, but so

what? That was the kind of thing you‟d expect aliens to do.

His head was the worst thing. The first time I saw it, I

didn‟t know whether to jump or laugh. It looked tiny, com-

pared with the rest of his armour-plated body. Like a little

insect‟s head, welded to the top of a war machine. It was a

normal-sized human head, obviously, but the rest of him was

much too big for it. His face wasn‟t armoured, although it

was thin and grey, as if the rebuilding potions inside him had

sucked out all the blood and flesh he didn‟t need. There were

studs in his neck, smaller than Frankenstein-bolts, but just

as noticeable, which, I eventually found out, acted like extra

eyes, seeing kinds of light normal eyes couldn‟t see. Oh, and

he had hair, scraped back across his head and down the

neck of his suit, but the hair looked like wire, like strands of

iron, or maybe silver. If you could ignore the pale skin and

the machine parts, he didn‟t look much older than me.

Resculpted man. I must have wondered, even on that first

day, whether Cwej would look like that in the end. Or worse.

As it turned out, Khiste had rebuilt himself only three times;

God knows what he‟s going to look like in another century or

so, if he‟s still alive by then. If he really makes himself more

efficient with every rebuilding, he‟ll probably end up as a big

armoured ball, covered in weapons hatches. I think he‟d like

that.

24

I never got on with Khiste. To him, I was a „lesser being‟. He

obviously thought he was better than me, just because he‟d

leave all kinds of tin toys behind when he finally died,

instead of plain old ordinary bones.

Once, while we were in the fortress on Simia KK98 (more

about that later), I went ahead and told him exactly what I

thought of him. I was having a bad day, that was all. I asked

him why he thought he was so fucking great, when he‟d been

born just the same as me.

Khiste snorted, like he always did when I asked any

kind of question (or am I just remembering him as more

obnoxious than he really was?).

„How do you know how you were born?‟ he asked.

I didn‟t tell him the story about the screaming woman in

the maternity ward. I just lied, and said I could remember it

all. He snorted again.

„The sphinxes made your planet,‟ he said, hissing through

his stainless-steel vocal cords. „That means they made your

whole species. Don‟t you know that?‟

„So?‟ I said. „How do you know you‟re any different? How

do you know your universe isn‟t inside some other kind of

bottle? It might be like Russian dolls or something. One

universe inside the next one. And that‟d make you the same

as me.‟

„You don‟t know anything,‟ he said, practically spitting in

my face. I got worried, at the time, because it was easy to

imagine him spitting acid instead of plain old flob. Then he

stomped off, lumbering away like an animal that wished it‟d

been born faster and lighter. Which he had, I suppose. With

Khiste, you always got the feeling he‟d built up scar tissue on

his personality as well as on his skin, to help him cope with

his new life.

(Incidentally, I don‟t know if I mentioned this before, but

the name of Dorian‟s stupid poetry book was Only Ants and

Humans: An Evolutionary Thriller. No, really. This was

all supposed to be some useless metaphor about the race

struggle in modem society - American society, natch - on

the grounds that ants and humans were the only animals on

Earth that attacked each other because of skin colour. In

Dorian‟s world, anyway. But when I think about Khiste in his

armour-plated skin, specially grown to help him fight all the

other people and things in the universe... No, I‟ll stop right

there. The next thing you know, I‟ll be saying that Dorian

might actually have been right about something. Stupid

idea.)

25

It made me think, what Khiste said. I‟ll own up to that. After

all, Cwej had never told me when the sphinxes had built my

universe. What I mean is, the world as I knew it might only

have been made on 27 September, and all my memories

could have been part of the blueprint.

Back at school, there was this Christian girl who used to

cross her arms in history lessons, and sit at the back of the

room looking grumpy while the teachers talked about the

way cavemen used to live. As far as she was concerned, the

world was only six thousand years old. One day, I asked her

how she explained the dinosaurs. She must have been asked

that a lot, because she had the answer straight away.

„God made the dinosaur bones,‟ she said, pretty much

sticking her tongue out at me. „He did it so he could test our

faith.‟

I‟m starting to sympathize with her now. If she ever

existed, anyway, and she‟s not just a made-up memory. I‟m

sure the Christian girl wouldn‟t have believed what Cwej and

Khiste told me about my universe, if she‟d been in my shoes.

She probably would have said they were just there to test her

faith. And who‟s to say she‟d be wrong?

26

But the first thing I ever heard Khiste say, standing there in

that half-lit room in the flat, was: „Is that the girl?‟

He nodded at me when he said it, with that little grey head

of his. Apparently, Cwej had been telling him all about me

while I‟d been out of the room. Paranoia, paranoia, paranoia.

„Um, yes,‟ said Cwej, looking from Khiste to me and back

again. „But that‟s not the important thing right now.‟

Thank you, Cwej.

„You‟re right,‟ said Khiste. His voice was like metal

fillings biting down on tinfoil and no, I‟m not sure what I

mean by that. „It‟s not. You‟d better come and see what‟s

happening on the colony. It doesn‟t look like we‟re going to

have the bottle much longer.‟

„Look, this is important,‟ said Cwej, waving his arms like

a mad thing. „There‟s a third party here. We could be talking

about the end of the whole...‟

Then he tailed off. I saw his skinny blond eyebrows

crinkling up on his face.

„Not going to have the bottle?‟ he asked.

Khiste sighed, or growled, by rattling the metal-flesh in his

throat. He took a great big breath, so his suit stretched to

bursting point. „We‟re wasting time,‟ he said.

Cwej bit his lip. Then he looked at me again.

„D‟you want to come?‟ he asked.

„Cwej,‟ said Khiste. It was obviously meant to be a warning.

„She needs to know,‟ said Cwej, not facing him. „She‟s

involved. Christine... look, I know this is hard. But I really

think... I really think it‟d help, you know? If you saw

what‟s out there. It‟d help you understand.‟

All of a sudden, everybody and everything was looking at

me. The sphinx included.

„How do we get out of this... universe?‟ I asked. Trying

to sound like I was part of this whole operation. Khiste

snorted, the first time I‟d actually heard him do that, I think.

Cwej reached out for me. It took me a while to figure out

that he wanted me to take his hand.

„We walk down the tunnel,‟ he said. „Out of the neck of the

bottle. You‟ll probably need a coat, though.‟

27

There‟s this old movie called A Matter of Life and Death,

which my parents took me to see at a cinema in Hulme when

I was fourteen (at least, that‟s the way I remember things, but

why believe any of my memories?). The hero‟s killed in an

aeroplane crash at the start of the film, but there‟s some kind

of mix-up in Heaven, so he gets sent straight back to Earth

again. He spends a lot of the film moving between Heaven

and Earth, trying to convince the people in both worlds that,

whatever the rules say, he‟s got a right to be alive. Which in

itself strikes a kind of chord with me.

But what I remember most about the film is this: Earth

was in colour, because everybody knows Earth‟s in colour,

and Heaven was in black and white, to give it that all-

important otherworldly feel. Which drove me up the wall,

when I was fourteen. The way I saw it - and this is real

adolescent reasoning here - Heaven should be more real than

Earth, not less. How you could get more colourful than

colour I didn‟t know, but it bothered me for years afterwards.

(These are adolescent years, which are about as short as dog

years, so you can claim to be old enough to go into pubs even

though the rest of the world thinks you‟re twelve.)

And moving between my universe and Cwej‟s? How did

that feel? You‟ll just have to take it from me that the walk

down the tunnel was a walk between worlds as different

as black-and-white and colour, or as different as colour

and more-than-colour. And all the time the cramps in my

stomach were getting worse, and there was a headache

coming together in my skull, as if the universe (the „real‟ one)

wanted me to know that not only was colour more colourful

where I was going but pain was more painlike as well.

I still don‟t know what I must look like to the people of the

„real‟ universe, as someone who was born inside the bottle.

Do I look like a black-and-white character in a colour film?

Or a cartoon character in the middle of a live-action scene,

like that bit with the pavement pictures in Mary Poppins,

only backwards?

28

You might have thought Khiste was unlucky, ending up

in that stupid pin-headed tank-body. He got a good deal,

though, compared with some. Cwej‟s employers were happy

to regenerate themselves pretty much at random, but they

had other plans for their followers. There were special drugs,

which „advantaged‟ people could take to change the way

their bodies would rebuild themselves in the future. I don‟t

know this for a fact, but it wouldn‟t have surprised me if

Khiste had been taking drugs from a little bottle marked

„heavy artillery‟. I know there were drugs like that in Cwej‟s

bathroom, only without labels, so... make your own guesses.

Cwej‟s employers had war machines, too. Big floating

spheres, like great brass orreries (have I spelt that right? -

oh, look it up), all held together with machine parts too small

to believe in. You could see the insides whirring and turning

whenever they bobbed across the sky, and every now and

then you‟d get a glimpse of the pilots through the gaps in the

machinery. The pilots would be sealed inside the things for

life, wired into the life-support systems there and pumped

full of the time travellers‟ drugs. When the pilots rebuilt

themselves, their new bodies would fill up the cracks in the

clockwork, until the spheres were perfect combinations of

skin and metal.

I thought that sounded cruel, although Cwej said it wasn‟t

hard finding people who wanted to be machines, in a

universe this size. Well, so much for his employers‟ policy of

nonintervention. Khiste was lucky to keep his face at all, I

suppose.

I‟d be seeing a lot of machines like that, where I was

going. At the end of the tunnel.

29/30

The planet was called Simia KK98, and apparently it was one

of the few colonies Cwej‟s employers had bothered setting

up. Ten minutes after I‟d arrived in the „real‟ universe, once

I‟d finished gawping at the bottle and Khiste had finished

snorting at me, I was standing in the open air, taking in a

landscape that looked like the front cover of one of those

acid-head „adult‟ fantasy magazines they used to sell on the

top shelf in WH Smith‟s.

The air was freezing, and the sky was psychedelic. There

were stripes of orange and turquoise and black as far as the

eye could see, a kind of aurora you never got on Earth, and

which was supposed to make you hallucinate if you stared at

it for long enough (that was what Cwej said, anyway, but he

was always a lightweight when it came to hallucinations).

Under the sky, there was just snow, turned blue and gold by

the aurora. The Technicolor Day-Glo clouds were making

thick ripples of shadow on the ground, so it looked like the

ice was going up and down all the time, like there were huge

fat animals under the surface, trying to force their way up

into the air.

I felt sick. Later on, I found out that Simia KK98 made

people sick even if they were used to the way the „real‟

universe looked.

And behind me was the one solid feature on the landscape,

the building that me and Cwej and Khiste had stepped out of,

to join the other armoured men standing on watch outside.

The building was a fortress. It looked like a big broken tooth,

pushing its way up through the ice and casting a great spiky

shadow in front of us. The stuff the building was made of

looked like rock, so I thought maybe it had been camouflaged

to make people think it was a natural feature, although this

was kind of spoilt by the fact that there was no real rock

anywhere on the planet.

My breath was making little clouds in front of my face,

turned funny colours by the stripes in the sky. Cwej had

made me put on a duffel coat and some thick trousers before

we‟d left his flat, although I don‟t know where the coat had

come from. It smelt of cigarettes and second-hand shops,

definitely not his kind of style. I pulled the coat tighter across

my neck. My cheeks were starting to sting.

Cwej looked straight up into the sky when we walked out

of the building, which is where all his colleagues were

looking. Personally, I didn‟t have the nerve.

„Oh no,‟ he said.

I almost laughed at that. The understatement. Like it was

such a small thing to say, in a place as bright and dangerous

as this one. If I‟d known what he‟d been looking at, I would

have laughed even more. Probably.

„See what I mean?‟ Khiste grunted. „What happens in the

bottle isn‟t an issue any more. It looks like they‟ve come to

take it back.‟

The word „they‟ worried me, the way Khiste had said it.

So, against my better judgment, I looked straight up. Again, I

don‟t know why I do things like that.

NOTES ON THE SIEGE

31

I‟ve just had another root around in my rucksack, and I can‟t

help noticing that it‟s a lot emptier than I thought. It was

supposed to be what Cwej called a „time capsule‟, a little

cultural survival pod from London, but most of the

collection‟s made up of souvenirs from other planets. Oh well.

I‟ve found another twenty-sixth-century newspaper, The

Times (not the same one as on Earth?), following up the

Gods‟ takeover on Dellah. There‟s a whole pull-out guide

to the crisis, complete with a timeline, charting all the

major events from 22 January 2591 (Professor Begarius of

Loughborough University warns of „unseen consequences‟

of Earth‟s recent imperial policy), through 18 November

2593 (sea serpents spotted on Tyler‟s Folly: there are monster

sightings wherever the Gods go, although I don‟t know

whether sphinxes can swim), right the way through to 30

March 2596 (Earth finally admits that Dellah‟s a no-go area).

It‟s almost funny, reading that. Hearing the Earth

politicians talking about the Gods as just another bunch of

aliens, maybe hoping to come up with some kind of political

answer. The same kind of culture shock „my‟ version of Earth

felt, when the first alien presence went public there on 7

October 1970. Think about Ted Heath, Prime Minister of

Great Britain, going on television in September and talking

about the state of the economy. Now think about me,

standing on Simia KK98, looking up at the sky and seeing

the end of the world coming. Makes Mr Heath look a bit

pathetic, doesn‟t it?

Another thing I‟ve just pulled out of my bag is a stone

paperweight, carved in the shape of a sphinx. Cwej bought it

for me on a „planetette‟ called Cygni 8.6, and there‟s still

a little sticker on the bottom of it that says GUARANTEE

HAND-CARVED (which means, I‟ve been told, that it was

carved by a machine with hands... I feel honoured). The

sphinx is supposed to look like one of the Gods‟ servants,

the fashionable alien species in 2596, but you can tell the

sculptor‟s never seen the real thing. It looks too solid, like the

stone Sphinx in Egypt.

I‟m looking at the paperweight, and I‟m thinking about the

sphinxes in the sky over Simia KK98. I can‟t see the link

between the two, just like I can‟t see the link between Ted

Heath and Cwej‟s world.

32

It took me a while to work out what Khiste was looking up

at, because I‟d never seen KK98 before, and I didn‟t spot the

obvious problem. The obvious problem was this:

The Day-Glo stripes in the sky were supposed to be only

two colours, turquoise and orange. What I finally noticed was

that the single thick black stripe I‟d seen was moving faster

than the others. All the stripes moved, the same way clouds

move, but this one moved with a purpose. And with wings.

It wasn‟t the air at all. The black stripe was made up of

bodies, thousands and thousands of them, flapping across

the sky in such a tight flight path that you could hardly see

the gaps. The stripe went all the way to the horizon, in both

directions, and the tip of the fortress very nearly scraped the

bottom of it. From ground level, you could imagine that the

black band went all around the planet, that there were

billions of shapes locked together in one big solid ring.

None of the sphinxes looked like they were paying us any

attention, but they weren‟t there by accident, either. They

were there so we could see them. So we could see how many

of them there were.

„Siege conditions,‟ Khiste said. He was getting ready for

combat, just like the war machine he was.

Me and Cwej were the only people on Simia KK98 who

still looked human. You couldn‟t tell what the other

armoured men were, or what they‟d been. Some of them

were like Khiste, with their heads outweighed by their

bodies, but most of them had gone one step further. They‟d

been working for the time travellers for so long that they

didn‟t even have proper features. The armour had crept over

their heads and smothered their faces. I wondered, in the

days after the siege, whether they could still breed in the

normal way. With humans, or with each other. In the end,

Cwej told me that the reproductive system was supposed to

be one of the first things to go, after your body rebuilt itself.

(Note the words ‘ supposed to be‟ - we‟ll come back to this

later.)

There weren‟t any of Cwej‟s employers at the fortress.

They didn‟t like to leave their homeworld, and it‟d be

another two weeks before I‟d see any of them face to face.

When Khiste looked up at the sphinxes and said those two

magic words - „siege conditions‟ - all the men outside the

fortress seemed to listen, and turned to go back inside, to

man the battle stations or whatever it was they did. Not

because Khiste had given them an order, but because he‟d

been the first one to say what they‟d all been thinking. Maybe

he was the only one of the soldiers who was still human

enough to bother saying it in English.

34

Cwej took my hand, and led me back indoors. All of a

sudden, the fortress had come alive. The armoured men were

taking up positions around the building, all of them knowing

exactly where to go without being told. The tunnels were all

the same, as far as I could tell, made of rock that looked like

it had opened itself up to make way for the people, instead of

being burrowed out in the normal way. It was like being

inside Ayers Rock, only less... purple. The rock was mud-

coloured, and ridged, so you got the feeling the walls were

trying to do an impression of corrugated iron. There were

streaks of black wherever you looked, seams of minerals

running through all the ceilings and floors. The smell of rock

dust everywhere. Dirty, heavy air.

Cwej was leading me along one of the passages that ran

around the outer wall, where the floor was a rough slope, so

we were spiralling up towards one of the higher levels as we

walked. Yes, just like in the dream about the house. There

were windows in the walls, one every eight yards or so, like

the windows in one of those old Robin Hood castles: not

wide enough to let much light in, but wide enough to shoot

out of. There wasn‟t any glass in the windows, although the

building managed to keep the heat in anyway. You could

feel warm air all around you in the corridors, like the

building was breathing in and out, sucking the atmosphere

back into its lungs before anything could get out through

the cracks.

There were armoured men in front of most of the windows

by now, all of them kneeling in exactly the same position.

None of them were carrying guns, but who‟s to say what kind

of weapons they might have had built into their bodies? The

passage was curved, so I kept getting the feeling we were

walking round in circles, passing the same frozen statue

people again and again and again.

After a while, I tripped, and my hand slipped out of

Cwej‟s. There was a stitch in my side now, as well as cramps

in my stomach, so it felt like somebody was sticking needles

through the part of my body where the two pains crossed

over. Cwej must have stopped, because I remember staring at

his feet, at the rubbery running shoes he‟d slipped on just

before we‟d left his flat.

„Are you OK?‟ he asked. Sounding helpless for once.

„I want to die or something,‟ I said.

I didn‟t look up, but he was quiet for a while, so I guessed

he was looking around the corridor, wondering if he should

ask any of the soldiers for help.

„Just a bit further,‟ he said, in the end.

35/36

Eventually, we came to a stop in front of a window that

wasn‟t already taken. I leant against the wall, safe in the

knowledge that, if I felt the need to be sick, I could always do

it through the gap. Unless the building wanted to breathe

that back in as well, of course.

We had a better view of the sphinxes from here. You could

just about see the spaces between their bodies now, and

make out the shapes of claws, tails and wing tips in the gaps.

The sphinxes didn‟t make a sound, not that you would have

heard much anyway, over the metal-feet-on-rock noise that

was echoing through the fortress.

„If we just hand over the bottle…‟ I said.

There was a look of pity on Cwej‟s face, as if he was sorry

I didn‟t understand more about politics in the „real‟ universe.

„Not really an option,‟ he said.

„OK.‟ My head was starting to click into „science-fiction‟

mode, which I guessed was probably the best way of dealing

with all this. I remembered the evenings I‟d spent arguing

with Cal, telling him exactly why I thought The Outer Limits

was crap, and pointing out all the stupid loopholes in his

precious Brian Aldiss novels (which I hadn‟t read, but I

was a good guesser). „You said your people have got time

machines,‟ I said. „So there‟s no problem. You can go back in

time and... stop this happening. Somehow. You could get

ready for them before they turn up -‟

Cwej didn‟t actually cut me off, but the look he gave me

was so sad and pitying that he might as well have done.

„There are rules,‟ he said, once I‟d stopped talking.

„But you‟ve got a way out of here, haven‟t you? A time

machine or something?‟

Cwej bit his lip, and turned back to the window. I realized

he had his arm around me. Until now, my shoulders had

been too cold to notice the body contact. „We‟ve got a way out,

yeah,‟ he said. „Look, this is kind of hard to explain. Our...

travel machines... they work by taking you out of normal

space-time, then putting you back somewhere else. Right?

We... um, how can I put this? We have to kind of cut

through the different layers of space to get anywhere.‟

„So?‟

„The sphinxes can mess up space. That means they can

shift around the layers. Tie us in knots. Basically, what I‟m

saying is that if we try to get out of here they could just lock

our machines into a loop.‟ (As with everything, I‟m quoting

this from memory, so excuse me if I get the technical details

wrong.)

„It‟s worth a try, isn‟t it?‟ I said. „If you don‟t have any

other way out.‟

„No,‟ said Cwej, not taking his eyes off the sky.

37

Note the way I said that. If you don‟t have any other way out.

At that point, I still didn‟t feel like I was involved - it was as

if Cwej really didn‟t have anything to do with me. What was

I expecting? For the sphinxes to zoom down on the fortress,

kill off all the armoured men, but leave me standing? Call me

cynical, but I don‟t think they‟d have been likely to let me off

the hook, just because I‟ve got skinny legs and a cute arse.

38

The „rules‟ of time travel were complicated, and you couldn‟t

get them in a handy little paperback, not like the Highway

Code. Most of it was in the blood, apparently. It wasn‟t what

you knew, exactly: it was what was in you.

I once tried asking Cwej about this, while we were out

shopping one day. It was four days after the sphinx siege, by

my reckoning. Back in LONDON!, my peer group used to go

on shopping expeditions to Camden every couple of months,

which we used to think was a long way away. I did the same

kind of thing with Cwej, although the place we went to was

Cygni 8.6, which was just on the edge of Earth‟s empire in

the twenty-sixth century.

Cygni 8.6 was almost completely made up of markets. It

was as if a little bit of Camden had been planted in the dirt

there, and it had spread its seeds all over the world, so

wherever you looked there were racks of clothing and

second-hand-music stalls, all under a sky that for some

reason didn‟t have a proper sun, so you had to do your

shopping by starlight. According to Cwej, it was only

because the planet was so badly lit that the first traders had

set up shop here, hoping to sell off second-rate merchandise

(hat didn‟t look so great in the light of day.

There was a reason Cwej had chosen Cygni 8.6 for the

shopping trip. The reason was, it wouldn‟t be there for much

longer. It was against his people‟s rules to warn the locals,

but this was going to be the next planet to get taken over by

the Gods. Cygni 8.6 was in the same part of space as Dellah,

just a few short hops away, on the cosmic scale.

This didn‟t make sense to me, so I asked Cwej about it. At

the time, we were standing in front of a stall that was selling

novelty pets, bred on one of the nearby human-run planets.

There were dozens and dozens of plastic bags on the stall in

front of me, full of what looked like water. I‟d been expecting

to see goldfish in the bags, like at funfairs.

„Liquid cats,‟ the woman on the stall had told me.

In the twenty-sixth century, in the „real‟ universe, people

had apparently tried to build machines out of liquid,

computers that could store their ideas on drops of water. It

had worked, more or less, but the scientists couldn‟t make

the machines smart enough to be really useful. On the other

hand, it was pretty easy to give the computers the same kind

of brain power as a house pet. Some of the liquid cats had

been let out of their bags as a demonstration, and now they

were lying in puddles around the stalls, sloshing around and

squishing into each other, so Cwej -

39

Wait a minute. I‟m getting mixed up. Let me finish telling

you about me and Cwej watching the siege, all right? We‟ll

come back to Cygni 8.6 in a minute, I promise.

„All right,‟ I said. „What about the bottle? We could go

back inside the bottle.‟

„No good,‟ said Cwej. „Once the sphinxes get hold of it

again, they‟ll come in after us. Besides, if we could get that

many people inside, I wouldn‟t have had to…‟

He tailed off. At first, I thought it was because he‟d seen

something outside, something even worse than the sphinxes.

But he was just thinking things through.

‘You could go back into the bottle,‟ Cwej said.

I blinked at him. „Me?‟

„You‟re not... I mean, you fit in there,‟ he said, doing his

best not to hurt my feelings. „We could easily get one person

back inside.‟

He still wasn‟t looking at me. If I‟d been thinking, I would

have been grateful that he‟d thought about saving me, even

though things were looking rough for him and his own kind.

At the time, I just shrugged.

Go back in the bottle? Go back home, having spent just a

couple of minutes outside? I couldn‟t imagine living like

that, spending the rest of my life knowing I wasn‟t real, that

none of my friends were real, that nothing the human race

ever did really mattered. Nixon could put as many men on

the moon as he liked. Charles Manson could kill off the

whole of showbiz, from Bill Grundy to Elizabeth Taylor. I

could spend my whole life snorting spilt coke off the floor of

every public toilet in Britain. What difference would it

make?

„It‟s OK,‟ I told Cwej. „I‟ll stick with you.‟

40/41

Right. Back to the markets on Cygni 8.6, four days later.

Cwej was getting distracted by the liquid cats, so I thought

it‟d be a good time to ask some tricky questions. I slid one

arm inside his jacket, and wrapped myself around his waist.

„So, these rules of time travel,‟ I said. „Can I learn them?‟

„Um, no,‟ said Cwej. He picked up one of the bags, and

weighed it in his hand, feeling the cat sploshing around

inside. „D‟you want one of these?‟

„You can mix dye with „em,‟ the saleswoman told us.

„Have „em any colour you like.‟

„Why can‟t I learn?‟ I asked Cwej.

„You‟d need to have stuff done.to you,‟ he said.

„You mean, like those drugs you keep in the bathroom?‟

There was a pained kind of look on his face when I said

that. He carefully put the bag back down on the stall. „Have

you been messing about with my drugs?‟ he asked.

„Answer the question.‟

„It‟s not that easy. Look... the reason my employers are

so tough is because of all the things they‟ve pumped into

themselves over the years. Their grip on... time. It‟s pretty

much genetic.‟ (He whispered the word „time‟, so the woman

at the stall wouldn‟t hear.) „I mean, humans are only built to

work in three dimensions, you know? Your eyes, your ears,

they‟re made to take in three-D information. If you can

rebuild yourself in the right way, you can rewire your

nervous system, so...‟

„So you can see in four dimensions?‟

„So you can think in four dimensions,‟ said Cwej, eyeing

up the saleswoman to make sure she wasn‟t listening. She

wasn‟t. She was busy stroking one of her pets with what

looked like a cocktail wand. „That‟s the only way you can

understand the rules.‟

„But you can time-travel. You can even take me with you.‟

„Well, yeah.‟

„So you must know some of the rules.‟

He didn‟t answer. Obviously. If he‟d said „well, yeah‟ again,

he‟d be admitting that he wasn‟t as human as he wanted

everyone to think. Of course, the old reproductive system still

worked, which made me ask myself: was I meant to be one

last fling for him, before he lost his breeding power for good?

„So what about this place?‟ I asked, trying another tack.

„You said we should come here because it won‟t be around

for long.‟ The woman at the stall glanced up at me when I

said that, but she didn‟t say anything, so she must have just

thought I was on narcotics. And by that stage she was wrong.

„Why bother?‟ I went on. „You can come here whenever you

like, can‟t you? By going back in time.‟

„Yeah,‟ said Cwej, under his breath. „So I must still be

thinking in three dimensions.‟

„Mmm,‟ I said.

I turned away from the stall. Then I froze.

„Cwej?‟ I said.

„Yeah?‟ he said.

„I think I just stepped in a kitten,‟ I told him. „Help.‟

42

I‟ve seen some of the things Cwej‟s employers make, by the

way. And their statues look weird, compared with the ones

on Earth. Like there are patterns in them we poor humans

can‟t see properly. It‟s only when you remember what Cwej

said about thinking in four dimensions, that you start to

figure out why.

The statues are made so that when they get old and fall

apart they still look artistic. Decay‟s all part of the design.

Even the time travellers‟ ruins are well planned.

I bet their skeletons look fantastic.

43/44

Four days earlier, in the sky over Simia KK98, the sphinxes

had stopped moving. They were just hanging there, hovering,

with their wings still flapping away. If I‟d been ten years

younger, I probably would have tried counting them. I

probably would have given up somewhere after the first two

thousand.

From the window, you could see some of the ledges that

had grown out of the side of the fortress. Great flat spikes of

rock, like those cliffs the coyote‟s always falling off in Road

Runner cartoons. There were men on the ledges, armoured

men, sitting on horseback. That‟s how I remember them now,

anyway. Like knights, perching on horses that had been

covered in the same blue-grey armour plating. I can‟t really

imagine the people in the fortress keeping horses, though, so

I might be misremembering things. The shapes on the ledges

definitely had four legs, but whether they were things being

ridden, or just agents of the time travellers who‟d grown

themselves much bigger and heavier bodies, I can‟t say for

sure. It‟d make sense, I suppose, to turn yourself into a

centaur. If all your weapons are built into your body, then a

bigger body can pack more firepower. There could have been

whole nuclear generators in the guts of those horse people.

Even now, none of the men had opened fire. The planet

was quiet, apart from the sound of the wind. The sphinxes

were staring down at the fortress, and the fortress was

staring up at the sphinxes.

„What are they waiting for?‟ I asked Khiste.

Cwej had left me, just after our conversation about going

back into the bottle. He‟d spotted Khiste in the tunnel, and

told the pin-head to look after me. Then he‟d bounded away

up the slope of the passage.

Khiste snorted, more at the sphinxes than at me tins time.

„They don‟t have to rush things. We don‟t even know if our

weapons systems are going to scratch them.‟

„So they‟re trying to psych us out?‟

„Maybe. Doesn‟t really matter.‟

I gave Khiste a withering look. He didn‟t wither. Six-and-

a-half-foot-tall people with metal skins usually don‟t. „So

you don‟t care about their tactics? I thought you were sup-

posed to be a soldier.‟

„Not a soldier,‟ Khiste snapped. And when I say snapped, I

mean, teeth-like-a-mantrap snapped. „This isn‟t an army.

We‟re just here to keep watch on the bottle.‟

„But you still don‟t care about the sphinxes‟ tactics?‟ I

asked, sticking to the only good point I thought I had.

Khiste shrugged. Chunks of armour the size of dinner

plates ground together around his shoulders, it doesn‟t make

a difference what they do. We can‟t fight them.‟

„So we just sit here and die, is that it?‟

„Don‟t be stupid,‟ said Khiste. „We‟ve sent for

reinforcements. There‟s a bunch of warships on the way from

the homeworld. We just have to hope the sphinxes aren‟t

smart enough to figure that out. We might get lucky. They‟re

not built to think for themselves too much.‟

„Oh,‟ I said, is that where Cwej went, then? To send for

help?‟

„ I sent for help,‟ Khiste grumbled. „While you and Cwej

were busy screwing around in your world.‟

I didn‟t know what to say to that, seeing as it wasn‟t true.

Not at that point, anyway.

„He‟s got a thing about two-dimensional women,‟ Khiste

added.

45

I‟d like to be able to say I kept my dignity after that, and gave

Khiste a piece of my mind. I didn‟t, though. As if to prove his

point, I did what any two-dimensional character would have

done. I stomped off, and went to find Cwej, who‟d become

the one thing in this world - no, in this universe - I felt I

could safely cling on to. Whether I was screwing him or not.

If I‟d known where Cwej had actually gone, after he‟d left

me well, I suppose I might have thought twice. I don‟t know.

But he didn‟t give me any clues about what he was up to. He

didn‟t say, for example, „Excuse me a moment, I‟m just going

outside to talk to the sphinxes face to face.‟

46

It‟s only just struck me, how much of this story sounds like a

bad LSD trip. Those of you who still think I‟m a mad junkie

will be wondering whether the whole thing‟s a hallucination.

I mean, is it really a coincidence that I somehow ended up on

the only psychedelic planet in the galaxy?

Well, maybe you‟ve got a point. Maybe this whole book‟s

just a list of the states of mind I was in when I wrote it, like a

catalogue of all the things I‟ve been putting into my system.

Paranoia for cocaine. Multicoloured planets for acid. I‟ll be

relaxed again soon, so you‟ll think I‟m writing it on dope.

NOTES ON THE FACE-OFF

47

Imagine this:

There‟s a spire, and it‟s made out of solid gold, because the

people who made it don‟t know about money and can get

whatever materials they want from any time zone they can

think of. The spire‟s built for travelling through space, and it

looks aerodynamic, even though it doesn‟t need to be. There

aren‟t any fins, and there aren‟t any booster rockets,

although the gold‟s been twisted into a kind of corkscrew at

the nose end, as if the ship has to burrow its way to wherever

it‟s going.

Now imagine you‟re getting closer to the spire. So close

that you can see the bodywork in detail, and you can see that

it‟s not solid at all. It‟s like a lattice. It‟s like a cat‟s cradle of

beams and arcs, all solid gold, woven together so tightly that

there‟s no way you could untie the knots even if you had

pincer-hands like Khiste‟s. You get even closer, so you can

see right into the black spaces between the slats - and they

are black, completely black, no way of seeing through the

spire to the other side. You‟re looking at the big black heart

of the ship, that‟s why.

It‟s about now that you start to work out how big the ship

is. You‟re further away than you thought, and each of the

gold beams is as wide as a house, so you can see blurry little

figures moving about inside the framework, figures in robes

that make them look like monks, moving up and down and in

and out and left and right across the ship. So how big‟s that

big black heart? Bigger than you can get a grip on. And it‟s

throbbing against the gold bars, trying to get out. Getting

ready to bleed. You can tell, you can just tell, that one

pump‟s going to be enough to push the ship halfway across

the galaxy.

And if the heart breaks? Then all its power‟s going to be let

out at once. Black lightning‟s going to burst over the metal.

The ship‟s going to be the eye of a storm, and the storm‟s

going to be big enough to tear up whole worlds.

Now imagine there isn‟t just one of these monsters in front

of you. There are a dozen. A hundred. A thousand. Maybe

more.

That was the kind of help Khiste had sent for, from his

employers‟ homeworld. That was what was on its way to

Simia KK98.

Apparently.

48/49

I didn‟t know where I was going. I just kept walking, up the

helter-skelter passage that ran around the fortress, past all

the identical windows and identical soldiers, none of whom

even noticed I was there. (By the way, did I mention that

there weren‟t any female agents on the planet? Not as far as I

could tell, anyway. It‟s funny, but I never thought about it

while I was there.) Eventually, I found Cwej, mainly because I

couldn‟t really have missed him.

There was a space in the outer wall, an archway, where the

rock had opened itself up to let the light in. There was a bust

set into the wall above the arch, a carving of a man‟s head

and shoulders, glaring down like one of those gargoyles I

remember throwing stones at on the school French trip to

Notre Dame. The man was wearing a crown on his head, and

there was a huge collar behind his neck, with shoulder pads

so big they looked like armour. It was my first sight of one of

Cwej‟s employers, I suppose, although the face had been

made out of the same rough rock as the passage, so you

couldn‟t make out the details of the face. At the time, I

wondered whether Cwej‟s employers actually looked like that,

or whether they just wanted people to think they were

faceless, the same way they wanted people to think they were

nameless.

The ledge was a kind of pier, stretching out from the hole

in the wall, ending in a point like another one of those Road

Runner clifftops. There was no railing, nothing to stop

anyone going over the edge. The archway was filled with sky,

with those glowing orange-and-turquoise stripes. From here,

you couldn‟t see the ground. The only solid things in sight

were the sphinxes.

At this height, the sphinxes weren‟t just a black mass. You

could see the fingers clawing at the air, and the big glassy

heads lolling backward and forward. Cwej was standing

close to the end of the pier, staring up at them with his back

turned to the arch. He had his hands stuffed into the pockets

of his jacket. I got the feeling he was trying to look casual.

The wind was blowing his little blond hairs in all directions,

and his jacket was flapping around his waist, but somehow it

never managed to blow any frost through the archway. Cwej

looked wrong, standing there against the shiny sky. Like he

was the only normal thing there, as if his picture had been

cut out of a newspaper and pasted on to the cover of one of

Cal‟s cheap SF novels.

He hadn‟t seen me. When he finally said something, it

wasn‟t me he was talking to.

„I suppose you can hear me,‟ he said, and his voice got

buffeted to and fro by the wind.

I didn‟t know what he thought he was doing. He‟d got the

sphinx to talk to him back in his flat, but only because he‟d

trapped it inside the circle. Here, he didn‟t even have any

little pieces of hardware to use as crucifixes.

„Face to face,‟ Cwej added. „If, you know, that‟s OK with

you.‟

The next thing I knew, there were new shapes blotting out

the light from the archway. I counted about six of them. Six

sphinxes, dropping out of their column, leaving holes in the

middle of the black band. Slowly, and quietly, they got into

position around the ledge.

The pier was surrounded. Cwej was surrounded. Half a

dozen blank faces were staring at him, some of them floating

just a few feet from his body, some of them hovering yards

away. They were all focusing on him, so you could see his

face reflected six times over in the lenses. The sphinxes kept

flapping their wings, not making a sound, but other than

that they didn‟t move.

I took a step back. So did Cwej.

For a few seconds more, nothing happened. Cwej looked

down at his feet, then back up at the sky, then into the big

glass eye of the nearest sphinx. He cleared his throat, and

the wind carried the little grunting noise straight to me.

„I expect you‟re wondering why I‟ve called you here,‟ he

said.

I seem to remember the sphinxes turning to look at each

other. But that would‟ve been silly, wouldn‟t it?

„I want to talk to your leader,‟ Cwej said. „Can I do that?‟

50

There are all kinds of rumours about the place the sphinxes

come from. We might as well call it „sphinx space‟, which is

what Cwej always called it. Who started the rumours, nobody

knows, seeing as nobody‟s ever come back from sphinx space

alive. Except for Cwej‟s Evil Renegade, obviously.

(Don‟t you love that expression? „Nobody‟s ever come

back alive.‟ Like the Gods keep sending back dead bodies,

with little notes attached. Well, maybe they do. I never

asked.)

Even though sphinx space has been twisted out of shape

by the Gods, the stories say there‟s still a planet in the

middle of it all. And on each side (hemisphere?) of the planet

there sits, or stands, or floats, a great big sphinx. These two

huge sphinxes are supposed to be the mother and father of

all sphinxkind, although the rumours are in two minds about

whether they‟re actually the Gods themselves, or just the

Gods‟ own personal lapdogs. But all the stories say that one

of these ultra-sphinxes is black („as dark as a black hole‟,

according to Professor Begarius of Loughborough University)

and one of them is white („as bright as a supernova‟...

ibid., whatever ibid.‟s supposed to mean).

It makes me think of that story about the white and red

dragons they used to tell us at nursery school. I suppose

that‟s the way it is with stories. You need these big contrasts.

The important thing is that these sphinxes are so huge,

they can make whole worlds in the blink of an eye. So huge

that their worshippers have started building cities under the

glass of their face-screens.

Professor Begarius‟s theory says that sphinx „society‟ is

based on a stupidly complex set of rules, and that these two

great big sphinxes - the Kings of Space - are the ones who

make judgments about sphinx law. But after what Cwej told

me about the rituals, about „programming‟ the sphinxes, I‟ve

got my own ideas. If I‟ve understood this properly, then the

sphinxes are like computers, or maybe like solid versions of

the „programs‟ computers run on. In which case, I think the

Kings of Space ( if they really exist) are just the bodies used

by the computer‟s central databank, or whatever the most

crucial part of a computer‟s programming is supposed to be

called. That‟s what I think, anyway, and I‟m the important

one.

51

Cwej was always the diplomatic one among his people. That

was his purpose, as far as they were concerned. I told you,

didn‟t I, about the morning he came back from the planet of

the machine people? I can‟t forget the way he looked then,

the shock on his face, the horror of knowing who he‟d been

talking to. Dealing with the sphinxes was nothing compared

with that.

I remember how he felt that morning. The tension in him,

when he climbed back into bed and pressed himself up

against me. When we had sex, it felt like he was doing it

because he had to, not because it made him happy. Because

he felt like he‟d been touched by the machine people, and

needed to get that machine-ness out of him. If you were

being cynical, you could say he emptied it all into me, but I

don‟t think he saw it that way. „Mechanical‟ is pretty much

the only word for what we did.

Afterwards, he lay next to me and talked nonstop for about

an hour, about the deal he‟d had to make with the machines.

I was half asleep, so all I can remember is a dream that didn‟t

make sense, spiced up with snatches of Cwej-speak. In the

voice-over of the dream, Cwej told me about the deal his

people had made with the machines, thousands of years

earlier. About how his employers had let the machines invent

time travel, but only a simple kind. About how they‟d

promised not to scoop any of the machines out of time for

their own entertainment, like they did with so many other

races in the days before they knew better.

And in return... no, I don‟t remember what the machines

promised in return. All I remember is that, after Cwej‟s visit,

there was a brand-new treaty signed between the two

planets. All allies together against the Gods.

I remember Cwej telling me where he thought everything

had started to go wrong. The point when his people had

really compromised their principles, for the first time in

thousands of years. He said: „It was that day on the ledge.

When I went out to talk to the sphinxes. Fuck, what was I

doing!’

52/53

„Question: leaders?‟ said the sphinxes. All six of them said it

at the same time, changing the whole shape of the air around

them, bending the wind into one big chorus of words. Even

Cwej looked surprised at the force of it.

„The ones who give you your orders,‟ he explained. „The

ones who speak for... um, the Kings of Space.‟

It took the sphinxes a while to answer. Perhaps they were

all trying not to laugh.

„Programming detail: all units speak for each other,‟ they

said. I don‟t think they were speaking in time because they

were telepathic, or anything like that. I got the feeling they

were doing it because they were all sharing the same

program. Mind you, I got the same feeling from the men in

the fortress.

Cwej folded his hands behind his back. „So if I talk to you

now, your leaders are going to know about it?‟

„Proposition: no discussion is necessary. Statement of fact:

property has been stolen. Statement of intent: property will

be reclaimed.‟

„It wasn‟t us who stole it, though,‟ Cwej told them.

„Statement of fact: property has been stolen.‟

„But we don‟t need to do it like this,‟ said Cwej, in a

pleading kind of voice that made him sound very, very little.

„We don‟t want a light or anything. Look... your employers.

The Gods out of, er, sphinx space. They‟re renegades, right?

They aren‟t allied with the other Gods. I mean, they don‟t

care what‟s happening on Dellah.‟

It took the sphinxes a while to unscramble his English.

„Statement: there are no renegades among God units.

Secondary statement: there is only self-interest. Clarification:

the God units designated “Kings of Space” have no interest in

the activities of those God units in the region of the planet

designated “Dellah”. Secondary clarification: the Kings of

Space have no interest in the universe outside of the area

designated “sphinx space”.‟

Cwej went „hah‟, and clapped his hands. The sphinxes got

a bit flustered by that, like they didn‟t understand the body

language. „So you don’t care about the other Gods. That‟s

what I thought. Listen, my people aren‟t worried about you.

They aren‟t worried about the sphinx space. It‟s the rest of

the Gods we‟ve got a problem with. That‟s why we wanted to

keep the bottle, after... um, we rescued it. We want to get

out of the way of the other Gods. We want to be left in peace.

That‟s all.‟

The sphinxes all bobbed their heads - like they‟d decided

to end the conversation.

„Wait, wait,‟ said Cwej. „Listen to me. All we want is the

bottle. We want to put... some of our people, some of our

culture, on Earth. I mean, the Earth inside the bottle. That‟s

all. Can‟t we come to some kind of arrangement here?‟

The sphinxes considered this. Perhaps it just took them a

while to remember what „Earth‟ was.

„Reply: there is nothing your units have which is of

interest to our units. Suggestive secondary reply: nothing

your units would offer.‟

There was a long, long pause. I got the feeling the sphinxes

were testing the water, seeing what Cwej would do. As it

happened, Cwej just nodded a bit.

„Go on,‟ he said.

„Statement of fact: the Kings of Space have an interest in

certain fields of knowledge in which your units specialize.

Specification: time.‟

„Ah,‟ said Cwej.

He left it at that, for a while. He paced across the width of

the ledge, occasionally kicking at loose chips of rock at his

feet, just to watch them tumble over the edge and down to

the ground. (Cwej on the edge of the ledge. Now, there‟s a

mantra for you.)

Finally, he looked up.

„All right,‟ he said. „Let‟s talk.‟

54

This was wrong. How did I know this was wrong?

Cwej‟s people never, ever, ever swapped their secrets with

other races. It was a fact of life. Something so basic, I felt like

I‟d known it even before I‟d been told. Like the time travellers‟

control over space and time went so deep that one bad

decision could make everyone in the universe feel ill.

How much of history gets decided like that, I wonder? In

my world, or the „real‟ one? One of the time travellers

sneezes half a galaxy away, and whole wars start down on

Earth. I‟d like to think that this explains all the things I lived

through in London. I‟d like to think the reason I‟ve spent so

much of my (remembered) life blowing my brains out with

drugs and poisons is that I was trying to get over the shame

of Cwej‟s employers, trying to shake the guilt they‟ve always

felt about the things they did in their past, when they were a

lot younger and a lot more careless with their time travelling.

It‟s like original sin, I suppose. The oldest civilization suffers,

so we have to suffer along with them. We have to live

out their nightmares, and deal with all their paranoia.

But I don‟t suppose any of this is true. I‟m just trying to

find excuses for everything I‟ve ever done, all those mornings

waking up sick with the taste of vomit in my mouth, all

that time spent mixing Space Dust with the cocaine (for that

extra adolescent buzz and no, it doesn‟t work, but I had to

try). I don‟t think I can blame Cwej‟s employers for every-

thing. Or the Gods, even.

Another conversation between me and Cwej, while we were

lying on our backs looking up at the stars:

„How can the sphinxes do that, though?‟ I said. „How can

they just mess up the whole shape of the universe?‟

„You mean, by making sphinx space? Er...‟ Cwej mulled

it over for a while. „I don‟t know. Maybe it was always meant

to happen that way. You know? Maybe there‟s something in

nature that says things like the Gods have got to be there.‟

„Like an appendix,‟ I said.

Another long pause from Cwej. „Um...?‟

„An appendix,‟ I said. „Part of your body that doesn‟t

really do anything except go wrong and give you gut ache.

Maybe that‟s what sphinx space is. Maybe it‟s like the

universe‟s appendix.‟

„Right,‟ said Cwej. He sounded like he thought I‟d gone a

bit strange.

(We had a lot of conversations like that. If I‟ve got space

later on, I‟ll tell you Cwej‟s story about visiting a planet run

by intelligent numbers. „They were all between seventeen

and eighteen,* he said. „All the really complicated bits came

after the decimal point.‟ You‟ll laugh, believe me.)

56/57

Now imagine this:

The warships, those twisty golden spire things I was

talking about earlier, are burrowing their way through space

towards Simia KK98. They used to have this story on Earth,

which I never really believed, about the Great Wall of China

being the only man-made thing you could see from space

(why you should be able to see that, I don‟t know, seeing as it

wasn‟t any wider than my old flat). Stick with that image

for a moment. Stick with it while the warships get closer,

because it‟s the best way of imagining what the pilots can see

from up there on the other side of the atmosphere.

There‟s a line all the way around the planet, like an equator

that‟s been drawn out in marker pen, all black and shiny.

Then, when you get closer, the equator looks up at you. You

can see billions and billions of dots of light, where the

sunshine‟s glinting off the face-screens. Finally, some of the

dots break away from the line. They‟re coming. Some of the

sphinxes are coming, to eat their way into the warships.

Down in the clouds, the battle‟s already started. Those

brass-coloured spheres I told you about, remember them?

Spheres with pilots who‟ve grown into the machinery. The

spheres are rolling across the sky, trying to pick off the

sphinxes that are breaking out of the formation. The

sphinxes do their best to strike back, but it‟s not easy. The

spheres, and the spheres‟ pilots, have got the blood of the

time travellers in them. A pilot stretches an arm, and his

sphere stretches, too, right into the middle of next week. One

of the sphinxes twists space, tries to get a grip on the sphere,

but the machine‟s already dragging itself into another time

zone.

This is a bad thing. The sphere/pilot is halfway between

one time and another, so right now only half of him is in the

real world. But the sphinx is being tugged through time with

him, so the two of them are getting scrambled together, and

the sphinx‟s flesh is leaking into the cogs and gears of the

machine. There‟s one object where there used to be two. A

big black smear gets stretched along the timeline.

It takes months to unscramble a mess like that.

Meanwhile, the warships are closing in, meeting up with

the breakaway sphinxes that the spheres haven‟t managed to

deal with. One of the sphinxes sinks its teeth into the first of

the ships, not that it‟s actually got teeth as such (no, don‟t

ask about my leg, please). Space stretches. A gap opens up in

the side of the ship. While the men in robes get sucked out

into the dark, little bubbles of flesh pop out of the hatchways

of the other ships, and start clustering around the damaged

parts. The bubbles were probably human once, but since

then they‟ve been forced to rebuild themselves in the

vacuum, so they‟re not held back by things like lungs any

more. These are Swiss-army-knife people, who can spew out

sealing fluid as quickly as the sphinxes can spew out raw

space.

You might be wondering how I know all this, seeing as I

was on the ground when it happened. The truth is, Cwej told

me. I know he wasn‟t there either but, if there was one thing

Cwej was good at, it was describing space battles. Besides,

there are so many faulty details in this story already that I

didn‟t think you‟d mind a few more distractions.

58/59

So there was Cwej, talking to the sphinxes about the secrets

of his people. And there was me, standing in the passageway,

watching history being made in front of my eyes.

I felt I had to say something. I wasn‟t sure what.

„Cwej?‟ I tried.

Cwej whipped round on his heels, almost falling off the

ledge when he did it. The sphinxes stretched out their necks,

until my own pale, skinny, empty-looking face was staring

back at me six times over.

„Christine,‟ Cwej said. „Listen, you shouldn‟t —‟

He didn‟t bother finishing the sentence. A second later, his

face had gone from „surprised‟ back to „serious‟. He turned to

look at the sphinxes again, without saying another word to

me.

„She isn‟t important to you,‟ Cwej said. „I‟m the one you

want to talk to. You want to know about time travel, is that

it?‟

„Reply: these units are interested in the concept,‟ chanted

the sphinxes.

„All right,‟ said Cwej. „Here‟s the deal. We get to use the

bottle. We don‟t want all of it: we just want to be able to get

to Earth and back. But the bottle still belongs to you. You

can guard it, if you like. As long as you never let the other

Gods get their hands on it. OK?‟

The sphinxes didn‟t answer. They were waiting to hear the

other half of the deal.

„I can‟t speak for all my people,‟ said Cwej. „My, er,

employers can tell you what they‟ve got to offer. I don‟t

know the details, I‟m not an expert, but... you can have

what you‟re after, basically.‟

„Rejection: this deal is too vague.‟ Was it just me, or did

the sphinxes sound angry? No, it was just me.

„But this isn‟t the deal,‟ said Cwej. He looked so frustrated,

he was practically stamping his feet. „AH I‟m saying is, we

promise we will make a deal. We can sort things out later. We

have to stop this fighting, that‟s all. You can have what you

want. I promise.‟

The sphinxes thought about this for a moment. I absolutely

didn‟t hear them muttering among themselves, whatever I

might remember now.

„Question: your units give their word that negotiations will

take place with regard to supplying time technology to the

Kings of Space?‟

„Yes,‟ said Cwej. He was almost screaming by now. „Just

say you‟ll deal with us. Please. Before the warships get

here.‟

Even while he was saying it, things were happening.

The sky was getting dark. The psychedelic stripes were

fading away. Something black and heavy was forcing its way

through the clouds from the other side of the atmosphere.

From where I was standing, I could see the side of Cwej‟s

face. I could see him looking up at the sky with his jaw

dropping open. Like he wanted to tell the sphinxes to hurry

up and make a decision, but thought he‟d sound stupid

saying it.

„Decision: the conditions are acceptable,‟ the sphinxes

said. Then, and only then, they swivelled their necks to

watch what was happening up above them.

NOTES ON AFTERWARDS

60

I don‟t know what it was that filled up the sky over Simia

KK98. At the time I thought it was the sphinxes, coming

down to the fortress in their billions - like the locusts in that

book at the end of the Bible where God freaks out and

everybody dies. But the sphinxes weren‟t expecting it, I don‟t

think. So it must have been Cwej‟s employers.

That worries me, and I‟ll tell you why. It‟s because I‟ve

seen the time travellers‟ warships, and they‟re gold and

spiky, not fat and black. Which means one of two things.

Either the warships were just an escort, bringing something

even worse to Simia KK98 to face down the sphinxes, which

is a bad enough thought in itself. Or... or the warships had

already fired up their weapons by the time they got to the

planet. That‟s how the ships work, I‟ve heard. Everything

goes black, and then the world ends.

Which means that Cwej‟s employers, who were supposed

to be the good guys in this face-off, were ready to let their

warships wipe out everything on the planet, us included.

They‟ve apparently done that before, sterilized (or do I mean

cauterized?) whole satellites if they think there‟s some kind

of threat to the grand order of things.

Would they have done that? Killed all of their agents, and

even sacrificed the bottle? It makes sense, in a kind of if-we-

can‟t-have-it-nobody-can way. Or am I getting paranoid

again?

61

It was only the next day, when the world I knew about had

come back again and I was sitting drinking chocolate in the

flat, that I asked Cwej about the deal he‟d done.

„If the sphinxes get time machines, won‟t they mess

everything up?‟ I asked him. „You know. Do damage to the

space-time continuum, or whatever.‟ (I always used to say „or

whatever‟ at the end of sentences like that, just so I didn‟t

sound like I was taking the whole time-travel thing seriously.

Even if it was supposed to be real.)

He sipped at his chocolate, although he must have known

it was too hot for him. „Doesn‟t make much difference,‟ he

said, once he‟d finished making slurping noises. His voice

was quiet, maybe even a bit on the broody side. „I think the

universe is finished. I mean, my universe. I think that‟s the

bottom line here. Pretty soon, nowhere‟s going to be safe. If

the sphinx-gods get their hands on time travel, it‟s not going

to change much. They‟re not interested in the rest of the

universe anyway. Just their patch.‟

„And your people go along with this, do they?‟ I asked.

Another shrug. „They okayed the deal. I‟ll be putting my

name on the treaty, pretty soon.‟

„Cynical,‟ I said. I was stirring my own drink with a

teaspoon, watching the chocolate flakes dissolve on the

surface and wondering if it was supposed to be a metaphor

for something.

„Maybe I‟m just starting to think in four dimensions,‟ Cwej

told me. Back then, of course, I didn‟t know what he meant.

62

Two hours before that, as I think I mentioned before, I was

crawling around on the floor of Cwej‟s bathroom and wishing

I had the nerve to make myself throw up.

We‟d got back to the bottle at about ten o‟clock in the

evening, 28 September 1970. Before we‟d left Simia KK98,

Khiste had started taking the piss out of Cwej for wanting to

stick with me, and wanting to go back to the flat inside the

bottle. I think Khiste saw me as being like one of those

rubber woman-shaped dolls you can get in Soho. Something

for Cwej to use to take his frustration out on, without getting

involved in a „real‟ relationship.

That hadn‟t made Cwej happy. It hadn‟t made much of an

impression on me, though, because by then I was so sick and

tired that I probably wouldn‟t have felt much if I‟d been hit

by a bus. Name-calling wasn‟t going to make much of an

impression.

As soon as we‟d got back to the flat, Cwej had headed

straight for the kitchen, and forced me to eat something. He‟d

pretty much ignored the sphinx in the spare room, just

telling it to close the passage out of the bottle. He‟d shut the

door to the spare room behind us, and tried to pretend that it

was perfectly normal for someone to have a sphinx in the

house, like it was a television or a washing machine or any

other mod con.

I hadn‟t felt like eating, even though my stomach lining

had practically been chewing itself up by then. Cwej had

talked me into swallowing whatever he could get his hands

on, more cereal, more toast, pieces of celery stuffed with

peanut butter (most of Cwej‟s recipes involved peanut butter,

as it happens). He‟d watched me like a hawk while I‟d sat in

the spare bedroom and chewed, just in case I tried stuffing

any of the food down the back of the headboard.

He‟d put me to bed after that. I hadn‟t slept. The cramps in

my stomach had got worse, and the food hadn‟t helped. I‟d

ended up convincing myself that the peanut butter had

poisoned me, that Cwej had spiked it with some kind of drug,

to turn me into one of the armour-plated beetle people from

the fortress. Or worse. I‟d imagined wings bursting out of my

back, and that was before I‟d even read that cutting from Fate

magazine.

63/64

I never did manage to make myself sick, which is probably a

good thing. Once I‟d finished leaning over the toilet bowl, I

turned on the strip lighting, and leant against the sink,

feeling dizzy at having to stand upright again. I remember

looking at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, all pale and

blurry, just the way it had looked in the face of the sphinx.

As if the wind had changed direction and I was stuck like

that for good.

Cwej was waiting for me in the hallway when I left the

bathroom. He was leaning against the wall opposite the

bathroom door, with his eyebrows raised. The same loo

policemen are meant to give you when they think you‟ve

been the victim of an accident, and want you to think they‟re

sympathetic.

„You‟re not going to be OK, are you?‟ he asked.

I shrugged. Cwej looked... pained. I suppose that‟s the

word.

„I could make you forget,‟ he said. „I mean, my people

could. We‟ve got ways of doing that. Chemicals. To break

down the memory acids.‟

„Memory acids‟ sounded like the kind of medical slang

Cwej would just make up on the spot, but I got the idea. „I

thought you said I was involved,‟ I said.

„You‟ve had a shock,‟ Cwej told me. (What, just the one?)

„We could make you forget. It‟s just... the technique‟s not

totally reliable. Bits of memories get stuck in the back of

your head. You wouldn‟t know about any of this, most of the

time. But...‟

He paused. I could tell he wanted me to say „But what?‟,

so I‟d feel like I was part of the conversation instead of just

being lectured to. I did what he wanted. As ever.

„You might have dreams,‟ Cwej went on. „About the

sphinxes. About seeing your world from the outside. And

you‟d start getting paranoid. You might not be able to look at

anything without having... that feeling, you know? You‟d

suffer. Psychologically.‟

„You mean, I‟ve got less of a chance of going mad if I

know what‟s happening,‟ I said. At least I said something like

that, although I probably wasn‟t so lucid. My stomach was

still killing me.

Cwej stepped forward. He tried to make the action look

casual, but I could tell, even while he was reaching out for

me, that this was all part of the „reassurance‟ programme

he‟d been taught, by whatever people had taught him to be a

soldier. I didn‟t care. He held out his hands, palms up, and I

held on to them. I felt myself stumble forward, as if my body

wasn‟t sure whether this was a good time for a hug or not.

„I want to help you,‟ he said. „I mean that. I really, really

mean that.‟ They say that kidnap victims, female kidnap

victims, sometimes end up falling in love with the people who

are holding them prisoner. It‟s not surprising, is it? The

kidnappers are the only things those women have got to hold

on to. The only things they can touch.

It‟s the same with cults. If you took all the cult leaders who

were around in 1970, all the gurus and hippies and loonies, I

don‟t think any of them would have been as convincing

us Chris Cwej. He‟d been trained by people who weren‟t

human, who could see human beings from the outside and

spot all the stupid little flaws in the way they acted. And the

irony is, he really did want to help me. He just wanted to help

me in a way that involved my clinging on to him all the time,

just him and nobody else.

He tried to keep me away from my friends, and he tried to

keep me away from my own home. Back then, I thought it

was just because he didn‟t want the „knowledge‟ to spread.

Oh yes, make no mistake, on my home planet the secret of

the universe was contagious.

66

I said I didn‟t sleep, that first night after I‟d come back from

the universe outside. That‟s not strictly true, now I come to

think about it. I slipped away a couple of times, but never for

more than a minute or two, so I spent most of the early hours

of the morning in that state when your brain doesn‟t need

any help to start seeing things. Not hallucinating, but being

so scared of hallucinating that you end up seeing the little

pixie people anyway.

I saw the world the way the Gods would have seen it, the

same way I‟d seen it in the dream, the one I‟d had the night

before. The planets were great big collections of leftovers,

with the sphinxes perched on top of all the gravestones, or

wrapping their tails around the spires of the churches. But

this time the perspective was different. I was looking at the

universe from the outside, so I could see that even the

planets, even the stars, were just more pieces of „stuff the

Gods had shifted around.

This time, of course, I knew it was true. The universe

really had been made for the Gods‟ benefit, and all the things

my race had left behind were just parts of the collection

inside the bottle. But, in all the time I spent with Cwej, I

never got over the feeling that it went further than that. That

even his world, his „real‟ universe, had been put there to keep

someone or something happy. And who‟s to say I was wrong

(apart from Cwej, who quite often did say I was wrong)?

Cwej never could tell me exactly what was on the outside of

his universe.

67

That afternoon - after a morning spent dozing in Cwej‟s‟

living room, drifting in and out of sleep while the Labour

Party conference went on in the background and Bert Foord

read out the weather forecast - Cwej and I went out for a

walk together. He said he thought it‟d be a good idea for me

to get some fresh Earth air back into my system. Something

about the way the blood works.

We ended up in Leicester Square, drifting across the road

from the underground station and along Cranbourne Street,

past the boutiques and the „special-interest‟ bookshops, up

towards the cinemas. The roads were clogged up with black

cabs, the way they usually were, and at least half of the

passers-by were tourists. Germans complaining about the

food prices, or Americans taking photos of every statue they

could see (because all English statues dated back to the

stone age, according to the Americans). It was warm, for the

time of year. There was prickly orange sunlight beating down

on my right side, cold wind coming in from the left, so I just

slung „my‟ duffel coat over one shoulder and kept walking.

Running hot and cold at the same time, the same feeling I

used to get from cocaine, before I ended up not feeling

anything.

There was a street performer who‟d made a space for

himself on the pavement outside Leicester Square Gardens,

in the big gap between the cinemas. The tourists were

gathering around him in a kind of semicircle, taking photos

while he waved his arms and shouted. I think he was a street

performer, anyway, although most of what he did was just

shouting, so I suppose he might have been a preacher, like

one of the end-of-the-world-is-nigh people you used to see in

Hyde Park before the world ended and surprised the lot of

them.

If I‟d thought about it, I might have pushed the man out of

the way and told all those tourists the truth, two weeks

before they found out the important bits for themselves. Not

that it would have changed anything. On 29 September, with

the sunlight making the railings sparkle and lighting up the

posters for Women in Love, the whole world suddenly looked

flat to me, as if everything I could see was part of one big

doll‟s house. Cwej bought me a cardboard cup full of Coca-

Cola from a street vendor, and I remember being surprised by

the logo on the side, like it‟d make more sense for it to say

ACME, and for the man who sold it to me to have a little

„Made in England‟ sticker on his back.

68

We stopped by a bench in the gardens. We were opposite the

statue of Shakespeare, who used to stand on top of a

fountain with a marble scroll in his hands, carved with the

words THERE IS NO DARKNESS BUT IGNORANCE. And that

made me laugh, because there was at least one other kind of

darkness I knew about, made up of the bodies of sphinxes,

and I‟m pretty sure that even Shakespeare would have picked

ignorance if he‟d known about it. Cwej had bought a copy of

the Standard from the newsstand outside the tube station, so

now he started to flip through it, frowning at most of the

pages.

„What‟re you looking for?‟ I asked him.

„Um,‟ said Cwej, which was his usual answer when he

didn‟t want to talk about something.

„More specific,‟ I said.

Cwej fixed his eyes on something in the paper, doing his

best to look interested. „Anything that doesn‟t look normal.

Any clues. There‟s something else here on Earth, remember.

That third party the sphinx told us about. We‟re going to

have to help the sphinxes figure out what it is.‟

I looked around the gardens, watching the students from St

Martin‟s rolling around on the grass and flirting with each

other. „I was going to ask you,‟ I said. „The third party‟s the

thing that‟s been doing the killings, yeah?‟

„Mmm,‟ said Cwej.

„But the papers are saying that whoever‟s doing it is like

Charles Manson or someone.‟

„Mmm,‟ Cwej added.

„So,‟ I said. „So I thought, is it maybe possible that...‟

69

I can‟t believe I said it. I can‟t believe I actually asked

whether Charles Manson, whose followers had hacked up

nine innocent Hollywood lounge lizards (one pregnant movie

actress among them), might have been some kind of alien.

Luckily, I don‟t remember how Cwej reacted. I must be

blotting the embarrassment out of my memory.

Romance. If „romance‟ is the word. Hammer Horror-

romance, the kind that makes people think Jack the Ripper:

was a vampire or a magician or a science experiment gone

wrong. I‟d say that things don‟t happen that way in the real

world, but the truth is that the „real‟ world is exactly where

they do happen. They just didn‟t happen in my world, that‟s

all. Where Cwej comes from, Jack the Ripper was probably a

renegade time traveller from a parallel universe, and John

Christie was probably in charge of an alien invasion force

that was trying to take over the world by drugging, raping

and murdering as many women as possible. For some

reason.

I keep thinking about all those Barbara Cartland novels

Lady Diamond used to read (although she hid them inside

copies of the Spiritualist Journal, natch). Full of shy,

good-hearted, blushing Victorian gentlemen, making nervous

passes at noble and free-minded heroines. Never mind the

fact that Victorian gentlemen were nothing but misogyny and

VD, never mind the fact that they spent most of their time

beating up their wives and hanging around male brothels.

You get the same shit told to you over and over, the same old

stabs at rewriting history, whether the stories are set in the

French Revolution or ancient Babylon. You never get told

about the lies, or the brutality, or that desperate paranoid

fight to stay in control when someone else gets his claws into

you. And my great romantic hero? I think about Cwej on the

morning he came back from the world of the machine people,

grinding himself into me in a last-ditch attempt to get his

humanity back, and I don‟t know whether to laugh or

scream.

70

The first time I went to Simia KK98, Cwej made sure we left

before the warships landed, before any of his employers

arrived to work out the deal with the sphinxes. On the day

the treaty with the Kings of Space was signed, the time

travellers didn‟t show up at all. They let their agents handle

the diplomacy.

The signing was done on the top level of the fortress, a

room with no ceiling, so the snow and the cold had to be kept

out by an invisible roof, and the floor was covered in ripples

of orange and turquoise light. There was a kind of podium in

the middle of the floor, a little stepped pyramid made of the

same rock as the rest of the building. The beetle-skinned

men (Khiste included) lined up in two rows on either side of

the podium, standing dead still, like clockwork toys that

needed rewinding. I stood at the back, trying not to be

noticed, while Cwej stepped up to meet the sphinx that was

hovering over the podium, floating in a bubble of its own

personal space-time. It couldn‟t have squeezed into the room

otherwise.

I saw a lot of ceremonies like that - I‟ve already told you

about the Inside-Out World, haven‟t I? - but this was the first

of them. This signing was different from all the others I‟d

see, because there was only one copy of the treaty on the

podium. The sphinxes had their own way of sealing a deal.

While the other men watched, one of the armoured people

stepped out of line, and knelt down in front of the pyramid.

His joints made little squealing noises whenever he moved.

Cwej stepped back, just in time to get out of the way, as the

sphinx reached out with its front paws and twisted the man‟s

head off.

There wasn‟t any blood. It wasn‟t even violent, as such

The sphinx had refolded space, that was all, so the place

where the man‟s head had been suddenly wasn‟t next to the

place where his neck had been. The sphinx kept working,

picking at the universe with its claws, until it had unfolded a

space it could squeeze itself into. The victim‟s body had been

expanded, and then hollowed out. Once it had climbed inside

the man‟s armour, the sphinx stretched itself, flexing its

muscles, and slipping its fingers into all the body‟s little

cavities. As soon as the sphinx had control of the victim‟s

arms, Cwej offered it the pen, to add its own mark to the

treaty.

And was I shocked by all of this? Good question.

71

It‟s funny, isn‟t it? Ever since I started writing this book, I‟ve

been telling you about the end of the world, about all the

millions of people who must have been swept away when it

came on 12 October. But somehow the bit about the soldier

having his head ripped off seems much, much nastier.

You can‟t care about genocide. That‟s what I think, any-

way, now I‟ve seen a fair amount of life in the outside

universe. Is that how the Gods get away with so much, do

you think? By doing things so big, by wiping out so many

whole populations, that nobody can really care about all the

victims? It was the same on Earth, I suppose. Nixon must

have sent thousands to die in Vietnam, but if he‟d gone on

TV and tortured some kittens in front of a live studio

audience the revolution would have started in a second.

72

„So the sphinx is going to kill him?‟ I‟d asked, when Cwej

had told me about the ceremony an hour or so earlier.

„Not really,‟ Cwej had said, like he thought it was possible

to „not really‟ kill someone. „It‟s just going to fill up the extra

space inside his body. Er, once it‟s finished making the extra

space.‟

I‟d blinked, because that had been the only thing I‟d been

able to do. „And this man... did he volunteer for this?‟

„Sort of. He‟s not real.‟

That had annoyed me. „You mean, like I‟m not real?‟

Cwej had looked shocked. Then confused. Then upset.

„No, I don‟t... Look, what I mean is... he‟s been

engineered.‟

I‟d already locked my head into „SF‟ mode, so this

information wasn‟t too surprising. „You mean he‟s a clone?‟

„Er. It‟s not as easy as that. But he‟s been put together by

my people, yeah. Specially for this ceremony. They do stuff

like that all the time.‟

„Bred for slaughter,‟ I‟d said, suddenly wishing I was a

vegetarian, just so I could sound even more holier-than-thou.

„Kind of,‟ Cwej had admitted. „Look, you don‟t have to

come to the ceremony, all right? I mean, I just thought you

should know what‟s going on.‟

73

I felt sorry for that soldier, being sacrificed to the treaty just

because that was the way the Gods wanted it. („Felt sorry‟.

Does that sound like ironic understatement? It wasn‟t sup-

posed to be.) I felt like I had a kind of sympathy with him, for

pretty obvious reasons. Still, it didn‟t shock me, not as much

as you would‟ve thought. And it didn‟t make me think any

less of Cwej, either, although by that time I was starting to

wonder exactly how happy he was working for the time

travellers. He tried to hide it, but I saw him wince when the

head came away from the shoulders, just like anyone else

would have done. Well, apart from Khiste.

That evening, we went back to the flat inside the bottle,

just like we always did. By then I was so used to moving

between worlds that I hardly noticed the difference, the same

way you stop noticing that an old film‟s in black and white

after the first twenty minutes or so. That was the first week

in October, the one week when I could honestly say I was

starting to feel comfortable with my new life. Apart from the

decapitations, obviously.

When the night came, we drew the curtains in the living

room and snuggled up together on one of the bunk beds, the

one that gave us the best view of the colour TV. We lay curled

up next to each other, Cwej‟s arm draped over my

side, the back of my head tucked under his chin. I think I

remember us being under a duvet, although I don‟t

remember there actually being a duvet on any of the bunks.

Maybe I just think about duvets whenever I think about

being warm and cosy.

So there we were, shaking our heads at Tomorrow’s World

(„discoveries... inventions... ideas that will affect you in

the future!‟), talking over the sketches on Not Only... But

Also, and giggling at the period costumes on Thirty Minute

Theatre. Outside, the world kept turning, and all the little

model people got on with their Pogle’s Wood lives, but neither

of us cared much any more. I let myself drift off to sleep,

feeling Cwej‟s fingers stroking the hairs at the back of my

neck, knowing that all I had to do to live through things was

stick close to him.

He had to protect me. Cwej was dead set on his duty, like a

little kid playing soldier, and I knew he had to look after me.

It was his way of making up for everything, for dragging me

into his world to begin with. His way of dealing with the

guilt, and that was fine by me.

At least, that‟s how I saw things. But then, what did I

know? I wasn‟t even real.

NOTES ON TRAFALGAR

74/75

I don‟t know where Cwej got the ship from. And it was a ship,

not in the way that one of his employers‟ space-corkscrews

was a ship, but in the way that the things pirates and

Vikings used to use were ships. It wasn‟t big, although it was

shaped just like a longboat, right down to the dragon

figurehead at the back (if it was supposed to be a dragon - for

all I know, it was a portrait of the person who built it). It was

made of gold, like a lot of the aliens‟ things were. Even the

sails were gold, sheets of metal cut so fine that they rippled

whenever the wind blew. The sails were huge, kept up by

great big webs of wire, so I got the feeling that they‟d been

made to catch more than just wind, that the ship could run

on sun or rain or snow or anything else Cwej‟s people felt like

running it on.

The deck was like a mesh, with gold beams that were tied

together at the prow and the stern (whichever one was

which), and if you looked through the gaps you could see the

internal workings, the machinery that made the ship fly. The

pilot sat somewhere down there under the deck, of course,

although I didn‟t know it at the time, because by then Cwej

hadn‟t told me about the way his people would rebuild

themselves to fit their machines. This was just a couple of

days after I‟d met him, before we‟d even started sleeping

together. All I knew was that sometimes, if you looked down

through the deck, you could see something soft and fleshy

moving through the clockwork.

But I didn‟t spend much time looking down. I spent most

of it standing at the front of the ship, leaning over the edge of

the railing, letting the wind slam into my face. The ground of

Simia KK98 would roll past, and there wouldn‟t be much to

see, except for the stripes and clouds that Cwej had told me

not to look too hard at. Every now and then, Cwej would

come up behind me, put his mouth close to my ear, and

mumble things over the sound of the wind, telling me about

the landmarks down below. All the landmarks were the same,

bad teeth sticking out of the ice-fields, fortresses just like the

one where the bottle was being kept. There were shiny little

people crawling over the ledges and walkways, all looking

up at the same time when we flew overhead.

After a while, I started laughing. I told Cwej that it

reminded me of an old Errol Flynn movie I‟d seen on ITV,

and that it was like we were the pirates, swashbuckling from

city to city, so the people never even knew what hit them. We

started playing with make-believe swords after that, leaping

backward and forward across the deck and shouting „Avast!‟

whenever one of us fell over. Cwej finally won the game by

scaring me into submission. He hopped up on to the railing

of the deck, and teetered. Deliberately teetered. Flapping his

arms around and everything.

He wasn‟t in any danger. The ship was trapped inside one

of the aliens‟ magic air bubbles, which knew what to keep in

and what to keep out. The bubble let us feel the wind

whipping around us, but it stopped us getting cold. It let the

snow fall on the deck, but Cwej knew it wouldn‟t let him go.

On the other hand, I didn’t know. I kept gasping and

gibbering at him until he agreed to come back down.

I went back to the front of the ship after that, to watch

another fortress rolling past. Cwej stood behind me, with his

arms around my waist, while I leant forward to pull faces at

the soldiers. He wasn‟t worried about me falling, obviously.

76/77

Three days later, the two of us were lying together in

the room at the top of the fortress, where the treaty had

been signed and the engineered soldier had been ritually

decapitated (something that, I‟ve got to admit, I‟d completely

forgotten about by then). Even though the room didn‟t have a

roof, the heat was kept in by another magic bubble. The

bubble had decided to let some spores in from the outside,

and they‟d settled all over the room, covering the floor with

patches of fungus, tinted funny colours by the light from the

sky. There were clumps of blue grass all over the place,

which felt like stubble when you ran your fingers through it.

We lay next to each other, staring up at the night sky with

our faces almost touching and our heads resting on the

grass. Night was the only time you could look at the sky

without feeling ill, because the stripes faded away when the

sun (suns?) went down, leaving behind deep-blue clouds that

never quite managed to cover up the stars. Cwej was

mumbling me to sleep.

„That bright one is where we come from,‟ said Cwej, using

the word „we‟ in a nonhuman kind of way. „That‟s our sun.

It‟s a supernova.‟

„Supernova,‟ I muttered.

There was a pause. „Aren‟t you going to ask me how we

can live on a planet near a supernova?‟ Cwej asked.

„Supernova,‟ I repeated.

„You don‟t really care about the universe much, do you?‟

Cwej asked. He sounded puzzled, more than disappointed.

As if it ought to be perfectly normal for someone to know the

difference between a supernova and a black hole and a white

dwarf and a jolly green giant.

„Jolly green giant,‟ I mumbled.

„What?‟ said Cwej.

And that was when Cwej‟s phone rang. I say „phone‟,

although, as I‟ve already said, I don‟t think it was connected

to any of the telephone exchanges on Earth. Unless it wanted

to be, I suppose. I heard Cwej pulling it out of his jacket, and

tapping one of the buttons.

„Cwej,‟ he said. I sniggered. I still couldn‟t take his name

seriously, not when he said it himself.

I could hear a scratchy little voice at the other end of the

line, and Cwej interrupted it with lots of „um‟ and „yeah‟

noises. Finally, he said „OK‟, and hung up.

A few moments later he started nudging me, testing to see

whether I was really asleep.

„They want me on Earth,‟ he said. He meant my Earth, of

course, but he was too polite to say it.

„Mmm,‟ I said. „Back to the flat?‟

„No,‟ said Cwej. „Trafalgar Square.‟

78

I remember one other thing about that evening, lying under

the invisible roof and looking up at the stars. It was the first

time Cwej started opening up to me, about his family and his

friends, about the people he‟d left behind when he‟d started

working for his employers.

I‟ll be honest, I don‟t remember all of what he told me. All

I remember clearly (and there‟s a very good reason for this) is

that he said he had friends on the planet Dellah, there in the

twenty-sixth century. He had had friends on Dellah, anyway,

before the Gods had come.

One of them was called Bernice. Bernice Summerfield.

When I asked Cwej if she could have been a descendant of

mine, he didn‟t answer.

It took me a whole minute to figure it out. We couldn‟t

have been related, because she was a „real‟ person, and I

wasn‟t. So I ummed and ahhd, and asked if, maybe when the

sphinxes had made everybody inside the bottle, I‟d been

inspired by this Bernice person. Cwej said he didn‟t think it

was likely, because I was nothing like her, and it was

probably all just a coincidence. I could tell he didn‟t really

want to talk about it.

79

I‟ve only just realized that I use quotes whenever I write the

word „real‟. Why is that, do you think? Am I just trying to

convince myself that Cwej‟s world wasn‟t any more „real‟

than mine, or is there more to it than that?

I sometimes wonder whether those artificial people the

time travellers made came with instruction manuals, or with

one-year guarantees, like you get with TV sets. It‟d make

things easier, wouldn‟t it? Giving everyone who came off the

production line a little leaflet called „How to Have a Happy

and Successful Life (At Least Until We Twist Your Head

Off)‟- But then, I suppose I should have had an instruction

manual too, seeing as I‟m just as fake as that soldier who got

taken over by the sphinx. Or maybe I should have a little

label on my arse, telling people not to machine-wash me.

80

It was close to midnight by the time we got back inside the

bottle, and made our way over to Trafalgar Square from

Soho. The square was empty at that time of night. You could

still see Nelson‟s Column by the streetlights, but the only

people in the area were passers-by, coming home from the

pubs and clubs around Charing Cross. Most of the human

beings we saw were huddling together in little drunken

crowds, moving through the streets around the square rather

than heading straight through it, which was lucky for us.

Maybe it was an English thing, not wanting Nelson to look

down from his perch and see his countrymen as a bunch of

alcoholics.

For those of you who haven‟t been there, and who now

never will: Trafalgar Square was a bit like an amphitheatre, a

big square pit in the middle of London, cut off from the rest

of the city by whole walls of benches and railings. There was

a huge phallic column in the dead centre of the square, and a

statue of Admiral Nelson used to stand on top of it, although

the statue was so high up that you couldn‟t see it from

ground level, so it could have been Adolf Hitler for all

anybody really knew. And around the bottom of the column

there were lions. I don‟t remember exactly what they were

made of, but I know they were huge, I know they were black,

and I know that children and art students used to spend

hours sitting on their backs, swinging their arms around like

they were Boadicea riding into... whatever battle Boadicea

had ridden into.

That was in the daytime, anyway. At night, things were

quieter. We hopped across one of the roads that ran around

the square, dodging the late-night taxis that trundled past,

then came to a stop on the edge of the amphitheatre. Looking

for the person who‟d called us there.

Actually, it was impossible to miss him. Khiste was pacing

up and down between the lions, the only human(ish) shape

in the whole square. In the light from the streetlamps, his

little grey face had gone all yellow.

„Is he stupid or something?‟ I said. „Everyone‟s going to

see him.‟

Cwej chewed on his lip. „I don‟t think he cares,‟ he said.

No, of course Khiste didn‟t care. There wasn‟t anybody

important on Earth, was there? He could have zoomed over

Oxford Street in a warship, and not thought twice about it.

81

There was a statue in the fortress on Simia KK98 as well, and

if you‟d picked a random alien from one of the other planets

in the „real‟ universe, then he, she, or it would have had

trouble telling which statue was supposed to be Nelson and

which one was supposed to be the founder of time-traveller

society.

The statue in the fortress was in one of the hallways, one of

the big rocky caves that crisscrossed the bottom few floors of

the building. The statue was at least twice the size of a

normal human, although Cwej seemed to think the subject

really had been that tall, while he‟d been alive.

The man had a face that could probably have been called

„ageless‟. He had a bushy beard and a wiser-than-thou

moustache, but the sculptor had done everything a sculptor

could to make him look strong and virile. The body was made

completely out of muscle. The man was standing with his

massive chest puffed out, two of his eight hands on his hips,

the others holding on to a collection of rods, orbs, keys and

sashes. His legs were wide apart, with his heavy boots

planted in the pretend soil of the plinth, while his eyes were

fixed on the far distance. Probably looking forward to a better

future, or something.

The first time I saw it, I burst out laughing. Cwej almost

looked hurt.

„What?‟ he said. „What‟s funny?‟

„Him,‟ I said. „Captain Marvel.‟

Cwej screwed up his face, which was what he did when he

wanted you to think he was offended. „It‟s the founder of our

civilization,‟ he told me. „He was a great man. A great

thinker. A great scientist.‟

„A great weightlifter?‟ I asked.

„There‟s nothing wrong with the way he looks,‟ Cwej

insisted.

„And he wore an all-over body stocking, like that one?‟

„Well, yeah.‟

„With eight arms.‟

„Um, no.‟ Cwej wandered up to the base of the statue, and

stood in its shadow, copying the pose without realizing he

was doing it. As much as a two-armed man could, anyway.

Somehow I managed not to giggle again. „The arms are...

erm, figurative,‟ Cwej went on. „But he was a warrior, that‟s

the main thing. He fought off a whole army of our enemies,

right at the beginning.‟

„The beginning of what?‟ I said.

82

The founder of time-traveller society was a great thinker, a

great scientist, a great philosopher, and a great politician.

That‟s what the stories say, although whenever Cwej told me

the stories he always got distracted and started talking about

space fights with giant vampire-beasts. But the statue in the

fortress? Just a great warrior. Because warriors were what

Cwej‟s employers needed, I suppose. Warriors were what they

wanted their agents to be. I wonder if Cwej‟s employers had

potions to change their history, like they had potions to

change their bodies. If all they had to do was give their

culture a good dose, and watch history rebuild itself into

something stronger, fitter and angrier.

When I think about Cwej, I sometimes end up thinking

about two different people. Nice Cwej, who used to snuggle

up next to me and watch night-time TV in the flat. The

Cwej of Cuddles. And Warrior Cwej, who did whatever his

employers told him to do, right up until the end. The Cwej of

Holy War. The Cwej of Destruction. I think I know which

Cwej is going to end up on top, if his employers ever get

round to writing the history of their fight against the Gods.

If the centre of London really is being used as a battlefield

these days, with Charles Manson and Jack the Ripper

knocking the shit out of each other for all eternity, then I‟m

sure Nelson‟s going to be climbing down off his column to

join in. The Admiral‟s probably wearing big boots and an all-

over body stocking by now. And he‟ll have a big letter N on

his chest.

83

By the way, in case you were wondering, what with all this

coming and going between the two universes, I never went

back to Lady Diamond‟s shop after I met Cwej. I tried to, just

the once, one morning while Cwej was off signing agreements

in the universe outside (I couldn‟t be bothered hanging

around any more desert planets by that point, so I‟d stayed

home).

The shop was open when I got there, and the front window

had already been fixed after the night of the sphinx. I had a

quick look at the things Lady had added to the window space

since I‟d been there last. A couple of new psychedelic prints,

and a poster of Jesus that made him look more like a

country-and-western singer than anything (no worse than

the statue of Nelson, really, or the statue back on Simia

KK98). There were lots of Egyptian „relics‟ as well, a whole

range of pottery Tutankhamen death masks covered in little

yellow price tags. Oh, and sphinxes. Plenty of sphinxes. Lady

Diamond, psychic extraordinaire, must have started picking

up on what was really going on in the world.

I stopped in front of the door, and peeked through the glass

panel. I could see Lady inside, lounging on one of her

beanbags with a cup of tea in her hand, sticking out one little

finger whenever she drank, the way her parents must have

taught her to do it. She was in the middle of a conversation,

and I had to squint through the glass to see who else was

there.

I could make out two other people inside the shop. One

was a boy called Garth, who was a friend of Dorian‟s, and

who‟d been following me around a couple of weeks earlier,

trying to get his hand up my skirt by quoting Czech poets at

me. I didn‟t recognize the other „customer‟. She was skinny

and blonde, and she was lying sprawled out across the

orange beanbag, the one I always seemed to end up with

whenever I paid a visit to the shop. In fact, she looked exactly

the way I would have looked, right down to the sweatshirt

and the you‟re-not-going-to-impress-me- that-way look on her

face.

84

I could have just walked in on them, of course. I didn‟t

bother. My beanbag was already taken. It was like the

universe had spotted the hole I‟d left in the peer group, and

slotted in another skinny, pale-looking girl to take my place.

As if the world was saying, in case I hadn‟t got the point yet:

You‟re not a part of this any more.

Right, I thought. Right, you bastards. I don‟t need your

stupid world or your stupid drugs or your stupid beanbags.

I‟m going to be the Queen of fucking Outer Space. Then let‟s

see how replaceable I am.

So I turned, and walked away. I thought about going back

home, to my own flat, the place I shared with Cal and Dorian

and any of their friends who were too stoned to walk back to

their own homes. But that wouldn‟t have felt right, either.

Besides, Cal would have just forced me to pay the last

fortnight‟s rent.

85/86

„You‟re late,‟ said Khiste, when we reached the middle of

Trafalgar Square. It was 3 October 1970.

„It was short notice,‟ Cwej told him. „We had to get here

from the flat. Anyway, what‟s the problem?‟

„This is where the sphinx wanted to meet us,‟ Khiste

wheezed, through his tin lungs.

I looked at Cwej. Cwej looked blank.

„The sphinx?‟ he said. „You mean, the control sphinx?‟

(That was what Cwej called the sphinx who lived inside

the bottle, the one who‟d been trapped inside the chalk circle.

As part of the treaty, Cwej had released it back into the wild,

and it had apparently spent the last few days trying to find

out about the „disturbances‟. The „disturbances‟ that, in my

world-view, were going around hacking people up on the

streets of London.)

„So where‟s the sphinx now?‟ I asked. I didn‟t really care,

but I wanted to sound like I was part of things.

Khiste swivelled on his heels. We both turned to see what

he was looking at.

He was facing one of the statues, one of the big stone lions

that were crouching in Nelson‟s shadow. Except that it wasn‟t

a lion any more. The body was still lion-shaped, still lying in

the old Great Sphinx pose, but it was rocking backward and

forward on its hind legs, and its claws were kneading at the

stonework. You could see the muscles shifting under the

skin, huge and black and rock-solid. The head was the same

kind of shape it had always been, but the face had fallen

away, so you could see the shiny black glass underneath.

And the statue had wings. Wings that started flapping as

soon as we turned to look at it, making a noise like whole

continents grinding together. There was the smell of animal

sweat and Welsh quarries.

I remembered the signing of the treaty, when one of the

sphinxes had unfolded the space inside a (fake) human being

and climbed inside. The control sphinx, who cared about

what the locals thought even less than Khiste did, had done

the same kind of thing with the stone lion. It was wearing the

statue like a suit. It had slipped into something that, as far

as it was concerned, was just the right size and shape for

comfort. It could have just turned up in its „normal‟ body, by

twisting space into a shape that looked something like an

animal, but this must have been much easier for it.

I couldn‟t breathe. I could hear the cracking noises when it

tried to lift itself up on its haunches, and I started imagining

the whole world coming to life, the entire planet being worn

by the sphinxes like a waistcoat...

I remember Cwej‟s arm being around me before I could

fall over, but I saw his face when the sphinx turned to look at

him, and I know he wasn‟t feeling any more stable than I

was.

„STATEMENT: THIS UNIT HAS IDENTIFIED THE CAUSE

OF THE DISTURBANCES TO THIS ENVIRONMENT,‟ the

sphinx told us.

(This time, I think it‟s all right to use capitals.)

87

Artists and mad people are supposed to be the first ones to

notice when things start going wrong with the world. Artists

and mad people saw World War One and World War Two

coming a mile off, apparently. When those inmates in the

Indian mental hospital started turning into monsters, like it

says in Fate, the staff must have thought World War Three

was on the way.

A weird piece of graffiti turned up in the last few days

before 12 October, in a side road off Old Compton Street. It

was supposed to be a picture, and it covered up most of the

KILROY WOZ „ERE and KEEP BRITAIN WHITE slogans that‟d

already been scrawled there. It was a silhouette of an animal,

in thick black spray paint. It was ugly, and it was blurry, but

it definitely had legs, and it definitely had wings, and it must

have been a good six feet from head to tail. As far as I could

figure out, nobody in the neighbourhood knew who‟d done it

or what it was supposed to be, although a lot of people were

saying it was some kind of vulture.

Of course, I knew full well what it was, even though I

never found out who‟d put it there.

The thing that had followed Cwej into the bottle had

burrowed its way under the skin of the world, and now it was

hiding there, just below the surface of London. Every time it

moved it made cracks in the city, and people started seeing

into those cracks, getting glimpses of the way things really

worked. They were seeing sphinxes everywhere; the thing

that was hiding under the world didn‟t have a proper shape

yet, so the sphinxes were the only things you could see if you

looked into the shadows too hard. In the local paper, some-

time in early October, a woman in Holborn said she‟d seen a

„mystery animal‟ in the alleyway next to her house (I

remember this well, although it‟s one of the clippings Cwej

never got around to sticking into his scrapbook). The thing

had been going through her bins, she said, and she‟d

thought it was a stray cat, or maybe a fox. Then she‟d thrown

a milk bottle at it, and it had grown wings. And flown away.

A hallucination, obviously. I can‟t think of any reason why

a sphinx, even a baby one, would want to go through

someone‟s bins. But, like the graffiti, it was kind of a

symptom of what Cwej and his friends had let loose on the

world.

88

Halfway through the conversation with the sphinx, about half

a dozen men wandered across Trafalgar Square, on their way

home from one of the local pubs. Cwej stopped talking as

soon as he saw them, and looked embarrassed. On the other

hand, Khiste didn‟t even notice they were there. Neither did

the sphinx.

What happened when they spotted the lion statue, and saw

it flapping its wings, was this: they stopped, and they turned

away, and they turned back again, and they looked at each

other, and they grabbed hold of each other to make sure

nobody got any closer, and, in the end, they ran back across

the square. Back towards the safety of the pubs.

„Shit, man,‟ one of them was shouting. „Shit, man. Shit,

man. Shit.’

Nothing about this ever turned up in the papers.

NOTES ON THE HORROR TO COME

89

Although Cwej taught me a lot of the basic rituals - like how

to hold off the sphinxes, just in case the treaty fell through -

he never got round to the difficult stuff. Once, while I sat in

the chalk circle in the spare room, he told me that the rituals

could be used to change just about anything inside this

universe. The same way the sphinxes did it.

„You‟d need sacrifices, though,‟ he said. He didn‟t go into

details.

He and his people had held a ritual to open up the bottle in

the first place:, making a passageway big enough for Cwej

und his hand luggage to get through. Cwej said no more

rituals like that would be needed now, because the control

sphinx could open and close the bottle at will, although the

passage was still wide enough for only a couple of people to

get through at a time.

„Wide enough for your people to send that survival team

in,‟ I said.

„Once we‟re sure it‟s safe,‟ Cwej admitted.

The problem was this. Cwej and Khiste hadn‟t really

known much about the sphinx‟s rituals, when they‟d opened

up the bottle. They‟d understood the basics, but they‟d

compromised, using their employers‟ technology to cover up

any holes in the process. Meaning, they‟d cheated. They‟d

forced their way in. To make the final breakthrough, they‟d

actually drilled through the last few layers of space-time,

with help from the time devices they kept in the fortress.

And that was where the trouble had started.

Cwej‟s people talk about something called the „vortex‟,

which nobody really understands properly, but which is

supposed to be a kind of no-space and no-time that connects

all the other points in the universe together. The way Cwej

explained it, the only way you can get into the vortex is by

falling through the cracks between one second and the next,

and I think that was how the time travellers travelled. By

forcing open a crack, squeezing their way into the vortex,

then popping out through a different crack in a different time

zone. It was that kind of technology Cwej and company had

used to make the passage into my world, popping out of the

vortex inside the bottle instead of in another time.

It all gets a bit technical at this point, so I‟ll try to

remember exactly what the sphinx in Trafalgar Square said.

90

„STATEMENT OF FACT: THE UNIT DESIGNATED “CWEJ”

ENTERED THE BOTTLE ENVIRONMENT VIA THE AREA

DESIGNATED “THE VORTEX”,‟ chanted the sphinx. Its vocal

cords sounded like boulders scraping together.

„Well, yeah,‟ said Cwej. „Is there a problem with that?‟

„REPLY: YES,‟ answered the sphinx. „STATEMENT OF

FACT: DURING THE TRANSITION OF THE UNIT CWEJ

FROM THE VORTEX TO THE BOTTLE ENVIRONMENT, ANY

OTHER PRESENCES IN THE VORTEX WERE GIVEN THE

OPPORTUNITY TO ENTER THE BOTTLE.‟

Cwej blinked for a few seconds, to make himself look

stupid and innocent. „But that‟s OK, isn‟t it? Nothing else

was in the vortex with me. I mean, it‟s not like anything lives

there.‟

STATEMENT OF FACT: THE EMPLOYERS OF THE UNIT

CWEJ HAVE BEEN USING THE VORTEX AS A MEDIUM OF

TRANSITION FOR MILLENNIA,‟ the sphinx announced.

„SPECULATION: OVER THAT TIME, THERE HAVE BEEN

ACCIDENTS.‟

„He means, things have got lost,‟ Khiste added.

„Lost in the vortex?‟ queried Cwej. „Like what?‟

„God knows,‟ said Khiste. „Faulty timeships. Faulty pilots.

You know what the vortex does to you, if you‟re not

protected properly.‟

Cwej clenched his teeth.

„You mean, all those things that have got lost over the

years...‟ he began.

„Have found somewhere else to go,‟ said Khiste, obviously

trying to sound as accusing as he could, even though it was

as much his fault as Cwej‟s. „Well done.‟

91

I could understand this much. When Cwej‟s employers left

their remains behind for the Gods and the archaeologists to

pick through, they scattered their leftovers through time as

well as space, losing some of their old bones in the gaps

between the seconds. According to Cwej, though, people

who had accidents in the vortex didn‟t die. They couldn’t die.

They were torn to pieces, bent out of shape by the currents

that ran between the time zones, but they never got the

chance to be buried. Just imagine these living dead things,

seeing a way out of their prison, and realizing they finally

had a place where they could dump themselves...

Earth. 1970. My world. Or, the way the sphinx put it:

STATEMENT OF FACT: PRESENCES FROM THE VORTEX

HAVE

ENTERED

THE

BOTTLE

ENVIRONMENT.

SECONDARY STATEMENT OF FACT: THE VORTEX HAS

DEPRIVED THESE UNITS OF PHYSICAL FUNCTION.

SUMMARIZATION: THESE ALIEN UNITS HAVE ENTERED

THE OPERATING SYSTEM OF THE BOTTLE ENVIR-

ONMENT.‟

„Wait a minute,‟ I said. „What do you mean, the operating

system?‟

„Quiet,‟ said Khiste.

EXPLANATION: THE ALIEN UNITS ARE INSIDE THE

SUBSTANCE OF THIS UNIVERSE,‟ the sphinx said.

„You mean... they‟re inside the world?‟ I asked. „Like

you‟re inside that statue?‟

It took the sphinx a while to think this through.

ANALOGOUS FACT: YES,‟ it said, in the end.

„Shit,‟ said Cwej. I didn‟t think anyone would add any-

thing to that, but the sphinx hadn‟t finished yet.

REMINDER: ACCORDING TO THE TERMS OF TREATY,

ALL EFFORTS MUST BE MADE TO REMOVE NON-

PERMITTED

PRESENCES

FROM

THE

BOTTLE

ENVIRONMENT, BEFORE PERMANENT DISRUPTION TO

THE OPERATING SYSTEM IS CAUSED. REQUEST: THE

UNIT CWEJ WILL ASSIST IN THIS REMOVAL PROCESS.

ALTERNATIVE: THE TREATY WILL BE BREACHED.

RAMIFICATIONS: IN ORDER TO RETAIN THE INTEGRITY OF

THE BOTTLE ENVIRONMENT, ALL LOCAL LIFE WILL BE

EXCISED.‟

Or, in English, if Cwej didn‟t get rid of the things that had

followed him from the vortex, the sphinxes were going to kill

off everybody and everything in the bottle, and start again

from scratch.

92

More trophies from the rucksack:

I‟ve got a scroll, printed on what looks exactly like real

parchment, which Cwej bought for me while we were at the

markets on Cygni 8.6. He didn‟t want to buy it, but I didn‟t

give him a choice. There was a stall in one of the markets

where a man was advertising his services under the slogan

WE FIND YOUR HERITAGE WHILE-U-WAIT, and I just

couldn‟t resist it.

It works like this. In the twenty-sixth century, every

human-made computer is linked up to a central network,

because computers are so cheap there that they come free in

cereal boxes, and people need something to hold all the

information together. Which means that, if you know what

you‟re doing, you can access any piece of data from anywhere

in the universe. And that‟s pretty smart, by human

standards.

Now, the man at the stall had these things called „AIs‟,

which were little robot minds that could scuttle around

inside the network and dig out any information you wanted.

He‟d programmed these things to hunt down birth and death

records, then string them all together. In other words, half an

hour after you gave him the money, he could supply you with

a complete family tree for your own bloodline, going all the

way back to the twentieth century.

It sounded good to me. Cwej didn‟t understand why I‟d be

interested in a thing like that, seeing as this wasn‟t even my

home universe, but I had my reasons. Cwej handed over the

cash, and the man asked me what my name was.

„Bernice Summerfield,‟ I said.

„ID number?‟ the man asked.

I looked at Cwej. Amazingly, Cwej knew the number

off by heart, so either his employers had built some kind

Of telephone directory into his body or Bernice was more

important to him than he wanted to admit. Either way, the

man at the stall was happy.

Thirty minutes later, I had a complete family record,

tracing the Summerfield name all the way back to the 1930s.

93

I wasn‟t on it, of course. Cwej always admitted that „my‟

Earth and „his‟ Earth were similar, in a lot of ways; I‟d been

hoping that maybe there really had been a Christine

Summerfield in the „real‟ universe, that I was some kind of

shadow of her, like a reconstruction made by the sphinxes. I

don‟t know why I‟d hoped that. Maybe because it would have

given me some roots outside the bottle. Because it would

have justified me leaving the doll‟s house where I belonged.

Cwej was angry when we walked away from the stall. You

could tell, by the little twitches he made whenever he moved

his arms. Like he‟d suddenly gone all sharp and jagged.

„That was pointless,‟ he said.

„I wanted to know,‟ I told him.

„You won‟t learn anything like that. You‟ll just gel upset.‟

„Oh, so how will I learn anything, then? By listening to

you all the time?‟

„That‟s not what I‟m saying.‟

„Isn‟t it?‟

He didn‟t answer me back. He kept trudging through the

market streets, trying to look all tough and moody, but still

politely stepping out of the path of any old people coming

the other way. Cwej was never very good at being a bastard.

At least, not in the obvious kind of way.

But let‟s go back to Trafalgar Square. I won‟t go into any

more detail about the sphinx, or about the way it folded

itself up and left the square, although it‟s true that the statue

was never the same again, and the tourists must have

noticed something funny about the claw marks in the plinth.

Again, the papers kept quiet about that. Too busy dealing

with women who‟d seen flying cats in alleyways, I should

think.

94

It was too late to catch a tube, so me and Cwej ended up

walking back to the flat along Charing Cross Road. Behind

us, we could feel the TV hum of the bottle opening. Space

was twisting itself into a funnel again, letting Khiste walk

back to Simia KK98. We didn‟t bother looking back.

„D‟you think it‟s true?‟ I asked.

„Hmm?‟ said Cwej.

„What the sphinx said. About killing everything in the

bottle. If we can‟t sort things out.‟

(Note: we. How involved can you get?)

„Oh,‟ said Cwej. He didn‟t answer for a while. „Yeah.

Yeah, I suppose they‟ll do it. I mean, if there‟s something

loose in the operating system... I don‟t know. They might

want to wipe the whole system, just to be on the safe side.‟

He sounded like he was in shock, but let‟s not kid

ourselves. He probably just felt guilty. „So these things from

the vortex,‟ I tried. „Are they supposed to be dangerous?‟

Cwej nodded, and kicked an empty Tizer bottle into the

gutter. The breath was freezing in front of his face, so for a

moment I couldn‟t remember which planet we were supposed

to be on. „Like Khiste said. Lost property. Ships and people

and... everything. Some of them must have been warships

to start with, and they won‟t have got any weaker. Not after

all that time in the vortex. Not even if they‟ve had their

bodies taken away.‟

I didn‟t know how they were supposed to hurt us without

bodies, but I didn‟t argue. „So... can your people deal with

them, or what?‟

Then Cwej did the worst thing he could have done. He

shrugged.

„If they can‟t?‟ I asked.

Another shrug. Yes, there he was, Chris Cwej, shrugging

away the end of the world.

95/96

Flying again.

It‟s different this time. I‟m still standing at the front of the

dragon boat, and I‟m still letting the wind tear through my

hair, but the atmosphere‟s changed. Cwej has been quiet all

day, and we‟re not playing pirates.

I haven‟t taken any coke in nearly a week, not since the

night I met Cwej. Here on the prow (or is it the stern?) of the

»hip, I can‟t remember why I ever bothered. Perhaps, I tell

myself, this is the real reason why people use narcotics.

Because, deep down, they all know they‟re living in the

bottle, and they want to be able to peek at the things on the

outside. But then, even the people in Cwej‟s universe have

invented LSD. Everybody must want a better, brighter world

than the one they‟ve got. Can you blame them?

Then Cwej mumbles something, and I open my eyes, and

nee what‟s on the horizon. More of the alien fortresses,

sticking up through the ice. I get ready to wave at the

confused little machine people down below, but this time it

takes forever for the ground to roll past and the fortresses to

come into range. It takes me a long, long time to work out

why.

The fortresses are further away than they look, and they‟re

miles high. I mean that. Literally, miles. I start to make out

the details, and things suddenly turn scary. The buildings

are linked to each other, growing out of the ground in

clumps, with the walkways and ledges tying themselves in

knots, like teeth in a rotten set of gums, all stuck together

with the decay. Then I realize that there are even more of the

buildings than I thought, with the smaller, nearer ones

huddling in the shadows of the further, larger ones. All of

them are made out of the same kind of rock, so the same

streaks of rotting brown and black are running through all

the walls.

Now we‟re there, drifting into the capital city of Simi

KK98, floating over the alien suburbs. We fly between the

buildings, and everything suddenly gets darker, because

we‟re moving into the shadow of the bigger towers. The ship

lurches, dipping under one of the pathways that link the

buildings together, and I can see one of the locals crossing

the bridge in front of me, just a couple of yards from my face.

The man turns to watch us when we go by, out of a set of

home-grown compound eyes.

There are more of the men down below, with their skins

shining in the sunlight. They‟re crawling along the plat-

forms, or climbing the walls by digging their claws into the

rock and scuttling across the buildings like spiders. The

nose of the ship is down, and when we dive towards ground

level every single one of the locals stops to look up, just for

a moment.

Does all this sound like a dream? It‟s got that feel to it,

it‟s true. Cwej leans over, and tells me that his people built

this place as a retreat, a place where his employers could

hide in their millions if anything ever happened to the

homeworld. They would have used it, too, if they hadn‟t

found out that nowhere in the universe was safe from the

Gods. Cwej says we‟ve come here to talk to the best

scientists on the planet, to sort out the „problem‟ on Earth. I

just nod. I haven‟t got anything to say to him.

There are thousands of people here in the capital, all of

them agents of Cwej‟s employers. All of them, I‟m told,

came here of their own free will. The time travellers don‟t

believe in getting involved with other races, except on rare

occasions, but in a universe this size there are going to be a

lot of rare occasions. In fact, the city‟s so crowded that it

has to be policed, so the powers that be can make sure

everybody‟s following the same programme. They might all

be following one routine, but when you‟re dealing with

numbers this big, things start to go wrong. The „policemen‟

are the sphere-shaped machine people we can see floating

between the buildings, keeping track of all the insect people

down on the ground. Thinking, breathing cameras. Watching

everything.

Cwej tells me that this is the one place on Simia KK98

where he can feel at home.

97

Cwej used to be a policeman, before he was adopted by the

time travellers. I never saw anything in him that reminded

me of the policemen from „my‟ world, though. I can‟t even

imagine Cwej with a truncheon. He probably came from

a place where policemen actually got to carry space-age

stun guns and drive fast cars, rather than having to spend

their time filling in forms and sticking matchsticks under

prisoners‟ fingernails to get confessions.

So what was Cwej‟s mission in life? To serve his people, to

nerve the universe, or to serve the public trust? None of

them, I‟m sure. His real goal was to get his hands on as

much neat stuff as possible. That was how his employers

kept him happy, by giving him new toys to play with. Just

like the hippies in London/LONDON!, who always said they

wanted a nonmaterialistic society, but wouldn‟t be seen dead

without their gonks and lava lamps. Show Cwej a warship

that could tear up whole countries or kill off millions of

people, and he‟d just go „wow‟, and not ask any more

questions.

Cwej was the kid who never had any reason to grow up.

He even liked me to wear boots when we had sex, because

they reminded him of someone from a TV show he used to

watch when he was a teenager. I don‟t remember her name.

Just some outer-space villainess the fourteen-year-old Cwej

had developed a crush on. He‟s spent most of his adult life

fantasizing about being (playfully) tortured by her, which

was tough luck for him, because I couldn‟t stand going on

top.

98

Then there was Khiste. Khiste‟s motives were different,

although it took me a while to work that out. In the last

couple of days before the end, Khiste started to open up to

me a bit; or at least, he stopped snorting at me for long

enough to answer a few questions. He didn‟t have much of a

choice, really, bearing in mind the position we ended up in.

I looked at the fossil again. I couldn‟t imagine anything

wanting to look like that.

„This must have been a test,‟ Cwej went on. „That‟s why it

looks like a sphinx. The sphinx shape must be a basic

template, right? It‟s kind of the default setting for a new

body, inside this universe. Whatever made this, it must have

been human before it fell into the vortex. It was trying to

make its new body look like its old one. It didn‟t work,

though. It just ended up half-human and half-sphinx. It can‟t

have lived for long.‟

„It‟s millions of years old,‟ I repeated.

Cwej nodded. „If they manage to take over the system

completely, they can go anywhere in the bottle. Past, present,

whatever. If they all break through together, it‟s not just

going to be the end of the world. They‟ll take over the whole

of history inside the bottle. The fossil‟s only been here since

this morning, but it‟s millions of years old.‟

A shrug, then, it‟s the way these things work,‟ Cwej

concluded.

111

That was when the phrase „the end of the world‟ started to

mean something to me, I think. It wasn‟t some kind of far-off

apocalypse any more, like a nuclear holocaust you couldn‟t

really imagine properly, or even like that crisis in Cuba we

were all supposed to have been frightened by when I was

fourteen. I imagined looking out of the window in the flat,

and seeing sphinxes - or things that were wearing the bodies

of sphinxes, anyway - picking off the people on the streets of

London, and wrapping themselves around the tops of the

buildings.

Funnily enough, about a week later that‟s more or less

what I did see when I looked out of the living-room window,

But most of the old buildings were gone by then, and the

circumstances were a bit different.

112

There‟s one more thing I have to say, about the time me and

Cwej visited the capital city on Simia KK98. About what

happened when I was standing in front of the „tank‟, half

listening to Cwej talking about the prisoner from Dellah.

A couple of seconds after I‟d touched the surface of the

water, one of the naked people opened his eyes in front of

me. It was one of those moments when you know you have to

stop breathing, because if you don‟t then you‟ll just start

choking.

The clone didn‟t move. He stared at me through the water,

and I looked over my shoulder, to make sure the scientist

hadn‟t seen what had happened. He hadn‟t.

I held up a finger in front of the clone‟s face. The man

focused on it, not blinking, even though the water was

soaking right into his eyeballs. I tried moving my finger from

side to side, just to see what‟d happen, and the clone

followed it with his eyes. It didn‟t look like an automatic

reaction or anything. It looked like he was wondering why I

was doing it.

It‟s a picture I‟m having trouble putting out of my mind,

that‟s all. That face of his, all pale and sick-looking and

curious. Wherever he is now, if he hasn‟t already been

dissected by the sphinxes, I hope he‟s still curious. I hope he

can live through all the experiments, and just wonder why

they‟re doing it to him. Perhaps he might learn something

that way, from the experience of being a second-class person

caught up in the middle of another race‟s politics. Because

I‟m not sure I ever did.

113

I said I wasn‟t sure whether I‟d picked up any memories from

that liquid in the cave. Well, there‟s something I should

mention now, which I didn‟t mention before just in case it‟s

even less reliable than the rest of what I‟ve been telling you.

I remember a night we spent in Lady Diamond‟s shop, me

and Cal and a couple of others, having one of our „sessions‟

after the shop had closed and the lights had come on in the

street outside. I remember Lady bringing a Ouija board out

from one of the back rooms, and putting it in the middle of

the rug between the beanbags. I especially remember Cal

telling us that he wasn‟t going to join in with any game as

irresponsible as this one. He said at the time that, if there

really was any way of talking to the dead through the Ouija

board, then it‟d be downright rude to call up the ghosts of

people who were supposed to be resting in peace, just so you

could ask them who was going to win the next Grand

National. He‟d made that up on the spot, but he must have:

liked the sound of it, because he decided to pretend it was a

lifetime philosophy.

The rest of us put our hands on the little wooden wedge

which, according to my twenty-sixth-century Eeze-e-Matic

Wordfinder, is called a planchette. Lady told us all to

concentrate, to call on whatever spirits might have been

hanging around the astral plane with nothing better to do.

The planchette started moving straight away, of course,

because that‟s the way Ouija boards work. You can‟t get four

people to touch a small slippery thing without their

subconsciouses doing something to it.

We started with the easy questions, like „Will Christine‟

ever get her hair cut?‟ and „Will Dorian ever get to sleep with

a real girl?‟ Then, as we got more excited and our fingers

became used to the way the game worked, the messages!

started to come through.

The reason I wonder whether I picked the memory up from

the „tank‟, and added my own friends‟ faces to the picture

later, is this: I can remember every single letter the

planchette pointed to. It was as if I‟d soaked up the words

through my skin, and they‟d got themselves stuck in the

back of my head. I‟ll write down all the letters on the next

page, and you can figure out where to put the spaces

yourself.

114

MAKETHINGSOUTOFSINMANSONISASINNOCENTASHELOO

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115

Once you unscramble it, and try to filter out the bits that

were caused by our forcing the planchette across the board

to spell out stupid messages, the words say something that

worries me. They say that, even before Cwej turned up on

Earth, the ghosts from the vortex were already in the system.

Travelling backward and forward in time, looking for weak

points where they could break through to the surface. Cwej

once said that the reason his people chose 1970 was

because, apart from the Hammer Horror Jack the Ripper era,

it was the only time period in tune with the sphinxes‟ rituals.

But did we help make it that way, by getting the attention of

the vortex things with all our Ouija boards and pretend

rituals?

I suppose you can see why I like to think that the memory

only got put into my head while I was on Simia KK98. (By

the way, it‟s only just struck me: Dorian would have loved

those cloning tanks, wouldn‟t he? He spent most of his time

trying to tell everyone how dark and ruthless and terrible the

world was, even though nothing really bad had ever

happened to him in his life. I think he felt a bit embarrassed

about that. He could have had hours of fun splashing around

in the „tank‟, picking up all the bad memories he could ever

need, just so he could feel justified about being so sodding

miserable.)

116

That recurring dream comes back, about being stuck in the

old dark house with the stairways and the balconies. This

time, I‟m being followed. The family that lives in the house,

the in-bred bloodline of Summerfields, is chasing me up one

of the spiral staircases. I‟m moving too fast to be careful, fast

enough to cut myself open on the shadows, so there are

zigzags of blood on my face and splashes of red all over my

wedding dress. My family are going to tear me often if they

catch me, to make the bouquet out of my heart and throw it

into the air, to find out who‟s going to be next in line for the

slaughter. It‟s the only ritual they know.

When I get to the top of the stairs, Cwej is waiting for me

there. Cousin Cwej, dressed in his new wedding suit, with all

the jagged edges bursting out from under his skin. His best

man (namely Khiste) stands by his side with more potions at

the ready, to help Cwej change into his honeymoon body.

We‟re all family here.

I wake up in England on a freezing cold morning in

October, and Cwej isn‟t anywhere in the flat. He‟s probably

off on a mission somewhere outside the bottle. So I put on

my jeans and my shoes and my sweater, and I go out to score

some coke. Suddenly, Cwej‟s world just doesn‟t seem bright

enough or fast enough for me. Today, I‟d rather be sniffing

spilled nose-powder off the bathroom floor than having to act

like the Queen of Outer Space.

Space is like any other drug. There are highs and lows.

117-28

[These pages torn out.]

THIRD NOTEBOOK

[128 PAGES, 4 BLANK.]

NOTES ON REPRODUCTION

1

The scroll that Chris Cwej bought for me on Cygni 8.6, the

one that charts the history of the Summerfield name in the

‘real’ world, isn’t really parchment at all. It’s some kind of

computer, pulped down until it’s as flat as paper, just like

that copy of The Times with the talking columnists. If you

press the names on the family tree, little windows of

ink open up, and tell you more about the generations of

Summerfields.

Because of this, I know that Jonah Summerfield was born

in 1930, and died in an industrial accident in 1975. The

scroll says that he was skilled in all kinds of crafts, but that

his main line of work was in the military. I think what this

means is that he spent his life being pushed from one job to

another, and got called up for national service sometime in

the 50s. The family tree also tells me that Jonah was just

eighteen when he got his wife-to-be pregnant, and that the

boy-child they ended up with was also called Jonah.

Jonah Jnr was born in 1948, the same year as me. I know

Jonah Jnr must have been a child of his time, because when

he had a son of his own (in 1970, another big date in my

personal diary) he called the baby Valentine. After the lead

character in Stranger in a Strange Land, probably. You’d be

amazed how many people had the same idea in the late 60s.

When Jonah Summerfield Jnr called his first-born

Valentine, he was actually starting a long tradition of

Summerfields with stupid names. Valentine’s one male child

was called Benedict, born 1990, and I have no idea what

might make someone give their son a name like that. Maybe

there was a famous pop star called Benedict in the 1990s,

who knows?

2

It wasn’t hard, finding a decent coke supply in London 1970.

You just had to know which public toilets to hang around.

On 5 October, I got back to the flat after a happy afternoon’s

toilet-shopping and found a note from Cwej waiting for me

on the doorstep. Something had come up, the monitoring

station had spotted another problem, blah blah blah, and

he’d be back before nightfall unless he got killed or

something.

So, I wasn’t expecting to find anybody waiting in the

living room. But that’s what I got.

It was Khiste. He looked like a totally different kind of

killing machine, here in the light of the bottle. He sat

hunched up in the middle of the floor, his body too big and

bulky to squeeze into any of the bunks, with his little grey

face fixed on the TV set. Watching Eamonn Andrews

rounding up the stories on the Today programme.

He looked up at me when I walked in, and grunted. He

almost sounded friendly. Whatever kind of tension there’d

been between us on Simia KK98, there didn’t seem to be

much point to it here in London. Away from the battlefield

outside the bottle.

‘D’you want tea?’ I asked him.

He shook his head. ‘Don’t drink.’

‘Do you rust or something?’

I’d meant it as a joke. But Khiste looked at me like he

didn’t know how to answer.

‘I can drink,’ he said, and you could hear his lungs

crunching together inside his armour. ‘I just don’t.’

‘Don’t you miss it?’

Again, he looked like he didn’t know how much to say,

like he thought I was going to start taking the piss out of him

at any second. I wandered over to him, and squatted down on

the floor by his side, resting my backside on one of the

pillows from the bunk beds. I tried to look serious and

interested, so he’d know I wasn’t joking.

‘You can feel it,’ Khiste told me, in the end. ‘You can tell

what’s missing. You don’t get thirsty, but you know you’re

supposed to get thirsty. That’s what makes you want to

drink.’

I nodded. Still putting on the ‘serious’ face.

‘What’s it like?’ I said. ‘I mean, not being human any

more?’

So Khiste told me.

3

The family tree doesn’t say much about Benedict

Summerfield, which I think means that most of the records

he left behind are criminal ones. A pretty bad start, for the

first of the space-age Summerfields. If I’ve read between the

lines properly, then Benedict must have slithered from one

side of the world to the other, dealing in suspect merchandise

(drugs?) and getting off with as many women as he could on

the way. When one of those women gave birth to a boy called

Jason, in 2007, Benedict didn’t hang around. Somehow, the

kid ended up with his surname anyway.

Jason is the most boring Summerfield on record. He spent

his life indoors, living on welfare cheques and watching TV,

just marking time between the more interesting generations

on either side of him. He never got away from England, even

when civilization started to fall apart in the 2030s (it says

here). In fact, the most interesting thing about him is that,

when he somehow managed to breed, he called his child

Jubilation Constantine Summerfield, thus bringing back the

Summerfield tradition of stupid-sounding first names.

As things turned out, Jubilation Summerfield (2039-2106)

was the first of the family line to leave Earth full-time, setting

up a cosy little homestead on one of the outer planets with

his wife and three children. I imagine them looking like those

people in that painting, American Gothic. God-fearing farming

folk, standing out on the surface of Uranus or somewhere

with pitchforks and spacesuits. Twenty-first-century

puritans. Maybe that’s the kind of life the man was damned

to, when his dad called him Jubilation.

4

The first time I had sex with Cwej was on 30 September, the

same day he took me for my first ride on the dragon boat. I’d

say it was part of his technique, to get a woman breathless

and worn out before he made his move, but frankly I don’t

think Cwej was ever that aware of what he was doing.

The kissing was OK, although you could tell nobody had

really told Cwej how to use that big tongue properly. It was

after that, after I’d gone past the point of no return by taking

my T-shirt off, that he went all serious on me. Which made

me go all serious, as well.

‘Look,’ I said. I didn’t know exactly how to put this.

‘Look, I’m not on the pill, OK?’ (I’d never bothered seeing a

doctor about it, whatever Lady Diamond used to say about

the sexual revolution. I remember telling myself that I hardly

ever got into positions where I needed it, but who was I

kidding?)

Cwej just looked confused. ‘What pill?’ he said.

‘Contraceptive,’ I told him. ‘You know?’

‘Er.’ Cwej looked down, maybe because he was

embarrassed, maybe because he wanted to look at my tits.

Such as they were. ‘That’s... not a problem, OK? I don’t... I

mean, I can’t...’

‘Fine,’ I said. I just wanted to get the conversation over

and done with.

5

In 2076, Jubilation Summerfield made the mistake of calling

one of his children Benedict, after his grandfather. The

family tree shows that any Summerfield called Benedict is

bound to turn out bad, and Benedict II was one of the worst.

This time, the scroll tells the truth about Benedict’s career,

probably because the AIs who wrote it thought it’d sound

romantic and glamorous to admit that there was a psychic

assassin in the family. By the time Benedict was arrested (he

was only twenty-five!), he’d already murdered sixty-three

people, most of them politicians. ‘The Hyena’, they called

him. Maybe it was his laugh.

Oh, and he spawned two children before he was executed.

At his trial, the lawyers found out that Benedict had

messed around with his ID records at least twice, so for all I

know the last few generations of Summerfields before him

were all figments of his imagination, and there never was

such a person as Jonah. If so, then I know just how Jonah

might feel.

Once he’d been taken away from his parents’ ‘criminal

empire’, little Marshal Summerfield lived a long and happy

life. He stretched out his life with all kinds of futuristic

drugs, and had children left, right and centre. One of the last

of them was Dylan, born in 2165, when Marshal was sixty-

eight years old. The name Dylan makes me think of Bob

Dylan, so I like to imagine him as some kind of space

bohemian, travelling from planet to planet in his magic bus

and singing songs about how bad it was that Earth kept

being invaded by aliens. He didn’t leave many records behind

him, old Dylan.

6/7

‘Can I ask something personal?’ I asked Khiste, on 5

October.

Khiste spent a few seconds pretending to listen to Eamonn

Andrews rounding up the headlines. Then he nodded.

‘What about... the other thing?’ I said.

He turned his head to face me. I jiggled my eyebrows at

him, in a kind of nudge-nudge-wink-wink way.

‘Sex?’ he said.

I bit my lip. I had to, to stop myself laughing at the sound

the word made in his metal windpipe. ‘That’s what I was

getting at, yeah.’

Khiste shrugged a great big mechanical shrug. ‘You don’t

miss anything.’

‘You mean, you’ve lost your... thing.’ I nodded towards

his crotch, where the fabric of his suit was stretched to

bursting point over his armour. I deliberately didn’t use any

word that might have meant ‘penis’, just in case he hadn’t

had one even before the mutations had started. I didn’t know

anything about his species, remember.

‘Like the drink,’ said Khiste. He was talking slowly and

carefully, still looking out for traps in the conversation. ‘You

know you’re supposed to feel something. I’ve still got... the

anatomy.’

‘I can’t imagine it, that’s all. I mean, having a big part of

your life -’ yes, I spotted the innuendo as soon as I said it,

but I tried to keep talking ‘-just taken away like that. Yeah?’

Khiste snorted. I didn’t mind so much this time, because

he was snorting at life on the whole, not just at me. ‘Sex is all

about power structures,’ he told me. ‘We’re stronger without

them.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I said.

Khiste nodded towards the TV, where the credits were

rolling on Today. ‘Politicians. Corporate leaders. They do

whatever they think they have to. For power. For money.

For status. Why?’ I shrugged. ‘They want mates,’ Khiste

explained. ‘As many as possible. They know the best way of

acquiring them. Through power. Through influence.’

I wasn’t convinced. I didn’t feel like getting off with any

politicians, and I said so.

‘Not important,’ snapped Khiste. A bit too quickly, I

thought. ‘They pick up the programming in adolescence.

Power means mating power. They carry on using the same

techniques right through their lives. Whatever it costs. How-

ever many other lives it jeopardizes.’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘What you’re saying is, it’s the

women’s fault that the world’s so fucked up, because they

keep getting off with men like Richard Nixon? Is that it?’

‘Your war,’ Khiste noted. ‘Your Vietnam.’

‘It’s not my war -’

‘Not important. The war’s a territory challenge. The same

as any other animal territory challenge. The rules were

thought up by your ancestors, when they were still apes

in the forest. The challenges were just extensions of their

mating rituals. And that’s what your war is. A ritual. Driven

by the reproductive cycle.’

‘But you used to work for a big corporation,’ I pointed out.

‘And that corporation must have been run by people just like

the ones you say are -’

‘Not important,’ Khiste said, fixing his eyes on the TV

screen again, even though nothing interesting was happening

there. Here, I told myself, is one seriously repressed

individual. ‘You asked whether I felt... anything. That’s

all.’

‘I’m not sure I got an answer,’ I said.

Khiste took a deep breath, so the armour stretched across

his chest, and you could see the little plastic veins pulsing

under the skin. I suddenly got the urge to touch them, just to

see if they’d go pop. ‘I’m flexible,’ Khiste said. ‘I can still

send out sexual chemical signals, if I need to. It’s part of this

body’s programming. Like any other weapon.’

‘That’s really the way you see it?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Khiste.

‘So how does this weapon work, exactly?’ I asked.

8

Dylan Summerfield never got married, but one of his

space-hippie girlfriends had his child, Candice, in 2188. (I

don’t know whether she pronounced it ‘Can-deece’, like the

Americans do. I expect so, seeing as she worked in

television.) Candice is the only woman on the list of the

family line. When she got married, she made her husband

change his name to Summerfield. And it’s the name that’s

important on the scroll, not the genes.

(Why do we think names are so important, anyway?

According to the rules of sphinx magic, knowing the real

name of something is the first step towards having power

over it, which is maybe why Cwej’s employers never let

anyone call them by their names. I don’t know, I’m just

guessing.)

Candice was some kind of reporter for interplanetary TV,

whose career ended up on the rocks after she got too close to

the drugs cartel she was supposed to be investigating. ‘Too

close’ as in ‘close enough to snort the stuff herself, another

juicy story for the AIs, and one that kind of strikes a chord.

And in the year 2214, she was stupid enough to call her first

child Benedict, not learning from history at all.

This Benedict must have wanted to react against his

mother, because he grew up to be a policeman on a planet

called Vandor Secunda. The scroll doesn’t mention any

details, but he probably got ‘too close’ to his prey as well,

because he killed himself before he was thirty. He left behind

a son, another Marshal Summerfield, as well as a daughter,

who I’m mentioning only because her name was Christine,

the only Christine I’ve been able to find on the family tree. In

his suicide note, Benedict said that all his problems were his

mother’s fault, and that he wanted the young Marshal to go

to military college, where he could learn some proper

discipline.

It must have worked, seeing as someone called Marshal

Summerfield was the head of the Caprisi Military Academy

for most of the late twenty-third century. His son. Marshal

Summerfield II, carried on the tradition. So did his son.

Marshal III. In fact, by the time Marshal IV was born,

the Summerfields had built up their own little clique at

the Academy, the Wayfinder Order, which was apparently

famous for its right-wing views and kinky secret rituals.

It makes me think of Khiste, and his universal corporate

brotherhood.

Marshal IV, however, was a disappointment.

9

One day, just after I’d started sleeping with Cwej, I went

out to Boots and bought every self-testing kit I could find.

Not just pregnancy testing, but tests for infections, tests for

VD, tests for... anything, really. I knew I couldn’t go to

the GP. Cwej had told me not to, saying I might have picked

things up on Simia KK98 that’d just confuse the doctors on

Earth.

I wasn’t pregnant. I did four separate tests for that, keeping

the bathroom door locked while I waited for the results, just

in case Cwej came home from ‘work’ early. Cwej had said he

was infertile, but let’s be honest: men lie about that kind of

thing all the time, even men from other universes. And who

was to say what might have been inside me, even if I hadn’t

been fertilized? I still don’t know, to this day, whether any of

his employers’ poisons got into my system while we were

having sex. My womb could be full of the same stuff they

grow the clones in. If I ever have a baby (hah!), it’ll probably

be born wearing armour and quoting Shakespeare.

10

Marshal Summerfield IV (2318-62) wasn’t the big military

man his forefathers had been, and he died in disgrace, ‘of a

broken heart’ according to the family history. It was all

because of his sole child, Cathy/Cathal Summerfield, born

2344.

At sixteen, Cathy/Cathal announced that he/she was going

to become an androgyne, which was apparently all the rage

in those days. The records aren’t sure whether he/she was

Cathy or Cathal first, because by law all gender records were

changed when you had the operation, although I should

imagine he/she started out in life as a Cathy. If he/she had

been born a boy, he probably would have been called

Marshal.

As it happened, Cathy/Cathal met a bad end, after

hermaphrodites went out of fashion in the 2360s. He/she

made some quick money by selling his/her body to medical

science, which is why the next Summerfield in the chain was

born (and spent all his life) in a laboratory.

He was part of an experiment in super-fertility, a new way

of filling up some of the outer planets in Earth’s empire. As a

result, the experimental baby had a child of his own at the

age of two, in 2365, and died just afterwards. The name of

that doomed infant in the laboratory? Well, no prizes for

guessing. He was called Benedict.

11

I don’t know why I had sex with Khiste, exactly. Yes, it was a

stupid thing to do, under the circumstances. No arguments

there. Cwej was in the middle of a war, getting ready for

Armageddon. The last thing he needed to worry about was

that.

Maybe I wanted to prove that Khiste was wrong, about all

sex being mixed up with power politics. He didn’t really

have anything to gain from it, and neither did I. Then again,

for all I know I was a victim of his ‘weapons’, those signals

his shiny new body was supposed to be able to send out

whenever he wanted to attract a female victim. If he did turn

on the chemical charm, there in the flat... well, I don’t

suppose I’ll ever know whether it was deliberate, or just

some kind of urge that the poisons in his blood hadn’t

worked out of his system yet.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just too stupid to say no.

I don’t want to think about what it actually felt like, not in

detail. In a lot of ways, it was like the time I lost my virginity,

up against a wall in the spare room of somebody else’s flat,

with everything happening much, much too fast. Cal had

been all hair and muscle, more like a force of nature than a

human being. And Khiste was the same, only without the

hair, so smooth that my fingers kept squeaking and sliding

on his back. Beyond that, it’s just anatomy. Some of it

human, some of it not. Not worth talking about.

I made tea once it was all over. I remember standing in the

kitchen in my dressing gown, looking at my reflection in the

kettle. Hair choked up with sweat, little blotches of acne on

my forehead that I didn’t remember seeing before. Somehow,

it wasn’t the reflection I’d been expecting.

By the time the tea was ready, Khiste was in the living

room again, acting like nothing had happened. I asked him

whether he wanted any, whatever he’d said about not

drinking. I thought maybe there were other urges he

shouldn’t have had, but did. He just shook his head, though.

Cwej came home five minutes later. He was so busy

talking about the kind of day he’d had that he didn’t even

stop to ask why I was wearing the dressing gown.

12

Isaac Summerfield, who was born in 2365 as the child of a

two-year-old toddler, had a confused kind of life. Which isn’t

surprising, I suppose. The scroll tries to be polite, but I

get the impression he was a nervous, paranoid, messed-up

person, who spent most of his time being shunted from one

space-age housing project to another. I think I’ve got more

sympathy for him than for any other Summerfield.

When Isaac and his lover had a child, in 2389, Isaac

decided not to let the baby have a life anything like his, and

practically sold the baby into slavery, handing the child over

to the Earth military before the year was out. Isaac had

called the boy Marshal Summerfield V, probably in an

attempt to bring back his family’s glorious military past. But

Marshal V turned out to be a pretty mediocre soldier, who

ended up doing not much at all in the army’s civil service.

That might explain why the pendulum swung back again

for the next generation of Summerfields, and Marshal V’s

son was called Dylan, in the hope that a bohemian life might

suit the boy better than a military one. But it didn’t work,

because in 2455 Dylan’s children were taken away from him,

when it turned out that Dylan had been sleeping around with

nonhumans (something you absolutely weren’t allowed to do

in the twenty-fifth century, for some reason). Whether any

alien blood got into the Summerfield line at that point, the

family tree doesn’t say.

13

One day, I woke up in one of the guest rooms of the fortress.

It took me a while to get a grip on the rock walls and the

army-style bed sheets, to work out which world I’d ended up

in the night before. Cwej was already awake, but still naked

apart from his Daffy Duck shorts. He was sitting up in bed

next to me, staring at the doorway.

Khiste was standing there, filling up most of the frame. I

pulled the sheets over my body anyway.

Khiste looked at me, then at Cwej. For a while, he didn’t

say anything. I wondered if something had snapped inside

him, if the wrinkly human parts of his body had remembered

how to be jealous. If he’d come here looking for a fight.

But what he said was, ‘It’s started.’

I looked at Cwej. Cwej looked blank.

‘The ghosts,’ Khiste told us. ‘They’ve worked out how to

use the operating system. They’ve broken through. They’ve

got London.’

14

There’s something about the Summerfield line that makes

the children want to be soldiers, maybe something that

started back in the 1950s, when Jonah was called up for

national service. Dylan’s son eventually took up the old

family trade, and ended up as an officer in the space navy (or

whatever it’s called), winning medals at all kinds of battles

with silly-sounding names. Maybe by coincidence, his name

was Jonah, too. And his son, another Isaac, kept up the

tradition of recycling the same names over the generations.

This Isaac Summerfield became an admiral, even higher up

the ladder than his father. The records say Isaac died in

combat in 2543, although they also say he was still in active

service as of 2595, so the AIs must have messed something

up somewhere.

The important thing is that his daughter was called

Bernice. Not having the same fighting spirit as the boy

Summerfields, Bernice ran away from the military and got

herself a life as an academic, specializing in xenoarchaeology

(something about aliens... the curse of Dylan Summerfield?)

and Martian history. However, this didn’t do her much good

when, in 2596, the planet she lived on was eaten up by the

Gods.

You see? With one act of unplanned procreation, Jonah

Summerfield (1930-75) set off this whole chain of events,

and cut a Summerfield-shaped wedge right through the

middle of history. No wonder Khiste was so hung up about

sex: just look at the damage it can do.

It’s a bloodline that never existed on the Earth where I was

made. A bloodline I’m not connected to in any way, shape or

form. So why do I feel so attached to it? And why do I

feel this urge to go looking for the remains of Bernice

Summerfield?

NOTES ON THE HORROR

15

It’s funny. I’m lying on a deluxe, extra-padded, two-

person, snuggle-up sleeping bag as I write this, so I can’t

feel the rubble underneath me while I work. I’ve been

eating a month-old packet of biscuits as well, and I’ve just

finished brushing the crumbs away. The funny thing is, I

didn’t just brush the crumbs on to the other side of the

‘bed’, the way I usually do. Somehow, I’m still expecting

somebody else to be sleeping there. It’s like I’m waiting for

Cwej to come back at any minute, as if the dent he’s made

in my life is so big that I can’t believe the hole’s not going

to be filled in again.

I’m running out of supplies, as well. I’m out of toilet paper

already, because it’s just not the kind of thing I stopped to

think about when I planned this expedition. This morning

I had to start ripping sheets out of the back of the last

notebook. If any future historians do get to read this, they’ll

probably think the pages were taken out to protect some

terrible secret or other. How exciting.

There won’t be any secrets left, soon. Not now we’re

getting close to the end of the story.

16/17

The three of us were hurrying down one of the spiral

passageways inside the fortress, down towards the room

where the bottle was kept. Cwej was dressing himself while

he ran, doing up the buttons on his suit, hopping on one leg

when he tied his shoelaces.

‘How many of them are there?’ Cwej asked, as he did up

the zip on his trousers.

‘How many of what?’ said Khiste.

‘The vortex things. On Earth. How many are there?’

‘One,’ Khiste told him.

Cwej looked disappointed, like he thought he wasn’t going

to get the big fight he’d been expecting. ‘I thought you

meant... you know. There’d been an invasion.’

Khiste sighed. It sounded like Venetian blinds rattling. He

wasn’t looking back at us, and I wondered if it was because

he didn’t want to look at me, if maybe he was still brooding

about what had happened at the flat.

‘The things from the vortex are in the operating system,’

Khiste said, going over things from the beginning, as if we

were too stupid to remember the details. ‘Ever since we let

them into the bottle, they’ve been trying to build themselves

new bodies there. But they’ve been in the vortex as long as

anyone can remember. They’ve been growing. Human bodies

aren’t strong enough to hold them any more.’

Cwej finished doing up buttons and things, and did his

best to look dignified. ‘So?’

‘They’ve changed their strategy,’ said Khiste. ‘They’ve

built themselves one bioform. One body that can hold all of

them. And now it’s arrived. On Earth.’

‘So all we have to do is kill this one big baddie, and the

problem’s solved?’

Khiste stopped in front of us, blocking the doorway of the

bottle room. He turned, and fixed his eyes on Cwej, still

ignoring me completely. I saw Cwej jump. Khiste had locked

his pincer-fingers around Cwej’s wrist.

‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ Khiste hissed. You could

see the contempt in those little blue eyes of his, the

frustration of knowing he was the only one taking things

seriously. ‘The bioform. It’s everything. Everything that’s been

lost in the vortex over the years. All the people, all the souls,

all the machines. It’s all of them at once.’

‘Er,’ said Cwej. ‘So, it’s big, is it?’

Khiste didn’t answer. He let go of Cwej’s wrist, and stomped

into the room, probably snorting to himself under his breath.

18

I haven’t talked much about the way the bottle looked from

the outside. The first time you saw it, you could see all the

stars twinkling away behind the glass, all the galaxies

tumbling away from each other in what Khiste used to call

the Red Shift. But the view changed if you kept watching, as

if the bottle knew it was being looked at. Stare at one galaxy

for long enough, and that galaxy would fill the bottle. Stare at

one star, and you’d see its whole solar system... and so on

and so on, until you could see any room in any building in

any street on any planet. Somehow, I always ended up spying

on the people I’d known back in London, before Cwej had

taken me away from them. Isn’t that petty? A whole universe

to explore, and all I used the bottle for was to watch Cal

feeding LSD to whatever women he was trying to get off

with, or to pull faces at the blonde girl with the pale white

legs who’d taken my place on Lady Diamond’s beanbags.

On the day the things (thing?) from the vortex broke

through, the bottle wasn’t working properly. Every time

Cwej tried to look at London, the glass just filled up with

black. Probably not a good omen. Khiste told him that

something was blotting out his employers’ monitoring

systems as well, so nobody really knew what was happening

down on Earth, except for the fact that it was big and nasty.

Khiste had already scrambled the troops at the fortress,

and the plan was to send them through as soon as we’d

worked out what kind of threat the men were up against. I

suppose that meant Cwej was a kind of guinea pig, and the

soldiers’ tactics would depend on the way the monster killed

him, but at the time he must have thought he’d been chosen

to do one-on-one battle with the thing just because of his

prowess in combat. Poor, deluded, romantic Cwej. And as for

myself… well, nobody even bothered trying to stop me when I

followed him into the bottle.

Could we do it, though? Could we stop the Horror in its

tracks, and prevent the imminent end of the world?

Well, what do you think?

19

And on Earth?

Across the world, news agencies were being told about the

things happening in London, but not doing anything about it

in case the story turned out to be (a) a hoax or (b) not

important to anyone outside Britain. In the northern parts of

the UK, from Scotland to Birmingham, the regional TV

stations waited for the next gap in the programmes before

they told the viewers that something big was going on. South

of Birmingham, in the places where London was supposed to

matter, shows were actually interrupted to make way for

the bulletins. The live racing programmes were taken off

the air, and the screens were filled with confused-looking

newsreaders instead, who officially announced that nobody

really knew what was happening.

In London itself, there weren’t any news flashes at all. The

normal TV stations were blanked out as soon as the thing

from the vortex turned up in the city. The thing was a kind of

hole in the bottle, a living, thinking gap between the world

on the inside and the world on the outside (and don’t ask me

how the physics of this worked, by the way, because I don’t

know and I don’t care). When the hole opened up, the two

worlds suddenly found themselves rubbing up against each

other, and all sorts of signals leaked into 1970 from the

‘real’ universe. Across the capital, TV sets were picking up

thousands of different channels, all of them broadcasting

live from the twenty-sixth century. So the viewers must

have found out the horrible truth: that six hundred years in

the future, sitcoms wouldn’t have changed one little bit.

Meanwhile, people who’d tuned in to Radio One just to hear

how Desmond Dekker was doing in the hit parade ended up

turning into their parents, as they listened to the kind of

music their descendants might make - if they’d been allowed

to have descendants, anyway - and said to themselves: What

is this rubbish?

20/21

And on Cwej’s homeworld?

They had a computer there, which Cwej’s employers used

to keep track of everything they’d ever done (because, if you

can move around in time, you’ve got to have some way of

keeping everything in the right order). Cwej always said that,

whenever one of his employers died, his or her mind would

be sucked up into the machinery, so the computer could

learn more about the universe and make better guesses

about the future. In fact, the computer was so smart that

some people thought it controlled its users, not the other way

round. Some of the rumours said the computer would have

existed even without Cwej’s employers, and that the machine

had invented the time travellers itself, just so it could be sure

that it’d be built - in which case, the computer must have

been a lot like one of the Gods, but never mind that now.

This computer had things programmed into it, special

defences, which would be set off whenever it spotted any-

thing going wrong with the universe. So, as soon as it noticed

that the vortex thing had turned up on Earth inside the

bottle, it sent signals to other time-traveller stations around

the universe, getting Cwej’s people ready for the fight

wherever they happened to be.

Halfway across the galaxy, there was a whole planet that

Cwej’s employers used as a prison. They’d snatched up some

of the universe’s most dangerous criminals, and trapped

them in blocks of ice, just like in Adam Adamant. How this

fitted in with their policy of nonintervention, I don’t know -

maybe they just put away all the master criminals who

looked like they were close to inventing time travel them-

selves - but, whatever the truth, one of the signals the

computer sent out was aimed right at this prison planet.

Through the whole of the prison, the ice started to melt, and

the prisoners suddenly found themselves free after all those

years in cold storage.

They didn’t have much time to enjoy it, though. As soon

as they’d thawed out, the warders of the prison stepped in

and started to operate on the captives, injecting them with

God knows what poisons and bolting on God knows what

extra bits and pieces. They were being turned into weapons,

their personalities cut out with knives and replaced with

the time travellers’ own programming. All that criminal

talent was being reapplied. At the end of the day, thousands

and thousands of living, breathing machines were sent out

from the prison planet, all of them capable of thinking up

devious new improvements for themselves. Weapons that

would evolve and grow over time, but always follow Cwej’s

employers.

Of course, Cwej’s employers could have done this years

ago, but they’d thought it was inhumane. With their plans for

the future of the bottle going so badly wrong, though, the

computer on the homeworld must have thought it was time

for action. Several hundred of the people-weapons headed

through space towards Simia KK98, ready to move into the

bottle if things got any worse there, or to attack the sphinxes

if the Kings of Space thought the treaty had been broken.

Some of this is based on what I was told, after it was all

over. But it’s mostly just creative writing. Which doesn’t

mean it’s any less true than the rest of the book.

22

While all this was happening, me and Cwej were arriving

back at the flat and meeting the control sphinx, who was

squatting in the corner of Cwej’s spare room. The sphinx had

folded itself into a smaller space than normal. Its head was

tilted at a funny angle on the end of its neck.

‘Error message: this environment has become corrupted,’

it said, when we stepped out of the passage from the ‘real’

world.

‘We know,’ Cwej told it.

23/24

We’d left a couple of bags of shopping in the hall the day

before, and Cwej scooped a banana out of one of them as we

galloped out of the flat. He peeled and ate it while we hopped

down the stairs towards ground level, like he thought it’d be

dangerous to come face to face with the monster on an empty

stomach. At any other time, I would have laughed. It’s not

possible for a human being to keep his dignity while he’s

eating a banana. Nothing reminds you of your monkey genes

faster than that.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked him. We’d already reached

the bottom of the stairs by then, and we were hurrying across

the foyer of the building, past the broken lifts and the corners

where the tramps used to sleep. The way I saw it, we had no

way of knowing where the vortex thing was. I imagined

Cwej driving through the streets of London in his rented car,

trying to follow the sound of screaming bystanders.

‘Mmf,’ said Cwej, through a mouthful of banana. ‘Khiste

said it was in London. It’s probably noticed all the holes

we’ve been making around here. This was probably the

weakest point for a breakthrough.’

‘You mean, it’s our fault it’s here.’

‘Mmf,’ Cwej agreed. ‘So it can’t be far away.’

He pushed open the big glass doors of the foyer, and

stepped out into the side street that ran along the side of the

building. It was a good place to hang out, if you were a

mugger or a graffiti artist. There was nobody in the side

street when we got there, though.

Cwej looked up. The sky was dark, and the stars were

brighter than usual, which I thought was lucky, because the

street lighting hadn’t come on for some reason. The side

street led to a wider road a few yards away, and every so

often somebody would run past the end of the street, not

even glancing at us when they went by. They looked like

people trying to get out of the rain. There wasn’t any

screaming, that I can remember, although I could hear doors

and windows slamming all over the city, and car horns

blaring at each other as the drivers tried to get as far away

from the area as possible.

Cwej headed forward, towards the main street. He kept his

eyes fixed on the sky, and I stayed behind him, not wanting

to break his concentration, whatever it was he was

concentrating on. By the time we got to the street ourselves,

the place was deserted. There were cars parked on the

pavements, but none moving along the road. In the light from

the stars, I could see faces pushed against the windows of

the buildings, curtains and blinds rustling inside all the

houses, a man with a moustache peering out from behind the

shutters of a newsagent’s on the corner. There was noise in

the distance, cars and swearing pedestrians, but everything

was quiet here. We were the only human beings stupid

enough to be out in the open.

Eventually, Cwej came to a stop in the middle of the road.

Still looking up, and clutching the bottom half of his banana.

He stood like that for a while, and I could hear the sound of

his breathing, even over the background noise.

‘So,’ I said, eventually. ‘Where is it?’

Cwej didn’t look down, but I could see his eyebrows

twitching.

‘You mean you can’t see it?’ he said.

That worried me. He was watching the sky, but I hadn’t

seen anything interesting up there. Although, having said

that...

Having said that, there was something wrong with the

stars. Even apart from the fact that they were brighter than

they should have been, for London in October. They were

moving, but only very slightly, wobbling from side to side

while I watched. You had to really squint at them to see it. In

fact, it looked like the space around the stars was stretching,

or maybe even breathing, moving in and out and in and out

and...

‘I don’t get it,’ I said.

‘Have you checked your watch?’ said Cwej.

25

Cwej had given me the watch himself. Standard equipment,

he’d said. It looked like an ordinary wristwatch, without even

a brand name to make it stand out, but somehow it always

seemed to know what planet I was on and which universe I

was in. It moved its hands around to suit local time, some-

times even changing the numbers on its face for planets that

didn’t have twenty-four-hour days. To begin with, I thought

this might just have been a side effect of time travel, for

watches to do strange things to themselves when you moved

between time zones. But I don’t suppose that makes sense,

does it? It’s one of those old SF fairy tales. Clocks don’t melt

or start going backward if you go through a time warp. The

universe can’t tell the difference between a timepiece and any

other lump of metal (at least, not unless the timepiece has

been specially built by Cwej’s employers), so why should it

change the rules just to make the clocks go peculiar?

‘Twenty past three, I’ve got,’ I said.

‘In the afternoon,’ Cwej added.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

Then I looked up again, at the night sky.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Right.’

I wondered if that was what had scared the locals, the fact

that the sun had suddenly gone out. But they were English,

and they would have just put a thing like that down to bad

weather. It was only when I saw the light, a huge yellow

triangle of it opening up in the sky somewhere over Russell

Square, that I figured it out.

26/27

That thing over our heads, the big black space full of stars -

it wasn’t the sky. The sky was as bright as ever, lit up by the

usual off-yellow London sunshine. The darkness was some-

thing else, something that had come between the ground and

the sky, and blotted out the sun for as far as the eye could

see.

I told you, didn’t I? The body the vortex things had built

for themselves wasn’t really a body at all. It was a non-body,

I suppose. A hole. A gap in the universe in the shape of a

living thing. And through that hole we could see the universe

outside the bottle. The stars were inside the Horror - and, no,

I can’t think of a better name for it than the Horror and, yes,

I’m going to insist on using a capital H - and we were

standing right in the shadow of its stomach. I didn’t realize it

until the light spread out over Soho, and I saw what shape

the sunshine was. The light was shining down through the

crack between the Horror’s wing and the Horror’s body.

I think I only really got my head around it when the thing

reared up, and looked down at us. Can you imagine that?

The whole of space, rearing up over you. On Earth, there

used to be people who had a fear of open spaces, a fear of

being out under the sky, and I think the Horror was the thing

they were always secretly waiting for. When the night moved,

and flapped its wings, there was a wave of noise across the

city. The car horns got louder, as if the people had just been

reminded of why they’d been scared shitless in the first

place.

It was inside the operating system, that was what Cwej had

said. I suppose he meant that the things from the vortex had

crept inside the rituals, the laws the sphinxes had used to

make bodies for themselves. Like the archaeopteryx man

we’d found in the quarry. The shape of the sphinx was the

template for anything that wanted to build itself skin and

bones inside the bottle. So that’s what the Horror looked like,

when it finally turned up on Earth. A sphinx. A sphinx so

big, you could make out only a few details at a time. I

remember thinking, before I’d really understood what was

happening: It’s wearing the sky. Wearing the sky, the same

way the sphinx in Trafalgar Square had worn one of Nelson’s

lions.

The light spread across the neighbourhood, while we just

stood there and gawped. The Horror was shifting its attention

from one part of the city to another. We could see the length

of its neck, a huge black stripe over our heads, speckled with

the stars of the twenty-sixth century. When we’d arrived,

we’d been in the shadow of its body, and its wings had

covered the whole of central London. Now it was looking

right down at us. Whether it was just taking in Soho as a

whole, or whether it knew we didn’t belong there, I don’t

suppose I’ll ever know for sure.

28

Another thing I’ll never know for sure is the death toll. There

were plenty of reports, in the days afterwards, but the TV and

newspaper people were so confused by the whole thing

that none of the figures sounded believable. Wherever you

looked, the total had a different number of noughts on the

end.

I sometimes wonder how many people I remember were

mauled to death by the Horror. When I ask myself that

question, I imagine Lady Diamond’s shop, ripped in half by

the fake sky. I imagine all the bodies in the wreckage. Lady

Diamond, finding out for herself what was on the other side

of the Veil of Anubis, or whatever afterlife she believed in

that week. Dorian, with his face frozen in mid-sentence, like

he’d been reading out a poem to mark his own passing when

the Horror had finally got to him. That skinny blonde girl,

torn to shreds, and serves her right too. The bitch.

Cal. Dead in the wreckage.

These are the things I imagine, but I know none of them

are true. Even if the Horror did take them all, there wouldn’t

have been any bodies left. There wouldn’t have been any-

thing. That was the way the Horror worked.

29

At the time? At the time, I didn’t even think about Cal, or

Lady, or the state of the neighbourhood. I remember staring

up at the neck of the Horror, and thinking: This is the end,

however you want to look at it. Even if the sky didn’t fall in

and take us both, I think that was the moment when I knew

Earth was finished. Earth as I knew it, anyway.

Khiste, like the rest of Cwej’s people, didn’t give a damn

whether the natives of the bottle knew about the aliens or

not. Cwej had done his best to keep his presence on Earth a

secret, to make it easier for him to move around, but

everything changed on the day the Horror came. Everybody

in London, and soon everybody in the world, would get a

chance to see the universe outside the bottle. From that point

on, the Earth of 1970 was mixed up in the politics of the

places outside, just like I was.

All I could think about, when I saw the Horror start to drag

its claws across the city, was that Quatermass movie where

the Devil turns out to be a Martian and tears up half of

London at the end. Britain made a lot of movies like that, in

the gap between World War Two and the end of the world. I

must have watched London meet the apocalypse a dozen

times before it actually happened. As if we somehow knew

the Horror was on its way, and thought we could make it go

easy on us by putting it in the movies.

30

Whoever you are, whatever pretend world you live in: go out

now, or as soon as it gets dark, and lie on your back with

your face turned up to the stars. (No, I’m serious. Go out and

do it.) Try to imagine that you’re not really looking at empty

space at all. Try to imagine that you’re looking at one single

wing, stretched across the sky, blotting out the daylight. Now

try to imagine that there’s a layer of glass on the other side of

the wing, with a whole different sky behind it. Try to hold

that picture in your head for a moment. The size of the

Horror. The tinyness of the universe, compared with what’s

outside.

Now try to keep that picture in your head, so you know

you’ll never be able to get rid of it. It doesn’t matter where

you go or what you do, it’ll always be there. It’ll always be

with you.

Good. I just wanted you to know what my whole life feels

like. That’s all.

NOTES ON GETTING OUT WHILE

WE COULD

31

Somehow, we ended up in Leicester Square. I remember

running, although I don’t remember running that far. The

streets were pretty much deserted on the way, as though the

people of London thought they’d be safe if they put the

chains on their doors and tried to watch things on TV.

Having said that, there were a couple of policemen hanging

around on the edge of Soho. They waved at us a lot, to tell us

which roads they thought it was safe to run down. Like it

made any difference.

There were people in Leicester Square Gardens, though.

About two dozen of them, crowded around the statue of

Shakespeare, maybe hoping he’d be able to save them from

the apocalypse with his witty sixteenth-century wordplay.

You couldn’t see the shape of the Horror at all from the

gardens. The office blocks and cinemas made a tight square

of sky overhead, and if you didn’t know better you would’ve

just thought it was night-time.

I think that was the reason Cwej went to the gardens. He

was looking for a place where he could focus on the Horror

properly, where he felt like he was standing right under its

heart. I’d say it was all part of the ritual, but what do I know?

He might just have been panicking. All I know for sure is that

he made straight for the statue.

32

Shakespeare was standing on top of a fountain, right in the

middle of the gardens. There was a pathway of paving stones

leading from the gates to the fountain, cutting the lawn in

half, and when Cwej moved along that pathway the crowd

actually parted for him. The people shushed themselves quiet

when he walked past. Did they know, do you think? Was the

world suddenly noticing that he was different, and that he

knew something everybody else didn’t? Maybe. Or maybe I

just want to remember it like that.

The people lined up in two neat rows on either side the

pathway, just like the armoured men at the signing of the

treaty. Not wanting to step on the grass even in the face of

the end of the world. When Cwej reached the statue, and

stopped right in front of the THERE IS NO DARKNESS BUT

IGNORANCE inscription (oh, the irony), there was total hush.

As if the crowds were expecting him to be able to shoo the

Horror away.

Even so, his voice was so quiet that I think I was the only

one who heard him. He looked up at the stars again, and

said: ‘You can hear me, can’t you?’

33

I can’t remember how long it took me to notice what was

happening to the statue. I know I heard someone shrieking in

Japanese, and suddenly there was a cracking noise, either

like cracking ice or cracking bones. Shakespeare had been

leaning against a big stone desk on top of his plinth, but now

one of his elbows was tearing itself away from the desktop.

I’d say Shakespeare was coming to life, but it wouldn’t be

true. The thing that was inside him didn’t care enough

about human beings to bother making the limbs move in a

believable way, or to use the face muscles properly. As a

kind of final insult to the English, Shakespeare shrugged

his shoulders, and two huge stone wings exploded out of

his back. The body kept twisting, until the head - which

the thing inside the statue obviously didn’t think was very

important - just rolled off the neck, and shattered against the

ground.

With one movement, the statue leapt down off its plinth

and into the fountain. I remember seeing its legs bending and

flexing in lots of different places, the same way spiders’ legs

move. One of Shakespeare’s arms dropped off when his feet

cracked against the marble.

I think Cwej must have taken a few steps back when it

happened. I know I did.

‘Sphinx?’ said Cwej. ‘Is that you?’

The other people around the statue just scattered. They

scrambled off in all directions, running for cover and

throwing themselves over the railings of the gardens. Most of

them stopped when they reached the edges of the square, to

turn back and watch, wanting to know what was going on

without getting involved. You could see faces peering out

from the doorways of the cinemas, ready to duck inside if

things got too nasty.

34/35

But me and Cwej just stood there, waiting for the sphinx to

get its act together. The headless thing flapped its wings, like

it was getting a feel for the local gravity. When it spoke, its

voice was as hard as its body, and you could almost hear the

cracks in it.

‘Statement: this unit is now slaved to the presence which

controls the operating system,’ the sphinx said, not out of

any particular orifice.

Cwej took another step back, and trod on my foot. ‘It’s

getting its orders from that,’ he told me, under his breath. By

‘that’, he meant the Horror. He didn’t bother pointing at it.

‘Statement,’ said the sphinx, and for the first time ever

there was a kind of feeling in its voice. It sounded... well,

cross, really. ‘Angry’ is too strong a word. ‘Statement.

Statement…’

It sounded like it had forgotten what it was going to say. It

turned on its spider legs, with its wings still twitching,

looking around the square even though it didn’t have any

eyes. Finally, it got a grip on itself.

‘Statement: this unit... I... we... are here. Wait. The

personality of this unit will be erased.’ The sphinx started to

straighten up when it said this, so I suppose it had

remembered how to walk around in a human body. Even a

headless one. ‘There. Now. Talk? You wanted to. To me. Yes?’

I wasn’t looking at Cwej’s face. Which is a pity, because I

would have liked to see how he dealt with that kind of

shock.

‘It’s... you?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said the Horror. ‘We talk. Talk. This is what you

wanted. So.’

There was a long, long silence. Cwej didn’t seem to know

where to start. In the end, I cleared my throat.

‘Ask it why it’s doing this,’ I mumbled. ‘Ask it why it’s

been killing people.’

Cwej must have thought it was a good question, although

he rephrased it a bit, just to make it his.

‘What do you want?’ he asked the Horror.

‘Live,’ said the Horror, through its big stone lungs. ‘To be.

To exist. For ever, spent nowhere. Let me out? Out now. Yes?

Here, will live again. This new body. This new life.’

It took us a while to realize that it had finished. Cwej was

shaking his head. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘My people... we

need this planet. It’s important to us. You don’t understand.’

‘I,’ said the sphinx. ‘I. I was your people. Some of me were

your people. Cracks between times, trapped in. Have been

your people, in the past. No longer care. Will tear. Will kill.

Hard to talk, yes. So long since using language. Wait. I-do-

not-care. So. I-will-live-in-this-world. I-will-kill-all-other-life-

here. Your-plans-are-not-important-to-me. Is true?’

Cwej kept shaking his head, and I wouldn’t have been

surprised if it had dropped clean off, just like Shakespeare’s.

‘That doesn’t make sense. You said you wanted a new body.

A new life. Well, fair enough, but... not here. And why do

you want to kill everything else, anyway? I mean, why

bother?’

I’m sure I saw the statue puff up its chest, like it was

getting ready to breathe fire. ‘Vortex,’ the Horror told us.

‘Pain. Nothing. Empty for ever. Left to die, left to live for

ever, no time at all. Nothing to hold me... nothing to hold

us together. Nothing but spite. We-were-left-to-die. No life.

No respite. Why kill? Why not?’

‘Spite?’ said Cwej. ‘Is that it? You’re just angry, because

you’ve been stuck in the vortex all this time?’

‘No,’ said the Horror. ‘Vortex is angry. Nothing else there.

I am-not-angry. This body is anger. Difference. Will kill. This-

body-will-kill. Because. Because we... because I want to.’

‘No,’ said Cwej. He took a step forward, towards the

statue, and I don’t think I would have stopped him even if I

could have made myself move. You could tell, you could just

tell, that he was getting all kinds of mantras ready inside his

head.

36

A few days before the Horror had turned up, Cwej had held a

dinner party at his flat. It was the first time I saw the soldiers

turn up on Earth en masse. I can’t forget the way they looked

when they stepped out of the spare room and into the hall,

the way they turned their heads, like they were confused,

couldn’t work out why this universe looked so different from

the one they were used to. (The same way you can tell the

difference between a film made by the BBC and a film made

in Hollywood, just by the difference in the film stock,

but you can’t ever describe to anyone what that difference

actually is.)

I say ‘dinner party’, although nobody wanted to eat any-

thing. Really, it was more like a poetry recital. Cwej had

invited the soldiers to Earth because he wanted them to see

the way Earth worked, and learn how to use the rituals

inside the bottle. I guessed the men were probably the ones

who were going to be part of the survival team, once the

crisis was over.

So the aliens all sat around the table Cwej had set up in

the living room, finding out about the mantras that could

keep the sphinxes away. Sometimes the men would all say

their mantras together, and things would happen. Objects

would move across the table, or the corners of the living room

would end up being in slightly different places. The way

Cwej explained it, the words you said didn’t really matter, as

long as they helped you focus. Some of the guests at the

table started using poems and songs from the planets where

they’d been born, and some of them - the ones who’d become

most like machines, I suppose - didn’t even bother with

words.

They screeched out a kind of code instead, which was

probably quite pretty if you could slow it down and hear the

maths properly.

By that time, I had a mantra of my own. It was something

I’d picked up while Cwej had been giving me the guided tour

of the twenty-sixth century, and I’m not sure exactly where

I’d heard it, so for all I know it was just a nursery-rhyme

from the future. But it seemed to befit me, somehow. It went:

We make things out of sin, with blood and human skin;

We make things out of dust, so we can smash them up.

I’m mentioning this now, because it’s going to be important

later on. All right?

37

But a few days later, I couldn’t imagine any mantra being

good enough to make the Horror go away. And I was right, as

it turned out.

‘I can’t let you do this,’ Cwej told the Horror in Leicester

Square. He sounded angry, and I hoped to God he wasn’t

posing just because I was there. ‘Whatever it is you think you

want out of this place, it’s not going to happen, OK? You

know what my people can do. If you want to hurt Earth,

you’re going to have to go through us first.’

The statue seemed to think about that for a while. It cocked

its neck to one side, looking sorry that it didn’t have a head

any more.

‘Fair,’ the Horror told Cwej.

38

Later on, once they’d sorted through the wreckage, the local

authorities told everyone that there’d been earth tremors

across central London. That some kind of seismic trouble

had opened up the ground there. It wasn’t true, though. If

anybody had bothered to measure the whole city from side to

side, they would’ve found out that London had grown a little

bit wider than it had been. The Horror had made more space

inside the capital, and all the stuff that was already there

had been shifted aside to make way for it.

I didn’t know this at the time, obviously. I remember

feeling the ground moving under my feet. I remember falling,

cutting my knees on the paving stones, grabbing hold of

one of the metal benches near the fountain. Then I looked

up, and saw that the bench had been cut in two. One half

was there, between my fingers, but the rest was on the other

side of a gulf, a crack in the ground that had split Leicester

Square Gardens right down the middle. The air was rushing

in to fill the space, dragging everything that wasn’t bolted

down into the gap. The screaming had started again on the

edges of the square, and the spectators were being pulled off

their feet by the air currents.

I didn’t look up at Cwej, not at first. I just expected him to

be there, like I always expected him to be there. I remember

reaching for him, stretching my hand out towards the spot

where I’d seen him last...

But of course that spot was right on the edge of the gulf.

The fountain had been cut in half, just like the bench had.

There was no sign of the statue, or the bits of the broken

head. And there was no sign of Cwej.

I remember rolling on to my back, letting go of the bench.

I was staring up at the sky, seeing the stars breathing in and

out over my head, the big black body of the Horror rolling

and rippling and... laughing? The people were still screaming,

and one of them was screaming right into my ear, except

that it turned out to be me, shouting at the Horror and telling

it that I wanted Cwej back, that I wanted London back, that I

wanted my life back. The night was moving again, falling in

on me, forcing itself into the gap between the cinemas of

Leicester Square. The thing was starting to claw the ground,

raking London with its front paws.

39

Later on, the authorities found out that the Horror had left

hardly any rubble in the parts of the city it had wrecked.

Wherever the Horror had put its claws, the architecture there

had been sucked in by its body, along with anybody who’d

been in its way.

What happened to all those people and buildings? Did they

end up outside the bottle, floating through empty space

somewhere in the twenty-sixth century? Or did they go to a

vortex of their own, between the two worlds? If they did,

then there must be whole suburbs of London still stuck

there, drifting around until the end of time. Eternal suburbia.

Not a nice thought.

From what I heard afterwards, Leicester Square was

almost completely wiped off the face of the Earth. I would

have gone too, I should think, if I hadn’t been rescued.

40

Personally, I still can’t think of it as being a rescue. I

remember lying there on my back, with the stars getting

closer and closer, screaming at the Horror - no, the world -

to take everything away and let me start my life over again.

Then there were shapes standing over me. One of them

looked down, and I realized it was Khiste, but I didn’t care.

Khiste wasn’t what I needed.

I kept screaming, even when Khiste knelt down and put his

arms round me. That makes him sound so soft and sensitive,

doesn’t it? But Khiste was a piece of lifting machinery, that’s

all. A bulldozer with a face. I remember struggling when he

hoisted me up (I don’t know what I was fighting against, I

just kept kicking), and I remember hearing his skin squeak

when I clawed at his chest. His face was only a couple of

inches away from mine, so I could smell his skin, all sweat

and chemicals and iron filings. He didn’t look down at me.

‘Back to the station,’ he said, to the other soldiers he’d

brought with him.

They’d come to save me. They must have done. There was

no other reason for them to be in Leicester Square. But at the

time I think I would have been happier if I’d been dropped

down the crack in the ground.

A couple of moments later, Leicester Square wasn’t there

any more. It had been taken away from me, and a completely

different kind of world had been put in its place, the world

Cwej’s employers had built in Earth’s orbit. It was a bit like

waking up from a dream, that moment of feeling sick and

annoyed when you have to move between one life and

another.

41/42

There was a ceiling over my head, a brown rock ceiling, so

for a moment I thought I was in Cwej’s quarters back at

the fortress. I must have thought I’d been dreaming, that

Khiste was some kind of weird leather armchair I’d gone

to sleep in. Then I was being moved again, shaken up and

down while Khiste’s feet clanged against the floor of the

station.

Yes, the monitoring station. The little lump of Earth his-

tory that had been floating around the planet for about

forty-eight hours now, fooling the astronomers into thinking

it had always been there. I’d been to the station once before,

on the day it had been finished, so it wasn’t hard figuring out

where I was. The station was made out of the same stuff as

the fortress, and there was the usual ‘living’ feeling in the

rock, like it had hollowed itself out as part of some biological

function or other.

I must have stopped screaming at some point. I saw Khiste

look down at me, but he didn’t make eye contact for more

than a second. I got the feeling he was embarrassed by me,

more than anything else.

Perhaps he was. After all, I’m sure it wasn’t his employers

who’d told him to risk going down to Earth with a whole

mini-army of his men, just to pick me up and carry me off to

safety. Did he feel responsible for me, because of Cwej? Or

because of what had happened between us?

I’d like to think so. But to be honest I don’t think Khiste

was human enough. Only in a romance novel would a

supercharged war machine feel guilty about a one-afternoon

stand.

‘You can put me down,’ I told him. My throat had been

scraped raw by all the screaming, and I still didn’t know how

I’d ended up on the station (alien teleporter technology,

probably), but I was starting to get my head together.

Khiste didn’t look down at me. ‘You’re hysterical,’ he

said.

‘I’m fine,’ I told him, trying to sound tough.

‘Even after what happened to Cwej?’

Cwej. I remembered the ground cracking open, in more

detail than I’d actually seen it, I think. I could imagine Cwej

falling into the hole, with the statue tumbling after him. I felt

the scream at the back of my throat again, so when it tried to

get out I had to clench my teeth and pretend it was just a

cough.

‘I’m fine,’ I said, once again.

Khiste probably didn’t believe me, but he stopped anyway,

and let me stand on my own two feet. Somehow, I managed

to stay upright when he let go of me.

‘Don’t get in the way,’ Khiste said. ‘That’s all.’

43

From the outside, the station looked like a great big pebble,

hovering around just outside the atmosphere. It hadn’t been

built to look attractive. The only reason I know what it

looked like is that I saw a picture of it, on my first visit there

with Cwej.

The ‘control room’ of the station (and that’s just my

name for it, but then, I’ve seen too much Thunderbirds) was

another cave, dome-shaped, like the hall in the fortress

where the clones were made. But the room was full of

spheres, three-foot-wide glowing ones that hovered a few

inches off the floor, just like the map of Earth’s history I’d

seen back on Simia KK98. All the spheres were supposed to

be pictures of Earth, but they all showed the place in a

different light. Some of them were like ordinary maps,

marked out with the biggest energy sources on the planet, or

the earthquake stress-lines in the rock. Some of them were

maps of time, showing Earth’s history from every possible

angle. If history’s got angles.

There must have been at least thirty of the spheres, all

arranged in a ring around the wall of the dome. The middle of

the floor was kept clear, and decorated with only a mosaic -

one of the time travellers’ holy symbols, I think. The first of

the spheres that Cwej led me to was a straightforward view of

the planet, in three dimensions, although I have no idea

where the camera might have been to take a picture like that.

You could even see the station floating over the Earth, a tiny

little speck of dust over Africa, trying to look innocent

whenever it thought Patrick Moore might have been looking

up at it.

44

After Khiste left me in the corridor on the day of the Horror,

the ‘control room’ was the first place he headed for. By the

time I stumbled into the dome after him, it was very nearly

full, and the space in the middle of the floor was seething

with bulky blue-grey bodies. The soldiers were inspecting

the spheres and muttering to themselves in machine talk,

exchanging notes on how things looked through their own

specially grown eyeballs.

I found Khiste again, in the middle of a bunch of armoured

men who still had their own faces. They were eyeing up one

of the time maps. I peeked around the edge of Khiste’s

tank-body to get a better look, but if he saw me there he

didn’t show it. I was persona non grata again.

They were watching the time contours of Earth but, if the

last time map I’d seen was anything to go by, things weren’t

looking good. A lot of the map had turned black, and the

blackness was spreading, moving along the contours like a

spark on a fuse wire in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. I didn’t know

whether that meant the Horror was actually getting bigger, or

whether it was just eating its way through more and more of

the past. I wondered if it’d be turning up in the sky over all

the big events in world history, if everyone from Winston

Churchill to Jack the Ripper (if there’s that much difference)

would be looking up from their work and seeing the night

come down early.

‘Impossible problem,’ one of the men said. He sounded like

the scientist I’d met back at the fortress, although it’s hard

telling one insect-mutant from another. ‘What you’re asking

is, how do we go up against the universe we’re living in?’

‘It isn’t all of the universe,’ somebody else said. I had one

of those Alice in Wonderland paranoia moments, and I didn’t

turn round to look at the man, in case he turned out to be a

talking sheep or something.

I could practically hear Khiste grinding his teeth. ‘But

we’ve got weapons we can use?’

The scientist looked dubious, as much as he could with a

face like his. ‘Not weapons, exactly. Rituals. We could try to

sabotage the operating system.’

‘How long would it take?’ snapped Khiste.

45

I don’t think Cwej’s employers were religious, as such. I talk

about the time travellers having ‘holy symbols’, but I think

they were only holy in the same way that, say, John Kennedy

was holy. Leftovers from a time when people still believed in

believing in things.

Once, though, I saw something in one of the caves on

Simia KK98 that made me wonder. There was a queue of

armoured men, and they were lining up in front of what

looked like a machine gun. They were just strolling past it,

letting themselves get sprayed with bullets. Some of the men

weren’t even scratched, but the others... the others rebuilt

themselves, to make sure they were tougher than before.

Their idea of self-improvement, obviously.

It made me think of those monks in medieval days, who

used to flog themselves stupid to get closer to God. Because

as far as Cwej’s employers were concerned the soldiers

weren’t just making themselves stronger. By turning them-

selves into machines, and getting rid of all the things that

wouldn’t have suited the time travellers’ programme, they

were making themselves pure.

NOTES ON THE DEAD HEART

46

There are all kinds of theories about where the Gods came

from, especially now you can’t go anywhere in the twenty-

sixth century without hearing about them. Most of the

popular theories are about ancient alien super-races leaving

peculiar reality-warping machines behind, but some of them

are more exotic than that (hah).

One of the weirdest ideas was thought up by Professor

Begarius of Loughborough University, who was one of the few

people to have bothered studying the Gods before they

invaded Dellah. According to the professor, it’s kind of

inevitable that we keep running into things like the Gods in

the universe. He says that back on Earth human beings used

to see ‘mystery animals’ wherever they went, and I can vouch

for that, because it was the same even inside the bottle.

There were supposed to be sea serpents in all the big lakes,

and missing-link-style apemen in just about every forest on

the planet. Whether those animals were ‘real’ or not isn’t

important, as far as the professor’s concerned. The important

thing is this: there’s something in our brains that can’t help

seeing monsters, even if the monsters are obviously

impossible.

And, when people finally went out into space, all of a

sudden, they had a pretty much infinite canvas for drawing

their ‘mystery animals’ on. The people of the universe had to

invent the biggest monsters possible. Basically, the

professor’s idea is that the Gods are just a side effect of being

alive. They have to exist, to fill up the big black spaces in the

universe that our imaginations keep focusing on.

Obviously, I don’t believe any of this. Partly because it

sounds like the work of an acid-head, and partly because my

own theory about the Gods (I’ll come to it, trust me) is

confusing enough already. But to be fair to the professor, it’d

explain a lot. It’d explain why the Gods are always so in tune

with everyone’s bad dreams. Why so many people who’ve

met the Gods’ servants wake up in the middle of the night

yelling ‘no, no, not the rectal probe’. It’d even explain why

the Horror - made by God technology, remember - didn’t

just act like the end of the world, but looked like it, too.

Lying there in Leicester Square Gardens, I must have felt the

way Chicken Licken felt, when he (or was it she?) figured

out that the sky was falling. No wonder I couldn’t stop

screaming.

47

It was only there in the ‘control room’ of the station,

surrounded by Khiste and his scientist-warriors, that I really

started to feel useless. Yes, these people were talking about

my whole world, but so what? It wasn’t like I felt connected

to it any more. Earth had gone and replaced me as soon as

I’d run off with Cwej, and now Cwej was gone as well...

Oh yes. Cwej. I remember making a noise that would have

been another scream, if I’d let it out. The soldier/scientists

were too busy talking about weapons strategies to notice.

So, I started to move away from the group, not sure exactly

where I was meant to be heading. As it happened, I ended up

drifting towards the other side of the hall, to the place where

Cwej had shown me the picture-sphere of Earth. The

ordinary one, with all the continents and oceans where they

were supposed to be, and all the clouds taken away so you

could see what was happening properly. You could even see

Britain, as a little blob of green rock on the edge of Europe.

Except that you couldn’t, not any more. None of the

armoured men around the hall were interested in something

as boring as a normal picture, even if it was in 3-D, so I was

the only one standing in front of it. Europe was turned

towards me, although there was nothing but black where

England was supposed to be. On the map, you could see the

Horror as a blob the size of a bluebottle, stuck to the

surface of the globe. You could even make out the details of

(he body. The wings, covering most of the land south of

Birmingham. The tail, thrashing about over the channel, just

to scare the French. You could even see the face, or the space

where its face was supposed to be...

Which meant that it was looking up.

For a moment, I honestly thought it was looking at me. But

no: it was looking at something else, something that had

moved away from Africa and was now hovering right over

Europe, a tiny speck stuck in the planet’s orbit.

I started thinking about the old cat Cal used to have, the

way it’d stared at the rats that kept getting into his room

through the holes in the foundations. The cat would just sit

there, watching every move the rats made, like it knew it had

to catch the bastards sooner or later but couldn’t make up its

mind about when.

I screamed. This time, everybody listened. While the

soldiers started clustering around the sphere, the Horror

reared up over the curve of the planet and headed straight for

us.

48

From the outside, this is the way things must have looked:

The pebble was still floating on the edge of the atmosphere,

but you couldn’t see much of it any more. There was

something wrapped around the rock, so dark that it blended

in with the empty space behind it. The Horror must have

been about the same size as the station, from head to tail.

Now it had all four of its legs wrapped around the rock,

opening up spaces in the walls and sinking its claws into the

corridors.

The station did its best to deal with this. It squirmed and

wriggled, trying to grow new lumps of rock over the holes

the Horror had made, but not having enough raw material to

fill all the gaps. Inside the walls, the station did everything it

could to make sure its passengers stayed in one piece,

keeping the air pumping and the floor level no matter how

much the Horror shook the place.

49/50

Five minutes later I was lying face down in one of the

corridors, pushing myself against the wall and trying not to

go deaf from the sound of the soldiers’ feet, clang-clang-

clanging against the rock. Once everyone had noticed that

the Horror was heading for the station, the battle-tank men

had thundered out of the ‘control room’ in their dozens,

manning whatever battle stations they’d thought might be

worth manning. Me? I’d been caught up in the stampede,

clinging on to the arm of one of the men when he’d stomped

out of the cave, to stop myself being trampled to death. He

hadn’t even noticed me as he’d dragged me along after him.

The soldiers were getting to grips with things now. The

Horror had already chewed away the parts of the station that

handled transport and communications (clever, clever

Horror), stranding the men on the rock with no way of getting

back to Earth or calling for help. After that, they’d apparently

realized that manning the battle stations wasn’t going to

make any difference, and they’d all headed towards the

middle of the station, just to get out of the Horror’s way

while it squeezed the walls.

I decided to lie low. There wasn’t much else I could do. So,

having gone to all the trouble of making this decision, I was

kind of annoyed when something hard and sharp pressed

into my neck, and I felt myself being pulled to my feet.

Khiste was standing next to me, not letting go of my

shoulders in case I couldn’t stand up on my own.

‘Come on,’ he growled.

‘Why?’ I said. I didn’t know why I was arguing. Maybe I

just wanted to annoy him.

‘We’re setting up a ritual,’ he told me. ‘We’re going to try

calling in the sphinxes. Get their help shutting down the

operating system.’

I could tell, just by the way he said it, that this plan of

action wasn’t going to work. The Horror controlled the

bottle, so it wasn’t likely to let any sphinxes in from the

outside. I didn’t point this out at the time, though. I just

yelled at him to let me go.

Khiste crunched his teeth together, like all of this was one

inconvenience too much. ‘I told you not to get in the way,’ he

said. ‘You’re slowing us down.’

Which was when I really snapped. I hadn’t asked for any

of this. I’d been pushed into this lifestyle; I’d been pushed

into caring about what happened to the bottle; I’d even been

pushed into this stupid corridor. I wasn’t going to let some

grey-faced twat tell me I was a nuisance for being here.

Especially not after... everything.

So I hit him. A flat palm, right against the shoulder. It was

never going to do any damage, but I felt my hand bounce off

his skin (it felt like plastic, even if it looked like metal), and I

saw Khiste flinch, like there was some programme in his

body telling him to hit back and he was trying not to act on

it.

I hit him again. Kept hitting. Or, rather, I kept flapping my

arms, and some of the punches reached his body, while some

of them just made me sweat more. Khiste kept glancing over

his shoulder all the time, wanting to follow the other men off

up the corridor. Or maybe he was worried what they’d say if

they saw him getting into a fight with a puny Earthling.

Finally, he dropped me. I collapsed on to my knees when I

hit the floor, but I think I managed to make it look deliberate.

‘You can’t stay here,’ Khiste said, and his voice was as flat

as ever.

‘Fuck off,’ I told him.

He spent another few seconds staring at me before he

turned on his heel and stamped away. Moments later, he was

gone, into the not-much-safer rooms deep in the heart of the

station.

51

There were still armoured men trundling past me, but they’d

thinned out now. The last stragglers were hurrying away

from the walls where the Horror was breaking in. I stood up,

and pulled myself together. Composed myself. Brushed the

hair out of my face. The men were veering around me, but

apart from that they hardly noticed I was there. Even so, I

tried not to look stressed. Despite the fact that there were

sweat stains the size of the Lake District under my arms, and

despite the fact that yesterday’s make-up was turning into

sticky black splotches all over my face (I could just feel it).

There was no way off the station. There was no way of

getting away from the Horror. I was not, absolutely not,

going to do as Khiste said just for a few extra minutes of life.

I turned, and stalked off down the corridor towards the

outer walls of the monitoring station, still keeping my nose

up in the air. Heading for doomsday with dignity.

See? Romantic to the last. Knowing what I know now, I

would have just slouched the whole way. Why not?

52

If I get distracted sometimes, then I’m sorry. I don’t usually

remember things in the right order, and, besides, there are

plenty of things to distract me here in the ruins.

For example, I just searched through my rucksack for

another packet of biscuits, and ended up pulling out a photo

that’s been lying at the bottom of the sack ever since I left

London. It’s a picture of a city, stretching off into the

distance, all spiky pyramids and shiny domes. There are

sphinxes and dragon boats everywhere. One of the sphinxes

is in the foreground, wrapping itself around the nearest spire,

turning its head towards the camera. It’s all very psychedelic.

I remember taking that photo with a magic instant camera

from the twenty-sixth century, which I’ve lost since then. I

remember wondering whether the sphinx was eyeing me up

or just posing.

I wish I had some glue. I could stick the photo to the front

of this notebook. Or maybe inside the cover. I could say it

was an author’s photo. After all, this is the story of a whole

little universe, and the sphinxes were the ones who built it.

It’s their story. I’m just the one who gets to hold the pen.

53

Back on the monitoring station:

I turned a corner. Well, I turned lots of corners, but only

one of them was important. The one I turned just before I got

to the outer wall.

I panicked when I saw it. The wall at the end of the

corridor had vanished, leaving behind a wide-open space,

full of stars and not much else. I remember shutting my eyes.

Expecting to get sucked out into the void at any second.

Nothing happened, though. It was only after I’d opened

my eyes again that I remembered. I wasn’t looking at the real

space outside the station: I was looking at the skin of the

Horror. The passage had been split open right down the

middle, and the Horror had slipped one of its big black claws

into the gap. I wondered how easily the thing could have

killed everyone here, just by opening up space all over the

station. Instead, it was physically tearing the rock apart.

Why? I don’t know. Why do human beings enjoy popping

the bubbles on that see-through plastic packaging you used

to get in hardware shops? Because it’s satisfying, I suppose.

I couldn’t hear the soldiers’ footsteps any more. We were

alone, just me and the Horror. I took a few steps forward,

until I was inside spitting distance of the claw, watching the

stars whirling around in front of me.

I cleared my throat.

‘Hello,’ I said.

54

What did the Horror sound like, when it spoke? It was like

all the people on all the planets inside it were opening

their mouths at the same time, making whatever buzzing or

squawking or chattering noises they felt like making. I know

this can’t have been true, because the Horror was really just

a hole between universes, and the stars were the stars of the

universe outside, but that’s the way it sounded.

It told me that it was listening, in more words than my

head could take in at once. I think it actually paused when I

talked to it, breaking off the attack just to hear what I said. I

don’t remember exactly what I told it, but I was probably

gabbling. I hope to God I didn’t sink to the level of saying

something like ‘can’t we talk about this?’ - although I can’t

be sure. All I know is that, once I’d finished, I heard all its

voices say four little words: ‘In. Come in? Now.’

Which is how I ended up putting my best foot forward,

and stepping right into the Horror’s body. The first human

woman to walk in space. And without a suit, too. Eat your

heart out. Buzz Aldrin.

55

Imagine this:

You’re walking into a planetarium, like the one they used

to have in Marylebone. Except that this planetarium’s

sphere, so you can see in all directions, including down

(don’t ask what it is you’re walking on, it isn’t an issue).

When you walk in, you get the sneaky feeling that this isn’t

really a planetarium at all, that you’re actually seeing the

whole of space, live and as it happens - but you’re seeing it

in so much detail, you’re sure this isn’t the same thing as

just lying under the stars on Box Hill with a bottle of cider.

You start tracing the constellations across the sky, seeing the

patterns marked out by the stars, although after a while you

start to realize that the shapes are actually there.

Space is made up of shapes. Shapes of all sizes and...

well, shapes, but they’re all alive. Some of them look like

people, some of them look like machines, some of them even

look like animals. The clever thing is that all the outlines are

locked together, with no gaps between them. Somehow, all

the different things that have fallen into the vortex over the

years have been slotted together, like they were parts of one

big cosmic jigsaw (and I mean ‘cosmic’ in the way Lady

Diamond would have meant it, natch).

There are other patterns, too. You think about the things

Cwej used to draw in chalk on the floor of the spare room -

yes, you’ve got all my memories to play with, don’t worry -

and you can see the same kind of patterns in the sky, huge

glyphs and pentagrams joining up the living constellations.

You figure out that these patterns are what hold the sphere

together. All the living things here rotate and revolve, inside

the loops and webs of the patterns. This, you tell yourself, is

the heart of the Horror. The operating system of your entire

universe.

Or is this a bit too cosmic? It didn’t strike me that way but,

then again, I was trying not to suffocate at the time.

56

I tried to fall on to my knees, but there was nothing

underneath me and nowhere to fall to. I wanted to breathe in.

I couldn’t. My lungs were tearing themselves apart inside me,

and I could see blood vessels popping in front of my eyes.

‘Air,’ said the universe. ‘You? Need air. Yes.’

When the air flooded into the space around me, it got

sucked into my body so fast that it practically lifted me off

my feet. I kept gasping, kept taking it in, just in case it went

away again while I wasn’t looking.

‘Now,’ said the Horror. ‘Talk?’

57

Some of the shapes I could make out in the night sky, which

had fallen into the vortex over the years and ended up as

part of the Horror:

1. People. Lots and lots of people. A lot of them had

probably been Cwej’s employers while they’d been alive. They

looked human, but I got the feeling you could see them in

any number of other ways if you looked hard enough. So I

didn’t.

2. Human people. I didn’t know how close the humans

from Cwej’s time had come to inventing time machines, but I

guessed the humans here were victims, bystanders who’d got

caught up in the time travellers’ fights and paid the price for

being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of the

humans in the constellations recognized me as one of their

own, and started swearing at me in funny accents.

3. Aliens. Use your imagination.

4. Machines. Time-traveller probes that had been sent into

the vortex and never come back, and had started to grow

there, finally turning into things that could call themselves

‘smart’. (What a way to be born.) One machine looked

especially important, because it had tentacles everywhere,

squeezing between the outlines of all the other shapes. I was

told later on that in the twenty-fifth century some

supercomputer or other had been dropped into the vortex

during a duel with Cwej’s Evil Renegade, so that was

probably the thing I saw. While I was there inside the

operating system, I got the feeling that this was the thing that

had brought the Horror together. The thing that had joined

up all the other ghosts, and given them one voice to speak

with.

5. A hole.

58/59

When I finally got my head back in order, and worked out

that I could breathe again, I realized I wasn’t alone in the

planetarium. Meaning, there was somebody else standing

there in the middle of it all, somebody I could at least deal

with on my level, not like the rest of the vortex things. I

could see a man-shaped hole in the constellations behind

him, so I guessed that he was one of the ghosts, and that

he’d stepped out of the wall to talk to me.

He was armoured, like the men back on the station,

although he was smaller and less bulky. I got the feeling he

hadn’t been designed (evolved?) for total war. And the

armour wasn’t exactly the same style as, say, Khiste’s. It was

jet-black, for a start, and his head actually looked like a

helmet rather than a face that had grown new parts. Like an

old pharaoh’s death mask, but less fiddly, more streamlined,

without most of the features. Two slits for eyes, and that was

about all. The armour was battered all over, covered with

scar tissue in a lot of places. For some reason, I got the

feeling the damage had been done when the man, whoever he

was, had been sucked out of time and into the vortex. One of

his arms was all twisted and gungy, crippled by the accident.

My first impression? That he was one of Cwej’s people,

but some kind of renegade. Not the Evil Renegade himself,

but maybe one of his followers, a soldier from an enemy

faction. One of the bad guys. Then again, I might just be

saying that because he was dressed in black.

I must have asked him who he was. He answered in his

own person-voice, but it was obviously the Horror talking.

‘We can’t communicate properly,’ the man said. He

sounded English, although most of the aliens I met sounded

English, and, no, I don’t know how that worked. ‘Not as a

whole. Too many thought systems operating at once. Too

many words.’

‘But you’re the Horror?’ I asked.

‘You wanted to talk,’ said the man. He sounded smug and

self-satisfied when he said it, which was probably his own

personality at work, or whatever was left of it. ‘This is the

only way you can understand us. If we use this mouthpiece.

So what do you want?’

‘I want to understand,’ I said. ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Doing what?’

I waved my arms around. ‘Tearing everything up. London.

The station.’

‘The world,’ the Horror added. ‘The universe. Everything

inside the bottle.’

‘Yeah, that. Why? Why do it?’

‘I told your friend. We’re spite. We’re anger. That’s all.’

The Horror shook his head. The one he was currently using,

anyway. ‘We’ve been in the vortex. We’ve been trapped there

since... no. Linear time doesn’t work there, so you might as

well call it forever. Do you have any idea what there is in the

vortex?’

‘Nothing?’ I guessed.

‘Less than nothing. The understanding of nothing.’ I could

tell he was having trouble explaining himself, even in this

body. ‘When we were alive, we believed in things. Even the

ones who didn’t have Gods of their own. We believed in

civilization. We believed in principles. Then we saw the way

things looked from inside the vortex. We saw everything in

its proper context. And there is no proper context. Does this

make sense in your language?’

His voice sounded fragile when he said that. For a Horror

the size of all space, anyway. I tried to nod.

I don’t remember what he said next, not word for word.

But I’ll sum it all up, and I’ll try to put it the way I imagine a

Horror putting it, whether it happened like that or not.

Existential angst, as told by the Horror and filtered through

Christine Summerfield.

60

Everything is meaningless. No, it’s worse than that. Even

calling it ‘meaningless’ puts it inside the context of meaning,

and... there isn’t one.

Wait. Let me explain.

You suck in information about the universe around you,

through your eyes, through your ears, or through whatever

other senses you were born with. Then your nervous system

starts building webs to catch the raw data, filtering the

information, shaping it into something that looks like it

makes sense. All your principles, all your beliefs, all your

laws - just filters, ways of dealing with the information, of

forgetting how small and amoral your life really is. And,

when people with the same filters get together, that’s what

you call a ‘culture’.

Civilization is just a filter. A romance. A lie, if you like.

And we always knew it was a lie, even before we ended up in

the vortex. I think everybody knows it, on some level, but the

fact that we were civilized meant that we could cushion the

shock and get on with our lives anyway.

It’s different once you ‘ve been in the vortex. Once you’ve

seen how big time is, and how small the romances are. Once

you’ve had your nervous system ripped out, and lost all your

filters. All those ideas about philosophy, and civilization, and

ethics...

You asked me a question. You asked me why.

The answer is, ‘Why not?’ It’s only when you’ve had your

culture taken away from you that you realize what a good

answer ‘Why not?’ really is.

See?

NOTES ON ME AND THE HORROR

61

I’d heard that kind of talk before. In a way, the Horror

sounded just like Dorian. Dorian, who’d skim-read every

book on philosophy in the LSE library (NB: there weren’t

many), liked to tell people that all life was meaningless,

that all free will was an illusion, and that God was dead.

He generally did this to prove how clever he was, com-

pared with, say, the college’s Christian Union, and to justify

writing poems about the Coming of the Angel of Death.

None of which ever really convinced me. Because - and

this was always my argument, even though Dorian usually

ignored it - if life really is meaningless, and there really isn’t

a God, then you might as well be a happy fucker as a

miserable one. What I’m getting at is that in a pointless,

empty universe a good time is as meaningless as a bad time,

so you might as well just slap on a smile and get on with

your life. Personally, I’d never been able to do either of those

things, but that was just my problem.

62-5

[These pages are headed ‘My Conversation with the Horror’.]

Again, I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I think I

must have told all this to the Horror. Once I’d finished, the

man in the black armour just nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Yes?’ I said. ‘What d’you mean, yes?’

‘Yes. You’re right. It isn’t built into the laws of the

universe that we have to kill everything.’

‘So why do it?’ I asked. I got the feeling I was going round

in circles here.

‘Because we aren’t happy either,’ the Horror told me.

‘Because the anger’s all we’ve got left.’

‘You didn’t used to be just anger, though, did you?’ I said.

‘You used to be people.’

I could swear I heard the other ghosts buzzing at me when

I said that. You always know when you’ve said the wrong

thing, don’t you?

‘You want us to be human again?’ Black-Armour Man

said, looking down at me through whatever nose he might

have had.

‘Well, yeah.’

‘Not possible. Not after the vortex. We don’t have any

humanity left.’

I wasn’t convinced. ‘So... how come you’re talking to

me now, instead of wiping out the station?’ I said. ‘Doesn’t

that mean you must still be a bit human?’

Sniggering from the other shapes? No, it couldn’t have

been. ‘We don’t mind talking,’ said the Horror. ‘We’ve got

all the time in the world. Besides, you might say something

interesting. Not that it’ll stop us.’

‘All right. So what about the time travellers? They won’t

just sit back and let you take over the bottle, will they?’

‘They can’t hurt us,’ the Horror told me. ‘Not here. If they

want to fight us, let them come. We’ll be happy to kill them

as well.’

He wasn’t gloating. He wasn’t being funny. It was just the

way he saw things. I thought about Khiste, permanently

locked into ‘macho’ mode inside that big metal skin of his.

There was no backing down, as far as Khiste was concerned.

The power struggle between the time travellers and the

Horror, or between the time travellers and the Gods, or

between the time travellers and anybody else who wanted a

fight, would carry on until one side beat the other into

submission. The Horror had the same kind of mentality, by

the sound of it.

‘But that’s just it,’ I said. I was pacing the planetarium by

now, not looking down, in case I started to ask myself what

was holding me up. ‘It’s all so stupid. Look... the last couple

of weeks, I’ve been hanging around with Cwej, yeah?’ (I had

to pause after I said ‘Cwej’, thinking about the ground

opening up under Leicester Square, but that wasn’t

important now. For God’s sake keep your cool, Christine -

deep breathing, deep breathing, aaaaaaaaah.) ‘He’s been

showing me around his universe. Showing me the way things

work there. Like, the pyramids were built by aliens, and there

are these green men on Mars, and Jack the Ripper was...

listen, the point I’m making is…’

It took me a few moments to work out exactly what the

point I was making was.

‘Things are just so simple there,’ I said. ‘So basic. It’s like

that siege they had, when the sphinxes turned up at the

fortress. It all came down to one big face-off. And, yeah, the

face-off might have ended in a big fight, or it might have

ended in a treaty or something, but the point is that there

was one big scene, and it was all over. It was all resolved. Is

this making sense so far?’

‘Yes,’ said the Horror.

‘Only I think things might be getting a bit complicated

here,’ I said.

‘That’s all right,’ said the Horror. ‘I’m more intelligent

than you are.’

‘Fine. The thing is, I keep comparing that with the way

things work back in the... back in my world. Back on my

version of Earth.’ I kept talking, even though I had no idea

why the Horror was bothering to listen. ‘Look. I used to hang

around with this guy called Cal, all right? We had sex a

couple of times. And it was like... after we’d done it, there

was this kind of feeling in the air, like something had

changed, and we couldn’t get over it. I mean, we’d said we

were just going to be friends and everything, so that should

have been the end of it, but it was like nothing ever got

resolved. Because things like that never get resolved. Every-

thing keeps hanging around, and most of the time it just gets

worse.’

‘Sex isn’t important to us,’ the Horror pointed out.

‘Yeah, I guessed. But the point is... things are different

where Cwej comes from. Where you came from. [ don’t

know why that is. Maybe it’s just because the sphinxes left so

many loose ends behind when they built all the stuff inside

the bottle. In Cwej’s world, everything always gets sorted

out, see? Things always end up in a big face-off. I think that’s

why Khiste can’t deal with me. Because he got involved with

someone from inside the bottle, and he keeps expecting the

stuff between us to get resolved, but... sorry, I’m just

rambling now.’

‘Yes,’ agreed the Horror. If he really was just anger, then it

must have been a slow-burning kind, because he seemed

happy to listen to me spouting off. I suppose you don’t feel

any need to rush things, if you’re immortal.

‘All I’m saying is that... this fight between you and the

time travellers, it just looks stupid. I mean, it looks stupid to

me. This big life-or-death struggle you’re getting yourself

locked into. This whole last-man-standing thing. Things

don’t work like that. Not in the real world.’

I realized what I’d said as soon as I’d said it. ‘All right,’ I

blurted. ‘All right, things do work like that in the real world.

That’s exactly how they work in the real world. But they

don’t work like that in my world, that’s all I’m saying. Not

inside the bottle. That’s why it looked wrong, all right? You

turning up over London like that. It was like the end of the

world was coming, and it was the kind of end of the world we

only thought we were going to see in the movies. No loose

ends, no fallout, nothing. Have you ever seen Quatermass?’

‘No,’ said the Horror, not sounding either particularly

bored or particularly interested.

‘Well,’ I said. I was finally running out of steam. ‘Well,

that’s all I’m saying. We don’t do things that way where I

come from.’

‘The way things work in your universe isn’t important,’

the Horror told me.

I thought about that for a moment.

‘Isn’t it?’ I said. ‘You are my universe now. Remember?’

The Horror looked puzzled. Probably.

‘Think about it,’ I said, and I knew I had no idea what I

was going to say next. I was letting my mouth run on

automatic. ‘You said you’re just anger. That’s all you are.

Just spite. Yeah?’ The Horror nodded, so I kept gabbling.

‘Then how do you know you really want to kill everyone?

How do you know that’s what’ll make you happy? I mean,

happier?’

‘What else is there?’ asked the Horror.

I thought about telling him to take up golf, but I decided

against it. ‘That’s just what I’m getting at,’ I said. ‘You don’t

know anything about the way this world works. You don’t

know what it’s like to live here. All you know about is this

stupid face-off.’

‘So you’re saying...?’

‘I’m saying you’ve already made up your mind what to do

with the bottle, even though you haven’t got any experience

with it. Look, there’s more to the world than just pointless

fights, all right? Things aren’t that simple around here.’

The Horror sounded like he was picking his next words

carefully. ‘Let me see if I’m following you. You think I

should try to understand life in this universe, before I...

before we remove it. Is that right?’

‘If you like,’ I said.

‘I’ve already told you. Humanity isn’t important.’

‘Oh, fuck humanity.’ At this point, I started remembering

all the philosophical arguments I’d had in Cal’s flat, and

some part of my brain started searching the planetarium for

an ashtray I could lob. ‘What I’m saying is, this stupid

agenda of yours doesn’t belong here. You just haven’t seen

enough of the place to know it.’

‘All right,’ said the Horror.

That threw me.

‘What?’ I said.

‘All right. We don’t seriously believe we’re missing any-

thing by not getting involved in this world. But we’re ready

to listen. We’re not in any hurry.’

‘You’ll listen?’ I said. Somehow, this wasn’t what I’d been

expecting.

‘We’re anger,’ said the Horror. ‘Anger is all we are. But

anger might be different, here in the bottle. It might be less...

straightforward. As you said. So teach us.’

I had no idea how to teach it a thing like that, and I said

so. It’d probably be going too far to say that the Horror looked

disappointed.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘In that case, we’ll just have to carry on

killing everything.’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Wait, wait, wait.’

So the Horror waited. I spent another minute or so pacing

the no-floor, and he didn’t interrupt me once.

‘OK,’ I said, in the end. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

66

The Horror was quite happy to answer my questions. It told

me it could take on any form it liked, if it tried hard

enough. Just as the sphinx on Earth had worn the statue of

Shakespeare, the Horror could climb into any shape, or even

make new shapes of its own, by shifting space around atom

by atom. That was what the sphinx had done back in Lady

Diamond’s shop, knitting itself a Manson-style body, based

on the images it’d picked up from a quick survey of the

culture. The Horror told me that this kind of thing was fiddly,

but perfectly possible, if you had the patience. At first, it

hadn’t been able to get the process right - hence that

archaeopteryx man we’d found in the quarry - but now that

the Horror was rooted in the operating system it could do

just about anything.

My idea was this. I told the Horror it should build itself a

new body, say, the body of a baby human being. If it wanted

to do things properly, it could even build itself a family, just

to make the whole thing more convincing. Then the Horror

could squeeze itself into that body, and spend half a lifetime

on Earth as a human, learning about the world the way a

human would have done it. Obviously, it’d have to adjust its

brain so it forgot it was really an immortal monster and

everything, but after about thirty years on the planet as a

‘normal’ person it could get its old memories back and crawl

inside the operating system again, this time with all the

cultural knowledge it’d need to make a proper decision about

the future of the bottle.

I was halfway through explaining this when the thought

suddenly hit me: if it wanted to, the Horror could learn things

much faster just by taking my own brain apart, which is

something it was almost certainly smart enough to do. I got

around this problem by telling the Horror that (quote) ‘the

knowledge won’t be any use to you unless you experience it

yourself (end quote). Either the Horror was taken in by this,

or I’d accidentally made a really good point.

Of course, there was a hidden agenda here. The bottom

line was this: I hoped that by spending thirty years as a

human being the Horror might get back its lost humanity,

and decide that making people happy might be a better idea

than killing them off in their billions. But the Horror spotted

this secret mission of mine straightaway, and pointed out

that, since it would remember being in the vortex once its

human body hit thirty, this wasn’t very likely. Still, we’ve got

to live in hope.

67

This story is starting to make me think of The Wizard of Oz.

You know how there are two worlds in the movie, the ‘real’

world (in black and white this time) and Oz? And you know

how all the characters in the black-and-white world have got

counterparts in the fantasy world? Well... let’s just say that,

if this book ever gets turned into a movie, you could cut the

cast list in half with no trouble at all. Cwej and Cal could be

the same person. Or Khiste and Dorian. Or Lady Diamond

and the sphinx.

Or me and the Horror? It’s an idea.

68

So. A quick note about my own philosophy:

Like a lot of us who grew up in the 60s, I personally wasn’t

sure whether the human race was such a good idea. Like

Dorian, like Cal, like all the others, I went through that

Apocalyptic Teenage Deadhead stage when I thought that the

best thing humanity could do was wipe itself out in a nuclear

war and let the insects have a go at running everything.

Obviously, I grew out of it once I got to eighteen and the

spots cleared up, but...

But there in the planetarium the future of my whole bottled

race was in my hands, and nobody else’s. Did I, at any time,

wonder why I was bothering? Did I ever ask myself whether it

wouldn’t be a good idea to let the Horror wipe everything

out, just for the sake of it?

Well, yes, I did. Maybe that was what made me think of

the plan, about the Horror having a trial run at being

human. I was putting a kind of random element into things.

Basically, if the Horror human had a good time, the world

might pull through. If the Horror human had a bad time, the

world didn’t stand a chance. See? I was getting things out of

my hands, letting the world judge itself by the way it treated

the baby Horror.

As it turned out, I needn’t have bothered. Things were

about to get pretty random anyway.

69

There was a long pause after I’d finished explaining the plan,

while the Horror mulled things over.

‘We’re not sure,’ the man in the black armour said, in the

end.

‘But you said it yourself,’ I told him, trying not to choke.

‘You’re immortal. You’ve spent forever in the vortex anyway. I

mean, thirty years -’

‘Is nothing to us,’ the Horror agreed. ‘No time to wait.’

‘Well, then?’

‘The question is, why should we wait at all?’ That stumped :

me, I’ve got to admit. ‘We might be missing something, in I

our understanding of the way this universe works,’ the

Horror went on. ‘We might be, but we’re probably not. We’re

not sure we should bother wasting any more time. We’re not

convinced there’s enough to be gained from it.’

He went quiet after that. It took me a while to work out

what was happening. He... they... the whole of the

planetarium... was/were/was waiting for me to say

something else. The ghosts had thought about what I’d told

them, and they’d decided it made sense, but it wasn’t

enough.

One more sentence would make the difference. Just a few

more well-chosen words and they’d give the world another

thirty years of life, or maybe even leave it alone completely,

i! things went well. All I had to do was say the right thing.

Suddenly, I couldn’t think of anything.

I opened my mouth. Went ‘er’. Then I realized that I was

doing to say something really stupid, and that if I did it’d be

the last really stupid thing the human race ever came up

with. Why couldn’t I think, for Christ’s sake? What was I

supposed to say? How was I meant to know what the Horror

wanted to hear, and save every man, woman and child on

Planet Earth?

I felt my mouth pop open again. There was only one thing

I could think of, only one way I knew to settle an argument

once and for all.

‘Do you know how to play stone-scissors-paper?’ I asked.

70

I only worked it out afterwards. The Horror had sent the

black-armoured man to talk to me, because it knew that was

the best way of communicating. The Horror might have been

bent on mass destruction, but it wasn’t stupid.

The point is that I could have picked any method at all of

finishing the argument, and the Horror would have accepted

it. Because it was ready to do things on my terms, at least for

as long as I was there inside the planetarium. I could have

decided to flip a coin, or to challenge it to a game of Cluedo,

or even to start a debate about modernist French poetry. But

I chose stone-scissors-paper, and there in the heart of the

Horror it was as good a way of doing things as any.

71

The man in the black armour knew how the game worked, or

if he didn’t then one of the other ghosts must have whispered

the rules in his ear while I wasn’t looking. We both held our

hands out, ready to play.

We were just about to start shaking our fists when some-

thing struck me.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Let me get this straight. If I win,

you go along with my plan. Otherwise, you kill me, and

everybody else in the universe. Yeah?’

The Horror nodded. ‘True.’

‘How do I know you’ll keep your side of the bargain?’

The Horror shrugged. ‘If I wanted to, I could just read your

mind and win automatically,’ he said. ‘But then there’d be no

point playing.’

‘Fine. One more thing, OK? Is this game going to go on

the first shake, or is it best out of three?’

‘Best out of three,’ said the Horror. ‘Why not?’

72

There’s an art to playing stone-scissors-paper. A kind of

rhythm. You both clench your fists, then you try to move in

time with each other. You shake your fists once. You shake

your fists twice. You shake your fists three times. Then you

push out your hand, in whatever shape you’ve chosen.

Clenched for stone. Two fingers out for scissors. Flat open

for paper. You wait until the last possible moment before

you change the shape of your hand, so you get at least a

one-per-cent chance of spotting what the other person’s

going to do.

So that was how things were in the planetarium. Me and

the Horror, fixing our eyes on each other’s fists, moving in

perfect synch. Playing for the world.

One shake. Two shake. Three shake.

Hands out.

I looked at what I’d chosen. Two fingers out. Scissors -

the same thing I always chose to start off with. Even before

he said anything, my eyes were drifting over to the Horror’s

hand.

Still clenched.

‘Stone blunts scissors,’ said the Horror.

For a moment, my stomach was somewhere else. In a

completely different dimension.

‘Best out of three,’ I croaked.

‘That’s what we said,’ the Horror agreed.

73

First round to him. I tried to work out what that meant,

probability-wise. Two more rounds to go, and I had to win

both of them. Did that mean I had a one-third chance, or a

one-quarter chance, or... bollocks to it. Not important.

One shake.

I could go with scissors again. No, because he’d probably

go for stone again, to bluff me. Paper, then. Except that he

might see that coming, so he’d choose scissors, so...

Two shake.

...so stone it is. Except that the way he’s shaking his

hand, does that look like he’s going to do paper? All right,

cancel everything out. Suppose it’s paper. If it’s paper, I need

scissors, but he’ll be expecting scissors, so...

Three shake.

To hell with it. Sheer blind luck.

Hands out.

‘Scissors,’ said the Horror.

I looked down at my fingers. Just to make sure.

‘Scissors,’ I said.

‘A draw,’ the Horror pointed out. ‘We play the round

again.’

Uh,’ I said.

74

Still losing. Still a point behind. Are we going to keep getting

draws? Be here for ever? There’s an idea. Stall him, so Khiste

and the others can work out some way of...

One shake.

Oops. Wasn’t thinking. Where was I? Help! What did I

pick last time? I picked paper, so...

Two shake.

No, I picked scissors last time. And the time before. Hah!

He’ll be expecting me to pick scissors again, and pick paper.

So I’ll pick stone to beat paper.

Three shake.

Wait... that’s not right. If he thinks I’m going to pick

scissors, then he’ll pick stone. Which means... which

means... Christ, what does it mean?

Hands out.

‘Paper wraps stone,’ said the Horror.

At first, I didn’t know who’d chosen what, because my

eyes were shut. I opened them again, one at a time.

I’d chosen paper. He’d chosen stone.

‘Final round,’ the Horror noted.

75

One shake.

Last round. Maybe the last round ever. All of Earth’s

future hangs on this. All the people. Cal, Dorian, Lady... Does

that matter now? Cwej is gone. Lost in space. What about all

the others? People, animals, insects... Two shake.

No insects to take over. Nothing. Nothing but the Horror.

Damn, what am I thinking about? Stone, scissors or paper?

What was it last time? I chose... I chose...

Three shake.

Paper! Paper, that’s it! Paper!

No, I’m not meant to choose paper, I’m meant to choose -

The Horror looked down at his fist. Then at mine. He’d

gone for scissors, and I’d gone for...

Nothing. I hadn’t gone for anything. I’d frozen up, just

stuck out my hand without making a choice. My fist was still

clenched.

Which looks, for all the world, like a stone.

I looked up. The Horror was the same as ever, no

expression on his mask face, no feeling there at all.

‘You win,’ he said. ‘We’re agreed.’

‘Aaaaaaaaaaah,’ I repeated.

NOTES ON THE AFTERMATH

76

I’d like to have seen it. I’d love to have been watching the

sphere in the ‘control room’ when the Horror broke away

from the station. The Horror must have stretched its wings,

turned its head away on the end of that long, long neck, and

started spiralling back down towards the planet, shrinking as

it went. Exiling itself to Earth, at least until the year 2000 or

so. It must have been... well, spectacular, I suppose.

But I was standing in a corridor at the time, watching the

hole in the outer wall seal up, so you’d never have known the

Horror had even been there. In the end, I was staring at plain

brown rock, in an empty, stuffy, badly lit passageway.

Which was a bit of a come-down, after all I’d been through.

77

Before we go any further, let me tell you one thing: Cwej

wasn’t dead. I mean, he didn’t die when the Horror opened

up the ground under London, and for all I know he’s still

alive today. I’m telling you this in case you think I’m trying

to build it up into a surprise, with Cwej suddenly turning up

again on the last page for a happy ending. Well, there isn’t

going to be one, but he survived anyway.

After the crisis was over, Khiste took me back down to

Earth. I stood with him on the edge of the gulf in what had

once been Leicester Square Gardens, while a couple of the

other men sorted through the nibble at the bottom of the

crack. The hole wasn’t as deep as I’d imagined it (i.e. it

wasn’t bottomless), although the drop was still pretty lethal.

From the edge, we could just make out the wreckage ten

yards below us, all the bits of metal piping and electrical wire

that had been exposed when the crack had opened up, all the

things from the surface that had been sucked down into the

gap. We couldn’t see Cwej, although the men working in

the crack told us he was there. He was probably trapped

under that statue of Shakespeare.

I remember glancing at Khiste while we stood there, but

his face was as hard and grey and lifeless as it always was.

He didn’t look at me, probably just because he didn’t think I

was important enough to look at, even if I had saved him and

all his people from the Horror. There weren’t any locals

around. The cinemas and the shops were gone, sucked up by

the Horror while we’d been on the station. You could see the

stumps of the buildings wherever you looked, so the Horror

must have swept its claws over the whole area, taking away

everything more than a yard above ground level. People

included? I should think so.

The men brought Cwej up on a stretcher, which floated a

foot or two over the pavement without anybody having to

carry it. Cwej’s body was covered in growths by then, little

blobs of white fungus, like the thing that had healed up my

leg. Cwej didn’t look like Cwej any more. He was a big

tattered rag doll, a great lump of scar tissue held together by

mushrooms (or is that a mixed metaphor?). I could just

about see his eyes through the blood and the growths, but

they were closed.

He would have died, if the men hadn’t got to him. I

suppose I could have asked them to help some of the other

people who’d fallen into the crack, but to be honest I didn’t

even think about it. By then, they weren’t important to me

any more than they were important to Khiste.

78

Technically, I suppose you could say that the incident

between me and the Horror was another face-off, just like the

ones I’d been taking the piss out of while I’d been in the

operating system. But I think I get bonus points for saving

the world with a game of stone-scissors-paper.

This should have been the end of the story, really. The

Horror had been seen off, Earth was safe (if a bit shaken) and

Cwej was alive. Little did I know that the Horror would turn

out to be the biggest red herring in the history of the world.

The real horror was still five days away.

79

After the mess had been cleared up, Cwej’s employers let

him stay on Earth instead of calling him back to Simia

KK98. I don’t think either of us ever saw the monitoring

station again, although over the next few days Khiste kept

dropping into the flat, to keep Cwej up to date on the

progress of the ‘survival plan’. Khiste always made me leave

the room before he’d talk to Cwej. I still don’t know whether

anything personal happened between them, anything to do

with me. Knowing Khiste, I doubt it was even an issue.

Cwej was up and about forty-eight hours after his near-

death experience. On the morning of 9 October, I found him

walking around the living room in his dressing gown, trying

to get his legs back in full working order. Most of the little

fungal growths had either dropped off or sunk into his skin

by then, but you could still see tiny scars over his face and

hands, like the gaps between the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

When I walked into the living room, he was staring down at

his feet and mumbling to himself. He looked, and sounded,

like a grumpy old man.

The television was on in the background. After the crisis,

BBC2 had pretty much become a round-the-clock news

channel, clearing most of its schedule to report on any

findings about the Horror. Or, as the BBC called it, ‘the

tragedy’. They couldn’t find a better name than that. If a UFO

had turned up in the middle of London, the TV people would

at least have had some idea how to deal with things, but the

Horror just wasn’t the kind of alien they’d been waiting

for all those years. When I walked in on Cwej, Kenneth

Kendall was hosting a debate between a leading American

psychiatrist and an official from the Church of England.

Something to do with ‘psychological fallout’, whatever that

was supposed to mean.

‘You need more rest,’ I told Cwej.

But Cwej didn’t listen. All I could hear him say, under his

breath, was this: ‘No time, no time at all.’

80

I stuck by the stretcher after Cwej was pulled out of the

hole on 7 October, while the armoured men waited for the

station to teleport them up out of the atmosphere, where they

apparently had better medical facilities. Khiste had wandered

off by then, so I was the only one left to do the love-and-

comfort routine. The other men definitely weren’t going to

bother. I thought about squeezing Cwej’s hand, but his hand

was covered in lumps of sticky white fungus.

I think I was the only one who noticed him opening his

eyes. I couldn’t see most of his face for the blood, but he

looked scared anyway. I heard him take a deep breath.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s over.’ (Not very original, I know,

but what else could I say?)

Cwej tried to talk. It took him a while to get his tongue

moving, and when he finally managed it he had a lisp,

thanks to the cuts and bumps on his lips.

‘Where did it go?’ he hissed.

I told him. I must have kept blathering, giving him all the

details. I probably got the scenes in the wrong order back

then, too.

‘So... it’s human?’ he grunted.

I tried to look reassuring and normal, by smiling at him

and playing with the ends of my hair. ‘Mm-hmm. It’s on

Earth somewhere. I don’t know where.’

The growths on Cwej’s face started to stretch. I figured out

that he was probably smiling, although it must have hurt

him to do it. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good. We can find it. It must

have left... traces. Find it. While it’s still human. While it’s

vulnerable.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

Cwej blinked at me. It must have been the only movement

he could make without damaging himself.

‘Leave it,’ I told him. ‘Just leave it alone. Don’t try to end

it with another face-off. Please.’

For the first few moments, Cwej didn’t move. Then he

closed his eyes. I think I saw him nod before he collapsed

back into unconsciousness.

81

Cwej had been a policeman before he’d been ‘recruited’. The

legendary good, loyal, honourable cop. He must have known

how important it was to stick to your word. I’d never actually

promised the Horror that Cwej’s people wouldn’t come after

it while it was human, but that was kind of implicit in the

deal we’d made. (Implicit! What a great word.)

I never confronted Cwej about it, not head on. I think he

was embarrassed that he’d even talked about going after the

Horror. Maybe there’d been a time, when he’d been younger,

when he wouldn’t have even needed telling to leave it alone.

Cwej had fallen a long, long way.

An omen of what was going to happen next, maybe?

82

Cwej and I never had sex again, after the day of the Horror.

It’s funny, but that never occurred to me before. ‘Officially’,

it was just because of his injuries, because it wouldn’t have

felt right to end up fucking when his whole body was being

held together by medical supplies. But underneath all that I

don’t think Cwej wanted the attention. He was restless after

7 October. He wouldn’t stop moving. He’d be walking in

circles around the flat all hours of the day, trying to get his

body in shape again. He’d try to read the papers, but he’d get

fed up with having to concentrate, and end up going out.

At nine o’clock on Sunday evening, we were sitting in the

living room, watching Laurence Olivier in some play or other

- ITV, unlike the BBC, was ready to pretend ‘the tragedy’

hadn’t happened - when Cwej suddenly told me that he was

going for a walk. I didn’t argue.

‘D’you want me to come?’ I asked, hoping he’d say no.

He did say no. He pulled his raincoat on over his shirt,

walked out of the living room and shut the door behind him.

It was a good ten minutes before I heard him opening the

front door of the flat, so I guessed he’d felt the need to pace

up and down the hall for a bit, just to get his legs in the

mood. He’d been doing a lot of that recently.

I got bored of the play after that, and turned over to the

news on BBC1. It was a full minute before I got sick of it. I

couldn’t listen to any more theories about the Horror, not

without shouting, ‘Isn’t it fucking obvious?’ at the screen. I

turned the TV off, and wondered whether I was starting to

pick up Cwej’s itchiness. He was trying to distance himself

from me, I could tell. And, seeing as he was the only thing I

had left to hold on to, this made me as restless as he was.

After a while, I decided that I’d go out for a walk as well. I

had to find something else to fill up my life, just in case Cwej

dropped out of it altogether. As ever, coke seemed like a

good answer.

83

At that time of night, you couldn’t walk for more than

five minutes in London without running into a policeman.

The local authorities had drafted in extra forces after ‘the

tragedy’, signing up anyone with military experience as a

temporary police officer. They didn’t have uniforms. They

just had armbands, with the letters SC (maybe Special

Constabulary - I’m not sure) printed in white letters on the

blue fabric. The SC people covered the city, forcing

pedestrians away from the parts that had been levelled by the

Horror, and generally keeping order in a Dad’s Army kind of

way.

I must have seen half a dozen SC people between the flat

and Covent Garden. I didn’t think any of them would have

cared about a lone druggie looking for action, but I kept my

head down anyway, tucking my hands into the pockets of the

duffel coat and trying not to splash through any puddles, in

case it had been made illegal while I’d been off the planet.

It had been raining for days, so people were starting to

wonder whether the Horror had done some kind of

permanent damage to the sky.

I walked past a man selling the Evening Standard at

Covent Garden tube station, and saw that Charles Manson

was on the front page again. The paper had managed to

squeeze together the two big stories of the day, as Man-

son had apparently claimed to be responsible for what had

happened in London. Or connected with it, anyway. The

prosecution lawyer, old Mr Vincent Bugliosi, had always

said that Manson was expecting the end of civilization.

The thing the British had seen was, in the great madman’s

opinion, a taste of things to come.

I was so wrapped up in thinking about this, and in trying

to resist buying a copy of the paper, that I didn’t realize

where I was going until I got there. I was in Covent Garden

proper, back in Lady Diamond’s neighbourhood. More

importantly, I was close to home. Close to my real home, that

is, the one Chris Cwej had been keeping me away from for

the last two weeks.

84

Manson wasn’t the only one getting Messianic. So much had

changed during the 60s that a lot of people just told them-

selves that the Horror was all part of the process. The older

generation must have thought the youngsters had somehow

called it down to Earth, with all their drugs and pop music

and casual sex. And they were right, in a way. After all,

Cwej’s employers had chosen Earth in 1970 only because of

our love for all things foreign and mystic, remember?

‘The tragedy’ was the burning issue of the day. All of a

sudden, it was the only thing people had to argue about.

Which meant that all the old political lines had to be

redrawn. In the days after 7 October, both Ted Heath and

Harold Wilson tried to dance around the question of what

had caused the Horror, knowing that anything they said on

the subject could ruin their chances at the next election. The

pundits thought we were looking at the birth of whole new

parties, as members of the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet

joined together to preach the gospel of the Horror as they saw

it. England was crawling with foreign officials, come to check

out the scene of the crime, in case it turned out to have

anything to do with the Russians or the Chinese. And all over

the world, from Baghdad to California, there’d been other

sightings of the Horror, people claiming to have spotted

patches of night in the sky just like the one over Britain.

Unless the Horror had children that we didn’t know about,

they must have been imagining things.

‘Now, more than ever, Britain must stand united,’ Mr

Heath told the nation on Friday evening, between Wheel of

Fortune and Gunsmoke. ‘We are one people, and we have all

crawled from the shadow of this terrible, terrible thing.’ (He

was grasping at straws, and everybody knew it.)

Meanwhile, it took Watch Out! magazine only two days to

come up with a ‘what I was doing when the tragedy

happened’ article, in which they asked just about every

second-rate celebrity in the business where he or she had

been when the Horror had come. Most of them said ‘indoors’.

Forget what the Archbishop of Canterbury had to say, this

was the real meat of the issue.

85

I don’t know exactly when I decided to go back home. By the

time I reached the flat, my flat, I’d completely forgotten about

the cocaine hunt. All I’d wanted was something to fall back

on, if Cwej decided to leave me behind, and home was as

good as anything. If my old world didn’t want me, I’d make

it want me. After all, I knew things about it that nobody else

knew. If all else failed, I could always try blackmailing it.

The flat was on the ground floor of a big Victorian building

off Endell Street. The building had been walled off into half a

dozen smaller living spaces, and the rent was pretty low,

mainly because the place wasn’t technically safe to live in.

Cal had found the flat, and convinced the landlord that a

bunch of dropouts with a bad pot habit couldn’t really make

the building much less stable. Three of us had been living

there ever since, spending most of our spare time saying that

we couldn’t stand each other and that we’d move out as soon

as we could be bothered to get proper jobs.

There was nobody in the street when I got there. It was

close to the part of WC2 that the Horror had sucked up, so

most of the old residents had moved out just in case it came

back. There were roads cordoned off all around the

neighbourhood, but none of the SC people were showing their

faces.

So, at around eleven o’clock on 11 October, I found myself

standing on the doorstep of the place I remembered calling

home, two weeks and a whole lifetime in the past. Somehow,

the WE DO NOT BUY DOOR-TO-DOOR sticker in the window

didn’t look as welcoming as it should have done. Nor did the

terracotta tiles on the step, which had been cracked across

when Cal had dropped a fridge on them, the day we’d moved

in.

I didn’t have a key on me. I thought about ringing the bell,

then remembered that, even if anybody was in, by this time

of night they’d probably be too stoned to bother answering. I

remember swearing. I’d come all that way, walked the

distance back to my own world, and I wasn’t going to give up

now.

86

I should have given up. The world would have ended any-

way, but if I hadn’t broken into my old flat then I never

would’ve figured out the truth. I wouldn’t have known what

was happening until it was too late. (Oh, who am I kidding?

I’d probably be dead by now, and, yes, I’m sure it’d be very

romantic for me to say that I’d rather be dead than know the

truth, but I’d be lying through my arse.)

Fifteen minutes later I was hurtling through the streets of

Covent Garden again, pushing aside anyone who got in my

way, police or otherwise. I remember running around in

circles, breaking through a couple of the cordons, getting

much too close to the parts of London that weren’t supposed

to be there any more.

Cwej had spent two weeks keeping me away from the

place I remembered calling home. He’d been subtle about the

way he’d done it, or as subtle as Cwej could get, and now I’d

found out why. I’d run face first into the twist in the plot.

87

This is what happened, when I went back into my old flat:

Breaking in wasn’t a problem. There was an alley by the

side of the house, between two of the big Victorian buildings,

and there was a window there that led into the kitchen. There

hadn’t been a lock on the window when we’d moved in, or

even a catch, and we hadn’t thought it was worth fitting one,

seeing as we didn’t have anything worth burgling except for

Cal’s record collection. I knew you could get into the house

by forcing the window open from the outside, because we’d

done it once before, when Dorian had deliberately dropped

his key down a grating in an effort to ‘loosen up’ and make

himself less paranoid about losing stuff. If you can follow the

logic of that.

The kitchen was the same as it had always been, although

the smell of grease was worse than usual, and somebody had

taken to using paper plates, probably just to avoid doing the

washing-up. The paper plates were lying in heaps around the

pedal bin now, like someone had tried to Frisbee them into

the bin from across the room. Nobody was around. When I

walked out of the kitchen and into the hallway, nobody was

around there, either. The house was empty. It had that feel

empty houses usually have, when you can tell, even without

looking properly, that there are no TV sets or radios switched

on anywhere in the building.

I called out, just in case I was wrong. No answer. I started

to wonder if everyone had evacuated the place after the

Horror had come, or if they’d been standing too close to

Leicester Square when it had been levelled. (I never did find

out the answer to that one, either. But it’s all academic now.)

88

I started to get worried when I walked into my bedroom. As

soon as I opened the door, I knew it hadn’t been left alone in

the fortnight I’d been gone. All the things I recognized as

mine were there, but they weren’t in the places where I

remembered leaving them. There were dirty sheets scrunched

up at the bottom of the bed, and clothes I hadn’t worn in the

last couple of months hanging over the armchair. Some of the

drawers were half open, which wasn’t unusual, but there was

something wrong about them, like they’d been opened in

ways that weren’t normal. Does that make sense?

I sniffed the air. It smelt of girl sweat. It smelt of me, but

the smell was more recent than it should have been, and

somehow it made my nose itch. I wondered if the cocaine

had finally broken something in my nostrils.

I moved into the middle of the room, and started touching

things at random, just to get a feel for the place. Then I

started fiddling around with the bits and pieces, shoving

things back into drawers, or folding up the skirts that had

been left on the floor. Not that I really cared how neat the

room was, but I wanted the world to know it was mine.

Except that I couldn’t get over the feeling it wasn’t mine,

even though I remembered everything there. I ended up

standing by the bookshelf, tutting at how few books there

actually were, and rearranging the decorations: the little

stone gargoyle I’d bought on an expedition to Camden, the

crystals Lady had given (or ‘sold’, as everyone else in the

world would have put it) to me in the hope that they’d clear

up my karma. There was a stack of photos on one of the

shelves, and I started neatening up the pile, without even

thinking about what I was doing.

Which was when I finally noticed.

89

I don’t have any of the photos with me now, which is a pity,

because they’d make nice souvenirs. They were all in black

and white, and they’d all been taken in the summer of 1969,

when me, Cal and half a dozen others had all taken a coach

to Aberdeen for a week, to look at stone circles and pretend

to be impressed. The top picture of the stack was of me and

Cal standing in front of a wire fence, with a great big stone

archway in the background. I was grumpy that day, and I

looked it. Cal was stoned, and he definitely looked it.

At least, that’s what the picture should have shown. But it

wasn’t me hanging around in front of the megaliths. Yes, I

think I must have actually jumped when I saw it.

It was somebody else. Another girl. She was standing right

where I’d been standing, wearing the cagoule I’d been

wearing, and Cal was leaning against her for support, the

same way he’d leant against me. I stared at the picture for a

while, trying to remember where I’d seen the girl before.

Same age as me, but a bit taller. Blonde. Skinny legs.

Lady Diamond’s place, obviously. The last time I’d tried to

go home, I’d seen her through the glass in the door of the

shop, lounging around on one of the beanbags. Back then, I’d

thought she’d taken my place, whoever she was. I hadn’t

been expecting her to take over my past as well.

For the first few minutes, while I stood there and stared

and stared and stared at the photo, that’s honestly what I

thought. I’d left my own world, so the universe had slotted a

new girl into the space I’d left behind, even letting her take

over the bits of my life I’d already lived through. It was only

once I’d got over the shock that I started to put everything

together. All the loose ends. All the things I’d never got

around to asking Cwej about. All the holes in the story.

That’s when I figured out exactly who the girl was. That’s

when I dropped the photo. And that’s when I started running.

NOTES ON THE TRUTH

90

I might as well say it now, seeing as you’ll be working it out

for yourselves soon anyway. A lot of this book is, strictly

speaking, lies. The parts about Cwej are all true, of course,

and so are all the bits about the Horror, the sphinxes, and

Cwej’s employers. It’s the little details, about my friends and

my family and my early years, that are suspect.

Remember what I told you back at the beginning? I’m

making a book out of my memories. I can’t swear that any of

those memories are anywhere near to the truth. If I tell you

that I fell off a horse at a children’s zoo when I was six, or

that I lost my virginity to Cal when I was fifteen, then I’m just

telling you things the way I remember them happening.

Am I getting too philosophical here? I’m sorry. I just don’t

want you thinking I’m a liar, that’s all. Because I don’t feel

like a liar.

91

At around twenty past eleven on 11 October 1970 I ended up

back at Cwej’s flat, with my hair full of sweat and a stitch in

my side the size of the Suez Canal. There was nobody in

when I got there. I didn’t even bother to look. By then, I think

I’d worked out that Cwej wouldn’t be coming home. Besides,

the car he’d rented was missing from its space outside.

The first thing I did was go to the kitchen. I knew I could

find some old tools there, a couple of spanners and a bunch

of rusty screwdrivers, stuffed into the cupboard under the

sink. I’d seen them while I’d been trying to clean the place

up, on one of those mornings when shitty housework seemed

like a better option than jetting off across the galaxy with

Cwej. By the look of them, the tools had probably been left

behind by I the last tenants of the flat, who’d had no idea at

all that the next occupier would be working for aliens.

I picked up the heaviest spanner, then went out into the

hall and headed straight for the one door that I’d never seen

Cwej open. Yes, the one with the padlock. Living here for the

last fortnight had made the door so familiar to me that I’d

stopped wondering what was behind it. Until now, of course.

Now I’d started to figure out the truth.

Question: why had there been such a long gap between

Cwej leaving the living room to go for a walk, and me

hearing him open the front door of the flat, earlier in the

evening? He hadn’t really been pacing the hall, not like I’d

thought. He’d been doing something else. Something in here,

in the secret room.

How did I know all this? Because I did, that’s all. Because

it was the only thing that made sense. Which is why I started

beating at the door with the spanner, first trying to break

the, padlock, then giving up and just trying to beat a hole in

the wood panelling.

92

This is a list of all the questions I started asking myself, while

I was running back to the flat after I’d found the photo of Cal

and the blonde girl:

1. If Cwej’s employers could get one or two people into the

bottle by copying the sphinx’s rituals, then why had they

bothered sending Cwej in at all? Couldn’t they have just used

the rituals to send their ‘survival team’ straight to Earth, one

traveller at a time?

2. Was it really a coincidence that the person who got

mixed up in Cwej’s life just happened to have the same

surname as one of Cwej’s oldest (and apparently deadest)

friends?

3. According to the arrest report, which Cwej had nicked

from the police station after the sphinx had turned up, Cwej

had been carrying something that looked like a murder

weapon on the night we’d met. Why?

4. And exactly how had the Horror managed to kill two

innocent women on the streets of London, if it hadn’t worked

out how to build itself a proper body by then?

And finally, the one that had helped everything else click

into place:

5. What was behind that locked door in the flat, anyway?

93

The room turned out not to be lit, once I’d smashed my way

through the door. At least, it wasn’t lit in the normal way.

Most of the room was dark, but there was a kind of blue glow

in the middle of it, which somehow didn’t manage to light up

the walls, the floor or the ceiling.

I climbed through the hole in the door, cutting my hands

on the splinters and not really caring. I was sweating like a

pig by then, and there was an itch behind my nose that

wouldn’t have been fixed by all the coke in South America. I

was prickling all over by the time I reached the blue glowing

thing. I was getting close to the truth, and I wanted to stuff

as much of the truth into my body as I could, by snorting it,

smoking it or injecting it. Anything to make me whole again.

The thing in the middle of the room looked like a tank of

water, but there were little blue bubbles of light frothing up

in front of my face. I knew, even before I touched it, that it

wasn’t a tank. It was just a cube of liquid, like the ‘tank’ I’d

seen on Simia KK98, where Cwej’s employers grew their

clones. There weren’t any naked bodies floating around

inside, but the cube was big enough for at least three full-

sized adults, maybe four.

I put my fingers against the side. Just close enough to hear

the words that had been programmed into the ‘tank’, to feel

the memories stored in the water. The water told me how it

had fallen off a horse at a children’s zoo when it was six, and

how it had lost its virginity at fifteen. It told me about Cal,

and Lady Diamond, and Dorian’s bad poetry, and...

And by the time I moved my hand away, I knew whose

personality was being kept inside the cube. I remember being

calm, there in the locked room. There was no point getting

violent. I could have tried lashing out at the ‘tank’, or

throwing things at it, but I knew anything I hit it with would

just end up as part of me. I think I’d already figured out

where I had to go next, even before I’d finished thinking

things through.

94

What’s the first thing I remember?

The first thing I remember is a book of fairy tales I had

when I was eighteen months old. I remember there being a

picture of a fox on the first page, dressed in a top hat and a

suit, showing its teeth and letting its tongue dangle out of its

mouth in a getting-ready-to-eat-someone kind of way. I

remember being scared shitless of that picture, screaming at

it until my parents worked out what was wrong and tore the

page out of the book.

Except that I don’t really remember this at all. I just

remember remembering it. The memory was one of the

things that had been stored in the ‘tank’ in Cwej’s flat, the

place where I’d been made. It was only while I was heading

through the streets of Soho, without knowing whether to

walk or run, that I started to ask myself what my real first

memory was.

I remembered being at the police station, seeing Cwej for

the first time. No, before that: there was the building site on

the Embankment, where I’d been found slobbering down my

chin and babbling like a junkie. And before that? Before that,

there were still memories, but they felt like they’d gone cold

on me. Machine memories. Just programmes, supplied by

the tank and sucked into my body through the skin.

The building site was the first ‘real’ thing I remembered.

So that was where I was heading. Even now, I don’t know

whether it was because I thought I was going back to my

roots, or because I already knew what I’d find there.

95

Two weeks earlier, I’d stood in a cave on Simia KK98, seeing

the bottle from the outside for the first time. That was the

moment when I’d given up, I think; the moment when I’d put

my future in Cwej’s hands. I wasn’t ‘real’; nothing I knew

was ‘real’. This was obviously the lowest any (pretend)

human being could go, so what was the point fighting it?

Except that now, on the streets of London on 11 October, I

knew better. Even in the pretend world, I was a pretend

person, made by Cwej and his employers for reasons I was

only just starting to figure out. Yes, in the hierarchy of the

‘real’ universe, I was about as far down the ladder as anyone

could get.

The lowest of the low, that’s me. The most unreal of the

unreal. Sometimes I think the only reason I lived through the

end of the world was that I wasn’t important enough for

anybody to get rid of.

96/97

The building site was sealed off by a big mesh fence. The

workmen had only just laid the foundations when I’d been

arrested there, but now the skeleton of the building had been

more or less finished, even though the site didn’t look like it

had been touched in the last couple of days. Nobody was

bothering to build anything in London any more, not now

they’d seen the Horror and found out how easy it was for

things to get torn down again.

By night, the site looked like a place for dead things,

more like an archaeological dig than anything else. I headed

around the skeleton building once I’d squeezed through the

gap in the mesh, past the vans and cement mixers that had

been abandoned there, past all the tools that had been left

scattered across the gravel (when the Horror had come?).

There wasn’t anybody around. I hadn’t seen any police since

the Strand. There was the sound of traffic from the

riverbank, but you couldn’t see the road from here.

I finally reached the corner of the building, and stepped

around the edge of the scaffolding. There was a big empty

patch of ground on that side of the site, which was where I

remembered being when I’d started screaming at the sky and

drooling on my shirt, two weeks earlier. The space was pretty

much the way it had been, still littered with the things the

builders had left behind, the broken cola bottles and the old

packed-lunch wrappers.

And Cwej was there. The only light was from the street-j

lamps on the other side of the fence, but you couldn’t miss

him. Cwej looked the same as when he’d left the flat, with

his raincoat pulled tight around his neck and his body all

hunched, like his bones still felt too old and fragile to let him

walk properly.

He looked up as soon as I turned the corner, so he must

have been on edge, maybe expecting someone to find him

there. Even before he realized who I was, his face had started

twisting itself up. I think he was scared, more than anything.

When he finally recognized me, the look got worse, and I

could see the muscles getting tighter under his clothes. He

looked like he was trying to stop himself running away.

For a while, we just stared at each other. Eventually, I

managed to look down.

Cwej’s coat was covered in streaks of black, which is how

blood usually looks in that kind of light. There was some-

thing in his hand, something sharp and shiny, but I didn’t

care about the details enough to focus on it. Besides, I was

too busy staring at the ground, at the thing that was lying

there at his feet, covered in spots and smears of black.

‘I’m sorry,’ Cwej said.

He must have tried his best to sound like he meant it. He

must have really, really tried.

98

I won’t bother describing the body. I’m not sure I could if I

wanted to. Whenever I think about it, I imagine that photo

from the Jack the Ripper book, of the woman turned into dog

meat in her bedroom. The body at Cwej’s feet wasn’t that

bad, though. I’m sure it wasn’t. Whatever else I might want

to say about him, I’d never pretend Cwej enjoyed what he

did.

So the mutilations were clinical ones, I’m sure of that

much. I’d like to think that the wounds to the chest had been

made first, that the woman had been neatly stabbed to death

before Cwej had taken away all the traces of her identity

(face, fingers, scalp etc.). He’d even dressed her up, which

was something I’m sure he didn’t have to do; she must have

been naked when she’d come out of the cloning ‘tank’ in the

flat. Almost as if Cwej wanted the world to know that he

wasn’t getting a kick out of this, even if nobody was really

watching.

I think the worst thing was knowing what the woman must

have looked like, before Cwej had gone to work on her. She

must have looked exactly like me. What was Cwej thinking

about, I wonder, when he made the first cut? Was he

thinking about all the bad times between us, just to make

the job easier?

Cwej used to be a policeman. Mr Good Cop. I have to keep

telling myself that. And I have to ask myself whether he only

fell that far because of his employers, or whether he’d had a

talent for killing anyway, and they’d just exploited it.

99

‘Why?’ I said.

I wasn’t even angry. I wasn’t even upset. I was empty by

then, empty as an unreal person in an unreal world should

be.

Cwej dropped the knife, or whatever it was. I think I saw

him shake his head. When he finally said something, you

could hear the words making little bubbles of spit at the back

of his throat.

‘Ritual,’ he said. His voice went all high-pitched and

squawky at the end, and I knew he was trying to make

everything he said sound like an apology, not just to me, but

to the universe in general.

I remembered what he’d taught me about the bottle, and

the way the followers of the Kings of Space could ‘program’

it. How they were just like Lady Diamond’s Egyptian priest-

masons. What was it Cwej had said? That to make the bottle

do what you wanted, you’d need sacrifices. Blood sacrifices,

even.

‘They told me to do it,’ Cwej said. His eyes were flicking

from side to side, watching all the shadows and the skeletons

of the building site. Anything rather than look at me head-on,

I suppose.

‘Those other two women,’ I said. I still didn’t feel anything.

‘Did you kill them as well?’

Cwej started to nod, then changed his mind. He opened

and closed his mouth, looking for the right defence. ‘They

weren’t women,’ he said, after a while. He’d started whining

now. ‘They were clones. My employers, they wanted me to

use... to use real people. Whoever I could find. In the

bottle.’

100

I’m remembering that mantra of mine again.

We make things out of sin, with blood and human skin;

We make things out of dust, so we can smash them up.

101

I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, and waited for him to

finish. I remembered seeing a documentary about the

Nuremberg Trials on BBC2, about how Albert Speer had done

his best to look guilty-but-sorry to get off with a twenty-year

sentence. Funny thing to think about, really. At a time like

that.

‘I couldn’t do it,’ said Cwej. ‘I couldn’t just kill people.

Not the people in the bottle. That’s why I asked for the

cloning stuff. I had to make the sacrifices. To finish the

ritual. Three people, that was the way it worked. I had to kill

three people.’

‘So you just made them? In your flat?’

Cwej nodded. He looked down at his feet, but down was

where the body was. I saw him shut his eyes.

‘Who am I?’ I asked.

‘Christine Summerfield,’ he said. Without even pausing.

‘Was I made in the cloning... thing?’ He nodded again.

‘So who do I look like?’ I asked. ‘Who was I a clone of?’

Cwej shrugged. ‘Nobody. I don’t know.’

‘Nobody?’

‘The genes came from the files,’ Cwej snapped, much

more aggressively than he’d meant to, I think. I took a step

back. He was making me feel like I was asking all the wrong

questions. ‘It was a... a standard human template. I don’t

know.’

‘So what about my memories? Are they standard, too?’

‘No.’ Finally, Cwej looked up. He was looking straight at

me, although his face was just as wrinkly and confused as it

had been when he’d shut his eyes. ‘All the... victims. I had

to give them memories. They wouldn’t have counted as

people, otherwise. It’s in the rules of the ritual. It’s how the

sphinxes think.’

‘So whose memories are they?’ I asked.

102

They were the memories of the blonde girl in the photo,

of course. When he’d arrived on Earth, Cwej had headed

straight for Lady Diamond’s shop, to learn about the way the

people in the bottle performed their own rituals. He’d met

Lady there, and Cal and Dorian and all the others. Including

the blonde girl, who was, in a sense, me.

Cwej didn’t go into details. I got the feeling he’d seduced

her, although he must have felt guilty enough already

without mentioning a thing like that. While the girl had been

looking the other way, he’d copied her long-term memories,

using whatever magic brain technology his employers had

given him. Then he’d dumped her.

Obviously, he’d changed the memories a bit before he’d

programmed them into the ‘tank’. He’d given me a new

name, for a start, probably just to give me an identity

separate from the blonde girl, so he wouldn’t feel too bad

about what he had to do next. Summerfield, after Bernice.

Chris, after... himself? I should think so.

(Another question: if you had to give a name to someone

you were going to kill, would you name her after one of your

friends? Well... actually, I think I would. But then the

friends I had - the friends I remembered having - were just

gagging for it, weren’t they?)

The first two Christine Summerfields had been grown and

slaughtered before I’d even been made. For the sake of the

ritual, Cwej had killed them off in a very specific pattern,

choosing the right places as well as the right times. The flat

obviously hadn’t been good enough, which was why they’d

been found in the gutters around London. I suppose he had

to leave the bodies for the police to find, as well. Maybe it’s

not the actual murder that powers the ritual, but all the fear

and panic it causes... Or maybe I’m filling in too many blanks

here.

I never found out what the blonde girl’s name was. I

suppose I should have asked. After all, we had so much in

common.

103

‘You’ve killed me twice already,’ I said. I was trying to sound

angry, but I was failing miserably. Frankly, I didn’t really

care what had happened to the last two Chris Summerfields.

It was hard enough remembering to care about myself.

Cwej shook his head. He was still eyeing up the shadows,

waiting for the world to punish him for what he’d done. ‘The

clones needed memories. But I buried the memories as deep

as I could. They weren’t people.’

‘Am I a person?’

‘Yes! Look... the others weren’t conscious or anything. I

mean, before they started acting like people, I had to...’

He had trouble getting the next word out. I helped him.

‘Kill,’ I said.

‘Kill them,’ Cwej blurted. ‘I killed them. Before the

memories could get rooted inside them. I wouldn’t have done

it otherwise. Really.’

‘Then what about me?’ I asked.

104

I can’t help wondering how Cwej moved me from his flat to

the building site, on the night I was made. In the hired car,

or by some kind of time-traveller technology? I don’t know. I

don’t know exactly what went wrong, either, because Cwej

was gabbling when he explained it all to me. I was a walking

vegetable back then, before my memories had taken root

properly. Maybe I made a break for it, not knowing who I

was or what was happening to me. But somehow I ended up

standing in the middle of the building site, screaming and

slobbering, like a little baby seeing the world for the first

time. Lucky for me, really, that the police came along at just

the right moment.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Was the blonde girl a

coke-head, like I was? According to Cwej, my memories

started changing when they settled in, to fill in the gaps and

make sense of the world around me (but note how I was

always surprised when I looked in a mirror, like I was half

expecting to see somebody else there). When the police

found me and took me out of Cwej’s clutches, they thought I

was a coke-head, and maybe it was because they treated me

like one that I turned into one. Who can say?

No wonder the sphinx attacked me, back in Lady

Diamond’s shop. It knew I didn’t belong inside the bottle,

because, let’s face it, I didn’t belong anywhere. When it bit

into me, it must have tasted a hint of Cwej and decided to go

for a bigger, tastier, more important target. By the time Cwej

found me again, or I found him, it was too late to finish the

ritual. I’d turned into a proper person. The memories had

settled. I might not have been exactly ‘real’, but I was so

close to being ‘real’ that Cwej couldn’t bring himself to cut

my face off.

Nice guy.

I always knew he felt guilty about me. I’d always thought

it was because he’d dragged me into his life without asking,

but the truth was that I’d always been part of his life. He felt

guilty because he knew he was responsible for me, and if it

hadn’t been for a lucky accident he’d have killed me on the

night I’d come out of the ‘tank’. If I was Chicken Licken,

then he was the fox. God only knows what must have been

going through his head while we’d been sleeping together.

105

Once it was all over, once Cwej had finished explaining

things to me and was panting to get the air moving around

his lungs again, I ended up staring back down at his feet. At

the skinny, dark-haired mess that was lying there, bleeding

into the gravel. My identical twin, not that I felt much for

her.

‘The orders haven’t changed,’ said Cwej. The cracks in his

voice had just about healed over by now.

The orders. That was what Khiste had been talking to him

about, over the last few days. The production of a new Chris

Summerfield, which Cwej could bump off to finish the ritual.

The treaty with the sphinxes, and the trouble with the

Horror, had just delayed things a bit. The plan was the same

as ever.

‘It’s that easy,’ I said. ‘It’s that easy to kill me.’

Cwej didn’t answer. He’d shut his eyes again.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘You still haven’t told me why. What’s the

ritual for, anyway? What are your employers trying to do?’

As it happened, Cwej never had to give me an answer to

that. Because the ritual was over, and things were happening

even while I was asking the big question. There was light in

the sky, and the night was opening up. The walls of the bottle

were moving. The world around us, the whole wide world,

was starting to follow Cwej’s instructions.

It had just gone midnight. It was 12 October 1970.

NOTES ON THE END

106-8

It wasn’t like before. The bottle was opening, but it wasn’t

just a tunnel, like the one the sphinx had made in Cwej’s flat.

Wherever you were in London, however good or bad the

view was from your bedroom window, you would have seen

it. The horizon was coming away from the sky. A gap was

opening up between the city and the night, and there was

boiling orange light pouring into the world through the

crack, flooding in from outside the bottle. There was alien air

sweeping through the streets, blowing the litter into little

tornadoes, cracking all the windows along the Embankment.

The people of London must have looked up at the sky,

remembered the Horror, and not known whether to start

screaming or just to roll their eyes in a ‘not again’ kind of

way.

Space shifted. Distances changed. The buildings moved

aside, like that bit in The Ten Commandments with the Red

Sea, until there was an open pathway across the whole of the

capital, a valley of light stretching all the way from the

Thames to NW1. The building site was at the end of the path,

and from where we were standing we could see right down

its length, into the other world in the distance. The buildings

in front of us were cut in half, and a five-mile-wide stretch of

space was neatly slotted into the middle.

There were shapes at the end of the pathway. They were

little black smudges against the light, marching towards us

from the place where the horizon used to be. The column was

miles wide, and too long for us to be able to see the end. We

both just stared, peering into the distance, forgetting all

about the smell of the blood on the gravel.

They were coming in their thousands, maybe in their

millions. Armed and armoured, with their black metal skins

shining in the light. I could see their faces now, or maybe just

the faces they’d decided to wear for the night. It wasn’t an

army, exactly. It was an exodus. Some of them were

marching alone; some of them were marching in groups;

some of them were marching under the flags of old families

and colleges; and some of them were riding on the backs of

animals that must have been genetically engineered to take

the weight of giants. And they were giants. Even if most of

them weren’t much taller than Cwej, they looked huge, like

whole power-houses of energy that had been squeezed down

into human bodies. They had boots that could crush rock,

hands that could tear metal, and brains so strong you could

feel the weight of them from miles away, smothering you with

their ideas. Giants, in the only sense of the word that

mattered.

Not all of them had armour. Just the first few hundred

ranks. There were others following the soldiers, things from

the same species, wearing high-collared robes instead of the

black plating. They weren’t just agents, you could tell that

much. These were Cwej’s employers in the flesh. The ones

who rode the animals were covered in spikes and crests and

horns, so you couldn’t always tell where the riders started

and the things they were sitting on ended. The noise? There

aren’t any words to describe it, the sound of that many feet

crashing across the ground. It blotted out everything, apart

from the hymns. You could hear a kind of muttering from

some parts of the column, like songs that had been

translated into computer talk, but the groups inside the

column couldn’t agree on a single prayer for everyone.

They weren’t heading for the building site. Well, why

would they be? They broke off from the column in fives and

tens and hundreds, filtering into the streets on either side of

them. The giants were pushing their way between the

buildings, spreading out until they filled up all the empty

spaces. They must have taken Covent Garden first, then

Russell Square, then Euston. And the column went on for

ever, and I knew London couldn’t hold all of them, even if

they trampled everything that got in their way. Soon, they’d

be in Oxford, and in Birmingham, and in Brighton, and in

Liverpool, and in Edinburgh, and... and past the coast, they’d

still be marching. In bodies that had been specially built for

walking on water, I should think.

After what must have been half an hour, half an hour of

staring, I finally turned to look at Cwej. But Cwej didn’t look

back at me. The story he’d told me, about his employers

sending a ‘survival team’ to Earth, had been a lie from the

start. The people - the things - he worked for had come for

what they really wanted, their one last hope of getting away

from the Gods of Dellah.

It was the time-traveller invasion of Earth. It was the end

of the world.

109

So. This is where the story ends, more or less. All I have to

do now is resolve things, just like Cwej would have done.

I’m looking at that photograph again, the one of the dragon

boats over London, with the sphinx wrapping itself around

one of the spires that Cwej’s employers had planted there.

The picture was taken a week or so after the invasion started,

once all the old buildings of central London had been sucked

into the sky and recycled. The sphinx-gods had wanted to

take a look at the Earth inside the bottle, to make sure the

time travellers were treating it properly. They sent thousands

of sphinxes to flap over the world, all taking notes through

their big glass eyes. They stayed for only the one evening.

I took the photo myself, from the window of one of the

spires. From the quarters Cwej had been given, in fact. Of

course, Cwej wasn’t there at the time - off on more secret

missions, probably. I’d spoken to him only once since 12

October, when he’d told me that I was welcome to stay at his

place on the new Earth, if I wanted. I’d shrugged. I don’t

think I said more than four words in the whole conversation.

If I hadn’t been there, in the safety of one of the spires, I

probably would have suffered the same fate as all the other

human beings in London. Which makes me wonder: would

Cwej have come back for me, if I’d stayed at home when he’d

gone out to finish the ritual? Or would he have let his people

bury me, like he’d buried the other two women with my face?

110

A few days after that, I was back on Simia KK98 for the last

time. Cwej’s people had let me choose where I wanted to go.

As far as the time travellers were concerned, the humans

inside the bottle were an irrelevance, but Cwej must have

had a word in their ears. I owe him that much, anyway. They

never would have thought about genocide, not with laws as

strict as theirs, but the bottle people hardly counted as a

species. They weren’t any more real than, say, the characters

in Pogle’s Wood. That was their view, and I think Cwej very

nearly managed to convince himself that they were right,

towards the end.

It was Khiste who met me on Simia KK98, when I stepped

out of the bottle and into the fortress.

‘Well?’ he said. He sounded a lot less impatient than he

had done, now the Great Work was over.

I shrugged. ‘I can’t go back,’ I said.

‘You’re not going to stay with Cwej?’

I tried to figure out whether he was jealous. I don’t think he

was. Whatever had happened between us, it was resolved, as

far as he was concerned. Just like the whole world had been

‘resolved’.

111

Before I tell you where I ended up, maybe I should explain

exactly what happened to Earth, after Cwej’s employers

turned up in their millions.

It didn’t take the governments of the world long to notice

what was happening. Somebody somewhere started

launching the nuclear missiles, and the rest of the world

followed suit. A lot of the missiles were fired at England,

while some of them were fired at other superpowers, probably

for complicated political reasons that weren’t really very

important any more. It might have been called World War

Three, if anybody had been taking notes.

The missiles that were sent to England never detonated.

Cwej’s employers weren’t stupid. They’d taken precautions,

and brought defences with them. On the other hand, any

missiles aimed at parts of the world that hadn’t been invaded

yet went off as planned. The TV and radio stations

stopped broadcasting after the first few explosions, so there

weren’t any big news stories about the takeover, no David

Frost interviews with eyewitnesses. Nobody ever found out

what happened to Charles Manson, either. Meanwhile, the

aliens hardly noticed that half the planet had been made

radioactive.

Cwej’s employers didn’t feel any need to talk with the

humans at all. They just marched where they wanted to

march, tearing down anything they didn’t like the look of,

and taking over all the facilities. They left the human power

stations standing, so they had a handy energy source to work

with until they got their own systems up and running (during

his one-way conversation with me, Cwej told me they were

planning on turning the sun into some kind of black hole,

although he might just have been talking big). The invaders

didn’t try to kill off the population, or anything like that. The

population wasn’t even an issue. Any humans who died just

got caught up in the machinery.

112/113

I don’t remember which of the big cities got torn out of the

ground first. It all happened so quickly. The architecture was

scooped up by machines the size of the Isle of Wight, and

then recycled, turned into the materials the time travellers

needed to make their own buildings. The people? They were

probably all stored in some big cultural database somewhere.

From what I could see, from my place of safety up in one of

the London spires, there was a new kind of human

civilization forming down on the ground. Whole families,

whole communities of survivors, were living in the cracks of

the new time-traveller society. Not exterminated, not hunted,

just forgotten about.

Why had Cwej’s employers picked Earth as their new

home, anyway? Apart from the fact that it was the same size

as their homeworld, and had the same length of day (believe

me, this is the voice of experience speaking), I think it was to

do with resources. They knew they could live on Earth even

before they’d finished rebuilding the place. They knew they

could move in straight away, and worry about the

redecorations later.

Then there were the people. I think they knew how they

could use the people. Cwej’s employers didn’t need slaves, as

such. They didn’t - don’t - have any sadistic urges at all.

What the humans on Earth did, they did to themselves.

It started just before I left Earth for the last time. The

survivors had been skulking in the underworld, down in the

shadow of the spires, and after a week or two they figured out

that they couldn’t live like that for much longer. They could

find food and water, but all their culture had been taken

away from them, and there was no way the people of 1970

could survive without their posters and their icons and their

smiley faces. The day before I walked out of the bottle, I

looked down from the spire and saw the first of them

crawling up from the ground, clambering on to the walkways

between the new buildings. They were human, but they were

wearing armour, and they could climb up sheer surfaces like

they’d been born to it.

The humans had started asking Cwej’s employers for

favours. It was all they could do. And Cwej’s employers,

paying attention to the bottle people for once, had agreed to

help. The aliens must have drowned the surface of England

with potions, giving the people who lived there the chance to

mutate, to turn into things the invaders could use as their

agents. There wasn’t any compulsion. The humans were just

starting to work out that life would be better that way.

114

I met Cwej one more time, after I took the photo of the

sphinx. It was the day before I left Earth, two days after the

invaders decided to turn the sky orange. I’d gone down to

ground level for the first time since the spires had been built

(they’d all been put up in one afternoon, natch), floating

down to the ruins on a current of hot air. Past the humans

who were just starting to crawl up out of the underworld,

blinking at the sunlight through their brand-new compound

eyes. Genetic social climbing, I suppose.

There were gaps between the spires down at ground level,

‘streets’ made out of the crunched-up wreckage of old

London. I didn’t have any reason for being there. I just

wandered. Through the alleyways that had been lined with

impacted cars, past all the remains the human race had left

behind, along the broken pavements and through the

skeletons of heavy machinery.

Eventually, I found a building that had been left more or

less intact, although the windows had been shattered and

one of the outer walls had apparently been sucked up and

reprocessed. The building had been a burger cafe while it’d

been alive. Not an American-style one, not like a Wimpy bar.

A British one. There were yellow rubber seats inside, cartoon

menus on the walls, and... and, yes, big red plastic tomatoes

on the tables, full of dried-up ketchup.

I sat down in the near-darkness inside the restaurant, and

tried to feel reassured. But this was, if anything, even less

‘real’ than the world up above. Pretending that this was

normal somehow seemed a bit sick.

I’d been sitting there for about twenty minutes when Cwej

came through the doors. He didn’t have any reason for being

there either, so, unless it was all a stupid coincidence, he

must have followed me down into the underworld. How

touching.

115

Of course, not all the humans agreed to change. There were

fanatics, especially in Russia and the Middle East, who

started building their own H-bombs and blowing up the cities

(the cities that were still human-run, that is, the ones the

aliens weren’t protecting... I think they called it a moral

victory). I can just imagine Ted Heath and Harold Wilson,

living half naked in the rubble of England, fighting out their

tribal wars and never giving in to the time travellers’ rule.

But by the time I left the planet I think most people were

ready to evolve. And it was a kind of evolution, wasn’t it?

They were changing their bodies to suit the surroundings.

The next great step forward for mankind, and it had all

happened in less than thirty days. They were shedding their

humanity, all taking on exactly the same programme for

living. They must have seen Cwej’s employers the same way

Cwej’s employers saw the Gods.

116

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ said Cwej.

He was sitting opposite me in the buried restaurant, trying

not to make eye contact. Even in the dark, you could tell he

was sick. He’d lost weight in the week or so since I’d seen

him last. He was still wearing his suit, but it was dangling on

his shoulders, like it had died on him and started rotting. Age

had caught up with him, as well. Time must have noticed

that he’d been a kid for too long, and slapped a few big black

lines around his eyes.

Also, his hair was falling out. I got the urge to reach out

and tug it, the same kind of urge that makes you pick at

scabs.

‘Nowhere else to go,’ I said.

There was a long pause after that.

‘Christine,’ Cwej began. Then he gave up.

That was the way things worked in this world, wasn’t it?

Even now the time travellers had taken over. Nothing ever

got sorted out, not really. Even if your boyfriend had ripped

your face off three times over, even if your whole life was a

lie designed just for his benefit, what could you do? You

couldn’t end it all in one big argument. You just had to sit

there and run out of things to say, letting all the

awkwardness and clumsiness suffocate you to death.

‘Are you sick?’ I asked.

Cwej nodded his head. ‘Body’s dying. Radiation poisoning.

Got too close to one of the H-bomb hits.’

‘Will you get rebuilt?’ I said. Just making conversation.

‘Yeah,’ said Cwej. Whether he was going to regenerate

into something like Khiste, or into a new version of himself

- or into something specially designed for life inside the

redecorated bottle - I didn’t ask. I didn’t care enough.

In the end, I just got up and walked out of the restaurant.

117

Yes, I know I was mass-produced. Yes, I know I’m not a real

native of the bottle. But I was born on Earth in 1970, and all

my memories come from there, so you’ll pardon me if I still

think of it as home, won’t you? Maybe that’s why I left the

bottle, so I could finally feel like I’d resolved something. The

only way I could resolve anything, between me and Cwej,

between me and Khiste, or between me and Earth. By

walking out. Starting over in a whole new universe.

I wonder if the Horror’s learning anything, back in the

bottle. I wonder if it’s still alive. Cwej’s employers might

have tracked it down already, whatever body it’s wearing.

For all I know, they’ve turned it into another one of their

weapons. Poor sod. Not much of a life. And it’s all my fault,

obviously.

By now, I should think I’m the last human survivor of the

Earth in the bottle. Cwej’s employers will have covered the

place with potions in the last few months. If Darwin was

right, then the ones who didn’t evolve will have gone under,

just leaving behind their bones and relics for the next

generation to either dig up or build over.

118

Khiste dropped me off on Ordifica after I left the bottle, one

of Earth’s colony planets a long, long way from Dellah. He

said I’d be dead before the Gods got round to taking it over,

but he didn’t sound like he meant it in a bad way. I said

thanks. That was pretty much as far as the goodbyes went.

I brought this rucksack with me from Earth, and packed

it with all the things Cwej salvaged from the wreckage,

including some handy bits and pieces from the twenty-sixth

century (which is, after all, my time now). The credit card is

the most useful thing: I don’t think it’s got a credit limit,

which I suppose is one of the perks of time travel. I used the

card to rent living space on Ordifica, and I used it to book

passage off the planet, heading for another colony world

a bit closer to the galactic centre. That’s what I’ve been

doing these last few months. Moving from colony to colony.

Ordifica, Criptostophon, Gardener’s World, Hai Dow Seven,

Lubellin, Shatner’s Climax, Ultra Caprisis. Following one of

Cwej’s old pocket star charts, in no particular hurry. Taking

in the scenery along the way, looking at all the ruins the

civilizations of the ‘real’ universe have left behind, and

watching the daily news updates from the part of space

where Dellah used to be.

Getting to this planet was the hardest part. It’s a long way

out from any of Earth’s colonies, so I had to hire a ship of my

own, and a crew, who’ve been told to come back and pick me

up in a couple of days’ time. I’m sitting in the ruins as I write

this. The ruins that Cwej’s employers left behind, when they

moved away from the homeworld and took over the bottle.

They wrecked the whole planet, by the looks of things.

Made sure there were no bones left behind, no relics, nothing

to give the Gods any clues (when the Gods finally get this

deep into the galaxy, that is). I know not all of the time

travellers went to Earth - I think some of them were talking

about setting up other colonics in the ‘real’ universe, staying

in their own continuum until they can see the whites of

the Gods’ eyes - but the homeworld’s been completely

evacuated. And gutted. Just like my world was gutted.

So here I am in the rubble, with orange sunshine pouring

in through the holes in the ceiling, writing the story of my

life ( all of my life, start to finish) for no particular reason. I’m

going to leave it here, in what must have been the capital city

of the homeworld. This place used to be the font of all

galactic wisdom, or something. And I get the last word. Hah.

119

How do I feel, now it’s all over?

Not as bad as you might think. I’ve learnt to deal with the

fact that I’m not technically a ‘real’ person, anyway. It’s all to

do with my theory about the Gods.

Cwej’s employers never told us what it was they’d found

out about the Gods, what it was that had scared them out of

their own universe. But I think I know. After all, when the

time travellers arrived in the bottle, didn’t they look like

Gods to the humans? From the humans’ point of view,

Cwej’s employers might as well have had infinite power,

more power than even the time travellers were used to, now

they had the codes to rebuild the bottle from the inside.

Well... just suppose, just imagine, that Cwej’s universe

isn’t the ‘real’ universe at all. Just imagine that everything

here (Dellah, the homeworld, Professor Bernice Summer-

field, and all) is actually inside another bottle. Bottles inside

bottles inside bottles inside bottles inside... Oh, you get the

idea. A thousand universes, all stacked one inside another.

My theory is this. I think the Gods of Dellah come from

somewhere outside this bottle, outside the ‘real’ universe.

Where they come from, they’re probably just like Cwej’s

employers, people who’ve cracked the secrets of time travel,

at least in their own world. But, just like Cwej’s employers,

they had enemies. They had to escape. So they came here,

into this world, and they pushed aside the time travellers

who were already there, not caring about them any more

than the time travellers cared about the humans. They

probably wasted a couple of million years getting used to the

way this universe works, maybe even spending a few aeons

asleep, recharging their batteries after the journey. Then they

woke up, and all hell broke loose.

That’s what got Cwej’s employers so scared, I think. The

fact that they were up against themselves. Only bigger.

Harder. More ‘real’.

At least, that’s my theory. It helps me deal with things,

anyway, because it means that none of us are ‘real’, not even

the people who weren’t grown in a cloning machine or built

inside a bottle - but maybe I’m just trying to make myself

feel better, who knows?

The only question I don’t want to ask myself is this: what

the hell must the Gods’ enemies have been like, to scare the

Gods into coming here?

120

So. Here’s where the story ends, out in the ruins of the

homeworld.

By the way, I’m off the cocaine now, although that’s

mainly because you can’t get hold of the stuff in this time

zone. You can pick up all kinds of space-age narcotics on the

colonies, but so far I’ve been too scared to try any of them.

They might make me see things six hundred years too bright

and too fast for my head to deal with. I’m sure I’ll give in

eventually, though. I know there’s a bigger world out there,

on the other side of the glass, and I’m still stupid enough to

think that a bunch of chemicals is going to help me see it.

After I leave this planet, I’ll start drifting again. Towards

Dellah, I think. There’s one thing I’m still curious about, and

it’s this: I want to know what happened to Professor Bernice

Summerfield, because in this universe she’s the closest thing

I’ve got to family. Of course, this means going into the part

of space that’s run by the Gods, but so what? I’ve hung

around with higher beings before. Maybe they’ll let me visit

their home universe, and I can keep moving up and up and

up through the worlds, until I finally find out for certain

what’s ‘real’ and what isn’t.

I suppose I should be more worried about what happened

to that blonde girl from Covent Garden, when the end of the

world came. But frankly I just can’t find any sympathy for

her at all.

121-8

[These pages left blank.]

Document Outline

Front Cover

Back Cover

FIRST NOTEBOOK

NOTES ON A PROLOGUE

NOTES ON THE STATION

NOTES ON LADY DIAMOND’S SHOP

NOTES ON THE KILLER

NOTES ON THE THING IN THE CELL

NOTES ON THE FLAT

NOTES ON CWEJ

NOTES ON THE BOTTLE

SECOND NOTEBOOK

NOTES ON THE SPHINX

NOTES ON KHISTE

NOTES ON THE SIEGE

NOTES ON THE FACE-OFF

NOTES ON AFTERWARDS

NOTES ON TRAFALGAR

NOTES ON THE HORROR TO COME

THIRD NOTEBOOK

NOTES ON REPRODUCTION

NOTES ON THE HORROR

NOTES ON GETTING OUT WHILE WE COULD

NOTES ON THE DEAD HEART

NOTES ON ME AND THE HORROR

NOTES ON THE AFTERMATH

NOTES ON THE TRUTH

NOTES ON THE END