WELCOME TO BLACK STATIC. For many of us this would have been the 43rd issue of The Third Alternative. And it should have been two years ago. I'm extremely sorry about that. I could point to more than a few snags that scuppered more than a few sets of plans, but that's no excuse really, and all things considered your patience and unwavering support during this protracted delay has been truly remarkable. Many thanks!

Thanks also to David Gentry, who came along with some exciting, brave concepts that got this project back on track, resulting in Black Static as it was probably always meant to be ... although what you now hold in your hands isn't quite that, I'm afraid, as this is a reprint of the first issue. Some of the transparencies and filters used threw up some unexpected results (which we didn't catch until the issue was actually printed and delivered) so in preparing the files for a reprint as quickly as possible, and in order to avoid the same problems, we've had to compromise on some of those effects. Once we get going again I'm sure our luck will change.

For the benefit of our newer readers, and readers of longer standing who might well have forgotten by now!—here's a brief summary of the reasons behind the changes we made: With the arrival of Interzone to this stable it made little sense to continue to compete with it for sf or fantasy, so we took the opportunity to tilt TTA fully towards its darker side, which had always been its more dominant side. The change in title is intended to emphasise this shift, leaving potential readers in no doubt about what it is we actually do, which was always a problem with the more nebulous ‘third alternative'.

TTA readers will still feel at home with the fiction, and most of the old non-fiction is still here, with just a couple of tweaks and additions such as Tony Lee's DVD reviews and the welcome return of Christopher Fowler. Please visit the website and forum regularly for more announcements as we go along.

I hope you like where we've gone and the impression you get of where we're yet to go, and that you'll come back for more—more from artist David Gentry, and more quality fiction from the likes of Melanie Fazi, Steve Rasnic Tem, Scott Nicholson, Lynda Rucker, Barry Fishler, Daniel Kaysen, Tony Richards, Trent Hergenrader, Matthew Holness, F. Brett Cox, Will McIntosh, Bruce Holland Rogers, Cody Goodfellow, Ian R. Faulkner and others. ANDY

Copyright © 2007 Andy Cox

TOO DARK

At a recent script meeting a word was uttered and a cold claw of dread gripped my heart. I was with a television production company in London discussing a possible new drama series and the question came up: how can we make it more ‘heart-warming'? Apparently, I was told, this is what the broadcasters are all looking for at the moment. To which I said, if you want ‘heart-warming’ you can kiss my pimply white Welsh ass. Or words to that effect.

I apologise if I'm over-sensitive to this issue, but it's one that's dogged me throughout my so-called career and the battle of fighting for the rights of dark fiction is becoming tedious.

My TV series Afterlife took six years to get to the screen, stalled by comments from drama heads such as ‘too dark’ or ‘too much death'. (It's ghost stories for Christ's sake; if you can do ghost stories without death, hats off to you.)

It's not just here. In America, too, I've encountered a real prejudice against the disturbing, the tragic, the even ever-so-slightly-down-beat. (Gosh, I was even told once that my feisty heroine swore too much—even though she was being attacked by aliens at the time.) But I shouldn't really be surprised. For all their talk of Democracy, Puritanism is what makes most Americans feel safe, and there, like here, it's left to striking, aberrant, individual film-makers to buck the trend—and the trend is more often than not to do with the buck.

Recently I had the pleasure of re-watching Palindromes, directed by Todd Solondz (Happiness, Storytelling). I recommend it as a minor masterpiece of acid, pitch-black wit. One might think teenage pregnancy to be the ho-hum subject matter of soap operas or right-on documentaries, but take it from me there was no social worker in Palindromes script conferences, and it shows.

Let me define my terms. By ‘dark’ I don't mean Miserablism. That's the British disease of ‘social realism’ where Mike Leigh and Ken Loach occupy the thrones of royalty. Frankly, I thought there was more social comment in Sin City than Vera Drake. And who wants to see a film set on a council estate? Certainly not the people who live on them.

But commissioning editors in Britain feel comfortable churning out endless product like that because they think it's ‘real'. In fact, Leigh is as formulaic as Star Wars and Loach is making the same films he did in the 1970s.

The fact is, dark drama, left to its own devices, can go where so-called ‘naturalistic’ drama fears to tread. Once upon a time on TV we had Nigel Kneale's prophetic Year of the Sex Olympics, and David Rudkin's enigmatic and memorable Penda's Fen. Now we have the re-heated dung of Daktari (renamed Wild at Heart), and cuddly Stephen Fry in Kingdom.

Television has become terminally ‘safe’ when, paradoxically, the outside world is anything but. That in itself makes me deeply uncomfortable. But then I like being made uncomfortable—by fiction, anyway.

Which brings me back to Palindromes. There's a scene where a honest-to-goodness Christian Mom and Pop at a care home lead a chorus of disabled children (yes, real disabled children) in a spirited rendition of some raise-the-roof Gospel song. What was it about the scene that made me snigger at its awfulness? What about it made me think it was both sick and brilliant? I think, because the characters were utterly ridiculous in their blind optimism. There was no room for darkness in their lives. And that's scary. So scary you have to laugh or you'd cry.

Dark stuff can warn. Hold up Caliban's mirror. Piss on somebody's Hush Puppies. Yell and scream that we can't take it any more. Will it be listened to? Responded to? Will it rattle cages? Will it get people angry?

If we try hard enough, yes.

An artist, writer, film-maker shouldn't have responsibility to politicians, or society, but only, I think, to portray his or her ideas honestly. However uncomfortable, however dark.

A recent film that shook me up was Jindabyne directed by Ray Lawrence, in which three Australian fishermen find a dead body. The reactions and repercussions of those men and their society are so truthful, it breaks your heart. It's about hurt, and about racism at its core, and at times it's hard to watch. That's film-making.

Harold Pinter got it dead-on: “You don't give the audience what they want: you force them to have what you want to give them.” That's the difference, or should be, between writers and commissioning editors. They are afraid of losing their jobs. We don't have a job in the first place.

A film that declares ‘misogyny is bad’ in a preachy way is boring. But Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men shows us that subject through vivid characters and actions, and is ultimately cathartic because he shows us people more awful (hopefully) than we are. In Kissed, Lynne Stopkewich's topic is a woman's love for a dead man—literally: which is interesting, or disgusting, depending on your point of view. But challenging, most certainly.

Take Jonathan Glazer's Birth. Misunderstood by some critics as an empty, and some said cold, mood piece, it is to me one of the most remarkable films of the last few years. Not just because of its intelligence and pitch-perfect control, but because I found it heart-rending and almost literally haunting. But it did mediocre box office in spite of Nicole Kidman in an Oscar-worthy performance in the lead. Why? I'd suggest because it didn't give the neat, expected answers. It got emotionally dirty and deep and restless, and left you there. Which I love. But reverse baseball-hatted Mid-Westerners clearly didn't.

Similarly, when Frida Kahlo was asked to paint a portrait of the suicide victim Dorothy Hale, she outraged Hale's mother by depicting Dorothy's bloody and twisted body at the foot of the skyscraper from which she'd leapt. Not exactly what the grieving parent was expecting. But it was the truth.

Julie Taymor, the clever director who made Frida based on the painter's tragic but ultimately heroic life, also adapted Shakespeare's ‘too dark’ Titus starring Anthony Hopkins: a big, bold, beautiful and grotesque film more awash with blood, horror and mutilation than Peter Jackson's Brain Dead.

Also undoubtedly ‘too dark’ is Milos Forman's Goya's Ghosts. It's about detainment without trial, religion as power and the role of the artist under a totalitarian regime. Coming from where he does, Forman knows. It's about the Spanish Inquisition, but it's about us.

In this age of anxiety, terrorism, threats to freedom of speech, darkness has a duty to look under the covers.

And it's not negativity or pessimism or a gloomy nature that motivates dark fiction, but a kind of optimism. Because it always says, underneath, things are not as bad as they could be.

Margaret Attwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale, says: “Literature is an uttering, or outering, of the human imagination. It lets the shadowy forms of thought and feeling—heaven, hell, monsters, angels and all—out into the light, where we can take a good look at them and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are."

Let's continue to celebrate our darker thoughts. Believe me, it's the sweetness and light I worry about.

Copyright © 2007 Stephen Volk

I discovered Charousek in the shadow of a lonely courtyard. He was chiselling at a block of wood until it resembled an arm. His front door was ajar. There were flowers in the dusty window, candles and oil lamps in others, turning the courtyard into a flickering gallery of empty views. Charousek's shadow was huge, omnipresent as I approached him. I said his name, breathed it perhaps. I couldn't be certain he'd heard for he didn't interrupt his work. While I hesitated, I studied his face. His skin was yellow (perhaps, I accepted, a product of the candlelight), and papery, stretched so tightly over the angles of his cheekbones and his jaw, that I thought it might tear if he as much as smiled. There was a white stubble on his chin, a hashish roll-up gripped between his teeth. I could smell its rich heady scent, even from some distance.

Beside his feet and scattered about his stool was a freshly carved head, three hands, a torso and a tiny wooden heart, which he had painted a bright crimson. The whimsy of it gave me a sudden courage to persist.

"Mr Charousek, I wondered if I may...?” I began.

"You are a pretty one, to be sure,” Charousek said, finally. But still he continued to chisel away. His fingers were raw, calloused. When he finally did pause and turn to meet my gaze, he smiled until his face was a map of his years. “A pretty one, yes. Have we met before?"

And then, while I searched for an appropriate response, he said, “Look, the procession."

We heard it before it emerged between the frame of narrow houses leaning over the courtyard, so close their eaves almost touched. The sound of accordions and fiddles, of hurdy-gurdies and mandolins, of cow-bells and makeshift drums. Besides Charousek's hashish, I could smell their incense, like a pungent cloud that lingered about the town.

And then, there they were. The celebrants. Weaving their way through the narrow cobble streets in brightly painted masks of suns and moons, and the faces of the dead. Buttons for eyes and zips for mouths and ruby red tears tattooed on cheeks. Constellations sewn into the hems of their coats, and on the brims of their hats. At their feet, flowers were flowing in thin rivers of piss and bathwater in the gutter. As they passed, lamps and candles were being lit in windows in reverence.

It was our End of Darkness. A festival to celebrate the last days of night. Already I could sense the sun rising in the faint orange tint to the edges of the houses, in the soft, luminous glow to the mist that hung around the sulphur lamps. I fancied I could feel a warmth on my bare arms and face at some moments. A new day, finally. I could almost not remember the light, to be honest. My anticipation was mingled with fear.

The cemeteries were filling with wreaths, colours rising on the graves of those who'd died during the darkness. Perfume in the air and burning leaves. The ceremony would continue until the light burned through the fog, until the new sun flared across the roofs and windows. At the final hour, the bridge that led away from the town would reveal itself to the communion, and it would be safe again to venture into the forest beyond. Who knew what happened after that? I was young, not privy to that information. Who knew?

Perhaps Charousek. He'd returned to the wooden limb: a crooked digit here, a veined arm, tendons corded on the back of the hand there. I fancied I could smell magic in the sawdust and in the oil in the creases of his fingers. There were figures in the interior of the house, a shape at the window. Something about it made me baulk and look away. Instead I looked at the back of my hand.

"Mr Charousek,” I persisted.

"Mr? Mmm, I like that,” he said, still diligently chiselling away. Then, quite abruptly, he stopped. Sighed through his nose. “I know. You've come to ask me questions, haven't you, pretty?"

He drew deeply on his roll-up, blew the smoke away from me. His eyes were the pale, watery blue of a man who felt his age when it rained for too long, or when there wasn't enough coal to feed the fire. But still full of guile and defiance. “How would it help to know all the answers to life, my dear? To know? To really know them? Isn't it like holding on to mercury? Like knowing the formula to love? Or how art is made? The alchemy of it? There are no words or diagrams. There is only this—"

Charousek held out his hands, palms upraised. He showed them to me. There was only dirt under his nails, linseed oil in the creases, in the whorls of his fingerprints.

"I would never had thought to ask those questions...” I began, discovering the words as I stumbled over them. My fear made me unabashed, suddenly. “We heard that you were taken away by the Puritans, incarcerated for political activism..."

The Puritans governed us. They controlled the country's political and economical climates with an almost despotic rule. And they policed us from the shadows with their Precisemen: rarely seen, but witnesses reported them as towering men in cruel masks and robes who would steal into people's homes while they slept, to spirit them away for incarceration or torture. From their seat of power they made the laws and set the taxes we abided by unquestioningly; from the pulpit, their priests sermonised about moral virtue and ‘the traditional order of things'.

Charousek stared deeply into his palms, as if the story of his detention might be there. “Indeed I was taken away. And who sends pretty young ladies to coerce such stories from me? Prokop, perhaps..."

I nodded. “I write reports for Prokop's journal. An underground journal. Stories have been circulated during your incarceration, most of which we took to be apocryphal. I see it as my duty to separate truth from fiction."

Charousek laughed a ragged laugh at that. “Well, I see it as my duty to bring both together, so that none could tell the difference.” He squinted up at me. “It's only in fiction that we find ourselves, wouldn't you say?"

"I'm afraid,” I said, “I only deal in facts, Mr Charousek."

He looked past me into the twilight. “Then I'm afraid we are at an impasse."

I couldn't think of an appropriate response, and when I hesitated, he smiled again. “Come,” he said finally. He got stiffly to his feet and gathered up his stool. “Bring in my carvings and we shall see if we can sift through the ashes and discover some facts among my fictions."

Charousek's rooms were tiny and cramped, and smelt of a workshop; the heady aroma of glue and petrolatum, lacquer, varnish and acrylic paints greeted my nose. Beyond the instruments of his craft, however, there were no adornments. And while this paucity of contents could suggest a diminished personality, or a creative mind who'd reduced his world of distraction, I imagined it more likely that, when the Puritans had come for him, they'd simply confiscated his possessions. There was a thin carpet of sawdust over everything; the chairs, the rugs ... I only hoped that he didn't offer me a drink.

When he let me into the front room, I halted, surprised. Initially, I supposed that Charousek had guests, if in fact those guests were all entertaining their own solitary pursuits. But as I stepped over the threshold, I realised my mistake. They were only Charousek's marionettes, life-sized, dressed in shabby cast-off clothes, their hard features covered in a film of dust.

Charousek re-seated himself and watched, bemused at my open-mouthed curiosity at his house guests. Despite the splinters in their joints, the knots in their wooden bodies, and the glassiness of their eyes, they were perfect in detail and anatomy.

One was seated on a chair beside the window with an impossibly sad look of longing on his face, another appeared to be asleep beneath the covers of a cot in the corner of the room, the sheets tangled about its legs. In the kitchen area I spied one seated in an iron tub full of water, frozen in the act of scrubbing its armpits; one watched a clock on the wall; another hung its head, seemingly in despair. When I noticed one to my side, half curled in a corner, nursing an erection, staring nakedly at me, I stopped looking.

"Many of them have left now, of course,” Charousek said, as he contemplated a pipe and a bottle of Laudanum beside it on a table. His voice seemed consumed by the room's emptiness.

"Left?"

An almost imperceptible nod. “Left. Departed. Grown up. They found their identities and left.” He sniffed. “Don't we all?"

"I'm not sure I understand,” I said.

Charousek sighed. “When we're faced with questions to which we have no readily available answers, then perhaps we have to dig at our own roots and go in search of ourselves."

I hesitated at the window and glimpsed the procession winding its way through the narrow lanes; I glimpsed a face made of sun; pearls flashing at a woman's neck; a child, cartwheeling on the cobbles between the crowd; confetti, tossed into the air, catching the breeze and dispersing about their hats.

"You're thinking now: did the Precisemen confiscate his mind when they incarcerated him, yes?"

"Perhaps just your marionettes..."

Charousek seemed to bristle at the very thought of calling them ‘marionettes'. But I wasn't here to indulge an old man in his caprice. If he was afraid of the truth, of what the Puritans had done to him, what they might do again, then there was no point to my staying.

"What do you think you wish to hear?” Charousek said then, as if reading my thoughts, or more likely, my suddenly stiff posture. “That they held me captive in a filthy sanitorium and left me listening to the other lunatics and schismatists sing and scream? That they shaved my skull and placed leeches upon it to bleed out my insanity? That they stuck needles into my eyes, immersed me in ice cold water when I protested? That they sent electric currents under my fingernails, and into my veins?” He smiled but the smile was false. “Is that what you want to hear?"

"I'd rather like to know why they incarcerated you,” I said.

He slipped on a pair of wire-framed spectacles, and suddenly looked very old. “I am a revolutionary, my dear. A magician and an artist,” he began, a bitter smile playing across his face. “Art and magic is revolution, art and magic is questioning. And for that kind of heresy, they took my wife as a caution, as a punishment."

This was the first I'd heard mention of a wife, and was reticent to pursue it, but I imagined I must, however painful it might be on the old man.

But then he continued: “Before, I lived outside of the town walls, happily. Once I lived for my wife, my family, and my art hadn't such urgency, but after she'd gone, and I had nothing but the memory of her face to console me, my art was all that I had left. It was all that motivated me. It's strange, no, that they inadvertently instilled in me more power."

I glanced around again at the empty shelves and mantelpiece. There were no pictures. “They took all trace of your wife?"

"All trace. I set my son free before they could get to him. Now all I have are these ... But then they will leave too."

I glanced around at the marionettes. Their stillness was unnerving. I fancied that they'd moved incrementally in the dusty gloom, but it was only my mind, playing tricks. “And where is your son now?"

Charousek shrugged. “A rented loft on the other side of the town. The further away, the safer he and I shall be."

That begged another question. “What's to stop the Puritans coming back for you if you continue to create?"

He paused and the question lingered in the silence for a time. “What indeed?” he said finally, bitterly. But there was something in his eyes, a spark that made my belly flutter and my heart race.

It took me some time to find the son Charousek spoke of. I slept and searched, and slept again, while the procession marched on, leaving posies on the graves of the departed, singing and dancing in the streets that flickered with candlelight. Fading in and out of the fog like the ghosts they represented.

I asked around on the other side of town. I mentioned Charousek's name to watchmakers and pawnbrokers and butchers and tailors, but gleaned no clues. No one knew (or was telling) of a son of the (in)famous puppeteer, nor indeed a wife. After that I asked after the landlords, many of whom were reluctant to divulge any kind of information, let alone that of their tenants. But eventually I managed to narrow my search to lofts rented by young men, and was led to a narrow, filthy street, much of it cluttered with the tools and old iron of a junk dealer. At the end of the street, a narrow passage led to some worn steps, which I climbed with weary limbs. Once inside the grubby little building, all I could smell was cooking fat and stale tobacco. I held my breath as I made my way up to the highest part, where I could hear a loose shutter crashing in the silence.

When I knocked on the door, I thought I heard a brief sound from within, but then I was left waiting, and no one came to answer. I knocked again. Again. I felt my heart sink. I was unused to defeat. To dead-ends. I glanced about me and was confident that I was alone. I closed my hand around the door handle and twisted.

To my surprise, the door swung open easily. I hesitated, let out a breath of euphoria, and paused to gather my nerves. Then I stepped inside.

Initially I could see nothing. The window shutters had been pulled closed. I kept my fist closed around the door handle so that some of the light from the corridor would find its way inside. But even then, all I could make out were the faint outlines of what I took to be furniture. I had to let go of the door in order to investigate further. But I could hear something: very faint, but constant. A creaking that was as persistent as clockwork. I ventured inside, finally relinquishing the handle, stretching out my other hand like a blind man. I groped around and felt the back of a chair, a table. I skirted around them, squinting into the darkness for some partial illumination from the window, but could see none. When my feet kicked against something on the floor, I flailed briefly, almost losing my balance. Once I was steady again, I crouched down and felt a chair on its side. I picked it up and righted it. As I did, my head struck something hard above me. It swung outwards then struck me again. I reached out, my chest tightening in fear, and grabbed at the object. When I had it in my hands I let out a cry that cracked in my throat.

I had taken hold of someone's feet.

I stumbled backwards and, as I did, I heard a sigh from above me. I could see a faint outline swinging to and fro before me.

"Light a candle,” it said to me in an impatient throaty rasp.

My body was frozen for a moment that seemed like an eternity. Then, forcing myself to move, I turned and stumbled out of the room and into the corridor, where I took hold of the first lamp I could find. I slid out the candle, cupping my hand around the flame and stepped hesitantly back into the room.

The light shifted about its corners, illuminating first the table and its chairs, turning their shadows huge across the ceiling. And then the light found him—Charousek's son—hanging from a tight noose, flung over the rafters. His head, tilted at a grotesque angle, shifted slightly until his eyes met mine.

"You might as well cut me down,” he said, with a note of defeat in his voice.

I admit, I was reluctant to admit the truth of things in my mind. Perhaps it was some kind of elaborate joke, played by the old master, Charousek. Or perhaps I was still asleep, with the shutters drawn, and I was merely dreaming.

But then I heard Charousek, saying ... Left. Departed. Grown up. They found their identities and left ... How many more might there be?

I'd righted the chair and stood upon it, let Charousek's son's weight fall into mine while I reached up and loosened the noose from his neck. We left it there, as a reminder of his folly. I set about in the kitchen, making him warm sweet tea, although I had no idea what he might do with it. When I returned, he was sat, rather like one of Charousek's marionettes had, his face staring at his feet, lost in some reflective turmoil. I set down the tea and sat opposite him at the table.

"What is your name?” I asked.

"Jaromir."

"Why were you trying to kill yourself, Jaromir?” I asked. I tried not to stare at the whorls and knots, the grain on his face, his arms. The joints at his neck, his elbows, his wrists. His eyes, like bright marbles.

He glanced up briefly, but didn't meet my gaze. “What else should I do? What else is there?"

I couldn't answer that for him. What indeed was there? The new sun rising, finally? The promise of a new day? The promise of love? Of beauty? “So many things...” I began, but I knew there would be no consoling him. How could someone such as he be consoled? Instead I tried another avenue. “I saw your...” (I admit, at this I faltered) “...your father. He has finally been released by the Puritans. He spoke of you."

His gaze had become fixed at some point in the corner of the room, but I sensed him start a little at Charousek's name. “He will not see me any more,” he said finally. “It isn't safe. We met once, then he sent me away. It isn't safe with the Puritans watching us all."

"When did you see him, before that?” I asked.

"A long time ago,” he said. “When we lived beyond the town."

"What was it like—outside of the town?"

His gaze seemed to fold inwards, and he glanced at me. Suddenly I wanted to touch him. I wanted to feel his face in my palm, to see how emotions could live in something so artificial.

"We lived in the forest,” Jaromir began. “That was where I was born. My father was a woodcutter, and at the end of the day he would carve pieces of wood beside the fireplace to entertain us. Soon he became proficient. My father was quite the artist. He had a library of texts he kept under lock and key, that he claimed he'd learnt everything from. He wrote stories for me and enacted them with the puppets he made. Then he took them out to other towns and mounted larger productions with them."

"Were you happy then?"

He smiled. Nodded. “Very much so. I was a child. All children are happy. Or they are until awful things befall them. Families are fragile things to hold together."

"What was your mother like?"

"Very beautiful. Her hair was like spun gold. Her eyes were like the sky when it was blue. But then she was taken."

"By the Puritans?” I ventured.

He looked up then, and gripped the table. “Yes. Although my father told me she had been taken by wolves. Or a wolf that walked on its hind legs. My father said she would never return."

"What happened after she was gone?"

"We went on as before. But my father wasn't the same. He spent time away from the forest, researching the tales he wrote, and mounting productions with his marionettes. When he was away, I was forced to survive on my own. But then one time he came back in the night and woke me. He told me that I must leave alone. He told me of a town that he knew of, not far from our home, where I would be safe. He'd arranged everything for me—lodgings and money and work ... But I didn't want to go. He said I must. The Puritans were close by and he would be taken away and punished for what he was."

"And what was he?"

Jaromir glanced away for the answer then shrugged. “An angry old man with power that he'd stolen."

I couldn't help but close a hand over his. He stared at it for a moment, but of course, his expression didn't change.

"What did he say to you when he was released and came to you?” I asked gently.

"Only that he was pleased that I was still well. And also disappointed, to see...” At this, he broke off and looked away at the wall.

"To see what?” I urged. “Please tell me, Jaromir."

He turned back to me and closed his other hand over mine. “Do you feel that?” he asked. “Is it warm?"

I wanted to lie but I felt he wouldn't appreciate my deceit. “No, you are quite cold I'm afraid..."

He nodded. “He wanted to see if I still believed I was ‘real'. He said, ‘Once upon a time, there was a piece of wood...’ I thought he was mocking me, but he told me that I was not human and probably never would be. What do you think of that?"

I could see that he still wanted to believe that the old man was lying to him, that this was another elaborate tale that he was spinning. I didn't know what to say. Instead I just sat there, not withdrawing my hand. Letting his rest on mine while we sat in the silence.

Later, when I was at home, I slept and dreamt of the forest that Jaromir had spoken of. I was approaching the cottage from the shade of the trees. When I stepped beyond their protection, I could feel the sunlight on the grass beneath my bare feet. There was a cottage in the near-distance, smoke curling up from its chimney. Outside, a man I recognised as a youthful Charousek was chopping wood. I could see the sweat on his brow. His sleeves were rolled up tightly over his biceps. I watched, hypnotised by the rhythmic motion of the axe as it described an arc in the air and swung downwards to slice the blocks of wood on the stump in front of him.

I quickly made my way around the perimeter of the clearing and approached the open door, while Charousek's attention was focused on the work before him. Inside I could smell the heady aroma of cooking: a whole hog on a spit in front of the fireplace. On a chair beside the window, a woman was running a thread through a piece of brightly coloured material. She had already completed a tiny shirt and some socks, which sat on the table before her.

I realised that I was listening for the sound of a child somewhere in the cottage; the image of Charousek's son running through the fields or sprawled out on the rug, drawing a picture of big, bad wolves on some paper. But none of that happened. For as I lingered at the doorway, my attention was drawn to another chair on the opposite side of the table, where a small wooden boy was sat, mute and immobile, waiting for his new clothes.

While I had slept, flyposters for Charousek's new production had appeared on every street corner and lamp post. In the gloom, small knots of people were surrounding them, and a swell of interest had begun to spread like a common cold from townsperson to townsperson. With the procession streets away, it was as if the End of Darkness had been momentarily forgotten.

I unpeeled a poster from the dirty window of a house that squatted side by side with other similarly run-down houses, and studied it as shop fronts lit up with candles and lamps to herald the start of another dark day. It read:

TO CELEBRATE OUR END OF DARKNESS, MASTER OF MAGIC AND MYSTERY, TRUTH AND LIES, CHAROUSEK RETURNS WITH A NEW PRODUCTION AT THE KISHUF THEATRE: BURY THE CARNIVAL COME ONE, COME ALL!

I folded it and shoved it into my pocket and hurried on. Prokop, the editor of the underground journal I wrote for, was expecting my article on Charousek. I'd fallen asleep at my desk after returning from Jaromir's loft, unable to bring the story to a satisfactory close. I couldn't help wondering about Charousek's remark about his ‘children’ having left, departed, grown up ... I'd already found myself staring at people's faces for signs of artificiality; at the cobbler I'd passed on my street, with his sleeves rolled up, his elbows slightly irregular, his motions a little jerky ... But I knew I could never recall seeing anyone like Jaromir.

What I had managed to write was also stuffed into my pocket, and I harboured hopes that Prokop would allow me further time to interview Charousek, and perhaps his son, again. Although surely he would only scoff at what was there on the page, and would think me mad. Perhaps I would have to persuade Jaromir to accompany me to Prokop's office to prove otherwise. Perhaps even with proof of my findings, he would still believe that my senses had taken leave of me. But I felt sure Jaromir would not come anyway.

Jaromir. After the encounter with Charousek's son, I found my thoughts returning to him often. But I couldn't decide if my feelings were simply that of pity or of something else that I had no real knowledge nor experience of.

Prokop's office, no more than three or four streets away from Charousek's home, was part of a small, crooked building that also housed a funeral director and an accountant. His narrow windows were always condensated, his tiny rooms locked with heat from the piles of paper and books and files that tottered like columns around his desk.

Prokop looked up from his creaky chair and set down his pen when I knocked on his door and sat myself down opposite him. There were beads of sweat rolling down his round bald head, yet his stiff collar and coat were buttoned all the way to his chin.

"Ah, what have you for me, my sweet?” he smiled, steepling his fingers beneath his chin. “The master, Charousek, has unveiled his new endeavour in these past few hours, so I'm reliably informed."

"Bury the Carnival,” I said, retrieving the poster and unfolding it onto the table for Prokop to read. “I would assume he is referring to the suppression of his work by the Puritans."

"And he confirmed as much, I assume?"

I faltered. “He did not mention the production when we met. In fact he gave no indication that he had even begun work.” When Prokop looked up, surprise and disappointment creasing his features, I added, “I'd hoped I might visit him, perhaps at the Kishuf Theatre, and interview him further about it, before we publish..."

"Indeed?” Prokop began, reclining into his chair. “I expected you would have all we needed by now."

"He spoke of his incarceration by the Precisemen, and of a son, whom I also interviewed. I feel that now they are familiar with me I might gain some further insight, if you were to give me a little longer."

"A son, you say? Charousek has a son?” Prokop leaned forward again, his curiosity piqued.

For some reason, I was reluctant to reveal the nature of Charousek's son at this point, and merely nodded. “Just a little longer..."

Prokop drummed his ink-stained fingernails upon the table and looked beyond me at the misted windows. “Very well,” he said finally. “Talk to both again, but have something for me by the time this production begins. I want to be able to have someone selling this story like hot cakes outside that very theatre. Don't disappoint me, my dear."

I nodded and quickly got to my feet before Prokop could change his mind.

Before I could go to the theatre I found myself walking back to Jaromir's loft. His face wouldn't leave my mind. Before I spoke again to Charousek, I had to know the truth of things. Was Jaromir unique? Or was he the prototype for others like him, the flawed first born?

I returned to the now familiar narrow, filthy street, cluttered with the detritus of the junk dealer's wares. I climbed the steps back to the grubby building where his loft was, and knocked on the door. When he answered this time, Jaromir seemed pleased to see me. It was only then that I realised how my heart had been beating so in anticipation of seeing him again. There was sweat on my brow, and I was suddenly aware of how I had forgotten to change my clothes since the last time we spoken.

"Jaromir,” I began, and then faltered. I felt my face flush, uncharacteristically. I tried to remember why I had come here. “There are some questions that I failed to ask you when we spoke before. I wondered if we might talk again."

"After you left, I dreamed,” Jaromir said, his glassy eyes suddenly exhibiting a strange shine to them. “I have never dreamed before. In fact I don't think I've ever slept before. I only know of these things by their descriptions in texts, and from others."

I thought of my dream too, of the sad little wooden boy waiting for the clothes his ‘mother’ was sewing for him. “What did you dream of, Jaromir?” I asked. “Was it a pleasant dream?"

He nodded, and then I knew what he was going to say by the subtle animation that had crept into his face in the short hours since we'd had parted. “I dreamed of you,” he said.

My heart quickened again, and without warning I closed my hand around his, as I had earlier. But this time, I fancied I could feel a warmth there in his palm. “I am glad, Jaromir. I dreamed of you too. Perhaps we were meant to meet this way."

We returned to the table we had sat at before, our hands still wrapped together. I studied his face, ran my palm over it. “Something has changed in you, Jaromir. Do you feel it?” There were tiny beads of perspiration on his forehead, and his eyes began to follow my fingers. I touched the wetness of his lips and lingered there, aware of the fluttering in my belly as I did so.

"I am changing,” he said, a note of tremulous excitement in his voice. “I am becoming more, like the others my father made. I am becoming human..."

...like the others my father made. I remembered my earlier reasons for talking to Jaromir again, and withdrew my hand. “Jaromir,” I said. “The others that you speak of...” I felt reluctant to use the word but felt I must be blunt to get to the truth “...the other marionettes that Charousek made, carved with his tools out of wood, and jointed together, how many of them are there? Are they more or less than you, Jaromir?"

Jaromir stared at my eyes for a moment, and I thought him lost in some private reverie, but then he said, “Come. Come with me and I will show you."

I followed him out into the street, my hand grasped tightly within his. I noticed him shivering involuntarily at the unfamiliar sensation of cold. He glanced at me as we walked, and I said, “We shall have to buy you a coat, Jaromir. Or else you'll freeze. Take my scarf, at least.” I unrolled my bright red scarf and wrapped it around his throat, while he smiled down at me affectionately.

He smiled so broadly that I heard his face splinter at the suddenness of it.

At the end of the street, we heard a carriage in the distance, making its way along the cobble stones, and the clatter of horses’ hooves. We trudged away from the sound, while the street lamps blinked above us. There was not a soul to be seen, and for a moment, I wished that we could walk for miles and remain perfectly alone. But that was not to be. When we passed a statue of the virgin Mary beside a church I had never seen before, Jaromir pointed to two identical old women with grey scarves on their heads, muttering a rosary of the virgin by candlelight. “They are Charousek's creations. Both made together as twins, inseparable, and sent out into the world."

I stared for as long as I was able, and then we went on towards a part of the old town where market stalls had been erected, the canvases flapping about their metal frames in the cold, whipping wind. By the harsh light of smoky torches, we walked amongst the thin crowds, while Jaromir pointed out the human and the less than human that made up their number. A street poet on a box, reciting his work for no one; a child with two others, his face no less mud-spattered or real; a fishmonger, who sang his prices out above the other market-traders ... When I looked with new eyes for them, I realised the truth of things. Charousek's creations were everywhere: gutting animals in the abattoirs, shining the shoes of gentlemen, skipping in the play yard, praying in the temples...

I gripped Jaromir's hand that was gently perspiring into mine, and I stopped. When he turned to face me, I saw his eyelashes flutter in excitement. Once, I realised, he had been an outcast, a stranger not only to humans but to the rest of Charousek's creations. He'd seen them come, seen them grow into their lives, while he had remained the same. But now finally, he was part of the world.

"You have made me this way,” he said, simply.

I drew close to his face and closed my mouth over his. “Yes,” I said.

A thick mist had returned to the streets as I made my way to the Kishuf Theatre. I'd not told Jaromir of my next destination, for fear he would want to accompany me, but promised him I would return to him afterward. Even now, when I thought of him, I felt the fluttering return to my belly. It felt like the sunlight had risen early in me.

I struggled up a steeply rising lane, then down several narrow twisting alleys with no lamp light to guide me. Here there was a huge weather-worn tavern, the air around it thick with the enticing aromas of ale and of pipe smoke. Then, as I turned a blind corner, the procession suddenly appeared from the mist. The sound of laughter and song and heavy boots dancing on the cobbles filled the air. They passed by me like a dream: a Pierrot with his mouth pursed into a frozen kiss glanced my way, his wooden hand slowly uncurled like a flower in my direction, and was gone. Then a woman in a cloak painted with tears and hearts pirouetted across the cobbles and her strings of coloured pearls twisted round and round her neck, like strange moons in the darkness. I felt her gloved hand caress my cheek, and then she twisted away to be replaced by a dwarf on stilts, a cigar gripped between his teeth, all of his concentration fixed upon the antiquated accordion he had gripped between his white-knuckled fists. I watched them as they twisted and danced and frolicked past me, and for a brief moment only wanted to join them in their ecstatic procession, be consumed and deemed anonymous in the darkness and mist until the light returned to our town. But then they were gone, turning one corner and then the next, and then there was only the whisper of their strange music left dissipating in the air, like my breath.

And when I turned around, there was my destination: the Kishuf Theatre.

Once it might have been something. But now the columns both outside and inside the vestibule were almost shattered to pieces, and the façade was stricken with age. The boards that had covered its windows and doors years in the past had been prised away and piled up in an adjoining alleyway. I could hear bursts of music and chatter from inside as I crept into the foyer. There was a thick film of dust on the red velvet curtains, the beautiful balustrades on the grand staircase that led up to the stalls, the faded illustrations of performers from the past in shabby frames on the walls. I hesitated, unsure that Charousek would welcome me quite as readily now he was in the midst of preparing for the production. And, knowing what I did about his son, Jaromir, would surely lend some weight to my questions. How had he created him? A puppet with thoughts and feelings, but still—until he had met me—cold and hard to the touch, like any other marionette in Charousek's workshop. What magic was that? Where had Charousek learnt such abilities? From the library of texts that Jaromir had spoke of, that he had kept under lock and key? And if so, where had he obtained such books?

I stole through the lobby and quietly pressed through the heavy curtains that led into the theatre, and then peered transfixed at the sights that greeted me.

There were lamps and candles lit everywhere, lending everything a magical glow: in the galleries, in the boxes, in the orchestra pit, up on the stage ... I glanced around at the people at work in the theatre, trying to spy Charousek, and finally located him on the stage, on a stool, carving a piece of wood with a chisel. Even from a distance I could see the sharp blade shearing away spirals of wood until the features of a face became apparent in his hands. All around him, there were flurries of activity: another old man with a thick braided beard worked his fingers over an ancient pipe organ, discovering a melody that made Charousek's foot tap in time to it; beside him, an albino, naked save for his baggy trousers and some braces that were sliding off his sharply-boned shoulders, was playing an accordion and clanging some cymbals that were tied between his knees; and other musicians nearby—a flautist, a fiddler, an old woman with a singing saw bent into an S on her thigh ... I could have happily listened to their music all day, but I was here to unearth the truth of things, not fall under Charousek's spell.

I hurried down the dirty steps that led between the theatre seats, glancing at what I first took to be other onlookers, but then realised were more of Charousek's marionettes. As before, they were assembled in various poses that gave them an unnerving semblance of being more than they were. Perhaps soon they would be.

Some of the stage's occupants had noticed my approach by this time, and the music became discordant as, one by one, the instruments fell away and I reached the orchestra pit. Charousek looked up finally, and if he was surprised by my presence, his face implied nothing of the sort. But something was different about his demeanour. I noticed that when he dropped the head that he had been carving onto the stage, his hands were trembling.

This close to the stage, the odour that wafted beneath my nostrils was thick, almost floral, but tainted somehow. The smell of bodies, of heated flesh and incense. I wondered if that was indeed the smell of Charousek's magic. I wrinkled my nose, and said, “I'm sorry to interrupt you, Mr Charousek, but I wondered if I may talk to you again."

The faces of the musicians flickered with shadows from the multitude of candles as they regarded me. The organ player and the albino shook their heads and lit up pipes, puffed on them, smiling cruelly. Charousek himself unearthed some tobacco from his pocket, emptied some into a brown paper, then crumbled something else into it before sealing the paper together. The action seemed to calm the tremor in his hands. “Be brief, my dear."

He got slowly to his feet and extended his hand to me. I walked to the side of the stage and climbed the steps. When I reached him, he took my hand and kissed it. His mouth felt rough on my skin. “And I may warn you,” he continued, “that all of your questions will likely be answered by this production. I'm sure you'll attend..."

"So Bury the Carnival is an autobiographical piece?” I asked, conscious of the other performers around me. They had grown silent, but I felt their eyes and those of the marionettes in the audience on the periphery of my vision.

"Oh, absolutely, my dear. Fact is, as they say, stranger than fiction."

"In the production, do you speak of the arcane arts that you practiced, which led to your incarceration?” My fear had adversely made me bolder than I imagined I could be. “And of your son, who is less than human?"

Charousek tried to appear unperturbed. He smiled. “You, my dear, have been speaking with my first born."

"Was he born? I think he was made, Mr Charousek. Possibly the first of all your marionettes. What magic did you use to make him live like a real boy?"

He tried to remain impassive. But I appeared to have the attention of everyone on the stage, and I could see that was making Charousek uncomfortable. Finally he said, through a plume of rich smoke, “Everything shall be revealed in the production, my dear. All of the answers to all of the mysteries of life...” His voice rose theatrically, and he turned to walk across the stage. “Come one, come all, be you flesh and blood or oak and cedar! Meet the dog-faced boy! The world's smallest giant! The human skeleton! Freaks and oddities! Step a little closer, ladies and gentlemen! See the pious souls who guide our moral compass, lurking in the shadows of the stage. Stare into the very soul of a man whose wife was taken away from him; and watch him laugh!” His voice had risen to a roar by now, spittle flying from his lips. He spun round and bounded towards me. I flinched and cowered at his proximity. I could smell the hashish on his clothes, his breath, his fingers. He whispered then, his mouth at my ear. “When we're faced with questions to which we have no readily available answers, then perhaps we have to dig at our own roots and go in search of ourselves."

I was paralysed, my joints locked. He'd said it to me before, and when I turned to look into his face, Charousek added, even more quietly, “Run now but wait in the foyer. And hide yourself from view.” Then he withdrew, his face unreadable, as if he'd said nothing of consequence to me. The silence in the theatre seemed to swell, become almost unbearable.

I turned and ran back the way I came.

I couldn't ignore what Charousek had said. I flung the heavy red curtains aside and stood frozen when I reached the foyer. Initially when I saw the shadows beyond the theatre door, I imagined that perhaps Charousek had an audience already, queueing outside for the best seat in the house. But the shape of the shadows, and their size, made me step back into the concealment afforded by the ticket booth, my breath trapped in my chest. I stayed there, as Charousek had commanded, waiting for the owners of the shadows to reveal themselves, knowing somehow what I would see.

And then they were there in the foyer: the Precisemen. Three huge shapes in dark, unadorned robes, hoods drawn forward over their masked faces. Although I cowered, I felt compelled to at least catch a glimpse of them while I could. But my head felt swollen since they had arrived; there were voices in my head, mellifluous. There were too many to focus on, and I put my hand to my temples, ground the heel of my palm into my eyes. Still they refused to be silenced. And then above it all, one of them spoke, and the sound was like nothing I'd ever heard. It sounded rich and musical, almost like birdsong, and then so low, I could feel the sound of it make my entire body vibrate.

"Charousek ... ” they said. “...Charousek, it is time..."

The old man had emerged from between the red curtains, and stood in the shadow of the Precisemen, who towered above him, their beaked masks lowered towards his face. Still his face offered no clue to his emotions, nor to my being privy to their exchange. “In no more than three hours the curtain shall indeed rise, and they will all return home to their maker,” he said. “But I cannot be rushed. There are delicate and arcane magics at work here."

The voices flowed together again in my head. I screwed my eyes shut as if that might dull the pain of it, but it wouldn't be silenced.

"...delicate and recondite magics that pervert the natural order of things, Charousek ... you have been warned ... these will be your last magics ... only enough to bring them back from the world and to return them to their original state ... after that, the primal texts that you stole from us will be burned forever..."

"And you will return my wife. You will return Loisa to me, as you promised?” At the mention of his wife's name, I heard Charousek's voice crack audibly, and for a brief moment I almost empathised with him.

"...your cowardice, your betrayal of your beliefs and your creations will indeed be rewarded, Charousek..."

But how could I empathise with him for what he was about to do? Was this to be the raison d'être of the whole production? To give his creations life and identity, and all the complexities of the human condition, only to snatch it away from them again? Clearly not all of Charousek's marionettes had experienced the limitations of Jaromir, his ‘first born'. Some had gone into the world, and found it waiting for them. Perhaps some of them had married, procreated...

And for what? Had Charousek been released on the Puritans’ condition that if his wife was returned to him, then he must give up his creations in exchange? But then, at the last, he had instructed me to hide here in the lobby, out of view. He must have anticipated the Precisemen's arrival, and wanted me to hear them. I could only assume that despite the promise of his wife, his conscience was making him hesitate.

But then I heard Charousek step away from the huge masked faces, and as he did, he caught my gaze momentarily. His expression wavered and I held my breath, suddenly terrified of being exposed to the Precisemen. Charousek nodded in my direction, and the dissonance of voices in my head reached a volume that would surely split my temples. I closed my hands over my ears, conscious of the absurdity of the gesture, but as I did I felt a presence rise up behind me. I gasped as something huge plucked me up from my crouching position and into the cold air between us. I screamed briefly, my legs kicking, my throat burning at the violence of the reaction. The miasma of voices in my head was so extreme that I may have lost consciousness, but then I was face to face with one of the Precisemen. I stared, frozen, at the bejewelled mask, carved into a cruel beak, at the milky pool of eyes that lay beyond it. I felt as insignificant as a rag-doll in its leather-gloved hands. He took hold of my hair, and tugged it down in his fist, until I was bent almost backwards.

"...what is this, Charousek? A spy? ... ” I could hear the venom in their voices, and felt my eyes rolling backwards in my head. ” ... would you try to deceive us at such a critical juncture ... do you wish to ever see your wife again?..."

At this, Charousek raised his hands in a placatory manner. His implacable face had vanished, and had been replaced with naked fear. “I know nothing of this girl! Do what you will to her!"

I gasped at his response, and tried to protest. But before I could open my mouth the man in the robe produced a long black knife from within the folds of his cloak. I felt his other hand tighten his grip on my hair, and then the blade produced a long arc in the gloom, and plunged into my belly. My breath came out in a long hiss, and I felt tears spring from my eyes immediately. For a long moment I couldn't breathe, and began to cough, to choke. I could feel the blade, cold and heavy inside my belly. Then I felt it withdraw, and the fist tugged violently again at my hair. I pressed my shaking hands to my belly to close them over the wound. There were patches of blackness flickering at the edge of my eyes, threatening to paint my vision with darkness. If I didn't retaliate soon, I would lose consciousness and I would never see the End of Darkness, never again walk with Jaromir's hand in mine with the sunlight on our shoulders...

At that moment, something made the fist clutching my hair loosen its grip very slightly. I seized the opportunity and tugged my head out of his grasp, extricated myself entirely. In a dizzying moment I had flung myself forward, first towards the other Precisemen, then dodging quickly sidewards, out of their grasping hands, and towards the theatre doors. I could hear my own voice, as if it were a separate entity, screaming like a lunatic. My hair had been torn from the back of my head, and the pain was almost the equal of that in my belly.

I was too fast for them. I dashed through the open doors and down the shattered steps, out into the street, howling like a banshee. The mist was still thick; all I could see as I ran down the cobbled street was the soft, blurred glow of gas lamps and candles in the windows of houses. I felt it consume me, conceal me inside it. Before long I was hopelessly lost in the warren of streets and alleyways, but refused to stop running, out of fear that the Precisemen might descend out of the darkness and mist, unbidden. I longed now for the familiarity of the procession, for their lights and music and wild abandon, but I could hear nothing of them above my panting breath and clattering boots. I peered into the murk for sign of the weather-beaten tavern I'd passed on the way to the theatre but could see no sign of its lights, nor the odour of the ales and smoke. All I recalled was of walking uphill for some of the journey, so when the alleyways descended gradually, I gladly followed them with my hand still clutching my belly, cuffing away the tears and snot rolling down my face.

I have no idea how long I ran for but it seemed like an eternity. Then, when I thought I could go no further, I found myself in the little market square that Jaromir had brought me to earlier, and I thought I might faint in relief. The market-traders had packed away early for the End of Darkness, and all that remained were the skeletal outlines of the frames that the tarpaulins were tied to. I didn't stop. I continued on, passing the church and the Virgin Mary without a second glance, and on, to the now more familiar streets where Jaromir lived.

He must have heard me weeping, my harried footsteps, or was simply awaiting my return, for he met me on the stairs, his face now creased with a concern he wouldn't have been capable of mere hours before. “You are hurt!” he cried, and when he took me in his arms to carry me back to his loft, I could feel his warmth through our clothes, and I felt calmer, safe again.

When he lay me down on his bed, he took hold of my hands, lifted them away from the wound I'd been given. I thought I heard his breath catch, and feared that it might be more serious than I could imagine.

"I saw the Precisemen,” I gasped. “Conspiring with Charousek. He tried to have me arrested; he intends to betray all of his creations..."

But Jaromir didn't respond as I relayed the events that had led me to this point. Undeterred, I continued, telling him about Charousek whispering to me confidentially on the stage of the Kishuf Theatre, in order to reveal me to the Puritans; and the exchange Charousek had with them, the mention of his wife. And still Jaromir didn't respond. He was staring at the wound that had been made in my belly, his face contorted with a plethora of new emotions that I could only guess at. I had to see. With some effort I propped myself up with my elbows to look at whatever it was that they had done.

Jaromir withdrew his hand, and at first I couldn't be sure what it was on his fingers. Certainly not blood. He looked at me finally and said my name. But his words sounded dull and distant to my ears. I stared at my wound and put my fingers into it, scooped up what had leaked out. “Oh...” I said, and held up a palmful of sawdust. I blew it off my fingers deliriously, watching it light up in the candle's glow.

And then I passed out.

When I came around, I was alone in the room. I called Jaromir's name but he didn't respond. The candles were guttering in their dishes, flickering their last. When I sat up in bed, I suddenly remembered what had happened. The wound no longer hurt, and I pressed my fingers around it and began to weep silently to myself.

I was flesh and wood. I was as artificial as Jaromir. Another of Charousek's creations, carved with his rough artisan's hands, and given life, and the will to live it. And I had forgotten. I had no memories of my childhood because I hadn't had one; no recollection of parents for my only parent was Charousek. I searched my memory, looking for a moment in his workshop, where I ceased to be a still life carving in a chair, perhaps staring at a clock, or out of a window, and got to my feet and walked away, into the world.

But I couldn't find it. And besides, Jaromir's absence was nagging at my mind. I was afraid he'd gone to gain revenge for me, or for himself. I sat up and walked to the door. My heart had begun to pound in fear for him, and then I remembered the tiny, crimson wooden heart I'd seen at Charousek's workshop the first time I'd gone to him, and paled. I wondered at the extraordinary kind of magic contained in the texts Charousek had stolen that made wooden hearts beat. Magic that the Puritans and their Precisemen had attempted to contain.

What could I do? Before I had been merely an outsider, looking in on this new world that had been revealed to me, but now I was part of it. I had now become one of the potential victims of Charousek's production. He was indeed burying the carnival, in exchange for the promise of his wife returned to him. Because he was left with no other option.

I had to find Jaromir. I left his loft and returned to the theatre.

As I quickly returned to the Kishuf Theatre, I could hear the voice of the Precisemen, still buzzing like a bluebottle in my head.

"...these will be your last magics ... “ they had said to Charousek. ” ... only enough to bring them back from the world and to return them to their original state..."

The magics that Charousek had used to bring life to his creations (I could now no longer refer to us as marionettes) could clearly be reversed somehow. Perhaps the only way to stop him was by physical means. I thought then of Jaromir and feared for his well-being. If only he had waited for me!

I hurried on, as fast as my exhausted and wounded body would allow. There was no sign of Jaromir, and indeed no sign of anyone else on the mist-enshrouded streets. Had everyone abandoned their homes to see the maestro's return to the stage? The market square was as abandoned as the last time I'd passed it, and as I made my way up the narrow alleys that led to the Kishuf Theatre, I began to fear for all of Charousek's creations. For all of us. It was clear now that his magic had indeed exerted a pull that none could resist, not his creations, nor the flesh and blood denizens of this town. Even when I passed the warm and welcoming tavern, its door was closed and the windows were shrouded in darkness. This was not a good sign. I had no idea what I could possibly do to reverse what Charousek had set in motion.

By the time I reached the street where the Kishuf Theatre lay, I was in no doubt of the truth of things. Even from a distance I could hear the sounds of an ebullient audience within, the roaring of laughter, of applause, of cheering and jeering. I began to glance around quickly, terribly aware that the Puritans would surely still be in the vicinity, awaiting the moment that Charousek's magic took effect and he betrayed us all. What would they do then? Gather up all those stilled people and load them into carts to be driven away god only knew where...

No! I couldn't let that happen. I clattered up the steps to the theatre entrance and into the foyer, past the ticket booth where I'd come face to face with the Precisemen, and on, past the red velvet curtains, and into the theatre.

It was filled, it seemed, to the aching rafters, both with the real and unreal. The noise was louder than anything I'd encountered before. It rose and then simmered in the air, like thunder. The audience was too huge for the theatre; when the threadbare seats had filled, they spilled out into the aisles, over the steps. Crowds filled the boxes and galleries. My nose filled with the scent of wood and grease-paint, of beer and tobacco, sweat and hair-oil. I tried to shrink back from it all, for there were people jostling me from all sides, and my nerve had started to diminish. I was insignificant amongst numbers this huge. If I were even to attempt to make my way to the stage, I would have to squeeze past the throngs jostling in the aisles.

I craned my neck over the people in front of me, stepping this way and that, in order to see what was happening on the stage, far below. And there, caught in the glare of the footlights, was Charousek, singing while his ramshackle orchestra played like madmen: the old man in front of his pump organ, the albino with his accordion and cymbals, the flautist and fiddler, the old woman with the singing saw on her knee ... At the back of the stage I could see the huge shadows of marionettes, bobbing from side to side; but their movements were so jerky and their shapes so ill-formed that I had to look away from them for my head was starting to freeze in fear. Instead I watched the audience below, trying to spot Jaromir there. But after a moment I thought that I could see a curious warping to the air, spreading out from the stage, to the gallery, the stalls, the boxes. It washed in and out from the stage, like waves, and I wondered if anyone else could see what I did. I looked from face to face, but none seemed to see what I could. They were too caught up in the reverie that Charousek had incited. Above it all, I could still hear the voice of the Precisemen inside my head: ” ... these will be your last magics ... only enough to bring them back from the world and to return them to their original state..."

For the moment, no one appeared affected in any adverse way, but I was certain that there wouldn't be long before Charousek's magic undid everything he had created. Suddenly determined that I wouldn't simply stand idly by, I plunged into the crowd before me and made my descent down the shabby steps to the stalls, slipping on the discarded bottles of beer underfoot. Here and there I would stop and strain above the other heads in my way to see what was happening below. The crowds ebbed and swelled around me, a seething mass, sucking me into the heat of their sweaty bodies, then relinquishing me, further along the route to the stage.

I reached the steps down to the benches near the front of the stage and scrambled down them. By the time I reached the bottom, I felt so weary that I thought I might keel over. When I withdrew the hand that had been clutching my wound, it came away full of sawdust. My neck was growing stiff too, and my legs were refusing to keep the pace I was trying to set. I felt a flush of panic crawl over me. Was Charousek's magic beginning to hold? When I glanced around, the crowds did seem to be growing more subdued. I spotted one man with his hands seemingly frozen mid-applause. His eyes were glassy, his face fixed in laughter. But still the crowds pressed around me, and I couldn't see a clear route to the stage to prevent what was about to happen.

I stood on tip-toe to see over the heads of the audience as the music had staggered to a halt. The scene on stage had transformed into a house in the forest, and Charousek was chopping wood while dark figures lurked in the shadows of the trees. The music took on a plangent quality, the singing saw keening as the figures crept forward, the footlights catching the beaks of their masks...

But I couldn't be distracted. I looked away, and cast my gaze over the crowds nearer to the front. And then I spotted Jaromir! He was close to the stage, barging his way through the jostling bodies, the bright red scarf I had given to him making him stand out in the throng. I called out to him, but my voice wouldn't carry over the clamour of the crowd. I thrust myself down the aisle that Jaromir was almost at the end of, and cried his name again. I was all too aware of the stiffness in my joints now, and that the people in my way were offering less resistance to my urgency. Indeed, many of them tumbled forward onto the seated members of the audience, then were tossed aside onto the ground. I stepped quickly over them and hurried on, still calling Jaromir's name. But then, Jaromir had made his way around the orchestra pit and was climbing the steps to the stage. I saw the lights in his eyes, his grim expression turning into a mask that I didn't recognise. I couldn't decide if the gradual simmering of the audience was in anticipation of Jaromir's actions or simply because Charousek's magic had spread further outwards. When I began to run and shout Jaromir's name again, Charousek's monologue faltered, and a murmur passed through the remaining vocal members of the audience. First the old man squinted out from his spotlight to see from where the voice had originated, and then quickly his attention turned to the figure emerging from the left of the stage. Jaromir's legs had turned uncooperative, and twice he almost fell on his face.

"Jaromir,” Charousek began, and his voice sounded lonely in the quiet of the theatre. He raised his hands, almost in surrender.

But Jaromir had produced a knife from the folds of his coat. I saw it flash in the footlights, and those that could in the crowd gasped.

"My son!” Jaromir cried. “Please. We could both be with your mother again. Your mother! I will ask them to spare you."

I saw Jaromir falter. His legs would no longer bend, and his head remained fixed in one position. He couldn't look at me now, even if he wanted to. “My mother?” he said finally, and I thought Charousek had him. “Look at what you've done to us! You betrayed us!"

At that he lunged forward, the knife flashing once and then it was deep inside Charousek's chest. I cried out again and felt my face stiffen and set into an O. My voice had fluttered to a halt in my throat. All I could do was watch as Charousek closed his hands around the knife, and gaze into his son's eyes. But Jaromir's eyes had gone glassy and cold, frozen in place. I tried again to call his name but there was only silence. For a moment I thought Charousek too had lost the ability to move but then he stumbled backwards, the knife sliding wet and heavy out of his chest, and he arced backwards, arms flailing, and crashed to the stage. I heard him breathe his last breath. It came out in a rattle, and then he was dead.

At that I felt something thud into my back and send me toppling forwards to the ground. I could hear myself shrieking, could feel the world going black, when suddenly I felt sensations return to my extremities. I flung out my arms and let my hand take the full force of the fall. A murmur was growing all around me, sound returning to the theatre, in notes of panic and anger. When I pushed myself up onto my knees, the fallen were rising again, their joints flexing, their faces growing animated. People were rising from their seats, suddenly anxious for the exits. The magic that Charousek had sent out into the audience had returned, and then died with its maker.

I rose before the discord became a riot, and found the way to the stage blocked again by audience members rushing in my direction. I wanted to see Jaromir, wanted to call out to him, so he knew I was here. But as I pushed my way forward, I could see that he alone had not moved. I froze, tears springing to my eyes. Charousek's magic had dispersed as he'd breathed his last, but it had not reversed the effects on Jaromir. He was frozen in the spotlight, the knife still in his hand, dripping with Charousek's blood. I called again and again, but he never moved.

Then the curtain came down.

I acquiesced and let the crowds carry me away. I could hardly see for the tears in my eyes. I felt myself carried back up the steps, and away. Past the red velvet curtains, the ticket booth, and out onto the streets.

Some part of me had imagined that the darkness would be gone by the time I stumbled out of the Kishuf Theatre, that the sun would be shining and I'd feel the warmth of it on my face. But still, dark it remained. I saw the huge horsedrawn black carts in the alleyways beside the theatre, there in waiting for a cull that the Puritans knew would now not be granted. I lingered for while, dallying with the notion of going back inside for Jaromir, but as the crowds dispersed I quickly realised the folly of being left alone here. I took one last look at the theatre and then ran from it.

I returned to Jaromir's loft. I stumbled there without thinking. The streets were silent, deserted. People had taken to their homes and bolted the doors. What would happen next? Surely now that Charousek was dead, and the magic with him, the Puritans could do nothing about us. For some of the journey back I imagined the Precisemen following me, but I saw no one, not even when I peered into the shadows.

I'd imagined that being in Jaromir's home would mollify my feelings somehow, but his meagre possessions made me only more sad at his loss. I sat at his table and tried to remember the touch of his hand when he'd taken me walking into his world. Our world. But I only felt cold inside. My wound had closed up; no more sawdust leaking out of it. I was once again more than, or less than, human.

In absence of anything else to divert my mind, I retrieved the article that I'd intended for Prokop, my editor. Sat there, shivering in the cold, I slowly re-read what I had written, then screwed up the pages and began again. I wrote about Charousek's magic, stolen from the Puritans; about his wooden first-born son, Jaromir; I wrote of the Puritans and the Precisemen's abduction of Charousek's wife. I wrote about all of his creations, and his final deal with the Puritans. Finally I wrote, at first haltingly, about myself, and my part in the proceedings, my wound, my self-discovery, and my feelings for Jaromir.

It took many hours, but I was so immersed that I didn't notice the change outside. The light. Slowly it crept through the shutters, and stole across the room, over the table and over the page I was writing on. I gasped at the sight of it, and set down my pen, my heart racing. I lifted up Jaromir's windows and threw open the shutters.

And the day came in. I could feel sunlight on my face, as warm as Jaromir's hands had once been. Out in the streets, the townsfolk had overcome their fears, and were walking in the sunlight, glancing up at the blue skies with a kind of awe. I stood there for a while, feeling Jaromir's absence inside me.

I gathered up the pages I had worked on and left his room, ventured out into the sun.

Prokop greeted me with some indifference initially, dissatisfied with the lateness of my article. But word had reached him of Charousek's production, and he had fielded many outrageous claims already made by associates, who may or may not have been there. Initially he would doubtless greet my story as fiction too, but perhaps in time the facts as I saw them would be substantiated. I took his money and told him there would be no more articles. He seemed disappointed, a little deflated, but he did rise and gather me in his arms to say goodbye.

I returned, somewhat nervously, to the Kishuf Theatre, to see what remained of Charousek's production in the cold light of day. There was no one around, and after hesitating for a moment out on the cobbles, I ventured back inside.

It was chilly inside now that I had grown used to the warmth of the new day, but I hurried past the curtains and down the aisles to see what the Puritans had done with the remains. The stage had been cleared of scenery and props. The pump organ remained in the corner, with the albino's accordion at its base, already beginning to gather dust. I stepped up onto the stage and walked to where the spotlight had picked out Jaromir and Charousek's final act. All that remained was the stain where Charousek's blood had been spilt. But there was no sign of either of them. Surely the Precisemen had taken them; Charousek to an unmarked grave, and Jaromir to the furnaces. I wondered if Charousek's wife would really have been returned to him, unharmed. I could only imagine it being a deception.

I sighed, feeling the last of my hope for Jaromir disappearing, then glanced out at the rows of seats, at the litter in the aisles, at the rows of lights.

And then I saw it: my red scarf. The scarf I had given to Jaromir, when I had fussed over him in the street. I wrapped it around him and he'd smiled so hard his face had cracked a little. I reached over and tugged it away from the light, pressed it into my face to see if I could smell him on the fabric. As I did, I remembered that he had been wearing it when he struggled down the aisle and onto the stage. He hadn't unwrapped it and tossed it away. It had been still wrapped around his neck when he'd finally grown still. I was certain of it. So how had it come to be on the light?

It was the smallest flicker of possibility. And yet still I ran.

He wasn't in his loft, but I had not expected him to be. Had he escaped, then that would be the first place the Precisemen would think to look. If he was alive, then I knew where he would go to take stock.

I returned home and filled a bag with possessions. I had little of value, so it didn't take long. In minutes I was back out on the street and in search of music. The celebrants, with their brightly painted masks and robes. I thought again of that first time I had seen them, while with Charousek. He had said then, “When we're faced with questions to which we have no readily available answers, then perhaps we have to dig at our own roots and go in search of ourselves."

I understood. I found the procession at the gates to the town. The bridge had been lowered and the townsfolk were venturing out of the town limits. Beyond the walls were lush rolling meadows, the tall grass curving in the warm breeze. I stepped out past the celebrants, who were dancing in the grass, near the perimeter of the forest. I glimpsed the pierrot and the dwarf, the woman with the cloak of tears ... Already, horsedrawn carts were advancing into its darkness of the trees, en route to other towns and ports for supplies.

I hefted my bag onto my back and apprehensively followed the carts into the forest. When I turned back for a final look at the town, no one was watching me go. I watched a wooden kite take to the air, and children running in the fields, trying to keep it aloft. I watched it until my eyelashes brimmed with sunlight and tears.

The forest was daunting. No sooner had I grown familiar with the feel of the sun on my bare arms than it was gone again. The trees towered above me, their canopy blocking out the sky. I listened to the sound of birdsong above me, and the sound of music from the town growing ever more distant. Soon, the carts were far out of sight, and I was alone in the forest. I walked for a long time, and slept when I was weary on the hard ground, my head resting on my bag of possessions. I followed the path, wary of straying, wary of the unidentifiable noises that rose and fell in the forest's depths. I had no idea which direction to go, so I continued on until I had no idea how long I'd been gone from the town. I almost believed I longed for it on occasions.

But then, some distance from the path, I glimpsed something in a clearing, and stopped. Holding my breath, I crept off the path and approached the house I had dreamed of, perfect in every detail.

There was smoke snaking out of the chimney and outside was a solitary figure chopping wood. I dropped my bag and ran to him to return his scarf, my little red wooden heart beating fast.

Copyright © 2007 Simon Avery

IN MEDIAS RES?

Since the last appearance of this column way back in Interzone 198 (May-June 2005), much has happened in the media of the fantastic, not least of which is the transmogrification of The Third Alternative into this strange new beast you're holding right now.

Whatever its eventual shape and design—and, more importantly, whatever reaction it elicits from you—let us wish it well.

In the interim we've seen the usual glut of SF and fantasy films, ranging from the hyper-budget franchise product—Pirates of the Caribbean, X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Wars—to the lower-end dross which struggles to make it even to my local rental store. Luckily, and sometimes surprisingly, there have been a number of genuine marvels born out of the relationship between film and the fantastic. While we might have anticipated that Christopher Nolan would do a remarkable job of adapting The Prestige, how many of us truly expected him to successfully revitalise the Batman franchise? Richard Linklater gave us a movie—A Scanner Darkly—which finally did justice to the ideas and vision of Philip K. Dick; Danny Boyle and Alex Garland gave us Sunshine, a dystopian vision which, while plundering elements from a variety of sources, also remembered that SF can and does have an adult audience. We also had the odd, disturbing Outback western The Proposition, scripted by Nick Cave and probably the closest thing we'll have to a gothic western until someone gets round to making a film of Cormac McCarthy's bleak masterpiece Blood Meridian. The latest from David Lynch finally appeared, causing the usual fury, bafflement, indignation and admiration we've come to expect—meaning that with Inland Empire, the director continues to explore the possibilities and contingencies of film as art, indifferent to the expectations or demands of audience or critics. Better even than all of these was Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, a beautifully scripted, designed and acted tale of a young girl's Alice-like retreat into an underworld which serves as a dangerous refuge from the horrors of Spanish Fascism.

There was also The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feuerzeig's brutally honest documentary about the life and work of the singer/songwriter and artist. Johnston has attained cult status, partly as a result of his own self-mythologising, but more due to the beauty, oddness and truthfulness of his simply crafted songs. The film explores this self-mythologising—like Robert Johnson, Johnston claims to have made a pact with the devil, selling his soul in return for fame—without patronising its subject, or excusing his behaviour as entirely due to his bipolar disorder. Whatever demons haunt Johnston and his work (listen to his despairing lament for ‘King Kong’ or the allusions to devils and vampires that recur in many of his songs) the film offers a fascinating glimpse of an artist operating in the interstitial territory between external reality and the inner world of—and I'm groping for an apt phrase here—the lived unreal.

Which transition—from film as fiction to film as documenting an imagined reality—leads to the intrusion of a wider reality into this piece. I'm talking here about the News media, through which truth and the real world are re-presented to us. This intrusion, apropos, the reporting of and our reaction to, the coverage of the abduction of Madeleine McCann.

By the time this piece sees print we will probably know the outcome of this story. For now, the abduction and the not knowing constitute, for the parents and relatives of the little girl, an awful nightmare. Beyond the fact of her abduction, there have been, up to this point (10 May 2007) no new developments. Which leaves an awful lot of nothing for the press and TV news reporters to comment on. Most predictable was the disapprobation which the Portuguese police have received, and by extension the Portuguese people. The decision to conduct the investigation according to their own methods and to not kowtow to the British media's insatiable thirst for information, no matter how inconsequential, has resulted in a barrage of unjustified and even racist criticism. That Portugal doesn't have a paedophile register, that known British paedophiles might holiday there (as they might in any European country if, as the law requires, they have notified the British police of their travel intentions), and that particular pieces of evidence, including an E-Fit image of a possible suspect, have not been divulged to the UK press, have all been held up as evidence of Portuguese incompetence and inability to do the job.

Also predictable once the media had done kicking the Portuguese, was that the initially sympathetic response to the plight of Kate and Tom McCann would be superseded by a desire to point the finger of blame. Once the Mirror, by way of Madeleine's mother, had suggested that the McCanns were wrong to leave their three children alone in their rented apartment while they dined with friends, most other media outlets, along with the public, were unwilling to restrain themselves from participating in the feeding frenzy. Never mind that the children were in a locked room and that the parents, eating at a restaurant less than fifty yards away, checked on them at regular intervals—there could be no excuse: they should not have left the children alone. Soon, the BBC and Sky were providing reporters to comment on the Mirror's story and encouraging The Great British Public to phone in or email them with their views, and, afraid perhaps that they might miss the boat, other papers were offering their take on who was at fault while wringing their hands on the difficulty, no, the impossibility of bringing up a child in a completely secure environment. And how intolerable is that?

Many of us are parents, all of us have been children. Is it possible or even desirable that children should be raised in a world where they are subject to the ceaseless vigilance of parents? If all risk or potential threat is banished from a child's life, then what kind of adult will result?

Eight days after her abduction and god knows how many pages of self-righteous, fulminating prose, we, and perhaps the police, are none the wiser about what really happened. At best, many of us will have wised up to or had confirmed our suspicions about the extent to which the news media will cannibalise itself in order to fill the void left by the haunting unknown. We know now that the story is not about Madeleine or paedophiles or the methodology of a foreign police force. In truth, the story has become the story; the whole body of assumptions, speculations, allusions, accusations, falsehoods and evasions created and fuelled by the news media has become the fantasy which elides the fate of a little girl and the despair of her family.

I make no apologies for commenting on this story. Following the recent massacre at Virginia Tech I read one ‘opinion’ piece commenting on the possibility that Cho Seung-hui, the killer, may have been ‘inspired’ to kill thirty-two people by the ‘sick', ‘violent’ Korean film Oldboy.

The media speculates and calls it ‘truth'; it creates fantasy in order to fulfil our need to understand, to rationalise, compartmentalise and ultimately forget. News becomes entertainment. It is fantasy, of a kind, but less honest than that given us by Del Toro or Nolan. It is a fantastic beast at the centre of whose empty heart nothing can be seen or heard except black static.

Copyright © 2007 Mike O'Driscoll

COPACABANA, NEW YEAR'S EVE

I cast the shells onto the sand and called to Iemanjá, fishtailed orixá-mother of the sea, to protect me; but something dark and deathly cold crawling around inside my head whispered, “Stand up, run for the sea."

I stood up; I took a step forward, towards the edge of the circle that I had drawn in the sand. A second voice called out—but this from further off, somewhere behind me. I turned; someone was pushing through the crowds of revellers milling around the fringes of the beach: Sortudo.

Our eyes met. He called my name—"João!"—then he looked past me, searching for something. He came closer. Blood was streaming from his nose, flowing over his lips and into his mouth; blood sprayed the air in front of his face as he breathed.

His pupils were so large that his eye sockets looked empty in the gathering twilight.

He slid to a stop a few metres behind me and reached out his hand. He had a gun—a revolver, massive and ugly—gripped in his small fist. He brought up his other hand to support the gun's weight, fighting to steady it. A second passed, two, then he pulled the trigger, unleashing a thunderstorm.

Unleashing a thunderstorm.

A thunderstorm...

TWO DAYS EARLIER

I touched down in Rio in the middle of a thunderstorm. Two in the afternoon and it was already as dark as the late twilight. The streets were awash. High winds had closed the Niterói Bridge; traffic was backed up from there right across the junction with Brazil Avenue, bringing the avenue to a standstill. The Red Line and the Furnas Road were both flooded. Most of the other routes out of the city were jammed.

The favelados, the people of the shantytowns, washed out of the mountains by the rain, were robbing stranded drivers from Tijuca to Gávea, from Santa Tereza to São Conrado.

Rio, cidade maravilhosa: city of wonders.

I had been away a long time; it felt good to be back.

I hired a radio-taxi at Santos-Dumont—fixed fare: this wasn't the day to be on the meter. The driver was an ancient mulatto, a gnarled root of a man who drove with just the tip of one finger resting on the steering wheel, while, with his other hand, he worked the radio dial, chasing the traffic news.

We inched along the Catete Road. Sweat poured out of me. Rain drummed against the roof of the car. The old man had a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe taped to his rear-view mirror and a little straw figure splashed with wax resting on a bed of lace on the dashboard.

"Brother,” I said, “what's with this weather?"

He turned around and looked at me, as if seeing me for the first time, as if I had only that second appeared in his cab. “Paulista?"

"Yes,” I lied. He didn't need to hear my life story.

"My wife is from Indianópolis,” he said, naming a suburb of São Paulo, then: “Brother, this—” he jerked his thumb towards the rain-darkened windows “—this is Mama Axé. This is the saints. They've summoned up the storm, called down the rain, to wash the Europeans away."

Mama Axé: Macumba mistress of Rio de Janeiro, healer, shaman, high priestess of the orixá-saints of true Brazil. Dr Marin would have to wait. “Change of plan,” I said. “Take me to Babylon."

Babylon was a favela—a shantytown—built on one of the rocky prominences that separate Rio's Botafogo Bay from the district of Leme. Babylon: a grand name, but the favela was nothing but a dismal scattering of tin-and-breezeblock shacks and abandoned cars lining the road that led up the mountainside, terminating behind an old Catholic shrine.

The old man stopped the taxi by the burnt-out ruin of a MacDonald's stand, ten metres short of the shrine. I cracked open the door and stepped out into the driving rain. The old man started to turn the car around. I headed up the road.

I had my umbrella with me, but I hadn't gone three metres before my trousers were plastered to my legs. There wasn't a soul to be seen. Though there was no mains electricity on the mountain, the favelados did have battery-powered lighting, the odd generator. But I could see no lights through the windows, under the doors, of the shacks that I passed.

Washed off the mountain by the rain, the favelados, the people of the shantytown, were ... elsewhere.

I headed in the direction of the shrine, a white smudge on the rain-blackened near-horizon. At the head of the road, just short of the shrine, there was a building two, three times larger than the rest. Long and narrow with whitewashed walls, it could have been a chapel, a missionary church. But no, it was the High House terreiro: the church, the clinic, the council chamber of Mama Axé, Macumba mistress of Rio de Janeiro, uncrowned queen of Babylon.

A fitful light, leaking in like rainwater through the space between the walls and the raised roof, lit the interior of the High House. The air was dank and filled with the sound of the rain beating against the corrugated-iron roof sheets.

I propped my umbrella against the wall by the door and took in my surroundings. I was standing at the back of the main hall, the hearth and heart of the terreiro, the place where all the ceremonies, the celebrations, were held. It was a wreck. The white cotton wall hangings lay, crumpled and torn, in sinuous heaps on the rough concrete floor. The path between the crumpled drapes was strewn with debris—with broken candles, shards of pottery, piles of food, with chicken feathers and gore.

With chicken feathers and gore.

I started forward, picking my way through the debris, my heartbeat quickening.

On the floor by the front wall a length of white lace foamed out from under an overturned trestle table. Dozens of pieces of garishly coloured plaster were embedded in the lace: the shattered remains of the terreiro's plaster saints. Macumba, called Candomblé by some, Babassuê by others, was a mélange of African and Catholic beliefs—Holy Spiritualism. There was a movement in Macumba, coming out of Bahia State, to discard the Catholic trappings, to bring the African gods out from behind the old disguises, out from beneath the robes of the Catholic saints. But Mama was orthodox, rooted in tradition, loyal to the saints.

I knelt down to gather up the plaster fragments. At that same moment, I heard something scrape against the floor to my left. Startled, I straightened and turned towards the sound. There was a door in that corner of the room: the door to Mama's private office; I had forgotten that it was there. The door stood slightly ajar. A shadow flitted across the gap.

Waves of heat washed over me.

"Who's there?” I said, my voice thick with fear. “Come out.” I stood stock still, but cast about with my eyes looking for some kind of weapon; I hadn't come prepared for a fight. A figure stepped out from behind the door. It was a boy, a tattered child, dressed in nothing but a ragged pair of jeans. “Keep coming,” I said, as the tension started to drain from my body.

The boy took another step forward, fully into the room, out of the shadows. The fitful light from the windows washed over him.

My breath caught in my throat. He had a row of blanched and jagged scars splashed across his chest: five great bullet wounds stitched across his heart.

"Looking for Mama Axé?” he said. “Me too.” He started towards me, threading a path through the debris. He had the angular features and rich, black hair of an Indian; an unlikely type to find in a house of Macumba—if it wasn't for those scars. He stopped, just out of arm's reach, and returned my stare. “You're not from around here,” he said.

I ignored the remark and asked him his name.

He thought about that for a little while then laid his hand on his chest with his fingers splayed out to cover the scars. “They call me Sortudo,” he said. Lucky.

I couldn't help myself: giddy with released tension, I burst out laughing.

"What do they call you?” Sortudo challenged, speaking over my laughter.

"João Watanabe,” I answered him.

"Wata...?” His eyes lit up and he dipped his head: it made sense to him now. “You're from São Paulo.” São Paulo was home to the largest Japanese community in Brazil—the largest in the world outside of Japan. I could have played along, but I needed to know what had happened here—what had happened to Mama Axé and her helpers, her priestesses, her seers. For that, I needed to make a connection with the boy.

"No, I'm from the Green Coast; my family are fishing people. But I spent most of my childhood—up until I was about your age—living right here with my mother."

"Right here in Rio?"

"No, right here—in Babylon. In the High House."

"The terreiro?” Sortudo's eyes widened with surprise. “You're Mama Axé's son? The one that went away?"

"Yes."

Sortudo dipped his head in an exaggerated gesture of respect. Then he swept his arm around the room. “In that case, welcome home."

"What happened here?” I said. “Who did this? Where is everybody?"

Sortudo held up his hands in a gesture of surrender: he didn't know. “I was trying to find out when you got here."

"Find out how?"

Sortudo smiled. He seemed endlessly amused. “Come on.” He turned and gestured for me to follow as he headed back towards Mama's private office.

His back was a mess of pale, palm-sized splashes of scar tissue that pulsed and rippled as he moved.

The office was in as bad a state as the hall. Mama's old high-backed chair, the finest, oldest, heaviest piece of furniture in Babylon, had been shattered. Her white cotton ceremonial robes had been torn apart. The contents of her ancient filing cabinet—the only store of official documents in the favela—were scattered about the floor. The room reeked of wine and beer. But I could see no signs of blood.

Sortudo had placed a small table that had lost its legs on top of the filing cabinet and covered it in a white cloth. There was a little pile of cowrie shells resting on the cloth.

I knew then what he had in mind.

"Do you know what you're doing?” I asked.

Sortudo trailed his fingers across his scars once more. “No one closer to the saints than me, Mama said.” His brush with death would have given him special status in Mama's eyes.

"Who shot you?” I asked.

"The police. The Army. Drug dealers. Gunrunners. Bandits.” He shrugged: all of them, any one of them. “The police raided the City of God ... two years ago now. It turned into a war.” The City of God was one of Rio's roughest districts. The poor souls who lived there seemed to revel in the cruel irony of the name.

"And now you're an initiate of the terreiro?"

That sparked another smile. “Mama asked me to become an initiate. I asked her how much it paid.” He shrugged. That was the end of that. He scooped up the shells and pressed them to his chest, over his heart, over his scars. “You ready?” I nodded. “We need to know what happened here,” he said, his head tipped back, looking to the roof. “That's the question we need answering.” He threw the shells down on the tablecloth then looked up at me. “Tell me, what do you see?"

I leaned forward and studied the fall of the shells.

I saw a dark force coming cloaked in illusion, hidden from us, coming to kill. I saw a man who wasn't there.

"What do you see?” Sortudo said.

"Someone came here to find Mama,” I said. “And when they couldn't find her, they tore the place apart. Then they left to go look somewhere else."

"The Europeans,” Sortudo said. The men that Mama had summoned the saints to wash away.

This much of the story I already knew. Swiss, they were, engineers, working on top of Pavão, one of the mountains that separate Copacabana from Ipanema and the lake. There were fifteen or twenty of them, a construction crew, working for a French company, partnered with a Belgian firm that had a piece of Brazil's booming wireless communications industry. They had come to put up aerial antennas, masts for mobile phones.

They weren't evil men; they had not come to do harm. They were just engineers, just doing a job. They built their masts. But they also dug ditches to stop their site from being washed away. Four weeks after their arrival, one day in late November, it rained for a half-hour—just an ordinary summer downpour. The Swiss site was untouched: their drainage system worked, channelling tonnes of water away, off Pavão. But in the shadow of Pavão, clinging to the leeward slope of its sleeping sister-peak, Cantagalo, there was another of Rio's many favelas. The water channelled away from the Swiss site swept through the favela like a river in flood. Twenty-three people died in as many minutes, washed away with their homes.

The city government lamented their deaths, but did nothing. The Swiss had permits; the favelados were squatters.

It was around this time that Mama entered the story. She was asked to mediate between the Swiss and the favelados—the survivors who wanted compensation. Favelados, people without a voice, often asked Mama to speak for them. She met with the Swiss before Christmas. Those talks had to adjourn for the holidays. Sometime after that, something changed.

"How did it come to this?” I asked Sortudo, gesturing towards the storm-battered roof of the terreiro.

Sortudo shrugged. “People were protesting outside the site on Pavão: it was holding up the work. So, a week ago now, the Europeans moved down onto Cantagalo and bulldozed what was left of the favela to make way for a security fence to keep the protesters away. Mama saw that the Europeans were only playing at listening to her. She decided to make them pay for their contempt."

"She called down the storm?"

Sortudo's eyes lit up. He shook his head. “She called down Xangô, holy saint of thunder and righteous retribution. She went to Central Station and beat the rails; she plied the saint with blood and beer. And he called down the storm.” He made no attempt to hide the thrill he felt, his childish joy at this display of Mama's power, the saint's violent rage.

"Madness,” I said.

Sortudo's face contorted into a look of confused surprise.

I gestured at the wreckage of Mama's chair. “It's what Mama did that led to this; that brought...” I shook my head: it was pointless trying to explain further. “Sortudo,” I said, “we have to find Mama. Where would she go from here?"

"Don't you know?"

I smiled ruefully. “I haven't been here in fifteen years."

Sortudo tipped his head to one side and squinted at me: I was a puzzle to him. “Okay, I know someone we can try."

I took him outside, to the waiting taxi. It cost me 10 reais to get the old man to let him inside.

It was two a.m. before we found her, Sortudo, the old man and me; nine hours after we left Babylon. Sortudo directed us to a house in nearby Gloria; a phone call from there sent us to a fortune-teller in Tijuca. The fortune-teller sent us to a store in the City of God.

The City of God: we crept across a road junction; Sortudo, his face pressed to the window, muttered, “There, right there, that's where I fell."

The store sold raw materials to half the priests, half the fortune-tellers, in the city. The owner, a thick-bodied black woman with the dull, dead hair of a former platinum blonde, recognised Sortudo. When Sortudo introduced me, she gasped and reached out and took my hand—an act of reverence that left me flushed with anger and embarrassment; it reminded me too much of when I was a child, in the High House; the favoured son. But I didn't pull away. I asked her if she knew where Mama was.

"She sent for my grandson this afternoon, wanted him to bring her chickens and salt. He took all we had."

"Bring them where?"

"Central Station."

Mama had returned to the railway tracks.

Three a.m. The streets of Central Rio were axle-deep in water, but almost clear of traffic. We crawled up Vargas Avenue—the taxi, Sortudo, the old man and me. The tower of the railway station loomed large.

"Where will Mama be?” I asked Sortudo.

"Where she called down Xangô,” the boy replied with certainty.

"Where was that?"

"In the marshalling yard,” the old man said. “We'll have to take the works’ road.” I looked at him with some surprise. “There were hundreds of people there for the ceremony,” he said, as if stating the obvious. “They had to stop running the trains. My wife and me watched it all on World TV."

"Sortudo,” a voice called, “where have you been?"

A tall, thin black woman, dressed in a turban and a voluminous dress of white calico stepped out of the shadows and nodded to the boy. Her clothes were wet through. She was carrying a cloth-wrapped bundle of candles.

We were in one of the train sheds, on our way to the marshalling yard. I had paid off the old man, sent him and his taxi home with nearly 150 reais—all the money that I had on me.

"Iyálorixá Souret,” Sortudo said. “I've been looking for Mama. She wasn't where she was supposed to be."

The woman, Souret, tipped her head to one side, accepting Sortudo's reply. But her eyes were on me.

Seeing this, Sortudo made the introductions. “Iyálorixá Souret of Ilé Itàn Ifá—” the words were African, not Portuguese; the Iyálorixá was a priestess of one of the Bahian nations—a Candomblist “—this is João Watanabe."

The Iyálorixá's face grew pale. “Yes. I knew tonight was a fateful night, all the signs were there.” She crossed her arms over her chest and bowed to me. “Welcome home, Axélinho."

"Don't call me that!” I snapped. I had been under the storm for over twelve hours; my nerves were frayed. And a new tension was building inside me: a heightened sense of the encounter to come. “Where is my mother?"

The Iyálorixá nodded wearily: she wasn't there to fight with me. “Mama came here to draw strength from the orixá. But it won't be enough; all the signs are there."

"Just take us to her, please."

The Iyálorixá bowed to me a second time. Then she turned and walked away, piercing the veil of water streaming down across the mouth of the train shed. Sortudo and I went after her.

The Iyálorixá followed the tracks out of the shed. Spotlights cast their light down onto the yard, a gaze so intense that it pierced even the gloom of the storm. Fifteen metres ahead of us the tracks crossed those from the other train sheds arranged around the marshalling yard. A canopy, an open-sided tent, had been thrown up over the point of convergence. The heavy fabric rippled and snapped in the wind, flashing bright beneath the arclights. A ghostly-white crowd of people were gathered beneath it. They rocked and swayed, as if buffeted by the same wind that drove the canopy. But I could hear the drums; through the hiss, the static, of the falling rain, I could hear the bass beat of the drums, driving, driving the people on.

Xangô, holy saint of thunder and righteous retribution, had a love of iron; he was drawn to it like lightning. The wronged, the vengeful, those who would seek Xangô's aid, sought out railway tracks, banged on the rails to get Xangô's attention, covered them in blood and beer to draw him near.

Lightning flared, thunder rolled; sparks played about the light towers. The drums drove the people on.

We reached the canopy. The Iyálorixá began to moan. Sortudo swore then broke into nervous laughter. We began to push our way through the crowd. The heat and the humidity were incredible. I began to tear at my clothes. The sound of the drums beat at my ears. The electricity coursing through the air locked my jaw. I growled through gritted teeth. I pushed forward, through the swaying crowd.

Lightning flared. I saw my mother; I saw Mama Axé, Macumba mistress of Rio de Janeiro, queen of Babylon, at the centre of it all, at the point where the tracks met, alone in a circle of burning candles, surrounded by a feast of rice and fish and manioc, and bowls of chicken blood and beer.

And bowls of chicken blood and beer.

I tried to call out, but my jaw was locked; I could not speak. I growled, I moaned, I pushed my way to the edge of the crowd. I broke through, into free space; I stumbled over a rail, stepped on a plate of rice, shattering it, kicked over a dish of manioc. Mama's eyes were closed, her face upturned, her expression serene. She had her hands held out, palms raised to the sky. I took another step towards her. I reached out.

Something, somewhere, snapped; a flash of light darted across the underside of the canopy. Mama stepped out of the circle. She died. Mama died.

Mama died.

"João!” I felt someone tug on my arm. I looked down. It was Sortudo. Blood hung like a mist in the air between us. Sortudo's face was covered in it. It stained the cloth of the canopy above us, around us, everywhere I could see.

I looked down at my own hands. Something, somewhere, snapped. I pulled away from Sortudo. And I screamed. “Hiro!"

"Mama, it's me.” Sortudo had left my side and crossed over to my mother's corpse. She had fallen back across the circle of candles. But the explosion of blood from her body had already quenched the flames.

"Mama, it's me,” Sortudo said. I stumbled towards them, flanked by the blood-soaked figures of Mama's congregation. The drums had been stilled. The air was filled with the sound of sobbing, of retching, and wailing. Iyálorixá Souret appeared at my side. She mumbled a prayer. At least, I saw her lips move; my mind told me that it was a prayer.

"Mama, it's me,” Sortudo said, over the corpse of my mother. I hadn't seen her in fifteen years. How old she looked. How thin. “Mama, it's me,” Sortudo said. “I've come to take you home."

The morning of the day before New Year's Eve, the people of Rio woke up to find that the storm had passed. The floods were gone. A layer of glittering silt dredged up from the storm drains, and washed down out of the mountains, covered the whole city. Diamonds carpeted the streets. Diamonds hung in the air. Diamonds danced between the buildings, across the windswept squares.

Rio, cidade maravilhosa. Rio, city of wonders.

The climb up from the lake to the top of Cantagalo was made easy by the road that the Swiss had cut into the side of the mountain. Trucks thundered past Sortudo and me, as we walked single-file up the mountain road. Work had restarted now that the storm had passed. Everything was returning to normal.

Sortudo and I crested the rise and carried on along the road balanced on Cantagalo's narrow spine. The gate in the new security fence was thrown open to allow the trucks through. We walked past a pair of security guards: boys in poorly fitting uniforms, high-school dropouts armed with guns.

They didn't see us.

The sun blazed down; steam rose up from the surface of the road, from the rocks, the earth. The mountain groaned and shifted as it dried out in the heat of the morning sun.

We reached the gates of the construction site, high on Pavão, at a little after eight a.m.

Mama had been dead for nearly five hours.

We found Paulo Marin sheltering from the sun in the shadow of one of the radio-masts, consulting a humidity meter. He glanced disinterestedly at us as we approached, then jerked his head up and took a step back. “Watanabe!"

"Sortudo,” I said, conversationally, “this is Paulo Marin, head of AliTel Brazil."

Marin's eyes narrowed. “Mr Watanabe, what ... what are you doing here?"

"Dr Marin and I met in Angra,” I went on in the same conversational tone, “four days ago now. He came to offer me a job. AliTel were experiencing—how did you put it...?"

"...some unusual local opposition to one of our construction projects."

"Religious opposition?” There was no other reason for a man like Marin to seek me out. I separated a 50-centavo piece from the pile of change on the table in front of me and began to idly flip it up into the air: flip-catch-flip.

Marin tipped his head to one side—his way of saying that I might call it ‘religious', he never would.

"One of the African sects?” I said. Flip-catch-flip.

He was much more comfortable with this label, it said outside of the mainstream to him, black people and their superstitions. He jerked his head up and down. “One of the African sect leaders, yes. I spoke to Alex Page of Travis-West; he told me you handled a similar situation for them down in Paranaguá."

Flip-catch-flip. “The trouble at the docks was hurting us too—much more so than the Americans. We couldn't land our fish. If we don't sell our fish, the banks take our boats."

Marin nodded: he accepted the distinction. “Times are hard. I understand that catches are down?"

It was an obvious lure. I ignored it. Flip-catch-flip.

Marin smiled: he saw that I wasn't going to play his game. “Mr Watanabe, AliTel is willing to pay you 5,000 reais to come to Rio and handle a woman called Mama Axé for us."

Flip-catch-flip.

"He had no idea what he had just said. I could tell by the fall of the coin,” I said to Sortudo, on top of Pavão, the day before New Year's Eve. “But, it wasn't chance that sent him to me, any more than it was chance that governed the fall of the coin."

"The saints,” Sortudo said, “guide the hands of all men."

The saints, the old ancestor-gods of my father's homeland; they were all the same, all pulling at me. I was a half-breed, doubly cursed. I was never more certain of that than the day that Marin came to Angra dos Reis.

"What is this about?” said Marin. “Why are you here?” He was looking past me, trying to catch the eye of one of his men. They didn't see us. “Why are you here?” said Marin.

I fixed my eyes on his. “Mama Axé was my mother."

The blood drained from Marin's face.

"I turned Dr Marin down,” I told Sortudo, my eyes still fixed on Marin's face. “I didn't tell him why. He left. And I tried to forget that he was ever even there. I left Rio to escape my mother and that world."

"Mr Watanabe, I'm sorry. But—"

"I didn't want any part,” I said, talking over Marin, “of anything involving my mother."

My mother's marriage to my father, Milton Watanabe, had been a political one, an attempt to bring peace to conflicting African- and Japanese-Brazilian communities by joining in marriage two of the most influential members of the two factions. The attempt succeeded: peace reigned—for a generation at least—but the marriage itself was a failure. My father left Rio and returned to the family home in Angra three years after I was born. As soon as I was able to choose my own path, I followed him. I had thought then that that would be the end of it.

"But the saints,” Sortudo said, “they wouldn't let you go."

The saints, the old ancestor-gods, my family, my curse. “Yesterday, I heard the rest—about Cantagalo, the demands for compensation. Yesterday, I found out that Dr Marin had hired someone else.

"Hiro,” I said, staring at Marin. “You hired my cousin in my place."

"Mr Sukura came to us,” Marin said. “He told us he could ... advise us on how best to stop Mama Axé exploiting the coincidence of the storm to stoke up further opposi—"

"Where's Hiro, Marin?” I said, quietly, calmly, cutting off his attempts to rewrite history, to deny the true nature of the job that he had hired Hiro to do.

"I ... I don't know where Mr Sukura is."

I opened my mouth to argue, but Sortudo said, “João.” I looked down at him. He was stroking his scars. “He's telling the truth."

"I can't help you,” Marin said.

I stared at him, not speaking.

"You should go,” he prompted.

"João,” Sortudo said, tugging at my arm, “he's right: it's time to go.” His eyes bored into mine. “It's time to go."

He was trying to tell me something. I nodded. We started to walk away.

Marin called out, “I wish things could have turned out differently, Mr Watanabe, but it is over now. Understand that."

I stopped. I turned. “Over, Dr Marin? Listen. Feel.” I stooped down. I laid my hand flat against the earth. It was trembling. “Your flood defences have been overwhelmed; the ground is waterlogged. And now the sun is heating the exposed rocks. You're the engineer, here, Dr Marin: what does that add up to?"

Marin shook his head, dismissing my words. “Mr Watanabe, please, just leave."

We were just fifty metres down the road when we heard it: the crack, the shattering of the rock, the low rumble, the dull roar of shifting earth. The ground beneath our feet shook and the air filled with the stomach-churning sound of wrenching metal. I spun round and saw, like the balling of a fist, one by one Marin's radio-masts fold up, topple over and disappear.

"I have to go,” Sortudo said. “There are things I have to do."

This was at back the foot of Cantagalo, on the street, while the police cars and ambulances screamed by.

I shook my head. “I need your help to find Hiro. I need you to cast the shells."

Sortudo shook his head. “Your cousin belongs to the East. He's out of the reach of the saints. Only when he comes to us, stands on our ground, can we know him; only then can we reach out and touch him."

"Then what can I do?"

Sortudo studied my face. “Tomorrow night is Iemanjá's night,” he said. “Mama's people will go down to the sea to honour her memory, to ask the orixá-mother to be her guide.” Sortudo fixed his eyes on mine. “Your cousin will come. He has to: he knows you'll be there."

He started to back away from me. Then he turned and crossed the pavement towards the street. He reached the kerb, started to search for a gap in the traffic.

"Sortudo,” I called out. He turned. Our eyes met. “Who are you?” I said.

"Tomorrow,” he said. “On Copacabana."

Thousands came, a silent, solemn mass of people, their drums silenced, who gathered at the water's edge, while behind them, all around them, millions laughed and danced and drank and sang. The old man, the taxi driver, and his wife probably watched it all on World TV. I kept my distance. I watched from Atlantic Avenue amongst the crowds of revellers. Then, when it was over, I walked down to the water and, for the first time in fifteen years, drew a circle in the sand.

A voice started to whisper in my head, calling me out of the circle. Sortudo came. He had a gun. He pulled the trigger, unleashing a thunderstorm.

Unleashing a thunderstorm.

A thunderstorm...

COPACABANA, NEW YEAR'S EVE

I spun around, tracing the path of the bullet. But all I could see was the sand and the waves and the dark backdrop of the sea. The voice crawling around inside in my head whispered, “Run. Run to the sea."

Sortudo fired again.

The bullet struck the air somewhere in front of me.

The air shivered. It began to smoke and hiss, like fresh meat thrown on a fire. Sortudo kept firing; bullet after bullet struck home in the smoke. After the fifth shot the air behind the smoke darkened and began to solidify.

And a human figure crystallised out of the night.

It was Hiro. He was naked; his bare chest splashed with steaming blood and shot through with bullet holes. Long steel needles hung loosely from his skin in five curving lines radiating out from the area over his heart. Blue sparks leapt and played around the needles. Our eyes met. He hissed at me. Six more needles hung like cats’ whiskers from his cheeks. Smoke and steam swirled around him. He advanced a step, then another, raising his right arm. In his hand he had a machete, its blade encrusted with dried blood. He advanced another step. I was trapped in his gaze.

Sortudo drew alongside me and cocked his revolver. Hiro's eyes shifted. Sortudo called out to him, in a voice hot with blood, “I think maybe I should introduce myself. I am Exú. I am the saint in-between. I am Death. And I've come to take you home."

Hiro opened his mouth, smoke poured out. Sparks played around the needles hanging from his cheeks.

"Hiro,” I said. He turned towards me. But, this time, there was no recognition in his eyes.

"Hiro...?” But, before I could say anything more, Sortudo—Exú, the saint in-between inside the child—reached out and took him home.

The gun-smoke cleared, carried off on the sea breeze, to reveal Hiro's body lying tossed back onto the sand still wreathed in its own sinewy white smoke, still steaming.

Somewhere someone was screaming. Shouts for the police mingled with cries for the Lord and Holy Jesus.

Sortudo laughed. I turned towards him. He coughed, spitting up blood. Then his legs crumpled, and he sat down heavily on the sand. I rushed over to him, putting my hand out to support his back as he started to topple over. Blood was still streaming from his nose and mouth. His head fell forward. He laughed again, and spat out more blood. “He was a tough one to reach, him,” he said, throatily. “He fought hard."

I looked over at Hiro lying dead on the sand. A wave tumbled up the beach and washed over him.

"The banks were going to take his boat,” I said.

The sky exploded; two million voices began to roar; it was twelve o'clock midnight.

New Year's Day.

Copyright © 2007 Jamie Barras

COMFORTABLY DUMB

Why did I choose ‘Interference’ as the title of this new column?

Running interference is about going against the natural order of things, and that, according to J.G. Ballard and many other intuitive futurologists, is where we're headed, into a zone where the only fun left is enforced by corporations, and the fate of the world doesn't matter so long as we get a thousand channels of hyperintense presenters desperately trying to make us believe they exist. Ballard reckons the future has ended, and we now merely inhabit the rolling detritus that represents the present. Luckily our virtual cages are velvet-lined, so we hear little and feel nothing except the warm, soothing relief of everlasting micturition.

Interference is also a form of intervention and obstruction. When I was a kid it had an additional meaning: getting your inner thigh touched by a man in a gabardine mackintosh at the Odeon.

So it's a nicely loaded word that allows free range across a variety of subjects like culture, media and society. Let's touch on those for a start, as if we were all at a dinner party, whatever that means these days. (Do you honestly know anyone who has dinner parties? Do you even know anyone with a dining table?)

Sorry to come on strong. Perhaps we should just chatter about cocaine or the latest handbags. Everyone says the British are becoming ruder, but all I hear is people saying sorry. Blair's retirement speech was filled with the drizzle of appeasement instead of fiery pride. In bars and buses, private individuals can't wait to offer an apology. When served inedible food—'sorry, but there seems to be broken glass in my eggs,’ when poured a bad drink—'sorry, is there any vodka in this?’ It's a triumph of environment over heredity. Overseas visitors acquire the habit within seconds of arrival. The only people who don't believe their own apologies are corporations. They're happy to let you know that they only care about your ability to generate revenue, and when things go awry they'll get you to pay again, preferably on the internet by credit card, so they can charge you extra. They know that you know it's wrong, and yet it doesn't matter.

This is a new development brought about by a society that realises we are only vaguely disgruntled when service deteriorates and promises collapse. We expect failure, because we don't even believe in the future. Fractured and disjointed by the very processes that were intended to make our lives easier, we now behave like Russians in the 1950s, half-heartedly patching and repairing just enough to see us through, without a thought for anyone coming after. Or before, for that matter, because we have no true remembrance of the past beyond those Hitler and Marilyn Monroe documentaries they endlessly show on cable.

My grandfather said the trouble nowadays is nobody wants to work, but he was wrong. The workforce is retiring earlier, so that many meetings I attend are now made up entirely of twentysomethings, which has the effect not of granting them power at a younger age but of rendering them powerless no matter how many hours they put in, because all major decisions are made somewhere else by people they will never even meet.

Nothing does what we thought it would.

Who'd have thought that advancing cinema technology would simply be used to release identical franchised segments of stylised violence? Scripted entertainment is in its death-throes. Every corporation from furniture to computers forces you onto the treadmill of upgrades, clothing stores lead you to believe their latest items are for you when in reality they're only made for trade shows. And you don't really mind.

The only time we ever fought back is when we were teenagers, but now that particular demographic has been satiated with shiny objects, although what we consume isn't even as good as it was thirty years ago.

Examples? Cheap audio devices once allowed you to mix tracks and create music with a wide sound range. Now mp3s have reduced audio quality, removing depth, cross-fades and sampling without specialist equipment. Books are so demographically niche-marketed that you can no longer be surprised by something you just picked up. The book released without press quotes or a celebrity author is dead in the water. The author has become confused with the word, as if that person has to live the story in order to write about it.

The other day I saw some test footage for a new action movie. It was created on a computer, and showed robot figures diving in hyper slow motion through windows firing guns and throwing bombs. The footage will then be edited, and finally the actors will imitate the movement of the computer figures. This means that film-making is now doing the opposite of what it did. Once the artist rotoscoped the movements of the actors to make lifelike animation. With films costing so much, the suits want all elements of chance removed from performance so that everything can be predicted, meaning it is marketable and contains none of the disturbing surprises that proper acting can throw up.

Cinema is now about turning actors into objects, which can then be sold. Ideally they should also be holding, riding or wearing other objects which are also for sale. By preplanning highs into their films, companies eliminate the kind of spaces that let you think, keeping you reactive and receptive. The more relentless a film is, the duller it becomes, until it is so action-packed that it stops altogether, becoming a meaningless flypast of colour and noise that you can tune in or out of at will. Try watching Crank or Underworld without periodically zoning out into an alpha state that involves thinking about the weather, your laundry, or nailing some corporate drone's living flesh to a post.

Actually, that's not fair. We all have to make a living, don't we? True, we could get together to bring water to Africa, but we'd probably just end up arguing and the work would be difficult and it would be a step-down, salary-wise, and everything will work out fine eventually, just you wait and see.

This is the new world in which this magazine now exists. Not bound by politics or policies, but sales units. It is a world which brings us back to the ever-prescient Ballard, who says that ‘as the nation infantilises itself, the point is finally reached where the abandoned infant has nothing to do except break up its cot.’ Michael Bywater writes about this end-game beautifully in Big Babies, his book of essays about the end of culture and society. He says ‘our damnation is that we so happily trade our autonomy for the illusion of perpetual promise,’ so that we approach the condition of insects, where ‘only the collective can possess any individuality'.

And to place a counter-argument here it must be asked, is this just a kind of early Grumpy Old Man syndrome, complaining that ‘things were better in our day'?

Certainly politics, music, film, art and literature were woven together without their own assigned sales divisions, so that they felt reliant on each other, but you be the judge. People like Jeremy Clarkson, Jonathan Ross and Chris Moyles are hugely popular. They're probably better known than Disraeli or Mussolini ever were. Ask yourself if they grant you any insight into your life and remember—every society gets the icons it really, truly deserves.

Copyright © 2007 Christopher Fowler

Bax once had a dream where Joseph Goebbels was working as the entertainer at a children's birthday party. I have never forgotten it. At that time, the TV had packed in and the mother board on the computer was shot. Bax and I relied on each other's dreams to pass the time.

As Bax explained it, Goebbels stood in front of a large map of Europe with the children seated on the floor. The map was a large, box-like structure, decorated with brightly coloured leadpaints on embossed tin. Under the shape of each country, Goebbels had hidden small balloons, and when a child called out a country's name, Goebbels would lift a lid off and present a balloon as a prize. One country had a picture of Hitler underneath its lid. The child who chose this country would receive an extra special prize.

The hinges on the lids were very stiff, and Goebbels had trouble in prising them open. The balloons kept bursting on the sharp metal edges of the map. The picture of Hitler did not appear. The children grew more and more restless and began to heckle Goebbels, which flustered him more and more. Fingers straining on the lids, balloons popping as soon as he was able to retrieve them, the search for the non-existent picture of Hitler, the laughter and taunts of the children: all of this made Goebbels sweat and shake.

"I woke up laughing,” Bax told me at the time, still chuckling to himself as he blew on his morning coffee, a Gauloise burning in his mouth. “It was incredible. It seemed perfect, somehow."

Bax and I have lived together for five years, introduced by a mutual friend after I had returned from Indonesia and Bax's marriage ended in divorce. Over the years, we have grown accustomed to one another's habits, and even begun to share each other's interests, sometimes collaborating on various projects. This has developed over the past year, when both of us were made unemployed. Bax lost his job reviewing books for a science magazine, after some unfortunate remarks about Buckminster Fuller. I have been out of work ever since the College of Art in Barking decided to dispense with my services, feeling, as they did, that my particular research into the philosophy of avant-garde science was not relevant to their operation. I was not surprised. Throughout my career, I have encountered much ignorance in the face of my work. I realise that in such a materialist world, results are more important than theories. Over the years, I have begun to embrace this philosophy, as it spurs me on to the proof that I crave. Together, Bax and I live hand-to-mouth, surviving on vegetables and pulses, drinking the cheapest of wine and supermarket brand Scotch. We continue our studies.

Some time last year, I had a dream where Bax referred to his penis as “Unston's Weeble.” That time, I woke up laughing. When I told Bax about this, he was delighted, and on those occasions when he found it necessary to refer to his penis in my company, he began to call it Unston's Weeble. At first, I found this dream slightly disturbing, not because I dislike relaxed banter about penises between male friends (I'm comfortable with this) but because my dream came true. After much contemplation, I arrived at a few conclusions and the case of Unston's Weeble gave rise to my first theories on the nature of dream objects. I call these theories my own, although I have drawn upon works by Leibniz, Marshall Maclune and Karl Jung.

In essence, the dream object is something that, once dreamed, comes into being. I am not talking about prophecy. Events are predictable in many ways, and what we once thought of as second sight long ago became the business of the financial markets. Rather, I am intrigued by something dreamed that enters the real world. This is not as simple as you might believe. Taking Bax's dream as an example: we know, of course, that a person such as Joseph Goebbels existed, that there are such things as children's birthday parties and that they have entertainers. We also know that children are apt to become restless when bored. Although it is unlikely that the large metal map of Europe exists, given specifications supplied by Bax, it would be easy enough to construct one. It is feasible. Therefore, no matter how funny or bizarre we may find Bax's Goebbels dream, however improbable, it is entirely possible.

The example of Unston's Weeble is different. Although both Unston and Weeble exist in our world, the former a place in Derbyshire, the latter a variant of ‘weevil', put together as a linguistic construct they are unique. Incidentally, I don't care to what, in the logic of the dream, the words actually referred. The fact that they created a name for Bax's penis are completely arbitrary as I see it. Aside from one drunken night two years ago, ours has never been a sexual relationship. I care nothing for Bax's penis, per se. Before my dream, the structure “Unston's Weeble” did not exist. Now it does. This is my starting point.

I wrote a paper on my theories and sent it around the usual institutions with an application for funding. I had little success. I did have some encouraging feedback from a small journal run from Dalston, but I later discovered that the editors regarded the report as ironic. Faced with this ignorance, Bax and I began to conduct our own researches into dreams. I theorised, with Bax's help, that with a more concentrated dreaming experience, it would be possible to create actual objects, events in physical space in the same way as events in language. Over a number of weeks, we sat up in the front room in Acton, Bax fuelled by nicotine from his French cigarettes, both of us sharpened by a supermarket whisky. We formulated our plan.

Through an old friend in the pharmaceutical industry, I acquired some cutting edge cancer drugs which I had read about in a recent journal. At first, my friend was very nervous about supplying them, but he was soon persuaded. Over the course of my research at Barking college, and earlier during my time in Jakarta, I made a number of discoveries relating to the use of certain chemicals by these companies, which, if they were widely known, would be unpopular. When I explained all of this to my old friend, he was happy to help me out. Blackmail is only a word. These cancer drugs were remarkable for the intensity of the activity they provoked in the deep occipital lobes and the right posterolateral thalamus: the dream centre of the brain. Not only were the pills extremely effective at treating the cancer, this side effect reduced the activity in the brain's pain centre and literally took the patients’ minds off their treatment.

Of course, the cancer drugs alone wouldn't be enough to create dream objects. We could have spent days, it is true, revelling in their excitement, transported into the luminous worlds which our subconscious could create. But these would have been redundant visions, almost sybaritic. While Bax and I regard the use of hallucinogens as beneficial (I taught a seminar on political hallucinations while at Barking College) we both agreed that for us, that time had passed. In order to manipulate our dreams the better, we began to study the practice of lucid dreaming, the technique of controlling one's dreams. After a few months, we had trained our subconsciouses to manipulate our dreams. Bax, in particular, was adept at this. He spent most of his time asleep, controlled the phantoms of his imagination.

"You know, I've been thinking,” Bax said to me one night after spending the whole day in his room, dreaming. It was a dark evening, glowering with autumn. “It hadn't occurred to me before, but surely the process can be reversed."

"What do you mean?"

"Theoretically, if a dream can cause these objects to come into being, then surely it can cause pre-existent objects to fall out of being."

I nodded. “It's an intriguing possibility."

We talked about it late into the night, over cigarettes and whisky, agreeing to call this theoretical phenomena an undream. That night I wrote up the notes concerning the undream in my room, staying awake till the hours of early morning the only sound in my room the pen scratching on the paper. I had the feeling that life was about to change.

The experiments continued. Every night, Bax and I would retire to our rooms and take doses of the cancer drugs. While the drugs certainly provoke wild dreams—an orgy in the Sahara, Gordon Brown cockfighting in a late night drinking den in Clapton, an expedition to a mountain that had arisen in the middle of Hyde Park—the sheer intensity of the experiences made them very difficult to control. Soon, Bax and I were exhausted by each stint of dreaming, and waking became a kind of blank state, filled only by various bodily needs. We spent days sitting around the flat, too tired to move. We bickered often. Bax accused me of stealing his ideas. I accused him of never having got over the night we'd shared a bed. We drank heavily, and once even came to blows. The morning after, we apologised, and agreed to call a break in our dreaming. “Take a holiday, perhaps,” Bax said. “I've a friend with a cottage on the Pembrokeshire coast. Get away from Acton, come back refreshed and start again."

I agreed with him, of course I did, but I was not quite prepared to leave the experiment. Without Bax knowing, I went to my room, and took a double dose of the cancer drugs. As the rain pecked at the window of my room, I let myself drift into sleep.

And in the dream I had that night, I walked the dank maze of the underground hospital in Guernsey. Smells of mould and damp brick came towards me. Puddles shined black on the floor, illuminated by weak yellow halogen bulbs, caged behind wire. The grim white walls had been blotched by graffiti. I read the slogans out to myself as I walked along. i am dog ... qui-est the motivator ... who is processing the water?

I heard voices in the corridor behind me, but I was not scared. Suddenly, out of the dark, a small child ran towards me. Looking closer through the gloom, I saw that he had curious red lumps, the size of thumbtips, on his eyelids. He spoke in a rough voice, ravaged by cigarettes smoke. “Who would you say would want the world?” he said to me. “Who would have it?"

"I don't know."

He coughed, rasping, and the knobs on his eyelids fluttered as he blinked rapidly. “The first man will be your father,” he said, suddenly, and then pushed past me and ran down the corridor.

But the first man was not my father. He was an old man, with yellow tinged skin, and blue rheumy eyes, his long grey hair tied in a ponytail. I came across him in a room further down the corridor, a few doors down from the old morgue, that word sprayed in military stencil on the bubbling white wall. I'm not sure how I began to talk to the old man, but suddenly we were discussing the nature of dreams, their significance, their magic and architecture. The old man had many things to say, and as I followed his words, I knew that I would not even remember half of what he told me. I felt dizzy, drunk. Everything became unconnected. At some stage the man put his hand on my shoulder. “This is the world,” he said to me, and pressed an object into my hand. I looked down to see a red brick of some indefinable material.

"Yes,” the old man said, nodding at me. “And you can be sure we know what that means."

I woke up in my bedroom in Acton. I held the red brick in my hand.

It took me a while to realise what had happened. The experiment had been a success. I had proved my theories. Amazed, almost deranged with excitement, I ran out of my bedroom and down the hall. I burst through Bax's door. The bed lay empty. Bax had gone.

During the days after his disappearance, I realised that like me, Bax had been unable to let the experiment pass. After counting up the blister packs of cancer drugs, I guessed that Bax had retired to his room that night, and unable to let go of the intense dreaming experiences, he had taken his usual dose. As I sat alone in the flat, it became clear that Bax had dreamed the undream of himself. I don't need to tell you how horrifying I found this. Now that this had been so clearly proven, I began to wonder whether the undream might be an established natural phenomenon, accounting for disappearances every day. I thought of all those objects we lose: a set of keys, a favourite pen, and odd woollen gloves. I thought of the missing people throughout the world, the sad reminders of the absences on milk cartons and the backs of magazines. I even wondered whether it was possible to undream a country, and theorised the glorious, immense undream of Atlantis. I typed all of this up on the computer in the living room, washing two fingers of Talisker around a glass.

Meanwhile, the red substance was mutating.

It began quite quickly. When I discovered Bax had disappeared, I placed the brick on a shelf in my room. An hour later, I returned to examine it. I saw that it had lost its brick shape, that it had seeped slightly into the wood of the shelf. I managed to pull it away, thinking only that the room had been too hot. I ran a few tests on the substance, but they were rudimentary at best. I have to admit that I spent these few days in a mild sort of shock. The intensity of the dream, the disappearance of Bax, the dream object: all had left me feeling slightly removed from the world. When I examined the red substance, it occurred to me how lucky I had been with its appearance. If it had possessed a new colour, for example, one outside of the established spectrum, then the effects on my psyche would have been catastrophic. As it was, its appearance had unsettled me. The thrill had given way to a kind of depression. I spent my time sitting around the front room in my dressing gown, staring at a blank patch of wall. I drank too much and could not sleep.

But one night, I came into my room to discover that the red substance had once more leaked into its surroundings, and that it had almost quadrupled in size. It was now impossible to remove it from the shelf. Daily it grew, spreading into the wall, absorbing everything around it into its structure. Things started to happen. One night, I was awoken in the living room by a giant orange butterfly fluttering against the inside of the window. When I went to catch it, the butterfly broke apart in my hands, covering my skin with a fluffy orange powder, like delicate pollen. One morning, I left the front door of the house to see an old woman standing at the bottom of the front yard, waiting with her dog. When she caught my eye, I smiled. As I stepped outside of the gate, I saw that the dog was blind, with no eyes in its skull. It seemed to find its way along purely by its sense of smell. I noticed that his nose had been lacerated, and was little more than an open wound. The old woman grinned at me. “He's able to smell so much better, now,” she said to me. “It's the surface area."

I stopped leaving the flat. I began to detect signs of strangeness, proof I thought that the red substance was having an effect on the outside world. Music began to play throughout the day, the same three tones. I heard it from passing cars and personal stereos. It began to play through the wall of the house next door. On the television, newsreaders became unable to deliver the headlines without laughing. Reports spoke of people submitting to the signs around them, following the directives of adverts without being able to resist. A man literally ate himself to death while walking down a high street, unable to resist the orders given to him by fast food chains. A woman spent her entire savings in half an hour, after becoming snared by the adverts for a travel agent. The red substance had now covered my old bedroom, creeping up the walls like some malignant, sentient wax. It throbbed with an animal heat, but it was cold to the touch. I slept on the floor of the living room, too scared of the substance, too superstitious to use Bax's bed. I did not dream.

Eventually, I couldn't stand to be around the flat any more. I packed my bag, ready to flee the substance, which was now creeping out of my bedroom, down the hall. On the television, a hysterical newsreader cackled through a report. Vehicles were disappearing mid-journey, only to re-appear thousands of miles away from their original destinations. An aeroplane bound for South Korea made an emergency landing in the North of Spain. A Uzbek yurt appeared on the Twickenham roundabout, its owner surveying the traffic with a baffled serenity. I stopped packing. There was nowhere left to run. The substance had taken hold. With a recognition of fact that was more terrifying than any kind of heroics, I realised that only I could stop this.

I began to dream again.

It took me nearly a week. I slept most of the day, taking double doses of the cancer drugs. I did not turn on the TV, scared of what new terrors the substance had unleashed on the world. I visited strange territories during those days. At first I recorded them in a diary, so that during my waking hours I could examine the details and try to find some clue that might stop the effects of the substance. Eventually, this way of anchoring myself to the real world became too draining. During my waking hours, I lived like some kind of zombie. Only in dreams did I find a way to live.

And then one night, I once more found myself in the underground war hospital in Guernsey. I hurried along the corridors, recognising the same graffiti, the laughter of distant children, the damp on the walls, the frame of an old metal bed, totally corroded, turning to brown dust. I thought—I hoped—that by meeting with the old man, I could at least discuss the substance and the effects it was having on the world I had left behind. I passed the morgue, with its military stencil on the wall outside, and walked towards the room where I had met him.

Bax was waiting inside.

He was smoking a cigarette as he leant against the rancid wall. He smiled at me as I walked through the door. I was reminded, suddenly, of Harry Lime, and the surprise I felt at seeing him again was tempered by this image.

"Bax,” I said. “You're here."

"Not really,” he said, which seemed typical of him somehow. He smiled. “What I want you to know, first of all,” he said, “is that everything will be all right on the other side. This might make things easier. Everything is just as you left it that night."

I nodded. I knew really what he was about to tell me. It did not come as much of a surprise. He explained to me how, the morning after I had taken the double dose of cancer drugs, he came into my room to find that I had disappeared. It was obvious what had happened.

"In many ways, I envy you,” Bax said. “Over the past few weeks, I have had a line from Conrad in my head. ‘This must be life since it is so much like a dream.’ You are living life as pure hallucination, or rather a hallucination within a hallucination. An undream. It's incredible."

I sat down on the floor. I felt suddenly exhausted. “And you? What is happening?"

"After you disappeared, I got in touch with your contact in the pharmaceutical company. We've been discussing the research together. I'm thinking of approaching the military with this. Imagine, an army of trained undreamers, capable of undreaming leaders and rogue states, of undreaming events.” He frowned. “That's not much consolation, is it?"

"No. Not much.” I paused. “How long have I been gone?"

"Nearly two months. It's a shock I know, but you need to think of yourself as a pioneer. Unfortunately, pioneers are often lonely.” He smiled again. “I suppose there's an irony of physical proof about all of this."

I stared at him. “Oh yes. Really. It is quite magnificent."

Bax nodded. He smoked his cigarette thoughtfully. I noticed that it didn't recede at all, although he tapped ash regularly. “What do you want to do?"

"I'm not sure."

"I have a suggestion. That we can meet here, means, to me at least, that you aren't totally lost."

"You mean there's a way I might be able to wake up."

He shook his head. “No. Sorry. I don't think that's possible. I think it has gone too far."

"So what do you suggest?"

"Perhaps the shared geography of Acton is the key. Perhaps, together, by dreaming of its terrain, we can find some way to put an end to your undream."

"Is that the only way?"

Bax dropped the half-burned cigarette to the floor. From outside in the underground hospital, the laughter of children echoed along the corridors. Bax said, “Tomorrow night, I will dream of the road down from the tube station in Acton, which crosses the rail tracks. In your undream, dream this dream also. Walk up these tracks while I dream the dream of a train. Don't flinch, and keep walking. The psychic shock might do the rest."

Bax offered his hand. I took it in mine. He walked out of the room, and I was left alone.

That was three months ago. Now, I walk the emptiness of Acton, although it does not seem to help. Whenever I try to find the area Bax described, the road always seems to curve away, and I find myself on the high street once more, or by the supermarket, or in front of the house I once shared with Bax. I hear the trains but never see them. I walk around, a dreamer in an undream. One day I hope to find the rail tracks, and this way I will wake.

Copyright © 2007 Daniel Bennett

SIX DEMON BAG

A key ingredient of any commercial genre movie is a desirable starlet, whether she's the ‘last girl standing’ (when the villain is eventually despatched), or destined to expire horribly so our hero can avenge her. Buffy's Sarah Michelle Gellar seems unhappily typecast nowadays, following Scooby Doo flicks and The Grudge remakes with Asif Kapadia's terribly ordinary The Return, about go-getting independent 25-year-old Joanna, a haulage company's top sales rep, haunted by repressed memories of a childhood trauma, stuck in a recurring nightmare of apparent self-harm and Texan town secrets, and hardly supported by estranged father Ed (Sam Shepard) against the mystifying barrage of violent flashbacks. While swapping out her trademark shiny blondeness for a ‘serious actress’ brunette style helps Gellar shoulder the grim dramas endured by her depressive character, she's obviously still just the same plucky Hollywood chick underneath. Her not smiling much here is unlikely to make a difference to future casting agents.

Thora Birch (The Hole, Ghost World) has nothing much to smile about in Ray Gower's Dark Corners, even though she plays two distinct characters—one blonde, one brunette. Fair-haired Susan is a happily married wannabe mum, with a bright and cheerful middle-class lifestyle, but she's anxious about the fertility treatments that she and supportive husband Dave have opted for. Susan's world falls apart due to chronic bad dreams about dark-haired Karen, alone in a grungy slum every night, working as a mortician's assistant by day.

Both women encounter a weird hypnotist, are stunned by the murders of colleagues, and troubled by shared visions of a serial killer, but Karen's apparently homemade hell drags Susan down into utter madness. This creepy puzzler expertly weaves Asian horror influences into the shadows of a Lynchian post-industrial realm, complemented by the surrealist high notes of Argento's operatic shockers. Here, the blackened fingernails are a telltale clue, and a vomited key (oh, when did she swallow that?) opens a buried strongbox of clarifying evidence, yet appearances remain deceptive in the story's headlong rush to judgement. Its unremitting strangeness, contrasting set décor, and foreboding-but-funny zombie scenes all merit fans’ interest.

Karla stars another blonde, Laura Prepon (October Road), but this time her character is definitely complicit in villainy. Directed with psychotic intensity by Joel Bender (Vampire Cop, Jennifer Is Dead), this crime drama is based on a true story of a killer's muse; as the coldly manipulative Karla helps fiancé Paul (Misha Collins) to drug and rape her own little sister Tammy. When Tammy dies from an overdose, Paul uses home video of the assault to secure his emotional dominance over Karla, forcing her to help satisfy his lust for virgins, and so the ‘Barbie & Ken of serial killers’ kidnap three young girls for sexual abuse and murder. Although her lover rapes and kills, Karla happily marries him, despite being a victim of his abusive temper, her own passive/aggressive manner results in a seemingly obedient Karla remaining with the wife beater. Told in flashbacks as Karla willingly undergoes psychiatric evaluation hoping for parole from her twelve-year prison sentence, the portrait of a chillingly unsympathetic psycho emerges. One that's even more peculiarly disturbing, in many ways to the credit of actress Prepon, because so much of the film's potentially titillating, objectionable sex and violence occurs just off-screen.

Werewolves, vampires and zombies abound in current subgenre variants like romantic mystery Blood & Chocolate, vampire actioner Underworld: Evolution, and sci-fi horror Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse. Not to be confused with Tom Shell's comedy-thriller of the same title, The Thirst by Jeremy Kasten is about a couple of ex-junkies, Maxx and Lisa (Matt Keeslar, Clare Kramer), who are turned into vampires so they can join a violent clan led by crazy Darius (Jeremy Sisto). Dying of cancer, Lisa is presented with a fascinating moral dilemma when Mariel (Serena Scott Thomas) lures her toward immortality where bloodsucking and UV-sensitivity might be the only drawbacks. Wild guy Lenny (Adam Baldwin) and haughtily eccentric Duke of Earl (Neil Jackson) seem overly fond of re-enacting the bar-room slaughter from Bigelow's Near Dark, but for Lisa and Maxx, at least, there's as much vampire romance here as torn flesh and arterial spray. Although the poignant dénouement echoes the tragic end of Blade II, plenty of good humour and cleverly inventive character material makes this worthwhile viewing. First-time director Patrick Dinhut's TV movie Dead And Deader tasks US Army Lieutenant Bobby Quinn (Dean Cain, Lois & Clark) with afterlife survival when he's KIA and infected by a zombie-virus from Cambodia. Despite a slavering dependence on fresh meat, Quinn retains his mental faculties and sets out to destroy his Special Forces team, numerous other undead soldiers and civilians while the contagion spreads rapidly. Genre notables John Billingsley (Enterprise), Armin Shimerman (Star Trek: DS9) and Dean Haglund (Lone Gunmen), are among the first batch of unlucky casualties, and Quinn gets two sidekicks, army cook Judson (Guy Torry) and film geek Holly (Susan Ward)—whose critical assessment of Romero's Dawn Of The Dead is a droll highlight of this wittily scripted comedy-horror thriller. The cancer-riddled scientist, desperate for eternal life, chimes with the concept behind The Thirst, but here seriousness is neglected in favour of irreverence, as Quinn's repeated arrests by police, prompt kung fu escapes and defiant vigilante scenes are stacked wall-to-wall in a rumble of shotgun and exploding head action, valiantly redecorating sets with dripping crimson. The balance of light and dark, suspense and slapstick, is deftly achieved. In the mischievous epilogue, our TV heroes casually ponder their options for a regular series.

Americanised remakes of Japanese chillers rarely match the impact of their originals, so it's a pleasant surprise to discover Walter Salles’ Dark Water is far better in many respects than Hideo Nakata's drama (aka: Honogurai mizu no soko kara). Jennifer Connelly is extraordinary as single mother Dahlia, struggling to avoid a custody battle for her young daughter Ceci (eight-year-old Ariel Gade, from sci-fi TV series Invasion), and moving into a rundown apartment on New York's Roosevelt Island, while fighting personal demons inextricably tied to her own childhood sorrows. Confronted with apathy, professional incompetence or hostility at each turn of events, Dahlia slowly loses emotional strength when her low-rent home is plagued with horrendous plumbing faults, possible vandalism, and seemingly haunted by the ghost of lost neighbour, Natasha, who becomes Ceci's invisible ‘friend'. Dahlia crumples magnificently under the pressures of her workaday urban life, but she emerges from the drowning pool of Salles’ expertly crafted psychological thriller as a superb heroine, willing to pay the ultimate price to keep her innocent daughter from any harm. On Dahlia's side here, against slippery estate agent Murray (John C. Reilly is entertainingly believable), there's lawyer Jeff Platzer (a virtually unrecognisable Tim Roth, creating a lonely yet sympathetic character), while the great Pete Postlethwaite delivers a memorable turn as Veeck, the building superintendent, whose intentions remain ambiguous to the end, despite his initially suspicious behaviour.

As screenwriter Rafael Yglesias admits, when interviewed for the DVD extras, his revision of Dark Water owes more to the surreal melodrama of Polanski's Repulsion than its eastern sources. That, however, merely broadens the appeal to genre fans of this remarkable US movie. The copycat flipside of Hollywood remaking commercially viable foreign pictures is when today's wannabe genre maestros pay homage to the works of past auteurs. Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later bridged Day of the Triffids and Romero's The Crazies splatter. As with the ‘rage’ virus central to Boyle's drama, every successful recycling of a winning formula gets its knock-off violent sci-fi thriller plot stretched to sequel, and so we come to 28 Weeks Later by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, director of Spain's enigmatic Intacto. Robert Carlyle (Ravenous, The 51st State, so no stranger to action or horror) and Catherine McCormack (A Sound of Thunder, Shadow of the Vampire) are the star names acting up a storm here, but there's also Rose Byrne, fresh from Boyle's sci-fi Sunshine, in service for this follow-up's gloomily documentary-style second outbreak of peculiarly British hell.

While quarantined on the Isle of Dogs, two London kids escape from the occupying US troops, and discover their mother is actually still alive. With one family sharing potential for immunity to rage, it's not long before intelligence and caution are flushed away in a welter of security lapses, fight or flight responses, and attacks by the infected escalating rapidly into an untenable military situation.

In contrast to whiz bang CGI of dismemberment by helicopter, and a visually climactic docklands firebombing, this features hand-held camerawork in a guerrilla style of filmmaking, with close-up mauls and intensely chaotic bloodlust, which enhance the scenario's ever-present claustrophobia. With genetically remarkable, and therefore vitally important, youngsters caught in a veritable war zone, the heart of this storyline suggests a thematic link to Children Of Men, but plot comparisons are hardly warranted, and other concerns of both the movies and their makers are almost mutually exclusive. Documentary realism is often cast aside here, in favour of pulp poetry and supernatural coincidence, somewhat leavened by exhilarating scenes of unashamed homage, as all the hopes of a tragically dwindling number of survivors gradually slip away. The cross-channel epilogue is very predictable. A lack of surprises and unforeseeable plot twists is the biggest failing of genre horror.

Not half as intriguing as the Texas Chain Saw Massacre remake, The Butcher, the feature debut of director Edward Gorsuch, recycles familiar US rural horrors, as a vanload of stranded bickering students encounter a reclusive, violent, scarred farmer with a seeming penchant for rape, abortion, murder and incineration of corpse evidence (apart from bottled trophies). Wrong Turn has already been there, got the T-shirt, and handled its own medley of chills, thrills and spills with greater skill. Much-harassed Rachel (Catherine Wreford) is presented as strongly independent during the first batch of mishaps and crises but falls apart emotionally, long before the closing escapades. Posing, with midriff bared, she's more of a screensaver than an attractive heroine, and still needs rescuing by the young hero, who's insecure but rises to the inevitable challenge of the bone pit. What makes this flick a failure though, isn't its witless scripting, shallow characters or mediocre performances; it's the complete lack of genuine scares, or suitably unpleasant gore quotient. At a time when even major disappointments like The Dark can generate a modicum of spooky atmosphere, Evil Aliens offers lashings of deliriously twisted fun, and the wholly underrated Reeker effortlessly taps into a range of overworked road-trip and paranoia tropes with hugely impressive results, there is simply no excuse for such boring horror films and no reason to forgive their apparently talentless makers, either.

Copyright © 2007 Tony Lee

Votary's father was very fat.

He lived in the furthest back part of the basement, in moist darkness gathered behind black-painted windows. He watched an antique console television all day and all night. He peed in mason jars that Votary's mother would take and empty in the toilet, pouring urine into the smooth ceramic bowl in a thin whiskey-colored stream.

He was very fat. His body took up all of the old blue couch, spilling out sideways and over the front. His arms stuck out almost straight, supported by fungus-folded billows of cushiony flesh; his head was like the tiny hard eruption of a huge inflamed boil. He could not wear clothes. When it was cold, or when the basement was damp and water dripped down the walls, mother draped a white king-sized sheet around him. Other times he just sat, white and naked and hairless, his skin striped with shiny pink stretch-marks that made him look as if he'd been whipped, his modesty protected by the puffy half-moon pad of fat that waterfalled down over his knees.

Votary could hide behind parts of him that were outside his field of vision. She could crouch in the misty, musky darkness by his ankles and he would not know she was there, and she could listen to him talking to himself, chewing over the words he heard on the television. He didn't speak very loud. His voice was hardly distinguishable from the eructations of his vast body; a soft, squishy belch or a deeply muffled fart or the ripple of some huge organ shifting itself deep inside of him could sound exactly the same as a word or a sentence. But Votary always understood what he said.

Sometimes he would get excited, too excited, and the words would become short, like bullets, fragmentary pieces of a slowly-exploding consciousness.

The world would become colder and hotter, and things would speed up and slow down jerkily, like a boat moving through choppy water. Father would begin to grow larger and larger, and she could feel him expanding like a balloon being inflated at a tank, and his eyes would shine with hunger, and his mouth would open wider and wider as words spilled forth, old words, unintelligible words saturating thick-hewn fir beams, seeping up through the floor and down through the concrete and through the old walls, hundreds of years old, stinking and damp...

Then Votary would tickle him on his swollen instep, and he would fall abruptly silent, and the air would stop trembling and time would stop rearranging itself. She would touch him, and he would waken from strangeness, for no matter how huge he got, he always felt every inch of himself.

"Thank you, Votary,” he would say, then.

Votary's mother's name was also Votary. That's what father called them both. But Votary always knew when her father was talking to her, and when he was talking to her mother. When he spoke to her, there was love and affection in his voice. Father loved Votary.

Every evening after mother got home from work, she would call to Votary and they would climb into the old Chevy Suburban and they would drive to the stores. They would get a half-gallon bottle of Old Crow, a carton of Pall Mall cigarettes, and three-dozen $1 double cheeseburgers. Mom would order Votary a kid's meal. Mom would drink the soda that came with the kid's meal, but she never ordered anything for herself. Votary couldn't remember ever seeing her mother eat.

When they got home, Mom would bring the bags downstairs into the basement. She would open the bourbon and all the packs of cigarettes and all the cheeseburgers and she would pour everything into father's mouth. His jaw unhinged like a big door opening, a big half-circular door on coiled springs, expanding until he was like a living caldera, bulbous and shapeless below, deep and round above. Then Mom poured everything in, the whiskey first, glug glug glug, then cigarettes (sometimes Votary would help her by unwrapping the individual packages, cellophane sticking to her fingers), smooth white sticks falling piecemeal through her fingers, then hamburgers, round seedy grease-dripping chunks. She threw everything in like someone pouring flour into the huge cauldron-shaped mixing machines Votary had once seen on a field trip to a bread bakery.

Father would slowly close his mouth and chew for a long time, slowly, a smell of tobacco juice and beef fat and alcohol leaking from his pores. He chewed and chewed and chewed, slowly and contemplatively, as he watched a progression of images in pasty black and white, reruns and commercials. Dreams that other people dreamed and digested for him.

He'd never gotten up from that couch ever, as far as Votary knew. She thought he was wonderful.

One day Mom came home from work early. Votary found her sitting on the porch talking with Mr Dubeck, the postman. He had his bag next to him, full of mail. He was bald and skinny, with neck muscles that stuck out and jumped around when he laughed. He had strong muscular legs, rippling and hard, and they had fine golden hairs on them that shone in the sun. He was sitting on the stairs below her mother, in the late afternoon sunshine.

She was sitting in the cool shadow, speaking quietly, her hands clasped together. The thumb of one hand was stroking the palm of the other. She was sitting back under the overhang of the roof; her face was darkened by the heavy shadow. Mr Dubeck had his head inclined sympathetically toward her. They weren't talking about mail.

Votary imagined her father, sitting inside, in the dark, his naked white body saturated with shifting, reflected brilliance, listening to other noises filtering through the black-painted windows below the stairs, secrets whispered through the jangling din.

Votary said nothing, but went inside the house and sat with father as he watched a show with multiple explosions. She pillowed her head on one of the three huge pads of fat under his left arm. He was warm as a mountain of rancid butter, and he smelled like mushrooms and earth and sour milk. He hadn't had a bath ever, as far as Votary knew. There were patches of green and white on his hidden places. But she didn't mind his smell. He smelled like father.

"Who is she talking to?” Father asked.

"I don't know,” she said. It wasn't a lie. She didn't know Mr Dubeck. All she knew of him were his golden legs and his mailbag. She didn't know him.

That night, as they were driving to the liquor store, Votary could tell that something was wrong. Her mother was never very talkative, but this night anxiety was like smoke coming off her, steaming and twitching from her shoulders. She gripped the steering wheel of the Suburban and squinted through the windshield as if the headlights of oncoming traffic illuminated some kind of secret.

They bought the cigarettes and the liquor. Then her mother did something Votary had never seen her do before. She bought a small bottle of Kaluha and tucked it inside her purse. She counted the cash out carefully, three twenties and a ten. Votary caught a glimpse of something else inside mother's purse, something pink and tissue-thin. It was folded up into a small square.

On the way home, Votary asked her mother if she liked Mr Dubeck's legs. “That's a stupid question,” Mom said, and pressed her lips together.

But she must have liked his legs, because she talked to him often after that, leaning over and showing him the smooth skin between her breasts. She didn't go to work anymore. She stayed home, upstairs in her own room, reading newspapers. She would sit on the bed with the newspapers spread before her. Sometimes Votary would find her snoring atop the sheets of newsprint, smelling sweetly of chocolate and alcohol, like a chocolate hospital.

"You worship him now,” Mother said, one night when the sweet smell was particularly strong. “You think he's wonderful. I did too. But that won't last forever."

"Yes, it will,” Votary said sullenly.

Mother was silent, staring up at the paint-peeling ceiling. When she spoke again, her voice was very soft. “Do you know how old this house is?” she asked. “How many years, how many hundreds of years—” She stopped abruptly, dropping her eyes back down to Votary's face. She licked her lips.

"When I was a little girl, when I was your age, I wanted to paint pictures,” she said. “I wanted to get away from this house, away from the basement. From my mother. I wanted to paint. I wanted to be an artist."

Votary had never known that her mother wanted to be an artist. In other circumstances, she might have been interested. But she hadn't been happy with her mother since she started paying attention to Mr Dubeck's legs, so she only grunted. She went to open the door of the bedroom so that they could hear father if he called.

"What do you want to be?” Mother asked.

"Nothing,” Votary said sullenly, looking down the stairs into the silent darkness. “Nothing. Like him.” Mother didn't say anything, but Votary felt waves of fear and disgust pouring from her like warm breath on a frosty morning.

One day, mother went out and didn't come back. She didn't bring father his cigarettes and liquor and hamburgers. She didn't come home at all.

"Votary,” her father said, “I'm hungry."

Votary went into the kitchen and made him bowls of cereal and milk. She poured them into his mouth. But bowl by bowl wasn't fast enough. Finally, she just climbed up on the wide arm of the sofa and tore open the top of the box and poured it into father's mouth, followed by the whole gallon of milk. His mouth was huge, and dark and red, and there was a glow deep within, like looking into the throbbing heart of a volcano. She fed him all the cereal in the house, and then she unwrapped pats of butter and threw them in there too, and she threw in some eggs as well. He chewed disconsolately, bits of shell cracking between his teeth.

That night, she slept on the cold cement floor by father's feet. Mom didn't get back until the light of dawn was shining through the scratches in the black paint. She didn't say anything when she came in. She did not come down to the basement, but went right upstairs and went to sleep.

Votary's mother went out often after that. Sometimes she came home, and sometimes she didn't. Sometimes she would bring food and cigarettes for father; sometimes she would bring nothing. Father muttered to himself more and more, reciting whole commercials back to himself in a monotone.

It was all Mr Dubeck's fault. Votary started sitting on the porch, waiting for him to come. She would sit and watch him and glare at him silently. Mr Dubeck tried to joke his way through at first; after a while, however, he avoided her eyes and hurried away from the house.

"Is there any mail for my father?” Votary asked Mr Dubeck one day. He looked at her sadly, like he felt sorry for her. “I do have a father,” Votary said. “He does exist."

She thought that Mr Dubeck would pretend that he hadn't heard her and walk away quickly, as he had before. But this time he went down on one knee and looked into her face. With his face that close to her, she could see that his skin was leathery and lined, and his eyes were hard as little stones. “Have you ever seen him?” he hissed.

"He lives in the basement,” Votary said.

"I've never see him."

"He doesn't go out."

Mr Dubeck's face softened. He let his breath out through clenched teeth. “Whatever makes you feel better, kid,” he said, straightening and turning to go.

"He does!” Votary screamed at him. “He does live in the basement! He's down there now!"

Mr Dubeck paused, shaking his head. There was pity in his face. Pity and contempt. “Poor Anna,” he sighed, looking up and shaking his head at the house. Suddenly, Votary saw it how he saw it, old and broken-down. Then those eyes came to settle on her, and Mr Dubeck shook his head and sighed again. “Poor Anna,” he repeated.

"That's not her name.” Votary bit the words at him. “Her name's not Anna. It's Votary. Like mine."

"Votary?” His brow wrinkled, and he began speaking very slowly and distinctly. “That's not a name. That's a thing. A servant. Your name is Katie."

Votary curled her lips back from her teeth. Hate burned through her. She hated Mr Dubeck. She focused her hate on him, willed him to catch fire, become a pillar of ash before her that she could disintegrate with one contemptuous tap of her finger. But he just stood there, looking down at her, frowning quizzically. “Come inside, if you don't believe me,” Votary whispered. “Come inside and see."

Mr Dubeck was silent for a long time. Then he threw his mailbag down on the porch with a dusty whump. “All right,” he said, as if in answer to a challenge. “All right. Show me this father of yours. Votary."

Votary led Mr Dubeck inside. She led him down the dark narrow hall with the smoke-colored walls, past the bathroom. She led him into the kitchen with the cracked-lineoleum floor and the peeling wallpaper. Then she led him down the narrow basement stairs.

Mr Dubeck felt along the wall as he descended the stairs. He squinted against the gloom. The shifting rainbow light of the flickering television played softly over the concrete floor at the base of the stairs.

Mr Dubeck looked around himself at the huge hewn beams, the skeleton of the floors above. “This house must be two hundred years old,” he said.

"Thank you, Votary,” Father whispered.

Mr Dubeck jumped and swore. She could hear his heart slamming against his ribs. She could taste the salt of his sweat in the air. “Jesus,” he said, moving closer. “Is that ... he...” He paused. “What is that?"

Father mumbled something, something like a rumbling fart. Mr Dubeck made a face at the smell, but it was just father's usual smell. “Jesus,” Mr Dubeck said again. His voice was high, wavering.

"He's trying to talk to you,” Votary said. “You have to listen hard."

Mr Dubeck leaned forward, closer to where father's head sat like a lump in the middle of a pile of mashed potatoes. Father was muttering, soft quick flurries of agitated sound like violent snowflakes. He was growing larger and larger by the moment. His body was rippling and warbling, making bubbling sounds, emitting pockets of stink and warmth. Mr Dubeck went so far and then no farther; he started backing away, but father's mouth kept opening wider and wider as he spoke, and he was growing faster than Mr Dubeck could run, his flanks and belly and back pressing against the sweating walls like overrisen dough, and then he moved swift as light reflecting in a mirror and Mr Dubeck was inside those jaws, his legs with the golden hairs flapping in the light from the black and white console television, his body thrashing helplessly against the dead heavy weight of the mountain of fat and gristle and bone that held him trapped. His legs kicked for a few minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, blue-socked ankles spasming, one black tennis-shoe dangling, then falling to the floor. The legs kept slipping steadily downward, disappearing down father's throat. He moved his lips around the legs, as if he were trying to chew, but instead just mouthing the golden legs, mouthing them and stroking them. His body deflated like a slow-punctured balloon leaking air, his loose skin falling in graceful, beautiful folds.

Votary sat on the floor and watched the whole process, her heart thumping and fluttering, the sound of the television filling her ears, her body cold and brittle and bright with the wonder of it all.

Anna came back three days later. She brought a case of whiskey and cartons of cigarettes and bags and bags of cheeseburgers. She brought a kid's meal for Votary, carried like an offering, and she hadn't even drunk the soda.

Votary was squatting by her father's feet. She had stripped herself naked, wrapped herself in a thick blanket of his living skin. She stared at her mother with hostile eyes, eyes that had seen wonders.

Anna set the white paper bag on the cold damp floor, but Votary did not touch it. Anna started to open the bottle of Old Crow, but stopped. She let out a long breath, then set it all, the bourbon, the cigarettes, the cheeseburgers, on the floor in front of Votary. Anna didn't say anything, but went back upstairs silently. She went back to her selfishness, her regret, her useless resistance.

Good riddance, Votary thought, love making her heart swell painfully in her chest.

"She doesn't deserve us,” Father said softly, as Votary opened the bottle of bourbon and he opened his mouth.

Copyright © 2007 M.K. Hobson

BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEWILDERED

We take you to the hushed incense-filled ambience of the temple of Yumusebi Teiken Zaapisu. Humble acolyte is seeking enlightenment from Sensei regarding matters in the land of the chrysanthemum and the cute-looking robot...

ACOLYTE: Master, I hear the Land of the Rising Sun is now under new management.

SENSEI: Yes, young grasshopper. Mr Koizumi, he who stunned the nation with his hairstyle and his political reforms that revolutionised Japan, has stood down in favour of his successor, Shinzo Abe. And Mr Abe has lost no time in making his mark.

A: In what way?

S: In miring the country down in corruption and incompetence. The new slogan for the new government is ‘Japan: the Beautiful Country'.

A: Hmm. Beautiful in what way? In how it protects and repairs its environment? In how it treats its citizens and how it presents itself overseas in its foreign policies?

S: Well ... nobody's really sure what it means. But we Japanese know deep down in our hearts that this is the beautiful country because Japan is ... er ... well, Japan is Japanese, that's why.

A: And has this campaign been successful, master?

S: It has indeed. Apart from Mr Abe getting trounced in the midterm election at the end of July 2007 and his party losing their majority in the House of Councilors. A trivial setback, young sand-hopper. We are trying to show the people that they should be proud to be born in ‘beautiful Japan', to look at the many positive aspects of the country. The safety, for instance. We do not have the gun culture and ganging banging ultra-violence of the USA, do we? When has there been a nasty shooting here?

A: What about the assassination of the Nagasaki mayor on April 17, by a native Japanese with ‘alleged connections to right-wing nationalists and yakuza syndicates'?

S: Ah, yes. A regrettable incident.

A: Apparently more and more guns are entering Japan from China, Russia, the US and the Philippines, and the price of an automatic pistol is now as low as 50,000 yen [200 pounds].

S: You are taking these things out of context, my young space-hopper. The point of ‘beautiful Japan’ is that we are trying to teach our young people to respect themselves and to make a decent contribution to society.

A: How are you going to do that?

S: By instilling a sense of national pride in the nation's schools. At official ceremonies such as sports days and graduations, we have requested all teachers and students to stand to attention before the Japanese flag, the Hinomaru—and sing our national anthem, the ‘Kimigayo'.

A: What if some teachers refuse?

S: We are a country that respects freedom of speech, my young salt-and-vinegar crisp. They are entitled to refuse—but the Government will prosecute them if they do.

A: Also, the flag and the national anthem—don't they remind some international observers of the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in World War Two?

S: Well, those pesky Chinese and Koreans are always complaining about something, but Japanese history textbooks are carefully edited to remove phrases such as ‘atrocity’ and ‘aggression', and to avoid any reference to events such as the Nanking Massacre, the Manila Massacre, the Bataan Death March and Unit 731. We don't want historical facts to get in the way of patriotism, do we? So when Japanese children salute the flag, they won't know anything about the men, women and children slaughtered in its name.

A: Wouldn't it be better to break with the past and use a new flag and anthem?

S: Your words are truly the farting of a cicada in the long summer night, my son! What about the beauty of tradition? Listen to the first lines of the Kimigayo, based on a poem written in the Heian Period 900 years ago: May the Emperor reign for thousands of years,/Until the pebble by age becomes a mighty rock/And moss forms on its surface. Is that not beautiful?

A: Oh yes, master, I think that would prepare any teenager for life in the 21st Century.

S: Exactly.

A: Well, what about some of the role models who have tried to inspire today's youth? What has become of the entrepreneurs, Takafumi Horie of Livedoor and Yoshiaki Murakami of MAC?

S: They have received their just rewards for their contributions to society, my young fruit pastille. Each received about two years in prison.

A: On what grounds?

S: Insider trading and abusing their positions of authority.

A: But when politicians and the heads of large corporations are tried for the same offence, they always receive suspended sentences.

S: The crimes of those two youngsters were much more heinous; they upset the established order of business. The stability of Japanese society depends on social conformity. It is best if all Japanese fit in and work in harmony with each other—and if they don't, we have another traditional saying: the nail that sticks up will be hammered down. Why be a pushy and troublesome entrepreneur, when you can work at a giant faceless corporation for fifty years and retire on a comfortable pension?

A: That reminds me, Sensei. About this scandal over pension payment records...

S: Don't even think about mentioning it, you snotty little punk.

A: Sorry. Well, how about international relations? The Japanese are notorious for treating all foreigners with suspicion and mistrust, and naming them gaijin [literally, outsiders]?

S: But we welcome foreigners and their funny ways!

A: Then what about the furor surrounding this magazine published in February 2007—Kyogaku no Gaijin Hanzai Ura Fairu [Shocking Foreigner Crimes: the Underground Files]?

S: Not all foreigners are Johnny Depp, my son. That magazine was purely presenting the facts: that if more foreigners come to Japan, then we should have more information concerning what they are doing here and how to relate with them. Such publications are highly educational.

A: Educational? Articles like ‘You can identify Korean prostitutes because their cunts smell of Kimchi'?

S: We are only trying to learn more about the outside world! Anyway, my young jolly roger, that magazine was withdrawn from sale after six weeks, because of complaints from trouble-making foreigners—that is, I mean, human rights bureaus.

A: That one's gone, but what about the others such as the Joshi Gakusei Daraku Manual, which advises young girls on foreign penis sizes and shapes, and offers editorials saying foreigners are ‘junkies who have no money and demand a lot of sex'?

S: You are missing the point. Did not the Education Minister warn against focusing upon human rights, saying it was like ‘eating too much butter'? But you are young, grasshopper, leave these things to your elders. Go back to that Western rock music on your ipop device thing. What modern rubbish are you listening to? The Beatles? The Carpenters?

A: No, master. I think the band is called Status Quo.

S: Ah, yes. I like the sound of that. You are indeed learning.

Copyright © 2007 John Paul Catton

Some people join the police force to try and make a difference to society. Some do it to try and keep things the same. Some do it because they like beating people up—and they're the only ones who don't end up disappointed. I'm still not sure why I joined the force, or why I stayed in it for thirty years. But I think it had to do with needing to understand. Police work was about finding evidence and explaining. There was no room for the unknown, or for the complications that lead from one thing to all kinds of other things. I was young then, of course.

When I started training for police work in Wolverhampton, I left home for the first time and rented a truly dreadful flat in Coseley, a few miles outside the city. It was part of a converted house that had once belonged to a fairly wealthy family. The exterior was still quite impressive, but the interior was largely plasterboard held in place by wood-chip wallpaper. The water-pipes had the ghost of a murdered child trapped inside them. The fuses regularly blew if two people in the house were cooking at the same time. Not that you could cook much on the tiny, sluggish Baby Belling cooker in the corner of my living-room.

In the early days, I spent as much of my off-duty time in Wolverhampton as possible. There was a lot of good live music around at that time, blues and folk as well as the grinding industrial rock that would eventually be called heavy metal. I was on my way home from some gig or other, waiting in a frost-coated bus shelter for the last bus out, when I met a dark-haired girl called Kath. The next weekend, we met again for a drink. Kath lived with her parents in Tipton, a few miles south of Coseley, deep in the estranged heart of the Black Country. She could speak the Tipton dialect, which no one outside the town understands.

By early spring, Kath was spending the weekends at my place. We'd sit up late, smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap vodka, sleep into the afternoon and make love until nightfall. It was my first experience of intimacy—whether physical or emotional—and I couldn't seem to get enough of her. The bed stank of tobacco smoke and flesh. What I liked best was the dreamlike recovery from the climax, when we held each other and slowly got our breath back while the shock of joy went on echoing in our veins. At those times Kath seemed like a recently fallen angel, her skin glowing, her eyes filled with a mysterious bitter light.

When we met during the week, there was rarely time for us to go back to Coseley together. We'd see a gig or a film in Wolverhampton, then walk out together along the bus route heading south. Just where the factories gave way to fields and woodland, there was a low railway bridge of blackened stone and criss-crossed iron girders. At night, the underside of the bridge was murky and cold. Young couples went there to smoke dope, drink bottled beer and screw. Sometimes there were people hanging around, and we wouldn't stay. But often we were alone, holding each other in the blurred half-light and kissing desperately as the cars sped past. Or looking up at the intricate, barely visible iron lattice as if it was a stained-glass window, some kind of design we needed to interpret.

One night when it was raining, we sheltered under the dripping bridge to warm our hands on each other's skin. Droplets of rain flickered in Kath's hair. I kissed her closed eyelids, and her mouth twisted with some emotion she didn't have words for. Her nipples were rigid under her thin shirt. Being quite small-breasted, she often didn't wear a bra. Our mouths locked together, sharing breath. I felt the distant pulse of an approaching train. Then its passing shuddered through us, and the quiet was torn apart like a tarpaulin over a nail-bomb. Kath pressed against me, breathing hard. My fingers found her open.

Kath bit my lips as I shared her with the lime-smeared wall, fumbling to remove the barriers of fabric between us. The air was cold, too cold for this. Kath's muscles locked me inside her. It felt unreal, or perhaps more real than I was. We struggled, cried out, froze together. The night was suddenly very still. Kath found a tissue and wiped her thigh. I felt as though I had violated her, or something had violated both of us. We walked to the bus stop in silence, holding hands, a little shaky from the violence of it. Thirty years on, I still remember how that felt.

A few weeks after that, Kath told me she was late. “I must have forgotten to take the pill,” she said. We were sitting in a café near the bookshop where she worked. In those days, there were several bookshops in Wolverhampton. She lit a cigarette, but stubbed it out after one draw. I noticed that her make-up was clumsily applied, the eye-shadow not quite masking the effects of a sleepless night. Her fingernails pierced the back of my hand. “Can I move in with you?” she said.

I felt my head shaking before I'd even thought about it. Panic gripped me. “You did it on purpose,” I said. “Getting pregnant so you could leave home.” I apologised almost at once, but the damage was done. Things unravelled quickly after that. A few awkward phone conversations; one more shared night, bitter and restless; then nothing.

As a child, I had a recurrent dream of a hidden place. It was part of a wasteground, not far from my school. No such location existed in my waking life, but each time I dreamed of it the memory was clear. I wandered through brittle ferns and the grey fringes of willow trees, towards a ruined wall on the far side of which someone was waiting for me. When I reached the wall, I could hear traffic going past rapidly on the other side. I remembered that only the road was there.

Kath got another job and didn't come into Wolverhampton any more. I think she had the baby, but I don't know if she kept it. More than anything, I felt tired—as if the sleep debt from the past four months needed to be paid off all at once. The rainy spring dried out into a stale, metallic summer. I concentrated on passing the police entrance exams.

By the end of the year, I was a constable in the Missing Persons team. Off duty, I kept to myself for the most part. They built a new expressway going south out of Wolverhampton, and closed down the road that passed under the railway bridge. I walked out there one freezing afternoon and saw the bridge had already deteriorated: a dense black mould was spreading on the walls and blurring the overhead girders. There was a smell of decaying stone, if stone could decay. I never took another girl there.

The Missing Persons work was fairly demanding, though I soon became frustrated by the lack of answers. Almost every week, someone in the region would disappear—and not only loners but young couples, pregnant women, even people with families. My more experienced colleagues seemed to take it for granted that no one much would ever turn up. “Either they're alive and hiding or dead and someone has buried them,” my supervisor commented.

The local paper ran a few stories about the missing people, but it made no difference. I began to realise how fragile the links between people really were. Like a necklace that broke at the least strain, scattering beads everywhere. I tried not to think about Kath and the baby. Eventually they became unreal to me. Muddy Waters seemed to have the relationship thing sussed.

One night in early spring, I took a girl back to my flat. She complained about the smell in the bedroom—"It's like there's something dead in the wall.” I hadn't even noticed, but when Susan pulled the mattress back I could see a black skin forming over the wood-chip wallpaper. It had crept up from a discoloured piece of skirting-board. I touched the mould with a fingertip. It was smooth and yielding, like a bruise.

We took the mattress and blankets into the living-room that night and slept with the gas fire on. I dreamt the house was burning down, and woke up sweaty and confused. The orange light glowed through crumpled tissues on the floor. There was a dark shape huddled in the blankets beside me, smelling of blood and perfume. I didn't want her to wake up.

The next day, I scraped all the mould off the wall and dabbed bleach onto the raw plaster. Then I dried the surface with an electric fan heater. The next morning, it was already growing back. I scraped it off again. Once separated from the wall it became flaky and brittle, like ashes. I moved the bed into the middle of the room. In the morning, the wallpaper in the corner was grey and puffy. By the next evening, the mould was back again. I stuck a poster over it and went out to phone the landlord, then stopped at the pub on the way back. By the weekend, the poster had split down the middle. I could see the blackened plaster behind it.

I'm not sure what made me go back to the railway bridge that weekend. Perhaps I wanted to be forgiven, allowed back into the past. And I was naïve enough to imagine I could reach it on my own.

As I walked along the disused road in the moonlight, the bridge looked different even from a distance. I thought it was because the streetlights weren't working any more. But as I reached the bridge and stood just outside its shadow, I could see that the stone and brick of its exterior were entirely covered with uneven black mould. The pale streaks of lime that the rain had leached from the brickwork were no longer visible.

The moonlight revealed another difference too: something the mould had hidden from me before. The structure of the bridge was made up of tightly packed, naked human bodies, twisted together in the warmth of slow decay. They looked as if they were about to move, but they were still. I was close enough to smell them.

My hand reached out, but I was afraid to touch the wall. Afraid that I might not be able to leave. In that moment, I realised they hadn't been killed and left there. They'd gone there of their own accord. A train ran over the bridge then, and the vibration made me start to shake.

Copyright © 2007 Joel Lane

HERDING CATS: A MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH FEATURETTE

Michael Marshall Smith is back, with his first new novel in nine years, only don't go expecting the genre mix ‘n’ match fireworks of Only Forward or Spares. The Servants (Earthling hardback, 224pp, $30) is a quieter work than either of those, and if you need to fit it in any lineage then it's the precocious child grown to novel length of the MMS who produced all those elegant supernatural and horror stories that sent shivers down our backs.

Precocious child would be an apt description for Mark, the eleven year old protagonist of The Servants, newly moved to Brighton with his mother and stepfather David. Mark is resentful, hurt by his parents’ marriage break up and enforced move away from his old haunts, blaming everything on David. He believes David is trying to keep him from his mother, who is dying of cancer and refuses all treatment (something else Mark blames David for). His only friend is the old lady who lives in the basement flat of David's house, and it is she who introduces him to its secret, a locked door behind which are the servants’ quarters, a hangover from Victorian days when the house was far more grand than now. To his amazement, Mark is able to see and interact with the servants, soon realising that something has gone very wrong below the stairs, with repercussions in the present day, and that he is the only one who can fix the problem.

This is a short novel that does many things well, with Smith playing his cards close to his chest, so that you are never quite sure if we are dealing with a ghost story or time slip fantasy, or simply Mark's externalisation of his emotional problems, not that it matters much anyway. The bleak atmosphere of a seaside town in the winter months is vividly portrayed, giving Mark a landscape through which to roam that is both pregnant with possibility and tainted with the echo of broken promises. Also handled superbly well is the depiction of life below stairs, each of the servants with his or her allotted role, while the blight that has entered this supposedly idyllic scenario is powerfully delineated, black ash falling ceaselessly from the air and dirt piling up on every side, a malaise that effects them all and curses the life of the house, the ideal metaphor for the cancer that infects Mark's mother.

The scenes of conflict in the family are seen from Mark's perspective, each event filtered through his resentment and boredom, so the reader is left to fill in the gaps, to conjecture what is not being said, to grapple with the import of the heavy silences and moments of tenderness that punctuate this ongoing war. For Mark these events are a rite of passage, each a milestone on his road to maturity, as he slowly reaches the conclusion that things are not how he believed and the realisation that there are two sides to every story. In solving the problem of the servants and bringing harmony below stairs he is also reassessing and redefining his own role in the family unit. And lurking back of all this is the concept that the house itself is an entity, which all the people who dwell within its walls, both the living and the dead, must serve in their own way, each part of some great design and only when the parts get out of alignment do things go awry. It's an intriguing conclusion to a fine short novel by a writer of considerable range and talent.

That range and talent are seen to full advantage in The Intruders (HarperCollins hardback, 404pp, 12.99 pounds), the latest book released under Smith's bestselling Michael Marshall byline, which is separate from The Straw Men trilogy, but addresses many of the same concerns, and with clues in the text that suggest it is set in the same world as those novels, so the future possibility of a crossover cannot be ruled out.

For former LA cop turned author Jack Whalen (perhaps a nod in the direction of Joseph Wambaugh), the mystery starts with a visit from a schoolmate he hasn't seen in years, Gary Fisher, now a lawyer and seeking his opinion on a double homicide, and then he gets a phone call from a taxi driver who has found his wife's mobile phone. Amy is supposed to be in Seattle on a business trip, but Jack can't find her and there are questionable text messages on her phone. Amy has been acting strangely of late and this disappearance brings matters to a head, is something Jack can't let go of even though she turns up safe and sound, and with an explanation that would sound entirely plausible to a trusting husband, but not to one who fears she is having an affair. As Jack digs deeper he finds the trail leading back to Gary Fisher and the double homicide, but Fisher is not a reliable witness, holding back many things for reasons of his own, while the actual truth of what is going on is far more fantastic than Jack could have suspected. Jack's book was called The Intruders and consisted of photos of crime scenes, places where intruders have forced their way in, but now he must recognise that there are other kinds of intruders and, as the novel's tag line has it, they're already inside.

The Intruders is being marketed as a thriller, but as with the other Michael Marshall novels there are outré elements that should make it of interest to readers of horror and science fiction, the suggestion of more things than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Marshall is a writer who likes to push at the boundaries and my own take is that, with this book and its predecessors, he is reinventing the ‘secret race’ fiction of novels like Williamson's Darker Than You Think and Farmer's Wold Newton series (the governing council of the Intruders are called simply the Nine, as are the group of immortals who secretly rule the world in Farmer's work), has brought it kicking and screaming into the twenty first century, and imbued the form with a hitherto unseen level of sophistication and subtlety.

Marshall is canny in how he handles these fantastical elements, with the narrative entirely realistic at the outset, but gradually setting up plot strands, such as the exploits of nine year old runaway Madison, which can only make sense given one explanation. The reader, like Whalen, is forced to reach conclusions at odds with all we think we know of science. Making Whalen a former cop is another smart move, in that he has the technical abilities and mindset to uncover the evidence, but none of the constraints that go with still wearing a badge, while the conspiracy theories that run through the book further reinforce the reader's willingness to accept the conclusion Whalen reaches, tying in as they do to our basic human need to believe that things make sense, that there is some guiding intelligence at back of all the madness.

On the personal level, Whalen is a fully rounded character, with flaws to sit alongside his virtues. He takes the law into his own hands and is too quick to reach for the bottle when things are not going his way, and in parenthesis one could understand if his wife was seeing another man, but he is also compassionate, an honest man, a good friend, a husband who loves his wife deeply and is undone completely by the changes she appears to be going through. Also undergoing changes is nine year old Madison, one of the book's other viewpoint characters, a child who runs away from her family, the internal conflict between the girl's essential goodness and the evil that is trying to possess her externalised in acts of shocking violence and abuse that, in many ways, are the most unsettling element of the novel, and the Intruder response to Madison suggests that they are not all bad, that there is more going on here than can be rendered in black and white terms.

The Intruders has an open ending, with Jack Whalen's life and world view turned upside down, and Jack not knowing what to do with the knowledge that has fallen into his lap. I suspect (and hope) that Michael Marshall knows exactly what he's going to do with it.

A MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH BIBLIOGRAPHY

Published as Michael Marshall Smith:

Only Forward (1994)

Spares (1996)

One of Us (1998)

The Vaccinator (1999)

What You Make It (1999)

Cat Stories (2001)

More Tomorrow and Other Stories (2003)

This is Now (2007)

The Servants (2007)

Published as Michael Marshall:

The Straw Men (2002)

The Lonely Dead (UK)/The Upright Man (US) (2004)

Blood of Angels (2005)

The Intruders (2007)

Are you conscious of any difference in how you approach a writing project with your Michael Marshall hat on as opposed to when you're writing under the Smith byline, or is it simply a marketing convenience?

It started off not so much as a marketing convenience, as an expedience. I'd written The Straw Men as a Michael Marshall Smith novel—not seeing it as any different to what I'd done before, but rather being a next step in a hopefully interesting direction. It was quickly pointed out that Michael Marshall Smith had written three SF novels, and a bunch of horror short stories, and that this novel was neither. So to avoid confusion, I agreed to change my name. I wasn't that keen on the process at the time—and would still, if I'm honest, prefer to have everything out under the same byline, as so far as I'm concerned, it's all just my stuff—but being able to make the distinction does occasionally make it easier for me to step outside my current publishing box. With The Servants it certainly helped that I had no need to make it even slightly like a Michael Marshall project, but could just write what I wanted to write ... Michael Marshall Smith has basically generally had the freedom to write whatever the hell comes into his head, which is a wonderful (if not always very profitable) situation to be in. Luckily, for the time being, he has Michael Marshall as a patron ... And MM's novels do represent where a lot of my head is at now, anyway.

Conspiracy theories are central to The Intruders and the other Michael Marshall books. Are these just a plot device for you, or do such things have a wider appeal, tying in to some basic human need to have things make sense?

I believe conspiracy theories are absolutely key to our understanding of the universe. I suspect the very first times our species started to weave fictions, they were intimately concerned with the process of trying to bring shape and order to the inexplicable: what is thunder? Why do the crops fail sometimes? Why did Thog, who's always been great at killing bison, get gored to death this afternoon? We're still doing the same things now. I don't go looking for the conspiracies in my novels—they just seem to come as part and parcel of the stories and the characters within them. We are a pattern-making and dot-connecting animal—it's part of what's put us where we are.

There are some tell-tale details in The Intruders which suggest it's taking place in the same world as The Straw Men etc. Do you have any plans to bring these two story strands together at some point?

Well spotted! I don't know, is the honest answer. I certainly don't think that those two worlds are inconsistent, so it might happen at some point ... Though the novel I'm writing at the moment goes in a different direction altogether. You don't want to be in my head. It's like trying to herd cats.

As far as I know, The Servants is the first book length story that you've written entirely from the perspective of a child. How challenging was that?

To be honest, I didn't think much about it. I've always tried to tell a story from the point of view of the people inside it—which is why The Straw Men books have at times ended up very multi-perspective, including the points of view of characters who don't actually survive very long. The Servants is Mark's story, and so that was always going to be the only way into it. And ultimately I suspect that a large proportion of our adult reactions and responses to the world differ only slightly from the way we'd react as a child. Certainly one has recourse to experience, as you get older, and a little more patience, and a few other adult glosses—but when you're angry, you're angry, and when you're scared and sad, you're scared and sad. Distress, anxiety and confusion are great levellers.

One of the things I enjoyed most about The Servants was the sense of place, Brighton in the off season, so I'm wondering if you have any personal connection to the town?

I do, yes. We're lucky enough to own a flat down there on the seafront, and though it's rented out most of the time, we do manage to spend a few weeks a year there. My wife always wants that to be when it's sunny, but I love Brighton most when the weather's grim and you really feel like you're on the edge of the land, and the town's true nature starts to peek out from behind the tourist front ... Keith Waterhouse apparently once said that Brighton was ‘a town that was helping the police with its enquiries'—and that's a brilliant way of capturing the place's cheery but implacable dodginess. It's a town you'll always have a great evening in a pub with, but you wouldn't exactly trust it with your house keys. And there's something about the presence of the ocean that puts humankind in its place, and in context.

Both you and John Connolly, a writer with whom you're often compared, are producing thrillers with outré elements. Can reader receptivity to such work be taken as a sign that genre boundaries are blurring?

I'd love to hope so, but if so, it's not a new thing but a return to the way things once were. Rigid genre boundaries are relatively new, and not something that some writers enjoy dealing with very much. In the past, people like Guy de Maupassant or D.H. Lawrence could write off-beat and spooky tales (The Rocking Horse Winner, for example) and nobody batted an eyelid. More ‘literary’ writers have been allowed to get away with this throughout, too, under the guise of ‘magic realism’ or ‘metaphor’ or ‘artifice'. Given that crime and thriller novels deal intimately with the basic verities of life—love, death, greed—it's absolutely right that they should deal with good and evil too. And that way lies the boundaries between what's real, and what's not.

SOME FACTS ABOUT MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

Michael Marshall Smith's first short story, ‘The Man Who Drew Cats', appeared in Dark Voices 2: The Pan Book of Horror edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton in 1990, and won the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Short Story. x Michael's first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth and Philip K. Dick awards. His second, Spares, was optioned for film by DreamWorks and translated into seventeen languages. x His story ‘Everybody Goes’ appeared in issue 19 of Black Static's predecessor The Third Alternative and was later picked up for Best New Horror 1999, edited by Stephen Jones. x The first Michael Marshall novel, The Straw Men, was promoted with the slogan ‘as good as John Connolly or your money back'. We have no information as to whether anyone asked for their money back. x Michael is currently co-producing and writing a feature film based on his short story ‘Hell Hath Enlarged Herself', and will be adapting a Stephen King story for television later in the year, while The Intruders has been optioned by the BBC and is currently under series development.

PLANTING FLAGS IN NO-MAN'S LAND

The novella, that no-man's land between the trenches of short story and novel, seems to be enjoying more than its fair share of popularity in genre circles of late, and Steve Vernon's Hard Roads (Gray Friar Press paperback, 150pp, 8 pounds) presents us with two for the price of one.

Hillman, the protagonist of ‘Trolling Lures', is a man with issues, a former cop who made a bad decision, going off into the woods to die, something he hardly dares admit to himself. Instead, with a little help from the trickster god Coyote and some handy spirits, he saves a young boy from the Troll, a magical being stranded there by Odin, though as a prerequisite of this Hillman needs to come to terms with his own past. Simply put, this is a tall tale, one that conflates various mythologies, the Amerindian and Scandinavian, and would probably give the comparative mythology academics apoplexy, but Vernon's touch is light enough to make you swallow the improbabilities and put credibility on hold. There are dashes of scabrous humour and moments of gore to flavour the pot, while Hillman's quest to recover his memories injects the story with a personal dimension, the end result an enjoyable tale with rather more depth than the length and backdrop might allow.

At half the length ‘Hammurabi Road’ is more of a mixed bag. Three men escort a fourth into the woods with the express purpose of killing him, payback for a crime of which he is accused, burning down a hotel, but along the way they have an encounter with a bear that puts an entirely different spin on the night's events, as the three argue with each other and doubts are raised as to the fourth man's guilt. There's something of the Jacobean tragedy about this tale, with things fated to end badly and a veritable feast of recrimination and guilt, regarding all of which I have mixed feelings. Vernon has the voice of a born raconteur and his prose is never less than compelling, with a homespun slang feel to it that brings to mind the work of Joe Lansdale. Scatological humour informs the work and the characters of the men are all well drawn, but all the same the scenes in which one of them talks to the spirit of the bear and where they eat the flesh of their victim don't quite ring true to character for these men as presented here, and thus doubts are raised about the validity of the whole, so what we're left with is something that engages the reader but doesn't quite convince, an entertaining story but with the outré elements slightly undermining the rest.

Conversely, in Rain by Conrad Williams (Gray Friar Press paperback, 100pp, 8 pounds), the supernatural thread that runs through the narrative remains ambivalent, a backdrop to the central tale of a disintegrating relationship. After a break-in at their UK residence, Ben and Grace move to an old farmhouse in France with their son Noah, but they seem just as incapable of papering over the cracks in their marriage as they are of renovating the building in which they live. The story is told from the perspective of Ben, whose self-image as husband and breadwinner has been undermined, while now even his role as father to Noah is built on shifting sand, giving Ben something else to feel guilty about. Williams weaves seamlessly into the narrative a panoply of special effects—strange sounds in the night, spectral visions, constant rain and hostile neighbours—so that the world itself seems to reflect and acerbate the troubled marriage, as if their unspoken conflict is being externalised. When Noah is hurt in an accident, it's the catalyst that brings everything to a head.

'Rain’ is a disturbing snapshot of a failing marriage, looking back at happier times and trying to figure out where it all went so badly wrong. The characterisation is spot on, and the outré elements enhance the growing sense of unease as the story progresses, the feeling that otherworldly forces are involved. The writing is moody, evocative, involving, packed with incidental detail and chillingly perfect metaphors, Williams equally adept at describing the almost sublime eroticism of happier times and the gut wrenching horror of the finale. If I have a complaint, it's that I didn't feel the ending was sufficiently foreshadowed, with the first hint of the true state of affairs appearing only four pages from the end, but it's a quibble, and Williams's skill at creating atmosphere, delineating damaged characters and simply shocking the reader to the core is as evident here as in any of his longer works.

Double Act (Nyx Books paperback, 91pp, $14.99) is old style supernatural horror from L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims, two masters of the form. Walter Coker, half of the vaudeville double act Cocker and Hass, has his life and career thrown into turmoil when his partner Charlie Hass dies suddenly of a heart attack. Charlie's widow June, with whom Coker had a brief fling years before, finds evidence that somebody else may have been writing Charlie's scripts for their act. June's house and Coker's rented room are broken into and ransacked, the cryptic message mine left behind on the wall, and then Coker's agent suffers a stroke and dies. When Coker is contacted by Joanne, Charlie's illegitimate daughter, he realises how very little he knew about his old partner, and a fatal chain of events is set in motion.

There's little that is innovative here, just solid storytelling in the Jamesian tradition. Maynard and Sims have an assured grasp of the material, building the story one brick at a time and taking the reader with them, so that you can never quite pin down the moment when the natural order fell by the wayside. The atmosphere of vaudeville is captured perfectly, even though we never set foot in an actual theatre, a world of second rate boarding houses, grasping agents, headliners and also rans, with the dividing line ever so thin, and name dropping to add verisimilitude. At the heart of the story is the dichotomy of the funny man and the straight man, each dependent on but also resentful of the other, the old adage of a sad man inside the clown given a concrete form, only the creation here is not exactly sad, but an unsettling monster, its genesis rooted in an act of betrayal and its acts dictated by madness, unreasoning anger. And having brought us this far, Maynard and Sims pull the rug out from under the reader's feet with a twist at the end as unexpected as it is shocking.

It's a nicely produced book too, with a striking cover from Peter Mihaichuck, easy on the eye print and miniature posters/handbills from the age of vaudeville used for interior illustration, adding a nice touch.

SMALL TOWN USA VS. THE VAMPIRES

Five towns that have had more than their fair share of bloodsuckers:

Sunnydale—epicentre of the Buffyverse and, with an average kill rate of three vampires per episode, probably not the best place to be out on your own at night. x ‘Salem's Lot—eponymous setting for Stephen King's 1975 novel. x Santa Carla—a quiet seaside town invaded by a pack of vampires led by Keifer Sutherland in the 1987 film The Lost Boys. x Grandville—visited by The Travelling Vampire Show in Richard Laymon's 2000 novel. x Junction—transformed by S.P. Somtow into Vampire Junction (1984).

NAME DROPPING

A few novels, other than the obvious, with Dracula in the title:

Anno Dracula—Kim Newman x Dracula Unbound—Brian W. Aldiss x The Dracula Tape— Fred Saberhagen x The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula—Roderick Anscombe x The Revenge of Dracula—Peter Tremayne x Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula—Loren D. Estleman x Dracula Returns— Robert Loring x The Dracula Archives—Raymond Radorff

THE BRIDESMAIDS

Female serial offenders in the vampire stakes:

Charlaine Harris—Sookie Stackhouse Vampire Mysteries x Nancy A. Collins—Sonja Blue books x Jeanne Kalogridis—Diaries of the Family Dracul x Mary Ann Mitchell—Marquis de Sade Vampire series x Karen E. Taylor—the Vampire Legacy x Tanya Huff—Blood series x Susan Sizemore—Laws of the Blood series x Sherrilyn Kenyon—Dark Hunter series x P. N. Elrod—the Vampire Files x Elaine Bergstrom—Austra Family books

SECRET HISTORY

Historical characters who have been ‘vampirised':

The Marquis de Sade in a series of novels by Mary Ann Mitchell beginning with Sips of Blood x Vlad Tepes in Dracula by Bram Stoker x The Count Saint-Germain in a series of novels by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro x Lord Byron in Tom Holland's The Vampyre x Attila the Hun in Empire of Fear by Brian Stableford x Just about everybody else in a series of books by Kim Newman beginning with Anno Dracula

SIGNIFICANT TITLES

Thirteen tombstones on the vampire highway:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—The Bride of Corinth (1797) x John Polidori—The Vampyre: A Tale (1819) x J. Sheridan Le Fanu—Carmilla (1872) x Bram Stoker—Dracula (1897) x Richard Matheson—I Am Legend (1954) x Theodore Sturgeon—Some of Your Blood (1961) x Anne Rice—Interview with the Vampire (1976) x Suzy McKee Charnas—The Vampire Tapestry (1980) x Whitley Strieber—The Hunger (1981) x George R.R. Martin—Fevre Dream (1982) x Lucius Shepard—The Golden (1993) x Poppy Z. Brite—Lost Souls (1993) x Andrew Fox—Fat White Vampire Blues (2003)

OUTSIDERS

Some writers you wouldn't normally associate with vampires:

Nikolai Gogol—Viy x Alexander Dumas—The Pale-Faced Lady x Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire x Colin Wilson—The Space Vampires x Philip Jose Farmer—The Image of the Beast x Simon Raven—Doctors Wear Scarlet x Federico Andahazi—The Merciful Women

BOOKS WITH BITE

Fashions change, movements come and go, but our fascination with the vampire remains a constant, and at times this monster's popularity has threatened to eclipse the genre of which it is such a significant part. Both Polidori's The Vampyre and ubertext Count Dracula triggered an almost obsessive concern with bloodsuckers in the general population, or at least that part of it interested in the literature of the fantastic, and there is strong evidence that we're in just such a period at the moment. In his 1998 overview of the year in Horror, Stephen Jones recorded that more than 15% of books published in the genre featured vampires and nine years on there's no sign that the bubble has burst, with the shelves in bookstores groaning under a plethora of spin offs from the Buffyverse and Anne Rice wannabes, complete with Gothic trim, while the critical success of Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian has conferred the cachet of literary respectability on the subgenre.

Here at Case Notes we get to see more than our fair share of books with bite, and so a round-up of some recent titles seems in order.

In the aptly titled Blood Red (Berkley paperback, 416pp, $7.99 * Earthling Publications hardback, 331pp, $40) James A. Moore creates the affluent coastal community of Black Stone Bay and then turns it into the personal playground of master vampire Jason Soulis. People disappear at an alarming rate, victims of Soulis, who is assembling his own private army of the undead. Most newly made vampires are not very bright, and by keeping them safe for a few days Soulis hopes to increase his progeny's chance of survival. He is also engaged in an experiment to create another master vampire like himself.

The story is told through the eyes of a motley crew of well realised characters, none of whom have the full picture. There's drop dead gorgeous student Maggie who supplements her college grant by working as a high class call girl and becomes a vital element in Soulis's plan. Fellow student Ben, a skilled computer hacker, is fixated on Maggie and will do anything to protect her, while another student, Kelli Entwhistle, becomes involved when two young boys whom she baby sits disappear. Boyd and Holdstedter, the detectives investigating the disappearances, infuse the narrative with a Tarantinoesque touch of black humour. Nor does Moore let human beings off the hook as regards moral culpability, providing two compelling bad guys in the form of pimp Tom and a crooked cop who preys on vulnerable college girls.

On the night of Halloween, Soulis unleashes his vampire horde on the town and all the chickens (bats?) come home to roost.

Bottom line, this is pretty much a textbook example of small town America in peril, the kind of thing Stephen King does so well, with echoes of 'Salem's Lot in the text and, although it's never stated, I got the distinct impression that the book is part of an ongoing series, with hints of events that took place before Soulis's arrival in Black Stone Bay and a major plot strand left unresolved at the end.

Regardless of that, Blood Red is certainly worth reading. Moore is a writer who knows what he's doing and exercises complete control over the material. He takes on a large cast of characters, each of whom is convincingly portrayed, with the kind of attention to detail and subtle touches that invite empathy by ensuring they are never less than three dimensional. There's a wealth of subplots, such as Maggie's problems with her pimp, all of which enrich the narrative, and the writer takes no prisoners, really putting his characters through the grinder with no guarantee that anyone will get out the other side, so that the reader can take nothing for granted. The action scenes are well done, particularly at the end when Soulis and the vampires cut loose, with an almost cinematic feel to the mayhem taking place on the page, though I have to concede (minor whinge) that by this point I was getting rather tired of the comic cut out antics of Boyd and Holdstedter. There's nothing in Blood Red that is strikingly original or takes the vampire in a new direction, but it's an entertaining book, with a wealth of genre tropes put through their paces by a writer of considerable ability, and well worth a few hours of anyone's time.

There's a more familiar urban centre under threat in Simon Clark's London Under Midnight (Severn House paperback, 214pp, 9.99 pounds), with vampires coming up out of the river Thames at night to feed on the capital's citizens. Clark has dabbled in this subgenre before, but doesn't seem able to come up with an original angle, making do with grounding the vampire menace in a foreign culture. Vampyrrhic had a Viking twist and this time around there's an African connection, the god Edshu having decided to test London and its people with a vampire plague. Fortunately, though the word is never used, there's a shaman conveniently on hand, perched atop a pole alongside the river, to explain things to the hero and tell him how to get rid of the vampires.

Journalist Ben Ashton is sent to investigate strange graffiti that is popping up all over London—vampire sharkz they're coming to get you—and as a sideline looks into the disappearance of his old girlfriend April Connor. Naturally the two are connected. From shaman Elmo he learns of the vampires and that April has become one of them although, having a stronger will than the other victims, she is still fighting against the change. Ben, Elmo and April's fiancée Trajan, set out to save her and avert the disaster that threatens the city, with the final battle fought on an island in the middle of the Thames.

Elmo's explanation for what is going on was a little too pat for my liking. Why these African deities, for whom we've not seen the slightest bit of proof before, should suddenly be taking an interest in London is beyond me? It is, like so much else here, simply a plot convenience, a hook on which to hang the story, but one that doesn't convince or add anything new to the vampire canon.

Allowing for the contrived nature of the plot, this is a fast paced and exciting read, with lots of twists and turns, Clark having fun with the familiar material. One particular highlight is April's fight against vampirism, which in her mind she at times refers to as New Life and regards as a boon that should be spread to the rest of mankind so that there are moments when she comes on like a crazed evangelist, and the hunger for blood is put over well, an insatiable craving that it takes all of her will to deny. In contrast to this, yin to its dark yang, is Ben's personal obsession, his unrequited love for April, which is holding him back and becomes the medium in which his mettle is tested. And there are suitably gory moments as well, with the image of the vampire sharks lingering in the mind, a powerful signifier of their menace, their attacks on humans as savage as they are repellent, while the final race for life and battle with the vampires is a compellingly taut end to a decent book, albeit one that was nothing special, not a novel that tried to do anything new with the tropes of the subgenre, simply polished them up a bit.

With Anne Rice on extended sabbatical Laurell K. Hamilton is the uncrowned queen of the female writers producing vampire serials. Her heroine Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, lives in a world pretty much like our own except that the vampires and a whole host of other supernatural beings have come out of the closet and are living alongside mankind, tolerated as long as they abide by our laws, and with people like Anita ready to step in and dole out summary justice when they don't toe the line.

The Harlequin (Orbit hardback, 422pp, 12.99 pounds), which is the fourteenth volume in the series, opens with Malcolm, head of the vampire church, asking Anita for help when two of his congregation are framed for murder. From Jean-Claude, her lover and vampire master of St Louis, Anita learns of the Harlequin, a secret order of vampires with incredible power and given authority to execute judgement on others of their kind. It seems that Jean-Claude and those close to him are being investigated, only the Harlequin appear to have thrown aside the rule book in favour of pursuing their own agenda.

That's the main thrust of the book, but there's plenty of other stuff going on, with powerful vampire Belle Morte lurking in the background and the threat of Marmee Noir, the mother of all vampires, awakening from her long sleep, plus all the usual relationship stuff that arises out of Anita's attempts to control the ardeur, a power she has that feeds on sexual energy, obliging her to take on rather more lovers than the average healthy young woman (six, and still counting), and elsewhere we have the threat of sociopath Olaf and political manoeuvring within the ‘furry’ community, while Anita's friend and fellow vampire hunter Edward has to cope with a son who wants to follow in his footsteps.

Yes, there's a lot happening here, but Hamilton makes a much better fist of integrating the various plot strands than she did with Incubus Dreams, the last book in the series that I read, and it's a better book for that, one that seems more firmly centred. The sidebar stuff, to do with relationships and the etiquette of sleeping with ‘monsters', goes on without getting in the way of the main plot, which is allowed to build naturally, with the final showdown with the renegade Harlequin a tour de force of invention, the battle swinging first one way and then another, holding the attention even while you know it can only end with Anita and her gang on top. Hamilton is still a bit too coy about sex for my liking, going for terms like ‘lengths’ and ‘openings’ in lieu of ‘penis’ and ‘vagina', which is begging a mortis and tenon metaphor for coitus at some future point, but if she is occasionally wishy washy in addressing the mechanics, the psychology of sex is one of Hamilton's strong suits. In that regard there's lots of interesting developments, as Anita and the various men in her life deal with the implications of the ardeur, while one of her lovers registers a need for S&M that causes Anita some perturbation.

To summarise, The Harlequin works very well as a stand alone novel, but also moves along the various strands that weave throughout this series, with the hint of a battle royale with Marmee Noir looming on the horizon. Prior to reading this I'd been in two minds about the series, but now I'm engaged with Anita Blake once again and curious to see where Hamilton will take the character.

There's also a vampire society of sorts in No Dominion (Orbit paperback, 248pp, 6.99 pounds), the second volume in another ongoing series, but in this case everything is very much under the human radar, Charlie Huston offering us a fusion of vampire fiction with gangster sensibility that brings to mind the freshness and noir feel of the early Anita Blake books.

Huston's hero Joe Pitt is a vampire and native New Yorker, but affiliated to none of the Big Apple's vampire clans, a free agent who hires out to them for work. When a new drug, one that can addict vampires, hits town Joe is employed to discover its source by Terry, nominal head of the Society. The trail takes him to the territory of another clan, the Hood, and from there to that of the biggest clan, the Coalition, whose head honcho just so happens to hate Joe with a passion. Seems like everybody wants a piece of Joe's ass, either to kill him or to use Joe to further their own ends, and that includes the Enclave, a vampire sect with an especial interest in our hero. Things get complicated, and then some.

This is a fast paced, take no prisoners kind of book, with much more going on than my plot summary might suggest and an interesting take on the vampire novel even if you can't quite get past the feeling that it would work just as well ‘gangs of New York’ style and without the bloodsucking twist. Pitt is an agreeable hero, one who is not afraid to mess up his hands when it's required, but with a ‘human’ side to him, as seen in his love for his AIDS victim girlfriend, while his smart mouth and penchant for Marlowesque putdowns entertain the reader as surely as they get him into trouble with everybody else. There's plenty of action, with gritty scenes of violence and unexpected plot twists, plus some larger than life characters, such as the ‘amiable’ Gravedigger, the cartoon cut out vampire Count with his camp followers and the barking mad white supremacist vampire who causes this whole mess in the first place. All in all, it's an engaging mix and Huston is a writer to keep an eye out for.

Scott Westerfeld's Parasite Positive (ATOM Books paperback, 276pp, 5.99 pounds) is also set in New York and has a whole vampire society in hiding, but there the resemblance ends. The novel's protagonist Cal works for the so called Night Watch, an organisation that hunts down and contains vampires, or peeps as they are known (an abbreviation of parasite positive). Cal is himself a vampire, like most Night Watch operatives, but one of the lucky ones who can control his lusts. The peeps he captures are taken to a facility where their addiction can be curtailed by drug use. While hunting down the woman who infected him, Cal finds evidence that a new strain of the vampire parasite has developed, one that can cross over into other species such as cats, and that his ‘maker’ is deliberately infecting as many people as she can. But this is only the tip of the iceberg and Cal's subsequent discoveries have serious implications for vampires and humans alike.

Scott Westerfeld's book offers an intriguing variation on the scientific approach to vampirism, which is here attributed to a parasite but, as the title reminds us, this is not necessarily a bad thing. To underline the point, alternating chapters of the book offer lively info dumps on the nature of parasites, how they can be both a burden and a blessing to mankind, all of this necessary spadework for the final revelation about the true nature of vampirism.

One has the feeling that the plot doesn't quite add up, with the Night Watch being kept unnecessarily in the dark about so many things and the idea that vampires will be any more capable of combating the real threat than, say, men armed with rocket launchers seems slightly fanciful, and Cal's reaction to what he is told is not entirely convincing, while the character of Lacey, his love interest, annoyed me like heck by constantly referring to Cal as ‘Dude'. In an Anita Blake book that woman would be gagged.

Regardless, Westerfeld does have a novel slant on the vampire archetype and does some interesting things with this old favourite. His writing is slick and assured, carrying the narrative along at a cracking pace, with moments of genuine creepiness. There are some great touches of incidental detail along the way, such as the parasite chapters, which are so often squirm inducing, and he brings humour to the table as well. In particular, within the context of the parasite he provides a convincing explanation for vampire traits such as an allergy to churchgoing and the Bible, with a modern interpretation of this phenomenon that provides the book's biggest laugh, and shows so much chutzpah that it's worth the price of admission alone. Succinctly put, Parasite Positive is a fun read.

Title aside, Fangland (Vintage Books paperback, 388pp, 7.99 pounds) is the most serious minded of this vampire sextet, and comes with a back cover blurb by literary heavyweight Audrey Niffenegger. Formerly a producer on 60 Minutes, John Marks writes of the world he knows, updating the archetypal figure of the vampire and superimposing it on the modern media landscape.

Evangeline Harker, an associate producer on top rated TV show “The Hour", is sent to Transylvania to spy out a possible story on crimelord Ion Torgu, inviting inevitable Dracula jokes from her workmates, though curiously none of them seem to register the significance of her surname. Torgu lives in a remote town in the ruins of a burnt out hotel, and as it turns out is something far worse than a mere vampire, though he does consume blood in his own special way. Evangeline manages to save herself from his clutches, though she is changed by the encounter, becoming more feral, savage. But while she recuperates in a monastery, Torgu comes to America and begins to infiltrate the offices of “The Hour", initiating a terrible plan that only Evangeline can counter.

Fangland reads like a cross between Stoker's Dracula, whose narrative technique of letters, journal entries etc it mimics and many of whose most famous tropes are reprised, and the J-Horror film Kairo (Pulse in the Hollywood version), with its echoes of madness and disturbing vision of the spirits of the dead subtly infiltrating our world.

There are many things to commend this book. Marks knows the cutthroat world of TV news inside out, making his backdrop totally realistic, and he is excellent at characterisation, bringing these people to compelling life, their competitiveness and petty obsessions, all the inner demons that drive them on, with the rare oasis of sanity in this prime time wasteland. The writing is beautiful throughout, descriptive and evocative, but at its most compelling in the scenes of horror that punctuate the text, events that shock with their savagery, or are simply creepy, as when Torgu cuts his victim's foot and collects the slow dripping blood in a bucket, an image that lingers in the mind in the same way the vision of Dracula scaling his castle wall did for a previous generation.

Torgu's corruption spreads like a cancer at “The Hour", infecting both the computer system and the people with its taint of madness, and paving the way for his ultimate goal, to unleash the innocent dead on the world, even at the cost of its destruction. If he stands for death, Evangeline is his opposite, sexuality and the life force personified and the book reaches its climax with the confrontation between these two, but not before we are chillingly reminded of all the innocent dead, the victims of concentration camps and battlefields, all the atrocities that make up human history and whose memories are ingrained in the land, dead voices crying out for revenge and closure.

It's unnerving stuff, a story that is original yet at the same time a powerful tribute to its source material and proof, if any was needed, that there's still a lot of life left in those bloodsucking vampires.

THE RUINS by SCOTT SMITH

Corgi paperback, 432pp, 6.99 pounds

To me it looks as if the marketing men have decided to pitch this as a thriller, but that's a crock of something or other. It is, and make no bones about it, a horror story in the tradition of Hodgson, Blackwood et al.

Four young Americans on holiday in Mexico agree to go with their German friend Mathias to look for his brother, who wandered off with a girl to an archaeological site in the jungle. Jeff and Amy, Eric and Stacy, Mathias and their Greek friend Pablo arrive at a Mayan village near to where an old mine is supposed to be. Friendly at first, if not welcoming, the Mayans soon turn hostile, forcing the strangers to climb a vine covered hill and keeping them prisoner there, without food or water. They find evidence of previous prisoners—abandoned tents and supplies, skeletons hidden in the undergrowth. But as the days pass they become aware that their situation is more perilous than they could ever have imagined and their Mayan captors are the least of their worries.

This is not vanilla horror, with the answers all parcelled up and presented to the reader at the end, or chainsaw chic with its quota of beautiful young things slaughtered before the inevitable feel good resolution, but a grim and unrelenting tale in which things start badly and just keep getting worse. The title is a red herring. The eponymous ruins are not an issue. The real terror is something else, and I shan't spoil things by giving away its nature, though you could do worse than imagine John Carpenter's The Thing transplanted to a tropical setting.

Smith misses no opportunity to crank up the tension that extra notch, gifting his nemesis with new and ever more chilling abilities with each day that passes, inflicting plagues of Biblical proportions on his characters. A particular strength is the way in which, not content with their physical situation, he catalogues their psychological unravelling as well. Switching viewpoint between the four Americans, the book cleverly lets us into each one's head, showing how vulnerable they are: Jeff, who thinks he has to be the leader and is even enjoying their situation somewhat; Eric, who is convinced that the enemy has got inside of him and is cutting himself open with a knife; Amy, who thinks that everything is her fault, and Stacy whose promiscuity and feelings of inadequacy threaten to unravel her psyche. They play off each other, demonstrating Sartre's dictum that hell is other people, adding an extra frisson to the mix. With moments of genuine horror and outrage, and a feeling of claustrophobia that inevitably mounts, the whole playing out to a background of screams from Pablo, wounded in the opening pages, this is an unremittingly bleak book, with a subtext of despair, but for all of that it is never less than believable and compelling for the reader. Recommended.

GOTHIC FICTION: A READER'S GUIDE TO ESSENTIAL CRITICISM by ANGELA WRIGHT

Palgrave Macmillan paperback, 178pp, 14.99 pounds

The focus of this book is on the Gothic novel's first wave of popularity, between 1764 and 1820, with the emphasis on such key texts as The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Caleb Williams and the work of Mrs Radcliffe. In a series of themed chapters Wright looks at how critics have dealt with the genre and its tropes, along the way charting its standing in popular culture of the day.

The opening chapter gives a brief history of the Gothic novel's origins and its reception by the eighteenth century public, with critics expressing concern at its popularity with female readers (and writers), and almost affectionate mockery of some of the most emblematic of its devices, this discussion broadening out in the second chapter with an attempt to define the sublime, those elements which made Gothic so effective regardless of the clichés inherent in the material, and to differentiate between ‘terror’ and ‘horror'.

The third chapter examines the effect of the French Revolution, the historical event of greatest significance in the genre's development, with writers and critics both for and against social change enlisting the Gothic in their cause, finding within its pages the echo of their hopes and fears. Following on from this the Gothic's attitude to religion is put under the microscope, particularly its supposed anti-Catholic stance, the chapter segueing into a consideration of how the novel reflected nationalist concerns. The fifth chapter opens with a comparison between the Gothic and surrealism, with the likes of Andre Breton finding common ground, then moving on to a psychoanalytic approach to the key Gothic texts. The final chapter attempts a feminist reappraisal of the genre and considers the role of gender in the Gothic novel, and writing as a means to empowerment for women such as Mrs Radcliffe.

Of course you don't need to know any of this stuff to simply enjoy The Monk or The Mysteries of Udolpho, but for those who want to deepen their appreciation of the Gothic novel Wright is an articulate and intelligent guide to the critical minefield, digging up the most fascinating and representative texts and marshalling their arguments in a way that makes them accessible to the lay reader, with plentiful insights into the nature of supernatural fiction and its appeal. From my own perspective what struck me was how familiar some of this material seems, albeit in a contemporary context, as with the attempt to put water between ‘acceptable’ texts and their more sensational fellows (cue a Ramsey Campbell fan trying to explain to an outsider why Shaun Hutson is not representative of horror fiction), or critics mocking the scene in which, instead of running to safety, the heroine goes to investigate that strange noise back of the arras (cue just about any contemporary horror flick with teens in peril). Seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I WANT TO WATCH by DIEGO DE SILVA

William Heinemann hardback, 196pp, 10.99 pounds

This is one of those elusive books that slip through the cracks of genre; not really Crime fiction, though marketed as such, nor Horror though undeniably horrific, but it should appeal to the readers of both tribes. Certainly the opening sequence is shocking. A man first plays with and then murders a young girl, the act described in graphic detail, the understated and controlled prose capturing the amoral nature of its perpetrator. The killer is Advocate David Heller, a prominent criminal defence attorney, and he is observed dumping the girl's body on a beach by teen prostitute Celeste.

For a while two strands run parallel. On the one hand Heller's aggressive career moves and failure to make a connection with women of his own age, and on the other Celeste's relationship with her family and the men she goes with, one of whom abuses her. Then Celeste makes contact with Heller. He thinks she intends to blackmail him, but the young woman has something very different in mind. And so the machinery is set in motion that will ultimately bring us to an ending as unexpected as it is savage.

This is a novel fraught with moral ambiguity, a beautifully observed book but also one that challenges the reader's expectations and asks uncomfortable questions of us through its amorality, and the fact that though what they do is monstrous these people, even Heller, are not actually portrayed as monsters. We never really get a handle on either character. We don't know why Heller acts as he does; only that he has a drive to self-destruction that he seems helpless to control, and that Celeste offers him a momentary reprieve by showing an interest. Similarly for Celeste, there is no explanation for her behaviour, though in hindsight you can see that she is a deeply unhappy person, her lifestyle reflecting a low self-worth. I Want to Watch is a novel of character, recording extremes of human nature and reporting back on what it finds, but with no real conclusions to offer, just the facts and nothing else, so that ultimately we too want to watch, are all in some way voyeurs at our own dissolution, De Silva leaving us to make up our own minds, to find a position and see if we can defend it.

GOING BACK by TONY RICHARDS

Elastic Press paperback, 168pp, 5.99 pounds

This collection brings together fourteen stories by the talented and much underrated Richards, a writer who seems equally at home in Science Fiction and Horror, even dips a toe into the mainstream, but brings his own distinctive slant and voice to whatever he attempts.

Richards’ heroes are men and women who have become displaced in their own lives, as with the protagonist of the title story, ‘Going Back', whose very existence is undermined by a terrible accident in which his daughter was killed, and who yearns for a way back, a chance to put things right. Eventually whatever powers answer prayers allow this, but there is a terrible price to be paid, one that leaves the protagonist with no purpose to his being any more. This is a moving story, the plain, understated prose capturing perfectly the overwhelming pain and sadness of the character, and the heartrending poignancy of the ending. A similar concern with the effects of time pervade ‘What Malcolm Did the Day Before Tomorrow', its eponymous hero becoming caught up in a Groundhog Day variation, able to live the same period of time over and over again, doing whatever he wishes, but then the realisation that he can never move on, and even this does not last forever, Richards gradually revealing to the reader and Malcolm alike the horror of his situation, addressing concerns about our actions and the consequences. The protagonist of ‘A Matter of Avoiding Crowds’ is inordinately proud of his knowledge of London's backstreets and byways, but also someone who cannot connect with people, giving the title an extra dash of irony, and so finds himself lost when he strays from the familiar paths, cast adrift in some faux reality. This is a powerful tale of self-alienation, of someone obsessed by the minutiae of life, but completely losing any sense of what is actually important. A similar fate befalls the hero of ‘Yesterday, Upon the Stair', a ghost who can only bear witness to unfolding events, is helpless to affect them in any way, much to his chagrin. These characters are dispossessed, ineffectual, but there is always the suggestion that the fault lies not in circumstance or others, but with some fatal flaw in their own nature.

Richards invites us to look beyond the surface of things. In ‘A Place in the Country’ a woman stuck in the city fosters the illusion of countryside living in her city flat, pasting pictures over the windows, pretending that she can hear rustic sounds, and the illusion becomes a reality she can enter with an ending that brought to mind Bradbury's tale The Veldt, but Richards has another trick up his sleeve and deftly pulls the rug out from beneath the feet of our foregone conclusions. ‘Skin Two’ is another story about surfaces, a series of vignettes that cleverly explore the implications of synthetic skin that can be made to cover the whole body, hiding the wrinkles of age. In a world where everybody is beautiful, what price beauty? Does it matter how old the person we are about to get intimate with is, if they present the appearance of a twenty year old? Richards deals with the morals, social etiquette and emotional fallout of this discovery with an enviable lightness of touch and invention.

'Too Good To Be True', one of my favourites in the collection, has a man becoming involved with a beautiful and sexually precocious woman, only to discover that he is the unwitting star of a porn movie, involved in an R-rated version of The Truman Show. This is a story that does so many things right, with a subtext about the chasm between reality and the expectations shaped by the adult industry, and touching on the vulnerabilities of sad, lonely people. Sexuality plays an important role too in ‘Alsiso', which explores the shifting balance of power in the relationship between two lesbians when one of them sleeps with a man, the characterisation spot on and totally convincing, the keen bite of desire echoed in the exotic surroundings, and with an ending that is as chilling as it is ambiguous.

Not everything here works, as with the unfortunately titled ‘Man You Gotta See This!’ which seems rather slight compared to the other stories, a one trick pony of a tale in which the human race is endangered by a virus that takes the form of paintings, reminiscent of Ballard's Now: Zero, only not as clever. But even when he's operating below par Richards is worth reading, his simple and uncluttered prose, and gift for creating damaged characters we can believe in, making you willing to forgive any slight shortcoming.

Copyright © 2007 Peter Tennant

Lady of the Crows told the story of Alena Zeminova, who successfully poisoned two of her three husbands using a concoction of milky cocoa, strychnine, and a powder prepared from the ashes of crows. Zeminova's third and surviving husband, according to the play's version of events, had loved her deeply, and continued visiting her Prague gaol until she died of consumption in 1901. Opinions were divided on the work, as they were in 1889 at the time of Zeminova's trial. Some thought the portrayal overly sympathetic, saying she was a cold killer motivated by greed, while others believed it too harsh, as she had clearly been a victim of her father's “unnatural impulses,” and then some ill-chosen, brutal spouses. The play had a reputation for disuniting audiences. Bickering voices were not uncommon in the stalls after lights up, even today, thirty-two years after her death.

Grigori Voryzek knew the story well. He had performed the play as a student at the Academy thirteen years ago, playing the part of Kudlic, the doting third husband. Whilst he enjoyed the role, Voryzek failed to understand how Kudlic could love a woman who had attempted to murder him. Voryzek's former fiancée Milena Palovsky had played the poisoner Zeminova. Although there had been several women in Voryzek's life back then, he had always believed Milena was special, and perhaps events would have turned out differently had he been less besotted with himself, and more conscious of the fact that such women only came along once in a lifetime—if at all.

And now Milena was back in Prague, a successful stage actress starring in a professional production of Lady of the Crows, once again playing Zeminova. It wasn't that Voryzek disliked the work particularly—as a younger man he had been seduced by the dark themes, the sinister ambience that had clung to rehearsals like an exotic scent—just that the play summoned some uncomfortable memories, a mood of despondency and unfulfilled dreams that he really could do without right now. For that reason he had tried his utmost to ignore the production all week, averting his eyes from advertising posters, inventing excuses for why he shouldn't enter the auditorium during performances, and more importantly, avoiding the presence of the lead actress Milena Palovsky. A difficult task, he acknowledged, and somewhat unrealistic considering he was the theatre's front-of-house manager. He would have booked the week off had he not already exhausted his leave entitlement. So far though, his attempts had been moderately successful. Only once had he been required to venture into the auditorium during a show (when a woman fainted in one of the poisoning scenes), and he had spotted Milena on just a single occasion, across the crowded Green Room after the first performance, after which he made a hasty exit. It was Friday evening now. There were only two more performances tomorrow then he was free of it.

Voryzek waited for the last of the theatregoers to leave by the foyer entrance. They gathered on the street corner, huddled under umbrellas, debating the play they had just witnessed whilst hailing cabs that cruised through puddles in the narrow road. The last to leave was a frail old man who was wiping tears from his eyes with a handkerchief. Voryzek was about to ask if he needed assistance but the old boy was already outside. Strange how the play had that effect on people, he thought, locking the doors. He returned inside to supervise his staff, glancing only briefly at the advertising poster, which featured a slightly older looking Milena than he remembered, expression fey in nineteenth-century prison garb, yet more beautiful than ever.

He turned into the stalls bar. Everything seemed in order. Bar attendants had finished polishing glasses, usherettes were changing, he assumed, into coats and hats for their journey home on the tramcars. A young woman of slight build, wearing the regulation uniform white blouse, black skirt and white pinafore, was struggling to pull the shutter down towards the bar's marble surface. It was Katja, lagging behind as usual. Voryzek watched, noting the passing resemblance to a young Milena Palovsky. Leaning with her full weight, Katja managed to insert the key and lock the clasp.

"Having trouble Katja?"

"No, Mr Voryzek, sir,” she answered, startled. “Got there in the end."

"Takings?"

"Over here.” She scurried off to collect a tin box resting on one of the room's mahogany tables.

Voryzek took the box from her. “You really shouldn't leave it unattended."

"I didn't! I never let it out of my sight."

He peered down through gold-wire spectacles. He was tall, and cut an imposing figure in his sharp black suit. “My dear, I saw you. Your back was turned as you closed the shutter. There's a lot of money here. A thief could easily have snatched it while your attention was elsewhere. I hope for your sake there's nothing missing."

Katja bowed her pretty head. “Sorry Mr Voryzek, sir."

"Don't let it happen again. You may go home now."

Like many of the part-time staff, Katja was an aspiring actress, a student at the Academy. Over the years he had met hundreds like her. Faces changed as each class graduated, fresh eyes sparkling with youthful ambition, not yet dulled by rejection. Voryzek would sometimes follow their early careers in the local newspapers, until they were mentioned no more. Such a tiny percentage made the grade. Katja would probably end up a secretary, he thought, or trapped in a loveless marriage, the light of her dreams extinguished like with so many others.

During their relationship, Milena had been selfless in her encouragement of his acting, never asking for the same in return, and never receiving it either. She nurtured his vanity with her praise, and impressed upon him what everyone in their fashionable inner-circle had believed: that Grigori Voryzek—that insouciant, sometimes arrogant young man—was the most promising student in the Academy, the more likely to achieve wealth, fame and professional status. Furthermore, her support achieved the desired results: hadn't his performances been breathtaking, his exam results outstanding? Admittedly, that was in the amateur arena, under the appreciative eyes of his tutors, and the transition to the professional circuit had not fared so well—not with those hard-shelled directors sniping at his every move. What he feared now, what disturbed his sleep at night, was seeing the disappointment in Milena's eyes as they met for the first time after so many years; the pity even, at his lack of success in their chosen field. And after such promise! That pitying look, which he was certain would be instinctive rather than deliberate (Milena had never been cruel), would cause him to wither in the presence of important people. Better they never meet again, he decided. Milena Palovsky would remain a memory, and his life once more would plod towards its predictably mundane destination.

He carried the takings into his office and locked them in the safe. Staring in the mirror, he adjusted his bow tie and collar. Satisfied, he left to continue his final check, fidgeting with his personal set of keys.

A smell of vanilla and almonds lingered by the merchandise cabinet, where trays of loose confectionary, programmes, and books about Alena Zeminova were displayed. On impulse, he flicked through a book, stopping at a page of gruesome charcoal sketches. Zeminova had drawn them from her prison cell. They depicted one of her husbands, Pavel Kovac, in his final moments: three sketches showing the galloping effects of the poison over a fifteen-minute period. Below these, Zeminova had written a commentary.

My preference for strychnine over arsenic concerned immediacy. Arsenic, slow and decaying, is more suited to those practitioners who wish to conceal the true source of their victim's malady and pass it off as something else. Whereas I wanted Kovac to know precisely what was happening before I bundled his corpse into the Vlatava. As the Tincture Nux Vomica played the music of discord on his central nervous system [Fig. 1], he was both silent and alert, his senses heightened, receptive to what I had to say. Here was the one occasion in our marriage where I was able to venture an opinion without fear of him bludgeoning me with those stone-like fists. A most enlightening, one-sided conversation, I might add! Soon his spasms could not have been more dramatic had I wired him to one of those electrical armchairs the Americans use to dispatch their criminals [Fig. 2]. His grin was fixed and hideous, his spine contorting in a most unnatural U-shape, so that only the heels of his shoes and the back of his head made contact with the floor. Yet the true terror and realisation of his predicament were revealed most strikingly in those bulging eyes. For those who follow the logic of science, who shun the idea that such a thing as a soul exists independently from the body, I would suggest you witness what I have witnessed. For never has there been a clearer demonstration of a soul trapped in a fiery Hell of its own making. Like a good wife should, I applied a cold flannel, wiping hot sweat and drool from that tortured countenance [Fig. 3]. Then said in a calm and matter-of-fact voice, ‘There, Kovac. Not so cocksure now, eh!'

Feeling decidedly uncomfortable, Voryzek returned the book and locked the cabinet. He approached the auditorium, where he stuck his head inside the doors for a quick scan. The safety curtain was lowered, partitioning the stage, as it should be. Deserted and silent, the gloomy arena was lit only by the pale glow of the exit signs, the orchestra pit a deep rectangular shadow. He shivered. That book had given him the jitters.

He walked past the box office cubicle then turned into the foyer and began his ascent of the grand circular staircase with its curving white balustrade and gigantic crystal chandelier hanging above. The carpet felt soft and springy underfoot as he checked the upper levels. All the staff had gone. He locked several doors then made his way down again using the fire exit staircase and by this back-route arrived at the stage door.

No one was about. Surprising how quickly the building emptied, he thought, feeling mildly resentful. There was no sign of the stage door keeper Pytlik either. Voryzek imagined the old man doing his rounds, dragging his lame foot behind as he locked and checked the backstage area. He was so slow it was miracle he ever finished.

He entered Pytlik's glass-fronted booth, frowning at the odour of stale cigar smoke. The cramped space was as cluttered as a tobacconist's stall, decorated with old show fliers and signed photographs of little-known artistes. He leaned towards the public address system that was attached to the wall and spoke into the microphone. His voice echoed as it projected around the otherwise silent building.

"Pytlik, it's me Grigori Voryzek. I've been waiting here fifteen minutes,” he lied. “Where are you? Anyway, everything's in order front-of-house. I'll see you tomorrow."

From along the corridor leading to the stage area came a rattle of keys, then a dressing-room door closed with a clatter. Someone was whistling tunelessly, dragging a foot along the floor. Voryzek stepped into the corridor.

"Pytlik, did you hear my message?"

"Ah, Voryzek, there you are,” croaked Pytlik. “I've been looking for you everywhere."

"Don't lie. I've waited here fifteen minutes. You shouldn't leave your post unattended."

The old man chuckled. “Fifteen minutes? And you call me a liar. Listen, I got my job to do same as anyone else. How am I supposed to do it if I can't leave my post?"

"You should wait till I vacate the building, lock the stage door entrance and then commence your rounds, as agreed at the last management meeting. It prevents undesirables from wandering in off the street."

"It'd take me all night! You're not the only one who wants to go home. Anyway, I don't answer to you. The stage manager's my boss."

"Yes and he's gone home. So I'm senior here."

The old man shook his keys at him. “I know what you are, alright."

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"Like that German chancellor fellow, Hitler. Power mad! You're just a failed actor, a washed-up thespian who takes his frustrations out on everyone else."

Voryzek swallowed, feeling the shift of his Adam's apple. “Nonsense. I'm professional management. True, I did a bit of acting once, a long time ago, but decided it wasn't for me."

"You had no choice in the matter. Remember, I've been working here a long time. You were the worst bloody actor I ever saw."

"I'm very happy in my chosen career, thank you, not that it's any business of yours."

Pytlik sneered. “Pull the other one. Anyway, I wanted to tell you something important before you had a go at me. Something strange is going on."

"I did not have a go at you. And frankly, your attitude is beginning to try my patience."

"Want to hear it or not?"

Voryzek controlled his anger. “Very well, continue."

"One of the actresses is still here."

"Which actress?"

"Milena Palovsky."

The name cut deep into his composure. “Wha ... what's so strange about that?"

"She hasn't left the building."

"Can't you just ask her politely to go?"

"I would but I don't know where she is."

"Then how do you know she's still here?"

"Because she hasn't gone past my window."

Voryzek sighed. The old fool was going senile. “How do you know that when you left your post prematurely to do your rounds, like always?"

"I've been down the dressing room corridors. I would've seen or heard something."

"And you haven't seen or heard a thing?"

"That's what I'm saying."

"Then she must've left by another entrance. A fire exit, or across the auditorium and out through the foyer perhaps. It happens sometimes."

Old Pytlik shook his head. “I know who's left my building alright. Milena Palovsky is still here."

Voryzek returned inside the booth and spoke into the microphone again. “Ladies and gentlemen of the visiting company, I would like to remind you that the theatre is now closed. Please vacate the building so the stage door keeper can finish locking up. Thank you."

"Spoken like a true thespian,” said Pytlik chuckling.

They waited several minutes. “You're imagining things,” said Voryzek.

Pytlik shook his head stubbornly. “She's still here."

"And the rest of the company?"

"Gone."

"Did she go to her dressing room after the show?"

"I saw her. Standing there in her brassiere and those silk French knickers they wear.” Pytlik grinned wickedly. “She just smiled at me. Fine looking woman."

Voryzek felt a rush of anger. “You were peeping?"

"Course not! But I couldn't help noticing. She leaves the door wide open."

"And you've checked her dressing room since?"

"Empty."

"On stage?"

"I stuck my head round, but it's all switched off back there."

"Aha, so there's your answer. She must've gone on stage for some reason. A quick rehearsal perhaps, going through company notes. Go and ask her to leave while I man your post."

"But it's pitch dark back there. The electrician's turned the power off."

"Take your flashlight."

Pytlik shuffled off. It suddenly struck Voryzek that Milena would never rehearse in the dark. He could not think of a single reason why she should remain in the building after hours. He was annoyed because he wanted to go home. Also he disliked being reminded of her and that play. But he shouldn't leave Pytlik alone to sort it out. There were rules to adhere to. Behind was a row of pigeonholes, one of which was reserved for the visiting company manager. He hung his keys on a hook and sifted through the contents. There were several letters, some newspaper cuttings and a ledger containing lists of cheap Prague hotels and bed and breakfasts. A quick examination revealed the entire company, including Milena, was staying at a boarding house in the Mala Strana region, a fifteen-minute walk away, not far from Voryzek's own apartment in fact. He was surprised that Milena was staying in such a place, and not the luxury hotel he had imagined. Perhaps the life of a stage actress was not so glamorous after all. He tried ringing the number but the operator said the line was unobtainable.

Pytlik returned. “No sign of her. Anyway she wouldn't be back there in the dark. You sent me on a wild goose chase."

"I just tried telephoning the boarding house but I can't get through."

"Wasting your time. She won't be there."

"Well I think you're mistaken. You obviously missed her. There's no other explanation.” He checked his watch. “There's nothing we can do now. I'm going home."

Pytlik shrugged. “You're in charge. Leave an actress in the building for all I care. Break the rules."

Voryzek walked across the bridge towards the Mala Strana. He took long strides, rain pattering his coat and hat. Across the river was Hradchany Castle, its spires lit with blue and amber spotlights. On either side of him the statues of the saints were motionless silhouettes. The wide black River Vlatava was streaked with streetlamp reflections and pinpricked with rain. In another life he had strolled across this bridge holding Milena's hand.

As he reached the Mala Strana side he spotted the riverbank bench where they used to sit, kissing on warm summer evenings to the sound of moored barges knocking against one and other, the water lapping their hulls. She used to fall asleep on his shoulder. He would hold her in his arms like that till she woke dreamy eyed, thinking that beautiful women would always fall asleep on his shoulder.

Their romance began while he was in his last year at the Academy, during rehearsals for Lady of the Crows. People told them what a wonderful, talented couple they made. Sitting on the riverbank after the shows, they had discussed how they were going to be famous classical actors. Voryzek was not entirely convinced by Milena's ability, though he didn't mention these misgivings. There was a certain laxity about her behaviour that irritated him, a slovenly disregard for the basic work ethic. She would often sleep in till midday, and was frequently late for class. He had not believed she possessed the dedication required to succeed.

After finishing his exams, Voryzek began his acting career positively enough as understudy for a small yet respectable touring company. The money was far from exceptional, but it was a solid environment to learn his trade. He was so busy that he grew careless with Milena. There was a thriving after-show social life, and several older, more experienced women to distract him, sophisticated and well versed in the art of lovemaking. At first the tone of Milena's calls and letters was pleading, then she grew resentful, and finally, silent. He blamed the relationship failure on the distancing nature of touring. And anyway, his work was the most important thing.

He was delighted when the director offered him speaking parts. Yet as he took on these more important roles he began receiving poor press reviews. Some of the critics were inhuman in their cruelty! And after six months the producer declined to renew his contract. From that point on, life became increasingly difficult. He applied, he auditioned, yet failed to secure a single part. His rent went unpaid and he was threatened with eviction. And while his misery increased, the dream was becoming real for Milena. She was in demand. Not exactly famous, but a professional actress nonetheless, never wanting for paid work.

The most humiliating moment came just after he started work as an usher in the same theatre he was employed at now. The job was intended to be temporary, to help pay the bills before his big break came along. Milena returned to Prague in a production of Uncle Vanya. The press said she was involved romantically with the leading man, who had appeared in several French motion pictures. After the show one evening, in his usher's uniform, Voryzek begged Milena to put a word in for him with the show's director. Watching the audition from the stalls, Milena bowed her head with embarrassment. Nerves had got the better of Voryzek. It was the worst experience of his life, and he never set foot on stage again in an acting capacity. Yet he understood, in that one shameful moment, how much Milena had loved him.

Voryzek realised he had taken a detour whilst daydreaming. Across the road was the boarding house: a narrow four-storey townhouse with cracked, mustard-yellow walls and dull-red peeling shutters. The shabby exterior boosted his morale. Her expenses allowance must be somewhat lacking. Also, the walk across the bridge, running events through his mind as the rain cooled his face, had been therapeutic. He should be proud of himself. He was front-of-house manager at a fifteen hundred-seat venue, a good position. And didn't holding that position require he perform his duty? Which surely meant investigating any irregularities. He realised now that letting the matter go unresolved had been unprofessional. His desire to avoid Milena and everything to do with that play had affected his judgement. Pytlik was a cantankerous old lech, but Voryzek trusted his intuition. Pytlik knew everything that went on in that building. If Milena Palovsky was locked in then that was a serious breach of the rules. What if there was an accident, or a fire? He would be blamed for his casual disregard. He crossed the road, determined now to settle the matter.

The sign in the grimy window said vacancies. Underneath, an old menu stained with coffee rings had at some point fallen onto the sill. Voryzek rapped the doorknocker. A middle-aged woman ducked her head round. “Want a room? Bit late, aren't we?"

"Sorry to bother you at this hour, madam. I was wondering if you could tell me if a Milena Palovsky is staying here."

"Who's asking?"

"Grigori Voryzek, front-of-house manager at the theatre."

"Just a minute."

A moment later a handsome gentleman appeared in a green silk robe holding a glass of cognac. He leaned against the doorframe, raising an eyebrow quizzically. Although Voryzek had not paid much attention to performances, he had seen this man at the stage door on several occasions, and assumed he was an actor. Voryzek introduced himself then explained Pytlik's theory.

"Ah yes, no mystery there,” said the actor. “After the show she said she was going to have a quick look through the script. To be honest I forgot all about it. She's asleep somewhere in the theatre by the sound of it."

"Asleep?"

"She suffers from narcolepsy.” He smiled at Voryzek's puzzled expression. “Means she falls asleep a lot. In rehearsals, on the tram, in a department store, even standing up. She takes rather potent pharmaceuticals to keep her awake, but sometimes they affect her acting so she doesn't bother. That's when she falls asleep."

"But what if it happened during a performance?"

The actor swirled the cognac in his glass, took a sip. “Milena Palovsky is a dedicated professional. She would never fall asleep during a live performance."

"How can you be sure?"

His smile was mocking. “I'll try and explain. You see, once she's made a connection with an audience, on a psychological and spiritual level, they give her all the energy she needs. It's like an electrical current. You'd have to be an actor to fully grasp what I'm saying."

"I think I get the idea."

"And like I said, the drugs do the trick. But occasionally, when she feels she's not quite getting into character, she'll stop taking them for a day or so. She calls it ‘recharging her empathy'. Her artist's insight, if you like."

Voryzek touched his dripping hat rim. “I understand. Thank you for your help."

"One thing,” the actor said. “If you're going back to the theatre, it's not advisable to force her awake. We tend to leave her to it. She'll be alright."

Voryzek walked back towards the bridge, avoiding the puddles that had formed in the cobbled road. Narcolepsy? And he had always thought she possessed a lazy streak, never suspecting a recognised medical condition. But perhaps it had worsened over the years. Reaching their bench, he felt a twinge of guilt for when he used to snap at her. He sat on the wet surface, stifling a yawn, trying to determine his next move. He was tempted to leave it for tonight, to go home and get out of these damp clothes. He could raise the issue of breaching regulations tomorrow. Surely the visiting company was responsible for one of their actresses? What sort of people would leave her alone in a dark building anyway? Those actor-types were an irresponsible bunch. But what if Milena awoke confused and disorientated? She might fall in the darkness. This very minute she could be lying injured.

The theatre's baroque façade was in shadow, the windows dark. Rainwater flushed off the main entrance's glass awning onto the pavement. Voryzek approached the stage door entrance, reaching in his pocket for his keys. He checked his other pockets then remembered leaving them hanging on a hook in Pytlik's booth. He cursed. Was nothing going right tonight? Pytlik had the other set, but he lived miles away.

Voryzek remembered the cellar window. He had been complaining to the maintenance man for months to fix that clasp. He walked around the side of the theatre, stopping beside the wrought-iron gates. Feeling like a prowler, he jumped the gates into the narrow lane then trotted off among the shadows. He passed the entrance to the scene dock—the giant sliding door where scenery was loaded in and out. Alongside this was a stairwell leading down to the cellar. He descended carefully, as the mossy steps were slippery, the damp-smelling recess thick with a mulch of dead leaves.

Standing on tiptoe, he forced the window open with his fingertips. He threw his hat inside then pulled himself up to the ledge. He squeezed through, snagging his coat, yet eventually managed to drop down to the other side. In the darkness he groped among the beer barrels and wine racks till he found the door. He didn't bother turning the lights on because it would only mean doubling back and turning them off again at some point. He walked along a corridor then came to the wardrobe store. The dusty room was crammed with costume rails and wicker skips. A group of mannequins stood motionless, some naked, others wearing period dress: a lady with a black veil, a man in top hat and tails, a soldier with epaulettes and shako. He quickened his pace, as the figures unnerved him in the darkness. As he was entering the prop store, he heard a noise. A dull clanging, a metallic tap-tap projecting through the plumbing. He listened again, yet heard only the dull throbbing of his temple.

Then he jumped as a scream ripped through the silence. Muted by the pipes it had travelled through, but a scream nonetheless, a singular note of unwavering tone that made him shiver. Was that Milena?

He rushed through the prop store, bumping into a table, knocking an old oil lantern onto the floor, barely hearing the glass shatter. Had he imagined its nightmarish tone, or was Milena in some dreadful predicament? In a fearful daze, he travelled through the dark building before eventually arriving at the stage door through a set of double doors. Once inside Pytlik's booth he grabbed his keys and the old man's flashlight.

There was an unnerving quiet, which he half expected to be broken by a sickening wail. He tried composing himself. A clear head was needed here, free of frightful thoughts and digressions. Damn it—where could she be? Where would he go to look over a script if he did not want to be disturbed?

He jogged back the way he had come and entered the auditorium through a side door, making his way to the centre aisle. Behind was the orchestra pit—fenced off with a brass rail—and beyond this the thick edge of the stage jutted out from beneath the iron curtain. He swung his flashlight across the galleries. The beam picked up the ornate gold-leaf designs that decorated the white-fronted balconies, and rows of empty maroon seats. He peered at the curved architecture of the boxes. Then he heard the scream again. Closer, enhanced by the auditorium's acoustics, drawing the hairs erect on the nape of his neck. In one of the boxes was a shadowy figure.

He rushed out and climbed the stairs to the next level. He entered the box, pulled aside the heavy curtain. Milena was sitting in a chair, her back facing him, alone. There were several gold chairs in the box, scattered in a disorderly fashion. Her alert posture suggested she was watching a performance rather than sleeping.

"Milena?” he whispered.

Treading softly, he walked around her. Her eyes were closed. She did not appear to be in any distress. Must be having nightmares, he thought, relieved. He pulled up a chair.

She had not changed a great deal in thirteen years: leaner in the face perhaps; tiny lines in the corners of her closed eyelids; more assured and elegant looking. Yet the hair that he had once run his fingers through was the same shade of walnut brown, the lips that he had once kissed the same soft pink. She did not make a sound. She might be dead.

Close by was a vanity mirror on a swivel stand, a black leather bag, a glass of water, and a script which lay open on the box's red velvet shelf. He took the mirror and held it an inch from her nose, leaning close enough to inhale her perfume. He was relieved to see the mirror's surface blur. If she were to wake now he would be happy to talk with her. He felt confident with just the two of them, away from a crowd of sharp-tongued thespian types with their casual put-downs. The actor had said not to force her awake. It seemed good advice. To do so would be almost sacrilegious. He decided to wait until she woke, even if it meant for the rest of the night.

After half an hour, her lips opened fractionally and a piercing scream issued forth. A strange sound, akin to the shriek of a bird, but no less unsettling than before despite his knowing she was in no danger. He wondered what terrible things she was dreaming of. He studied every inch of her; the contours of her waist and hips in a snug-fitting navy rayon dress, her smallish breasts pressing against the shiny thin fabric, the slim legs in tan stockings. The sight summoned carnal memories of her naked body—soft white skin, rosebud nipples and a thick tuft of mousy pubic hair—and he became aroused. He cleared his throat quietly, feeling ashamed, a voyeur. What if she woke now and saw his excitement? A distraction was needed.

He took the script of Lady of the Crows and began flicking through. At first the words carried no meaning, and were just ink on paper. Yet after some time he began to recognise certain scenes, mostly those involving Kudlic, the role he had played at the Academy. Once again it puzzled him why Kudlic had loved Zeminova after she had murdered two husbands and tried to kill him. Voryzek read the text of Act Two, Scene Three, his favourite part of the play, certainly from an actor's point of view, as there were some dramatic moments.

Voryzek muttered Kudlic's line. As he did this, Milena's lips moved. He thought she might be about to scream again but she made no sound. He repeated the line, louder this time. "You are too kind, my dear." There was a prompt now for Kudlic to turn his head from his book and smile questioningly at Zeminova as he recited the next line. Voryzek turned to Milena. "Are you going to hover about me all night like a little bird?"

Milena's eyes were closed still but her face was turned towards him now in the manner of a sightless person, or a clairvoyant reaching to the spirit world. "I'm sorry," she said in a whisper. "I was wondering what you were reading, that's all."

As she spoke Voryzek's skin came out in goose bumps. Was Milena dreaming the play? There was a scene towards the end where Zeminova screams in despair from her prison cell, and through the bars of her window the audience sees a crow settle on the sill outside. The crow's caw and Zeminova's scream merge as the play concludes. Could this explain why Milena had screamed earlier? Had she been dreaming the play's final scene? Or could she actually be rehearsing in her sleep? He felt both thrilled and disturbed at the prospect.

This was the first time he had read from a script since that disastrous audition thirteen years ago. It was surprising how quickly he eased into it. He was soon in character, and with no overly critical directors watching, he delivered with the understated panache that had earned him such good marks at the Academy.

At this point in the scene Zeminova is meant to be sitting opposite Kudlic, watching him intently still.

"Drink your cocoa, Kudlic," whispered Milena. "It will turn cold. I made it especially."

"What's that?" said Voryzek, looking up from an imaginary book. "Ah yes, thank you, my dear. You know, this novel really is very good. You should read it after me." Voryzek pretended to hold a cup in his hand. He made fake glugging sounds.

But Milena failed to recite her next line. Her expression puzzled, as though waiting. So he took the glass of water and drank noisily. Only now did she speak. "Nice and creamy, your favourite."

He pulled a face. "There's an aftertaste. Quite bitter in fact."

"I added a pinch of nutmeg and cinnamon. Don't you like it?"

"Unusual flavour. Very good though."

Voryzek drank more water. In rehearsals years ago they had used real cocoa. At first it had been a novelty, but he had soon grown sick of it. For a moment now, he actually tasted the lukewarm powdered chocolate. There was just a small amount of water left in the glass.

"Finish it. I will take the cup to the parlour."

As he did so his middle finger twitched. It began as a tick, but was soon jerking uncontrollably. He put the glass on the floor, and as he released it his whole hand came away twitching. He clenched a fist, opened it, and repeated this flexing action as he said his next line. "Why do you look at me so?"

"You are my husband. I shall look at you as I please."

The spasm had spread all along his arm now. There was a tightness in his chest as though someone were sitting on him. His next line was uttered in a hoarse whisper, as there was barely enough air in his lungs to form the words properly. "You unnerve me with your stare woman."

"That is to be expected. I have unnerved more than a few with my stare."

Voryzek decided enough was enough. He felt too unwell to continue, stricken with a sudden bout of influenza or something. He had to go home immediately and rest. He tried standing yet discovered it would take an extraordinary amount of effort, and a command of his limbs that he did not possess. His legs were convulsing now, his heels kicking the floor in a lunatic tap dance.

"It will soon be over Kudlic," said Milena. "The poison is working on your nervous system. There is pain, I know, and for that I am sorry. But I have tried making the transition favourable for you. I included the ashes of a crow, a bird very dear to me. Listen out for her. Follow the beat of her wings. She will guide you to the next life."

He saw his reflection in Milena's vanity mirror. An ugly vision: spine twisted violently, eyes wild and staring, jaw clamped in a woeful grimace. His body was in agony, yet his thoughts were coherent, his senses imbued with a remarkable clarity. From somewhere he heard the solid flutter of a large bird's wings, and instinct told him not to listen, not to seek it out. Something soft brushed his cheek.

But wait! Hadn't Kudlic survived? Didn't Zeminova, wracked with guilt, have a last-minute change of heart and call for the doctor? Kudlic was strong, strong as a bull, and he fought for life.

The script had fallen onto the floor at his feet. The text was a blur, and he could not remember the next line. He knew he had to get to the end of the scene. He knew that if he did so then the pain would go away. There was only one more dialogue exchange each before curtain down for a scene drop. But his throat was knotted. And what was that damned line?

Milena's eyes were open. She did not appear to be focusing on anything, not in this world anyway, but her expression was reproachful. The look sparked a memory from rehearsals years ago. He forgot his lines and she prompted him, teasing him about it afterwards. Of course! The most absurd line in the play in his opinion. He had never understood the playwright's mentality with that one. Why would Kudlic apologise to the woman who had just poisoned him? With great effort, he forced the words out through the pinhole of his throat. "I am sorry ... Alena ... my love."

"My love?" Milena laughed softly, though she seemed genuinely perturbed by this unexpected and final show of tenderness. "You weren't the worst, Kudlic. I'll grant you that. Perhaps things could have been different ... “ She shuddered. "But it's like ... like I have taken a ride on a train that never stops. A ghastly black engine pulling row upon row of funeral carriages. Once you are aboard, you cannot get off. And it gets faster! Faster and faster, Kudlic! My love? Why did you say that? Why make it so difficult for me?"

As she said this, the vile intrusion departed his body. His vision swam into focus. And all at once he understood the reasoning behind that line. Kudlic's forgiveness, his unconditional love for Alena Zeminova. That's what saved his life. Voryzek only needed to look at Milena to understand.

But now he must leave her, and they must never meet again.

He managed to stand and stagger forward a few steps. Just as he reached the door she spoke, in a different voice this time.

"Grigori? Is that you?” She rubbed her eyes, yawned. “It is you. I've been dreaming the play again. It never leaves me."

Voryzek stared, speechless.

"I heard you were working here still,” she said. Her smile was sincere, and it melted him. “How wonderful to see you again!"

He felt a little queasy still as together they walked to the stage door. He related the evening's events and how he had come to find her asleep in the box, though he omitted the part about reading the script. She laughed and apologised for her “wretched condition.” They stepped out onto the pavement and he locked the doors. The rain had stopped. The monochrome streets were glistening and silent. A few deep breaths of cold air and he was soon feeling better.

Across the road was an old man staring. Slowly, he crossed over, never taking his eyes from Milena. Voryzek recognised him from earlier in the evening. He had been last to leave the foyer after the show, and had been wiping his eyes with a handkerchief.

"Alena?” he said, shuffling closer.

Milena touched his arm tenderly. “No. It's me, Milena Palovsky. I'm just an actress. I thought you would've recognised me by now. You've watched every performance this week."

"Oh,” said the old man. “I thought..."

"It's late. Go home. No doubt we'll see you tomorrow for the matinee. You're our biggest fan. Good night, Kudlic."

Voryzek offered to escort Milena to her boarding house, and was surprised and flattered when she accepted.

A thick, static mist hung over the Vlatava as they walked across the bridge. She took his arm, the steam of her breath mingling with his. There was so much to discuss, so many lost years to catch up on, yet oddly, neither said a word.

Copyright © 2007 Tim Casson