propelling Dennis down a grassy slope between the outsized stems, the stout sartorial pioneer places a gentle but insistent hand between the youngster’s shoulder blades … Calendar’s fingers are, it seems, starting to fuse together … ‘No, chum, that’s not something you can just leave anywhere. What you’ve got there, it’s what they call a breach. You’ll have to take it to the City Heads and let them sort it out. Just follow Monolulu’s tip and you’ll be— Oh. Hang on,’ and Maurice brings them to a halt … floating towards them through the falling starlight, winding between the smooth green trunks of a gargantuan bouquet, there comes a phosphorescent gauze that hovers at approximately head-height … sinuous movement of a snake in water … Dennis stands stock-still while it drifts nearer, crinkling and relaxing its white fabric as though sniffing at him like a dog … after a thoughtful pause, it billows off into the stellar glimmer, and Maurice resumes both his unhelpful commentary and their downhill stroll … ‘Don’t worry about that. It’s one of the Arcana, and its title is Her Train. From what I gather, it’s drawn to the smell of poetry’ … the insectival hum in Calendar’s inflection is now more pronounced … heart hammering against the cell bars of his ribcage, Dennis is convinced he’s going to die; is perhaps dead already, blood congealing in a lightless Soho alleyway … they’re almost at the bottom now of their descent, and Maurice stops them in their faltering tracks …

  he directs Dennis’s attention to a point beside the path where two of the huge blossoms have grown close together, only a few feet of swaying grass between them … it may be the umbra of the flowering heads up high above, but in the gap that separates the yard-wide stalks there seems to hang a thicker darkness, a cessation of the starry fog … Maurice still has one hand – appendage? flipper? – resting on the stripling’s back, and as he leans in to confide, he has a funny smell … his voice now fifty houseflies in a jam jar … ‘Look, I know it’s rough the first time, when you haven’t got the hang of the perichoresis yet, but you go and see Awstin, like the Ras Prince told you. He’ll look after you. Now, nothing I’d like better than to stand around and natter’ … unobtrusively he’s guiding Dennis closer to the patch of abdicated twilight, the black absence in the scintillation … ‘but I’ll have to leave you here and get back to my Upper Beak Street lodgings in Soho Entire, or else there’ll be a lot of mess. Perhaps I’ll see you in a month or two’s time, but I won’t be me then. It’s just how I am. Good luck with all this, Knuckleyard. Just watch out for the anamorphic spasms,’ and with that, Maurice shoves Dennis forward … taken by surprise, he trips face first into the dark framed by the monstrous shoots … except they’re not there any more, it’s all – what’s happening? – all gone, the scents and sounds abruptly gone, the whole place gone, he’s falling, and the next thing that he knows

  he was on all fours, knees against hard London pavement in the middle of the night, and he burst into tears.

  He was chock-full of words, names, pictures and sensations that he couldn’t possibly begin to fathom; didn’t even know what order the events had happened in, as with a half-remembered dream. He was in pieces, all the certainties of who and where he was gone down into a terrifying quicksand of incomprehension. The eighteen-year-old’s attempts towards an adult personality that functioned in the world had come to bits like tissue paper, and so had the world itself. Nothing in existence was what he’d assumed it was, and Dennis grovelled weeping on a street he didn’t recognise, carrier bag in one hand and the Reverend Thomas Hampole’s double-damned book in the other.

  Gradually, a little at a time, the city that he knew came back to him, dark where the other place was starlit, cold where it appeared to have no temperature at all. He heard the purr of motor traffic from not far away, and somewhere near were intermittent voices raised in drunken jollity, with none of these sounds spiralling into the aviary trills and echoes of his just-concluded elsewhere. Something had just happened for which he’d no words, no language except snot and crying. One with the shell-shocked metropolis around him, Dennis had been in the wars.

  Posed like a dog amongst the senseless fragments of himself, he sniffed and snivelled, distantly aware of a reverberant and rhythmic tapping that seemed to be getting louder, drawing closer through the backstreet gloom. Pik-pok-pik-pok-pik, then a hesitation, then pik-pok-pik-pok-pik-pok and, finally, ‘Where did you come from?’

  Lifting a big head that felt too heavy for his neck, he tried to focus welling eyes – the left one difficult to open for some reason – on the source of the enquiring voice, female and unfamiliar, although in his present circumstances everything was unfamiliar. It was a young woman, unlit save for stray rays from a lamppost further up the street, which were nevertheless sufficient to set off the molten metal of her hair. He groaned and recognised the gorgeous streetwalker that he’d met, Jesus, was it only yesterday? He dimly understood that he must be in Bride Lane, evidently the girl’s pitch, and now someone he’d hopelessly and briefly fancied was stood watching him while he sobbed like a little kid. He didn’t feel like Winston Smith or Harry Lime. He didn’t even feel like Dennis Knuckleyard. Abject and wretched, he gazed up at her through lenses made of quivering brine.

  ‘N-nowhere. I … I don’t know. I don’t know.’

  Adjusting to the light, he saw that she was frowning now in puzzlement. She crouched down to his eye level and studied him more closely. Fleetingly, irrelevantly, he believed her upraised knees to be the loveliest he’d ever seen. She managed to maintain her calm, investigative tone, though he could tell that this was not without some effort.

  ‘I walked down here not two minutes back, to stretch my legs, and there was nobody about. Now here you are. Have you been in a fight?’

  He didn’t know. Had he been in a fight? Had he received blows to the head that would explain all this? Why had she asked that question? Did he look as if he’d just been beaten up?

  ‘It’s just there’s claret all over your mush. You’ve got a cut above your eyebrow.’

  Dennis lifted one hand questioningly to his forehead, where the fingers came back wet and sticky. That, he thought, explained why he’d had trouble opening his eye: it was the red glue. But how had it happened? Picking mystified through the kicked-over jigsaw of his recent memories, he managed to say, ‘No. No, not a fight. It was a sort of … silver paper, it just, it just flew at me. I didn’t …’, before realising what he sounded like and lapsing once more into racking sobs.

  Judiciously, the girl stood up, perhaps attempting not to startle him with any sudden movements, straightening her skirt as she took a step back. He sensed that, in her estimation, he was shifting from pathetic to possibly dangerous, but there was nothing he could do to salvage things. His head was full of wildlife, foreign objects that he had nowhere to put. Making the situation worse, there were now other people in the nearby night – an old chap puffing down the street’s far side, walking his dog, with a young couple giggling up the other way – and Dennis knew that him and the slowly withdrawing redhead must make quite a sight, or at least he must, on his knees and roaring; a big, shabby baby. He was bringing her the last sort of attention that someone in her profession wanted, and could hear increasing distance in her voice as she began to disengage.

  ‘Yeah, well, long as you’ve not been set on. You should take more care, chum.’

  Then it was pik-pok-pik-pok-pik-pok as she turned and walked back up the lane, presumably to once more take her place beside the lamp across the street from St Bride’s churchyard. She was the sole human thing that he’d had contact with since Tolerable John had exited the Cheshire Cheese, and she was leaving him alone here with his mouth full of perichoresis, vividistricts, Fisbo openings and silver-paper dragonflies. More desperate not to be alone with his unutterable experience than he was to seem manly, Dennis called into the widening dark between them.

  ‘Was it like net curtains?’

  Pik-pok-pik … the girl stopped and turned back towards him.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  He himself barely knew, and much less why he’d said it. Probably it was because he’d started to associate the churchyard up the road with the glass sculpture from his fit, the contoured soap bubble that stood amongst floral immensities. In the strewn fragments of his hurricane-hit recollection, he was sure that it connected to something she’d said the previous day.

  ‘The thing you said you’d seen. Was it net curtains, but all white and shining?’

  For long seconds, silence reigned and then, unhurriedly, pik … pok … pik … pok … pik … pok. She stood there looking down, directly between Dennis and the uphill streetlamp, hands deep in her pockets, face unreadable in shadow, hair a copper halo.

  ‘What’s the book?’

  Taken aback, he looked from her down to A London Walk, then quickly stuffed the grubby volume back into his carrier bag, exactly, he belatedly reflected, as a mad person would do.

  ‘I, I, I, I can’t tell you. I’m, I’m not allowed. It’s better you don’t know about it, to be honest. It, it, it’s a lot of trouble.’

  Once more, a protracted pause ensued while she considered this, surveying Dennis in his bloody, babbling wreckage and perhaps concluding that the book might indeed be a lot of trouble. Sighing in an admixture of resignation and annoyance, she crouched down again and skewered him with a gaze that brooked no argument.

  ‘Listen to what I’m telling you. In my coat pocket, on a bunch of keys, there’s one that isn’t any use for opening doors, and that’s because I’ve had it sharpened. If you ever get ideas – and, looking at you, I’ll admit that isn’t very likely – but, still, if you ever should, then you must understand I’m going to put your eye out. Am I making myself clear?’

  He nodded vigorously, anxious to convince her he was in his right mind, but then spoiling the effect by telling her she was as clear as Christmas when he’d meant as clear as crystal. She stood up.

  ‘And yes, it was net curtains, and they were all white and shining. That’s the reason why I’m doing this. It’s not because you’ve got a winning smile or lovely personality: it’s the net curtains.’

  She extended a surprisingly small hand, empty of weapons, down towards him.

  ‘Right, then. Pull yourself together. I’m Grace Shilling, and you’re coming home with me.’

  3

  Catshit Manor

  In an otherwise deserted ladies’ lav off Cannon Street, his irritated saviour insisted Dennis rinse off all the juice from what, as it turned out, had been a relatively minor cut, turning the water in the chipped handbasin pink like dentists’ mouthwash. ‘You’re not going anywhere with blood all dripping off you. It draws sharks and coppers.’ Patting himself dry, he looked up from a gory paper towel into the basin’s mirror and, for a few seconds, found he couldn’t properly identify with his own face, which briefly seemed a thing that he just happened to be wearing, eyes as blank as buttons.

  When he was halfway presentable, they carried on towards the east across a punch-drunk city. Her hair shaped and shaken by the wind, the woman was a candle leading him along Threadneedle Street, its rearing bank masking profound anxieties behind an imperturbable façade, the same as everybody else. They wandered up the murky swim of Bishopsgate, still relatively populous despite the hour, and in amongst the lighted boozers and the home-bound market trade, she took him by his carrier-free arm. This was presumably to make them look more like a couple and thus less conspicuous, but it also allowed her to propel her rescued stray in the correct direction with a firm and even painful grip on Dennis’s protuberant elbow. In the big dark overhead, he was surprised by how few stars there were, when normally he marvelled at how many.

  Other than occasional sharp words from his short-tempered escort, they continued up the main road without conversation, of which Dennis was as yet incapable. He’d just begun to worry that they were approaching Shoreditch, where Ada had said he shouldn’t venture, when the redhead – Grace, he thought she’d said her name was – marched him to the highway’s other side and into Folgate Street. They were in Spitalfields, tall houses piling up the Leather Apron shadows to each side, cropping the panoramic night above them to constricted rectangles; making the lanes human canals, deep cuttings silted up by history. As it transpired, at Folgate Street’s far end she’d got a ground-floor flat, which they were forced to enter by the means of pantomime and Grace’s mouthed instructions to avoid protesting floorboards in the hall. She didn’t want the neighbours thinking she was bringing business home, even if Dennis didn’t look like anyone’s idea of business.

  Her accommodation was three small rooms, but these smelled safe, and of her. They both removed their coats, and when she kicked her shoes off and lost some three inches in the process, Dennis felt still more ungainly by comparison. He perched on her settee, all knees and cranial bristle, while she made them each a cup of tea before she joined him there. Although his mug was cracked and ringed with tannin, he gulped down its over-sugared contents gratefully and, within minutes, it was like he’d had a blood transfusion. Vivid green eyes tracked his every movement.

  ‘Have you got a name, or should I just keep thinking of you as “the liability”?’

  He glanced at her resignedly before returning his attention to the tidelined teacup.

  ‘Yeah, I’m, uh, I’m Dennis. Dennis Knuckleyard.’

  He waited for the scorn and incredulity, but all she did was raise a pencilled eyebrow and say, ‘Hm. Well, that’s a useful name.’ Taken aback by the word useful where he’d been expecting stupid, Dennis didn’t think to ask her what she’d meant. The comment hadn’t sounded sarky, and he thought that he might even count it as a sort of compliment. Grace took ten Craven ‘A’ from her slumped handbag, and the packet’s mascot cat head, black on red, became immediately elegant in her white fingers. Lighting up, she plumed a writhing salamander of blue haze so exquisite it almost made him take up smoking on the spot, and narrowed her viridian gaze to an interrogator’s lamp.

  ‘So, Dennis Knuckleyard, what do you know about net curtains?’

  Dennis ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck absently, against the shaven grain. She looked so warm, had such a vitalising presence, and he genuinely didn’t want her to end up the wrong way out. He told her what he could.

  ‘It’s like … I think I’ve got myself mixed up in something horrible by being told things, and I don’t want to land you in the same boat. So if I miss bits out, it’s not that I don’t want to tell you; it’s that I don’t dare. Are you alright with that?’ She pulled upon her cigarette and nodded. He went on. ‘The only reason I’m involved in this, it’s all to do with where I work, at Lowell’s Books & Magazines just up the road in Shoreditch. Anyway, we had this book turn up …’

  He trailed off, noticing that she already offered an expression of affronted disbelief before he’d told her anything at all unusual.

  ‘Wait a minute. Lowell’s Books, that’s Coffin Ada Benson’s place. You work for her? Someone told me she’d had six blokes buried alive in her backyard.’

  Astonished and appalled, he gaped. Had everybody known of Ada’s homicidal history except for him? He struggled for an adequate response, but all that he could manage was, ‘What I heard, it was just the one,’ realising once he’d said it that this wasn’t much of a defence, for either him or his employer. Grace now had an element of wariness in her regard, but indicated that he should continue with his narrative. Clearing his throat, Dennis began again.

  ‘We got this book in a job lot. It looked like rubbish, but it really put the wind up Ada. She said it was, well, not cursed exactly, but as good as. Said I’d got to get it back to where it came from before something awful happened, but I didn’t, and it did: the chap I bought it off, I showed up at his place in Soho right when they were loading him on to the morgue truck. There were scuffers everywhere. Someone had done him in, and later I found out that it had been over the book. There were these criminals who’d heard about what it could do and wanted it themselves, like something from Dick Barton. This must sound as if I’m making it all up.’

  She nodded, stubbing out her fag in half a bivalve that appeared to have washed up on the unsteady coffee table’s wood veneer, an estuary memento.

  ‘Yeah, it does, but then I’ve never known a story about Coffin Ada that was anywhere near plausible. So, when you say these crooks had heard what it could do, then what was that, exactly? What can this book do, apart from frightening Ada Benson?’

  Dennis scrutinised her pale lavender wallpaper, held up with tacks where it was peeling, and tried hard to think of something he could safely tell her.

  ‘Well, it … it comes from a place that’s sort of special, and perhaps these people think the book is going to get them in there, like a ticket to the pictures. I don’t know. All I know is, I’ve had a run in with it, and it’s not for me. It’s making me a nervous wreck, so that I’m all on edge and seeing things. You know what I was like in Bride Lane. I’m not like that all the time, I promise.’

  She considered this. Pushing the sleeves of the grey jumper she’d had on beneath the raincoat to her elbows, she rose from the couch and fetched a teapot to top up their mugs before replying.

  ‘I believe you. I should hope there’s nobody who’s like that all the time, but what’s it got to do with my net curtains? When you said that you’d been seeing things …’

  The idea of hallucinations offered him a way to speak of his experience that was nearly rational, and Dennis clutched it with both hands.