at its top, their paradisiacal defile runs into the Despairs of Clink Street, where is something terrible … a heaviness descends, a gravity that slows their pace towards the warp of wharf and warehouse bordering a still-unsighted river … to their left extends a street-long absence, a wide area of demolition that, almost alone amid these metamorphic terraces, seems not to be continually renewed … it looks as if a great, grim structure loomed here once, a single towering and tottering wall still standing at the site’s northernmost end, with, halfway up, the empty brickwork tangle marking the remains of an ornate rose window … it belatedly occurs to Dennis that this must be where the prison stood that gave its name to prisons everywhere … the crumbling window overlooks now an enormous cavity, where the deep cellar regions of the famous penitentiary have been scooped out, its bowels exposed to the relentless, always midday sky … his tutor’s grubby hand, firm on Dennis’s shoulder, shoves him gently closer to the pit’s edge … ‘Since we’re passin’, I thought you should see this. Go on, ’ave a butcher’s. It’s a big ’ole what they’re in, so they can’t ’urt yer’ …

  in the thirty-foot-deep yawn of the gaol’s excavated innards is a nightmare hatchery, with creatures that are neither insect nor umbrella spidering fastidiously on the penal rubble, clambering across each others’ intricately grooved and slotted backs, some several dozen of them, ratcheting and clicking … standing at the chasm’s broken edge, Knuckleyard moves his head from side to side in terrified denial … on examination they have only five legs, more articulated starfish than arachnid, with a glistening jet membrane stretched between … clattering, rearing, seeking purchase on the rough sides of their subterranean pen but falling back into the melee, upturned, kicking, ghastly and majestic as piano skeletons … glitter of lenses in a briefly exposed stomach … with each failed escape they modify themselves, they fold unwanted body parts away into their casing’s many apertures, Swiss Army organisms, sliding shut or opening from one configuration to another, and all their extremities have fists of needle, hook and frightful knife … a gaping beetle nest of dreadful engines …

  now the hand between Dennis’s shoulders hauls him back from the appalling precipice, almost paternally, and in his ear, the basement hierophant’s gruff mutterings resume … ‘They’re called the Popes o’ Blades. Been ’ere for donkey’s years, but nobody’s any the wiser about what they are. Best guess is they’re precursors to these homicidal maniacs we ’ear so much about at present, ’eath and ’aigh and that lot, things what kill just for the pleasure of it. It’s a fuckin’ awful sight what stays with yer forever, and you must be wonderin’ why I showed it to yer in the first place’ … still in shock and staring blankly, Dennis only nods as he is led through stupefying alleyways in the direction of the bridge, while Spare explains … ‘I wanted you to know ’ow seriously you ’ave to take this place, an’ what the consequences are if anythin’ goes ’aywire: a big enough upset in this London would mean lights out for the other one; for ours. Even this place’s minor problems bring about catastrophes where we come from. Remember yesterday, when you were in our kitchen, and I flung that article from the Reveille on the fire? Well, this is why: one o’ the Popes got out in 1888, an’ what was worse, it managed to break through into Short London before anybody realised it was gone. Most probably, it got in by one o’ the Liberties – they were these areas o’ London what were allowed different tradin’ regulations – since they’re just about the oldest of the back doors leadin’ into the Great When. My guess is, it used the entrance near the Liberty of Norton Folgate, up in Spitalfields where your young lady ’as ’er digs. All o’ that autumn it were on the loose and killin’ women, an’ it took a couple o’ this place’s heavyweights to bring it back ’ere. Sixty year ago, that was, and still mentioned in the Reveille, so be warned. Anything what leads back to this place, we don’t talk about it’ …

  they have by now reached the fever dream of London Bridge, and Dennis isn’t sure he can go on … his previous visit to this churning province, mostly taken up by vomiting and screaming, had been no more than ten minutes in duration, whereas this delirious ordeal seems never-ending and the pressure of merely existing at such levels of intensity is near unbearable … the artist’s casual reference to Grace Shilling, sitting up there now in Folgate Street with Jack Spot’s men, betting her life on Dennis’s return … it wakes a pang of panic in him still, but, viewed from these asylum pastures, doesn’t feel as real or as immediate, where there is nothing save the more-than-real, and many eras have immediacy … the pair traverse the bridge’s boiling continuity, convulsing between Roman wood and Norman elm, twelfth-century stone, supports dissolving from nineteen great arches down to five, to three, as the span reaches out across the cold, surging eternity of an immortal Thames … the edges of the structure are a foment of mills, churches, houses, bubbling up to seven listing storeys before simmering back down … a phantom tide of transports and pedestrians moves at the brink of visibility around them, Danes and peasant insurrections, funeral processions for dead kings with torchbearers five hundred strong, metallic millipedes and two-floor buses in anachronistic commute …

  then the river crossing is behind them, and with the abruptness of a journey in a dream, they’re on the pall of Ratcliffe Highway, in a fizz of ghostly whores and sailors, making their approach to Shadwell Melancholy … the despairing clank and cry of pirates drowning in their chains at Wapping Old Stairs drift inland from off the timeless waterway, sounds twisting and contorting in this latitude’s peculiar acoustic … turning left into a flattered Cannon Street Road, it occurs to Dennis that he’s yet to see the golden pavements of his previous outing, reasoning that such may be confined to the four-folded city’s central districts and not to be squandered on its outskirts … he reluctantly concedes that these are the first near-coherent thoughts that he has managed since he turned that drawing of a doorknob in the Brixton artist’s cellar … overcome by the enormity of his experience, he’s convinced that there are things he’s missing, things that he’s not seeing properly … a problem with his vision that has troubled him throughout this current venture, a grey, blurring movement on his ocular periphery that’s not there when he looks at it directly … he’s about to mention this to his more knowledgeable chaperone when the magician lifts one palm and calls a halt, the cease of movement shaking loose a further scurf of faces from Spare’s arc-light hair … ‘We’re ’ere’ …

  a little way up from the Ratcliffe Highway’s salty notoriety, just short of the perpetually recurring Blackshirt brawl in Cable Street, they’ve stopped outside somewhere that looks the way a public house would if it had been canonised, its spoor of hops worn like a halo … a snub-cornered chapel of intoxication that, as with the Elephant and Castle or the gutted Clink, appears immune to the continuous transmutation which afflicts its neighbours … on its signage, where the swinging board is decorated with yet more symbolic ambiguity – a youthful French prince in a golden coronet whose body is that of a porpoise – is the legend ‘Crown & Dolphin’ … seeming vexed, Spare frowns along the road in both directions, murmurs, ‘Still no sign o’ bleedin’ Monolulu, then,’ and turns to address Dennis, fishing in his jacket pocket for the bad-luck Hampole volume as he does so … ‘I expect ’e’ll turn up in ’is own good time, so we might just as well get on with what we’re ’ere to do. This place might look like it’s a boozer, but it’s more a parliament. It’s where the City ’eads assemble, and where ’opefully they’ll take this shillin’ shocker off yer without further incident. C’mon, let’s go through to the front room so that we can get this business over with’ …

  the weighted brass and glass of the establishment’s main entrance pushes open on to a brief passage where the lilies on the wallpaper are moving, withering or blooming independently, and then it’s through a latched door and into the haunted mumble of the Crown & Dolphin’s spacious bar … the City Heads have been arranged in a rough circle at the room’s perimeter … each is contained in a glass bell jar with a generous amount of pot-pourri to conceal any odours, all of them alive and talking, none of them still wedded to a body … long diagonals of dust and light lean in through chinks in the drawn velvet curtains to define a glimmering indoor twilight, heavy with the redolence of flaking petals and the susurrus of ancient conversation … there are possibly thirty or forty of the gossiping decapitations, by Dennis’s paralysed and flinching estimate … he numbly follows Spare across the room’s dull claret carpeting, through a convenient gap between the bottled craniums and thus into the ringed tribunal’s centre … the glazed hubbub dies away, and scores of eyes that should have long since dried to sockets turn in puzzlement to Knuckleyard and the itinerant magician …

  moulting more redundant personalities, Spare brandishes aloft the battered first edition of A London Walk and takes the floor … ‘Gentlemen, ladies, my apologies for interruptin’ your discussion. I am Zos, an adept from Short Brixton, ’ere to ’elp this mortal boy in the return of a breached artefact to your safekeepin’. It’s the ’ampole book, what Arthur Machen took a gander at when ’e first come ’ere. It’s already done a bit o’ damage although, luckily, so far it’s nowhere near as dreadful as that balls-up with the Soames collection, Fungoids. ’ow do all these bastard things keep gettin’ out? No disrespect intended’ … the enchanter faces a specific cluster of the watchful trophies while he’s speaking, although Dennis is as yet incapable of telling one jugged remnant from the next, all of them shabby and ungroomed, all of them pallid save a couple that would seem to have been dipped in tar … from the receptacle that Spare appears be addressing, one of the chopped eminences clears its ragged throat … male and in middle age, the black hair hangs in lank and greasy locks about his meaty features, jewelled with warts on cheek and brow line, there behind the thumb-smudged glass, and Dennis realises with a lurch that it’s Oliver Cromwell …

  clearly nowhere near its rumoured resting place in Red Lion Square, the relic nut of the dead, dug-up and dismembered Lord Protector looks both angry and embarrassed, shifting with a rustle of unease amid its nest of desiccated flowers … ‘Sir, we are as much perplexed by these escapes as you yourself. It might be that they are the work of parties seeking the disruption of our higher town to serve their personal imperatives, but whether Barebones, rogue Arcana or some further faction, we cannot be certain. Be assured, the matter shall reach resolution swiftly and with great severity’ … the muffled voice is grudging and officious, bristling with ill-concealed impatience, and the cold eyes of the regicide are swivelled now to Dennis … ‘Thank you for your timeliness and your discretion in returning this unfortunate bedevilment to us. My name is Oliver Williams-called-Cromwell. Who are you?’ … Dennis finds his hands are shaking, palms suddenly wet with perspiration as he answers to the severed head of England’s most successful and most ruthless revolutionary … ‘I’m Den, Den, Dennis Knuckleyard. I’m sorry. I’m not used to this’ … the captive capitals shuffle themselves around as far as they are able in their scented grit and prickle, eyes meeting conspiratorially, any remaining eyebrows lifted … finally, after conferring with his white- and red-haired neighbours in the jars to either side of him, what’s left of Cromwell raises once more its slate gaze to Dennis … ‘Knuckleyard. That is a clan we have not heard about before this day. The appellation seems to us outrageous, but is in some way not unfamiliar. Friend Swedenborg, what are your own thoughts on the matter of this young whelp’s disconcerting name?’ …

  the white-haired revenant in the adjacent vessel is an older man whose skin is ironed-smooth tissue paper, beard coiled like a sleeping cat in the crushed lavender, his piping voice almost inaudible from underneath the glinting dome … ‘He is, I think, familiar to our future, for are we not angels who know naught of time? That being so, the choice of his admission is not ours to make, and is already in a sense resolved. Whether this fore-remembered Knuckleyard should bring us benefit, misfortune or the pair in tandem, we can but sit in our lucent bulbs and let his comedy or otherwise play as it must’ … after a moment’s contemplation, the malignant egg that is now all of Cromwell rocks and totters slightly, nodding in so far as it is capable of doing so … a ripple of agreement seems to run through the encircling crania, transmitted in a language of squints, blinks, pursed lips and non-committal grunts … a woman with protuberant eyes, possibly Anne Boleyn, develops hiccups …

  with this article on the agenda settled to their satisfaction, the council of overdressed skulls gradually resume their previous apiary drone of muted conversation, buzzing softly from their separate glass hives … hugely discouraged, Dennis harbours the impression that the Lewis Carroll audience has been concluded, but then Spare steps forward, his armada-beacon haircut spilling cameo deformities … ‘’old on a minute. Beggin’ your illustrious pardon, I’m not done. This young whelp, as yer call ’im, ’e’s put ’imself an’ ’is loved ones in ’arm’s way on your account. Right now, there’s a Short London gangster, Jack Spot, got ’is girlfriend ’ostage, threatenin’ to execute the pair of ’em if Dennis can’t arrange a meetin’ between Spot an’ the Great When’s epitome o’ criminal endeavour, ’oo I’m guessin’ is still ’arry Lud. There’s one bloke dead already because you lot can’t keep yer man-eatin’ books shut in their kennels. Never mind takin’ the piss at ’is daft name, just get the ’opeless little bugger out of ’is predicament, an’ keep the peace in both our ’ouses, ay?’ …

  at this impertinence, the gathered delegates furrow their many brows, save for the few coated with hardened tar, who cannot … trying to shake his head but only wobbling, the tyrant puritan is adamant in his refusal … ‘No. A common cutpurse, while in life, shall not be granted entrance to our holy purlieus’ … in the bottle-hushed commotion, the red-headed specimen residing next to Cromwell lifts his reedy tones above the whispering uproar … ‘At your sufferance, I am John, who is Williams also, falsely called the murderer of Ratcliffe, and so emblem to injustice and her sanctimonious sister. In matters of criminality, mine is the senior authority. I move that Master Lud be granted licence to step out into the transient domain, there to conduct this exchange without trespass’ … following a brief and mostly mouthed debate, the fragranced horrors reach some manner of consensus and the Cromwell remnant is obliged to grudgingly make his concessions … ‘Very well. If Master Lud should prove agreeable, we shall permit this interchange. Do you propose a site and an occasion?’ … after first conferring with the human supplicants, the flame-haired scapegoat suggests Arnold Circus in Shoreditch – where there apparently exists an aperture between the Londons – offering the next day’s midnight as a schedule for the dialogue, to which the architect of interregnum sourly agrees … ‘Then we are done. Please leave the damnable book on the floor where you are standing, that our servitors may presently secure it. I bid you good day’ … dismissed, the two men drift in apprehensive silence past the ever-wilting, ever-blooming lilies in the hallway, back on to the sparkling résumé of Cannon Street Road, with a contrite Ras Prince Monolulu anxiously awaiting their emergence …

  marvellous in his erupting ostrich plumes and garment of embroidered charms, the trackside dandy is an English dream of Africa who seems less out of place here than he had in earthly Berwick Street … ‘Ah! Mr Spare and our young sprinter of this Tuesday last! Forgive me for the sluggishness of my arrival, but my morning has been spent escaping the deceitful rogues who claim they are my creditors. Confound them and their so-called promissory notes! How went your natter with the sainted loafs of bread? Did you return their piece of dog-eared juju without injury?’ … Spare nods, and mugging atavisms burst against the bogus prince’s robe of moons and shamrocks … ‘I suppose it went alright, seein’ as neither of us are wearin’ our bladders on the outside like a pair of underpants. There’s complications, though. Jack Spot’s after a chat with ’arry Lud, and ’e’ll top matey ’ere an’ ’is young lady if it en’t forthcomin’. You tell Ironfoot when yer see ’im that the ’eads ’ave granted us a meetin’ for tomorrer midnight, up by the ol’ rookeries in Arnold Circus. ’e’ll know what to do’ … the tipster and the conjuror consult while Cannon Street Road’s soul foams up prismatic everywhere about … once more at Dennis’s eye corner is dust-coloured movement, although when he looks there’s nothing there … scratching his head, displacing scabs of obsolete identity, Spare looks uneasy, eager to depart … ‘I don’t like bein’ ’ereabouts for too long at a stretch, in case I get the ’eebie-jeebies. Monolulu, ’e’ll accompany yer from ’ere, an’ I’ll nip back over the Centuries o’ Thames to me black ’ole o’ Brixton. ’ope it all works out, young Knuckleduster. Look us up, if you should get ’ome in one piece’ … and with his literal headlight and his comet tail of sloughed monstrosities, he strolls away downhill towards the Ratcliffe slaughters and the river’s billion-gallon rush of moment …

  bleeding colours into the surrounding jamboree, Prince Monolulu smiles encouragingly and claps Dennis on the shoulder … ‘Let us hurry, sah, the quicker to be done with all this harum-scarum. Mr Spare is right to say that too much travel here will lead us only to the booby hatch, and we must rush to our appointment in Stoke Newington Miraculous’ … as stately and involved with gambling as a riverboat, the talismans of his apparel billowing like banners, he steams off into the scrambled myth and chronicle with Dennis bobbing in his wake, caught up in the man’s hurtling energy …