they charge through fantasies of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, where the tall church is now a latticework of interlocking ivory daggers, brown stains on their cutting edges, and where, in a lower world than this, Grace Shilling loiters in unlovely company and waits for Dennis to get home … there are displayed albinos, crocodiles paraded in the effluent Nile of a gutter and still, in his side sight, balls of optic fluff that are dispelled by the most fleeting direct glance … Dennis is dogging Monolulu’s footsteps through a tangle of constrained Elizabethan passageways, peopled by intermittent serfs and flickering centurions, ducking low wooden beams that grow out of thin air to bridge these narrow, tilting streets he doesn’t know, and now he asks his symbol-decorated escort where they are … the Epsom witch doctor pauses amid a temporary flock of herded geese, and looks back over one embellished shoulder at the gawping adolescent … ‘Why, we are in the Persist of Cripplegate, a very famous part of dear old London, flattened by the fucking bastard Germans, and I will make no apology for my improper language. A young gent of tender years such as yourself will very likely not remember such a place’ … they move on through the huddled lanes that vacillate between cobbles and mud, the geese dissolving into a black carthorse who snorts steam, and Dennis yelps excitedly on realising his location … ‘I’ve been into Cripplegate, when I was little and me mum took me there shopping once or twice. I was out in the Blitz the night they bombed it, nine years old I must have been, and sheltering in Glasshouse Yard just up the way when all of the incendiaries were coming down. God, I’d forgotten that. And when the air raid finished, I saw something, in the fire and smoke, just for a second. It was like an archway, but I think it had, like, little rooms with windows piled on top of it’ … the turf diviner beams and lifts a piebald hand to indicate the soaring structure rising from the flagstones, duckboards, tarmac path ahead of them … ‘Then you were privileged, my friend. You saw the Cripplegate itself. I would lay odds that your glimpse was brought on by Germany’s despicable bombardment, which made cracks in both the entwined cities, oh, my word, yes! Although I recall that Glasshouse Yard was one of London’s Liberties, places unusually susceptible to jiggery and pokery. That may have been what did the trick’ …

  incapable of speech, Dennis trails after his gregarious guide, sleepwalking under the arched portal that he’d long ago dismissed as shell shock, the old Roman gate demolished to permit a widened road, two hundred years before he’d been conceived … he foggily recalls the horror-stricken figure reeling in the firelit aperture, but manages to steer that thought away before he has a chance to inwardly encounter the name Shakespeare … he’s got too much on his plate already, and the grey blots are still there, elusive at the margins of his vision … they continue through the self-dismantling territories, making their way north beyond the Sleep of Bunhill where Blake, Bunyan and Defoe sit perched on headstones in fluorescent conference, on into Shoreditch Remarkable, the Hoxton Stumbles, Crackling Hackney and the Stamp of Shacklewell … mile after mile of curdling and clarifying splendour, terrors of hybrid significance in all their Sunday finery, a monsoon of distractions notwithstanding the ongoing difficulties with his eyesight …

  these last are resolved, unpleasantly, on the Apotheosis of Albion Road, as Knuckleyard and Monolulu reach the fraying borders of Stoke Newington Miraculous … here are a myriad of flowers of unfamiliar hue, constant between the insubstantial architecture and the stuttering manifestation of its populace – entrepreneur Svengalis, slavers, abolitionists and lost Pre-Raphaelites – surfacing and submerging in the trickle of its time stream … noticing once more the optic fluke that hovers at the fringe of his perception, Dennis turns and looks at it directly in the expectation that it will evaporate but, horrifyingly, this time it doesn’t … seated on a fist of rock that juts from the uncanny flora is the memorably hideous cat that he’d last seen yesterday morning, pouring out through Austin Spare’s front door when the magician’s landlady had opened it … a suede of gristle-grey so fine upon the pelt that it looks naked, every crease and fold of its repulsive skin exposed to view … without the camouflage of fur, the felid’s epidermis is too thin to fully mask the queasy mechanisms of its jaw and the attendant muscles, lending it a peeled look … nothing but contempt in its piss-yellow eyes …

  catching sight of the sickening creature just a second later, Monolulu becomes motionless so instantaneously that he might have turned to chinaware … what most unsettles Dennis is the startled recognition and stark fear suddenly gripping his hereto fore unflappable companion … ‘Please, sah, do not move. We are in danger for our lives’ … the cat licks one unappetising paw and says, ‘Oh, you’re in worse danger than that, and standing still’s not going to help. If things have reached the point where you’re talking with me, then, frankly, nothing’s going to help’ … the voice, upsettingly, is male and human, but with yowling twists of pitch at unexpected intervals … the stomach-turning sphinx stands up and stretches before hopping from its granite pedestal down to the violet grass, uncomfortably close to the two men’s rooted feet … it paces in a slow, deliberate circle that compels the victims to perform a shuffling rotation at its centre, turning like a frightened cake stand lest it get behind them … in its padding orbit, the cat’s jaundiced gaze does not shift from them for an instant, with the barely covered bone whip of its thin tail switching irritably back and forth …

  unable to restrain himself, Dennis asks Monolulu what their persecutor is, in a hoarse whisper that the beast inevitably hears … stopping abruptly in its tracks, it cocks its anatomical depiction of a head and icily regards the pair … again the voice, unsettling and detuned … ‘They call me Charming Peter’ … finding himself in a conversation with a cat and no idea how to proceed, his normally loud colleague staying wisely silent, Dennis tremulously asks, ‘And why, why, why is that?’, to which the cat replies, ‘Because they have to’ … with no warning, it steps forward until it is standing at the youngster’s flinching toecaps, tilting back its head to nail him with a sodium-lamp stare … ‘Listen to what I’m saying. I can harm you in ways that you didn’t know existed. I pulled Teddy Wilson inside out as easily as if he’d been a washday sock, and he wasn’t a fraction of the problem you’ll turn out to be. You’re going to be the worst mistake those putrid noggins ever made, perhaps the one that brings this city down around their perfumed ears. Listen to what I’m saying. If I could, I’d disembowel you now before you’ve ruined everything, but that’s not how it works. Just know that when the day arrives, it will be me who’s coming for you’ … at this point, with great reluctance, Monolulu feels compelled to put his oar in … ‘Charming Peter, I implore you, sah. This young chap cannot be the obstacle that you suppose. Please do not form an untoward impression of the boy because of his naivety’ … the cat subjects him to a nearly fleshless smile … ‘Oh, don’t you worry about this walking disaster. You’ve got troubles of your own. Your death, when it occurs, will be the doing of black magic. But I mustn’t keep you. You have lots to think about’ … and then, with a last withering inspection of the cowering Knuckleyard, it’s gone into the drifts of unknown flower …

  despite the animal’s repeated admonitions, Dennis had stopped listening when Charming Peter had claimed authorship in the demise of Teddy Wilson, and can only stand there trembling, nothing in his head but deafening fire alarms of panic … by his side, the vivid racing forecaster is pale as cigarette ash, winded by the hairless monster’s forecast and for once devoid of spiel … the cat has evidently got his tongue … with neither man willing or able to remark on what just happened and a knot of doom nested in both their bellies, they continue in near silence through the sumptuous gardens of Stoke Newington Miraculous, flaring with wraiths of flesh and brickwork … suffragettes and burning pillar boxes, unimaginable entertainments and a stadium chant that echoes in the higher world’s unearthly soundscape, ringing from the future … ‘Harry Roberts is our friend, he kills coppers’ …

  finally, their trek concludes at an Edenic park, where the unprecedented blossoms are contained by bastions of fabulous design … still barely able to converse, Prince Monolulu indicates a rearing wall of windows at the meadow’s furthest end … one of the apertures up on its highest floor is standing open and seems shabbier than the rest, an ordinary builder’s ladder soiled with whitewash propped incongruously beneath it, out of place in these transcendent reaches … at the ladder’s foot, his sobered guide conveys with an extended palm that Dennis should be first to climb the spattered, splintery rungs … stupid with dread and glory he ascends, almost completely unaware of what he’s doing, still preoccupied by that unutterable cat … he can hear Monolulu, heavy on the treads behind him, as he nears the gaping fenestration, paintwork peeling on its weathered frame … he can’t see anything past the chipped ledge, with whatever interior exists beyond become a square of solid blackness in its contrast to the drenching light outside … still trying to recall the worst of Charming Peter’s horrid monologue, he’s unprepared for the thick, powerful arms that thrust from out the inky dark to grab his gabardine lapels … he’s struggling in empty space, and then,

  before he knew it, he was grovelling and wheezing on the stained linoleum of a cabbage-scented hovel, the untidy junk of a material world piled everywhere upon its busted furniture. This time he didn’t puke or weep, but both his mind and stomach were performing somersaults, wrenched by the shock of his transition. Dennis became haltingly aware that there were voices in the dingy room with him, and groggily he levered himself upright to see who it was.

  The gnarled and bulky market trader that he’d clocked in Berwick Street the other day hulked to his left, and to his right there was the oddly built man with the dragging orthopaedic shoe. Between them, being helped over the ledge into the gloom of the apartment, a clearly exhausted Monolulu cursed and swore, ‘Never again! That is the last time, or I am a Dutchman. The last time!’ Out through the window, framing the pretended prince, were the pavilions and the unimaginable blossoms of a dissident reality, a madman’s heaven tinted by a broader rainbow.

  This time, Dennis fainted.

  5

  Woodenhead

  When the world returned to Dennis, it was not immediately recognisable. Horse-blanket curtains had been pulled across the problematic window at the room’s end, shutting out the alien sunshine and replacing it with an unshaded lightbulb, dangling from its twist of flex. The cluttered living space, to Dennis, appeared unaccountably and wholly wrong, from floor to furnishings to the three men who were apparently in the apartment with him: nothing changed or shifted, everything stayed resolutely as it was from one slow minute to the next. The murmur of the other parties’ discourse did not shrill or bubble up into a fanfare of imaginary instruments, remaining at a register that now seemed flat and two-dimensional. The normal was for a few moments foreign, as with the attempt to walk on solid ground after a spell at sea.

  He found himself sprawled on what felt like an inadequately sprung settee, his body limp as someone made from wool. Nearby, sat hunched on a low stool, the disproportioned chancer with the iron boot was speaking as he held out an exotic object made of liquid, bone and rising vapour, which Dennis at last identified as a hot drink.

  ‘Here, get this down yer – a nice drop o’ Rosie with three sugars. That’ll sort you out.’

  Taking the proffered cup in nerveless woollen fingers, Dennis sipped, surprised as the warm sweetness seeped into his system and the habit of material being gradually came back to him. Details of his environment unhurriedly swam into focus as he reassembled what existed, jigsaw piece by jigsaw piece. He noticed the unsteady ladder that he’d lately mounted, evidently pulled back in and resting on its side against the skirting board. Up in one gloomy corner, the imposing fruit-and-veg purveyor sat attending to a plainly agitated Monolulu, who was fretting over his foretold demise, to be occasioned by black magic. ‘Sah, I’d sooner be back marching for my meals with the Salvation Army than go near that slinking fiend again! It pisses poison everywhere, and looks like it’s been skinned! I wish with all my heart it could be boiled to glue!’ The market vendor’s guttural commiserations were too softly spoken to be audible, though this did not decrease his overpowering presence: even from his couch on the far side of the untidy quarters, Dennis could see muscles standing out like tree roots on the big man’s neck and forearms. Blincoe, that was the chap’s name. Gog Blincoe.

  Closer to him, crouching on a few inches of footstool, the character with the built-up shoe had his attention on the couple in the corner, listening to Monolulu’s tirade of complaint and Blincoe’s gravelly reassurances, eyes sad and sympathetic beneath overgrown black brows. Without the customary hat to cover it, the fellow’s hair was long and lank down to his collar, but, on top, was hardly there at all. He wore his heavy coat indoors against the late October chill, and at his wrinkled throat, a purple silk cravat bunched in its ornate silver fastening. He turned his somehow noble head to Dennis and smiled wearily, nodding towards the still-indignant tipster.

  ‘Charmin’ Peter, ay? Sounds like you ’ad a run-in with that scabby little fleabag, from what Monolulu ’ere’s been tellin’ us while you were spark-out. I’m Jack, by the way. Jack Neave, but people call me Ironfoot. Lovely to meet yer.’

  The worn-leather voice was soft, warm and accommodating, and, to Dennis as he surfaced from his swoon, seemed an aural equivalent to the revivifying tea he was already halfway through. At Charming Peter’s name, though, he made an attempt to sit bolt upright, managing an unimpressive forty-five degrees before subsiding back on to the sofa’s lumpy cushioning. The man with mismatched legs gazed at him questioningly, while Dennis tried to recall what words were for.

  ‘What, what, what’s Charming Peter? What’s he for? What, what, what does he do?’

  Neave turned the corners of his mouth down and then tipped his head from one side to the other, indecisively. His mannerisms and his intonations seemed to have been probably acquired from marketplaces, fairgrounds or the draughty ends of seaside piers, Dennis decided.

  ‘Well, if I’m succinct about it, ’e’s a mouthy little cunt. ’e’s, like, a frightener, and an enforcer, what’s called a performer in the criminal fraternity. That’s not to say, however, that ’e can’t do you a mischief – in all likelihood, a fatal mischief – if you piss ’im off. Officially, he’s answerable to the City ’eads, but if there’s something or somebody that ’e thinks needs doin’, they don’t ask too many questions. They’re a mixed bag, are the ’eads. Ol’ Swedenborg and ginger nut, John Williams, they’re alright, but Cromwell and ’is mates you need to keep yer eye on. I mean, they’re not goin’ anywhere, but all the same. A lot of ’em are just as crafty now as when they were on shoulders.’

  Dennis’s partial recuperation had been spotted by the duo on the chamber’s other side, who now pulled up their spindly chairs to the settee, both of them towering over Ironfoot Jack, squatting beside the couch’s nearer end. Down at its foot, Prince Monolulu remonstrated volubly, the blustering outrage doing nothing to disguise the fact that he’d been shocked to his flamboyant core.

  ‘Thank heavens that you are recovered from our grave ordeal. I feared the mangy brute’s insinuations may have speared your vitals, as they have my own.’

  Seated on Monolulu’s left, Gog Blincoe lifted up a spade-sized hand with pale hairs curled like shavings on its back, to still the forecaster’s offended ire.

  ‘The London Cat will do as it will do, and cannot have a part in our discussions. To my mind, more pressing is the matter of Jack Spot and the young woman. That is business that we must put right, and do it sooner rather than too late.’

  With a protruding jaw and his small eyes like knotholes, the street vendor’s face was contoured something like that of a wild boar or a head from Easter Island. The deliberation evident in Blincoe’s every word or gesture had an aura of such gravity that Dennis once more tried to lever himself upright to show his respect, this time with more success. His head still swimming, he sat on the sofa’s edge and, prompted by the trader’s mention, thought with sudden paralysing clarity of Grace and the appalling trouble they were in. Dazedly gaping at the men around him, he attempted to convey such useful information as he could, stumbling on words and dribbling his syllables.

  ‘Grace – the young woman – Spot’s got her in Spitalfields. He said, he said that if I didn’t get him the arrangement that he wanted, he was going to top the pair of us. He said …’

  Once more Gog Blincoe raised a weighty palm, the loops and whorls of which were not restricted to its fingertips, and with a curving lifeline so deep that it looked as if a saw had slipped. His voice had the low, splintering creak of ships’ holds in the night.

  ‘We have been told about your situation, Mr Knuckleyard. Along with our absent acquaintance, Mr Calendar, we have been watching out for you since the bad book turned up in Berwick Street. And now, if we hear right, the Heads of the Great When have been petitioned.’

  Ironfoot Jack had straightened up from his uncomfortable footstool, repositioning himself on the couch next to Dennis now a space was vacant. Lighting an unfinished dog-end that he’d taken from behind one ear, his interjection was a thing of billowing blue-grey.

  ‘Our Abyssinian royalty ’ere tells us ’ow Awstin swung a deal with Cromwell and the rest, allowin’ ’arry Lud into the short world so that ’im and Spot can ’ave their chit-chat.’

  Monolulu sucked on his front teeth dismissively and nodded.

  ‘What my one-and-a-half-legged friend says is, for once, entirely accurate. Their villainous discussion will take place in Arnold Circus at the witching hour tomorrow, by which time I hope to be somewhere else altogether. I can no longer afford to interfere in magical affairs, now I’ve been rudely told that they will be the death of me. I think that it is time for me to cut my losses.’