Like a bank, the building’s lobby was all marble, with the churchlike hush fringed at its edge by echoed whisper. Well-presented men and women came and went in demure quiet, lugging their briefcases through the great columns of sunlight propped against the front glass. The prevailing mood was of immediate and natural respect for power, and Worsley found he was OK with that. American, he knew, was on the twenty-eighth floor. Almost tiptoeing, he made his way to a side concourse where two banks of elevators faced each other across tiles that were marmoreal and sibilant. Locating one that had floors twenty-five to forty as its promised destinations, Worsley congregated with a random half a dozen staring strangers, silent as a baby funeral, watching the bright ruby numbers counting down towards them. Nine eight seven six five four three two Ground Floor. Bing.

  The doors slid back with a self-satisfied intake of breath, and in the elevator was a monster. Eight-limbed, a bespoke arachnid but demonstrably bipedal, it stood quivering grotesquely at the centre of the otherwise deserted carriage. Readjusting the parameters of the word ‘alien’, the mind reeled, failing to provide a category for what it was looking at: the creature, or perhaps the object, seemed to face towards the elevator’s rear, at least from the alignment of its handmade oxblood brogues. All six of the thing’s upper limbs were folded in defensively around the polyester thorax, four of them emerging from the horror’s back, the upper pair in navy with pink spots that folded down like wings across the shoulder blades, the lower white and hairless and tensed like a backward cricket’s. As it shook and trembled, it made sounds that were uncanny, oscillating between different growling registers, one deep, one deeper still, as in the strange throat-singing of the Tuvan people. Growling, shivering, the otherworldly dignitary made its debut to the small, stunned crowd stood on the far side of the gaping doors, where no one moved save for their pupils dwindling to pinpricks, atoms, quarks and then gone altogether. An unfathomable, hideous angel, it spoke only to apocalypse.

  Then the eruptive boiler shuddering ceased, the rasping and inhuman dual voice fell silent, and the rear limbs gradually unpeeled themselves. Part arthropod and part amoeba, the reality-defying entity next fissured into two discrete and separate life forms. Suddenly, the carpeted and spacious box contained a stony-faced executive in his late fifties and a short, blonde businesswoman in designer clothes and possibly her early forties. Neither of the pair looked at the still frozen spectators, not as if they were avoiding eye contact, but more as though the dumbstruck onlookers outside simply did not exist on their attenuated plateau of awareness. Smoothing down her dotted navy skirt, the woman said, in a surprisingly deep voice, ‘So, you can get those contracts to me by next week?’, and there was the brief buzz of a drawn zipper before her associate replied, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Then they both turned towards an audience that were apparently invisible to them and exited the elevator, moving independently away across the shining, shushing lobby murmuring beyond.

  Without acknowledging what they’d just witnessed, Worsley and his fellow trauma victims entered the vacated space and jabbed requisite buttons. It had been a drive-by haunting. They ascended in a redolence of fornication, wildly different individuals united by their desperate longing not to be there; by the certainty that on their separate and distant deathbeds, they and all these other people that they didn’t know would whimper at the same appalling memory, made family by monstrosity. There was an old guy at the rear that Worsley thought was maybe crying.

  When the doors sighed open at floor twenty-eight, he disembarked and was immediately transfixed by shock at where he found himself. In panic, he turned back towards the elevator but it was already gone, whisking its sex-bombed passengers towards the building’s unknown upper reaches.

  Porlock stood in an unpopulated corridor that had the look of an unwelcome acid flashback. Walls of citric yellow had been overprinted in electric turquoise with a pattern as if two or more sheets of concentric-circle halftone had been overlaid, so the resultant moiré flickered into butterfly ellipses as Lorenz attractors or berserk magnetic fields, an aura of anxiety and stress made visible. Extraterrestrial, the décor made it just about impossible for him to get his bearings, and he bitterly reflected that addressing his drink problem had been meant to rule out episodes like this.

  Down at the corridor’s far end, like some mirage viewed through a heat haze of pulsating colour, a tall man was standing by a watercooler with his back to Worsley, too far off to call to. His spatial awareness floundering in weaponised interior design, like that of a CIA mind-control experiment, Porlock progressed between the spiralling and spinning walls with the exaggerated stagger of a furloughed sailor yet to find his land legs. Eighteen months’ hard-won sobriety and here he was, stuck in a Hitchcock titles sequence, stumbling like a baby. The distant figure further down the psychedelic tunnel did not move, nor, for a scary thirty seconds, seem like it was getting any closer. Then, in a confused perceptual rush exacerbated by the wallpaper, Worsley was in a small reception area with an abandoned desk and just the one guy at the water cooler, maybe a receptionist taking a break or something. ‘Boy, am I glad to see you,’ gushed Worsley in relief after the corridor.

  The life-size resin replica of Ambrose Bell, secret identity of Thunderman, made no reply.

  Porlock was frightened now, and in that elongated moment felt as if he hung above a garish abyss where he had no way of knowing what was real. Then Brandon Chuff rounded a corner into the untenanted space and said, ‘Worsley Porlock! Jesus Christ, you look like shit, man. No, I’m kidding.’

  Worsley was just pleased to spot a friendly – or at least, passive-aggressive – face. He babbled a hello to the United Supermen writer and editor, then let Chuff lead him down the swirling migraine passages for a full tour of the American experience. They first called at the office of Pete Mastroserio, wherein the company’s executive director was involved in a robust exchange of views with writer Jerry Binkle over – it goes without saying – Mr Ocean. Mastroserio, a rumpled figure made of duvet meant to trick the guards, was saying that the last time anybody on the planet had been interested in the subaquatic sentinel was in the 1970s, when a fired colourist had crudely drawn an erect penis jutting from Kid Ocean’s swimming trunks that nobody had spotted before it was on the newsstands. Jerry Binkle, who had longed to see an eighty-page giant Mr Ocean annual since the age of twelve, was differently persuaded. Blond hair thinning, pink with indignation, Binkle was a strawberry ice cream dessert confronting Mastroserio’s more substantial smoked-fish entrée, when they never should have been on the same menu. Both men cordially greeted Worsley for about five seconds, then resumed their bellowed threats and imprecations as if Chuff and Porlock were no longer in the room. ‘Look, Jerry, no offence, but seriously? I wouldn’t wipe my ass on Mr Ocean.’ ‘Pete, you know that I respect you, both professionally and personally, but I am going to hunt you and your family down and kill you all for this.’ Picking up signals that their visit was inopportune, Worsley and his snickering Virgil backed out of the office and resumed their jaunt through the eye-rupturing Inferno.

  Wandering in the mechanically tinted labyrinth, it came to Worsley that these halftone halls and life-size comic characters were, in some strange way, flattening him, turning him to something two dimensional, as if his entry to the industry were also entry to a new life as cartoon, conducted in the depthless confines of a coloured page, forever slightly out of register. He wondered distantly if a prolonged exposure to this wilfully unreal atmosphere, month after month, year after year, explained the mangled personality that typified a long-term comic book professional. Deciding that most probably it did, he nonetheless continued blithely with his own adventure into that career.

  With Chuff, he next called at the office of the venerable Thunderman line editor, Sol Stickman, who had seemingly been born a septuagenarian at some remote point in America’s eventful past. After the deafening crossfire of Pete Mastroserio’s hostile environment, Stickman’s more orderly enclosure was a polished-wood oasis of congeniality and calm, though not without its own extra dimensions of unease. Foremost as a disquieting element was Stickman’s practised and mesmeric patter, honed across a hundred thousand bagels-and-lox breakfasts into something in between off-Broadway shtick and the Egyptian Book of Coming Forth by Day:

  ‘Trust me, you’re gonna go far. Like I always say, if it was up to me, further the better. Ever hear o’ Hugo Gernsback? Used to shine my shoes. He had this nutty idea for what he called “Fictional Science”, like how gravity’s a kind of glue that things secrete, but it’s invisible, and stuff like that. I told him, “Kid, change those two words around, you could be on to something. Otherwise, don’t waste my time.” These guys, what do they know? It’s like Herb Wells, this Brit who wanted me to agent for him one time. He’d show me his novels that he couldn’t sell, like The Moving Through Physical Space Machine, which was about a wheelchair, or The Man That Everybody Could See. War of the Adjacent Parishes, that was another. I said, “Herb, look, you’re an OK writer. What you don’t got is pizazz,” and I suggest he make these little changes, nothing major. Next thing, the guy’s telling me that I’m the greatest editor or literary agent that the world has ever known, so I say, “Yeah, sure. That and five cents will buy me a cup o’ coffee. Now get outta here, ya bum.” It’s like I said at Julie Metzenberger’s funeral when all his relatives were trying to drag him from the coffin so that they could kick him, “I’ve met more shmucks in this business than I would have as a shmuck collector, out collecting shmucks in Shmuckburgh, Pennsylvania.” Anyway, so, Worsley Porlock. You look like the kind of half-developed guy who probably grew up in awe of me. I’m guessing that you’re gonna wanna see the scrapbook. All you late-stage foetuses are basically the same.’

  Without waiting for Worsley’s answer, Stickman rustled in an office cupboard and produced the promised scrapbook, tombstone in the form of document, before trapping his speechless guest beneath its aeon-spanning weight. Numb and uncomprehending, Porlock turned the matt black pages that were badged with clippings from archaic newspapers, letters and postcards signed to the science fiction agent from dead literary giants, or photographs of Stickman, always seventy, in a variety of different cities, towns and decades, generally in winter, with his breath a white silk hanky draped upon the air. ‘See that eight-month-old baby in the pushchair? Stephen King.’ Fighting a mounting sense of obscure panic, Worsley flipped through the funereal pages of this dreadful ledger until coming to a tipped-in photographic print, spectral and bleached where too much light had been allowed in, that he thought he recognised as a daguerreotype. It showed Sol Stickman, in his sempiternal dotage, standing grinning with one hand clasped round the shoulder of a smaller, frailer man who peered mistrustfully into the lens, confused and squinting. Porlock slammed the scrapbook shut before his lurching psyche could confirm that it was definitely Edgar Allan Poe.

  Later, and with hindsight, he considered that most probably he’d been in shock, because he had no memory of exiting Sol Stickman’s room, and only seemed to fully regain consciousness when he and Brandon Chuff were once more in the whirling technicolour of the corridor, en route for David Moskowitz’s office. It was here, Worsley was certain, that the publisher would put him through the formal interview that would decide his future in the comics industry, or lack of one. It was here, also, that Chuff grimaced apologetically and said, ‘Worsley, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ditch you here. There’s work that I need to get back to, so I’ll leave it up to David to tell you that you’re a worthless putz, and that American is never going to be dumb enough to hire you. I’m just joking.’

  Chuff then disappeared into the bilious vortex. Porlock knuckled hesitantly at the varnished oak and realised that his palms were sweating. Long, excruciating moments passed without the knock being acknowledged, and he was about to leave the building and his dream job there and then, when, on the far side of the door, a nasal yet imperious voice enunciated the word, ‘Come.’ Uncertainly, he waited, but the message didn’t seem to have a second syllable. Swallowing hard, oiling the cool brass doorknob with his copious perspiration, Worsley went.

  Within the softly lighted crepuscule of Moskowitz’s workplace, the unnerved interviewee came finally to notice that none of the rooms he’d visited thus far had windows. Disconnected from the passage of the day and human time, the hours at American were small hours nested in continuous night. The publisher’s huge desk was at the chamber’s centre, soaking in a pool of strong light from above that only served to reinforce the sense that this was a place of interrogation. Moskowitz did not look up from the small print that he was studying as Porlock entered, leaving Worsley to assume that he should find his own seat and wait quietly for the other man to notice him. Other than Moskowitz’s swivel chair, however, there weren’t any other places in the spacious office to sit down, except for a three-legged wooden milking stool, positioned on the carpet opposite the engrossed publisher. Worsley stood blinking at this for some time – was it a joke; a test; an infantilisation technique; a cost-cutting measure; all of the above? – then sat down anyway.

  Even without this child’s-eye viewpoint, Moskowitz was an imposing man, three or four inches taller than the crouched job applicant. Behind his light-framed spectacles, the unquiet eyes were watchful, while his neat moustache gave the impression of a mind as trimmed, as orderly. After a small eternity, he shuffled pages, tapped them on his desk edge to align them, put the stack to one side and, at long length, lifted his incurious gaze to meet the frightened stare of Worsley Porlock.

  ‘Worsley. So. At last we meet.’

  They’d met already at a number of conventions, although Worsley didn’t feel it was his place to mention this. He gave a strangled chirp, and nodded.

  ‘Well, I’ve heard a lot about you, Worsley. Not to beat about the bush, the things I’ve heard have mostly been disturbing. Not least the insanitary incidents at ChiCons ’83 through ’85 – three times in the same dumpster, for God’s sake. How could that possibly have happened? Never mind. I take it that you’ve put your drinking days behind you, is that right?’

  Three times? Skateboarding Jesus, how could Worsley have forgotten ChiCon ’83? Admittedly, alcoholism wasn’t a great aid to memory, but still the revelation shook him badly. Nodding vigorously in response to the last question, his head a struck punchbag, Porlock made another inarticulate noise, like an injured squirrel, that he hoped sounded affirmative. Moskowitz studied him in silence for a while, probably still trying to figure out the shit-in-hair thing, and then, after a long stretch of mute deliberation, ventured his next question.

  ‘What is the civilian name of Clock Kid?’

  What occurred next was as startling for Worsley as the news of his disgrace at ChiCon ’83. A district of his mind he didn’t know existed, a closed-down and shuttered place he hadn’t visited in years, chugged, on the instant, into full industrial life, as if remembering its vanished purpose.

  ‘Gorlo Vamm.’

  How had he known that? The publisher’s sharp-featured face remained impassive.

  ‘What about his world of origin, his birthplace?’

  ‘Haxor.’

  Porlock, to his own astonishment, had suddenly become a factory of unimportant information that was eager to burst out. Across the tidy desktop, Moskowitz allowed himself the faintest apparition of a smile and went on with his questioning. Expanding Lad? Distorted Boy? What about Indescribable Lass? With his string of correct answers unbroken, Worsley started to feel as if he was acing this, and all without a word of spoken English. Bixil Preen, Zaloora. Lom Tertarvis, Margalanth, and Drilpa Nool, Wulpezer. Now that Worsley thought about it, David Moskowitz had always had a reputation as a fan of the Tomorrow Friends, but who knew that he’d integrated it into his interview technique so thoroughly? It was at this point that American’s beloved leader asked what turned out to be his last question. Fingers steepled. Leaning forward.

  ‘Have you ever in your life considered making a time capsule with your chronological and spatial whereabouts inside, a note intended for the fiftieth century and the Tomorrow Friends, instructing them to travel back through three millennia and accept you as a member?’

  Worsley gasped and drew back physically, recoiling from the question and forgetting he was on a milking stool. He was, then, belly-up and kicking on the deep-piled carpet as he answered. Everything had just collapsed, and he no longer knew exactly where he was or what was happening.

  ‘Yes! Yes, when I was five years old! How did you …?’

  Moskowitz’s tight smile broadened now, revealing the incisors. As the interviewee floundered, struggling to roll on to his front, the publisher stood up and walked around the desk with one manicured hand extended, bright eyes glittering.

  ‘Congratulations, Worsley. Welcome to American. I’m going to make you an assistant editor, and put you with Sol Stickman. He could use some help on Exploit and Exciting.’

  The apparently successful applicant was by now on both knees, as though at prayer. His new boss stood before him, grinning with unknown delight, an open palm now reaching down that didn’t seem intended as a hand-up. Feeling more obliged, tiny, and vulnerable than he’d been since infancy, Porlock felt that he had no option save to formally shake Moskowitz’s hand while in a kneeling posture, like a freed slave. He was mumbling his bewildered gratitude and wondering how this whole business could have possibly been more undignified, when he found out: in through the office door, without so much as a preliminary tap, swept the diminutive blonde woman in designer clothes that Worsley had, only an hour ago, encountered copulating in an elevator. Moskowitz, without relinquishing his new employee’s hand, said, ‘Mimi! Come on in, meet Worsley,’ and the full awkwardness of the situation became glaringly apparent.