to either side, buildings boil up and simmer down as Dennis skids on the quintessence of the Strand, sizzling in and out amongst the slow drift of phantasmal boulevardiers … men with the heads of pigeons, little girls with clocks instead of faces, stained-glass dowagers, and, gathered at the mouth of a sublime Arundel Street, grouped figures in Regency frock coats, wearing hose and periwigs and chalk-white gloves without a shred of flesh or skin to mask their grinning skulls … they stand in conference to examine unrolled diagrams or take a pinch of snuff, wet eyeballs swivelling suspiciously in their dry cavities as they watch Dennis and his hunter streaking past … does he remember Cromwell’s head mentioning something about Barebones? … but the thought is thrown away as he imagines Amery narrowing the gap between them, burying his letter opener between Dennis’s shoulder blades … refuelled by fright, he pulses forward and, near Surrey Street, sees once again the stocky form that Maurice Calendar had said was Arthur Machen, still in his viridian spotlight with his arms thrown up in ecstasy … and Dennis charges onward through unending marvel …

  on the iridescent avenue, uncanny traffic still processions and parades … helmets with headlights, tramcars that have gills and glide like trout, glass penny-farthings … as with his first visit, this illuminated torrent forks about a great, marmoreal erection rising from the highway’s centre, trailing rivulets of maypole ribbon, an unfathomable telescope of vast dimension balanced on the sculpted bulb … he hears Clive’s surprised bark of schoolboy laughter, ringing and repeating in the rarefied acoustic, still some way behind him but not far enough … competing fireballs, they stream past a steaming analogue of Charing Cross at the Strand’s end, where the Infanta de Castile’s beloved body touched the earth and sprouted an ornate stone monument to stroke the busy firmament … as he tacks right and surges through an ultimate St Martin’s Place towards the Indices of Charing, Dennis realises that his chosen route is simply an unplanned reversal of his flight with Maurice on that first occasion, running in the one direction he can almost recognise … it fleetingly occurs to him that this was not the wisest path he could have taken, but he has a madman with a dagger right behind him, and it’s too late now, one more spilled-milk decision that he doesn’t have the time to cry over …

  he leads their hectic dance of death into the Charing Cross Road’s flipped-through, frilling immortality: a canyon of cracked spines with doorways where the imprint of a publisher should be, with walls of rippling page in lieu of shopfront or façade … his chest is aching now, his legs and his adrenal gland exhausted … knowing that he cannot save his life and very soon will not be even able to prolong it, Dennis hammers on into the unfamiliar scents and soundscape of an utter London, into the distended jaws of his forthcoming doom and disappearance without so much as a marker …

  he’s eighteen years old and cannot bear the thought of suddenly and simply vanishing, with Grace and Tolerable John and Coffin Ada never knowing where he’d gone, his short duration ending in a puzzle and, thereafter, soon forgotten … with him living off the record to avoid his National Service, will there be the flimsiest remaining trace of his existence? … on the heels of this, he finds that he is thinking of Clive Amery, however much he doesn’t want to … thinking of the trail of slaughter that will certainly lead from his own, the other Kenneth Doldens and, oh God, the other Eileen Lockarts … but there’s nothing he can do about it except thunder on through the asylum lights …

  like beaded mercury he skitters on gold paving, Clive and Dennis both now only pulses of velocity, weaving at high speed to avoid collisions with the strolling wonders … in the road, a seahorse of cast porcelain on wheels rolls by the other way, and vehicles that bounce, and a brown anaconda omnibus that slithers with the creatures on its open top deck taking the intoxicating air … it seems to Dennis highly likely that the last impressions passing through his mind will be of things that he could never in a lifetime understand, an apex of monstrosity that no one save an ether-swigging fin-de-siècle poet could imagine … when he can’t resist the impulse any more, he risks a backwards glance across his shoulder, and discovers with alarm that Amery is closer than he’d thought … the kris clenched in one pumping fist, fawn raincoat flapping like a harrier’s wings, and on Clive’s face that impish, playful smile of certainty, the storm-grey eyes locked hungrily on his escaping prey …

  at Shaftsbury Avenue Superior, a river of bejewelled improbability, Dennis buys precious seconds with a reckless spurt in front of an oncoming transportation, a brass mechanism that conjoins the locomotive with the locust, leaving Amery paused briefly on its other side … dear God, he thinks, don’t let me perish here, beneath this herd of foreign stars … gaining the foot-worn treasure of the pavement opposite, his thoughts are a consuming bonfire of irrelevance, sparks going everywhere … an image of the clicking horror from his dream, concealed behind an evening paper with a nonsense headline … Clive’s surprise, back in the Upper Scandals, on discovering that there were fortunes underfoot: he’s not familiar, then, with the Great When’s interior … torn pages of Sax Rohmer gradually disintegrating in a Shoreditch gutter … out of nowhere, and before he knows what he is doing, Dennis finds his beanpole legs have made a unilateral decision to propel him out amongst the fuming, nightmare chariots that rumble on these Indices of Charing …

  he careers across the busy avenue, avoiding gaseous velocipedes, carts pulled by strutting metal peacocks, diamond humming tops … there’s a near miss with an impractically large roller skate … he hears Clive shouting something, still not far enough behind, and races on into the last place that he’d ever hoped to see again, into the trachea of an Older Compton Street … he doesn’t have the first idea why he is doing this; why he is slavishly retracing his initial flight with Calendar despite its leading inexorably towards the very place that Maurice saved him from … and suddenly, he knows …

  now galloping along what – one way or another – are his chosen track’s home furlongs, he swerves north abruptly into the ennoblement of Greek Street … blurry but explicit ferns, smut butterflies, a handful of mirages on their twilight promenades … and, at the steep lane’s near end, the deciduous gas lamp with its knotted ferrous roots sunk into precious concrete, where the shabby spectre of Thomas De Quincey slouches in eternity awaiting Ann of Oxford Street’s return … certain that Clive is close enough to see where he is going, Dennis darts across the relatively peaceful and unthreatening byway, making for the mouth of Bateman Street’s tropic epiphany …

  and now it’s rank outsider Ada’s Servant in the lead, only a length or two, with bookie’s favourite Legal Murder coming up on the inside … the sylvan squeal and chitter grows more evident, more resonant, and in his flaring nostrils, the exotic scent of petrol orchids now, the sour spoor of trash animals … he’s hoping he can get in fast enough, before the place wakes up … he hoofs it over a delirium of Frith Street with Clive right behind him, hurdling the first carnivorous dustbin that rolls optimistically towards him, hoping Amery will take it for another of the higher town’s outré phenomena, without considering its implications … hoping Clive will not know what a vividistrict is …

  when Dennis spots cracks with the contours of a snout, fissured across the million-dollar slabs ahead of him, he’s ready … without breaking stride, he stamps down heavy on the paving gator’s upper jaw before it has a chance to lift up, how Maurice had taught him, knowing that most of the inorganic creature’s buried-cable muscles are designed for clamping shut, not opening … he bats away spent-lightbulb hummingbirds that whir into his eyes, barely in time to notice that one of the busted fruit crates on his right is starting to stand up … it’s small, a youngster, only big enough for plums or tangerines, and Dennis kicks it from his path just as he hears Clive Amery scream behind him …

  running on a few steps more to make sure that he’s safely past a swaying, snapping cardboard flytrap made of empty chocolate boxes, Dennis stumbles to a halt … flapping away tin-tack mosquitos, he turns back reluctantly towards the now continuous shrieking …

  the gold-crusted crocodilian has taken Clive’s left leg off, just below the knee, and now the well-bred homicidal lunatic is headlong on the teeming cobbles of Soho Entire, crawling and writhing, horrified amid investigating crate crustaceans, litter organisms, earwig hairpins … painted mamba black, some fifteen feet of drainpipe lazily detaches from the brick wall where it’s been sleeping, slithering and scraping noisily across the priceless stones to wind around the young solicitor’s remaining ankle … from the hungry rubbish, Amery lifts up his head and glares through angry tears, with sticky gumdrop parasites embedded in his cheek and brow … ‘Dennis, you worthless little oik, you come back here! You come back here and help! This filthy fucking slum is eating me! It’s—’ … he breaks off to scream again as the constrictor drainpipe finds new purchase on his thigh, around his waist … blood everywhere, the run-off gurgling between the iron teeth of grateful drains … from a safe distance up the snarl of Bateman Street, Dennis peers nervously into the glimmering dark around him, looking out for any debris predators, but all the district’s febrile scrap seems more attracted to the feeding frenzy down the way …

  one of the wooden crabs draws back as Amery flails with the kris, biding its time and waiting for its victim to exhaust himself before successfully impaling the offending hand with a sharp-splintered foreleg … there is what appears to be a mantis improvised out of a rusted penknife, sawing at Clive’s ear … the python pipe is now around the doomed man’s chest and squeezing tighter every time there comes an exhalation or a moan … unable to take any more of this unbearable display, white-faced and shaking, Dennis tears his eyes away and runs into the twitching shadows … at his back, Clive’s mounting screech is ceased and there is nothing save for scuttle, clank and munch as the Night-Life of Soho settles down to supper …

  skidding over Dean Street with its nest of yard-brush centipedes, with its discarded pairs of motorcycle gloves made leather bats, its tetanus cacti bristling with builders’ nails, Dennis is speeding still, running now not from Clive but from what he has done to Clive … he’s killed someone, he’s worse than killed them: had them eaten by a street … he crashes on, still heading west through writhing shortcuts, backyards boiling with ferocious bric-a-brac biology … he’s killed someone … he swipes the toffee-wrapper wasps away and treads hard on the levering, invaluable jaws of alley Caymans … feral reels of filmstock roll at him down something more than Wardour Street … he’s killed someone … barrows with hands on Berwick Street, Ingestre Place alive with cubist reptiles folded out of dirty postcards … finally, in Upper Beak Street, where there are once more a few unearthly strollers and the wildlife seems restricted to less harmful breeds – French knickers billowing an inch or two above the gleaming kerbs like saucy jellyfish, or wriggling moray fishnets – Dennis shudders to a halt and makes an effort to collect himself … he’s killed someone …

  and, yes, the person that he’s killed was trying to kill him, had killed four innocents already, would have gone on to kill dozens more, and, yes, he knows he’s done the right thing, but he’s killed someone, is now in that select minority of people who have taken human life and from that moment on have known themselves for killers … he stands shivering, all the fear and energy drained from his legs into the ingot pavement, all the ugly electricity running to ground … his head swims, and he concentrates on keeping himself upright, focusses on not collapsing in a heap to the king’s-ransom ground amongst the grazing lingerie … perused through quizzing glasses by hallucinatory night wanderers, at length it comes to him that what he has committed is perhaps the perfect crime … his earlier anxieties about not having talked of Amery with anybody else now show themselves to Dennis’s advantage, and he also, with an inward wince, knows that they’ll never find a body … worryingly, Dennis registers his fit of giggling at the same moment that he realises he is weeping, the effects of shock in a place wholly made from shock … above him, fruitbat brassieres make short leaps from lamp to lamp, cups swelling on the updraft …

  after some few minutes’ wobbling there at the western limits of Soho Entire, Dennis feels once more capable of motion, executing an unsteady stumble on the backstreet’s alchemy-touched flagstones, with an eye to somehow getting out of here … the metaphysical pedestrians don’t seem inclined to interfere; the drifting coelenterate underwear appear to be avoiding him … he numbly wonders where he’s previously heard of Upper Beak Street, fuzzily recalling it as somewhere Maurice Calendar had lodgings, when he passes a shop window of vertical puddle water, rippling concentrically, and is astonished to catch sight of Calendar himself …

  beyond a pane of liquid, the sartorial trailblazer is suspended, head down, by a fibrous white umbilical cord from the ceiling of a mostly empty premises, unfurnished and unlit saving the astral shimmer from outside, refracting through a wall of water … though on Dennis’s last sighting of his erstwhile rescuer the fashion king had seemed unnaturally puffed and swollen, now his dangling outline isn’t even human … a dirigible, a saveloy, a six-foot cylinder with rounded ends, the pulpy mass is only recognisable from the caricature of Maurice Calendar that has apparently been painted on its wrinkled surface … at its bottom end, the hanging sausage looks to have been dipped in tar, a viscous blackness following the shape of Calendar’s contemporary haircut, with above that his inverted features, two-dimensional and crudely reproduced, cartoon eyes open wide and staring … torso, legs and feet are similarly rendered, the fawn raincoat’s arms and the protruding hands drawn flat against Maurice’s sides, the grey tube of the trousers, childishly delineated shoes and socks there at the upside-down blimp’s top … the coloured epidermis, puckered and distressed, is blotchy; peeling here and there like sunburn … strewn about the shadows of the chamber’s floor, akin to sloughed-off sleeping bags, Dennis can make out the remains of empty husks with bits of people painted on them, brittle, dry, unmoving, slowly decomposing in the starry dark …

  he doesn’t understand what he is seeing … pummelled each new second by signals and signs he can’t decipher, he is overloaded with the alien, incapable of a reaction or response … if things in the Great When are Symbolist precursors of phenomena in Dennis’s own London, what the hell is this ridiculous arrangement meant to represent? … he struggles briefly with an impulse to extend his fingers through the sheet of fluid hanging upright in its ornate window frame, but, not wanting to lose them, thinks again … he turns and shambles off from the incomprehensible display, continuing towards the west and Upper Beak Street’s end with no more sense of destination than a wind-up train …

  it takes perhaps an hour or more for him to navigate a path back to the Upper Scandals, the one gateway that he’s reasonably familiar with, and in that time he’s only intermittently aware of who or where he is, much less what he is doing … concussed in this ghastly paradise, he totters down the length of a symphonic Regent Street and past the Kiss of Piccadilly with its slow but passionate debauch of naked statues … as in dreams, the constant flow of abnormality and outrage all too soon becomes acceptable as commonplace reality, humdrum and barely worthy of attention, dangerously comfortable, and this is the particular insanity of the Great When, the reason journeys here are best concluded quickly … near dissociative, he roams the Apogee of Pall Mall, bumps into a silver-grey top hat as tall as he is, that tips its own brim in courteous apology before continuing its shuffle … only when he reaches the expanded Strand and Arthur Machen’s emerald epiphany does Dennis cloudily remember that he’s Dennis; does he inexactly piece together how he comes to be in this excruciating landscape, or recall that he is trying to get out … concussed by solid poetry, he makes his dizzy way down to the folded-paper counterpart of Fleet Street and, there at the base of Fetter Lane Unchained, is disconcerted to find something waiting for him …

  on her ossuary charger, the preliminary gesture drawing of a woman limned in moving light still occupies the same spot she did earlier, but with her and her boneyard horse now faced the other way … although there is no sign of her black handkerchief – perhaps explaining why time is not stopped on this occasion – she is holding the iron key up in one lightly pencilled hand, the moving traceries that are her minimalist features flickering into what seems to be a smile as she regards Dennis’s numb and vacant-eyed approach … he shuffles past her like a wandering patient who no longer recollects which ward he’s come from, peering quizzically up from time to time at the half-finished rider without demonstrating more than the most foggy recognition … when he stumbles closest to her, the horsewoman lowers her arm in a tumbling cascade of undecided lines and then extends her key to him, the hasty pen strokes of her lips continually revised and rubbed out as she speaks, the voice like showering radio rain, blown in from elsewhere and then swishing off into the long-wave distance … ‘For the quick’ … he distantly recalls Jack Neave identifying Slenderhorse as an Arcanum capable of speech, and reaches up to take the proffered prize out of her flip-book fingers, mostly motivated by the vague sense that to not do so would in some way be impolite … ‘Yeah, thanks’ … he struggles on in fits and starts, the key now clasped forgotten in one hand, until he is once more amongst implausibly tall flowers, voluptuous glassware, and the crumpling smudge of Her Train still maintaining a safe distance, hovering cautious in the astral pallor … wading through the wavering grass, he traipses down the now familiar incline, following a dreamy instinct rather than a conscious plan … he’s barely conscious … when at last Dennis identifies the Doric-column stems that hold between them a more serious blackness, he at first looks for some mechanism, knob or handle by which means he might unlock this ‘Fisbo entrance’, although nothing of that nature is apparent … he is slowly inching his way forward in the worse-than-dark when he