His first descent into the stylish abyss of the atrium was measured, then, and stately. Unlike his ascending journey, anxious and preoccupied, he had the time to notice things he hadn’t seen on his way up. For instance, he had overlooked the numerous banners hanging from the landings of – it looked like – every third floor, that proclaimed their message in a bold, black font a yard high: WELCOME TO SATYRICON!, like in the entrance hall when he’d come in. Eight repetitions of this bellowing calligraphy scrolled up past Duckley’s entranced gaze before he reached ground level, and emerged into the sexy nightmare of the lobby, feeling full of beans and over-welcomed.

  Everything seemed more relaxed, seemed livelier, more jubilantly populous, though maybe some of that was just his improved mood. The Brandon Chuff memorial exhibit looked completed, with the central portrait flanked now by white roses in an ostentatious sprawl and, rising from this, enlarged reproductions of Chuff’s best-remembered covers, on what looked like music stands. He was surprised and childishly delighted to see a small gathering of attendees dressed up as the United Supermen, all ten of them, presumably part of the tribute that was scheduled later. Moon Queen and Red Fox appeared to be a couple, which in terms of continuity was somewhat jarring, but apart from that, the detail work on all the costumes was superb. The way Duckley was feeling, it was all superb.

  And then, to make it all superber, he saw Worsley Porlock supervising the memorial display and hitting on the woman dressed as Eagle Girl. When Porlock noticed Duckley, he excused himself expertly from the avian adventuress and walked across to greet his socially inept friend, who was also his continuing experiment in ethics. Porlock slapped him on his already damp back, called him the Dickster, and insisted that the two of them retire immediately to the convention bar so that they could catch up. This sounded like a good plan to the Dickster.

  In the bar, as crowded as a Bosch or Breughel landscape, the two editors secured a relatively quiet corner, there amidst speed-dating aliens and endless carrier bags of merchandise. There were a lot of skin-tight women drifting back and forth, and Worsley Porlock’s eyes went with them as, distractedly, he listed his concerns about the Chuff memorial presentation later.

  ‘Man, I really hope that this goes well. The company could use a boost, you know, just for morale. Since Brandon died, I’ll tell you, it’s been one catastrophe after another. First, he drops dead in that half-baked diner incident, with Dan Wheems bleeding everywhere and Jerry Binkle fainting. Then, at Brandon’s funeral, it happens all over again. Still, fingers crossed, nobody’s heard from Wheems since then, and looks like he’s a no-show here at the convention, so maybe we’ll at least get through this memorial thing without a lot of screaming and blood everywhere. I wish I was in your shoes, over at Bordello, where you can fit all the editing around the jerking off, right?’

  Duckley laughed and nodded, although until then he hadn’t truly understood that editing and jerking off were separate things. He liked talking to Worsley, and he liked the bar with all its slutty monsters. The light fittings, bar top, bottles, cyborgs, broadswords, spectacles, battle bikinis – everything was twinkling and he was floating in a galaxy of constellated highlight. With a Diet Coke or two inside him, Porlock gradually became more upbeat, and enthused to Duckley about the new inker that they’d found to replace Arvo Cake on Milton Finefinger’s book, Union. ‘He’s a great inker, and his style works really well with Byron James. And best of all, he’s this real gentle guy who isn’t going to massacre his girlfriend. I saw on his CV how in his spare time he’s, like, a vet – or anyway, he’s somebody who works with animals. I’ve got high hopes, the same as with this Chuff memorial. I really think it’s going to end this run of bad luck that the company’s been having.’

  Later, in what little time he had to think about such things, Duckley decided that he maybe needn’t have spent so long talking in the bar with Worsley Porlock, when he should have been at the Bordello stand for the Orgasmics signing, but, hey-ho, that was conventions. At last Worsley pointed out that it was nearly time for Brandon’s tribute, and that he’d said he’d catch up with Eagle Girl to offer her support, possibly moral, in her role. They shared a culturally appropriative fist bump and said that they’d see each other later, probably at some post-human afterparty. Porlock hurried off, going where eagles dare, leaving Dick Duckley to find his way back to the Bordello table, through what had been formerly a fine mist of imaginary people, but was now a quivering solid of mismanaged colour and unorthodox protrusions. It took nearly half an hour for him to navigate the horns, fins, Vorg Assassin body armour, and somebody as a steampunk Flavor Flav who had watch parts all over, before Duckley hove in view of the Bordello booth.

  The signing looked like it was over, and from the diminished stack of trades that he could see behind the stall, it had gone relatively smoothly. The book’s artist, Chris Pulaski, was just finishing a sketch of Anal Robot for a couple of Orgasmics fans, while writer Terry North and the blonde woman who was maybe Oral Lass had left already, from the look of things. Tony and Steve were putting the unsold books back in boxes, and it seemed like everything was OK, but their faces when they saw him there was something wrong and in his stomach he felt bad and Steve was walking over to him what was what was going on and then the world around him speeded back up like a rewound phonograph, and there was sound again, and Steve looked near to tears and he was saying, ‘Dick, you’ve got to call Amanda,’ and something about how the company were sending people, no, that couldn’t be right, sending people to the con to talk to him about, no, about thirty, no no no no, thirty thousand dollars and they’d be here soon and oh what was he going to do, but he knew there was nothing, nothing, there was nothing to hold on to.

  He was terrified, the colour draining out of him like hourglass sand. Turning away from his distraught employee without speaking, Duckley did his best to run back through the paranormal push towards the lobby area, which is to say he barely strolled. With cartoon heads and helmets everywhere around him, he was like a child abandoned in a ball pit, making his ‘nnnnnnnnnn’ sound with every ragged breath. He didn’t have a plan or a direction, except, maybe, if he got back to his room, picked up his stuff, he could get out before these people from head office got here, change his name, become a drifter, something, anything. Caught in the viscous crowd, he struggled past recesses where extragalactic Nazis shoved mail gauntlets down the laddered tights of elves, past threesomes that involved two breakfast-cereal mascots and a rabbit, past solitary objects where he didn’t know what they were meant to be but they were weeping, and it all looked evil to him now. It all looked crazy.

  In the lobby, it was even worse. The Brandon Chuff memorial presentation had begun, cramming the space with a perspiring press of inappropriately costumed mourners that he had to shoulder his way through to reach the elevators. Duckley’s panicked, whining stumble was made more conspicuous by the crowd’s silence, as they listened reverently to the United Supermen reading the dialogue balloons from Chuff’s widely respected #121, ‘The Call of Coelentero’. Somebody dressed as Rocket Ranger said, ‘As one extraterrestrial to another, my Neptunian senses tell me you are troubled, old friend.’ To which a tall, thin guy dressed as Thunderman replied, ‘You’re right as usual, Nark from Neptune. Coelentero can control us. He can make us into monsters.’ Numerous members of the audience voiced their appreciation at this classic line, while many more called Dick Duckley an asshole, as he rampaged through their hushed assembly doing his weird squealing noise. He was just glad that Worsley Porlock didn’t seem to be around to witness Duckley’s interruption of the ceremony, after all that he’d said about wanting it to go well. If he hadn’t had his mind on other things, he might have also registered that there were only nine United Supermen, with Eagle Girl not in attendance. As it stood, however, he could only think of doom and his remaining rations of cocaine.

  Then he was in the elevator as it climbed clear of the ground floor and its night-sweat fauna, with his view of the event below occluded by his own scared breath that greyed the glass. Wiping an oval with his sportscoat sleeve, he thought he saw two men in suits and sunglasses, just coming in through the main entrance, but it couldn’t be the company guys already, could it? Maybe it was just people in cosplay as the pair of CIA vampire-squad agents from that movie Stakeholders. He hoped that might be what it was, although hadn’t one of the agents in the movie been a black guy? Duckley found he couldn’t swallow, and the crawling glass-box elevator made him feel like he was being tried for war crimes in The Hague. That was always the problem with ascensions: they took far too long, compared with other directions of travel.

  On floor twenty-seven, there were fewer free-range travesties of reason than there had been earlier, but Duckley still managed to spook three separate horror franchises as he ran past them, with his strangled whining ringing in the corridors behind him. Why had he stayed drinking for so long with Worsley Porlock? He could be halfway to somewhere else by now, but it was too late and the people from the company were probably already in the building, and he couldn’t go back down without them seeing him. He could remember having dreams like this, and so he squeezed his eyes tight shut hoping this might be one of them, but when he opened them again, it wasn’t.

  Finally he reached his room, although it didn’t feel like his room any more. It wasn’t safe. The light was prickly and wrong, and Duckley realised he was crying as he stuffed his dirty T-shirt and some other oddments in his holdall, short of breath and panting like a locomotive having sex. It wasn’t fair that this was happening to him. He was just someone who liked Thunderman. He knew he wasn’t average, what with his background, but, as far as comics went, he felt that he was representative. He wasn’t a bad guy. He’d seen how everybody else was acting, and assumed they were on morally reversed World Daleth, so that it was all OK. Except it turned out that it wasn’t, and now he was in more trouble than he’d ever been in, and he felt he deserved more than this from Thunderman, for all those years of study, all that loyalty. Duckley knew all there was to know about the character, and this was the way Thunderman rewarded him. Then he remembered the cocaine.

  What made most sense, he pseudo-reasoned, was to take it all at once so that he wasn’t carrying it if he was caught. This time it didn’t work the same. The increased dose made him feel like a superhero, but it was a frightened superhero, so he just felt super frightened. They were probably already in the building, and he’d got to get out, just get out, fast as he could. He grabbed his bag and, unaware that he was bleeding copiously from one nostril, burst out of his room into the silent corridor, like gibbering and gory refuse from a backed-up drain.

  By this point his thought processes weren’t even mammal. There was some vague notion of finding the service stairs and leaving through a hypothetical rear entrance, but this was shot through with thoughts of Thunderman, and Momma, and damnation. In a too tight skull, his brain was poached in simmering cerebrospinal fluid, and he felt the blanched words and ideas as they flaked away into the boil and seethe of his insoluble predicament. This was the end, he knew it. He was finished. He was crying again now, his nose still bleeding as he blundered down the narrow corridor, pinballing into walls and around corners, and all of a sudden there was someone walking down the carpet-quieted passageway towards him and, just like that, he was in another world.

  He knew then that his desperate plea to Thunderman, to his heavenly Father, had gone neither unheard nor unanswered, and the proof approached him hesitantly down the green hush of the hallway, where her lovely face was shining with concern for him, and it was Peggy. It was Peggy Parks. Or it was someone kind and beautiful who was in cosplay as her, but that didn’t mean a thing because symbolically, symbolically she represented Peggy Parks, and, like an angel, she had come to rescue him. Sobbing his gratitude, he staggered into her consoling arms and pressed his face with all its human juices in the molten copper tresses that cascaded to her shoulders. Then he put his hand between her legs and tried to kiss her.

  Her name, on the badge he hadn’t noticed, was Patricia Ross. She worked there in the hotel as a junior manager, and had red hair. Like many younger people, she had never heard of Peggy Parks. She bit Dick Duckley’s cheek, called him a motherfucker and then started yelling for security.

  Moaning with horror and incomprehension, Duckley ran on down the hall towards the landing he could see at the far end. Behind him, he heard Peggy talking on her phone, angry and crying from the way it sounded, telling somebody the floor number and that it was a big curly-haired guy with a bloody nose, who had a thirteen-year-old girl preparing to perform fellatio printed on his T-shirt. But he hadn’t got a bloody nose, and Oral Lass was, well, was older than thirteen, and all of this was terrible and made no sense, and all he could do now was run, just run.

  Out on the landing with its chrome-steel rails and wooden balustrade, there was a scattering of ostentatious vigilantes, goblins, hard-light holograms, and two big men in matching maroon jackets rushing at him from along the walkway, both with serious expressions, from a franchise that he didn’t recognise. He turned and started pounding carpet in the opposite direction, around the stupendous atrium that echoed faintly with the dialogue of the late Brandon Chuff, from far below. ‘Great Suns! Coelentero has his tendrils in the mind of Blue Beam! Anything could happen now!’

  He wasn’t thinking anything coherent, and the whimpering sound he made in flight was all his language. He could hear the maroon men not far behind him, shouting ‘Sir’, and all the lights and colours and reflections rippled past him in a rush of photon-vomit. Duckley’s lungs and heart were hammering against his breastbone, frantic to break out and stage their own less cumbersome escape. ‘Surrender to your destiny, United Supermen. The power of Blue Beam’s azure amulet will have you as my slaves until your final breath!’ Lifting his streaming eyes, he looked ahead of him, and …

  Leaning languorously up against the balustrade a few yards away were the male and female devils that he’d spotted earlier, while he was waiting for the elevator. Both were drinking cocktails with umbrellas. The she-demon watched as Duckley thundered down the landing at the two of them, raising one painted eyebrow questioningly, and behind, the maroon voices were still Sirring him. There wasn’t anywhere to go, so with a lurching sideways movement like a bucket slopping over he

  spilled

  past

  the

  railing

  WELCOME TO SATYRICON!

  into

  a

  spinning

  abyss

  WELCOME TO SATYRICON!

  with

  want

  for

  angels

  WELCOME TO SATYRICON!

  (no angels save for Eagle Girl, whose golden wings were spread on Worsley Porlock’s hotel bed)

  and

  he

  fell

  keening

  WELCOME TO SATYRICON!

  through

  tiers

  of

  mythos

  WELCOME TO SATYRICON!

  through

  the

  glass

  elevator

  WELCOME TO SATYRICON!

  (more accurately, he went in the top, and something that had been him came out through the bottom)

  meat

  and

  crystal

  raining

  WELCOME TO SATYRICON!

  upon

  bad

  dialogue

  rising

  WELCOME TO SATYRICON!

  up

  from

  the

  lobby

  —where he burst on impact. Rocket Ranger threw up on Gold Eagle, while the Streak, keeping in character, just ran as far as possible. The ‘Going Down’ shirt made it worse. A Grand Guignol precipitate, he spoiled the snowy roses, speckling the black and white framed portrait as an offering. And Brandon Chuff, with hair and beard like Faunus, smiled all saturnine upon his abattoir arcadia.

  It was Worsley Porlock’s best Dick Duckley story ever.

  19. (May, 2016)

  If it had been a film, then in this opening shot there would be a black freeway carpet rolled out to the flat horizon, as if for important visitors. Some lambswool snags of cloud hurry across Midwestern blue from left to right, and a strong breeze is evident in intermittent wuthering against the microphone and in the urgent signalling of wheatgrass stems, up close, down in a foreground corner of the frame. There is the angry insect wheedle of a distant engine, some moments before the vehicle makes itself visible as an expanding bead of silver grey, there in the visual centre of the careful composition.

  Dan Wheems, six months out of comics, was discovering how it felt, being alive. Behind the wheel, his tinted windows wound down, dressed in adult clothing unadorned by licensed properties, he was as happy, in the wind and sunshine, as he’d ever been. He guessed that part of it was being back here in the state where he’d grown up, but mostly it was shedding the immense, unrealised weight of his career. He hadn’t known what it was doing to him, not until he’d stopped and had been shocked by how immediately different his existence seemed to be. He felt as if he’d spent the last few decades on some hellish prison planet with tremendous gravity, that had an atmosphere of cyanide and methane. Finding out that he could breathe and wasn’t made of lead had been an ecstasy.

  He slowed to let a startled-looking rabbit get out of his way, supposing that the wildlife didn’t have much traffic to become accustomed to out here, which he thought a good omen. If only he could locate the house with the For Sale sign that he’d half-wittedly driven by the week before, then this could be the first idyllic afternoon of many: living here in fine seclusion, working on the novel about childhood that he’d started, with just rabbits and this endless sky for company.