When at last he arrived at 777, its reverberant lobby was jam-packed with nobody, save himself and the Indian man at the reception counter who, with worried eyes above an ice-blue mask, tracked Worsley’s progress through the ringing emptiness towards the elevators. It was as if the soap opera of the world was trying to ride out a writers’ strike, with all the motivation, dialogue and narrative at a dead stop and Bobby Ewing frozen there forever, stepping from the shower.

  To underline the Marie Celeste state of things, the elevators all stood open and available. On Worsley’s solitary and unhurried journey to the twenty-eighth floor, he had time to be concerned about what he might find there. These last few months at American had been disastrous, with many of the experienced staffers having been let go, and all but a few books on permanent hiatus. Maybe that’s what his trip to the building’s higher reaches was about: to tell him comic books were over.

  On floor twenty-eight, the door shrugged open in disinterest as to whether Worsley disembarked or not. As people lost the will to live, things lost even the will to be inanimate. He stepped out to the queasy moiré of a corridor that, after decades of familiarity, still had the forceful nausea of that first paralysing glimpse. He didn’t know if it was those low-energy bulbs that they had or if his eyes were getting worse, but in the labyrinthine hallways of American there lay a pall as though the light itself were dusty and untended.

  There was no one at the front desk when he came to it, but then, there never had been. More unusually, on the desk itself was a brown paper bag with a half-eaten sub protruding from it, over a week old to judge from the proliferating starbursts of near-turquoise mould. Behind him, there was a faint scrabbling, and when he looked he saw with fascinated horror that a colony of vermin – mice, he hoped – had somehow eaten through the front of Ambrose Bell, and were apparently inhabiting his stomach cavity. Although the hero-in-disguise still lounged insouciantly against his dried-up watercooler, he looked destitute and ill, with his good-natured smile now straining to a grimace.

  Unnerved by both silence and the perfume of decay, Worsley strayed further down the throat of the distressing corridor. In some stretches, light fittings stuttered and recited insect poetry. For want of anybody to infect, and so as not to be mistaken for a Massive-loyalist jihadi, Worsley pulled his Brute mask down around his chin and went on through the carcass of a thirteen-year-old boy’s imagination. He’d reluctantly accepted that this was to be no ordinary call-by at the stables of American before he turned a corner and encountered thirty-year-dead Hector Bass.

  More accurately, Worsley was confronted by what seemed to be a newsreel of the deceased Our Unshaven Army chronicler. Bass was in crackly black and white, a film-loop of himself on damaged 1920s stock that stood before what had once been his office door, some distance down the hall, reaching one sparking silver hand towards the knob and then retracting it. As Worsley cautiously came nearer, the electric phantom glanced towards him and appeared to be aware that he was there, but was unable to communicate. The lips worked in the anguished face, but Bass was seemingly trapped in a bygone era before talking pictures, so whatever he was saying wasn’t audible. Only the pleading eyes could express his impossible predicament, staring from under the St Elmo’s fire that flickered in the hanging gardens of their brows. It was as if Bass had resolved he would reclaim his room or die, but was incapable of doing either. He was almost ready to come back to work, eternally.

  Needing to get to David Moskowitz’s office further down the optical-illusion hallway, Worsley edged around the silent movie ghost, and when Bass caught his gaze, he pulled a sympathetic mug and did a jazz-hands shrug in order to convey his helplessness. He pointed to his wristwatch and thumbed down the corridor behind him, indicating that he’d like to get involved in the dead man’s unfathomable situation, but that he had an appointment. Grey tears trickled on the fragile celluloid of Bass’s cheeks, but by then Worsley had gone hurrying down the ugly passage without looking back.

  He’d seen the apparition of a man who’d died last century, and on the one hand, he supposed he should be screaming or reporting it to someone, possibly an exorcist, but, then, this invitation upstairs, in career terms, was just so important that he mustn’t get distracted by psychic phenomena. He barged on down the hall, resolving that his mind would process the Bass incident when it had time, but that time clearly wasn’t now. Besides, on rounding the next bend, all thoughts of Hector Bass were driven from his mind by the nine-year-old boy, pacing impatiently and scowling at his mobile phone to check the time, there in the pulsing thoroughfare.

  Was he here with a parent, or was he maybe some kid who’d won a competition? The boy was approximately four foot six and, from the way he dressed, was probably the coolest nine-year-old at his expensive private school. He’d got an extra-small official football jacket on, and although Worsley didn’t know much about current prepubertal footwear trends, he thought that the child’s sneakers looked impeccably state of the art. He wished he’d had a mom and dad who could afford to spend that kind of dough on him when he’d been that age, although, now that he got nearer, Worsley saw the youngster didn’t look particularly grateful or contented with his comfortable lot in life. His face was lined with stress, and hair that had looked blond from further off revealed itself as mousy-grey on close inspection. Then the rug rat turned around to look at Worsley and said, ‘Where the hell have you been?’, and he had a moustache, and, oh Jesus, it was David Moskowitz.

  Worsley was lost for words, and started stammering apologies for having been delayed, at which the downsized publisher held up one tiny palm and, sighing, closed his eyes.

  ‘Is Hector there again?’

  Worsley could only nod, at which the Moskowitz-child shook its elderly head in exasperation.

  ‘We don’t know what’s causing him. The specialist we spoke to thought it could be sunspots. I’ve got everyone in legal working on it, seeing if we can take out some kind of preternatural injunction, but it isn’t looking hopeful. Anyway, we don’t have time to stand around exchanging pleasantries like this when you’re wanted upstairs. Please follow me.’

  Though Moskowitz’s transformation had been coming for a long time, now that Worsley thought about it, witnessing the final stages was no less bewildering. The voice and features were those of somebody in their early seventies, so this wasn’t so much rejuvenation as reduction, a return to childhood that did not relinquish adult knowledge, power, or status. With the miniature executive running in front of him, he followed Moskowitz through the American mirage-maze, to a door that Worsley thought had once been that of Mimi Drucker’s office.

  ‘Wasn’t this once Mimi’s room?’

  The old man’s head on the child’s body tilted to look up at Worsley chidingly, as Moskowitz reached out to turn the grown-up handle with his sticky infant paw.

  ‘It still is.’

  Drucker’s office looked as if the former VP had just stepped out for a five-year restroom break. Atop the oddly shaped designer desk, a dainty cup of herbal tea was steaming on its King Bee coaster. Worsley was confused.

  ‘Um, weren’t we headed for the elevator? So that I could go upstairs?’

  The pocket publisher allowed himself a smug grin, as if he was at his own tenth birthday party, showing his new toys to all his pals.

  ‘Oh, no. This is a different kind of upstairs, so we use a different kind of elevator. It’s behind the big framed picture, back of Mimi’s desk.’

  Still struggling to make sense of anything that he’d experienced since pressing ‘play’ on Glenfield season one, Worsley glanced up at the ornately bordered giant photograph that overpowered the office’s rear wall. Its austere black and white contained in carven arabesques of painted gold, the shot of Mimi Drucker’s dad and General Pinochet approaching the eleventh green had been the source of many raucous comics-business anecdotes – and Worsley had of course seen it before – but there was something different this time. It was so unmissably apparent that he couldn’t place it for a moment.

  Then he could. There were three people in the picture now, upsetting Richard Avedon’s masterful composition. On the clipped grey grass beneath a cold pearl sky, between a windswept and relaxed Senator Drucker and his merciless Chilean fascist golfing buddy, Mimi Drucker stood naked and beaming, one hand resting casually on each of the men’s sleeves. Besides her clothing, the petite blonde also lacked for bodily hair, genitals and nipples. She’d have looked more like a plastic doll or airbrushed centrefold, if not for all the goosebumps that were clearly evident, raised from her white flesh out there on the chilly links. She looked more happy and fulfilled than Worsley could remember seeing her, and both of the old men looked glad to have her there. Casting a sideways glance towards Mimi’s redacted breasts, Augusto Pinochet smiled thinly behind his untrimmed moustache. The three of them playfully coexisted in the captured pewter light of a gone afternoon, and Worsley didn’t have the first idea what he was looking at.

  ‘But this, this isn’t Photoshopped. How did they work the photograph of Mimi into …?’

  From beneath his pepper-and-salt brow, the grade-school publisher served Worsley with a warning glare. ‘That’s not a photograph of Mimi. Anyway, it’s not important for our purposes.’

  Approaching the impractical and lovely desk, lips set to a grim line, the moppet Moskowitz placed one diminutive hand on the King Bee coaster that was without herbal tea, and gave it a sharp quarter-turn. The huge framed photograph, and what looked like the whole section of wall that it was mounted on, purred smoothly to the left, exposing a bronze door beneath. A further quarter-turn caused this to open and display the elevator car itself, white-lit and big enough for two at most. Moskowitz stared at Worsley, his progeria-afflicted schoolboy face unreadable.

  ‘Get in. There’s two columns of eleven buttons each, and it’s important that you only press the one marked with an aleph. That’s the top one on the left side. Don’t press any of the others, or you’ll end up somewhere you don’t want to be. That’s how we lost Pete Mastroserio. As far as we can work out, he’s a cattle rustler now, on Tzaddi.’

  Worsley did as he was told, and occupied the box of light. Fixated fretfully on pressing the right button, he’d not really taken in the bit about Pete Mastroserio and cattle-rustling. Beside the door were the two rows of buttons Moskowitz had mentioned. There were twenty-two of them in all, each button black but marked with letters from the Hebrew alphabet in gold. The aleph, which he thought he recognised, was there at the top left as he’d been told it would be.

  Through the open elevator door, he could see Mimi Drucker’s office, with the Moskowitz-boy peering in towards him – somewhat anxiously, it seemed to Worsley.

  ‘Porlock, can I say, the company wishes you the very best of luck in all of this. Remember, if the head is human, then you’re on the wrong floor. And if Hector Bass’s name comes up, I’ve told them that we have the situation in control, so don’t say anything. Good man.’

  While comprehending none of the instructions he had just been given, Worsley nodded reassuringly and pressed the aleph button. The bronze door slid shut, at which the Hebrew character there at the bottom of the rightmost column suddenly lit up, as if with a gold light inside it. Worsley didn’t know which character it was, but thought it maybe marked the floor that he was on at present, which was twenty-eight. The elevator started moving.

  The black squares beside the door announced the alphabet in Hebrew, backwards, with the gold light slowly climbing up the file of buttons on the right. The movement of the carriage was ambiguous: he couldn’t tell if he was shooting up at speed, or if the elevator cable had just snapped and he was plummeting. At times, his overburdened inner ear told him that he was going sideways, and with each measured ascension of the golden light, his stomach felt like he’d performed a somersault. Still more unsettling, each new floor seemed to involve a sharp and noticeable change of atmosphere, moods so strange and specific that they came and went before he could articulate precisely what they were. As the gold light rose through the last few buttons of the left-hand column, he experienced a strong compulsion to do evil, a brief fit of childish giggling, and unbearable nostalgia for the 1940s. Finally, the lexical progression reached the aleph, and the sense of motion ceased. The feeling on this floor was one of Christmas morning excitation, shading into something else that Worsley thought might possibly be terror. The arrival at his destination was suggested by a solitary chime, and after a few seconds, the bronze elevator door withdrew, discreetly, like a waiter.

  Disappointingly, outside was nothing but a field of diffused shades – bursts of soft pink, splashes of lemon, twilights of pale blue and green – that looked like babies had thrown powder-paint against a nursery wall, except it moved, crumpling slowly into new configurations. Supposing it to be some sort of high-tech lighting trick he hadn’t previously encountered, Worsley Porlock drew a deep breath and stepped through the elevator door, into the beautifully tinted and psychotic pasture that revealed itself beyond the shifting candy lights.

  It was a flawless summer afternoon in the Midwest, and far away, bare telegraph wires hymned the 1950s at each novel breeze. He stood on solid dirt below the sky’s blue-glass sublime, and he was suffering respiratory difficulties, gasping the thin, perfumed air. Attempted screams, dilute and breathless, were all but inaudible in his own popping eardrums. Pouring midday light, that seemed to come from everywhere, was crystalline, was perfect, was entirely wrong. Here was the heaven for a foreign world, with him frightened and wheezing in it.

  Labouring to assimilate impossible terrain, he saw that – from his shaking hands to gentle tumuli past distant fields – all shapes were bounded by thin lines of dark, as though overexposed at their scorched edges. A new Real, relieved of cluttering detail, ridded of distracting textures, a placatory simplicity that bordered archetype. He was in arid scrubland outskirting the small-town past, with boulders, weeds, a featureless grain silo left of background. Everything pared down to signal, prickling in its clarity.

  Noisily hyperventilating, he perceived that even colour was here reimagined, brighter yet more limited, calm neutrals gemmed with sherbet primaries. Hues were at once more artificial and more true, but closer up appeared to be particulate, tinted mechanically so that his sleeves were dot-screened on their hanging folds, themselves reduced to pen strokes. Unsourced glare from all directions banished shadow, so that nothing looked to be with weight or volume, but in its own terms seemed right, seemed satisfyingly familiar. Visually, at least, it was a world less challenging than his.

  Other than wind in weeds, the sound of open distance, or his straining lungs, it was likewise a minimal acoustic with no traffic, trains or other transport audible. Past straight-tilled land, generically Middle American, low hills plumped against graded cyan firmament near bleached at its horizon. Ocean, surely, was thousands of miles away, yet still he caught that redolence of a marine maternity, of seals, of aromatic bladderwrack, incongruous amidst these dusty latitudes. His skin crawled, wanting to be elsewhere.

  Turning his much-simplified head, suffocating still, he noticed other figures in this shocking, charming landscape. Off in its right midground, one adult and several little boys and girls in fancy dress were standing grouped beside something he realised, haltingly, was forty feet of metal hourglass, shimmering hot in sunlight where no sun was visible. Rising up from perfunctory yellow wastes, it was faux silver, white with tremulous azure trickling on its wasp-waisted contours, outline crisped to hair’s-breadth black. As with its mesmerising rustic backdrop, its aura was one of tantalising reminiscence, alien and yet insidiously familiar, singular but seen before.

  Clustering at its base where umbra should have been, children in sugared-almond costume, perhaps twelve years old, conferred with their adult companion. Powerfully built, he faced away, presenting just a long gold coat with hunching shoulders as he solemnly addressed his festively attired young friends, there in their tingling, long-gone utopia. His hanging robe was decorated with an emblem of sharp TV monochrome, and in that dreadful moment, Worsley realised it was Thunderman – but when he turned, he had a tiger’s head.

  It was just how he’d looked, there on some half-forgotten cover of Exciting Comics sixty years since, freak effect of Felix Firestone’s Random Ray, put right in the same tale, but now appallingly made manifest. The youngsters, it became apparent, were dressed up as various Tomorrow Friends, whose time machine was hourglass-shaped, if memory served correct. Dust Damsel in her smart grey uniform was present, Clock Kid in his enigmatic watch-face mask, with Indescribable Lass also there. They stared at the onlooking editor-in-chief, expressing cold indifference that seemed out of place on such cherubic countenances. Their beast-headed senior, lifting one giant honey paw in greeting, began his approach across the intervening half-tone dirt.

  It was as if, in this uncanny place, time was a thing of discrete parcelled instants. Hideous or magnificent in aspect, Thunderman advanced towards him in disorienting lapses, fading out of sight after a pace or two then reappearing nearer, travelling through space-time by way of bewildering saccades: right background, centre midground, creases in his violet suit redrawing themselves with each step, until he jewelled into existence left of foreground, close enough to feel his burning exhalations.

  He did not speak, instead bubbling forth spheres of pure meaning that would burst as wet words in his visitor’s disintegrating consciousness. As with Thunderman’s walk through hyphenated time, so too was information bundled into concise, separate packages, with some concepts expressed more forcefully, a heavier telepathic timbre.

  {Worsley! Finally, we meet. Sorry about my head. Unfortunately, Firestone’s Random Ray proved irreversible, although I thought it better to conceal that from your readership, as with my executing Firestone very soon thereafter.}