Afterlude
AFTERLUDE CHAIN OF OFFICE With a splash of sunlight to the cheeks Spring Boroughs basked, enjoying one of its more glamourous and less hungover mornings. Saturday dusted dilapidated balconies with cautious optimism, the persisting sense of a respite from school or work even in those attending neither. May brewed in the scruffy verges. Chalk Lane’s elderly stone wall bounding the former paupers’ cemetery was an abattoir of poppies, while just up the way a jumble sale assembly clotted on the daycare center’s slope. The district preened; no oil painting but from the right angle still as pretty as a picture. Scuffing down across the balding mound from Castle Hill, Mick Warren trickled as an off-white bead to merge into the human pigment pooled about the nursery door, quickly surrounded by a turquoise swirl of sister and the largely neutral spatter of her friends. Alarming Mic... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Book 3, Chapter 11 : Go See Now This Cursed Woman
GO SEE NOW THIS CURSED WOMAN Viewed from beneath the stone archangel spins scintillate darkness on his billiard cue, unhurried constellations turning at the tip just as the land below rotates about its busted hub. A universe of particles and archives of their motion bruise the lithic eye in its tooled orbit, overwriting data on a century-old smut which serves as pupil, the incessant bulletin of Friday, May the 26th, 2006. Off in the standing shadows, babies, dogs and convicts with their dreams. Viewed from above, the isomorphic urban texture flattens to a blackout map which swarms with plankton phosphorous, a Brownian nocturnal churn of long-haul truckers and unwinding weekend couples, marathon commuters, flashing vessels of emergency. Arterial light moves through the circulatory diagram in spurts, tracking the progress of cash vectors and plague opportunities. Pull focus further and the actions of the worl... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Book 3, Chapter 10 : The Jolly Smokers
THE JOLLY SMOKERS Den wakes beneath the windswept porch alone On bone-hard slab rubbed smooth by Sunday feet Where afternoon light leans, fatigued and spent, Ground to which he feels no entitlement Nor any purchase on the sullen street; Unpeels his chill gray cheek from chill gray stone Then orients himself in time and space. The roof’s a black-ribbed spine viewed from the floor With on one wall some obsolete decree Meant for the Cypriot community And at the near end an iron-studded door, A Bible-cover slammed shut in his face, Or that of some more academic tome. He struggles up onto one threadba... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Book 3, Chapter 9 : The Rood in the Wall
THE ROOD IN THE WALL It’s what you’d call a first-draft face, after the angry and frustrated crumpling. It’s a private eye face, it’s Studs Goodman’s thug-and-bourbon-battered figurehead cresting the dirty suds and breakers of another dead-end town, a burned-out world as fallen as his arches. This is how it plays, the gumshoe life, the endless waiting between cases sitting by a blinded window in the slatted light. These empty stretches with no homicides, they’re murder. Studs takes a deep, satisfying drag upon his biro. Puckering those cruel and crooked lips into a sphincter he exhales a writhing genie of imaginary smoke into the hyphenated sunrays, and considers how the bone-dry periods of his chosen trade must be like those endured by people of a thespian persuasion. Studs, a seriously addicted heterosexual trying to cut down upon a forty-dames-a-day vagina habit, has no time for... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Book 3, Chapter 8 : Cornered
CORNERED to judge, that’s what keeps going round and round with me well I suppose you could say I believe that everyone should have the benefit of what’s the phrase, I worry sometimes when I can’t remember things, benefit of the doubt, there, everyone should have it well not everybody obviously not some of them round here, with them what they should have it’s more doubt of the benefit in my opinion you take her, the one with stripy hair Bath Street St. Peter’s House I think she lives you see her on Crane Hill up from the Super Sausage black girl well not black mixed race, from what I hear she’s on the lot the benefits the crack the game part of the pond-life the Monk’s Pond-life I should say I mean it’s not her fault up to a point and if you’re from a disadvantaged background then statistically it’s like predestination how you end up but I still think and perhaps I’m... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Sleepless Swords
SLEEPLESS SWORDS That blowing-up bloke on the balcony had rattled John. He liked to think that generally he kept an even keel but the two-legged fireball had upset him, there was no denying. For a kickoff, John had never seen before what an exploding person looked like, not in all that frozen detail and not from outside. When John himself had copped his lot over in France he hadn’t even realized it had happened for a good few minutes. He’d just taken it for a near miss and had gone running up the road with all the other lads. He’d noticed that the shell-fire was now muffled and that he was seeing everything in black and white, but just assumed the bang had made his eyes and ears go funny. Only when he’d realized he w... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Flatland
FLATLAND Reginald James Fowler was the beautifully-written name upon the only two certificates he’d ever been awarded, which were the same two that everyone got, just for turning up. He’d been called Reggie Bowler ever since Miss Tibbs had got his name wrong, reading out the register on his first day at school. The actual hat had come much later, and he’d only started wearing it to fit in with the name. He’d found it, with his much-too-big, perpetually-damp overcoat, among the rubbish on the burial ground near Doddridge Church, when he’d been sleeping there just after his twelfth birthday. He’d already had the dream by then, of Miss Tibbs holding up a book called The Dead Dead Gang with an overcoat-and-bo... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Trees Don't Need to Know
THE TREES DON’T NEED TO KNOW Marjorie Miranda Driscoll was among the well-read dead. She hadn’t been much of a reader when she’d followed her dog India into the dark Nene down at Paddy’s Meadow, but she’d caught up in the timeless time since then. She’d loitered, liminal, in libraries, skulked spectrally in sitting rooms and crept, crepuscular, through classes. The bespectacled girl’s tubby, weightless form had bobbed unseen at scholars’ shoulders like a gray, translucent pillow as she’d followed them through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Dickens, into the linguistic hinterlands of Joyce and Eliot with quite a lot of M.R. James and Enid Blyton on the way. She’d enjoyed ne... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Rafters and the Beams
THE RAFTERS AND THE BEAMS Mashed in the Atlantic’s iron-green jaws off Freetown, on his skinny ship out of a Bristol plump from sugar and the sale of Africans, John Newton weeps, makes promises which he will not immediately keep, pleads for amazing grace and on the skyline, lightning-lit, are tumbling granite manes, are snarling caves and heavy paws of avalanche. The Lion Mountains, as the Portuguese adventurer Pedro da Cintra calls the land in 1462: Serra de Leão. Romarong, as it’s known to the local Mende tribesmen. Sierra Leone, the name tawny with dust or rank with ambush, where sweet hymns are pressed from vintages of mortal panic and undying shame. When he gets to be old, Black Charley don’t care for the songs... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Scarlet Well
THE SCARLET WELL Straight down the rabbit hole, and through the wardrobe door: it seemed to Michael as if this was a completely proper and time-honored way to get into another world, although he couldn’t for the death of him have told you why it felt like that. Perhaps he just remembered something similar from an old story that he’d once had read to him, or else he was becoming more accustomed to the way things happened in this curious new place that he was lost in. After all the fuss and fireworks of his kidnap by the horrifying Sam O’Day and then his rescue by the eerie ragamuffins of the Dead Dead Gang, he had decided that the best thing he could do would be to treat the whole thing like a dream. Admittedly, it was a dr... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)