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.)

Rabbits
RABBITS Oh, and weren’t they all the talk Upstairs, the Dead Dead Gang, their muckabout and mischief round the everlasting drainpipes, famous exploits that had dished out scabs for medals? They were much loved in the shitty gutters of Elysium, wanted for questioning in four or five dimensions and admired by boys and girls throughout the whenth and linger of this shiny, well-worn century. They were a pack of quick and dirty little animals and there were far too many of them, running up and down the world all day. They trespassed upon babies’ dreams and took short cuts across the thoughts of writers, were the inspiration and ideal for every secret club and Children’s Film Foundation mystery, for all the books, for every Stea... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Asbos of Desire
ASBOS OF DESIRE What Marla thought was, it had all gone wrong when the royal family had killed Diana. All of it was bad things what had happened after that. You knew they’d killed her, ’cause there was that letter what she wrote, how she’d thought, like, they’d do it with a car crash. That was proof. Diana was expecting it, what happened to her. Marla wondered if she’d had a whatsit, premonition, a prediction thing that night it happened. That bit what you always see with her and Dodie and the driver coming out the Ritz where it’s like on the hotel cameras and they go through the revolving doors. She must have known in some way, Marla thought, but it was like Diana’s destiny what couldn’t be a... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Atlantis
ATLANTIS Foul fanthoms five his farter lies, and office bones are cobbles made. Ah ha ha ha. Oh, bugger, let him stay down here and underwater in the warm, the sweaty linen currents drefting him away, aweigh in anchor chains and scrabble crabs and mermaids mermering to their slowmile phones, their fishbone combs, don’t make him swim up to the light just yet, not yet. Five minutes, just five minutes more because down here it isn’t any time at all, it could be nineteen fifty-eight and him a five-year-old with all his life uncoiled unspoiled before him, down here in the warm and weeds and winkles, with his thoughts bright-colored tetras streaming in among the tumbled busts, the dead men’s chests, but it’s too late, alre... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Mental Fights
MENTAL FIGHTS Scrambling up out of the crook-door after Phyllis Painter, all the ringing uproar of the Works – its scale and color and especially the niff of Phyllis’s putrescent scarf – hit Michael Warren squarely in the mush. The factory floor that the Dead Dead Gang had emerged onto, big as an airdrome and flooded with a pearly light from its improbably high windows, hummed with purposeful activity. Builders were everywhere, on ladders and on gantries, striding back and forth with scrolls and sheaves of documents, calling instructions to each other in a language where each syllable flowered to an intricate and lyric garden. Clad in wooden sandals, wearing plain robes of soft pigeon-gray that had a hint of green or purpl... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Destructor
THE DESTRUCTOR “Michael? Ooh Gawd. Michael, can you ’ear me? Please cough. Please breathe …” “ ’Old on, we’re nearly there. ’Old on, Doreen.” The sight of sulfurous Sam O’Day leaning out through the window of that car, the one that had the lady being hurt inside it, that had nearly done for Michael. And the pub full of bad ghosts, with those two screaming wooden people and the man whose features floated round his face like clouds, that had almost been worse. Those things aside, though, he was starting to get used to all this haunting business. He liked burrowing through time, and being in a gang, and having fallen secretly in love with Phyllis even though she didn’t want to ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)