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.)

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.)

Clouds Unfold
Book Three: VERNALL’S INQUEST Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only stubbornly persistent illusion. —Albert Einstein, Letter to Vero and Bice Besso, March 21, 1955 CLOUDS UNFOLD Always now and always here and always me: that’s what it’s like for you. Now always and here always and me always: this is what it’s like for me. Now. Here. Me. Now always, even when it’s then. Here always, even when it’s there. Me always, even when I’m you; even when I’m in Hell and am I fallen, when am I a thousand fiends. They fold up into you. You fold u... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Hark! The Glad Sound!
HARK! THE GLAD SOUND! Aspidery piano music picked its way in cold mist from the Abington Street library to the workhouse in the Wellingborough Road. His feet like ice inside his work boots, Tommy Warren took a last pull on his Kensitas then flicked the glowing dog-end to the ground, a tiny fireball tumbling away in marbled dark, smashed into sparks on frosted paving stones. The distant, tinkling notes were creeping from Carnegie Hall above the library and out through this November night, their sound a string of icicles. Its source was Mad Marie, marathon concert pianist, booked at the hall that evening, giving one of her recitals which might last for hours. Days. Tom was surprised that he could hear her right up here outside St. Edmund&rsqu... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Forbidden Worlds
FORBIDDEN WORLDS In Bill’s experience, being both intelligent and working class was usually a recipe for trouble. In the lower orders – lacking academic aspirations – genuine intelligence most often manifested itself as a kind of cunning, and if Bill was honest with himself he’d always been too cunning for his own good. Just look at the frankly awful current circumstance that his latest scheme had led to, cowering behind the portly shade of Tom Hall while a gang of nightmarish and drunken specters tortured a bald, weeping man who seemed to be made out of wood. Hardly an ideal outcome, even for a serial optimist like Bill who generally tried to make the best of things. He could remember the first intimations that had ... (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.)