Nivello

 Erimus, the second moon, was rising on their left and Fao, the third moon, was setting on their right.  Between the moons the evening sky was spotted with clouds and the occasional sparkle of a low-orbit satellite.  The sky, normally turquoise during daytime, was shading into purple with red at the edges and the last of the sun was hiding now behind the spires and towers of Lustrous, the capital city of Medthorn.

Jasper squeezed himself into the driver’s seat of the gravity-car, cursing as he twisted this way and that in the plasti-steel seat trying to pull the seatbelt free from beneath himself.  Honoré tsked under her breath and opened the rear door to sit in the back and paused.

“What the hell, Jas?” she said, staring at an animal carrier emblazoned with a logo in red and white that she didn’t recognise.  “This had better not be occupied.”  She put a hand on it to lift it out and something inside lunged against the grille blocking the door, jolting the carrier forward and bumping it against the front passenger seat.  Honoré suppressed a cry of shock and her eyes tightened with annoyance that she’d even let herself be startled.  “Jas?” she said again, trying to put meaning into her tone.

Jasper’s bulk squeaked as he turned in his seat to look over his shoulder.  “Oh that, that’s the wolverine.  Special delivery for Dr. Veille.”

“When you get round to it,” said Honoré.  “Did you feed it?  Is that why it’s trying to take my hand off?  And where am I suppose to sit?”

“Uhhh,” said Jas as he turned back to the controls.  “Huh.  I might have forgotten to feed it today actually.  I’ll do it when we get back.”

“Deliver it already!  Why do you want a half-dead wolverine in the back of your car anyway?”

“I don’t,” said Jasper staring through the windscreen.  “But… well, it’s Dr. Veille.  It’s not like we get on.”

“You’re not to get on her good side by starving her bloody wolverine to death!  And where am I supposed to sit?  You’ve still not answered me!”

“Next to me?”

“Hah!”  Honoré hauled the animal carrier out and pushed it onto the passenger seat next to Jasper, which seemed to agitate the wolverine inside.  It started growling now, a low, throaty noise that made Jasper keep glancing over at it.  His face, naturally jowly and pale, took on a slightly sickly sheen to it and he started sweating.  Behind him Honoré got in the back, her feet crunching on paper and cardboard debris in the floorwell, and sighed heavily.  She slammed her door shut.

“Let’s get going,” she said.  “Ryegate first, then Dr. Veille.  I was rather hoping to get some reading done this evening but that looks like another dream gone up in smoke.”

“What are you reading now?”  Jasper unlocked the controls with his fingerprints and checked the power levels as the dashboard display lit up.  He adjusted the steering column slightly and then gently engaged the antigravity drive.  It whined loudly and the car shuddered momentarily, then there was a stomach-clenching sensation of weightlessness as the whole car became wrapped in a zero-g bubble.  It lifted slowly up into the sky and Jasper focused on the radar display, checking for other sky traffic.  Honoré was saying something about the book she was supposed to be copy-editing but interpreting the two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional sky traffic took up most of Jasper’s concentration.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“I will be when we’re in a sky-lane,” said Jasper, whose brain replayed the last thing Honoré had said when the silence of her not talking got too loud.  The whine of the anti-gravity drive had faded at last and he made a mental note, for at least the fifth time, that he should get the drive serviced.  “Sorry, this is a bit tricky.”  The car shuddered as he engaged the impulse drive to correct their trajectory.

“I thought they did it all themselves?”

“Self-driving gravity-cars got banned last year, Hon,” said Jasper.  “Too many accidents.  Lustrous doesn’t like its residents being scattered over its terraces from a great height.”

“How?  They’re AI driven, right?”

Jasper sighed and tweaked the controls until the radar flashed, indicating that they were in a sky-lane.  He gently eased back on the anti-gravity and increased the impulse speed and the car started moving smoothly through the air.  With that done he relaxed a little.

“AI’s just another name for Expert System,” he said.  “If it was just reacting to what’s around the car it’d be fine.  But all the attempts to make it clever, to have it do what you say when most people can’t even say what they’re thinking… it’s not working.  They’re taking the AI out of everything now.”

“I didn’t understand any of that,” said Honoré.  “How long until we get there?”

Sand schooner

 “Ahoy there, the land!” came a cry from somewhere beyond the columns and I started.  I had expected that I would be alone in this place, whether it was Iglé or somewhere pretending to be like it.  Behind me there was nothing, just the red sands of the Sonora desert and the stone columns rising up and marking the edge of the city.

“You!  Yes, you!  Ahoy there!”  The voice sounded slightly hectoring and reminded me of a shopkeeper I had known in Paris who bemoaned her lack of repeat custom while refusing to hear that her attitude was miasmic to an extreme.  I looked around to both sides now and still there was nothing in sight.  Then an odd-shaped sail appeared above a low wall and a sand-schooner hove into view.

The ship was medium length, at least compared with those ships I knew to ply the sands of the desert, and was ivory-coloured all over save for the name which was written in teal along one-side: the Ivy Mariner.  Portholes indicated a single below-deck and the bridge was two-storied in the tradition of the University schooners that gathered seismic data and geological artefacts.  The lower-bridge level would house the instrumentation for study and the upper-level was where the steering and speed of the ship was managed.  A tall woman was standing outside the upper-level of the bridge and leaning on a railing.  When she noticed that I’d seen her she stood upright and waved an arm dramatically as though concerned that I might look away again.

“Ahoy!”

“Hello,” I called back, wondering how well my voice might carry in the dry afternoon air.  “Can I help you?”

“Are you lost?” she shouted back, and uncertain if she could hear me or not, I shook my head carefully and meaningfully.  “I think you are,” she shouted.  “Wait there, I’ll send out a man.”

I shivered despite the heat of the day.  Sending out a man meant this was a private vessel and not a University ship.  The Academics were a well-meaning bunch in my experience, and friendly to a fault, but they would always put you aside in favour of their latest obsession or idea.  The private vessels however were owned by the wealthy of Sonora desert.  They had been granted a number of freedoms and permissions under successive governments, all discretely paid for naturally, until someone had realised that the desert was essentially a self-governing fiefdom that was only a short step away from not having to pay taxes.  The court cases arising from that are still making their way through the Sonora courts, hindered at every step by the fact that all Sonora law enforcement and judiciary are connected, one way or another, to the wealthy who view the desert as their playground.  At the very least, if I were to ‘accidentally’ die out here I could be certain that no-one would investigate my death.

Looking around though my options were limited: I could wait for this man and find out what the lady of the schooner wanted, or I could venture deeper into a city that was trying to fill me with memories that were not my own.  I balked at one, and then the other, feeling as though I had no options at all but to wait for fate to overtake me.

I decided, too late as it turned out, that the city was the lesser evil and turned and walked briskly down what might once have been a street intending to take the first turning that would hide me from the ship and then find a broken house or shop to hide in.  I doubted that anyone would search too assiduously for me: a stranger without water in the desert wouldn’t last long.  They might wait for me to leave and then try and accost me, but once night fell I was sure I could sneak past the ship and try and find my way back.  Though I was as ill-dressed for the cold of the desert at night as I was for the heat of the desert during the day.

I had misjudged the athleticism and interest of the man sent to find me though, and I had barely turned the corner and started looking at rotted brick and crumbling stone, considering which shadows might be deep enough to hide in, when the sounds of light, running footsteps made me tense and a hand landed firmly on my shoulder.

“Wrong way,” said a voice that wasn’t quite friendly.  It was deep, slightly growly, and I wondered for a moment if the man were artificially deepening his voice, perhaps to disguise it.  The fingers on my shoulders gripped tightly, but not enough to hurt.  I doubted I could pull free without prising his fingers loose though.

“I wasn’t intending to wait for you,” I said.  “I have business here in the city.”

“In Iglé?  You need permission to visit.”

“I have permission,” I said without thinking.

“Then you just need to show Madam Friest.  Come on.”

The voice still wasn’t quite friendly and I found myself trapped in my lie: clearly I couldn’t claim she’d already seen my permission, and now when we returned this fellow would tell her about it and I would have to admit that I didn’t have any.  I controlled my anger and regret and turned to face my captor.

In ve Iglé

 I walked towards the sound of the water noticing that the sand beneath my feet seemed firmer in this direction; after maybe only twenty seconds the sand became sparser and I could see red rock beneath.  The water turned out to be a small spring, leaping from a crack in the rock  and puddling in a shallow pool before running along a channel the width of two fingers and disappearing into the ground some distance away.  The water was cold and refreshing and once again I found myself regretting that I’d set out so ill-prepared; this would have been an excellent place to refill a water bottle from.

As I looked around, splashing a palmful of water onto my face I saw stones piled up here and there in what might have been roughly rectangular shapes, and wider paths past them that might have been streets.  I rubbed my eyes with more water, and then splashed some onto my shirt, figuring that it being damp might help with the heat, and looked around again.

The buildings seemed intact all of a sudden; I could see a squat red block with an empty doorway and a mustard-yellow awning shading it.  Two windows loomed blackly above, the shadows inside impossible to penetrate from where I was standing.  A wooden frame held trays of what looked like watermelons, though I had no idea where you’d grow watermelons in a desert.  Alongside the building ran a street, paved for the most part but with gaps in the surface where I could imagine someone slipping and twisting an ankle.  Some kind of wiry yellow-green grass grew up against the side of the building, little tufts of it sprouting here and there.  It looked like it was probably torn up when it was noticed.  Overhead the sun shone but it seemed weaker, or least less hot, and I noticed that I wasn’t sweating any more.

I rubbed my head and looked down at the spring, which wasn’t there.  Without thinking I knelt and patted the ground, unable to conceive that the water could just vanish, and instead, as I touched the cool liquid, the water reappeared and the building and the street faded away instead.

A mirage?  It seemed too unlike anything out here for that; too much detail, and the sun’s strength changing wasn’t something a mirage could do.  I pondered, letting the water run over my hand, and then, gradually, the memory of my one-time mentor and no-longer friend Isabella Bonfontaine, came to me.

Iglay is a strange place, she was saying.  I could remember her standing in the courtyard of a bar in Covent Garden, a drink in one hand and a pipe in the other.  It tries to fill you with its memories.  You can’t stand there for any length of time without being made to remember something that never happened to you.  Someone in the chairs, hunched over and trying not to listen turned to face her at that point, and shouted, ‘Will you shut up!’  That’s my point, Isabella had said, sloshing her drink out of its glass as she waved it around.  It just keeps on, pressuring you, trying to force you to leave by never shutting up about its past.

Why was I remembering her?  Was this place like Iglay, a city overfull with memories, looking to pass some off to vistors and passers-by, to take the pressure off itself.  I considered it odd that there should be two cities with the same problem though.

And then my mind started working; I’m going to blame the heat and the sun for me not seeing it sooner, and thank the water for its cooling.  What I had transliterated as Inveigle wasn’t… it was, in fact, in ve Iglé.  In, despite the impossibility of seeing it as anything other than the English word for me, wasn’t even a preposition; it was… a number, I thought after nearly thirty seconds struggling to recall it.  I couldn’t remember which one though.  Ve, however, was a preposition, but it also escaped me.  And Iglé was also spelled Iglay and Iggely if you believed some of the medieval manuscripts.  Number, preposition, Iglay.  I had no idea what that could mean.

Inveigle

 I left the Hotel Borealis around noon; the receptionist was the same on who’d checked me in the previous day and she looked tired, as though she’d been on shift continuously since I’d arrived.  She lifted her eyes from whatever she was looking at behind the long, steel counter just long enough to identify me and sneer, and then her attention returned to whatever it was that was more interesting.  I considered wishing her a pleasant day and decided against it.  I do not like raising my voice unless there is no other choice and she was far enough away from me that I would have needed to shout.

The heat from the desert hit me like a wall.  I hadn’t noticed the air-conditioning in the hotel once I’d adjusted to its internal temperature, but now outside again the difference was apparent.  The heat was dry but breathing felt difficult at first: I found myself gasping as though the air were somehow thinner instead of just drier, and it only gradually subsided.  I kept walking while I adjusted though and soon stepped out of the shade of the hotel’s colonnade and into the full midday blast of heat and light.  It was less of a shock than leaving the hotel had been, but it was still another shock; enough that I reconsidered leaving the hotel at all.  But the city in the pillars that I had seen last night under the borealis would be treacherous at any time, and at night I’d be hard pressed to see what was coming.

I should, I realised belatedly, have taken water with me.  Instead I strode manfully across red sand that crunched underfoot like cinders and headed north-west with the bravado of an idiot.  After half an hour the city was still nowhere in sight and I was sweating copiously; sweat ran down either side of my nose, behind my ears and down the back of my neck, wicked from my scalp by my hair.  My clothes were soaked through; small patches of sweat had grown and merged and now my shirt clung unpleasantly to my skin and my shorts felt heavy and clammy.  Thirst was increasing; my throat was dry despite my sweat and I found myself licking my upper lip frequently, trying to pick up the salty sweat before it evaporate.  The sun beat down overhead, a constant reminder that what I was doing was foolish, and each footstep trudged a little further away from coolness, water, and civilisation.

Two hours and some handful of minutes had passed by the time I struggled into the shadow of a tall stone column and while the temperature difference wasn’t that great it was enough to afford me temporary relief.  The stone was wind- and weather-worn but still towered above me.  Shading my eyes from the afternoon sun and staring up until my neck hurt I estimated that the column was eight, perhaps nine metres tall, and if the city was three thousand years old then it must have been over ten metres when it was constructed.  The stone was rough to the touch and warm and if anything had ever been carved into it it had eroded away long since.  Beyond it were hints of stone paving beneath shifting red sand and, a little further along still, were two stone lumps that might have been animals once.

There was no sign of any water, though I was probably still outside the old city limits.  Now, for the first time, it occurred to me that whatever water had once flowed here might have dried up as the millenia passed and I estimated that I might make it back to the hotel without collapsing but only if I stayed here less than an hour.  And probably less if I couldn’t find shade to stay in.

A sensible man would have turned back at that point and remade his plans to come back another day.  I, however, wiped my forehead and licked my fingers to try and conserve some water, however futile the gesture, and stepped back out into the furnace of the desert afternoon and continued into the city.

Even up close I couldn’t make out what animals or objects the next two stone lumps might once have been, but carved beneath the left-most one, in letters now only shallowly incised, were runes that I slowly translated to read Inveigle.  A name, or an instruction?  As I pondered my ears registered a regular tapping sound, something both familiar and confusing.  It took nearly thirty seconds before I finally identified as the sound of water dripping.

Breakfast before dawn

“We stop serving breakfast at dawn,” said the receptionist primly.  She looked like my sister, if my sister braided her hair and had glasses; the same shaped face, the same snub nose; even the same slightly-whiny voice.  Her outfit: an entirely respectable two-piece suit over a white blouse with a little brass (or bronze, I couldn’t quite make it out) brooch pinned to the lapel on the left was the kind of thing my sister would have put on.

“Dawn seems kind of early,” I said.  I was checking-in to the Hotel Borealis for seven nights and had been looking forward to a week of rest; lazy days sitting on the terraces that overlooked the red sands of the Sonora Desert, quiet evenings in the bars of the hotel, and maybe a night or two at the casino.  Having to wake up before dawn just for breakfast didn’t fit with my agenda.

“Ok boomer,” she said.  “This is your room key — it’s electronic.  Place it against the plate on the door and wait for the beep.  There’s a light that will flash green…” I stopped listening.  I knew how hotel keys worked and my booking was for a suite with the mini-bar prepaid so there really wasn’t much she could say that interested me.  I wondered if I’d be able to make a decent Old Fashioned from the mini-bar or if I’d have to call down to room service.  “…in the event of a fire.” She finished and half-smiled at me.

“Thanks,” I said.  She looked slightly surprised and I wondered if she’d slipped some more ‘ok boomer’ like comments into her little spiel.  “What was the room number again?”

“413,” she said, pointing at the little white card containing my room keycard and a slip of paper bearing the wifi password.  Where the number should have been written was empty space, which she realised at the same time as I did.  “Let me write that down for you, in case of memory loss,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said again, with less sincerity.

The suite was three rooms: a bathroom with an actual bidet — something I assumed had gone the way of the dinosaurs by now — and a Japanese toilet with more functions than my smartphone; a bedroom with the expected kingsize bed that could sleep at least three people plus their dogs; and a sitting room that was slightly overcrowded with overstuffed furniture.  The armchairs bulged and the couch positively lounged and sitting on any of them was like sitting down on a cloud; after a moment you’d forgotten you were sitting at all and felt like you were just being somehow supported in the air by fluffiness.  Getting up proved trickier and I resorted to just rolling off the couch onto the floor and navigating my way up from a solid surface.  All of these faced the huge, plate-glass picture window that looked out on to the Sonora Desert.

Behind the couch, facing away from the window, was a desk and stiff-backed chair.  I considered moving the chair around to the other side of the desk so that I could see out of the window from there too, but it seemed like too much effort.  I wasn’t intending to spend all that much time at a desk anyway.

The borealis woke me at 2am.  I had drawn the curtains across the window before going to bed, and they were floor-length, heavy, weighted curtains of a thick brown material that drank in the light and suffocated it until the room was pitch black.  The noise — the strobing hum that seemed to sweep across the room, bounce off the walls and arc back again, throbbing against the bed, was the culprit.  I sat up, unable to see anything and feeling disoriented, wondering where on earth I was.  Slowly I remembered that I was in the hotel, though that didn’t explain the noise, and I fumbled for the bed-side light-switch.

Instead of the lights I found the switch for opening and closing the curtains and, with a stately whoosh, they drew apart letting greenish-yellow light flicker in from the sitting room.  Thoroughly confused now, I got out of bed and went to the door, convinced that the room lighting had come on anyway but was somehow faulty, and was greeted in the doorway by the borealis in full, glorious performance through the plate-glass window.

It’s not June, I murmured to myself.  The hotel’s brochures were quite definite on the borealis only being visible in June.  I expected that the hotel staff had any number of disgruntled idiot customers at other times of the year who did little more than reveal their illiteracy to the receptionist (and probably escalated it to the manager; what else would an idiot do when proven wrong?) regarding the borealis.  And yet… here I was, being inconvenienced by something I’d deliberately intended to avoid.

The shimmer of the light across the sky was mesmerising though, and the Sonora Desert below it responded; glittering and shining, reflecting back the light from the electromagnetic interactions above and creating odd illusions: a monstrous creature here seemed to stalk westwards towards the columns of an ancient city; then it collapsed into the ripples of a vast ocean on which sailed boats with strange-shaped sails.  Despite myself I moved towards the couch and sat down, transfixed by the display.

At 5:30 the borealis ended and darkness settled back over the cold sands.  The stars twinkled slowly back into view as my night-vision restored, and my stomach rumbled.  With a sigh I reached for the phone.

“Room service?  Yes, I’d like to order breakfast please….”

Prison Dilemma

I could hear Briana shouting my name, though it seemed to be a long way away.  I started to turn to see if I could see her, and maybe reply, but the alien looked down at something it was holding, did something with its face that might have been a frown, and pushed at a dent on a small metal box.  The box hummed and I got a blast of the aniseed smell again, and suddenly Briana didn't seem very important any more.
"What time is it?" said the alien, its head warping and distorting.  Nearby two other aliens seemed to be having a conversation in a different language, and instead of their whole head changing shape they would lean in close to each other and ripples and waves would spread over their skin instead.  I thought I ought to be interested, but I just couldn't muster the energy.
"Earth time?"  My wrist seemed heavy, but I carried on trying to lift it up anyway to look at my watch.
"No...." The alien seemed confused, and I finally pulled by wrist to where I could see my watch.  Somewhere, someone was shouting my name.
"It's about half-past five," I said, though the time was meaningless to me.  Somewhere, so far away that the distance was measured by how long it took the fastest moving thing in the universe to get there, it was half-past five.  I had no idea what happened at that time of day that it had been considered worth giving a name to.
"I was hoping that you could tell me if R'th'gabose had happened yet?"  He clicked the apostrophes and I wondered if there was some hard surface in his throat to help generate such sharp sounds.
"What a Rutherford hose?" I said.  The stars in the constellations looked like they were moving.
Another alien leaned in and ripples and whorls chased each other across his head in rapid, ever-changing, merging patterns.  My interrogator's head responded, and his greyness lightened slightly.
"We are waiting for the ones who want to kill us to leave," he suddenly said, speaking quickly.  "When they are gone we would like your help to return to our world.  It will be easy, and we can then help you."
"Wha–" I started, and then everything turned inside out and squashed back down again and I was being hugged by Briana.  In my hand, the steel straw had run and melted like ice-cream on a hot day and was puddled around my feet.  Neither my hand nor feet were hurt.
"Do you think they were telling the truth?" said Briana after I told her what had happened.  "It sounds very strange to me.  Perhaps they're all prisoners somehow?"
"I... it could be, I mean, they could be."  I was still feeling slightly confused.  "But they're still part of the people who disappeared.  I suppose we have to try and talk to them somehow."
"But suppose they're the reason that all the rest of them disappeared," said Briana.  "Then we'd probably be next on their list of people to kill."
"How can we know that from one of them just talking to me?  You're sounding hysterical, Bri.  What's wrong?"
She didn't answer me at first, instead she held up an oddly shaped skull with a hole in one side.
"There's thousands of them in the hill," she said.  "I think the hill might just be some kind of heaped up mass grave."
"Suicide?" I offered, but I didn't believe it either.
"So what do we do?"
"We pass it back up the chain of command," I said.  "If we can get back to the Guinevere."
We both looked out at the sea of metal straws, all of which might be capable of taking us back to that other world, the place that seemed to be at right-angles to this one, that filled the area between us, the landing ship, and the mountains.
"Yeah," said Briana.  "So, fancy your chances building a boat, or shall we go mountaineering?"

Ten foot steel straws

Briana sniffed.  "Can you smell that," she asked.  I sniffed, a little tentatively at first, and then a little harder.  There was a faintly eggy smell about the moon that I didn't exactly mind, but made me vomit when it got strong.  The air was human-breathable, but there were persistent rumours that the sulphur compounds that gave the air its eggs smell were carcinogenic, teratogenic, and just about any other -genic you cared to suggest.  I made sure I got a monthly check-up and reminded myself every so often that so far, only Auntie out of all the people in this career had made it to retirement.
"I think so," I said, sniffing again.  There was something else against the eggy backdrop and the loamy smells from where we'd disturbed the earth.  I sniffed one last time, and suddenly caught it quite strongly.  "Aniseed?" I said.
"I was thinking fennel," said Briana, "but I think other people describe that as aniseedy, so it's probably the same smell.  Where's it coming from?"
It was kind of a rhetorical question as it pretty much had to be coming from the ten foot metal straws that now separated us from our landing ship, the Guinevere.  I sniffed again, and edged towards the straws.  The smell vanished immediately.
"Apparently not from where we both thought," I said. coming back.  The aniseed hint returned to my nose.  "It disappears when I start to walk towards those straws."
"Bugger," said Briana.  "That would have given us somewhere to start, at least."
"We've got two places to start now," I said.  "We've got a field of metal straw that might be some kind of Spoon harvest, and we've got food smells, that might lead to a Spoon Diner."
She laughed, but she also punched my arm, just above the segmented armor we both wore.  I said ow in a loud voice, and she laughed again.
"Let's follow the smell," she said.  "We know where the straw is, but the smell might go while we're looking at the straw."
"The straw came up pretty fast, it might go again just as fast."
We looked at each other for long moments, and I found myself admiring how she arranged her blue hair to frame her face and draw the eye to her seriously sharp cheekbones.  She looked almost too beautiful to touch, and her choice of mission partners was limited to just three of us, who could each be guaranteed not to fall in lust with her.
"You do the straws," she said.  "The smell has to be more interesting."
"Ok," I said.  "So, standard protocol.  Visibility at all times, unless you radio contact me first and show me where you're going to be and how long you're going to be there for.  Veto rights applied, and we'll use band 35 as the fall-back if we think we're compromised.  First scout, twenty earth-minutes."
Our watch timers all carried earth-standard time as a universal default so neither of us had to work out the local time conversion rates, for which I was grateful.  I started off back to the straws, turning round from time to time to make sure I could still see Briana.
  When I reached the metal straw Briana was still navigating her way. I reached out to the straw and touched one.  It was slightly warm to the touch, and vibrated all the time. I gripped it a little harder, trying to see if it would snap, and it seemed to flex and bend somehow; the world around me flattened out, went two-dimensional, and then seemed to recede as though at the end of a long tunnel, making me feel instantly nauseous.  When I recovered, I'd broken the straw off and was clutching it tight in my fist.  Then I looked for Briana, and instead of seeing her, I found myself surrounded by tall, thin Grey-like aliens and the sky behind them was already dark with strange new constellations visible.
"Hello?" said one of the aliens, his head stretching and distorting to make the sounds as though he were running through a circus-grounds Hall of Mirrors.
"Hello?" I replied, and then everything went weird.

The realignment halls

My footsteps raise small puffs of dust from the floor, and each puff of dust intensifies the smell of mould. It's gloomy in here, so it's hard to be sure, but I think the puffs of dust are actually greenish, and I'm a little worried that what I think is dust is actually just a thick layer of mould. Nonetheless, I've been told that this is the only way in, so this is the way I go. I pull my sleeve across my mouth and try to breathe shallowly, hoping that it will make a difference.
The room is narrow and long, and by the smoothness of whatever it is on the floor, hasn't been visited recently. This also worries me, as I only know of this place from ancient references. It's looking more and more likely that the realignment halls have been shut down or destroyed long ago, and the space is being reclaimed by Nature in her cthonic garb. I plod on anyway, clutching a tiny spark of hope in my heart. Even if the halls aren't in use any more I might be able to find something useful.
I reach the end of the room and stop, stymied by the wall in front of me. There's no obvious handle or way through, so I reach out, a little gingerly, and run my hand over the wall. It's smooth and dry, and nothing flakes away or bursts into sporeclouds. I relax a little, and use both hands to touch and probe all the wall I can reach. It goes up to the ceiling, about thirteen feet above me, so if the way in is up there I've no chance of finding it. The wall remains obdurately solid.
I shuffle over to the corner of the wall, pulling my sleeve back across my mouth again. Dust rises to the level of my knees, but I encounter nothing on the floor that might be a handle or lever. At the corner I check the wall that adjoins the one I want to pass. It's colder than my wall, but otherwise smooth and dry again; no secret panels, no touch-switches. Not even a neatly-printed white placard with instructions for seekers of enlightenment.
I shuffle across to the opposite wall. The flame of hope in my heart is guttering now. I reach it, again not finding anything on the floor, and reach out. Almost immediately I touch something yielding and fibrous. Spiderweb! I think, and I have to cruch my stomach hard and bend forward to stop myself screaming. I back up a little, staggering in my awkward pose, and make myself take a deep breath. Then another, and another, and then I can stand up again. It's the last thing I want to do, but I reach out again, and check out the spiderweb.
It's a bell-pull, a silken rope tied around a peg in the wall. My relief is so strong that I actually break out in a cold sweat on my forehead and my knees tremble, jellylike. I allow myself a tiny little chuckle at how stupid I've been, and then untie the bell-pull. It drops heavily to the level of my waist and hangs there, immobile in the stillness of the room.
I yank on it, tugging firmly, and almost immediately a line of light shines out of the middle of the wall as a door cracks open, and hangs very slightly ajar. The light is the soft yellow of the glowglobes used everywhere in Tal Mallan, and the flame of hope burns more strongly at last. I approach the door and, hopefully, the realignment halls.

Travelogue VI: The wreck of the Aidolate

The wind howls like a woman mourning her lover, tugging at the sand and occasionally flinging small handfuls of it into the air. The grains scatter down again, pattering like dry rain on the orange desert below. The scent of cinnamon is strong here, and the orange sand is stained darker and darker, shading almost to brown, as the wreck is approached. Scrubby plants cling to life, mostly bare brown branches with tiny buds of olive green leaves tucked on the underside to hide them from the wind.

The Aïodolate crashed down almost vertically, and its speed caused it to embed over two-thirds of its length into the ground. There is speculation that it stopped because it met bedrock, and more speculation that it stopped only because the engines gave out. Either way, the wreck resembles an iceberg, both in that most of it is hidden below the surface, and in its general outline.

The engine housing is cratered and craggy, standing proud like a burnished metallic mountain. A few hardy souls each year attempt to climb it, and so far routes have been found to half-way up but no further. The metals used for the engine housing were commonplace save for a small amount of exotic bonding material, and that reduces friction and toughens the alloy. This makes climbing harder, and hammering in pitons almost impossible.

All of the access doors are below the surface somewhere. The engine housing stands proud of the desert, but the eighty metres between the start of the engine and the desert sand are either smooth metal panels or docking junctions for probes. The Aïodolate was known to have launched many probes shortly before starting its cataclysmic descent, and conspiracy theories about them abound. There are telemetry stations set up at regular intervals around the Aïodolate to watch for the return of any of the probes, in the hope that they might have some information that would explain the crash.

No-one knows if anyone survived the crash. No-one has emerged from the Aïodolate in over one-hundred and fifty years, but it did have a number of experimental stasis generators aboard. People could be asleep in there, waiting for rescue.

The political climate has changed at last, and there is talk; quiet, not-quite-insurrectionist talk of attempting to dig down to an access hatch and investigating the wreck at last. Our plans are being drawn up, and people are silently hoping that it's been long enough that if anyone crashed it for a purpose, that purpose is long gone.

Travelogue V: the approach to the plateau

The wind howls around the mountain like a banshee, and like the banshee it never has any good tidings to bring. Up above us -- and not a very long way above us at all -- are dull clouds that look heavy with snow or hail. The last of the sunlight is still falling on the mountainside below, but it's a little too late now to turn back and try to pitch a tent to wait the weather out. It would take us at least an hour to find a surface we could secure ourselves too.

Ahead of me, Jordan is hammering pitons into the rock and behind him David is passing rope through his belt and then throwing it down to me. It's a scant comfort, but at least we'll be trying to hang on with more than just our hands and feet if the wind grows stronger and the clouds decide to drop their burden on our heads.

We begin our ascent again, slower now than before because of the need to hammer in the pitons ahead of us, and I retrieve them as a pass over them. It's hard to pull them out again, but I know that if Jordan didn't make them properly secure we'd all regret it.

Below me the mountain cascades down to a high pasture where rare cattle are summered and bred, and a small group of people make the kind of living rich Westerners pay holiday money to go and pretend to do. The mountain seems haphazard, almost careless, like a woman who has lost her sense of style and dresses in the morning with her eyes closed. The people in the high pastures wouldn't talk to us, and when it became apparent that we were planning on climbing the mountain they wouldn't even look at us. I'd heard rumours that the mountain was considered sacred, and perhaps, to these people, it is.

We've spent two years planning this ascent, researching the mountain as much as we could. There's not a lot written about it, and it's debatable if anyone's ever reached the top. Some of the books that had the most information were unobtainable; there are apparently only four copies of De Vermiis Mysteriis left in the whole world and a mountain-climber doesn't have the clout to get access to a copy. It might not have helped anyway, my Latin is barely remembered from my schooldays. I casually asked the British Museum why they didn't make more copies of the book and, before the assistant was hurried away by a senior-looking man in a very sharp suit, was told that they couldn't afford the staff attrition.

There's a cry from up ahead and Jordan waves, makes sure he has my attention, and points. The next plateau is visible now, maybe only a cautious half-hour's climb away, and we might even get there before the clouds descend on us. We shout a brief conversation and decide to be a little less cautious and try to beat the weather to the top.

What awaited us on the plateau was a scene of horror.

Travelogue IV: Subtle Wind

In Autumn we collect leaves as they fall from the trees. The subtle wind shakes the branches and the leaves rustle and jostle, and eventually fall. The susurration is like whispers in the room next door: barely audible and mysterious. I feel a stirring inside myself, and wonder if I am remembering what love is at last. Then another leaf, brown and gold, dances past me on an invisible breath of air and I am distracted, racing off to catch it before the wind abandons it and it falls to the ground.

I am not alone, but I am isolated; we all are. We pursue the leaves, each of us driven to find the one that bestows the gift of memory. The trees tower above, and let through beams of autumn sunlight sometimes, soft drizzle and chill mists at others. People join us regularly, and I resent them briefly. Then I forget who they are, and return to my pursuit of the leaves. I think people leave us too, having found their fragile map back to... wherever. There are always more leaves.

Another leave whisks past me, but this one has a touch of light about it, a barely visible trail of sparks. Something inside me screams at the sight of it, but I have reacted already and leapt to catch it. Everything slows down.

I hang in the air, my hand reaching for the leaf, my fingers closing around it as slowly as though we were all suspended in syrup. At the back of my mind a voice is screaming but it is faint and tinny, distorted by static, heard as though on a badly tuned radio. I finally realise it is screaming one word over and over again: STOP.

I am stood on the ground again, holding a dead autumn leaf in my hand, and I am cold. I shiver, and look around at this ancient, dreary forest, and remember coming here, following a woman with smouldering black eyes. I look around for her, but she is gone. For a moment I think I hear a giggle and the sound of feet crunching on leaves, and then it is gone. I am alone, and on my way home from work. I kick aside a drift of leaves, drop the one I am holding, and carry on through the forest to the road.

The road, it would seem, has been gone a long time. I stare out across a desolation of black, ruined soil, carved with trenches, scattered with coils of barbed wire and smell a scorched smell on the subtle wind. I wonder where I've been.

Excess Cafe

Back before the downtime the building on the corner of Archer Street was the Excess Cafe. I remember that it was June, and it was hot on London's streets. It was hotter still in the Underground, and I was sincerely glad that I could walk over to the Excess Cafe without needing the Tube. I walked in, letting the door swing shut behind me, and laid my laptop on my usual table and dropped my bag on the floor behind my usual chair. Lehar, the waitress, looked up from the glossy gossip magazine she was reading -- from where I was the title looked like 'loser' -- and smiled quickly at me. As she bent her head over the pages of her magazine again, her black hair falling to conceal her face, she said,
"The rage is in the salt."

I felt relieved, I never knew if they'd have any rage for me when I turned up. I've been using it for the past couple of years to write. I write a fairly gory brand of fiction, in a couple of different genres. I do police procedurals with serial killers and mass murderers; horror stories where people get ripped apart and gruesomely killed; and M&B style romance novels where revenge is exacted with deadly certitude. The rage helps.

My usual table was two away from the glass window that fronted the cafe and let the street outside look in. I'd tried sitting at the window, and found that there was too much light for me to see the laptop screen well for most of the day; a little further in there was more shadow and I could still see out. The table itself was formica topped, hollow-steel-legged, and bolted to the floor. The chairs were all moulded plastic, and my usual chair was just the one facing the window and next to the wall. The seat had a couple of rough spots where someone had let hot cigarette ash fall and melt it.

Anna-Mix was in, sat over at the counter on a tall red plastic-seated stool, hunched over a white polystyrene cup of instant coffee, shivering slightly. Her lips moved silently, and her knuckles were a little white, so I let her be. I'd love Anna-Mix if she'd let anyone get close; I've written her into so many of my stories now that she's becoming a stock character. I've not told her though, because she's not heroine material, which means that her character always meets a messy end. I don't think she'd cope well finding out how many ways I've found to kill her.

Jeff was in as well, eating the Excess Club Sandwich. It's a slice of brown toast spread with mayo, then stacked with a fried egg, a couple of rashers of bacon, two slices of fried tomato, a potato waffle squashed flat, a slice of white toast spread with mustard, another fried egg, a sausage sliced down the middle, a splash of ketchup, a spoonful of baked beans and a last slice of brown toast spread with butter. Yellow yolk pooled on his plate, and his face was shiny with grease and gritty with toast crumbs. He had a couple of paper napkins on the table, and a takeaway cup of ground coffee. Jeff freelances as a town-planner, and is currently overseeing the construction of a Gaudi-inspired multi-storey parking lot. He's told me a couple of times he's hoping to reduce traffic volume in the city with it.

Dax was missing, but I was pretty certain he'd be here soon, as he knew I was looking for him. I sat down, uncapped the salt and tasted it, checking the rage, then flipped the laptop open and pressed the button to turn it on. While I waited for Dax I could find a way to kill the latest incarnation of Anna-Mix. This time she was a young single mother just finding her way into prostitution, walking through the streets of the council estate she called home. I looked over at Anna-Mix as she shuddered over her coffee and talked to herself in words that only she could hear, and saw immediately that my character would be run down by an ice-cream van driven by a vigilante paediatrician who'd been treating her daughter for Polio.

I began to type.

Ghosts

I live in a haunted house.

I quite enjoy it, if I'm honest. A lot of the aspects of the hauntings don't bother me very much. I never wake up to find ghostly people standing at the foot of my bed eyeing me suspiciously, and there are no especially cold spots in the house anywhere. I've never noticed the temperature drop while I'm watching TV, and the electronic equipment around my house functions perfectly well (if you keep my house-mate away from it, because she seems capable of developing a charge of static electricity even when she's standing perfectly still on an conducting surface). The ghosts tend to communicate through the fridge magnets, and even then they're a little oblique about the things they say. We regularly find messages warning us that food in the fridge is nearing it's expiry date, and I've had recipes before now as well (the sausage and mayonnaise casserole was... indescribable). One of the ghosts keeps trying to flirt with my housemate through the fridge magnets as well, but as it appears to only speak Swedish and she has trouble with long words, I don't think it's going anywhere so far.

The thing that tends to cause us most trouble is trying to explain the toilet roll to guests. One of the ghosts likes to write on it, so when you sit down, you'll find essays and calculations running along in blue biro. We think that the ghost somehow manages to write on the sheets without unwinding the roll, but I'm not completely sure: a couple of rolls ago I found eight sheets of it that seemed to be a study of the maximum tension you can put toilet paper under before it rips, and there's some stuff I didn't understand except for the word torque. Some guests think we do it ourselves (we don't; neither of us could stand to use a pen as crude as a biro. I hand-sharpen my own fountain-pen nibs and mix up my own inks from acorn-gall, and my house-mate uses japanese calligraphy brushes). Others think we purchase it printed like that and want to know where they can get hold of it. Occasionally they steal rolls when they've got particularly interesting stuff on (like the eye-witness account of a fire in 18th century Leeds).

The message on the fridge this morning though was unusual even by our standards. It was a call-to-arms for all the ghosts in the house. Granted there's only so much you can say in 128 luminous Fisher-Price magnetic letters, but it looks like we're about to become the battleground for a war of ghosts. I'm wondering what that's going to be like...

Travelogue 3: Tal Mallan

Haruspice is farmed on the hills within the walls of Tal Mallan and nowhere else. As the name suggests, it is used by diviners and prognosticators to accurately see the future, and Tal Mallan jealously guards them so as to take best advantage of this unusual spice. I came to Tal Mallan by the only safe route, on board a ship that had left from Port Sinistrex under license from the Emir of the city.

Tal Mallan is on a peninsula, and is surrounded completely by walls that are ten feet high at their lowest point. The walls are well maintained, built from the dense, egg-yolk-yellow-veined grey rock that is quarried from higher up the peninsula. The cubic blocks cut from the quarries are each half the height of a man and are either dressed, if being used for the foundations of the walls, or carefully carved if being used for the visible area. The carvings are images taken from the Tal Mallan religious beliefs, and hard to describe and unpleasant to see. The Gods of Tal Mallan are despotic.

Guards in uniforms of ochre and brown patrol the walls both inside and atop and are fiercely loyal to the Emir. Although no human agency has attempted an assault on the city in two hundred years, there are periodic incursions from the large phlogistonic mammals that live further up the peninsula, beyond the quarries, and where the land is in a constant state of tectonic upheaval and volcanic activity. Looking north at night you can see a dull red glow on the horizon from the active lava lakes and rivers, and when the eruptions are in full swing the sky sometimes seems filled with fireworks. Rains of ash over the city are commonplace.

Tal Mallan is annular for visitors. You enter through the port and pass through the customs house where there is a simple visual inspection to check that you are not on a list of people banned from the city or wanted for crimes. You may bring anything you like into Tal Mallan, but you leave with almost nothing. If you look across the customs house to the queue of people leaving they are empty handed and all wear the same ivory shirts and trousers. These clothes are provided by the grace of the Emir to replace your own, and are soft and comfortable, though not entirely suited to a sea-voyage as they become see-through when wet.

Visitors may travel anywhere between the outer and inner walls, but not beyond the inner walls. Inside those walls are the central hills of Tal Mallan where Haruspice is farmed, the temples to the pantheon have been built, and the Emir's palace stands.

When I entered the city for the first time, I was warned not to stay any longer than two weeks. The guard who warned me was a middle-aged woman wearing a brown and ochre uniform and carrying a bone-handled da, the weapon they use to kill the alligator-sized salamanders when they swarm in the mating season. She had a lined face that made her seem older than she was, and hazel eyes that never quite focussed on me when she was talking, but constantly slipped away and looked over my shoulder. Haruspice, she told me, permeated the air and the water of the city because it was farmed from the centre. Haruspice is addictive over long exposure times, and the longer I spent in the city, the harder I would find it to leave.

I stayed only four days that time, but she was right, and I've not been able to stay away for longer than eight months at a time. I woke last night to find I was sweating blood and my fingernails had turned a deep green, like the colour in the depths of the abyssal ocean just before the light gives out. I could remember fragments of a dream about things I would be doing today, and I've been experiencing deja vu all day. I've been expecting it, and so I walked down to the Sinistrex harbour this morning and booked passage on the next ship. It's time to return to Tal Mallan.

The Museum Ward

When I was twelve I was taken to the Herringbone Museum by my father because he was feeling guilty. He had returned a couple of weeks earlier from a relic-hunting trip in Central Africa that had lasted two-and-half years, and I had failed to recognise him. The museum trip was his way of trying to reconnect with me.

The Herringbone Museum, as you may know, houses the De Havilleau collection of artefacts. We started in that wing of the museum, with my father telling me tales of the items whose provenance he knew, often knowing more than the museum's information signs because he knew the researchers who were working on them. He told me of the strange history of Angelo's eyeball, a single eye floating in a cloudy jar of formaldehyde, and of the numerous deaths associated with the silver carillon, a tiny object of beauty that I coveted instantly. As we walked past the huge bones that De Havilleau claimed to have dug up from a vast graveyard in the Andes my father whispered to me that there were indications that the bones were even older than De Havilleau had believed, and when we stopped in front of a single case containing jade jewelry my father told me that the pieces of jade were set in some kind of bone that held unusual amounts of heavy metal, and were bound together using sinew.

When we left that wing, and walked through the grand atrium again, with its huge domed roof of stained glass, I remember catching sight of a well-dressed middle-aged man sitting in a velvet-upholstered armchair. He was wearing a black stovepipe hat, had sad grey eyes and a monocle, and was contemplating a gold pocket watch with a thin chain that ran to a pocket in his waistcoat. He looked up at me as though feeling the weight of my gaze on him, and our eyes met. There was the oddest sensation, a tingle that seemed to jolt right through me, and he winked at me. I paused in mid-step, but my father chose that moment to take my hand and pull me forward. I stumbled, turning away to look at where I was going, and when I looked back he was engrossed in his watch again.

We spent the whole day at the museum, the last hour before it closed spent looking at the things that my father had donated from a trip before I was born. That time he had been in Eastern Europe, somewhere in the steppes, and had brought back some pottery with ancient, undeciphered, writing on it, a couple of shrunken heads that filled my dreams for months afterwards, and a canoe that he suspected had had ceremonial and sacrificial purposes.

That was thirty years ago, and today I found myself in front of the limestone steps that led up to the grand doors of the Herringbone museum again, holding the hand of a little girl I'd found five minutes earlier wandering around the shopping mall two streets away. Despite all the warnings children are given about accepting sweets from strangers it had been ridiculously easy to get her to accept a chocolate bar: I had dropped my clipboard of papers near her, and when she helped me pick them up, I gave her the chocolate bar as a thankyou. Her thin face had beamed with a smile, and she opened it straight away and bit into it. Her eyes had glazed over almost immediately, and she happily accepted the suggestion that she should come with me for a half an hour or so, and return to the mall afterwards.

We walked up the steps, and I pushed open the huge mahogany doors, three times my height and counterbalanced so that even a child could push them open, and we walked into the atrium of the HerringBone museum.

Nothing had changed. The stained-glass domed ceiling still seemed as far overhead as it had when I was a child; there were a couple of display cabinets off to the left that told of the museum's history, and some hand-lettered signs on the walls indicated where various exhibits were. But most importantly, there was a green-velvet upholstered armchair in the centre of the atrium, in which was sat a middle-aged man wearing a three-piece burgundy suit and a stovepipe hat. From one pocket of his waistcoat dripped a gold-chain, that ran across to the pocket on the other side, and a monocle hung from a lapel. He was sat back, one ankle resting on the opposite knee, and he looked straight at me as I looked straight at him. I led the little girl across the marble floor, our footsteps ringing in the silence until we stood before him.

"Oscar De Havilleau?" I said quietly. The atrium was empty save for we three.

"As you must know." he replied. I nodded.

"Ward of the museum," I said, "Trapped here now for more than eighty years."

"I see the world changing by the clothes people wear, and the toys they bring in," he said. "It would be nice to see the rest."

"I need your expertise," I said. "I will be traveling to the Antartic in three days time --"

"I accept," he said cutting me off. I smiled. He smiled. The little girl smiled, though I'm sure she didn't know why. I let go of her hand, and it fell to her side, and Oscar took her other hand. I felt that tingle again, a sudden jolt, just like thirty years ago, but this time I understood what it meant, and that she had felt it too. As her eyes widened I placed my hand on Oscar's chest and spoke the words it had cost the lives of seven men to obtain. There was a coruscation in the air, little tiny supernovae of light, and I felt the presence of an ineffable being, a feeling of frustration, and a dreadful urge to turn around. I fought the urge, I knew that what must be behind me now would blast and sear my mind, leaving me an insane gibbering wreck. Oscar's eyes were tightly closed, and his lips were mumbling what was probably a prayer, and still the pressure on me to turn around grew. I trembled, my teeth chattering as I shook, and my knees felt weak and I felt myself, against my will, begin to turn.

Then the lights went out, the presence receded with a unheard, but felt, scream of anger, and I collapsed to the floor, soaked with sweat.

Oscar gave me his hand and helped me to my feet. There was a new light in his eyes, that of a man given his freedom, and the little girl sat in his chair, her eyes distant and patient. I thanked him, and we turned to leave the museum. I glanced back once at the little girl, and wondered if she knew how important she now was.

Waltzing Mathilde

Portraits hang on three of the four walls of the ballroom. The fourth wall is made of toughened glass and looks out over the harbour. In the distance the sky meets the sea, a melding of blues; in the foreground white-capped waves run ahead of the wind and crash on the craggy rocks that stand out from the shore. As 2,400 couples dance here, there is the faint noise of the surf audible through the window, a subtle regular hiss like the static crackle behind the music from an ancient vinyl record player. The dancers are unperturbed by this, it is unlikely that they even hear it any more. They move in harmony, waltzing in great interlocking circles, parading the ballroom in an eternal cycle of creation.

The dancers all wear heavy metal slippers. The ballroom floor is magnetized, and as they dance the slippers slice through the magnetic field lines, causing the flow of electricity in the superconducting cables that run below the floor. The dancers convert chemical energy in the form of food into electrical energy that can be put to better uses: this year alone they will produce enough energy to power all the 50" flat-screen plasma televisions in the country for long enough to watch every episode, analysis, re-run and repeat of American Idol XXIV: Escape from Guantanamo, and still leave enough to power the internet-enabled fridges, toasters and washing machines that the modern age deems essential.

The dancers are the elderly, the subnormal, unruly children, anyone who's ever received an ASBO, anyone the police didn't much like the look of, first-time criminals, habitual criminals, committed recidivists, students, unmarried mothers, unwanted grandparents and civil servants who have lost large amounts of public data. They come from all walks of life, and when their shift ends, they can return to what they were doing first. Many of them don't remember that they have that option when their shift ends, and so they stay here. Dancing happily to music that's entirely in their heads. A humane form of the hamster wheel for humans.

The first portrait on the wall, the one opposite the window, is of the the woman who made the ballroom possible, Waltzing Mathilde. She was born in Paris in 1920, collaborated with the Nazis in 1941, and fled to the US in 1943 under threat of death. By 1950 she had been committed to a secure mental hospital, where she waltzed quietly all day long. The portrait is of her shortly after her incarceration, waltzing in the recreation room of the mental hospital. She is petite, and wearing only a torn nightdress. Her feet are bleeding from her non-stop waltzing, but there is a smile on her face reminiscent of that of the Mona Lisa. There is a vacancy in her eyes reminiscent of modern television audiences. She is clearly happy in the portrait, even if it is the joy of oblivion.

Mathilde was studied to find out why she waltzed, and why when they tied her to her bed she would struggle to waltz to the point of rubbing all the skin off her arms and legs where they were bound. She was put into especially heavy shoes, and still she waltzed, untiringly and unceasingly. Not even four months of increasingly heavy electroshock therapy could stop her waltzing. She finally stopped waltzing when a surgeon removed 80% of her brain-stem. She also stopped breathing.

Portrait number two is of Spastic Freddy. Before Mathilde was killed in care, researchers thought they had isolated the chemical occurring in her brain that made her waltz. The chemical was synthesized and injected into the brain of Freddy, a young man with acute depression. The chemical made him flail about spastically, uncontrolled and uncoordinated, flopping around like a rag-doll. He was put out of his misery when the head-doctor of the asylum shot him four times in the chest. The same doctor received the Congressional Medal of Honour ten years later for having had the wisdom not to shoot Freddy in the head.

The research done on Freddy's brain led to the refinement of the drug, and with the advent of large-scale bio-industry, huge vats of bacteria were programmed to produce it. The third portrait is of Felicity Landon, who built the first ballroom and prescribed it to all of the patients of mental health facilities in the state of which she was governor.

The ballroom solves so many problems, of overpopulation, of what to do with undesirables, and of where to get the energy we need for modern life. And we televise it too, on pay-per-view. We increase the drug dosage and let the contestants battle-dance for the entertainment of the paying audience.

This is definitely the future today.

Keeping Flowers in full bloom

When you approach the Temple of Concern the first thing you notice are the flowers. Whatever the time of year or day, whatever the weather, the flowers are in full bloom. The path that is barely there, handfuls of gravel scattered on thick mud that sucks at your shoes, is bordered by thick, luscious tulips of deep burgundy and purple hues. Heavy bulbous heads stand proudly erect on thick fleshy stems of vibrant green, and never wilt, never die. Beyond them, where the path reaches solid ground and becomes a lattice of wooden slats laid carefully irregularly, there are sprawls of creepers and ground-cover shrubs, all covered in tiny white and blue flowers like tiny jewels wherever you look. Even at night the air is heavy with pollen and scent, and bees buzz all around, their soft drone a gentle hypnosis.

The irregular wooden path, a metaphor that you must puzzle out and understand during your stay at the Temple, leads into the walled gardens that lie before the temple. Trees stand, branches laden with blossom that never falls, and never reveals ripening fruit, and the ground is laid out in checkerboard fashion. In one square bed grows vegetables for the Temple, in the one adjoining it grow yet more flowers. Against the wall jasmine climbs, and its scent is strong enough to be pervasive throughout the Temple. Even when I left the Temple the first time, I found myself wearing scents with a jasmine base, unable to concentrate on the outside world without the reassuring breath of jasmine close to hand.

Inside the temple, flowers that were cut over two hundred years ago and are still fresh and in full bloom today are arranged in vases, urns and sacred vessels. These have lost their fragrance now, but are still visually appealing.

I asked the Temple's custodian, a gaunt man with a black patch over one eye, waist-length brown hair, and a paleness of skin that suggested he never saw sunlight, how the flowers were preserved. He told me that they weren't exactly preserved, not in the sense I meant, and escorted me through the Temple.

The Temple is tall, though it sits on a small footprint. It towers impossibly when you see it for the first time, with turrets growing out of the middle of walls, and then themselves supporting further walls and further turrets, like a forest of incestuous mushrooms. We ascended first, and spiralled in towards the middle, and then descended a little again, and I think we must have reached the dead centre of the temple itself. There, sat in a small empty chamber at a plain wooden desk with nothing on it, was Brother Cantharides.

I started when the custodian told me his name, and the custodian half-smiled.
"It's more of a title than a name," he said. "Cantharides stimulates his mind."

"It's poisonous!" I said, and the custodian nodded.

"This is the five-hundred and thirteenth Brother Cantharides," he said. "Some last longer than others."

"And what is he doing?" I said, puzzled, and a little concerned.

"Keeping the flowers in full bloom."

I left the Temple again that afternoon, and as I reached the gate in the walled garden leading outside, I turned once more and looked at the Temple, the impossible chaos of towers and walls and chambers that somehow stretched upwards without falling and defied gravity and the scouring of the wind and the erosion of the rain, and then I looked at a small figure at the main doors to the Temple, the custodian, and I didn't ask my question, and he didn't answer it. But the answer was as clear in my mind as the ringing of the silver bell in the sanctum of persistent inner peace, and I wondered just how far this all went. And as I struggled across the sticky mud, I asked myself if I would be content, in that situation, with keeping the flowers in full bloom.

Travelogue II: Recycle Park

I'd just been sacked from my job with the Movers and I found myself drifting aimlessly around. I'd leave home early in the morning so that none of the neighbours would realise I'd lost my job and spend the day wandering around the neighbourhood, finding new places to visit and while away the hours while I tried to work out what to do next. Of course, I picked up a job as an insurance agent not long after that, but in those few weeks in the middle, I stumbled across Recycle Park.

From a distance the park looks like any other I've been too: the edges delimited with box-hedges and railings in places, gates at several entrance around the edges, and signs just inside the gates to tell you something of the history of the park. There are lots of trees at the main entrance to Recycle Park, mostly sycamores and beeches, with a couple of stands of Silver Birch a little way in. In summer it looks verdant and wonderful; in winter I bet it looks bleak and isolated.

I didn't bother to read the signs in the park at first, I just wandered around. Then I came across the children's play area, and paused for a moment. The play area was a roughly oval open space, with bushes and shrubs thickly lining most of it, and a single tarmac path winding through. It was clear that the intent was that anyone visiting the area or leaving it would have to use the path. The ground was covering in soft wood chips, favoured for play areas these days. Out of that rose a white climbing frame, but the frame was constructed out of large, curved beams that were shaped like bones. Where the bones weren't long enough, two were articulated together, with what could be mistaken for tendons of some kind.

The roundabout was similarly organic looking; the swings looked for all the world as though they were suspended from long strings of muscle, again from a bone supporting frame. Everywhere I looked, the play area looked surprisingly organic.

After the play area I started noticing other oddities. The park benches were all metal, but when I looked closer, they appeared to have been made by compressing beer cans. The bandstand appeared to be constructed from compressed stacks of cardboard, and the roof was insulated with what looked like shredded carrier bags. The name of the park started to take on a new resonance.

Back at the park entrance, I found my suspicions were correct. The signs informed me that the park had been built on top of a landfill site using mostly items found in the landfill, from bones from a previous era when a slaughterhouse had stood here, to non-obviously toxic non-biodegradable waste such as carrier bags.

I didn't go back to the park again, but I did go home and shower for nearly an hour until I felt I'd manage to wash the taint of the place off my skin.

Travelogue I: The Elder Kitchen

I was driving down the old coast road towards Dunwich late one afternoon when I realised that I was getting low on fuel. Not wanting to spend the night in Dunwich again, I pulled off at the first exit and drove another mile or so to a small village with a single petrol station. Just behind the petrol station was a restaurant, with the odd name of the Elder Kitchen. I was just starting to feel hungry, so I decided to give it a try, and see what it had to offer.

I walked in and was immediately greeted by the Maitre'D, a squat little man with warty skin, a squint, and a clammy handshake. I recognised this as the Dunwich taint, that set of slightly squamous characteristics that affect the inhabitants of Dunwich and a couple of the surrounding smaller villages, and pretended that I hadn't noticed any of it. He was smartly dressed in a white ruffled dress shirt and a tuxedo that looked strangely damp, and asked me if I had a reservation. I conceded that I hadn't, and he smiled and said he was sure he could find me a table anyway. Looking around me at the dining room, I was sure he could too, of about twenty tables, only two were seated.

My table was against a wall of the restaurant, well away from the other two seated tables, and afforded me a view of most of the dining room and the entrance. The door to the kitchen was behind me. The table was well-laid with a crisp white tablecloth and sparkling silver and glassware. In the centre of the table was an off-white ceramic vase filled with a fragrant oil that held a floating wick. The Maitre'D was quick to bring me both the menu and a separate wine menu, and lit the wick. Almost immediately a rich, spicy scent rose from the liquid candle, reminding me of my time in the Middle East as a temple inspector.

I opened the menu first, wondering if the quality of the food would live up to the expectations set by the restaurant decor, or those set by the Maitre'D and the Dunwich Taint. The menu was short, with only two starters, five mains and two desserts offered, which I felt boded well: this allowed the chef to concentrate on producing quality food. As I read through the choices though, I was surprised to find that I had never seen any of them offered anywhere else before.

For a starter then, I had a choice between Mi-go Salad and Zoog skewers. The menu described the former as delicate pieces of Mi-go lightly fried in lemon and olive oil served on a bed of conventional salad leaves and the latter as three individual zoog roasted alive and skewered with peppers and onions. The mains were no more helpfully described; I was offered Roast young of Shub-Niggurath in an Abhoth sauce with no further explanation, Leg of Leng Spider served with your choice of vegetables, Tindalos steak with Dijon mustard and sour cream, chunky chips and black pepper served on a perfectly circular plate, Shoggoth shoulder with wilted vegetables from Leng, and Shocked chicken a l'Hastur. I was certain I didn't want the spider's leg, and a little curious as to how big the spider was that the restaurant could offer just one leg as a main course. The roast young of Shub-Niggurath sounded interesting, but I thought I would probably go with the safe sounding option of the steak.

For dessert I had a choice of Color Essence and Chocolate Nemesis. I was fairly certain I'd had a chocolate nemesis while in London a few years back, and the Color Essence didn't sound all that filling -- very avant garde I thought.

A waiter now appeared carrying a bread-basket and asking if I was ready to order, so I asked him for more information about the starters. He told me that the Mi-Go were also known as the Fungi from Yuggoth, but that they were a lot more like lobster than any earthly fungus. The Zoog he said, were rodent-like creatures that they had to source especially. Deciding that lobster sounded better than rat, I opted for the Mi-go salad. When I asked for the Tindalos steak though, the waiter turned pale. I pressed him on this, and he finally admitted, with a lot of reluctance, that they obtained the steaks 'very fresh' and that this was 'a little dangerous.' I insisted on the steak, and decided to defer choosing a dessert until after I'd eaten these.

I opened the wine menu at this point, and found that there were only two items listed: Ulthar Riesling and Fischwasser. I asked the waiter if this was a misprint for Kirschwasser, a spirit I found a liking for when posted in Mannheim studying the sewers there, and the waiter shook his head. This, he suggested, was not really suitable for me, and that I should try the Riesling. I accepted, not quite graciously, and the waiter disappeared with the menus and my order. I tried the bread.

It was extremely good, a little malty, and had a flavour that was almost meaty. Little seeds crunched when I chewed it, and it was moist and light. I ate all of it ravenously, only realised when I'd finished it that I was probably making a pig of myself. I sat back and looked round, and was relieved to see that the other diners had paid me no attention. My attention turned back to the odd listing in the wine menu; my German was good enough to translate Fischwasser as Fish water, and I now wondered if perhaps this was reserved for the locals from Dunwich, and maybe this was why it wasn't suitable for me. I'd never heard of Ulthar, but a Riesling is a hard wine to spoil in my opinion.

I heard the door to the kitchen open behind me, and for a moment I heard hysterical shrieking and a deep growling that seemed to vibrate in my bones, and then my waiter was placing my salad in front of me. He looked a little shocked, and there were two deep wounds on his arm clearly visible through a torn sleeve, yet neither was bleeding; they seemed like something has punched cleanly in and out, pulling away a plug of flesh and sealing off the surrounding tissue in the process. I opened my mouth to ask him about this, but was distracted by the rattle of a trolley across the floor, and saw a silver-cloched platter being delivered to a table across the room. The platter was the size of an occasional table itself, and my question became asking what was.

Chocolate Nemesis said my waiter quietly, and quickly left. I watched as the cloche was lifted off to reveal a large, deep pool of chocolate above which small twists of steam seemed to writhe. Around the edge of the pool were designs in some rich red sauce that seemed almost runic, and from where I was it was hard to focus on them, they seemed almost to be squirming beneath the weight of my gaze. I had turned my attention back to my salad -- glistening green leaves with succulent lumps of something pink, not unlike lobster nestled in it, and a fragrant aroma mixed with something vinegary rising from it -- when the two waiters that had brought the trolley in started chanting. My fork, raised halfway to my lips, slowed and halted and my gaze was pulled to the table as strongly as though someone had seized my head and were turning it for me. My lips started to move of their own accord, and I found myself chanting strange words I'd never heard before in time with the waiters.

A strange somnolance seemed to come over me then, and though I still chanted I felt drowsy and my body felt heavy, too heavy to stand up or move. A slight chill came over me, and my fingers, toes and lips went numb, but this didn't stop me chanting. I could see across the way that the diners who had ordered the Chocolate Nemesis were also lolling back in the chairs, seemingly dazed. One of them spasmed for a moment, his eyelids fluttering, and a hand lifting, stretching out towards the platter, but then it fell back and he became still again.

Then the deep, dark pool of chocolate rippled, and rippled again though nothing was touching it. The ripples grew into small waves, which became choppy and splashed, growing taller and taller, until suddenly a tower of chocolate rose from the platter, formed itself into a tentacle, and seized one of the diners, wrapping around his neck and snaking down his body. It reached his waist, and then retracted, pulling him out of his chair and down into the pool, impossibly swallowing him inside the dessert on the dish. Something in the back of my mind screamed and howled, thumping mental fists on whatever it was that numbed and bedazed me, but I couldn't stop chanting or turn my gaze away, watching at that dreadful dessert formed another chocolate tentacle and ensnared the other diner.

Something broke in my mind, and my fork fell from my hand. It tinged brightly against the plate, and the numbing oppression lost its grip on me, and I could turn away from the abominable dessert at last. I found my waiter stood on the other side of me, looking at me appraisingly.
"Only one diner has ever survived to eat that dessert," he said quietly. "It's a bit too extreme for most people."
"Bill please!" I said brightly, suddenly desperate to get out of the restaurant.
"Just go," he said.

I left as fast as I could, and made no note of the roads I took to get back to something approaching civilisation. I had no wish to return to the Elder Kitchen again. Though to this day I still wonder about that Leng Spider. Perhaps if I see they're offering a take-away and delivery service I might order it out of curiousity.