Can I play with madness?

Madame Sosotris was feeling uncomfortable, which was unusual for her.  She was sat at the battered, wooden, circular table where she conducted her palmistry (occasional dental), tarot readings and other divinations of the future.  The table rocked because she’d never bothered to get the legs evened off.  On the other side of the table was a young man, possibly even a boy, with milky white eyes that seemed to be pointed directly at her face.  His nose was running almost as badly as her own, and they sniffed in concert every few moments.  His upper lip was split and twisted revealing slightly yellowed teeth.  And he was listening intently to ever word she said.

She passed her hands over the crystal ball that she’d set in the middle of the table for this reading.  It chilled slightly in response to her hands, sucking in energy from its surroundings to allow her access to the future.  White clouds seemed to boil inside the ball and she flinched.  Normally the future was much more serene.

“What do you see?” asked the man-child, lisping slightly.  “I can feel the future drawing closer.  You are strong with your gift, aren’t you?  They’ve told me true.”

Madame Sosotris opened her mouth, intending to ask him who they were in this context, and who had been talking about her.  Partly it was professional pride, wanting to survey her customers to know how they’d learned about her, but partly it was fear as well, fear that there might be more people like him intending to pay her a visit.  Before she could speak though, the mist in the ball cleared and she leant forward, stunned by what she could see.

“Well I never!” she said.  “Did you see that?”

The man-boy sneered at her, but she was still looking into the ball and missed the expression.  “I cannot see,” he said when the silence drew on and he realised that she was either ignoring him, or not looking at him.  “You might have noticed my eyes?”

“I’ve learned not to make assumptions without better evidence than just my eyes,” said Madame Sosotris.  They sniffed at the same time.  “And if you had been watching, you’d have seen that in less than a year you regain sight in your eyes.  A man performs surgery and cuts away the veil from your vision.  You will wear cotton pads for three days, and then you will take the pads off and see again.”

“Really?”  The man-boy’s voice was hoarse, possibly with excitement.  “Do you truly see this?”

“Oh yes,” said Madame Sosotris.  “I know the man who performs the surgery, though I cannot see what would bring him here.  It seems that he is only part of your future insomuch as he lets you see again.”

“What do I do with my sight?  What is my future, woman?”

“There’s no call to take that tone with me!  I have a name you know.”  They sniffed is unison again.

“And I’m paying for your services,” said the man-boy.  “I’ve bought the right to call you woman.”

“I’m putting my prices up…,” muttered Madame Sosotris, not bothering to be quiet enough to keep her words from the man-boy’s ears.  “Your future is unclear afterwards.”

“What does unclear mean?  Tell me!  I HAVE TO KNOW!”

“Shouting gets you thrown out, money or not,” said Madame Sosotris.  She looked up from the crystal ball and saw that he’d pushed his chair back and was standing at the table, leaning on his knuckles and staring intently at the chest-of-drawers off to her right.  “I mean your future is unclear; the crystal fogs like there’s a frog in there breathing all over it when I try and look further.  There are a couple of reasons for that….”

“A frog?”

“It’s my metaphor, don’t mess with it.”

“Fine, woman.”  His voice was pointedly angry.  “What are these reasons?  And don’t tell me that I’m powerful and that hides the future from you.  I’ve had that from every charlatan on this side of the City.”

“Hah!  No, you’ll not hide your future from me just because you’re powerful.  You can sit down again now, if you like.  Your future might be unclear because you’ve crossed paths with the Drowned Sailor, because he distorts the future and reshapes it wherever he goes.  Your future might be unclear because you go and visit the court of the Eidolon, and She has ways of protecting her dominion.  Or it might be unclear because you’re fated to die and it’s not yet been decided how.”

“I’m hardly going to visit the Eidolon, everyone knows she eats people!”  The man-boy sat, his voice calmer now.  He reached out a hand and it brushed the crystal ball.  He sucked in a breath, a gasp, and pulled his hand sharply away.

“Don’t touch, it gets cold,” said Madame Sosotris automatically.  She sometimes used the crystal ball to make ice.

“Why is it so cold?”

“The future is frosty,” said Madame Sosotris.  “She is a harsh mistress.”

“What was that about death?”

“Oh nothing,” said Madame Sosotris.  “Anyway, it’s most likely the Drowned Sailor.”

“Who is that then?”

“He’s a friend.”  If the man-boy could have seen he would have recoiled from Madame Sosotris’s leer.  “And he’s coming here in three days time.”

“Are you always this cryptic?”

“Are you always as cheap as you’re going to be when you leave?”

“Oh.  You saw that in the crystal ball?”

“Hah.  Reading the future has its perks, yes.”

Profound dreams

Dr. Fraud tapped the Enter key on his keyboard and a wisp of smoke rose gently from the vents at the back of the computer.  He sighed, three times, heavily, sounding very put upon and, looking around his desk, found a glass of water he’d been drinking earlier.  He picked it up and poured it into the vents of the computer.  The smoke disappeared and a few blue sparks dances in the air over the keyboard for a moment.  Dr. Fraud waited for them to disappear too, then pressed the button on the office intercom.

“Miss Phelps, the computer needs seeing to again,” he said, his crisp German accent making him sound rather authoritarian.  There was an audible sigh from the other side of the intercom.

“I’ll send Sebastopol in,” said a gruff female voice that suggested a heavy cigarette habit.  “It would help a lot if you’d tell him what you poured into it this time when he gets there.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Dr. Fraud picking the glass back up and looking for somewhere to hide it.  “Please ask the nice young man to hurry.”  He took his finger off the intercom button, cutting Miss Phelps’s reply off before it really got started.  Then he opened drawers in his desk at random until he found one with some space in all the clutter, forced the glass in, and closed it up again.

There was a tap at the door, and he called out “Come in, Herein!  Open it, it is unlocked already!”  A late-middle-aged man with a shaggy mop of grey hair interspersed with white ones ambled through the doorway holding a wet mop in one hand and an aluminium spanner in the other.

“Dr. Fraud?  You broke your computer again?”  His voice was soft and sounded educated.  It was a perennial puzzle to Doctor Fraud that someone who sounded like they should be debating philosophical issues at Cambridge appeared to enjoy doing maintenance work and cleaning other people’s lavatories.

“It attempted to catch fire,” said Dr. Fraud.  “It certainly wasn’t my fault!”

“Let’s take a look then,” said Sebastopol putting the mop on Dr. Fraud’s consulting couch.  It squelched, and Fraud frowned, wondering why the noise sounded familiar.

“I was attempting to complete my app, you know,” he said.  “We are very nearly there now.”

“What’s it do then, this app of yours?”  Sebastopol picked up the laptop and shook it experimentally, tilting his head to listen.  Then he turned it sideways and a sooty liquid drained out and into the inch-deep pile of the carpet.

“It will interpret dreams,” said Dr. Fraud.  “You place your head inside the special apparatus and let yourself go to sleep.  While you dream the app records your physiology and how you respond, and from that we infer what you were dreaming about and then provide you with an automatic interpretation.  Of course, it’s not as good as coming to see me on a regular appointment basis as the app can only provide an analysis on the dream in isolation, but it would give people like me a starting point for interpreting the whole suite of dreams in the context of your own life.”

“That sounds quite interesting,” said Sebastopol.  “Reckon you’ve got a leak in here somewhere Doctor, that’s the third time your laptop’s been full of water.”

“Can you make the silly thing work again?”

“Let me open her up and see,” said Sebastopol.  He produced a swiss army knife from a pocket, and then a second from another pocket.  “See these?  Between them they’ll deal with 90% of all screw-heads on the market.  Not many people know that.  What’s this special equipment then for you app?  Is it waterproof?”  He chuckled, to Dr. Fraud’s evident bemusement.

“I do not see the humour,” he said, but Sebastopol said nothing to enlighten him.  “For now, I am using the photocopier,” he continued.  Screws rattled on the desk as Seb took them out of the machine.  “It is not perfect, but if you close the lid firmly enough people pass out and go to sleep quite quickly.  I was hoping that we could get some pictures of their eyes as well, but the bright light seems to wake them up again.”

“Right,” said Seb.  The computer was open now and he was staring at what looked like rust eating into the motherboard.  The hard-drive case had holes in it, and the power-supply unit was sparking despite not being connected to the mains.

“Dreams are often the most profound when they seem the most crazy,” said Dr. Fraud.  Sebastopol poked some solder on the board and it oozed away from his finger almost as though it were alive.  “I have tried it now on several guinea pigs and we have had most interesting results.  Obviously I cannot name names, but the young lady who comes here on Tuesday afternoons between 2 and 3 had a detailed dream that involved you.  It seemed that in the dream, when I spoke to her afterwards, she’d fallen on an inappropriately sign-posted patch of wet floor and you’d come over to rescue her.  As she reached out to let you take her hand you too had slipped and fallen on top of her, and then somehow, unaccountable as the dream recorded it, all the buttons on her blouse flew off from the force of the collision.  Is it supposed to do that?”

“Do what?” asked Seb, who had stopped looking at the computer and was paying close attention to Dr. Fraud.  “Buttons don’t normally fly off no.  You should introduce me to her and I can probably fix that problem.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Dr. Fraud.  “I explained to her that the dream is her subconscious telling her that she should sue you for improper conduct in the workplace and she was quite happy with that idea.  No, I meant that big black thing.  Should it move like that?”

“Sue me?”

“This is America,” said Dr. Fraud.  “It’s practically a national hobby.  I gave her lawyer your address.”

“What!?”

“Well, I didn’t want anyone coming her to serve you papers.  It would give me a poor reputation.  Look, it did it again, it moved!  It pulsed!”

“Yeah,” said Sebastopol, his voice oddly dull and heavy.  He put the lid back on the laptop.  “All good in there, Doc,” he said.  “Plug it in, give it two minutes to get warm, and then if nothing’s happening shove that letter opener of yours in the yellow slot at the back.  Steel it it?”

“Silver,” said Dr. Fraud.  “Though I don’t hold it against you, when would you have ever had reason to encounter the precious metals?”

“Yeah, stick that knife in there several times then,” said Seb.  “Gotta run, I have an appointment with someone else on the faculty!”

The point of the knife

“Just go through,” said Isabella, pushing him in the small of the back.  David opened the door further and stepped through, holding the door open behind with one hand.  He stared around him, trying to reconcile this new place with the old-fashioned sitting room that they’d just come through from.  There was grass underfoot and some trees growing off in the distance.  There was a paling fence about twenty-feet away, with a black-latched gate in the middle of it.  Flowers grew in a flower bed off to his left, and after that was a freshly-dug patch of ground, and then another paling fence.  A bird twittered overhead and he looked up to see the sky, dotted with fluffy clouds.

And everything was either black, white or shades of grey.

“I’m back,” said Isabella behind him, her hand prising his fingers off the door.  He turned to look at her, his eyes glazed over and his whole face slightly vacant.  “Have you touched anything?”  She closed the door, and with a tiny click it was gone; behind them both was just a field stretching off into the slightly-grey distance.

“No,” he said.  “It’s… this is like a black and white photograph.  Only… it’s not a photograph.  Is it?”

“It’s not a photograph,” said Isabella.  “It’s just desaturated.”

“Huh?”

“All the colours bled out,” she said.  “It happens, but we don’t know why.  It’s not the only place like this, and they don’t seem to be dangerous, although the longer you stay the longer it takes you to return to normal when you leave.”

“Whuh?”

“Really David, sometimes I don’t think you think at all.  When we leave this area and go back to a saturated zone where there’s colours again it’ll take a minute or two for us to return to colour.  We’ll be black and white temporarily.”

David looked down at his hands and turned them over and back, looking at them like they belonged to someone else.  While he stared, Isabella looked around.  She recognised the area in general; it was still part of the Teddybear land, but there were no buildings to provide a proper landmark.  She checked the position of the sun in the sky and turned to face south.  The flower bed and the dug-over ground was there, and she walked over to take a closer look.

The flowers were large blooms on thick, fleshy stems.  They were shaped like a cross between snap-dragons and tulips, and she picked a single stem, curious as to what colour it would be when she took back somewhere saturated.  The flower-bed looked tended, and recently at that.  As she looked over it she spotted a small weeding trowel and a similar sized fork half-hidden by the base of the leafier flowers.  She looked around her again then, taking more time and scanning the horizon for signs of any more teddy-bears.

“David!”  She watched until he looked up, his eyes still wide and slightly-scared looking.  For a moment she considered just cutting open a new door and leaving him here.  She hadn’t told him quite the truth about the dangers of the unsaturated regions: stay here long enough and you’d fade away until you just disappeared on a gust of strong wind one day.  “Come on!  We’re out in the open here, and I’d rather like to find a way back to our world before anyone else in this world finds us.”  She skirted the flower-bed and fresh diggings – probably a vegetable patch, she decided – and stepped neatly over the paling fence.  Then she looked back; he’d not moved.  “David!”

“What happened to the teddy-bear back there, Issy?” His voice was low but it carried in the quiet air.

“It lived happily ever after,” she said.  “Just like in the fairy-tales.  Come on, David.  This isn’t a game, remember?”

“It looked all slumped over,” he said.  “When I turned out when you came out, I saw it.  It looked –“

“Asleep,” said Isabella.  “They’re small mammals, think of them as being a bit like cats.  They sleep a lot, and they eat when they’re not sleeping.  And if they find us, and there’s a pack of them, they’ll eat us.  So come on, David.”

“Asleep,” he repeated.  “I suppose….”

The Tailor

The shop was on a busy street, sandwiched between a music superstore and a small electronic shop with lots of coloured lights on display in the window.  The Tailor’s shop had a couple of dusky mannequins in the window wearing pinstriped suits, and a desultory display of ties on a hanger behind them.  The door pushed open and a bell jingled and the carpet just inside the door was threadbare and the brown of a mongrel dog.  Martin Lewhide looked around, wondering where the Tailor was.

“I’ll be with you in just a moment, Sir,” came a voice from the other side of what looked like a cupboard door.  It was quiet, slightly refined, and the words were crisp and clearly enunciated as though the speaker was used to being on stage.

“No hurry,” said Martin.  He looked around at the short racks of suits with a sign at one end: For display purposes only.  All suits made to measure.  Behind a small counter was another rack holding other suits that looked… well, tailored for want of a better word.  Martin walked over to have a closer look, wondering for a moment if he’d got the wrong shop.

“Please don’t touch,” said the voice, halting Martin’s steps.  His hand fell back to his side and he felt inexplicably guilty.  He turned; there behind him, closing the cupboard door with one hand and holding a wicked looking pair of cloth-shears in the other was a short man, well-dressed in a shirt, waistcoat and expensive-looking dark trousers.  His shoes were probably leather and shinier than any Martin had ever owned.  “Those are awaiting collection and as such, are already sold.  I doubt you want a bill for dry-cleaning.”

“You’re the Tailor,” said Martin, his eyes scanning the Tailor’s face.  It was plain, simple, nothing stood out.  His eyes were grey and looked like they saw a joke that Martin didn’t.  His nose was small, pointed and unremarkable.  His lips were thin, his chin was slightly dimpled.  Everything about him rang a bell, but all because he looked like the generic description people gave when they actually hadn’t been paying attention.

“That’s very observant,” said the Tailor.  “You must be the customer.  What are you looking for today?”  Eyes flicked up and down him.  “Everything?  A wedding perhaps?”

“You.  I’m looking for you,” said Martin.  “I know who you are.”

“I’m a tailor, Sir, yes.  And though I might suggest that I’m very good as discerning a man’s intentions when dealing with his suit preferences, I am not a mind-reader.  Could you perhaps be more specific why you’re looking for me?”

Martin paused, uncertain again.  The man was as nondescript as he’d been told, and this was definitely the right shop.  Could he be making a mistake?

“Do you have a partner?” he said.

“Someone I work with?  No, this is a sole-proprietor enterprise, which is possible by the bespoke nature of my business.  If you mean a romantic partner, then I’m afraid you’re simply not my type, but I am, naturally, flattered.”

“Then you’re the Tailor,” said Martin, wishing that he felt more confident.  “You’re running the numbers station.”

“What on earth is a numbers station?”

“A list of numbers, recited, at regular intervals,” said Martin.  “Why am I telling you though, you already know.  We’ve tracked the signal to here, you’re definitely running the numbers station.  And you have to be the Tailor, because the Tailor is the only person who would run a numbers station in Odnose B.”

“What’s an odd nose got to do with this?  This is very interesting by the way, but if a genuine customer should come in I’ll have to ask to leave, I’m afraid.”

“You don’t have any real customers!  This is all just a front.  You’re well aware that Odnose B is a language, a dead one, that probably killed off all its speakers.  You’re the only person in the world who’d pick it for a numbers station, and that’s just one of the things that’s going to have to stop.”  Martin pulled a gun from the inside pocket of his mac; the pockets there were tailored specifically for him to provide him with quick access to his weapons and other little tools that helped him with his tradework.

“Oh dear,” said the Tailor, sounding unconcerned.  “Is this is a robbery?”

“Dammit, stop pretending!  I know you’re the Tailor, I’ve been looking for you for the last three weeks.  People are dying because of your numbers station, you know!  Do you know how many people have died because of you?”

“Fewer, by an order of magnitude, than the number of its citizens that your country remanded into special custody to Guantánamo-like camps in the last calendar year.”

Martin stared at the Tailor.  The Tailor nodded.  “Oh yes.  Have you been doing this for so long now that you think you’re one of the good guys?  You’re not; everything I do is for the good guys, the improvement of the situation of the people I’m working for.  I never sit down and ask myself how I can be evil today, only what I can do to make life better for people.  Do you ever sit down and ask yourself anything?”

“I am too a good guy!” Martin stumbled over his words in his rush to get them out.  “You’re the one with a lethal numbers station!”

“You should really think about the intent of that,” said the Tailor.  “You might surprise yourself and understand something.  And while we’re at it, your government designated me an enemy combatant over eight years ago.  What did I do to deserve that?”

“I… I don’t know, I wasn’t working for the – for my employer then.”  Martin felt his face flush as he almost admitted who he was working for.

“Then you should have done your homework,” said the Tailor.

“I did!  We’ve been after you for six years, and you keep getting away.  But that’s not going to happen this time – we have this shop surrounded, front and back.  We’ve been watching it for three weeks now, and we broke in a couple of nights ago to check for hidden exits and secret passages.  There’s no way out this time, Tailor.  We have you, and I think you should just come quietly and make it easy on yourself.”

“Is there a book of clichés somewhere that they make you read and memorise?  You sound like a parody of yourself, you really do.”

“Just give up, Tailor!”  Martin felt quite proud of himself, sure now that he had the right guy and that he was going to walk out of here with the Tailor in handcuffs.  He’d be a hero, having finally caught the man they’d been after for so long.  “Hey, what are you doing?”  The Tailor had walked behind the counter.

“Turning the radio on,” said the Tailor, smiling faintly.  A tinny voice suddenly came out of the speaker system saying something utterly horrible.  It sounded like the word had stuck in the speaker’s throat and had had to be vomited out.  Syllables cracked where they should have resonated, phonemes seemed to melt and acidify in Martin’s ears.  He slapped his hands over his ears reflexively, but the Tailor just turned another dial and increased the volume.

As Martin sank to his knees, unable to pull his hands away from his head, and feeling his brain pulse with the intensity of a migraine as the words spoken in Odnose B echoed around the room.  The Tailor placed a piece of paper in front of him, and the writing on it swam before his eyes until he made himself blink and bring them in focus.  There are High and Low forms of Odnose B, read the note.  Be grateful that the numbers station is only using the Low form.  Martin blinked again and his vision turned red.  With a sudden cold feeling in the pit of his stomach he realised that his eyes had started bleeding, and he tried to get to his feet.  His feet, and his knees, wouldn’t obey him, and he just slowly fell over to one side.  He remained there until his team came in, wearing ear-protectors normally used on building site and shot both the radio and the PA system to put a stop to the words.  They had to carry him out between them.

Little chef

Manguy stood at his filing cabinet, idling sorting through the papers in the drawer.  It was organised along GTD (Getting Things Done) principles, with a folder for each day of the month and then a folder for each month of the year.  It was complicated a little by the need to have folders in there for each of the Jewish and Muslim months as well, plus the fact that at Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisations they used a standardised 37-day month for a lot of internal billing and business practises.  Then there were a couple of additional folders of his own addition that marked deadlines for tax forms (in eighteen jurisdictions) and proposal tenders, plus a tracking folder for the CEO, Jeremy Diseased-Rat.  It was, in fact, a rather full filing cabinet drawer, and the data it contained was very important, so long as you knew how it all inter-related.

His fingers found a sheet of dove-grey paper that was otherwise unmarked and he paused.  This was the colour he reserved for Margoyle, one of his colleagues who was showing promise and signs of thinking about promotion.  The page here was to remind him that his last tactic, of suborning her assistant and making it seem like Jeronica’s doing, had gone oddly wrong.  Her assistant, Corisette, was dead due to a freak asphyxiation event in the stairwell that had lead directly to him (and about twenty-five people at his level) installing a fire-escape rope-ladder in his office for exiting the building via the window, but Jeronica didn’t seem to be suffering unduly from Margoyle’s rage.

Actually, Jeronica was an interesting puzzle in her own right at the moment.  A few more flicks and his fingers found a sheet of canary-yellow paper, one corner dog-eared and a loose staple in the diagonally opposite corner.  She was achieving far too much in internal meetings at the moment and he couldn’t figure out why.  Certain meetings where he was sure she would be stalled or blocked by equally-ambitious people were going smoothly instead of erupting into arguments and dividing along faction lines, and she was gradually drawing attention from the level above.  Soon enough she’d even attract Jeremy Diseased-Rat’s attention, and Manguy definitely wasn’t ready for that kind of competition.  He placed the sheet on his desk; he would need to sit down and do some planning to deal with this.

More flicking through the papers in the cabinet and he pulled out the only sheet of paper that was due tomorrow.  There was a drawing of a chef’s toque on it, and he sighed.  He closed the filing cabinet, closed the blinds on his office window that had a view of the corridor outside, and sat down in the leather swivel chair to think about this meeting.  A… let’s call her a lady, he thought, though that may be generous.  A lady, connected in not insignificant ways to the National American Society of Hipsters, was concerned that her children were insufficiently ambitious and may fail to obtain jobs that would allow them to lead the kind of lives she felt were appropriate for them.  She had four children, and Manguy had already managed to see to it that the girl who wanted to be a school-teacher had changed her mind and become a banking executive for an organisation that leased school-supplies to the third world using a scheme that applied punitive damages to anyone trying to leave it or think for themselves.  That had been almost simple: it was just a case of finding the right boyfriend for her and then having her attacked a small herd of five-year olds that had been eating sweets all morning.  The pay-off for him was the National American Society of Hipsters listening more attentively to his recommendations, and nominating the right presidential candidate.  The polls were looking promisingly like he’d win the next election too.  This time though, the issue was the son who wanted to be a chef.

Manguy wasn’t sure what was wrong with being a chef.  Occasionally, when his dealer failed to come through with the good stuff and he had to sleep unaided, he’d wake up from dreams of working in a kitchen and turning out plates of beautiful food that made beautiful women weep and powerful men offer him jobs on private yachts.  He would lie there in the morning light, remembering the scent of lobster bisque, or tasting the memory of a single perfect madeleine, and for a moment he would know what happiness was supposed to feel like.  Then he’d get up, pay the hooker to leave, and return to being Manguy, the go-to guy at Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisations and heir-apparent to Jeremy Diseased-Rat.

Well, now there was a point.  The woman wanted appropriate life-styles for her children, so perhaps the job wasn’t such an issue.  What she needed was a celebrity-chef for a son, someone with a television show, a chain of high-profile, high-turnover restaurants, a reputation for swearing like a hooker… no, wait that wasn’t the phrase, was it?  Swearing like a sailor, on shore-leave.  That was it.  Someone  who made powerful women fall in love with them and rich men offer them jobs on private yachts….

He made a couple of notes on the page, and jotted down a phone-number of the publicist to call to get this young man’s career started, and only had to brush a single tear away from his eyes.

Bar black

I don’t know if I like Bar Black, but I know it’s where I go when I need a place to drink while I think.  The overflow morgue’s great for thinking, but the only stuff to drink in there will pickle your insides.  Literally.  It’s on a street that’s down another street, and you only get to that street by walking to the end of another street that you’d be forgiven for thinking wasn’t going to end.  I met the guy who did the city planning during a previous investigation: in order to makes ends meet he was dressed up as Shirley Bassey and singing karaoke at a place that specialised in burlesque.  Right before I punched him in the jaw he told me that all of his city planning was done on the comedown after nights like that.  He also offered to rezone Mad Frankie’s office as a school district for me, and I won’t say I wasn’t tempted.

I reached the end of the street and turned down on the next street.  There were little groups of people sitting on the front steps of the houses here, muted conversations being had just on the fringes of the streetlights.  The windows of the houses behind them were all dark and quiet; families tucked up in bed and dreaming of a better future while their heads talked about the world and the possibilities it might offer in the morning light.  Now and then someone would look up as I walked past, and a conversation would pause for just long enough to let me know I wasn’t welcome, but I walked on and they resumed talking behind my back.  Which is where most of the world talks, it would seem.

One more turn onto a street darker still, more forgotten by the world, and I stepped up to a door with a man the size and shape of the Michelin-man outside.  He grunted, tiny red eyes opening and glaring at me like those of a homicidal robot in a science-fiction film.

“Mac?” he said, his voice high-pitched and slightly whistly from the holes in his teeth.

“The very same,” I said, and tipped my hat slightly towards him.

“You’re welcome,” he said, and shuffled aside to allow me to squeeze past him.  He could have moved further, but I happen to know he likes a little frottage now and them, and not many people are happy to have me touch them.

The bar was busy, but there were still two seats available.  One was next to the torch-singer, who was putting on her make-up and sipping from a martini glass, and the other was between two guys who looked like sailors.  I picked the sailors; Gaby the torch-singer lives up to her name and I wasn’t in the mood for listening to second-hand showbiz gossip from a lush.  I can get that in the morning papers.  Away from the bar there were tables with people sat at them, a small stage with a piano and a microphone, and a tiny little stand holding three chafing dishes that met the ‘hot food’ requirement for the bar to have its current licence.  No-one seemed to be eating from them, and past experience reminded me why.  Botulism is a dish best not served at all.  I hoisted myself up on to the bar-stool and tried to get Blue’s bed-leg out from my trousers.

“Hey.”  The voice from the guy on my left wasn’t friendly.  “Why are you playing with yourself?”

“Because you probably won’t do it for him,” said the barman walking over from where he’d been pouring Gaby another martini.  “The usual, Mac?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.  “It’s a big one,” I said to the talkative guy getting a grip on the leg at last.  “Want to see?”

He growled, a low, rumbling, threatening sound like a volcano letting you know that it’s feeling congested and might be doing something about it shortly.  I yanked hard and pulled the bed-leg free, though I heard something tear and knew that my trousers were going to draughty after this.  Tom, the barman, slid a cocktail glass in front of me, and I shoved the bed-leg under talkative-guy’s nose.  “Impressed?” I asked.

“I bet that’s the biggest thing you’ve ever pulled out of your pants, Mac,” said Tom.  I spared him a glance; I’ve known him for years and indirectly I’m responsible for him only having three fingers on each hand.  He gestured at my glass, “One pink lady.  And don’t ask for a tab.”

“What the fuck is this?” growled talkative guy.  “You bringing your bed in here with you?”

“Would you go home with him to find it?” asked Tom, stepping neatly out of reach and going over to the other side of the bar to serve a tall man dressed head-to-toe in a haz-mat suit.

“It’s not my bed, and it’s none of your business,” I said.  “Just keep drinking and let me worry about the furniture.”

Talkative guy grunted and swivelled on his stool slightly so that his shoulder was all I could see of his head, and I shook the bed-leg experimentally to see what might drop out.

Lilies from the dead land

“Tell me about Paysmort,” said Dr. Rosendieb.  He had lead them to the end of the colonnade and then produced a small brass key from a pocket of his waistcoat and opened a barred door in the wall.  Phlebitis peered unenthusiastically inside where it was gloomy and smelled damp.

“No,” he said.

“But you brought it up yourself,” said the doctor.  Seeing that Phlebitis was not about to lead the way, he took it himself.  “Close the gate behind you, it will lock itself.  You wouldn’t have brought it up if you didn’t want to talk about it, you know.”

“Amateur psychology,” said Phlebitis.  The gate clanged at it closed, and he followed Dr. Rosendieb round a corner.  The corridor, hewn seemingly out of rock, got narrower, the ceiling lowered, but a row of white electric lights set in rubber, waterproof housings now illuminated it.  Rosendieb was walking briskly along it, just a little faster than Phlebitis might have expected, and he had to speed up a little to catch up.

“Professional, actually,” said Rosendieb.  “It is my job, after all.”

“Hah!  Yes, I suppose it is, though it still feels like an amateurish attempt.  I brought Paysmort up, Doctor, because their scent gets onto anything inorganic and lingers.  Anything you take from my cargo as payment will carry some of that scent with it for a couple of days at least, and so you’d ask about it anyway.  I’m telling you up front that you won’t get any answers, or any lilies.  They’re as bad as the boiled frogs.”

“I suppose you don’t want to talk about the boiled frogs either?”

“I’ll talk about them as much as you like, I think you don’t want to listen.”

Doctor Rosendieb laughed, a short bark that echoed slightly in the corridor.  “I listen to anything if the price is right,” he said.  “But you said I could have anything from your cargo, and your memories are cargo that all men carry through their lives.”

“I also said that you couldn’t have any of the lilies from the dead land,” said Phlebitis.  “And memories are certainly lilies from a dead land.”

The corridor turned a corner and ended abruptly at another metal gate.  Rosendieb produced another key, that might have been the first again, and paused before he unlocked it.  “How did you discover Paysmort?” he asked.  “There have been plenty of rumours over the years about it, but they’ve all been just that: rumours.  I’ve interviewed your first mate at length, and he says that you just came back to the ship one day with a new map and co-ordinates and that you sailed there with the aid of it.  Where did that map come from?”

“Is this your price?”  Phlebitis shivered as the tunnel was much cooler than the sunshine outside had been and it was starting to affect him.  “Knowledge of how I found out where Paysmort is?  Because it will not include the location of Paysmort or how to get there.”

Rosendieb slipped the key into the lock.  It turned with a brittle click.  “Yes,” he said.  “In my office, tell me, and we will call that payment.”

*

Rosendieb’s office had four walls that were divided each into four sections from floor to ceiling, and each section was painted with a semi-human monster.  Having heard the doctor’s description of the colonnade Phlebitis shuddered, aware that these too were probably painted from life and were how the poor unfortunates in the Tiergarten had ended their lives.  In the exact centre of the office was a steel desk with three drawers, deep enough for the doctor to lay out five tablet computers on and wide enough for him to lie down on comfortably.  There was a single chair on each side, made of a sturdy metal frame and bolted to the floor.  Phlebitis noted, with little surprise, that there were anchor points for chains or manacles on the floor on his side of the desk.

“There are anchor points on my side too,” said Rosendieb sitting down and looking uncomfortable.  “And the table is actually welded to a metal slab buried in the floor, and when patients are in here there’s nothing out on the desk.  But you’re here to tell me about how you found the map.”

“I’m here to rescue my first mate.”

“Of course, of course.  Let me have him brought here while you tell your story.”

“Have you heard of the Unreal City?” asked Phlebitis after the doctor had tapped some instructions in to one of the tablet computers.  Dr. Rosendieb lifted his head and looked at Phlebitis, his expression unreadable.  He nodded.

“Oh good.  Then this is a story of the Unreal City and a City Director,” said Phlebitis.  “And how I came to liberate a map and be told how to read it.”

“The Unreal City actually exists then?  I thought it was… well, a fugue state, a dream-world.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” sighed Phlebitis.