Cities of the Red Night

"It would be handy to have a 32-20. Same shells for pistol and rifle. Anything around here need a heavier load?"

"Yep. Bear. It isn't often a bear attacks ... when he does, this"—he tapped a box of 32-20 shells—"would just aggravate him."

He paused and his face darkened. "Something else needs a heavier load and longer range...."

"What's that?"

"Folk across the river."

I picked up the Colt 32-20 and holster. "Any law against packing a gun in this town?"

"There's no law in this town, son. Nearest sheriff is twenty miles from here and keeps his distance."

I loaded the gun and strapped it on. I picked up the Gladstone bag.

"How much do I owe you?"

He calculated rapidly. "Two hundred dollars and forty cents plus a two-dollar delivery charge. Sorry about that. Things keep going up."

I paid him. "Much obliged. Delivery buckboard leaves at eight tomorrow morning. Best get here a bit early. Likely think of a few more things you'll need."

"Any place to stay here?"

"Yep. Saloon Hotel three doors down."

Drugstore next door. Old Chinese behind the counter. I bought tincture of iodine, shaving lotion, permanganate crystals for snakebite, a tourniquet, a scalpel, a five-ounce bottle of opium tincture, a five-ounce bottle of cannabis extract.

Saloon Hotel. The bartender had russet hair and a face the same color. A calm slow way about him. Two drummers at the bar drinking whiskey, talking about the rising wholesale cost of fencing. One fat and clean-shaven, one thin with a carefully trimmed beard. Both of them looking like they stepped out of an old photo album. Poker game in one corner. I buy half a pint of whiskey and a stein of beer and carry them to a table. I measure myself some cannabis extract and wash it down with whiskey. I pour myself another shot, sit back and look around. A boy turns from the bar and looks at me. He is about twenty with a wide face, eyes far apart, dark hair and flaring ears. He has a gun at his hip. He gives me a wide sunlit grin and I push a chair out with one foot. He carries a glass of beer over and sits down. We shake hands.

"I'm Noah."

"I'm Guy."

I hold up the bottle of cannabis extract. "Want some?"

He reads the label and nods. I measure it out and he drinks it with a splash of beer. I fill two glasses with whiskey.

"I hear you rented the Camel shack on the river," he says wriggling his ears.

"That's right."

"Could you do with some help fixing it up?"

"I sure could."

We drink in silence. Frogs croaking outside. It's dark when the bottle is finished. I call to the bartender.

"Got anything to eat?"

"Passenger pigeon with corn bread, hominy grits and fried apples."

"Two orders."

He steps to the end of the bar and taps on a green panel. The panel opens and the Chinese from the drugstore looks out. Bartender gives him the order. When the food comes we eat ravenously. Time travel makes you hungry. After dinner we sit, observing each other with impersonal attention. I can feel the chill of silent space and a second we our breath in the air. One of the drummers shivers and looks around at us then turns hastily back to his whiskey.

"Shall we take a room?" I ask.

"I've got one already."

I pick up my bag. The bartender hands him a heavy brass key. Number 6, second floor. He goes in first and lights a kerosene lamp on a table by the bed. Room contains a double bed with brass bedstand, faded rose wallpaper, a wardrobe, two chairs, copper luster washstand and pitcher. I see a Gladstone bag like mine but this one has seen a lot of wear. Travel-stained, the stains unfamiliar. We take off our guns and hang them on the bedstead.

"What caliber?" I ask.

"32-20."

"Same here."

I point to a rifle in one corner: "30-30?" He nods.

We sit down on the bed and take off our boots and socks. Smell of feet and leather and swamp water.

"I'm tired," I say. "Think I'll turn in."

"Me too. I've come a long way."

He blows out the kerosene lamp. Moonlight streams through the side window. Frogs croak. An owl hoots. A dog barks in the distance. We take off our shirts and pants and hang them on wooden pegs. He turns towards me, his shorts sticking out at the fly.

"That stuff makes me hot," he says. "Shall we camel?"

When I wake up sunlight is streaming in the front window.

We get up, wash and dress and go down to the bar for a breakfast of ham and eggs, corn muffins and coffee. We walk up to the store, where a youth of fifteen or sixteen is loading the buckboard. He turns and holds out his hand.

"I'm Steve Ellisor."

"Noah Blake."

"Guy Star."

The boy wears a Colt Frontier at his hip.

"32-20?"

He nods. He has russet hair and skin the same color. I figure he must be the son of the saloonkeeper. I go into the store and buy a slicker, mess kit and bedroll for Guy, a two-man tent, a can of white paint with three brushes, a bushel of apples, corn on cob and three stools. We give the Ellisor boy a hand loading the gear, climb in back and sit on the stools. The boy takes the reins and we move off down the road. When we come to the turn the boy points to the saloon.

"Get some bad hombres in there sometimes. Not that he wants their custom. They come anyway looking for trouble."

I remember the pale gray eyes of the saloonkeeper and wonder if he is related to the store owner in Far Junction.

"Yep," the boy says, reading my mind, "brothers. Only two families hereabouts, the Bradfords and the Ellisors.... except for those who come in from outside...."

"Anybody else on the riverfront?"

"Two Irish and a girl if you could call her that ... end house by the inlet ... expecting more visitors in a few weeks...."

"These bad hombres you mentioned. Where they come from? ..."

"Across the river." He points. I can make out the outlines of a town through the morning river mist. "When the fog lifts you can see their fucking church sticking up." The boy spits. He stops in front of my shack.

"I could help you fix the place up....Just one delivery to make down the road...."

"Sure. We could do with some help...."

"Would a dollar be too much?"

"Sure not."

"All right. I'll drop the gear off and be right back...."

Guy and I get out with broom, mop, bucket, carbolic solution and washrags. Guy goes to river with bucket. Up steps, new hinges for screen doors, new screening for door and front porch. Unlock door which is heavy oak. Heave old stove into brambles followed by coffeepot, bean and tomato cans, preserves. Guy is back with a bucket of water into which he pours carbolic. He is mopping up bathroom and cleaning toilets while I sweep. Under the dust the floor is yellow pine in good condition. Yellow pine paneling on walls and ceiling, Trapdoor leads to attic.

Guy is cleaning table and shelves when the Ellisor boy returns with buckboard. Boy unhitches horses and hobbles the strawberry roan.

Next to unload in sequence. We don't talk, we know what to do. Water container by stove. Fill container from two five-gallon cans. Fill boiler with river water. New stove on table. Fill stove with kerosene. Fill burner under boiler with kerosene, put in new wick. Groceries and cooking utensils on shelves and stove and nails. Mattress and blankets on walnut bedstead. Trunks along wall, bedclothes packed in trunks, Gladstone bags out of the way in the attic. We take off our shirts. Steve's body is red-brown like his face. Guy's body also tanned but tanned in overlaid blotches like dab painting.

"Star tan," he tells me.

Steve and Guy start screening the porch. I take ladder outside and scrape the walls for paint. Old paint comes off easy. One wall scraped. Screen door on hinges, porch half-screened. Time for lunch. Lemonade, apples, flapjacks. Screening finished on porch. New screen for the two side windows. Scraping. Painting. No wasted movements, no getting in each other's way, no talking. Time laid out in screening, painting, putting things away in trunks, storing cases of food and ammunition in attic. At four o'clock we are looking at a neat house, white and shining like a ship in the afternoon sun. I mix a copper-luster pitcher of lemonade. We go out and sit on the porch steps. There it is in the afternoon sun, a white church steeple with a gold cross on top. I can see the mean pinched hate-filled faces of decent church-going women and lawmen with nigger notches on their guns.

Steve retrieves the bean and tomato cans I have thrown away and puts them up on a beam of the loading shed about thirty-five feet from the porch steps. He walks back towards us, pivots in a crouch, draws, aims, and fires, gun held in both hands and extended at eye level.

SPLAT

A tomato can explodes dripping tomato juice down the beam. Steve sits down. Guy stands up, draws, and aims and fires.

SPLAT

Bean can explodes.

I stand up, arms relaxed, both eyes open. Look at target. See bullet hit. Release draw mechanism. Gun jumps into my hand.

SPLAT

We fire six rounds each and reload.

Smell of black powder, smoke, beans and tomatoes. Steve gets a shovel from the porch corner, walks around by side of house tapping ground with his feet. He stops and digs, fills can with earth and thick red worms. We get three lines on spools with hook, leader, float. Guy and I take our 30-30s. We walk down road to the tributary which is about forty feet wide at junction with river. As we pass the end house I see three people sitting on the porch which is overgrown with vines. A dark Irish boy grins and waves. Sitting on either side of him are a boy and girl, obviously twins. They both have casques of bright orange hair and blank inhuman expressions. They wear green shirts and pants and yellow shoes. They look at us, faces twitching. Across the inlet the road continues overgrown with weeds and bushes. I start to take out my line. They boy shakes his head.

"Catfish here."

He leads the way along a path through undergrowth by the inlet. A water moccasin thick as my arm slides into the water.

"Here."

We stop by a deep blue pool, bait hooks and drop lines in. In a few seconds floats are jerked down out of sight and we are pulling out bass and jack salmon. We are cleaning the fish when I hear a deep growl. We turn, picking up 30-30s. Twenty feet away a huge grizzly stands on its hind legs, teeth bared. Cock guns.

Click

Click

Steve slides his Colt out. We freeze and wait. The bear drops to all fours, growls and lumbers away. As we pass the end house I see that there is no one on the porch but the door is open. I call from the road.

"Want a fish?"

The dark youth comes to the door naked with a hard-on.

"Sure."

I toss him a three-pound bass. He catches it and goes back inside and I hear the fish slap flesh and then a sound neither animal nor human.

"Strange folk. Where they come from?"

Guy points to the evening star in a clear pale green sky.

"Venusians," he says matter-of-factly. "The twins don't speak English."

"You speak Venusian?"

"Enough to get by. They don't talk with the mouth. They talk with the whole body. It gives you a funny feeling."

We light kerosene lamps, cut boneless steaks off two jack salmon. While the fish cooks, Guy and I drink whiskey and lemonade.

There is a hinged table with folding legs attached to the wall opposite the stove. We sit on stools, eating the jack salmon which is perhaps the best pan fish in the world if you prefer the more delicate flavor of freshwater fish. We sit on the porch in the moonlight looking across the river.

"Be all right if they stayed there and minded their own business," Steve said.

"Ever hear about smallpox minding its own business?" Guy asks.

The boy slept between us light as a shadow. Thunder at dawn.

"Have to get started. The road floods out."

Smell of rain on horseflesh. The boy in a yellow slicker and black Stetson waves to us and whips the horse to a trot as rain sluices down in a gray wall.

We make a pot of coffee and sit down at the table. We sit there for an hour without saying anything. I am looking at two empty stools. Going zero, we call it. A gust of wind knocks at the door. I open the door and there on the porch is the boy with orange hair from End House. He is wearing a slicker and carrying a gallon can. He points to a five-gallon can of kerosene in a corner of the porch. I get a funnel and fill his can.

"Inside? Coffee?"

He steps warily into the room like a strange cat and I feel a shock of alien contact. He twitches his face into a smile and jerks a thumb at his chest.

"Pat!" He ejaculates the name from his stomach.

He throws open his slicker. He is naked except for boots and a black Stetson. He has a hard-on straight up against his stomach. He turns bright red all over, even his teeth and nails, an idiot demon from some alien hell, raw, skinned, exposed, abandoned yet joyless and painful like a prisoner holding up his manacles, or a leper showing his sores. A musky rotten smell steams off him and fills the room. I know that he is trying to show us something and this is his only way to communicate.

The words of Captain Mission came back to me.

"We offer refuge to all people everywhere who suffer under the tyranny of governments."

I wondered what tyranny had led him to leave his native planet and take refuge under the Articles.

The rain stopped in the late afternoon and we walked down to the inlet in a gray twilight and shot two wood pigeons from a dripping tree.

A sharp sickening smell. In the middle of a red carpeted room I see a plot of ground about six feet square where strange bulbous plants are growing. Centipedes are crawling among limestone rocks and from under a rock protrudes the head of a huge centipede. I arm myself with a cutlass and someone I can't see clearly picks up a piece of firewood. I kick the rock over but the centipede digs deeper and I can see that it is huge, perhaps three feet long. Now it is under my bed and I wake up screaming. I know that I must make preparations for a war I thought had ended.

Please to use studio

postulated to you

We arrive at Ba'dan around midnight local time. The space front is stacked with garbage under sputtering blue arc lights. Garbage collectors' strike. Someone is always on strike in Ba'dan.

Smugglers of every variety are moored at Ba'dan. The skippers all get together at the annual Skipper Party and award a gold cup to the all-around "Vilest Skipper of the Year." Skipper Krup von Nordenholz will win hands down. There are also cops of every variety making deals with the skippers and arresting anyone who doesn't have the fix in.

We hail a cab. "Where's the action here, Pops?"

"Wal, I reckon you boys want to go to Fun City. Better pick some artillery first."

He stops at a neon-lighted all-night gun shop. The shopkeeper has all the old western models and some of the new-fangled double-action 38's. These guns shoot an aphro charge that can disable or kill. Neck and heart shots are fatal, stomach, solar plexus and genital hits are knockabout shots.

Audrey selects a snub-nosed 38 in a quick-draw holster. Pu slips a 41 Derringer into his vest pocket and straps on a Smith & Wesson 44.

"It's a much better load than the 45, old sports."

Fun City is on a plateau that falls steeply on one side down to the river that separates Ba'dan from Yass-Waddah. On this slope is a vast casbah—the houses are connected by catwalks, trapdoors, and tunnels—that contains the largest per capita criminal population ever seen anywhere. Ba'dan breaks a lot of records.

We walk into a leather bar called the Stretch Nest. A goodly crowd is there—four feet deep at the bar, waiting in line for openings at the gambling tables, going up the wide red-carpeted stairs to private hanging rooms followed by waiters with trays of drinks and buckets of champagne.

The usual costume is boot and chaps, bare ass and crotch. Some have tight-fitting chamois pants up to midthigh and shirts that come to the navel. Many are naked except for boots, gun belts, and hang-noose scarves. Nooses dangle every ten feet from a beam down the center of the room.

A hang fistfight draws a circle of cheering onlookers, as two kids smash each other in the face—lips cut, eyes black, noses broken, spurting blood. One kid is down—he tries to get up and falls on his side.

The winner bends down and ties his arms with a noose scarf. Next thing, the kid is hanged and his semen spatters the bar. The bartender wipes it off with his bar rag.

Now an old rooster, strapped into his corsets, comes in a-gunning for some kids to hang at his debutante daughter's coming-out party. He settles on Pu who has seen him a-coming and has the Derringer palmed.

"Fill your hand, you young varmint," the old gun drawls. Pu shoots him in the neck with the Derringer and he falls farting and shitting, the corsets bursting off him.

"Lucky thing he had his clothes on, old sports."

A naked fifteen-year-old sticks his head in the bar. "The Clantons and the Earps is shooting it out at the O.K. Corral."

A great bestial whoop goes up from the bar. The patrons shove and jostle out past hanged corpses, slipping in sperm. And they head for the O.K. Corral ... there it is right beside it a gallows that can service thirteen at a time.

The Clantons and the Earps walk towards each other, naked except for gun belts and boots, meeting cock to cock.

"You boys have been looking for a fight ..." Wyatt drawls. "Now we aim to give it to you." He draws and gets Billy Clanton in the crotch. Billy sags but he knocks Wyatt out with a solar-plexus shot from the ground. Doc Holliday turns sideways but Ike Clanton circles and gets him right in his skinny ass. Virgil and Guy Earp are down. The Clantons have won.

The Earps and Doc Holliday are hanged simultaneously. The crowd goes hanging mad. Gunfights all up and down the street, people sniping from windows and doorways, casting from rooftops with deep-sea fishing gear and nooses, trying to snag someone off the street.

They are lined up at the gallows. Ropes are unslung and bodies thrown aside, some of them still alive, strangled by street boys or picked up by roving Buzzard Bands.

People hang from balconies, trees, and poles. Even horses are hauled into the air, kicking and farting, while boys prance around them, showing their teeth in mimicry.

The culmination of this loutish scene is now at hand as drunken cowpokes drag screaming whores out of the cathouses.

"You've given me your last dose, you rotten slut."

"My God, they're hanging women!" Audrey gasps.

"Enough to turn a man to stone," drawls Captain Strobe. "Let's get out of here." Six youths in chaps bar the way.

"In a hurry, stranger?"

"Yes," says Audrey and he kills him with a neck shot. He flops against another boy, deflecting his aim. Audrey and Pu are unbelievable with hand-guns. They boys are all down now or dead.

We walk away and leave them, fair game for any roving band of vigilantes. Before we turn a corner, they are seized by the Hanging Fathers—naked except for their clerical collars. The Hanging Fathers represent one of the sects under the control of the Council of the Selected. They are one of the most powerful organizations in Ba'dan.

We stroll along to the amusement-park section. Here are the elevators, parachute, and roller-coaster gallows and all variations of hanging roulette. "From Russia with Love" is played like Russian roulette. You stand on the trap with the rope around your neck and you get a gun with one live load. You spin the cylinder and then, instead of putting the gun to your own head, you aim at someone in the audience—if you can draw an audience or anyone within range—and if it's the live shell, the shot springs the release. Or maybe some yokel throws a firecracker under the gallows—they'll work up to an atom bomb eventually.

Now the wall of a building flies up and there are thirteen Commies hard at it, and we take off across the park, bullets whistling all around us. We duck behind the elevator-gallows building—ten stories, three hundred feet long.

You start at the tenth floor with a rope around your neck and drop down at express speed, and when the elevator stops a panel flips open and you get popped. And, of course, you can play roulette on the elevators, any odds you want.

Audrey is getting that weak feeling—it's the wet dream of his adolescence, going down very fast in an elevator that suddenly stops. He didn't know what it meant then. Now he just has to try it.

So up to the tenth floor. A red-carpeted corridor runs the length of the building. On one side a Turkish bath, on the other the elevators, green lights showing when the elevator is vacant. Youths, draped in towels or naked, come out of the showers and steam room to importune in the hall.

Audrey beckons imperiously to an attendant: "Do you have a well-equipped think room?"

"Oh yes, sir. Right this way, sir. Very sensible of you, sir, if you don't mind me saying so, sir."

The youths mutter angrily. "Come up here for a free feel."

"Hombre conejo.... Fucking rabbit man."

Inside the think room, the boys put on helmets. There are dials and screens—you can call your shots. Will it be an open elevator? The moon is full. The lights of Yass-Waddah twinkle across the bay.

Audrey could throw a potent curse. Or something with mirrors and video cameras—home movies to show his friends when he has a comfortable little bungalow in a nice residential district of Ba'dan.

Everything is permitted in a think room, so Audrey simply lets himself go. An open elevator or a mirror job? Why not both, one after the other?

POP POP POP

He is spattering death all over Yass-Waddah across the bay. Now he reaches out for the hermaphrodites and transplants of Yass-Waddah.

Two of these creatures undulate in, trilling, "You know what happens now, don't you, Audrey?"

Jerry's head is on the body of a red-haired girl and her head is on his body, long red hair down to his nipples. Audrey gets the Gorgon Queezies at the sight of them.

"We're going to pop you, Audrey."

An open elevator for this one.

"Here you goooooooooo...." Her hair blows up around her head like flames from hell.

POP

Audrey is learning to relax and throw his pops. A fire starts in a warehouse across the bay.

Now for the Big Dipper, which towers eight hundred feet into the night sky, all lit up with twinkling stars. Biggest and fastest roller coaster in the solar system. Like I say, Ba'dan breaks a lot of records.

Audrey stops in a little café he just remembers, up this little street and turn right ... they sit under an arbor and order mint tea and all take a whopping dose of Itchy Tingles.

"You chaps just back up my play. Give me all your Itchy Tingle prana when I pop."

"Sure thing, old sport."

Audrey remembers a very exclusive little shop—you don't get through the door or even find the door unless the proprietor likes your looks. Audrey knows him from Mexico City where Audrey was a private eye in another incarnation.

Inside the shop, he buys winged-Mercury sandals and a helmet with wings from a whooping crane. He tops off the ensemble with a silver wand.

They take a private car on the Big Dipper. Audrey stands with a silver silk noose around his neck, feet apart, knees bent, riding the dips, the wand moving in front of him. Up they go now—up up up up up—Audrey is getting a hard-on ... a dizzy pause and now, the Big Dipper comes down down downdowndown and levels off. Audrey extends his arm and the wand tingles straight for the power plant of Yass-Waddah.

P O P

All the lights in Yass-Waddah go out.

A lecture is being given

Jimmy Lee is checking dials. "We better get out of here fast before they get our range."

We walk over to the shooting galleries and penny arcades on the edge of the plateau. A high electric fence separates Fun City from the vast slum area in Ba'dan that stretches down to the river and extends along the river's banks.

It is 3:00 A.M., a warm electric night, violet haze in the air and the smell of sewage and Coleman lanterns. The pitchmen wear pink shirts, striped pants, and sleeve garters. They have gray night faces, cold eyes, and smooth patter.

One of the shills with a Cockney accent and a thin red acne-scarred face, standing in front of a curtained booth, makes a gesture that is unmistakably obscene and at the same time incomprehensible. Audrey is reminded of an incident from his early adolescence down on Market Street, brass knucks and crooked dice in pawnshop windows and a smooth high-yellow pitchman trying to talk him into a "museum," as he called it.

"Shows all kind masturbation and self-abuse. Young boys need it special."

Audrey does not exactly understand what the man is talking about. He turns and walks abruptly away. The mocking voice of the pitchman follows him.

"Hasta luego, amigo."

We walk on and stop in an all-night restaurant where an old Chinese serves us chili and coffee. He puts a CLOSED sign on the front door and locks it.

"Out this way...."

He shows us out the back door into a weed-grown alley by the fence. Frogs are croaking and the first light of dawn mixes with the red sky. A boy pads up beside us silent as a cat.

"You come with me, mister. Somebody want to talk you."

The boy has a straw-colored face dusted with orange freckles, kinky red hair, and lustrous brown eyes. He is bare-footed and dressed in khaki shorts and shirt. We walk along beside the fence.

"Here."

The boy pulls aside a piece of tar paper. A little green snake slides away. Under the paper is a rusty iron panel set in concrete. We go down a ladder and through a winding passage that smells of sewage and coal gas, out into a narrow street that looks like Algiers of Morocco.

The boy suddenly stops, sniffing like a dog. "In here, quick."

He guides us into a doorway, up stairs and a ladder onto a roof. Looking down, we see a patrol of six soldiers with machine guns checking every doorway on the street. Audrey studies the gray faces and cold fishy eyes of the soldiers.

"Junkies."

"Fuckin' Heroids—" the boy spits.

The boy guides them through a maze of roofs and catwalks down a skylight, finally stopping in front of a metal door. He takes a little disk from his coat pocket. The disk bleeps faintly and the door opens.

A Chinese youth stands there. He is wearing a pistol in a holster at his belt. It is a bare room with a table, chairs, a gun rack, and a large map on one wall. A man turns from the map. It is Dimitri.

"Ah, Mr. Snide, or should I say Audrey Carsons, so glad to see you again." We shake hands. "And your young assistant as well." He shakes hands with Jimmy Lee. "Both somewhat altered—but none the worse for wear."

We introduce the others.

"You are welcome, gentlemen ... and now, there is much to explain." He stands before the map with a long thin hazel stick in his hand. "We are here—" he circles the area below the plateau of Fun City down along the Ba'dan riverfront. "It is known as the Casbah. Outlaws and criminals of all times and places are to be found here. The area is heavily patrolled and the soldiers, as you have observed, are all heroin addicts. Their addiction conveys immunity to the fever and assures absolute loyalty to their masters who, of course, supply them ... extra rations for arrests ... rations cut for any dereliction of duty."

"It's neat," I put in. "But couldn't they buy it somewhere else?"

"No, they could not. We control the black market. No pusher would serve them unless he is tired of living."

"But why not? If they can get it someplace else, that breaks the monopoly."

"We have other plans which you will learn in good time."

Dimitri was giving a lecture accompanied by slides and moving films:

"Ba'dan is the oldest spaceport on planet Earth and like many port towns has accreted over the centuries the worst features of many times and places. Riffraff and misfits from every corner of the galaxy have jumped ship here or emigrated to engage in various pernicious and parasitic occupations, swelling the ranks of brothel keepers, whores, pimps, swindlers, black-market operators, go-betweens and fixers. The class and occupational structure is compartmentalized like an Arab city."

Blue twilight was filling the narrow twisting alleys of the city. The stranger shivered, gathering his ragged cloak about him. Lights were going on behind latticed windows.

Here and there blue streetlights sputtered in sockets. A beggar crawled into the street, barring his way and holding forth a bowl fixed into the stump of his arm like a ladle. His legs were twisted, limp and boneless, his shaven head was fetal, his lips parted with a fetid yellow exhalation of breath. The stranger stepped by him and the beggar muttered curses in a gurgling liquid dialect that seemed to bubble up from noisome depths. The stranger felt as if he were being pelted with filth, the words sticking to the back of his cloak with a vile stench. Just ahead was a stone stairway half a house high stained with garbage and phosphorescent excrement. Beyond he could see a misty, blue-lit square. As he stepped into the square, which was littered with rubble half-buried in sand, he found himself surrounded by a gang of filthy youths about four or five feet in height, mewling and chittering and chirruping among themselves as they moved closer to blocking his way and sidling in behind him. At first glance in the blue light and drifting wisps of fog the boys appeared simply as ragged hungry waifs bent on extorting what money they could from a stranger. Looking closer, he saw that they were all in some way inhuman.

Some had long red hair and sputtering green eyes and their hands were armed with needle claws dripping fluid in the blue light. They were wearing leather jockstraps and short fur cloaks that gave off a rank smell of stale sweat and half-cured skins that billowed around them as they moved. He noted that the inside of their cloaks was faintly phosphorescent and surmised that the skins had been cured by rubbing in the phosphorescent excrement that littered the streets. The boys hissed through sharp yellow teeth with snarling smiles as the hair stood up on their heads and legs, bristling like animals. Others, completely naked despite the cold, had smooth reptilian skins, crystal dark eyes and long flexible tails tipped with points of translucent pink crystal. They swung the tails up between their legs pointing at the stranger with mocking bumps and grinds as they hissed in simulated ecstasies. Other boys had crystal fingertips, which they drew out to needles, clicking them together like tuning forks to little rhythms that set his teeth on edge.

The boys drew closer.

"Why do you block my path? I am a stranger who would pass in pass."

One boy stepped forward and bowed so that his long red hair brushed the stranger's boots in a gesture of mock servility.

"A thousand pardons, oh nobly born. But he who would pass here must pay the price of passing. This is reasonable, is it not?"

As the boy straightened up he grabbed the bottom hem of the stranger's cloak and leaping high in the air with a shrill animal cry pitched the cloak up over the stranger's head.

The other boys imitate his cry and wave their arms like the flying cloak. The stranger is now naked except for leather shorts and knee-length leather boots that cling tightly to his calves and flare up the backs of his thighs. He moves sideways, trying to beep the boys from getting behind him, and reaches for his spark gun. A boy lights on all fours like a cat, tail arched over his back. From the pointed crystal tip he quivers out a shower of red sparks that spatter the stranger's body with burning erogenous sores that twist and writhe into diseased lips whispering the sweet rotten fever words. The sparks are coming from all sides, stirring in his nipples, opening in his navel, mewling and chittering from his crotch and rectum.

Audrey woke up with a start, his phallus tight against his thermal jockstrap.

Dimitri's voice droned on, hypnotically lulling: "The area adjacent to the spaceport is an international and intergalactic zone known as Portland. Portland has its own administration, customs, and police. Biologic inspection and quarantine measures are enforced by the DNA police force. These are highly specialized officers qualified in every branch of medicine, authorities on every disease and drug in the galaxy.

"They are armed with the most sophisticated weapons: Infra-Sound and DOR guns, fear probes, death guns that can be adjusted to kill, stun or disperse, and devices shooting tiny pellets of nerve gas and toxins.

"There officers are highly skilled interrogators, trained in telepathic techniques, equipped with the most advanced lie detectors, with readings taken from the sensitive reactions of living creatures: this flower droops at a lie, and this octopus turns a bright blue.

"In certain cases where the subject has been trained to circumvent telepathic probes and lie detectors, and where time is short (a nuclear device must be located and deactivated), the DNA interrogators have recourse to injections of stonefish venom. This poison produces the most intense pain known. It is like fire through the blood. Subjects roll around screaming.

"And here, in this syringe, is the antidote which brings immediate relief."

On screen an impassive interrogator holds up a tiny syringe filled with a blue liquid.

A man with a wrinkled old-woman face and toothless mouth was bending over him, his head ringed by a halo of blue light.

"Well, young guy, it's a good thing I happened along." He picked up the spark gun and hefted it. "Now this little trick could fetch a right price in the right place...."

The stranger tried to stand up and fell backward, hitting his elbows.

"Easy does it, young feller." The man helped him to his feet. "And right this way."

Every step sent excruciating stabs of pain through his body. His throat ached and he was spitting blood. His legs felt numb and wooden. He had to lean heavily on the man's arm to keep from falling.

"Here we are." The man kicked at a strange animal in the doorway, a cross between a porcupine and a possum.

"Fucking lulow!"

The lulow snarled and scrambled away. The man inserted a rod with a pattern of holes into the lock and the door opened into a dingy hallway with stairs at the end.

He guided the stranger into a room to the right of the door. The window opening on the street was high and barred and the plaster walls were painted blue. The man lit a torch in a socket: blue light, a filthy bed, a sink, table and stools.

"No place like home, what?"

He pulled a tattered coverlet of blue velvet over the grimy bedding and the stranger slumped down. The numbness in his legs was wearing off and he felt unbearable shootings and pricklings, like recovery from frostbite. He covered his face with his hands, groaning in agony.

The man held out a tiny syringe filled with blue liquid.

"Shoot your way to freedom, kid."

The stranger held out his shaking hands.

"Roll up your sleeve. I'll hit you."

Cool blue morning by the creek, soft remote flute calls, sad and sweet from a dying star. Phosphorescent stumps glow in the blue twilight that hangs over the streets at noon like a haze.

Red brick houses line blue canals where crocodiles play like dolphins. Lost mournful stars dim as spark boys chitter and mewl against his shoulder, a frosty luminescence off their back-sides, cool remote garden, lead gutters dripping, a stone bridge where a boy stands with a sad blue monkey on his shoulder.

*

"Fun City is a segregated vice area occupying a plateau on the north side of the city. Here gambling houses and brothels of many times and places promise to satisfy any taste, but these establishments are, for the most part, tourist traps and clip joints with more shills and Murphy men than whores."

Audrey blinks at the screen. He must have seen Fun City through fever-tinted glasses. Seen on the screen, it is a vast composite honky-tonk, temple virgins sealed while you wait, Aztec and Egyptian sets looking like 1920s movie theaters, hula girls around swimming pools with paper palms, fan-tan games with tasseled lamps and geisha girls, New Orleans whorehouses with fake Spanish moss and houseboats on filthy lakes and canals, massage parlors, Dante's Inferno with female impersonators ... the whole scene made in Hollywood.

"The real action is in the Casbah, but tourists are afraid to go there, scared off by horror stories concocted by the trades-people and the Fun City shills. Addicts are routinely burned or overcharged in Fun City, so they head for the Casbah, where any drug can be had for a price.

"The Casbah is built into the hills and bluffs that slope down to the river. This vast ghetto houses fugitives and displaced persons. Outlaws in every sense, they pay no taxes and are entitled to no municipal services. Criminals and outcasts of many times and places are found here: bravos from seventeenth-century Venice, old western shootists, Indian Thuggees, assassins from Alamut, samurai, Roman gladiators, Chinese hatchet men, pirates and pistoleros, Mafia hit-men, dropouts from intelligence agencies and secret police."

Cameras pan old western sets, bits of ancient Rome, China, India, Japan, Persia, and medieval England.

"Over the centuries, the area has been mined with tunnels so that all the buildings interconnect. The tunnels also give access to a maze of natural caves and caverns.

"There are cable cars and wires with hand carriages and jump seats that run from building to another. The Flying Squirrels, little people like Igor, hop from the highest bluffs in hang-gliders, skipping from roof to roof, carrying messages, drugs, and weapons.

"The Casbah spills into the river in a maze of piers, catwalks, moored boats and rafts. The tunnels at river level are half full of water, forming an underground Venice with gondolas and limestone palaces dripping with stalactites.

"Any services can be purchased in the Casbah—from assassination to such illegal operations as I.T. —Identity Transfer. There are whores, from the most sophisticated courtesans and Rems who offer wet dreams to order, to such mindless organisms as the Happy Cloak and the Siren Web.

"Any drug can be had in the Casbah for a price. Longevity drugs that require ever-increasing dosage, the addict crumbling to putrescent dust if the drug is withheld. Joy Juice: blackout in erotic convulsions and every shot takes years off the user's life-span. A Joy Juicer lasts two years on average and ends up a burnt-out idiot hulk. And Derm my God what a feeling ... soothes your skin down to flexible marble ... but if you don't get it ... the irritation of the dermal nerve endings ... well I've seen a kicking Dermy tear himself to pieces with his own hands. The Blue and the Gray, heavy metal drugs so habit-forming that a single shot results in lifelong addiction. Yes, every drug can be had here for the price."

"Now you take the stonefish poison...." He tapped the vial of milky fluid. "... Like fire through the blood; morphine won't touch it, but this Blue shit is fifty times stronger. So combine the fish poison and the Blue"—he draws the milky fluid into the syringe—"for a Fire Fix!"

The stranger was running short of credits. No money for luxuries like Hot Shots. Jay had a deal going to bring in some Gray but it was dragging out and then the panic hit.

Suddenly there was no Blue in the city. Heroin just barely took the edge off like codeine with a heroin habit. The cold fire in his bones kept him in constant agony and he was bleeding through the skin: blood-sweat, it's called.

Fortunately, he had not been on long enough for the spontaneous amputations that leave arms and legs smoldering blue stumps. With the last of his credits, he went to a clinic for a deep-freeze sleep cure.

"On the south side of Ba'dan, along bluffs overlooking the river, are the vast estates of the rich, guarded by their own Special Police. Recently, sons of the rich, bored with the tinsel attractions of Fun City, began frequenting the criminal ghettos. Some of these youths are addicts and drug dealers, others are purposeful agents sounding me out with offers of aid and weapons.

"The administration, courts, and police occupy a governmental area. A pass is required for entrance. The large middle class of tradesmen, artisans, and minor functionaries occupy the middle of the city, hemmed in between Portland, Fun City, the Casbah, and the governmental area."

Camera pans a wasteland of housing projects like the drearier sections of Queens.

"Traditionally, the city of Ba'dan is ruled by a City Council in which the very wealthy hold an overwhelming majority. Now, the discontented middle class is demanding more seats in the Council. These demands are fanned by agitators under orders from the Council of the Selected with headquarters in Yass-Waddah.

"The Council of the Selected controls a number of cults that are finding adherents among the middle-class youths. These cults are basically of low-church Protestant derivation.

"Agents from the Council of the Selected are also organizing paramilitary groups and smuggling in arms. These agents operate with the connivance of the Heroid Police.

"The basic issue is a proposed Anschluss with Yass-Waddah that would leave the Council of the Selected in virtual control of both cities. The plan is supported by the middle class, who are ignorant of the intrigues of the Council to ruin Ba'dan economically and eventually to close the spaceport.

"To distract attention from these maneuvers, agents of the Council, vociferously self-righteous, call for a cleanup of Fun City, a crackdown on the Casbah, and an end to the international status of Portland. The wealthy see the Anschluss as a danger to their position, but much more vulnerable and immediately threatened are the inhabitants of the Casbah."

He is dozing off. Dry cold rasps his raw lungs ... putting on his clothes, shivering, dropping things, cold burn in his bowels, just made the privy, a trough of smooth red stone in the hall streaks of phosphorescent shit, a smell like rotten solder, burning shivering sick, he needs the Blue Stuff. Dry blue crystals of snow on the floor stir in an eddy of wind and a crystal spark boy takes shape, naked, radiant, his long needle fingertips dripping the deadly Joy Juice, bright red hair floating about his head, disk eyes flashing erogenous luminescence, his erect phallus smooth as seashell with a tip of pink crystal, he is like some dazzingly beautiful undersea creature dripping deadly venoms.

"Yass-Waddah, a spaceport in rivalry with Ba'dan, is a matriarchy ruled by a hereditary empress. Here men are second-class citizens who can only achieve status as courtiers, servants, shopkeepers, agents and guards.

"Those who fall into none of these categories try frantically to ingratiate themselves as informers. No city in the cosmos is so riddled with informers as Yass-Waddah. The Ba'dan word for informer is Yass.

"The inner city of Yass-Waddah is forbidden to any male being, except the Green Guards, genetic eunuchs, pot-bellied but strong. They form the shock police of Yass-Waddah.

"Latterly, Her Serene Majesty, the Empress, is being pushed upstairs into the attic as the Council of the Selected moves in, backed by the powerful countesses de Vile and de Gulpa, smarting from their defeat and narrow escape in Tamaghis. They are pushing for the Anschluss, after which the Heroids and the Green Guards will wipe out Tamaghis and block the way to Waghdas forever.

"The riots we are here to foment are simply a prelude to an all-out assault on Yass-Waddah. We are pushing for a final solution. There can be no compromise. Even the memory of Yass-Waddah must be destroyed as if Yass-Waddah had never existed."

Afterbirth of dream

Smell of the salt marshes, slivers of ice at dawn, catwalks, towers, and wooden houses over the water where white-furred crocodiles lurk ...

There are many albinos in the city with hair white as snow and long slanting black eyes, all pupil, like black shimmering mirrors. Many of the inhabitants change color with the seasons—being white in winter and changing in summer to a mottled green-brown.

The summers are almost tropical and the marshes bloom with a rich profusion of flowering trees and shrubs along pools and canals. Here and there patches of swamp poppies with pods big as cantaloupes bursting with reddish-brown opium.

It was a fall day, leaves turning, crisp frosty air. Most of the people were out in red hair and freckles, yellow, sepia, and orange.

Naked with the spark boy in narrow stagnant streets. Saffron smoke curls out between his legs and fades to pale yellow and violet as the boy winks and capers away.

When young Audrey woke up, the smell was still there oozing from the yellow cashmere blanket that covered his naked body. He closed his eyes, remembering the arrival in Ba'dan ... a shabby whorehouse district called Fun City where he had gone to meet his contact ... the briefing from Dimitri during which he kept dozing off ... dreams in which Fun City became an arena for deadly sexual games ... encounters with the spark boys ... addiction to a radioactive drug known as the Blues ... the clinic ... the doctor.

There was another body in the bed beside him. Opening his eyes and turning his head, he saw milky-white skin, amber hair, and the face of an idiot angel.

"Toby."

An English boy named Arn with a foxy, red face and a corrupt insinuating leer: "Popper Toby, we calls him. When he gets in—eat the smell of him—pops you right enough. Bit of a lark, mate."

Toby opened huge blue eyes and looked at Audrey, the pupils contracting. He kicked the blanket down and arched his body, stretching.

The room is cold with a dusting of dry snow on the floor from the round opening in the wall that serves as a window. Audrey shivers, hugging his knees against his chest.

"Oh my." Arn stands at the foot of the bed in a red turtleneck sweater, green corduroys, and sandals. "Just popped in to put some water on for tea."

Arn then lights an alcohol stove and turns back towards Toby and Audrey, peeling off his sweater and pants. "Coo..." he says.

A violet smoke pours from Toby's scent glands, blanketing Audrey's body with a smell of hyacinths, cyanide, and ozone. Audrey is choking, gasping, in a flash of violet light.

Audrey sits up groggily. "Where's Toby?"

Arn puts a hand on Audrey's chin, turning his head around to face a tarnished mirror on the wall above his bed: "Mirror mirror on the wall ..."

A vertebra pops in Audrey's neck. Arn clicks his tongue. Audrey is looking into the vacant blue eyes of Toby, seeing the milky-white flesh, larval and wraithlike, clinging to his body.

Arn points to the mirror. "Gor blimey you shoulda 'eard 'im before we got together like. Right school tie 'e was." Arn says this in those clear penetrating upper-class English tones. You can hear every word fifty feet across a hotel dining room.

"You've 'eard of me, myte. Arn the voice. 'Absolutely breathtyking,' said a gentleman from the Times and the Queen dropped 'er haitches on TV. Wouldn't you?"

He tossed Audrey his underwear. "Nip into your duds, luv. Nobody is lyte for briefing. It's like rehearsals in show biz."

In the operations room, Dimitri is passing out photos and addresses for hit assignments. Arn is nowhere to be seen. Audrey is looking at the photo of the man he is to kill: a thing Italian face with protuberant yellow eyes glowing with sulfurous hate.

"Don't looka me ..." screams the photograph.

This will be a pleasure, Audrey thinks. I have not come justa looka you—you greasy worthless black-market wop.

Dimitri point to the map: "Right there. Runs a cigarette store. Smuggled stuff. Also an Uncle, a Broker, a Buyer. Pays off in info to operate. He's got lookouts in this kiosk and this grocery store who report any strangers in the neighborhood. Two metal detectors, here and here. He's got another in the door of his shop and a sawed-off shotgun under the counter. You pick up your gun here after you pass the first two detection points. The detector in his doorway will be disconnected."

A miniature youth, passing for an eight-year-old street boy, clicks his heels and bows. "I am the Disconnector."

"And you're just a dumb space sailor," Dimitri tells Audrey, "looking to pick up a few cartons of smuggled cigarettes." He glances at Audrey's clothes—blue pullover, seaman's pea jacket, blue pants ... "And here's your hat. After you do the job on him, you walk out with your cigarettes and go to this Chinese laundry. They'll show you out the back way."

In the street, Toby's face is an asset. With vacant blue eyes, yellow hair and seaman's clothes, no one could look less like a dedicated and purposeful assassin.

He pauses frequently, looking at a map of the city which he can't figure out how to fold up again, so he fumbles it together and stuffs the protesting paper into his pocket. Just a dumb fucking kid space sailor.

Now he feels the eyes from the lookouts, probing, hate-filled, but not suspicious. Just the contempt of the angle boys for a mark, a crumb who worka for a living. He drops his map and as he bends down to get it, pulls loose a brick from a wall and gets the gun. He can feel the lookout's eyes on his ass.

"Looks like a fucking fruit—takes it up the farter."

An old Italian hag leans over a balcony: "Ha ha ha, maricón."

The gun is a snub-nosed 38 with cyanide bullets. He looks around, blushing, then opens the door of the shop and goes in.

The man behind the counter looks at him. Audrey fumbles awkwardly and pulls off his hat. The man's eyes spit hate and contempt.

"Whatta you want?"

Audrey holds the cap by the visor, moving it across the counter within two feet of the man's chest. With smooth fluid casual movements, he draws the gun from his waistband and pushes it gently into the cotton lining of the hat.

The vacant face of Toby ages and tightens, the eyes blazing into the Italian's face like a comet as Audrey smiles. Comprehension, then stark ugly fear, flickers into the man's eyes as he knows what is happening and knows it is too late to reach the shotgun.

Audrey shoots three times through the chest—a muffled sound like a backfire in heavy snow. The man crumbles sideways, his eyes flaring out. Audrey reaches across the counter for a carton of cigarettes. He steps outside, looks around uncertainly and walks away.

In the Chinese laundry, and old Chinese is ironing a shirt. He jerks his head towards the rear of the laundry. Audrey walks through into an alley that leads to a sort of mall in sunlight.

A walk to the end

of the world

Audrey was walking on a mall in bright sunlight. Ahead he could see mountains shrouded in mist, brightly colored food stands, tables under umbrellas, waiters in red uniforms. This could be a small resort in Switzerland.

He was passing a huge marble snail, a bronze frog and a beaver. Fourteen-year-old boys lounged on the statues in studied postures, eating ice cream and looking at each other, insulated from the passerby by some invisible barrier.

Farther on, boys in cowboy boots, Stetson hats and jeans posed in front of a clothing store with the same stylized unsmiling nonchalance, engaged in some timeless charade. A boy with white-blond hair sat on a stone bridge dangling his legs.

Audrey turning into a paved courtyard and suddenly the air was oppressive and heavy with tropical heat. Youths in eighteenth-century clothes lounge in cane chairs sipping rum punch. They look cruel and languid as they caress pistol butts in their belts with slow obscene movements.

A private eye is talking to the bartender. "What were you doing in Bill Gray's Tropico?" It's an old western and Clem Snide is a fabled shootist. The bar is full of black powder smoke, the smell of entrails, blood and chili. The walls and roof fall in.

A sweet dry wind rises from the southeast. Audrey with some last-minute purchases. Almost the same buckboard it is already take care of Meester once he gets up beside the boy and they start off down the road where the flint chips glitter in the sun. Ahead they see mountains shrouded in mist, the orange and purple sky glowing behind.

He must have dozed off while he was walking—it's known as the Walkies—you get it from space travel. You can walk and talk and get yourself around while you are sound asleep, living in a dream. The dream is made of your actual surroundings—so you don't bump into things. You just see them differently.

A ragged street urchin falls in beside him for a fraction of a second. He glances sideways and knows it is one of the miniature youths, strong and quick as little cats.

The boy flashes ahead leading the way through mirrors and walls, through shops and urinals that open into squares where street acts are in progress: minstrels, Gnaoua drums, lutes, horns, zithers, tumblers, fire eaters, jugglers, snake charmers—all blurring together.

Audrey is walking very fast to keep up with the youth's "sorcerer's gait," past a platform where several boys are doing animal copulation acts as they impersonate cats, foxes, lemurs, and horses, snorting, whinnying, growling, whimpering. The spectators roll in the street pissing with laughter.

Audrey is struck by the variety of garb and racial types that flash by like scenes glimpsed from a train window: Mongols with felt boots, eighteenth-century dandies in silk pumps and breeches, pirates with cutlasses and patches, medieval jerkins and codpieces, sharp smell of weeds from old westerns, boots and holsters, djellabas, togas, sarongs, and youths clad in a transparent fabric like flexible glass lounge about in the studied postures he had noticed in the mall—obviously there to be seen ... superb Nubians naked except for leopardskin capes and boots of hippopotamus hide ... boys in tight rubber suits with smooth poreless faces like green-white glazed terra-cotta.

"Frog boys from underground rivers ..." the guide throws over his shoulder.

Audrey notices that his guide and most of the other people he passes carry at their belts a tool like a little crowbar hooked at one end. Now a ripple passes along the street, actors and musicians are gathering up instruments and props behind them as the word moves from lip to lip.

"HIP." (Heroid Patrol)

People are dodging into doorways, prising up manhole covers with their tools, and scrambling down ladders into a maze of tunnels where the Heroids do not dare to venture. Audrey follows his guide through twisting tunnels, past youths on roller skates, scooters, and skateboards.

The tunnels open here and there into caverns where people live in stalactite-and-quartz houses and tend pools of blind fish. Up twisting iron ladders are Turkish baths, lodgings, houses and brothels. Privies open into restaurants and patios.

Down a rope ladder is a dusty gymnasium where boys are practicing with various weapons as they wait for an assignment: Jerry and Rubble Blood Pu, Cupid Mount Etna, Dahlfar, Jimmy Lee, and the Katzenjammer Kids, as we call the German boys. They drift over to greet him.

"How'd you make out with the Eyetie?"

"Easy and greasy and lots of fun ... the look on his lousy wise-guy face when he knew. It was tasty."

Audrey sees a number of the little people climbing up and down ropes and swinging from rings with great agility. He is amazed to see that some of them have long prehensile tails and retractable claws on their feet and hands that enable them to scramble up trees like squirrels.

As he watches, one boy drops thirty feet to the floor, lighting like a cat. The other boys are constantly trying to touch the little people but they are skittish of contact, dodging away from outstretched hands or snapping with their sharp little teeth.

All of them are expert assassins, deadly with knife and strangling cord, dropping on their victims from trees or roofs or climbing into seemingly inaccessible windows. They are also highly proficient with firearms, using a tiny revolver that shoots naillike projectiles and a rifle that shoots poison darts with a range of two hundred yards.

The subtlest assassins among them are the Dream Killers or Bangutot Boys. They have the ability to invade the REM sleep of the target, fashion themselves from the victim's erection, and grow from his sexual energy until they are solid enough to strangle him.

Audrey finds Toby in the locker room, sitting naked and pensive on a worn wooden bench. He looks up absently and pats the bench beside him. Audrey sits down and they both stare vacantly at the wall for several minutes.

Finally Audrey asks, "Is Arn around?"

Toby looks at him blankly from an empty space. "I never heard of it."

"I uh thought ... I mean this morning ..."

"Well, my scent glands are so potent sometimes people hallucinate," Toby tells him smugly. "Perhaps you dreamed up the whole thing."

"Well, maybe." He puts his arms around Toby's shoulders hoping to excite him so he will give out the smell which is like exquisite perfumed poppers.

Toby's cock begins to stir and stiffen as he stretches his legs out in front of him and leans back, looking thoughtfully at his toes. Two little people come in rubbing against his legs like cats. They give off a delicate sand fox smell that floats on the heavier male scents of the locker room like a pousse-café.

A thirteen-year-old in the black suit and straw hat of an English public school "fag" sticks his head in and calls to Audrey:

"The Shrink wants to see you." He pushes his eyes up at the corners to make a Chinese face and adds in falsetto, "Chop-chop!"

After a few general questions about space lag, the Doctor asks with elaborate casualness: "Would you please tell me in your own words everything you remember about this uh Arn." He glances down at a file in front of him.

Audrey tries to comply but he encounters blanks in his memory like trying to recall a dream that hovers just out of reach on the edge of perception, skittering away as you try to grasp it, erasing memory traces with a little broom that fades out, in turn wiping away footprints in distant sand.

The Doctor leans across the table and breaks an ampule under his nose. "Just relax now and breathe in deeply."

Audrey finds himself on a table looking up at masked faces.

"That's right now—count up to fifty...."

When Audrey wakes up he finds a shaved spot at the back of his head that is slightly sore to his touch.

"Well, Audrey," the Doctor explains, "we've installed a separator. Might come in handy if you ever need to be in two places at once...." He pats Audrey's shoulders. "You can leave the hospital tomorrow morning. Now I'm going to give you an injection."

The days seem to flash by like a speeded-up chase scene in a 1920s comedy ... patrols always behind them, bullets thudding into flesh, bombs in Middletown bars and theaters and restaurants. A wake of glass, blood and brains and the hot meaty smell of entrails remind Audrey of a rabbit he had once seen dissected in biology class. A girl had fainted. He could see her slump to the floor with a soft plop.

Shatter Day always closer ...

Moves and checks and slays

Like many riots, the Ba'dan riots began with a "peaceful demonstration," but neither side had any intention of letting it end that way.

The Anschluss with Yass-Waddah was to be put to a plebiscite. Those most directly concerned, namely the inhabitants of the Casbah, were disenfranchised. But they had obtained permission from the Town Council to make a peaceful demonstration in Courthouse Square around which most of the government buildings were located.

Meanwhile, Yass-Waddan agents were arming and organizing paramilitary forces in Middletown, intending to catch the "Arabs," as they called them, between the Heroid Police and the armed vigilantes and wipe them out. After which, they would demolish the Casbah and drop poison gas down the tunnels and occupy Portland.

Dimitri had his own plans. After delicate negotiations, he had made contacts in Portland. Portland officials are supposed to keep out of local politics except in cases of "dire emergency." But the Anschluss posed such a threat to their continued function, if not to their personal safety, as to constitute a "dire emergency" and all Dimitri asked was for a customs agent to look the other way for a few seconds when the containers of heroin for the Heroid Police were being passed through customs, while Dimitri's agents substituted identical containers filled with a short-acting opiate antagonist.

Dimitri also had promises of arms caches in the courthouse building provided by certain wealthy families who preferred to avoid more direct involvement. None of the old families wanted the Anschluss. It was a threat to their power and Yass-Wadan agents were talking openly about "parasites" and "traitors."

Audrey knew the battle plan. Even if it went according to plan, there would be close fighting and heavy casualties. So he had these special codpieces made up of a tough plasticlike material and issued them to his team, which was very good for morale. He was in charge of a commando group who were supposed to break through the line of Heroids like a football scrimmage then race upstairs to a room in the courthouse where a cache of arms was to be waiting and then take over the courthouse building.

On the appointed day, the demonstrators from the Casbah, after passing a metal detector and a hand search for weapons, made their way towards the square past snarling middies. So many things could go wrong: the guns aren't there ... they are in the wrong place ... the keys don't work.

As they filed into the square, he saw the line of impassive Heroids in front of the courthouse armed with 9-M grease guns. Sandbags and heavy machine guns on tripods were at the windows and on the roof.

The provocation was carefully planted: crowbars and a stack of cobblestones from street repairs. Audrey glanced at his watch. Two minutes to countdown.

Muscular youths snatch up cobblestones. Jeers and catcalls explode from the demonstrators. Automatic weapons are raised. This is it.

And something is happening to the Heroids. A composite groan is followed by the sound of emptying bowels and a reek of excrement. Instead of responding with deadly accurate machine-gun fire, the Heroids are going down like tenpins as the cobblestones hit. So far, Dimitri's plan is working.

On duty when there is no time for injections, the Heroids function on heroin capsules that dissolve at different rates, releasing a dosage every few hours. However, what is dissolving now is not heroin but a short-acting opiate antagonist. Withdrawal symptoms that would be severe enough spread over several days are compacted into minutes, resulting in immediate incapacity and, in many cases, death from shock and circulatory collapse.

A boy throws a football block into a Heroid in front of Audrey. The gun flies out of his hand and Audrey catches it in the air. Now they are racing from the gangway. Two Heroids in front of the main door are trying to raise their weapons, Audrey gives them a burst as he runs past.

A heavy iron door. The key works. Now down the gangway. Side door is open as it should be. Upstairs and this must be the room.

Key works and there are M-16s, ammo, grenades and grenade launchers, and a few bazookas. (The Paries he knows are equipped with the older and more cumbersome M-15s and some even with Garands.)

Immediately Audrey's team spreads out in groups of five to take over the gun emplacements in the building and on the roof. Audrey and four others fan into a room. A machine gun is on a tripod behind sandbags. The crew, sprawled on the floor and over the sandbags, is completely disabled. Two are dead.

Audrey kneels beside a young Heroid who is lying on his back, his deathly pale face covered with sweat, his pants sticking up at the fly. Audrey whips out a Syrette containing a quarter-grain of pure heroin and injects it into the boy's arm. Now the second part of Dimitri's plan is going into effect: the conversion of the Heroids. This is why he did not simply substitute a quick-acting poison for the heroin.

The boy sits up.

"Welcome to our cause, comrade," says Audrey.

The first shots in the area signal the Paries, under the command of General Darg, to pour out of side streets into the square, where they expect to catch the fleeing unarmed demonstrators on the flank. Instead, they run into a hail of machine-gun fire from the demonstrators who have seized weapons from the fallen Heroids. Even deadlier sniper fire strikes down from the windows and roof of the courthouse. To conserve ammunition, Audrey's commandos keep their weapons on semiautomatic, making sure of a hit with every shot.

In a few seconds, Darg's forces have suffered several hundred casualties. He hastily withdraws to seize and fortify buildings on the opposite side of the square and along the side streets leading into the square. He dispatches troops to cover the entrances from the Casbah and to patrol Fun City to prevent more men and weapons being brought into action.

By the end of the first day, rioters are in control of most of the buildings on the south side of the square. They are, however, unable to open a passage to the Casbah.

Meanwhile, there is much rejoicing in Yass-Waddah. The courtiers are planning a torture festival for the captives, camping around in costumes and, of course, there will be a prize for the most ingenious torture device. The tortured captives will be rendered down into the most exquisite condiments and sweetmeats: raw quivering brains served with a piquant sauce, candied testicles, sweet-and-sour penis, rectums boiled in chocolate.

The Countess de Gulpa admonishes her courtiers to bear in mind that only the ringleaders deserve exemplary punishment. The rank and file will make useful slaves.

"Oh, Minny is so kind," coo the courtiers. "Minny is so kind."

Reports are coming in. The rioters have been surrounded and will surrender in a few hours. These reports have been sent out by General Darg, who is certain of a final victory and does not want the Green Guards or, worse still, a regiment of useless courtiers getting in the way and tarnishing his glory. On the other end, the reports are further falsified to curry favor with the countesses.

The Empress of Yass-Waddah holds aloof from these rejoicings. She knows that whatever the outcome of the battle, her power is gone. She is, in fact, making plans to flee the city in disguise with a handful of faithful eunuchs.

The Empress intends to leave behind a little present for the countesses, a basket of sleeping kundu.

The dreaded kundu is a species of flying scorpion. The body is covered by need-sharp back-slanting red spines. The jaws are razor-sharp and designed for burrowing like a mole cricket's. The venom that drips from the hairs and the tail-stinger causes instant paralysis. Then the kundu sheds it wings and burrows its way up body orifices and deposits its larvae in the intestines, the liver, the kidneys and spleen so that the paralyzed victim is eaten alive. Unlike other scorpions the kundu is diurnal, remaining comatose during the cold desert nights and being slowly roused to activity by the heat of the day.

Perhaps I will win the torture contest in absentia, the Empress thinks.

The second day saw substantial gains for the insurgents. The little people who can climb like monkeys, moving from roof to roof with their poison dart guns, carrying cylinders of chlorine and sulfur dioxide, flushed the Paries out of the buildings around the square, which were then occupied by the insurgents and the renegade Heroids. Darg and his troop, however, remained in occupation of the buildings along the side streets and continued to block entrances from the Casbah. Dimitri knew better than to attempt to force a passage through these narrow streets with troops on the roofs of buildings five and six stories in height—an error that cost the police heavy casualties in the New York Draft Riots of 1863. Then rioters on the roofs of buildings along the narrow streets of lower Manhattan defeated armed police contingents with cobblestones and other missiles.

General Darg, still sure of ultimate victory, even if a long siege was involved, refused to ask for reinforcements and sent back reports that the situation was under control. However, there were still a few pockets of resistance.

The third day dawned like a bleary red eye. An old woman brought a basket of exquisite golden figs to the kitchen door of the Countess's palace. Under the figs, the kundu were still comatose from the icy chill of the night.

Will Hollywood never learn

In Ba'dan both sides are looking for a showdown. Darg, because he knows that he cannot conceal the actual state of affairs much longer. Dimitri, because he feels that a state of siege is not to his advantage owing to the numerical superiority of the enemy and their readier access to supplies and weapons. So both generals evoke every aid they can summon through magic rituals.

As the sun climbs higher, the square looks like Hollywood gone berserk. Roman legionnaires under Quintus Curtius are fighting French riot police. Vikings and pirates battle crusaders and Texas Rangers. Old western gunfighters shoot it out with the Black and Tans and Kenya Special Police. Hannibal's elephants charge a train of 1920s Marines on their way to protect the assets of the United Fruit Co. Battle cries and songs ring out. Peons with machetes decapitate lynch mobs ... mucho bouncing heads, meester. Battle cries and songs ring out with grunts and bellows, war whoops, bagpipes, the reek of horses, chili and garlic....

"La cucaracha la cucaracha

Ya no quiere caminar

Porque no tiene porque le falta

Marijuana por fumar."

Pancho Villa's men shoot down a helicopter from Operation Intercept. An army of Chinese waiters charge out of a false-front chop-suey joint with meat cleavers, screaming: "Fluck you! Fluck you! Fluck you!" They reduce narcs and Mafiosi to hamburgers. Poison darts from Indian blowguns wipe out a Klan rally. Nigger-killing southern lawmen are hacked to pieces by naked Scythians on horseback.

Audrey is in the very thick of it, changing costumes every few minutes. Now he leads a detachment of amok Malay youths with krisses against the Shah's Savak. Next Audrey, on a great black horse in medieval armor, charges down the streets of Middletown skewering religious women and lawmen on his lance. Then he is a shootist with his custom-made 44 double-action revolver leading the Wild Bunch to break up an auto-da-fé in Lima. Now he boards a Spanish man-of-war with cutlass and laser gun. Machine-gun bullets, poison darts, arrows, spears, boomerangs, bolos, throwing knives, cobblestones. Rockets whistle through the air, sharp smell of weeds and dry heat from old westerns, snow and ice with Viking ships, amok Malays trail muggy heat and jungle smells, pirates blow in with a sea wind and a whiff of rum and spices, pitchmen and camp followers spread out their wares, false-front saloons, whorehouses, taco stands, carny booths with root beer and spun sugar, sod-roofed huts serving chicha, chick-peas and roast guinea pig, street performers passing around the hat and picking pockets—pea under the shell, now you see it now you don't ... shift partners round and round—Malay youths with krisses skewering religious women, shootist with custom-made Kenya Special Police in his nostrils, southern lawmen are hacked to Hollywood and gone, and a grinning boy passes around a bloody Stetson.

"Nominate your poison, gents."

Klansmen clutch their throats and turn black.

"We don't serve niggers in here!" thunders the bartender. "Take them outside because they stink. Take them to the Nigger Morgue."

Boys in medieval codpieces have set up a catapult. Roman soldiers break down doors with battering rams, impervious to the bullets, which break against clear classic light with a whiff of ozone.

Raids and prisoners ... Rape of the Sabine ... Romans sweep in on a women's rally and carry the bitches away, screaming and kicking, an old western posse is lynching a Neanderthal man, KGB and CIA agents bustle scientists and enemy agents into cars or sweep down and hook them into a silent chopper like actors pulled offstage, Inquisition Police drag jet-setters out of cocktail lounges, and the Green Guards are busy with their nets.

"Oh I want that one ..." coos a courtier.

Audrey leads an army of twelve-year-old boys carrying banners of colored silk ... POLTERGEISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

They stand now, still as stone, in a sickening uneasy calm. As the barometer drops and drops, slowly a black cloud gathers over their heads. A little wind stirs brown hair across the mouth, brown lilacs and brown hair, ruffling through hair yellow as corn silk, through auburn, orange, russet and flame-red hair and black Pan curls....

WIND WIND WIND

A sighing sound, a whistle, a shriek, hair standing straight up now as a black funnel whirls around their slender bodies tearing cobblestones up from the street, screaming hurricanes of broken glass as the boys ride this bucking whistling wind—it's known as a "space horse." You let it carry you all the way out, glass blizzards stripping flesh from bones, tossing bloody bones through the air with street signs and branches, masonry, stones and timbers—the whole city is flapping and shredding.

Thousand-mile-an-hour winds—the fences, barbed wire, and massive iron gates hemming in the Casbah are tearing loose ... flying wire decapitates screaming crowds. Pan, God of Panic, rides the wings of Death as the torn sky bends with the wind, prop sky tearing, shredding—incandescent force—the pure young purpose blazes like a comet....

WIND! WIND! WIND!

Audrey is in the eye of the hurricane, a point of lucid calm. In front of him is a dusty tube of Colgate toothpaste in the window of a Tangier shop.

Far away he sees Middletown: red brick houses, a deep clear stream, some bridges, naked boys, high-pitched distant voices. A boy who looks familiar ... he knows the boy's name but can't remember from where exactly ... it's Dink ... Dink Rivers, the boy from Middletown.

Now Dink waves and beckons: "It's me, Audrey! I'm back!"

Audrey tries to reach him but the wind tosses Audrey about like a cork. He is fighting his way upriver through breaking ice floes ... years tearing loose.

The distant voice of the pitchman: "The age-old story of Adam and Eve ..."

Audrey finds himself in the Fun City of his dream ... can't remember exactly ... pinwheels ... shooting galleries a rural slum ... rundown houses ... rubbish ... little fields of corn and cabbage ... blotched diseased faces ... silent and intent ... all moving down a steep road of red clay ... no one seems to see him.

The road leads to a rubbly square. In the middle of the square is a platform built around a tree.

Argue second time

around such a deal

On the platform is Arn as Eve with long red hair, her body covered with fever blotches. A naked youth with long yellow hair is Adam. The fever smell steams off their naked bodies and the crowd draws the smell in, whimpering and rubbing themselves.

Something familiar about Adam, Audrey thinks. Reminds him of something a long time ago. Why ... it's me!

Now Arn proffers Adam an apple. The fruit is purple-red and shiny like the head of a penis. Here and there on the fruit are triangular bulges like Adam's apples and at one end is a russet rectum. Why it's made of male flesh, Audrey thinks.

"No! No!" Audrey screams without a throat, without a tongue.

Adam does not hear. His face wears an appalling expression of idiotic ecstasy as he bites into the apple. Audrey can feel the sugary burning-metal taste down to his quivering toes as Arn rises from his side tearing loose ... the sweet diseased knowledge.

Eve stands there with a noose ... bone's song burning marbled cream smashed roses ... old story of Adam and Eve ... how Eve was made. Knowledge of the blackout ... Black Jack's Apple Tree ... fruit made of the boy's death dangling there. It's a lovely tree, isn't it? Nets of the Green Guards fall over Audrey's head.

By noon of the third day, General Darg is ready to surrender. Knowing the treatment meted out to defeated generals in Yass-Waddah, he calculates how he can get a better deal from Dimitri. The insurgents are now in control of Ba'dan, or what is left of it. Considering the terrible fate awaiting prisoners taken by the Green Guards during the battle, Dimitri launches an immediate all-out assault on Yass-Waddah.

Audrey has been captured by the Green Guards and brought to the Countess de Gulpa's palace. She isn't going to share this with the courtiers.

"Hello, Audrey, I am very glad to see you here." She smiles and licks her lips, her eyes glowing with green fire. "Let me show you around."

Two massive guards flank him on either side and two walk behind. Through electrodes implanted in their brains they are telepathically controlled by the Countess.

"I'll show you my conservatory, Audrey. I'm sure you will find it interesting."

She leads the way into a red-carpeted room. There is a plastic sheet across one end where plants are growing. A horrible black smell of filth and evil fills the room, a smell of insects and rotten flowers, of unknown secretions and excrements.

"Come along, I'll show you my little plants." She stands at one end of the plastic screen, which is open and leads to a narrow path that encircles the garden. "Look there, Audrey."

Audrey sees a pink shaft growing from the ground, a penis-shaped shaft, red and purple, and as he watches, the shaft moves and pulses. The Countess leans forwards with a hoe and turns the plant out of the ground. The shaft is attached to a pink sac with insect legs like a scorpion or a centipede. It scrabbles to cover itself up with dirt.

"That was once a silly boy like you, Audrey, and that's where I'm going to plant you." The Countess stands with her hand on the door. "You'll find out how it's done, Audrey. You'll have six hours to learn."

The courtiers, lounging on a colonnade high above the river, see a flotilla of boats, rafts, and landing barges approaching. This must be General Darg returning in triumph with hundreds of captives. They squirm and moan in vile anticipation, stretching forth languid fingers to a basket of golden figs warmed by the noon sun.

"My God, something's up me!"

The principal defense of Yass-Waddah are the towers, manned by a few skilled technicians, capable of throwing electric blasts like lightning bolts. Now the towers open fire, blowing boats out of the water.

The insurgents take heavy losses but they spread out and keep coming. Landings have been made all up and down the river and Yass-Waddah is surrounded by confused troops without a plan of attack.

The Cyclops Boys go into action. These beings have one eye in the center of the forehead. They can activate the death chakra in the back of the neck until a laser boom shoots out the third eye, cutting through stone and metal, seeking the electronic control centers of the city.

Instrument panels are blowing out, magazines exploding. The screaming crowd pours through the walls, now broken in many places.

"Death to the Council of the Selected!"

"Death to the Green Guards!"

"Death to the Foreign Sows!"

"Death to the Courtiers!"

But the courtiers are deaf to everything but their own screams as the kundu do their work.

Audrey felt the floor shift under his feet and he was standing at the epicenter of a vast web. In that moment, he knew its purpose, knew the reason for suffering, fear, sex, and death. It was all intended to keep human slaves imprisoned in physical bodies while a monstrous matador waved his cloth in the sky, sword ready for the kill.

From the depth of his horror and despair, something was breaking through like molten lava, a shock wave of uncontrollable energy. Audrey felt the chakra at the back of his neck light up and glow like a tiny crystal skull brighter and brighter. A hum filled the room and a smell of ozone.

The Countess turned from the door, eyes blazing with alertness, and Audrey saw what had happened. He orders to the guards had not been obeyed. An interfering frequency had blanked out her control of them.

Audrey smiled and licked his lips. He started forward, hands outstretched to block a groin kick. The Countess screamed like an animal, dodged past him and out the door.

He was a step behind her as she sprinted down the corridor. He ran with inhuman speed, taking twenty feet at a stride and caught her at the end of the hall. He held he elbows pinioned, his hip against her, and grinned into her screaming face, which was losing all human semblance as he smashed her against the wall and threw his hammer-fist into her face, crushing the perfectly chiseled nose and lips that that crumpled like rubber.

Now he was clawing out her eyes, which were blank and white and rubbery. Someone was shaking his shoulder.

"Mr. Carsons, what are you doing? Why, you're waking up the whole ward."

Audrey found himself looking at a ruptured pillow. A nurse stood over him.

"Just look what you've done. You've torn your pillow to pieces." She snatched the pillow from his hands and bustled out.

The nurse returned with a new pillow. She straightened the bed and put the pillow under his head in a way that said, See that it stays there. She looked at her wristwatch. "I'll get you an injection."

Audrey lay back looking at the ceiling. He felt calm and relaxed. He must have had a nightmare. He couldn't remember what it was and it all seemed very remote and unimportant. Just a pillow. Well, he had a new pillow now. The nurse was back with a hypo on a little silver tray. He rolled back his sleeve, felt the alcohol on his arm—and the prick of the needle. GOM one quarter grain.

He woke in gray dawnlight and lay there trying to remember. When had it all started? In London with Jerry Green and John Everson. His first real habit.

He had chippied around in New York with cut shit but this was pure H dispensed by a woman doctor with a title. The Countess, they called her. If she liked you she would write for any amount of heroin and coke or both. She liked the "boys," as she called them.

Then, suddenly, the terrible news. The Countess was dead of a heart attack. The Home Office was clamping down. Time to move.

So Audrey, Jerry and John set out for Katmandu in a second-hand car that got them as far as Trieste, where they took a boat arriving in Athens in the middle of the summer.

The boat was like an oven. They finally found quarters in a hostel: a bare room with three cots. The proprietor had inquisitive unpleasant eyes. Everything about him said "police informer." But they were thin and the room was cooler than the street. The boys stripped to their underwear and sat down on the cots.

"I feel terrible," said Audrey.

"I got some kinda awful hives," said Jerry scratching at a red welt on his ribs.

"Probably just the heat and being sick," said John. "Let's see what we've got left." He stood up and swayed and put a hand to his forehead.

Audrey stood up to steady him and silver spots boiled in front of his eyes. They both sat down again, then got up very slowly and took a little Chinese H and some cotton from the knapsacks. They cooked it all together and split it.

Ten minutes later, Audrey was down with Cotton Fever. Teeth chattering, his whole body shaking, he lay on the bed, knees up to his chin, hands clenched in front of his face.

Finally, he got two Nembutals down and the shivering stopped. He went to sleep.

He dreamed he was back in Saint Louis as a child. He was eating orange ice very fast for the sharp headache and the relief that comes from sipping a little water. Just as he reached for the water, he woke up with a pounding searing headache, his body burning with fever. He knew that he was very sick, perhaps dying.

He tried to get up and fell on his knees by Jerry's bed. He shook Jerry's shoulder. The flesh was burning-hot. Jerry muttered something.

"Wake up, Jerry. We have to get help."

The door opened. The light was turned on. Three Greek cops and the proprietor were watching from the doorway. The cops pointed to the boys and said something in excited Greek. They backed out of the room stuffing handkerchiefs in front of their faces. Leaving once cop at the door, they called an ambulance.

Audrey vaguely remembered being lifted onto a stretcher by masked figures. As he was carried down the stairs, he saw words in front of his eyes: a lattice of black words on white paper shifting and rotating. He could make out the first sentence:

"The name is Clem Snide. I am a private asshole."

The nurse stood by his bed with a thermometer. She put it in his mouth and left the room. She came back with a breakfast tray. She drew out the thermometer and looked at it. "Well, almost down to normal now."

Audrey sat up in bed, drank the orange juice greedily, ate a boiled egg and a piece of toast and was drinking his coffee when Doctor Dimitri came in. The face looked familiar and seemed to stir and concentrate the vague shapes of the dream. Of course, Audrey thought. I've been delirious and he was the doctor.

"Well, I see you're a lot better. You should be out of here in a few days now."

"How long have I been here?"

"Ten days. You've been very sick."

"What was it?"

"Don't know exactly ... a virus ... new ones keep turning up. We thought at first it was scarlet fever but when there was no reaction to antibiotics, we shifted to purely symptomatic treatment. I don't mind telling you it was a close thing ... temperatures up to a hundred and six ... your two friends are here ... exactly the same syndrome."

"And I've been delirious all this time?"

"Completely. Do you remember any of it?"

"Last thing I remember is being carried out of the hostel."

"The remarkable thing is that you, Jerry, and John all seemed to be in the same delirium. I've made a few notes...." He flipped open a small loose-leaf notebook. "Does this mean anything to you? Tamaghis ... Ba'dan ... Yass-Waddah ... Waghdas ... Naufana ... or Ghadis?"

"No."

"Cities of the Red Night?"

Audrey glimpsed a red sky and mud walls .... "Just a flash."

"And now, there is the matter of my fee."

"My father will pay you."

"He has already agreed to do so but he has refused to pay the hospital costs—pleading his income tax. This is awkward. However, if you will sign an agreement to pay ... your father suggests that you apply to the American Embassy for repatriation...."

*

The boys are at the reception desk of the hospital, signing papers. Doctor Dimitri stands there in a dark suit.

Audrey looks around: something very strange about this hospital ... for one thing, no one seems to be wearing white uniforms. Perhaps, he thinks egocentrically, they are all waiting for us to go home so they can leave—but then another shift would be coming on. In fact, he decides, this doesn't look like a hospital at all ... more like the American Embassy.

A cab pulls up under the portico. Doctor Dimitri shakes hands with a rapidly disappearing smile.

As soon as the boys are gone, he walks through a series of doors, each guarded by an armed security man who nods him through.

He is in a room with a computer panel attached to a battery of tape recorders. He flicks a switch.

"The Consul will see you now."

A black wooden slate on the desk said "Mr. Pierson." The Consul was a thin young man in a gray seersucker suit with an ascetic disdainful Wasp face and very cold gray eyes.

He stood up, shook hands without smiling, and motioned the three boys to chairs. He spoke in a cultivated academic voice from which all traces of warmth had been carefully excised. "You realize that there is a considerable hospital bill outstanding?"

"We have signed an agreement to pay."

"The Greek authorities could prevent you from leaving the country."

The three boys spoke at once:

Audrey: "It wasn't our fault...."

Jerry: "We got sick...."

John: "It was ..."

Audrey: "A virus ..."

Jerry: "A new virus." He smiled seductively at the Consul, who did not smile back.

All together: "We almost died!" They rolled their eyes back and made a death-rattle sound.

"The police found evidence of drug-taking in your room. You are lucky not to be in jail."

"We're certainly grateful to you, Mr. Pierson. And lucky to be here—like you say," said Audrey. He tried to sound impulsive and boyish but it came out all slimy and insinuating.

The others nodded in agreement.

"Don't thank me," said the Consul dryly. "It was Doctor Dimitri who put in a word with the police. He is interested in your case. A new virus, it seems...." He looked at the boys severely, as if they had committed some gross breach of decorum.

"Doctor Dimitri is quite an influential man."

All together, plaintively: "We want to go home."

"I daresay. And who will pay for it?"

"We will—when we can," said Audrey.

The others nodded in agreement.

"And when will that be? Have you ever thought about working?" asked Mr. Pierson.

"Thought about it," said Audrey.

"In an abstract sort of way ..." said Jerry.

"Like death and old age ..." said John.

"Doesn't happen to people one knows..." said Audrey feeling like a Fitzgerald character. The sun came out from behind a cloud and filled the room with light.

The Consul leaned forward and spoke in confidential tones. "For example ... for example ... you could work your way home. There's a ship in Piraeus now that can use three deckhands. Any sailing experience?"

"Reef the mizzenmast!" said Audrey.

"Scuttle the bilge!" said John.

"And pour hot tar on the companionway!" said Jerry.

"Good." The Consul wrote something down on a slip of paper and passed it to Audrey. "When you get to The Billy Celeste, ask for Captain Nordenholz."

The boys stood up and said in chorus: "Thank you, Mr. Pierson." They flashed toothpaste smiles.

Mr. Pierson looked down at his desk and said nothing. The boys walked out.

As he stepped out of the office, Audrey got a whiff of that unmistakable hospital smell. A young man in a white coat was chatting with a nurse at the reception desk. A taxi pulled up for them at the door.

In the office, Doctor Pierson picked up the phone: "Doctor Pierson here.... Yes, no question about it." He picked up the slides and studied them. "B-23 all right.... The boy Jerry is obviously the original carrier.... Active? Like a plutonium pile....There is, of course, the uh delicate and sensitive question of differential racial or ethnic susceptibility ... with further research, perhaps ... Could not commit myself on the basis of present findings ... theoretically possible, of course. On the other hand, uncontrolled mutation cannot be ruled out ... sure? How can I be sure? After all it's not in my district."

Late afternoon in the cabin of The Billy Celeste. Audrey and the boys have just signed on.

Skipper Nordenholz glanced down at the names. "Well uh Jerry, Audrey, and John ... you have made a wise choice. I hope you are quite fit?"

"Oh yes, Captain."

"Aye, aye, sir."

"The doctor said we made a remarkable recovery."

"Good. We will be sailing within the hour.... Tunis, Gibraltar ... Lisbon for Halifax. Incidentally, we will be passing the exact spot off the Azores where The Mary Celeste was found in 1872—all sails set, completely undamaged, nobody on board." His green eyes glinted with irony and he smiled slightly and added, "The mystery was never solved."

"Perhaps it was just the basic mystery of life, Skipper," Audrey added cheekily. "Now you see it—now you don't."

Minutes to go

We call ourselves the Destroying Angels. Our target is the rear-end of Yass-Waddah, if it could be said to have one. We feel rather like the Light Brigade. All the bad characters of history are gathered in Yass-Waddah for a last-ditch stand: the Countess de Gulpa, heavy and cold as a fish under tons of gray shale; the Countess de Vile, eyes glowing, face flushed from the ecstasy of torture; the Ugly Spirit; the Black Abbot; and the Council of the Selected—all with their guards and minions and torture chambers. How can we prevail against this wall of icy purpose?

We got the message on the teleflash from Ba'dan. Yass-Waddah has completed nuclear device ahead of schedule. All-out aid requested.

We are still 150 miles from Yass-Waddah. Four days hard marching. We don't have that much time.

We are here because

of you

Woke up in the silent wolf lope. There is the river. No sign of Yass-Waddah. I must be above or below it.

I reach the bank. Across the river I can see the rotting piers and sheds of East Ba'dan. To my right is what remains of a bridge, the upper structure rotted away, leaving only the piles protruding from green water.

I am standing where Yass-Waddah used to be. The water looks green and cold and dirty and curiously artificial, like a diorama in the Museum of Natural History.

A blond boy enters from my right where the bridge used to be, walking on the green-brown water. He moves with a stalking gait as if he were playing some part in a play, mimicking some actor with a touch of parody.

The boy is wearing a white T-shirt with a yellow calligram on the chest surrounded by a circle of yellow light, rainbow-colored at the edges. He is weaing white gym shorts and white tennis shoes.

A dark boy in identical white gym clothes is standing to my left on the bank at the top of a grassy hillock. He has planted a banner in the ground beside him and holds the shaft with one hand. The banner is the calligram in the rainbow circle stirring gently in a wind that ruffles his shorts around smooth white thighs.

The blond boy walks up from the water and stands in front of his dark twin. The dark boys begins to talk in soft flute calls, clean and sweet and joyful with a sound like laughter, wind in the trees, birds at dawn, trickling streams. The blond boy answers in the same language, sweetly inhuman voices from a distant star.

Now I recognize the dark boy as Dink Rivers, the boy from Middletown, and the other as myself. This is a high school play. We have just taken the west side of the river. This is the conquest of Yass-Waddah.

Good evening, our chap. A good crossing. Yass-Waddah disintegrated.

A slow insouciant shrug of rocks and stones and trees spreads a golf course along the river now several hundred yards away. Two caddies stand in a sand trap. One rubs his crotch and the other makes a jack-off gesture. Music from the country club on a gust of wind. Red brick buildings, cobblestone streets. It is getting darker. Dusty ticket booth.

A sign:

The Billy Celeste High School presents:

CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT

I lead the way through rooms stacked with furniture and paintings, passageways, partitions, stairways, booths, cubicles, elevators, ramps and ladders, trunks full of costumes and old weapons, bathtubs, toilets, steam rooms, and rooms open in front....

A boy jacks off on a yellow toilet seat...catcalls and scattered applause.

We are in a cobblestone alley. I look at my companion. He is about eighteen. He has large brown eyes with amber pupils, set to the side of his face, and a long straight Mayan nose. He is dressed in blue-and-brown-striped pants and shirt.

I open a rusty padlock into my father's workshop. We strip and straddle a pirate chest, facing each other. His skin is a deep brownish-purple gray underneath. A sharp musty smell pulses from his erect phallus with its smooth purple head. His eyes converge on me like a lizard's.

"What scene do you want me to act in?"

"Death Baby fucks the Corn God."

We open the chest. He takes out a necklace of crystal skulls and puts it on. There is a reek of decay as he drapes me in the golden flesh of the young Corn God.

We are in a vast loft-attic-gymnasium-warehouse. There are chests and trunks, costumes, mirrors, and makeup. Boys are taking out costumes, trying them on, posing and giggling in front of mirror, moving props and backdrops.

The warehouse seems endless. A maze of rooms and streets, cafés, courtyards and gardens. Farm rooms, with walnut bedsteads and hooked rugs, open onto a pond where boys fish naked on an improvised raft. A Moroccan patio is animated with sand foxes and a boy playing a flute ... stars like wilted gardenias across the blue night sky.

A number of performances are going on at the same time, in many rooms, on many levels. The spectators circulate from one stage to another, putting on costumes and makeup to join a performance and the performers all move from one stage to another. There are moving stages and floats, platforms that descend from the ceiling on pulleys, doors that pop open, and partitions that slide back.

Audrey, naked except for a sailor hat, is tipped back balancing in a chair while he reads a comic book entitled: "Audrey and the Pirates."

Jerry comes in naked with an envelope sealed with red wax.

"Open it and read it to me."

Oh sir, it's battle orders."

"Wheeeeeeeeeeee!" Audrey ejaculates.

On deck, naked tars throw their hats into the air jacking off and leaping on each other like randy dogs: "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" They scramble into uniforms as bugles call them to battle stations.

The Fever: A red silk curtain scented with rose oil, musk, sperm, rectal mucus, ozone and raw meat goes up on a hospital ward of boys covered with phosphorescent red blotches that glow and steam the fever smell off them, shuddering, squirming, shivering, eyes burning, legs up, teeth bare, whispering the ancient evil fever words.

Doctor Pierson covers his face with a handkerchief. "Get it out of here!"

Yen Lee looks at a painted village with his binoculars. Taped voice: "We see Tibet with the binoculars of the people."

In a stone hut, a naked boy lies on a filthy pallet. Bright red luminescent flesh-clusters glow in the dark room. He rubs the clusters with a slow idiot smile and ejaculates.

Yen Lee sags against a wall with a handkerchief in front of his face.

"It's the pickle factory."

"A health officer is on the way."

The Health Officer is on the nod on his porch over a sluggish river. The huge bloated corpse of a dead hippopotamus floats slowly by. The Health Officer is oblivious. Taped voice: "For he had a sustaining vice." On a riverbank with Ali standing over him, he looks with horror at his torn pocket and empty hand. Backdrop shifts to another bank. With the same expression, Farnsworth looks down at his naked body covered with red welts. Ali stands over him smiling, the red welts a dusky rose color on his reddish-brown skin.

Marine band plays "Semper Fi."

Picture of a privy on a door with a bronze eye under the sickle moon. Audrey, as Clem Snide the private eye, is sitting in a sunken room open at the top. The audience is looking down into the room so they can see what he is looking at: photos of Jerry—baby pictures ... age fourteen holding up a string of cutthroat trout ... naked with a hard-on ... Jerry live onstage, naked with his hands tied, face and body covered with red blotches, a baneful red glow behind him. He is looking at something in front of him as his penis stirs and stiffens. Scattered applause and olés from the audience.

Banner headlines in red letters: MYSTERY ILLNESS SPREADS.

On a hospital bed, Jerry spreads his legs with a slow wallowing movement, showing his bright red asshole glowing, pulsing, and crinkling like a randy mollusk. He twists his head to the right, eyes spluttering green flashes as he hangs.

A sepia cutback to the hospital bed. He ejaculates, kicking his legs in the air. Jimmy Lee, as a male nurse, catches his sperm in a jar.

Thunderous applause ... "Olé! Olé! Olé!"

The jar is passed to four Marine guards and rushed to a top-secret lab. A scientist looks through a microscope. He gives the OK sign.

Bouquets of roses rain on stage.

Red-letter headline: NATIONAL EMERGENCY DECLARED.

Stop lights. Quarantine posts.

Soldiers with their pants sticking out at the flies clutch their throats and fall.

Newscaster: "It is impossible to estimate the damage. Anything put out up to now is like drawing a figure out of the air."

A diseased face with a slow idiot smile is projected onto the newscaster's face from a magic lantern....

"The world's population is now approximately what it was three hundred years ago."

Boys on snowshoes reach the haman. Steam and naked bodies fade to a misty waterfront. Opium Jones is there with patches of frost on his face as the boys sign on in the ghostly cabin of The Great White.

Dinner at the Pembertons. Candlelight on faces that suggest madeup corpses. Only Noah, his boyish face flushed, looks alive. The conversation is enigmatic.

"Are they doing mummies to standard?"

"This is the aunt's language."

"We still don't have the nouns."

"You need black money."

"A master's certificate to be sure...."

"Suitable crops."

"Are you in salt?"

"Bring a halibut."

"Ah good the sea."

They all look at Noah, who blushes and looks down at his plate.

"Draw the spirits to the plata...."

"The family business ..."

"It probably belongs to the cucumbers."

"Cheers here are the nondead."

The boys are back on The Great White. A shout from the cabin boys brings them out on deck. Jerry, with a noose around his neck, grins a wolfish smile. Then he hands, as the western sky lights up with the green flash.

Captured by Pirates: Boys swarm over the rail with knives in their teeth. One with an enormous black beard down to his waist swings his cutlass at imaginary opponents with animal snarls and grunts and grimaces until the crew of The Great White rolls on the decks, pissing in their pants with laughter.

"Guarda costa ..." the boys mutter.

One puts a patch over one eye and scans the coast with an enormous wooden telescope.

Kiki fucks Jerry, pulling a red cashmere scarf tight around his neck and grinning into his face. As Jerry ejaculates, blood gushes from his nose.

Slowly, a room in an English manor house lights up. A picture on the wall shows an old gentleman wrapped in red shawls and scarves propped up in bed, with laudanum, medicine glass, tea, scones, and books on the night table beside him. Taking to his bed for the winter....

A light shines on a huge four-poster bed. A man with a nightcap sits up suddenly. A naked radiant boy is standing at the foot of his bed. The man gasps, chokes, turns bright red and dies of apoplexy, blood gushing from his mouth and nose.

Cities of the Red Night: Spotlights bathe the papier-mâché walls in red light. The boys camp around putting on disease makeup. Juanito, the Master of Ceremonies, puts a red rubber flesh-cluster in his navel.

"My dear, you look like Venus de Milo with a clock in her stomach."

The boys pose with expressions of idiot lust. The spectators roll on the floor laughing. One turns blue in the face.

"Cyanide reaction! Medics on the double!"

Boys in white coats rush in and shoot him with a blackout dart.

Piper Boy with a bamboo flute in Lima ... blue sky, color of his eyes. Smell of the sea. Dink is fucking Noah who turns into Audrey and Billy.

"It's me! It's me! I've landed! Hi, Bill! It's two hundred years, Bill! I've landed!"

The pilgrimage may take many lifetimes. In many rooms, on many levels, the ancient whispering stage ...

Moving age with his binoculars, Audrey lays back in a chair masturbating. Bright pirates. Jerry comes in red wax. We see Tibet for a few seconds, people. A sepia cutback to the hospital. Depraved smile, sperm in a beaker.

He plays "Semper Fi" to four Marine guards. Baby pictures declared in red letters of cutthroat trout. Red anticipation of fever drifts from the bed. See what he is looking at onstage.

National Emergency, age fifteen, holds up a string of stoplights. Jerry's radiant ghost may take many lifetimes. Jerry, the cabin boy, stands over the hills and far away.

"Lima, flash, it's me. The Piper Boy in Lima. Dink, I've landed. Long way to find you."

Noah is in the library studying diagrams of mortars and grenades. He is drawing a cannon. A Chinese child in the doorway throws a firecracker underneath his chair. As the firecracker explodes, the cannon barrel tilts up at an angle. A backdrop of burning galleons falls in front of him.

Audrey's boys are back on deck. Gas tank explodes in Tamaghis. Flintlock rifle on the library table. Hans and Noah take off their shorts.

"Wenn nicht von vorn denn von hintern herum." If not from the front then around by the back way.

As Noah bends over, the flintlock breaks at the breech. As Noah ejaculates, breech-loading rifles pour withering fire into a column of Spanish soldiers.

A float of a Spanish galleon moves slowly and ponderously across the gymnasium floor. On the deck, we see the Inquisition with stakes and garrotes, the Conquistadores, the patróns and governors, officers and bureaucrats and their modern equivalents, machos and politicos swilling Old Parr scotch and brandishing pearl-handled 45s.

Immigration police in dark glasses ... "Pasaporte ... Documentos ..."

Kelly as Ah Pook, spattered with black spots of decay, is fucking the young Corn God in a pirate's chest overflowing with gold ducats and pieces of eight. As they come, a yellow haze like gaseous gold streams off them and wafts across the deck of the galleon. Machos clutch their throats, spit blood, and die.

Noah hangs ejaculating in the same yellow haze of magical intention. The curtain is drawn for a moment and guns are piled up in front of him—from his first cartridge rifle to M-16s and bazookas, rocket guns and field pieces.

He is lowered with a slow sinuous movement by the Juicy-Fruit Twins. The twins are naked except for their sailor hats and white sneakers.

Offstage, a voice bellows: "All right, you jokers.... Battle stations."

Noah and the twins are in the gun turret making calculations, taking the range....

"Yards: twenty-three thousand ... Elevation: point six ..."

The galleon is in the cross hairs of the sight. Jerry turns bright red as he presses the Fire button. The galleon blows up and sinks into a prop sea.

Panorama of Mexico, Central and South America ... music and singing ... naked Spanish soldiers washing in a courtyard, jetting the soap around like a soccer ball and tackling each other, washing each other's backs. In trees by a river boys with idiot expressions jack off, snapping and gurgling like fish as they shake fruit into the water.

Audrey is naked against a backdrop of jungle and ruined pyramids. He gets a hard-on and levitates as it comes up. He lands from a hang-glider in a red desert.

Jerry, the cabin boy, meets him in a lizard suit that leaves his crotch and ass naked. "Me lizard boy ... very good for fuck." Rainbow colors play over his body.

Spanish galleon ... movement by the Juicy-Fruit Twins ... on the deck we see white sneakers ... bureaucrats calculating the range ... hand hair turns bright red on Fire button ... The Galleon Pasaporte Documentos is blown out of the water and so a vast territory as Ah Pook spatters the panorama with insurgents. All the boys in yellow haze of skintight magic transparent for a moment come to attention in a line from the first cartridge gun to M-16s ... naked haze like gold gas....

"TENSHUN!"

Audrey and Noah ejaculating angels in rainbow intention....

"AT EASE."

Naked soldiers sniff bazookas and field pieces....

Peace does not last forever....

Red Night in Tamaghis. The boys dance around a fire, throwing in screaming Sirens. The boys trill, wave nooses, and stick their tongues out.

This was but a prelude to the Ba'dan riots and the attack on Yass-Waddah. The boys change costumes, rushing from stage to stage.

The Iguana twins dance out of an Angkor Wat—Uxmal—Tenochtitlán set. The "female" twin peels off his cunt suit and they replicate a column of Viet Cong.

The Countess, with a luminous-dial alarm clock ticking in her stomach and crocodiles mask, stalks Audrey with her courtiers and Green Guards. Police Boy shoots a Green Guard. Clinch Todd as Death with a scythe decapitates the Goddess Bast.

Jon Allistair Peterson, in a pink shirt with sleeve garters, stands on a platform draped with the Star-Spangled Banner and the Union Jack. Standing on the platform with him is Nimun in an ankle-length cloak made from the skin of electric eels.

The Board enters and takes their place in a section for parents and faculty.

Peterson speaks: "Ladies and gentlemen, this character is the only survivor of a very ancient race with very strange powers. Now some of you may be taken aback by this character...."

Nimun drops off his robe and stands naked. An ammoniacal fishy odor reeks off his body—a smell of some artifact for a forgotten function or a function not yet possible. His body is a terra-cotta red color with black freckles like holes in the flesh.

"And I may tell you in strictest confidence that he and he alone is responsible for the Red Night...."

Jon Peterson gets younger and turns into the Piper Boy. He draws a flute from a goatskin sheath at his belt and starts to play. Nimun does a shuffling sinuous dance singing in a harsh fish language that tears the throat like sandpaper.

With a cry that seems to implode into his lungs, he throws himself backward onto a hassock, legs in the air, seizing his ankles with both hands. His exposed rectum is jet-black surrounded by erectile red hairs. The hole begins to spin with a smell of ozone and hot iron. And his body is spinning like a top, faster and faster, floating in the air above the cushion, transparent and fading, as the red sky flares behind him.

A courtier feels the perfume draining off him....

"Itza ..."

A Board member opens his moth.... "Itza ..." His false teeth fly out.

Wigs, clothes, chairs, props, are all draining into the spinning black disk.

"ITZA BLACK HOLE!!"

Naked bodies are sucked inexorably forward, writhing screaming like souls pulled into Hell. The lights go out and then the red sky....

Lights come on to show the ruins of Ba'dan. Children play in the Casbah tunnels, posing for photos taken by German tourists with rucksacks. The old city is deserted.

A few miles upriver there is a small fishing and hunting village. Here, pilgrims can rest and outfit themselves for the journey that lies ahead.

But what of Yass-Waddah? Not a stone remains of the ancient citadel. The narrator shoves his mike at the natives who lounge in front of rundown sheds and fish from ruined piers. They shake their heads.

"Ask Old Man Brink. He'll know if anybody does."

Old Man Brink is mending a fish trap. Is it Waring or Noah Blake?

"Yass-Waddah?"

He says that many years ago, a god dreamed Yass-Waddah. The old man puts his palms together and rests his head on his hands, closing his eyes. He opens his eyes and turns his hands out. "But the dream did not please the god. So when he woke up—Yass-Waddah was gone."

A painting on a screen. Sign pointing: WAGHDAS-NAUFANA-GHADIS. Road winding into the distance. Over the hills and far away....

Audrey sits at a typewriter in his attic room, his back to the audience. In a bookcase to his left, we see The Book of Knowledge, Coming of Age in Samoa, The Green Hat, The Plastic Age, All the Sad Young Men, Bar Twenty Days, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Adventure Stories and a stack of Little Blue Books. In front of him is the etching depicting Captain Strobe on the gallows. Audrey glances up at the picture and types:

"The Rescue."

An explosion rumbles through the warehouse. Walls and roof shake and fall on Audrey and the audience. As the warehouse collapses, it turns to dust.

The entire cast is standing in a desert landscape looking at the sunset spread across the western sky like a vast painting: the red walls of Tamaghis, the Ba'dan riots, the smoldering ruins of Yass-Waddah and Manhattan, Waghdas glimmers in the distance.

The scenes shift and change: tropical seas and green islands, a burning galleon sinks into a gray-blue sea of clouds, rivers, jungles, villages, Greek temples and there are the white frame houses of Harbor Point above the blue lake.

Port Roger shaking in the wind, fireworks displays against a luminous green sky, expanses of snow, swamps, and deserts where vast red mesas tower into the sky, fragile aircraft over burning cities, flaming arrows, dimming to mauves and grays and finally—in a last burst of light—the enigmatic face of Waring as his eyes light up in a blue flash. He bows three times and disappears into the gathering dusk.

Return to Port Roger

This must be it. Warped planks in a tangle of trees and vines. The pool of the Palace is covered with algae. A snake slithers into the green water. Weeds grow through the rusty shell of a bucket in the haman. The stairs leading to the upper porch have fallen. Nothing here but the smell of empty years. How many years? I can't be sure.

I am carrying a teakwood box with a leather handle. The box is locked. I have the key but I will not open the box here. I take the path to Dink's house. Sometimes paths last longer than roads.

There it is on the beach, just as I remember it. Sand has covered the steps and drifted across the floor. Smell of nothing and nobody there. I sit down on the sand-covered steps and look out to the harbor at the ship that brought me here and that will take me away. I take out my key and open the box and leaf through the yellow pages. The last entry is from many years ago.

We were in Panama waiting for the Spanish. I am back in the fort watching the advancing soldiers through a telescope, closer and closer to death.

"Go back!" I am screaming without a throat, with a tongue—"Get in your galleons and go back to Spain!"

Hearing the final sonorous knell of Spain as church bells silently implode into Sisters of Mary, Communions, Confessions ...

"Paco ... Joselito ... Enrique."

Father Kelley is giving them absolution. There is pain in his voice, It's too easy. Then our shells and mortars rip through them like a great iron fist. A few still take cover and return fire.

Paco catches a bullet in the chest. Sad shrinking face. He pulls my head down as the gray lips whisper—"I want the priest."

I didn't want to write about this or what followed. Guayaquil, Lima, Santiago and all the others I didn't see. The easiest victories are the most costly in the end.

I have blown a hole in time with firecracker. Let others step through. Into what bigger and bigger firecrackers? Better weapons led to better and better weapons, until the earth is a grenade with the fuse burning.

I remember a dream of my childhood. I am in a beautiful garden. As I reach out to touch the flowers they wither under my hands. A nightmare feeling of foreboding and desolation comes over me as a great mushroom-shaped cloud darkens the earth. A few may get through the gate in time. Like Spain, I am bound to the past.

'Not only Burrough's best work, but a logical ripening extension of all Burrough's great work'

Ken Keasy

'Burroughs is an awe-inspiring poetic magicians. I believe Cities of the Red Night is his masterpiece'

Christopher Isherwood

'The outrageousness of Cities of the Red Night suggests it was written in collusion with Swift, Baudelaire, Schopenhauer, Orwell, Lenny Bruce, General Patton and John Calvin . . . Burroughs may just turn out to be a hipster Moses leading his children of darkness through debauched deserts into the promised land'

San Francisco Chronicle

'Elliptical, startling and very funny'

Time Out

'Burroughs's nightmares render Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four as innocuous as The Archers'

Heathcote Williams, Guardian

'He has created an obsessive landscape which lingers in the mind as a fundamental statement about the possibilities of human life, hopelessly lost and yet so much to be hoped for. I don't expect to read a better novel this year'

Peter Ackroyd, Sunday Times