The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

CHRISTOPHER HARMAN Behind the Clouds: In Front of the Sun

Proffit's arms firmly encircled the bulky contents of the black plastic bag for the whole of the journey across the city. The driver had been visibly curious, but had refrained from questioning him. That suited Proffit, preoccupied as he was with his own internal dialogue, in which he argued with himself that this latest purchase was a good deal and not a dud. More than that, it seemed a portent of a better future. Not that the present is all that bad, he thought as the driver slowed and prepared to double park briefly.

The house was one of a row of Victorian buildings facing the park. Ironwork and window mouldings were testament to a prosperous past. Now, if anyone could be bothered, the brickwork needed pointing, and the window frames several fresh coats of paint. Litter choked basement railings.

Dashes of curtain colour, plantless plant-pots and space-filling ornaments were all that distinguished Proffit's building from its neighbours, on one side three floors of dentists and on the other a firm of insurance brokers behind smeared windows. Beneath a sparse wig of aerials Proffit's ersatz family peeped at him from the windows of his rooms on the third floor.

Proffit pushed open the cab door and placed the bag carefully on the pavement, before getting out himself. Having spent enough that afternoon without parting with more, Proffit fed the exact fare into the cabby's hand. The cab screamed off at speed, the driver making a point, Proffit supposed, unless he were anxious to reacquaint himself with the city's busier thoroughfares, whose clamour, heard from this enclave, was a seditious murmur.

Inside the house Proffit was only mildly out of breath by the time he'd reached the top of the stairwell, the item being more awkward than heavy to carry. Entering his flat, he was presented with the problem of where to place the thing amongst his growing collection. In the living room alone every spare surface was lumpy with china and ceramics, a broken Ormolu clock, an ivory chess set, a pile of 1970s box games. Only the walnut coffee table before the second-hand sofa was clear.

The black polythene covered the great roundness like silk. Proffit unknotted the chicken-neck twist of plastic and a whispering crackle welcomed his delving hands. With care, he lifted out the globe and transferred it reverently to the table. He switched on the ceiling light, and the reflected room thrust out over the road. The globe's ghost twin hovered, a dark moon over the park opposite.

Hitherto, the thrill of finding, the bargaining and the moment of possession had been succeeded by an anticlimactic slump in his mood. Not this time.

The globe was clasped at its poles by a plain brass meridian half-ring. Spinning it produced a frail, but strangely eager, squeal, as of something surprised at its own resurrection.

This wasn't Earth, far, perhaps literally far, from it. Bass-relief mountain ranges crossed oceans of red that faintly stained Proffit's fingers where he'd touched. To most of the surface, black oil paint had been applied with a palette knife, in a scale like effect; Proffit had no idea what physical feature this represented. Zephyrs presided, three or four in each hemisphere; thin rather than plump, their sexlessness assured by discreetly raised bony thighs. They had ashen curls, and cruel teardrop eyes. Cheeks were puffed out roundly in their haggard faces, and from their pursed lips issued burst-pillow effects of crimson feathers. Their fists terminated in black talons.

The woman had asked for twenty pounds in the squashed confines of Cuttings Curios. Fifteen, returned Proffit, with a shrug that said, Doing you a favour love — I mean — look at it. And she had looked, her upper lip pulled fastidiously out of true. She'd capitulated to Proffit's offer, cast a cloud of black plastic in his direction, and as good as stood back. People were funny, Proffit reflected.

He stretched. Half a day trawling the charity shops and market stalls had left him pleasurably fatigued. He was hungry though, and for more than the dry and curling morsels in the fridge. Food; he resented the way it spirited away his limited funds, then itself. Objects remained. Even so, his stomach protested, aloud.

Three streets away the basement restaurant bore the weight of a dozen perpetually darkened floors. Proffit told the waiter not to stint on peppers and chillies; without them food tasted of nothing to him. Afterwards he went to the video store and hired a war film.

Back in his flat, whenever Proffit had to avert his eyes from the screen, they met the blood-red deserts of the globe. Worst of all was the soldier dealing out his intestines, like a magician casting forth cloth sausages from a top hat. Something like this just might have interested Proffit's charges, when blackboard battles never had.

The film over, Proffit reached for the globe and pushed along its horizontal axis. Shades of blacks, browns and reds smeared, then blurred and seemed to rise off the surface in an effect like encompassing dirty cloud. An arbitrary god, Proffit stopped its whirl. A bit of investigating might unearth a value, failing that he'd make one up; experts did it all the time. Proffit yawned off any other bright ideas. Bed first. Should I attend for work in the morning? The option was no longer available to him, but surveying his narrow kingdom, from the wide throne that was his threadbare sofa, it still gave him pleasure to answer in the negative.

Not a traveller he. Never a hankering to set foot on the foreign fields he'd chalked too many times onto a blackboard. Not a flyer either.

Madness to be in this miles high tube. But flying troubles him now at a basement level. More immediate is the likelihood that one of the passengers in the front rows of the plane is going to turn and see him, pyjama-ed and prone in the brass-framed bed at the rear.

Proffit minimizes himself beneath the covers as the hostess stops just beyond where his feet make twin-peaks of the blanket. "We'll arrive shortly," she says. Her voice has a slight buzz as if it were a discreet tone in the ambient sound of the engine. She's a star he cannot name. She glows like sun-washed terracotta. '"kay," he says meekly, snuggling, arranging the flies of his pyjama bottoms as he knows he'll have leave the refuge of his bed soon.

In the porthole, the stars are so close he can see flames. He corrects himself: they aren't stars, they're planets on fire. Noticing a sensation of inexorable turning, he looks out of the round window to his right.

The black blind is pulled most of the way down, its lower edge bowed in a curve. Only it's not a blind, it's the southern pole of the Earth. He hadn't realized they'd gone so high. The Earth is massive, the plane a hollow pin in comparison, and he a pinprick of blood inside it.

No sense of motion now. The circumference of the black disc is out of sight. It's a target seeking its arrow. He'd never have guessed the Earth's shadowed side could be this dark.

There's a change in the note of the engine. A sick, floating sensation inside Proffit.

A clunking beneath him — landing gear? Not long after, a jolt and rattle as of colossal crates. A sense of motion again, fast but gradually decelerating.

All the lights are out in the cityscape, at the edge of what Proffit assumes is the vast apron of an airport. If landing lights of other runways exist they are comprehensively concealed by multitudes.

The plane has stopped. Voices make thunder against which are lightning solo cries of triumph and anguish. Proffit notices pools of elegantly licking flame. A body rolls, clothed in fire; some think kicking will douse it. To others, the plane offers a distraction. They crush forward. They have upraised pikes and spears-a forest of them. Proffit is dismayed at the horde surrounding the plane. There is a tattered banner marked by a huge black blot.

Despite the peril presented, the door has been opened. The passengers are impassively filing out. "Come on," the hostess calls to him, a tease in her voice. Then she is gone. The lights in the cabin go out, a prompt that he is to follow. Faint firelight from outside suffuses the interior.

He'll stay here, that's what he'll do. Responding to his thoughts, the door shuts, subduing the massed voices. But what now? Proffit fingers his blanket as if the stitching encodes an escape-plan.

The plane is an oven building heat.

A toddler begins to wail. Wait a second, the child isn't outside in the maelstrom of violence — it's in here. It must have been left behind, either by accident of design. Whatever the reason, the toddler's harsh thin wailing isn't fearful. Proffit ponders nervously. The child hasn't the years to have accumulated such hate and aggression. Proffit thinks any object might serve as a focus for that savage crying.

He wishes he were outside.

Against the diminishing pattern of headrests, a flaw appears, low in the aisle. An audible intake of breath isn't Proffit's. A vagueness due to the haze of smoke, but there is no mistaking the little, wizened face beneath the mop of hair. It takes another breath, and another. It's not hyperventilating — or playing the Big Bad Wolf. Another breath and its cheeks bulge. Proffit screams helplessly, his face masked by bis hands against the heat, the brightness…

He was half out of bed in the tight embrace of his twisted duvet, his own cry in his ears. His own bed, no sign of a brass frame. A big rectangle replaced the tiny porthole. A good thing dream fires didn't scorch or blind.

Shouts outside — an inadequate re-enactment of that wild populace.

The carpet was cool, dry land against Proffit's feet. The dream was floating off satisfactorily on an inner sea.

Down in the street a brawl. A youth was puzzled by the blood on his fingers. Two others grappled, their trainered feet doing complex dance-steps over glass shards. Another beckoned with upturned waggling fingers for anyone, just anyone to… Another hung ape-like from the park gates; with the bottle in his free hand he toasted the world. Ancient schoolyard scraps played around the action. Not intending to resume his peacemaking role now, Proffit shoved down the sash window on the few inches it had been open. A scratching remained.

He couldn't pinpoint its source with any certainty, but a hollow-ness in the sound was suggestive of an enclosed space. A rodent in the walls meant a pest problem shared by other residents, in which case they could band together and find the elusive landlord and insist he remedy the problem. Listening carefully, Proffit scowlingly realized the problem was his alone.

He padded out of the bedroom, hesitated a moment on the threshold of the living room. He went in.

He orbited the globe until he'd satisfied himself the scratching came from the inner surface and not the outer. Those scales of black paint were reminiscent of roofs, vastly out of scale in terms of the dimensions of the planet depicted, but maybe representative of an endless city, swirling around every space not occupied by mountain and desert.

The scratching had stopped; he couldn't help but think his soundless presence had brought this about. He disrupted the outer-space silence with his breaths and considered the matter.

Anything sealed live inside the globe, deliberately or not, perhaps at the time of its fashioning, should have died long since. But what if an insect, or grub, had mindlessly, and to its cost, chewed its way in — or found some pre-existing and overlooked chink? And then grown to a size preventing its egress from the point of entrance, or via any other minuscule exit? Perhaps the recent scratching had been a final paroxysm of effort to escape its paper and card prison, culminating in its death?

Proffit waited; moments later, hearing nothing more from the globe, he returned to his bedroom. He mulled over whether to leave the door ajar, so to hear the scratching should it recommence, or close it to block out that very eventuality. He closed it, against the possibility of the scratching thing escaping and making its presence known to him face to face with bites or stings.

A pattering daylight awoke him. He went into the living room. Nothing within the tapestry of rain sounds. The inhabitant of the globe must be dead, or in a similar dormant state. He pressed his ear against the globe; it felt like cold hard earth. Blood pumping in his inner ear imitated a pounding furnace at a planet's core. He tapped lightly with a knuckle. Nothing responded. A dead planet.

The clutter of furniture and collectibles rekindled the crazed multitudes in his dream. Getting rid, selling with any luck, would clear the flat — as well as his head. He'd start with the globe, but it had to be far less of a mystery first.

The city's wet streets oppressed, from bowed doorsteps, basement railings and gurgling drains, to the high peaks and sagging valleys of the upper world of slate roofing. The rain fizzed on his face, formed tears. Windows, opaque with rain, were blind to his passing, as were huddle rushing fellow pedestrians.

Proffit splashed through growing puddles, dodged through the white fog pumped from cars. Blotches and veins glowed darkly in brick and stone. He passed the sooty prison-house of Grundy Secondary Modern; its railings, like the raised spears in his dream, dared him to return.

Where the road crossed the canal he viewed the rear of the terrace, reflected in the slick black length pitted with rain. In that murky compressed perspective was the back of number seven. Esther and he had listened morosely on many a night to the rats scuttling at the water's edge. He guessed she still did. Unable to think of a pretext for visiting now, Proffit moved on.

The streets deepened beneath the piled-high architecture of the powers running the city. Old stone was gnawed and dark-stained by rain. High up, cloud mingled with mock-battlements and limp flags. Down below, Proffit felt of no more worth than the ones darkly housed in doorways, and as vulnerable while he was out here.

The city library was a temporary escape from the city. Today was the first time in a while that Proffit was here with a purpose, other than seeking shelter from Harrowby's current two-note weather system; cloudy, cloudy with rain.

The reference department was a series of slant-ceilinged groins in the roof of the building. The Compendium of Maps and Globes and several similar works contained nothing resembling Proffit's globe. He waylaid an employee who'd fined him with relish on numerous occasions in the lending department below. She disappeared into a staff enclave behind the enquiry desk and returned with a pile of small periodicals.

Charts! the title proclaimed with enthusiasm, The Journal of Maps and Atlases. In the flyleaf of the topmost copy was a list of minor deities, each accompanied by a photograph and the attribute with which he or she held sway in that particular domain of cartography. The economically named Humphrey Humphries was one such; his face and high forehead poked through a halter of neatly trimmed, white hair. The "Historical maps" editor was accessible to ordinary mortals via an electronic mail address, which Proffit took down.

Home again, Proffit cranked up the assemblage that was his computer. His e-mail account hadn't lapsed despite two or three months of neglect. He entered the address, the subject (bizarre globe inquiry), then struggled to convey the appearance of the globe in words. He was on surer ground with the zephyrs, describing them as "mean-looking infants", "bags of bones with jazz trumpeters' cheeks". No name or maker's mark on the globe, and his other "extensive researches" had proved fruitless. Any other lines of inquiry would be gratefully received. Proffit thanked Humphries in anticipation and signed off.

Glad to put the matter aside, Proffit restlessly thumbed the TV remote. Mayhem on various scales; bombs in hotter climes, a soap opera family bickered, a cat and dog fought in primary colours. The globe at the corner of his eye was like a persistent fault in his vision.

Light had shrivelled to nothing over the park when he returned to his computer. He hadn't expected a reply so soon, but was unduly frustrated as his negative expectation was confirmed.

Prawn crisps, a whisky nightcap then bed. No dreams please, he asked of the silence.

Either the baby crying next door or the scratching from the living room awoke him — perhaps both. Shouts now, a male voice — angry. A door slammed. The scratching was louder, as if to be heard over the competing noise, or even drawing sustenance from it.

So the thing inside the globe survived; a big beetle perhaps? Proffit got out of bed and went into the living room.

The globe looked like solid rock rather than segments of stiff paper ("gores" as he'd learned from his limited studies) covering a sphere of air. Light from the bedroom swathed the western hemisphere in sunshine. The scratching was more pronounced, eager, as if the occupant of the globe were invigorated by Proffit's presence, rather than cowed to the listening silence of the night before.

Next door a glass smashed amidst the shouts of the parents. What were their names? All smiles on the stairs, in the laundry room. The baby ceased suddenly to cry. The adult voices were accusatory. A door shut them away; noisy toys put away for the night. Scratch, scratch.

It's getting through, Proffit thought, stepping back. A tiny movement in a join between gores. The end of something sharp protruded minutely, in time with the scratches. No beetle this. Bits of paint and paper fluttered to the floor. Proffit wasn't going to wait for the creature inside to discover him.

He opened the front door of his flat. Back in the living room he warily picked up the globe. Leaving the flat he wondered if the globe were heavier now than when he'd carried it from the shop. Near the stairwell was a small back window. Proffit worked quickly. The talon, for he was convinced that was what it was, had sliced a slit between gores. A bird? That conjecture alone was enough to have him flinching from a desperate flourish of wings. He was a planet himself the way the core of him thudded. The window swung outward from hinges running along the top. Not wasting another second he squeezed the globe through the gap.

It plummeted, a dark star. The night obscured it, cushioning to a soft crumple its impact with the ground. Proffit strained to see it — then it rolled, minus its brass stand and meridian half-circle, into a wedge of moonlight between the dustbin enclosure and a decrepit bench.

The globe and Proffit were as still as each other. A flickering hope in Proffit was doused as the globe shuddered. The jabbing action was evident again, the thing inside seemingly energized in anticipation of the completion of the task it had set itself.

And something broke through. A dark sinewy growth from the seed of the globe. At the end of the growth, cilia waved, then scrabbled blindly on the broken concrete, then became still. Proffit gasped at the sight of the little hand. Suddenly, from this anchorage, the globe moved in a series of fast wide arcs.

The rent in the globe widened. The birth continued with the bulb of a head, narrow shoulders. The globe was shook wildly back and forth for several more seconds, before flying off from the body it had contained.

Bad dream: any moment now the black night would collapse on him, reduce him to nothingness until morning. Or he'd awake. The cold window ledge, the grit on it, defied his wish.

He looked down again. A creature snuffled the ground as if searching for a scent. Proffit dreaded whose. He was still — an insect in amber. Below a face rose, pinched, snub-nosed. It was looking at the sky, not for him. It grinned with satisfaction. Then the grin vanished, focus in the eyes, business to see too. Baby-like, it toddled rapidly away on all-fours into the shadows.

Proffit quietly closed the window. The creature must have been folded like linked playing cards to fit inside the globe. Diminutive, simian in the cast of its bony limbs, and those pale wedges of flesh flopping at its shoulders…

Proffit was alert for its reappearance. When he detected renewed movement, out in the darkness, it was at eye level.

Beyond a crumbling wall and a wide dingy plot of broken bricks and weeds was a towering black edifice, daubed with graffiti, its window apertures all brick-filled. Something moved fitfully up the black geometry of the superfluous fire escape. Such was the nimble-ness of its ascent, it seemed barely in contact with the steps. Higher and higher until the top-most portion of the fire escape forced a halt. Proffit had room for a new trajectory of astonishment as the figure bobbed out from the protection of the fire escape to cling to adjacent brickwork. And then it rose again, finding adequate handholds in the interstices of the blackened and mouldering brick courses, yet seeming hardly to require them, for the rapid folding in and out of the appendages at its shoulders seemed as necessary in keeping the mite aloft. Wings, Proffit thought, why prevaricate? The narrow summit of the building had an overhang; the child-thing, as unthinkingly as an insect, fluttered out and ascended, as if assisted by a current of air, to finally stand on the small platform of flat roof.

And there, from the way its arms reached skywards, it aspired to greater heights.

The window buzzed faintly. Proffit put his ear to the glass. Cold thrilled through him, further evidence that he wasn't in some outpost of dreamland.

Words caused the sympathetic vibration in the glass. Proffit pushed open the window the better to hear.

Instantly, he flung himself against the adjacent wall. The window crashed back into its frame. Had the thing heard? After several moments Proffit dared to look again.

Still there. The noise hadn't distracted it. Too bad he'd let that high, rusty and oddly demanding voice, unmediated by glass, assault his ears. A summoning and an entreaty, directed at the pale tumours of the clouds, or whatever they might conceal.

Proffit returned to his flat. He didn't sleep, unless the blackness he stared into for an eternity was that condition. Maybe he had slept, and the voice was the leavings of a dream. He wished it would stop; he wished its alien, implacable words, heard through so many thicknesses of bricks and mortar, were unintelligible to him. Ready. Ready now. Come. The waiting is over.

Morning: a threadbare light. On the coffee table were a bowl of crisp crumbs and a smeared whisky glass — but no globe.

The computer's querulous hums voiced Proffit's reluctance to face the day. The waiting message scotched Proffit's hopeless hope that the globe had been nothing more than the presiding artefact of an extended dream.

The provenance of the globe no longer concerned Proffit. It was out there, like a piece of damp rotting fruit; he only hoped some instinct didn't compel the midget thing to remain near it.

He opened the curtains and the dull light provoked a token squint. With too many clouds to fit comfortably into the sky, some bulged low to blend with the city's misty morning attire. Leached of its colour, a bus passing below seemed like a portion of the road afloat. Two successive shrieks came from the park gates, opened by the keeper.

With the city behaving like its usual self, an interpretation of the night's events came forth. You threw out the globe, returned to bed and dreamed it out of the window again, but with a weird addendum. The letterbox rattle concurred with this, and a beige tongue poked fun at any other explanation. But the silence of the flat made his memory of the rasping voice all the more vivid. Proffit decided on a circuitous route to pay the gas bill. Walking, he could corral his thoughts, if not calm them.

Ten minutes later the clouds weren't letting him appreciate the vast freedom of the park; they seemed as inert and solid as a plaster ceiling. A tramp shouted at them, or the chisel-marks that were birds, moving his fist in a stirring motion. Proffit headed to an outlying border of trees and a path that deposited him in narrow streets choked with traffic. Horns were territorial, like bird calls; behind windshields a limited sign-language of waved fists and jabbing fingers. Proffit couldn't see the cause of the gridlock, or why it should provoke this particular ire. There was little to choose between parkland and city pavement; Proffit thought anywhere might feed his tension.

He ate in a cafe window. Outside a skinhead pulled at the tie of a schoolboy, and feinted with his other fist. Passers-by were better placed to intervene, and maybe one did, or said something, for the youth and the boy abruptly ran off in different directions.

Proffit left the cafe and waited with a group at a crossing.

"It's coming," a voice said behind him. All knees and wrist bones, the man sat against the brick division between two shops. The bowed peaked-capped head nodded lower — Yes, you. Proffit ignored him. A sad-eyed mongrel licked the black sore on the back of the man's thin trowel of a hand. "Behind the clouds: in front of the sun."

The green man twittered and flashed, legs scissoring. Proffit went with the crossing band, impatience at the man like heartburn.

He paid his bill in the Post Office, then looked at rustic cottages in an estate agent's window. He moved on, and was three streets away.

"It's coming," said a figure set back in an alley. Darkness between the wide brimmed hat and the front complement of the long sandwich board; feet were shod in stumps of darkness. He-she may have been facing away. On the sandwich board a huge black blob, crimson gashed and blistered, dripping red onto the white below.

Proffit breathed in assertively through his nose and advanced on the figure. "What is?"

An arm rose. A match flared, illuminating a scrap of flesh between nose and chin. Smoke billowed as from a vent in a chimney. Proffit stumbled back. "Waste of space," he muttered, though hardly that as the figure backed away, ungainly as one fellow atop another, to slot neatly into a recess in the alley.

Proffit merged himself into the flow on the pavement. The egg-white sun was being bandaged in clouds. He sidestepped into the Regal.

A formulaic thriller though the violence engaged him. His fists clenched with the blows. His body tensed to dodge the gunshot. Horror cinema on the front row as a pair of teenagers consumed each other's faces. Others flicked unidentifiable missiles at the screen.

Proffit left, but the film continued on the street. Shoppers braked on the pavement. Shots; echoes disguised their point of origin so everybody faced all ways. A siren cried. From an upstairs window over shops a woman screamed, perhaps with laughter. Proffit took refuge in the Cancer Shop.

Monica disappeared as soon as she saw him. She returned with a long black trench coat which Proffit, with more politeness than enthusiasm, put on. "Fits like a glove Mr P.," Monica said admiringly. "You look proper distinguished." She said she'd saved it with him in mind. A bargain if you ignored the distant galaxies of impacted dandruff on the shoulders. In her Doc Martens and print frock Monica appeared to have the pick of the stock. Proffit showed one shoulder then the other to the long mirror. The silver buttons were tarnished, and the epaulettes just a little prominent on his shoulders, but yes, he did look like someone to be reckoned with. In fact, a bit of military chic might have encouraged a more studious air in his classes.

With a chilly smile, Proffit said he'd take it. He barely recalled Monica; ex-pupils were merging into composites.

"It'll keep off the rain," she said, keen to keep pleasing him. Bigger, greyer clouds were back, like schoolyard bullies.

"Don't let up do they?" Proffit said.

Back in his flat, relieved to be there, Proffit saw he hadn't logged out of his internet connection. A vague displeasure at the telephone bill left to fatten over several hours was mixed with trepidation at the new message.

Mr Proffit,

Harrowby rang some bells that prompted me to contact a longstanding colleague. I recalled him telling me of a catalogue with a mysterious supplementary list of imaginatively named places, all represented on maps and globes. The seller was one Albert Lo-stock, a stationer, formerly of your own fair city of Harrowby. To my friend's knowledge none of these globes or maps has ever been documented elsewhere, nor have examples emerged from private collections. Sadly, the fire that apparently destroyed Lostock's shop in 1937 may have robbed us of unique and fascinating items. Send pics soonest, for prompt reply. Humphrey Proffit rang the city library that evening. Yes, he was told. Lostock, A. Stationer. 3 Coal Row, Harrowby. Listed in Pigot's Directory of 1936.

Proffit felt comforted. The globe was physically gone, and now given a context and history that further distanced it. With the receiver in his hand he dialled again.

She answered with a clipped "Hello."

"How goes it?" Immediately, the phrase, a punishable offence.

"Fine." Esther was merciful, or sounded so.

"Still chucking?" He knew she'd turned number seven Canal Terrace minimal as soon as he'd left.

"Still hoarding?" A double edge: bottles behind the bookshelves, under the stairs. Funny how drinking had started his collecting. Bottles first, before broadening his scope.

"Hoarding with a purpose," Proffit said, suddenly inspired to add. "Thinking of opening a shop. Antiques." Someone in Esther's presence moved plates carefully; they weren't antique ones, nobody was stepping into Proffit's shoes to that extent. He wasn't going to ask who it was.

"Good luck," Esther said, unconvinced by Proffit's pipedream.

"It's coming apparently."

"Hmm?" A lapse of concentration, then, "What is?"

"That's what I said." He let out a chuckle. "People on the street. Doom-sayers." A pause Esther didn't fill. "Actually I'm beginning to believe them."

A sigh in his ear. "I'll have to go now Trevor —»

"One other thing," he began, but no words would serve to introduce that nocturnal adventure. She'd guess it were a stress dream, maybe whisky-fuelled, the zephyr a veritable bottle imp: his problem, no longer hers.

"I'm thinking of leaving the city."

That must have surprised her; it had surprised him as much as the shop idea. "Oh," she said, as if this would be a drastic step even allowing for what had happened between them.

"This city — it's 'doing my head in' as the kids say. The aggression I mean. Complete strangers on the street look like they'd like to knife you. Have you noticed the sirens all day?"

"Cities are tough places, but crime is exaggerated by the media." She sounded like a member of it. "People get paranoid —»

Proffit felt reduced to a trend. Her concern not sufficient to pursue the topic, Esther said she had to be going now.

A stumble of «Byes», a withering "Take care," from Esther.

Proffit slumped on the sofa with a glass of lager. Another glass shattered in the street. As the evening darkened, cries came at intervals too frequent to require investigation from Proffit, or anyone else within earshot; they were all too patently part of the fabric of the city. A madman shouted barely coherent orders in an increasingly hoarse voice as Proffit was preparing for bed. One great explosion, worth a few pages in tomorrow's Messenger, made his window brace like old bones stretching. Running steps littered Proffit's dreams, in a chaotic and interminable military deployment.

Proffit groaned, pulled the pillow over his face. He must have slept, and regretted this burdensome wakefulness. The knocking again, like an aural personification of the daylight. His presence was known with a deadly certainty, and nothing less than his presence in the flesh would be acceptable.

Proffit tugged on his clothes, and opened the door. Immediately he could tell the pair before him had nothing to sell and weren't collecting the rent. They smiled at Proffit; apparently he didn't know how lucky he was. Their faces were smeared with earth, or paint, or both.

"It's here; it's now." From a slight refinement of feature Proffit guessed the speaker to be a girl. The other nodded, wonder and something of relief in his expression, as if at some point in the past there'd been doubt on some crucial matter, but all was now resolved.

In the gloom of the corridor something about them… Proffit folded his arms. "What is?"

"The new world of course," she said with a pout and flutter of lashes, as if Proffit were being deliberately obtuse.

"What 'new world'?" He leaned against the jamb, settling in for a debate, getting a better look at them. "I think you'll find there's only this one," he said, unable to prevent a sigh intermingling with the words. They wore combat jackets and jeans, all torn and stained as if they'd been on particularly taxing manoeuvres. Grimy epaulettes on his jacket; murky brass buttons down the front of hers.

"You've got to be ready for the fight," the youth said, half-addressing, through a smile breaking out on his lips, his companion, "Or you'll go under." Barry — ''Baz' … yes. And she was… Ann.

Baz smirked. "And you're a good shot, Sir."

No, Proffit wasn't, but this world had a mischievous god who had worked in a mysterious way to engineer an outcome that had been a shallowly buried wish. Memories pushed and shoved.

Too many shorts at someone's lunchtime leaving do in the pub behind the school. Proffit staggering into the classroom like he'd been bayoneted. Class 3C primed and waiting. Today the Great War, the war to end all wars. Baz burbling away on the back row. A tectonic plate had shifted. Elemental anger. The chalk missile, aimed and not aimed, finding the blue between piggy sporadic lashes. Proffit walking before the governors could push him.

It was a history he wasn't going to allude to for their entertainment.

"Who are we fighting?" Proffit was readying himself for scorn.

"The enemy," she said, "And they're everywhere." Proffit noted with distaste, black deposits at the corners of her eyes. Soap and water wouldn't come amiss, young miss. Had they rolled out of bed only minutes before he had? Puffy faces, pinkly imprinted beneath the dirt, as if they'd slept with their heads on pillows stuffed with cutlery. Proffit felt unnerved as the youth fingered a Swiss army knife hanging from his belt. Finding words to conclude the encounter was suddenly beyond him. Then he thought of one.

Slam was the door's loud monosyllable, into their unwashed and increasingly crazed faces. What had Baz been about to extract from an inner pocket? Both their jackets had been bulky enough to contain arsenals. Proffit was glad of the closed door as a wild violence flew in the cage of him. Young people today, the tabloid leader writer trumpeted in his head. Perhaps their enthusiasm for battle would be enacted on the doorsteps of less restrained citizens.

Proffit switched on the computer. It was no surprise, the message waiting for him.

Proffit clicked on the icon.

Albert was a character. His shop was tiny, the catalogue in his head enormous. No kind of businessman, he made a living, though his manner hardly encouraged regular customers. He rather despised humanity en masse. He often opined the world was heading for rack and ruin. In fact he seemed to relish the sorry end he predicted for civilization. He collected, and I fear read, books of a «specialist» nature bearing on the occult. Over a few too many gins one evening he told me of his strange and vivid dreams. He spoke of «flying» over these bizarre and terrible realms. Albert would record them in his notebook on waking. He said that making maps, and latterly globes, of these places was the only means he had of purging them from his head-

Proffit had been aware of the barking for several moments before it became intolerable. He went to the window.

Baz and Ann were with an old man who was walking head down. The old man's dog strained at the end of its lead and yammered at the couple. She was talking as Baz swished at the grass with a long stick.

Proffit returned to the screen.

— I don't believe he sold any, though I believe he tried. He told me he was working on a globe clasped in the grip of a world-spanning city at war with itself. Fire-breathing demons flew over every size and type of conflict, aligning with neither one side or another, but feeding on terror and death-

And not exactly fattening on it, Proffit thought, recalling the grey-shanked zephyrs.

In the park a figure lay on the ground close to where the old man had been. Figures approached, nobody anxious to get there first. Proffit drew a chair up to the window; with tea and toast in hand he had the best seat in the house. It was looking bad. Was that something sticking out of the old boy? A police car and an ambulance entered through the park gates.

Mid-afternoon, Proffit made his way by back streets beneath the grey dunes of the clouds. Muffled cries of pain or pleasure came from a wheel-less, curtained van. A fire was barely contained in the cauldron of a backyard. A crash of glass released from a high room a violent argument, in a language Proffit didn't recognize. Sirens seemed like calls to arms. Sat on a far chimney stack, a misplaced gargoyle hugged its knees. It turned on its axis, a chunky weathercock — then it was no such thing as it became airborne. A bird, Proffit was determined to believe, and not as substantial as it appeared to be.

In the city library, Proffit searched the microfilm of the Harrowby Messenger for 1937. It was an hour before he found that which he hardly could have wanted to find.

A police spokesman said it was too early to speculate on the cause of the fire at Coal Row, and made no comment on the claims of Mr Ernest Purbright who was one of the first at the scene.

"We couldn't get no further than the hallway. The place was falling apart with smoke and flames everywhere. I saw something at the top of the stairs. I thought it was a monkey, but my workmate said it was a big bird. Whatever it was seemed buoyed up on the smoke; it seemed to have a little pot-belly and weedy arms and legs."

It is believed the body found in the cellar of the house is that of Mr Albert Lostock. The investigation continues.

Proffit returned home on busier streets. It was early evening and street lamps leaked orange; others flickered weakly, or remained unlit in smashed casings. Eyes glanced anxiously or were filled with a furtive hate. Pockets surely bulged with more than the hands they contained. There were scuffles in side-streets.

Glad to be inside again, Proffit looked out. How dense would the clouds need to be before they blocked out daylight completely? A spur of the park looked in danger of being chewed by adjacent office blocks, like blackened tombstone teeth. Tree foliage was the dense coiling black of smoking tyres. Around the crater of the sandpit, grass was grey stubble. Proffit drew the curtains.

Later he opened them again, onto a city like a coastline of black rocks strewn with lit bulbs. Something caught his eye, something so massive the streets it moved along could barely accommodate it. The vehicle, or the load it carried, had a curved upper portion that overlooked roof and chimney. Switchback-style it moved up and down the streets; no deceleration, let alone stops, for road junctions, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights. The monstrous size of the thing must have activated some special dispensation. Proffit would have thought it lost were there not purposefulness in its unhesitating progress. Not so much lost in the city as determined to explore every yard of its network of streets. As if to map it.

As troubling as the vehicle's smooth, almost floating motion, was its disappearance. Either it had gone behind the castellated heights of the city council buildings, or sank into the deep adjacent streets. The city seemed to have darkened while he watched, and fewer street lamps appeared lit than was usual at this time of the evening. The darkest streets seemed the ones the vehicle had passed along — as if it had sucked the dull orange sodium light away leaving black trenches in its wake. The more likely theory soothed a little; those blackened lengths were affected by localized power cuts. Suppose they should spread here? Proffit drew the curtains and searched for candles. He found none, but his dread of sudden darkness receded as the evening progressed, with not a flicker of the living room ceiling light.

There was a message in his e-mail account. He wondered how long this one-sided communication would continue.

Darkness, abrupt and shocking. After a death-like instant Proffit's feet were again in touch with the floor. He moved carefully to the curtains and opened them. The computer screen was an impenetrable black; he could hardly believe it had ever been lit up with words. Bed seemed the safest place.

He doubted he was the only one lying awake. Beckoning, urging voices in the street. A vehicle accelerated, skidded; an impact. A sharp tang of sound as a window fragmented.

When he pressed the light switch, Proffit found the power hadn't returned. He got up and felt his way out of the room.

The view from the living room window; he was becoming addicted to it. Discreet crimson glows around the city; flitting figures below. Gun shot barked. Moonlight was painted meanly on the trees of the park. The open space beyond the gates seemed a great blister rather than flat. Was the curve not apparent in daylight because of all the attendant distractions? As he stared, the rise seemed more pronounced. Before the darkness could make it a mound, Proffit closed the curtains against it. The duvet soon covering him was another barrier.

He only drowsed. Where sleep should have taken him there was a shadowed floor; it swelled higher and higher, until it freed itself, and, like a black balloon, floated as free as the walls of his head would allow.

He got up and fetched his portable radio. He desperately wanted its sounds. Re-tuning right across the dial produced coughs and hisses like a premonition of nuclear fallout. He returned to bed.

Dread awoke him, taunted that sleep had been his and was no more. He reached for his alarm clock, squinting to make out the hands. The quality of the light suggested a much earlier hour. But in the dim living room the mantle-piece clock confirmed eight-twenty in the morning. Still no power, so no television, no tea, no toast. He tried the radio but soon switched off the sequence of cracked syllables that were like the calls thrown to the clouds and beyond the other night. The fact that Proffit was experiencing part of a wider privation was of little comfort. Was the Railway Hotel affected? If Humphries had been true to his word, he must be finding Harrowby a poor substitute for the sunny south.

With no allowances for the early hour, the city's repertoire of turmoil was already establishing itself. Esther might retract her complacent words about cities should he be crass enough to remind her of them. He'd drop in; their amicable estrangement was an example to the rest of the city. Besides, wasn't mutual support between friends, ex-lovers, neighbours, desirable, if not essential in these times? Unless the opposite state of affairs was endemic. There was little contact, let alone neighbourliness, between Proffit and his fellow residents. In the passage outside his flat the three other doors might have opened into closets, such was the silence.

Furtive as a spy, Proffit left the building. A harsh chemical in the air hit the back of his nose, and at least had the virtue of waking him fully. Passing cars assisted, blasting their horns at him for no obvious reason. Other cars' wheel-less state left them part-immersed in broken tarmac. On an otherwise dead van a windscreen wiper wagged No.

The canal was a ribbon of black gloss paint. On its rubble beach a dummy, or body, lounged. Two crows flop-fluttered together, hopelessly entangled. Rats scampered, busy as clerks preparing for an inspection.

The door of number seven Canal Terrace opened to the limit of the chain. A terrible falling off if this was Esther's new paramour. A sign of the times that such a vested hulk should cower behind a door. Murky the hallway; an odour of over-used cooking oil. A television whisper-hissed.

"Hello — it's Trevor. Esther's 'ex'."

Glimpsing an arm in a sling, a drooping gut, Proffit was appalled.

'"Stheroo?"

Alternatives; Esther and this one, a couple; Esther in the back tied to a chair, the attentions of the vested-one temporarily interrupted; Esther living elsewhere, having moved out at short notice without bothering to tell Proffit. He couldn't believe any of these possibilities. Esther was simply gone, profoundly so.

'"Ckoff," the man said. The door banged shut, lid tight. Proffit returned home.

As if taking advantage of his absence the house had succumbed to the madness. From the five top-floor windows, his included, gargantuan black ropes of smoke rose to flatten against the undersides of the clouds. A dry sob was painful in his throat. Packed into his few rooms was the only future he could envisage. Dentists and patients had vacated the surgery next door and grin-grimaced orange teeth at the show. The insurers had evacuated their building too, and looked hungry, though not, Proffit judged, for the business the fire might have represented. Fellow residents didn't acknowledge him: their fire-lit faces were aghast or elated as at a burning god. Proffit's eyes watered copiously. There was no going in, though he doubted anyone would have tried to stop him.

A rumble of collapsing floors. Perversely, considering the past twenty-four hours or so, no sirens. A suitable end, to walk in, cloth himself in flames, burn to nothing the burden of confusion and dread. But an end for a braver man, and maybe a less curious one. He'd see this through and begin again, as he had only months before. But his thoughts had no emotional impulse. He felt hollow — as eaten away as the inside as the house. But when the metallic sniggering began, anger moved into the void.

The smoke formed a low ceiling over the furnace. A round face, a grimed, grinning urchin's, poked through. There was no way of apprehending that fellow. The fun was his to be had.

Proffit had to tell someone, and only one would understand — Humphries, if he hadn't already vacated his room at the hotel. After Humphries, Proffit would renew contacts with friends and former colleagues. In lieu of the authorities mastering the situation, they'd discuss, exchange information. Abandonment of the city might be the sanest response to the challenges it presented. His own sanity might be questioned if he implicated an old globe in the chaos. No, he'd save talk of the globe for Humphries. The globe would confirm Proffit's identity, and then the expert could take possession of it. Damp and damaged it would be worth pennies — and then only in other cities, not Harrowby, that's if other cities weren't themselves being infected by this one.

Proffit felt the heat of tropical lands as he skirted the building. Amongst the crumbling walls at the back, lidless dustbins on their sides disgorged rubbish. Lids, ideal for shields, Proffit found himself thinking dispassionately.

He found the globe. It was a dead thing. With his fingers encased in the great north south rent, it was like a huge boxing glove.

The street was littered with the detritus of once tepid, routine-driven lives. Broken chairs, bottles, de-limbed dolls, half-consumed packages of fast food, were tokens of lives changed perhaps forever.

Water frothed from a burst water main and pooled in the road. A van passing at speed sprouted great white wings of water. One caught Proffit but he cared little at the drenching.

Viewing the smoking wreck of a car, Proffit wondered how much safer he'd be conveyed on four wheels.

Here was a car, a black one. It might be a cab. And couldn't anything be anything now in this city where the rulebook had been tossed aside? There seemed an intention in the air to return to first principles — or no principles.

The car/cab stopped at his raised hand. Proffit recognized the driver.

"By yourself this time?" the man said. "Should have charged extra for whatever was in that black bag." Wry words, but glaring eyes in the rear-view mirror. He may have been thinking of the omitted tip. Proffit was glad that in the general gloom the cabby hadn't noticed the misshapen globe?

"Railway Hotel," Proffit instructed. " 'Please'" was a nicety, a sign of weakness, he wouldn't display.

A swerving, halting progress along many diversions. Gaps in railings seemed emblematic of iron bars and spears in use elsewhere. A cast-off manhole cover suggested misrule spread to the underside of the city. Birds flew haphazardly, as if the clouds were an unprecedented environment to fly in. Something larger passed over the cab with more purpose. Proffit shrank in his seat as if the metal roof were insufficient protection from the grating giggler. The thing alighted on a skeletal tree to which it, or someone, assigned a bright blazing foliage, an instant before the thing flew off again.

The clamour of approaching sirens shook Proffit to his bones. The muttering driver edged the cab grudgingly left, and two battered ambulances overtook, neck-and-neck, as likely to create emergencies as attend any. People ran in every direction, faces fearful orcrazily happy. The red rose emblem on the face of City Hall was being painted black by a man on a rickety platform; he needn't have bothered, as the darkening atmosphere beneath the smoke-fouled clouds was painting quicker.

On the seat next to Proffit the globe felt like a heft of dead flesh.

They passed the university hospital. Horseplay on the top floor. The cabby laughed, hands batting the steering wheel. "Bloody students!" he shouted over his shoulder. Proffit supposed the white-coated, jeering figure might be one, and he was bloody indeed. So was his colleague. Each held an ankle of a dangling, squirming third. Below, laughing ambulance men tautened a blanket between them and manoeuvred it drunkenly. Proffit turned from the plummeting scream.

A pitched battle on the silvery swirl of lines feeding the railway station. A shape swept overhead; its stubby wings looked barely adequate for the job of keeping aloft the bundle of limbs. Ahead was the Railway Hotel.

The cab braked hard to a rocking sudden standstill. Proffit got out and went around to the driver's door. The driver viewed Proffit's handful of change with contempt, then relented as Proffit thought he might. "Go on then — though I'm thinking money's heading to be a game like everything else."

The facade of the hotel was as lightless as a cliff. The canopy before the entrance hung in rags. Backing away, a cat spat at Proffit.

From a high window opposite the hotel, a child chuckled hoarsely. Pr6ffit's shoes ground glass on the steps rising up to the foyer.

The entrance hall was deserted. Slashed sofas grinned foam. Clothes were frozen in mid-clamber from an abandoned suitcase. There was an opened-out road map with an alternative network of bloodstains. Proffit went to the reception desk and leafed through the visitors' book. The large windows, most divested of their glass, let in sounds of a tumult that appeared to have passed through here — and, Proffit feared, might yet return. The light was gilded with an unnatural sunset.

Here was H. HUMPHRIES, neatly written amongst the previous two days' arrivals.

With each step, the soles of Proffit's shoes peeled away audibly from the sticky carpet. Alcohol fumes sweetened his way past the black mouths of the lifts to a grand switchback stairway.

An anticipatory apprehension invigorated him as he climbed the stairs. Would Humphries be here, and if he were, what could Proffit say when the city was speaking so madly for itself? The globe was an irrelevance. I'm leaving the city, he'd said to Esther, floating an idea he'd not seriously intended to act upon. He felt differently now. From a rural retreat he could have watched the city, or cities, totter in TV news items, and ended the conflict with the OFF on his remote control. But the more he thought of it, the more fantastical seemed any place of repose and peace.

He began to hope Humphries might provide a more balanced perspective. Here was the fourth floor. Past a right-angle another long corridor. All doors were open onto wrecked rooms. How was that avuncular persona, from another world, dealing with this one?

Well enough, Proffit had to concede. Ahead a voice, a plummy, equal-to-anything, voice. Open your eyes Humphries. Proffit ran. It sounded like Humphries was alone and talking into a telephone.

Room 408 coming up. Proffit swung around the door, "Here's the damned…"

No lights were on but he could see adequately. It was a large room with two tall windows; one had a single mountain peak of glass. Outside a flash underlit the clouds; a moment later a dull explosion.

No sign of Humphries, though he sounded only a yard or so away.

And he was, in a sense. Profit dropped the globe.

There was a dressing table with a three-leafed mirror. Someone had pulled it away from the wall. In the large central glass Humphries stood bathed in a sunny afternoon. The white hair was a radiant oval frame, from high forehead to chin. No wonder Humphries didn't have a care in the world, for he wasn't exactly in this one. Proffit's hands clasped his mouth; it felt real enough to confirm the reality of everything else. Light spilled from the mirror to the plush patterned carpet; Proffit went to stand in it and face the mirror.

"Course," Humphries was saying into his mobile phone, "I was sceptical from the beginning. And right to be as it turned out. But I had high hopes with this one, this being Lostock's home patch. What…? No I shouldn't think he'll contact me again. Cold feet I expect… Oh, maybe some shoddy imitation based on a bit of research — if he'd taken the trouble to make one at all — which I doubt, and which in any case wouldn't have hoodwinked Yours truly…"

The person on the other end of the line said something that made Humphries chuckle. The chuckle escalated. Humphries shook as if his torso might lift off from his legs.

Proffit's face contorted. If Humphries had been a bodily presence Proffit would have relished smashing him, pulverizing him — just one more act of violence in a city saturated with it. But all he could do was lift the dressing table chair and swing it with all the force in him, straight into the mirror.

The rain of glass took the day-lit room with it, took away the cruel illusion of a better world elsewhere from which he'd been insidiously sidelined. There had been no bifurcation. There was this city, and no other. Until the authorities took control, individuals like him would have to take matters into their own hands.

The things he could see dipping their curly mops out through the undersides of the clouds could be shot at and brought down. Had nobody thought of that? A savage, incoherent shouting, down in the street. A woman screamed laughter, or for mercy. A flurry of leader less furious voices grew, then faded.

Proffit didn't doubt he'd find someone who'd know where to obtain a gun. With a sense of purpose burgeoning inside him he left the room.

Along the corridor, down the stairs. He didn't hesitate in the foyer but headed straight through. Determined to engage with it, and not seek the reassurance of its boundary, Proffit went out into the city.