Walking on Glass

AMWELL STREET

A succession of heavy trucks rumbled down Amwell Street as Graham turned onto it from Rosebery Avenue; they were big grey lorries, stone or chippings carriers with great corrugated sides and a plume of dust trailing after them in the near-still air. Graham was heading slightly uphill now, and slowed his pace accordingly. He listened to the traffic, felt the warm air slip by, moved his portfolio from one hand to the other, and thought of her.

He hadn't been able to see Slater for two days after the party, and that time had passed in a daze for him. On the Monday, though, Slater had been in the small steamy cafe and sandwich bar on Red Lion Street which he usually spent most of his term days in, and Graham had supplied him with cups of tea and expensive rounds of smoked salmon on granary bread while Slater slowly, teasingly, told him about Sara.

Yes, they had been neighbours in Shrewsbury, but of course they had only seen each other during the school holidays, and of course they hadn't made friends over some grotty little terrace-house garden fence; he'd first noticed her from the tree house in his parents" garden while she was learning to ride her new pony in her parents" ten acres of mature woodland and well-kept pasture.

"A tree house?" Graham teased back. "Wasn't that a bit butch?" Slater replied tartly: "I was being Jane, sweetie, not Tarzan."

Sara's best years. Slater continued, had been just after leaving school. She had been a scamp in those days, he said, sighing with exaggerated wistfulness. She drank Guinness, smoked Gauloises and would eat anything as long as it was loaded with garlic. Odour-free she wasn't. She carried a large handbag whenever she went out. It contained potatoes to stuff up the exhaust pipes of expensive cars, and a very large sharp knife for tearing holes in the hoods of convertibles. If it could be arranged, she threw up into the cars through the holes so created.

She got drunk a lot and once did a strip on top of the piano in a local pub. (Graham asked Sara about this, on one of their canal walks. She smiled, looked down at her feet as she walked, finally admitted, a little ashamedly, that it was all true; "I was wild," she agreed in her slow, low voice, nodding. Graham felt a sort of ache then, as he had when Slater first told him; he wanted to have known her then, to have been a part of her life during that time. He was jealous, he realised, of time itself.)

She was three years older than Slater; twenty-three now. She had been married for the last two years, to a man who really was a sewage plant manager (Slater was quite hurt that Graham thought he'd invented this detail for the sake of a joke). She had married against the wishes of her parents; they hadn't talked since the marriage. She didn't get on well with them anyway; probably she married as much to get at them as anything else. It was a pity, because her parents weren't bad sorts; like his own, they just believed everything they read in the Daily Telegraph.

Sara had only one real skill, or talent. Not having done very well at school (not even allowed to sit the Oxbridge exams), she had nevertheless been diligent about her piano lessons, and was in fact quite good on the instrument. The horrible hubby had not encouraged this, however, and indeed had sold her piano one weekend when she was away staying with friends. That hadn't been The Last Straw; far from it. Selling the piano was only a few months into the marriage. She ought to have got out then, but she, the stubborn one, persisted.

Hubby wasn't happy when no kiddies appeared; blamed her. Sara had tried to be the good wife but failed; the other wifies she was supposed to socialise with to further hubby's career were dreadful, brainless bores. Social ostracism followed outbursts of silliness, hubby drank a lot, didn't hit her often but did bad-mouth her excessively, and took up fishing; went away for weekends with male friends she'd never heard of. Claimed to be tackling rivers but kept bringing home filleted sea fish on the Sunday night, and was always suspiciously careful to empty his pockets when he gave her his clothes to wash. She began to Suspect.

She had her own weekends, here in London, staying with Veronica, whose flat she was now looking after while its owner worked a year's exchange course at UCLA. On one of those weekends she had met Stock, a photographer who did a lot of, work for one of the newspaper colour supplements, though always under assumed names, for tax purposes. Slater had seen him on his BMW bike, or just getting off it. Never seen him without his crash helmet on; could be an albino or a Rastafarian for all he knew. Looked a bit like Darth Vader without the cloak. Jealous, moody type, apparently; married too but separated. No idea why he appealed to the lovely Sara.

Anyway, he thought they would be drifting apart a bit now, perversely but predictably because they were seeing more of each other, not just weekends; Stock stayed the night at the horrible little place in Islington quite often, but Slater thought Sara might be getting bored with the black-leather macho man.

The thing round her neck? Scar tissue all right; a birthmark she'd had removed in early teens in case it turned malignant. Yes, he found it perversely beautiful-too. "La Cicatrice" had been his pet name for her.

Finally Slater divulged the flat's telephone number, and Graham noted the seven numbers down carefully, double-checking them and ignoring Slater's snide remarks about quirky Sara with her terrible taste in men, and the unfaithful, untrustworthy nature of women in general. He'd offered to swap stories about what had happened once they had each paired off at the party, but Graham wasn't going to tell, and told Slater so as he carefully wrote her name by the side of the numbers: Sarah Fitch. Slater laughed, pointing and guffawing at what Graham had written. "Not one big "f; two little ones. Like British industry, our Sara's undercapitalised. And no "h" on the end of Sara," he said.

Graham called her from the School that day, found her in. She said she was delighted to hear from him; he thrilled at the sound of her voice. She was free the following Thursday evening. She'd meet him in a pub called the Camden Head, at nine. Looking forward to it.

He whooped for joy as he left the phone cubicle.

She was late, as she always was, and they only had about an hour and a half to talk before she had to go, and he was nervous and she looked tired though still beautiful in bright red cords, Arran jumper and tattily magnificent fur coat. "I think I might be falling for you, you know," he said as they were drinking up at eleven.

She smiled at him, shook her head, changed the subject, seemed distracted, looking about as though for somebody she expected to see. He wished he'd kept quiet.

She walked with him to the bus-stop, would not let him walk her back to the flat, said not to follow her; she'd watch, be angry. She kissed him again, quickly, daintily. "Sorry I haven't been great company. Call me soon; I'll be on time next time."

Graham smiled to himself at the thought of that. Her sense of time didn't seem to be like everybody's else's. She kept her own time; some inner, erratic clock regulated her. Like some conventional caricature of female punctuality, she always arrived late. But she usually did turn up. Almost always. They met on weekdays, not weekends at first, in pubs never very far away from the flat. Small talk mostly; a slow process of discovery. He wanted to find out all she'd done and been, everything she thought, but she was reticent. She preferred to talk about films and books and records, and though she seemed interested in him, asking him about his life, he felt cheated as well as flattered. He loved her, but his love, the love he wanted to be their love seemed stalled, stuck at some early stage, as though hibernating until the winter had passed.

She wouldn't talk about Stock at all.

Graham walked up Amwell Street. How are you? he asked himself. Oh, I am well. He looked at his fingernails. It had taken him half an hour to get his hands and nails clean, using white spirit and a nailbrush as well as soap and water. A couple of specks of paint on his shirt had surrendered, besides. He had used a friend's Nivea to restore some moisture to the scrubbed, parched skin on his fingers. The only stains left on his hands were a few stubborn traces of India ink, left from the drawings of Sara he'd finished the previous day. Graham smiled; she was ingrained in him.

He passed the entrance to a courtyard. There was a banner slung slackly over it, advertising a fete. He gave the banner a second glance, fixing its curves and lines in his mind, storing the sight so that he could draw it some time. Tricks could be played, points made by drawing a drooping banner so that certain letters and words were obscured and altered by the folded fabric.

He remembered one time he'd walked up here, in May, after she had started seeing him in the afternoons and going for long walks along the canal-side. It had poured with rain; a total cloudburst, thunder cracking and grumbling in the skies above the city. He'd been soaked, and hoped that at least this might finally gain him entry to the flat; she'd never invited him in.

When he got there he pressed the button on the entryphone, waiting for the crackle of her distorted voice, but there was nothing. He pressed and pressed. He stood back in the street, the rain stinging his eyes, wetting him to the skin, getting in his mouth and eyes; warm rain, huge hard drops, slicking and sticking the clothes to his body; erotic, making his heart beat faster in a sudden, squally sexual fantasy; she would invite him in... no, better yet, she would turn up in the street, having been out, also wet to the skin, she would look at him... they would go in...

Nothing.

He walked all the way to Upper Street, near the bus-stops, before he found a free phonebox. He stood in it, his clothes and skin steaming, dripping water into the urine-scented callbox, called her number, listened to it ring, called again, saying the numbers to himself like a chant, making sure his finger was in the right hole on the dial each time. The double ring: trr-trr: trr-trr: trr-trr. He listened to it, trying to will her to the phone; imagining her coming back to the flat after being out; she might hear the phone from the street... now she would put the key in the lock... now running up the stairs... now dashing in, dripping, short of breath, to grab the receiver... now... now.

Trr-trr: trr-trr: trr-trr.

Please.

His hand hurt, his mouth ached with the expression of tense anguish he knew he wore, water ran from his hair, over his face, down his back. Water dripped from his elbow where it bent, holding the phone up to his ear.

Be there: be there: be there: trr-trr: trr-trr: trr-trr...

There were people outside the callbox. It was still raining, though more lightly now. A girl outside tapped on the glass, he turned away, ignored her. Please be there... trr-trr: trr-trr: trr-trr...

The door of the callbox opened eventually. A wet-looking blonde in a rain-darkened coat stood there, glaring at him," "Ere, wot's your game, eh? I've only been standin" "ere twen'y minutes, "aven" I? You ain't even put your bleedin" money in yet!"

He said nothing; he put the phone down and walked away to get a bus. He forgot to take his ten pence out of the slot where he'd had it ready, and he'd left a pile of tens and fives sitting on top of the directories. He felt sick.

She apologised, over the phone, the next day; she'd been hiding under the bedclothes, playing her favourite David Bowie cassette at maximum volume on her Sony Walkman, trying to drown the noise of the thunder.

He laughed, loving her for it.

Graham passed a small hall; in its courtyard was a little stall selling cakes. He considered buying a cake to eat, but while he was thinking about it he kept on walking, and thought it would look stupid to turn back so far up the street, so he didn't, though at the thought his stomach suddenly rumbled. He'd last eaten about four hours earlier, in the same small cafe where he'd got Slater to tell him about Sara that January.

Graham crossed the road. He was approaching Clairmont Square, at the summit of the hill, where tall houses, once genteel, then decaying, now undergoing gentrification, faced over tall trees to the bustle of traffic on Pentonville Road. Graham shifted his plastic portfolio from one hand to the other. Inside were drawings of Sara ffitch, and Graham was proud of them. The drawings were in a new style he had been experimenting with recently, and now, he felt, he had got it just right. It was perhaps a little early to be certain, but he thought they were probably the best things he had ever done. This made him feel good. It was another sort of omen; a confirmation....

Once they'd had a conversation on two levels, from street to first-floor window; it had been in April; on the second occasion he'd visited her in the afternoon, for a walk along the canal.

She came to the window when he pressed the button on the entryphone, poking her head out of the lower half of the opened sash window, through dark brown curtains. "Hello!" she'd called.

He went out into the middle of the street. "Coming out to play?'. he said, smiling up at her in the sunlight. Just then the window had slipped, the lower half falling down on her; she laughed and turned her head round.

"Ouch," she said.

"You all right?" he asked. She nodded.

"Didn't hurt." She wriggled. He shielded his eyes to see better. "I think I can get back in. Hope so, or I'm stuck here."

He gave a small, concerned laugh. He thought suddenly of how she must look, seen from inside the kitchen she was leaning out of; an ugly sexual idea occurred to him, and he looked about for the big black BMW bike, but it wasn't there. It never was when she invited him to meet her at the flat; she was keeping him and Stock out of each other's way. Sara was giggling.

Things like this are always happening to me," she "said, and shrugged, put her elbows on the sill of the window and smiled down at him. She wore a loose, heavy tartan shirt, like some fake lumberjack.

"So," he said, "are you coming for a walk?"

"Where shall we go?" she said. "Tempt me."

"I don't know. You fed up with the canal?"

"Maybe," she shrugged. Her eyes seemed to wander away from him, scanning the horizon. "Ah," she said, "the Post Office Tower."

He turned round, looking south and west, though he knew he couldn't see the tall building from the street. "You want to go there?"

"We could go to the revolving restaurant," she laughed.

"I thought they'd closed it," he said. She shrugged, stretched her arms out, arching her back.

"Have they? How boring of them."

"Bit out of my price range anyway," he laughed. "I'll buy you a Wimpy and chips if you're hungry. There; how's that for an offer?"

The zoo," she said, and looked down at him.

"Aardvark and chips? Chimpy and chips?" he said. She laughed, making him feel good.

She said, "We could go to the zoo today."

"You really want to?" he said. He'd heard it was quite expensive to get in. But he'd go if she wanted.

"I don't know," she shrugged again, "I think so,"

The canal goes by the zoo. Might be a long walk, but it would be nice. Through Camden Lock." His neck was getting sore from looking up at her. She gripped the edge of the window sill, seemed to strain up on the window across the small of her back. She's stuck, he thought, but she doesn't want to admit it. Proud; embarrassed. Like me. He smiled. Perhaps he would have to go and get a ladder; rescue her. The idea amused him.

"Did you know the canal goes right under this house?" she said.

He shook his head. "No. Does it?"

"Straight underneath," she nodded. "Right below. I looked it up on the map. Isn't that amazing?"

"Maybe there's a secret passage."

"We could build one. Tunnel." Her voice sounded scratchy; he wanted to laugh at her but didn't. She was getting annoyed, embarrassed at being stuck out of the window, making conversation while she secretly strained, trying to heave the trapping window back up.

"You having problems up there?" he said, trying to keep a straight face.

"What?" she said, then "No, no of course not." She cleared her throat. "So, what have you been doing with yourself."

"Nothing much," he grinned, "just looking forward to seeing you." She made a funny face, gave a snorting sort of laugh. He continued, "I've done some more drawings of you."

"Oh yes?"

"They're still not good enough, though. I'm going to tear them up."

"Really?"

"You're difficult to draw." He looked up and down the street. "Will you pose for me properly some time?"

"You mean improperly," she said. He laughed.

"Better still. But I'd settle for you sitting still for a while."

"Maybe. One day. Well, all right; yes, definitely. I promise."

"I'll hold you to it."

"Do."

"So, are you going to come down?" he said.

She really was stuck. She turned her head round, he saw her shoulders tense and her back arch again. She muttered something which sounded like a curse. She turned to him again, nodded, "Yes, yes, just a second."

He grinned as she pushed up on the window sill, her head down, hair hanging blackly. He could just see her face as he walked over to the pavement beneath. She grunted; the window squeaked. He looked up into her triumphant face; she smiled broadly and then pushed herself back, waving once, saying, "Ah, that's better. See you in a second."

They walked to the lock at Camden; she didn't feel like walking very far. They spent most of the afternoon in a poster shop, looking, then in a cafe. She wouldn't walk back; they got the tube from Camden Town to the Angel.

In the train, in the tunnel, he asked her things he'd often wanted to ask, but never dared. There was a sort of noisy anonymity about the rattling carriage which made him feel safe.

He asked her about Stock; had she come to London for him?

She said nothing for a long time, then shook her head.

She had come to escape, to get away. The city was big enough to hide in, to become lost in and anyway she knew a few people here; Slater was one. Stock was here too, but she had no illusions, never had had any illusions, about the permanency of their relationship. She was here, she said, to be herself, to find her way again. Stock was... something she still needed, even yet; something to hold on to; a devil she knew, immovable in the change and flux of her life.

She knew they weren't suited to each other, really; she didn't love him, but she couldn't give him up just yet. Besides, he wasn't the sort it was easy to give up.

She stopped talking then, as though she thought she had already said more than she should have. She looked at Graham after a moment, put her hand to his cheek, said, "I'm sorry, Graham; you're good for me, I love talking to you. That means a lot. You don't know how much."

He put his hand on hers, held it. She gave a brave little smile. "I'm glad I'm good for you," he said (keeping his voice down; there were people nearby), "but I don't want to be just like a brother to you."

Her expression froze at that, and his heart seemed to sink into his guts as he realised he'd almost said the wrong thing. But she smiled again and said, "I'd understand if you didn't want to see me any more," and looked down, away from him, at her feet. She took her hand away. He hesitated at first, then put his hand on her shoulder.

That's not what I meant," he said. "I love seeing you. I'd miss you terribly if... well, if you went away." He paused, bit his lip lightly for a second, "But I don't know what you're doing. I don't know what your plans are; if you're going to stay here or go or what. I just feel uncertain."

"Join the club," she said. She looked at him, touched his hand where it rested on her shoulder. "I think I'll stay. I'm applying for the R.C.M. I had a place there if I'd wanted it, three... four years ago, but I didn't go. Now I might get a place there, this time. If they'll have me."

He bit his lip. What to do; admit his ignorance and ask what R.C.M. stood for, or just nod, make appreciative noises?

"What exactly will you do there?" he said.

She shrugged, looked at her long fingers, flexed them. "Piano. I think I can still play. I'm not getting the practice I should, though. I've got this electronic one of Veronica's; well, one of her ex-boyfriends'... and its action is all right, but it isn't the same." She shrugged, still inspecting her fingers, "We'll see."

He breathed again, relieved. Royal College of Music; that must be it. Of course; Slater had mentioned about her being good on the piano. "You should have a shot on one of the pianos in a pub sometime," he said. She smiled.

"Well, anyway," she said, taking a deep breath. He felt her slim shoulder move under the thick fabric of the tartan shirt, "as much as I know anything at the moment, that's what I think I'll be doing. Staying here probably, for the next few years. I think. I've still to get myself sorted out. But I'm glad you're here, you help me think." She looked into his eyes, as if searching for something in them; her white face made the dark, heavy-browed eyes look lost and empty, and after a while he could not look into them anymore, and had to smile and look away.

Then, from nowhere, a kind of despair seemed to settle on him, and he felt lonely and used and cheated, and for a moment wanted to be far away from this slim, black-haired woman with her tense white face and her slender fingers. The moment passed, and he tried to imagine what she was going through, how it felt to her.

The train shuddered and braked, slowing. Graham had a sudden, strange image of the train in its tunnel suddenly bursting through clay and bricks into the canal tunnel under Sara's flat; taking some ancient subterranean wrong-turning and missing the station entirely, smashing into the darkness and water of the old canal under the hill. He tried to imagine drawing such a scene, but couldn't. He shook his head, forgetting the idea and looking at Sara again as the train stopped in the station. She sat forward in her seat, smiling wryly.

"All my life people have liked me too quickly, Graham, and for all the wrong reasons. Maybe you'll change your mind when you know me better." The doors opened; she stood, and as he got to his feet, as they went out on to the platform, he grinned confidently and shook his head.

"No way," he said.

And now, in June, how much better did he know her? A little better; he had seen her in a few more moods, some higher, some lower. Her attraction had only grown; he found himself trying to smell her hair when they sat together in pubs, he gazed out of the corner of his eye at her breasts under whatever jumper or T-shirt she was wearing, wanting to touch them, hold them.

But it never seemed right; she would kiss him, for not very long, at the end of each meeting, and he could hold her, feel his arms around her narrow back, his body briefly against hers, but he could feel her tense if his hands went lower than the small of her back, and when he tried to kiss her more deeply, or hold her tighter, she would break away, shaking her head. He had almost given up testing the limits.

But now what? It sounded as though Stock was no more, as though at last she was free, strong enough to do without him, to get rid of his influence and accept Graham as more of - and more than - a friend.

Don't get your hopes up, not too much, he told himself. It might not be all you hope for. He stood at the side of Pentonville Road, by a telephone junction-box with posters advertising Woza Albert on it, and he told himself not to expect everything. Hopes and dreams had a way of evaporating.

But he could remember the sound of her voice on the phone that morning, when he'd called her up from the School, too well.

"Why don't you come in this time?" she said, "I'll get us a salad together, or something."

"Actually come into the flat?" he laughed. "You mean come oop and - "ow you zay - zee you zome time?" he said, in a good mood, making a silly French voice which he started to regret almost as soon as he'd spoken. Her voice over the phone was cool:

"Well... why not, Graham?"

His throat went dry after that; he didn't recall what else he'd said.

MRS SHORT

Social Insecurity!

He'd just remembered he owed Mrs Short a month's rent in a couple of days. He had plenty of money now, but what if they took a long time to give him this Social Security? Would he even get enough?

Grout stood outside Mrs Short's house in Packington Street, Islington. He didn't know whether to go in or not now; maybe he should go to the pub first; it was always easier to face Mrs Short with a drink in him. He decided not to be so stupid; he wouldn't really owe the rent until the end of the month, and it was only the twenty-eighth. Anyway, it being his birthday, he deserved favours. He let himself in.

It was dark in the narrow hall of Mrs Short's house; the small curved window over the front door was brown with grime, the walls were covered with dark brown wallpaper, and Mrs Short's supply of forty-watt lightbulbs appeared to have dried up once again. After the bright street, Grout was almost blind. He groped his way to the stairs and started up; his bedsit was on the third, top storey. Mrs Short pounced on the second floor landing.

"Oh, Mr Grout, you're home early," she said, coming out of the Television Lounge (hard chairs, monochrome set, lodgers to share licence fee and extra electricity, turned off at twelve o'clock). Mrs Short wiped her hands on her duster, then on her nylon dress; she was a stout, balding lady of about fifty. Her hair was so tightly tied back at the rear of her skull that Grout swore the front strands, over her forehead, were being pulled out by the roots, and that the tautened skin so produced was thus responsible for the expression of malevolent surprise she wore; he had the impression that when Mrs Short blinked her over-stretched eyelids didn't quite make it to the bottom of her eyes. That was why she blinked a lot and had such red eyes. "You "aven't been fired again, "ave you Mr Grout?" Mrs Short said, and burst out laughing, bending at the waist and cracking her duster like a whip.

Damn! Grout hadn't thought about this. What was he to say? He had a few precious seconds while Mrs Short laughed and then dried her eyes, wiping her nose on the duster. She sneezed suddenly; more precious seconds! He stood there. The seconds ticked away.

"Ah... no," he said. Well, it was succinct. Not all that convincing, perhaps, he knew that, but unequivocal. He pressed his lips tight together.

"Well then, Mr Grout, what brings you back so early?" Mrs Short smiled. The subtle variations in the colour of the enamel on her false teeth, replaced one by one over the years as the originals gave up the unequal struggle against the mint humbugs Mrs Short favoured, drew Steven's eyes and he said quickly,

"Dentist." Brilliant! he thought.

"Oh, you been or you going?" She poked her head forward, staring into his mouth. He closed it quickly.

"Going, soon," he mumbled.

"What's he going to do, then? Take any out? Fill them? My niece Pam, she got hers drilled by her dentist the other day; hit a nerve! She bit him; didn't mean to but she closed her mouth, didn't she? End of the drill snapped off in her mouth! Right in the tooth!" Mrs Short doubled up laughing at this. Steven watched anxiously to see whether a way round her and up the stairs would present itself, but without reward. Mrs Short came upright again, searched for a hanky in her dress pocket, failed to find one and so used her duster again, blowing into it, inspecting the nasal hollow indented in it briefly, then looking back at Grout. "Poor cow! Off work for a week she was. Had to eat through a straw!"

She mistook Steven's immobile expression for fear and said, leaning forward to flick his chest with her duster, "Oh, there I go; I'm making you all frightened now, aren't I? Oh, Mr Grout, you men are all the same; least little bit of pain and you're off. You should have a kid sometime! Ha!" She laughed, tears coming to her eyes at the memory. "Gawd, Mr Grout, I thought I was bein" torn in two! Scream? I thought I was goin" to die!" Mrs Short gave a long, in-sucking laugh, and had to hold on to the banister rail to prevent her mirth from toppling her to the ground. She flapped her duster weakly, then dried her eyes with it. Grout tried to estimate the distance between his landlady and the wall opposite the banisters to see if by grasping the latter she had left sufficient room for him to escape upstairs to his room. Not quite.

"Yes, well," he said, edging forward to show that he wanted to go upstairs. "Better get ready for the dentist." He shuffled forward, turning to one side so that he could squeeze between Mrs Short and the wall.

"Oh, you got to go now then have you?" Mrs Short said, turning to look at him but not actually moving out of his way. "Well I shall get on with my dusting then, I shall. You quite sure that I can't dust your room for you, Mr Grout? It wouldn't be any bother you know."

"Ah, no, no thank you," Steven said, trying to press himself back into the wall to get around Mrs Short's bulging hip. His back scraped against the peeling varnish of old wooden boards.

"Well, I should think you'd find it was much cleaner and less dusty in your room if I did your dusting for you, Mr Grout, really I do. Why don't we give it a sort of trial period?" Mrs Short nudged him in the ribs.

"No, honestly, no," Steven said, rubbing the place where Mrs Short had nudged him. What did it feel like when your spleen ruptured? Mrs Short still wasn't moving to let him past. She frowned at his shoulder and used her duster to flick something off it.

"No, I really..." Steven said, and then sneezed.

"You wouldn't have that hay fever half as bad if you let me dust your room, Mr Grout." She snapped her duster again. More of the shining motes which had made Steven sneeze the first time floated in the air around his face.

"Really must get to my -" he began, but Mrs Short said,

"No you wouldn't, Mr Grout."

"Room!" Grout gasped. He pointed up the stairs, and with one mighty effort succeeded in squeezing through the tight space between Mrs Short and the wall, almost falling out on the far side.

Mrs Short swivelled like a tank's gun turret and looked at him. "The room, Mr Grout? You want me to do it, then?" "No," Steven said, backing off towards the next flight of stairs, but still facing Mrs Short and trying to smile without showing his teeth. "No, honestly," he said, "really, I'll dust my own room, really. Thank you, but, no, really."

Mrs Short was still shaking her head and shaking her limp duster when he finally got round the sheltering twist in the stairs; Steven wiped his damp forehead, turned and ran quickly up the rest of the steps, shivering and grimacing as he thought about Mrs Short.

In his room, he could relax. He sat by the" window after he'd washed his face and upper body at the small handbasin in one corner of his room. From the basin he had to negotiate four straights and three right-angled corners through his maze of books on the floor to get to the window, where he had a small chair and could look out into Packington Street.

He liked looking out the window (today he had it open; it was a nice day) and sometimes would spend entire Saturday or Sunday afternoons just sitting there watching the traffic and the people in the street, and a curious sort of peace would slowly take him over, like something hypnotic, like a trance; he would just sit there, not thinking or worrying or seething about anything, just sitting watching, mind blank and free of cares, and the cars would move and the people pass and talk, and for a little while, through that lack of thought, that temporary surrender of his own personality, he could start to feel part of this place, this city and people and species and society; feel like he imagined all the other, ordinary people, the people who were not him and were not there specifically to torment him, must feel all the time.

He dried himself with his small towel; it smelled a bit, but not offensively. Comforting, like his bed.

He looked over the maze-walls of books covering the floor of his room. The book-walls, which he tried to keep at roughly the same level, were up to mid-thigh level now, and he was worried that soon they would start to become unstable. Of course, if he wasn't going to be getting any money he wouldn't be able to buy any more paperbacks for a while, maybe not until he found another new job. But even so, it was depressing to think of the chaos which would result from the books becoming unstable through sheer height, and while there was one way round the problem (he was proud to have worked this out) by putting the books together like bricks in a wall instead of simply stacking them one on top of another, this would make it even more difficult to get at a book if he wanted to read it again.

He started to panic at the thought, and wound his way through the books to the door of the room. He locked it, and took his Sunday-best safety helmet down from the overloaded peg behind the door. He put the hat on, and felt better. He took a different route back to the chair by the window and sat down again. What would he do now? Go for a drink. That was what you did when you left work, or when you had lots of money. He took the money out. It was mostly in ten pound notes; there were lots. He looked at the big brown rectangles of paper; the Queen looked nice, the way he liked to think his mother must have looked. Florence Nightingale, on the back, on the other hand, reminded him of some of the nurses at the home he'd gone to.

He put the money away, stuffing it into his back pocket. He looked round his room, over the walls of books, the pile of clothes by the side of his bed, the hunchback of jackets and shirts and coat and ties on the back of the door, the large wardrobe where he'd kept all his books originally, and still had lots of them stored in shoeboxes, the small bedside cabinet with a plastic glass of water and his latest book lying on it. The room had an old, blocked-off fireplace, where his two-bar electric fire sat. On the mantelpiece was his collection of car mascots.

There were five Jaguars, eight Rolls-Royce silver ladies, two old Austin signs, and a varied collection of leaping salmon, racing horses, pedigree dogs and one cricketer, wielding a bat. He still, to his disappointment, had no Bentley mascots. He kept the Mercedes signs in a big jar at one end of the mantelpiece. He wasn't really bothered about Mercedes signs, but somehow his original reason for hacksawing the mascots off cars - his own safety - had been complicated by the collector's urge to add depth and breadth to the collection.

Originally he had taken offence at Jaguar mascots; the leaping cat, no longer on every car, but still in actual, solid form on quite enough, seemed designed to disembowel him. The silver lady was little better, and some of the custom-made special mascots were even worse. He thought they were illegal, but when he went to the Police Station in Upper Street to complain that people were riding around in these lethally armed cars, the bored-looking sergeant had just looked at him and eventually said well there wasn't a lot he could do about it and sir would just have to look both ways before crossing the street (Steven had been disappointed about that, but on the other hand he was most impressed that a policeman had called him "sir'). They weren't usually helpful, and of course it was obvious that at least some of them must be in on the whole secret of Grout's Torment, but even so, you couldn't help but admire them and look up to them, and to have one call him "sir" was rather good. He went back a few weeks later to report the theft of a bicycle he didn't even own, just so that he could be called "sir" again.

Taking the car mascots was often dangerous. Several times he had almost been caught by enraged owners when they heard some noises in the street outside, in the darkness, or heard feet crunch in a twilit driveway.

Steven had stuck to the immediate area at first; Islington, especially Canonbury, and the quiet streets around Highbury Fields. Then the pickings became leaner as people were careful not to leave their cars in shady spots and parked them only under lamp-posts, or were more conscientious about putting their cars in their drives or garages, and locking the gates.

Steven, hacksaw in pocket, had accordingly widened his area of operations, and now was liable to strike anywhere from the City to Highgate, capturing jaguars, kidnapping silver ladies and pocketing stars. He certainly felt a lot safer walking about the streets, holding his breath between the parked cars and trucks, keeping an eye out for low walls and raised doorsteps he could also use to escape from the lasers in the passing vehicles, knowing that a good few of those growling death-traps had been made that little bit safer thanks to him.

Then he had started to think about bikes; motorbikes could be pretty deadly, too. They were usually driven by suicidal exhibitionists, and just the sound of them had given Steven some terrible frights in the past, and made him hate the people who rode them.

So he'd started putting sugar in their fuel tanks; that was what he'd been doing the previous evening, down in Clerkenwell. He'd been out until two in the morning, and had been chased by a security guard who'd seen him fiddling with a bike's fuel tank in a car park. Steven had been very nervous and excited when he got back, and even though he felt very tired he had taken a long time to get to sleep. Maybe that was why he'd been on a short fuse this morning.

Well, he didn't care; that was their problem, back at the depot. They'd see, when those holes in Upper Street which he had repaired were still intact after all theirs had opened up again. Let them worry about all that. He didn't regret sugaring bikes" tanks and scalping car mascots in the least. He wasn't even just doing it for himself, after all. Although of course he was the most important person, he was doing everybody else- all these people walking in Packington Street, for example - a favour as well.

Steven hung the small towel on the back of the chair by the window. He looked through the pile of clothes hung on the back of his door until he found a cleanish shirt, and put it on. There was a can of Right Guard under his bed which he used to spray under his arms when he remembered, but it had run out last week and he kept forgetting to get a new one. He tucked his shirt into his trousers.

He took his Evidence Box out from the bedside cabinet and went to sit with it by the window. The Evidence Box was an old cardboard Black and White whisky case Steven had picked up somewhere. In it he kept a small radio-cassette recorder, a piece of estate agent's literature and a school atlas, along with dozens of fading yellow newspaper cuttings.

The cuttings were of the Strange But True type; fillers and funnies, supposedly True Stories which Steven could tell were complete nonsense; made-up rubbish they taunted him with, trying to get him to stand up and challenge them, call their bluff. But he wasn't going to be so predictable or stupid; he would keep quiet, and he would collect the evidence. One day he might have a real use for it, but in the meantime it was reassuring.

He took out the cassette recorder, switched the tape on. He had recorded the noise of the so-called "static" from the Short Wave band. But he knew what it really was; he listened to the grinding, deep, continuous roaring noise, and he recognised the sound of the War's eternal heavy bombers of the air. He was amazed that nobody else had noticed it. Those were engines, that wasn't static. He knew. This was a Leak, a tiny slip they had made which let part of reality slip through into this false prison of life.

He breathed deeply, looking out down Packington Street, trying to remember or imagine what those droning, immense-sounding noises represented; through what limitless airs and atmospheres did those huge craft power, what was their seemingly endless mission, what was the appalling cargo they carried, what dreadful enemy would suffer beneath them when they arrived over their target. He switched the tape off, rewound it.

The next piece of evidence was trickier. It was a sheet of paper with house-buying details on it; the evidence of the leak came from the name of the firm. Hotblack Desiato was the name of the estate agents, and Grout knew that was a Leak. He was sure he could recall something about that name which related back to his previous life, his real life in the War. What that name actually meant, whether it was a name at all, and if so that of a friend or enemy or place or thing, or whether it was a phrase, order, instruction or what, he could not remember, no matter how hard he thought about it, or how hard he didn't think about it and just waited for his subconscious to come up with the right answer. But it meant something, he was sure. Something had happened to him, sometime, which related to that name.

Oh, and as usual, they were very clever, very subtle. If the name was not a Leak then it was a deliberate ploy by the Tormentors to taunt him, tease him. They had put that firm of estate agents in the area he lived in just so that he could keep seeing their signs and so be constantly distressed and frustrated by his inability to remember exactly when and where he'd heard the name before. Anyway, it was more evidence, even if it turned out just to be a Leak and they hadn't meant it. He folded the paper up again and put it back in the box.

He took out the atlas, opened it at a map of the World. He had drawn red-ink circles round places like Suez and Panama, Gibraltar and the Dardanelles.

He snorted with contempt at their ridiculous attempt to design a reasonable-looking planet. Who did they think they were kidding? Ho-ho, so the continents just happen to link on to each other, do they? Very handy. Any idiot could see it was all too carefully arranged to be natural. It had been designed. Whether he really was on a planet with those shapes on it he didn't know; he suspected not, but it didn't matter. Even if, as he rather suspected, the "world" actually came to an end just outside Greater London, that wasn't the point. The point was that they were trying to get people - him - to believe this travesty of a map. The contempt they must feel for him, expecting him to accept this! It made him boil just to think of it. But they had made a serious mistake; they had underestimated him, and they would not break him, certainly not while he had evidence like this to back him up. He turned the atlas to the pages on South East Asia... yes, the island of Celebes still looked like a letter from some alien alphabet (and the more he thought about it, the more familiar it looked, too, so that sometimes he almost thought he knew what it represented, or the sound it made, if his human throat or brain was capable of forming such a foreign sound). He closed the atlas, smiling to himself and feeling better; justified and reassured. He put everything back in the Evidence Box and put it back in his bedside cabinet, where it fitted in neatly, then he made his way carefully back to the window, dosed it, and threaded his way back through the walls of books to the door, making sure that he had his door keys and his money in his pockets.

He stopped at the door, faced with the choice of keeping his good hat on or putting on his usual safety helmet. He decided to keep the good one on. It was a lovely deep-blue colour, with almost no scratches or abrasions on it at all, and a nice real leather sweatband bit inside the front part of the inner webbing. Why not keep it on? Celebrate today. It was his birthday, after all. He wondered if it was worthwhile telling Mrs Short it was his birthday. It didn't seem right that nobody else knew. At least if he told Mrs Short there would be somebody to wish him "Happy birthday" or "Many happy returns'. That would be nice. Still undecided, he left the room, after first checking that he hadn't left the fire on or left a plug in a socket, or left the light on.

He didn't encounter Mrs Short on the way down the stairs, and found this something of a relief. He was walking quietly through the gloom of the front hall towards the door to the street when Mrs Short's door opened suddenly and she was there in front of him in the hallway, huge arms folded, the light reflected on her taut-skinned forehead.

"Aow, there you are, Mr Grout. Off to the dentist, then?"

"What?" Steven said foolishly, then remembered. "Oh, yes, yes that's right. Umm..." He closed his mouth so that Mrs Short couldn't see into it, not that he expected her to be able to see anything in the darkness, but one never knew.

Mrs Short said, "Don't suppose you'd like to give me my rent money now, would you, Mr Grout, in case I don't see you for a few days?"

Steven thought about this. Not seeing Mrs Short for a few days. What a pleasant thought. But unlikely. He shook his head and said. "No, not just now, Mrs Short; I haven't got enough money just at the moment. I'll have it on... Friday," he lied, starting to feel hot again. They were using the microwaves on him even now, even here! He had one of his hands behind his back, the fingers crossed because he was telling lies.

"Well, if you're sure, Mr Grout," Mrs Short said, then looked down at his trousers. "Only I thought I saw this bulge in your rear pocket, didn't I?" An" me bein" me I just naturally assumed that it was pay."

Steven felt his eyes widen. He didn't know what to say; Mrs Short had guessed! She must know! In fact - of course! - they'd told her. She had probably been informed by the depot immediately after he'd left. That was probably one of the first things that Mr Smith's secretary had done. Idiot! Why hadn't he guessed this?

Well, he would just have to brazen it out, he decided. There was no point in trying to come to some sort of compromise now. It was all or nothing. Mrs Short might know, but it seemed that it was not in the rules that she was allowed to tell him she knew, and she could only imply it.

"Friday," Steven said, nodding briskly. "Money on Friday. Definitely." He edged towards the welcoming opening of the door, shaking his head as he passed her. She blinked rapidly at him. He had often wondered if this was some sort of code. He cleared his throat, said, "That's all right, thank you." He patted his back pocket; "Dental card," he explained. Mrs Short nodded sympathetically.

He was out! He stood on the doorstep, almost in the street, and he'd escaped. "You mind how you go now, Mr Grout, won't you?"

"Oh yes," he said, and turned, took a deep breath, and set off down the street.

"Sure I can't dust your room while you're out, Mr Grout?" Mrs Short shouted from the still-open doorway when Steven was about ten yards away. He felt himself seize up; his legs stopped, his shoulders came up as though to tense for a falling blow. He turned round in the street, looked back at the stoutly smiling face of Mrs Short, and shook his head violently. There were no parked cars for about thirty metres; traffic was grumbling down the street in a ragged stream. He shook his head again.

"What's that, Mr Grout?" Mrs Short shouted, and put one chubby hand, cupped, to her ear. He stared at her, widening his eyes, shook his head as violently as he dared. "Can't hear you, Mr G," Mrs Short called to him. He was starting to run out of oxygen?-

He put his head down and walked back to the doorway, stood up out of the level of the laser-axles, and said straight into Mrs Short's face, "No, thank you, Mrs Short. Please don't dust my room. I prefer to do it myself."

"Well, if you're sure," Mrs Short smiled.

"Oh, completely," Grout assured her. He waited there, to see if she would close the door, but she didn't. He took a deep breath, said "Goodbye," and turned away. He walked quickly, towards Upper Street, and had done perhaps fifty metres before he heard Mrs Short, far in the distance, shout at him. He didn't turn round, but heard her distant scream of "Byeee!" with a sort of nauseous relief.

SPOTLESS DOMINOES

They sat on the balcony outside the games room of the Castle Doors. Inside was a blaze of light. The snow on the balcony had all melted and a warm, moist, salty breeze blew around them constantly, from the room over the balcony and out into the open air. Quiss and Ajayi sat with light tunics on, over the small wood-filigree table, shuffling plain white sticks of ivory over the cut surface.

It was now too hot in the games room. The boilers of the Castle of Bequest had been repaired only about thirty of their days ago, and according to the seneschal there was still a bit of "fine tuning" to be done.

From where she sat, Ajayi could see the quarries. Small black figures moved up the snow-covered paths and roads to the mines and quarries, and carts trundled to and fro; the ponderous, laden ones disappearing from her view behind an outcrop of - she peered, narrowing her eyes to try and see better - well, either rock or the castle; she couldn't tell.

The rest of the landscape was as near-flat and uniform as ever. A gust of warm air from the baking heat of the games room swirled round her, then unwound itself again. She shivered briefly. No doubt all this heat, and the salt, was playing even greater havoc with the castle's plumbing than usual, and before too long, once they did get things back to normal, and an acceptable level of light and heat, the whole system would break down again, probably for even longer. In the meantime they were playing a game called Spotless Dominoes, in which plain pieces of ivory had to be arranged in certain linear patterns.

Neither she nor Quiss had any idea when they were going to finish the game, or even how well they were doing at any stage, because although they knew that in the original version of the game there were spots on the ivory pieces, their pieces were blank. They had to lay them out in lines each time they played, hoping that the small table with the red glowing jewel at its centre on which they played would recognise that the spot-values it had -randomly, of course - assigned to the pieces before each game were such that the pattern Quiss and Ajayi produced was a logical one; one in which, if all the spots suddenly appeared on the surfaces of the dominoes, the pattern would make sense; a one would be matched with a one or a double one, a two with a two or a double two, and so on. It was the most frustrating game they had played yet, and they had been playing it for one hundred and ten days.

She deliberately did not think about how long they had been in the castle. It didn't matter. It was one instant of exile, that was all. She had no idea how much of it she would remember if... when she returned to her post in the Therapeutic Wars. It was a rare punishment and not one that people who had had to experience it were likely to talk very much about even if one did bump into them, so although she, like Quiss, had always known of the existence of the castle, what happened to those who successfully passed through it was not recorded.

No, it did not matter how long they were here, as long as they did not despair or go mad. They just had to keep playing the games and trying the many different answers, and eventually they would get out.

Ajayi looked over at her companion, without him seeing. Quiss was busy mixing the dominoes up, frowning deeply at them as though he could somehow bully the pieces of dead animal into forming a correct pattern. Quiss, Ajayi thought, seemed to be surviving all right. She still worried about him though, because his urgent, intimidatory style was not guaranteed to last for ever against the castle's so often impenetrably purposeless-seeming regime. She was afraid that what he had constructed for himself was something too much like armour, too much like what the castle itself represented. That armour might have to give in eventually, just as no fortress ever built could withstand any siege (they had discussed this ultimate vulnerability of the static, the hardened, before they gave their first answer to the riddle), whereas she had tried not to armour herself, she had tried to go with the castle's strange mood; adapt to it, accept it.

"Oh get on with it you two," the red crow said from its perch on the stump of a flag-pole about three metres above their heads, "I've had more fun watching snails fuck."

"Why don't you go and do just that?" Quiss growled at it, without looking, as he took seven of the face-down dominoes from the shuffled log-jam of them in the centre of the small table. He held all seven of his pieces easily in one huge hand, the little bone-chips lost in the hard flesh's folds and creases.

"Listen, greybeard," the red crow said, "it's my appointed duty to stay here and annoy you bastards, and that's just what I'm going to do until you have the sense - not to mention the common decency, considering you've grievously overstayed your welcome - to do away with yourselves." The red crow's voice twisted into an impersonation of Ajayi's least favourite teacher from her schooldays; "Ajayi, you old bag, pick up your pieces and play. We haven't got all day, you know." The red crow chuckled after this last sentence.

Ajayi said nothing. She selected seven of the dominoes, biting her lower lip as she did so. The bird's voice really did grate; it war ludicrous really, but the damn thing was an uncomfortably accurate mimic and commanded a repertoire of hateful voices from the past.

It was Ajayi's turn to start. She took one of the blank tiles and set it down in the middle of the table. She knew that there was something about the way she inspected her dominoes before placing them down which infuriated Quiss, who just picked out the first one that came to hand. Somehow, though, Ajayi needed this pretence; it was one of those little things which kept her going. She couldn't just pick up the dominoes, whack them down one after another, mix them up and do the whole thing again, even if that was the fastest way of getting through the games; that was too mechanical, too uncaring. It was important to her always to believe that this next game would be the right one, the one where everything fitted and all the junctions of all the pieces made sense, so giving them another chance to escape from here.

So she placed her piece down carefully, thoughtfully. Quiss slapped one of his down immediately after her. Ajayi paused for thought. Quiss tutted impatiently and tapped one foot. The red crow coughed from the stump overhead. "Bugger me, here we go again. I hope you two get fed up soon and kill yourselves so we can at least get some people in here who'll be fun."

"You're not the most gracious of hosts, crow," Ajayi said, putting a domino down.

"I'm not your host, idiot," the red crow sneered. "Even you should be able to work that out. I know you've no balls but I thought you had the basic minimum of brains."

Quiss snapped another of the white tiles down on the table, and Ajayi looked suspiciously at him, not sure if she could hear him suppressing a laugh or not. He cleared his throat. Ajayi looked up at the red crow. "Oh," she said, "I think you are in a way, whether you like it or not. In some ways you are a very fitting host, because you help to epitomise what this place is about, so" - she looked away from it and studied the pieces of ivory in her hand when she heard the tap-tap of Quiss's foot on the balcony floor, "-while you might not like it, you do play the part well."

(The red crow was looking out over the snowy landscape and quietly shaking its head.)

"Not pleasantly," Ajayi concluded, "but thoroughly."

"What a load of bullshit," the red crow said, looking down at her, still shaking its head. "Bullshit from an old cow." It looked away from her, out over the white plain again. "You think you're being punished; I've got to stick around and listen to all this rubbish. I wonder why I bother sometimes, I really do. Must be easier ways of making a living."

Ajayi was looking up at it, thoughtfully. She was wondering if there was some way of making a weapon with which they could shoot the red crow. If they did, what else would be added to their sentence, and would it be worth it? She could hear Quiss's boot going tap-tap again, but ignored it as she looked at the red crow. She had been aware of Quiss sniggering when the red crow was insulting her, and didn't see why she should hurry with her next domino just to please him. The red crow stared back at Ajayi, then after a few seconds shook itself furiously, spreading its wings briefly and stretching one leg out as though stiff. "Come on, will you?" it shouted at her. "Good god, woman, what got you in here?

Prevarication or just plain stupidity? Or both? Get on with it."

Ajayi looked away from the bird, selecting one of her dominoes and placing it slowly, carefully on the surface of the table. She felt her face flushing slightly.

"Don't tell me," Quiss said, leaning close over the table to talk in a low voice as he put down his next piece, "that our little feathered friend has hurt you..." he glanced into the old woman's eyes as he leant back again. Ajayi looked away from Quiss's eyes, then shook her head slowly as she chose between the remaining dominoes in her hand.

"No," she said, taking one of the ivory pieces from her palm, leaning forward to place it on the table, then changing her mind, putting it back and reconsidering, rubbing her chin with one hand. An exasperated choking noise came from above their heads.

This is ridiculous," the red crow said, "I think I'll go and watch some icicles form. It can't be any more boring than this." With that, it opened its wings and flew off, muttering. Ajayi watched it go. Some other rooks and crows from higher battlements flew down and joined it as it flew off in the direction of the slate mines.

"Pest," Quiss said after it. He drummed one set of stubby fingers on the table top and looked back at Ajayi, who nodded and put another domino down. "No," Quiss said, putting another piece down, "it's just that I wondered if it had struck a bit close to the bone with that remark. About how you ended up here." Quiss darted a look at his companion, who watched him look away again and smiled to herself.

"Well," she said, considering the choices in her hand, "perhaps it's time we told each other why we're both here. What we did to be sent here."

"Hmm," Quiss said, apparently not all that interested. "Yes, I suppose we might as well. Perhaps there's even some sort of clue to the right answer we should give; you know; something common to both our... reasons for being here which might help us out," He raised his eyebrows at her, a "what-do-you-think-of-that?" expression. Ajayi thought it politic not to remind Quiss that she had come out with exactly that argument for them trading stories not long after she had arrived in the castle. Quiss had been totally opposed to talking about their separate misfortunes at that point. She had decided all she could do - all she had better get used to doing - was be patient.

"Well that might be a good idea, Quiss. If you're quite sure you don't mind telling."

"Me? No, not at all, not at all," Quiss said quickly. He paused. "Ah... you first."

Ajayi smiled. "Well," she said, taking a deep breath, "what happened was... I was aide-de-camp to our Philosophy Officer, who in our squadron was of Marshal rank."

"Philosophy Officer," Quiss said, nodding knowingly.

"Yes," Ajayi said. "He was a terribly keen hunter, and - rather unfashionably - enjoyed getting back to the great outdoors and the good old-fashioned ways of doing things, whenever he had the opportunity.

"I could appreciate the concept of getting back to one's roots and reaffirming one's integral relationship with nature - even if it was alien nature - all right, but I let him know I thought he took it too far. I mean, he would never take anything like communication gear or transport along, or even modern weapons. All we had were a couple of archaic rifles and our own legs."

"You went along with him," Quiss said.

"Had to," Ajayi shrugged. "He said he took me along because he liked arguing with me. So I used to go on these expeditions with him, and I became quite proficient at the art of rhetoric, and passably handy with the ancient, primitive weapons it amused him to hunt with. Also quite skilled at rejecting his rarely more than half-hearted advances.

"One day, towards dusk on this... place... we were trudging through a swamp trailing some immense wounded beast he'd just shot, beset by insects, tired, out of contact with the fleet until a fast picket rendezvoused with us at midnight, wet, fed up... well, I was anyway; he was having a great time... when suddenly he tripped on a submerged tree trunk or something, and as he fell his hand must have closed on the trigger- his gun was so old it didn't even have a safety catch - and he shot himself in the chest.

"He was in a bad way; still conscious but in a lot of pain (he didn't believe in taking modern medicines on these trips either). I thought I'd better move him out of the marsh and over to some rocks I could just about make out through the mists, but when I tried to move him he started screaming a lot; then I remembered reading some historical story about people being shot with these ancient projectile weapons and having bullets dug out of them without any anaesthetic, and what they used to do then, and I thought that what they did seemed oddly appropriate in the circumstances, even if it probably didn't do any real good, so I took a bullet out of my own gun and gave it to him to bite on while I dragged him over to the rocks."

"And?" Quiss said, once Ajayi had stopped. She sighed.

"It was an explosive bullet. Blew his head off soon as he bit it."

Quiss slapped his knee with his free hand and rocked with laughter. "Really? Explosive? Ha ha ha!" He went on slapping his knee and swaying in his seat, howling with laughter. Tears came to his eyes and he had to put his three remaining dominoes face down on the table and hold his belly with both hands.

"I knew I could count on your sympathy," Ajayi said dryly, putting down another ivory tile.

That's beautiful," Quiss said, voice weakened with laughter. He wiped the tears from his old cheeks, took up his dominoes again. "I take it he was dead." He played one of the pieces.

"Of course he was dead!" Ajayi snapped. It was the first time she had ever spoken loudly or harshly to Quiss, and he sat back, looking surprised. She tried not to scowl as much as she felt like doing, but went on, "his brains were spread over half the swamp. And me."

"Ho ho ho!" Quiss said sympathetically. "Ha ha ha!" He shook his head, grinning widely, and sniffed.

"What about you? What did you do?" Ajayi asked. Quiss was quiet all of a sudden. He frowned at the two remaining dominoes in his hand.

"Hmm," he said.

"I've told you mine," Ajayi said. "Now you tell me yours."

"I don't know that you'd really be interested," Quiss said, not looking at her. He shook his head, still looking at his hand. "It's a bit of an anti-climax after yours."

He looked up, a look of pained apology on his face, to see that Ajayi was glaring at him, not only more furiously than he had ever seen her looking before, but also rather more furiously than he would have thought her capable of looking. He cleared his throat.

"Hmm. Well, on the other hand," he said, "I suppose it is only fair." He put down his dominoes on the table, put his hands on his knees and stared over the top of Ajayi's head. "Strangely similar to yours, in a way... might be a common link. There was this gun involved... anyway." He cleared his throat again, putting his fist to his mouth and coughing. He was still staring over his companion's head, as though the red crow was still on the broken flagpole above them and he was addressing it, not the woman.

"Well, anyway... suffice to say that after a long... ahm... and strenuous campaign... and not one we had expected to survive really, I might add, I was with others of our guard corps on the roof of... this big palace in this city. There were celebrations; the... ahm... this dignitary... well, a prince actually; this was one of those backward places as well, and we were limited by the rules to fairly crude weapons and equipment and stuff... well this prince was due to appear on..." Quiss looked briefly at Ajayi, then around at the balcony they sat on,'... on a sort of balcony thing like this," he said lamely. He cleared his throat again.

"Well, there was this huge crowd waiting to greet the prince; maybe a million locals, all armed to the mandibles with pitchforks and muskets and things - but all more or less on our side, and anyway glad the fighting was over - and we were guarding the palace roof with a few unobtrusive missiles, just in case there was some desperate last-ditch aircraft attack, not that that was very likely, we thought.

"We were all a bit... umm... happy, I suppose, and we were celebrating too, and in high spirits anyway, glad to be alive, and we had some drink... and two of us - this other captain and me -were having a lark, daring each other to walk along this sort of balustrade thing on the roof, looking over the crowd, above the balcony where this prince and his cronies were going to appear, and we were closing our eyes and walking along, and standing on one leg and drinking, and using these big machine-guns to balance ourselves... sounds a bit undisciplined, I know, but like I say..." Quiss coughed.

"This other captain and myself, we collided while we were walking along the parapet; walked right into each other while our eyes were closed... of course, our comrades thought it was a great laugh, but while the other fellow was falling towards the roof and into the arms of these other drunken types, I was falling the other way, over the edge of the roof. All there was down that way was the balcony about ten metres down, and then the ground about twenty metres beneath that. I was off-balance, going over, my comrades were out of reach; I mean that was it; I was going to plummet right down to my death. I was a goner." Quiss looked briefly at Ajayi, his expression one of pained sincerity, then he looked away again and continued.

"But... well, like I said, I was holding this big machine gun, and just sort of without thinking about it, pure instinct I suppose, I... I brought this big machine-gun round, and pointed it down the way, and fired it off." Quiss cleared his throat loudly, shaking his head and narrowing his eyes. Thing was set on anti-aircraft rate; just about leapt out of my hands. Could barely control it, but the recoil was enough to bring me upright again, let me get my balance on the parapet before the magazine ran out of bullets. So I was saved.

"Only trouble was, the prince and his retinue had just come out on to the balcony beneath me as this was happening, and got caught in this hail of fragging AA shells that bugger of a gun had sprayed all over the place. Killed the prince and quite a few of his pals, not to mention several dozen in the crowd underneath.

"Crowd got very annoyed. Pandemonium; riot and mayhem. Palace was sacked. Cost us forty days and half a brigade to calm the upset. That's it." Quiss shrugged, looked down at the table.

"Yours sounds more dramatic," Ajayi said, trying not to sound amused. "Back from the brink of death." She played a domino.

"Oh, yes," Quiss said, and his eyes took on a misty, distant expression as he looked up, "I felt really great for about half a second."

Ajayi smiled, "So, it would appear we share an element of slightly thoughtless irresponsibility, and projectile weapons." She looked up at the ramshackle heights of the castle above them. "The links don't seem all that close, but there you are. Here we are. Does any of this actually help us?"

"No," Quiss said, shaking his great grey head sadly, "I don't think so."

"Still," Ajayi said, "I'm glad we both know now."

"Yes," Quiss said, placing his second last piece. He coughed. "Sorry I ah... laughed. Shouldn't have. Bad form. Apologies."

His head was down, so he did not see Ajayi smile at him, a look of real affection on her old, lined face. "As you say, Quiss," she said, smiling quietly.

Her stomach rumbled. It must be nearly mealtime. A waiter would probably appear soon. Sometimes the waiters took their orders and brought what was ordered, sometimes they brought something quite different, sometimes they didn't take their orders but arrived with what they probably would have ordered anyway. Often they brought far too much food and stood around looking confused, as though looking for other people to serve. At least the times of the meals were relatively predictable, and the food satisfying, usually.

She wanted a break from the games anyway. She could take only so much of this purposeless placing of ivory pieces. After a while she got bored and restless and wanted to do something else.

For a while, when her stiff back and sore leg permitted, she had explored the castle, going off for long walks, at first always with Quiss, who knew the rough lay-out of the place better, then later mostly by herself. Her bones and joints still complained about climbing stairs, but she ignored the pain as best she could and anyway took frequent rests, and trudged through vast areas of the castle, exploring its turrets and rooms and battlements, shafts and halls. She preferred to keep to the upper levels, where there were less people around and the feeling of the castle was more... sane, she supposed.

Lower down, Quiss had told her, things got more chaotic. The kitchens were the worst, in some ways, but there were even stranger places, places Quiss didn't like talking about (she suspected this was just him enjoying the feeling of power which exclusive knowledge gives to people, but perhaps in some clumsy way he thought he was protecting her from something. He meant well; she would allow him this).

Eventually, though, the attraction of the castle's tortuous internal geography palled on her, and now she restricted herself to only very occasional sallies, mostly conducted - as near as possible - on the same level, just to stretch her legs. The very inexhaustibility of the castle's ever-changing topography depressed her after a while, whereas at first it had seemed encouraging that one could never know the place perfectly, that it would never be boring, that it was always constantly changing; falling down, being rebuilt, altered and redesigned. Stuck all the time in a human frame which would not change, imprisoned in this one age, this cage of cells, the analogue of organic change and growth and decay which the castle exhibited seemed somehow unfair; an unpleasant reminder of something she might never have again.

Now she filled up her spare time with reading. She took books from the interior walls of the castle and read them. They were in many different languages, most of them tongues from the nameless planet which was the castle's Subject and from where all the books seemed to originate. These languages she could not understand.

Some of the books, however, appeared to have been produced on this single globe as translations into other - alien - languages, some of which Ajayi could to varying degrees understand. She often wondered, as she read, if perhaps the name of the Subject world was some sort of clue; it had been carefully removed from any and every book in the castle which mentioned it, the word cut out from each page it had been written on.

Ajayi read the books she could. She took them from the littered floor of the games room, or from deteriorating walls and columns, only glancing at most of them, dropping or replacing those whose languages she couldn't understand, scanning the remainder and keeping to read later those which sounded interesting. Only about one in twenty or thirty was both comprehensible and intriguing. Quiss wasn't happy with her new pastime, and accused her of wasting not only her own time, but his as well. Ajayi had told him she needed something to keep her sane. Quiss still grumbled, but he was hardly blameless himself. He still went for his long walks through the castle, and sometimes didn't come back for several days. She had tried asking him what he did, but the reaction was always either blank or hostile.

So she was reading, and gradually, with the use of some picture books she had discovered in one not-too-distant gallery, she was trying to teach herself one of the languages she kept encountering in the books which appeared to be written in one of the Subject world's own tongues. It was difficult - almost as though by design - but she was persevering, and after all, she had plenty of time.

THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT. Well, it was a start.

Ajayi put her last domino down. Quiss hesitated before completing the pattern, suddenly unsure which end of the line of tiles to put his last one on.

The woman was getting restless, and soon, he guessed, it would be time to eat. And this would be another wasted, stupid game, like all the others, no matter what way he put this piece down. They should have come up with a solution by now, a good pattern, a logical arrangement that would satisfy whatever subtle mechanism existed within the small table. But they hadn't. Were they doing something wrong? Had something escaped them in their attempt to escape? They had checked and re-checked and didn't think so.

Perhaps they were just unlucky.

Already they had gone through three sets of the pieces; three times he had become so frustrated with the whole idiotic exercise he had just thrown the dominoes away, out over the balcony; once while still in their ivory box, once lifting the table and shaking it over the edge of the balcony (Ajayi had almost died of fright, he remembered with a grim smile; she thought he was going to throw the table away too, and there was only one table; no replacements. If it was destroyed or badly damaged then they were not allowed to play any more games, and therefore could give no more answers), and once he had just cuffed the bone pieces off the table surface and sent them scattering through the pot-bellied slatework of the balcony's balustrade. (However, now the seneschal was saying he would have the table bolted to the floor.)

Well, what did they expect? He was a man of action. This constipated, decaying puzzle-palace wasn't his sort of place at all. Ajayi seemed to enjoy it at times, and he would have to sit sometimes, fidgeting, while she expounded on some philosophical or mathematical idea she thought might get them out of their predicament. He wasn't going to challenge her on what was more or less her home ground, but from the little that even he knew of philosophy, he thought that her smug positivism sounded too soulless and logical to be much use in the real world. What the hell was the point of trying rationally to analyse what was fundamentally irrational (or a-rational as she, splitting hairs as usual, would sometimes admit)? It was a way to arrive at personal madness and despair, not some universal understanding. But he wasn't going to put this to Ajayi; she'd smile tolerantly and shoot him down in flames, without a doubt. Know your strengths; don't attack where you're weak. That was his sort of philosophy; military. That and an acceptance that life was basically absurd, unfair and - ultimately -pointless.

The woman read a lot. She was going downhill, even trying to understand one of the common languages she had found in the books on the games room floor and in the walls. It was a bad sign, Quiss was sure. She was starting to give in, not taking the games they were playing seriously. Or taking them too seriously; the wrong way. The appearance was taking over the reality. She was getting caught up in the surface of the games, not their real meaning, so that instead of getting the games over with as quickly as possible and so getting to their real goal - another crack at the riddle - she was starting to behave as though the playing, the motions and apparent choices, mattered.

He wasn't going to give up, but he did need to escape this dead, desperate feeling the games and the woman gave him. He had escorted her round the castle for a while, showing her the odd places he had discovered, the one or two odd characters who existed in the place (the neurotic barber was his personal favourite), but gradually she had gone off more and more by herself, then seemingly become bored with it (or frightened, somehow, he wasn't sure), and stopped.

He still visited the castle's lower floors and storeys, journeying down to the kitchens and even beyond, so far below he guessed he was almost down to the level of the snowy plain itself, deep inside the rocky crag the castle proper stood upon. There were a few strange things down there, and, past a certain level, a suspicious number of locked, stout, metal-banded doors.

He had a few attendants he had partly befriended and partly terrorised into acting as guides for him. He told them he would put in a good word for them with the seneschal if they did what he wanted, but that if they didn't he would have them transferred to the slate mines or the ice-gathering expeditions. Apart from these bribes and threats (none of which he could deliver on as he had no influence whatsoever with the seneschal in such matters) he relied entirely on personal charm.

The stunted minions led him to new places in and under the Castle of Bequest, and even told him things about themselves; that of course they too were exiles from the Wars, but from a somewhat lower scale than he and Ajayi. They even coyly revealed the secret of their physiology; Quiss listened patiently though in fact he knew all about their physical make-up, having taken one of them apart not long after he first arrived in the castle, trying to torture the truth out of it. So he knew that these failed soldiers had no solid bodies at all; he had peeled layer after layer off the one he was interrogating, robe after robe after vest after vest after tunic after tunic, taking off finer and finer layers of gloves and little socks and clothing, taking off mask after mask only to find smaller and smaller masks inside, and a sort of ubiquitous gooey stuff which permeated all the fabrics and in places acted like some silicone mixture, flowing easily but cracking when hit sharply. This whole, weird stripping process was accompanied by the gradually diminishing screams of the wretch he had tried his experiment on. The bits of it he tore off and threw to the ground moved weakly of their own accord, as though trying to reassemble themselves, while the bit he still held, slowly getting smaller and weaker and thinner as he went on, struggled hopelessly.

Eventually he was holding nothing more than a sort of squidgy sack, like a sort of sticky fabric balloon from which a clear, odourless fluid wept, while all the rest of the layers and pieces of clothing trembled and spasmed on the glassy floor around him, their movements attracting the slowly writhing shapes of the luminescent fish in the waters below. He hung the whole scrappy assemblage out to dry, eventually, on a makeshift washing line. The wind moved the pieces so that he could not tell whether the thing was still in some dismembered way alive, or not. A few crows had pecked at the remains, but not for long. When he brought the bits back in to try and reassemble them, they had started to smell, so he just threw it all away.

He had asked the minions if they knew of anything the castle kitchens produced - or any other part of the castle produced, for that matter - which could get a chap merry? You know; drunk, happy, smashed, out of one's box? Did they?

They looked at him, mystified.

Drink? Fermented something-or-other. Brewed or distilled; boiling off vapours to leave alcohol behind, or even freezing water off...fruit, vegetables, grains... no? Any plants they knew of which, when you dried the leaves...?

The minions had never heard of such things. He suggested they investigate, see if they could set something up. He met a few of them every now and again, and was even fairly confident that he could have picked them out in a crowd of the things. They weren't all identical, after all; they had slightly different patterns of stains and scorch-marks on their little robes which helped one to identify them, and of course their boots seemed to be colour-coded to their precise duty in the castle's service structure. The ones he had made contact with, this gullible gang, tried to do what he asked them. They stole food from the kitchens and hid bits and pieces of kitchenware under their cloaks. They tried to set up a still and a fermentation vat, but it didn't work. They produced a liquid at one rendezvous which made Quiss throw up just from the smell, and when he ordered them to take him to their equipment so that he could look it over and set it up properly, they explained that they had set it up in the only place they thought was safe from the prying eyes of the seneschal; their own quarters, where the cramped scale of their tiny cells and corridors made it impossible for the seneschal - and, alas, Quiss - to enter. They refused to set it up anywhere else. The seneschal would do much worse things to them than what Quiss was threatening. This was all strictly illegal and against the rules, didn't he know?

Quiss was depressed by this. He had thought it would be possible to find some way of getting out of one's skull in this place. Perhaps it was thought that here in Castle Doors reality itself was so strange that there was no need for any substance to make it more so. That was Ajayi's sort of thinking; logical but out of touch, even naive.

Then, by chance, he found something which really did do just that; alter reality. But not in the way he had expected.

He had been exploring alone, deep down, well underneath the level of the kitchens and the great central clock mechanism. The walls were of naked slate, blasted and scraped out of the rock on which the castle stood. Light came from transparent pipes set in the ceiling, but it was cold and still quite dark. He came to one of the heavy, metal-strapped doors he had seen time and time again on his travels in the lower levels, but unlike all the rest, this one was open very slightly. He could see a glint of light as he passed; he stopped, looked around, then pulled the door towards him.

It was a small, low-ceilinged room. The ceiling was like that of the upper reaches of the castle, made of glass, with a few dim specimens of the light-fish swimming slowly to and fro. The floor was rock. The room had one other door, on the far wall, also constructed of wood and metal strapping. In the centre of the room, alone in the place, stood a small stool. Above it was what looked like a hole in the glass ceiling.

Quiss looked up and down the dark corridor. There was nobody about. He slipped into the room, observing as he did so that the door had in fact been locked, but somehow the bolt had missed the hole it ought to have slipped into. He let the door swing to behind him, so that it caught on the extruded bolt, but was as closed and as unobstrusive from the outside as possible. He explored the small room.

The far door was locked securely. There was nothing in the place except for the small stool under the hole in the ceiling glass. It looked like the stools the scullions employed to bring themselves up to the right level to attend to their duties in the kitchens. The hole above the stool was dark; something seemed to be shielding the inside of the hole from the glow of the light-fish. A large, shadowy shape filled a circle nearly a metre in diameter around the hole, which was ringed with what looked like some sort of fur, like a collar, and which was just about big enough for a human head to go through. Warily, Quiss went up to it. He stood on the stool.

There were two metal bands, hoops of iron which extended from the lower surface of the glass ceiling's iron reinforcing bands, with leather pads on them. The U-shaped pieces of metal were on either side of the hole, a little over half a metre apart, and hanging about a quarter of a metre down from the ceiling. Looking at them more closely, Quiss saw they were adjustable; they could be lowered or raised slightly, and set further apart or closer together. He didn't like the look of them. He had seen pieces of torturing apparatus which looked vaguely similar.

He peered up into the dark hole in the glass ceiling. He carefully touched the fur surround. It seemed ordinary enough. He took the end of his loose-fitting fur sleeve and poked the pinched cuff up into the hole. It came back down unscathed, and he inspected it carefully. He grimaced, stuck a small finger into the gap. Nothing. He put his whole hand in. There was the faintest of tingling feelings, like blood going back into a cold limb after a winter's walk.

He looked at his hand. It too seemed undamaged and the tingling had disappeared. He put his head tentatively up towards the hole, the fur tickling his grey-haired head. The hole smelled of... fur, if anything. He stuck his head up inside, not the full way, and only briefly. He had a very vague sensation of tingling on his skin, and an even more vague impression of scattered lights.

He put his hand in one more time, felt the tickling, tingling on it, then checked the door again. He stood on the stool and put his head fully up into the hole.

The tingling disappeared quickly. The impression of tiny scattered lights, like a rather too consistent starfield, stayed, and it made no difference whether his eyes were open or not. He thought for a moment he could hear voices, but wasn't sure. The lights were unsettling. He felt he could make them out individually, but at the same time felt there were too many - far too many - to count, or even for him to be able to see separately. Also, he had the disturbing impression that he was looking at the surface of a globe; all of it, all of it at once, in some way spread out in front of him so that no part of it hid another pan. His mind swam. The lights seemed to beckon him, and he could feel himself starting to slide down towards them, then pull back as he fought the impulse. He arrived back at some still point.

He got down out of the hole again. He rubbed his chin. Very odd. He put his head back in. Temporarily ignoring the lights, he snapped his fingers, outside, in the room. He could just hear the small sound. He felt for the iron loops and put his arms through them, supporting himself there as one was obviously meant to.

He felt the pull of those lights again, and let himself go towards them, sliding down towards one area. He found that just by thinking about them he could head for other areas. It was as though he was parachuting, able to steer however he wanted as he fell.

As he approached the area of lights he was sliding towards, he got the impression of them also being strangely globe-like yet spread out. He still had the impression that he could see too many, that they should not look so individual for their apparent size, but he ignored this as he approached the surface of whatever the lights were placed upon. He tried to convince himself that he was floating towards the outside of the sphere, that he had started at the centre and worked his way out, but for some reason he felt he was falling down the way, onto a convex surface.

A single light approached; an orb of shifting, multi-coloured hues, like something cellular, dividing and re-dividing within a single membrane, yet with the patterns in the sphere somehow like distorted pictures, images thrown haphazardly on an unfixed screen. He felt himself float round this odd, scaleless thing, the other lights still apparently as far away as they had always been, and he felt oddly attracted to this globe of light, and that he could somehow, without damage to it or himself, enter inside it.

He was still, when he thought about it, aware he was standing in the room. He snapped his fingers, felt the edge of his tunic sleeve where it still hung at his side, then willed himself to enter the glowing, slowly pulsing sphere.

It was like walking into a room filled with babbling voices and lit with chaotic, ever-changing images. His head was full of confusion for a moment, then he thought he started to glimpse patterns and real shapes within the inchoate mix.

He let himself relax slightly, ready to watch, and just then all the images and noises seemed to coalesce, become part of some single feeling, which included the impression of touch and taste and smell as well. Quiss reacted against this, and was back in the noisy, gaudily chaotic room-feeling. He relaxed again, just a little more warily and slowly. The strange crystallisation of sensation occurred again, and slowly Quiss became aware of some sort of other thought-process, a set of feelings which was at once intimately close but still utterly cut off from him.

The truth of what was going on suddenly hit him, stunning him. He was inside somebody else's head.

He was so amazed he didn't have time to be revolted or really shocked before the novelty, the sheer interest of it all, took him, excited him. He shifted his body slightly, feeling in a very distant sort of way, like something in a dream, his feet move on the small stool he stood on, his armpits settling a little more comfortably into the leather-softened hoops.

He felt a moment of dizziness as the light and sound swelled around him, then a sudden, sharp feeling of anxiety; fear and distress. He smelled burning, heard loud, crude engine noises, saw metal wheeled vehicles frighteningly close (the fear increased, he felt dizzy again, sensed he was somehow losing contact), then he looked up, or the person whose head he was in did, and saw a blue, blue sky, like some polished, blue, shining sphere, some immense, smooth and flawless jewel.

The dizziness made him stagger (he only then realised he-or his host - was walking), and a wave of fear pulsed at him, sending him out and away, breaking off, back into the strange, dark, light-speckled space again, his heart beating wildly, his breath quickened.

He collected himself, snapped his fingers a couple of times, back in the real room inside the Castle Doors.

He vaguely considered giving up his little experiment; that experience had been frightening and alien, but he decided to persevere. This was much too fascinating to abandon now, he might not get another chance to explore so, and anyway he wasn't going to give in to some undisciplined streak of cowardice, not him.

He let himself fall gently towards another of the soft-looking orbs of shifting colours, and entered it as before. There was the same feeling of dizziness, but no fear this time.

He was looking at a pair of hands, holding small stalks in one hand, taking a stalk at a time from the bunch and planting them quickly, accurately, into holes in brown earth. His back was sore. The arms were brown, like the earth. They were his arms, the arms of the person he was inside, and he wore some sort of loose, filmy covering. The arms were very slim. He - or rather the other person - stood up, straightening that sore back, putting one arm behind their back and stretching again. The view was of lots of women doing the same thing he was; stooped, putting shoots into the ground. The landscape was fiercely lit by a high sun. The ground was brown, he could see distant shacks and what looked like thatched roofs. There were some hills in the distance, green, cut with terraces like map contours made solid. Tall trees with naked trunks and all the leaves in a round bunch at the top. The sky was blue. A thin white vapour-trail stretched across it. There were a few clouds, pure white. His belly rumbled, and he thought of -what? The child in his belly.

The woman whose body he had invaded bent back to the soil. Why yes! Now he thought about it he could feel the weight on her chest; tits! The child must be small, because his/her belly felt normal, if a bit empty (and at the back of her mind the woman, he realised, was looking forward to a small meal of some stored, baked grain in another few hours, after which she still would not feel full-she would still be hungry. She had always been hungry. She always would be hungry. Probably so would this child, like all the others). A woman! Quiss thought. A peasant; a hungry peasant; how odd! How strange to be in this way inside her body, there but not there, here but not here, listening in. He tried to sense her own feelings about her body, as the woman bent to her task again, methodically planting the small green shoots. She was chewing on something, her mouth working on some substance, she was not actually eating; something numbing, something which helped to deaden thought and make the work easier.

How very, very singular, Quiss kept thinking. And although this was a woman's body, strangely it didn't feel all that different to being inside his own; less than he would have imagined. Maybe he just wasn't making full contact, he thought, but somehow he got the impression he was. The woman didn't seem totally aware of herself. Not specifically as a woman. What about her - ?

The woman's hand moved, involuntarily, towards her sex, actually brushing the gathered-up material of her clothing between her legs. She stood up, puzzled almost, then stooped back to her work. A pain or an itch, she thought. Quiss was amazed; just by thinking something he had made the woman do it.

He imagined that she had an itch behind her right knee. She scratched there, quickly and hard, hardly breaking the rhythm of planting and stooping. Fascinating!

Then something was pulling at the woman's leg, but she ignored it. In fact she didn't seem aware of it. Quiss didn't understand; he could feel the tugging. It was quite urgent and insistent... then he remembered where he was really standing. His head swum slightly for a moment as he re-oriented himself mentally, then he was aware again of the weight under his arms and on his feet. He took his arms out of the loops and ducked down, back into the room under the Castle Doors.

"Don't do that! Don't do that!" a small attendant squeaked, jumping up and down as it tugged on the hem of his tunic. "You can't do that! It isn't allowed!"

"Don't tell me what to do, you... nanobrain!" Quiss kicked the attendant square in the chest, sending it tumbling away from him over the slate floor. It quickly picked itself up, pulled its loosened cowl-brim back down tight and glanced at the opened door. It put its little hands together, the yellow-gloved fingers meshing.

"Please get out of here," it said. "You really shouldn't be in here at all. It isn't allowed. I'm sorry, but it just isn't."

"Why not?" Quiss said, hanging on to one of the iron loops and leaning forward, glaring at the small attendant.

"It just isn't!" it screeched, jumping up in the air and waving its arms about. Quiss found something funny about the thing's antics juxtaposed with the frozen expression of aching sadness shown on its mask. He got the impression from its sheer anxiousness that it was in some way responsible for leaving the door open. It wasn't pleading with him to leave just for his sake; it was frightened stiff.

"Actually," Quiss said lazily, letting the iron hoop he was holding take his weight as he leaned back underneath the open hole in the glass ceiling and looked inside, "I've found this to be a quite fascinating experience. I don't see why I should stop now just because you tell me to."

"But you must!" the attendant shrieked, flapping its arms about and running forward towards him. It thought the better of tugging at his tunic again, however, and stayed about a metre away from the stool, hopping about from foot to foot and wringing its hands. "Oh, you must! You aren't supposed to see any of this. It isn't allowed. The rules -"

"I'll go if you tell me what it is," Quiss said, glowering at the small figure. It shook its head desperately.

"I can't."

"Fair enough," Quiss shrugged, and made as though to put his arms back through the hoops again.

"No no no nonono!" the attendant wailed. It ran forward, throwing itself at his legs as though tackling him. He looked down at it. It cuddled his hosed shins like a tiny lover; he could feel it trembling. It was terrified; how delightful!

"Get off my legs," Quiss said slowly. "I'm not going to go until you tell me what this is." He glanced back up at the dark shadow inside the glass which surrounded the hole. He shook his right leg, and the quivering attendant rolled along the floor. It sat on the slate, put its head in its hands, then it glanced towards the door which Quiss had found open. It got up quickly and took a key out of its pocket, put it in the lock, twisted it, shoved the heavy door to with some difficulty, then locked it.

"You promise?" it said. Quiss nodded.

"Of course. I am a man of my word."

"All right, then." The attendant ran forward. Quiss sat down on the little stool. The attendant stood, facing him. "I don't know what it's called, or even if it has a name. It's a fish, they say, and it just sits there and... well... thinks."

"Hmm, it thinks, eh?" Quiss said thoughtfully, rubbing his neck. A little bit of fur from the hole's collar had stuck to his tunic neck; he picked it off and fiddled with it. "What, exactly, does it think about?"

"Well..." the attendant looked agitated and confused. It kept shifting Its weight from one yellow-booted foot to the other and back again.'... it doesn't actually think so much as experience. I think."

"You think," Quiss repeated, unimpressed.

"It's a sort of link," the attendant said desperately. "It links us up with somebody... in the... on the Subject world."

"Ah-ha!" Quiss said. "I thought so."

There, that's all there is to it," the small attendant said, and started tugging at his sleeve, its other hand indicating the door it had just locked.

"Just a moment," Quiss said, and jerked the sleeve away from the creature's grasp. "What is the name of this Subject place, this planet?"

"I don't know!"

"Hmm, well I suppose I'll find out soon enough," Quiss said, and started to get up off the stool, looking up at the hole. He stood and grasped the iron hoops, put one foot on the stool. The attendant jumped up and down, its little yellow gloves made into fists and jammed together at the small hard mouth of its face mask.

"No!" it shrieked. "I'll tell you!"

"What's it called then?"

" 'Dirt'! It's called 'Dirt'!" the hopping attendant said. "Now will you go, please!"

"Dirt?" Quiss said incredulously. The attendant beat its gloves on its head.

"I... I... I think..." it spluttered, "I think it loses something in the translation."

"And this thing," Quiss nodded up at the ceiling, at the shadow round the hole. "It forms a link from here to this place called Dirt. Is that right?"

"Yes!"

"And are all the people on this planet... accessible? Are all those lights you see initially individual people? How many? Can you get into any of them? Are they all unaware of people looking in on them? Can they all be affected?"

"Oooh no," the small attendant said. It stopped jumping and bouncing around, seemingly collapsing in on itself. Its shoulders dropped, it looked forlornly down at the slate floor. It went and sat with its back to the door. "All the lights you see at the start are individuals." It sighed, talking more slowly now in a small, resigned voice. "They are all available, and can all be influenced. There are about four billion of them."

"Hmm. Their bodies look quite similar to ours."

"Yes, they're supposed to. It is our Subject, after all."

That's where all the books come from?"

"Yes."

"I see," Quiss said. "Why?"

"Why what?" the small attendant said, looking up at him.

"Why the link? What's it all for?"

The small attendant put back its head and laughed. He had never heard one of them laugh before. It said, "How am I meant to know that?" It shook its head, looked back at the floor again, "What a question." Suddenly it sat bolt upright. It turned quickly and pressed the side of its head to the door. It spun round to face him. "Quickly; it's the seneschal! You must get out!"

It quickly unlocked the door and pulled it open, its small boots sliding and skidding on the slate floor with the effort. Quiss was on his feet, but he couldn't hear anything. He suspected the small attendant of trying to trick him. It looked at him, held out its little hands, pleading with him. "For your own sake, man. You'll be here for ever; you must go now."

Quiss could hear a sort of deep rumbling noise from beyond the open door. It sounded like one of the main driveshafts from the great clock, heard through one of the thinner walls. It hadn't been there when he entered the room from the corridor outside. He went quickly to the door and outside. The attendant ducked out with him, and he helped it close the heavy door. The rumbling noise stopped. From along the corridor, as Quiss and the attendant went in opposite directions (the small creature scurried to a tiny door on the far wall and disappeared through, slamming it), a tortured squeaking, squealing noise came. Quiss was walking slowly towards the source of this cacophany; it sounded like metal scraped over metal. A wedge of light came from the side of the wall, and from a large square room with metal gates which squeaked and squealed as they were concertinaed to one side, and which Quiss realised must be a lift, the seneschal emerged with an entourage of black-cloaked minions. They stopped in the corridor when they saw him. Quiss looked at the small figures surrounding the seneschal, and for the first time felt genuinely apprehensive of the castle's dwarfish inhabitants.

"May we escort you back to your own levels?" The seneschal's voice was cold. Quiss got the impression he had little choice; he entered the elevator with the seneschal and most of the small minions, and they let him out a few storeys below the games room level. Nothing else was said.

He had tried since to find either the attendant he had met in the room, or the room itself, but without success. He thought they had probably rebuilt some of the corridors down there; a lot of building work had been going on in that area recently. He was fairly sure, too, that even if he did ever find himself in the same place, the door would be locked.

He hadn't said anything to Ajayi about this. He enjoyed having knowledge she didn't. Let her read, and complain about not having the name of this mysterious place; he knew!

Quiss placed his last domino down. The two of them sat looking at the irregular construction of flat, placed ivories, as though expecting it to do something. Then Quiss sighed and went to scoop them up for another game. He might persuade Ajayi to give it another go before she broke off for food or a book. Ajayi was leaning forward, putting out one hand to stop her companion from starting another game. Then she became aware that the dominoes weren't moving. Quiss was trying to prise them from the surface of the small table, and growing annoyed.

"Now what the -" he began, and went to pick up the table. Ajayi stopped him, putting her hands on his forearms.

"No!" she said, and met his gaze. "This might mean..."

The old man realised, and quickly got up from his seat and went into the hot, bright space of the games room. By the time he came back from calling for an attendant, Ajayi was leaning over the table with a smile on her face, watching as a pattern of spots slowly appeared on the dominoes they had placed there.

"There, you see!" Quiss said, sitting down, bright-faced with sweat and triumph. Ajayi nodded happily.

"Gosh," said a small voice, "it's awfwy hot in here."

"That was quick," Quiss said to a waiter as it appeared from the games room's bright interior. It nodded.

"Welw," it said, "I was on my way here to see what you wanted fo" wunch. But I could take you-wanswer, if you wike."

Ajayi was smiling at the waiter, finding its speech impediment more funny than she knew she ought. She was just in a good mood, she supposed. Quiss said, "Certainly you can; it's...' he glanced at Ajayi, who nodded, and Quiss continued, "... they both disappear in a blaze of radiation. Got that?"

" 'They bofe disappea" in a bwaze of wadiation.' Yes, I fink I've got that. Twy not to be too wong; see you water..." It turned and waddled back through the games room, head down, mumbling the answer to itself, its little blue boots sparkling with reflected light from the fish under the glass floor, its steps and voice dopplering oddly as it passed a clock face.

"Well..." Quiss said, and leaned back in his chair, taking a deep breath, putting his hands behind his head and resting one booted foot on the balcony balustrade, "I think we might just have got it this time, you know that?" He looked at Ajayi. She smiled and shrugged.

"Let us hope so."

Quiss snorted at such faint-hearted lack of belief, and looked out over the blank white plain. His thoughts returned to that odd experience in the room deep in the castle's bowels. What was the point of that hole, that absurdly named planet and the link between here and there? Why the ability actually to make those people do things? (He had, reluctantly, discounted the idea that it was only he who had this intriguing capacity.)

It was most frustrating. He was still in the process of trying to get his contacts in the attendants to talk about this new aspect of the castle's mystery. So far they had been quite unforthcoming, despite all his cajoling and threats. They were frightened, no doubt about that.

He wondered just how immutable the castle's society really was. Might it be possible, for example, for them - him - to carry out a coup? After all, what god-given right did the seneschal have to run the place? How had he come to power? Just how closely did the two sides in the Wars supervise the castle?

Whatever the answers, at least it gave him something else to think about apart from the games. There might be another way out. There just might; never assume things were set and certain. That was a lesson he'd learned long ago. Even traditions change.

Maybe this run-down heap was approaching some sort of catastrophe curve-edge, some change. Once, no doubt, it had been all its architects had intended, perhaps full of people, intact, not crumbling, fortress as well as prison... but now Quiss felt its pervasive air of decay, tottering senility made it - if he could find the right key, or weapon - easy prey. The seneschal was only slightly impressive; nobody else was at all. He - along with the woman - was the most important person in the place, he was sure. It was all for them, it revolved around them, only really made sense if they were here, and that itself was a kind of power (as well as a comfort - he liked to feel he was, as he had been in the Wars, part of an elite).

Ajayi sat, wondering whether to wait for the small waiter to return before she went on reading her book. It was a strange story about a man, a warrior, from an island near one of the planet's poles; he was called Grettir, as far as she could make out from the translation she was reading. He was very brave except for being afraid of the dark. She wanted to go on reading, no matter what the response was to their riddle-answer. Either way she couldn't imagine anything happening for a while.

They were both sitting there, quiet, absorbed, a few minutes later when, from the bright, air-shimmering depths of the games room a small voice said,

"Sowwy..."