CRAG CRY DARKNESS

Chapter 1. (Algernon)

How the dawn would have come alive in her eyes, how the morning’s radiance would have wrapped her in life and roused her sleeping body gently from the darkness that had eclipsed it. How I wished to see the first stirrings of the morning within her limbs as she sensed the day awakening around her and her body so tuned to the circadian flow of this world gave up its last longing for the empathy of the other and rose to greet me as it rose to greet the day.

 I sat, or better lounged upon a chair nearby, legs carelessly sprawled out; boots creased upon Italian cowhide as though no one was present to judge my slovenly carelessness, as indeed there wasn’t for when she awoke I would be long gone.

I amused myself momentarily within the gradually growing still life of the dawn, appreciating the muted colours that were only just beginning to paint the world around me in hues that were foreign to my palate of tints and shadow and the gross glossiness of synthetic light.

Still the dawn was a while away, perhaps someone less attuned would testify that indeed it was still nightfall, of course the girl before me still thought it so, but then what was nightfall to one such as her?

Who was she? I did not know we had fallen together but once and would not cross paths again. I had come from the streets to her private place, her small piece of autobiographical fiction where she sheltered from the world, we had barely spoken a word in hushed and secretive tones since she had made my acquaintance, even then the excitement upon her had been palatable, the reek of synthetic serotonin upon her breath discernable, the sense of fear as much of a heady intoxicant as her poorly veiled arousal.

 We had come together and soon we would come apart, we had taken from each other what we needed and yet even I had to admit the lingering sentimentality that remained within this intimate moment and it made me angry and in all the more willing to flee.

I knew of course it was a lie, what could we share aside from the sex that had already been spent? I was a nocturnal tide to her, sweeping in high upon her body and experience giving her a taste of something foreign, unique until I receded back into my rightful place the night and she went on as a creature of the day. Likely she would remember nothing in her opiate fuelled sanctity and for this I would be grateful our kind were better off left to obscurity no matter how much we longed for the recognition of the day.

I wished to leave, the sound of my foot falls echoing in other places was what I wanted to hear most, but of course the dawn as much as the twilight was something that made any vantage point worthwhile so I remained pondering this view like I had done time and time again in my past.

She had been like the others, rich, beautiful, the world waiting for her every gesture, nothing could deny this undeniably self assured creature anything, not even me, or so it seemed.

 Her clothes lay scattered, discarded and broken upon the floor, this is what they expected, or so it seemed, a rampage of forbidden lust wrapped up in the trappings of rebellion and sin, somehow this idea of sexual savagery testified to that and myself ever the performer always complied. Style was absent in everything, functional uniformity, no room for individuality. Her bra as so, on the floor now, before of course had been fastened upon the slick warm flesh of this woman, just like every woman here, not clones, but almost as much. Her dress the same, torn as though an animal had taken it from her and my mind of course brought back to that moment of forced passion when my mind wished to shelter within the gentleness of this world and within someone like her and not be the derelict savage that she and the world expected from me.

 Her briefs lay close by black against the crisp sheen of the carpets and like a dark raven against snow I expected them to rise from their place and to fly between the billow that was the curtains invisible against the naked night sky.

Of course I should probably mention her for it was to her that my attention was focused, she like the sparse sweep of the carpet was also cradled in white, her skin a tint of ebony now so common a shade that can appear flawless and at once I knew that she had chosen these sheets to make it appear so. She was tall, long and lean, her breasts small tight and perfect against her chest, her hair short and unadorned cropped close to her skull, her back a marvelous expanse of frigid athleticism, no doubt sculptured with drugs and electrodes in one of the towers clinics.

A genetic marvel from head to toe, no need for the tailored flick of a surgeon’s wrist she was born a simulacrum of natural nativity. No biological function eugenics had taken care of that. Sex was retained for mate bonding and to prevent the feralisation of her male counterpart. Her eyes and smile the same, calculated to appeal to symmetry and perfection. I knew all this and yet still I found some sort of sanctity within this scene, growing old I guess I half mused, as I adjusted my position on the chair and turned to the rest of the room and thought again of the time that had preceded.

I remembered the experience that was her, that had been us, though already I found it hard to separate her from the others, even now barely moments after we had finished with each other her face and body merged at once with other people, other places I had to shake my head re adjust and re focus to bring her again to life as she had been.

 We had fallen together at once the moment her door had stealthily opened allowing a pale glimmer of moon light to peer in, most of them preferred it this way I guess, anything else would be strange to them and sex between strangers despite narcotics was already strange enough.

I remembered as I always did the look on her face as she first comprehended me beneath the harsh florescent electric light that filled the space between us. The look of awe and almost reproachable fascination and perhaps as is always the case a glimpse of that place in her eye where her brain tried to distinguish between horror and beauty. She was into it at once, yes despite all this, crying, crawling, clutching in some sort of fever that I knew to not be her, but perhaps something that she wished to be, something that they all wished to be in this moment.

 I gave her what she wanted; her clothing as described still bore testimony to that, I could feel still the wounds still wet upon me that she had inflicted in her passion, it was over quickly as it always was, they wanted it this way, always, and perhaps again anything else would be strange? She would sleep for a while and neither myself, nor the dawn would wake her anytime soon.

Looking around me I comprehended the sterile sophisticated affair that was her bedroom. I had seen a thousand such places to know, to have discovered and to have grown bored of all their secrets long ago. So why did I linger within this world that apparently I knew so much of and yet cared so little for?

Nostalgia? But for what? This girl, this life?….. No this could never be, her memory of me and been completed, stored, catalogued, memories would be all that remained and even those were probably already fading, we were worlds apart upon an infinite spectrum of impossibility, nothing resided here for me, except perhaps for the beauty that was the light of the dawn breaking delightfully, dangerously over the reminiscence of something that would never be.

The next thing I knew I was being pulled from a dream by the agonising yet ecstatic touch of the sun, seemingly I was trapped amidst these two worlds during a time when I needed to be fully connected with the this one. An image from the dream still filled me, a tree, a tree amidst this city! but god knows where and how and I searched the vision at once, the skylight for something familiar, a building, a bridge anything so that I might discover this location for I knew it was within the boundaries of the city and though I had never seen it, I knew that somewhere in all the vastness of this place it stood for law told us that there was nothing else and my dream told me it could not be otherwise.

The sun grew larger and larger in my subconscious as I rose, the pain and pleasure delicious, serotonin transfixing my synapses, the ecstasy if it all incredulous.  How could I have made this mistake? Waking groggily unsteadily hands up and shielding moments before I realised at once the stupidity and futility of my actions, this dream had robed me of the instinct which might be the only thing that could save me and then at last as the image and its tree faded and my coat moved to cloak me, instinct once again preserved me.

 And then for the briefest of instances before I took the long shadows that were ever so quickly receding towards the door I looked one last time to the bed and comprehended just before the world disappeared in a fiery radiance the girl and the girl was not the girl that had been there before.

Chapter 2. (Eve)

Amidst the metropolis the tree rose, silhouetted in its own private sanctity in the dim swollen ceremonial light of the dawn, the broken shadows of the night falling from it, the first light of the dawn surrounding it and I quietly beholding it.

 We had shared the silence of this time often, this tree and me, as the great orb of celestial light began its accent before us, creating the first shift of its trajectory above us and then later we would come back together as it fell behind us, each again making this our meeting point in the Earth’s encroaching twilight as we each farewelled again the day light. The buildings around us stood aster and opaque, cramped and clotted, their electrical wizardry slowly falling into day time irrelevance the concealment of their grey glass structures safely seeled for a time in discordance.

Though they kept their confidence in vain for the sun was on its way.  

Even now on the cusp of the encroaching day I longed for that time, a time that was given over to me and my kind, but for now I liked it here and though I could feel the first tingling touch of the sun on the back of my hands and behind the near opaque mirrored lens of my glasses I knew that for a time this place would become a place of grace and a chance for me to remember for a time the touch of something that had long ago forsaken us and that we in turn had later forsaken.

The city around me was still sleeping, its diurnal inhabitants not yet aware that their maker had again appeared in the sky, they breathed and slept silently under the sovereignty of the silver one who still appeared somewhere behind me hidden by the monstrosity of the sun warmed sky.  I say Sleeping but this perhaps in not the correct word, for this state was far deeper than sleep and not one dream would be spun within the dim dimensions of those that had succumbed to it.

 Few of their kind would be up now, those that had ingested against all reason potent cocktails of synthetic melatonin stabilizers and us, those that had no choice.

This time was a dangerous time, a time that did not rightly exist for the majority of this cities citizens crowded as they were upon the banks of this last metropolis that sat like a beacon captured within the sea that was spread all around them, they sheltered from the dark in the only way they knew how, for many of them the night did not rightly exist, a figment of the past captured at best as charcoal and tinted pastels splashed upon canvasses, portrayed in a thousand gothic romances that depicted a place of uncompromised horror.  The night was indeed a place to be feared, but of course that had not always been so.

  It was only those, the foolish, the rich and the exceedingly brave, or the unlucky that could bridge the twilight between worlds and of course myself, who had no choice.

Normally there would be a few of those night time stragglers, scattered through the ghostly silence of the city traversing its darkened corridors as their consciousness was slowly burned apart in the light of the ascending sun, some would be turned insane by it light as they wandered feverishly through the city the serotonin in their systems overloading synapses as they succumbed to its light. Some would be captured by the collectors, automated servants of the city that would secure their bodies and minds before they could cause mayhem with tales of strange events and visions from the nocturnal world, others it is believed lapsed into deep dream states from which they could not be woken, they would disappear of course into a place that even I had no knowledge of. I pitied these creatures for at least they had the courage to walk the night and to dream amidst its nocturnal kingdom, be it as tourists upon these magnificent night time shores. Few made it here of course for this place was hidden, perhaps even to the eyes of the city itself, this tree, this rearing great green anomaly was akin to a miracle within a city that was no stranger to the strange.

 It would not be long now before I would be forced to leave, before the world became too full with this light, but in the precious moments given to me I would but for a few moments persist.  I could see the tree transform before me the bulk of its great trunk sheltering me from the full effect of the rising sun growing like a holy miasma against the distorted pollution of the distant sky, its great canopy reaching out in an almost symmetrical spread of wonder, its roots that I in my reverie could almost feel writhing in the ground beneath me. Not long now I whispered as the sun began its burn in my retinas, as my hands began their first instinctual movements from the full intensity of the light. I could not leave it too long, for it was only in the long shadows that we could traverse the day and if those long shadows were to depart I would be lost here waiting for the sun to come over head in a place where not even this tree could save me. The ecstasy of the light filled me, freed me and then I was gone traversing the shadows keenly, quickly with the feel of the sun cradled again within me.

(Cassandra)

She awoke and she knew in an instant that she had never done this before; she awoke perhaps as the first human being to have properly awake for millennia. She was aware of the sun in a whole new way; she felt it within her as though she had had it in her while she had slept. She felt it growing within her conscious as it grew to fill the frame of the window outside. Dreams were there also, strange left over fragments from another place, leather dark and rich smelling of something delicious and forbidden, a body lean and long and pale as though it could not hold a shadow upon it and some sort of delicious torment as though something had been put inside her that had been left there to grow.

She turned marvelling in the sleepiness that had pervaded her body; she turned and within this new world of delicate conscious slumber she found a new appreciation for her bed and the feel of her body against it and the reminder of the dreams that filled that part of her mind that had previously remained unknown. 

She wanted to languish some more within this place to spend an idle day lost upon this bed, neither a part of the waking world, nor a part of the dreaming world, but as a tourist free to travel between both. She tried in her delirium to remember more of her dream, despite the fact that until now she had no concept of what a dream was. From the fragments that she was able to collect she realised that some of what she had first thought of as dreams were in fact recollections of her former night, this again was a shocking revelation for she had been told that she would remember nothing.  She looked around the room; seemingly all was as it should be, then there on the bed, red against the snow white of her sheets there lay a rose, instantly her mind opened like a Pandora’s box, her conscious sweeping backwards like a clock spinning on a great axis, the world collider scoping and then reforming behind her eyes.     

Earlier that day she had made contact with one of the dealers. As the flow of the day people moved around her, like an unbroken wave moving relentlessly onwards he had appeared and it was as though he had chosen to reveal himself in this way to her and to her alone. Amidst the throng of the day people they had come together. The world moving around them as though only they existed, he had appeared as though he had sensed some undefined need that dwelt within her heart, a need that dwelt so deeply that it was also hidden to her, the day people unconsciously parting around him like a great tide of mediocrity as he stood calm like the great rock of Gibraltar and not one save for her noticed his appearance. It was as though he had stepped from another world into this one to grant to her with the beckoning of his hand and the mysterious knowing look in his eyes something that she alone longed for. The exchange was done in an instant, she had heard that this was always the way, she received and he took, but what it was the dealers took no one quite rightly knew and neither did she as she hurried onwards, but she felt the absence of something.  He vanished at once like a harlequin caught momentarily upon the wrong side of the stage something within her sweat covered hand, as a forbidden excitement coiled alluringly around the trembling muscle of her delicate heart, her first few steps faltering almost tripping and then resuming with the pace of the people around her.

She had come to her work place with no recollection of the journey, she had let the pace of the crowd carry her as she became lost in the thought of what she had done and what it might mean. At the first opportunity she fled to the bathrooms locking the door behind her with an unfamiliar clatter, her hands fumbling momentarily with the unfamiliarity of the lock and then at last the mechanism engaging and at last within the narrow confines of the cubicle she opened her hand, nothing. Her hand lay empty, ripped off she thought, she had received nothing and then with apprehension she felt the loss of that something deep inside her and remembered the look of allure in the dealers eyes moments before he had disappeared and the crowd had flooded in to occupy the space like a vacuum that had surrounded him.

The day had finished quickly and by the time she made the last adjustments to a document near the end of work hours she had almost put it all aside, laughing at herself and her gullibility. The dealers did not exist; she had merrily stumbled across some prankster that had taken her for a ride. She hoped the city caught him, perhaps he had already been caught, apparently they were all caught eventually, she made a mental note to call them the following day, one less dealer within the city surely could not be a bad thing. She left the work like the others, looking forward to the hour of free time before the day ended. On the way home she again tried to stop where she had stopped that morning, but the crowd quick and impatient would not stand for it and she was swept along with them, her last doubts disappeared with them. Her apartment was close and she was glad of this, the day had been long and she longed for the unconscious.

Her hour went by she was so caught up in her tasks that she only realised that something strange was occurring at the beginning of the second hour, she went to the window at once her hands clammy and her heart beat filling the silence that she had not picked up on earlier. The streets were deserted and the silence unearthly what’s more the sun that had stood always high upon the sky was falling, the first of its many shadows reaching out towards her.

She could feel that moment even now, the sheets that before cradled her in warmth and security seeming to bind her in anxiety, her sweat hot and clammy between them. The memories were indeed coming back unveiling like a coherent series of events, even now being filled in with all the colour, sounds and scents that they needed to become alive.

She wrapped herself deeper into the sheets, realising that she should not be here still, a world out there awaited her and she would be missed.

As the sun had fallen the shadows had grown and she had stood there contemplating the world as a new world seemed to envelop it, she could not deny the beauty of this new place, the way the fiery ball of the sun so gracefully fell below the curve of the horizon the clouds seeming to rush past as though to hide the last traces of its disappearance from the world and then the world falling into fire as the sky gave birth, at last to darkness and then the stars appearing tiny pin pricks in the shroud of the night. What now she thought, what now? And before she knew it is was dark and the streets were silent and she had the feeling that she needed to be somewhere anywhere but alone here.

She had gathered her darkest warmest jacket with haste, shivering in the clutches of this sunless cold leaving her apartment with speed she had little time for it was only when the sun had fallen that she realised the opportunities that now lay ahead, she had not long and the city was big.

She stretched out feeling again the excitement of the night around her, the sweat and apprehension of moments ago forgotten, she became lost within her memories as though someone born to them.

The streets were dank and cold and she knew that she must be careful here the most for the city had eyes and the same tales that had been spoken of the dealers also mentioned the cleaners…

She was off at once though she knew not where, she summarised that if the dealers and god forbid the cleaners existed, maybe other aspects of the night people also existed? She recalled a tale of the train that left 66^th street, number 6 at midnight, a discontinued underground line that was laughed about by the day people, if a colleague, heaven forbid was late for work. She knew the location; well she knew the location of 65^th street if the train existed it could not be far from there. She hurried nearly falling, her shoes clattering within the nights silence eerily around her. She made good time, the streets were silent and not a soul was there to hinder her movement, so strange she thought to be alone with one thoughts within this place called the night.

She found the corner of 65^th street peering around desperately as to a clue, it was then that she heard a distant sound something as though alive within the becoming night moving it seemed closer and closer towards her, such a sound as foreign as the world around her, but also familiar seemingly to link with a memory of something older than the city itself. As the sound approached she became aware of others coming out of the darkness. A strange amalgamation of people, some confident in their approach as though they had done it time and time before. Others hesitant looking, searching the faces of others for clues and others still, sly and secretive, filled it seemed with a strange intensity, or madness moving closer and closer amalgamating upon a single spot. It was then that she had noticed it herself… 2 doors double ended made of stone and a corridor heading down, she joined the mad throng falling in with the crowd to descend into the greater darkness below and all the time that sound growing louder within her ears…

There was a platform below and not a greater congregation of madness could have been contained upon its iron bound surface, from people like her made up as though they had missed the last train home, to others as though they had climbed from the recesses of her darkest most demonic memory as though it had opened itself up and spewed them all out. The majority wore black, hair done up in colours and shapes that denied comprehension a wizardry of instruments ticking away upon their bodies, archaic inlays of brass, dials and gages sweeping backwards and forwards, clothing sometimes clinging and at other times spreading out in great swathes of cloth that swept the platform, expressions of the like she had never seen on the faces of human beings before.

She tumbled into the confines of the archaic carriage falling at once into its smoked filled interior with the others as the doors closed behind her and then as the sound echoed again through the world like some lonely, lost spirit and smoke again billowed up around her, they were off, the clacking of hidden mechanics filling the silence around her.

The train was underway, seeming to whoosh through the world with a speed that defied the mechanical abrasion of its many wheels upon the track, a vast underground network of worlds and weirdness flashing by, the devilish resonance of its sound echoing off into incalculable distances. Smoke billowed around her thick and rich with the perfume of another world, as she fell into the romance of a past that she had never known.

Once the train was underway the passengers settling more comfortably into the seats around her allowing their bodies to find postures that suited their personalities best. Some crouched on the floor their bodies obviously attuned to the motion of the track beneath them. Others stood slumped against the wall in dishevelled neglect, posing with unnatural indifference, couples sat together locked in excitement their eyes lost within each other’s and yet others seemed to fall into apathetic sleep their eyes lids quivering and then falling, the world narrowing itself to slits and then pinpricks of light and then finally to darkness as their heads lolled forward into defeat.

It did not take long for them to notice her. A melange of mannequin styled expressions began contemplating her with inquisitive glee, painted eye brows raised, pierced lips creased with theatre paint politeness and heads tilted in inquiring thoughtfulness. It seemed that she was the stranger here…  They continued this way, mirth and mockery curling their features into masks, the features trapped into emotional caricatures that over moments lost all hint of humanity.  

Company soon found her within the darkness of the carriage; eyes like cats distinguished themselves from the deeper obscurity of the carriage, two pairs emerging into the light, faces following, mischief and mayhem painted wantonly upon their features. And all this time the others frozen in place around her, eyes and expressions unchanged. She felt that the stage had turned and now the actors were now the audience looking out.

They slinked towards her, twin creatures of sin and sensuality, their hair midnight tresses falling below their wastes, glistening with a thousand coats of garish shellac, their curvaceous bodies strapped tight in twin corsets, which lay slick and sexual against their flesh, their breasts round and almost unnatural in their fullness, swelling up into twin peaks of femineity, the flesh tight and pulsating with their every breath. Their faces were twin symbols of sensuality, teeth white and flashing against the licentious line of their painted lips, their tongues long and pierced snaking out between them and their eyes alive with the promise of a thousand brazen secrets and the will to make them be.

They were upon her at once, their breath hot and sweet within her ear, their tongues deliciously licking, their voices panting and painful, whispering secrets of their will and their wanting. She tried to push them aside, but her hands found only their breasts, full within their bodices. At once she tried to rise, but at once one was astride her bringing her gently back into her seat, the  girl’s legs wrapped around her as she gently used her weight to bring her back down, her corset rising up to reveal long slick legs that rose deliciously into laced lined lingerie. All this time the fullness of their bodices crushed against her while their perfume fell around her and like the scent of a thousand dead roses dipped and dried within a vast vat of honey and given a devilish dash of something sublime and something that smelt of sex she fell helpless amidst them.

She lay at their mercy, cradled between them, lost within them, they purred to her, cat like, feline like and as one dipped her lips to hers and she felt the first press of the girls tongue snaking against her own, danger condensed around her and became thick, dark and palatable within the air.  When the other cradling her, wrapped around her found with ease the stiff shape of her nipple under her bra and squeezed it that danger and all its unheeded warnings was swallowed up by her awakening, drowned forever in the wetness that was her growing arousal, soon she was smiling, her tongue and mouth greedy within the others, yes this is how it was meant to be……… and all the time the others looked on silently, now solemnly, now sanctimoniously standing distantly all around.

Oh god how she had become lost in that moment, even now in the light of the morning she could not escape that memory and the seductive pull of its presence. She had become lost within them, those two girls and the effigy of their presence, the night and its foreign substance.  And in that moment the eternal remorseless darkness had hung itself in the air around them spun them all gently within the tight strands of its net and for that time nothing else had existed.

She had known nothing of this ecstasy before. Nothing that could resemble anything of what she had been able to experience then and while she lay in the empty light of the dawn she allowed herself to sink back into that place, her hands moving down to cup herself to toy momentarily with the wetness as it had been so expertly toyed with before.

 What length of time had passed during that moment she could not say, the train had of course tunnelled on through the darkness the menagerie of sounds from every part of it had become lost, like time and like herself upon its dark tracks.

 What was for certain her time with them had not lasted, for like everything that seeks to sink us into the timeless veil of eternity there had come a time when the veil had to be pulled aside.

It had come shockingly, instantly. The girl upon her, fingers deep within her had been torn from her first, the tender touch of her wretched achingly from her body, while she had reached out desperately and feebly to keep her there. The other was also taken in an instant also tossed with what seemed like horrific force against the side of the train to lay dazed and dishevelled though still ravishing in her fallen faery like reverie her expression transforming from ecstasy to shock to anger and then seemingly back to ecstasy again. She had sat up shaking her head as though to dispel a dream, or the last clutches of sleep, wiping the sweat streaked hair from her face to contemplate the intruder that she sensed standing before her.

She cried out then from her bed separated from that moment but linked to it by her experience. That smell, that leather, that touch, it was him, he whom she had first remembered when she had awoken. He who had been on the train, he who had been here then, but who was not here now, he who had taken her, broken her and then left before he could put her back together again and in the pale touch of the dawn she lay and longed for the night that had escaped her.

He had described much in those first few moments Algernon of Absutropolis he was, a descendent  of  those that had been cast from the day light world, left upon the cliffs in the dawn, as the cold spray of the sea rose as though in a hallo around them. She knew of this, it was written in the cities archives, she knew, all who lived amidst the city did. Of course the practice has been discontinued this particular rarity of genotype had been quickly purged from the city’s population through this cruel form of eugenics.  The long pilgrimage to the edge of the ocean to bare witness to the purging as parents left their sons and daughters pale and perfect against the cold dark rocks, their small mouths crying for their mothers, their hands clutching at the fabric of the dawn so that it seemed as though even then they wished to pull the night down around them and then as the city had born witness, the sun rising like a great cleansing orb above them, the sea turning to a cleansing sea of fire around them and they the children fearful, crying, trembling as the people of the city turned their backs and began their journey home without them.

He told how for generations his kind had bred amidst the subterranean domain of the cities foundations, forging a new civilisation in the darkness, making for themselves a place that they could call their own. How many generations has preceded his birth he did not know, but what was certain only the strongest survived and he a child of those survivors was one of the strongest.

He had sat there the whole time and if it had not been for the beguiling tone of his voice and the way he wove words together as though from a long lost age, if it had not been for the warmth of his smile that would appear and vanish as suddenly she would have thought him dangerous, as dangerous as anything she could imagine.

As she lay wrapped in the daylight that filled the world outside she tried to capture his appearance in her mind’s eye, tried desperately to bring together all that he had been to her in those few brief moments within the envelope of the night had surrounded them. He was tall over six foot and although slim he possessed an athletic build and the natural movements of a gymnast, or dancer, sometimes when he moved it had seemed to her as though he had vanished to materialise in another spot without the need to make the ponderous clumsy human like motions that separated them . His clothing had consisted of dark trousers, leather or a similar fabric with the same appearance. Boots high amidst the cuff of his trousers again well worn though well maintained. He wore a shirt, also black and over this a long dark leather jacket that fell to mid leg, like everything he wore it was exceptional quality and tastefully cut, though without any adornment. He wore gloves which he had placed on the table between them and around his neck goggles with lenses as opaque as the night. For all the uniqueness of his dress however these were by no means the features that stood out the most, oh no not nearly. His skin had been the first thing she had noticed, so white that it had appeared luminescent, the fine veins and capillaries just visible beneath the skin, the surface flawless and appearing mask like. It was only when he smiled when his thoughts and feelings seemed to break through from some distant place of steady contemplation that a measure of personality was able to find its way onto his features. His features lent themselves to Northern European heritage indeed strangely similar to her own, high forehead and cheek bones and the most startling green eyes that seemed to capture the light from surfaces around them. She had felt attraction instantly for this strange creature that had been evident then and particularly later when he had led her home ensuring her safety within the growing light of the dawn.  

The night had been a plethora of strange experiences and undeniable wonder, a strange place where the indefinite idleness of immortality of the place seemed to give presence to the common place wrapping all into an amalgamation that was as foreign and enticing to her as anything she had ever known.  Of course there had been fear though, always present on the edge of her consciousness as much as it was always disenable on the edge of her vision where the world would  disappeared into the same dim darkness. So strange to not know things, to look, but to not see, to have this darkness filling the world around her, collapsing her vision to indistinct objects and rough outlines of things that she could not comprehend. How the darkness had messed with the scale of her world, at once at street level it had contracted to the extent of her vision making the world seem a small hidden foreboding place, but then on the scale of the sky as she had looked up as though into the very universe knowing the earth for the first time to be something other than a place under the eternal wreath of a baron blue sky.

Of course the night could not last its dark dense blanket no matter how densely woven would soon be penetrated by the sun, this place within the bowels of the city would remain the darkest for the longest, but even here the sun would soon find its interminable way and fill the  empty spaces with its light. She sat lost within this world amidst revelations that she knew would take days to digest, hoping that this time would go on forever, but aware that it could not. Algernon had explained many things during that time and one was that she must return to the day, she would be missed and those that were missed for too long undoubtedly went missing themselves and were seen never again in the world of the night, nor the day. She had protested, begged then. Perhaps she could stay in this world? With him, but this also could not be, not yet at least and she knew by the steady feeling of lethargy growing in her limbs that this was so, without the drug from the dealers her mind conditioned by the city could not survive within this world and though she had rallied, protested, she could feel the steady pull of unconsciousness taking her under and like the people around her who were slowly rising, moving, departing she knew that her time here was near at its end and soon this place would become but a memory. He had helped her then, supporting her sleeping body with his strength, moving with her protectively, determinedly through the throng of the departing and as gas lamps slowly flickered and dimmed around her and a strange anxiety and apprehension filled the crowd she heard as though from an explicable distance the approaching sound of the train and as it rose up around her and as she was able to captured the first inklings of its smoky scent on her tongue she fell into unconsciousness that was for the first time that of sleep.

She lay there now on her bed in the morning sun reliving those moments even as her mind and heart flickered forth to taste the ones that were soon to come, she lay, moved onto her back and smiled to herself in a way that she had not smiled before, before she again dipped her will back amidst her recollections.

She had awoken sometime later the smell of him and the now distant smell of the locomotive mingling somewhat oddly with the sterile smell of her room around her. She had been put into bed, sleep and the night around her. She had risen at once certain that he should have disappeared certain that his scent and the morning would be the only thing that remained. But no he was there studying it would seem her as she had slept, his features lost in contemplation and then almost instantly breaking open into a quick smile that told her everything that she needed to know. She realised then that she was near naked a simple singlet and her briefs and the sheets around her providing her no small modesty and then the realisation that he had undressed her and placed her there, filling her face with a vague awkward embarrassment that quickly gave way to some sort of a reserved excitement. She had motioned to him then, perhaps some reserve of excitement had remained like a residual from the night earlier, perhaps it was natural that she should want this at a time like this when she was within moments of surrendering everything to the day and perhaps it was just because he was him as no one else had been him before.

Algernon

What fools they were those that thought they could enter the world of night and leave as though the night would forget them, as though we its custodians would let them. Of course many entered through the doors of twilight; many came to us when they failed to fall as the sun did, they stumbled full of trepidation and anticipation into our world, like strange amalgamations of spend thrift upon the shores of the night, the day receding like the tide about them and they helplessly floundering within the darkness that surrounded them. Some took a while, the night a great mystery around them, they would venture out cautiously slowly, seeing little and understanding even less before they returned once again to the day. Others of course could not grasp the night, for them it was as though they had been washed up upon nightmare shores, every instinct, every primal fear awake and raging within their subconscious, the destiny of these poor souls was often as sad as their day lives, it was told they would be found huddled afraid of even the smallest of shadows and for some, for those who rushed from their apartments in fear into the very maw of the night well to the hygienists they would be condemned and for their fate even we did not know. Others, the rare ones they awoke as though they had spent their previous lives asleep and it was to this reality that they were truly born too, they adapted with uncanny ability to the night world around them, casting the day from them as though it had never been, our world was full of those that had they had been born to one world, but were now the sons and daughters of both. They were the dangerous ones, because they remembered and the ones that remembered always wanted to return.

She had been one of those, the sun forgotten even before it had disappeared over the horizon. Of course even she would have felt fear in those early moments, when everything she had ever known had disappeared, but fear like everything has its allure. She had found the locomotive as all the promising ones do, many of us think they had known of it earlier, perhaps they had heard it in their dreams as it breached their subconscious as it breached the subterranean, Perhaps they smelt its smoke within their sleep  perhaps its passage caused vibrations that travelled up into their world awakening senses that should have remained slumbering, for whatever reason she had come, boarding the locomotive that could have taken her to hell for all she knew, but then she knew nothing of  hell for hell  was a part of the night. She had nearly found it then though, falling into the delicious arms of the succubi she had succumbed without fear, or thought, she would not have been finished then of course, no the succubi were not so primitive, she would have returned time and time again to their arms, night after night giving up her life until she became one of many that walked both worlds, but comprehended neither. I had found her earlier of course, she had left her apartment and I had been there moving quicker than her through the last of the day light shadows walking at times in her shadow swiftly and silently though she never would have known it, she had found the subterranean station, looking mystified, excited, but also horribly alone she had stood of the platform as the night world swept around her and she a remnant of another day standing upon the stage of the night.

 I remember her still, small in stature, neat, compact yet feminine body, blonde hair swept back as though in haste, but still lending itself to an old world charm that was so often lost within the day world above. Her features were strangely pale, though not as pale as one of us she still possessed a completion that spoke of long winters and cold crisp days and I thought at once that a winter breeze off the sea would look good within her hair. Her eyes were blue though I only noticed this later and though they were small a great passion and keenness seemed to reside within them and even before we become properly acquainted I wanted to be a part of this thing that was there. Her facial structure spoke of Nordic blood, high cheek bones and forehead; once again a mystery for this blood line was incredibly amidst the world above and I wondered again at her origins and how she had come to be here.  Her mouth I instantly liked, perhaps the best of her features, her smile for now only hinting at the mischief that lay hidden by the fear within her heart. I knew even then that it would take little for this fear to disperse and of course it was only moments later that I was proven right.

I had in my cruelty left her to them for a moment; perhaps it was my need to see her taken by them that stayed my hand, perhaps I ever her protector wanted to see her lovely young body being enveloped by them taken to places that the world above could not imagine and certainly would not understand. Perhaps I felt that she deserved this much, to languish within her own pleasure and abandonment for a time before the dawn took this world and maybe even this memory from her. She was in ecstasy and though the danger now was still very real, this was the seduction and it would persist for some time before they fed. She gave herself to them in an instant, her eyes taking in their beauty as they took in hers. They took their time of course and a thousand small caresses occurred before they entered her with their fingers and tongues, expertly bringing her closer to the edge as her body writhed around them. They kept her there, not allowing her body the release that it so craved, this is what they did best building and building her pleasure, soon they would take it from her, take it into themselves leaving her vacant, limp and left almost for dead, until she crawled  back craving to be fed from again. It was time, her breath coming in short ragged gasps as she tried to bring more of them inside of her, tried with desperation to make room for their fingers at her entrances, tried to bring herself over the edge as her own hand joined theirs, this was their signal and mine and before they could take from her what they desired I had them away from her with my strength and speed and they fell floundering and she fell pain wretched and panting. Oh my sweet ones, they recognised me at once, for we are like no other in this place and they fell back further, fearful though their eyes thick with malice and spite at what I had taken from them and in that moment I enjoyed the fear within their eyes as much as the ecstasy within hers. She of course was still lost in her arousal and I was in my mood tempted to finish her off then, but it was a long night ahead and she would need her strength. I gathered her from the ground the whisper of those around us joining with the sound of the train and we were at once up and out of there, her head cradled in my arm as her eyes dilated and still hooded with arousal stared uncomprehending around her.

We found somewhere quite, later when the train had left and upon a lonely platform we stood deep within the city, the last of the train’s vapours like the wisps of white ghosts around us and the last of its sound within the eerie blackness subsiding and then departing us. She was still in shock, scared and perhaps more so than she had been before, but what could she do and where could she go? It was the same for all of them, they feared, but the night alone was more fearful.

 I motioned for us to move and she at once seemed shocked that we could share the same words that our language could be the same and in that moment when her surprise was the greatest I took her hand cold and small amidst mine and though she tried to loosen me from her, that small part that made us both human with in this world hesitated and then held me so. We took the left exit, pale gas lights flickering and leading the way, the steps were many, but soon the corridor gave way opening up into a narrow promenade filled again with a ménage of night creatures that seemed to give no thought to the two new ones within their midst, but of course they were aware,  the night time world was becoming smaller in the eyes of man, a barren place, the city was wining as we its ancient enemies were slowly dying, new ones upon our shores meant hope and that is why I was there.

We moved to a place of darkness, many hours were still ahead and if she was to survive this night we would need solitude and a space to talk. We found a bar and I laughed as she looked around, so strange to think that a place such as this no longer survived in the world above, we fell into a quiet corner a table between us I lost in the understanding of her situation and she lost in trying to understand it. “My name is Algernon; welcome to Absurdtropolis for this is the name of the world that surrounds you”.  Once again she seemed lost, lagging moments behind understanding, “Your voice, your accent, it is not as ours” I laughed then deep and without mirth, this girl had been privy to a strangeness that would confuse, condemn and the conquer most and yet it was to my voice that her attention had been drawn. “Ah yes my voice, we, us, learnt our language from other ways, old ways of clackety screens, squeaky gramophones and dusty books, of course she was mystified by these words and though I explained as best I could, she did not understand. Our speech disappeared within the darkness until we were left with the subject of I. “You are one of those aren’t you?”

The night had slowly died around us like glowing embers from a fire fallen cold. The twilight had long since gone and the eternity of the night now surrounded me and her. She was enraptured with it as though the silkiness of its hidden texture whispered and caressed her secretly telling her things that she could not have possibly known before. She was alive and animated within its hold, natural and naive within its grasp, born to this realm or so it seemed to me. We talked I told her what I knew of our history and our beginning as it had been since the first of us had been left on the dreadful black rocks. I spoke if the world that we had forged within the darkness, the place that we had come to call our own and she had listened attentively faithfully to my every word as we had continued like this until well past midnight. The night around her was of course strange and often we would pause mid sentence as some strange figure moved past her and she wished to know all that I could tell her of them. Of course she wished to know of the ones that had seduced her, the two girls of exceptional beauty who had brought her to her metaphorical knees with their touch. I explained to her that like the world above each person had his role within the city and it was a sad undeniable fact that the world beneath the city survived like bacteria consuming the detritus from the city above provided.  There were many like these girls I had explained they had fallen through the day light society into the night world and had become stuck here, but to live here they needed sustenance, or otherwise their bodies would fall to sleep like the rest of the people in the world above, they needed to harvest that thing that would keep them awake, their bodies over many, many generations had come to depended upon it. When they had seen her they had known instantly that she was not of this world, it had not just been her clothes, her demur, her confusion but the sense of the substance that she secreted, but which they no longer possessed. They had been drawn to her like moths around a candle, but to properly feed they needed to bring her to arousal, over hundreds of years these ones had perfected this art, they knew every trick needed to make any man or woman a floundering, begging ball of pleasure and when their excitement was at a level, when they would do almost anything to gain release they would take from their victim this secretion and so be able to survive another night. Perhaps a long time ago these girls had been like her taking from the dealer the substance to keep them awake, they had stumbled into the night world and into the arms of another, they had craved again this connection perhaps finding another dealer and heading back like addicts in search of the arms of the one who had had them before until they too became like them, prowling the night corridors for new victims.

They would not be forgotten; in the same way the twilight would never forget the heat of the summer’s day that had impregnated it. The night like its people despite the secret sacred haven of their world  wanted to pull back the dense fabric of its darkness and let the stars in all their thousands in to show them its beauty even if meant then that that beauty would then be destroyed, we the people of the night were the same, we longed for the day and its people we wanted to find for a time the thing that we had loved most,  to see the light of the sun sparkle in their eyes as it would never again sparkle in our own, to touch sun warmed skin, we wanted to show them our world even though they had in their thousands the capacity to destroy it and even though they had been the people that  had banished us from there’s. We were proud of our place, strong in the world that we had made, but what is a world if it cannot be shared?

They were a different breed altogether, many wondered as to their relevance and in the night world all was relevant. Theories were propositioned, speculations devised. I did not know, but I had my theories, but they were just theories and until I had one before me that is all they would ever be.  

Of course they longed for our realm as we longed for theirs, so sometimes a door would open between these two realm and for some that door would never swing again closed.

Eve

I was safe now the tree and the sun gone, dwelling, living, growing in a world that I could now only imagine. I was deep, deep down within the city, so deep that the sound of the city alive and busy could not touch me. I liked it here this place, the feel of the cold earth around me, but I still longed for the tree, longed to climb into its branches by the light of the moon, longed to hug its trunk close as the stars winked joyfully around us. Soon soon it would be so and I fell into sleep the sun, the sun still alive within me. I dreamed then of someone out there in the city slowly moving through the darkness, his skin pale like mine, his eyes green like mine and his hair also like mine, he was coming closer searching for something within the darkness and just before I slipped into the unconscious world of the day I saw in his mind an image of the tree that he was searching for and I knew that before long he would be here.

  Algernon

The night slept, tucked away behind the sun in the distant realm of stars. The city rose dark and majestic from its proud perch upon the edge of the ocean as the ocean continued its eternal assault upon the precincts of the city. Pure white clouds of vapour rose into the air between them, rising up they joined the cumulous amalgamation of pollutants that slowly circled within the maelstrom of the night sky.

After the incident in the apartment I had decided to come here, to escape as best as one can the precipitants of the city, of course I had not come straight away. I had slept for a time, the dangerous escape from the apartment amidst the rising sun had tired me and I had needed time to heal, I had gone to one of the many places that I had within the city and sheltered down amidst the darkness waiting for the last of the sunlight and its two edged sword serotonin to leave my body and the day.  

That journey to had been fraught with peril, the long shadows had been given hours to recede as I had slept and I not familiar with this part of the city had been forced to use every ounce of speed and cunning within my arsenal to make it out alive. I had been a desperate figure then, navigating the light and darkness that had separated me from my haven, traversing the world of the day people hidden mostly in shadow, but occasionally venturing into the light if my path would not present the opportunity to navigate within darkness, I had been lucky for many reasons.

Here again it was twilight, the world a place of shadow and silhouette, the crushing white of the waves and my skin seemingly the only surface capable of reflecting light. Amidst this world of shadows I pondered the revelations that had been made earlier that morning. There was a tree within this city, or so it seemed. Even now 12 hours after its discovery my breath still caught in my throat remembering it. I had seen trees before we all had, even us the night dwellers, but before those trees had been consigned to the past, desperate forbidden images scrawled upon city walls by despotic destitutes, broken burnt crumbled and crumpled manuscripts from another world passed feverishly amidst the excited throb of sweet marred hands and occasionally as a time like this an image blasted upon the mind’s eye so vivid as though one could reach in and drag it out. Serotonin I pondered, it happened to us all trapped in the light of the day this precious, yet dangerous neuro transmitter  given the opportunity to course through us at levels that could kill us providing us with strange visions of distant places, the future and the past, but what was this?

I could not know, but the city looked similar to how it did now, but then the city had probably looked like this for thousands of years I anxiously mused, but something told me this had been now and my heart grew quick and fast within my breast and my hands clammy at the thought that this could be so. I pondered the sea while all the time this thought passed through me, where did it end? The computers told us that it didn’t, that it stretched from pole to pole unbroken save for us, we did not know and most of us of course did not care, the city provided for everything, what use did we have for anything else? There was something captivating by this thought I could feel it perhaps as our ancestors had felt it an awareness trying to penetrate the darkness of the ocean as they had tried to  penetrate the darkness of space, of course that to had failed.

 I loved this place its solitude, but almost always while I was here I longed for the dangerous excitement of the city, the black monolithic structure that rose above and behind me, we and our kind had too much of a game with it to abandon it now, so despite the promising secrets of the sea and its beauty as it lapped upon the last shores of the earth held my thoughts and its thought were the same.

We and the city had evolved together; we were in a sense more its children than we were the worlds. The relationship between us loving and tender and though we clung to each other desperately, with desperation we also wished to tear each other apart. The day people of course had changed but differently since the seas had risen up and left us here, since the sun had grown hot within the sky and the atmosphere had almost boiled away, the seas like acid rising up around us. They had been the inheritors of the day, using their technologies to breed bodies that could survive the atmosphere that their distant uncaring ancestors had created they had made themselves rulers, tailoring their genomes until nothing remained of the old races that had preceded them. To them our heritage was owned.  

We of course were different, we were the children of the past, genetic anomalies that should have been cast like the children of Sparta were onto the rocks outside the city to die. Of course we had not, We the survivors forsaken and cast from their niche had found somewhere else to grow and prosper, this place became the night, the place that the day people had left behind and so hundreds of years later we became their distant superstitions brought again to life. Oh the irony of this and how it still excited me, for who is some sense does not want to be the monster that prowls both the figurative inner world and the cold callous outer world, who does not wish to hunt with impunity both, above and beyond the moral law that this new world could not offer.

Tonight, what would it bring? I did not know, but in all the years that I had lived here I still felt a thrill at its approach. We the night people lived outside of time, well at least in the sense of recorded time, for while we walked the city the world stopped, no event would be recorded, no event transcribed and all would be made well so the world awoke tomorrow with the vestige of the night cast from it. Who would not want this world for themselves?

I left the black sweep of the sea then, my solitude giving way to the anticipation of other places, other people and the night. It would not be long before the locomotive departed and still I was some distance from one of its many hidden stops. I gained the outskirts of the city quickly and as ancient coastal aeries gave way to ash felt funfairs I was almost instantly amidst the buildings towering as they did above me. I soon found my baring and moved deeper into the metropolis with a quick and efficient pace that I often used to cover large distances within the city. The streets were of course silent and filled only with my growing anticipation that seemed to move ahead of me with in the gloom. This night I would not be left purely to my own devices, the dealers had dealt and there was the chance that some would come to us from the day and I like the ferry man upon the dark waters of the Styx would be there to make their passage to the underworld all the safer and all the sweeter. The dealers had been active in section F. a middle class inner suburb of massive proportions that rose high into the sky and dominated much of the skyline that was starting to rise around me. The dealers seemed to choose their locations randomly, but we always knew where they had been and to these areas we would congregate, our eyes sharp and all seeing within the darkness, ourselves hidden from everything but the night. I spotted her instantly, though I had heard her much earlier, her foot falls echoing like pistol shots with in the narrow confines of the narrow promenade, this one had given up all care and was a prisoner to her curiosity, her arms moving quickly and frantically by her side, her head moving around, to stare, to ponder then to try and understand all that was around her. I had no problem gaining the distance that separated us, coming up close smooth and silent like, to smell the perfume behind her ear and the even sweeter smell of her fear and excitement. She did not see, nor sense me, we are too quiet and too fast for the day people and while I danced within the space around her I too scanned the world around her for danger for in the city at night the danger can come in many and varied forms and one such as this a new born to the night would become its perfect target, We moved like this together for a time. It did not take me long to realise that this one had a destination in mind and she walked as one not overwhelmed by her surroundings and her situation.

Memories and their associated sensations trap us in time and it was here that I was trapped. I had left her as I had left the rest washed upon the daylight shore as I again departed with the distant pull of the night tide as the moon stirred my blood and pulled my being back to its rightful place. I had once again narrowly avoided the rising sun. Lingering too long the night had dissolved around me, but for the first time in over a century I had wished to stay with it and when her arms had reached out beckoning me, tempting me to stay I had instead smiled to her sadly as I departed as if to say “Not now, but maybe….” I had watched her  then as I had departed , retreating before me in the dramatic crown of the rising sun as the tears stained the space that separated us.

It was almost midnight and my thoughts could dwell on her no longer. She lived in the day and until I could make up my mind this is where she would stay. I had work to do, I had seen the tree again that morning, it had appeared in the darkness between us as I had departed and I was now more sure than ever that this being existed somewhere in the city. This time like before I had seen it rising up out of the derelict dilapidated darkness, as though imprisoned within its own maze of dark dusted streets. This time however I had scanned the vision more closely and it had been to the skylight that my eyes had been drawn for it was here that I had hoped to discover a feature of the city that might provoke some close or distant memory within me, but yet again nothing, no spiralling pirouette painted palace for dreams foreclosed, no looming monstrosity of mediocre pomposity, No misplaced spire of rust coated sadness on which I could hang my cloak of madness, nothing and yet I could not lose hope.  I ditched my resting place in a moment, at once gathering my cloak around me to secure my body from the cold that was  even now precipitating out of the darkened sidewalks and concrete boulevards. it hit me at once the streets were filled with a loneliness that I had not felt before, it permeated through the night and blew silently against store front windows somewhere above me I could sense it whispering through the heady heights of far off buildings, I knew what sounds it whispered and yet I stilled my ears against them, those thoughts would have to wait. The city around me was as familiar I had sheltered here before. It was my kind of place. The streets narrowly arranged, perhaps too claustrophobic for most people, the architecture a slap dash rendering of gothic grandeur and the overwhelming fear of a god long dead drenched in a coat of neglect and splashed with this and that. This place was dangerous. I guess I liked that too. I was eager for its distraction, eager for its touch I beckoned to the darkness as though to invite the darkness out  here we could dance a dies irae within this cobblestoned  conundrum and yet the darkness ignored me so I smiled and moved on. Danger was following me, I could feel its silky soft foot falls falling within lamp light shadows. I could feel its breathe sweet with some sort of expiring expectation, Oh how I welcomed it and yet when it came I was shocked. They appeared together as they always were, coming at me from either side of the narrow lane way that I was following, seeming to deny gravity as they slid seductively out of the shadows. “Algernon”. “Sisters” for this is how I knew them, because they had never offered their names. “The girl”  and I knew by the loneliness that seemed to condense out of the darkness that she was the one we spoke of, my temper, my need for danger evaporated, I wanted, I didn’t know what I wanted. “What about her” I replied my voice betraying nothing. “Where is she?” You took her.  “She is back with the day, she will no longer wake again to this world” “You lie Algernon. We saw how you looked at her, you know more”. “And why my ladies, my vampiric vain vixens would she interest you? More will come to replace her, more will fall through the sewer grate grills into your world, why was she any different? “Algernon, for all your years, for all the pompousness in which you prowl this city, you understand so little”. We tasted her and she did not taste like she should have….. They were gone then in an instant, they could do this too, this trick of invisibility and though I could have followed them, although I could have hunted them down from the lofty haunts into the guttural grouse underworld  that I could sense their diminishing shadows returning too I had not the energy and besides they had shocked me and far off I could hear their laughter as though they knew it too. 

I regained my composure overtly at least I was Algernon and no street scrubbing banshee such as those two would see me ruffled. I continued on into the great dark distance of the night following god knows what, intuition, inkling, foresight, instinct I knew not, but I would follow them where ever they might take me. The girls were of course right, she had tasted differently, indeed  there had been a whole lot of things about her that had been very strange and here I was again thinking of her, damn women and all their unnatural intuition, damn their canny ability to understand everything that the heart sought to hide. I imagined her now stretched almost death like on that big white bed that we had for a time shared. Her conscious lost to where ever the city took it when the night fell around its inhabitants. I imagined the sweetness of her breath as it became lost and underappreciated, as her breast rose and fell ever so magically within its secret tide and as I pondered I suffered and wanted her again. Before I knew it I had found my way into her district, I had consciously failed to see the changes around me, within the night the buildings had gone from their ponderous gothic brutalism and gained some sort of neo futuristic flavour, saturated with clean lines of cosmetic continuity.  Her apartment block probably indistinguishable from all others aside from me and her stared down to the street, the opaque sheen of its windows like tranquil pools of water, hiding a deeper world from view. I gained entry to the building in my usual manner, the city despite all its effort to keep us out proved to be as ineffectual as usual and before I knew it I was amidst its halls and indistinguishable rows upon rows upon rows of doors. I found hers with ease, I guess I have a memory for these things and there I stood between those walls against her door. I wanted in, I wanted to watch her as she slept, to curl up amidst her immobile body and the immortality of the night and yet to do this I would defy the sanctity of her place, I would invite myself to where I was not invited and yet I wanted this more. The lock clicked open loud within the confines of the hall as though this small treason upon the sanctity of this space was made to resonate with all the betrayed emotions of my own guilt and yet in that moment typically I had made a million justifications as to my actions and  before the lock clicked back into the space behind me I had already forgotten why I had even paused. She was not there, the room lay empty within the swollen light from the moon. This of course could not be and yet as I ran my hand desperately, inquiringly against her bed as though to feel a remnant of the warmth that had transpired from her as she had been before, not even a tell tale impression made by her sleeping body. I was at once an anxious apprehensive mess, moving through her rooms, some small moans of fear escaping me as I considered the possibility of what this could have been. She was not in the apartment and yet nothing suggested that she should not be. Everything was as it had been last time I was here. Her coat the one that she had worn before was in its familiar place hanging against the door, everything was here save for her. I wanted to scream then in some sort of desperate frustration to shake the foundations of this place with my pain so all who were near could be allowed to feel it too. Instead I sat upon the bed, silently trying to bring my mind back under control. There were few reasons as to why she could be missing and none of them were good. I thought at once of those Street scrubbing banshees taking her away, but they had seemed to know nothing of her when we had talked and I had sensed  nothing from them that had hinted at the concealment of secrets. The other option was that she had found the dealers again and had entered the night unbeknownst to us  and while this was a possibility it was unlikely, highly unlikely. So this of course left the most frightening option of all the city itself had taken her. 

I stood there silhouetted by the crisp clinical condominium, all pure white and reeking of antiseptic sanitisers, a smell that I had never noticed before. The dawn already not far away , the light outside the city already becoming dawn grey. Where was she? Without her this place was cold, nothing here could touch me, it was like a vacuum devoid of substance, feeling, anything. I had no time to begin my search, hours already wasted and a day ahead filled with desperate frustration as I waited for the return of the night. I had a plan and there were few within this city that could match myself at the task that had been placed before me and I vowed that I would find her within this city be it the end of me.

I hit the pavement running, from the buildings above my shadow had collapsed upon the street hunched momentarily against the force of a two story fall and in a moment I was up, surging forward into the night, city blocks became a blur around me as I moved forward. I had people to find, people who made their secrecy part of their identity and yet I would find them. First I would seek out those temptress tricksters, those sumptuous twin vixens of seduction and sexuality I knew of course their places, they would still be sleeping waiting for the night to fully fall around them before they awoke and I with this advantage would set upon them and take their beautiful necks between my fingers and gleam from them all that I might know.

 I headed into the old city, the haunts of creatures like themselves, the desperate pillages of the day people, they who themselves had been part of this other world until like desperate junkies drunk upon the beauty of the night they had succumbed and sold their humanity in order to stay.

 They were easy to find, their decadent dungeon was buried not so deep, a plethora of adjoined doorways sprawled amidst the collapsed ruins of the underground. A delicious place of filigree and shadow crammed with towering partly charred church candles that flickered momentarily when I brought myself and the draft into their sanctuary.

The place was saturated with a picturesque neglect , a broken mildewed amalgamation of Victorian this and Elizabethan that. Great worn and mildewed tapestries adjoined the walls, worn thin by the ages spilling out also over the floors, the remnants of some gothic grandeur that had found some sort of meaning once again within this dark belly of the world.

 A great crystal chandelier sparkled in the space before me sending fragments of light to dance around the room. A giant mirror its surface surprisingly untouched lay against the wall, as my reflection danced across it and a great table set with many chairs and filled with the remnants of food scavenged from the city above.

The air was filled with a musky sweetness as though sex itself had condensed itself out of the walls to fill every space and every breath and I grew at once heavy and aroused by its presence. I moved on deeper into this laconic labyrinth, the halls a harrowing homage to the grim graffiti of a civilisation long dead, messages left by the past now irrelevant to the future, the faded memorabilia of ancient scripts faded .

Broken remnants of machinery cloaked and partly concealed, others polished up and functioning to perform some occult operation, for these girls and their kind had become like witches of old and no one could rightly say what apothecary alchemy functions they were now able to perform.

 I moved deeper until a door stood before me, a great oak amalgamation of iron and brass, Ahhh here they were, my treasures, my temptresses. The door whispered open on its well oiled hinges and before me out of the departing darkness they lay.

Oh sweet heaven, Jesus would weep himself for such beauty, my mouth eager and wishing for twin founts of feminine lustfulness.  Elaborate Scented coiffeurs around them bursting with bodices and corsets. Long tresses tangled about ivory necks, naked limbs entwined within silken sheets, the soft sigh of sleep amidst them and the perfume of the night still upon them.

They lay sprawled amidst each other finding a comfort a solace that was almost touching and I wondered for a moment upon the past that had brought them here and the world that had brought them together.

 They had chosen little to sleep in, the warmth of their bodies against the cold earth around them enough in this place of fire sparkling candles and the remnants of a coal fire smouldering and dying nearby. They were like statues almost perfect in the candle light, long and languishing, filled with everything that made them dangerous. I came closer, my shadow momentarily cast upon them like a dark god delivered to them and at once without thought, without compromise I set upon them.

I had them in an instant pinned against the slippery silk as their eyes snapped open, one in each hand. I could feel their blood pumping at once feverishly frightened through their veins as awareness grew with in the dark angelic depths of their eyes. Their backs arched, but I was ready for this and with my knees I pinned each of them, their nails ineffective against the thick leather of my coat and gloves and soon they stilled, soon they stopped struggling, soon their limbs quietened perhaps to the point of death, but not beyond.

 And it was here that I left them, beautiful, pain full, their hearts beating out in the darkness like the sound of soft foot falls leading to the gates of hell, as their limbs fell again into laconic dismay, they knew me and what I could do and silent they soon became and soon in silence they just laid.

Still beautiful I marvelled, their breasts  heaving with the exertion of their struggle, small veins visible beneath  the flesh pulsating with the softness of the life that I had almost taken. Their nipples hard with fear, or longing? grazing the leather of my coat and yet cold ineffective in their intent. Their bodies almost too perfect sprawled out beneath me, the dark conjuncture of their sexuality exposed and strangely wet within the candle light.

Sensuously they waited….. “Where is she” and they knew of whom I spoke and I sat back confident in my power of them and they before me regaining slowly and then instantly their composure, for beauty never truly loses its poise and if it does not for very long.

“We do not know Algernon”

and in their eyes I saw some sort of pity which only made me angry and I turned from them in rage as they cowered away from me.

 “She is not there, I went to her last night, the apartment was empty”

They looked at each other in the silence that followed, sharing secrets, sharing  tacit sighs and I knew in that moment that they suspected as I suspected, they knew as I knew. The city had indeed taken her.

We sat together on their bed, amidst the devilish disarray of their nightly addiction, they had pulled with haste robes from their draws and the sat silently smoking some narcotic herb that filled the air with an exotic flavour, passing the cigarette between them, the tip smeared like blood from their painted lips.

We had known each other before, I knew this place for it was here that long ago they had brought me, I was then an infant within the night, alone and naive, but they had taught me within those long nights I had given them everything and they had nearly broken me with their pain until they brought me again back to life with their pleasure. I had left them there in the dawn one morning, pinned together amidst candles and the piety filled gazed portraits of long dead icons. I could have ended them then. I could have ended it all, but piety had filled my heart as I had watched their tears fall and mingle with their blood and then dry perhaps forever.   I had turned my back and farewelled them and the last part of me that was fully human.  

The cigarette smouldered itself to a pillar of black ash before falling slowly as the last of it was carried away into the darkness by a  breeze that swept in silently through the open door. It had done its work, the girls were again twin founts of seductiveness, lounging against one another as though they might fall again to sleep if their bodies had not supported each other.

Strange instead of anticipation I felt strangely sick, the shape of their bodies beneath their robes while beautiful  bore no resemblance to  anything that I could relate to, they were as alabaster statues removed, distant and at last sexless in the night that I had lost her.

They seemed to sense this also as they crept even closer together as though to reassure   each other that love did still exist within this room. I knew I was now unwelcome company I no longer reinforced their power, not with my violence, nor my sexual thirst and I rose to go, also done with this facade and also amazed that I had not done with it before.

 “Algernon?”

I turned.

 ” You should try the library, or the dealers they know better than anyone the movements of people between worlds. if there is a chance that she has returned to the night world they will know”.

 They looked upon me as I at last turned, perhaps something more than pity within their eyes. I left in silence as I knew no words would adequately fill the silence.

They were right though, the library and the dealers. Both were not easy, but if things came to the worse they would be nothing as to going up against the city. The library was close by and it wasn’t, it was something that people could spend a life time trying to seek and then it could just appear without ceremony on a street corner for no apparent reason, for no particular purpose, just there. I had seen it once before, its leather bound smoke filled interior, its warm welcoming lamp light, the magic of old knowledge bound in ancient  leather.  Then I had not had the time I had been in pursuit of someone and had turned to see it there and had never seen it again. The dealers were also another conundrum they could be found in the city only during the day, but we as night walkers could never walk their land during this time, we were separated in time but not space.  Apparently they also could walk the night world and they as outcasts of the city dwelled here, but where? No one rightfully knew. Of course the library would know, but where would I find the library? I left their rooms paying nought attention to the world around save for my thoughts, the street was cold as cold as it can only be before the dawn. I wanted sleep, I wanted darkness, I craved oblivion.

A sheer drop into silent gorges, amidst the winds on the top of the world I waited. Amidst sleet and steam and silence everlasting I slept and at last the sun was done and I rose silently from my place. The roof tops became my ride, from here I could traverse within silence this sleepy world. I was in a rage a frantic repose of passion and peculiarity wondering  upon the futility of the hours ahead and as the day fell like a ghost from me, the cold night air rushed in like a vacuum to take its place. I wondered at the end of this night would I be any better off? The airy haunts of sky scraper splendour spread before me and I was off across these new corridors as quickly as I could.

 The person I searched for lived up here, crouched away in the marbled black glassed facers of this grim metropolis , finding airy loft like dens, places broken, forgotten and stuffed with the excrement and tattered feathers of broken angels and rats and anything else that he managed to drag up here to make his world.

 These places had become his own, stained black with the excrement  of the night sky, a place that rose above the clouds in day light sun drenched delirium and then shivered the nights away in the company of ice laden gargoyles, demons and the Antarctic winds that roamed the sky.

 The sea from this position spread out around the city in its own despotic darkness, occasionally even from this height and distance a great rise of white water would catch the sun and bring as though from a great distance the fresh promise of salt.

 For a moment I stood exposed dangerously to those winds, to the sea birds that rode them, to the freshness of the air that  filled them and then I would move and that the dank dark heat of the city would venture up from its mechanical heart to reclaim me and together we would move on.

 I came at last to a building higher and more ancient that any nearby. It stood on its own, for a moment, the claustrophobic clutch of the city leaning away to give it space. Why it had been spared in the cities inexhaustible quest to build the new upon the grave of the old who could say, but it stood much like our world fell below, a relic of another time and place. It stood almost black some distance from me still. A gothic like perambulation in an otherwise neon sky. Its fractured balk works comprised of stone and partial repairs, gargantuan gabled and partly gutted by an ancient fire that had charred its walls, it stood amidst a sprinkling of stained glass window remnants,  twisted cast iron cast offs and the wind.

 My heart became filled with the remnants of its internal walls and floors rotting slowly and filled with the nostalgia of salt and the slums. I inhaled, its history, wet upon my tongue.  I was close now the great romantic bulk of it before me, and yet separating me from the privilege of its walls a mere 5m of sanctity and space and the soft silky sigh of the beckoning sea below. As I watched it swept in, a great rushing whoosh of sea and salt and the froth of faraway places, as though it might reach up and fill the space that separated us, but at once it subsided into an inky black reflection under the cold night sky.

I had done this before this great leap of space across the space that separated us, I had done it once and still I could imagine so vividly the sound of the sky as it began to rush past me moments before I found my feet on the other side. The trick I had been told then was to wait for the wind to rise up in the space between, I had also been told that to not wait for this wind was to wait instead for death. I sat down letting the world pull away from me, letting the world depart from me. Gone went the fear and apprehension of the morning, gone went it all except those senses immediately linked to the wind and the walls around me. I could feel it slowly, carefully, moving, sometimes a whisper, sometimes a roar, but would it be enough? I stood now, reaching out across the space, soon, soon, soon….. I felt it gather somewhere far off, perhaps somewhere out over the ocean, I felt it coming across the city, dividing, diverging and then before it drained away, me, lifting, stretching, opening and that dreadful rush of air and then a buoyancy and then before gravity took its unkind toll the touch of my toes on the other side. I had arrived.

I regained my balance quickly, the void open, behind me and ready to receive me, but I refused its summons at once finding more stable ground to place my feet. I was upon a spire, a towering carbuncle of stressed striated and strained stairways that tumbled down into the dark depths below. The perfume of ages rose up around me, great eons of death and decay, mildew and mould competing for the space around me and then a great flutter of feathers and a flock of pigeons veering off into the night behind me. I followed the dim lit stairs lower into the darkness, more absolute than the night around me, it somehow confused and confounded me. The stairs weaved their way deeper like a great downward spiral and I their passenger followed. Star after stair I seemed to be descending for eons, I had been here before and yet everything seemed wholly unfamiliar  and I could not understand why, but a sixth sense told me that I would find out soon. It was some time later that I reached the base of the tower and the world opened up around me into the lower cathedral. The site even in its dilapidation was breathe taking, what moon light there was poured through the fractured remains of stained glass piercing the darkness with dappled painted moon light , great swathes of cobwebs like cloth and the dust of a thousand unswept days  covered every surface so that I felt that if I were to fall I would fear nothing. I moved lower, the relics of a religion long dead cracked and littered with age, as the apathy of their devotes  settled like dust upon the shoulders of the sleeping messiah and a great black raven broke free from its slumber as though to take Jesus from sleep with it into the night. All about me was a sea, the oceans had long ago swept in and reclaimed this consecrated ground so that only the higher alters were still exposed. I moved lower still following a gallery around the edges I tried to gain a bearing within this sunken city of god. How it would have been to enter this place of sanctity and warship, to walk amidst the pews, to smell the ancient aromas of mire and frankincense swung from the thurible of an approaching priest. How the holy words would have echoed so solemnly within these great hollowed walls as the organ its depths now beneath the ocean, its notes accompanied by the liturgy in Latin swelled up and out towards the distant gates of heaven so that the angels above might partake in this music of men. For a time I stood, enjoying the play of light upon the waters, the small swell of the ocean within the confines of the walls, the silence of a past long dead “Silence etres mortels” I whispered under my breath before continuing on, for even I an unbeliever  owed this small amount of reverence. I moved towards the alter, like a great poop deck of some wrecked vessel with the virgin Mary at the helm the sea sloshed around it, but it stood tall despite the rot and the weevils amidst its walls. Before me candles appeared pale and fluttering and I breathed at last a sigh of relief, he was still here and with that breath the last breath of my apprehension escaped me and I knew the peace of this place around me.  I moved closer knowing that he would make his appearance when he saw fit, always one for some strange mix of subtlety and dramatics I would expect nothing less. The sermon for the day was spread out before me, an ancient book, its rarity unimaginable, though its words fit only for the fishes. I waited, it was then that I noticed back from the alter within the shadows though illuminated by one desperate candle another carving of Christ and with my heart lurching within my throat my friend draped upon the cross hanging from bloodied wrists and broken ankles and I was at once moving closer, the candles flittering to darkness to my haste so that only the one candle alone witnessed my passage. He was dead, but not for long, his body limp with death. Who could have done this, within this world this did not exist. He had died like his messiah, his flesh torn apart from the same filthy nails that held his church together, driven with force through delicate tendons, the blood still not dry upon the boards… At once I was alert, eager, the killer may still be here within this building and yet I had no sense of anyone. I moved into the shadows finding purchase upon the crumbled walls I climbed higher, faster to gain a vantage point, no nothing, for there was nothing living within the darkness that I could not hope to find. I circled the building to make sure and still nothing and finally returning to the alter I gazed again at the book “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi” the words seem towhisper out of nowhere and before me upon those bleached pages stood the tree of my dreams.

It rose with a splendour upon those parched pages, interwoven and broken with Latin scripts that curled majestically around the broken manuscripts and the aged breath of its limbs, as they themselves  curled like life itself from shoulder to signature, filling the space before me, with a vibrancy that was so lost to the world the book now found itself in. The colours and detail were painted with a meticulous precision that had defied the entropic breath of the ages and stood testimony to a dream that I had almost forgotten. Who had left it here, like this for me? Had it been my friend now bent and broken against the body of his saviour? Had it been his assailment who had left it as though a testimony to some great truth, or symbol that they had both shared, or had it merrily fluttered open is some stray breeze from the open sea?   I knew not, but this book could not stay here. I gathered it at once into my coat, its bulk at once against my heart as I moved to pay my last respects to the dead. I had known him only once, but in that time that we had shared I had met my first truly innocent soul within this dog eat dog state of a city and though we had not been friends, barely even acquaintances I felt a great remorse for his death and a great need to do justice against those that had facilitated it.

 I went out the way I came in. The cathedral of tears grew dim behind me, the waters against its foundations dragging the last of it into the ocean, this kingdom of god would soon be no more, but what may I ask would replace it? The jump to the other building was as precarious as when I had come in, the wind itself had seemed reluctant to help me leave, perhaps because it had sensed what I had taken from gods house and had disapproved, or perhaps it was just the weight of the book, or the weight against my mind, either way I was again within the city, moving against the dawn, home.

The book lay sprawled open, balanced at once dangerously and precariously upon its spine, its velum folded pages catching the light as the illuminated scroll work flickered to life amidst the small amount of candle light that was lent to it. I let my eyes drink up the images, wondering at all the places of god that it had occupied  and that had had fallen like time behind it for it to be here now. The tree was the most truly captivating image within the manuscript, none of the other images depict a tenth of the magic that had been imprisoned with ink upon that particular gilded page and I marvelled for ages upon this one embodiment, wondering as to it and its relevance. The tree was like the other, the one in my vision. It rose up a tangled scrub of ancient foliage, a trunk entwined with age and strength lying somewhere in a deep valley of towering peaks and majestic mountains. Script in Latin wove around its form, as though every space needed to be utilised to tell its story, the words and sentences almost running together in their complexity speaking to my imagination of unbelievable truths, every cursive stroke a revelation and every flourish of the writers hand a portrayal of everything I did not know, but wished to understand. I sighed then long and forceful, the only person I knew who could have deciphered this manuscript was dead and although other minds might exist within this city who knew the understanding of things I did not have the time to find them.  The maddening perspective of knowing just enough, it worked its way into my subconscious and before I knew it I was accentuating an anxious stampede through the space around me, I had to get out, I needed distraction, it was still only early and the night train was still to run.

I emerged from the steam, at once chic and dangerous, all in black, leather, pale face and hands, born to this night and every night, a ghost, a revelation, a stranger to most and a danger to some.

 I leapt from the platform, spanning a length no human could muster and then my hand was around some small handle and I was pulling myself into the interior as the train began its long winsome rout into the descending darkness.

All seats taken, the usual amalgamation of pimped up personalities each trying to distinguish themselves from the plethora of the night, each failing. I lounged in my usual despotic act of neglected nihilism, glaring at those around me with a long flat gaze that denied inquiry,  curiosity and inquisitiveness .

I had seen it all before and I would see it all again. The train rattled on, the conversation rising excitedly around me, to remember this as it was, when the night  was new and full of the mystery of another world. I could not listen to this anymore, each syllable only brought to me a small measure of what those words had been truly worth. so I turned and took my attention to the blur of the tunnel around me.

We travelled deep under the world. The tunnels long ago had been sewers and before that great natural caverns that disappeared so deeply into the earth that where we were now would have appeared as day.  Occasionally something would come into view, a light, a dwelling some sort of lonely out post trapped between stops, some place never visited and almost forgotten, but having an identity down here trapped like the rest of us.

 This darkness was the personification of madness, on it spread dark, down and deep, we were not made to live here, we had strayed too far and dug too deep, the soil and stones we turned could only bring us deeper amidst our own fear, amidst our own personal darkness’s until we forgot the face of the sun forever and became silent like the earth.

The train was slowing, a great gothic bridge of twisted and strained metal spanning some immeasurable chasm fell below us. The crowed jostled with its communal excitement each longing for something that they could not put their finger on and would probably never find.

The train stopped with the squeal of a thousand demons, sparks flying like hell amidst the track and the smell of steam and sulphur rising up around us and despite myself I felt my heart swell with the crowds, we were here.

 I leapt from the carriage before each and everyone could disembark, moved ahead of the throng in my own private world of excitement tinged nostalgia and melancholy I wished that she was here again with me. I wanted distraction, I craved it and this world offered it up unto us like a great spread of bountiful treats, a great bouquet of brave beautiful flowers and in the night these became all the sweeter. I moved to through the thickening throng, cutting a path like a shadow, people sensing me only after I had gone.

 A bar, some music, some girls and some danger…. The narcotics were good, the smoke divine I lay, or better sprawled across the floor, somewhere in the darkness music pounded with a primitive syncopation that seemed in sympathy with my heart, I closed my eyes, trying to find a deeper darkness and then let them open as the world sprawled around me like I sprawled around it.

Somewhere near my others lounged, this was a small bar, tucked somewhere away from the main midnight thoroughfares  catering for a select crowd of unsocial sycophants, people like myself of select taste and sophistication who had no time for day time tourists and their tenacious animation.

I knew some of these people. There was Salicia, she was like me,  her expression as always haunted, dressed as I in black, her figure also like mine long and lean, she did what I did freelance, a finder, a seeker, destroyer,  we had worked together, for a time loved together, but neither of us were made for one another. It was said she had a boy friend, someone made high in the day light city above who kept her like a toy amidst his lavish and luxurious apartments, apparently she had a place she could go call her own there, where she could escape the light and live with him, who knows?

 The city itself would destroy her if it knew, but then the city didn’t know everything.  Galantis was also nearby, his  voice booming over the music, he was a dwarf who had been cast from the city like the rest of us, he was what one might call a seeker of fine things, there was little that Galantis could not acquire whether it was from the darkness below or the city above.

Then there was a voice and a smile and lips painted like blood and hair so long and fair, my host  Hannah. She knelt down beside me, like the gathering of twilight darkness the soft flush of some exotic perfume, perhaps a gift from Galantis wafting around me as though I had died amidst a funeral bouquet and come back. Her soft pillow like breasts loose and free amidst her blouse softly singing some sort of comforting soliquay that begged to be heard. Hannah I moaned Hannah and she was there at once caught up in my arms my tears wet against the welcoming warmth of her neck Hannah.

We had a history, a past, an ebb and flow of experience that stretched back upon the midnights of long dead nights and amidst the desolation of twilights and also occasionally sometime a place where we had stood amidst the sunrise and beckoned to the dawn of our old world.

Long ago I had found her, lost and abandoned and cut from her solar world, a child born under the sun, but already on the door step of the night. I had taken her in my arms as they had instinctively crept around mine. I had not known a child before, few came into our world, few by birth, or by mischance and instantly I was in love with this thriving bundle of hope and promise and I saw amidst her something that I had forgotten and perhaps had never been privy too and at once I wanted to give it all back to her and in so doing save a small part of me that had never been able to grow.

 I had taken her deeper to this place and found for her a space to thrive when she could not be beside my side.

 Her story was a short and tragic one, her parents had been targeted by the cities for crimes undisclosed and somewhere amidst the turmoil and their clinical extraction from their premises private she had escaped. She had probably stumbled into the streets, perhaps at that exact time when the shadows of twilight had risen up from the ground to capture the sky and had instead captured her and by the grace of these shadows she had escaped alone.

Here  she had wondered for a time in this world before I had found her and brought her to her new home. Over the years we had become something to each other, something that defied all levels of conformity and yet within this space something new had grown and lived and was here now as she my daughter held my head like a mother and murmured sweet words like a lover.

“Algernon, what world has captured you now” What world that could bring such grief and yet make your heart beat so?”

And of course I had told her then of my plight, of the love that was now so inexplicitly tainted by terror and in her way she brought me again to my senses and brought some sort of hope into my soul.

“Algernon we know the city, we know that she could be here still and you of all the people amidst this world have the talents to see to it that she is brought back to us for her place is with us in this world”.  of course I knew all this, but it somehow helped when she said it.

I wanted to believe it, I wanted to shed my doubts and distrust amidst the female softness of her skin and hear again how everything would be alright.  We were left like this, like statues and this was all the peace I needed until the place began again its ancient vibration, as the steam spilled like ghosts upon the ground and a whistle pierced the ambience and again the night train rolled in upon its ancient rusted tracks and I went again to take its passage back to the sleepy solitude of the day.  

The train had gathered its usual menagerie of morning mayhem, a despotic tyrannic amalgamation of transient tramps none looking the better for their presumed nocturnal excesses. People broken by the dawn, sleep clouded, drug addled confused, insular and longing for something that they had, but needed the night to reveal. Some of course in raptures, like twenties bourgeoisie conservative agriculturists fresh from the carnival spectacle, rejoicing in their freedom even as they longed for the daylight conundrum of mediocrity and safety. Others still as though they had already said good bye, tears and longing mingled like sleep in the eyes of revelation, they had awakened and no longer would want sleep. For myself I felt rejuvenated, strangely upbeat  amidst the broken wreck of these carriage transients, the night fled past from my seat like a long stream of consciousness that I type these memories upon, lights flashing ever so often off in the distance behind broken tracks, caverns, crevasses and places that gave nothing back. I knew this place sometimes only by the sway, the ebb and flow of the carriage upon its tracks, the clutter of its many iron wheels and the acrid stench of its steam, nostalgic and claustrophobic . Then there was a difference, this difference almost infinitesimal, an ebb when there should have been a flow, a flow when there should have been an ebb and myself tussled, pressed upon the seat stopping  and then the doors opening like they had never done before. I was at once alert, what strange disturbance could this be? The others seemed oblivious, conversations, conflicts continuing unabated and yet ,we had stopped. I peered out amidst deserted railways, platform paraphernalia, dusted with the dust of misuse and abuse. The train seemed to be hesitating, waiting , then revving and racing I had little time to decide. I stepped from the carriage, my foot falls silent and private upon the platform, the doors closing with a whispering, hissing suddenness and then it was gone into the night and the darkness was allowed to gather in.

Where I was and why I was here I did not know, in the strangest of strange places, something stranger had happened still. I walked along the platform, somewhere ahead of me an exit sign flickered faded and then flickered again. Gross portrayals of individualistic anarchy scrawled upon walls and floor, dust coated seats like pews intent and yet unattended, dust bins filled with the excess of former generations. The exit sign led out a long snaking corridor that somehow retained the acrid stench of urine and the reek of humanity long departed, each brick surrounded by the grit of a people long dead. Cats down here, whispering through the darkness, all manner of feline fluffy fabulous marred by generations of genetic inbreeding, tempered by the archaic need for survival, longer in tooth and claw than any misplaced moggy before.

Then shop fronts closed as though after a long day, galvanised steel stamped with brands and branded with tags, nothing alive, there would be no rush hour here. Up ahead a light somewhere out of the darkness, something divine defying denying nihilism, something that still hummed with the electricity that was light and life. It grew amidst the darkness ahead of me, out of place, but owning some sort of grace, it was the library, I had come finally to this place.

The door was open, seemingly something from another older age still, oak and knotted with the vigour and strength of the sun. I moved into the interior hesitantly, excitedly. Green lamps illuminated, rows upon rows of knowledge and imagination elucidated. Printing and the infernal method, Gutenberg, Alexandria reborn. I scanned the titles from biology to bakery, everything here to furnish the knowledge of a nation and then walls of confounded philosophy to confuse it and then religion and politics to bind it, corrupt it and then finally destroy it. Where would I find what I needed?

The Tree, the Tree? History, the history of this city is what I needed. I found it sometime later, a metropolis almanac, a drug store, gas station publication, stamped with its price and in bold its year 2027. 500 years ago.

The pages were perfectly preserved some faint taint of cigarette smoke cloying, clinging. Where? I turned the pages from back to beginning as though moving back in time, each page  a decade, flipping, strange sights, foreign places and then hidden in a corner even then encompassed by the growth of city that spread around it like a metallic elixir, sparkling with an ancient newness, not yet the stained amalgamation of towering transient trash that stood here now. The tree as it was in the vision towering and yet dwarfed seemingly surrounded and contained as though what the city could not remake or destroy it had done its best to hide. And there before me a clue! I had seen that building, I had seen it somewhere, but where and as I racked my mind for this memory around me the libraries lights flickered, at first as though I wouldn’t notice and then more pronounced, off, on, off, on. I had little time, the library would only stay open for so long, or so it was told and one could not chance being trapped within its cloying walls until it opened again . This building was white almost like a tower seemingly devoid of windows or any other discernable character and yet I had seen it before and though I knew not where it was at least I now had something and somewhere out there if this building stood so must the tree.

It was then that the lights flickered one last time and I thrusting the book back into the darkness leapt for the door, its great bulwark of knotted wood moving slowly closer and with a agility that would have failed a human I slipped through  the crack, tumbling, rolling again out into the night and when I looked back the library like the rest, galvanised steel stamped with brands and branded with tags.

and then I noticed my book its weight absent, gone lost within in its depths.

Of course I could not return the way I had came, the train had long departed upon its harrowed tracks and dawn was not far away. I searched amidst the darkness and soon found an exit, broken decayed steps weaving their way upwards, I could smell the freshness of the night air so I let its presence guide me and soon I was working my way upwards and after a while the cloying breath of the underground gave way to crisp cold freshness and I gulped it down like a man starving, bent almost double against the chill of the night.

No matter where the night falls it owns its own reality. Sometimes it clings like the breathe of malice to the world, breathing in barely discernable breaths the essence of our fractured dreams and archaic nightmares, transforming the benevolent envelope of shadows around us into the pulse of a racing heart beat while clutching the skin in clammy cold clinginess . Sometimes it sinks to the earth’s surface, amorphous gentle, cradling and calling the earth in its presence , granting contentment and composure to all creatures, embracing, entwining and finally taking the conscious world under with it to sleep with it like the earth. This night there was no embrace, the world when I awoke was entwined with a tinkering tingling apprehension that buzzed in the night air around me, phantom sounds resonated in my unconscious sounds of dark, deep far off places primitive and stamped with an undisclosed anxiety that harkened to the memory of receding ravaged dreams, I was not alone. I remained motionless, my breaths controlled as though I still slept, gradually I pushed my conscious out probing the shadows that were hidden from my eyes. The city had at last found me. But as yet it had not caught me and yet in the shadows it waited. my conscious bled into the night space around me, until I could discern two of them, the city was taking no chances. Each of the beings were human, but only just, engineered in  biotech genetic laboratories deep within deep dark distant places they were a travesty upon humanity, broken and remade with modern alchemy and the twisted mind of science. Of course they needed to be, we were of course their targets and no human could hope to best what evolution had forged itself within the dark sanctity of our ostracism. Time was of the essence, while they believed me to be asleep I had the advantage, but they would hesitate no longer if given the chance to murder me in my sleep. Even I could not hope to best these two within the close confines of my lair I needed space to hit the streets, to divide and destroy them. I was up in an instant rolling for the door and the street above, their blades whispered around me, cold and bright within the night, but I was out of reach. I hit the street moving up a building using all my speed the fascia of the building seemed to condense into horizontal surfaces around me, my fingers and toes finding impossible fractures within the smooth expanses of concrete and steel in which to propel me up, they of course followed as best they could searching for more conventional routs, but their speed also impossible. 3 stories 8 and I was impossibly high, the world spreading out in a greater arc below me and yet still I went up. Within moments I was at the top surveying my battle ground, they would be here soon……..

Oh we would soon prance a desperate dance. Come my angels of death, my would be destroyers, come with  stealth and the cunning of machines, come to me with all your mechanical instincts and pit your steel against my flesh, finish what the city failed to finish millennia ago. They were upon me in an instant as though sensing my secret summons both at once, blades whispering where I had once been. I leapt higher up and over them ascending impossibly fast a shadow against the night I had one, its cloak as black as the night around us. It was strong with the might of mechanics, all steel, robotic interfaces and hydraulic links, nothing impenetrable and yet…. it struggled lightning fast reaching back for me trying to trap my limbs within its simian simulacra I avoided and before it could strike again I sent it up and over me. For a second it spun weightless, its cloak billowing amidst invisible updrafts and before realisation struck it was accelerating towards the earth below to shatter mangled and broken upon distant streets. The second was upon me then its blade cutting deep, once twice and then on the third I had it trapped for a moment. A moment was all I needed and before the pain of my wounds had registered I took its cranium within my cold hands and stared deep into the robotic visage of its simulacrum soul and twisted in a motion that tore its head from its shoulders, the body twitched once broken, before it collapsed inanimate, lifeless as I heaved its scull from me. It was then that the pain hit, deep, cold and piercing, it gave me no time to reveal within my victory before it had me upon my knees, blood like wine spilling, splashing  pooling around me and in an instant before the world was taken from me I saw a twin vision of a tree and a crucifixion and both bled dark crimson currents that caressed me before unconsciousness rose up and swallowed me.

Throwing roses into the abyss, whisper sweet nothings and then give it one last long kiss. It seems that my brawl had been witnessed, Ahh me, ever the star, the performer, even now a small part of me was relishing in the act that had sent those robotic dustbins to their metaphorical deaths. If only I had been allowed one last bow, to take the night out in a dramatic flourish of triumph and alas tragedy. To give my audience one last dramatic solute, be it on the door step to my own death. Fuck it, but then what is an act minus a dramatic exit? The pain was there likely that is where it would stay at least until my body had time to reorganise the flesh into a more becoming parody of functionality. As to my saviour, or capturer  and this place, god knows. The absents of light gave me hope, any rooms controlled by the city were always lit up like gas station drug stores, so at least they had not got me, but then who had? I was wrapped in something, shock, no, not embalmed like a living mummy, sheets, blankets, luxuries and yet where would such opulence be found except in the day. It was then that I caught a smell, a soft sensation of perfume that I knew, or had known. A female capturer, oh Algernon, you of such undeserving luck. I sat up the world tilting violently around me, ahh a clear case of diminished erythrocytes, never mind that. The room about me was indeed luxurious and clearly my first impressions were right I was  somewhere at least recognised or in league with the governances of the day, such opulence could come from nowhere else.  Oh this drab decor, the muted tints and tones, everything gray to caramel and white in between, such places had I seen before, the world of day was full of them. So who was my captive, of sweet smells and silent steps? Would she make her entry before I must raise my broken body from the funeral wreath of bloodied battles, or would she like a nurse sense my rousing and come at once to nurse my broken body back to health? It seems that it was to be the later for like a wraith she materialised by my side .

Lit in a lattice of shadows she drifted from the darkness. It was she,  of course I had known this, suspected this, unconsciously yearned for this and here she was bending, dipping almost curtsying and then a kiss. The flood of such warmth and breath entwined as time was taken from us and remade around us until it fell from us like dust.

We awoke later, the distant ache of my side forgotten. She lay there sleeping the last of the day away in fairy tale romantic repose, the sheets wreathed upon her like a gentle mist sitting long and flat against the surface of a silent tidal sea.

I arose to let her remain, moving from the bed I let my eyes adjust to my surroundings. This was indeed an apartment and an opulent one as such. The richness of the floor spun from the finest synthetics and the walls and windows thick with the silence of decadence. The city fell away dazzlingly from such a height we were in the Ivory precedent the place that became the home for those with the money to survive, in their thousands they had come here long ago as the waters rose up around the world and here their decedents lived in this opulence waiting at last for it to end.

I moved around the spacious place the richness breathtaking, art on the walls I recognised from perished paperback guides mildewed and moulded by the sea and time and yet here they stood fresh and alive, their paint as though just painted., their gilded frames massive and impressive capturing within their borders a time that will never be again.

Movement distracted me there was someone aside from us here. I was intently on guard, but apparently I had nothing to fear, for these were the words I then heard. A man sat or better lounged on a recliner some Victorian over flourished settee of fabulous old world significance. He was dressed not in our time and yet not like anyone else and he surveyed me from a distance with a welcoming expression of wisdom and unrealised age. I expected to hear him speak again. and I was not disappointed.

“Welcome Algernon for long I have sought to witness you within these walls” Do not fear, this place is your friend, perhaps as no place within this city is”.

“My name is Ruckenfigur, you are Algernon”.

Ohh the Smarminess of this situation, not one to appreciate having my introduction taken away, but one that equally appreciates being recognised  I was at a loss as to what tone to take with this penchant polite character on his Victorian lounge who seems not the least bothered by his close proximity to the possibility of death I was of course somewhat shaken by his relationship with she that still slept and my growing suspicion and unease despite the reassurance of the words began to put me on edge so that I began to nervously, anxiously pace the room like a trapped cat, not without some inclination to flea this room and back to the other, not I might consider normal Algernon behaviour. In this time he watched me like I was some rare exhibit in his private zoo and judging by the plethora of Monet Matisse that adorned his white washed walls I figured that he might indeed own within these illustrious walls.

“Settle down my friend you have every reason to feel unease, despite my words you have found yourself dashed from danger into the bed of your beloved and now you speak to a man who neither feels fear nor unease in your presence something which I expect you are not use to. You recognise this place of course, The Ivory Precedent, home to the last of mankind, the decadent dated global delinquents who for the most part helped to steer earth upon its collision course with the present and now lap up the last days of mankind from an opulence that only exists elsewhere below the waves.

Yes, it is hard to feel fear in the face of anything, my ancestors destroyed this world, but saved me, fate is a bitch and now we are here”.

“The girl I found you may know wondering the city during the dusk, she is unimportant, it was you I was after.  I know of much that transcribes this city I am given small concessions, small privacy’s to important information and of course I manufacture and maintain the supply of the drug Twilight and the network supply, you should know this now”.

My surprise would have been evident as was the abrupt change is pace. The Leader of The Dealers . No one knew of his identity, rumours, whispers and a list of names as long, people who had disappeared, who had enquired too much, had sought to far, If I was dangerous this man was deadly.

“Yes my little network of night ticket traders, spread the city around sending people in and out of the darkness. She was one he gestured absentmindedly back towards where I had come. Her one trip foray had her wanting more, searching, seeking the Twilight from where you came, dearest Algernon saviour of the night, Oh how his mandy-pandy  ways try to correct and make everything right. It was no accident that the dealer found her, no accident at all Algernon.

It was then that I struck with all my speed I had him at once against the wall his feet kicking involuntary before the dignity within him kicked in. His throat a pale font of life within the cold clasp of my hand, I could see the fear, here he was alone and unsuspecting, dangling, dragging. digging defiantly for order. The sweat broke out tiny infinitesimal against his brow his fear pervading his every pore so that I might lap it deliciously from the air around me.

“Algernon no”

Of course she was there before I could make true the bitter breakage of his brittle old back. He smiled at me then a knowing smile as though he had predicted this all along and for not the gentle touch upon my back he would have died then.

I let him fall and breathless for a time he lay as she tended him and looked towards me with eyes of resolute  fire that quelled and made plain my passion so that I stormed from the room back from where she had came.

She of course came to me later cloaking my passion within the wings of her shame as slowly she prospered a seed of regret and remorse  into my frame, an old man, offering safety held against a wall within the prospect of death, shame indeed Algernon, man of small words and misplaced passions. Shame indeed.

We talked long into the following night, she told me of her desperate need to again cross over from the border of day. She spoke excitedly of all that she had seen and all that she had wished to revisit and once again I was overcome by her passion and her words and that strange something that had secured my will to hers in the first place. She spoke extensively of the dull dull drums that had filled her day, for once she had escaped the tyranny of the day the day held magic no more. She cared not it seemed for the bland and tepid tyranny  of the tedious, the ho hum conundrum of  merit for materialism She was alive, animate a brimming vessel seemingly filled with the passion of her own words until I too found myself swept back towards the magic that had originally captured me eons ago when I had first made the journey as she had.  It seemed that when the leader of the collectors has attended her personally, when her hope was at its lowest and she sought not to ever come back to this place again he had appeared as if by magic raising her up by her hand, the cool flesh of his aged hand supporting her as she stood. He had whispered of who he was and what he could do and from then it seemed she was his. They had travelled here seemingly in secret for such authority and influence do those of the Ivory way that even the city itself bends to their way. They had made the journey together often in the previous weeks and as she spoke my vanity smarted at this and all the she had beheld at her new companions hand. Sensing this she had changed the topic a dizzy display of indistinct direction until she was recounting how they had found me, broken upon the building top, bleeding out my life upon the roof of the word and gently slowly they had brought me back. I of course had remembered not, my blood cascading from the sky to the streets below I had been in a state of stupor my mind retreating upon itself so that my body could heal.

When I questioned how she had found me she told me simply that they had been out, wandering diaphanous and dizzy skylines.  He of course had known her history and my place in it. He had seemed eager, keen to meet me and told her as many times, hinted that my reputation had preceded me and that they must undoubtedly meet. His eagerness at times had gained an obsessed almost fanatic following until at times it was all he spoke of. On many nights such as this one they had wandered letting the hint of her intuition lead the way.   I could not believe it was chance that had again brought us together upon the eve of my life when I had fallen high and alone to evil and strife and yet for now I could not command the reasoning needed to decipher a reason for how we had crossed paths there and then. She said that she had access to Twilight and infinite amount that would insure her survival in this world forever and that now she slept the days like she had slept the nights. She was buoyant, beautiful and seemed everything that I had longed for, but for some reason was now something else and perhaps something less.

Alone later in one of the many wings that adjoined this place I sat, contemplating, trying to understand. I did not trust those of The Ivory Precedent, this world had been sundered and flooded by their greed and self interest and until I was made to believe otherwise I would continue to believe the same. It was then that he entered, rubbing his neck for grim effect. “Ahh Algernon I see you have your passion under control. It seems I must owe you an apology. I baited you for I needed to know that you are who you are, I needed to know that you were nothing less, for too much relies upon this to be so. I stared at him my contempt visible emanating violently. Here was someone fearless and in control who had access to power and influence that I could only imagine and I was at his mercy trapped within his place and it seemed an extension of his purpose. “I have searched for one such as you Algernon for ages. We like you have access to the means of immortality, my life has been extended by the synthesis of biochemistry born deep within scientific laboratories within the heart of this city, we have uncovered the secrets of the alchemists and fused the knowledge of the old world with that of the new. Me and my kind stand at the dawn of immortality just in time to watch the waters of the world rise up and sweep the last of mankind away, if you have the time Algernon this is my story.

How could one know of what he spoke save if they had collected the pitted parchments of mildewed manuscripts that littered the foul foundations of this metropolis and like a great Diaspora of recycled knowledge drag the edges back to together from here until the start of time for  no one living within the city save for him and perhaps some other unknown denizens of the deep under dark knew what he knew.

He began slowly his voice barely a whisper so that I was forced to bend forward in anxious trepidation fearful that even a slight rustling of the fabric beneath me might obscure the importance of what he had to say.

“We were young, the human race barely out of its intellectual nappies, recorded history scarcely spanning two millennia, but yet what we had achieved? The agricultural revolution was long in our past, we had wiped out all known diseases and in the process created a few of our own, the industrial revolution had given us the automated existence that the science fiction writers had predicted and it was not long before we were looking to the stars for conquest.

With the information revolution we became connected like one giant collective conscious by a silicon network that rivalled the neural network of some giant suffering, striving, clearly disturbed and unhappy creature, but through this information portal our knowledge was amassed and stored and perhaps like the none temporal  wisdom of ancient tribes was stored, retrieved and deleted at random, until the richness of this world rivalled the real world.

We had wealth, knowledge and time and the wonders we wrought still stand today save that the world turned against us.  We had amassed a population of near 10 billion and conquered all known latitudes, humans swarmed like a dense crust of parasites upon the earth converting its purpose to our own and we were arrogant in our assumptions particularly those that related to our future. We had amassed knowledge, but as a young species we had little wisdom and no species that ‘s life can be measured in decades should have the power to influence circumstances that have been operating for millennia and through this charge our destruction was wrought.

It began slowly at first species began disappearing at first on land and then at sea until whole tracks of the earth that were not directly inhabited by us became lifeless.  We saw the signs but did not stop, we had created such artifices that we could unnaturally maintain and even prosper within this synthetic reality and every problem that the tools of science created could be solved by more science so we continued on like this.

Soon the very atmosphere became poisonous to breath and as our last link with the earth that had born us we cut the last ties with the one who had the power to destroy us. The oceans rose up around us, the poor and the pitiless were the first to go, their homes drowned, they sought protection from their brothers, but we, others like myself turned them back, the earth could only support so many and we had inherited the mantle of power and it was our will that determined who would  go and who would stay.

Great wars were fought between the last of us for the last of what the earth could give us and yet more inconsolable damage was done to our once beautiful planet , in those days the only thing that equalled our arrogance was our greed and nations that had stood since recorded time vanished from the earth until only those that were in power stood, but still we did not stop. To save the last of mankind upon the lifeless husk that was left we created mighty self sustaining citadels at great altitudes. These technological marvels were the product of the last great minds of humanity and in those dying days when the only planet that we believed had born life spiralled towards death we were responsible for our greatest folly, we made this great silicon portal self aware, this vast conglomerate of connection was given an identity and with the last of our knowledge we took from the earth every bit of information save that enclosed and cradled within it and so condemned the last of humanity to an existence devoid of its past. Soon generations would pass and without the need or will no new knowledge was stored and after a millennia it was as though the world had begun again.

Most people at this time had no idea of what we had done, those that were left had born a past of bloodied wars and suffering, they were there because they were rich and or resourceful and all they wanted was a respite from suffering at this stage anything would have been permitted to deliver them from this situation. Approximately 1000 citadels were built, some were destroyed during future wars and as far as what is known this one is the only one surviving within the South, we have been here for 5000 years since the dawn of recorded history the self aware silicon conglomerate guided by artificial intelligence has shaped the citadels into artifices of its own making, it has taken everything of what was recorded and given us this.

 These new worlds prospered, this knowledge guided by artificial intelligence free from the emotions that had guided humanity in the first place was put to the task of saving humanity and without the temporal limitations of the body new wonders were devised, the synthesis of life sustaining processes mastered until our new worlds gave us a life that our ancestors could only dream of. Here we have stood, still alive in relative peace for a time that has since doubled since the ocean rose up against us three millennia ago. Of course there was an “adaptive period” the populace needed time to get use to their new home and their lord. They were persuaded to give over some of their free will for the will of the greater good and as our lord predicted it took very little time, perhaps a mere generation or so, but before long we had created largely what you see here now, a stable, coherent society that will see out the end of the world. Of course when I say see here now I mean largely what exists above the ground on the light of the sun, not what dwells within the shadows. 

 We also realised that knowledge combined with the fiery reason of human emotion, the devious, survive and prosper at all costs biological damnation of our species needed to be curbed and through a system of incredibly advanced biogenic  processes we were able to turn off that part of human nature that allows it to think beyond the rational, for the human brain is at its most ingenious when it dreams and it dreams most of pleasure and of pain and so mankind since it had first become self aware lost its imagination.

We took it in one foul swoop, one hypodermic insertion and the circadian rhythm beat no more and as the sun fell from the sky so did we. To what place the human mind went  we still do not know, with ECG’s and CLP’s and TRC’s we measured a flat line of brain activity save those that kept the body functioning and through this we congratulated ourselves.

We had achieved peace, that was until sometime later at some unknown date a millennium past through fluke or the marvellous the first of our kind awoke. Who could have predicted this occurrence? Not the artificial intelligence that guided us. Not those of the conclave who slept the sleep of the dead like us. How much time had passed before we became aware of the first awoken one, we do not know. The city was always watching, guarding, never sleeping and yet we missed our opportunity because by then it was too late. Our negligence and complacency had led to this, there was little we could do, we would either capture the awoken one, or see how this new twist of human history would pan out. Point. If you try to capture something that seeks not to be caught it will only become better at getting away.

Decades would past and for the city above much remained the same, but as you know below things changed. The population of awoken ones grew, beyond the reaches of the city in the under dark a new civilization began to grow. Soon we were capturing their transgressions  on CCT footage, their bio rhythms on hidden detectors and soon came the startling fact, they were all as you and as Mark Twain said “While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.” and cats they were and they were not nearly as evolved as you.

We devised ingenious traps and devastatingly powerful cyborgs that we sent beneath the city never to return, We sought to hunt them out and destroy them and we failed And our artificial over lord had failed us.

For centuries a ceremony had been performed, our over lord had recognised a problem with our gene pool, certain individuals such as those like yourself  were found to be less fit by human society, aside from their skin colour, horribly unsuited to this new world a certain restlessness of spirit was apparent and as Anne Shirley once said “You’d find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair.” So our lord thought of a way to purge the urban of its auburn infidels and in its infinite wisdom devised solution based upon its records “In ancient Sparta those that were unfit for rule were cast upon the cliffs to die”. Algernon can you think of a better way to instil a sense of purpose coupled with a sense of revenge? Can you devise a better way to plant the seeds for a civilisations destruction? I cannot.

 Ask any within this city and they will say it is not so, this life of theirs is the only one they know and yet when was the last time humanity dreamed? When last where her ideas able to span the unconscious, to gather in the light of unknown worlds orbiting distant suns, to plunder unknown oceans and to wash up on distant fantastical shores. When was the last time humanity was able to reap the rewards of darkness, for in this city at least it has been banished, this city wants no one dreaming, it wants no imagination to prosper for with imaginations comes ideas and with ideas intent and these great minds immersed in paranoia and delusions seek only for themselves to remain be it within a dead city with themselves as the only flame.

Of course the blessing of human ingenuity knows no respite and small conclaves began to form and somewhere along the line some amongst us stopped sleeping and we awoke amidst this night world and let our cries ride out like great heralds into the stars. For these lucky few a new world was born one that lived in a sanctum of secrecy hidden deep beneath the city, isolated in small places of sanctuary that lived out the day in silence and awoke later to the beauty of the night. Soon old knowledge was reborn, manuscripts scribbled with the jargon of dead languages and with misplaced vast encyclopaedia uncovered we began to rebuild knowledge and soon we had a source of information free from the claustrophobic stifling taint of the city and with it we brought back to life the old and the romantic, the smoke stack  technologies, the alchemical marvels and the romantic rhapsodies and soon we had created a world where people could dream again.

So where does my place reside within the passing of all things? I was a rash and ambitious designer  of pharmaceutical pharmagora, a modern day alchemist extraordinaire and it was to me they came with their Jovian justice. “Switch this diabolical brain organ off” they said and after tireless days I came upon a concoction of chemicals that did just that… My place was guaranteed within the citadel of course, I was to receive a place amidst the Ivory Precedent and life almost eternal, sadly for them eternity is not suited to the minds of men, we grow insolent and bored under the turning of too many suns and soon I was dabbling away again in my make shift laboratory and from those  dabblings came the drug and the dealers. My motives? to free others from the tyrannical sleep, to strike out against the injustice of the city? To atone for my sins? No I could not care so much for humanity that I would risk the cities wrath to save them, I was bored. This sad city free from the lustrous illusions of dreams was boring. Nothing new resided within the minds, no hint of anything that wasn’t put there before, we were a nation slowly fading into intellectual indifference, the human race was dead and we were mere automations on auto pilot being fed a world for our own safety and it was up to me to again flick the switch. I distributed the drug via the dealers reprogrammed salvaged cyborgs  that your race had destroyed and ditched. I sent them amidst the morning rush hour, sensors primed to search out those that sought something different. Soon I had a little army of day time transients, tripping their way into your world, bringing new ideas, new flesh and a new awareness and didn’t that world change? Even I was not prepared for this… It seemed that those that unconsciously sought a new world  were brimming with rebellious reason and they took to their world with a gusto so that even I the illustrious illustrator of this marvellous plan was taken aback, quickly they became addicts and I was their dealer and a new world started to grow amidst the earth. Soon I hope that the numbers will eclipse the day walkers and human kind will be free again from the prison that I had committed them to a millennia ago.

So my friend Algernon, what is your purpose in all this I hear you silently ask? I need you to do something that only you of your kind are able to do.

I was of course stunned to silence. As one of the oldest being within this city I knew much, but even here new revelations had slowly revealed themselves. I now knew of the dealers and from where they came, as well as the diabolical plan behind their insurgence. A marvellous medley of emotion now gripped me, a chance to finish the rule of this city was within my grasp and I dared guess that my purpose within this plan would count as such.  I welcomed his next words anticipated the taste and their texture, soon would come the beginning of the end.

Algernon something strange is happening, those that sleep the sleep of the dreamless are dreaming again. I too dream their dream, this whole damn city is beginning to dream this dream.

I knew at once of what dream he spoke I could see the mighty tenacious limbs reaching, spreading, encompassing and finally embracing everything. I could see the minuscule detail of every leaf, crenulated, crisp and somehow caring. The trunk from the terra firma tearing and me tearing.  In my excitement I rose and paced, muttering seemingly to myself “The tree, the tree”

“Yes the tree Algernon” and in his voice I could hear the same excitement, the same bemused awe.

“I see it now and then, I could hear myself say, mostly in the morning when the light of the other world pierces my conscious and the serotonin threatens to sweep me away to oblivion. I know it is here, but I know not what it means”. It was then that I tore the faded broken paper back from my pocket depositing the broken piece of other worldly filth into his frail hands. The page fell open at once like well read porn paraphernalia and there it was and in his sigh I heard the truth.  Indeed it is Algernon, indeed it is. I have searched the cities archives from top to bottom, I have delved into such secret vaults of knowledge that if they were released to the world we would be sent into another war that would finish us for good. I have viewed the cities CCT cameras from every angle and perspective and yet I cannot find this tree, but this tree needs to be found for some strange and unknown purpose resides within its discovery. “If this is your purpose, if this is why you brought me here then I am yours and I will pledge everything to stand before this tree and not this city, nor this misguided malignant entity that controls it, neither its sleepy sad citizens that deny it, or its prospering posing under dark that define it will stop me.

I needed to get out, to digest the dialogue of hours, to share my worries with the wind and to sit with it and only it. He told me it would be fine and demonstrated the way in for when I returned. It seems he trusted me. Ruckenfigur I knew his name from the old German. He who looks across  the horizon and sees the future. I wonder what future Ruckenfigur saw?

The night was crisp and cold around me, a dense weave of nocturnal immortality. We embraced first like  friends, uncomfortable back pats, harsh hair rubs and every other gesture that could convey warmth without too much familiarity and at last when the tussling and smirking and veiled back stabs were over we came together at last as lovers, falling together, floating together, sinking sighing together and then when our hesitation fell as though like clothes around us we turned a desperate and  shy waltz, a hesitant jaunty jig and finally a perfect passion play, until we found our rhythm forgave all that there was to forgive and were at once off across great distances, dazzling one another with our speedy ways. To the sea, the sea we cried together as the roof tops became a blur beneath us.

 A mirror of stars, a great night time expanse of quicksilver and moonlight. I found a sheltered place, the night, the wind, the sea and my memories my friends. I had much to think on… This Ruckenfigur. Did I trust him? No, but then I trusted no one. He knew of the tree and the dreams and so very much more. I could not care for his grandiose, somewhat capricious ideological vision. The world had been full of these visionaries, or so we are told, men swept away upon some illogical force that controls and governs them and yet when they are done, their dust returned to the earth, what is left? The dredges of a thousand books bearing their name at the bottom of the ocean, or turned to ash in the fires of a thousand wars. Their words condensed to fractured fragments, misquoted, misinterpreted and finally just missing, better to be just that someone in someone’s eyes than this. There was no immortality in mans ideas, this earth was a tomb for man’s ideas, a great sepulchre carved with an understanding and a wisdom that came too late. As for the girl? Was the allure still there now she was one with the night world and seemingly all too familiar with this Ruckenfigur? I could not know and yet I had spared her not a parting word as I left, of course this may well be my indolent  insolence, my cruelty and my spite, surfacing so we could both suffer. My wounds seemed fully healed, no longer the pulling pain and a clean expanse of perfect skin, such creatures we are.  The dawn was again on its way, caressing distant horizons, other times and distant worlds. It would be here soon and as I suspected so would come the tree and the visions. Of course Ruckenfigur knew he would have not let me go otherwise. So here I sat waiting the dawn of a new world. Waiting for word from another world. Just before the dawn came I removed my gloves and jacket, my long lean body mirrored like a ghastly apparition in the waters of this world, quivering, rippling, refracting. I did this sometimes, all the better for the serotonin to be made, ahh this diabolical biological cocktail, it was life and death entwined. The sun rose during a time that seemed like forever. I stretched towards it like the messiah, reaching towards the truth and at last it hit me. I fell back shaken and yet awoken. A dizzy explosion of colour and then out of the chaos the darkness condensed into the tree, towering, majestic, seemingly as old as the earth itself. I must be quick, the serotonin would reach its peak and serve me death or loss of conscious. I surveyed the vision, looking for features, though every time I tried my eyes pulled back to the tree itself and then when everything seemed to be on the verge of condensing into a monumental darkness before me a face from the darkness turned to look at me…. Algernon the voice whispered and then the last I heard was my body breaking the surface of the water, as the world became mute, before it at last fell away from me.

When I awoke it seemed like only moments had passed, not at all familiar with the aquatic medium I twisted and turned, spluttered and coughed until the majority of the aquatic medium had left me. I was afloat it seemed, my own personal vessel navigating night waters. Night waters? The day, where had it…..? It seems I had floated for a while, a whole day, unconscious… Fear hit me and I fell again scrambling, succumbing, surfacing, How far had I drifted? I tried to take bearing, but the darkness was absolute and then before me, upon the sea something white and I spluttered and splashed my way towards it, but it was naught but a sheet of paper filled with the rambling it seemed of a…. madman, as  I went to discard it, in a fit of rage I saw another and another,  like flag stones they shimmered before me a great path of paper into the darkness. Kicking, coughing, lurching, perching I kept moving, bunching the manuscripts up unceremoniously in one fist as I made my way forth. Soon I had a great wreathe of said manuscripts, so I thought to make myself a boat and then my toe found land a rather startling unceremonious crack against a rock or other submersible and soon I was pulling myself out of the water, cursing my great swag of leather until I was on terra firma. Cursing my great wreathe of red lock as it tried to drag me back. Ahh in vain, free me fowl water. I was at last land born again.  

A rough track parted the darkness before me my eyes quickly adjusting to the low light in the night sky as they sought something recognisable. It appeared that somehow by some strange means I had escaped the city. I could see naught of its neon halo around me, the forever glow of florescent ambience no more, the tar pitted trap of its twisted roads no longer under me and the towering cliffs of midnight buildings no longer above me.

For what fluke had brought me to this place that the world had presumed did not exist I did not know. Faintly winding off into the distant darkness the path before me littered with the same despotic manuscripts clinging desperately to fissures and cracks , outcrops and crags, I gathered arm loads feverishly stuffing them haphazardly into collar, pockets and belt alike somehow sure that amidst the mad ramblings of this ghost writer I would discover some clue to the whereabouts of this world .

The beach that I had been swept upon was starkly quartzite under a trembling moon that reappeared and vanished again in a wild rush that seemed to be sweeping clean the upper heavens. The rock sparkled like the grains of crushed stars and these too I gathered into one hand before letting them drift deliciously through my fingers. The beach was narrow, a thin strip of moonlight against a threatening expanse of darkness. Leaving the beach I moved further from the water and quickly gaining ground and altitude I was soon wondering wearisome ways amidst crag, fag and glen. What can one understand of such a place when all one has known has been the synthetic. The rocks beneath me seemed to throb underfoot with some ancient vitality. I moved higher and higher still my way snaking up the mountainside until I left the water far below me. I could see a peak ahead, like some solitary still wanderer it thrust itself out of the darkness like a great tooth within the mouth of the night “Ruckenfigur I breathed” . It was to this that I made my way. Soon I was at its base and from here I could make out a light, the soft glow of some flickering candle, or hurricane lamp casting shadows and silhouettes against the greater darkness around me. I could feel a distant excitement take hold of me, here was a place, beyond the mysteries if the city, a place that should not exist and yet here it was and if the light was anything to go by occupied by some secret denizen of the dark. Around me papers still fluttered, great swathes of pristine paper filled with some ancient type face , momentarily clinging to every surface before a silent breeze silently lifted them , shuffled them and sent them off into the night where they flew away into the darkness like gulls.

 I moved higher upon some narrow goat track winding away up and up and overhead until at last the world fell away all around me. Upon the crag I could see a structure, of wood and rind. I moved towards it and before me the light swept again up and out before the world was again left in a state of darkness before the light swept back again. The papers where here also great masses against everything, some old and brittle with age, page upon page glued together with the glue of time, ink run destroying unknown language. I soon found a door and knocking hastily I swept it open before its hidden occupancy would have had a chance to answer.

 The door swept open and below a great light that turned within the heavens above me sat a type writer clacking away feverishly and manuscript after manuscript poring forth  coming loose and then being swept away in the grasp of this cold wind. No fingers could operated these keys, no human hand could operate the mechanical contraption fast enough and after each completed line the type writer whipped back  to begin a new, the parchment when completed picked up and dashed towards the open window to sit and ponder its future for a moment before it leapt hesitantly out into the night.

I moved closer the clap of the contraption all around me, tap, tap, tap ring. Until the world rang with the type writers consciousness. More words, more of the same, seemingly a stream of some unknown conscious. The light spun a dizzy net of night time contraption above me, the darkness periodically cut with the great light above and all the time the manuscripts billowing out before me. Just when I was about to turn to explore the rest of the crag a flash of script on a page behind me caught my attention and I raised it to study it further. My heart ceased and then cast such a catastrophe of  sound that the clack of the type writer was all but cancelled out.

Before me I read the words that you  read above, suddenly the light went out  and the world was transported into a realm of such thickness of night that even I lost my bearing, at once I scrambled for the parchment around me, even its lustre lost amidst this night and bundled such that I could under one arm and stumbled out the door.

Stumbled? It is true I was stumbling? Blindly, naturally and the cold rasped at me and clawed at me and the night frightened me and then pain flashed against my shin, blinding and numbing me. I sat huddled against the top of that sea mountain, crouched and broken upon its nightly gleam. I stuffed the parchment away, my hands shaking. What had happened? The light had gone and so to the preternatural strength, the animal cunning. Human, all so human. I shivered and wept and then at last plodded on, back the way I had come. Such was the difficulty, the aridity, the confounded desecrated pity of it all that I near crawled. This darkness seemed to soak me up, each wearisome step, each gruesome near decent into death. Each time a ghostly sea bird cried a mournful cry I was a wretched wreck upon the rock, my hands parrying the apparitions from me, my feet kicking desperately below me. This wearisome world went on like this for a long while, my shins seemed a bloody wreck so I knew not where pain ended and shins began. I was lost, I was broken and then I was saved.  At the tip of the water’s edge I fell forward, at last. I knew not what to do, no light surveyed the night . I knew, I tore the parchments out at once, my heart again leaping within my chest, my Zippo, my bygone light of a broken America. It whimpered and then flashed alight, Oh my own little statue of liberty within the darkness, my light and my book of law. I flipped through the narrative, crazy people that acted like trees and trees that acted like people and then at last me, at the edge of a sea and then falling, falling, falling.

I awoke upon the shores of my city, choking the black cloak of water from my lungs, coughing fowl explosions of throat tearing  pity. Ahh before me, no pitted wall of darkness, no moss drenched lightly lichened  sphagnum bog  fog. The City, my light, my night. I saluted it and bowed to it and at last showed the daintiest of curtsies to it. I could feel my strength returned, no withering weakness, no timidness of limb and knee. No frightening fear. Ohhh Glorious me.

 Even with my old strength I was exhausted, the parchments I was to find withered and run, paper washed and sloshed. I should never become I librarian. I plodded my way home, my boots an embarrassing slosh and my cloak pasted to me like the fur of a wet cat. Laughable he who spotted Algernon in such a condition.

I made it to the apartment, squeaking my way indoors , halting the barrage of questions with a defeated hand. I was shivering as though possessed by an unearthly cold. I was led at once to an adjoining room, a bathroom and here it rained the warmth of water upon me and the bliss. When it seemed I would melt into the wall I heard a voice distorted through the steam behind me. “Algernon don’t move”. She came forward seeming to materialize by my side, I went to hold her for she was gleaming and naked and warm, but instead she held my shoulders and made me observe my back in the hazy gleam of the mirror and upon it marbled like the blue of a thousand veins a great picture of….. a tree.

I went to touch it and yes, it was as I suspected transferred to my skin from a page, a parchment. Yes, I knew instinctively it would take us there and I brushed her caressing , carrying hands aside and brought her up gently against the mirror, the press of her wet against my body before her weight shifted as she climbed upon me and then as my blood dripped down my back as she bit me, she at last fell upon me and at last the world fell away wetly.

Triptych transfer, 3 pages printed upon my back, I now stood in a bright lit laboratory a beam of florescent  upon me as I recounted under these trying conditions the day past. Of course Ruckenfigur was all a glee, his subject, his obsession, born naked before him, the excitement of his barely disguised breath upon my neck. I to peered with fascination at the thing that now adorned me. The tree spread out of fantastical imagery draping part of my shoulder with the delicate touch of a branch that then curled around to caress the carotid confines of my neck, its roots spread grossly down my flank to terminate with some distaste deep beyond my groin. The whole image made of intricate text letters cascading with the image of their imprisonment, almost glowing against the preternatural gleam of my flesh. Ruckenfigur read at random, as she traced delicately the letters. ” The path is blocked for the uninitiated, she awaits in the shade” I could make nothing of this and then I thought of the face, the one is the visions, peering as though into me across the vast expanse of the city and the words “come” “Her I whispered, the words catching in my throat as I darted a somewhat sheepish glance at her. In my vision I stuttered, always towards the end. They read on “Chance upon the fractured fables, the broken gables of another land, glance upon the burnt pages the forgotten ages of this forgotten land. Trespass revolve, desire divulge,  cry and fold the end is foretold. Riddles….  Sense hidden in nonsense. Why could this not be easy.

Later we sat in the dying of the dusk, she tracing wandering whirlpools of deliciousness across my flesh as I gazed with adoration at the curve of her breast beneath the delicate lamp light. I spoke slowly and hesitantly of when I had come down from the mountain, the fear at feeling all so human, of course she did not understand she lived with this deplorable weak kneed  condition all the time, this slim fragile suffering. She could not understand, but then she knew not nothing of my real strength, but a portion had I demonstrated. Ahh the small joy of this. I reached for her breast, tantalizing and she brushed me aside impatiently, she was the astride me, the lamp twisted impatiently above her. “Algernon, look, Well don’t, just stay still. I could feel her fingers again travelling down in that delicious manner. Amidst the trunk they seemed to perch briefly before they dipped to my waist and I was rolled over beneath her. “Look and amidst the roots as the wrapped and writhed and there it was The Train.

She wanted to go at once, of course it was early and we still had time, Ruckenfigur I ventured? We have not the time Algernon, lets us go, briefly, quickly, If we see anything we can return for him.  Immediately she was ready, that old light alight in her eyes, as she pulled on her clothes and wrapped herself in winter warmth.  Her face was furrowed as though displeased, shall not be long, Ruckenfigur will only slow us down and the train leaves at once. I thought this strange Ruckenfigur had been her first priority over these last days aside from our physical time together she barely left his side. I was not to argue it seemed and I did now that I thought of it miss my old haunts. A little bit of Algernon extravagance might have been all that I needed to feel again like my old self.

We made the train, just. I swept her up from behind launching from the platform we floated momentarily, the clank of cogs and stem below before we were swept into the carriage.

Ahh such an amalgamations of evening carnage, the night dressed in black. Our meagre ménage of train stop transients. oh my little ones welcome to my world. two tramps stood opposite, bulging ballooning courtesans of sweet lipped convenience, a heady mist of Victorian putrescence, the musk of graves. Mascara caked to decorate, eyes old and cold and dimmed by fate. Ahh the comical pantaloon of pale princesses, a made up mockery of Elizabethan finery. They gave us the sweetest of smiles as their faces fractured with the trappings of painted upon eternal grace, a flicker of warmth from the font of their shrivelled affection. Their veracity like the mildewed cuffs of pale lace prettification purification gone.

Across the way, an old one Tailed and breasted in formal finery a great hob watch dangling in front of his nose, his mind lost amidst the tick of another time. Then like a great greasy flock of stick insects, a pack of androgynous banshees, as pale as I. Slithering around each other amidst the coach car, their sexless bodies at once ugly and beautiful, their pupils black with intoxication, comprehension barely a glimmer, the newest version of filth to hit the street. These the lost ones, the broken strung out strangers, gaining in number, their minds muted by overdose and misuse.  They seemed to only understand a language that they comprehended, some say the dwelt between worlds neither a part of this nor that. I detested them and they sneered at me knowingly.

At last to the new ones, two only, holding hands, I could smell their fear. Both alike, tall, dark, bronzed skin, clothes clinical mismatched in haste. A gleam of perspiration touching their brows. They peered about eager for emersion, but scared to drown. Always shuffling, taunt and then relaxing.  

The train itself Nebakenezer  whooshed by, like a great squealing squalling serpent full of Satan’s  black gas and coal fired smoke, it teased dangerously upon the fractured barb wired shoulders of railway track finesse  before hurtling soundlessly through bone box banished straights. It caught wind of subterranean drafts and leapt forward as though to choke before succumbing silently to the waft of bygone gutters, the excrement of other ages. We travelled deeper. Sparks flew cascading upon the rock around us, we rode it down straight to hell.

The sound of the brakes alive in the air around us, this part was the test. We needed momentum to reach the other side.  The train plummeted, our licentious ladies cavorting beneath pastel parasols, giggling, our swarm of insects gazing into each other’s eyes as though daring it to fail and our guests a perfectly posed tribute to the inevitably of death and their expressions at last as pale as mine.

 The train hit the station with a final shower of sparks. We were off, ahead of the crowd. I pulled her with me, but then she pulled me back. Algernon, remember the picture, remember the tree” She motioned to the tunnel from where we had come. I knew her intention at once. No, you do not understand. I came against her as we both gazed down the dark recess of the tunnel. ” You know nothing of that place, the train gives us passage, for nothing else will live beyond the stations recess of light, for beyond that light there dwells the death of all and with a shake of my head we were instead off amidst the throng. She was angry, her insolence alight, her breath breathed coward and her firmness said fight. I tried to explain, The train had been built long ago upon the bones of a distant track, an old track, built perhaps upon something even older still. It was said that something lived down there, something dark, no one walked the track without the train, the train is the only passage.

Dark things still dwell in contemporary places I explained later, deep beneath the oceans and the earth they still are. We intercept them occasionally when we dive too deep, or sink to far. After all why should these things not be there? They could have evolved much the same as us. Great swathes of microbial DNA coating sub crust caves, great hellish expanses of darkness and molten rock, the churn of lava over billions of years  and then the scamper of something large in the dark. This world has been millennia as molten rock, who knows what could have survived into this age. Of course she took my words lightly To what proof did I have?  Of course I had nothing but the whispers of superstition on the wings of the night and her doubt as comfort in that same darkness. We talked together, superstition, truths and histories lies.

She was beautiful then. Her head like the whiteness of a lily against the portrait of the night. Her eyes alight with the power of her conviction The wicked smile as her words seduced the truth into them. She wore some piece of old world magic that I should have touched upon earlier. This tight fineness of corset  tenderness. Of course she spilled out of it as only corsets know how to make a woman do and her breasts were the ivory white of her face.

Her hips were gathered in a shimmering of frock  a delicate  fire that crackled deliciously against the ground and I adored her then.

We drank the wine, the old world brew and I said I would show her such delights, but she said she only wanted one.

 Later we hit the clubs hallucinogenic allopathic aphrodisiac. The place was alive. The club band a collective burst of industrial steam punk madness, great billows of smoke swallowing the crowed, the reek of sweat and excess.

We fell together almost fucking the world spinning around us and then we were off, she barely contained. I took her then hoping to bring her to something of the fantastic, but she wanted nothing of a great ream of paper pouring forth the binary equivalent of the entire internet a great compilation of old world junk to be decoded like DNA from some long dead organism.

She thought not to see the lake a great subterranean cavern that had been filled with the ocean and that one could sale sailing boats on. No she cared not for that and a whole bunch of other things. Instead she wanted the night and lots of it.

We were lost together the wine most probably spiked. People all around us, but us alone. Her body, her breasts and then her wetness, she wanted to be alone. We soon found some darkness as I swept her bodice down and her nipple to my mouth, tenderly feverishly until I felt her breath catch, I could feel her wetness cupped in  my hand, the delicate pulse of desire as our lips came together, she opened warmly and I wanted her then, but it was then that they found us…..

I was pulled back, three of them on me, She swept aside in a great fury of lace. They wanted her, the pure serotonin in her blood, they could smell it. There were many, but soon there would be few. I disengaged myself from them at once, I heard bones snap as I twisted my arms away then it was my turn to be on the offensive, I longed to see the fear register, but I was too fast even for that. The first ones neck broke as I whip lashed his torso and heaved his body into the darkness. The second pale wretch I held tenderly as she looked up, the press of her puny hips against mine and then she was dead. The third I took from behind sweeping him up and off his feet in the darkness, he fell to earth unconscious. I came upon the others and she struggling, striking at her assailants as  they went at her. One dies straight away his neck twisted and broken, the third well he died by her and the pearly gleam of a Victorian pistol, the smoke in the night and a repercussion and the gun in her delicate hand said how.

More came, many more, a great pack of pale purification, let the cleansing begin I roared, but she would have not of this either and we were forced to run. We hit the tracks all too soon and before I knew of her desire we fell into the darkness of the tunnel. They stopped hesitant fearing to venture in, My breath was loud in the darkness. I wanted to kill. She held me and they left.  I felt her tongue then knowingly pressing, biting. This girl, she was insane, crazy, I felt her teeth, her breath as she held me in her hand. Algernon look! and even I could see it, a dull glow from the tattoo spreading off, timidly, curiously into the night.

I had known darkness all my life, that distant sun that had arisen stern and judging  upon my first dawn where I had been laid out a bawling babe upon the rocks had been the brightest source of life I had ever known and now I had finally found a darkness that was its equal. It clung to us like a second skin, filling our pores as its caress crept insidiously between our synapses to coax such manner of cortisol conundrums that our amygdalinas shuddered with their toxic deluge so that we were each a wreck upon these darkened shores. The primordial pulse of this place pitted its will against us so that we feared we would never persevere. Never had I come here, never had I ventured beyond the light of this station. I knew of the dangers, I knew of the past, the people, the faces, the disappearances as my ancestors sought to repair the old roads. I knew of the rumours, I knew of the fears, I knew that even amidst the heart beats of ourselves we were not alone. Yet despite this, or perhaps because of this the tattoo still shone with its pale unearthly brilliance. The tree glowed with its unearthly light pushing against the darkness as she guided me forth, her feet more confident in the darkness than my own. On we went in dark matrimony, shuffling forth for no other reason than there was no other way to go. Soon the confined mildewed monotony came to a end and above us around us, although we could not tell the tunnel opened up into something more massive, more mysterious and as dark subterranean winds buffered our skin with chilly disharmony  we felt ourselves immersed in a nature that man had long ago left behind. I knew this places history. Long ago men had paved this way with rickety iron carts, dragging the precious jewels of the earth into the eager eyes of the light where they sparkled with the dangerous temptation of possession, the stalemate of disharmony and the slyness of greed. Deeper man had dug, as richer the world above chanted. Some believed it was then that the disappearances first began, at first attributed to the usual reason of risk and remoteness, but soon the numbers grew so that even these reasons could not account, but still they dug deeper, the eyes of the miners as bright with greed as the gems themselves. The disappearances continued and fear soon competed for the dominion of greed, but always there were an eager few, for when miners moved away of course there were more riches for those left behind. Rumour was of course rife, songs of ancient shadows and unearthly sounds, the flicker of ghastly great shapes silhouetted upon walls before a question faded out before a reply could be brought forth and then the pounding of feet, the pump of fearful hearts and a loss that no amount of alcohol could forget. My mind swam with their ancient songs, Oh my Cassandra for what do you search, is not my world enough so that you must press on further, deeper, to be more brave and daring than myself?

 In the old days we were told also of an ancient mineral, some devilish black lustre, an overtured converted  thief of dreams. it dwelt they said where the earth was warm, deep within the moist darkness. Tin they said, iron ore, but it was to this that their eyes wandered and it was to this that their greed was served, it was rare, but every man beneath the earth sought it. Such small quantities of it existed, tiny minuscule amounts spread vast upon three dimensional distances. Some took it to themselves it was said and what was said of them was said no more. Most left the Isle to travel north across the lands, to be worn upon the hands of ancient foreign powers. I did not tell Cassandra of this and the other dark thoughts that crossed my mind. In this place I was as though a demon in the presence of the devil and I liked it not.

In the darkness my perception seemed to have shrunk to the tenacious clasp of her hand ahead, I did not understand this haste. In a moment I had her back, in my possession. This leading the pack was uncalled for and dangerous, at once I took possession again of my exceptional facilities and her, moving her closer against my ear, I think it was in these times that I scared her, when I went from lumbering unsure human to a callused cruel inhumane monster, but it was fear that I needed here and it was fear that I got. I could smell it on her, along with her breathe, her breast alabaster motionless for a moment and then her breathe again. My dear I do not think you understand the danger of this, even if it were simply the dark and we were off running through it the danger of calamity would already be quiet high,  if we are now to add the extra compilation of “dark unknown, evil presences” I believe our current level of haste would now seem self defeating. I suggest we slow down and assess. ‘She looked at me quaintly, tipping her head in some form of devilish sarcasm. Then she was gone. I could hear her a moment later stumbling off upon rocks, her laughter off echoing out, tauntingly. I caught up with her, her breathe ragged in the dark from exertion and laughter, I smiled I could help but not and she knew it, a squeeze and kiss, this time she really went. In an instant.

That night I dreamed of the tree and beneath it stood a girl, a beautiful pale girl with dark hair down to her waist. Her eyes were covered by goggles like mine so her expression was hidden, she appeared not to see me, her arms were raised she was tall and slender. It was then that I noticed her hands pinned back her breast thrust forward and her delicate limbs fastened with the strength of cruel nails to the tree. She dripped blood, dark crimson rivulets that pulled and gathered within the crust of the mottled oak. Her face fell in defeat upon her breast and then she looked up and I awoke.

The next day, still dark and then that horrible feeling where you know something has changed, but you don’t yet quiet know it and then it all rushes in to feel that big hole. I had slept and had not known it, I had stopped momentarily for a rest and dazed off. I felt a fool and more so wondered how far Cassandra might have escaped into the darkness.

In the darkness I thought of the girl and the tree.

As I walked on following the remnants of an old railway track I started to see a flicker in front of me, a  twentieth century flicker of fluorescents (to which our mythology speaks of with great romanticism).  Before I had time to ponder the circumstance my mind abated with department store opportunity, corporate building functionality I was acquainted  at once with a salesman with punctual opportunity.

“my dearest sir we have time in a clock, time in a box, time dead and time caught”. I did not understand his rhythmic ramberlings and pushed to go past. Did he not know I was searching for Cassandra. “We have memories caught and memories bought, what is lost, will now will be sought”. “Old man” and then as I looked behind him I saw row upon row of watches , thousands of clasp wrist, I am in a hurry, discrete versions of time, that had spent a lifetime counting seconds from the life span of its owner. But it was there in the middle, I knew that watch, between Rolex rip offs and Casio calculator copies a Victorian fob, I had seen it sparkle a thousand times as I removed it from all manner of wardrobe. Jacqueline’s I knew it. “Ahh you have of course noticed the 18th century fob watch, a new acquisition. I had it in my hands at once, it still felt warm. Instinctually I read the time, but it had stopped. “A beautiful peace, rarely do they show up these days, a sad one mind you. ” “Sad you say”, not grasping his meaning. “Yes sad, you see these little watches capture time, little discrete artefacts of the past and from them I can tell the future. “You are mad and this watch is my friends, how did it get here? I was losing my patience and I wasn’t acting my standard intimidating as scary as fuck self. I was feeling somewhat confused and afraid. “How?” And out of the darkness came a carakel cat and between its teeth it had a watch.

It sparkled delicately under the umbra of the florescent light, dangling precariously between the canines of the cat and what a cat, a giant lynx like feline with a dramatic tan stripe black dash coat . I had never seen such a thing, not of this size and nature. It looked on steadily with an insolence that only cats possess and then launched itself smartly to the hands of its “owner” presenting the watch like it were a mouse. The shop keeper at once raised it to its ear. I knew it had stopped and did not need to wait for his confirmation. He seemed lost in delirium for a moment swaying silently and then a single tear fell and he placed the watch carefully, reverently upon the wall with the others. I looked at the watch in my hands as the words “Will now be sought” What is the meaning of this, what can you tell me? My heart beating with a rare trepidation, as a premature sadness gripped my heart. Cassandra?  Sometimes we don’t know what we have until it is taken from us. Cassandra? Who were you, what were we? He came towards me and as the fluorescents flickered around he cupped my head with the watch between us. Distantly I heard it begin to tick.

• Click, click, click. She scampered off through the rocks, the trailing laughter that I had heard recede coming back to me like an echo. She moved deeper in the darkness, now her steps less sure, her laugh uneasy. Her hands for a moment unsure, unsteady. It was then that she seemed to hear something. It was then that she looked back amidst the impenetrable darkness that had now spread like an unconceivable distance of time and space between us. She looked back secretly, slyly, excitedly. Some secret in her eye that I realised had been there before, had always been there, but I had only become aware of now. It seemed she hesitated, paused, faltered and almost turned to return, but whatever it was that peaked her curiosity was ahead and not behind and it beaconed her with more promise than the invisible fall of my shallow in the darkness behind. The vision fell away to be replaced with another. She was moving through some thick ancient knotted undergrowth, some moist earthy remnants of a biological world. Great masses of mud seemed to collect around her, smearing her face and limbs until she seemed more mud than life. Still she seemed driven to move on, her eyes seemingly captured by sites I could not comprehend. The last expression I saw was one that I knew well and just before that other world took her and the watch at last came to a stop she was gone into the darkness. Cassandra, Cassandra and though my tears fell they were not for her they were for me. I awoke from the vision the watch gripped in my hand until the thin silver chain cut into my hand. My god, maybe there is time I thought, but I knew deep down it was too late. I made the first two hesitant steps towards the door and then as my resolve and determination grew so did my confidence. Maybe, maybe, maybe there was time. As I ran into the darkness I heard the receding cry of the watch collector “The clock, the clock and then the world “Atticus”. The darkness was thick and becoming thicker, but I trusted my instincts in the dark. I flew down the silhouette of a ghost, greater upon a greater darkness. Time and space vanished beneath the swift tread of my feat, still time, still time. Soon I came to witness the same gnarled nakedness of subterranean limbs, the same ghost like ivory appendages, the mud piled thick between. I did not like this place, its smell, its aura felt like a curse. The earth dead and dying. I went on, feeling my way carefully amidst the shadows. Searching with hands as my eye site failed. As I moved closer I felt in the darkness not the wrap of roots, but instead something else, something harder paler, something innately, recognisably human. Bones, bones, bones all around,

mandible maxilla, tibia tarsus, trapezium trapezoid, they were all there, my hands found them in the dark. I worked deeper, sure to find her limbs, still soft, still warm, still full with life. I remembered those limbs, how they languished and lazed, gripped and grazed, were passionate and sometimes afraid. I remembered their insistence, their tenacity and their pull, sometimes I felt like just being there was all I had to do.  Cassandra, Cassandra.

I buried my head within the slope of her neck, deep within the cradle of her pale, beautiful fragility where I hoped the last of her warmth would still dwell. My tears spilt and fell cradled for a moment in the naked cusp of her collarbone they trembled for a moment, no light for them to reflect, infinite pools of darkness within a deeper dark. Her hair as though still alive tickled my neck, the long cascade of blonde sweep swaying gently in a gentle subterranean zephyr, a brief stirring of currents in the under dark. I had loved her, or so I then believed. I loved her as I felt the last of the warmth leave her body and her skin became even more statue like in the darkness of the earth. This was not how it was meant to be I began to rage. To what foul instrument had her soul been lead to, what was this monstrous organic growth of dark deep tendrils within the darkness? I felt for her hands, those pale still appendages that save for her eyes and her smile said more about life than anything else. Where was she? Why these limp mannequin limbs masquerading as life?  I waited for her touch, for some gentle squeeze, some heartfelt caress so that she knew I was here, some signal that she knew I was here with her still, but no nothing, within this flesh a spirit no longer dwelt. My anger rose again a white hot burning pain cascading crashing and wrenching, it was then that I did the unthinkable, the unbelievable, the unforgivable. My teeth found that warm crook again, inhaling that perfume that I  knew so well, the scent not of her body, but of her soul. My teeth found the place, the conjuncture of life and death. The blood began to flow, slowly for her heart did not beat, but still rich and full of the light of the sun. Oh I hoped she could forgive this travesty, this foul trespass and then the blood released its vision…

I was swept as once on a current that was so powerful I felt myself at once lost, spiralling, twisting, falling, flying at a speed that seemed faster than light itself. Somewhere out deep within deep space, a massive burning white sun filling my visage, but as I raised my hands to prevent the death that I knew the sun would send I knew I was going to be alright and then momentarily as I gazed  in wonder at this vast fiery ball, this giant nuclear forge that seemed to dwarf everything that I have ever known I felt a pull and I was turned, thrust away, the Earth, a great blue orb within the dark pocket of the sky, a beautiful life filled sphere of oceanic expanses, small minuscule monumental mountains, silent sanguine patches of humanity clasped to the cragged roof of the world, all that was left of our dreams and delusions. Gut wrenching sadness for our failure, for our greed, for the beauty of a species that dreamt too far and understood too little. I felt a pull and a tingle within my limbs and as though light itself had transmuted the flesh within me I was off at a rate of speed that blurred the space around me. I felt at once massive and tiny, elongated and stretched and there was Earths sisters the outer terrestrial spheres burnt red and swirling deadly blue and then massive gas giants, great spherical race tracks of rubble encircling, their beauty unearthly and lonely within their orbits. Them  and as the music of the orbs cascaded within the space around me I flew out, out towards some unknown destination, far, far from the centre of our solar system. At times I seemed to sleep as the darkness cradled me, only to awake as some strange astronomic wonder came into view and the sky was painted with the colour of the light from distant nebula and the trails of comets crisscrossed my path, with a pallet of ice and star dust. Oh this frightening gloriousness and all the time she was there! Cassandra, holding, sheltering me, as though her blood was some strange conduit that linked me with her soul. I could not communicate with her, but some physical, spiritual conduit lay open between us and I knew that she knew that we were again together. Soon eons of darkness fell from us, hundreds and thousands of instances wrapped up and packaged within time and space, the past and the dark ancient together.

Soon I felt our journey slow, blackness was all around, but out in the darkness, unimaginable distances away the heavens writhed with the birth and death of stars. Scales that dwarfed our world and our dreams. Soon we were weaving through a vast meteor field. It was cold here, our sun was a long way away, but she held me closer still, comforting me with the last of her corporal warmth. The space rocks around us that I somehow knew to be the  left over remnants of our solar system, lonely rocky outcasts never to know the warmth of worlds, but to spin forever on the edge of a new beginning. The meteors were massive, near moon size conglomerates, dark with rare minerals, unearthly, beautiful and alone and as we passed I felt a new warmth and ahead through the crowded conglomerate of unmade worlds a new dark sun sparkled. Nemesis, its name came whispered with dread upon a cold celestial wind.

It grew to a size that dwarfed worlds and yet I felt not its warmth as it core burned away at a million degrees, ahh this one, this ancient hypothesized malignant one that dwelt on the edge of night. She was beautiful, distant sister of our sun, lonely without the earth and its life to appreciate her, but now me and Cassandra here waiting, but for what?

“I brought you here, we brought you here to witness something special”. I knew this voice, this accent and my love for her seemed to burn as brightly as this sun. “Algernon, somewhere back there hundreds of light years away lies earth, an unremarkable planet in an an unremarkable place in the sky. Over the last half a billion years it has evolved to produce you and now here you are. This is Nemesis, this glowing, boiling writhing ball of super heated gas. He is old and will outlive the earth and perhaps our sun. Nemesis has been here alone, here forever, he has known naught of us humans, of our world so far from its home. Sometimes it feels the pull of our things as we launch them into space and they drift upon nocturnal currents towards it, but they are so small, so that they are like an ant crawling upon the surface of the earth to it and the time a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a millisecond to it, so that by the time it has sensed us close we are gone and it has forgotten. It know  of course, our sun and that she has the earth for a friend, it wants to be loved, worshipped, prayed to and  adored like the earth adores its sun, Every so often it likes to send a little something towards the earth. a little something to let the earth know that it exists here alone. Last time it sent a little something near all life was killed on earth, but it recovered and it will recover again, but Nemesis has has eons on its side and soon it will prevail and then it and the sun will be equal within the heavens.

 At this moment something came into view dwarfed by the sun it was still massive, a fiery sleek ball of approaching light, a tail millions of kilometres long. This is its new gift Algernon. It was a comet, streamline and massive moving at speeds unimaginable. Last time one of these visited the earth it destroyed the dinosaurs and created a nuclear winter that wreathed the earth in the dust of a thousand deserts until the sun was cast from the sky and a deep dark winter took hold, but strangely out of tragedy we came, our ancestors crawling between the carcasses of the largest land creatures that had ever lived and from these creatures came us, so in a sense the star is our creator without it we would not be here, do you worship it Algernon, for it is our father. I watched the comet go as her words resounded, it seemed to bank momentarily and then turn, it was off like us as though it followed our trail back the way we had come. it was glorious, perfect, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and yet it was the beginning of our future and sometime millions of years from now it would find the earth and end us all. I felt then a pulling, a separating, a momentarily pang of pain and I was off like it, faster, faster, faster until I blacked out with the speed and there was no Magdalena to shelter me and to hold me in the darkness I was alone like Nemesis the star and for a time we shared the same pain.