Books of Blood Vol 5

In The Flesh

When Cleveland Smith returned to his cell after the interview with the Landing Officer, his new bunk mate was already in residence, staring at the dust-infested sunlight through the reinforced glass window. It was a short display; for less than half an hour each afternoon (clouds permitting) the sun found its way between the wall and the administration building and edged its way along the side of B Wing, not to appear again until the following day.

'You're Tait?' Cleve said.

The prisoner looked away from the sun. Mayflower had said the new boy was twenty-two, but Tait looked five years younger. He had the face of a lost dog. An ugly dog, at that; a dog left by its owners to play in traffic. Eyes too skinned, mouth too soft, arms too slender: a born victim. Cleve was irritated to have been lumbered with the boy. Tait was dead weight, and he had no energies to expend on the boy's protection, despite Mayflower's pep-talk about extending a welcoming hand.

'Yes,' the dog replied. 'William.'

'People call you William?'

'No,' the boy said. 'They call me Billy.'

'Billy.' Cleve nodded, and stepped into the cell. The regime at Pentonville was relatively enlightened; cells were left open for two hours in the mornings, and often two in the afternoon, allowing the cons some freedom of movement. The arrangement had its disadvantages, however, which was where Mayflower's talk came in.

'I've been told to give you some advice.'

'Oh?' the boy replied.

'You've not done time before?'

'No.'

'Not even borstal?'

Tait's eyes flickered. 'A little.'

'So you know what the score is. You know you're easy meat.'

'Sure.'

'Seems I've been volunteered,' Cleve said without appetite, 'to keep you from getting mauled.'

Tait stared at Cleve with eyes the blue of which was milky, as though the sun was still in them. 'Don't put yourself out,' the boy said. 'You don't owe me anything.'

'Damn right I don't. But it seems I got a social responsibility.' Cleve said sourly. 'And you're it.'

Cleve was two months into his sentence for handling marijuana; his third visit to Pentonville. At thirty years of age he was far from obsolete. His body was solid, his face lean and refined; in his court suit he could have passed for a lawyer at ten yards. A little closer, and the viewer might catch the scar on his neck, the result of an attack by a penniless addict, and a certain wariness in his gait, as if with every step forward he was keeping the option of a speedy retreat.

You're still a young man, the last judge had told him, you still have time to change your spots. He hadn't disagreed out loud, but Cleve knew in his heart he was a leopard born and bred. Crime was easy, work was not. Until somebody proved otherwise he would do what he did best, and take the consequences if caught. Doing time wasn't so unpalatable, if you had the right attitude to it. The food was edible, the company select; as long as he had something to keep his mind occupied he was content enough. At present he was reading about sin. Now there was a subject. In his time he'd heard so many explanations of how it had come into the world; from probation officers and lawyers and priests. Theories sociological, theological, ideological. Some were worthy of a few minutes' consideration. Most were so absurd (sin from the womb; sin from the state) he laughed in their apologists' faces. None held water for long.

It was a good bone to chew over, though. He needed a problem to occupy the days. And nights; he slept badly in prison. It wasn't his guilt that kept him awake, but that of others. He was, after all, just a hash-pusher, supplying wherever there was a demand: a minor cog in the consumerist machine; he had nothing to feel guilty about. But there were others here, many others it seemed, whose dreams were not so benevolent, nor nights so peaceful. They would cry, they would complain; they would curse judges local and celestial. Their din would have kept the dead awake.

'Is it always like this?' Billy asked Cleve after a week or so. A new inmate was making a ruckus down the landing: one moment tears, the next obscenities.

'Yes. Most of the time,' said Cleve. 'Some of them need to yell a bit. It keeps their minds from curdling.'

'Not you,' observed the unmusical voice from the bunk below, 'you just read your books and keep out of harm's way. I've watched you. It doesn't bother you, does it?'

'I can live with it,' Cleve replied. 'I got no wife to come here every week and remind me what I'm missing.'

'You been in before?'

Twice.'

The boy hesitated an instant before saying, 'I suppose you know your way around the place, do you?'

'Well, I'm not writing a guidebook, but I got the general lay-out by now.' It seemed an odd comment for the boy to make. 'Why?'

'I just wondered,' said Billy.

'You got a question?'

Tait didn't answer for several seconds, then said: 'I heard they used to ... used to hang people here.'

Whatever Cleve had been expecting the boy to come out with, that wasn't it. But then he had decided several days back that Billy Tait was a strange one. Sly, side-long glances from those milky-blue eyes; a way he had of staring at the wall or at the window like a detective at a murder-scene, desperate for clues.

Cleve said, 'There used to be a hanging shed, I think.'

Again, silence; and then another enquiry, dropped as lightly as the boy could contrive. 'Is it still standing?'

'The shed? I don't know. They don't hang people any more, Billy, or hadn't you heard?' There was no reply from below. 'What's it to you, anyhow?'

'Just curious.'

Billy was right; curious he was. So odd, with his vacant stares and his solitary manner, that most of the men kept clear of him. Only Lowell took any interest in him, and his motives for that were unequivocal.

'You want to lend me your lady for the afternoon?' he asked Cleve while they waited in line for breakfast. Tait, who stood within earshot, said nothing; neither did Cleve.

'You hear me? I asked you a question.'

'I heard. You leave him alone.'

'Share and share alike,' Lowell said. 'I can do you some favours. We can work something out.'

'He's not available.'

'Well, why don't I ask him?' Lowell said, grinning through his beard. 'What do you say, baby?'

Tait looked round at Lowell.

'I say no thank you.'

'No thank you,' Lowell said, and gave Cleve a second smile, this quite without humour. 'You've got him well trained. Does he sit up and beg, too?'

Take a walk, Lowell,' Cleve replied. 'He's not available and that's all there is to it.'

"You can't keep your eyes on him every minute of the day,' Lowell pointed out. 'Sooner or later he's going to have to stand on his own two feet. Unless he's better kneeling.'

The innuendo won a guffaw from Lowell's cell-mate, Nayler. Neither were men Cleve would have willingly faced in a free-for-all, but his skills as a bluffer were honed razor-sharp, and he used them now.

'You don't want to trouble yourself,' he told Lowell, 'you can only cover so many scars with a beard.'

Lowell looked at Cleve, all humour fled. He clearly couldn't distinguish the truth from bluff, and equally clearly wasn't willing to put his neck on the line.

'Just don't look the other way.' he said, and said no more.

The encounter at breakfast wasn't mentioned until that night, when the lights had been extinguished. It was Billy who brought it up.

'You shouldn't have done that,' he said. 'Lowell's a bad bastard. I've heard the talk.'

'You want to get raped then, do you?'

'No,' he said quickly, 'Christ no. I got to be fit.'

'You'll be fit for nothing if Lowell gets his hands on you.'

Billy slipped out from his bunk and stood in the middle of the cell, barely visible in the gloom. 'I suppose you want something in return,' he said.

Cleve turned on his pillow and looked at the uncertain silhouette standing a yard from him. 'What have you got that I'd want, Billy-Boy?' he said.

'What Lowell wanted.'

'Is that what you think that bluster was all about? Me staking my claim?'

'Yeah.'

'Like you said: no thank you.' Cleve rolled over again to face the wall.

'I didn't mean -'

'I don't care what you meant. I just don't want to hear about it, all right? You stay out of Lowell's way, and don't give me shit.'

'Hey,' Billy murmured, 'don't get like that, please. Please. You're the only friend I've got.'

'I'm nobody's friend,' Cleve said to the wall. 'I just don't want any inconvenience. Understand me?'

'No inconvenience,' the boy repeated, dull-tongued.

'Right. Now ... I need my beauty sleep.'

Tait said no more, but returned to the bottom bunk, and lay down, the springs creaking as he did so. Cleve lay in silence, turning the exchange over in his head. He had no wish to lay hands on the boy; but perhaps he had made his point too harshly. Well, it was done.

From below he could hear Billy murmuring to himself, almost inaudibly. He strained to eavesdrop on what the boy was saying. It took several seconds of ear-pricking attention before Cleve realized that Billy-Boy was saying his prayers.

Cleve dreamt that night. What of, he couldn't remember in the morning, though as he showered and shaved tantalizing grains of the dream sifted through his head. Scarcely ten minutes went by that morning without something - salt overturned on the breakfast table, or the sound of shouts in the exercise yard - promising to break his dream: but the revelation did not come. It left him uncharacteristically edgy and short-tempered. When Wesley, a small-time forger whom he knew from his previous vacation here, approached him in the library and started to talk as though they were bosom pals, Cleve told the runt to shut up. But Wesley insisted on speaking.

'You got trouble. '

'Oh. How so?'

'That boy of yours. Billy. '

'What about him?'

'He's asking questions. He's getting pushy. People don't like it. They're saying you should take him in hand.'

'I'm not his keeper.'

Wesley pulled a face. 'I'm telling you; as a friend.'

'Spare me.'

'Don't be stupid, Cleveland. You're making enemies.'

'Oh?' said Cleve. 'Name one.'

'Lowell,' Wesley said, quick as a flash. 'Nayler for another. All kinds of people. They don't like the way Tait is.'

'And how is he?' Cleve snapped back.

Wesley made a small grunt of protest. 'I'm just trying to tell you,' he said. 'He's sly. Like a fucking rat. There'll be trouble.'

'Spare me the prophecies.'

The law of averages demands the worst prophet be right some of the time: this was Wesley's moment it seemed. The day after, coming back from the Workshop where he'd exercised his intellect putting wheels on plastic cars, Cleve found Mayflower waiting for him on the landing.

'I asked you to look after William Tait, Smith,' the officer said. 'Don't you give a damn?'

'What's happened?'

'No, I suppose you don't.'

'I asked what happened. Sir.'

'Nothing much. Not this time. He's banged about, that's all. Seems Lowell has a hankering after him. Am I right?' Mayflower peered at Cleve, and when he got no response went on: 'I made an error with you, Smith. I thought there was something worth appealing to under the hard man. My mistake.'

Billy was lying on the bunk, his face bruised, his eyes closed. He didn't open them when Cleve came in. 'You OK?'

'Sure,' the boy said softly.

'No bones broken?'

'I'll survive.'

'You've got to understand -'

'Listen.' Billy opened his eyes. The pupils had darkened somehow, or that was the trick the light performed with them. 'I'm alive, OK? I'm not an idiot you know. I knew what I was letting myself in for, coming here.' He spoke as if he'd had a choice in the matter. 'I can take Lowell,' he went on, 'so don't fret.' He paused, then said: 'You were right.'

'About what?'

'About not having friends. I'm on my own, you're on your own. Right? I'm just a slow learner; but I'm getting the hang of it.' He smiled to himself.

'You've been asking questions,' Cleve said.

'Oh, yeah?' Billy replied off-handedly. 'Who says?'

'If you've got questions, ask me. People don't like snoopers. They get suspicious. And then they turn their backs when Lowell and his like get heavy.'

Naming the man brought a painful frown to Billy's face. He touched his bruised cheek. 'He's dead,' the boy murmured, almost to himself.

'Some chance,' Cleve commented.

The look that Tait returned could have sliced steel. 'I mean it,' he said, without a trace of doubt in his voice. 'Lowell won't get out alive.'

Cleve didn't comment; the boy needed this show of bravado, laughable as it was.

'What do you want to know, that you go snooping around?'

'Nothing much,' Billy replied. He was no longer looking at Cleve, but staring at the bunk above. Quietly, he said: 'I just wanted to know where the graves were, that was all.'

The graves?'

'Where they buried the men they'd hanged. Somebody told me there's a rose-bush where Crippen's buried. You ever hear that?'

Cleve shook his head. Only now did he remember the boy asking about the hanging shed; and now the graves. Billy looked up at him. The bruise was ripening by the minute.

'You know where they are, Cleve?' he asked. Again, that feigned nonchalance.

'I could find out, if you do me the courtesy of telling me why you want to know.'

Billy looked out from the shelter of the bunk. The afternoon sun was describing its short arc on the painted brick of the cell wall. It was weak today. The boy slid his legs off the bunk and sat on the edge of the mattress, staring at the light as he had on that first day.

'My grandfather - that is, my mother's father - was hanged here,' he said, his voice raw. 'In 1937. Edgar Tait. Edgar St Clair Tait.'

'I thought you said your mother's father?'

'I took his name. I didn't want my father's name. I never belonged to him.'

'Nobody belongs to anybody.' Cleve replied. 'You're your own man.'

'But that's not true,' Billy said with a tiny shrug, still staring at the light on the wall. His certainty was immovable; the gentility with which he spoke did not undercut the authority of the statement. 'I belong to my grandfather. I always have.'

'You weren't even born when he -'

'That doesn't matter. Coming and going; that's nothing.'

Coming and going, Cleve puzzled; did Tait mean life and death? He had no chance to ask. Billy was talking again, the same subdued but insistent flow.

'He was guilty of course. Not the way they thought he was, but guilty. He knew what he was and what he was capable of; that's guilt, isn't it? He killed four people. Or at least that's what they hanged him for.'

'You mean he killed more?'

Billy made another small shrug: numbers didn't matter apparently. 'But nobody came to see where they'd laid him to rest. That's not right, is it? They didn't care, I suppose. All the family were glad he was gone, probably. Thought he was wrong in the head from the beginning. But he wasn't. I know he wasn't. I've got his hands, and his eyes. So Mam said. She told me all about him, you see, just before she died. Told me things she'd never told anybody, and only told me because of my eyes ...' he faltered, and put his hand to his lip, as if the fluctuating light on the brick had already mesmerised him into saying too much.

'What did your mother tell you?' Cleve pressed him.

Billy seemed to weigh up alternative responses before offering one. 'Just that he and I were alike in some ways,' he said.

'Crazy, you mean?' Cleve said, only half-joking.

'Something like that,' Billy replied, eyes still on the wall. He sighed, then allowed himself a further confession. 'That's why I came here. So my grandfather would know he hadn't been forgotten.'

'Came here?' said Cleve. 'What are you talking about? You were caught and sentenced. You had no choice.'

The light on the wall was extinguished as a cloud passed over the sun. Billy looked up at Cleve. The light was there, in his eyes.

'I committed a crime to get here,' the boy replied. 'It was a deliberate act.'

Cleve shook his head. The claim was preposterous.

'I tried before: twice. It's taken time. But I got here, didn't I?'

'Don't take me for a fool, Billy,' Cleve warned.

'I don't,' the other replied. He stood up now. He seemed somehow lighter for the story he'd told; he even smiled, if tentatively, as he said: 'You've been good to me. Don't think I don't know that. I'm grateful. Now - ' he faced Cleve before saying: 'I want to know where the graves are. Find that out and you won't hear another peep from me, I promise.'

Cleve knew next to nothing about the prison or its history, but he knew somebody who did. There was a man by the name of Bishop -so familiar to the inmates that his name had acquired the definite article - who was often at the Workshop at the same time as Cleve. The Bishop had been in and out of prison for much of his forty odd years, mostly for minor misdemeanours, and - with all the fatalism of a one-legged man who makes a life-study of monopedia - had become an expert on prisons and the penal system. Little of his information came from books. He had gleaned the bulk of his knowledge from old lags and screws who wanted to talk the hours away, and by degrees he had turned himself into a walking encyclopaedia on crime and punishment. He had made it his trade, and he sold his carefully accrued knowledge by the sentence; sometimes as geographical information to the would-be escapee, sometimes as prison mythology to the godless con in search of a local divinity. Now Cleve sought him out, and laid down his payment in tobacco and IOUs.

'What can I do for you?' The Bishop asked. He was heavy, but not unhealthily so. The needle-thin cigarettes he was perpetually rolling and smoking were dwarfed by his butcher's fingers, stained sepia by nicotine.

'I want to know about the hangings here.'

The Bishop smiled. 'Such good stories,' he said; and began to tell.

On the plain details, Billy had been substantially correct. There had been hangings in Pentonville up until the middle of the century, but the shed had long since been demolished. On the spot now stood the Probation Office in B Wing. As to the story of Crippen's roses, there was truth in that too. In front of a hut in the grounds, which, The Bishop informed Cleve, was a store for gardening equipment, was a small patch of grass, in the centre of which a bush flourished, planted (and at this point The Bishop confessed that he could not tell fact from fiction) in memory of Doctor Crippen, hanged in 1910.

'That's where the graves are?' Cleve asked.

'No, no,' The Bishop said, reducing half of one of his tiny cigarettes to ash with a single inhalation. The graves are alongside the wall, to the left behind the hut. There's a long lawn; you must have seen it.'

'No stones?'

'Absolutely not. The plots have always been left unmarked. Only the Governor knows who's buried where; and he's probably lost the plans.' The Bishop ferreted for his tobacco tin in the breast-pocket of his prison-issue shirt and began to roll another cigarette with such familiarity he scarcely glanced down at what he was doing. 'Nobody's allowed to come and mourn you see. Out of sight, out of mind: that's the idea. Of course, that's not the way it works, is it? People forget Prime Ministers, but they remember murderers. You walk on that lawn, and just six feet under are some of the most notorious men who ever graced this green and pleasant land. And not even a cross to mark the spot. Criminal, isn't it?'

'You know who's buried there?'

'Some very wicked gentlemen,' the Bishop replied, as if fondly admonishing them for their mischief-mongering.

'You heard of a man called Edgar Tait?'

Bishop raised his eyebrows; the fat of his brow furrowed. 'Saint Tait? Oh certainly. He's not easily forgotten.'

'What do you know about him?'

'He killed his wife, and then his children. Took a knife to them all, as I live and breathe.'

'All?'

The Bishop put the freshly-rolled cigarette to his thick lips. 'Maybe not all,' he said, narrowing his eyes as he tried to recall the specific details. 'Maybe one of them survived. I think perhaps a daughter ...' he shrugged dismissively. 'I'm not very good at remembering the victims. But then, who is?' He fixed his bland gaze on Cleve. 'Why are you so interested in Tait? He was hanged before the war.'

'1937. He'll be well gone, eh?'

The Bishop raised a cautionary fore-finger. 'Not so,' he said. 'You see the land this prison is built upon has special properties. Bodies buried here don't rot the way they do elsewhere.' Cleve shot The Bishop an incredulous glance. 'It's true,' the fat man protested mildly, 'I have it on unimpeachable authority. Take it from me, whenever they've had to exhume a body from the plot it's always been found in almost perfect condition.' He paused to light his cigarette, and drew upon it, exhaling the smoke through his mouth with his next words. 'When the end of the world is upon us, the good men of Marylebone and Camden Town will rise up as rot and bone. But the wicked?; they'll dance to Judgement as fresh as the day they dropped. Imagine that.' This perverse notion clearly delighted him. His pudgy face puckered and dimpled with pleasure at it. 'Ah,' he mused, 'And who'll be calling who corrupt on that fine morning?'

Cleve never worked out precisely how Billy talked his way on to the gardening detail, but he managed it. Perhaps he had appealed directly to Mayflower, who'd persuaded his superiors that the boy could be trusted out in the fresh air. However he worked the manoeuvre, in the middle of the week following Cleve's discovery of the graves' whereabouts, Billy was out in the cold April morning cutting grass.

What happened that day filtered back down the grapevine around recreation time. Cleve had the story from three independent sources, none of whom had been on the spot. The accounts had a variety of colorations, but were clearly of the same species. The bare bones went as follows:

The gardening detail, made up of four men overlooked by a single prison officer, were moving around the blocks, trimming grass and weeding beds in preparation for the spring planting. Custody had been lax, apparently. It was two or three minutes before the officer even noticed that one of his charges had edged to the periphery of the party and slipped away. The alarm was raised. The officers did not have to look far, however. Tait had made no attempt to escape, or if he had he'd been stymied in his bid by a fit of some kind, which had crippled him. He was found (and here the stories parted company considerably) on a large patch of lawn beside the wall, lying on the grass. Some reports claimed he was black in the face, his body knotted up and his tongue all but bitten through; others that he was found face down, talking to the earth, weeping and cajoling. The consensus was that the boy had lost his mind.

The rumours made Cleve the centre of attention; a situation he did not relish. For the next day he was scarcely left alone; men wanting to know what it was like to share a cell with a lunatic. He had nothing to tell, he insisted. Tait had been the perfect cell-mate -quiet, undemanding and unquestionably sane. He told the same story to Mayflower when he was grilled the following day; and later, to the prison doctor. He let not a breath of Tait's interest in the graves be known, and made it his business to see The Bishop and request a similar silence of him. The man was willing to oblige only if vouchsafed the full story in due course. This Cleve promised. The Bishop, as befitted his assumed clerity, was as good as his word.

Billy was gone from the fold for two days. In the interim Mayflower disappeared from his duties as Landing Officer. No explanation was given. In his place, a man called Devlin was transferred from D Wing. His reputation went before him. He was not, it seemed, a man of rare compassion. The impression was confirmed when, the day of Billy Tait's return, Cleve was summoned into Devlin's office.

'I'm told you and Tait are close,' Devlin said. He had a face as giving as granite.

'Not really, sir.'

'I'm not going to make Mayflower's mistake, Smith. As far as I'm concerned Tait is trouble. I'm going to watch him like a hawk, and when I'm not here you're going to do it for me, understand? If he so much as crosses his eyes it's the ghost train. I'll have him out of here and into a special unit before he can fart. Do I make myself clear?'

'Paying your respects, were you?'

Billy had lost weight in the hospital; pounds his scrawny frame could scarcely afford. His shirt hung off his shoulders; his belt was on its tightest notch. The thinning more than ever emphasized his physical vulnerability; a featherweight blow would floor him, Cleve thought. But it lent his face a new, almost desperate, intensity. He seemed all eyes; and those had lost all trace of captured sunlight. Gone, too, was the pretense of vacuity, replaced with an eerie purposefulness.

'I asked a question.'

'I heard you,' Billy said. There was no sun today, but he looked at the wall anyway. 'Yes, if you must know, I was paying my respects.'

'I've been told to watch you, by Devlin. He wants you off the Landing. Transferred entirely, maybe.'

'Out?' The panicked look Billy gave Cleve was too naked to be met for more than a few seconds. 'Away from here, you mean?'

'I would think so.'

They can't!'

'Oh, they can. They call it the ghost train. One minute you're here; the next -'

'No,' the boy said, hands suddenly fists. He had begun to shake, and for a moment Cleve feared a second fit. But he seemed, by act of will, to control the tremors, and turned his look back to his cellmate. The bruises he'd received from Lowell had dulled to yellow-grey, but far from disappeared; his unshaven cheeks were dusted with pale-ginger hair. Looking at him Cleve felt an unwelcome twinge of concern. 'Tell me.' Cleve said. Tell you what?' Billy asked. 'What happened at the graves.'

'I felt dizzy. I fell over. The next thing I knew I was in hospital.'

'That's what you told them, is it?'

'It's the truth.'

'Not the way I heard it. Why don't you explain what really happened? I want you to trust me.'

'I do,' the boy said. 'But I have to keep this to myself, see. It's between me and him.'

'You and Edgar?' Cleve asked, and Billy nodded, 'A man who killed all his family but your mother?'

Billy was clearly startled that Cleve possessed this information. 'Yes,' he said, after consideration. 'Yes, he killed them all. He would have killed Mama too, if she hadn't escaped. He wanted to wipe the whole family out. So there'd be no heirs to carry the bad blood.'

'Your blood's bad, is it?'

Billy allowed himself the slenderest of smiles. 'No,' he said. 'I don't think so. Grandfather was wrong. Times have changed, haven't they?'

He is mad, Cleve thought. Lightning-swift, Billy caught the judgement.

'I'm not insane,' he said. 'You tell them that. Tell Devlin and whoever else asks. Tell them I'm a lamb.' The fierceness was back in his eyes. There was nothing lamb-like there, though Cleve forbore saying so. 'They mustn't move me out, Cleve. Not after getting so close. I've got business here. Important business.'

'With a dead man?'

'With a dead man.'

Whatever new purpose he displayed for Cleve, the shutters went up when Billy got back amongst the rest of the cons. He responded neither to the questions nor the insults bandied about; his facade of empty-eyed indifference was flawless. Cleve was impressed. The boy had a future as an actor, if he decided to forsake professional lunacy.

But the strain of concealing the new-found urgency in him rapidly began to tell. In a hollowness about the eyes, and a jitteriness in his movements; in brooding and unshakeable silences. The physical deterioration was apparent to the doctor to whom Billy continued to report; he pronounced the boy suffering from depression and acute insomnia, and prescribed sedatives to aid sleep. These pills Billy gave to Cleve, insisting he had no need of them himself. Cleve was grateful. For the first time in many months he began to sleep well, unperturbed by the tears and shouts of his fellow inmates.

By day, the relationship between he and the boy, which had always been vestigial, dwindled to mere courtesy. Cleve sensed that Billy was closing up entirely, removing himself from merely physical concerns.

It was not the first time he had witnessed such a pre-medicated withdrawal. His sister-in-law, Rosanna, had died of stomach cancer three years previous: a protracted and, until the last weeks, steady decline. Cleve had not been close to her, but perhaps that very distance had lent him a perspective on the woman's behaviour that the rest of his family had lacked. He had been startled at the systematic way she had prepared herself for death, drawing in her affections until they touched only the most vital figures in her life -her children and her priest - and exiling all others, including her husband of fourteen years.

Now he saw the same dispassion and frugality in Billy. Like a man in training to cross a waterless wasteland and too possessive of his energies to squander them in a single fruitless gesture, the boy was sinking into himself. It was eerie; Cleve became increasingly uncomfortable sharing the twelve feet by eight of the cell with Billy. It was like living with a man on Death Row.

The only consolation was the tranquillisers, which Billy readily charmed the doctor into continuing to supply. They guaranteed Cleve sleep that was restful, and, for several days at least, dreamless.

And then he dreamt the city.

Not the city first; first the desert. An empty expanse of blue-black sand, which stung the soles of his feet as he walked, and was blown up by a cool wind into his nose and eyes and hair. He had been here before, he knew. His dream-self recognized the vista of barren dunes, with neither tree nor habitation to break the monotony. But on previous visits he had come with guides (or such was his half-formed belief); now he was alone, and the clouds above his head were heavy and slate-grey, promising no sun. For what seemed hours he walked the dunes, his feet turned bloody by the sharp sand, his body, dusted by the grains, tinged blue. As exhaustion came close to defeating him, he saw ruins, and approached them.

It was no oasis. There was nothing in those empty streets of health or sustenance; no fruitful trees nor sparkling fountains. The city was a conglomeration of houses, or parts of same - sometimes entire floors, sometimes single rooms - thrown down side by side in parodies of urban order. The styles were a hopeless mish-mash - fine Georgian establishments standing beside mean tenement buildings with rooms burnt out; a house plucked from a terraced row, perfect down to the glazed dog on the window sill, back to back with a penthouse suite. All were scarred by a rough removal from their context: walls were cracked, offering sly glimpses into private interiors; staircases beetled cloudward without destination; doors flapped open and closed in the wind, letting on to nowhere.

There was life here, Cleve knew. Not just the lizards, rats and butterflies - albinoes all - that fluttered and skipped in front of him as he walked the forsaken streets - but human life. He sensed that every step he took was overlooked, though he saw no sign of human presence; not on his first visit at least.

On the second, his dream-self forsook the trudge across the wilderness and was delivered directly into the necropolis, his feet, easily tutored, following the same route as he had on his first visit. The constant wind was stronger tonight. It caught the lace curtains in this window, and a tinkling Chinese trinket hanging in that. It carried voices too; horrid and outlandish sounds that came from some distant place far beyond the city. Hearing that whirring and whittering, as of insane children, he was grateful for the streets and the rooms, for their familiarity if not for any comfort they might offer. He had no desire to step into those interiors, voices or no; did not want to discover what marked these snatches of architecture out that they should have been ripped from their roots and flung down in this whining desolation.

Yet, once he had visited the site, his sleeping mind went back there, night upon night; always walking, bloody-footed, seeing only the rats and the butterflies, and the black sand on each threshold, blowing into rooms and hallways that never changed from visit to visit; that seemed, from what he could glimpse between the curtains or through a shattered wall, to have been fixed somehow at some pivotal moment, with a meal left uneaten on a table set for three (the capon uncarved, the sauces steaming), or a shower left running in a bathroom in which the lamp perpetually swung; and in a room that might have been a lawyer's study a lap-dog, or else a wig torn off and flung to the floor, lying discarded on a fine carpet whose intricacies were half-devoured by sand.

Only once did he see another human being in the city: and that was Billy. It happened strangely. One night - as he dreamed the streets - he half-stirred from sleep. Billy was awake, and standing in the middle of the cell, staring up at the light through the window. It was not moonlight, but the boy bathed in it as if it were. His face was turned up to the window, mouth open and eyes closed. Cleve barely had time to register the trance the boy seemed to be in before the tranquillisers drew him back into his dream. He took a fragment of reality with him however, folding the boy into his sleeping vision. When he reached the city again, there was Billy Tait: standing on the street, his face turned up to the louring clouds, his mouth open, his eyes closed.

The image lingered a moment only. The next, the boy was away, his heels kicking up black fans of sand. Cleve called after him. Billy ran on however, heedless; and, with that inexplicable foreknowledge that dreams bring, Cleve knew where the boy was going. Off to the edge of the city, where the houses petered out and the desert began. Off to meet some friend coming in on that terrible wind, perhaps. Nothing would induce him into pursuit, yet he didn't want to lose contact with the one fellow human he had seen in these destitute streets. He called Billy's name again, more loudly.

This time he felt a hand on his arm, and started up in terror to find himself being jostled awake in his cell.

'It's all right,' Billy said. 'You're dreaming.'

Cleve tried to shake the city out of his head, but for several perilous seconds the dream bled into the waking world, and looking down at the boy he saw Billy's hair lifted by a wind that did not, could not, belong in the confines of the cell. 'You're dreaming,' Billy said again. 'Wake up.'

Shuddering, Cleve sat fully up on his bunk. The city was receding - was almost gone - but before he lost sight of it entirely he felt the indisputable conviction that Billy knew what he was waking Cleve from; that they had been there together for a few, fragile moments.

'You know, don't you?' he accused the pallid face at his side.

The boy looked bewildered. 'What are you talking about?'

Cleve shook his head. The suspicion became more incredible with each step he took from sleep. Even so, when he looked down at Billy's bony hand, which still clung to his arm, he half-expected to see flecks of that obsidian grit beneath his finger-nails. There was only dirt.

The doubts lingered however, long after reason should have bullied them into surrender. Cleve found himself watching the boy more closely from that night on, waiting for some slip of tongue or eye which would reveal the nature of his game. Such scrutiny was a lost cause. The last traces of accessibility disappeared after that night; the boy became - like Rosanna - an indecipherable book, letting no clue as to the nature of his secret world out from beneath his lids. As to the dream - it was not even mentioned again. The only roundabout allusion to that night was Billy's redoubled insistence that Cleve continue to take the sedatives.

'You need your sleep,' he said after coming back from the Infirmary with a further supply. 'Take them.'

'You need sleep too,' Cleve replied, curious to see how far the boy would push the issue. 'I don't need the stuff any more.'

'But you do,' Billy insisted, proffering the phial of capsules. 'You know how bad the noise is.'

'Someone said they're addictive,' Cleve replied, not taking the pills, 'I'll do without.'

'No,' said Billy; and now Cleve sensed a level of insistence which confirmed his deepest suspicions. The boy wanted him drugged, and had all along. 'I sleep like a babe,' Billy said. 'Please take them. They'll only be wasted otherwise.'

Cleve shrugged. 'If you're sure,' he said, content - fears confirmed - to make a show of relenting.

'I'm sure.'

Then thanks.' He took the phial.

Billy beamed. With that smile, in a sense, the bad times really began.

That night, Cleve answered the boy's performance with one of his own, appearing to take the tranquillisers as he usually did, but failing to swallow them. Once lying on his bunk, face to the wall, he slipped them from his mouth, and under his pillow. Then he pretended sleep.

Prison days both began and finished early; by 8.45 or 9.00 most of the cells in the four wings were in darkness, the inmates locked up until dawn and left to their own devices. Tonight was quieter than most. The weeper in the next cell but one had been transferred to D Wing; there were few other disturbances along the landing. Even without the pill Cleve felt sleep tempting him. From the bunk below he heard practically no sound, except for the occasional sigh. It was impossible to guess if Billy was actually asleep or not. Cleve kept his silence, occasionally stealing a moment-long glance at the luminous face of his watch. The minutes were leaden, and he feared, as the first hours crept by, that all too soon his imitation of sleep would become the real thing. Indeed he was turning this very possibility around in his mind when unconsciousness overcame him.

He woke much later. His sleep-position seemed not to have altered. The wall was in front of him, the peeled paint like a dim map of some nameless territory. It took him a minute or two to orient himself. There was no sound from the bunk below. Disguising the gesture as one made in sleep, he drew his arm up within eye-range, and looked at the pale-green dial of his watch. It was one-fifty-one. Several hours yet until dawn. He lay in the position he'd woken in for a full quarter of an hour, listening for every sound in the cell, trying to locate Billy. He was loathe to roll over and look for himself, for fear that the boy was standing in the middle of the cell as he had been the night of the visit to the city.

The world, though benighted, was far from silent. He could hear dull footsteps as somebody paced back and forth in the corresponding cell on the landing above; could hear water rushing in the pipes and the sound of a siren on the Caledonian Road. What he couldn't hear was Billy. Not a breath of the boy.

Another quarter of an hour passed, and Cleve could feel the familiar torpor closing in to reclaim him; if he lay still much longer he would fall asleep again, and the next thing he'd know it would be morning. If he was going to learn anything, he had to roll over and look. Wisest, he decided, not to attempt to move surreptitiously, but to turn over as naturally as possible. This he did, muttering to himself, as if in sleep, to add weight to the illusion. Once he had turned completely, and positioned his hand beside his face to shield his spying, he cautiously opened his eyes.

The cell seemed darker than it had the night he had seen Billy with his face up to the window. As to the boy, he was not visible. Cleve opened his eyes a little wider and scanned the cell as best he could from between his fingers. There was something amiss, but he couldn't quite work out what it was. He lay there for several minutes, waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the murk. They didn't. The scene in front of him remained unclear, like a painting so encrusted with dirt and varnish its depths refuse the investigating eye. Yet he knew - knew - that the shadows in the corners of the cell, and on the opposite wall, were not empty. He wanted to end the anticipation that was making his heart thump, wanted to raise his head from the pebble-filled pillow and call Billy out of hiding. But good sense counselled otherwise. Instead he lay still, and sweated, and watched.

And now he began to realize what was wrong with the scene before him. The concealing shadows fell where no shadows belonged; they spread across the hall where the feeble light from the window should have been falling. Somehow, between window and wall, that light had been choked and devoured. Cleve closed his eyes to give his befuddled mind a chance to rationalize and reject this conclusion. When he opened them again his heart lurched. The shadow, far from losing potency, had grown a little.

He had never been afraid like this before; never felt a coldness in his innards akin to the chill that found him now. It was all he could do to keep his breath even, and his hands where they lay. His instinct was to wrap himself up and hide his face like a child. Two thoughts kept him from doing so. One was that the slightest movement might draw unwelcome attention to him. The other, that Billy was somewhere in the cell, and perhaps as threatened by this living darkness as he.

And then, from the bunk below, the boy spoke. His voice was soft, so as not to wake his sleeping cell-mate presumably. It was also eerily intimate. Cleve entertained no thought that Billy was talking in his sleep; the time for wilful self-deception was long past. The boy was addressing the darkness; of that unpalatable fact there could be no doubt.

'... it hurts ...' he said, with a faint note of accusation,'... you didn't tell me how much it hurts ...'

Was it Cleve's imagination, or did the wraith of shadows bloom a little in response, like a squid's ink in water? He was horribly afraid. The boy was speaking again. His voice was so low Cleve could barely catch the words.

'... it must be soon ...' he said, with quiet urgency, '... I'm not afraid. Not afraid.'

Again, the shadow shifted. This time, when Cleve looked into its heart, he made some sense of the chimerical form it embraced. His throat shook; a cry lodged behind his tongue, hot to be shouted.

'... all you can teach me ...' Billy was saying,'... quickly ...' The words came and went; but Cleve barely heard them. His attention was on the curtain of shadow, and the figure - stitched from darkness - that moved in its folds. It was not an illusion. There was a man there: or rather a crude copy of one, its substance tenuous, its outline deteriorating all the time, and being hauled back into some semblance of humanity again only with the greatest effort. Of the visitor's features Cleve could see little, but enough to sense deformities paraded like virtues: a face resembling a plate of rotted fruit, pulpy and peeling, swelling here with a nest of flies, and there suddenly fallen away to a pestilent core. How could the boy bring himself to converse so easily with such a thing? And yet, putresence notwithstanding, there was a bitter dignity in the bearing of the creature, in the anguish of its eyes, and the toothless O of its maw.

Suddenly, Billy stood up. The abrupt movement, after so many hushed words, almost unleashed the cry from Cleve's throat. He swallowed it, with difficulty, and closed his eyes down to a slit, staring through the bars of his lashes at what happened next.

Billy was talking again, but now the voice was too low to allow for eavesdropping. He stepped towards the shadow, his body blocking much of the figure on the opposite wall. The cell was no more than two or three strides wide, but, by some mellowing of physics, the boy seemed to take five, six, seven steps away from the bunk. Cleve's eyes widened: he knew he was not being watched. The shadow and its acolyte had business between them: it occupied their attention utterly.

Billy's figure was smaller than seemed possible within the confines of the cell, as if he had stepped through the wall and into some other province. And only now, with his eyes wide, did Cleve recognize that place. The darkness from which Billy's visitor was made was cloud-shadow and dust; behind him, barely visible in the bewitched murk, but recognizable to any who had been there, was the city of Cleve's dreams.

Billy had reached his master. The creature towered above him, tattered and spindly, but aching with power. Cleve didn't know how or why the boy had gone to it, and he feared for Billy's safety now that he had, but fear for his own safety shackled him to the bunk. He realized in that moment that he had never loved anyone, man or woman, sufficiently to pursue them into the shadow of that shadow. The thought brought a terrible sense of isolation, knowing that same instant that none, seeing him walk to his damnation, would take a single step to claim him from the brink. Lost souls both; he and the boy.

Now Billy's lord was lifting his swollen head, and the incessant wind in those blue streets was rousing his horse-mane into furious life. On the wind, the same voices Cleve had heard carried before, the cries of mad children, somewhere between tears and howls. As if encouraged by these voices, the entity reached out towards Billy and embraced him, wrapping the boy round in vapour. Billy did not struggle in this embrace, but rather returned it. Cleve, unable to watch this horrid intimacy, closed his eyes against it, and when -seconds? minutes?, later - he opened them again, the encounter seemed to be over. The shadow-thing was blowing apart, relinquishing its slender claim to coherence. It fragmented, pieces of its tattered anatomy flying off into the streets like litter before wind. Its departure seemed to signal the dispersal of the entire scene; the streets and houses were already being devoured by dust and distance. Even before the last of the shadow's scraps had been wafted out of sight the city was lost to sight. Cleve was pleased to be shut of it. Reality, grim as it was, was preferable to that desolation. Brick by painted brick the wall was asserting itself again, and Billy, delivered from his master's arms, was back in the solid geometry of the cell, staring up at the light through the window.

Cleve did not sleep again that night. Indeed he wondered, lying on his unyielding mattress and staring up at the stalactites of paint depending from the ceiling, whether he could ever find safety in sleep again.

Sunlight was a showman. It threw its brightness down with such flamboyance, eager as any tinsel-merchant to dazzle and distract. But beneath the gleaming surface it illuminated was another state; one that sunlight - ever the crowd-pleaser - conspired to conceal. It was vile and desperate, that condition. Most, blinded by sight, never even glimpsed it. But Cleve knew the state of sunlessness now; had even walked it, in dreams; and though he mourned the loss of his innocence, he knew he could never retrace his steps back into light's hall of mirrors.

He tried his damnedest to keep this change in him from Billy; the last thing he wanted was for the boy to suspect his eavesdropping. But concealment was well-nigh impossible. Though the following day Cleve made every show of normality he could contrive, he could not quite cover his unease. It slipped out without his being able to control it, like sweat from his pores. And the boy knew, no doubt of it, he knew. Nor was he slow to give voice to his suspicions. When, following the afternoon's Workshop, they returned to their cell, Billy was quick to come to the point.

'What's wrong with you today?'

Cleve busied himself with re-making his bed, afraid even to glance at Billy. 'Nothing's wrong,' he said. 'I don't feel particularly well, that's all.'

'You have a bad night?' the boy enquired. Cleve could feel Billy's eyes boring into his back.

'No,' he said, pacing his denial so that it didn't come too quickly. 'I took your pills, like always.'

'Good.'

The exchange faltered, and Cleve was allowed to finish his bedmaking in silence. The business could only be extended so long, however. When he turned from the bunk, job done, he found Billy sitting at the small table, with one of Cleve's books open in his lap. He casually flicked through the volume, all sign of his previous suspicion vanished. Cleve knew better than to trust to mere appearances however.

'Why'd you read these things?' the boy asked.

'Passes the time,' Cleve replied, undoing all his labours by clambering up on to the top bunk and stretching out there.

'No. I don't mean why do you read books? I mean, why read these books? All this stuff about sin.'

Cleve only half-heard the question. Lying there on the bunk reminded him all too acutely of how the night had been. Reminded him too that darkness was even now crawling up the side of the world again. At that thought his stomach seemed to aspire to his throat.

'Did you hear me?' the boy asked.

Cleve murmured that he had.

'Well, why then; why the books? About damnation and all?'

'Nobody else takes them out of the library,' Cleve replied, having difficulty shaping thoughts to speak when the others, unspoken, were so much more demanding.

'You don't believe it then?'

'No,' he replied. 'No; I don't believe a word of it.'

The boy kept his silence a while. Though Cleve wasn't looking at him, he could hear Billy turning page. Then, another question, but spoken more quietly; a confession.

'Do you ever get afraid?

The enquiry startled Cleve from his trance. The conversation had changed back from talk of reading-matter to something altogether more pertinent. Why did Billy ask about fear, unless he too was afraid?

'What have I got to be scared of?' Cleve asked.

From the corner of his eye he caught the boy shrugging slightly before replying. 'Things that happen,' he said, his voice soulless. 'Things you can't control.'

'Yes,' Cleve replied, not certain of where this exchange was leading. 'Yes, of course. Sometimes I'm scared.'

'What do you do then?' Billy asked.

'Nothing to do, is there?' Cleve said. His voice was as hushed as Billy's. 'I gave up praying the morning my father died.'

He heard the soft pat as Billy closed the book, and inclined his head sufficiently to catch sight of the boy. Billy could not entirely conceal his agitation. He is afraid, Cleve saw; he doesn't want the night to come any more than I do. He found the thought of their shared fear reassuring. Perhaps the boy didn't entirely belong to the shadow; perhaps he could even cajole Billy into pointing their route out of this spiralling nightmare.

He sat upright, his head within inches of the cell ceiling. Billy looked up from his meditations, his face a pallid oval of twitching muscle. Now was the time to speak, Cleve knew; now, before the lights were switched out along the landings, and all the cells consigned to shadows. There would be no time then for explanations. The boy would already be half lost to the city, and beyond persuasion.

'I have dreams,' Cleve said. Billy said nothing, but simply stared back, hollow-eyed.' -I dream a city.'

The boy didn't flinch. He clearly wasn't going to volunteer elucidation; he would have to be bullied into it.

'Do you know what I'm talking about?'

Billy shook his head. 'No,' he said, lightly, 'I never dream.'

'Everybody dreams.'

'Then I just don't remember them.'

'I remember mine,' Cleve said. He was determined, now that he'd broached the subject, not to let Billy squirm free. 'And you're there. You're in that city.'

Now the boy flinched; only a treacherous lash, but enough to reassure Cleve that he wasn't wasting his breath. 'What is that place, Billy?' he asked.

'How should I know?' the boy returned, about to laugh, then disgarding the attempt. 'I don't know, do I? They're your dreams.'

Before Cleve could reply he heard the voice of one of the officers as he moved along the row of cells, advising the men to bed down for the night. Very soon, the lights would be extinguished and he would be locked up in this narrow cell for ten hours. With Billy; and phantoms -

'Last night - ' he said, fearful of mentioning what he'd heard and seen without due preparation, but more fearful still of facing another night on the borders of the city, alone in darkness. 'Last night I saw -' He faltered. Why wouldn't the words come? 'Saw - '

'Saw what?' the boy demanded, his face intractable; whatever murmur of apprehension there had been in it had now vanished. Perhaps he too had heard the officer's advance, and known that there was nothing to be done; no way of staying the night's advance. 'What did you see? Billy insisted. Cleve sighed. 'My mother,' he replied.

The boy betrayed his relief only in the tenuous smile that crept across his lips.

'Yes ... I saw my mother. Large as life.'

'And it upset you, did it?' Billy asked.

'Sometimes dreams do.'

The officer had reached B. 3. 20. 'Lights out in two minutes,' he said as he passed.

'You should take some more of those pills,' Billy advised, putting down the book and crossing to his bunk. 'Then you'd be like me. No dreams.'

Cleve had lost. He, the arch-bluffer, had been out-bluffed by the boy, and now had to take the consequences. He lay, facing the ceiling, counting off the seconds until the light went out, while below the boy undressed and slipped between the sheets.

There was still time to jump up and call the officer back; time to beat his head against the door until somebody came. But what would he say, to justify his histrionics? That he had bad dreams?; who didn't? That he was afraid of the dark?; who wasn't? They would laugh in his face and tell him to go back to bed, leaving him with all camouflage blown, and the boy and his master waiting at the wall. There was no safety in such tactics.

Nor in prayer either. He had told Billy the truth, about his giving up God when his prayers for his father's life had gone unanswered. Of such divine neglect was aetheism made; belief could not be rekindled now, however profound his terror.

Thoughts of his father led inevitably to thoughts of childhood; few other subjects, if any, could have engrossed his mind sufficiently to steal him from his fears but this. When the lights were finally extinguished, his frightened mind took refuge in memories. His heart-rate slowed; his fingers ceased to tremble, and eventually, without his being the least aware of it, sleep stole him.

The distractions available to his conscious mind were not available to his unconscious. Once asleep, fond recollection was banished; childhood memories became a thing of the past, and he was back, bloody-footed, in that terrible city.

Or rather, on its borders. For tonight he did not follow the familiar route past the Georgian house and its attendant tenements, but walked instead to the outskirts of the city, where the wind was stronger than ever, and the voices it carried clear. Though he expected with every step he took to see Billy and his dark companion, he saw nobody. Only butterflies accompanied him along the path, luminous as his watch-face. They settled on his shoulders and his hair like confetti, then fluttered off again.

He reached the edge of the city without incident and stood, scanning the desert. The clouds, solid as ever, moved overhead with the majesty of juggernauts. The voices seemed closer tonight, he thought, and the passions they expressed less distressing than he had found them previously. Whether the mellowing was in them or in his response to them he couldn't be certain.

And then, as he watched the dunes and the sky, mesmerized by their blankness, he heard a sound and glanced over his shoulder to see a smiling man, dressed in what was surely his Sunday finery, walking out of the city towards him. He was carrying a knife; the blood on it, and on his hand and shirt-front, was wet. Even in his dream-state, and immune, Cleve was intimidated by the sight and stepped back - a word of self-defence on his lips. The smiling man seemed not to see him however, but advanced past Cleve and out into the desert, dropping the blade as he crossed some invisible boundary. Only now did Cleve see that others had done the same, and that the ground at the city limit was littered with lethal keepsakes - knives, ropes (even a human hand, lopped off at the wrist) - most of which were all but buried.

The wind was bringing the voices again: tatters of senseless songs and half-finished laughter. He looked up from the sand. The exiled man had gone out a hundred yards from the city and was now standing on the top of one of the dunes, apparently waiting. The voices were becoming louder all the time. Cleve was suddenly nervous. Whenever he had been here in the city, and heard this cacophony, the picture he had conjured of its originators had made his blood run cold. Could he now stand and wait for the banshees to appear? Curiosity was discretion's better. He glued his eyes to the ridge over which they would come, his heart thumping, unable to look away. The man in the Sunday suit had begun to take his jacket off. He discarded it, and began to loosen his tie.

And now Cleve thought he saw something in the dunes, and the noise rose to an ecstatic howl of welcome. He stared, defying his nerves to betray him, determined to look this horror in its many faces -

Suddenly, above the din of their music, somebody was screaming; a man's voice, but high-pitched, gelded with terror. It did not come from here in the dream-city, but from that other fiction he occupied, the name of which he couldn't quite remember. He pressed his attention back to the dunes, determined not to be denied the sight of the reunion about to take place in front of him. The scream in that nameless elsewhere mounted to a throat-breaking height, and stopped. But now an alarm bell was ringing in its place, more insistent than ever. Cleve could feel his dream slipping.

'No ...' he murmured,'... let me see ...'

The dunes were moving. But so was his consciousness - out of the city and back towards his cell. His protests brought him no concession. The desert faded, the city too. He opened his eyes. The lights in the cell were still off: the alarm bell was ringing. There were shouts in cells on the landings above and below, and the sound of officers' voices, raised in a confusion of enquiries and demands.

He lay on his bunk a moment, hoping, even now, to be returned into the enclave of his dream. But no; the alarm was too shrill, the mounting hysteria in the cells around too compelling. He conceded defeat and sat up, wide awake.

'What's going on?' he said to Billy.

The boy was not standing in his place by the wall. Asleep, for once, despite the din.

'Billy?

Cleve leaned over the edge of his bunk, and peered into the space below. It was empty. The sheets and blankets had been thrown back.

Cleve jumped down from his bunk. The entire contents of the cell could be taken at two glances, there was nowhere to hide. The boy was not to be seen. Had he been spirited away while Cleve slept? It was not unheard of; this was the ghost train of which Devlin had warned: the unexplained removal of difficult prisoners to other establishments. Cleve had never heard of this happening at night, but there was a first time for everything.

He crossed to the door to see if he could make some sense of the shouting outside, but it defied interpretation. The likeliest explanation was a fight, he suspected: two cons who could no longer bear the idea of another hour in the same space. He tried to work out where the initial scream had come from, to his right or left, above or below; but the dream had confounded all direction.

As he stood at the door, hoping an officer might pass by, he felt a change in the air. It was so subtle he scarcely registered it at first. Only when he raised his hand to wipe sleep from his eyes did he realize that his arms were solid gooseflesh.

From behind him he now heard the sound of breathing, or a ragged parody of same.

He mouthed the word 'Billy' but didn't speak it. The gooseflesh had found his spine; now he began to shake. The cell wasn't empty after all; there was somebody in the tiny space with him.

He screwed his courage tight, and forced himself to turn around. The cell was darker than it had been when he woke; the air was a teasing veil. But Billy was not in the cell; nobody was.

And then the noise came again, and drew Cleve's attention to the bottom bunk. The space was pitch-black, a shadow - like that on the wall - too profound and too volatile to have natural origins. Out of it, a croaking attempt at breath that might have been the last moments of an asthmatic. He realized that the murk in the cell had its source there - in the narrow space of Billy's bed; the shadow bled onto the floor and curled up like fog on to the top of the bunk.

Cleve's supply of fear was not inexhaustible. In the past several days he had used it up in dreams and waking dreams; he'd sweated, he'd frozen, he'd lived on the edge of sane experience and survived. Now, though his body still insisted on gooseflesh, his mind was not moved to panic. He felt cooler than he ever had; whipped by recent events into a new impartiality. He would not cower. He would not cover his eyes and pray for morning, because if he did one day he would wake to find himself dead and he'd never know the nature of this mystery.

He took a deep breath, and approached the bunk. It had begun to shake. The shrouded occupant in the lower tier was moving about violently.

'Billy,' Cleve said.

The shadow moved. It pooled around his feet; it rolled up into his face, smelling of rain on stone, cold and comfortless.

He was standing no more than a yard from the bunk, and still he could make nothing out; the shadow defied him. Not to be denied sight, he reached towards the bed. At his solicitation the veil divided like smoke, and the shape that thrashed on the mattress made itself apparent.

It was Billy, of course; and yet not. A lost Billy, perhaps, or one to come. If so, Cleve wanted no part of a future that could breed such trauma. There, on the lower bunk, lay a dark, wretched shape, still solidifying as Cleve watched, knitting itself together from the shadows. There was something of a rabid fox in its incandescent eyes, in its arsenal of needle-teeth; something of an upturned insect in the way it was half curled upon itself, its back more shell than flesh and more nightmare than either. No part of it was fixed. Whatever figuration it had (perhaps it had many) Cleve was watching that status dissolve. The teeth were growing yet longer, and in so doing more insubstantial, their matter extruded to the point of frailty, then dispersed like mist; its hooked limbs, pedalling the air, were also growing paltry. Beneath the chaos he saw the ghost of Billy Tait, mouth open and babbling agonies, striving to make itself known. He wanted to reach into the maelstrom and snatch the boy out, but he sensed that the process he was watching had its own momentum and it might be fatal to intervene. All he could do was stand and watch as Billy's thin white limbs and heaving abdomen writhed to slough off this dire anatomy. The luminous eyes were almost the last to go, spilling out from their sockets on myriad threads and flying off into black vapour.

At last, he saw Billy's face, truant clues to its former condition still flickering across it. And then, even these were dispersed, the shadows gone, and only Billy was lying on the bunk, naked and heaving with the exertion of his anguish. He looked at Cleve, his face innocent of expression. Cleve remembered how the boy had complained to the creature from the city.'... it hurts ...' he'd said, hadn't he?,'... you didn't tell me how much it hurts...'. It was the observable truth. The boy's body was a wasteland of sweat and bone; a more unappetising sight was scarcely imaginable. But human; at least that.

Billy opened his mouth. His lips were ruddy and slick, as if he were wearing lipstick.

'Now ...' he said, trying to speak between painful breaths. '... now what shall we do?'

The act of speaking seemed too much for him. He made a gagging sound in the back of his throat, and pressed his hand to his mouth. Cleve moved aside as Billy stood up and stumbled across to the bucket in the corner of the cell, kept there for their night-wastes. He failed to reach it before nausea overtook him; fluid splashed between his fingers and hit the floor. Cleve looked away as Billy threw up, preparing himself for the stench he would have to tolerate until slopping-out time the following morning. It was not the smell of vomit that filled the cell, however, but something sweeter and more cloying.

Mystified, Cleve looked back towards the figure crouching in the corner. On the floor between his feet were splashes of dark fluid; rivulets of the same ran down his bare legs. Even in the gloom of the cell, it was unmistakably blood.

In the most well-ordered of prisons violence could - and inevitably did - erupt without warning. The relationship of two cons, incarcerated together for sixteen hours out of every twenty-four, was an unpredictable thing. But as far as had been apparent to either prisoners or officers there had been no bad blood between Lowell and Nayler; nor, until that scream began, had there been a sound from their cell: no argument, no raised voices. What had induced Nayler to spontaneously attack and slaughter his cell-mate, and then inflict devastating wounds upon himself, was a subject for debate in dining-hall and exercise yard alike. The why of the problem, however, took second place to the how. The rumours describing the condition of Lowell's body when found defied the imagination; even amongst men inured against casual brutality the descriptions were met with shock. Lowell had not been much liked; he had been a bully and a cheat. But nothing he'd done deserved such mutilation. The man had been ripped open: his eyes put out, his genitals torn off. Nayler, the only possible antagonist, had then contrived to open up his own belly. He was now in an Intensive Care Unit; the prognosis was not hopeful.

It was easy, with such a buzz of outrage going about the Wing, for Cleve to spend the day all but unnoticed. He too had a story to tell: but who would believe it? He barely believed it himself. In fact on and off through the day - when the images came back to him afresh -he asked himself if he were entirely sane. But then sanity was a movable feast wasn't it?; one man's madness might be another's politics. All he knew for certain was that he had seen Billy Tait transform. He clung to that certainty with a tenaciousness born of near-despair. If he ceased to believe the evidence of his own eyes, he had no defence left to hold the darkness at bay.

After ablutions and breakfast, the entire Wing was confined to cells; workshops, recreation - any activity which required movement around the landings - was cancelled while Lowell's cell was photographed and examined, then swabbed out. Following breakfast, Billy slept through the morning; a state more akin to coma than sleep, such was its profundity. When he awoke for lunch he was brighter and more out-going than Cleve had seen him in weeks. There was no sign beneath the vacuous chatter that he knew what had happened the previous night. In the afternoon Cleve faced him with the truth.

'You killed Lowell,' he said. There was no point in trying to pretend ignorance any longer; if the boy didn't remember now what he'd done, he would surely recall in time. And with that memory, how long before he remembered that Cleve had watched him transform? Better to confess it now. 'I saw you,' Cleve said, 'I saw you change...'

Billy didn't seem much disturbed by these revelations.

'Yes,' he said. 'I killed Lowell. Do you blame me?' The question, begging a hundred others, was put lightly, as a matter of mild interest, no more.

'What happened to you?' Cleve said. 'I saw you - there - ' he pointed, appalled at the memory, at the lower bunk, 'you weren't human.'

'I didn't mean you to see,' the boy replied. 'I gave you the pills, didn't I? You shouldn't have spied.'

'And the night before ...' Cleve said, 'I was awake then too.'

The boy blinked like a bemused bird, head slightly cocked. 'You really have been stupid,' he said. 'So stupid.'

'Whether I like it or not, I'm not out of this,' Cleve said, 'I have dreams.'

'Oh, yes.' Now a frown marred the porcelain brow. 'Yes. You dream the city, don't you?'

'What is that place, Billy?'

'I read somewhere: the dead have highways. You ever hear that? Well... they have cities too.'

'The dead? You mean it's some kind of ghost town?'

'I never wanted you to become involved. You've been better to me than most here. But I told you, I came to Pentonville to do business.'

'With Tait.'

That's right.'

Cleve wanted to laugh; what he was being told - a city of the dead? - only heaped nonsense upon nonsense. And yet his exasperated reason had not sniffed out one explanation more plausible.

'My grandfather killed his children,' Billy said, 'because he didn't want to pass his condition on to another generation. He learned late, you see. He didn't realize, until he had a wife and children, that he wasn't like most men. He was special. But he didn't want the skills he'd been given; and he didn't want his children to survive with that same power in their blood. He would have killed himself, and finished the job, but that my mother escaped. Before he could find her and kill her too, he was arrested.'

'And hanged. And buried.'

'Hanged and buried; but not lost. Nobody's lost, Cleve. Not ever.'

'You came here to find him.'

'More than find him: make him help me. I knew from the age of ten what I was capable of. Not quite consciously; but I had an inkling. And I was afraid. Of course I was afraid: it was a terrible mystery.'

'This mutation: you've always done it?'

'No. Only known I was capable of it. I came here to make my grandfather tutor me, make him show me how. Even now ...' he looked down at his wasted arms,'... with him teaching me ... the pain is almost unbearable.'

'Why do it then?'

The boy looked at Cleve incredulously. 'To be not myself; to be smoke and shadow. To be something terrible.' He seemed genuinely puzzled by Cleve's unwillingness. 'Wouldn't you do the same?'

Cleve shook his head.

"What you became last night was repellent.'

Billy nodded. 'That's what my grandfather thought. At his trial he called himself an abomination. Not that they knew what he was talking about of course, but that's what he said. He stood up and said: "I am Satan's excrement - ".' Billy smiled at the thought. ' " - for God's sake hang me and burn me." He's changed his mind since then. The century's getting old and stale; it needs new tribes.' He looked at Cleve intently. 'Don't be afraid,' he said. 'I won't hurt you, unless you try to tell tales. You won't do that, will you?'

'What could I say that would sound like sanity?' Cleve returned mildly. 'No; I won't tell tales.'

'Good. And in a little while I'll be gone; and you'll be gone. And you can forget.'

'I doubt it.'

'Even the dreams will stop, when I'm not here. You only share them because you have some mild talents as a sensitive. Trust me. There's nothing to be afraid of.'

The city -'

'What about it?'

"Where are its citizens? I never see anybody. No; that's not quite true. I saw one. A man with a knife... going out into the desert...'

'I can't help you. I go as a visitor myself. All I know is what my grandfather tells me: that it's a city occupied by dead souls. Whatever you've seen there, forget about it. You don't belong there. You're not dead yet.'

Was it wise to believe always what the dead told you?; were they purged of all deceit by the act of dying, and delivered into their new state like saints? Cleve could not believe such naivete. More likely they took their talents with them, good and bad, and used them as best they could. There would be shoemakers in paradise, wouldn't there?; foolish to think they'd forgotten how to sew leather.

So perhaps Edgar Tait lied about the city. There was more to that place than Billy knew. What about the voices on the wind?, the man with the knife, dropping it amongst a litter of weapons before moving off to God alone knew where? What ritual was that?

Now - with the fear used up, and no untainted reality left to cling to, Cleve saw no reason not to go to the city willingly. What could be there, in those dusty streets, that was worse than what he had seen in the bunk below him, or what had happened to Lowell and Nayler? Beside such atrocities the city was a haven. There was a serenity in its empty thoroughfares and plazas; a sense Cleve had there that all action was over, all rage and distress finished with; that these interiors (with the bath running and the cup brimming) had seen the worst, and were now content to sit out the millennium. When that night brought sleep, and the city opened up in front of him, he went into it not as a frightened man astray in hostile territory, but as a visitor content to relax a while in a place he knew too well to become lost in, but not well enough to be weary of.

As if in response to this new-found ease, the city opened itself to him. Wandering the streets, feet bloody as ever, he found the doors open wide, the curtains at the windows drawn back. He did not disparage the invitation they offered, but went to look more closely at the houses and tenements. On closer inspection he found them not the paradigms of domestic calm he'd first taken them for. In each he discovered some sign of violence recently done. In one, perhaps no more than an overturned chair, or a mark on the floor where a heel had slid in a spot of blood; in others, the manifestations were more obvious. A hammer, its claw clotted, had been left on a table laid with newspapers. There was a room with its floorboards ripped up, and black plastic parcels, suspiciously slick, laid beside the hole. In one, a mirror had been shattered; in another, a set of false teeth left beside a hearth in which a fire flared and spat.

They were murder scenes, all of them. The victims had gone - to other cities, perhaps, full of slaughtered children and murdered friends - leaving these tableaux fixed forever in the breathless moments that followed the crime. Cleve walked down the streets, the perfect voyeur, and peered into scene after scene, reconstructing in his mind's eye the hours that had preceded the studied stillness of each room. Here a child had died: its cot was overturned; here someone had been murdered in their bed, the pillow soaked in blood, the axe on the carpet. Was this damnation then?; the killers obliged to wait out some portion of eternity (all of it, perhaps) in the room they'd murdered in?

Of the malefactors themselves he saw nothing, though logic implied that they must be close by. Was it that they had the power of invisibility to keep themselves from the prying eyes of touring dreamers like himself?; or did a time in this nowhere transform them, so that they were no longer flesh and blood, but became part of their cell: a chair, a china doll?

Then he remembered the man at the perimeter, who'd come in his fine suit, bloody-handed, and walked out into the desert. He had not been invisible.

'Where are you?' he said, standing on the threshold of a mean room, with an open oven, and utensils in the sink, water running on them. 'Show yourself.'

A movement caught his eye and he glanced across to the door. There was a man standing there. He had been there all along, Cleve realized, but so still, and so perfectly a part of this room, that he had not been visible until he moved his eyes and looked Cleve's way. He felt a twinge of unease, thinking that each room he had peered into had, most likely, contained one or more killers, each similarly camouflaged by statis. The man, knowing he'd been seen, stepped out of hiding. He was in late middle-age, and had cut himself that morning as he shaved.

'Who are you?' he said. 'I've seen you before. Walking by.'

He spoke softly and sadly; an unlikely killer, Cleve thought.

'Just a visitor,' he told the man.

'There are no visitors, here,' he replied, 'only prospective citizens.'

Cleve frowned, trying to work out what the man meant. But his dream-mind was sluggish, and before he could solve the riddle of the man's words there were others.

'Do I know you?' the man asked. 'I find I forget more and more. That's no use, is it? If I forget I'll never leave, will I?'

'Leave?' Cleve repeated.

'Make an exchange,' the man said, re-aligning his toupe.

'And go where?'

'Back. Do it over.'

Now he approached Cleve across the room. He stretched out his hands, palms up; they were blistered.

'You can help me,' he said, 'I can make a deal with the best of them.'

'I don't understand you.'

The man clearly thought he was bluffing. His upper lip, which boasted a dyed black moustache, curled. 'Yes you do,' he said. 'You understand perfectly. You just want to sell yourself, the way everybody does. Highest bidder, is it? What are you, an assassin?'

Cleve shook his head. 'I'm just dreaming,' he replied.

The man's fit of pique subsided. 'Be a friend,' he said. 'I've got no influence; not like some. Some of them, you know, they come here and they're out again in a matter of hours. They're professionals. They make arrangements. But me? With me it was a crime of passion. I didn't come prepared. I'll stay here 'til I can make a deal. Please be a friend.'

'I can't help you,' Cleve said, not even certain of what the man was requesting.

The killer nodded. 'Of course not,' he said, 'I didn't expect...'

He turned from Cleve and moved to the oven. Heat flared up from it and made a mirage of the hob. Casually, he put one of his blistered palms on the door and closed it; almost as soon as he had done so it creaked open again. 'Do you know just how appetising it is; the smell of cooking flesh?' he said, as he returned to the oven door and attempted to close it a second time. 'Can anybody blame me? Really?'

Cleve left him to his ramblings; if there was sense there it was probably not worth his labouring over. The talk of exchanges and of escape from the city: it defied Cleve's comprehension.

He wandered on, tired now of peering into the houses. He'd seen all he wanted to see. Surely morning was close, and the bell would ring on the landing. Perhaps he should even wake himself, he thought, and be done with this tour for the night.

As the thought occurred, he saw the girl. She was no more than six or seven years old, and she was standing at the next intersection. This was no killer, surely. He started towards her. She, either out of shyness or some less benign motive, turned to her right and ran off. Cleve followed. By the time he had reached the intersection she was already a long way down the next street; again he gave chase. As dreams would have such pursuits, the laws of physics did not pertain equally to pursuer and pursued. The girl seemed to move easily, while Cleve struggled against air as thick as treacle. He did not give up, however, but pressed on wherever the girl led. He was soon a good distance from any location he recognized in a warren of yards and alleyways - all, he supposed, scenes of blood-letting. Unlike the main thoroughfares, this ghetto contained few entire spaces, only snatches of geography: a grass verge, more red than green; a piece of scaffolding, with a noose depending from it; a pile of earth. And now, simply, a wall.

The girl had led him into a cul-de-sac; she herself had disappeared however, leaving him facing a plain brick wall, much weathered, with a narrow window in it. He approached: this was clearly what he'd been led here to see. He peered through the reinforced glass, dirtied on his side by an accumulation of bird-droppings, and found himself staring into one of the cells at Pentonville. His stomach flipped over. What kind of game was this; led out of a cell and into this dream-city, only to be led back into prison? But a few seconds of study told him that it was not his cell. It was Lowell and Nayler's. Theirs were the pictures sellotaped to the grey brick, theirs the blood spread over floor and wall and bunk and door. This was another murder-scene.

'My God Almighty,' he murmured. 'Billy ...'

He turned away from the wall. In the sand at his feet lizards were mating; the wind that found its way into this backwater brought butterflies. As he watched them dance, the bell rang in B Wing, and it was morning.

It was a trap. Its mechanism was by no means clear to Cleve - but he had no doubt of its purpose. Billy would go to the city; soon. The cell in which he had committed murder already awaited him, and of all the wretched places Cleve had seen in that assemblage of charnel-houses surely the tiny, blood-drenched cell was the worst.

The boy could not know what was planned for him; his grandfather had lied about the city by exclusion, failing to tell Billy what special qualifications were required to exist there. And why? Cleve returned to the oblique conversation he'd had with the man in the kitchen. That talk of exchanges, of deal-making, of going back. Edgar Tait had regretted his sins, hadn't he?; he'd decided, as the years passed, that he was not the Devil's excrement, that to be returned into the world would not be so bad an idea. Billy was somehow an instrument in that return.

'My grandfather doesn't like you,' the boy said, when they were locked up again after lunch. For the second consecutive day all recreation and workshop activities had been cancelled, while a cell-by-cell enquiry was undertaken regarding Lowell, and - as of the early hours of that day - Nayler's deaths.

'Does he not?' Cleve said. 'And why?'

'Says you're too inquisitive. In the city.'

Cleve was sitting on the top bunk; Billy on the chair against the opposite wall. The boy's eyes were bloodshot; a small, but constant, tremor had taken over his body.

'You're going to die,' Cleve said. What other way to state that fact was there, but baldly? 'I saw ... in the city ...'

Billy shook his head. 'Sometimes you talk like a crazyman. My grandfather says I shouldn't trust you.'

'He's afraid of me, that's why.'

Billy laughed derisively. It was an ugly sound, learned, Cleve guessed, from Grandfather Tait. 'He's afraid of no-one,' Billy retorted.

' - afraid of what I'll see. Of what I'll tell you.'

'No,' said the boy, with absolute conviction.

'He told you to kill Lowell, didn't he?'

Billy's head jerked up. 'Why'd you say that?'

'You never wanted to murder him. Maybe scare them both a bit; but not kill them. It was your loving grandfather's idea.'

'Nobody tells me what to do,' Billy replied; his gaze was icy. 'Nobody.'

'All right,' Cleve conceded, 'maybe he persuaded you, eh?; told you it was a matter of family pride. Something like that?' The observation clearly touched a nerve; the tremors had increased.

'So? What if he did?'

'I've seen where you're going to go, Billy. A place just waiting for you ...' The boy stared at Cleve, but didn't make to interrupt. 'Only murderers occupy the city, Billy. That's why your grandfather's there. And if he can find a replacement - if he can reach out and make more murder - he can go free.'

Billy stood up, face like a fury. All trace of derision had gone. 'What do you mean: free?'

'Back to the world. Back here.'

'You're lying -'

'Ask him.'

'He wouldn't cheat me. His blood's my blood.'

'You think he cares? After fifty years in that place, waiting for a chance to be out and away. You think he gives a damn how he does it?'

'I'll tell him how you lie...' Billy said. The anger was not entirely directed at Cleve; there was an undercurrent of doubt there, which Billy was trying to suppress. 'You're dead,' he said, 'when he finds out how you're trying to poison me against him. You'll see him, then. Oh yes. You'll see him. And you'll wish to Christ you hadn't.'

There seemed to be no way out. Even if Cleve could convince the authorities to move him before night fell - (a slim chance indeed; he would have to reverse all that he had claimed about the boy - tell them Billy was dangerously insane, or something similar. Certainly not the truth.) - even if he were to have himself transferred to another cell, there was no promise of safety in such a manoeuvre. The boy had said he was smoke and shadow. Neither door nor bars could keep such insinuations at bay; the fate of Lowell and Nayler was proof positive of that. Nor was Billy alone. There was Edgar St Clair Tait to be accounted for; and what powers might he possess? Yet to stay in the same cell with the boy tonight would amount to self-slaughter, wouldn't it? He would be delivering himself into the hands of the beasts.

When they left their cells for the evening meal, Cleve looked around for Devlin, located him, and asked for the opportunity of a short interview, which was granted. After the meal, Cleve reported to the officer.

'You asked me to keep an eye on Billy Tait, sir.'

'What about him?'

Cleve had thought hard about what he might tell Devlin that would bring an immediate transfer: nothing had come to mind. He stumbled, hoping for inspiration, but was empty-mouthed.

'I... I... want to put in a request for a cell transfer.'

'Why?'

The boy's unbalanced,' Cleve replied. 'I'm afraid he's going to do me harm. Have another of his fits -'

'You could lay him flat with one hand tied behind your back; he's worn to the bone.' At this point, had he been talking to Mayflower, Cleve might have been able to make a direct appeal to the man. With Devlin such tactics would be doomed from the beginning.

'I don't know why you're complaining. He's been as good as gold,' said Devlin, savouring the parody of fond father. 'Quiet; always polite. He's no danger to you or anyone.'

'You don't know him -'

'What are you trying to pull here?'

Put me in a Rule 43 cell, sir. Anywhere, I don't mind. Just get me out of his way. Please.'

Devlin didn't reply, but stared at Cleve, mystified. At last, he said, 'You are scared of him.'

'Yes.'

'What's wrong with you? You've shared cells with hard men and never turned a hair.'

'He's different,' Cleve replied; there was little else he could say, except: 'He's insane. I tell you he's insane.'

'All the world's crazy, save thee and me, Smith. Hadn't you heard?' Devlin laughed. 'Go back to your cell and stop belly-aching. You don't want a ghost train ride, now do you?'

When Cleve returned to the cell, Billy was writing a letter. Sitting on his bunk, poring over the paper, he looked utterly vulnerable. What Devlin had said was true: the boy was worn to the bone. It was difficult to believe, looking at the ladder of his vertebrae, visible through his T-shirt, that this frail form could survive the throes of transformation. But then, maybe it would not. Maybe the rigours of change would tear him apart with time. But not soon enough.

'Billy ...'

The boy didn't take his eyes from his letter.

'... what I said, about the city ...'

He stopped writing -

'... maybe I was imagining it all. Just dreaming ...'

- and started again.

'... I only told you because I was afraid for you. That was all. I want us to be friends ...'

Billy looked up.

'It's not in my hands,' he said, very simply. 'Not now. It's up to Grandfather. He may be merciful; he may not.'

'Why do you have to tell him?'

'He knows what's in me. He and I... we're like one. That's how I know he wouldn't cheat me.'

Soon it would be night; the lights would go out along the wing, the shadows would come.

'So I just have to wait, do I?' Cleve said.

Billy nodded. 'I'll call him, and then we'll see.'

Call him?, Cleve thought. Did the old man need summoning from his resting place every night? Was that what he had seen Billy doing, standing in the middle of the cell, eyes closed and face up to the window? If so, perhaps the boy could be prevented from putting in his call to the dead.

As the evening deepened Cleve lay on his bunk and thought his options through. Was it better to wait here, and see what judgement came from Tait, or attempt to take control of the situation and block the old man's arrival? If he did so, there would be no going back; no room for pleas or apologies: his aggression would undoubtedly breed aggression. If he failed to prevent the boy from calling Tait, it would be the end.

The lights went out. In cells up and down the five landings of B Wing men would be turning their faces to their pillows. Some, perhaps, would lie awake planning their careers when this minor hiccup in their professional lives was over; others would be in the arms of invisible mistresses. Cleve listened to the sounds of the cell: the rattling progress of water in the pipes, the shallow breathing from the bunk below. Sometimes it seemed that he had lived a second lifetime on this stale pillow, marooned in darkness.

The breathing from below soon became practically inaudible; nor was there sound of movement. Perhaps Billy was waiting for Cleve to fall asleep before he made any move. If so, the boy would wait in vain. He would not close his eyes and leave them to slaughter him in his sleep. He wasn't a pig, to be taken uncomplaining to the knife.

Moving as cautiously as possible, so as to arouse no suspicion, Cleve unbuckled his belt and pulled it through the loops of his trousers. He might make a more adequate binding by tearing up his sheet and pillowcase, but he could not do so without arousing Billy's attention. Now he waited, belt in hand, and pretended sleep.

Tonight he was grateful that the noise in the Wing kept stirring him from dozing, because it was fully two hours before Billy moved out of his bunk, two hours in which - despite his fear of what would happen should he sleep - Cleve's eyelids betrayed him on three or four occasions. But others on the landings were tearful tonight; the deaths of Lovell and Nayler had made even the toughest cons jittery. Shouts - and countercalls from those woken - punctuated the hours. Despite the fatigue in his limbs, sleep did not master him.

When Billy finally go up from the lower bunk it was well past twelve, and the landing was all but quiet. Cleve could hear the boy's breath; it was no longer even, but had a catch in it. He watched, eyes like slits, as Billy crossed the cell to his familiar place in front of the window. There was no doubt that he was about to call up the old man.

As Billy closed his eyes, Cleve sat up, threw off his blanket and slipped down from the bunk. The boy was slow to respond. Before he quite comprehended what was happening, Cleve had crossed the cell, and thrust him back against the wall, hand clamped over Billy's mouth.

'No, you don't,' he hissed, 'I'm not going to go like Lowell.' Billy struggled, but Cleve was easily his physical superior.

'He's not going to come tonight,' Cleve said, staring into the boy's wide eyes, 'because you're not going to call him.'

Billy fought more violently to be free, biting hard against his captor's palm. Cleve instinctively removed his hand and in two strides the boy was at the window, reaching up. In his throat, a strange half-song; on his face, sudden and inexplicable tears. Cleve dragged him away.

'Shut your noise up!' he snapped. But the boy continued to make the sound. Cleve hit him, open-handed but hard, across the face. 'Shut up!' he said. Still the boy refused to cease his singing; now the music had taken on another rhythm. Again, Cleve hit him; and again. But the assault failed to silence him. There was a whisper of change in the air of the cell; a shifting in its chiaroscuro. The shadows were moving.

Panic took Cleve. Without warning he made a fist and punched the boy hard in the stomach. As Billy doubled up an upper-cut caught his jaw. It drove his head back against the wall, his skull connecting with the brick. Billy's legs gave, and he collapsed. A featherweight, Cleve had once thought, and it was true. Two good punches and the boy was laid out cold.

Cleve glanced round the cell. The movement in the shadows had been arrested; they trembled though, like greyhounds awaiting release. Heart hammering, he carried Billy back to his bunk, and laid . him down. There was no sign of consciousness returning; the boy lay limply on the mattress while Cleve tore up his sheet, and gagged him, thrusting a ball of fabric into the boy's mouth to prevent him making a sound behind his gag. He then preceded to tie Billy to the bunk, using both his own belt and the boy's, supplemented with further makeshift bindings of torn sheets. It took several minutes to finish the job. As Cleve was lashing the boy's legs together, he began to stir. His eyes flickered open, full of puzzlement. Then, realizing his situation, he began to thrash his head from side to side; there was little else he could do to signal his protest.

'No, Billy,' Cleve murmured to him, throwing a blanket across his bound body to keep the fact from any officer who might look in through the spy-hole before morning, 'Tonight, you don't bring him. Everything I said was true, boy. He wants out; and he's using you to escape.' Cleve took hold of Billy's head, fingers pressed against his cheeks. 'He's not your friend. / am. Always have been.' Billy tried to shake his head from Cleve's grip, but couldn't. 'Don't waste your energy,' Cleve advised, 'it's going to be a long night.'

He left the boy on the bunk, crossed the cell to the wall, and slid down it to sit on his haunches and watch. He would stay awake until dawn, and then, when there was some light to think by, he'd work out his next move. For now, he was content that his crude tactics had worked.

The boy had stopped trying to fight; he had clearly realised the bonds were too expertly tied to be loosened. A kind of calm descended on the cell: Cleve sitting in the patch of light that fell through the window, the boy lying in the gloom of the lower bunk, breathing steadily through his nostrils. Cleve glanced at his watch. It was twelve-fifty-four. When was morning? He didn't know. Five hours, at least. He put his head back, and stared at the light.

It mesmerised him. The minutes ticked by slowly but steadily, and the light did not change. Sometimes an officer would advance along the landing, and Billy, hearing the footsteps, would begin his struggling afresh. But nobody looked into the cell. The two prisoners were left to their thoughts; Cleve to wonder if there would ever come a time when he could be free of the shadow behind him, Billy to think whatever thoughts came to bound monsters. And still the dead-of-night minutes went, minutes that crept across the mind like dutiful schoolchildren, one upon the heels of the next, and after sixty had passed that sum was called an hour. And dawn was closer by that span, wasn't it? But then so was death, and so, presumably, the end of the world: that glorious Last Trump of which The Bishop had spoken so fondly, when the dead men under the lawn outside would rise as fresh as yesterday's bread and go out to meet their Maker. And sitting there against the wall, listening to Billy's inhalations and exhalations, and watching the light in the glass and through the glass, Cleve knew without doubt that even if he escaped this trap, it was only a temporary respite; that this long night, its minutes, its hours, were a foretaste of a longer vigil. He almost despaired then; felt his soul sink into a hole from which there seemed to be no hope of retrieval. Here was the real world, he wept. Not joy, not light, not looking forward; only this waiting in ignorance, without hope, even of fear, for fear came only to those with dreams to lose. The hole was deep and dim. He peered up out of it at the light through the window, and his thoughts became one wretched round. He forgot the bunk and the boy lying there. He forgot the numbness that had overtaken his legs. He might, given time, have forgotten even the simple act of taking breath, but for the smell of urine that pricked him from his fugue.

He looked towards the bunk. The boy was voiding his bladder; but that act was simply a symptom of something else altogether. Beneath the blanket, Billy's body was moving in a dozen ways that his bonds should have prevented. It took Cleve a few moments to shake off lethargy, and seconds more to realize what was happening. Billy was changing.

Cleve tried to stand upright, but his lower limbs were dead from sitting so still for so long. He almost fell forward across the cell, and only prevented himself by throwing out an arm to grasp the chair. His eyes were glued to the gloom of the lower bunk. The movements were increasing in scale and complexity. The blanket was pitched off. Beneath it Billy's body was already beyond recognition; the same terrible procedure as he had seen before, but in reverse. Matter gathering in buzzing clouds about the body, and congealing into atrocious forms. Limbs and organs summoned from the ineffable, teeth shaping themselves like needles and plunging into place in a head grown large and swelling still. He begged for Billy to stop, but with every drawn breath there was less of humanity to appeal to. The strength the boy had lacked was granted to the beast; it had already broken almost all its constraints, and now, as Cleve watched, it struggled free of the last, and rolled off the bunk onto the floor of the cell.

Cleve backed off towards the door, his eyes scanning Billy's mutated form. He remembered his mother's horror at earwigs and saw something of that insect in this anatomy: the way it bent its shiny back upon itself, exposing the paddling intracies that lined its abdomen. Elsewhere, no analogy offered a hold on the sight. Its head was rife with tongues, that licked its eyes clean in place of lids, and ran back and forth across its teeth, wetting and re-wetting them constantly; from seeping holes along its flanks came a sewer stench. Yet even now there was a residue of something human trapped in this foulness, its rumour only serving to heighten the filth of the whole. Seeing its hooks and its spines Cleve remembered Lowell's rising scream; and felt his own throat pulse, ready to loose a sound its equal should the beast turn on him.

But Billy had other intentions. He moved - limbs in horrible array - to the window, and clambered up, pressing his head against the glass like a leech. The music he made was not like his previous song - but Cleve had no doubt it was the same summoning. He turned to the door, and began to beat upon it, hoping that Billy would be too distracted with his call to turn on him before assistance came.

'Quickly! For Christ's sake! Quickly!' He yelled as loudly exhaustion would allow, and glanced over his shoulder once to see if Billy was coming for him. He was not; he was still clamped to the window, though his call had all but faltered. Its purpose was achieved. Darkness was tyrant in the cell.

Panicking, Cleve turned back to the door and renewed his tattoo. There was somebody running along the landing now; he could hear shouts and imprecations from other cells. 'Jesus Christ, help me!' he shouted. He could feel a chill at his back. He didn't need to turn to know what was happening behind him. The shadow growing, the wall dissolving so that the city and its occupant could come through. Tait was here. He could feel the man's presence, vast and dark. Tait the child-killer, Tait the shadow-thing, Tait the transformer. Cleve beat on the door 'til his hands bled. The feet seemed a continent away. Were they coming? Were they coming?

The chill behind him became a blast. He saw his shadow thrown up on to the door by flickering blue light; smelt sand and blood.

And then, the voice. Not the boy, but that of his grandfather, of Edgar St Clair Tait. This was the man who had pronounced himself the Devil's excrement, and hearing that abhorrent voice Cleve believed both in Hell and its master, believed himself already in the bowels of Satan, a witness to its wonders.

'You are too inquisitive.' Edgar said, 'It's time you went to bed.'

Cleve didn't want to turn. The last thought in his head was that he should turn and look at the speaker. But he was no longer subject to his own will; Tait had fingers in his head and was dabbling there. He turned, and looked.

The hanged man was in the cell. He was not that beast Cleve had half-seen, that face of pulp and eggs. He was here in the flesh; dressed for another age, and not without charm. His face was well-made; his brow wide, his eyes unflinching. He still wore his wedding-ring on the hand that stroked Billy's bowed head like that of a pet dog.

Time to die, Mr Smith,' he said.

On the landing outside, Cleve heard Devlin shouting. He had no breath left to answer with. But he heard keys in the lock or was that some illusion his mind had made to placate his panic?

The tiny cell was full of wind. It threw over the chair and table, and lifted the sheets into the air like childhood ghosts. And now it took Tait, and the boy with him; sucked them back into the receding perspectives of the city.

'Come on now - ' Tait demanded, his face corrupting, 'we need you, body and soul. Come with us, Mr Smith. We won't be denied.'

'No!' Cleve yelled back at his tormentor. The suction was plucking at his fingers, at his eye-balls. 'I won't -'

Behind him, the door was rattling.

'I won't, you hear!'

Suddenly, the door was thrust open, and threw him forward into the vortex of fog and dust that was sucking Tait and his grandchild away. He almost went with them, but that a hand grabbed at his shirt, and dragged him back from the brink, even as consciousness gave itself up.

Somewhere, far away, Devlin began to laugh like a hyena. He's lost his mind, Cleve decided; and the image his darkening thoughts evoked was one of the contents of Devlin's brain escaping, through his mouth as a flock of flying dogs.

He awoke in dreams; and in the city. Woke remembering his last conscious moments: Devlin's hysteria, the hand arresting his fall as the two figures were sucked away in front of him. He had followed them, it seemed, unable to prevent his comatose mind from retreading the familiar route to the murderers' metropolis. But Tait had not won yet. He was still only dreaming his presence here. His corporeal self was still in Pentonville; his dislocation from it informed his every step.

He listened to the wind. It was eloquent as ever: the voices coming and going with each gritty gust, but never, even when the wind died to a whisper, disappearing entirely. As he listened, he heard a shout. In this mute city the sound was a shock; it startled rats from their nests and birds up from some secluded plaza.

Curious, he pursued the sound, whose echoes were almost traced on the air. As he hurried down the empty streets he heard further raised voices, and now men and women were appearing at the doors and windows of their cells. So many faces, and nothing in common between one and the next to confirm the hopes of a physiognomist. Murder had as many faces as it had occurrences. The only common quality was one of wretchedness, of minds despairing after an age at the site of their crime. He glanced at them as he went, sufficiently distracted by their looks not to notice where the shout was leading him until he found himself once more in the ghetto to which he had been led by the child.

Now he rounded a corner and at the end of the cul-de-sac he'd seen from his previous visit here (the wall, the window, the bloody chamber beyond) he saw Billy, writhing in the sand at Tait's feet. The boy was half himself and half that beast he had become in front of Cleve's eyes. The better part was convulsing in its attempt to climb free of the other, but without success. In one moment the boy's body would surface, white and frail, only to be subsumed the next into the flux of transformation. Was that an arm forming, and being snatched away again before it could gain fingers?; was that a face pressed from the house of tongues that was the beast's head? The sight defied analysis. As soon as Cleve fixed upon some recognizable feature it was drowned again.

Edgar Tait looked up from the struggle in front of him, and bared his teeth at Cleve. It was a display a shark might have envied.

'He doubted me, Mr Smith ...' the monster said,'... and came looking for his cell.'

A mouth appeared from the patchwork on the sand and gave out a sharp cry, full of pain and terror.

'Now he wants to be away from me,' Tait said, 'You sewed the doubt. He must suffer the consequences.' He pointed a trembling finger at Cleve, and in the act of pointing the limb transformed, flesh becoming bruised leather. 'You came where you were not wanted, and look at the agonies you've brought.'

Tait kicked the thing at his feet. It rolled over on to its back, vomiting.

'He needs me,' Tait said. 'Don't you have the sense to see that? Without me, he's lost.'

Cleve didn't reply to the hanged man, but instead addressed the beast on the sand.

'Billy?' he said, calling the boy out of the flux.

'Lost,' Tait said.

'Billy ...' Cleve repeated. 'Listen to me ...'

'He won't go back now,' Tait said. 'You're just dreaming this. But he's here, in the flesh.'

'Billy,' Cleve persevered, 'Do you hear me. It's me; it's Cleve.'

The boy seemed to pause in its gyrations for an instant, as if hearing the appeal. Cleve said Billy's name again, and again.

It was one of the first skills the human child learned: to call itself something. If anything could reach the boy it was surely his own name.

'Billy ... Billy ...' At the repeated word, the body rolled itself over.

Tait seemed to have become uneasy. The confidence he'd displayed was now silenced. His body was darkening, the head becoming bulbous. Cleve tried to keep his eyes off the subtle distortions in Edgar's anatomy and concentrate on winning back Billy. The repetition of the name was paying dividends; the beast was being subdued. Moment by moment there was more of the boy emerging. He looked pitiful; skin-and-bones on the black sand. But his face was almost reconstructed now, and his eyes were on Cleve.

'Billy ... ?'

He nodded. His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat; his limbs were in spasm.

'You know where you are? Who you are?'

At first it seemed as though comprehension escaped the boy. And then - by degrees - recognition formed in his eyes, and with it came a terror of the man standing over him.

Cleve glanced up at Tait. In the few seconds since he had last looked all but a few human characteristics had been erased from his head and upper torso, revealing corruptions more profound than those of his grandchild. Billy gazed up over his shoulder like a whipped dog.

'YOU belong to me,' Tait pronounced, through features barely capable of speech. Billy saw the limbs descending to snatch at him, and rose from his prone position to escape them, but he was too tardy. Cleve saw the spiked hook of Tait's limb wrap itself around Billy's neck, and draw him close. Blood leapt from the slit windpipe, and with it the whine of escaping air.

Cleve yelled.

'With me,' Tait said, the words deteriorating into gibberish.

Suddenly the narrow cul-de-sac was filling up with brightness, and the boy and Tait and the city were being bleached out. Cleve tried to hold on to them, but they were slipping from him; and in their place another concrete reality: a light, a face (faces) and a voice calling him out of one absurdity and into another.

The doctor's hand was on his face. It felt clammy.

'What on earth were you dreaming about?' he asked, the perfect idiot.

Billy had gone.

Of all the mysteries that the Governor - and Devlin and the other officers who had stepped into cell B. 3. 20 that night - had to face, the total disappearance of William Tait from an unbreached cell was the most perplexing. Of the vision that had set Devlin giggling like a loon nothing was said; easier to believe in some collective delusion than that they'd seen some objective reality. When Cleve attempted to articulate the events of that night, and of the many nights previous to that, his monologue, interrupted often by his tears and silences, was met with feigned understanding and sideways glances. He told the story over several times, however, despite their condescension, and they, looking no doubt for a clue amongst his lunatic fables as to the reality of Billy Tait's Houdini act, attended every word. When they found nothing amongst his tales to advance their investigations, they began to lose their tempers with him. Consolation was replaced with threats. They demanded, voices louder each time they asked the question, where Billy had gone. Cleve answered the only way he knew how. 'To the city,' he told them, 'he's a murderer, you see.'

'And his body?' the Governor said. 'Where do you suppose his body is?'

Cleve didn't know, and said so. It wasn't until much later, four full days later in fact, that he was standing by the window watching the gardening detail bearing this spring's plantings cross between wings, that he remembered the lawn.

He found Mayflower, who had been returned to B Wing in lieu of Devlin, and told the officer the thought that had come to him. 'He's in the grave,' he said. 'He's with his grandfather. Smoke and shadow.'

They dug up the coffin by cover of night, an elaborate shield of poles and tarpaulins erected to keep proceedings from prying eyes, and lamps, bright as day but not so warm, trained on the labours of the men volunteered as an exhumation party. Cleve's answer to the riddle of Tait's disappearance had met with almost universal bafflement, but no explanation - however absurd - was being overlooked in a mystery so intractable. Thus they gathered at the unmarked grave to turn earth that looked not to have been disturbed in five decades: the Governor, a selection of Home Office officials; a pathologist and Devlin. One of the doctors, believing that Cleve's morbid delusion would be best countered if he viewed the contents of the coffin, and saw his error with his own eyes, convinced the Governor that Cleve should also be numbered amongst the spectators.

There was little in the confines of Edgar St Clair Tait's coffin that Cleve had not seen before. The corpse of the murderer - returned here (as smoke perhaps?) neither quite beast nor quite human, and preserved, as The Bishop had promised, as undecayed as the day of his execution - shared the coffin with Billy Tait, who lay, naked as a babe, in his grandfather's embrace. Edgar's corrupted limb was still wound around Billy's neck, and the walls of the coffin were dark with congealed blood. But Billy's face was not besmirched. He looks like a doll, one of the doctors observed. Cleve wanted to reply that no doll had such tear stains on its cheeks, nor such despair in its eyes, but the thought refused to become words.

Cleve was released from Pentonville three weeks later after special application to the Parole Board, with only two-thirds of his sentence completed. He returned, within half a year, to the only profession that he had ever known. Any hope he might have had of release from his dreams was short-lived. The place was with him still: neither so focussed nor so easily traversed now that Billy - whose mind had opened that door - was gone, but still a potent terror, the lingering presence of which wearied Cleve.

Sometimes the dreams would almost recede completely, only to return again with terrible potency. It took Cleve several months before he began to grasp the pattern of this vacillation. People brought the dream to him. If he spent time with somebody who had murderous intentions, the city came back. Nor were such people so rare. As he grew more sensitive to the lethal streak in those around him he found himself scarcely able to walk the street. They were everywhere, these embryonic killers; people wearing smart clothes and sunny expressions were striding the pavement and imagining, as they strode, the deaths of their employers and their spouses, of soap-opera stars and incompetent tailors. The world had murder on its mind, and he could no longer bear its thoughts.

Only heroin offered some release from the burden of experience. He had never done much intravenous H, but it rapidly became heaven and earth to him. It was an expensive addiction however, and one which his increasingly truncated circle of professional contacts could scarcely hope to finance. It was a man called Grimm, a fellow addict so desperate to avoid reality he could get high on fermented milk, who suggested that Cleve might want to do some work to earn him a fee the equal of his appetite. It seemed like a wise idea. A meeting was arranged, and a proposal put. The fee for the job was so high it could not be refused by a man so in need of money. The job, of course, was murder.

'There are no visitors here; only prospective citizens'. He had been told that once, though he no longer quite remembered by whom, and he believed in prophecies. If he didn't commit murder now, it would only be a matter of time until he did.

But, though the details of the assassination which he undertook had a terrible familiarity to him, he had not anticipated the collision of circumstances by which he ended fleeing from the scene of his crime barefoot, and running so hard on pavement and tarmac that by the time the police cornered him and shot him down his feet were bloody, and ready at last to tread the streets of the city - just as he had in dreams.

The room he'd killed in was waiting for him, and he lived there, hiding his head from any who appeared in the street outside, for several months. (He assumed time passed here, by the beard he'd grown; though sleep came seldom, and day never.) After a while, however, he braved the cool wind and the butterflies and took himself off to the city perimeters, where the houses petered out and the desert took over. He went, not to see the dunes, but to listen to the voices that came always, rising and falling, like the howls of jackals or children.

He stayed there a long while, and the wind conspired with the desert to bury him. But he was not disappointed with the fruit of his vigil. For one day (or year), he saw a man come to the place and drop a gun in the sand, then wander out into the desert, where, after a while, the makers of the voices came to meet him, loping and wild, dancing on their crutches. They surrounded him, laughing. He went with them, laughing. And though distance and the wind smudged the sight, Cleve was certain he saw the man picked up by one of the celebrants, and taken on to its shoulders as a boy, thence snatched into another's arms as a baby, until, at the limit of his senses, he heard the man bawl as he was delivered back into life. He went away content, knowing at last how sin (and he) had come into the world.