Sugar clapped her hands and said, 'Let's play a game,' so we all gathered round.
The table was square, but round in the centre, and everyone had their own chair, except for Sugar. She didn't need one. After a while the cross-winds collided, striking the ears in a musical way beyond the silent ruffle of nicer thoughts which Benjamin would collect in his old canvas sack when the nights were wild and leafy-warm ('watch out for the incipient purple of ancient imaginings!' they cried, but nobody paid much attention) in his favourite and sometimes creaky fashion beyond which the greening horizon was named. No-one spoke. There was no need.
Sugar curled up in her own spot, talking to us all with her legs.
On the next floor, the muddled shook gracefully and fawned with the days as they came, but this was a nameless place. One could be alone here. To my right was Charlie, creaky old Charlie, with the perspiring monocle his uncle gave him and a new letter for every word. Purple! Still insisting, still ignored. It tinged the trees outside, softened the sky and grubbled the groaning landscape, but we have no use for it. To my left was Almawhats, her arms extended towards the window and the fine panorama beyond. In the distance we could just make out the thin sliver of ocean that preceded the Coastal Plummet, wild now, no sailing tonight. All the nets were hauled in, lazyspiderlike, and cast in heaps on the shore. Crabs scuttled, chains rattled, more green creatures took refuge. The moon flitted white across the boiling sky.
The ache of autumn was in the air, and my hands were calloused. On both sides. Both hands, on deck. This was as it should be; Sugar called me, and I followed. She showed me her wide purple sheets, her pillowsoft pillows, her makebelieve curtains, though I had seen it all many times before. We lay there breathless for a while, masking each other's movement with our shadows. Flickering eyelids scaled the walls, empty in the earth and fingernail deep. Soon she led me back to the table, for another game, or maybe a continuation of the same. Always all the one, one.
There was a woodlouse on the table, and Samuel flicked it off with his thumb. An equivalent fall would reduce a human to pulp, but it was nothing a decent, self-respecting woodlouse couldn't cope with. It scuttled into the shadows, away from crushing footsteps. Polly was in the laboratory, soothing her lower brain with promises of melt. Somehow everyone could feel it, seeping through the air into our thin cotton vests, and resting there until it was time.
It was always time, and time. Kill this, if you will - it cannot be done, nor can I undo what I've done and the small vials of foot powder continue to accumulate, slowly but perceptibly. How to conserve conversation? How to converse conservation? How to convert constipation? A shrill blast of wind rattled the smaller panes, yellow leaves outside, white leaves within, wind leaves nothing untouched yet touches nothing. My hat feels too heavy, so I take it off and toss it towards our monkey, into which he promptly urinates. The heavy marble statue grins at my grin. I wash away the eyeballs that cling to my chin, yesterday's sticky ones, now slightly less than fresh, bereft of mucous, thankfully so. Sugar continues.
'Why don't we,' she suggests,' try something new today. I call it. We all can. Who's first?'
She waves her legs again and inevitably its Samuel who begins. He quickly removes the car, and oil runs down into his armpits. No-one moves to assist, so he is forced to strain himself. Eventually he manages to colour the icing, but the tremble is still there, and Sugar looks at him with disapproval. His face turns red with the effort. Suddenly, he has an idea; he snaps the rope into a small clip on his belt, and grabs the torsion between his teeth. Then, using the bones as leverage, he begins to swing towards the mirror, slowy at first, then faster and faster until he almost touches it, but not quite, his breath becoming heavier and heavier until in one final expense of energy he lunges that fraction further he needs he knows and the mixture finally cascades to the floor in a blinding explosion of syrup and fur. Sugar seems pleased, but we know that it was not an elegant solution; Sheloint On Fire points out that he could far more easily have achieved the same results by using a tangentially finer gradation on the second eyebrow. Sugar ignores her, of course.
She said, 'Something's here in the room, watching us.'
Poldrazineki shrugged, stood up. 'It was me,' he said, simply.
'No, not you. We know about you,' replied Sugar.
'Something else,' I said.
'Yes, something else,' agreed Sugar. 'It has eyes, and it watches, but not what it sees. It watches us, but it cannot see us, not with its eyes. It knows us. It can read our minds, our thoughts. It knows what you are thinking, Poldrazineki, yet it does not know what colour your shirt is. We must beware.'
'The crazier of most is the saner of all,' thought Poldrazineki, rubbering his ears.
'Let it watch, then,' he said. 'My thoughts make poor knowledge.'
Soon I would be upheld. Microfilament cement stained the soles of my shoes, linking me to the murder and the welcome mat which even now said 'Welcome'. A flash lit up our gargoyles' grimy heads, all capped like mountains with bird droppings, hanging out over the firmament outside, the moat below. In the courtyard, a tangled rope lurched down from the bell-tower, disturbing the bats that dwelled there, invading the places that light dare not sully, amazing the coral ridge of excrement they sculpt beneath, on rotting timber, in patterns of tiny trees. I could feel their memories in my brain, and later, in the lines of blood that hardened on my tattered legs; the man on the gallows, legs like that tangled bell-cord in the storm.
At least three of us here have insane hair. I, however, am the only one of sound mind; they think we are trapped, and perhaps we are. I don't despise them, they are merely weak with the visions of power they create, fools with big sticks; my own creations are my own, nothing more. I quite like the atmosphere; antique, authentic. Of them all, Sugar is the one who interests me most, the player of games. She is the one. I can sense the guilt, the badly hidden guilt that everyone harbours, but not Sugar; why is she here?
What possesses her to come to this place?
She has angular hands, clean but not soft - accurate. Her toes are the same, as is the cornice in the bedroom, as is the spoon in our soup, all piled up in the sink with terrible slurping sounds on splendid apostles that moan and crawl and beat upon the iron-clad doors when the wind blows from that particular direction and casts the words, the wordless words, from ear to bleeding ear until the deafness clouds our minds and we are free once more to claim the world our own, our pillows of pillow softness, our accurate hands. Pain evaporates upon the air. Eustace, the simpering Eustace, had bad knowledge of a girl, only eleven, which is why he was here. Carla ate bones, Charlie lured them to boniness.
It was a day far removed from this one, a day caressed by sunshine and the dreams of hopeful youth, radiated in return for the goodness of life. The summer was in full swing, and bunting hung in its own crazy way, fluttering this way and that with the fancy of the breeze; someone sold energy-squash from a stall, and others gathered around a man with a rubber woman on his forearm who complained about the price of grain and the footprints in the hallway. Soon he had a rubber fox on the other arm, and the arguments escalated until the man's ears were in danger of being shattered, so he stopped to a smattering of applause and went for some energy drink. On the side of the street long-haired guitarists guitared, drummers drummed and poets poemed. A juggler juggled seven sticks and a can of pears, simply because he 'couldn't find seven pears and a can of sticks.' On the outskirts of the town a small fun-fair had established itself, with small things for riding in, cages that spun around, a strange barrel with invisible fish and a squeaky octopus. It was a large barrel, a pool, with two blade-encrusted cylinders rotating slowly on either side. These cylinders would move in towards the centre, grinding and slicing all in their path. A blind man once managed to fall in, and a noble passer-by lost his right foot trying to save him. Opposite that, a miniature gazebo sold candy-floss, and then a small wizened old man supervised a shooting gallery, sucking on his glass eye for the sake of lubrication. He would put the eye in his mouth, roll it around and then, suddenly, it popped back into its socket as if by magic, and all the children screamed. They loved that, and he loved doing it. The owner of the fair was a man called Mr. Welfare, and he had a crooked smile. He shook hands like a robot, and some reckoned he was.
'But we don't need to worry about these things,' said Sugar, smiling. 'Why don't you try one, Paul?'
Poldrazineki shrugged and looked uneasy, but he glimpsed the cadaverous grin of the homunculus and spat in the fire as if to quench its crackle. The arms began to sway, in time to the oomphing tuba, his fingers winding up and down in line with the small spheres and reeds all green and rotten with little life, chipped slightly on one side exposing the lesser brown beneath and patterns of long ago spread large by a broken branch in a soft clay, moist like tongue, soft like brain. His head began to loll, his eyes contorted with the visions of another world, his body frail and plastic like putty in the hands of an epileptic sculptor, squaring crazy grapes between his feet and rending the place of little display, all hair and scabs, reeking of misuse and familiar with the slight squint of dead men's ends. His hair was slicked back on his head, covering a spotched crown; the ends of his ears matched the scars. I tried to calibrate his nostrils, but could not; they seemed to spew from the ends of the earth, creating corpulescence where only weeds could wind their way through the carpet of bones and infuse pliant breath of musty crawl on slickened lust, feathered from their own corrupt, their own inspire, their own kinky hidebound underwear that made the flesh seem so much less than real, tiny chains of acid coiled up in a rabid desire to replicate, symmetry for the masses, contempt for the content, cement for shoes. He was the kind of man who would sell you his leg for a loaf of bread and then eat the other for lunch; he used to wash windows, I'm told. On a cold Monday morning he confided in me a dark secret; he used to collect cigarette butts smoked by beautiful women and keep them in a jar for when he was lonely, which was most of the time. He sometimes slept with them under his foreskin, and it made him feel better, so he claimed. I believe him. He is not a good liar; when he tries to lie, his feet move in circles and his eyelids flutter. He cannot hold a compact disc without snapping it in half with his hand; a compulsion. He is not clumsy. His favourite food is bagels. He likes stars, and watches them whenever the skies are clear.