Tonight we caught six. And everybody's going crazy good. But what is it, what's wrong? I can't stop thinking about yesterday and the one we kept alive, the female. Because why are we catching them? Nobody knows. I asked Mr Bone, he's the boss and he doesn't know. I asked Clingfilm and he said it's for the money, and I asked Shiva and she said it's just so we can kill them. And I asked Edie, and Edie didn't answer. And then Mr Bone says we shouldn't never ask that question, it's a stupid question, you might as well ask the moon why it keeps coming back every night. We just catch them, that's all. And tonight we caught six. And then I got to thinking about Wesley again, and why he went and got himself lost.

Tonight we caught two. Pretty good. Pretty bad. I don't know. Thinking about the girl, the female, I mean. And thinking about Wesley and the job and everything. There's only two ways to leave the job, so Shiva reckons. You can die, or you get lost. And you bet she said that dying is the best way, the only way, because getting lost is when you just walk out one night, away from the van, away from the crew, and you become one of them, one of the lost ones out there, wandering, wandering. Wandering until you get caught. But when I reminded her about Wesley, she just turned away and started messing with the gun. So I waited for the quiet time and I asked Mr Bone and he says you shouldn't be thinking about that. But Wesley got lost, I says. Yeah, Wesley got lost, and Mr Bone gets this look in him then. But he'll come back to us, he says. And I ask what that means. And he says, just like Edie came back to us.

Today we caught one, or was it two? I can't remember.

Tonight we caught some. I think we did. It's just that I can't stop looking at Edie now, knowing that she got lost, and then she came back, and now she's a tracker and can find the lost real easy. Maybe you have to get lost, to find the lost, to become a tracker. Maybe that's what Mr Bone meant when he said that you have to be born a tracker, because you certainly have to be born to get lost. And I'm scared, scared that I was born like that, with the losing inside me, and that one day I'll just walk clean away.

Tonight we caught something. What was it? The whole crew is damaged by the catching. Because ain't that the nightmare: to catch the ones who got lost and to have them turn around and not want to come back. Not like Edie, not like Edie came back with the tracking knowledge, but to just go crazy bad on us. It must be Wesley. It must be poor lost Wesley we caught, but Mr Bone won't mention it, and Edie's on the edge of something, and Shiva just sits there cleaning the gun like for ever, and Clingfilm won't even talk about the money any more, that bad. But we had a job to do. And we did it. We went out there and we caught it and we killed it and I dragged it back and I skinned it. We had a job to do.

Tonight we caught two and a half. We did pretty good and everybody's jumping because no-one's ever caught a half a one before. It's not really a half a one, that's just what we call them when they're in the changing state. Anyroads, it's very rare, so we're on for the bonus, most definitely. And everyone's saying I did brilliant, even Clingfilm, because I helped catch the half a one. It's the first one I ever caught, and it turned out real special. And then we just went floating through the night, and we was singing.

CRAWL TOWN

Old Tom Sharpsaw had this story that nobody ever left Crawl, that's why the cemetery was so crowded. That's why all the tombstones scratched up tight against each other. That's why the ground was so parched. That's why the housing estate was so rancid. That's why the food was so bad. That's why the buses always stopped at the edge of town. That's why we didn't have a football team. That's why the windows were always broken. That's why the roads curved around and kept meeting themselves halfway. That's why the sun worked like a fridge light, and the rain like a toilet flush. That's why all us girls wore sackcloth tracksuits. That's why the local library placed all the street-maps on the sex-education shelves. That's why the Town-Hall clock has only got one hand, and seven numbers. And it moves backwards. That's why, he'd say. That's why, that's why.

Old Tom lived on top of the Vanishing Palace. This was the name of the amusement arcade, right next to the cemetery. To get there you had to step over the fallen stones, what was called the crazy paving of the dead. Us kids used to hang around the Vanishing Palace a whole lot, because what else was there, except for the Factory and that was too well protected. There were six machines to play. Five, really, because one of them was adults only. This was the famous Intravenus machine.

That's about as much excitement as you could find in Crawl, just thinking about what the beautiful Intravenus girl got up to. We just assumed the machine was female, it felt right somehow.

Crawl. Sounds like a strange name for a place, but believe me, you ever take several bad luck wrong turnings and end up here one day, you'll know where the name comes from. It's somewhere to the north of Manchester, so they tell us at school anyway. I won't say where exactly, just in case you're tempted. Anyway, I was born here, that's my excuse. I say born; nobody is strictly born in Crawl - you just wake up one day and find yourself here, alone in a stranger's bed, with nowhere else to go, and then you realize, oh shit, I've been here all my life already, what now? But like Tom said, escape isn't in the dictionary. Believe me, I've looked.

The machines in the Vanishing Palace only worked with old money. So when you went up to the change booth, and handed in your allowance, Tom would hand you back a little pile of antique coins. Most of them had a king's head on them, Charles III or somebody. And near all of them had teeth marks in the soft metal. Some of them had been bitten so hard, they didn't even work the machines. And anyway, the Intravenus machine would only work with one special coin that we never got to see. Tom kept it in a box behind the counter. And he'd sit there reading his paper while us youngsters played the kiddie games. Every so often he would mutter something about the state of the world, I mean the state of the town, of course.

The Crawl Gazette was four pages thin. It came out once a month. It was always four pages, even when there wasn't enough news or adverts to fill it; those times they just left some blank spaces in there. Sometimes they'd leave whole pages blank. One famous time the whole paper was blank, except for the title. When there was news, it was usually about the overcrowding of the cemetery, or the campaign to get rid of the Intravenus machine. Sometimes it reported on the latest product of the Factory. That was all I ever read it for, to see what the Factory had given this month. It always gave one thing a month.

Tom Sharpsaw had a robot that helped him run the Vanishing Palace. It was a crude spider of a thing, with two-and-a-half of its legs missing, and a single bulbous eye that was often clouded with a strange liquor. Out of its round body, a long needle sometimes protruded. This it would plug into the electric socket. The robot's name was Oris. Tom said that the name stood for Automated Retrieval of Information System, even though automated didn't begin with an O, it just sounded like it did. He'd stolen Oris from the library, so the machine wasn't up to much except maybe checking how many games had been played on which machine by whom. That kind of stuff. So Tom claimed anyway, but we reckoned it knew a whole lot more than that, including maybe the secret code to the Intravenus machine.