“Yeah, you do that, big brother…”

Gazid was all but scurrying out of the warehouse, pulling the door behind him with a cursory wave. Isaac heard a peal of absurd giggles from the retreating form, a thin wittering cluck that tailed out in the darkness.

Devil’s Tail! he thought. I fucking hate dealing with junkies. What a screwed-up mess he is…Isaac shook his head and wandered back to the caterpillar’s cage.

The grub was already starting on the second lump of sticky drug. Unpredictable little waves of insect happiness spilt over into Isaac’s mind. The sensation was unpleasant. Isaac backed away. As he watched, the grub broke off eating and delicately cleaned itself of the sticky residue. Then it resumed eating, soiling itself again, then preening again.

“Fastidious little bugger, eh?” muttered Isaac. “Is that good, eh? You enjoying that? Hmmm? Lovely.”

Isaac wandered over to his desk and picked up his own supper. He turned back to watch the twisting little multicoloured form as he took a bite of his hardening roll and sipped the chocolate.

“So what the fuck are you going to turn into, then?” he muttered to his experiment. Isaac ate the rest of his roll, grimacing at the slightly stale bread and the musty salad. At least the chocolate was good.

He wiped his mouth and returned to the caterpillar’s cage, steeling himself against the peculiar little empathic waves. Isaac squatted down and watched the starving creature gorge itself. It was difficult to be sure, but Isaac thought the grub’s colours were brighter already.

“You’ll be a good little sideline to keep me from getting obsessed with crisis theory, eh? Won’t you, you little squirming bugger? Not in any of the textbooks, are you? Shy? Is that it?”

A blast of twisted psyche hit Isaac like a crossbow bolt. He staggered and fell over.

“Ow!” he screeched, and writhed to get away from the cage. “I can’t hack your empathic bleating, old son…” He picked himself up and walked towards the bed, rubbing his head. Just as he reached it, another spasm of alien emotions pulsed violently in his head. His knees buckled and he fell by the bed, clawing at his temples.

“Oh shit!” He was alarmed. “That’s too much, you’re getting way too strong…”

Suddenly he could not speak. He snapped totally still as a third intense attack flooded his synapses. These were different, he realized, these were not the same as the querulous little psychic wails from the weird grub ten feet from him. His mouth was suddenly arid, and tasted of musty salad. Mulch. Compost. Old fruitcake.

Lumpy mustard.

“Oh no…” he muttered. His voice shook as realization gripped him. “Oh no, no, no, oh Gazid, you fucking prick, you shit, I’ll fucking kill you…”

He clutched the edge of the bed with hands that trembled violently. He was sweating and his skin looked like stone.

Get into bed, he thought desperately. Get under the covers and ride it out, thousands of people do this every day for pleasure for Jabber’s sake…

Isaac’s hand crawled like a drugged tarantula across the folds of the blanket. He couldn’t work out the best way of getting under the covers, because of the way they folded in on themselves and around the sheet: both sets of cloth ripples were so similar that Isaac was suddenly convinced that they were all part of the same big undulating cloth unity and that to bisect it would be ghastly, so he rolled his bulk on top of the covers and found himself swimming in the intricate twisting folds of cotton and wool. He swam up and down, waving his arms in an energetic, childish doggy paddle, hacking and spitting and smacking his lips with a prodigious thirst.

Look at you, you cretin, spat one section of his mind in contempt. How dignified is this?

But he paid no attention. He was content to swim gently in place on the bed, panting like a dying animal, tensing his neck experimentally and prodding his eyes.

He felt a build-up of pressure in the back of his mind. He watched a big door, a big cellar door, set into the wall of the most ignored corner of his cerebellum. The door was rattling. Something was trying to get out.

Quick, thought Isaac. Bolt it…

But he could feel the increasing power of whatever was fighting to escape. The door was a boil, bursting with pus, ready to rupture, a hugely muscled blank-faced dog, straining ominously and silently against chains, the sea pounding relentlessly against a crumbling harbour wall.

Something in Isaac’s mind burst open.

Chapter Sixteen

sun pouring in like a waterfall and I rejoice in it as blooms burst from my shoulders and my head and chlorophyll rushes invigoratingly through my skin and I raise great spined arms

don’t touch me like that I’m not ready you pig

Look at those steamhammers! I’d like them if they didn’t make me work so!

is this

I am proud to be able to tell you that your father has consented to our match

is this a

and here I swim under all this dirty water towards the looming dark bulk of the boat like a great cloud I breathe filthy water that makes me cough and my webbed feet push towards

is this a dream?

light skin food air metal sex misery fire mushrooms webs ships torture beer frog spikes bleach violin ink crags sodomy money wings colourberries gods chainsaw bones puzzles babies concrete shellfish stilts entrails snow darkness

Is this a dream?

But Isaac knew this was not a dream.

A magic lantern was flickering in his head, bombarding him with a succession of images. This was no zoetrope with an endlessly repeated little visual anecdote: this was a juddering bombardment of infinitely varied moments. Isaac was strafed with a million scintillas of time. Every fractioned life juddered as it segued into the next and Isaac would eavesdrop on other creatures’ lives. He spoke the chymical language of the khepri crying because her broodma had chastised her and then he snorted derisorily as he the head stableman listened to some half-arsed excuse from the new boy and he closed his translucent inner eyelid as he slipped beneath the cold fresh waters of the mountain streams and kicked towards the other vodyanoi coupling orgiastically and he…

“Oh Jabber…” He heard his voice from deep inside that cacophonous emotional onslaught. There were more and more and more and they came so fast, they overlapped and blurred at the edges, until two or three or more moments of life were occurring at once.

The light was bright, when lights were on, some faces were sharp and others blurred and invisible. Each separate splinter of life moved with portentous, symbolic focus. Each was ruled by oneiric logic. In some analytical pocket of his mind Isaac realized that these were not, could not be, grots of history coagulated and distilled into that sticky resin. Setting was too fluid. Awareness and reality intertwined. Isaac had not come unstuck in others’ lives, but in others’ minds. He was a voyeur spying on the last refuge of the stalked. These were memories. These were dreams.

Isaac was spattered by a psychic sluice. He felt fouled. There was no more succession, no one two three four five six invading mindset moments clicking briefly into place to be illuminated by the light of his own consciousness. Instead he swam in mire, a glutinous cesspit of dreamjuice that flowed in and out of each other, that had no integrity, that bled logic and images across lifetimes and sexes and species until he could hardly breathe, he was drowning in the sloshing stuff of dreams and hopes, recollections and reflections he had never had.