Bag of Weasels. Chapter 2

On a good day I know, I'm not the full ticket; on a bad day I don't know my arse from my elbow. So I've been told, and so it is written; it must be true. I've learnt to live with it after a fashion, and I can tie my own shoelaces and count to ten, but for the sake of my head I stay off the maindrag. I was on a downward curve about then anyway, drifting like litter down side streets and alleyways, slipping into the empty, unused spaces, the long-untouched deserted houses; cracks in the city, cracks in between. London was a scary place for me.
I'd struck out from the house in Upton Lane that day because it was time to go; I'd clattered about the place too long and my noise echoed up and down the rickety stairs like a bouncy ball. Worse, I'd peeped at the street from upstairs windows, and scuttled to skips to feed, and despite my best efforts, eyes had sighted me.
Never be seen; never be heard; never be known. That is the law. And I'd fucked it.
So I'd fled, out into the pissing Plaistow rain. It may be that I was drawn out - there would come a time when I would look back and wonder, but back then I could not have known. I just knew I had to go.
Now if they go empty for long enough, houses whisper their vacancy to me. They whistle me over, and in I creep, and that's how it was when I jumped down the steps to a basement, to duck into the porch and get out of the rain.
The door was open. I stepped in, and I knew straight off no-one was home - it was nobody's home, so I spun through the house checking its vital signs. All was well. I moved in there and then.
Now I wasn't the only one out in the wilderness; wayward strays trod these same deserted gaps in the city, passing each other watchfully like wary dogs, but more commonly just stumbling across each other's detritus, the signs of the lost and bewidered, the mad bad and lonely and pathologically confused. Odd bits of clothing, old paperback books, blankets, sheets, empty tins and food-related rubbish; and all the signs of sadness - the children's toys trailed up bare stairs to where a teddy bear sits in a puddle of something. All scattered across my territories.
But the real markers, the outpourings of heads that can't hold it all in any longer, come in more creative form, and the written word is the medium of choice for the more discerning denizens, leaking their whacked out texts onto the world: words to the wise, cautionary tales, confessions, prophecies, shopping lists. Prose, verse, one word statements, thousand-word rants. Backwards writing, mirror writing, in all the alphabets under the sun - some real and some fresh born, and all screamed across any surface that'll take a pen, chalk, charcoal, paint, blood etc. It's all out there.
And some of it was here. Up the stairs and up again, along bare floorboards and woodchip walls lit by the bland light from ugly sealed windows, the tiny room at the top of my new house was filled with paper. I'd creaked the door open and there it lay: books and papers in piles; scattered loose sheaves - small and large, plain and lined, as well as scraps and odd bits and pieces. And all the paper had been written on. Some of it was so completely covered, there was hardly any paper left to see, and from a distance it looked like scribble, but on picking it up I saw that it was the tiniest, most intricate writing; words cramped onto each page like these were the last pieces of paper on earth, and any words not geting on would be lost forever.
I stood with papers in both hands, reading from one to the other. I stepped in furhter and soon sat surrounded, immersed in the words, reading and sifting. I lay down in the piles, resting my head on heaped reams, holding up more to read again.
And what it said? Well now, it told me things I could not believe. It painted pictures in words of things unseen and very old, of things in the walls and under the floorboards in houses that came alive.

"In the derelict, find me in the derelict," it said on several pages.
"Lines of light shall burn me through and make me whole,"

And some read like a journal, the memoirs of some lost soul, who had follwed these lines and read these words in special places, and how this soul was found and reborn, through a fading light living out in the spaces, the gaps that were breathing their last as the city squeezed, and Authority's gaze peered in and trod its reason down.
It was a feverish tale in a feverish script, and the fever spread as I read the words, and the words transfixed me as I recited some aloud and they filled the room to live again:

"Older than oldest bricks and mortar, older than flint and mud and straw,
before the beginning, before fire and plague, given to the needy earth,
now taken for weakness. Do not shut me away.....
Let me Breathe...."

Now I knew right then how off-key it sounded, senseless and strange. I had seen some of what the world can turn out, the twisted and the turned; my mind was numb to its manifest form. I also knew to be on my guard against my own wayward senses. But this was a change, a new direction. This was something more than the rank and file odd, the one-off, never to be repeated.
For this was a repetition, an echo, a returning howl to a pack member far away: I'd heard the words before, from a diiferent voice in a different time, in a place all electric lights and battleship grey. Ralph.
That had never happened before.
Never the same thing twice out here.
Til now. I was intrigued. And with two dots there begins a pattern, and then other dots will appear.
Well I'm sure it's been said but I'll say it again, my head can do wondrous things: two plus two can mean so much more than a small sad four; it can make shadows leap. It doesn't take much and I'm forming links, seeing patterns. Already the beginnings of a grand design were emerging: two points of reference doth a web of intrigue make.
I stretched out on the floorboards and considered my options.
I knew I should leave it all alone to blow away in the breeze.
But I also knew I couldn't. Wheels turned and sparks flew as my head chainsawed into life: I was going to find Ralph.
I wanted him to tell me again.