Errata: Fifteenth Episode - Enter Screamo The Clown

Satan was too intent on doing good to stay in power for long. Driven by a burning desire to make the universe fair, he pioneered a monument to punitive justice - a Law Realm designed to attract wicked souls then subject them to eternal punishment. This was no reformatory, no scrubbing clean of the sin-bemerded - Hell was for keeps, flame-fringed payback and a cautionary tale for those tempted to filch unguarded change or crush bugs betwixt thumb and forefinger.

As Hell's population mushroomed, so Satan enlisted legions of forever-damned to help him expand, sculpting raw swirling ether into razor forests, lakes of magma, and warehouses stocked floor to ceiling with chainsaw hats. He listened to the shrieks of erstwhile evildoers as they got rubbed all over with wire-wool then drenched in iodine, and felt a warm glow knowing they had received their just desserts.

Of course this perfect storm of comeuppances generated no small amount of resentment and given that he had surrounded himself with countless hordes of the universe's least scrupulous entities, it wasn't long until he was deposed, stripped of his Phasecrafting abilities and left to languish in a gibbet on the nor'west road. You can see him there to this day, dead behind the eyes and mumbling imprecations in some long extinct tongue. No one pays him any mind. Nowadays you have to go pretty far off the beaten track to catch a glimpse of the old, unspoilt Hell - most of it's been ruined by tourism.

'So any road, I found myself out on the highway and had to hike four or five miles until I reached a Transport Café. I used their payphone to dial your cell-'

'And asked me to conjure a gate so you could come back to Errata, I know, I know, this is where I came in.' Nessa folded her hard, thick forearms. 'But that still doesn't explain the wedding dress.'

I glanced at my unconventional attire with practiced insouciance. 'I'm glad you brought that up,' I said. 'Of course there's a straightforward answer. The reason I'm wearing a wedding dress is-'

The door shook to shave-and-a-haircut knuckle rap on the opposite side.

'Shitcock!' Nessa grabbed the base of the foldaway bed and slammed it up against the wall. 'Don't even squeak,' she hissed and, spreadeagled like roadkill between mattress and plasterboard, I could only grunt my assent. I heard her clop to the door and commence the tortuous process of unfastening the fifteen latches. Coaxed by gravity, my head slipped a little and I found myself peering through a splinter-fringed hole into the adjoining bedroom.

I recognised the lank, ochre locks immediately; the bamboo-limbed sap beneath them looked for all the world like he'd had a kilo of wet wholemeal spaghetti dumped on his head. He was sitting on a bed and sobbing, arachniform hands upended in his lap and his tears dripping into the folds of a white lace ruff big as a sawmill blade.

A palm glossed with downy auburn fur rested upon his shoulder, gave it a conspicuous squeeze that forced ugly black creases into his purple velveteen tunic. 'Cheer up, Mr Two.' The vulpine rent boy standing next to him attempted a cheeky smile but just looked queasy, flashing nicotine-yellow fangs all rotten and porous from a heavy pod habit. Myth-mouth, they call it - the wages of smoking dried seed husks harvested from the Bombwastes. Odds on he'd once been as human and boring as me but months spent honking on pod pipes fat as cauldrons had given him dream-leak, transforming the kid into a freak of his own misguided design - no longer human, perhaps, but dull as ever. Kitsune-morphs were done, done, done, necrotic from repetition. He didn't even look like a fox - he looked tragically ridiculous, a broken victim in facepaint and fake tail. And now everyone could see he was a junkie, now his junkiedom was become transparent, there was nowhere else for him to crawl but the sick, faecal cocoon of the Magic Bordello, leasing his botched prank of a body to leering pouch-eyed fetishists like Drake Two, scraping together just enough clink to keep his habit afloat. 'Cheer up, eh?' He took his palm from Drake's shoulder, glanced at it with a hint of entirely appropriate repugnance.

'Cheer?' The Councillor's throat was thick with mucus; he spoke in the muted guttural tones of some fresh-risen swamp prophet. He'd always looked far more healthy on TV - in the inconstant light of several paper lanterns his flesh sagged like a rubber mould, its sepulchral whites and greys offset only by the merest tinge of yellow across his jowls. Deep shadow enhanced the impression of a melting snowman captured in bas-relief. 'The Thirteen is fragmenting like a summer iceberg. An unknown malcontent may blast us all to bright smears before the week is out. What cause have I for cheer?'

The rent boy's black leather jumpsuit creaked as he flexed his shoulders. 'D'you need a reason?' He faked up a smirk, studded codpiece bulging like an artificial heart.

'All effects must proceed from causes.' Sibilant and phlegm-heavy, Drake's words crawled from his mouth slow as plague zombies. He seemed hoarse with despair, fug-headed. 'Unless you're postulating some causeless first mover. Is that it?' He glanced up, knotty locks falling from his face, exposed his glistening red eye-cuffs to the lantern glow. 'Are you saying it'll take nothing less than the spontaneous ex nihilo emergence of a new God to breathe some limpid simulacrum of happiness into the ash-strewn hollows of my cold, cold life?'

'Would you like a fuck?'

Drake Two closed his eyes and grimaced, as if straining to discern some distant hushed music.

The rent boy walked to the bedside table and picked up a carton of Lucky Bonobos. 'A cigarette perhaps?' The packet was crumpled like a pig's trotter; the rent boy clumsied it open and dragged a crooked smoke from the wreckage. He held out the cigarette, pathetic, gnarled. In the fluctuating light it carved a shadow across Drake's face that might have been a meathook or a question mark. The rent boy relaxed his fingers; the cigarette fell to the floor. 'Never mind.'

'No, my boy...' Drake let his head slump, face vanishing behind a curtain of hair. 'Always mind. Always bloody mind, forever cognizant of itself.' His hands rose a little way from his lap as if preparing to clutch at his scalp then dropped back, exhausted. 'I wouldn't object to reflexive sentience if there were something worth watching, but no, no... just mind. Always bloody mind.' He sighed and began to sob once more - quiet, dry sobs that made his shoulders bounce and helped no one.

The rent boy wrinkled his muzzle, then walked over to the other side of the room, out of my field of vision. Above the bed was a pine-framed mirror. In its smudged reflection I saw a gaudy bawdy mural that took up the entire wall, entitled The Wheelbarrow Race, the words reversed of course. It depicted a giant pangolin gripping a boss-eyed tanooki by its hind legs while the tanooki ran on its forepaws; a front-on perspective placed the pangolin's groin and the tanooki's anus in ambiguous proximity, the former's lascivious lolling pink tongue and the latter's wonky eyeballs adding weight to my suspicion that the pair were somehow contiguous.

Gazing at the reflected scene I began to get the distinct and disturbing impression that the tanooki was watching me. I stared into its big dumb racoon-dog eyes, feeling simultaneously terrified and stupid. Keen to convince myself it was dead and 2D, I squinted hard. My heart almost cut out. With its undersized lazy eye, the tanooki was squinting back.

Seven seconds later I realised the glare under which I was quailing was my own. Like the spooky roving gaze of a cobwebbed portrait in a haunted house, my observations were disguised, my eyeball innocuously housed within the tanooki's fake left socket. Thank Jenkins for that, I thought, and gave myself a sly wink. (which of course, limited to monocular vision, I missed)

'You can't order happiness like a chop in a restaurant,' Drake muttered through his palms. 'It either comes to you or... it refuses.'

I smelt the burnt, cinnamony aroma of a pod pipe.

Still out of shot, the kitsune rent boy said: 'I know you want me to respond in platitudes, or better still, keep silent while you talk and weep, talk and weep...' He paused, and I heard the shrill brittle song of a long deep hit. When he spoke again his voice was tight and arid. 'But has it occurred to you that this is no more than you deserve? That this, all this, is no more than any of us deserve?'

Drake Two lifted his head. He scowled.

'Don't get above your station, you little shit.'

Another sibilant tug on the pipe. 'Or you'll do what?'

Drake stood. 'I'll pull your fucking tail off.' His eyes gleamed like gutter pennies as his tongue tip wetted his incisors.

A practised giggle. 'Come on then Mr Fancy Man! I bet those balsa wood limbs of yours can't crack a poppadom.'

'Why you...' But Drake was grinning suddenly, baring his digits like talons. This was some dirty ritual snowballing towards violent carnality, and being a bashful kind of guy I closed my eyelids, peepshow over, abort, abort! 'Just wait till I get my fingers round your scrawny throat!' The Councillor's guffaws and the rent boy's titters started to merge, footfalls segueing to the shriek of mattress springs. Now I'm no prude but I respect the dictum that some of the universe's truths are best left unapprehended. 'You naughty little-'

Nessa dragged the bed down with a clang. O sweet reprieve! Legs splayed I gazed through the lily meshes of my dress and saw ripped taurine muscletress Nessa stood alongside a gangly honk-nosed clown. Hefting the rubber bulb of an old-fashioned car horn in his gloved palm he said nothing, lips red protuberant and sagging at either end like the opening in a boxer's mitt.

'This is Screamo the Clown,' said Nessa, her face a case study in punch-drunk resignation. 'He says-'

With his free hand, Screamo waggled a lime-green balloon giraffe.

Nessa sighed. 'Mr Enchilada says they've been looking for you.'

I glanced from Nessa to the blot of greasepaint and polka dots then back again. 'And you decided to help them?' My head juddered as I struggled to empathise. 'You said okay? You ratted me out? Why did he even come to you in the first place?'

Nessa snorted, stomping her forehooves against the floorboards. 'Did I ask you to barge in here? Did I need a moronic faux-bride in my life that badly?'

'I'm on the run, Ness! Is this your idea of hiding someone? Handing me over to the first clown who walks into the room?'

Screamo shook his head. 'Weak, Chief.'

'Two Blade?'

Screamo the Clown reached up, pushed fat fingers deep into his eye sockets and pulled. His face fisheyed round his gloved fist like a reflection on a soapbubble, peepers narrowing to blind squints, sad mouth distorting into something past sadness, a bloody unreadable smear. A downward yank and the white-hooped sockets gaped like larch boles; beneath the circus makeup his skin was taut as a new-sprung trampoline; a slurping from his wigline then the fleshmask schlucked free, momentum flopping it inside out. Screamo took a couple of steps back, smarting from the recoil - but he was Screamo no more.

Two Blade looked at me and grinned, his face mucky wet and covered in circular welts, each with a pale dot at its centre. Draped over his palm, the mask spazzed and drooled like a manta ray in seizure, suction cups blowing kisses as they vainly gnawed the air in search of purchase.

Nessa watched frothing symbiote for a few seconds, then said: 'Come on, kid. Let me put it out of its misery.'

Two Blade nodded. He flung the convulsing mask to the floor. Nessa's muzzle flared as she took a deep breath. Raising her cloven forehooves, she trampled the creature to a red and white mulch. When she stepped back, we exhaled as one.

'So, TB.'

'So Chief.'

'I kind of figured...'

'That I was dead?' Two Blade was beaming as he peeled off his white gloves.

'Uh, no, actually. I kind of thought you just got bored and fucked off.'

He doubled over, feigning gut-rupturing affront. 'Aw Jenkins. That hurts, Chief. I think my heart just burst like an old piece of fruit.'

'Where did you get to, then? One minute we were shoulder-to-shoulder like two generic desperados from popular culture, the next-' And I snapped my fingers to indicate his vanishment.

'Wowzer. Am I really some conundrum grand panjandrum?' Reaching behind his dayglo bowtie Two Blade unhasped his collar then proceeded to unzip his clown costume down to the baggy groin. He tugged a rubber bung from the float bladder strapped across his stomach; the fake paunch deflated with a long odourless rasp. 'It's not rocket surgery. Back there in the factory it occurred to me that if we were going to make a second run on the Phase Vault we'd sure as shit need the combination to get in, and the little baby realisation that came popping out of the first was that we'd left the codearm back with Columpton's bag, and if we didn't want the Peace and their legendary restraint blasting it to sticky fragments I'd better go fetch it. By the time I'd had that thought I was already halfway across the factory floor, grunts receiving me like the archetypal angry natives.'

I leant forward. 'And did you get it?'

Two Blade straightened up, let his unzipped costume drop to his ankles. 'Ta da.' Dressed in a single-breasted twilight purple jacket and trousers, he raised his hands above his head to reveal Prenderghast's severed arm wrapped in transparent plastic and gaffer-taped to his right flank. 'You know I got off pretty lightly all things considered. I guess the Peace had a few whales needed frying.'

'How did you know to look for me here?'

Two Blade stepped away from his crumpled clown garb. 'I didn't. I came to find Nessa because I figured-'

'That you'd need my help if you wanted a second chomp of the apple,' Nessa finished, glaring at the pair of us. 'I get it now. Once bitten, twice as stupid, is that it?'

'I'm a wanted guy, Ness. I needed to find someone competent and trustworthy, fast - you know you keep those LimpetMasques on for more than a twelve hour stretch, they start trying to integrate with the host, right? That's why they're so hot for throwing Diviners and other Hedge Psychics off the scent - your psionic trace gets all scrambled cos the thing's trying suck its way right into your brain.' He scratched at one of the marks on his face. 'Sneaking round disguised as a clown ain't the gooey caper literature 'd have you believe, take my weary word.'

Nessa's mouth peeled back in a sneer. 'I saw straight through you the instant you waddled into the room.'

'Cos you're good, Ness.' Two Blade was coming over all salesman, great white bogus grin, arms spread wide, leaking more oil than a freeway pileup. 'No one's supposed to be able to find the Phase Vault, but you - you've got range, girl.'

'Call me girl one more time you get the same treatment as the mask.'

Two Blade shrugged, tried to look cheeky. 'Sorry, sorry, slip of the old tongue, you know?'

'Yeah?' said Nessa. 'Well if you don't want to hear me apologising for several slips of the old fist you'll cut the bullshit, Teeb. Peeking at Government secrets is like testing an ICBM by whacking the nosecone with a croquet mallet - you might keep your eyebrows the first time, but you keep pushing your luck...' A thousand horrendous roads to oblivion shivered in the ellipsis.

'Hey, I understand,' I told her, disappointment soaking my guts. 'It's a high-stakes scenario. I wouldn't risk it if we swapped boots.'

Nessa cocked her head. 'You pulling that reverse-psychology crap on me, Chief?'

'I didn't come here to plan another heist, Nessa - that's all T-Blade's thinking. I just want a way out of the city. I'll lay low in the Bombwastes for a while. As far as I'm concerned, there's no Plan B.'

'You're just going to give up?'

'Intent is to reality as slow jazz is to an iguana.' I grimaced, massaged my neck's sweaty nape. 'I don't quest for questing's sake. Most citizens in Errata know exactly who they are, and does it make them happy? It most manifestly does not. I went hunting for my true identity because my gut told me I ought to, but my gut's told me to eat a whole platter of Jeremy burgers smeared in hot sauce before now, so it's not exactly a trusted advisor. Even if you did snoop out the Phase Vault's new location, there's no guarantee we'd be able to reach it. Plus Columpton probably cleared out whatever I was supposed to be looking for anyhow, plus Kismet-Shaman W was probably blowing holy smoke up my ass right from the beginning. The whole thing was just a setup.'

Two Blade was at the window, peering through a crack in the blind's drab lips. 'Thing I don't get Chief, is why that Fleshbroker, what was he called?'

'Brahmini Jones.'

'Jones! That's the bastard. What I don't get is, why did he go to all the trouble of asking us to fetch a box then hiring some other guy to take us out and send the box to him instead? Why not just let us take it to him like we agreed?'

I shrugged. 'Beats me. Maybe he didn't trust us. Scratch that - I know he didn't trust us. But he didn't know the way to the vault or the code to the door so he had to fake like he wanted to make a deal with us then afterwards he used a goon to tail us.'

'Huh?' Nessa looked at me askance. 'That doesn't make sense. You were heading for the vault anyway, right? Why did he need to speak to you at all?'

I blinked, scratched my head. 'Jenkins Nessa, I don't know ' you're the Diviner, you tell me. Maybe he's just a fucking moron. It's not like he'd be stuck for company round here.'

'Damn right I'm a Diviner, Chief.' Nessa thumped the smoked blue cleavage of her glass cuirass and snorted. 'And my InStinks are telling me there's more to this tale than meets the nostrils. Nothing tessellates right. Some deeper reality's been poorly camouflaged - it's like five giraffes hiding under a yak pelt.'

'You really think so?' Scepticism wrinkled my cutesy button nose. 'Because I've got to tell you cupcake, in this city, surface is all you get. Try to penetrate the shiny exterior...' I snatched at air. 'Nothing. There are no symbols, Nessa, no crazy webs of significance. Everything's just what it is, that's the tragedy. A cigar is always just a cigar, just like a dick is always just a dick - unless you think you've spent all this time working in a tobacconist's.'

Her throat muscles bunched. 'You're exactly the kind of literalist schmuck the Government loves, Chief. They could hang a sign off a lit bomb that said: "This is a precious little baby and you'd stand there coochy-cooing and rocking it in your arms till the fuse burned down to Boomsville.'

'Look, I've got no truck with the assholes in City Hall. We're all selfish bastards - they're just more successful at it. But the way I see it, it's people who think like you they can screw over the most. Some Councillor's only got to eat a ham sandwich to set your mind scrabbling to decode the latent meaning. You find conspiracies the way fat guys find belly button lint. The Government doesn't even have to try to deceive you - you blind yourself with a matrix of bifurcating possibilities, and miss the big con going on right in front of your eyes. When a freight train's hurtling towards me, I don't stand and examine it for clues, I get the fuck out of the way. Always shunning the obvious and gazing five levels deeper - that's a fast way to get dead.'

'What's the matter?' Nessa trotted up to the bed, glowered over me. 'You afraid of what you might find out? That the real reason you don't want hit the vault?'

'Nessa.' I tried to make eye contact, wimped out. 'We've all got to bite it someday. You want the truth? I'm not afraid, I'm bored. The Phase Vault is my last hope for a little excitement and I don't want to wind up disappointed.'

Her breathing was heavy. 'I could find the new position,' she said, and flicked scar-pink hair out of her eyes. 'The code 'll be the same, of course. They never change it - officially the vault doesn't exist.'

'But there are catches, right?'

'Right. City Hall's on crazy-high alert right now. Syphilis Barracks churning out grunts like the passenger door on a clown car - my source inside says the official Diviners are doing sweeps for some guy who's going to destroy Errata accidentally on purpose or something like that. The moment I start tickling their defences...'

'All manner of weapons-grade pandemonium 'll rain down on our terrified behinds,' I said. 'I see your predicament.'

Nessa sat back on her haunches. 'It'd take a catastrophe of historic proportions to distract them long enough for me to run a full sniff undetected.'

'Uh, Nessa?' Two Blade stood with his face pressed against the slatted blind.

She glanced back over her shoulder. 'What's up Teeb?'

He took a thin, sniper's breath. 'You want to be careful what you wish for.'