Errata: Twelfth Episode - End

In the City Hall basement, the flaming torches were gas-powered, the straw fibreglass, and the levers on torture equipment mummified in grip-tape. Broom-bearded inmates in sackcloth nappies sang 'Hiya!' and flapped their scarecrow limbs as the Governor's Aide walked over slick, lichen-greased stone flagging towards an iron door. Set into the wall to the door's immediate right was a leering marble gargoyle. She unclipped her ID card from round her neck, swiped it through a cleft in the gargoyle's head. A reader beeped; behind the door, a brace of bolts withdrew with echoing clanks.

Moments later she was descending a granite spiral staircase, the door boom-slamming behind her and a pervasive, vaguely apian hum rising like the stink of feet from somewhere yet deeper. As the light tapered to an apologetic token effort the Aide groped for a stair rail. Her fingers curled round something soft and intestinal. She squeezed, and it held the memory of her digits like a filled tortilla.

Soon, the dark bullied its way into the bellies of her eyes, turning everything black and rangeless. Sound choked in the samey gloom; the slap of her sandals lost vigour. Inching her hand along the clammy feed-tube, she edged down the helixed steps as if lowering herself into a mudbath at gunpoint. Constant as gravity, the hum diversified into a broad drone and the little hairs lining her nostrils began to resonate. The rumble of blood built inside her ears and she knew she was getting close.

At last ' she dropped another step and her face sank into a cool gelatinous wall like a huge sloppy kiss. She let go of the feed-tube and pushed against the invisible barrier. It yielded, amoebic, resealing behind her. For a time the world was slow, soundless and womby; she was a bluebottle sealed in a tub of hair gel, and it occurred to her that she need not press on. To perish set in sterile hermetic jelly would be quite, quite adequate, as exits went.

Her whimsy was self-snuffing. Writhing, mole-pawing onward, she grimaced as her vernixed head broke the other side and jagged white staves blazed epiphanic and retina-bruising through her red lids, her ears full of hornets. She slopped loose an arm, threw a palm in front of her eyes. A buzz like the Original Error colonised her skull. Everything was noise and hot light.

She wriggled, felt the surface tension starting to give. A push, a flex of her pectorals and the gel-wall relinquished her upper torso. Sagging, half-born, she swiped blindly for purchase. A fistful of coarse spindly fingers locked round her wrist in a manacle grip. The Aide's lips parted in weak testament to her surprise then the foreign hand started to pull. Her elbow locked; she felt her lats stretch like cables. Squinting against the all-ablating glow, she glimpsed a headless silhouette and wished she hadn't. The gel-wall released her legs with sulky, glutinous fart. She hit the tiled floor face-first and lay there, gloopy and panting.

'Hyuck hyuck hyuck.' The voice came from somewhere close to ground level. 'Ayup. That's pretty much what I figured.'

The Governor's Aide sat up and knuckled clots of cytoplasm from her eyes. Blinking through a sticky film, she saw herself, hunched over suction-numbed legs, iridescent beneath a caul of mirrored jelly ' her warped reflection in the gel-wall. The room was tiled like a bathhouse. Hemispherical glowglobes blistered the ceiling like frogspawn. She tested her jaw, rubbing the sore spot where she had smacked it against the floor.

'What you here for, missy? We usually eat visitors.'

The gel-wall's freakshow concavities seemed to twist the speaker into a grotesque hunchback. The Aide turned ' with some difficulty ' and saw that the image was honest.

The Keeper was tall in two directions ' once upon a time his spine had risen like a cocky sunflower, holding his head proud and impossibly high. As he had grown in stature so too had he trended upward through the ranks at City Hall, leaving graft-jaded civil servants weary and jilted in his flagpole shadow. Once upon a yesteryear, whispers had spread that he was a shoo-in for promotion to the exalted station of Deputy Chief Of Warrants And Licensing; ceilings were raised in anticipation. The evening prior to the fortnightly reshuffle he had stood full of distance before an audience of underlings, revelling in the gulf between his toecaps and eyebrows, and there, as hundreds watched, his spine had finally buckled under the weight of his hubris, withering his indomitable totem pole charisma to croquet-hoop repugnance. His career soon adopted a similar trajectory.

After his disappearance, most assumed he had been fired ' only a select handful knew the truth.

The Aide's mouth was dry. She cleared her throat.

'The Council a member light. Latest vote locked six-six. In case of tie, power passes direct to the executive. Governor keen to end this bullshit.'

Positioned just in front of his ankles, the Keeper's head inclined like an owl's, or like a ratchet winding. To his left, the feed-tube was extruding yellow-black paste into a steel trough. Lumps of it clung to his beard.

'Now I don't believe you'd push through ten feet of jelly seal just to tell me that.' He grinned, ramshackle teeth filed sharp as pencils. 'What can I do you for?'

The Aide tried to clean her hands against her tunic, found herself wiping gel on gel. 'I come for Waltz.'

The Keeper sighed through his smile. 'You know young lady, Waltz always said to me, he said you know what Walt, cos that's my name right there, I'll bet you didn't know that, did you? Waltz 'd say to me he'd say you know what Walt, one day some greenhorn from somewhere way on high in that great concrete ashcan above us is going to come down here all gussied up with badges and fancy papers and whatnot, and he or she or it is going to try and take me away from you. He'd say to me Walt, they're going to try and break us apart because they can't understand the bond between us, and when folks can't understand a thing it scares 'em. They see us and it puts the fear a' Jenkins in 'em just 'cause we don't look so regular. They say a man and a monster can't fall in love, well you know what Walt? I'm sick of hanging my heads and hiding in the shadows for fear a' spooking the horses. They want to be afraid? I say let 'em! They want to hate us? Let 'em hate! I ain't going to hide no more, Walt, I ain't gonna bury what I feel for you out of fear and hate and shame. You know one day you and I are gonna be cold compost with maggots for moustaches and for all the rest of eternity we'll ne'er get gifted the chance to dance and laugh and sing that we got right now, right here in front of us. I want it so when they put us to the torch we burn like good coal, all heat and no smoke.' Tears streaked the Keeper's cheeks like warpaint. 'Dammit Walt, I love you! I love you in ways I ne'er believed possible!' He closed his eyes. 'And it's bigger 'n me! I get this pain right here in my chest, right here where my heart is and I can feel my love, all hot and icy and alive, and it all wants is to bust loose. Folks ain't built for feelings this strong. I want to join with you. I want to wrap my soul round yours and squeeze so warm so tight till who is who and which was which and who only knows. You gotta hear me, Walt, you gotta believe I'm sincere. Every man's got burdens to shoulder but there ain't nothing so heavy as nothing. It weighs a body down something wicked. I been hollow for so damn long, carrying this hole inside of me. I tried to fill it with drink, with work, I even tried a kind of fast-setting packing foam they use to ship antique vases¦ but it was you, Walt. Nothing fit, 'cause the hole was the same damn shape as you.' Choking back sobs, mucus swinging in strings from his chin like a bead curtain, Keeper Walt collapsed against a huge rivet-studded bulkhead. Artery junctions pulsed in his brow. 'Don't take him, missy. Don't take away my Waltz.'

The Governor's Aide stroked her sallow wattle. 'I come for Waltz.'

Walt's eyes narrowed. 'Last time, it was a plea. This time, it's a warning. Don't take my Waltz.'

'I come for Waltz.' Her inflection was even as a plate.

Walt wiped his eyes. 'Well that's a crying shame.' He stood up, wincing against the bite of his posture. 'If you're fixing to steal the only thing I got left in this broke-up world, then you'll have to do it over my dead body.' He chucked a glance at the bulkhead. 'And I got an idea Waltz ain't gonna be exactly bowled over to see you neither.'

The Aide reached behind her, pulled a pistol from the belt of her trousers. Though the grip was gel-smeared, the rest of the weapon was clean.

The Keeper laughed nervously. 'What? Am I meant to act scared or something? You know you can't use that.'

She pointed the muzzle at his low slung head. 'Last chance.'

'What is this?' Walt was shouting, arms flung out either side of his face like big gesticulating ear-stalks. 'We got a LawNet in place, lady. Your squirt-gun won't do squat.'

The Aide smiled, jowls and neck folds hanging from the corners of her mouth like a blanket den. 'Everything you know about Errata is bullshit.'

She pinched the trigger and his glum face blossomed.

* * *

In the Ire Marshes, a tussle of blood-pipes stirred.

'Sir?'

'Shh.'

The vein-thing turned from the chessboard and stared eyeless across mist-licked pools into fathomless black.

'Sir?'

'Do you hear that?'

'Hear what sir?'

The whole flesh islet shivered. 'Something's about to happen.'

* * *

Brahmini Jones found himself peering into a stack of interlocking blades reminiscent of a blender's complex mouthparts. He felt a faint jag of anticlimax.

Then they began to spin.

'I suppose I ought to judge this peculiar. They say necessity is the mother of invention but who's the daddy, eh? Is anything really necessary in the cold light of day? Perhaps we're all just a phantom pregnancy, hmm, a touch of trapped wind. Eggs are little spaceships that grow their own pilots ' just imagine breaking out of an armoured oval to find yourself stuck in this shitty ordeal!' He went to say something else but vocabulary was riffling out of his head like paperwork in a wind tunnel. He saw too late the endless convex eye opening at the box's centre.

His ganglia started to stretch with reality as it purled round upon itself. The delivery troll was teasing apart like a card fan. Beams of light punched through the failing roof, the walls of the treehouse smeared with motion blur. Jones tried to think and in the meltdown of exiting cognition experienced a succession of profound insights, realising for the first time the interconnectedness of all things and the oneness of the universe. Enlightenment felt like a crushing hangover.

'What bilge,' he exclaimed. His words decelerated to a subsonic moo as they rode the whirlpool's circumference and poured back in through his lughole, flooding his synapses with compacted truth. The void loomed. It was bland, bland, bland.

Jones balked, then his skull unpacked like a popcorn kernel.

* * *

'Hello ' what's this?'

'Sir?' Benson eyed the frothing waters querulously.

'ABOUT BLOODY TIME!'

All across the islet muscle broke open in gummy canyons; the vertebrae tree collapsed into the ground like a telescope; plasma juiced from severed capillaries. Benson staggered backwards, the chessboard crumbling to dust. He flapped his ruined wings in vain. Dripping hunks of meat rose on arterial stalks and fused over bone-caged organs. The pink slab under him tore free of its moorings, tipped through ninety degrees and he fell, landing in a net of sticky tendons.

'Sir! Slow down! I'm-' And he was borne upward through a seething plexus of dendrites, threads of blood twining together as they surged into a massive conglomerating torso.

'Whoopee!' Wet flesh rang with glee as Parish bellowed his elation. 'He took the bait! The bastard fell for it!'

'Sir! Please!' Benson prised apart tendons, scrambling out onto a shelf of slick cartilage. Veins swirled round him like tornado dust, dragging a layer of translucent fat in their wake. He kicked aside a hot, pullulating sac, climbed a ladder of ribs as his master's reconstituting flesh closed in on him. 'Sir!'

'I'm free!'

A meat shackle enclosed Benson's foot; he lifted his head and his nostrils filled with blood. Grasping through a juice shower he caught a handful of scales, tough as plectrums. Muscle clenched his stomach in a death hug. He let out a gargling shriek.

Benson felt his fingers close round the ossified bole of an eye socket. He pulled as hard as he could, slid from the flesh like a splinter. In a tide of pus and blood, he burst out of Parish's half-assembled mouth and plunged, knackered, into the marsh waters.

Moments later, Benson resurfaced. Glistening in midair, the Painsmith Parish was reborn, a lean saurian giant with sickle-moon eyes and claws like scimitars. He cackled, speaking at last with his real mouth while his beetle-black scales steamed with heat.

'Ho ho ho! How about this, eh Benson? Sometimes fate doesn't twist so much as jack-knife.'

Benson bobbed like a log. 'What now, sir?'

'What do you think? Now I collect my winnings and head to Errata, jolly as a hangman. Massacre? What massacre?'

And the Marshes boomed with his mirth.