“Hermes,” she says, “It is so good of you to come. Alice would have wanted it.”

No, I think, What Io would have wanted, I feel, is not have been eaten alive.

I am glad that some things have not changed in the twenty years since we were at University. Everything is so upside-down, Bosco dead, Io slaughtered, the whole shimmering world, that I grasp onto my familiar feelings as though they will save me. I always loathed Callie, thought her manipulative and greasy and I am relieved to find that after all these years, nothing has changed.  I loathe her pert face, her appearance of well-heeled Bohemia, her mischevious smile. Callie is one of those wretched Warp World Artists who – amongst other nonsense – seem to believe that by virtue of their solipsistic calling they automatically are a thorn in the side of Authority. Let them through the doors of a Municipal Archives, for example, and they seem to think they have caused havoc amongst the keepers, strewing social dislocation and professional anxiety just by showing up. Callie once told me, before she realised how much I despised her, that she and her fellow Warp World Artists saw themselves as figures of disruption and challenge, Lords of Misrule, if you will. I mentioned this to an archivist friend of mine, with whom Callie had had some dealings. A Pan in the reading room may be what she wants, he said grimly, tidying up her aftermath, it’ll be a Puck in the gob she’ll get if she shows up here again.

The walls and the balcony where I am sitting bulge and throb and I am terrified that whatever quantum warp is happening above our heads is about to come and sit beside us. Instead, the air is quickly laden with the most god-awful stench and a wiry, rag-draped body drops into the seat beside me. A grimy figure, with copper hair akimbo, stands for a few moments looking around, leaning over the railing to look down onto the stage and into the orchestra pit, and then up, at the stalls, and the spiralling realities above us. Then the figure leans over to me and whispers,

“I can’t believe I’ve come back from the dead for this Ridley Walker shit.”

The figure – male or female is certainly beyond me, though I think undoubtedly human, or mostly human – settles back comfortably into the padded chair, wriggling into the depths of the cushions and, its knees to its chest, presses the heels of its indescribably filthy, claw-nailed feet on the back of the chair in front. I am so grateful that the new viewer stops moving, and thereby stops sending waves of stinking air over me, that I barely hear when the hoarse, smoke-dried voice sounds again and says,

“Oh, by the way, love, your last guest is here too. She’s sitting on the far side of me. Sullivan.”

Now, as it happens, Callie was standing right at the edge of the pools of light, and I see her face when the bag of rags says the name – Callie goes very still. Everything about her shuts down, as though she has made her blood stop. Bless her miserable murderer’s soul, Callie is a model Warp World Artist and expresses no emotion – to do so would be to betray some other truth, that she is, in fact, mad as a box of hair. She may not have the imagination to be afraid of what she has done, or of the unstoppable nature of things she has started, but she is desperately afraid of the fact that though she holds all the strings, she no longer knows to what they are attached at the other end. After a few seconds she is as she was before, as sickening as liquifying flesh.

I lean forward and in the dim light I can see Sullivan stretch out her hand to shake mine. She is wearing a long jacket, reaching almost to her knees, of some material that looks black at first but I see then has a thin red pinstripe. Sullivan and I have met before and we smile. Now she is a proper artist. She knows how hard it is to drop phosphorous into water.

The stage begins to darken, and lights flicker as they are tested. The orchestra, in whatever plane of reality they might exist, have stopped tuning up and have settled down. There are five of us mourners now. Sullivan, the shocking bundle of rags and hair beside her, and I sit in the front row, in the middle three seats. I know, though I can’t see her, that Callie is sitting at the back of the set of half a dozen benches that have been set out for us. Behind me, sits Mary Rowan St. Maur Ker, Countess of Deira. I do not know who she is or why she is there. The stage darkens completely. My hand is suddenly grasped by my neighbour, who whispers dramatically,

“The play is about to begin. The gods be with the days when a wake involved a phalanx of whiskey bottles and quick ride if you were lucky.”

This irritates me – it is bad enough that apparently Scribes are no longer sufficient, in the opinion of the Pharaoh, to generate the record of a place or a person, and that we have to go through these feeble mechanisms for collecting the total archives, as though we had not been doing this for centuries, without this scabarous flea-bag lowering the tone.

The spotlight spears the darkness, and a willowy figure in a dark violet khiton and cloak steps into the bright beam. She is holding a staff in front of her. It has a large crystal orb embedded in the top. Off-stage, a female voice says solemnly,

“Ruth Judges Joshua.”

The figure stood without moving while the orchestra, invisible to me, played a lovely robust overture, which I had never heard before. As the violins stilled, the black-coated figure in the corner propels herself from her chair and stands, four-square, at the front of the stage.

“A Room of One’s Own. The Madwoman in the Attic,” she says, lighting a cigarette as she spoke, and hissing the smoke out between her teeth, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The Molly Bloom monologue. All these things speak of the empowerment of women. But this tale, this tale is a real tale. This tale is a new tale. This tale is as old as time. This tale tells the truth about the harm men do to women. It is a sad and sometimes terrifying tale.”

She pauses for effect, looking up at her audience, the artificial lights making her eyes look vast and dark, her mouth like a rent in a oyster-coloured curtain. She is smiling a little. Otherwise the effect is that of a Grecian theatrical mask.

“But you will not be alone, wherever this story takes you. I am with you. I am The Storyteller. My name is Khairo.”

She strides the length of the stage. She is tall and muscular. She has brown hair, cut in an Eton bob, and there is something terribly alien about her. Her black leather coat whirls behind her as she approaches the edge of the stage and as she does so, I realise what it is that has struck the false note. The wake narrator, this Khairo, is wearing trousers which made from different coloured strips and patches of leather, like a harlequin decked about in intense, jewel-mimicking colours. The upper half of her body is encased in a basque, also made of coloured leather cut into horizontal strips and stitched together. She is shod in knee-high laced boots, and wears heavy silver rings on her fingers. There is no country on Earth, and I know this for a fact, where the Pharaoh has decreed, through his Historical Truth Commission, that this sort of get-up is regulation clothing.

That wretched, accursed Commission revelled in its task of dressing nations up like airport dolls, according to what its misguided research through ambiguous and misleading sources led those on the Commission to believe were historically accurate for the country and hence, for example, the white-heritage inhabitants of North America (apart from Scribes, like me) are expected to be turned out like something from a Lampenka painting. So how this wake-caller has managed to get away with the leather coat and the rings and so on is a matter for suspicion – the Pharaoh’s representatives do not take kindly to insubordination.

As an aside, what interests me (secretly, of course) is the different approaches the nations have to refusing the Commision’s decrees. The Irish, to take the example of my adopted home. They said well do you see it’s like this. There’s a bit of a problem. There’s the whole question of the chain of historical custody (the Pharaoh was sorry he ever thought of that one) and we can’t be sure, do you see, of what it is the Irish might have worn had they not been under the Boot of the Oppressor for generations. So they essentially said póg mo thóin, lie to follow later,  and then have created more records about their mar dhea research than the Pharaoh’s enforcers could have time to read. The Dutch said that nudity was equally part of their historical heritage and while the rest of the world perked up brightly at the thought of several million strapping blond(e)s going around mother-naked, the Pharaoh said it was immoral and the battle commenced which currently the Dutch are winning, as you might expect if you have ever tried to bundle a resistent Dutchie into a doekje. The Peruvians and the Bolivians were hilarious. They got together and engineered a massive joke at the Pharaoh’s expense, using the cover of the Heritage Programme to create convincing archaological sites wherein they found a multitude of historical documents that proved all sorts of things about traditional dress. They did sterling work, each country carefully forging and planting evidence to support the other’s claims and it was only after about two generations that the Commission finally realised that the Peruvians and the Bolivians were taking the mick. They are now suffering the consequences of having a sense of humour. The French just said no, fuck off, you plebian, and then wrote lengthy post-modernist articles about the subsequent invasion. There is a rumour that Muinbeo sent a telegram that was so rude it had to be explained to the Pharaoh, who then tried to invade the county, except he couldn’t find it. Muinbeo can almost never be found; I suppose it is the nature of congruent realities, of deviations in the space-time continuum, that their borders with other – our – reality are not generally mapped.

But my point here is that there is no-where that Khairo’s get-up is not illegal. It is that point that hints to me that all is not what it seems in Belview House. Even more than the fact that I can see alternate, concurrent realities, clicking in and out of existence above my head, it is Khairo’s clothing that makes me think she does not live in our world. Callie is up to something. Callie and the Professor are setting us up.

I start to pay a lot more attention to what was happening on the stage. With Khairo in the wings, the figure in violet takes another step forward and pushes back her hood. Her long strawberry-blonde hair curls over her shoulders.

“So. She who had been Cleis, she who had

refreshed  Babylonia with her diamond tears…”

My heart sinks. This part of Io’s wake is due to go on for two hours. Behind me, I hear the Countess mutter oh for fuck sake. The bag of odour and patches beside me shifts vigorously from side to side in the seat, like a pig scratching its backside on a tree.

…trampling her blameless sands with unthinking feet,

he spoke and spoke again, yes, he said, and yes my mountain flower and

was it her innocence or naievity that made her believe him to be a stately buck

rather than the sharded scarecrow…

Beside me, the bag of bones is off again.

“What is this?”

I have decided from her voice she is female. The figure is beset with itches in several places simultaneously and the virgorous scratching that this occasions tells me that I am right. I reach over and hitch some of the displaced rags into a more modest position over her surprisingly pretty breasts.

“Cover it up, honey,” I say.

“What is this?” she says, again, angrily, “I am back from the dead to listen to a dreary tale about some lass fucked the wrong lad? Is that it? Are you codding me with this shit?”

Lo! The Daughers of Niobe are reft of tears and it is in

Cuirt na Mean Oiche na Mna, the

Midnight Court of Women that Joshua must now be judged,

his stone heart  dissected with the relentless knife, Hera’s steel

tempered in Athena’s fire ….

Sullivan says anxiously,

“Well that’s going to piss Athena right off.”

She should know. Sullivan is from Muinbeo. It is the kind of place where it is best not to make metaphors out of divinities because – well, you never know. From behind me, the Countess says,

“He? His heart? What the hell is going on? Joshua? What?”

The figures on-stage can tell that the audience is becoming mutinous, but they battle on. A male figure, ridiculously good-looking, strides onto the stage. Immediately, the rag-and-bone girl and Mary begin softly to sing Oh Sir Jasper do not touch me! and Sullivan begins to giggle, a charming, snuffling noise. Sir Jasper – or Joshua, I should say – starts his monologue about how he is a genius and how he does not know why he always falls for the wrong woman, and he lists all the terrible things his list of ex-girlfriends have done to him, mainly centering, as far as I can determine, on their failure to appreciate what a paragon he is, and their lack of gratitude to him for understanding women so well. It is banal and awful, and yet horribly good, because everyone knows, either through their own experience or through sitting up far too late listening to other people’s stories, a dozen, two dozen men like Joshua. The minute anyone, male or female, thinks that there is something in particular to understand about women is the time you can throw in the towel on any grown-up conversation. It’s a hopeless cause, so put the buttons back on the foils and and off with you to the pub.

“Christ on a crutch,” says the rag and bone girl, “How many girlfriends has this brasser dated?”

Behind me, the Countess snorts.

“Just the one,” she says, “Over and over again.”

Joshua has reached a dramatic pause, and he pauses, dramatically. From the wings shuffles as brow-beaten a figure as you have ever seen, weary with life and sick of herself. The figure in the khiton says,

“This is your victim, Joshua. Regard her. Enjoy your creation. This is Jude.”

“Why Jude?” Sullivan whispers.

“Patron Saint of Hopeless Cases,” whisper the rag and bone girl and I, together. You can’t beat a cradle Catholic for random information, but I am not sure what is the shit-bag’s excuse. Sullivan nods and sits back. The figures on the stage start to go through the whole ghastly routine of blame, self-blame and recrimination; neediness and emotional desperation masquerading as liberation and courage. With a sigh I look off to the wings and notice that Khairo is gone, and on an impulse I look up, into the swirling eternities above my head and I see her, stumping up the shallow spiral steps. She stops, and steps off the spiralling staircase, as though going into a room.

But there is trouble on the stage.

It starts when the rag and bone girl leans over the barrier, and shouts,

“I don’t mean to heckle or owt but can I just get one thing sorted out here? I’m not a member of the funeral, I am a Necrologue, and I need to get your lassie’s name onto my list. Not indeed that I was expecting another commission. No, I was quietly dying of plague. There I was, I was on the verge of death, looking out towards Lindisfarne Castle, about to breathe my last in the view of Holy Island, and I got dragged back and packed off here because, as far as I can tell, I understand you’ve got a dead ’un and seeing that I’m a Necrologue, I need to get her name. Now would you mind giving me the right one? You’ve called her Jude. Madam Callie here called her Alice earlier. Sullivan apparently doesn’t know her, nor the Countess neither. The Yank bint beside me called her Io, and which I thought was a cow. Can someone just give me her god-damn name so’s I can go into the black with a clear conscience?”

The figure in the khiton rolls her eyes and steps forward. She is standing beside Sir Joshua, Jude and three other characters who have shown up to give substance to the demonstration of how women are always victimized by men and never have any of their own baggage. With no baggage, I think to myself, why would they give a flaccid, self-obsessed, weapons-grade waste of deoxyribonucleic acid the time of day, let alone let the little bastard touch them? I am surprised by the strength of my feelings on the matter. I barely knew her – Io, I mean, the woman they were depicting as Jude, the one that Callie calls Alice. Io lived in this house years ago, and it was her funeral that we had come back to attend, once they had gathered up what was left of her after the Icharus had finished dining.  All  of the figures on stage answer the Necrologue at the same time, all five of them, to give Jude’s real name.

“Radclyffe.”

“Hilde.”

“Georgia.”

“Gráinne.”

“Brónagh.”

There is a silence, not a long one, but very profound. I look back at Callie. She is standing up, her mouth tightened up in fury. She puts her hand over her mouth, looks away, looks back. Since I am facing that way anyway, I sneak a look at the Countess. Her sea-green eyes are widening, she is staring at the stage, she looks very alarmed but slightly amused.

“By the hornèd gods,” she says, turning around in her seat,  “What have you been up to, Callie?”

The year that my mother turned one hundred and sixty-four, I fell in love, at first sight, with a woman I saw on the street. All very bloody Dante and Beatrice. But what woman? I did not know her name until today, I didn’t know where she comes from, or what she did for a living. I knew nothing about her family, her school, her home. I did not know her age, whether she is entirely human. With no such information, with no metadata with which to contextualize her, how did I actually know even that she exists? I had never seen a photograph of her, seen the registration of her birth, or read her innermost thoughts shared with the world in bits and bytes. I had no proof of her, spotted no trace of her, and yet there she is, here, breathing, chemicals fizzing and electricity buzzing in the frenetic cellular world beneath her smooth flesh that is pale as grass, sea-green eyes glittering like glass. She provided no evidence of her existence and still has the temerity to be so very here.

What street did I see her on? How many names has that particular hill gone by – Catherdral Street, University Street, Barrack Street; what was it before a person know how to put brick upon brick? Did events ever overtake mere human useage – King’s Lane, Cromwell’s Hill, Reiver Way? Could the names of that unremarkable half-mile of dusty, narrow road provide a potted history of itself – Factory Road, Plague Pit Pass, Auto-da-Fe Corner, Wicker Man Cross, Stegasaurus Boulevard? My attempts to pin down the locale dwindle away, and all its identifiers are as water. As the street becomes less and less identifiable, and becomes more and more nothing but rock and clay and an overlay of human attempts to control chaos, my memory of it becomes more and more clear; the bright heat from the pavement, the buildings trapping the sunny air for the pedestrians to wade through, the world locked in by an empty sky, shining blue.

Almost a year later I see her again, I have travelled back into the past becauseI am now as I was then, not a hair has changed; I am breathless and love-swamped, and we still have not so much as spoken. Half an hour ago she was standing in a flickering hallway and I was so shocked my heart almost stopped beating. She is sitting not two feet away from me, looking past me, her sea-green eyes wide and amused, her helmet of pale hair tilted to one side. I am staring at her, I am lucky my tongue is not, as far as I can tell, actually hanging out; I am not certain because I am so over-whelmed, I seem to have lost all motor functions. To make matters worse, now she looks directly at me.

As we make eye contact, there is a burst of racous, windy wheezing, which is the Necrologue laughing. She is standing by the balcony rail, hooking her thin frame over it, her copper-orange hair at all angles. Her rags billow and trail from her, like an obscene celebration with rotting bunting and inverted flags. She laughs very loudly, joyously, so swelling with mirth that the Countess starts to smile and even I am amused. The Necrologue waves at Callie and points at the stage. The actors have edged together into an uneasy clot in the centre under the burning spotlight, and we can see, flickering into our plane of existence, pennants of shining dark material gathering together to form agile, shadow-like forms.

“What have you been up to, Callie?” she asks, gleefully and points to where the stage is now fringed with busy information avatars, “You wanted a collective consciousness, eh? You fucking got a collective consciousness!”

I am too shocked to speak. I did not think that the Avatars existed, not really. It is not that we disbelieved the reports of their appearance, but how could Horodotoi, trained since birth to record the absolute history of the world, believe that there was excess information? Just the facts, ma’am. These are the facts. You can see them above our heads, with every potential reality that ever existed, however briefly, during the years Io was here and as if that was not enough, the information avatars have actually come into the house.

Let me just explain a bit about the Information Avatars. Some years ago, during a radio broadcast, there was a strange emergence that the Pharaoh, naturally, insisted that we pretend did not occur. It is said that if a billion monkeys were set to typing on a billion keyboads – presumably for about a billion years – one of them eventually would produce the works of Shakespeare; this illustrates not evolution, as the Pharaoh claimed when he executed a journalist who repeated the story in print, but rather chaos theory, that patterns will eventually emerge from complicated systems. In the same way, with so much digital information, so much abandoned, random, used and re-used information, data, ones-and-zeros, eventually, the whole complicated mess started to develop its own patterns. With all the uncalled for information in the world, with the millions of people, who can not bear to stop documenting their life, adding to the bit-stream, all the people who feel that they are not alive unless they can see, someone else can see, the words that go so small a way towards describing that life, all the people trying to sell stuff, sell objects, sell people, sell ideas, sell histories, sell lifestyles, sell themselves, all the unread, forgotton, invalid, abandoned information, starts to come together. It stops swirling, as it were, it is as though the mindless data, having picked up the habit of coming together when called for, started randomly coming together on its own and out of all of those billions of random, dumb coincidences of dumb, random data, coherent results – results that unexpectedly made sense to the viewer – began to appear.

They were uncontrolled and without predictable pattern, they did not develop in accordance with any kind of recognized fractal but rather simply pulsed out image and noise, image and noise, for about four minutes at a time, and then disappeared. These emergences are reported much more often now, though they are always denied, and once the first emergence happened, there started to be the avatars. Whether they are intelligent beings or whether they are the equivilent of a synapse, blindly taking information hither and yon, is not known, as they have never been captured or examined. They turn up, like crows at the sea-shore, where there is a surfeit of information, and this is what has happened here, because of Io’s wake, because of our memories of her, because of the Ruth Judges Joshua play.

It is not known how they interact with information or what they do with it, the only thing that can be measured is the heat and electro-magneticism, both of which are drastically reduced when the avatars have been visiting. Callie, for reasons best known to herself, wanted to bring together everyone who knew Io and it is as though all the Ios – all the Alices, the Radclyffes, the Hildes and so on – have come into being. They all existed coinstantaneously while we were in this house and now they have all come back, but they have presumably also been joined by all the people Io was in the years between leaving the house and being slaughtered by an Icharus. If indeed, that is what happened to her finally. I begin to have my doubts.

But true to the tenets of the Warp World Movement, Callie siezes the situation by the balls and hoves forward with it (why can I not stop using metaphors? Why am I being so vulgar? Is the Necrologue contagious?)

“We have to understand and accept the chaotic nature of Alice,” she announces, “She was the embodiment of chaos, she was the personification of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

“What I love about this,” the Countess’ breath is suddenly sweet on my ear and I am goosepimples from neck to ankle, “Is the solidity of pronouncements of this nature from people who have no actual clue of what is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and how it might be manifest in the material world.”

Amazingly I manage a smile, and then I nod. The Countess has moved from her seat and is sitting beside me now, she smiles back at me, and we both look again towards the stage. I think what I love about her is her own solidity of pronouncement; she looks more comfortable in the skin she is in that does a tiger, every move is purposeful and complete. Up close her eyes look more green than blue and they glitter and gleam as though they might, as the police thought many centuries ago, hold in the iris the images that they have seen. She smells of apples, and earth, and of laundered clothes, and fresh hair, as no person has ever smelled before or will again.

“It breaks my heart to do this,” Callie says, and her hands are shaking, “but I owe it to Alice – I owe it to Alice’s grieving family – to set the scene on Alice’s internal landscape. So I will tell you the story of Alice’s first true love, the love that very nearly saved her.”

The Necrologue mutters oh sweet suffering Mary fucking Magdelene. The Countess remarks acidly that this should be interesting, considering the number of editions there appear to be of maps to Alice’s internal landscape.

I am so eaten up with curiousity, as so gob-smackingly shocked by the news that there apparently is more than one of Io, that I momentarily am released from the penitential custody of my loins and heart and can ask the Countess a simple question, even can lean towards her so I can whisper, but without incapacitating myself by contemplating the simultanously positive and negative consequences of physical contact, however accidental. The Countess looks at me again and smiles. She has huge eyes. I think she must not be entirely human.

“Well, I have an unfair advantage there,” she whispers back, her breath pulsing briefly in my ear like a wing-beat, “Because I know what it is.”

“I thought that the whole point was that we all thought we knew what it was?”

She looks at me again, surprised. She tilts her head to think about it, as though the movement would jog out a profound thought that might otherwise have  stayed put. Then she says,

“She’s a bit like a volume of classic literature. Everyone is sure that they know it, everyone has their favourite part, their favourite adaptation, their favourite translation. But it never quite adds up to the real thing because no-body has actually read it.”

I am about to protest – the number of works of classic literature through which I have ploughed my determined way is something I insist on sharing with people as a pay-back for ensuring they don’t have to do the hard slog themselves – but before I can speak, the Necrologue speaks again.

“In my opinion we should stop arseing around telling ghost stories. Because in a house like this – in a house in this sort of state of transition – well. You never know who might hear you. You never know who might be here again, who has been gone a long time. And we don’t know why the avatars are here.”

You have never seen a group of urbane, civilized people regress so fast to a state of pre-literate, superstitious terror. It was like watching a fast-forward of rotting fruit, there faces lose all expression apart from recognition of the faces of those they would most fear to see alive again. I am not affected – there is no one who brings out my guilt in a rash like that – and neither is the Countess, consolidating my suspicion that she is not completely human. After all, who knows the appearance of Artemis?

“Oh, no!” says the Countess, and looks at me as though for support. She looks badly disappointed, and her face is so open and sad that my insides ripple and I want to touch her cheek.

“I want to hear the rest of the stories,” she says quietly.

“But look at the information avatars,” I say, also softly, “They´re dangerous. They – well. We have to get the actors out, to safety.”

The Countess laughs a little and looks at me again, her face adult once more.

“Safe,” she repeats, “in a house like this? A house drawing in realities from who knows where?”

She holds my gaze for a moment. I start to count. Once, I was told that if someone holds your gaze for more than six seconds they will either kill you, or go to bed with you. After four seconds, the Countess looks away thoughtfully.

“It´s a point, though. We should keep together. It is dangerous.”

She was not, I noticed, looking at the avatars.

“The only thing to decide then,” says the Chorus, flicking back her blonde hair in a carefree manner, “Is whether we come up there or you come down here.”

She is glancing nervously at the avatars, who are flickering and creeping around the edges of the stage, doing what avatars do – collecting information and scaring the shit out of everyone. She does not want the audience to come butting in to the play, this is definitely more Morality than Brecht, but she does not fancy making her way past that unknowable boundary of glittering shapes.

“More to the point,” says Sullivan, “How are either of us going to move?”

The Countess turns around and looks at Sullivan.  Callie is nowhere to be seen. Sullivan says,

“You know, you might be right. A vampire might be just the ticket.”

I put my hands over my face, I want to shut out this bewilderment. A straightforward wake has turned into some butchered nightmere. I must recover myself. I run my hands over my hair, breathe in through my nose, breathe out through the vents on the back on my neck. Vampires, indeed. Sullivan and the Countess are speaking together in low tones. Despite the flickering angles of the Avatars, the atmosphere is peaceful, the sort of interim blankness in which I work well. I have my papers about me now, my pen, my dictionary, my thesaurus. I control the world by the words that I write, and I will have Io in her proper place if it is the last thing that I do. In the centre of the page is a perfect circle. This is Io. I begin to attach her tags. Bronagh. Georgia. Alice. Io. The page is a Tropemaster, a template for history writing, honed over millenia by the Horodotoi, and I who have been using this since I was a child hardly need to look at the protruding corners that give the paper its Martian texture, my fingers flick slickly between them and the correct child-page pulses briskly into being. I begin to add her catalogue terms and as I do, the stink of the Necrologue assails me and she reads over my shoulder, and she laughs, and begins to sing.

The language of history, used by the Horodotoi, is not natural language; our moving finger does not write so much as play and then move on. The depressions and bumps left on the bio-chemical paper by the styli embedded in our fingers resemble the characters in Braille, but the language we use is at least as much like music as it is like language. We can encapsulate in a few fleet movements not just the word – the signifier of the event and all other events to which it is connected – but the music of it, the sense of the lived experience, those wordless triggers that bring it all back; we have the same capacity to capture and identify those divine sparks of memory – indescribable but which are recognised once seen – as a hound has to follow scent. A literary critic once described us has having fingers of Madelines, which amused the terribly clever because it was so terribly intertextually referentially. Oh, yes, a clever man. I believe he had a terrible accident with a window some time afterwards. In any event, my point is this -  we Horodotoi write history in the language of history, which is not natural language and which has to be interpreted for most people; I have never met a full human capable of reading it. And yet here is the Necrologue, reading aloud the terms I have written to encapsulate Io. Woman. Victim. Lesbian. Student of Literature. She even makes fun of them.

She is handsome, she is pretty, she is the Belle of Belfast City.

            She is courting, one, two, three, please can you tell me who is she.

“Well, good friggin luck to you,” she adds, as she walks off, “When none of youse even seem to know what her friggin name is.”

The song she hummed seems to have set off a train of thought in her head, and she starts to beat her hands on the wooden partition behind her, and sings something very fast, and syncopated, that sounded like it was meant to be sung by very drunk people who were only just sober enough to bang their glasses on a table every or so seven beats. It sounded the sort of song that started its life because a bunch of rowdies in doublet and hose decided to dance instead of fight, and then someone, some intimidated minstrel grabbed and held up with terrifying jovility against a wall, scribbled some insane lyrics to give them all something to shout. What other reason could there be for such an unlikely, Rabelaisian narrative? Who goes to Liverpool to reap corn? A body of water blocked with reeds? The Necrologue is glowering at me as she beats the wood, and I will not look away first. The house is beginning to sound as though everyone has joined in, people who are not even there, it is loud and confused and exhilerating, and even though I am beginning to be afraid I wonder if this is just the fear of walking in late at night to a public house when everyone is loud and crammed and sweating and you are the only sober being for miles, apart from cats and pigeons. There is a wild and rushing sound, as though a wind has just spring up, and I can not prevent myself from jumping, startled, and looking towards the window.

When I look back, there is a red-haired vampire in a long green dress standing between Sullivan and the Countess. I have never seen a vampire before and I am immediately, professionally, curious as to how I am so sure that she is a vampire. The Necrologue laughs and for the first time I actually look at her teeth. They are perfectly straight and white, and appear to be her own and not at all the glistening brown and red stumps I was sure that I had seen when she laughed.

“Now, for you,” she says, “And you thought you only ever saw the real truth. But you recognized a vampire when you saw one.”

The Necrologue is right, damn her. The vampire’s long hair, a dark, polished red copper as opposed to the dank firework of the Necrologue’s head, hide the membranes and scales that I know from encyclopediae develop along the necks of phlebophile (as opposed to genetic) vampires. She is white as an albatross. Her dress is green like algae, and is shot with silver thread. Naturally, she is not in full display, as she is not intending to eat either Sullivan or the Countess – and I blame on the presence of the Necrologue the fact that I cannot not think of that phrase´s more crude interpretation – and it is very curious that I know, without doubt, what she is, while I am unable to see, as it were, her markings. I have little time to pursue the matter. By whatever manner of means, the vampire´s arrival has heralded a rescue – as there was a stairs spiralling above our heads, from the stalls into the invisible and eternal depths of the house, now there is a stairs spiralling from the stage, that will carry the actors safely past the avatars. The stairs goes above our heads but off to one side, and it leads to the threshold of a room, which I can see from here is quite solid. I do not understand exactly how the vampire did this, but I assume that it is connected with the fact that vampires, being immortal, are outside time. Add that fact to the peculiar quantam flexibility of this house, at this time, I suppose the reappearance of a stairs that used to be here is not quite as astonishing as it might appear. I stand up, and look over the balcony at the actors, and I am astonished to see that they are clustering uneasily by the foot of the spiralling staircase. The vampire is looking down at them, then she shrugs, shakes hands with the Countess, and hugs Sullivan so tightly that I begin to worry. Then she runs up into the flickering house above us, and appears to be swallowed. At any rate she disappears.

“Her name is Cliodhna,” the Necrologue says to me, “Like the sacred wave. She has been alive – well, in existence – and in Galway for so long that she is still connected to a time when this house was a lighthouse.”

We both stand looking over the balcony. I am confused. Why on earth are they hanging around? They were terrified of the avatars, terrified, speechless with fear. Yet they still stand there, looking doubtfully at the stairs. I look at the Necrologue. She looks at our fellow-human as though trying to read small print, and then she leans over the railing.

“I don’t believe you lot!”

She does not exactly shout but she does speak very loudly indeed. She jams her hands onto her hips and glares at us, one by one. The Countess, who has one foot on the stairs, and Sullivan, who is  six steps up, she passes over.

“It’s no wonder you’re a fucking endangered species! By Divine Gabriel – they dredge up a fucking staircase for you,rifle through centuries to rescue you from things you think will – I don’t know, suck your few pitiable brains out through your arses and what do you all do? What do you do? You stand there looking at it like it was stuck to the sole of your shoe, like Saint Thomas, peering at the Anointed’s ribs, picking at the arteries, saying It’s not quite what I expected, you know.  Climb the goddamed motherfucking staircase, you solipsistic sons of bitches, or I will throw you into the goddamned abyss myself.”

By the time the last expletive has dried on the Necrologue’s lip, the painter and the Countess are at the top of the stairs, followed by a breadcrumb-trail of the chastened.

The room we stay in is oddly laid out, but absolutely perfect, I think, for our purposes. It is laid out in a large circle, but seems cluttered and full as soon as we are all inside and the door is shut. What I like about it is that it has a utilitarian feel to it, and an almost military atmosphere that I think is very suitable to the mood of unexpected, required cameraderie. At that moment we are all feeling the same physical reaction, the relief of escape; each of us feels our bones warming, our blood achieve its rhythym, we feel soft and warm and affectionate, now that the danger has passed.

I lie down on one of the bunks that line the wall. I am the first to arrive in the sanctuary, and so I take out a book of poems, to while away the time. It is small volume given to me by a somewhat mischevous friend who had divined the truth about the Countess. Well, when I say divined – the truth is she got me drunk on champagne, the kind of drunk where everything is right with the world, and I told her. The result was the post-man´s horse pulling up outside my house and delivering my copy of Neither Honey nor the Honey-bee.

The Countess and Sullivan are speaking together in low voices, still by the door. The Necrologue drops onto her bunk, with an expression of almost canine enjoyment of the luxury; her bunk is adjoining mine but at an angle so we can speak while looking at each other. She wriggles into the cushions and the crisply rustling cloth and sighs with a deep and honest contentment. She is someone who knows shattered roads, tiled beds and doubtful food, and so knows the true meaning of comfort. I almost expect her to wag her tail.

“I´m not going to wag my tail,” she says sharply to me, “So quit eyeballing me like that.”

I am mortified but my training helps me out. The Countess and Sullivan kiss, in the quick and absent-minded way people have when it is nothing more than greeting, and Sullivan takes the bench opposite me, while the Countess, to my adolescent delight, takes the bench between us.

“I suppose it´s from Muinbeo you two know each other,” the Necrologue says to Sullivan. Sullivan nods slowly, as not entirely sure that she should confirm this statement.

“In a manner of speaking.”

The Countess looks at her beautiful hands, and with a glance at me that seems almost compulsive, she says,

“My family did not live in Muinbeo. They did not move back there until very recently.”

“Why not?” demanded the Necrologue.

Sullivan looks at the Countess, but she seems very calm.

“There is a considerable amount of prejudice in Muinbeo,” she says, “ Against aliens. My father is an alien. They were afraid of the consequences for my sister and I, so we lived away for a long time. Just on the other side of the border, though.”

“Have you ever been to Muinbeo?” the Necrologue demands of me, in her disconcertingly abrupt manner. I shake my head slowly, not out of reluctance to respond but because those of us who are Herodotoi learn slow movements, otherwise – frankly – our beehive of hair will fall down. I have always wanted to go to Muinbeo, to see the strangeness for myself.

“I have never thought about it before,” the Necrologue says, and unexpectedly her voice is soft and resonant, so we all turn our heads in surprise, “I thought that I had found all the answers just by knowing that there were questions. But maybe I should try and get a permit. Get nose-to-nose with some genuine mysteries.”

“But you said you were facing death,” I say, “You say you were about to breathe your last and you were whisked away to here. You have been more than nose-to-nose with a mystery.”

The Necrologue says,

“Death is not a mystery, it is merely an unknowable. It has no form and no boundaries.  A mystery has boundaries but they are porous. A mystery looks like it will tell you something but instead it implies infinities, and infinities of infinities. It throws shadows, leaves footprints, drops bones and gives you no answers, just suggestions that you almost understand something profound. A mystery is the number of angels that can fit on the tip of your tongue, where you almost know their names. An unknowable is the eye of a god.”

“Since you are a Necrologue, I think you are likely to be permitted in to Muinbeo.”

“You have a Thanatos, don’t you?” demands the Necrologue, turning to Sullivan. Sullivan nods doubtfully. I guess that her doubt is not over whether or not Muinbeo has this gatekeeper between the dead and the living, but at the thought of this presumably august person shaking hands with the walking midden that is the Necrologue. The Countess is clearly struck by the same image and she laughs aloud. She has a charming, melodious laugh, and she jerks her shoulders back as she laughs, as though humour had loomed unexpectedly into her path and made her shy back like a horse. To my absolute horror, the Necrologue makes exactly the same motion as she starts to laugh her joyous, bubbling laugh at the image of her rank paw in the scrubbed palm of the Thanatos.

The Countess and the shit-bag look at each other. I could weep. This has resolved nothing, I have none of the answers I need or those that I deserve. Bosco is still dead. I have not proven Callie’s guilt as I was asked to do; instead, Sullivan has thrown a vampire into the equation. All about me in this accursed house are all the things that I suspect that I did not know, and that now will haunt me. I do not know why Callie froze in on herself, as though an Icharus had seen her, when she heard Sullivan’s name. I have not told the Countess that I am in love with her. Fuck, as the Necrologue might say. Fuck.

The Countess says,

“Presumably you were not actually named The Necrologue when you were born. What name were you given?”

“I was, if you can believe it, named after the great Egyptian library. Alexandria. Sorrow Alexandria,” she adds, “Though as a child I was always called Alex. Sorrow Alexandria Rowan.”

The Countess has been nodding, she nods now and continues nodding. She looks at Sullivan who makes an astonished face.

“Well, Cousin Alex,” the Countess says, “We have rather been looking for you.”

The Necrologue stares at her for several minutes. Everyone else is in such a state of shock – and, speaking personally, distress – that they just sit there, like cartoon figures of surprise, eyebrows up, jaws down. No-one speaks. I look at the Countess, but her beautiful face is quite blank. The Necrologue shakes her head slightly, moves her lips silently, and then says,

“Well fuck me gently with a chainsaw. Cousin Alice?”

Two things to mention: in Thicker than Water, for anyone who has not come across the names before Cliodhna is pronounced Clee-ona and Eoghan is like Owen. Necrologue has been previously published, as the title story in a collection published in 2003 by Diva; the collection as a whole won a LAMDA award.

Some other sites:

http://placeofpigs.wordpress.com/place-of-pigs/

http://sites.google.com/site/paganplaceart/

http://gurriers.wordpress.com/

http://goodredherring.wordpress.com/2009/08/