eyes, the lost look he put on for her.
    It was a fine game.
    Indeed, at first that was all it had been-a game. Now Simon knew they were playing 
for bigger stakes; what had begun as a sort of lie-detection test had turned into a very 
serious contest: McNeal versus the Truth. The truth was simple: he was a cheat. He penned 
all his "ghost-writings" on the wall with tiny shards of lead he secreted under his 
tongue: he banged and thrashed and shouted without any provocation other than the sheer 
mischief of it: and the unknown names he wrote, ha, he laughed to think of it, the names 
he found in telephone directories.
    Yes, it was indeed a fine game.
    She promised him so much, she tempted him with fame, encouraging every lie that he 
invented. Promises of wealth, of applauded appearances on the television, of an adulation 
he'd never known before. As long as he produced the ghosts.
    He smiled the smile again. She called him her Go-Between: an innocent carrier of 
messages. She'd be up the stairs soon-her eyes on his body, his voice close to tears with 
her pathetic excitement at another series of scrawled names and nonsense.
    He liked it when she looked at his nakedness, or all but nakedness. All his sessions 
were carried out with him only dressed in a pair of briefs, to preclude any hidden aids. 
A ridiculous precaution. All he needed were the leads under his tongue, and enough energy 
to fling himself around for half an hour, bellowing his head off.
    He was sweating. The groove of his breast-bone was slick with it, his hair plastered 
to his pale forehead. Today had been hard work: he was looking forward to getting out of 
the room, sluicing himself down, and basking in admiration awhile. The Go-Between put his 
hand down his briefs and played with himself, idly. Somewhere in the room a fly, or flies 
maybe, were trapped. It was late in the season for flies, but he could hear them 
somewhere close. They buzzed and fretted against the window, or around the light bulb. He 
heard their tiny fly voices, but didn't question them, too engrossed in his thoughts of 
the game, and in the simple delight of stroking himself.
    How they buzzed, these harmless insect voices, buzzed and sang and complained. How 
they complained.
    Mary Florescu drummed the table with her fingers. Her wedding ring was loose today, 
she felt it moving with the rhythm of her tapping. Sometimes it was tight and sometimes 
loose: one of those small mysteries that she'd never analysed properly but simply 
accepted. In fact today it was very loose: almost ready to fall off. She thought of 
Alan's face. Alan's dear face. She thought of it through a hole made of her wedding ring, 
as if down a tunnel. Was that what his death had been like: being carried away and yet 
further away down a tunnel to the dark? She thrust the ring deeper on to her hand. 
Through the tips of her index-finger and thumb she seemed almost to taste the sour metal 
as she touched it. It was a curious sensation, an illusion of some kind.
    To wash the bitterness away she thought of the boy. His face came easily, so very 
easily, splashing into her consciousness with his smile and his unremarkable physique, 
still unmanly. Like a girl really-the roundness of him, the sweet clarity of his skin-the 
innocence.
    Her fingers were still on the ring, and the sourness she had tasted grew. She looked 
up. Fuller was organizing the equipment. Around his balding head a nimbus of pale green 
light shimmered and wove-She suddenly felt giddy.
    Fuller saw nothing and heard nothing. His head was bowed to his business, engrossed. 
Mary stared at him still, seeing the halo on him, feeling new sensations waking in her, 
coursing through her. The air seemed suddenly alive: the very molecules of oxygen, 
hydrogen, nitrogen jostled against her in an intimate embrace. The nimbus around Fuller's 
head was spreading, finding fellow radiance in every object in the room. The unnatural 
sense in her fingertips was spreading too. She could see the colour of her breath as she 
exhaled it: a pinky orange glamour in the bubbling air. She could hear, quite clearly, 
the voice of the desk she sat at: the low whine of its solid presence.
    The world was opening up: throwing her senses into an ecstasy, coaxing them into a 
wild confusion of functions. She was capable, suddenly, of knowing the world as a system, 
not of politics or religions, but as a system of senses, a system that spread out from 
the living flesh to the inert wood of her desk, to the stale gold of her wedding ring.
    And further. Beyond wood, beyond gold. The crack opened that led to the highway. In 
her head she heard voices that came from no living mouth.
    She looked up, or rather some force thrust her head back violently and she found 
herself staring up at the ceiling. It was covered with worms. No, that was absurd! It 
seemed to be alive, though, maggoty with life-pulsing, dancing.
    She could see the boy through the ceiling. He was sitting on the floor, with his 
jutting member in his hand. His head was thrown back, like hers. He was as lost in his 
ecstasy as she was. Her new sight saw the throbbing light in and around his body-traced 
the passion that was seated in his gut, and his head molten with pleasure.
    It saw another sight, the lie in him, the absence of power where she'd thought there 
had been something wonderful. He had no talent to commune with ghosts, nor had ever had, 
she saw this plainly. He was a little liar, a boy-liar, a sweet, white boy-liar without 
the compassion or the wisdom to understand what he had dared to do.
    Now it was done. The lies were told, the tricks were played, and the people on the 
highway, sick beyond death of being misrepresented and mocked, were buzzing at the crack 
in the wall, and demanding satisfaction.
    That crack she had opened: she had unknowingly fingered and fumbled at, unlocking it 
by slow degrees. Her desire for the boy had done that: her endless thoughts of him, her 
frustration, her heat and her disgust at her heat had pulled the crack wider. Of all the 
powers that made the system manifest, love, and its companion, passion, and their 
companion, loss, were the most potent. Here she was, an embodiment of all three. Loving, 
and wanting, and sensing acutely the impossibility of the former two. Wrapped up in an 
agony of feeling which she had denied herself, believing she loved the boy simply as her 
Go-Between.
    It wasn't true! It wasn't true! She wanted him, wanted him now, deep inside her. 
Except that now it was too late.
    The traffic could be denied no longer: it demanded, yes, it demanded access to the 
little trickster.
    She was helpless to prevent it. All she could do was utter a tiny gasp of horror as 
she saw the highway open out before her, and understood that this was no common 
intersection they stood at.
    Fuller heard the sound.
    "Doctor?" He looked up from his tinkering and his face-washed with a blue light she 
could see from the corner of her eye-bore an expression of enquiry.
    "Did you say something?" he asked.
    She thought, with a fillip of her stomach, of how this was bound to end.
    The ether-faces of the dead were quite clear in front of her. She could see the 
profundity of their suffering and she could sympathize with their ache to be heard.
    She saw plainly that the highways that crossed at Tollington Place were not common 
thoroughfares. She was not staring at the happy, idling traffic of the ordinary dead. No, 
that house opened onto a route walked only by the victims and the perpetrators of 
violence. The men, the women, the children who had died enduring all the pains nerves had