this extremity he had dredged up a true talent, a skill that was a fraction of Mary's, 
but enough to make contact with her. Their eyes met. In a sea of blue darkness, 
surrounded on every side with a civilization they neither knew nor understood, their 
living hearts met and married.
    "I'm sorry," he said silently. It was infinitely pitiful. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." He 
looked away, his gaze wrenched from hers.
    She was certain she must be almost at the top of the stairs, her feet still treading 
air as far as her eyes could tell, the faces of the travellers above, below and on every 
side of her. But she could see, very faintly, the outline of the door, and the boards and 
beams of the room where Simon lay. He was one mass of blood now, from head to foot. She 
could see the marks, the hieroglyphics of agony on every inch of his torso, his face, his 
limbs. One moment he seemed to flash into a kind of focus, and she could see him in the 
empty room, with the sun through the window, and the shattered jug at his side. Then her 
concentration would falter and instead she'd see the invisible world made visible, and 
he'd be hanging in the air while they wrote on him from every side, plucking out the hair 
on his head and body to clear the page, writing in his armpits, writing on his eyelids, 
writing on his genitals, in the crease of his buttocks, on the soles of his feet.
    Only the wounds were in common between the two sights. Whether she saw him beset with 
authors, or alone in the room, he was bleeding and bleeding.
    She had reached the door now. Her trembling hand stretched to touch the solid reality 
of the handle, but even with all the concentration she could muster it would not come 
clear. There was barely a ghost-image for her to focus on, though it was sufficient. She 
grasped the handle, turned it, and flung the door of the writing room open.
    He was there, in front of her. No more than two or three yards of possessed air 
separated them. Their eyes met again, and an eloquent look, common to the living and the 
dead worlds, passed between them. There was compassion in that look, and love. The 
fictions fell away, the lies were dust. In place of the boy's manipulative smiles was a 
true sweetness-answered in her face.
    And the dead, fearful of this look, turned their heads away. Their faces tightened, 
as though the skin was being stretched over the bone, their flesh darkening to a bruise, 
their voices becoming wistful with the anticipation of defeat. She reached to touch him, 
no longer having to fight against the hordes of the dead; they were falling away from 
their quarry on every side, like dying flies dropping from a window.
    She touched him, lightly, on the face. The touch was a benediction. Tears filled his 
eyes, and ran down his scarified cheek, mingling with the blood.
    The dead had no voices now, nor even mouths. They were lost along the highway, their 
malice dammed.
    Plane by plane the room began to re-establish itself. The floor-boards became visible 
under his sobbing body, every nail, every stained plank. The windows came clearly into 
view-and outside the twilight street was echoing with the clamour of children. The 
highway had disappeared from living human sight entirely. Its travellers had turned their 
faces to the dark and gone away into oblivion, leaving only their signs and their 
talismans in the concrete world.
    On the middle landing of Number 65 the smoking, blistered body of Reg Fuller was 
casually trodden by the travellers" feet as they passed over the intersection. At length 
Fuller's own soul came by in the throng and glanced down at the flesh he had once 
occupied, before the crowd pressed him on towards his judgement.
    Upstairs, in the darkening room, Mary Florescu knelt beside the McNeal boy and 
stroked his blood-plastered head. She didn't want to leave the house for assistance until 
she was certain his tormentors would not come back.
    There was no sound now but the whine of a jet finding its way through the 
stratosphere to morning. Even the boy's breathing was hushed and regular. No nimbus of 
light surrounded him. Every sense was in place. Sight. Sound. Touch.
    Touch.
    She touched him now as she had never previously dared, brushing her fingertips, oh so 
lightly, over his body, running her fingers across the raised skin like a blind woman 
reading braille. There were minute words on every millimetre of his body, written in a 
multitude of hands. Even through the blood she could discern the meticulous way that the 
words had harrowed into him. She could even read, by the dimming light, an occasional 
phrase. It was proof beyond any doubt, and she wished, oh God how she wished, that she 
had not come by it. And yet, after a lifetime of waiting, here it was: the revelation of 
life beyond flesh, written in flesh itself.
    The boy would survive, that was clear. Already the blood was drying, and the myriad 
wounds healing. He was healthy and strong, after all: there would be no fundamental 
physical damage. His beauty was gone forever, of course. From now on he would be an 
object of curiosity at best, and at worst of repugnance and horror. But she would protect 
him, and he would learn, in time, how to know and trust her. Their hearts were 
inextricably tied together.
    And after a time, when the words on his body were scabs and scars, she would read 
him. She would trace, with infinite love and patience, the stories the dead had told on 
him.
    The tale on his abdomen, written in a fine, cursive style. The testimony in 
exquisite, elegant print that covered his face and scalp. The story on his back, and on 
his shin, on his hands.
    She would read them all, report them all, every last syllable that glistened and 
seeped beneath her adoring fingers, so that the world would know the stories that the 
dead tell.
    He was a Book of Blood, and she his sole translator.
    As darkness fell, she left off her vigil and led him, naked, into the balmy night.
    
    Here then are the stories written on the Book of Blood. Read, if it pleases you, and 
learn.
    They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown 
destinations. Few will have to take it. Most will go peacefully along lamplit streets, 
ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors 
will come, skipping to fetch them off to the highway of the damned.
    So read. Read and learn.
    It's best to be prepared for the worst, after all, and wise to learn to walk before 
breath runs out.
    
    
    
    
    THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN
    
    
    LEON KAUFMAN WAS no longer new to the city. The Palace of Delights, he'd always 
called it, in the days of his innocence. But that was when he'd lived in Atlanta, and New 
York was still a kind of promised land, where anything and everything was possible.
    Now Kaufman had lived three and a half months in his dream-city, and the Palace of