You're a good guy, Doc. You're sensitive and caring and compassionate. And if I could, I'd spew in your face.

"Hello, Kay. Isn't it a bit wet to be painting?"

"Kay's down in the underground, where there's no rain. You're talking to the hangman's beautiful daughter."

I've tried to be like them, I really have. But what happens when you just can't be strong anymore? What happens if you're weak? My painting's ruined. Everything's gone wrong.

Guy was a human torch, you know? Literally. His hair... everything... but he kept on walking. Real slow, like in a bad dream. Before he died, he said something weird. I... I got it written down right here. "...scissormen... The scissormen!"

It begins to rain fish. Mackerel. Herring. Sea bass. Pike. Sturgeon. Tench. Plaice. Salmon. From a clear sky. Trout. No cod.

"Rain Brain says your voice is like an old black telephone and Black Annis told me to tell you that you're the first man she hasn't wanted to castrate."

"Tell her she'd be too late anyway."

"Thirdly be grimmer as fond brevities."

"Eider with alders."

"And erethism safer."

In Rome, in Leningrad, in Darwin. "The door flew open, in he ran, the great, long, red-legged scissorman."

I couldn't think of one clever way to stop this guy, so I just trusted to mindless violence.

"Jane? Jane, are you... Oh my God."

"There is no God. I killed him."

All I want is the answer to one simple question before I run screaming back to the bughouse. Is this real or isn't it?

"It might help to consider the Zen koan, 'First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.'"

"Sure. That's really helped to clear things up."

Here the skull of a consumptive child becomes part of a great machine for calculating the motions of the stars. Here, a yellow bird frets within the ribcage of an unjust man.

You know, all of a sudden I can't think of anything even remotely funny to say.

Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know?

"You shot your imaginary friends? With what?"

"An imaginary gun! What else?"

I wish I were an angry shoe, a bodiless balloon. Cut off my covenant with God the pain of orthopedic glue.

"Shouldn't we put Cliff's brain back into the body?"

"Later, Joshua. I refuse to perform a delicate operation without chocolate."

"Where is my gum? I must try to look as normal as possible."

"I believe you stuck it onto the side of my head."

Chess! I'm tormented by thoughts of strip chess. Pure mind just isn't enough, Mallah. I long for a body.

Instead, you and I became the cornerstones of the Brotherhood of Evil! An empire of crime such as I'd dreamed of back in the old school, when the other children used to laugh at me because I was a brain in a tank.

I don't think. I just act. You brains are the ones who do all the thinking. You ruin it for us bodies.

Kiss me, Mallah! But first... please.. take that gum out of your mouth.

Oh, Venice, Venice, what have you allowed yourself to become? Crushed by the weight of your own past, stinking slowly into the waves. They've taken away your function, removed you from the present and from the future, and turned you into a drug mainlined into the veins of history junkies.

I'm warning you--I have a boiled egg and I know how to use it!

Now. Take this street to New Mexico.

The Living Guru! Hip-hop bishop of beat! The cool, gone Daddio of the Deva Dimensions!

You could say it all started in Arizona. Twenty-five years ago. On a farm.

It was an ordinary sort of farm in Arizona. The kind of place where you'd have sexual relations with your parents and end up shooting someone.

The well was like an old man who'd lost the desire to get dressed in the mornings. The well would sit around all day in its pajamas waiting for something to happen... Twenty-five years ago something did happen.

On Tuesdays he also wears the blue socks and the grey underwear and counts his bath towels. He has twenty-five bath towels. But how could anyone survive with less?

Michael is a tree ape who lost most of his hairs and now has nightmares about black horses and cancer. Sometimes he feels like a rumor drifting through a world of hard facts. What's the point of you, Michael?

The little mind games he plays, like reciting the dictionary backwards from memory, fail to amuse him for long. The walls of the world have been torn down and the wind that blows through is cold and preposterous.

He creates a new language, a new grammar, eight cases and five genders. This passes twenty minutes. Then it's boredom again...

Boredom, ennui, absurdity. His closest, his only friends... It looks like there's nothing for him to do but get dressed.

He couldn't face Sandra this morning. Crept out without saying goodbye. There's a dent on the hood of his car. There's a green lizard floating across the road.

You see, you're all wrong. My name isn't Brain Eater. I am the Head. And I don't simply eat brains. It's something deeper than that. Something magical. Something transubstantiational. Excuse me one moment while I ... <shlurppp>

Many primitive [*] peoples believe that if you eat a person's brains, you acquire his knowledge.

[*] Footnote: A primitive person is one who doesn't drive a car. Cars are among the greatest causes of premature deaths of lizards in Arizona.

When the honey of another's life touches my nervous system I could almost be sucking on God's little finger.

As soon as Roger saw the costume, his mind assumed the proportions of an industrial revolution unaware of the ecological damage it was causing.

His first victim was a priest. Roger's senses were blessed with furtive longings and sweet altar wine.

I am the Head and I demand your shrunken experiences now!

What do you think? Which has a better, a more sublimely developed, sense of the ridiculous? Life? Or death? Or me? Or Michael Smith?

If it wasn't for the fact that a monster called the Head was plunging a metal pipe up his nose preparatory to sucking his brains out, Michael Smith could almost laugh.

At last he's got it. He's got the joke. The joke is life. The punchline is that there are so many things he'd like to do with his life, now that his life is over. Not much of a joke. Not much of a life.

I know who you are, he thinks. You're my old secret pal... You're the Enigma, he thinks... And then dies.

"But as the papers say, he's caught the public's imagination."

"Didn't know they had any."

He sits quite still for two days, forgetting to move. Remembering the previous two days with such precision that it takes fully two days to remember them... remembering with such clarity that he forgets for a while that this is a memory and not the thing remembered.

Is this enough? Does this make it worthwhile? Does this make it less absurd? With these actions can I recreate the dark and sensible walls of an abandoned well?

He took the Head in his arms and looked into the eyes, looking for recognition, meaning, something, and seeing only madness and death, bashed his head open.

... lies and half-truths and deceits. Our society is built on them. Our churches and schools and politicians deal in them. Your entire lives are awash with them.

"Who among you can claim to be honest? Who does not lie? You? Do you claim to be honest?"

"Ahhh, I just work here, sir."

"If you could step outside..."

"There is no outside. There is no inside or outside, no up or down, when it comes to the truth."

For a moment he hesitates, memories stirring. Another life, another person. Suntans, lies and half-truths, a wife, a mistress, the clandestine clinic for cocaine dependency... A package arriving one morning containing a see-through, a brutually honest see-through body stocking...

The Truth fixes the unlucky man with a stare of such dismal honesty that the complex layers of lies and illusions on which the man's life is based fall away, one by one, leaving in their place all that is left once the lies have gone... nothing.

Should we say any words? We can't just turn him off like he was a microwave or something.

Look at me. Look into my eyes. See the bitter truth of your life reflected in them. All those lonely nights. All those nasty thoughts. You're the actor. You're the one playing a character who is a lie!

For a second he feels almost solid. Almost as though he were a real person in a real world.

The ants scurrying about, busily feeding, fighting, collecting, building, dying. The lizards watching the world as though they're wise, but they're not wise, just ugly enough to be wise.

It's like the book of Revelations, but funnier. It's like the Last Trumpet, but hopelessly out of tune. It's like the perennial battle between good and evil but no one can quite work out which is which anymore, and most people don't even know what perennial means.

The Truth has entered the church. He broke in a few hours ago and gave a sermon on the kind of truths you won't find in any book. Good, bad, or indifferent. Thirty-five believers, ten agnostics and two closet Satanists kicked the Eucharist.

But look at these others. The Enigmatics, they call themselves. Did these apes lose most of their brains when they lost most of their hair? They can't wait to leave their parents, then once they've left them, can't wait to find new and bigger parents to obey.

My own characters have come to life to get me, I thought. I should have been nicer to them.

Dad died in the last big earthquake to hit Pacific. It was like, after that, Mom was scared of anything chaotic in our lives. Like everything was on the edge of collapsing, getting sucked into an earthquake of chaos.

"Someone, I think John Cage, said that life without order was chaos, but order without life was death."

"Who's John Cage?"

"It doesn't matter."

Hey, Michael, you really don't want to go in there. No, really you don't. The Truth hurts, you know...

"Are you ready for me? Are you ready for my indifference? For my abysmal disinterest? Are you ready to have the lies and conceits of your life peeled away like so many layers of skin? Are you ready for the truth?"

"Ahhh... No, I... I don't really think I am..."

Too bad. The truth is a rude guest. The truth doesn't knock on the door and wait to be asked in.

Look into my eyes. You will see the dull horror of your childhood and we will begin to dissect this pointless obsession of yours.

When he opens his eyes he finds himself in a nightmare world surrounded by nightmare creatures with grotesque ovoid heads and wildly flapping limbs. Michael tells the policemen he remembers nothing.

Exactly the Truth is being carted out, to the cheers of the crowd, who obviously fail to see the irony of the Truth dying in a church. Actually, I fail to see the irony in that too, but who cares what I think? I mean, do I really care what you think? Who are you anyway? I mean, are you following any of this?

Someone has broken into his house and completely rearranged the furniture. And as he looks at the room, now so grotesquely unfamiliar, it's as though something breaks into John's head, and completely rearranges the furniture there.

"TV and papers are full of it. They creep into homes and rearrange the furniture."

"My God! The monsters!"

It seems they rearrange the furniture in such a way that somehow, God knows how, it drives at least one member of the household crazy. Like the furniture arranged in this pattern is a key that unlocks the mind...

Like so many others who have abandoned jobs, families, commitments; who chucked in the whole caboodle, torn up their past lives and all they'd thought important to seek out Envelope Girl. All captivated by her strong manila arms, her lovely gumminess, the heady allure of her zip code.

Returned to his place, he sits quite still, pretending he doesn't exist, which is a harder game than you might imagine.

Oh great. Charlie Manson is on my side. Things are really looking up.

You know what impresses me about you? Your ability to be as pathetic as you are and not want to kill yourself. If I were you, I'd have to kill myself.

What does it mean, huh? What does it mean when those kids die so... pointlessly? It doesn't mean anything, does it? That's the scary part. If it meant something, you could handle it, but it doesn't.

Look, they're carrying the corpses away, ho hum.

Do I sound detached? Indifferent? I'm not, believe me. I'll tell you a secret: I'm not a distant narrator, aloof from the action of this story... I'm a part of this story.

It's the following day and two more houses have been redecorated by the Interior League. Five people dead.

But somehow lizards are connected to all this. They're a constant theme.

What are we doing in this suburban living room? And look at that furniture, for God's sake!

The eyes burn with all the wet violence of the young and all the dry malevolence of the old. ... This creature will play a big part in our story, you wait.

Molesters and foul abusers of comfy chairs and imitation Edwardian sideboards, deflowerers of teak coffee tables and meek landscape paintings and ...

This of course is nothing like the comic book Enigma. This is real life, or as real as your life gets, anyway.

Of course I'm here. I've always been here, there, and everywhere.

My mother laid flowers on the ground above here. Seagulls flew off with them, before the crappy little makeshift service was even finished. Everything was against us. My poor old dad. The ground swallowed him and then the sky stole his flowers. Poor old dad.

I lost my Enigma comics too. They were buried with him and I used to imagine him like an Egyptian pharaoh, buried with what he needed for the afterlife, reading The Enigma for all eternity.

"I'm whoever you want me to be."

"No, sorry. That's the kind of tacky, bogus line that Titus used to come up with. It works okay on the page but just doesn't sound real when it's spoken."

People move in and out of other people's lives, and no one ever knows exactly what other people are thinking. In this way we are all alone. But I am more alone than most.

He had a charming lightness of touch as he transfixed the young doctor, neatly stripped him, and prepared to devour him, smelly toes first. Of course they hadn't told him that he wasn't allowed to eat the doctors: they'd just arrogantly presumed he wouldn't.

I think we should just be silent for one moment here, and contemplate this waste of reptilian life. Excuse me, are you still there? I haven't lost you yet, have I?

It's my belief that if you cut into a thing deeply enough; if your incisions are precise and persistent and conducted methodically, then you may reveal not only that thing's inner workings, but also the meaning behind those workings. This conviction was shared by the historical personage whose life is central to From Hell, although perhaps his beliefs were expressed in a somewhat broader sense than my own. For my part, the thing that I am concerned with cutting into and examining is the stillwarm corpse of history itself. In my chilliest moments, I sometimes suspect that this was his foremost preoccupation also, albeit in pursuit of different ends.

This book is dedicated to Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Marie Jeanette Kelly. You and your demise: of these things alone are we certain. Goodnight, ladies.

"The working class don't want a revolution, Mr Lees: they just want more money."

"Don't you ever feel guilty? We could have said something. We could have done something. Why, Fred? Why did we just let them bury it?"

"Because we didn't want our throats cut. Because we didn't want our lights hung over our shoulders."

"Well, if I may not work the ocean I should like to work with something of a kind to it... something that flows like the ocean... something salt and old."

"Though concerning the objects of your pity I fear there's little hope."

"There must be... even for such unfortunates. Is not all base matter gradually ascending; refining itself into pure spirit?"

"Assuredly... but some wretches have a downward momentum in their lives almost impossible to reverse."

"Consider it: water will of necessity flow downhill, thwarting all our best efforts that it should do otherwise. In order that water might rise despite itself it must first be transmuted into steam. It must first be touched by the purifying spirit of fire."

"Dorset Street -- the most evil in London, I'm told."

"Such minds, Hinton, shaping infinity itself."

"Fourth dimensional patterns within Eternity's monolith would, he suggests, seem merely random events to third-dimensional percipients."

"Let us say something peculiar happens in 1788... a century later, related events take place. Then again, 50 years later. Then 25 years. Then 12. An invisible curve, rising through the centuries."

"Can history then be said to have an architecture, Hinton? The notion is most glorious and most horrible."

"Such purpose. I am fifty, my own purpose unrevealed despite meaningless laurels."

"Our son is a wastrel and a halfwit. We shudder to think of the throne in his hands. But he is none the less of our flesh and our obligation is most severe..."

"These times, they are a worry to us, and it has been too long since we had men about us who were strong and dependable. Since dear, dear Albert... Go. Go now, Dr Gull. We would be alone."

"There is a wrong, an intense wrong, in our society running all through our life... And it will be made righter some day. I dashed myself against it but it is no one man's strength can move it. It was too much for my brain, but it is by the failure of some that others succeed, and through my very foolishness shall come better success to others... perhaps more than any cleverness of mine could have wrought."

"Fear not, though thoughts and memories most unendurable beset your mind... for I shall take them all away and quite relieve your suffering."

"Less then a thimble-full of iodine divides the intellectual from the imbecile. Of which phenomenon I shall forthwith attempt a demonstration."

"I dreamed about Stamford Street, where I lived with my Billy before 'e ran off..."

"Dreams! It's wakin' life's the trouble!"

"No, sir! Not "Done away with" for that is common murder, only fit for common footpads. I spoke of grand work, Netley. Grand work. A great work must have many sides from which we may consider it."

"Do you begin to grasp how truly great a work is London? A veritable textbook we may draw upon in formulating great works of our own!"

"The greater part of London's story is not writ in words. It is instead a literature of stone, of place-names and assocations."

"Symbols have power, Netley... Power enough to turn even a stomach such as yours, or to deliver half this planet's population into slavery."

"Do whatever needs to be done. You make your cuts, Sir Charles. I'll make mine."

"What a life you have endured, awaiting nothing but deliverance."

"Mm. I... Sir? I feel so queer. Does everything look sparkly to you?"

"Why, child, that's just the stars. This is a rare and special night, I think. For both of us."

"You're forging a letter from a killer? But that's ..."

"It's a whole new style of journalism, Mr Gibbs, and we're inventin' it right 'ere in Wapping."

"Oh God. I've been tryin' not to think about it. I had such a lovely fuck with Joe last night. I thought "Is this it? Is this the last of it?"

"Gull, please, in the name of reason..."

"Invoke not reason. In the end it is too small a deity."

"It... ughh... it is these grapes. They have something on them, I think."

"'tis laudanum. A little, nothing more. They are the grapes of mercy, child, not lightly spat away."

"If you'll forgive me, Sir, I am Robert Lees, psychic adviser to Her Majesty. I am familiar with your work, Sir, and have long anticipated this meeting."

"Indeed? I am similarly familiar with your work , Sir, profiting from delusions born of bereavement. Consequently, I have relished this meeting not at all. Good day."

"Say what you will, Sir. You are welcome to remain ensconced in lore and ritual. For my part I am happy to entertain a questioning spirit."

"Ha ha ha! Then mark my words, Mr Yeats, your bones shall never rest easy. Good day to you, Sir."

"Oh, an' I see Anderson's back from 'is Swiss 'olidays, ayin' we should arrest every tart for 'er own protection!"

"Well, he's one of them Second-Coming Christians, ain't he? Perhaps he'll put some of them up at his house."

"There, there, Netley. There, there. I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind, a dim sub-conscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves... Hell, Netley. We're in Hell."

"You're mad."

"Oh, undoubtedly. But you're helpless."

"Dear God, what is this Aethyr I am come upon? What spirits are these, labouring in what heavenly light? No... No, this is dazzle, but not yet divinity."

"It would seem we are to suffer an apocalypse of cockatoos... Morose, barbaric children, playing joylessly with their unfathomable toys."

"Where comes this dullness in your eyes? How has your century numbed you so? Shall man be given marvels only when he is beyond all wonder?

"You are the sum of all preceding you, yet seem indifferent to yourselves. A culture grown disinterested, even in its own abysmal wounds."

"Ah, Mary, how time's levelled us. We are made equal, both mere curios of our vanished epoch in this lustless world. This world, where in comparison I am made ignorant, while you... you are made virtuous."

"Do you understand how I have loved you? You'd have all been dead in a year or two from liver failure, men, or childbirth. Dead. Forgotten. I have saved you. Do you understand that? I have made you safe from time, and we are wed in legend, inextricable within eternity."

"Have you done, Sir? Is it finished with?"

"It is beginning, Netley. Only just beginning. For better or worse, the twentieth century."

"I have been climbing, Netley, all my life, toward a single peak. Now I have reached it. I have stood and felt the wind. I have seen all the world beneath me. Now there is only descent. Only the valley. Would that I had died there, Netley, in that light above the cloud line. I'm cold. Take me home."

"I remember my first Fenian bombin', year afore I were first married. Makes you think there's naught to us but shit and mincemeat."

"To be honest, I felt worse than sick. I came out that room and I felt somethin' bad 'ad 'appened. Not just to 'er, to everythin'. I felt as if everythin' were lost."

"Come on, Godley. Cheer up, for fuck's sake. There's good things happen in life as well, y'know."

"But... I mean, after that ... that thing in Miller's Court."

"I said in life, Godley. I didn't say in the East End."

"Ah, yes. Dear Frank. I'm afraid he's had to retire early with a mild touch of insanity."

"Oscar Wilde? Oscar Wilde, the writer?"

"Oh, good heavens, no! Awful fellow. Wouldn't give him house- room. No, I'm Oscar Wilde the florist. While over here we have Mr Walter Sickert, the turf accountant... and Mr James McNeil Whistler, who I believe keeps a tripe stall in Mile End."

"It's all just stories when all's said and done."

"But that's just the thing, it isn't just stories. Those women really died. And poor Druitt, caught up in something he could never understand."

"That's all done with though. That's all gone."

"Take my advice and don't get old. It's bloody rubbish."

"Now there's just us, knowin' what we know, both washed up 'ere. Can't send a message; can't tell anybody. I expect there's been a lot of chaps in our position down across the years with one thing and another. Makes you wonder, sometimes, doesn't it? Make you wonder 'ow much of the world is true."

"I think there's going to be another war."

The problem we face here is that neither Knight nor the assembled ranks of Freemasonry are necessarily telling the truth, at which point a Victorian fog starts to engulf the facts of our narrative. Given that the tortuous story of the Whitechapel murders is filled with liars, tricksters, and unreliable witnesses, it is a fog we shall encounter often.

The character and temperament of Victoria here is entirely my own interpretation, and has indeed been the source of debate between myself and the otherwise genial and agreeable Mr Campbell of Brisbane, Australia.

One almost suspects that the bereaved Victoria, who spent the later decades of her reign in mourning for her departed consort, would have changed her own name to Albert and the name of the country to Alberta if she had thought for a moment she could get away with it.

The phrase, Hairy-Ford-Shire, a rather dim pun upon the pronunciation of "Hertfordshire", is one of an extensive array of Victorian slang expressions relating to the female genitalia. The expression, in this instance, was passed on to me by Mr Neil Gaiman, who has a dirty mouth in at least seven centuries.

As with so much of From Hell, when we know the details of a person's life but not how he or she felt, then we must resort to fiction unless we are to exclude feelings altogether, which I don't feel inclined to do.

In the case of the fraudulent and press-generated "Ripper" letters, we see a clear prototype of the current British tabloid press in action, and for this reason it seemed poetically apposite that the letter be composed in Wapping, currently the home of Mr Rupert Murdoch's highly popular right-wing tabloid, which, unsurprisingly in this tale of obelisks and other arcane solar symbols, is called The Sun.

On the 29th September, the Central News Agency forwarded the letter to Scotland Yard that we see Abberline reading aloud here to Thick and Godley (and if there were ever two names more emblematic of the police force of that period, I should certainly like to hear them).

Abberline's eerily precognitive comments on page two are my own invention. They are also, in their way, a form of shamefaced apology from one currently making part of his living wrapping up miserable little killings in supernatural twaddle. Sometimes, after all you've done for them, your characters just turn on you.

Everyone seems agreed that Kelly was the real target. She'd infected Dr Stanley's son, corrupted Olga Tchkersoff's sister. The underlying assumption remains unstated: she must have done something to deserve that.

By Autumn 1988 I'm thinking of seriously about writing something lengthy on a murder. The Whitechapel killings aren't even considered. Too played-out. Too obvious. Publicity around the crimes' centennial, however, leads me to Knight's book. Ideas coalesce. Deciding on a serial in Steve Bissette's Taboo, I contact Eddie Campbell. The rest is dodgy pseudo-history.

Be vewy, vewy quiet. We're hunting Wippers.

Slowly it dawns on me that despite the Gull theory's obvious attractions, the idea of a solution, any solution, is inane. Murder isn't like books. Murder, a human event located in both space and time, has an imaginary field completely unrestrained by either. It holds meaning, and shape, but no solution.

The grounds of the enquiry are a forensic sucking-bog; treacherous, obsessional. Fall in this stuff and you won't come out again.

Reputedly, many prominent Ripperologists never set foot in Whitechapel for fear of being mugged. Mugging's not the danger here. This place is authentically dreadful.

It isn't getting drawn into Masonic Death Conspiracy that troubles me, you understand. It's getting drawn into the vortex of a fiction.

Some stories just don't have what it takes. The yarn that eventually survives to be accepted as history will do so by brute Darwinian mechanics. We'll lock all the suspects in a room together. They can fight it out.

Our detective fictions tell us otherwise: everything's just meat and cold ballistics. Provide a murderer, a motive, and a means, you've solved the crime. Using this method, the solution to the Second World War is as follows: Hitler. The German economy. Tanks. Thus, for convenience, we reduce the complex events.

The greater part of any murder is the field of theory, fascination and hysteria that it engenders. A black diaspora. Our tireless, sinister enthusiasm.

Soon, somebody will notice the disturbing similarities between the Ripper crimes and recent cattle mutilations, from which they will draw the only sensible conclusion.

Likewise, each new book provides fresh details, finer crennelations of the subject's edge. Its area, however, can't extend past the initial circle: Autumn, 1888, Whitechapel. ... Koch's Snowflake: gaze upon it, Ripperologists, and shiver.

The complex phantom we project. That alone, we know is real. The actual killer's gone, unglimpsed. Might as well not have been there at all. There never was a Jack the Ripper. Mary Kelly was just an unusually determined suicide. Why don't we leave it there?

It's going. It's all going. Will anybody bother with a bicentennial in 2088? Might our pursuit, our quarry, already endangered, be by then extinct?

We were looking at the naked woman dancing when it flew away.

Childbirth is not a miracle. Life is not sacred. When you have twenty thousand nomads huddled between two rivers in the Middle East and that's it for Homo sapiens, when one in five children is a live birth, one in ten living past the age of ten, then childbirth is a miracle and life is sacred. When the average age of a grandmother in Philadelphia's housing projects is twenty-five, to call childbirth a miracle is at least a tasteless joke and at worst a true obscenity.

Do not wander off without me. That's how we lost Amelia Earhart in here. Every day, about two in the afternoon, the thermals are right, and we hear her somewhere in here, screaming for peanut buttter and jelly sandwiches.

You'd have liked my father. He was a sweet guy. He died when I was fourteen, but when I was a little kid we used to sit together and I'd read my comic books to him. I don't think he cared much about the silly stuff in comics -- that was the '40s -- but he loved me and took pleasure in my reading aloud to him. I miss my dad.

But, if you have a moment, if your heart is big enough to spare a moment, give a nod and a smile for all the good ones who spent their lives making great art and small art and even entertainment. When they're gone, there's only one way to tell them you miss them... Send them a moment of kind thought right now. The beam will pick it up and carry it across the stars to them where they wait. I've been sending good wishes to the ones I miss all evening. Now it's your turn.

When I say that Seth will have his testicles torn off, I do not mean that his sac will always be a ragged void. If the gods are not exactly a law unto themselves, they can at least bend the rules. In other words, some balls bounce back.

I had it in me to be the Pierce Brosnan of my generation.

Vincent, you are a damaged person who uses sexual gratification as a displacement activity. Now get your hand off my behind.

I simply reject the capitalist credo. I reject anything that ends in 'ist' or 'ism'. In fact, I reject anything that ends in 's'.

Years later I was regaining consciousness in America, which is no mean feat.

"The Order of Osiris, the Order of the Listless One, oh God of Yesterday, He-Who-Is-Awakened, Lord of the Chennet, the suffering god from whose inert body..."

"I've got Latin in four hours, Josh. Let's get on with it."

"Oh, sorry, of course. Got a little carried away..."

"We got to thinking: how did the priests know exactly how long to suffocate the new pharaoh for?"

"Ah, ah, preposition at the end of a sentence, Kim. You owe me a dollar."

Three hundred years of tears have soured the very stones of this house. Drink deep, gentle reader: you have come too far to turn back now.

But we cannot disguise our abhorrence of modern communication devices.

The dandy has one unique advantage over the common herd. No matter what the situation, he will always be more exquisitely dressed than his enemies. Therefore, he has already triumphed.

One must commit acts of the highest treason only when dressed in the most resplendent finery.

We may be in the sewer, but there's absolutely no need for that kind of gutter profanity.

If I know Sebastian, he'll find it impossible to continue his mission in soiled clothing.

And now let us hasten to the station. I have commanded the rain to fall at exactly one-fifteen and I would hate to get my shoes wet.

I do so loathe nature, don't you? All that dreadful rot and decay and procreation. Here, everything is so much more tidy. I simply wind the trees once a day and reset the flowers.

It would take days to catalog your sins, Abbé. I simply don't have the time.

The Abbé, I'm afraid, has gone to meet his maker. Hard to decide which of the two will receive the greater shock.

"Don't fret, Theo. The lad's simply stunned. He'll wake up in an hour, none the wiser."

"But his throat has been cut."

"Oh, dear, my mistake. My diagnosis regarding his recovery would appear to have been somewhat premature."

First... a pardon. I should hate to be hounded further for acts which some might consider crimes, but which I prefer to think of as aesthetic statements. I have, after all, killed only the very dull.

One hardly requires the abilities of a Tiresias to predict fog in London. What other revelations have you to offer, Theo? That the Grand National will be won by a horse this year, perhaps?

We're beginning to think it may be a neurological disorder, similar to Tourette's Syndrome. It's quite possible we may be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century.

You must be feeling quite fragile by now, I expect. This house, it... does things to the mind.

I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity.

I should say I'm very much cleverer than any of the people who put me here. As a matter of fact, I could leave any time I wanted. It's only a doll's house after all. Anyway, I don't mind. I like dolls. Particularly the live ones.

"And if you want something hotter, you know where to find me."

"In the gutter on a Friday night, Tony."

Not every day one has God on the slab, eh?

"God is in the details," after all. Or in this case, perhaps, the details are in God.

I think everything that happens in the vicinity of a murder has some significance: the flight of birds, the shape of the clouds, the positions of the stars, items discarded by passersby. Nothing can be overlooked. If I find a match, I have to know where it was made and from what tree its wood was taken.

I'm not a metaphysical man. I'm a minister. That's my job.

I was somebody else once. I... I... don't think I was a very good person.

"The killer's still out there, Mr Purves. I hope Christ has taken out life insurance."

"Oh, I'm sure any firm would jump at the chance to ensure a man who has eternal life, don't you?"

Well, me whole family's musical, Jeffo... even the sewing machine's a Singer.

It's a little-known legend is Abaton -- the town of changing locations. Philosophers, mystics and clever-bastards-in-general have known of its existence for centuries.

As I follow the green man up the narrow path, visions of electric hedge trimmers go swimming through my brain.

You are in a beautifully wooded area covered with flowers, blah-blah- blah...

If Abaton's the unearthly reflection of all that we are, Britain's in far worse shape than I thought.

I've always believed that guilt was an emotion for weaker men -- so where does that leave me?

Ah, love... so much better than the alternative.

He's clouds or fires now.

Good news is he don't have to go to work tomorrow. Bad news is the same.

"I'm surprised you don't think justice is best left to higher powers, Bagsy?"

"I do, Dian -- I just want to make sure He knows where to look."

"And are your Lord's lessons learned in you, Cannon?"

"I am confident that I will pass through St. Peter's gates with only minor negotiations."

Good job, there, O'Grady. Always kick 'em when they're down. You might just make a detective yet.

There are very few people who directly touch my daily life -- and I can't imagine how much poorer I'd be without any of them.

I was happy in that field. I could have stayed there forever. I liked life in those days. I thought life was my best friend.

I was a happy little idiot, really.

I read a pamphlet on alcohol abuse once. It said alcohol turns you into a different person. I thought, "Great! That's for me!" But it was no good. You always wake up or sober up the same person. With a headache.

Shade said all the madness inside people's heads will be released, made real. The sky looks really weird today. The colors look wrong. The clouds look wrong. Everything looks wrong. Welcome to the madhouse.

"I'm your liberated dreams, baby. Your liberated dreams and your unfettered screams..."

"No! I don't want my dreams to be liberated. Our dreams are too terrible to be liberated!"

His teeth will always be perfect, his smile the smile of a sun god, his wife beside him and perfect. Texan sun on the limo's perfect polished bonnet...

And out it comes, out it grows. From the womb of Dallas, impregnated by seeds of blood and brain and bone, of conspiracy and deceit, of cowardice and corruption and greed, planted here on a hot bad Friday. Fifteen seconds past 12:30 PM, November 22, 1963...

The Kennedy sphinx... And who shall answer his riddle?

So the person chosen to be the leader of your country was murdered, and you had something called the Warren Commission to cover it all up. And the people really responsible were never even named. And the people you employ to protect you, the CIA, the FBI, they actually helped the people responsible to get away with it? And this was a popular president? What happens with an unpopular president? Do you just leave him in the gutter to rot or what?

This sphinx doesn't strangle. This sphinx is the Kennedy sphinx. This sphinx is American. It consumes. It eats.

Cancer is rather interesting. I believe it's a kind of wearing out of information. Runaway cells who've forgotten who they are or where they're going. But it mightn't be restricted to creatures or cells. Why not cancer of civilization? Why not cancer of the imagination? Imagine a cancer of reality.

"Bobby? Jesus... And what about Teddy? They get Teddy, too?"

"Ahhh, no. They didn't need to wipe Teddy out. Teddy was doing a fine job of that himself."

I must be plastic. I must transpose myself into a new and mad view of reality.

The past is a branch, forking through and out from Dallas. There's more than one truth, more than one assassin. But behind them all is the same hand, the shadow of the same creature... let's go deeper still...

Oh, the Mob and the CIA are just the high priests, the guardians of America's divinity... which is usually green and comes with a picture of Mr. Washington on one side and the words "In God We Trust" on the other...

"I say we fly in the choppers, drop a few dozen grenades and swamp the whole area with napalm. See how the big bastard copes with that..."

"You sentimental old liberal, Hopgood. Don't you think we should try the direct approach?"

You know, I've a horrible feeling that if we get much deeper into this madness we're gonna end up having a religious experience. And I vowed long ago never to have one of those.

And I am the American Scream, e pluribus unum, out of many, one... Giver of voice and flesh to the quiet screams of unquiet minds.

I used to stare at flowers, rage at death, cry at sunsets. After my confirmation, I was too sensible for that. I enrolled at college, took my occupational personality test, cried at no more sunsets. I was a dull little bastard, like all the others.

And I smile, as a man might smile looking round the ruins of his house, and finding something he thought he'd lost long, long ago.

How I enjoy people who refer to themselves in the third person! It's as though they were reciting from their own biography. And a biography of a person is always so much more interesting than the person himself.

"Yeah, I heard she'd screw a horse if it meant acting with Brando."

"If it'd help her career she'd screw Brando if it meant acting with a horse."

"What do you do in America once the money's run out."

"Starve."

You can't escape it. Everywhere there are screens, pictures, images, sounds. They won't let you be alone. America is scared of being alone.

"But a camera's just a machine. It can't have the madness. That doesn't make sense."

"If it made sense it wouldn't be the madness, would it?"

I must keep a clear head. If I'm to survive with my mind intact, I must put my queer shoulder firmly to the wheel of objectivity.

All the years the public lived vicariously through film, now they're living it. But life isn't like film. Life's got too many plot defects. Whom to blame? Who's the director, the auteur of life? Who writes these utterly absurd screenplays? God? But God doesn't exist. And if he does he's more Godard than Spielberg.

Guess this changes things, though. If inanimate objects can get the madness... an insane coffee cup. A schizophrenic shirt...

"Nice tits, by the way."

"Jesus, we got a date with Oscar Wilde..."

"I think she looks the type that will see through the whole charade."

"Yeah. We're just visible signs of his inner trepidation coupled with a fear of commitment..."

"Excuse me! I said, excuse me! Prostitutes! Ladies of the night! Streetwalkers! I'm talking to you!"

So that's two bottles of bourbon, twenty beers and four clubs to room one oh one... and if it isn't here in fifteen minutes we'll set fire to the hotel.

"You mean you want to help the people who've been hurt?"

"Actually, I was thinking more about me and my quality of life. But if people get helped as a byproduct I can live with it."

Hell... the most awful place you can imagine. Currently under new management, now guaranteed to be even worse.

"Zzzxxynax (Spit/Drool) Bite-your-dog's-head-off Zznoq?"

"Here."

Earth... the most awful place you can imagine, if you live in Los Angeles. Other than that, it's pretty neat.

"Hey, here's some more stuff from the Bicentennial! (ahem) 'My friends, taxes are too high and the government treats us like idiots, so I'm revolting.'"

"At least you had an excuse."

"Look, here's a book."

"Not another copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, is it?"

Yum, genuine polyester!

Better get going; your parents still think me imaginary, and I'd hate to shatter an illusion like that before dinner.

"Take this book back to my room, and don't eat it!"

"Stanley, you wound me. I already have this delicious stack of National Geographics, thank you."

"Great! Tomorrow we find the right tree!"

"What're our criteria?"

"One you won't break."

"Hell sounds like a very silly place. Don't you miss it?"

"No. Not even a little, Stanley. You see, we'd... play tricks on each other all the time... but nobody was your friend. Not really. Nobody was anybody's friend."

That is quite enough. I mean really, Stanley, I'm afraid you've exceeded your special effects budget for this entire month. Not to mention the casting calls I've had to sit through. I'm afraid that you'll be dreaming about the ocean for the next several weeks. I happen to have a lot of it in stock. Perhaps it will calm you down. Good night.

"So what's so bad about her?"

"To answer that, Stanley, I'd have to tell you about the birds and the bees... and the chainsaws, and the weasels, and the icepicks, and the acid, and the..."

"Aha! I knew I'd find you here!"

"Huh? Well, good for you. Now it's your turn to hide."

"'Disreputable Urban Magicians and Sorcerors Union' Oh...sorry."

"Ah, s'not your fault. You learn the basics, have a hideous experience in a graveyard, they give you a trenchcoat and steal your razor. Like an assembly line, really."

I've created my own form of divination. One that allows me to capture the currents of chaos in mid-motion and study the fluxes themselves. I call it-- JELLOMANCY!

"And you're a rhymer now. How... nice."

"Like it? Actually I'm still just apprenticing. They've been starting me off slow. Enchantments, prophecies of doom, greeting cards, stuff like that."

You'll die gloriously, I promise you. Well, actually, you're going to die slowly and painfully, but it's nothing a little editing won't fix.

Luckily, every good story is allowed one astounding coincidence. The writer has decided to cash his in now.

That does it! I cannot understand why everybody speaks so well of 'subtlety.' It never works, I don't know why I even try anymore!! Now!! Tell me, mortal scum, where is he?!

"Yes, that hideous thing that looked like my wife!"

"I beg your pardon?!"

"But Sheila, I didn't... I mean, she really was lovely--"

"Is that so?"

"But it was a hideous evil sort of lovely!"

"But what did they call you?"

"'Big-shaggy-red-spirit-dog-who-protects-village.' It's not like there were a lot of us around."

"I don't think you can fit under the bed."

"Oh, there are some ladies who'd tell you otherwise."

"Do you happen to know that consciousness is the creature of rhythm?"

"No, but if you hum a few bars..."

"Humf. You are not him."

"(Boy, and I thought the the Church of the Sub-Genius was weird.)"

"Okay, we've got all the ingredients for 'spaghetti'. You know, I think this would be pretty good if you threw in some turpentine and a few centipedes."

"I think the first time out we should just stick to the recipe."

"Where are we, Mr Bierce?"

"There are many realms between the spheres of life and death, Stanley. No magician can explore them all."

"You don't know."

"I'll be curious to see what he thinks Hell is."

"Garn, I hope he ain't British. Some of that stuff them people dream up... it's enough to gag a maggot."

What kind of theological education are kids getting today?!

Bar-B-Q sauce? Damnit, Nyx, what do you think that will do, you ignorant-- Uh-oh. Oh no! Cerberus? Buddy? Good dog?

I'm here for the FBI, not the Weekly World News.

"That isn't the real Shroud of Turin, is it?"

"No, Agent Mulder. Just a replica. I keep the original in the basement, next to the Holy Grail."

"You're off the case! Go chase Bigfoot!

"I'd love to, Sir, but with all due respect, the season is wrong. Bigfoot sightings taper off in the winter. Unless you were suggesting I go to China, where reports of a beast-man are..."

Mulder! We are not alone!

"Everyone else got to read the Fatima prophecy... and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." Thanks. I'll treasure it always.

It would be such a relief to think my sister's happy, but when I look up at the heavens, all I see are the stars.

"Hey, Mulder... how was therapy?"

"Pretty good. Today I remembered getting my first library card. Unfortunately, the name on it was Hans Holzer."

"Ah, you remember our names, Mulder. Recovering?"

"Still some gaps, Byers. The phrase 'Rosebud' rings a bell, but I can't place it."

"You know, when we heard you'd debunked Neola, we were afraid you'd gone over to the other side."

"Nah -- the hours stink but the pay's good."

"Congratulations. You're finally meeting one of those magical creatures you've spent so much time looking for. "

"Funny... you don't look like a leprechaun, Lieutenant Colonel Dunne."

"Mulder... this disk wouldn't contain Pentagon access codes, would it?"

"Actually it's Doom II. You know how the Bureau frowns on computer games."

Now that you're dead, Mulder and Scully and Drake, as dead as the trees in December, maybe you can understand what it is that I am.

Our friend believes that, unlike us working stiffs, he lives backwards and forwards in time.

And all the while, the computers dreamed of zeroes and ones -- unable to imagine a two.

"Who are you?"

"Oh, pardon me ... Zachary T. Paleozogt, at your service. But you can call me Zot!"

Welcome, one and all, to the far-flung future of -- 1965!

"Aww, c'mon! Where's your sense of fun?"

"I'm the standard model, Zachary. 'Fun' was optional."

Guards! Guards! Stop this madman! He's turning everyone into monkeys!

"My, how you've grown!"

"C'mon, it's only been a week and a half!"

"How about you -- what're you up to?"

"Issue #3."

Y'see, I figure I've got two choices at my stage. I can try to make my world grow bigger, or I can let it get smaller -- and if I don't do the one then the other's gonna happen in time...

I'm sorry I became abusive just now ... calling you worms... I was just speaking relatively, you understand.

"Ah, the stench of evil is about this place!"

"Actually, I think that's air-freshener."