Roderick Burgess's waking dreams are of the power and the glory. And of death, of course. Especially death.

Uh, Father, Magus. I've found something that may cast some light on our guest. In the Paginarum Fulvarum...

It was a dark and stormy nightmare...

The process was slow at first, my lord. Things in the dreamworld began to transmute. I was aware of it in my library... Slowly, the words began to fade. Some time after you vanished, my books became bound volumes of blank paper. The next day the whole library was gone. I never found it again...

"Atropos? No. Not now. You might as well call me the Morrigan!"

"She's right, my ducks. Might as well call us Tisiphone, Alecto, and Magaera -- and that takes us back, eh?"

"Might as well call us Diana, Mary, and Florence. Ha-ha! Uh, sorry."

Have you ever had one of those days when something just seems to be trying to tell you somebody?

"Hullo London."

"Hullo John Constantine."

"How are you then, London?"

"All right. Full of people. Raining. You?"

One thing I've learned. You can know anything. It's all there. You just have to find it.

When I got back she was gone along with me stereo, the telly, me Silver Surfers -- any old junk she could convert to money. And she'd long since converted the money into junk. Stupid bitch. Sometimes I still miss her.

It is never "only a dream", John Constantine. Here less than other places...

... see the sun set in the hand of the man ...

I sprinkle sand into the waters of night. The grains burn as they fall, reminding me of another in times long passed away. I watched him even then as he fell, his face undefeated, his eyes still proud.

It is time for me to walk the abyss. Time to reclaim my own. I must talk to the Morningstar. I do not have high hopes for the meeting.

THere's one at the door, at the gate to damnation. Is it thief, thug or whore? There's one at the door, and there's room for one more till the end of Creation.

The wood of suicides has changed since my last visit to Hell. I remember it as a tiny grove. Now it resembles a forest.

Never trust a demon. He has a hundred motives for anything he does... Ninety-nine of them, at least, are malevolent.

One of you has my helm; my mask of pure dream. I crafted it myself, from the bones of a dead god.

I thank you, last Martian. If you wish, you may dream of the City of Focative Mirrors...

Mother said, if you are going to be a criminal, John, you are not going to bring shame on the family name. I had to change it. I called myself Destiny. Dee is for destiny...

Dee is for lots of things. Death. Dust. Darkness. Demons.

All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

I will be a wise and tolerant monarch, dispensing justice fairly, and only setting nightmares to rip out the minds of the evil and wicked. Or just anybody I don't like.

"It is a comfort in wretchedness to have companions in woe." (Marlowe. Faust.) Of course, he was talking about Hell. But it applies equally to Arkham.

Oho, my sainted aunt, have I become a victim of brain fever, the curse of academia...?

Looking back, the process of coming up with the Lord of Dreams seems less like an act of creation than one of sculpture: as if he were already waiting, grave and patient, inside a block of white marble, and all I needed to do was chip away everything that wasn't him.

We have seen stranger things in dreams; and fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.

You are utterly the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification in this or any other plane!

There is another version of the tale. That is the tale the women tell each other, in their private language that the men-children are not taught, and that the old men are too wise to learn. And in that version of the tale perhaps things happened differently. But then, that is a women's tale, and it is never told to men.

You lot may die. I expect you will, 'cos you're stupid. Not me, though.

And in the meantime, I've started in a trade. Working with a friend of mine. It won't last. But it's a new trade. It's called printing. Don't need to be a guild member -- not yet. Never be a real demand for it, mind you. Hard work.

Her kind walk amidst the flotsam of lives they have sacrificed, for their own purposes, till friendless and alone they needs must make the final sacrifice.

"Death's a capricious thing, innit?"

"Yes. Yes, she is."

I doubt I'm any wiser than I was five hundred years back. I'm older. I've been up, and been down, and been up again. Have I learned aught? I've learned from my mistakes, but I've had more time to commit more mistakes.

"If I hear another of your theological paradoxes, I'll scream. Frankly, today I don't care if God exists or not."

"I doubt He feels likewise, Miss Walker."

"Surely, what the Choirboy is describing is a worst-case scenario, once they've caught you alive -- and you don't get the money, remember that."

"But, Carrion, we don't do it for the money!"

I tell you, I'm sick and tired of women in our line being stereotyped as black widows or killer nurses. I'm a serial killer, and a woman, and I'm proud of it.

And they left, slowly, one by one, with reluctance, leaving the safety of the light for the chill certainties of the darkness.

It seemed like the night sucked them up, took them into its dark heart. It seemed like the darkness swallowed them... Perhaps it did.

Zelda has a reassuring moral homily concerning God, difficult times, and a variable number of footprints in the sand. She told it to me once, and it cheered me up remarkably.

"Do you know what Freud said about dreams of flying? It means you're really dreaming about having sex."

"Indeed? Tell me, then, what does it mean when you dream about having sex?"

I left because I was curious. And because I was tired. Life as a human contains substance I never dreamed of in the Dreaming, Lord. The little victories, and the tiny defeats. I had my reasons.

"I do not understand--"

"Of course you don't. You're obviously not very bright, but I shouldn't let it bother you."

If my dream was true, then everything we know, everything we think we know is a lie.

It means the world's about as solid and as reliable as a layer of scum on the top of a well of black water which goes down forever, and there are things in the depths that I don't even want to think about.

It means that we're just dolls. We don't have a clue what's really going down, we just kid ourselves that we're in control of our lives while a paper's thickness away things that would drive us mad if we thought about them for too long play with us, and move us around from room to room, and put us away at night when they're tired, or bored.

Dreams are weird and stupid and they scare me.

"And then she woke up." I suppose there are worse endings.

Desire, listen to me carefully. Remember this. We of the endless are the servants of the living -- we are not their masters. We exist because they know, deep in their hearts, that we exist.

Human beings are the creatures of desire. They twist and bend as I require it. If I thought otherwise, I would crack, like Delirium; or I would abandon my realm, like our lost brother.

And Desire walks the endless pathways of its body, certain that he, or she, or it, is in sole and only control of its destiny. The only inhabitant of the twilight realm of Desire; and it feels nothing like a doll. Nothing like a doll at all.

The paths fork and divide. With each step you take through Destiny's garden, you make a choice; and every choice determines future paths. However, at the end of a lifetime of walking you might look back, and see only one path stretching out behind you; or look ahead, and see only darkness.

The garden of Destiny. You would know it if you saw it. After all, you will wander it until you die. Or beyond. For the paths are long, and even in death there is no ending to them.

A family meeting, eh, Destiny? You haven't redecorated in the last 300 years, I see. Oh well. And still wearing basic grey...

I lost some time once. It's always in the last place you look for it.

Oh, just shut up and let me finish. You can shout at me afterwards.

Desire smells almost subliminally of summer peaches, and casts two shadows: one black and sharp-edged, the other translucent and forever wavering, like heat haze.

Desire smiles in brief flashes, like sunlight glinting from a knife-edge. And there is much else that is knife-like about Desire.

Never a possession, always the possessor, with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes tawny and sharp as yellow wine: Desire is everything you have ever wanted. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. Everything.

Despair says little, and is patient.

Despair, Desire's sister and twin, is queen of her own bleak bourne. It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart.

Destiny is the oldest of the Endless; in the beginning was the Word, and it was traced by hand on the first page of his book, before ever it was spoken aloud.

Destiny smells of dust and the libraries of night. He leaves no footprints. He casts no shadow.

For Delirium was once Delight. And although that was long ago now, even today her eyes are badly matched; one eye is a vivid emerald green, spattered with silver flecks that move; her other eye is vein blue. Who knows what Delirium sees, through her mismatched eyes?

Dream casts a human shadow, when it occurs to him to do so.

"Well, at least you've got the element of surprise on your side."

"That would not be honorable, Matthew. I have already sent a messenger to the Lord of Hell, to let him know that I will be coming. One must do these things properly."

They also held that the way to salvation was to give way to lust and temptation in all things. And no greater percentage of them turned up here than of any other religion. Amusing, isn't it?

I move from dreamer to dreamer, from dream to dream, hunting for what I need. Slipping and sliding and flickering through dreams; and the dreamers will wake and wonder why this dream seemed different, wonder how real their lives can truly be.

I'm sorry, Your Majesty. The bastard hard disk's crashed again, but this hardware's still better than Roger Bacon's mechanical head.

"What's the occasion? Is it your birthday?"

"You must be born, to have a birthday."

They believe themselves Lucifer's equals, Cain, all these pitiful little gnats. But there is only one that we have ever owned to be our superior. There is but one greater than us, and to him... to him we no longer speak.

We do what we must, Lucien. Sometimes we can choose the path we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.

Neil Gaiman, writer: To set certain popular misconceptions to rest once and for all:

1) He was not found wandering the sewers of London as a child during the winter of 1864, unable to say anything more than "Powerful big rats, gentlemen."

Neil Gaiman, writer: To set certain popular misconceptions to rest once and for all:

4) He did indeed have what most people would commonly understand as "eyes".

There is quite obviously no "underground kingdom beneath London inhabited by huge, intelligent rodents". And even if there were, any suggestion of Neil's involvement in the mazy territorial negotiations between Londons Above and Below can be considered a joke, and in poor taste at that.

The details of his black life and dubious death are written in certain books, and the foolish and the curious may seek them out. Nothing could induce us to elaborate here; by comparision Gilles de Rais was an angel in human form, and de Sade a weak and simpering child. The world is well rid of him -- if rid of him it truly is.

They say she done them all of them in. They say she done it with an axe.

According to an old New York folk-tale, Alisa Kwitney appears in a bathroom mirror to people in the final stages of delirium tremens, and pleads with them to mend their ways. In another version of the same story she can be induced (by threatening to break the mirror) to reveal winning lottery ticket numbers.

The fraternity of critics, in reality a dark brethren, linked by profane rites and blood vows. To destroy an author they sacrifice a child and perform a critical mass...

A city in which the streets are paved with time. A train full of silent women, plowing forever through the twilight. Heads made of light. A small piece of blue cardboard. A plum, sweet and tart and cold. A were-goldfish who transforms into a wolf at full moon.

Two old women taking a weasel on holiday. Gryphons shouldn't marry. Vampires don't dance. A man who inherits a library card to the library in Alexandria. A rose bush, a nightingale, and a black rubber dog-collar.

I prayed to the darkness, to the night, to the carrion kind. I prayed to the king of the cats, the kind's emissary on Earth, he who walks amongst us and we do not know him. I prayed and I dreamed.

"Justice?" It repeated. "Justice is a delusion you will not find on this or any other sphere. And wisdom? Wisdom is no part of dreams, lithe walker, though dreams are a part of the sum of each life's experiences, which is the only wisdom that matters. But revelation? That is the province of dream."

All cats can see futures, and see echoes of the past. We can watch the passage of creatures from the infinity of now, from all the worlds like ours, only fractionally different. And we follow them with our eyes, ghost things, and the humans see nothing.

They dreamed the world so it always was the way it is now, little one. There never was a world of high cat-ladies and cat-lords.

Then a human arose amongst them. A golden-furred male, bred and raised in the pleasure gardens of one of the sybaritic feline ladies.

But if enough of us dream, if a bare thousand of us dream, we can change the world. We can dream it anew! A world in which no cat suffers from the malice of humans. In which no cats are killed by human caprice. A world that we rule.

Dream the world. Not this pallid shadow of reality. Dream the world the way it truly is. A world in which all cats are queens and kings of creation. That is my message. And I shall keep moving, keep repeating it, until I die. Or until a thousand cats hear my words, and believe them, and dream, and we come again to paradise.

Little one, I would like to see anyone -- prophet, king or God -- persuade a thousand cats to do anything at the same time.

"So... we are here on your command, my lord, on Midsummer's Eve, by the Long Man of Wilmington. An odd choice of a place for us to perform..."

"Odd? Wendel's Mound was a theatre before your race came to this island."

"Before the Normans?"

"Before the humans."

It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.

"Thou speak'st aright: I am that merry wanderer of the night."

"'I am that merry wanderer of the night.'? I am that giggling - dangerous - totally - bloody - psychotic - menace - to - life-and-limb, more like it."

Besides -- if you ask me, none of those women are women at all. They're males. I can tell. Human males taste more like rabbit than the females -- and they stick in your teeth. Oh yes.

You played me well, mortal. But I have played me for time out of mind. And I do Robin Goodfellow better than anyone.

"Not even Kit Marlowe will be able to gainsay that."

"You have not heard? Marlowe is dead, Will. He died in Deptford, three weeks back, of a knife wound to the head."

Things have changed, and will change more; and Gaia no longer welcomes us as once she did.

During your stay on this Earth the faerie have afforded me much diversion, and entertainment. Now you have left for your own haunts. And I would repay you all for the amusement. And more. They shall not forget you. That was important to me: that King Auberon and Queen Titania will be remembered by mortals, until this age is gone.

Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.

They say that cigarettes will kill you, eventually. Fine. That's just fine. I only wish they'd do it faster.

I like smoking cigarettes. It's something normal people do. I smoke a cigarette, and pretend I'm normal. And I wish I was dead.

"And you've come for me? Blessed, merciful death. You've come to make it all stop?"

"No. I haven't come for you, Rainie. There was a woman upstairs, changing the light bulb in her kid's room. The stepladder slipped... Like I said, I was passing and I heard you crying, and, well, the door was open..."

Anyway: I'm not blessed or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes, in hospitals and forests and abattoirs. For some folks death is a release and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.

When the first living thing existed, I was there, waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job is finished. I'll put the chairs on tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.

Rainie, mythologies take longer to die than people believe. They linger on in a kind of dream country that affects all of you.

It's his never-ending battle against Apep, the serpent that never dies. Dumb. I told him, "The serpent that never dies is dead. I took her three thousand years ago! The never-ending battle ended..."

No, Mister Mulligan. I really can't get a message to her. I'm sorry. Who am I? Just a friend. Sometimes. Maybe. Sorry I couldn't help any. Be seeing you...

I'm going stir-crazy, and I've joined the ranks of the walking brain-dead, but otherwise I'm just peachy.

"Hi Gregory. How they hanging?"

"UWURRRK."

"Yeah? You should try being a bird sometime."

It is sometimes a mistake to climb, it is always a mistake never even to make the attempt.

"I hesitate to tell you this, Sam, but there are certain individuals who have accused me of. Mm. Well, being mad."

"You shock me, Your Majesty."

"I am pleased to see that you are healthy."

"Healthy? I'm dead, Norton. You ever swallowed aconite? You don't get up and walk away again."

I am the Emperor of the United States, Pain. I am content to be what I am. What more than that could any man desire?

"Desire? You disappoint me. This evening's display: bringing back a dead man to offer Norton the pleasures of the world. It was not very subtle."

"Go screw yourself, big brother."

I'll bring the Kindly Ones down on his blasted head.

They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints - 36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist. They are the secret kings and queens of this world.

I've met a lot of kings, and emperors and heads of state in my time, Joshua. I've met them all. And you know something? I think I liked you best.

It's a great hat. Can I try it on?

"I must confess, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear."

"Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later everybody gets to find out."

Aye, Master Orpheus. Well, they do say that two heads are better than one.

"Will you kill all the poets, then, St. Just? Will you kill all the dreamers?"

"When they have served their purpose, yes. Fabre D'Eglantine devised our calendar, and he died with Danton last Germinal."

[Thomas] Paine is useful as a rabble-rouser; but rabble-rousers are needed before revolutions, not after.

Your son's head is valuable to you, and I am attached to mine. Indeed, hitherto we have been inseparable.

And from that Time on, the Song of Orpheus has always hovered at the Edge of my Perception; a Melody I can never fully recover, try howsoever I will. And do not doubt that there are many in Authority to whom I would sing it, if 'twere within my Power.

And I suppose if everybody cut off their heads and stuffed asafoetida into their mouths and buried their hearts at crossroads, then you'd do it too?

"Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night --"

"Okay. It was a forest. It had trees in it. I'm not stupid. I got it."

The young man's mother had died bringing him into the world; she gave him life, a small wooden finger-ring, and the name Vassily. There have been worse legacies.

"A small bone that he had what?"

"Carved into the shape of a small bone."

"But it was a small bone already."

"He carved it into the shape of a different small bone. All right?"

"Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?"

"Mm. It all sounds suspiciously post-modern to me, Grandpa. Are you sure this is really a story from the old country?"

Listen, blood of my blood, although I'm a hard man to anger, and I love you deeply, if you interrupt me again so help me I'll rip out your throat with my teeth.

You shouldn't trust the story-teller; only trust the story

In the black shadow of the Baba Yaga babies screamed and mothers miscarried; milk soured and men went mad.

Do you know how long it's been since I mislaid a book? Well, let's just say the continents weren't in their current shapes, not that that means anything to you.

Actors... I don't like actors. It's a profession based on lies and disrespect. Pretending to be what you are not.

It will be good to be dead - to be a god.

We write our names in the sand, and then the waves roll in and wash them away.

"There's a few thousand square miles of central Australia, a couple of Pacific islands, a field in Ireland, an occasional mountain in Arizona..."

"An occasional mountain?"

"It's not a very big mountain, but it's only there occasionally."

"You look terrible. White as the man in the moon. Are you always so pale?"

"That depends on who's watching."

And forewarned is seldom forearmed. Not even in the shifting zones.

He found himself able to see each falling grain, distinct and unique; and he knew then he was dreaming.

There are really patterns. It was a revelation, of a kind. Dreams and sand and stories. Deserts and cities and time.

The grains fell slowly, tumbling down from the dream-king's pale fingers into his own travel-stained hands.

The patterns they formed as they fell illuminated his mind: a landscape strobed by flashes of distant lightning.

You are mortal: it is the mortal way. You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life.

And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on.

She has lots of things, although she seldom has much use for them. You should see her floppy hat collection.

And Herakles was full of it. He just got dead drunk for a couple of weeks in Phrygia and told everyone he'd been to the land of the dead.

"I thought you could foretell the future?"

"I don't need to know the future. When the future's over, then it's me..."

"Mortal man?"

"Yes?"

"Beware of the dog."

Thou hast made the Furies cry, Orpheus. They will never forgive you for that.

Orpheus watched through tear-stung eyes until he was out of sight. His father never even tried to look back.

And there was also in that room the Other Egg of the Phoenix. (For the Phoenix when its time comes to die lays two eggs, one black, one white: From the white egg hatches the Phoenix-bird itself, when its time is come, but what hatches from the black egg no one knows.)

There were paths through the palace that none but Haroun Al Raschid knew; and this was because those who had drawn up the plans, and those who had built the paths, had all long since gone to their final reward: for it is seldom healthy to know the secrets of a king.

Imagine a thousand thousand fireflies of every shape and color; Oh, that was Baghdad at night in those days.

You have called me here, Haroun. It is unwise to summon what you cannot dismiss.

And he prays as he walks (cursing his one weak leg the while), prays to Allah (who made all things) that somewhere, in the darkness of dreams, abides the other Baghdad (that can never die), and the other egg of the Phoenix. But Allah alone knows all.

Dave McKean: Buy him a Margarita and he'll tell you why cats smile.

"I look a mess."

"You're talking. With those cheekbones? I'd kill for those cheekbones. Mm. Well, maim, maybe."

Interesting. Great winds are coming, Matthew, and darkness, and much pain. Do you see? One of the skerries is dying... I fear only grief can be the outcome.

"Don't you just love the subway? I just have to set foot on a subway train, and it's like a magic carpet, y'know? It could take you anywhere."

"Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of."

This is a bright place, filled with frightened people, and fast hard things that hurt and wound. No matter. I swore I would remain by her side forever, and until death divided us. I must walk until once more we are reunited.

My death hovers near me, screeching and fluttering and giggling: a ghost death, in a ghost world. I tell myself I feel only ghost pain, and I will not let it hurt me.

I am not afraid. O Princess Barbara, protect me now as I have protected you in days long past. O Murphy watch over me. I will not be afraid.

The present I won with my ticket is in the box. I go to open it. The baby smells of formaldehyde, not unpleasant. It is cold and slightly clammy to the touch. The autopsy scar is sewn together with black thread. It has been dead exactly seventy years.

"Wanda?"

"Yeah?"

"You've got a thingie."

"Hazel, didn't anyone ever tell you that it's not polite to draw attention to a lady's shortcomings?"

You see, there are two ways into another's dreams. We can go through the dream king; or we can go by the moon's road. But the dream king has little time for you women, and even less for my kind; while the moon is ever ours. It's time to draw down the moon.

Where others ask timorously, Thessalian, your kind commanded, directed, ordered. It galled us. But the others are dust now, and less than dust. And one day you, in your turn, will join them. And then our compact will be over, and you will be ours, as they are.

It's like we fell down the rabbit hole, woke up in ... I don't know. Stephen King's basement.

... and there's no love lost between the trees and the Cuckoo. Not that they're on our side, mind you, although most of the trees are all right. Keep themselves to themselves, unless they're bothered, and only an idiot bothers a tree.

"I remember the Hieromancer. I met him, when I was here before. He was a sweet old guy. Kind of like my grandfather. What happened to him?"

"He's dead. I expect that he's dead. If he's lucky he's dead."

I've been doing a lot of face-painting recently. Originally I was going to get a tattoo, but I don't want anything permanent anymore. It's like I can be a different person every day.

"Wilkinson? What's the Hierogram?"

"It's um. Well, it's um. It's sort of more like an um. Well..."

I was one of seventeen children. We were all named Wilkinson -- I suppose it was roughest on the girls, but we all got used to it in the end. I blame the parents, really. ... It was just when they found a name they liked, they stuck with it.

"And what's your name, caller?"

"Jim. Jim Morrison. Not the famous one."

"Hey, wouldn't that be a coup for my show if you were?"

All sense of where I am, of who I am and where I'm going, has been swallowed by the dark. And I walk through the stars and sky, a trinity of dreams beneath the moon.

Poor dead Luz, my little Judas. I could not find it in my heart to blame her: I, too, had been one of the servants of the Cuckoo, felt the overpowering need to protect and nurture her; to do anything that would make her happy. Luz got up. She stumbled. And then she walked into the blackness of his robe and she was gone. Murphy's peace be with you, Luz, if he has peace to give.

There were giants and centaurs and witches and fauns; bears and trolls; even a handful of giant spiders. I saw Wilkinson and Prinado, walking together. They waved when they saw me. They walked past me, the living and the dead, and one by one they vanished into the darkness of his cloak.

And then he reached out his hand and picked up the Land. I don't know how... It was like a little jewelled world. It didn't matter that it was tiny -- if it was tiny. I could see every waterfall and stream, every leaf on every tree. I could see everything.

And then it crumbled in his hand. It was just dust, sand, a glittering multicolored sand that fell away into the chilly wind at the end of the world.

"That's kind of my uh sort of a joke."

"That's right, George. It differs from the usual kind of joke only in the vast gulf between it and any kind of a sense of humor."

"You missed the open coffin at his folks' place -- Alvin looked pretty good, after the morticians were through with him. They cut his hair and put him in a suit and everything."

"But... Wanda was always so proud of her hair..."

The service drones to its end. I realize that I'm already beginning to forget what Wanda looked like. Is identity that fragile? The thought scares me.

I never knew that places around here had such beautiful names. ... Cloverdale, Florissant, Mulberry Grove, Boonville, Salina, Aurora and Goodland. They sound like the names of magic kingdoms, don't they?

And if there's a moral there, I don't know what it is, save maybe that we should take our goodbyes whenever we can.

I spent more than half a year with Barbie and Wanda and Hazel and Foxglove and Wilkinson and Thessaly and the rest of them wandering around in my head. Some nights I still miss them.

Neil Gaiman's favorite toys were mostly books. His favorite game was to find somewhere inaccessible and out of the way, and go read there for hours. He knew that he could go to Narnia or Oz or Cimmeria or New York if he just said the right thing or rubbed the right magic charm, but it just never happened.

Dave McKean's favorite toy was a wooden fish. It was called Fish. These days his favorite game is trying to get color copiers to do things they were never intended for, nor ever dreamed of doing.

Colleen Doran lived on a corner known as Crash Corner; one day she saw a child on a bicycle get hit by a car and fly 20 feet through the air. She was sitting in a tree in the front yard at the time. Her favorite book was The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

"She was a remarkable woman."

"All women are remarkable."

Blossom for a lady -- Rain in the doorway -- Not her sister -- Want/not want -- The views from the backs of mirrors -- Journal of the plague year -- "The number you have dialled..."

Change. Change. Change. Change... Change. Change. Chaaange. When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.

She'll phone you up, and hang around your house. When you ask her to leave you alone she'll just cry and not say anything -- look at you with hurt eyes and follow you around. Eventually this will make you so angry you'll find yourself needing desperately to make her say something. To make her react. To hurt her. To get her eyes out of your mind. After that it will be just a matter of time.

Delirium has, from time to time, visited Despair's grey realm. It is the antithesis of her own churning domain: formless and silent and still. Apathy hangs like damp mist in the chill air.

Today he's sitting in their family room. Realizing that his life is over, wondering if he has the courage to physically end it. He doesn't. Isn't it beautiful?

In her world there are so many windows. Each opening shows her an existence that's fallen to her -- some only for moments, others for lifetimes.

On the empty street, a corpse lay, waiting for the cart to take it to the plague pit; next to it lay a poor piper, untouched by disease, but dead drunk. He would come to his senses in the early hours of the following morning, in the plague pit, with soft earth on his face, and cold flesh beneath him, and believe himself in hell...

"Let me observe here," said Defoe, writing somewhat after the event, "... The people were brought into a condition to despair of life." When Despair read that, through a mirror, she nodded with the satisfaction of one who had performed her duty with diligence and care.

"Some things are changeless. People love, and die, they dream, destroy, despair, go mad. They fulfill their destinies, live out the course of their lives. We fulfill our function, as they fulfill theirs... That will not change."

"You think not?"

You know how she is when she gets an idea into her head. I mean, when one finally penetrates.

It always rains on the unloved -- Wet dreams -- A fishing expedition -- She kisses wyverns (The Disneyland analogy) -- Dinner etiquette and chocolate lovers -- Desire swears by the first circle -- "Things are changing" -- What can possibly go wrong?

"I mean, does this always happen when a girlfriend walks out on him?"

"Not at all. For example, after the Nada affair he razed the Dreaming. It was a bleak, lonely desert for centures. I remember the first flower that grew. The first time he smiled again...

She was no longer Delight, and the blossoms had already begun to fall in her domain, becoming smudged and formless colours, and she had no one to talk to...

There are roughly seventy people walking the Earth, human to all appearances (and in a few cases, to all medical tests currently available), who were alive before the Earth had begun to congeal from gas and dust.

There are less than five hundred living humans who remember the human civilizations that predated the great lizards. (There were a few; fossil records are unreliable. Several of them lasted for millions of years.)

"But I did okay, didn't I? I mean I got, what, fifteen thousand years. That's pretty good, isn't it? I lived a pretty long time."

"You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less."

The people who remember Atlantis -- Concerning mammoths, and falling walls -- Who controls transportation? -- Bored, she makes little frogs -- Truth Or Consequences, and other places -- Ancestral voices prophesying -- The dogs of art -- "When I dream, sometimes I remember how to fly."

"What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it felt to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago."

"There isn't one."

"Oh. I thought maybe there was."

"Can I have a name?"

"Don't you have one? ... If you don't have a name, what do people call you? I mean, do they just wave and smile, or jingle little silver bells or what?"

Well, there are these two people here, Sir. The man says he drank wine with you somewhere called Babylon, and the lady... she's making little frogs.

"I'm not asking for art criticism, Barnabas. Merely for a few honest words of appreciation."

"Honestly? Well, the perspective's shot to hell, the colours could be better chosen, and the olive tree on the left looks like an overgrown stinging nettle."

"Hmph. What the hell would you know? You're a dog."

"Did I ever say I wasn't?"

"'The colours could be better chosen my foot.' Anyway -- I thought dogs were colour blind."

"Yeah? That's a coincidence. I mean, looking at that painting I thought you were colour blind."

"You know, Barnabas, there are those who claim that for unquestioning respect and eternal devotion, all one needs is a dog."

"Hey, schmuck, devotion you've got. Perjury isn't in the job description."

When I dream, sometimes I remember how to fly. You just lift one leg, then you lift the other leg, and you're not standing on anything, and you can fly.

"So what I want to know is, when I'm asleep, do I really remember how to fly? And forget how when I wake up? Or am I just dreaming I can fly?"

"When you dream, sometimes you remember. When you wake, you always forget."

"But that's not fair..."

"No."

The other side of the sky -- A bear and his shadow -- Departed secrets -- "Twinkle's a nice word. So's viridian." -- Three keys -- A treatise on optics -- The perils of smoking in bed.

"Listen, I couldn't help overhearing you earlier. You said destiny was blind. Well, didn't you mean love? It's 'Love is blind'. That's the saying, isn't it?"

"The subject is one I find entirely lacking in interest."

Capax is dead. There is no doubt of that. There is nothing in his space but darkness and cold and silence.

Etain of the Second Look: things moving fast. Strange impressions, difficult to locate. No longer where she was. Is she still even in this plane? Refuge. She's taken refuge somewhere. Delirium extends her flickering consciousness. An old power? Something obscuring her vision? Possibly.

Do they think that they can impale the soul of it on their knives? That if they cut deep enough they can extract its dreams, naked and writhing and screaming, from its head? Reason is a flawed tool at best, my brother.

The things we do to be loved -- Her hands do not go to the moon -- The driving instructor -- Tiffany watches I -- White knights and/or pond scum -- Are dalmatians flowers? -- Nancy displays her erudition -- Wham bam thank you ma'am -- Tiffany watches II.

"You. Out of the car, and keep your hands where I can see them."

"You mean not make my hands go to the moon or anywhere?"

"Matthew. When you were a man, were you able to drive a motor vehicle?"

"Could I? Hey, I killed myself drunk driving, didn't I? I mean, the first time."

"I am not convinced that is any recommendation. However..."

She finds herself thinking once more about the women in the temple courtyard. There is a magic generated by money given for lust. Once on a time, she could use that magic, draw it to her. Create an aspect, take the power to herself. Now, she uses a shadow of it to survive. Even a little worship is better than nothing.

I know how gods begin, Roger. We start as dreams. Then we walk out of dreams into the land. We are worshipped and loved, and take power to ourselves. And then one day there's no one left to worship us. And in the end, each little god and goddess takes its last journey back into dreams... and what comes after, not even we know.

I'm going to dance now, I'm afraid.

Life isn't pleasant, petrified -- The parting of the ways -- The trouble with mortals -- Dreamings of meeting or meetings of dreaming? -- The trouble with gods -- Mervyn sets him straight -- "Have you got anything with a happy ending?" -- Tempus frangit.

"Ruby's dead?"

"Yes."

"Ah me. That's the trouble with mortals. They do that. Not to worry, eh?"

At the edge of the desert is the City of Bubastis. The City is Bubastis as she never was, save in the dreams of a long-dead builder; and in the dreams of a blind child dead four thousand years, who had never seen the city she lived in all her short life; and in the dreams of the goddess of that place. The dreams of Bast.

These are the ghosts of those of my folk who were embalmed, that they would live forever in the world beyond. But their physical forms were exhumed, over a hundred years ago, ground up and used to fertilize the land. Now they are only memories, slowly fading from the land and the world. Dreams of ghost cats, and cats of ghost dreams... sss. I know how they feel.

Cooking considered as one of the fine arts -- "My envelope isn't any good anymore" -- Where all mazes meet -- The other side of the coin -- Life as a glass of bitter wine -- Cherries are counted, and a bargain is made -- An unlikely growth.

Dream respects his brother, but the garden of Destiny disturbs him. It is usual, however, for the Endless to feel uncomfortable in each other's realms; only Death travels wheresoever she must, without misgiving.

The garden of Destiny. Look behind you: shadow-plays of memory are forever being enacted, on paths you walked too long ago.

Do you know why I stopped being Delight, my brother? I do. There are things not in your book. There are paths outside this garden. You would do well to remember that.

Journey's end -- Brains, a heart, a ride in a balloon -- Dinner -- Something new -- The illusion of permanence -- A wreath of bright stars -- Echoes of darkness -- Up. Out.

Ah, yes. You must have grown on a particularly penetrating and incisive branch of the family tree.

I suppose I had vaguely hoped that you had changed, my brother. That you'd noticed that there were other people in the world. That you had begun to see people as other than things that dream, as creatures of stories.

Destruction did not cease with my abandonment of my realm, no more than people would cease to dream should you abandon yours. Perhaps it's more uncontrolled, wilder. Perhaps not. But it's no longer anyone's responsibility.

I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend... I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend.

The Endless? The Endless are merely patterns. The Endless are ideas. The Endless are wave functions. The Endless are repeating motifs. The Endless are echoes of darkness, and nothing more. We have no right to play with their lives, to order their dreams and their desires.

"And even our existences are brief and bounded. None of us will last longer than this version of the universe."

"Except our sister."

"So we suppose."

Desire was right. Also untrustworthy, acerbic, dangerous, and cruel. But right. You would have been better off leaving well enough alone.

Still, what's done can't be undone. Or very rarely. And definitely not this time.

Farewells -- Answered prayers -- The flowers of romance -- Journey's end -- The gates of horn -- Things unlooked for -- Brief lives.

I am so scared. It's strange. For many thousand years I have prayed for death. I have prayed to all the gods for peace and relief and... I have prayed for an ending.

"You cannot seek Destruction and return unscathed."

"Delirium has."

"Delirium has been scathed enough in her time."

And from the horns of the youngest, he carved a gate that he reserved for true dreams. This because he had some little regard for her, and had, perhaps, in some small measure, regretted the course of action he had found necessary. But all this was long ago; and the truth of it all has not ever been told on this world.

At rest in the temple of its body, Desire, who would be darkly amused to hear itself described as an angel, floats in an eyeball larger than a cathedral, and remembers its lost brother in its own way. Desire's thoughts are private. It holds a small red flower, very tightly.

Andros takes the linen-wrapped bundle from his son. We will put him to rest, thinks Andros Rhodocanakis, beneath the cherry tree, and perhaps his spirit is in Elysium, with his beloved Eurydice. And perhaps his spirit has returned to darkness, or to nothing... And perhaps he is at rest.

I don't really like driving in snow. There's something about the motion of the falling snowflakes that hurts my eyes, throwing my sense of balance all to hell. It's like tumbling into a field of stars.

Matey, if you asks my opinion, a-sitting there in the snow is not eggzackerly the smartest thingie as you could be a-doing of, all things considerable.

You need help, matey. You and that there young lady. That red stuff, that's blood that is. Meant to be on the inside, it is. Bad sign if it's not on the inside, that's what I says.

Up the lane aways is the Inn. You just have to be sure it's there, though. If you aren't sure, then fizzlywinks, it's only goin' to be fireflies and treeses.

"What's going on?"

"We're telling stories. You just missed a really good one about a man who won November 1937 in a poker game."

In the subway train, in the morning, he would read a newspaper, and wonder what would happen were the subway carriage to be transported to a distant planet: how long would it take before the passengers began to speak, one to another; who would make love to whom; who would be eaten should they run out of food. He felt vaguely ashamed of these daydreams.

A carving on a wall above a door on a condemned house; a bright flash of sunlight reflecting off the railings of a park, making them serried spears to guard the green grass and running children; a gravestone in a churchyard, eroded by wind and rain and time until the words on the stone had been lost but the mosses and lichens still spelled out letters from forgotten alphabets... all these sights, and many others, he treasured and collected.

The roads mixed him up, turned him around. Here, he would pass a cathedral or museum, there, a skyscraper or a fountain -- always hauntingly familiar. But he never passed the same landmark twice, could never find the road to return him to the landmark again.

So, if a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe it dreams. That is where I believe we have come. We are in the dreams of the city. That's why certain places hover on the brink of recognition; why we almost know where we are.

"If the city was dreaming," he told me, "then the city is asleep. And I do not fear cities sleeping, stretched out unconscious around their rivers and estuaries, like cats in the moonlight. Sleeping cities are tame and harmless things. What I fear," he said, "is that one day he cities will waken. That one day the cities will rise."

I like to believe it was only the cold that made me shiver, only a strand of fog in my throat that caused me to catch my breath.

Robert walked away across the moor and I never saw him again. Since that time I have walked with less comfort in cities.

"So... where are you from?"

"Seattle. You?"

"The Necropolis Litharge."

I lack the ability to embellish. Thus you would perforce needs content all yourselves, one and all, with a rather sparse and uninteresting narrative.

"Sometimes I wish that my ambassador was not quite so... let me see. Feckless?"

"You reign over a feckless dominion, My Lady."

Well, you are the best I have, Cluracan, and to say that is to say little indeed.

We of Faerie are of the wild magic. We are not creatures of spells and grimoires. We are spells, and we are written of in grimoires.

Cluracan, it is one to me whether you live or die. It is not one to your sister, and she serves me well and faithfully. I would not see her needlessly distressed.

"Was that the truth, Cluracan?"

"All of it except the sword-fight with the palace guard, which I threw in to add verisimilitude, excitement, and local color to an otherwise bald and insipid narrative."

I stood there sweating with the line in my hands, and the sun broke above the horizon, and the gulls mewed and the grey sea turned to sapphire: and I knew this would be a good voyage.

"You're a romantic."

"Why be a sailor if you're not?"

"Why does the water glow like that?"

"The dream magic of the sea."

"Phosphorescent algae."

Some of it's the voice, and some of it's the hands, and a lot of it's learning to see what you see and not what you think you see, if that makes any sense.

"How old are you, sir?"

"Old enough to have learned to keep my mouth shut about seeing a bloody great snake in the middle of the ocean."

Given time, you'll spin a yarn of what we saw in the ocean. Given time I'll tell the tale of the handsome cabin boy. But given enough time and the right audience, the darkest of secrets scum over into mere curiosities.

But I'm getting too old for the trick, which troubles me, for the sea is in my blood like a fever and I don't know how I can leave.

And when, some day soon, I forsake the sea -- like a sailor leaving his lady-love on the shore -- I shall take another name to me and build another life.

But -- for now -- you can call me Jim.

My people have, of old, divided the world into two kinds of people: hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs know one big thing. Foxes know lots of little things.

In the White House is a tiger skin rug, shot and killed many years ago by Teddy Roosevelt. The feet of the great walk over that tiger skin each day. It listens to policy being formed and secrets being spoken. Now do you think that tiger would rather be dead and in the seat of power, or alive, and walking the jungle of India, sniffing the wind for the scent of game?

Some people said the woman who killed his Kathy returned to finish off the task she had begun years before. And these people knew that the killer had in her turn been executed. But still, they said, it was her.

"So what are you? God? Or the Devil?"

"I'm just Boss Smiley. I run your world."

"So that girl was right. You're not the watchmaker."

"If only."

Firstly, earth burial or interment. Variants are boxed, wrapped or naked, embalmed or otherwise; lying, seated or standing; grave, sepulchre, vault or cairn.

Secondly, disposal through fire. Variants: clothed, boxed, pyre, vessel, or ship. Also there are different procedures that can be adopted to dispose of the ashes.

Thirdly: mummification. Variants: salting, mineral baths, dehydration. There's the thing with pitch and bitumen and...

Fourthly, disposal through water. Variants include feeding to water animals or fish; disposal in sacred river or sea, boxing, bagging with rocks, dismemberment...

Fifth... Air burial, sir. Variants include dismemberment and otherwise; ingestion by raptors or scavengers; complete or partial disposal.

It is a fearful thing to be haunted by those who loved us once. It is a fearful thing to haunt those one loves.

We were here before any other city that now stands. And we will sing the funeral songs that are sung for cities for them when they die.

And then she found herself in a huge room, somewhere beneath the city. There were six silver cerements hanging in that room, shining in the darkness; and a huge book, locked closed, on a lectern. And a voice said to her: "WHICH OF THEM IS DEAD?"

"We're all dead. That's why we're here."

"Young man. If you were dead, I think I would know it. I have some experience in these matters."

I think that the Cluracan has had enough. I know he prides himself on his capacity for alcohol, but there's a thin line between intoxication and unconsciousness, and he's just about to cross it.

When a world ends, there's always something left over. A story, perhaps, or a vision, or a hope. This inn is a refuge, after the lights go out. For a while.

It is, however, a difficult hypothesis to test empirically. This is only the second of these storms in my lifetime, and we centaurs consider ourselves a long-lived folk indeed.

So, like everyone else, I was staring out of one of the windows of the inn at the end of the words.

Worlds. I meant worlds.

The words said over my father's body were hollow and dumb, and I couldn't find it in me to cry, not then. I knew I was watching the real thing here. There was true grief in each step they took across the sky, and they shouldered the casket as if they were shouldering the weight of the world.

She looked at me. Maybe she was trying to tell me something; I don't know. She probably didn't even know I was there. But I'll always love her. All my life.

But it was like I knew her. Like she was my oldest, dearest friend. The kind of person you can tell anything to, no matter how bad, and they'll still love you, because they know you.

"Hey. Thanks for listening. I suppose you must think I'm crazy."

"No. I don't. Maybe I ought to. But I don't. You hear a lot of weird stories behind a bar."

There's a moment of fear in the returning to sleep. A hesitation: there are darknesses beyond the curtain of waking, and the shadow-plays clutch at my heart... Too late. I'm gone.

Get your head outta the clouds! Not you, kiddo. I was talking to Tiny. He gets his head in the clouds, he'll be sneezing for days.

I'm Matthew. I'm the raven. Not a raven -- the raven. That's one of the weird things about the Dreaming -- it's a kind of one-raven-at-a-time sort of place.

Can't say I've ever been too fond of beginnings, myself. Messy little things. Give me a good ending any time. You know where you are with an ending.

Why, that's what I like about making things for people. You can start off in Birmingham and finish in, well, Tanganyika or somewhere.

It's never what they want, and if we give them what they think they want, they like it less than ever. "I never thought it would be like this." "Why can't it be like the one I had before?" I don't know why we bother.

We bother because we have no choice. Because that is what we are, in this aspect.

There are no gryphons, no wyverns, no winged horses in the waking world, raven. Not anymore. But we are here...

"Mervyn, build an ocean over here, knock down that city under the willow tree over there, and incidentally, Mervyn, this time remember that ice is customarily cold." Like I don't have enough to do.

"Whatcha reading?"

"An unwritten play by John Webster. A Banquet for the Wormes."

"Any good?"

"Yes. Very good. 'Webster was much possessed by death and saw the skull beneath the skin.' He did, you know, he really did."

"Yeah? You mean like he had some sort of X-ray vision?"

"No, nothing like that."

"Lucien? Were you ever alive?"

"I don't think so, no."

"You don't think so?"

"I can remember the title, author, and location of every book in this library, Matthew. Every book that's ever been dreamed. Every book that's ever been imagined. Every book that's ever been lost. Millions upon millions of them. That's what I remember. It's my job. Other things... I forget sometimes."

Imagine that you woke in the night and rose, and seemed to see before you another person, whom slowly you perceived to be yourself. Someone had entered in the night and placed a mirror in your sleeping place, made from a black metal. You had been frightened only of your reflection. But then the reflection slowly raised one hand, while your own hand stayed still...

A dark mirror... That was always the intention...

No, I'm afraid not. It is a song I find entirely devoid of interest. The melody is trite, while the awkward paraphrases of lesser Eliot poems in the lyrics are grating in the extreme.

"Are you sure it's a finger? It's very small."

"It was a very small baby."

"Ditch-delivered?"

"And birth-strangled. Just like it says in the recipe."

"I didn't know that there was a downstairs, here."

"There's a downstairs in everybody. That's where we live."

"Here -- have a porkie pie instead."

"It -- it's covered in mud."

"Everyone's got to eat a peck of dirt before they die."

"Fairy gifts traditionally are double-edged knives."

"And are your own gifts always without consequence, Sire?"

"Many years ago I convinced Thor of the Aesir that the reason for his impotence was that he was pregnant."

"Pregnant?"

"Mm. He's not very bright."

Somebody once told me you don't really die until everyone that you knew is dead, too. Think of all the people I'm keeping alive, eh?

I wish I could have told you about Peg. You'd've liked her. She died in the Blitz. We were trapped in a cellar. I held her hand, as she stopped breathing... Ah, but that's the past, and done with.

It was then that Delirium noticed that she had absent-mindedly transformed into a hundred and eleven perfect, tiny multicoloured fish. Each fish sang a different song.

Dreams are tricky buggers. You can't trust them.

Watch me. This is me going to the door, just like I've done thousands and thousands of times in the past and none of those times was important, I can't even remember them as individual times, who remembers walking to the door...? And then I open the door.

This is me walking into the family room. This is me just standing here listening to the voices in my head. One of them's saying "this is me just standing here..." And the other one's going "Eeeeeee..." in one long ceaseless scream. And the last one doesn't say anything at all.

I must be strong. And in my head a voice says, Yes, Dear, you must. And in my head another voice is muttering Oh that I were a man, or that I had power to execute my apprehended wishes: I would whip some with scorpions... And a voice says, You know what you must do.

"The early bird catches the worm, Star of Morning. The, um, worm that dieth not, in this case. Eh? Haha..."

"How remarkably funny, Remiel. Not actually original though, of course."

Been there, Remiel. Done that, wore the tee-shirt, ate the burger, bought the original cast album, choreographed the legions of the damned and orchestrated the screaming...

You didn't join the rebellion, not because you felt I was wrong, but because you were too damned scared. What would you have done, had I won? Told me that you'd always supported me ideologically? That you were secretly cheering me on the whole time?

"Do you want to come with me, kitty-cat?"

"I can't. I'm on my way to that castle. It's owned by a shape-changing ogre. I intend to wager the silver collar around my neck that the ogre cannot change itself into three things that I shall name for it."

"Will the third shape be a mouse?"

"Of course."

"But... don't they ever learn?"

"They can't. They're part of the story, just as I am."

I didn't say it was my fault. I said it was my responsibility. I know the difference.

"Y'see, my grandmother was Carmilla Bristol."

"Who?"

"Carmilla Bristol. She played, like, every black ladies' maid in every crappy Hollywood film made between 1925 and 1950. "Now dere, Missy, you hush up wid' yo' cryin'." She didn't get to demonstrate much dramatic range, but she had a great eye for a land deal."

Our sister died. But we never took revenge. We knew there'd be trouble one day, her being mortal. It's not as if we never said anything. We still miss her. We still mourn.

Take apples, by all means -- I'm guardian -- to be honest, don't give a toss who has them -- no one ever comes here. Just rot on the ground -- worms get them -- pity.

"A complete what, Mervyn?"

"A, uh, just a... complete, Boss."

"Completeness is a virtue, is it not?"

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.

The gods we prayed to when we were young used up their time so long ago. They cannot answer anymore.

"They never liked us, did they?"

"Gods don't 'like'. They love and they hate and they ignore."

"It was good to be three. I haven't forgotten... Twos don't work. Twos hurt and crumble. Twos fall into ones, and then into dust and nothings."

"We're still here."

"That's because we haven't given up hope of being a three again."

If you go looking for the Ladies... well, I don't know that that's such a good idea. You might find them.

Can I have more water, please? My hair drank most of it.

"You know, there's a three-headed snake out in the garden. I don't think it trusts you two. It was rude about you."

"Well, then the next time we see it, we'll glare at it."

"If you had stayed with us, we could have given you life until death."

"Don't I get that anyway?"

There's a theory that for a human to be killed by a god is the best thing that could possibly happen to the human under discussion. It eliminates all questions of belief, while manifestly placing a human life at the service of a higher power.

You don't have to believe in God. But what about gods? Eh? The plurality of powers and dominions. The lords and ladies of field and thorn, of asphalt and sewer, gods of telephone and whore, gods of hospital and car-crash?

And do you know your tragedy, Carla? ... It's that, for all your goodwill, for all your willingness to help, you never knew what any of this was all about. What was going on. You don't know how it ends. And you'll never get to find out.

I stay awake the whole way, this time, while Jack does the conversation thing that the English do so well, where they can talk forever and never tell you a thing.

And as soon as he was sure that he was dead, he got up and shook himself, and looked around, and there waiting for him on the bed was his wife, with long claws out, and her eyes blazing like a green cat ready to spring.

And he screams, "Kill me, for god's sake, just get it over with." But she licks her lips with a long worm tongue, and she shakes her head. "A meal this good must never be hurried," she says. "Just hold still, boy, and let me enjoy myself." And she takes her first, gentle bite from his cheek with her sharp sharp teeth...

And that's the story, as my mother used to tell it.

Well, there was this doggy. He was a very clever doggy. He said things like... like... "I would feel infinitely more comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options."

A raven walks slowly about her house, its frock-coated gait that of an elderly gentleman, leaning forward as it struts. A black hound waits by the door. In the garden by the stream a little girl plays with something yellowed and round that might conceivably be a ball.

And then, to conclude the day's work, he gave an elderly tortoise, alone on her island these past two centuries, a dream of her love, roasted by passing sailors long since for his rich green flesh.

Dancing salamanders brought the children silver plates filled with exotic ice-creams of various flavors, and with fruits they had never seen before and would never see again... although they would dream of them, on rare occasions, until they died.

He spoke to the embryonic silicon dreams who clustered in a far ballroom, and whispered to them, briefly, about the other machines that had dreamed in the distant past.

He spoke to the scar-dancers, to the straw-dust-women, to the old man with a swan's arm who tends the back stairs, to the three children of the autopsy, to the painters and the scriveners and the walls.

I know lots of things. People think I don't but I really do. I know more about us than any of us. That's just one of the things I know.

Sometimes old memories surface, like flotsam on the churning surface of the sea. And then they are gone.

Some were larger than eagles. Some were older than gods. They stayed in the shadows, kawwing and tokking. Waiting.

Gryphon, you are old. Your flesh is meat, and the meat is decaying. Your bones are dry and brittle. Within you now, lion and eagle abandon their battle for dominance, and surrender to time and to the grave.

"I am honor-bound to warn you to stay on the path through the castle. Straying from the path could mean your destruction. ... You killed my friend, woman. Stray from your path."

Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like "maybe we should just be friends" or "how very perceptive" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart.

"I... I did not intend to hurt you."

"And what if you did not? Intent and outcome are so rarely coincident."

The thing you ought to remember about ravens, is that we belong equally to both genders. You don't see that every day. But we're as likely to be the Morrigan's as Odin's, as likely to be Eve's as Dream's.

"So, young Matthew. You want to go first?"

"I can't. He was my friend. I just came down to say goodbye."

"So? Listen, an eye's just an eye. A few more days, and he'll be something not even a raven would eat. Over to the ants..."

It was like a bad TV show. "He's a reincarnated serial killer -- his partner's a bird. They're cops."

A Puck is harder by far to hurt than some little lord of malice from the lands of ice and snow. We Pucks are old and hard and wild...

I am the Puck, called Robin Goodfellow. I am a trickster, an antic prankster, a will o' the wisp. "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loose upon the world." That's me.

"You can't kill me."

"We can. If we want to. You scarcely exist. You're a dream of a ghost of a memory of someone who, one suspects, never existed in the first place."

You mustn't kill me. You don't love me. You d-don't even know me.

I swear on my name, soon he will be remembered only by antiquaries. But then, we are all improved by the glow of memory.

"You? What are you?"

"Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare -- a pumpkin with a gun."

They say I'm a bastard, and I'll tell you what. I am a bastard. A hard, tough bastard. A tough, hard bastard with a pumpkin for a head.

"Gods fear us. Demons fear us. We have hounded kings and angels. We have taken vengeance on worlds and universes. We are the Kindly Ones. We are the Eumenides."

"Yeah? Well, Eumenides this!"

"How... how dare you let that happen, Lord? How dare you?"

"You will not speak to me like that, Lucien."

"I doubt I'll be alive tomorrow, Lord. On that basis I find it particularly easy to say exactly what I think."

Things have been a little turbulent of late. Late being the operative word.

"On reflection, while I cannot give you the thing itself, I could give you a dream of my love."

"I already have that, my Lord."

I remember waiting for his return. I remember the strange strained grey days that stretched into years and into decades. The slow crumbling of walls... the rooms that were no longer there...

This will be felt across worlds and days as a reality storm; and, as it plays its course, conflicting realities will fall and spin and shatter across time and existence.

All around me darkness gathers, fading is the sun that shone, we must speak of other matters, you can be me when I'm gone...

Such a train it becomes, oh! a gleaming black and silver Deco dream of a train that clacks along the silver tracks with the unchanging rhythm of a nursery rhyme, and perhaps, if you listened hard enough, you could imagine that you could tease words from the pulsing clatter...

Above the entrance is a frieze: a wyvern and a winged horse are frozen in bas-relief, and there is an empty space, where a third carving might once have been.

And this occurs at the same moment that a customer at Lux's, drunk and flirtatious, peeks beneath Mazikeen's half-mask. He satisfies his curiosity, as he loses, one after the other, his drink, his lunch, and his sanity. Mazikeen has no patience with men.

Hmph. If you don't let me in, I will turn you into a demon half-face waitress night-club lady with a crush on her boss, and I'll make it so you've been that from the beginning of time to now and you'll never ever know if you were anything else and it will itch inside your head worse than little bugses.

So: exeunt the spider women, stage left. Look on their works, ye mighty, and clean yours with bleach.

"You're crying."

"Lord Shaper is in dire need, and he doesn't love me."

"Would it be better if he was in dire need, and did love you?"

Since I killed my son... the Dreaming has not been the same ... or perhaps I was no longer the same. I still had my obligations... But even the freedom of the Dreaming can be a cage, of a kind, my sister.

And the poison spills into Loki's mouth and eyes; he writhes, and a city falls: and in the moment of pain he gains a certain clarity. The master manipulator realizes how, ultimately-- how strangely, how elegantly-- he too had been manipulated. Perhaps the sound he makes is laughter.

Dream? Give me your hand.

"But I did look for you. All over."

"Hmph. Where were you looking? Patagonia? Mars? The Emerald City?"

"Um. Places like that."

I had the hubris originally to regard myself as a collaborator, as a co-author. Very rapidly I found myself reduced to the status of character, following something of a disagreement in the fundamental direction of the Creation.

"So you see, it was innocent. It really was. Just bad luck."

"Rosalita... there isn't any innocent. There isn't any guilty. There's just dead."

"What did we make? What was it, in the end?"

"What it always is. A handful of yarn; a little weaving and stitching; some embroidering perhaps. A few loose ends, but that's only to be expected."

It's the same old story... Whatever it turns into on the way, whatever it is you originally undertake to spin or knit or weave, keep it going long enough and, in the end, my lilies, it's always a winding sheet.

<snf> At least it's not a moral. Worse than beginnings, morals. I've got no time for them. No time at all.

Never mind. There. For good or bad. It's done.

The family did not send to ask from whom the messenger had come; it was not the first time that messengers had visited them, after all. And there are some powers that no one, not even the Endless, seeks to inquire into too deeply.

One for sorrow, two for sorrow, three for sorrow, four for for for I don't know but I'm all bored of sorrow, five for three two one, six for gold, seven for a magpie who tells me where to go...

Our brother is dead. We have come for the cerements and for the books of ritual, which are in your keeping.

And the state of his bathroom -- I'm not one to gossip, but there are things crusted on his sink that have not simply developed intelligent life but have in all probability by now evolved their own political systems.

Eblis O'Shaughnessy: you were created and gifted by five of the Endless, but you can neither dream nor, ultimately, destroy, and that shall be your triumph and that shall be your tragedy.

If you bring me back to life, my death will have no meaning. I had a fine existence. I was a good place. I spent a little time in the waking world. I even fell in love, once, a little. I lived a good life and it ended. Would you take that away from me?

And the Lady Bast, her fur thinning and her eyes milky and dim, summons all the power at her disposal, pulls together tiny strands of belief, a handful of instants of half-hearted worship. At a cat show in Glasgow, a teenage boy stares at a one-year-old Abyssinian and, for a moment, he sees a goddess. Head held high, eyes clear, fur sleek, she walks to the Dreaming.

Somewhere in the night, entities bigger than storm-clouds are building a house of remembrance. The people on the ground are waiting for the building to be finished before they go inside. They wait awkwardly, shuffling and making small-talk, in the wasteland that was once the heart of the Dreaming. Everybody's here. You're here.

I am not here to mourn him. I mourned the loss of my love a long time ago. I am here to say goodbye to a stranger who once did me a good turn. And to the man who gave my son the death he craved.

"Your predecessor, he told me there weren't any gryphons left in the waking world."

"Arimaspia is as far from the waking world as it is from the Dreaming, great lord."

"The one I hate is where I'm just an actor on a strange television version of my life. Have you ever had that dream?"

"Doesn't everyone?"

"I don't."

We were never loves, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was the better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old.

The bonds of family bind both ways. They bind us up, support us, help us, and they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself.

I cared for him, very much. He was so wise; he seemed so certain of the rightness of his actions. And I, who do nothing but doubt, admired that in him. He was a creature of hope, for dreams are hopes, and echoes of hopes, and I am a creature of despair.

I think of the first Despair sometimes, said Despair. It must be over a hundred thousand years since anyone thought of her but me. An eyeblink, and she is forgotten. And you will forget: death or life will take him from your minds. I know, whispered Despair, in her distant, empty voice. But I shall remember him.

Something Dian used to say to me. She'd say, "Wes, don't say anything unless you've got something to say." Advice I took to heart. She would also say, "It's a long, long trail that has no turning." And how right she was.

I'm not a young man anymore. I'm retired now. But I sometimes think that all the things in my life that have made it worth the living have been as a result of my connection to the dead gentleman.

It's astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself into, if one works at it. And astonishing how much trouble one can get oneself out of, if one simply assumes that everything will, somehow or other, work out for the best.

For a start, we never even noticed the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a load of bloody Italians poncing around claiming to be the golden age of the Greeks come around again. Nobody in England had even heard of the Renaissance until it had been over for centuries.

"C'mon, Robbie. There weren't any black queens of England."

"Catherine of Aragon."

"She wasn't black. She was Spanish."

"There were a lot of Moors and Africans in Spain and Italy in the old days. Remember Othello? Trust me, if Catherine of Aragon had been in Alabama in the 1950s they'd have made her ride in the back of the bus."

"When I first met you I thought you were gay."

"Why? 'Cos I'm English?"

"Uh-uh. Because you seemed to know so many people who were dead."

"... That's not funny."

"No. It's not, is it?"

"They're all having a marvelous time. It's great."

"Well, thank you, little Miss Sunshine."

Birds of a thousand colours danced in the sky when I was a boy. They brightened the day with their intricate songs. "We are who we choose to be," sang the goldfinch, when the sun was high. "I dream about dreams about dreams," sang the nightingale, under the pale moon.

Old friend, in my mind only do I write you this letter, but it is a splendid letter, with perfect brushwork. Old hands do not shake or cramp when the letter is written on the air.

"Father? I am your son. That is only a kitten. Why do you abandon me to chase after it?"

"When you were alive, you were all my joy. Now you are dead. I see you only in my dreams. And when I awake my pillow is wet with tears. The kitten is living, and it needs my help."

Why are you here, in this home of demons? Are you lost? Or are you also a demon? Forgive my bluntness, but I am an old man, and my flesh is sure to be stringy and lacking in taste: I doubt even a demon would relish it.

I have no liking for prisons, Master Li. Sometimes I suspect that we build our traps ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement the while.

"Lord -- what was it the barbarian said, as the riders vanished?"

"'Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.' 'Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.' Fare you well, Master Li."

But truth or no, still I believe in the correct manner, and correctness in behaviour is one of the cardinal virtues. I place the kitten in my sleeve once more. I have saved his life, as he saved mine, and am responsible for him. We cannot evade our responsibilities.

I am banished to the grey waste at the end of the world, but I mourn myself no longer; I cherish the pain in my hand. I imagine the taste of the mulberries in the violet dusk. And tomorrow I shall arrive in the town of Wei.

Only the phoenix arises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.

"Where does this one come from? Have you been raiding poor Holinshed again? Or does Plutarch bear the brunt of your depredations?"

"Bits of things, here and there, but it's mostly mine, for once."

Well, my own fine words notwithstanding, life is no play. We meet people once, and never see them again. There is no shape to events, no point at which we turn to the audience for their praise. No time at which we step behind the stage, to see the actors changing their wigs, and painting their faces, and muttering their lines.

"Nothing to fear? I thought I heard the beating of mighty wings, as in a nightmare that rode me when I was a boy..."

"You do. But have no fear of them."

I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died, and I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss.

"All we know for sure is that we don't know anything for sure."

"That is a particularly foolish thing to say, John Constantine. Light and darkness, life and death. These things are eternally certain."

The past is always knocking at the door, trying to break through into today.

"Wow. That's wicked! Like Star Wars."

"A strange analogy, child, but indeed, there was a war in heaven, and you see the vanquished now, burning as they fall, like stars. In the darkness before the first dawn, theirs was the first folly; theirs the first rebellion."

The true Atlantis is inside you, just as it's inside all of us. The sunken land is lost beneath the dark sea, lost beneath the waves of wet, black stories and myths that break upon the shores of our minds. Atlantis is the shadow-land, the birth-place of civilization. The fair land in the west that is lost to us, but remains forever, true birthplace and true goal.

It's all going to be a dreadful mess. I mean, I'll get Arthur up and running, swords out of stones, all that. Create the fleeting wisp of glory called Camelot, like a firework, a Roman candle, that sputters its light through the dark ages and then fades from sight once more. If I saw it through I'd make it work, you see. It'd all work just fine. But I won't.

Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible.

My life is strobed like lightning by a follow-spot, and looking backwards I can only see the corpses of the animals and birds who strutted with me on the darkened stage and helped me fool them all.

I wrote my name, but I can find it no longer; my ashes blow like dust around the invisible labyrinth.

"Have you ever been pleasantly surprised by the finished film?"

"Not... really. Probably because I know how far they are from what I had in my head. That's where the real films are. Then I put them on paper and finally I have to shoot them... put them out of their misery."

"That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger." That's as maybe. But that which does kill us kills us, and ain't that a bitch...

How do you make sense of your life? Signal to noise: What's signal? What's noise?

Perhaps they are leaving the village. They are going up to the high place, to wait there for the end of their world. And here in my room (I will be fifty soon. I wonder if I will see that birthday, if I will be here to celebrate?)... all alone, I am going with them.

I assume he was an actor. In Hollywood the man who cleans your pool is an actor. The man who sells you your copy of Variety is an actor. I don't think there's a real person left in the place.

When I was a child I used to draw people as animals - elephants, giraffes, mice. Was I retreating into childhood? I kept thinking of my doctor as a big cat. A snow leopard. A beautiful predator.

The walls of my study are covered with faces. Film faces. Actors. Directors. Extras. Old faces I've bought in film and junk shops on three continents. A patchwork of the nameless and the ones that interested me, with, here and there, a sprinkling of stars.

They are my frame of reference, the world in which I move. I can stare at them for hours, wondering about the people behind the faces, their lives before and after the frozen second they are trapped in.

Inanna talking, saying things, she's sorry, doctors make mistakes, she's so sorry, new treatments every day, if there's anything she can do, so very sorry, on and on, saying nothing at all. Just noise.

We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children... Where nobody dies... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.

The world is always ending, for someone. It's a good line. I give it to the father of the child. He says it to his wife. "The world is always ending, for someone", he says. She is trying to quieten the baby, and does not hear him. I doubt it would matter if she did.

I toyed briefly with an image someone once mentioned to me, of a village in the shadow of a twin-peaked mountain. In the morning the sun rises. At lunch it sets behind the mountain. In the early afternoon it rises once more. The cocks crow for the second time, and later the sun sets again.

No. One peak. Metaphors should not be belaboured.

Only, I don't believe in Apocalypses. I believe in Apocatastases. I think it may be the title for The Film. It's a bitch to pronounce, and no-one knows what it means, but otherwise it's a great title.

Apocatastasis. What it means:

1) Restoration, re-establishment, renovation

2) Return to a previous condition

3) (Astronomy) Return to the same apparent position, completion of a period of revolution.

Think about it.

We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.

"For Inanna: Apocatastasis"

"You always did pick rotten titles."

The old woman took the umbrella, gratefully, and smiled her thanks. "You've a good heart," she told him. "Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go." Then she shook her head. "But mostly, it's not."

There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar's eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelery; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike.

Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.

The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys.

"Can't make an omelette without killing a few people."

Coraline wondered why so few of the adults she had met made any sense. She sometimes wondered who they thought they were talking to.

She flipped through a book her mother was reading about native people in a distant country; how every day they would take pieces of white silk and draw on them in wax, then dip the silks in dye, then draw on them more in wax and dye them some more, then boil the wax out in hot water, and then finally, throw the now-beautiful cloths on a fire and burn them to ashes.

It seemed particularly pointless to Coraline, but she hoped that the people enjoyed it.

The cat yawned slowly, carefully, revealing a mouth and tongue of astounding pinkness. "Cats don't have names," it said.

"No?" said Coraline.

"No," said the cat. "Now, you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names."