Last week I posted a piece on the NBTC website at Nagspeake.com about the Funicular Railway in the Slope. In it I basically accused four men a century or so ago of plotting murder to cover up something that happened at one of the city’s most exclusive, mostly-annual events, the Shutter Club’s Sepia Ball. The four men were a former mayor of Nagspeake, a railroad magnate, the son of the man who developed the district known as the Slope, and the visible half of the mail-order principality known as Deacon and Morvengarde. It’s not the first time I’ve posted about something toeing the “iffy” line around here, but it is the first time it’s brought a knock on my door at home rather than at the NBTC offices. Or rather, a death-rattle from my doorbell. So I put on an insulated glove that I keep by the intercom buzzer for just this purpose (the wiring in my building is, shall we say, intermittently deadly), and shouted “hello” into the resulting static.

Somebody at the other end of the intercom said something back that sounded a lot like Balthazar Morton–but given the static and the dim possibility that the person on the other end was being electrocuted even as he or she attempted to identify him/herself, I was pretty sure I had misheard the name and my visitor probably wasn’t actually the current Mayor of the city. Still, I shouted a warning to step away from the intercom and buzzed the visitor into the building, hoping he was wearing gloves to dull the shock that’s pretty much a guarantee any time anybody touches the front doorknob. Then I waited for my visitor to hike up the stairs to my seventh-floor flat. I waited a really long time, and I admit that I waited most of that time with my eye glued to the peephole. It isn’t that I think the Mayor’s a bad guy, but you can’t live in this town without becoming something of a conspiracy theorist. Plus, Morton’s got a family link to Deacon and Morvengarde, and I think if I ever turn up on their radar, it’s not going to be as a fan. And I live in probably the easiest part of town for making people disappear. So I was just being, you know, a little careful.

After what seemed like enough time for anybody to get to my floor, even with frequent breaks for hydration, I cracked the door open and peered onto my landing. Nobody. I listened; you can always hear people before they get to this landing, thanks to some miracle of accoustics and the fact that usually they’re breathing pretty hard by the time they get a couple flights up. I couldn’t hear a thing. Then I noticed an envelope sitting neatly on the doormat. Deep plum-colored paper embossed with the seal of the city of Nagspeake: a lantern surrounded by a tendril of iron. I kicked the envelope inside, slammed the door, and locked it, half-expecting to hear the thudding of, I don’t know, arrows, or a hail of bullets, raining against it. I don’t know why. Too many spy thrillers on tv this week or something. Not to keep you in suspense, inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, with a question and a location printed on it. The location was SEPIA SANDS, SUNSET. The question was: How much do you want to know?

I’m not making this up. I guess if you’re going to run a city like this, you have to have an overblown sense of the dramatic.

Sepia Sands Park

This is Sepia Sands. It’s a park and wildlife preserve at the north end of Bayside, the district made up mostly of vacationers renting beach homes on the Magothy Bay, and it’s made up of basically a single gargantuan, shifting dune that’s constantly trying to creep across Bay Byway to re-unite itself with the beach frontage. Sepia Sands is a popular tourist destination, particularly at sunset, when everybody hikes up to the summit to get a glimpse of the sun setting over the westward-curling arm of the Spitegash River. I hear sometimes the right sunset turns the whole length of the river red as blood all the way to where it meets the Magothy, but I’ve never seen it happen. What I did figure I could count on, it being a beautiful, clear and unseasonably warmish November day, is that there would be about a million people on the dunes at sunset. Whatever my mysterious correspondent was up to, he or she had chosen a very public place at a time when I was guaranteed a crowd to blend into if I wanted. So I went.

There’s another weird feature of Sepia Sands, beyond the supposed occasional view of a river running red with blood. Being the beachy-vacation place it is, Bayside has about fifteen mini-golf courses scattered along the length of its main thoroughfare, and at one point some maniac built one on the dune side of Bay Byway, in the proverbial shadow of Sepia Sands. It was a fairy-tale themed course called the Sepia Sands Chip-n-Putt Emporium, and from what I can put together it lasted about ten years before the owners gave up trying to hold back the inexorable creep of the dune.  All that’s left these days is the top of what looks like a castle, and more or less of it is visible year by year depending on what the dunes themselves are up to. I like a good sunset, but I like a creepy, half-buried castle even more; plus basically anybody who’s going up to watch the sunset has to walk past the Castle, so I figured it would be a perfect place to wait. When I got to the castle, though, somebody was already there and looking a lot like he was waiting for someone, too.

I walked up and tried to look like I was just interested in the castle while I attempted to study the fellow unobtrusively. I don’t care how often people in novels claim to do this. It’s bloody difficult. I got an impression of tall and gaunt, but that’s kind of my default sinister impression.

“This used to be the ticket booth of the Chip-n-Putt Emporium,” the stranger said. Which gave me the excuse to look at him, and damned if it wasn’t the Mayor of Nagspeake. Oh, he’d tried to disguise himself with a big pair of horn glasses and a novelty-shop mustache and eyebrows, but it was Balthazar Morton himself, all right. “When I was about ten I came here for a birthday party,” he added.

“That’s nice,” I said, and stuck my hand out with the envelope in it. “Did the invitations look like this, at all?”

Morton smiled and nodded toward the top of the dune. “Let’s go. We’ll miss the sunset.”

So up we hiked, Morton with a dusty trenchcoat billowing out behind him and the fake mustache threatening to blow away at any time, and me trying to keep an eye out for any evidence that this was some kind of set-up.  At the top of the first of the hills that made up the giant dune, the Mayor stopped and nodded back in the direction we’d come. “It never gets old, this view.”

“What are we doing here, Your Honor?”

“Call me Julius. You’re the one who wrote about the Funicular?”

“Um. Yes?”

“And who threatened to call D&M on Augie Flyre?”

“Hang on, I didn’t threaten anybody–”

“And who wrote that thing about the punk in the Bazaar?”

“Well, yeah, but–”

“And something trying to link the hanged man at St. Horace Rye to the Shutter Club?”

I probably should’ve been flattered that he’d read any of my stuff, but then, this was the highest-ranking officer in the city, so he’d probably just delegated it to some intern and asked for bullet points. “Why are we here, sir?”

Morton sighed and took off the glasses to clean them. I took the opportunity for another quick look around, half-expecting to see the tweedy guards that police the Shutter Club grounds appearing from behind the nearest clump of scrubby, windblown bushes. “We’re here so I can tell you a few things,” the Mayor said at last. “You can decide what to do with them.” He put his glasses back on and looked at something off to our right. It could’ve been the Funicular, the Shutter Club Mansion, the cupola of St. Horace Rye, the smoking chimneys of Slaughterhouse Row, or the distant gleam at the top of Whilforber Hill that I knew marked the terminus of the railroad.  From where we stood, we could see all of them. “Tomorrow I’m leaving the city,” he added. “It won’t matter to me anymore.”

Knock me over with a feather. The Mayor was skipping town. Holy shit.

I waited as patiently as I could while Balthazar Morton made up his mind to go through with whatever he was proposing to go through with. “You know about the castle,” he said at length. “Do you know what else is left under there?”

I looked at the sift of sand around the remains of the castle. It seemed to me now that there were rises and depressions I hadn’t noticed, but then those same features might or might not be there in a week. “I can’t tell if what I’m looking at is something below, or just the dune,” I said.

Morton grinned behind the fake mustache. “It’s both. The whole golf course is still under there, you know.” He pointed a short distance from the half-buried castle. “That’s where the shoe was…you know, there was an old woman who lived in a shoe? More of a boot, really…and there, that was the tuffet, and the owners always had some girl hired to sit there and eat a bowl of something until this big mechanical spider came up and scared her off. Par four, if I recall,” he said thoughtfully. “The spider was a little unpredictable.”  Sensing me about to ask again what the hell was going on, he gave me another weird mustachioed smile and pointed up the dune to a batch of scrub about a quarter mile away. “And right under there’s the Little Red Riding Hood House. In fact, that tree’s growing right out of the chimney. Go look yourself, sometime. Know where the fairy tale displays came from? They were the scale models for the big ones at FantasyTowne.” FantasyTowne being a fairy tale-themed amusement park that closed years before I moved here. The elders at the NBTC talk about it in tones of  hushed wonder. I’ve actually considered breaking in–respectfully–and taking some pictures, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

Meanwhile the Mayor was looking at me as if it should mean something to me that the displays at the Chip-n-Putt were prototypes for FantasyTowne. “If there’s a significance, I’m ashamed to say I don’t follow.”

He gave me a slightly disappointed look. “You know, you can order a custom mini-golf course from Deacon and Morvengarde,” he said casually. “Just like you can order an Alice in Wonderland teacup ride, or a railway station, or a stained glass window. The days are long gone, when you could get yourself into trouble if you didn’t get those things from D&M, but some would say that’s only because Julius Honorius Deacon insisted on diversifying his company’s business.”

A horrible thought crossed my mind. “Why’d you say to call you Julius before?”

The Mayor laughed grimly. “Because I thought in this getup I looked a little like Groucho Marx. Settle down. Look, here’s the point: there’s a body in the Red Riding Hood House. It was put there the week the owner of the Chip-n-Putt gave up the course for lost.”

“Who is it?” I was trying like mad to figure who might’ve gone missing at the same time the Chip-n-Putt went kaput, but the stupid impossibility of putting together chronologies when you can only guess at when they happened kept me from making any immediate connections.

“It’s one of three people; more than that, your guess is as good as mine,” Morton said, fiddling with his left eyebrow, which had begun to peel away in the wind. “Depending on who it is, though, you have three different potential versions of the exposee of your career.”

I’m not a reporter. I’m not a reporter! When are people going to–nevermind.

“When did Lowell Skellansen go missing?” I asked, thinking hard. Skellansen was the artist who rendered the Shutter Club’s stained glass, and who I speculated might’ve been the man who was hung out in front of St. Horace Rye.

“It might be Lowell Skellansen,” the Mayor agreed with a little smile, as if proud of my wild guessing. “Or it might be Julius Honorius Deacon.”

“Deacon? Why on earth would–” But Morton was giving me a grin that conveyed something like, if you think that’s crazy…  “Skellansen, Deacon…or…?”

Balthazar Morton held his grin for what I can only describe as a dramatic pause, then said, “Owen Ilford.”

“Bullshit,” I said reflexively. “Bullshit!”

“May I die right here,” Morton said, “if I’m lying. Of course, it’s only a 33.33 percent chance…but it could be.”

“Ilford had to have died like fifty years ago!” If he ever existed. I chose not to add that part.

“Exactly. Or just a little less than fifty years.”

Damn Nagspeake chronologies. “So what you’re saying is–”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m telling you, if you really want to know the truth behind all these wild accusations you hint at in your writing, you’ll find out who’s wearing Granny’s nightgown. The key to the city’s there.” Morton straightened his trenchcoat and brushed some sand from the front. Our interview was at an end. “But you didn’t get it from me. Or if you did, you got it from me three days from now. I ought to be halfway to Bell Hill by then.”

I nodded. He stuck out a hand, and I shook it. With a quirk of one fake eyebrow, the Mayor of Nagspeake started down the dune toward Bay Byway. I waited, the last threads of red sun casting attenuated shadows of deep dark. When the gunshot sounded, I flung myself down out of instinct and wound up tumbling down the sandy slope directly into one of those pockets of black shadow that held the fallen body of Balthazar Morton, ravaged beyond repair by what looked like a blast of buckshot.

By then the entire dune was a sandstorm of fleeing bodies. It was too late to do anything for the Mayor. I made sure I had his letter safe in my pocket, then I got up and I ran. I reached Bay Byway and managed to shove my way onto one of the Byway shuttle buses. Through the green-tinted window I thought I spotted the silhouette of a tweed-suited figure in a bowler hat stalking down the dune toward the fallen man.

What I can’t figure out is this: why did the Mayor’s assassin wait until we had finished our meeting before shooting? Something tells me it doesn’t take the Shutter Club guards that long to find their targets, which means I was meant to see the Mayor die, and meant to understand that I was, for some reason, spared. Annabelle is refreshing my gin-and-more-gin cocktail, and I’m tired of speculating. Somewhere under a mountain of sand is a body that will point me on my way to answers–at least, according to another dead man of my acquaintance. I will just have to see what that body has to tell me, and take it from there.

Before I explain how these things caused the rift they’ve caused, let me explain that Nathan mailed the package to me in care of Magothy Treats because my apartment in Creve Coeur is notorious for “losing” mail. Creve Coeur is one of the slightly less-squalid neighborhoods of Shantytown, but it’s still Shantytown, and it’s just better–safer–if you keep a post office box someplace else. Annabelle offered her shop as my post office box, which was wonderful of her until this particular mailing. I’m sure she had no intention to steal anything, but suddenly a flurry of tweets from Annabelle’s account demonstrated a sudden fascination with mixed martial arts, which suggested to me that she just might have gotten into my mail. My husband, you see, is a mixed martial arts geek, and was concerned that I might have been missing our domestic evenings at home with a few beers and the complete history of the UFC, which we were working our way through. So he mailed me every single one, including a bunch of other promotions he particularly likes. I suspect that if Annabelle has been plowing through them as fast as her growing obsession would indicate she’s almost done with them, at which point Nathan’s care package will miraculously appear and make its way to me. That’s fine. I have plenty to keep me busy. Annabelle of course denies that she intercepted my mail, although she has more or less admitted to the crime on her website. Whatever. I’m willing to accept her apology along with the DVDs whenever she’s done with them. But someone out there who was reading our tweets back and forth, which anyone would be forgiven for reading as evidence of animosity between the two of us, then called me anonymously claiming to have Annabelle’s long-missing collection of antique copper pots in case I wanted them.

Now, if you’re not in Nagspeake or if you are and somehow have missed the fact that Magothy Treats hasn’t sold caramels since last winter, here is the quick background. Annabelle has always been justifiably famous for her seasonal caramels. In the spring she makes Bouquet Caramels, flavored with things like rosewater and orange flower, hibiscus and lavender and plenty more exotic blossoms. In the summer she does some amazing thing she calls Saltwater Caramels, which are like a weird hybrid of taffy, caramel, and summer honey. In the fall and winter they get warmer, flavored with spicy liqueurs and things like clove and ginger and cardamom and whatever more interesting spices she happens to have on hand. I was heartbroken that she didn’t make them this year, because they were going to be my Christmas presents to just about everybody. And the reason Magothy Treats has been without caramels (and plenty of other things it usually stocks) is the disappearance of Annabelle’s heirloom copper pots and pans.

You will have to get her to tell you the story of where they were made and how they came to her. I have suggested over and over that she write it down somewhere. The tale involves romance, smuggling, ciphers hammered into the surface of a turbotiere that lead to the negotiation of a very secret treaty by codes based on flavored candies made in the same pots Annabelle now uses to make her confections. In honor of her collection of pots, Annabelle had plans this year to introduce a gift box of Treaty Caramels, reproducing as faithfully as she could the candied correspondence that enabled the Magothy Concord and set Nagspeake on the path to becoming the great city it sort of is. But everything went to hell when she took a nap at the counter one day and woke up to find her kitchen pillaged.

Annabelle claims she knows who did it. If she does, she’s never named names, probably because it’s a little unnerving to have somebody waltz past you and steal a truckload of metal without making so much as a sound. She also claims she knows how they did it, and you have to know Annabelle to understand why this would be a logical conjecture on her part, but she says the thieves must’ve used a Hand of Glory to do their dirty work.

A Hand of Glory. Where to start? Well, like any good sinister bit of old European weirdness with any kind of history to it, there are plenty of variations. Some say you use the left hand of a hanged man. Some say you want the hand of a murderer, and it should be the one that committed the slaying. It’s used for home invasion, basically; either the hand is lit like a candle, or it’s made to hold a candle that can only be put out by very specific means. As long as the candle’s lit, whoever you rob will sleep, enabling you to abscond with her copper pots without having to worry about noise. Whatever variation you make your Hand of Glory according to, though, there are other tricky ingredients to source before the Hand will work. You need, for instance, a substance often translated as Lapland Sesame. There is supposed to be no such thing. Annabelle, being obsessed with weird spices, actually went looking for Lapland Sesame not too long ago. She hadn’t found it, but she thinks somewhere along the way in the course of her search she must’ve talked to someone who not only knew what she was talking about, but knew what it actually is and what it was used for. She clearly also thinks she knows who that person is.

I think I know who that person is, too. There just aren’t that many people in Nagspeake who both wish Annabelle ill and seem likely people to know about the arcane history of strange spices. I can think of two off the top of my head: John Pinnard, owner of Nagspice, Bayside’s premier spice shop; and Salvie Edmondson, owner of Cryptic Messages, a psychic parlor a few mileposts down the Byway from Magothy Treats. Neither sound precisely like the strange voice that called me a week ago offering the pots up for sale, but then both of them could safely assume I’d recognize their voices if they weren’t disguised. Of course, there could be an unknown dark horse out there whose grudge against Annabelle or her landmark candy shop I don’t know about. I presume, though, that whoever it is has read our Twitter conversations but not my Expat archives, or they’d have understood our spat for a spat rather than any kind of real animosity. My money’s on Salvie because although Pinnard’s a pretentious bastard, I don’t think he’s got a shred of real evil-spiritedness to him. Salvie, on the other hand, is a real bitch. She also happens to have recently been divorced by Annabelle’s brother Ted. We’ll see. I’ve arranged a hand-off meeting to buy the pots this evening. I have an itemized list from Annabelle to make sure I get the whole lot, and in my correspondence with the anonymous caller I’ve hinted strongly that if he/she is willing to sell the secret to stealing a heap of metal without waking a sleeping confectioner, I will pay extra. We shall see what it all turns up. More to follow!

(From 14 January, 2009)

I assume Nagspeake is not the only place in the world where iron flows. I learned as a child about the liquid-like nature of glass and how really old panes of glass are thicker at the bottom because the glass is flowing, obeying gravity in its slow, viscid way. I thought that was mind-bendingly weird at the time, so I’m trying to keep an open mind about the unique properties of iron in Nagspeake.

It’s very difficult for me.

Nagspeakers have grown up with their balletic, hive-brained iron “animalcules,” so I wonder if my readers can imagine what it’s like to be an out-of-towner discovering the motive capability of Nagspeake iron for the first time.  I know, I know, I’m not the first person to freak out and have to have things explained in a series of small, simple words delivered in a comforting tone accompanied by either a stiff drink or a cup of tea. However, I might be the only one with a website, so I’d like to take you through the series of encounters that have made up my tenuous understanding of what Nagspeakers call “Old Iron.”

Encounter #1:
My solicitous landlord warns me as he hands me the keys for the apartment I’ve just rented not to fall asleep on the balcony. I ask why (forgetting entirely for the moment that I don’t make it a habit to sleep on balconies) and he says, “Because it’s old iron, honey.” I assume he means it’s rusting and unstable or something. It doesn’t quite explain his precise exhortation per se, but I preferred it at the time to my first interpretation of his caveat, which was more along the lines of “There are bad people in the world, missy, and did you happen to notice you rented a flat in Shantytown, for Christ’s sake?”  Old iron I could handle.

Encounter #2:
Drunk on some kind of intoxicating tea ordered from one of the endless mail order catalogues that have begun showing up at my door, I stare for hours at a flourish at one corner of the balcony and watch it bloom, curlicues and whorls moving like fast-growing ivy as they take possession of a railing…then the phone rings.  I look at my watch, having expected a phone call from a particular friend what seems like hours ago, and discover only five minutes have elapsed since I drank the tea. Out on the balcony the flourish is still twisting slowly. I watch it, convinced the tea is behind this prank. The iron reconfigures itself, but it’s as if it’s obeying a fractal pattern or some kind of weird choreography. It never fully takes another shape; it stays confined to roughly the same 9″x12″ space and it moves only slightly faster than a plant does when its leaves turn on their stems to lean into the light. Fast enough to be seen, slowly enough to go unremarked just as easily.

I record observations throughout what I don’t yet know to call “the grey hours,” and yet the whole time I’m still convinced I’m drunk and hallucinating and recording the effects of the tea. In retrospect I could’ve saved myself the cost of the herbs and just watched the balcony in the first place.

Encounter #3:
I’m invited to a party in the Printer’s Quarter and sometime in the night overhear someone lamenting the total lack of effect she experienced from an herbal tea that was supposed to have intoxicating properties.  Recognizing this as my perfect entree to the conversation, I jump in and comment that she must’ve gotten the dosage wrong because I’d spent a good three hours watching iron move on my balcony after a cup of the same stuff. I assume the resultant laughter is because I’ve just admitted to being a total junkie and slink away to stuff my face with canape-size crab cakes.

It took some work, but I eventually figured things out and then went in search of a physicist willing to sit down over a string of beers and explain the dynamics of Old Iron and its constituent animalcules in terms I could understand. Sort of. To me, to someone for whom iron had always been inert, Nagspeake iron still seems something like a cross between a clockwork interpretation of a plant responding to light and a sentient, serpentine kind of hive. An elemental Borg.
Maybe he didn’t get it as clear in my head as I thought.
That was Encounter #4.

After that I went through several phases of realization and denial, most notably laboring for a while under the conviction that the entire city was having one over on me and then the conviction that I was mad, which precipitated a near-month of panicked fear; I knew I had gone off the deep end and that someone was eventually going to notice it and I had talked to way too many people about “the iron” already–I was seeing it move all the time now, forcing myself to stay awake through the grey hours every night (the time when the iron cools fastest, the animalcules, as I understand it, performing a quantum-level, half-organized sort of elemental yoga), lying on the balcony watching the belly-dancing flourishes, feeling the floor of the balcony itself move under my back…after a while the sensation is like floating on water in continuous but gentle motion. I wondered if I disobeyed my landlord’s injunction and fell asleep on this iron sea, would I wake up somewhere else? Would it bear me away to another place?

No, I never fell asleep out there. I did, however, stop leaving my apartment. I was so afraid someone, some well-meaning citizen, would find out about my madness and  have me committed to St. Whit’s, where I would grow old and die without ever coming out of my mania. Plus I couldn’t stand to stop watching my balcony. I went at least one two-day stretch without eating because of it, and let me tell you, I will never, never run out of Ramen noodles again. You can eat that stuff dry, straight out of the wrapper if you have to.

I got tired of being mad after a while and went back to work, but it was a distracted existence because although I had sort of decided I wasn’t crazy, I was still trying with pathological single-mindedness to figure out what was really going on. I had stumbled onto something for sure, the physicist had probably been speaking in code and now it was up to me to figure it all out.

What I learned:
I’m not crazy. The properties of Nagspeake iron have been documented by thousands of people over the years. The physics is still a little beyond my understanding, but what really interest me these days are the competing theories on the origins of the stuff: depending on which hypothesis you ascribe to, the “Old Iron” found all over the place was either brought to Nagspeake back in the days when the city sheltered pirates year-round, or pre-dates the city altogether.

Theory “A” adherents say there was a particularly devastating hurricane one year followed almost immediately by a citywide fire.  A fleet of pirate ships intent on doing a good deed for their adopted town went out and burned another city down the coast clear to the ground and salvaged the iron infrastructure, which they then brought into Nagspeake the way they always came to town: via the Quayside Harbors on the inlet side of the hill separating the Magothy frontage portion of the city from Shantytown. At the time, it took considerable work to move anything big overland from Shantytown to Nagspeake proper, so most of the iron stayed where it landed. This is why, despite the fact that most of Shantytown is the same ragtag collection of dives and flophouses and dubious warehouses that it was back in the golden age of Magothy piracy and smuggling, the largest transported structures and most beautiful ornamental iron is to be found there.  My apartment, for instance, has that balcony, which you really have to see to believe. There are doors, the great gates of the destroyed city’s cathedrals and churches, giant bells. New Orleans has NOTHING on Shantytown.

Theory “B” is weirder and cooler. It states that the iron underpinnings of the city, all the crazy structural stuff and the ornamental bits and the huge lanterns and grates and the wrought stairs and so on and so forth–all of it–was here first, a skeleton that the inhabitants of what would become Nagspeake used as a foundation. Some people have tried to link this theory with speculations about the Ferrous Sanctus Monastery on the western slopes of the hill, an institution of equally foggy origins–and why not; the monks don’t speak so its anybody’s guess. I think this theory has infinite niftiness over the other one–except in my paranoid moments when I think the iron is going to rise up and destroy the city the way it (possibly?) destroyed the last one, tearing it delicately and gracefully to pieces until only it remains, the gaunt blueprint of a city that once was, left for another people to build upon. If any remain. The monks of Ferrous Sanctus, protected by their devotions, will look down from the hill with bleak resignation, having, sadly, seen this kind of thing happen before.

I still sit up some nights, through the grey hours and into the dawn, watching the iron. More and more it symbolizes this little harbor city to me: rooted but mobile, it expands and contracts and spills over the bones of its basic shapes as it heats in the day and cools in the night.  Its inhabitants and its ships come and go, but the city remains, shifting and sighing, imitating the distortions of the shadows it casts on the ground, dancing in place. When all the people are dead and all the wood rotted away and plaster and brick eroded into the sands of another beachfront a thousand years from now, the iron will remain, older but unchanged, still waving at the sea from its place on the shore. Perhaps (I think sometimes) Nagspeake, the city, is alive in ways that other cities are not.

Or perhaps there’s a room in the asylum being made up for me this very minute.

(From 27 May, 2007)