Watch the spies!

Mr Jones's job is to watch, as it has been all his working life. He worked his way up to a supervisory desk from Field Services, where he (and his fellow operatives) furtively installed cameras and microphones in citizens' lives. And their toothbrushes. And their lapels, their pets, and behind their eyes. The technology has improved markedly since Mr Jones first started working. Lapels no longer weigh hundreds of grams and need steel reinforcement. Pets don't hum electrically. Except for some cats, who seem to have picked up the habit.

The Bureau that Mr Jones works for is secret, an arm of the Executive that is not ever mentioned in parliament. Its budget is entirely discretionary, and its executives are discreet. All they want to do is to watch.

Mr Green sits four desks away from Mr Jones, and watches him through the tiny camera he had installed in Mr Jones's bifocal spectacles. Right now, notes Mr Green, he's watching a cat perched on an anonymous window-sill, watching a blackbird through the glass. The bird hops nervously over the lawn searching for worms and watching for cats but is foiled by the window's reflection. Neither can the cat reach out to catch the blackbird.

Mr Jones sits back and takes a sip of cold milky tea from a mug that says 'World's Best Grandad'.

Four desks away, Mr Green watches him do it.

Will mimic for food

The Indo-malayan mimic octopus came to the City of Witches to complete a degree in economics and politics. Exposure to an environment that was not a dull muddy sea-floor provided a myriad of entertaining distractions, however, and he ended up quitting uni. His family cut off his allowance, expecting him to ship home with his legs between his, well, legs, but he stubbornly stayed on in this paradise where all his new wild friends lived.

He supports himself now by busking, since his ability to even get casual work has been nixed by his visa expiring. He lurks in a corner of the city piazza pretending to be a mantis shrimp. He makes balloon animals and bubbles filks of indy classics like 'Smells Like Teen Squid'. If the police look to hassle him he shifts colours and rearranges his legs into the threatening semblance of a venomous lionfish, or if necessary a banded sea-snake. When he has to flee he pretends to be a skate.

He lives in a burrow on the outskirts of the city with a never-ending medley of students, skaterpunks, drug addicts, shrimps, nudibranchs and gobies. He dreams of moving into improv and stand-up comedy, but worries his accent is still too strong.

The aquarium

Jeremy keeps mi-go. In his living-room he has a 100-litre tank stocked with about a dozen tropical mi-go of various colours - green, red, orange, mottled. At night, under the UV light in the tank, they glitter with pale fluroescence as they display their antennae-lights to each other, a constellation of tiny eldritch horror. During the day they shelter dreamily among the non-Euclidean basalt monoliths that Jeremy had imported for them. Occasionally they make forays across the tank's pale grey gritty substrate, singly or in groups of three or seven, leaving little trails of intricate occult import in their wakes. Sometimes, when all else in the house is quiet, Jeremy thinks he hears them clicking to each other with their tiny crab-claws over the constant humming and bubbling of the filter. He has begun to think he understands them, although he laughs this off self-deprecatingly.

Jeremy has kept things in tanks since he was a child. Starting off with goldfish and sea-monkeys in a glass bowl, he spent his pocket-money on ever grander tanks and more finicky occupants. He had his failures, of course: the yabbies cooked when a filter short-circuited and the octopus kept escaping, getting as far as the bus-stop down the road before expiring. The mi-go are by far his most complex project. He wrote a web article on the best way to use LEDs to simulate the stars being right to keep the fungi alive, how to reproduce the transmundane essences that they feed on, and how to stop their chelating fungal dreams clogging the tank's filter. He idly dreams about becoming an authority among aquariumists on keeping mi-go. He hopes that his pets will someday breed, but no one has managed that with captive mi-go since Alhazred's day. He studies the ancient sage's cryptic aquarium notes for hints on how to make the stars right for the fungi to sporulate.

Jeremy's wife Deb hates her husband's obsession with the star-fungi, and especially the way they gather at the front of the tank to observe her when she's watching 'Idol'. Given half a chance Deb would get rid of them or kill them - a kettle of boiling water over the lot! She has begun to think the repulsive little beasts know her intentions and mock her for her inability to act on them.

Deb knows the old adage that pet-owners come to look like their pets. Is Jeremy growing more fungal? Have his ears and nose begun to glitter at night? All she knows is the longer the little beasts are in her house, the less she wants Jeremy to touch her.

Deb has bought an Elder Sign on eBay and keeps it in her handbag, despite its brooding heaviness. One excuse, one final straw, and she will not hesitate to use it on him.

Checkout

Behind Arioch at the supermarket checkout was a family of pottery-faces. The father, his face a chipped and crazed bowl of rustic sienna, had already battered Arioch's legs with their shopping trolley as if to hurry him along. Not that Arioch was buying a lot or taking up very much time - a single basket, with slightly more individual items than the gannet-faced store supervisor would allow through the express lanes. Sienna's wife wore a face of faded Delft in blue and white, a country scene complete with windmill, perhaps an heirloom.

Four children: two boys, two girls. The boys, their faces juvenile daubs of random green and brown glazes and blank patches of barely-fired white jobbing clay, were arguing over a magazine. The two girls, ditto but pinker, just looked like they wanted to be anywhere else.

"You can have the magazine, Todd, but you can't read it until after we visit Gran's," the father said. This satisfied neither child: the essence of successful parenting. "That's not fair!" the boy whined in reply. "That's not fair!" his sibling chmed in. "Why does Todd get a magazine and I don't?"

"Life's not fair, Joshua," his father snarled with surprising venom. "You learn that as you get older." As an answer it satisfied no one, but Todd put the magazine back on the rack and began to quietly punch his brother whenever the father's back was turned.

Arioch paid for the groceries and on leaving the supermarket, head full of ponderous thoughts, nearly tripped over a Tupperware(tm)-faced child. The child belched loudly around a feral grin before being clipped across the lid by his mother, a somewhat brittle-looking green lettuce crisper who probably drove a Lexus. "Don't burp in public, Dylan."

Exact terminology 1

During the night Indagari dreamt there was a word for the colour of sunlight after two days of rain.

See the sites 3

Between the suburbs of Tunwich and O'Kieran there is a piece of open ground, not quite a park, not quite a wasteland. It is crossed by a line of worm-riddled pines that once might have been a windbreak. It is mowed occasionally, so there might be snakes, but mostly it is left to the joggers and walkers of dogs. Perhaps it dreams of the houses that can be seen glowing in the night all around it; perhaps it is glad to be free of them.

On the northern side of the space there is a single stone, about a metre tall, carved with scrollwork and a beady-eyed face that is not Celtic, Norse or Scythian. The stone itself seems old with its coat of lichen and moss, like an artefact of some lost indigenous culture, but it is not. It only dates back to the 1970s and the psychotic break of Charles Voss. One night in 1973 Voss discovered that consensual reality was not good enough for him and so he invented his own. In the occasionally violent transition to his new universe he decided his role was to carve guardian stones to 'cap' or block certain geomantic nexi around the City of Witches. He sought stone from particularly sympathetic places - the stone we started with originated in a quarry some 350 kilometers away - and gave them warding spirals and stony senses to do their work. He carved and placed five before the police arrested him over what he had done with his wife of 20 years, Lola.

Five out of a planned twenty-three stones are apparently enough to slow the onset of the ley-catastrophe Voss predicted, but he still worries about the shortfall in his ward in Greyhame Psychiatric Hospital, a safe 200 kilometers away in the Town of Rams. Another eight are still piled in his former home in Tunwich in various stages of completion. Voss had not even selected the stone for the other ten.

Waiting for the end of parrots

Leaving work, Arioch passed a parrot. It was on the ground amid the shrubs growing in perpetual shade by the office building's entrance. It eyed Arioch wearily. Arioch walked more softly so as not to disturb it into shrill chattering flight, and it did not do so. Arioch felt momentarily smug and privileged to come so close to the bird.

The next afternoon the parrot was there again, or perhaps still there. Arioch wondered idly if it were waiting for someone. In fact this turned out to be true.

The next afternoon the parrot was under the shrubs again, but this time it was obviously dead. It lay on its back, its weary eyes now milky with the sights they now saw. Arioch noticed its belly-feathers were a mess of mud - or dirty dried blood. Car? Cat? Collision? Cancer? No answers.

Arioch realised the parrot had been dying there in the shrubs next to the office entrance, for at least several days. Smug privilege soured into complicit guilt. Even though it was now too late to care or intervene, Arioch stopped, picked up the parrot and carried it reverently to a nearby bin. The body was light, cold and stiff. Its bright feathers were ragged and dirty. All its parroty animation had fled. Arioch disposed of its discarded husk thoughtfully, miserable that the bird's suffering had been prolonged by inaction.

Opposite worlds

In winter Indagari remembers summer, but as if in a dream, something not quite real. Reality is cold to the touch, painfully so in the mornings when the frost makes every surface blue-grey and problematic in nature. Reality is a wind that bites through layers of heavy cloth to deliver its venom of chill deep into the bones. Reality is dark for the greater part of the day, the sun a low, orange trembling phantom ever fearful of being assailed once more by grey clouds. Reality is hearty stews and pasta in bowls with red wine in front of the telly, wrapped up in blankets.

Indagari tries to envision the summer-world: incessant heat, a sheen of sweat, the air never still for the chirring and rustling of insects. Light bright clothes and sunlight that tingles on the skin. But it all seems implausible.