The old cat

It's colder than it used to be.
The sun takes longer to warm my bones.
Laps are not as comfortable.

The birds are faster and tree branches are higher.
It's too much bother to climb them.
I don't go out because the dogs are so much fiercer.

I sleep a lot. Sometimes I lose track of what time of day it is.
The food they give me doesn't taste of much.
I keep forgetting what I was doing, and I can't find whatever it was in any room.

There used to be more cats around here.
I can't smell them - they've gone somewhere I can't follow.
I hope it's warmer there than it is here.

When I sleep I dream of warmer sun, slower birds, the other cats.
But I keep waking up.

The Witches 4

She cultivated enigmatic condescension as a way to play hard-to-get. Her manques fell over themselves to assuage her apparent contempt for their offerings and themselves. But she has become trapped. Her superiority grows ever more real - and so does the tawdriness in everything around her. Nothing pleases her any more. The world has become shabby.

Talisman

Even Mrs Pearson's little toes have turquoise-set rings on them. But it's her fingers and thumbs that clatter and glitter with silver and turquoise-blue the most. She wears nearly half a kilogram of the stuff, carved into icons or left au naturel, on silver chains at her neck. Often too an aegis-shaped brooch or three are pinned to her blouse and jumper.

She reeks of vanilla and sometimes lilies. Turquoise has no smell, but her pieces resonate to her favourite scents through long association. Despite the olfactory chorus she is still able to smell the difference between real turquoise and its paltry imitators, howlite and chrysocolla, or dyed chalcedony or (mercy!) plastic.

Mrs Pearson's turquoise is her talisman. It protects her from arthritis and gout, the unwelcome advances of lechers, the pretensions of her subordinates, the jealous attacks of her rivals, and the humourless attentions of the tax-man. Piece by piece she is assembling a personal tomb-shroud or mummy-wrap of turquoise and silver, by which she subconsciously hopes to defeat Time and Death as well. She dreams of endless, eternal reaches of blue-green stony silence and yearns for their sanctity.

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.

The Witches 3

Always hungry for experience she copied herself off a number of times. Her copies, feeling similar urges, did so too.

Her copies' personalities and preferences are also much like hers, crowding out her rivals and consigning those who prefer them to marginality and obscure eccentricity.

But being mere copies, the copies do express a continuum of similarity rather than utter authenticity. But somehow this is more frightening that nearly the same sentiments are expressed in the same way by near-identical women in variations of the same clothes (as decided by the copies who have infiltrated the fashion industry): an observer not knowing the origin of the copies might begin to suspect some kind of mass brain-washing.

While you were sleeping

With stealthy tentacles the small octopus pulls itself across your carpet. Moonlight and streetlight leaks in bands onto the carpet through the blinds and the octopus matches these with the chromatophores in the skin of its tentacles and pulpy body. It edges round a discarded 'National Geographic', your bedtime reading, as yellow always makes it itchy.

You change position in the bed with a thrashing of bed covers and creaks from the mattress: the octopus freezes for tense minutes until it is certain you will not rise. As you begin to snore once more it completes its timid progress towards your bedside chest of drawers.

Slowly the octopus drags the bottom drawer open. Inside nestle your socks, paired up and drowsing. It reaches in and takes two socks from different pairs. One of these it stealthily adds to your partner's sock drawer. It puts the other in a ziplok baggie and stuffs it into a pocket on its ninja-suit.

On its way back out the cat-door the octopus takes out a small clipboard and adds a notation to the form on it with a stub of pencil. Only four more to go this night.

Redshirt chihuahua orchid blues

"The first day on the job they gave me a red t-shirt. I thought this was a bit weird but not too worrying - I didn't expect to meet mortal peril in a garden shop.

" But then I met the greenhouse. The owner, my boss, Mr Harbinger, was a mad horticulturalist with a passion for orchids. I found out on my second day that he had cross-bred some particularly ruthless South American specimens with chihuahuas and ended up with an armed insurrection. The hybrids had formed a pack and taken control over the bottom end of the greenhouse and were not letting anyone, particularly Mr Harbinger, in there. No one would have minded except the controls for the site's watering system was in there, so once a day, someone had to go in to turn it on. As the new hire that muggins was me.

"I have to say, all cliches aside, the red t-shirt gave me a fighting chance. I heard them rustling among the agapanthuses as soon as I went in. As I forced my way deeper into the humid green gloom I knew they were all around me, setting up an ambush for me. Finally I saw one - bug eyed, purple flowered, evil as an audit, tail-roots wagging. Some kind of sixth sense told me that I was meant to see this one, and that the rest of them were circling round behind me.

"I slowly took off my red t-shirt without breaking eye-contact. I was gambling that the monsters still had enough dog in them to 'FETCH!' I tossed the t-shirt one way and pelted off the other. I didn't stop to see what happened to the t-shirt but I heard it all right, and I'll never look at fruit salad the same way again. I got to the faucet and turned it full on, then stampeded back to the door as fast as I could.

"The other assistants were impressed I made it out. Mr Harbinger docked my first pay for the cost of the t-shirt, which I think is a bit unfair."

The Witches 2

She used to collect dolls. Specifically, she used to collect her brother's GI Joe dolls and put them to uses that they were not originally designed for. She thought it was funny that they were half the size of the Barbies her mother gave her. Somehow that seemed right.

She still collects dolls. These ones are taller on the outside at least.

Mirrors in the sky

Arhenius raises towers. After lengthy preparation with geomantic tomes and the intricate use of spider-fine pencil-lines and crystals, he attends a prepared site and begins his incantation. The genii of the city arrive along his predetermined leys. They crystallise into a drab cocoon of steel and board that often get brightly decorated by the punk advertisers.

Arhenius stands in all weathers, patiently incanting, for several months as the tower grows slowly skywards. Within the cooon heavier orange genii lift great beams out of the earth and bind them. Smaller, faster green ones finish floors, fittings and wiring before sealing the structure's surface with mirrored glass. Finally the genii carefully remove the new tower's cocoon and dry its sleek new skin with drafts from their beating wings.

Where once was horizon and sky there is now a tower of shadow and reflection: from one side the sky is made infinite; from the other the sun is exiled. At night the tower lights up its guts in fluorescent glory in the hope of attracting a mate.

Arhenius often has to be lifted out of his incantatory coma (and well-worn hollow in the ground) by the genii as they leave the new tower. He stretches massively, cracking joints, and regards the tower with paternal satisfaction but hopes never to see it again. He loves his towers but he detests their tenants. They put his towers to uses he did not incant into them. They deform them, rearrange their organs, maintain them shoddily, leave them to moulder. Sometimes they ask Arhenius to return to fix their ailing buildings' woes and Arhenius always marvels at the gap between the perfection of creation and the vicissitudes of existence.

But there is another reason why Arhenius dislikes visiting his children: as he prepares each incantation, and as he recites it and causes the tower over a course of months of glorious creation, he is striving to touch the Divine. The moment of completion is a moment of blindness made of pride and exhaustion. Only a few more months' perspective and recovery allow Arhenius to see where his children are flawed, perhaps even beyond the tenants' abilities to tell. But Arhenius can tell. And he hates it.

Arhenius could not live in a tower he had caused. When his friends ask him why he still rents, he shrugs and changes the subject.

See the sites 2

Just north of the city centre, in a neighbourhood of ramshackle cottages being slowly assimilated by apartment blocks, there is a traffic roundabout by a park. By day the park is deserted. By night it is the haunt of the walking dead, their eyes white, vacant and hungry, with tracked scars upon their forearms. Cranky old pine trees shroud the park in resinous gloom no matter the time of day.

The roundabout is lit at night with dim orange lights that give it the sense of being in a fire-cave, except that it is always unreasonably cold there, never warm. It is at the site of the oldest crossroads in the city. A circle has replaced the cross but the underlying energy is still the same.

Twice a year, on the ancient festivals, a faerie cavalcade passes through the roundabout between thither and hither. Typically mortal witnesses are blinded by the riders' splendour and sent into a cloying sleep from which they wake in their own beds, unable to remember how they got home.

In recent years, however, the cavalcade has not passed by at all and its place has been taken by the Wild Hunt. Now witnesses do not make it home at all.

Work lunch

The restaurant bustled and steamed; inscrutable waiting staff shuffled full plates to the tables and empty, smeary plates the other way to the kitchen.

It was a farewell: Owen from Systems was going on to better things. The entire suzerainty of the EL2, Matt Silverback, was assembled to do him honour, even though most of them barely knew him at all. Owen was one of the quiet ones.

Indagari ended up sitting next to Owen, near one end of a table. As the guest of honour Owen might have demanded a place at the centre of the group but that wasn't his way. It was the way of the banditos, the posse of techies who shared interests such as beer, cars and Xbox games, and inevitably shared work social occasions like this one with only each other. Some found it tough to be be excluded from their group but that wasn't really their intent: they weren't a clique, more of a default setting.

SIlverback had brought wine for everybody. Largesse. Conspicuous consumption. An open bottle of merlot had ended up in front of Owen. He turned to Indagari and asked, "Would you like some wine?"

"I never drink... wine," Indagari quoted.

Owen looked startled. "I should have known."

Indagari was also startled. "So odd, to meet a Kindred spirit so late in the piece."

"Damn Obfuscate."

See the sites 1

On the southern outskirts of town there is a factory that manufactures things that nobody wants. Part of it is a printery responsible for the bales of junk mail that appear in your letter boxes, as well as government forms. Other assembly lines produce spurious samples, traffic cameras, those spikes they use to stop pigeons roosting under bridges, and Volvos.

From the outside the factory is nondescript, concrete blocks floodlit tacky orange at night, beyond a sagging perimeter cyclone mesh fence. Featureless trucks deliver the factory's products to the rest of the city at all hours of the clock.

Inside it is another matter. The workers on the assembly lines, amid the machines, are children and youths, abducted from the city's central bus interchanges at night, and blinded especially for the factory's purposes. They are chained to their workstations and fed once a day on MacDonalds hamburgers. Their swift pallid fingers work for fourteen hours at a time. They do not dream.

When they grow too old and big for their workstations they are taken shambling away to a shed at the back of the property, still crabbed over from their years of toil, and humanely killed. Their bodies are recycled, dried and kibbled for use as cattle feed. Their overalls are washed and then given to their successors. Nothing is wasted.

The factory's purpose is not production but consumption.

Overheard 1

"Begmon Thaum, thou art a blaggard. May thy precious parts be shrivelled by the cold of days and turn into apricot pits, and may thy mandom become a runcible spoon."