CHAPTER 1 - OUT OF THE CRADLE INTO THE FIRE

He would always remember stained glass window fables told by automated tellers. So many to learn by heart, and later burn by decree during the great Recanting. Tales overheard in the cloisters from where you could look out and see the fruit trees in blossom, proverbs which took root in your mind and became a garden of wisdom, (“Root them out!”), ancient Sanskrit mutterings pored over by candlelight. Things were predictable then: matins, lauds, chants, all at the appointed hour. Data, descript, known, comforting. Now everything needed to be verified.

Here, at this watch of the moon, daily the same, hunched over his manuscript scribbling, is Crabdale the insufferable bureaucrat. How carefully the ground had been prepared for him, how thoroughly sterilised!

Of course, beauty was officially proscribed but hardly out of bounds for one who could invent a good story. Why can't he wrest his poor heart from its feckless mooring? Seven severed heads and he gave up the ghost, didn’t he? Instead he should be casting the torn nets of circumstance into the waves.

What ails him? Little by little he was lulled out of belief and set upon. His pathetic ribcage was stark in the dawn.