1. On the left breast, you will see a large and obvious patch where a scale appears to be missing. This is a stick-on decoy patch designed to draw the efforts of dragon slayers away from the dragon’s other vulnerable points. Most dragons wear them these days. You will notice if I peel it back that the scales underneath it are completely intact.
2. You’ll also notice some gold marks on the belly. These are exactly what you’d expect. This dragon has spent some time sleeping on a hoard, likely of gold of relatively high purity and softness. Over time, pieces of gold have rubbed off on the belly surface as she’s rolled over or crawled back and forth. Don’t touch!
3. I believe these symmetrical scratches down both sides of the belly are probably mating marks, likely in the dominant position.
4. There are also some scratches on the upper sides, here. These look like rock scratches and probably indicate that the dragon has spent time living in a cave. They may also indicate that she has grown since first occupying the cave and may be looking to expand it.
5. There is a scar of some kind extending down from the right wing base, possibly the result of a juvenile crash.
6. These scales here are a slightly yellower shade than the rest. I think this is a birthmark of some kind.
7. The dots, as you might expect, are arrow marks. Dragons get shot at a great deal.
8. This sticky stain on the top of the belly is probably custard. Dragons are notoriously fond of custard, and there have been a number of suspicious torchings of custard facilities recently. Note also the matching stains down the neck and left jaw.
9. If you look over there, under the left front leg, you can see a couple of pickaxes. It looks like someone (or several someones?) crossed the boundary between bravery and foolishness. As we might be said to be doing, of course.
10. These faint scratches on the left side are actually the dragon equivalent of a tattoo. They show more conspicuously in the ultraviolet; this would be quite bright in dragon vision, whereas we are barely able to see it. Note also that what we can see appears to be crossed out. Maybe the dragon equivalent of a regrettable tattoo?
11. The small button-like protuberance at the right breast - see here? - is a flaw cover. Yes, dragons do in fact usually have a real flaw in their belly scales. In fact, a good flaw is often a kind of status symbol. No self-respecting dragon would venture near humans without covering it up with some kind of armour, though. This cover is actually harder than the dragon’s own scales.
12. There is a small left-side white scar down here - can you see? This is likely a surgical mark. You will notice it’s almost directly above the dragon’s fire bladder, which is highly susceptible to infection and to the formation of cinder stones. Most probably this was for stone removal, which most dragons will have to get done at some point.
13. The ruby just below the base of the tail is probably deliberate and decorative, although it could be from hoard-sleeping again. May I remind you - DO NOT touch.
14. I think the purple smear down there is probably some kind of paint. They do have festivals, up in the Northern mountains. Of course humans who see them don’t tend to come back.
15. As you will notice, ladies and gentlemen, we are not in a custard factory but in a whisky distillery. And I believe the most recent stain here is from a large splash of whisky. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it will not have escaped your notice that a dragon in a distillery is a highly explosive situation. Nevertheless, I believe we have all learned something here today. It’s not often that one gets this close. Now let’s let her sleep it off, and retire to a safe distance.
1. Snunder. Despite the name, snunder is not a type of thunder but rather a type of rain. It occurs in places that have been subject to some act of public high drama or tragedy and can most easily be distinguished from normal rain by its slightly thicker, stickier texture and its salty taste. It is derived from the spectral mucous of sobbing ghosts. Ghosts are often particularly sentimental, and those ghosts that have no limitations on their travel in space often gather at sites that mean something to them. Note: this is not the gentle drizzle derived from the decorous crying of melancholy phantoms, which can hardly be distinguished from sea-spray. Snunder only occurs in places where sad ghosts are really going for it. Since some ghosts can also travel in time, the unexpected arrival of snunder can also mean that some public tragedy is about to occur; for example, it is rumoured that Princess Diana’s 1997 death in Paris was presaged by a particularly sticky snunder rain.
2. Avioplop. This is the theoretical rainfall that would occur if a sufficiently dense cloud of aircraft above a city all voided their toilet waste at the same time. Needless to say, a rain of avioplop is not a particularly welcome event. Some projections of future aviation demand which have not thought through their premises particularly well suggest that, by 2300, most major conurbations will be subject to avioplop. Little do they know that by 2300 27% of passengers, via a combination of genetic engineering and advanced physics, will have no bladders but instead void directly into a small one-way portal into deep space. Aircraft toilet demand will therefore be significantly reduced and only very flight-dense regions, such as the airspace above Beijing, will be at risk of it.
3. Gin rain. There have in fact been three documented gin rains, as far as we can work out. The first, in rural Texas in 1873, led to a scandalous episode of widespread intoxication. The second and third gin rains occurred in Lusaka in 1950 and in Archangelsk in 2005; less information is available about them. Gin rains are not more widely reported because for some reason governments seem particularly interested in hushing them up. Why governments should be interested in what we assume are the failures of experimental methods of gin production is beyond us. Maybe we should expect the advent of weaponised gin at arms fairs at some point.
1. She is the mother of a preschool-age child and a baby. Most of her time is taken up in caring for their needs. She does not usually work outside the home, and can go weeks without leaving her small, poor local area or travelling in a car. She does not have many hobbies. She is usually in pyjamas by 7:30 and in
bed with the lights out by 9:00.
2. She had the highest exam results in her county that year, and went on to study and teach theoretical astrophysics at one of the world’s top universities. She was known for not making eye contact and for wearing odd clothes to lessons. Sometimes her glasses were held together with sellotape. She once attempted to invent a system of algebra because she was bored. Later she dabbled in Antarctic science and ended up in economic modelling, acquiring an Erdos number of five via two entirely separate routes.
3. She first shot a gun with live ammunition when she was twelve or thirteen, which was perhaps unusual for her country where there are few guns. These days, Apocalypse Now is one of her favourite films and she can no longer remember how many times she’s crossed the border between North and South Korea. Her bookshelves are stocked with the Marquis de Sade and William Burroughs. She has not eaten human flesh in nearly a year.
4. A person with a disability asked her for a completely reasonable accommodation to do with their disability and she said no. Her mobile phone once made a noise in a concert that was being broadcast live on Radio 3. She’s nearly hit a cyclist with a car door. She’s several times incorrectly implied to experts in things that, as a person who is vaguely interested in their field, she can do a simple thing-related task better than them. She has flounced out of a room martyrishly complaining about martyrdom.
5. She had more than forty My Little Ponies, aged 11, and she is still fond of making notes in multi-coloured pens. She likes white chocolate, kittens, glitter and rainbows; she likes clothes and dressing up. In the past she has sewn and knitted her own clothes from patterns. She is interested in perfumery, although that will never come to much.
1. There were two detectives who went to a small village on the edge of a marsh. The earth was black in that place and the cold waters black too. There were no paths through the marsh, which was a maze of blasted thickets and dry, crackling reed-beds where strange birds lived. No water could be said to flow into or out of it. There were rumours that time went in different directions in different parts of the marsh and that its waters flowed from now to then rather than from here to there. Nevertheless, a reed-cutter had ventured into its nearer parts to gather eggs, and she had found a body on a mudbank, so the police were called.
2. They had a bit of a thing for each other, these detectives, but nothing would ever come of it because one was married and the other had too much of his identity tied up in being straight. Neither of them was particularly near retirement, but one was older than the other. Their companionship was based around their taciturn refusal to talk about their pasts, which one must assume were both murky and mysterious. In the village they found no-one missing and no-one suspicious. Though there were those who said that human finger-bones and the like had a habit of washing up in the marsh and it would be well to look out for a serial killer. There was a fortune-teller who gathered up the bones, because she was on the look out for her long-lost son who had slipped off playing into the marsh some years ago. But they were not the bones of a child, and she had taken to casting futures with them instead. This near the marsh, the bones would only fall in spirals, revealing nothing of themselves to anyone.
3. The detectives placed the remains, which were mainly skeletal, in a body bag in a refrigerated trailer. The next day most of the locals gathered in the village hall. There was an old man who said he was sure the murderer would be there but everyone, it seemed, had stayed out of the marsh for months. Someone said to see the fortune teller in her mouldy house by the willows, and since there was no other option, they went.
4. The fortune-teller was pleased to see them, for she was often lonely. She did not think she knew the body, she said, but she did know the marsh. She showed them a great black crystal with a spiderweb of incarnadine flaws at its heart, opaline and shimmering. It is a paradox, she said. Paradoxes grow around here like mushrooms. What with time in the marsh the way it is. I can show you the trunk of a hollow tree that is entirely crusted with them, down by the pool where I found the finger bones. Growing off all those petty little frog intrigues dragged back and forth through the years. But I have never found one so large and so strange. I truly think it could be worth something. I was hoping to pass it on to my son. The younger detective looked into the crystal and thought he saw his future written there, and he needed to know more like he had never needed anything. But the fortune teller shut the box. It is for my son, she said. I can show you the pool where the finger bones wash up, and maybe you can find the key to both losses for me, and I will bury it with him. I have never dared to dig there.
5. She gave them a map and a spade and sundry documents of her son’s that could be used to identify him. The detectives thanked her and, having little else to go on, packed sandwiches for a trip into the marsh. As they walked the sun ticked back and forwards across the noonday mark in the sky like the second-hand of an ailing watch. When they reached the pool, the younger detective started digging. The older leaned on the willow tree (they had not thus far checked its bleak crack for more glittering paradoxes). He opened the packet of documents and began to read. The first one was facts and strands of hair and identifying marks. The missing boy, it seemed, had had a wine-stain mark on his left shoulder.
6. The older detective had just such a mark on his shoulder, and he knew that as a child he had been found wandering (though he did not like to discuss it). He realised that he could be the fortune-teller’s long-lost son. He told the younger detective of his suspicions. But the younger detective, in sudden fright of losing the crystal’s speaking flaws to him (or of losing him to the crystal’s speaking flaws) jerked back the spade and swung at him with it. It hit the older detective in the neck and he bled out on the wet mud.
7. The younger detective threw the older detective’s body into the crack of the rotted-out willow tree by the black pool, where it hung for several days before slipping down into the water. It drifted into the currents of the marsh and washed back and forth through time, shedding small bones and shreds of skin along the way. Eventually the body fetched up on the reedcutter’s mudbank, three weeks before it had been laid to unquiet rest. The reedcutter found it, and called the police.
8. Some two days into the future, the sun ticked back and forth across the noonday mark like the second-hand of an ailing watch. The younger detective walked out of the marsh and into another story, which we are not concerned with here. He no longer needed the crystal. Before he left, fearful of evidence, he tipped the bag containing the skeletal body into a cracking reed bed. The body slipped into a deeper current where time turned itself inside out. It took the bones and reclothed them in their raiments of past years.
9. Twelve years before, a thrashing bag bobbed up from the current onto a sandy bank, and tore itself open under the moon. The older detective crawled out, young and gasping, with his memories scrambled. He stumbled South, out of the marsh, back to the city. It seemed he had been somewhat changed. He no longer bore the fortune-teller’s mark, he could not remember who he was, he bore no documents. In time he married a nurse, and the itch of the memory of the younger detective faded from his brain. But he knew that he himself had had a flair for detective work. So, after some years of rehabilitation and retraining, that is the field he went back to. Eventually, he was paired up with an older partner who was as taciturn as he about his past.
10. Some time later, they got a call about a body in a marsh…
0800 Lost things
-0800.1 Recently lost
–0800.23 Mittens
—0800.231 Mittens placed on walls, railings and gates by helpful passers-by
–0800.24 Stuffed bears, dogs and bunnies
—0800.241 Those that are found again, to great joy
—0800.242 Those that are not
—-0800.2422 Those that are lost in airports at the start of a long journey
—0800.243 Those that might have been found again, or might have been replaced by a duplicate, you are never quite sure
–0800.25 Things that you know you put down just a moment ago
—0800.251 Items that are in fact still on your person somewhere and obvious to a hypothetical bystander
—0800.252 Items which you need to find to be able to find them
—-0800.2521 Glasses
—-0800.2522 Cups of coffee
-0800.2 Long lost
–0800.21 The subject of intense nostalgia
—0800.211 Things for which the nostalgia does not align with the original reality
—0800.212 The subject of sepia-tinted documentaries
–0800.27 Things after the death of the last person who remembers them directly
–0800.28 Things after the death of the last person who has heard the truth of them
–0800.29 Things that have passed even out of story and rumour
-0800.3 Things that are not lost, but know perfectly well where they are
–0800.31 Things that are hiding
–0800.32 Things that are mistaken about their location
—0800.323 Confident walkers in mazes
-0800.4 Things under sofa cushions
–0800.41 Remote controls, keys and pens
–0800.42 Food, dust and buttons
–0800.43 Other sundry items
–0800.44 Things that have passed into the main body of the sofa
—0800.444 Things that are so valuable they require the dismantling of the sofa to retrieve
-0800.5 That are the subject of humorous asides
–0800.51 Marbles
—0800.511 Literal marbles
–0800.52 Virginity
—0800.523 May or may not be lost, depending on whether a specific act counts or not
-0800.6 Appetites, desires and dreams
-0800.7 Cities, civilisations, treasure, ships, aeroplanes, etc.
–0800.72 That in fact never existed in the first place
–0800.73 Rumoured location is covered in dense jungle
–0800.74 Rumoured location is under the sea
-0800.8 Memories
–0800.81 Of which only a ghost remains
—0800.811 Memories that itch maddeningly at your thoughts when you smell a particular smell
—0800.812 Things that you know you once knew
—0800.813 Things that other people know you once knew
1. The Holy Roman Emperor Lothair I. Reason: if your party is held during his lifetime, the cost of providing extra security will be prohibitive. If it is not, you will either need to mess with historical timelines or host a corpse, which is a bit of a downer.
2. The dwarf planet Pluto. Reason: it will not fit in the door.
3. Don Quixote. Reason: He is a fictional character, and thus unlikely to attend.
4. The North Sea. Reason: you will be too busy mopping up after it to enjoy your party.
5. Capybaras. Reason: there are too many capybaras in the world to fit inside a reasonably-sized party venue, and if you only invite some of them then the others will be jealous.
6. The platonic ideal of the colour blue. Reason: if it vomits on your carpet you will never, never get the stain out.
7. The norovirus. Reason: it is a terrible conversationalist, for one thing.
1. Stop breathing
2. Get rid of that heartbeat
3. Lose consciousness
4. Cease brain stem activity
1. The first of the seven other seas is initially difficult to distinguish from the more commonplace seas near its entrance, which some say is in the North Pacific. Navigation, however, is almost impossible. One can usually tell that one has entered the first other sea by the complete malfunction of GPS, compasses, celestial navigation, etc. at the same time. At night the stars are blurry smears across the sky. Generally the advice to those who have entered an other sea is to get out as quickly as possible, so the navigational problems pose a grave difficulty and few people have come back from the first other sea. Because it is near the North Pacific Gyre, great washes of plastic are sometimes seen near the entrance and this can be a way to navigate out. The nature of its actual hazards is rather vague. Some speak of just escaping the rising of unusually violent storms; others of drifts of fog they felt compelled to avoid. One must assume those who did not make it back learned somewhat more.
2. The water of the second sea is sweet and cherry-scented. It falls in extravagant waterfalls from steep, rocky islands thick with stinging plants (maybe there is some kind of fruit-based filtering system within?). Needless to say, the sweet water is clogged with vast algal blooms and the sort of extraordinary insectile forms one might expect near-infinite sugar to attract. The sky over the second sea is a thick, luminous yellow, as if a ferocious sun were doing battle with an enormous cloud bank. It is an awful place. Those who have come back from it are generally not fond of cherries.
3. The water in this sea seems to become thicker as one ventures further in. It grinds together like ice, although the weather is only moderately cool. Sailing into it is incredibly perilous and should only be undertaken for short distances and with a reinforced hull. There are many tales of ships who have entered unknowingly and their unfortunate ends. Needless to say, a swimmer could not last long in the milling waters, half-transformed to stone. They say if you could get through the transition zone this sea would be walkable on, and maybe it does not count as a sea at that point, even if one can still over the centuries feel the movements of great stone whales below.
4. There is no light here; no sun or moon or stars and (as far as we know) no phosphorescent seaweeds of the like. One can bring one’s own light sources, of course, but so far none have shown anything but a black, brackish sea against a black sky. The longest a boat has stayed here and returned is an hour. Depth soundings have yet to reveal evidence of a sea bed.
5. There is a perpetual smell of peat on the air; much more than the occasional small islands could produce. This is perhaps the friendliest of the seven other seas and there are some travellers who claim to have stayed here for weeks with little ill-effect. It is still notable that maybe one in three of those who have been in fail to come out. Therefore there must be some hazard, even if we are unable to say what it is.
6. We do not know anyone who has been to the sixth sea. Some say that it was invented to make sure that there were seven other seas and not six. Alternatively the entrance may be very remote or very small, or its waters peculiarly hostile.
7. It is a shallow sea, and can be waded in in places. The sun shines very hot on its nearer parts, which are windless and smell strongly of the thick red seaweed that grows there. It is not known how far this sea stretches, though no-one has found an end of any sort other than a few lonely sandbanks. But one cannot sail here other than in tiny rowboats or punts, so it is hard to travel far. There have been explorers who were determined to prove that some miraculous feature existed, somewhere deep beyond the bland inner reaches of this sea. We waved them off, and we have not seen them since. I suppose if they found their utopia they might have stayed, and be still living.
1. The ruins of an old coach house, it must have been miles from anywhere. There are trees growing through the windows and the roof is long gone. Everything is covered in moss.
2. A pile of mouldering pornography in a bush; it must be a remnant of the days when there was always a pile of mouldering pornography in a bush, as if that was how pornography came into being in the days before the internet.
3. A tangled thicket of dead branches and brambles. There is a nest of some sort at the other end, I think; it is impossibly large, as if it were a nest for a family of humans. But there is some kind of hair inside. There is no getting through the thicket to find out. The woods on the other side are their own place and cannot be reached without a machete; they stretch all the way to the mountains, even though this wood is bounded on every side by housing estates.
4. A winding path that leads down to a swampy valley, all yellow grass and mosquitoes. There is a small pond on the far side, unreachable without waders. Something white is moving in the rushes.
5. A den of numbers, newly hatched and wriggling. This is where they come from and where they grow alone, before they migrate to universities to perform elegant mating dances in a variety of exotic equations. Out here they are wild and you cannot be sure of adding them correctly. Sometimes they line up in the wrong order. I myself have been bitten by a particularly malevolent three.
6. Some actors. They are lost, and looking for the path. They are at pains to inform you that they are not performing a Midsummer Night’s Dream, although isn’t it funny that it’s turned out like this, ha ha. Not that one would be making love in these woods anyway. They are too damp. It is only a short way to the main road, from which it is twenty minutes’ brisk walk to the high school where they are performing.
7. There is a place where the morning mist lies heavy on the ground, beside a little stream. The first golden light of sunrise turns it all to sparkles and dew. The air is suddenly curiously warm and heady, even though everything is outlined in damp spiderwebs. Something large drops into the water, but one cannot see what.
8. There is an old tree, maybe it has been here for the full nine hundred years of an ancient oak’s age. It is split and hollow and surrounded by a crown of rotting branches. Inside, there is a hole leading down into the ground like a bottomless pit, scratched on all sides by the graffittied names of teenagers who must have slid down into its comforting embrace and ended up somewhere else.
1. There was an apartment building, I think it was in London somewhere. In the penthouse lived an entirely unremarkable couple, who had passed through thirty years in the world without leaving any mark on it. They did not quite realise this, living as they were on a day-to-day basis busy with small actions. But everything they did seemed to be erased shortly after they did it. People forgot them; their spilled coffee melted away; the people at the local shop greeted them every day as if they were new to the area. Certainly they seemed to have no family. In the end I am not sure if this was bad luck, or the action of some vengeful and powerful enemy.
2. On the floor below the penthouse lived some robots. Before their retirement, they had been involved in a top-secret surveillance project and hence they were conditioned to enjoy the view. Needless to say, their existence was also top-secret and, since they had been largely abandoned by the government, they had had to devise complex strategies for continuing to operate in peace. One of these, they thought, was to seek out forgettable and reclusive people and live near them. They were able to recharge from the electricity supply. For spare parts and oil they had taken to making orders from Amazon, then answering the door in a full-size Peppa Pig costume which a disgruntled London Marathon participant had discarded next to the building. Due to their compact, modular nature they were able to fit in spaces inaccessible to humans with no outward sign other than the occasional scritching noise. This was fortunate as they were often raided by the police (who had noted the apartment’s electricity use as highly suspicious) and had to all hide under the floorboards. Otherwise they spent their time making an enormous quilt, which one of their former operators had told them was a good way to pass the time.
3. There was a man who was writing a book, and he lived two floors below the penthouse. He survived on a small pension from the Department of Springs, which he had been awarded after a tragic pogo accident had led to him losing one and a half legs. He had been writing this book for fifty years. It was a beautiful thing and very long, with all manner of gilded maps and illustrations and equations and fold-out origami clocks and collages and flipbook animations. One volume was nothing but a series of holes in coloured pages which combined to spell out ever-changing poems; another contained only one enormous folded map of a city almost exactly the same as his own, combined ingeniously with a diagram of the nervous system of a rat. There was a book set in barely-discernable dark greys which was full of maps of caves. The fiftieth volume contained a hollow chamber which was always stocked with a tiny bottle of sherry and told of the coronation of a king in the book’s world. In the seventieth volume, the characters mounted an escape through a hole in the back cover, leaving behind themselves only a small trail of lost full stops. After this, the pages of subsequent volumes were largely blank or abstract, or dealt only in matters of space, time and geometry. The current volume, however, told of the author’s struggle to lure his characters back (he assumed they were living, like mice, in the walls of the house, and that this was what had been causing the scratching noises) via the medium of smells, and as a consequence his southward windows were stocked full of herb pots; thyme and rosemary and fennel and bay.
4. Three floors below the penthouse was an apartment that was entirely full of insects, from floor to ceiling. Because the insects entered the apartment via a private drainpipe on one side of the building, and exited it via the sewers, the other occupants were not aware that they were there. Indeed, they were generally held to be good neighbours, because they were mostly quiet and did not leave rubbish in the hallway. I am not sure why this apartment was such an important staging post on their journey, or where they came from, or where they were going. On summer nights, when the scent of thyme rose in the air, those insects who were currently in a winged phase would dash in joyous zigzags around the apartment’s congested spaces before falling to the floor to mate.
5. Six old women lived in the apartment on the ground floor. These women had once been in a ladies’ cricket team together, but had fallen on difficult times after an unsuccessful attempt to use occult powers to improve their fortunes. Since that day, they had been haunted by the hairy ghost of W. G. Grace. The ghost was most put out at finding itself haunting a London flat and would frequently invite other ghosts of his era around to complain at them. The old women thus usually found their sleep interrupted by querulous Victorians. They welcomed the quiet buzzing and pattering of summer nights, which they assumed was some kind of air conditioning system above, as it partially drowned out the constant spectral grumblings they were subject to. On these nights they all sat up and drank saffron gin in their huge bed.
6. Below the old women there was no flat, only a basement. Although it had been intended for the storage of cleaning equipment, it was currently officially marked as unused, and its plywood door was closed with an enormous padlock. However, it proved easy to remove the door from its hinges. The basement had therefore been inhabited by a succession of squatters, and was currently the home of a young man and his labrador. In the daytime, they pretended to be statues on the riverbank for the amusement and edification of tourists. The basement was rather damp, and so they did not care to spend longer there than could be helped. However, they happened to be in on the night that the ghosts of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, who had been getting drunk on saffron gin fumes, stumbled through the ceiling. Gilbert and Sullivan, who were pretty shitfaced, spent the rest of the night singing a new operetta about the many humorous problems faced by a ghost in the modern world (by which they meant the Edwardian era). Unfortunately, only the dog was awake.
7. Some days later, the dog (who was plagued with earworms which it was entirely incapable of expressing) took a wrong turning and ended up in the building’s malfunctioning lift. It was rare to find the lift venturing down as far as the ground floor, because one or other of the inhabitants of the building had levered open its workings and poured irn bru into them. The dog travelled to the top floor, where it howled and howled under the impression that it might have been singing until its owner came to find it. And that night, everyone who was heading home headed into the wrong apartment. Perhaps the dog had been singing after all, who knows?