#GIGANTIC GLASS ORB EYES SAVE ME

[yesloulou]

Daniel qualifies P5 at the 2024 Canadian Grand Prix 🇨🇦

[voraciousvore]

Bucky's (19/44)

Chapter 19: Save Me, Ronny!

Patty hadn’t been chosen yet to be eaten today, so she figured it was only a matter of time. She was restless, bored of sitting complacently inside the tank. The dinner rush cleaned out a significant chunk of humans, leaving the display tank more deserted than usual. Little Debbie and Slim Jim were gone, somewhere out in the dining area inside Giant bellies. She was in the tank with Honey, Sugar, Cookie, Cracker Jack, and a few others. She was beginning to feel agitated and started pacing between the transparent walls. She was certain, with so few humans available, she was next. 

Her heart dropped into her stomach when she saw the next customer to walk through the door. She recognized the features of his unshaven, sickly face—the paranoid pale eyes, the greasy hair, the waxy skin, the deep hollows and furrows of his cheekbones and brows—and shuddered. He had his hand concealed in the pocket of his rumpled jacket, no doubt clutching his trusty knife, the sharp blade thirsting for blood. Patty trembled. It was the Giant who had purchased Nutmeg for fatal consumption and butchered her. Here he was, back at Bucky’s, ready to carve up and devour his next victim. 

He shuffled over to the tank and bent down to look inside. The humans froze up in terror as those icy eyes surveyed the group. Patty shivered when his gigantic set of frigid orbs pierced her with their gaze, chilling her down to the marrow of her bones. The black pupils dilated slightly as they pinned her down. The Giant leaned in closer to the glass, his breath leaving a puff of fog upon the surface. He touched the glass with his fingertips, as if yearning to snatch up Patty right then and there. His bloodthirsty anticipation, and how his eyes hovered on her in particular, filled Patty with fear. 

“Can I help you, sir?” a waitress asked him. 

His lips curled into a vicious smile, exposing large blocky teeth. “Yes. I have a reservation for a private dining room. I’d like a human brought to me, raw, for fatal ingestion.” 

“Which one?” The waitress casually pulled open the lid, causing the humans inside to scramble around. 

“That one,” the seedy Giant answered, thumping the tip of his huge finger against the glass. “Uhh… Patty.” 

Patty felt the world drop away from her when she heard her name from those odious lips. She recoiled from the giant hand reaching to grab her, but she had no way to defend herself. The fingers coiled around her, squeezing securely in preparation for her inevitable struggle. She cried out and writhed, but there was no hope. It was her time. She was done for. The massive fingers squeezed harder, making her see stars as the air was crushed out of her lungs. 

“Here you go,” the waitress said cheerfully, handing Patty off to the Giant brute. “You can use the dining room right over there. Enjoy your meal!” 

“Excellent,” the Giant replied, bringing Patty up to his face. He ogled her greedily. “Oh, I can’t wait.”

Patty gasped for breath in his tight grip and clawed at his hairy knuckles uselessly with her hands. Her futile struggle only seemed to excite the Giant more. His lips parted slightly, dripping hungrily with saliva. Patty felt his hot breath on her skin and let out a desperate whine. “Nooo…” 

The Giant walked with huge strides toward Patty’s doom, making her lurch in his fist. He spoke to her quietly, with her inches from his wet teeth, so nobody else could hear. “Oh, boy, the things I’ll do to you… I’m going to skin you alive, little lady, and drink your blood and cut you up and feast on your dainty, succulent little body bit by bit… Ahhh…”  

He petted the side of her face tenderly with his finger, and Patty cringed away in horror. She tried to scream, but the Giant roughly clamped down on her with his powerful hand, cutting her off. “None of that yet,” he growled. “Not until I have you all to myself.” 

Patty let out one final, futile scream of “HELP!” before the Giant entered the private room, shutting the door behind him. He tossed her on the table and pulled his knife out of his pocket, flicking the gleaming blade open with his finger. Patty scampered away, but the Giant snatched her up and reeled her back with ease. He delighted in watching her run, only to slam his hand down on her and drag her back across the table. Tears streamed down Patty’s cheeks. He hadn’t even started hurting her yet, and she already couldn’t stand his cruelty.  

Meanwhile, Ronny arrived at the restaurant, trying to be nondescript so as not to draw Bucky’s attention. The seating hostess greeted him with a smile, and he gave her a dismissive wave before slinking over to the human tank. He scoured the tank with his dark eyes, but to his disappointment Patty wasn’t there. In fact, there were hardly any humans left in the tank to choose from. He was worried his rescue attempt was already dead in the water, if she had been consumed. 

A waitress materialized by his side and asked, “Would you like me to take your order, sir?” 

“Oh... actually, I was looking for a specific human. To eat, of course,” Ronny replied, trying to hide the light pink gracing his cheeks. “I think her name was... um... Patty?” He gulped, hoping his real intentions weren’t too obvious. He was growing nervous, thinking about what he was plotting to do. 

“Patty? Oh, too bad, you just missed her. Just a minute ago, she was selected by another Giant for fatal ingestion. Guess you’re out of luck today,” the waitress explained nonchalantly, gesturing absently toward the private dining room where the other Giant had taken her. 

“F-fatal ingestion?” The color drained out of Ronny’s face. 

“Yeah, but I’d be happy to give you a recommendation for another human entrée,” the waitress said cheerfully. Ronny stepped past her, completely ignoring her. “Sir?” Her words didn’t reach his ears as his heart started to pound and blood rushed through his head. He picked up the pace as he marched over to the private dining room that the waitress had indicated. His stomach twisted up as fear gripped his insides. He was scared what lay behind that door, what horrors he would find. He might very well be too late. Patty could be dead, ingested, gutted. He steeled himself for a gruesome sight and ripped open the door. 

He was met by two sets of eyes, one Giant pair, hateful and brutal, and one much smaller pair, wild with alarm. “RONNY!” Patty’s shrill voice screamed from the table. “Save me, Ronny!” 

Patty was pinned down to the table by the evil Giant’s thumb. In his other hand, he held his switchblade knife. The blade was biting into the skin of Patty’s shoulder, drawing blood. For a moment, Ronny was frozen up as he drank in the scene before him. “Can I help you?” the Giant growled in a gruff voice. 

Ronny snapped back to awareness. He had the element of surprise on his side, and he only had one opportunity to use it to full effect. With a snarl, Ronny charged and tackled the other Giant. The gaunt brute had a wiry strength that Ronny didn’t expect, and managed to stay on his feet, but he still released Patty from his grasp and nearly dropped his knife. Patty darted out of his immediate reach, but she was still suspended on the tabletop high off the ground, so she had nowhere to run. Before the taller Giant could plunge the knife into his flesh, Ronny grabbed his wrist, twisted it, and kneed him hard in the groin. The Giant yelped with pain as his legs buckled underneath him. 

Ronny didn’t hesitate once the other man was momentarily incapacitated. He snatched Patty up off the table, clutched her to his chest, and rushed out. Unfortunately for Ronny, his suspicious behavior had already prompted the waitress to call for back-up, since she anticipated trouble. He was confronted by two other beefy Giant men, wearing the iconic blood-red vests and white pants of Bucky’s uniforms. Ronny sidestepped the men, dodging their hands as they tried to grab him. He found himself face-to-face with the owner himself, Bucky, but easily evaded the obese Giant, spinning around and ducking under the swing of his arms.  

He rushed towards the door and sprinted out, the other men hot on his heels. Ronny ran like his life depended on it. The tracker on Patty’s wrist squealed in his hands, drawing the attention of every person he raced past. Ronny struggled to remove the screaming device from Patty’s wrist without hurting her as she was roughly jostled in his hands. He pushed his way into a busy club, throbbing with loud music and flashing lights, and managed to get lost in the crowd and evade the men chasing him. He ran back out and pounded the pavement away from the leisure district. 

Finally, he succeeded in snapping the tracker off Patty’s arm. He was about to crush the blasted thing with his fingers, but another idea sparked in his brain when he spied the human railway station. He bent down and stuck the tracker in an open railcar. The doors closed and the car dashed off, whisking away the tracker and throwing off any pursuers from the scent of the trail. Ronny continued to run in a different direction, adrenaline pumping through his veins, until he was certain he wasn’t being followed any longer. 

Everything had happened so fast, making Patty highly disoriented. One moment she was being sliced into with a knife, pinned under a tremendous thumb, and the next she was smashed up against Ronny’s vast chest, the siren of her tracker piercing her eardrums. As she bounced around in his hands with his great strides, she was overwhelmed with stimuli—Ronny's heavy breathing, the throbbing of his massive heart, blaring lights and noise, light and darkness as Ronny ran into the club and back outside, shouts and yells. Ronny opened his hand and fumbled with her tracker, making her dizzy as she was jostled about helplessly by his frantic movements. Her wrist felt lighter, unencumbered, and his massive hand enclosed her snugly in darkness. She was pressed up against his body once again, bobbing up and down roughly with every swift Giant step. Ronny was more concerned about getting away than about handling Patty smoothly. Patty started to feel sick at the wild ride. 

Eventually, Ronny slowed down to a walk. He was gasping for breath, not accustomed to so much exercise after living a sedentary lifestyle with an office job. Patty was less nauseated once the world stopped careening around her at such a rapid pace. Ronny’s titanic chest heaved in and out against Patty with the inhalations of his gargantuan lungs. His huge heart, thumping like a bass drum, began to slow down. The inside of his hand was hot and uncomfortably damp with sweat, but Patty wasn’t concerned with such trivial things in the present. She wanted to know where she was, what had happened. She pushed on the fingers closing her in, and Ronny opened his hand to check on her. 

“Are you alright?” he panted. He scanned her body quickly for wounds. Other than the cut on her shoulder and a few bruises, she seemed unharmed. He couldn’t tell how deep the cut was just by looking at her tiny form in his palm, but at least it wasn’t gushing blood. 

“I-I think so,” Patty said slowly, still a bit stunned. She gingerly explored her injured shoulder with her hand and winced. “That Giant sliced me with his knife, but you stopped him before he could pierce below the skin and chop my arm off.” She glanced around her, but she couldn’t see anything over the wall of Ronny’s monumental fingers. “W-where are we?” 

She strongly suspected the truth, but she hardly dared to give herself hope. The cool evening air was fresh and thrummed with the soothing hum of insects. Ronny smiled. “We’re outside, Patty. Far away from Bucky’s. We made it. You’re free.” 

Patty gazed up at Ronny’s immense handsome face high above her. His head was framed by the deep royal blue of the darkening firmament, studded with twinkling stars. The beautiful display caused tears to form in her eyes. “Ronny... thank you... thank you so much...” 

In a torrent of emotions, Patty buried herself in Ronny’s chest and cried. Ronny was so surprised that he stopped in his tracks and stiffened, staring down at the tiny woman with wide eyes. He supposed such a reaction as hers was perfectly natural, to be finally free of the terrible burden of her confinement, but he hadn’t really considered her feelings. In fact, he hadn’t really thought through the next steps of what would happen after he rescued Patty. He had been overcome with a strong desire to do good and help her, but he hadn’t considered the aftermath at all. He was being selfish, only thinking of himself as usual. He mentally kicked himself, feeling like a jerk despite the fact that he had literally saved her life.  

He walked again, carrying Patty more carefully now, as she sobbed into his chest. He felt a burst of tender warmth inside him as he looked down at her, so dainty and fragile, in his palm. He was filled with an urge to hold her close and protect her. He curled his fingers around her and stroked her back gently with his thumb. The flow of tears gradually subsided to sniffles and hiccups. She drew back from his chest, wiped off her face self-consciously, and looked up at Ronny with shiny eyes. 

“What now?” she queried timidly. 

Ronny gave a small cough. “Well... I figure I ought to take you to my apartment where it’s safe, to lay low for a little while so they don’t find us. How does that sound to you, Patty?” 

“Okay,” she agreed, thinking to herself. Her face brightened. “You don’t have to call me by my food name anymore. I have a real name, you know.” 

Ronny raised his eyebrows. “Really? And what is it?” 

The little woman beamed, grateful to finally shed the dehumanizing appellation forced on her by Bucky that marked her as nothing more than an edible scrap of meat. “My name is Tanya.” 

Chapter 20

Chapter 1

[cheri-translates]

[CN] S2 Gavin and MC in Chapter 2 - Part Two

🍒 Warning: This post contains detailed spoilers for the Season 2 main storyline, which has not been released in English servers!🍒

Be sure to read Part 1 first!

Things get intense after Lu Yi discovers that a particular STF member didn’t participate in the investigation of MC’s company, and had touched the case of drugs when his teammate brought it back

That STF member’s Evol is swapping objects. Keep this in mind IT’S VERY IMPORTANT.

How his Evol works: He needs to touch two objects. The item he touches the second time can then be switched with the first

Gavin is wary that the suspect might swap himself with another STF member, so they decide not to engage in any large scale action

Gavin: Tang Chao. As arranged, let MC leave this place safely. MC, I’ll look for you later.

MC understands that this is STF territory, so she agrees to leave

The STF member who leads her out is wearing a mask and is really shady...

While MC follows behind the shady STF member, the cogs in her brain start whirring: How could the culprit verify that the drugs were real or fake if he wasn’t at the investigation? -> What if there were two people?!

She prepares to press the earpiece to talk to Gavin, but hears his voice:

Gavin: MC, get away from that person! He’s F-45!

In the earpiece and behind me, I can vaguely hear the sound of explosions.

My feet halt. After hesitating for a second, I run in the direction where we came from.

He knew he’d definitely be discovered by Lu Yi, and so made a switch beforehand!

F-45 touches her and she gets swapped with F-45′s partner to view THIS MAGNIFICENT SIGHT:

In the next second, I see the cold muzzle of Gavin’s gun. Cold light is on his face, and it’s filled with austerity.

A startled expression flashes across his face for a moment, and his eyes widen slightly.

But the sharp bullet is already flying in my direction, and time seems to stand still.

The whistling of the bullet is the only sound remaining in the world.

The fired bullet continuously draws closer to me, as though it’d split my head apart in the next instant.

I know that F-45 has switched us. He must have touched his partner in order to carry out this plan.

To let me die here.

All the truths will be silenced with my death.

I know I can’t be faster than the bullet, but I still grit my teeth, wanting to turn my head to the side.

I’ll never give up struggling. I’ll not just die here!

A violent wind whips up instantly.

Gavin: Get down! 

Gavin’s eyes are stricken with terror. He stretches out his palm, green veins popping out on his forehead.

The frigid wind is mixed with an abnormal darkness, but all its strength is accurately and quickly concentrated at the front of the bullet.

The gale is at the fore of the bullet, as though they are engaging in a sharp confrontation.

The speed of the bullet is too fast, and it spins rapidly in the small windstorm.

In the next second, I see a strange figure behind Gavin.

MC: Gavin! Behind you!

The gale is next to me. In the windstorm, the bullet continues spinning fiercely.

Gavin lifts his hand, and the bullet flies off in the same direction.

It brushes the side of Gavin’s face lightly, hitting the person behind him.

F-45: Ah!!

In the next moment, F-45 touches himself. A small police emblem is swapped with where he stood previously.

Gavin protects me from the front, glaring at the STF emblem on the ground. His icy gaze is fixed on the two people.

The bullet had hit F-45′s thigh. The other culprit hits the emergency button.

MC and Gavin get trapped behind metal grilles while the culprits run off

Lu Yi speaks to them via the earpiece and identifies the other culprit, U-2, who joined STF 10 years ago. His Evol is creating explosions

U-2 uses his boom boom powers to destroy the cameras

While dramatic music ensues in the background, this happens:

MC: Gavin, can we break the glass behind us to escape?

Gavin: It’s a wall.

MC: Huh?

Gavin: It’s a projection. To beautify the environment.

Even under such circumstances, Gavin explains things to me seriously. It makes me feel like laughing.

I look at the two traitors, and my worry suddenly turns to ease.

MC: What should we do next?

Gavin: Protect yourself. Then, trust me.

He doesn’t turn his head, but his tone is specially slowed down and made tender for me. At the same time, a fierce wind whips up in our surroundings.

The sparks in the man’s hands flicker. Behind him are surveillance cameras set ablaze and knocked to the ground.

I look at Gavin, who has had his shoulders straightened all this while, and I feel vaguely uneasy.

Is Gavin still afraid of fire?

The bright blood red colours flood Gavin’s eyes. He clenches his tense fingers slowly, his entire body seeming to react more slowly than usual.

As U-2 moves his palms, explosions ignite all around us. Broken circuits sizzle with electricity. Together with the crackling sparks, they create raging flames.

??: Save mum! I beg you to save mum!

??: It’s not that I’m standing idly by. You’re too incompetent. You lack the ability to save your mother! From the start, you shouldn’t have been born. You’re the biggest flaw in my entire life!

The monstrous flames shroud his mother’s expression of despair, and Gavin’s own powerless cries for help.

A similar image suddenly surfaces in his mind, overlapping with a small voice, as though reminding him of his powerlessness.

He is unable to register the scalding sensation in his fingers. From that day onwards, something had changed.

It’s just like wanting to write an important letter on a drenched sheet of paper. No matter how much hard he tries, the writing will always be hazy and unclear.

He shifts backwards unsteadily, stepping against the tip of the girl’s shoe.

The girl’s soft and gentle fingers pause on his back, causing his shoulders to tremble slightly.

He turns his head to look at her face. The light in her eyes are crystal clear, without a trace of fear in them.

She grips his slightly trembling palm gently, giving him a smile filled with confidence.

Just like her unreasonable smile on that rainy day.

His fingers gradually regain their warmth. The explosions outside the wind-constructed wall become even more violent.

U-2: Are you going to keep hiding?

Gavin blinks slowly, his eyes flickering with light from the flames. But this time, there isn’t just fear in them.

Behind him, there’s someone he needs to protect.

In his fiery orbs, Gavin seems to see that tiny him.

There are scars all over his body, deep unwillingness and sorrow in his eyes. Tears are streaming down his face as he walks towards himself.

When he walks to his side, Gavin tousles his head gently. Their profiles intersect. But this time, he walks in the direction of the fire.

Who exactly should decide one’s value?

He steps onto the ground resolutely, looking at the man and the reckless flames, no longer retreating.

Gavin knows that this blood red colour will still be his nightmare, but she will be behind him.

Which is why he will not back down.

And this nightmare - someday, it will welcome the dawn.

Even though he can’t answer that question right now, his existence is definitely not defined by other people.

The value of this existence - he will find it himself, and will prove that he has never been a flaw!

The incisive and limpid wind courses through countless sparks, channelling even bigger flames.

The man didn’t seem to expect that the fire would grow this ferocious. He lifts his arm and retreats slightly.

At this moment, Gavin breaks through the light.

He crosses the wall of fire, one leg kicking the man onto the ground, using one leg to kneel on his back.

Without turning his head, he immediately lifts his gun, firing it behind him.

The bullet barely brushes past F-45′s finger just as he lifts it up.

Gavin: Don’t move.

Wind brushes Gavin’s hair lightly. He handcuffs the man steadily.

The man is on the ground. While he struggles, a faint branding of a snake appears on the back of his neck.

The guy suddenly spits out blood and smiles ferociously at Gavin

Gavin realises what he’s about to do and INSTANTLY LUNGES THROUGH THE LARGE FIRE TOWARDS MC T-T

The guy smashes his head on the ground, causing a gigantic explosion

In the midst of the fire, MC is surrounded by a gentle wall of wind T-T

Gavin is panting slightly, his left arm leaning against the wall of wind, looking as though he’s fine.

MC: Gavin...

Gavin: I’m fine, it’s just a small wound.

Just as I plan to lean over to take a careful look at his wound, I hear soft choking noises from afar off.

F-45 is still alive!

Gavin is prepared to stand up, but MC stops him by pressing on his shoulder, and it’s hinted that it’s coated with blood T-T

She says she’ll bring F-45 over. Despite Gavin saying she can’t carry him, he still lets her go, using his Evol to pave a small path for her amid the flames

I turn my head to look at Gavin. The corners of his lips are lifted. His head is turned to the side, the light of the fire rippling slowly in his eyes, clear and resolute.

Gavin: Go carry him.

MC manages to get to F-45, but he’s on the verge of dying so she reads his memories:

There’s a little girl crying and telling F-45 about the class president who keeps bullying her. F-45 says he’ll fetch her from school from then onwards so no one would dare to bully her

In the next image, MC sees a dark hall. Someone speaks: “The existence of Evolvers was a mistake. They will only increase the despair in this world. They shouldn't have appeared in this world. We are Gray Rhino. We will get rid of Evol, for the future of humanity.” 

F-45 is in the crowd, and everyone has a snake branded on different parts of their bodies

The next image: The warehouse transaction, and a face she can’t see clearly, though he has a mocking look in his eyes

The images vanish. F-45 is dead.

My hand trembles uncontrollably as I shut his eyes gently.

Gavin: MC.

In my blurry vision, Gavin stretches out his palm.

I walk to his side slowly, and he pats the top of my head gently.

Gavin: This isn’t your fault.

Feeling awful, I nod, knowing clearly that now isn’t the time to be despondent.

What I can do is remember the anger I'm experiencing right now.

She tells Gavin what she saw, and Gavin explains that Gray Rhino is an organisation which is against the existence of Evol, consisting of normal citizens and victims of Evol

STF has been investigating them, but didn't expect them to be related to the drugs

MC notices that Gavin is sounding very fatigued, and realises he’s been concealing his back from her

The fabric on his back has long since been scorched by the flames, revealing his skin which is gradually oozing droplets of blood. The shocking large patch of red seems to emanate heat from the flames.

Simply looking at it tugs at the nerves which perceive pain.

Even though he quickly blocked off that man’s explosion, the violent explosion still completely lashed at his back.

All of the wind was encasing me, leaving only a little for himself.

Because he still used his Evol in his injured state, his wound has been exacerbated. 

Waves of heat continuously rise up my chest. I grit my teeth and look at Gavin, who’s putting on a brave front.

He looks as though it doesn’t bother him, coolly and clumsily preventing his wound from getting lapped by the flames.

MC: Gavin you big fool! What do you mean by “small wound”!! You lied to me!

Gavin: [weakly] This isn’t life-threatening...

I don’t feel like talking, and only glare at him harshly.

He seems to realise something from the way I’m staring at him. He lowers his eyes, somewhat at a loss as he places his hand on the back of his neck.

Gavin: [hisses in pain]

MC: Don’t touch your wound!

I hurriedly pull on Gavin’s hand, but he unfurls his hand and grips onto mine tightly.

Gavin: Don’t be mad. Talk to me.

An unsuppressed fatigue is in his eyes. I end up reluctantly setting aside my pique, and look at him.

MC: What do you want to talk about?

Gavin: Anything is fine.

MC: Then... could you tell me why you suddenly left school?

Gavin freezes for a moment, his brows furrowed slightly. His fringe drifts with the wind. Light falls into his eyes, reflecting several dark and gloomy images.

Gavin: Back then... did you go to the library?

His tone seems to be expectant. There’s a tightening in my chest, and I hurriedly turn around.

MC: No! I...

I wanted to make an explanation, but thinking of what happened in the end, my voice grows soft. I lower my head defeatedly.

MC: I’m sorry. This time... I still didn’t receive your letter.

Gavin: This time?

There’s some shock in his expression, as though he didn’t expect that I’d say that. But I don’t explain further, but continue keeping my head lowered.

MC: They said Minor left a bloodstained letter on my desk and thought it was a threatening letter, so no one dared to go near it.

MC: But by the time I went back to the classroom, the letter was gone.

MC: I searched for such a long time... but couldn’t find it...

MC: I thought I accidentally threw it into the dustbin, so I looked through it for a long time. But... I couldn’t find that letter anywhere.

My voice grows even softer at the end, and I don’t dare to lift my head to look at him.

Even if this world were to be reset, unexpected events still present such regrets.

Like a merciless joke, an antithesis to my unwillingness to be powerless.

Gavin: That’s not important anymore. Back then, I had already left before the arranged time. So it’s all right.

MC: But...!

Gavin: MC, lift your head.

I purse my lips, staring at the floor blankly. Gavin doesn’t hurry me, but simply waits at the side quietly.

After a long time, I lift my head. Gavin is leaning his head against the wall of wind, and he reveals an evident smile.

Gavin: A few years ago, I suffered from a small injury during training.

MC: Your “small injuries” aren’t small injuries at all.

He laughs softly.

Gavin: Back then, I felt a little tired, just like in class.

MC: ...and then?

Gavin: I don’t know why, but I suddenly thought of you.

His gaze, from afar off, slowly drifts to my face.

Gavin: At that time, I was thinking...

Gavin: “What are you doing right now”?

The large fire scorches incessantly. Once again, he seems to sweep away all the regrets in my heart plainly and simply.

Gavin lifts his hand, rubbing his palm along a lock of my hair.

Gavin: All those things aren’t important anymore. The important thing is that we’ve met again.

-

Part Three: here

[softlilacmoonlight]

Everybody x Reader - Part Two (Angst Warning)

In group chat (with everybody)

(Y/N): Hey guys!

Everybody: (Commence mass and swift greetings.)

Beel Baby: How are you doing in the human world!?

Luci: I truly hope that you have readjusted well.

Asmo: We miss you! SO! VERY! MUCH!

In private chat with Lord Diavolo

(Y/N): Can I ask you a gigantic favor?

Diavolo: Anything! What do you need?

(Y/N): Can I come back to the Devildom permanently? I know it's a big favor to ask, and I know that it will cause issues with my safety. It's just... I'm all alone here in the human world. I promise I can work! I can continue schooling! I'll do anything!

Diavolo: (Y/N)... of course you can come back! We've all missed you terribly! When can we summon you?!

(Y/N): Gimme an hour! I can pack a quick bag to go and grab the rest later! Could I re-move into the House of Lamentations by any chance?

Diavolo: Of course! Also, from now on it's just Diavolo. When you get here, I need to speak with you for a moment.

(Y/N): Okay! Thank you so much, Dia!

Cue Diavolo processing nickname, and subsequently blacking out for a couple of minutes. Poor demon prince's pounding heart.

(Y/N) pov:

While Lord Diavolo summons everybody to RAD, I quickly pack a go-bag, grab the essentials, and make sure that everything is in order in my apartment. Rushing, I quickly check that the door is locked tight. Lastly, I sit on the couch and patiently wait for Dia to come and get me.

Suddenly, the sound of breaking glass sounds from my bedroom. Before I can even register what happened, a pair of hands force me back onto the couch. They cover and muffle anything coming from my mouth, while the attacker uses his body to force me against the couch making me immobile. No matter how hard I try, I cannot get myself free.

He takes out a cloth from his pocket, and I can't help but panic further. My assailant covers my mouth and nose with the cloth. In a matter of seconds, my brain feels fuzzy and my eyes close. Shutting me in a world of black.

~ With everybody ~

(The angels and Solomon joined them since Lord Diavolo summoned them all)

Third Person pov:

"Lord Diavolo, what is the meaning of this?" questions Lucifer.

To set the mood, Lord Diavolo is bouncing around like a giddy child that just got an early Christmas gift. Everybody is looking at him like he either a) lost his marbles or b) is the funniest thing on the face of the planet. Barbatos and Lucifer are barely containing their displeasure (except Barbatos is a master of hiding it), while Mammon and Levi are trying their hardest not to laugh. Satan and Belphie just watch in pure amusement... no Satan isn't taking a video. What do you mean? As for Beel, Asmo, and the other exchange students, they couldn't care less. They mainly just find it slightly entertaining.

"Lucifer!" exclaims Lord Diavolo in excitement. "I have wonderful news! You guys will never believe it!"

"Then spit it out already. I want to sleep," says Belphie with a heavy groan.

After getting Lord Diavolo to settle down, they re-ask him the question. "(Y/N)! It's about (Y/N)!"

"WHATD'YA MEAN! IS MY HUMAN IN TROUBLE OR SOMETHIN'!" half screams Mammon.

For once, in a blue moon, Asmo goes over to calm down Mammon. You can tell that Mammon is genuinely terrified that something happened. After all, this poor tsundere clings to you like the greedy demon he is. For now, Asmo set aside the normal quips and barbs, trying to take care of his brother. He knows that you'd want him to do so.

Lord Diavolo lets out a grand laugh. "No! She asked to come and stay permanently in the Devildom! I, of course, said yes! She asked to reinhabit her old room at the House of Lamentations permanently! Hence why I called the other exchange students to ask if they wished to rejoin the program or if they simply wanted to visit from time to time."

"SHE'S COMING BACK!" practically everybody screamed.

Mammon's eyes widen in excitement. "I'll have to take care of her again! N-Not that I-I w-want to. YA HEAR!"

"My snacking buddy will be back!" Beel's face looks like a happy little puppy.

Belphie lets out a tired smile. "Snuggles..."

"HUSH! We won't overwhelm her when she first gets here. We'll make her dinner and talk the night away. We still have school tomorrow, after all." responds Lucifer with a cool glint in his eye. Only people who truly knew him saw the fires of excitement in his orbs.

"Don't act like you aren't all excited either Lucifer." jabs Satan.

"Nonsense. The school will be getting a week off for 'important royal business'." states Lord Diavolo in all certainty.

Abruptly, Luke walks over to Lord Diavolo and gently tugs his pant leg, face bright red from having to do so so that the demon prince will recognize that he's there. Lord Diavolo kneels down, which obviously causes Luke's blush to intensify. He glances to Simeon, who gives him a smile and a nod of his head, before continuing.

"Simeon and I have decided that we would l-like to r-rejoin the program." stutters out Luke.

Lord Diavolo shines a gentle smile, all the while Simeon works to cover up his chuckles. "Of course Luke. How about I set up scheduled baking lessons for you and Barbatos?"

"REALLY! I-I mean sure, n-not that I w-want to..." stutters the flushed little angel.

"I am very pleased that I will get to bake with you once more Luke," states Barbatos gently to the flustered angel. Luke just responds with a small smile.

For the first time in this whole conversation, Levi pipes up. "When is (Y/N) coming?"

"Any minute now. I set the portal to grab her an hour after our conversation." he pauses and glances at his DDD. "And... now."

Everybody looks all over the room, eyes wide in excitement. All of their faces holding loving eyes and kind smiles. They just wait. They all know that strong spells like this take a while to be fully completed and properly completed.

Nevertheless, five minutes pass by. Then ten minutes pass, and then fifteen. By the time the twenty-minute mark passes, everybody is officially worried. They can't think of what could have possibly gone wrong.

"Are you sure you set up the time for an hour?" inquires Barbatos to the concerned lord.

Lord Diavolo just shakes his head. "I'm quite certain. I know for a fact we did since we sent texts, and both of us did agree on an hour's time. Here, I'll just try texting her. Who knows? Maybe she just lost track of time. She had to be on her couch when it activated."

In private chat with Lord Diavolo

Diavolo: (Y/N), did something happen? Did you have to leave the couch? Could you please answer? We're all terribly worried.

(Y/N): (Y/N)'s not here anymore. If you ever wish to see her again, then you better follow my orders.

Diavolo: What have you done to her?

(Y/N) Intruder: Nothing yet, but if you wish to get her returned to you, then you better come and follow the clues. Otherwise, I'll kill her. You have one hour to start the puzzle. I'd wish you luck, but quite frankly I don't want you to win.

Third-person pov:

That was the day that the whole Devildom trembled in terror. That was the first time they truly saw the fury of their future king and the full outrage of his closest companions. That was the day that made it clear to everybody. Touch the demon prince's, his butler's, and the seven deadly sins' closest loved one... you will suffer a fate worse than death. The other exchange students agreed with their... passion.

"Time."

"To."

"Save."

"(Y/N)."

And they all went together, as one joined force. The kidnapper will regret this, they swear that on their lives.

[jkfortunekookies]

BITE ME!

Fanart made by @fetus-jungkook / @ohneul-eun (Do not edit/ Repost) : My amazing friend Haneul made this fanart for my story. Please support her art . She’s really talented.

Genre : Vampire au!,Fluff,romance,comedy,implied-smut, implicit/explicit language,sexual innuendos  Pairing: Jungkook x reader Length: 12 258  words

Summary : Jungkook, a softhearted player who’s majoring in the Earth sciences, finds himself oddly getting attracted to a strange girl who’s attending the same University as him. Her purity is what attracted him, but what if she was something far more dangerous than what he thought?

Tell me your thoughts in the ask box/ comments !!

© Jkfortunekookies

Do NOT repost , plagiarize or translate. I’m watching YOU.

You sighed for the third time as you saw him making his way to you. You knew him too well and his tendency to never leave you alone. Whether it was on campus or even at work, he always had his way to find your whereabouts. Why was he so obsessed with you? He somehow always had the indecency to follow you just to nag you about anything. Stalker, perhaps? Even a stalker wouldn’t be as annoying as him. Hell, even stalkers weren’t as specialized as him when it came to finding where you were.

This time, he managed to find you through a crowd, in a club. God only knows how he always knew where you were. It was as if he had a GPS stuck onto you 24/7. You could call him a stalker but the term stalker might have been a bit too much to describe the relationship you shared. At least stalkers make sure to not get noticed when they follow someone, but he, on the contrary, tried everything to get your attention. You always gave him a reason to end up following you.

You roll your eyes as you feel his presence right next to you. His toned back leaning against the wall in his usual stylish way. A hint of his masculine cologne hit your nostrils right away as the scent of his apple flavored hair conditioner hit you right in the feels. You might have hated him, but you were addicted to his scent, that was for sure.

You didn’t have to turn around to be already aware of the fact that he was wearing that black leather jacket he was so obsessed with. The peculiar scent of leather mixed with the manly scent of his aftershave only made shivers run down your spine. His raven luscious hair, looking so soft, you caught yourself fantasizing about raking your fingers through it. His dark piercing orbs, always ready to make your knees weaken at their gorgeous sight. You knew he was eyeing you up and down. It wasn’t long before every nerve on your body felt threatened when he suddenly opened his mouth to shout something you weren’t expecting.

“OH SWEET PAPRIKA. WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH THAT OUTFIT?!”  His manly voice rang in your ears  

You hold onto your heart for mental support after hearing the unusual sound of his masculine voice, being so loud. It wasn’t long before the boy made his following comment.

“Did you dig through my grandmother’s outfits before showing up at the club? What the  F*ck, are you wearing? This is a CRIME AGAINST FASHION” His eyes rounded

You restrain yourself from punching his perfect face as you snap your head around to stare at him with that perplexed gaze. The fact that he was shouting at you made no sense. You were ready to take your claws out and fight him and his humongous Jeon Cena body built. His hair was disgustingly perfect as it usually was. Revealing that shining forehead that you hated so much.

“Oh, hi Jungkook, How are you, Jungkook? I’m doing very good, Jungkook, Thank you Jungkook.” you replied sarcastically “This is how people start off a conversation, you son of a worthless plant” you scoffed

The boy let out a small chuckle as he almost scoffed at your response. Even the way he chuckled had an effect on you. It made those foreign vibrations run through your veins.

“Yeah, nature gave birth to me. I’m so organic, anyone would want me inside their bodies” Jungkook replied, giving you his infamous smirk

“Look at you going” you stared at him in disgust “I can’t believe you’re majoring in earth sciences” you shake your head “That’s not even the point! Why are you doing here, again? Can you please take a hint and stop following me like a stalker, I’m tired of seeing you everywhere I go”

“You wish I had that much free time” he scoffed “As if I have anything better to do than to spend time bonding with a boring girl who dresses like my old aunt Clara” he rolled his eyes “ Even aunt Clara dresses better than you, at least she’s 65 and she actually had a husband” he eyed you in an arrogant manner

“Then, why do you always happen to be somewhere around me? I wouldn’t even be surprised to find you in my closet, after finding you here”

“Look here woman, the club is my place to hang out. You’re the one who isn’t supposed to be here. The last time I recalled, you were the one who refused going out after 10 pm for god knows why” he rolled his eyes “ Maybe you finally got your wakeup call and realized that the fun really starts after 11 pm? So stop trying to paint me into something I’m not. I may have had a lot of girls but I don’t chase random women. Especially not if they’re you. So for the record, you’re the one who’s stalking me. Mother Nature is watching and she knows it.”

“I hate you and your green ways to paint my accusations” you glare at him

“Why do you hate the nature so much?” he quirks up a brow “Don’t hate on the beautiful green beings! What did they ever do to you?”

“I wonder if you like the nature because it provides you all the drugs you’ve been consuming”

“Might as well move to Canada if I really wanted that” he commented “I only eat vitamins, for your information and they’re really helpful. At least I don’t look like I’m on verge of a midlife crisis like you are.”

“What about all the girls you slept with? I bet that had something to do with nature as well.” You smirked back at him

“Of course it does, it’s called sexual intercourse, and it happens when two individuals feel sexually attracted to each other and want to get rid of their urges and frustrations, but I guess you don’t know how sex works either?” he stared at his glass of wine “No matter how you perceive it, everything has to do with nature and beautiful green beings”

“Whoa, so you had a kink for Shrek all this time” you chuckled “ I never thought you’d be into bestiality, Jungkook”

“The only beast here is me and you know why” he winked at you

“Oh … so your dick is green?” you cringed your face before staring at his crotch area “Is it because you’ve been eating so many vegetables? Or because you f*cked too many girls majoring in earth sciences? Oh wait, I have a better one!” you gasped “Is it because you f*cked too many girls in the wild forest?”

He froze a few seconds, eyes glued to you before slowly bringing up his gigantic palms together to clap in celebration at your cleverness. You were a very straightforward specimen, as he’d usually call you, and he seemed to love your responses to his acts.

“Brilliant! Y/N, you never fail to impress me with your amazing theories” he chuckled before his facial expression became serious again “Of course, what a clever way to say it. My dick is ORGANIC” he emphasizes the word before grabbing his drink and swirling the cup with his fingers

“I pray day and night for this planet to be saved and you’re going to pollute it with your dick” you pout while staring at the shiny floor

“You must really want my dick” He chuckled, harboring his sexiest grin

Can grins be sexy? Was there such a thing? Could it even exist? Jungkook, the earth sciences Major God could make anything come true. You gulped on your saliva as you heard those words easily leave his sinful lips. This man was the definition of sinning behind an innocent façade. He seemed so innocent at first sight, yet he was fooling everyone with his sweet smiles. He was the kind of kid who smiled while cursing. As if cussing wasn’t already much, Jungkook had a history of several issues surrounding women and other doubtful happenings that made you want to stay away from him.

There was a reason why you were alone in a club, dressed like Jungkook’s grand aunt Clara, in the first place. Jungkook never failed to make you choke on your breath with his flirty yet naughty comebacks. The boy was so despicable and cocky that you wanted to smack his face with his own dick.

“You wish anyone would want your wrinkly overused dick” you rolled your eyes

“Overused? Did you mean experienced perhaps? My dick knows its way to the right spot” he raised his infamous brow “You wish I could hit that spot” he shot you a side smirk before chugging down his cocktail

You hit your fist on your chest in response as you felt the heat invading your cheeks. It wasn’t the drinks that were making you feel that way, nor was it Jungkook’s sexual comments. Anyone would have had failed to notice it, but Jungkook’s body warmth and bloodstream were what caused you to heat up. His sexual comments weren’t helpful either. The real question here: how could you feel his warmth in the first place?

You slowly grazed your sharp canine over your bottom lip, before you caught yourself in the act. Your fangs were started to slowly appear as they usually did around this hour of the night.

F*ck! Why am I such a klutz?! What if he noticed my teeth! you scolded yourself

“Are you blushing? You’re so cute.” he chuckled “I was obviously messing around to get a reaction, seems like it worked pretty well” he clicked his tongue

“The day you hit that spot is the day I’ll hit your face” you glare at him before turning your body to the other side

“Why are you so serious?” he nudged your arm with his warm bicep

“D-Don’t touch me!” you grabbed your hair to hide the bottom of your face, to avoid any form of eye contact between him and your fangs

“Relax, grandma! I’m not the kind of guy who bites on the first date. Not that this is even a date but a coincidental meeting.” He gave you an adorable smile “Now that I’m here, I might just as well give you some advice as your best wingman.”

“Wingman?” you raised a brow

“I’m an angel after all” Jungkook nodded to himself

“You mean Seagull” you laughed at your own joke “Baby, you’re still from Busan, no matter how much you try to deny it”

“I never denied I was from Busan. Seagulls ARE SEXY AND ORGANIC!” He replied in a sassy tone “and how did you know I like it when girls call me baby?” he raised a brow “Did some research perhaps? Because you love me” he clicked his tongue playfully

“In your wildest dreams,” you laughed heartlessly “As if I’d ever spare a glance at you or be interested in you”

“Ouch, was that your way to shatter my confidence in three seconds? Because it almost worked” he clenched his hand against his chest

“Aww, is Jungkookie hurting?” you said in a childish tone “Need a kiss and a hug to heal your wounds too? What a good boy you are!”

“Well, maybe I do feel hurt from time to time, just like everyone else and sex can’t solve everything” he muttered under his breath in a sad tone

“What?” you blinked as you caught on what he said

“I was just saying…” he cleared his throat before faking an excuse “I love kisses and hugs. Just like you said it, I slept with everyone after all!” He replied sarcastically “You’re always right, grandma” he nudged your arm

“You’re so full of yourself. Organic Boy” you stare at him from the corner of your eyes

“ Yeah, maybe I really am” he kept his act on “Or maybe I’m not full of myself and I’m just stating facts” Jungkook replied seductively   “I have the face of an angel, but I’m called the Lucifer of temptation in bed.”

The word Temptation set you off guard as you felt your lips pulsating with desire. Jungkook fanned himself with his phone as he made a comment about feeling too hot. You stared at him as he slowly removed his jacket, exposing his arms. His toned biceps were perfectly on your radar. You almost licked your bottom lip.

“I rock very hard in bed, for your information” he nodded to himself “Organic things are good for energy” he winked at you, trying to mask his previous heartbroken words

“Too much information, Jungkook” you cringed your face “Why, can’t we have a normal conversation without having you talking about your sex life every second?” you internally fanned yourself

“Because you’re not getting laid and I enjoy rubbing in your face how enjoyable sex can be” he nodded

“Wow, how mature Jungkook” you clapped your hands “Well sorry to disappoint you, sir, but I don’t feel the need to get laid”

“Well, that’s tragic.” Jungkook eyes rounded

“Thirsty much?” you tilted your head to stare at him

Thirsty my butt, I’m the one who’s craving every inch of him, you internally screamed as you felt his amazing scent spread around you again

“Planning to become a nun anytime soon?” he commented

“Yeah, I’d rather become a nun and pray God to exterminate you from this earth” you nodded

“You’re so mean” he pouted as you choked internally, watching his pink delicious lips jut out cutely “I wonder how it’d be to get laid with a nun though?” he tapped his chin

“JUNGKOOK” you slap his arm “For the love of Jesus, can you stop talking about getting laid” you rolled your eyes trying to fight the temptation

The fact that this specific human was tempting into the wrong at such a late hour of the night - when you were on the verge to transform - was making this Friday a hundred times worse. You tried your best to avoid Jungkook at all costs, but there was no way out of this mess. Once Jungkook targets you, he sticks to you.

“What?! “ his eyes rounded “ I’m trying to tell you that it’s not late for you to get some, even if you become a nun” he adds “ I’m always down to f*ck in a church If you want to roll that way”

“What an unholy son of a bitch” your jaw dropped ten floors down

“I was always that way” he smiles at you “Doing it in a church sounds pretty interesting though” he nods

“YOU’RE INSANE” you cup your mouth

“Not as insane as your outfit” He stares at your knit sweater “Look at me Grandma, this is a club, not a place where you meet your friends to play bingo”

“Why are you so concerned about my fashion anyway?” you scowl “I could wear a trash bag if I want to and it still won’t be of your business”

“You dress like a homeless man at school and you dress like a grandma, at the club” Jungkook sighed “Girl, I’m saying this for your benefit. Why are you hiding all of your best assets?”

If all jokes were to be put aside, Jungkook was indeed very right. The assets, or should we say the unrealistic glistering smooth skin you were hiding under those ten layers of clothes, were a way to avoid the sun. You even took those special red pills every morning to ensure that you wouldn’t vanish into thin air while attending morning classes. Living in the human world was a challenge you were willing to take, and it was the same reason as to why you always stayed away from people. The fear of being discovered and treated like a monster was your biggest weakness.

“There’s no assets to hide, jerk”

“Oh~ I get it” he nodded “You want to keep them hidden so that I can be the only one to see them” he replied with a proud look on his face but it wasn’t long before he felt your hand slap the back of his perfectly round head “ OUCH!!” he squeaked

You unconsciously cover your chest in protection

“Stop perving on a girl you just called grandma AND TELL ME WHY YOU’RE HERE” you glared “I hate your face”

“My face is too handsome for you to handle?” he ran his tongue across his teeth in a sexy manner

His indecent tongue made you swirl your own tongue inside your mouth and poke your cheek from the inside. An act that boys usually do when they’re jealous, but it had a different meaning when you did it.

You tried avoiding his face at all costs. You could smell his addictive scent every time he took a breath or a sip of his drink as you tried fighting against the temptation. Your biggest problem was your transformation. The transformation would usually take from two to three hours as you’d be in your full form after the clock hits 12:00. It was as sad as Cinderella’s story, yet the difference was that you weren’t a poor girl dressed as a princess, you were a monster hiding behind an innocent face.

“Ew, SIR. Keep that tongue in your mouth” you replied nonchalantly  

Jungkook stared at you for a few seconds before shrugging his shoulders and rubbing his temples in frustration at the view of your outfit

“Why did you even come here in the first place if you’re not planning to dance or to get laid” he adjusted his black leather jacket on his sturdy body “I’m giving you advice as a good friend” he lowered his face to whisper in your face “You need to take advantage of this situation and expand that circle of friends.”

You blinked frantically as his breath hit your philtrum. You pressed your palm against his chest to keep a safe distance between your bodies, which was a huge mistake on your part. You could clearly feel each and every beat pulsating from his heart. Jungkook’s heart’s pace was so calming yet fueling you up with temptation. You could feel his blood so well and you could only imagine how amazing he could taste. He had that rare addictive scent that you never smelled anywhere. This was also the main reason why you always tried to avoid him.

“I’m not here to make friends.”

“Then what are you here for?” he grabs your cold wrist with his warm fingers but you wasted no time to slap his hand away “Damn girl, you’re so cold” he furrowed his brows and you panicked at his comment “You always hurt my little heart” he pouted as you felt relief hit you. He wasn’t referring to your body temperature after all.

“I came here to have an anti-social night and drink on my own” you crossed your arms over your chest

“Sounds very pitiful” Jungkook replied in a disappointed tone

“Why would you do such a thing to yourself? You have a healthy body! You should be jumping around and dancing like everyone else, yet you prefer to drown yourself in alcohol.” He grabbed your shoulders “Do you really want to die as a virgin old lady who owns 13 cats?!”

“There’s nothing bad about owning cats” you frowned at him “I have three cats at home for your information!”

“Oh, saint mother of the holy Jesus Christ.” Jungkook put his hands in a praying motion “Please help me save this child from the grandma abyss”

“No need to dramatize” you rolled your eyes, “I think you should pray to prevent your future aids”

“There’s that thing called protection” he scowled “But I guess that you never even saw a condom in your entire life”

“And who said that I was virgin?” you smirk back at him

“W-What? You’re not?” His jaw dropped as he gulped on his saliva  “You’re telling me that some guy other than me,  saw the potential in that body that you’re hiding under twelve layers?!”Jungkook stared at your ponytail and the frame of your nerdy glasses in fascination

If the truth was to be told, Jungkook may have been the f*ck boy who had girls at his feet but the main reason why he was spending so much time with you, was because he wanted to help you make more friends. The vibe you gave off compared to the previous girls he met was different. The boy grew attached to you as you tried pushing him away. He was curious about you. Maybe you weren’t like these other girls who only perceived them as a way to relieve their sexual desires. Maybe you could somehow like him for who he really was? The boy may have had given off the f*ck boy vibes you wanted to avoid at all costs, but what if he had a deeper side? What if he wasn’t the player everyone perceived him to be? What if he was seeking for love, just like everyone else?

He naturally grew fond of you as you naturally hung out around school. Not because he liked you, but because he wanted to help you. Well, that’s what he liked to pretend.

“Shocked?” you chuckled soullessly

“Who’s the bastar—uhm… I mean GUY!” he coughed

“Is it that important?” you sighed

“EXCUSE YOU, BUT it’s SUPER MEGA EXTREMELY IMPORTANT!” he scoffed “I ABSOLUTELY NEED TO KNOW WHAT KIND OF DUDE TOOK AWAY VIRGIN MARY’S FIRST TIME!!! It’s something I need to know f-for science p-p-purposes …” he coughed

“Science? Are you going to integrate that shit in your future master thesis as well?” you chuckled “but Wow, Jungkook” you giggled at him and he felt his breath hitch at the tone of your girly laugh “You’re so gullible” you tapped his nose “You almost believed me”

Jungkook blinked nervously as he felt the cold tip of your index brushing against his warm nose. He never initiated any physical contact with you and this was probably the most skin to skin contact you ever initiated towards him. The sudden thrilling feeling of having your skin brush against his own made him fantasize about how it’d feel to have you in his arms. Your purity was what got to him in the first place. He was intrigued and he knew that you were hiding something.

Playboy or not, Jungkook was still vulnerable under your fingers. You might have been unaware of it, but you had Jungkook wrapped around your little finger.

“O-Oh, so you’re still v-virgin?” he gulped on his saliva

“Why are you stuttering” you chuckled

“I’m not stuttering! Pfttt” his eyes rounded in panic “and you’re out of your mind if you thought I believed your stupid lie” he rolled his eyes “You never got laid and THAT’S A FACT. I’M A SEX EXPERT” he coughed

“Sure, Sex expert who got an organic dick” you put your fingers in a quotation manner

The boy cleared his throat before striking his usual handsome pose to regain his confidence. He was a panty dropper, yet you had your ways to make him lose it momentarily. He always wanted to get a positive reaction out of you, yet you always rejected him and his organic dick. If truth was to be said, you were his new challenge.

“What about you? Does sleeping with every attractive girl you find on campus, really makes you happy?” you stare into his deep eyes

“O-Of course, I-I mean… any guy would kill to be in my position” Jungkook stuttered

“Or maybe you’re just lying to yourself?” you tilted your head

“Or maybe it’s just not of your business” you replied sternly

“Sure, then stop asking about me then” you frowned

“I can’t do such a thing” he stared at his shoes

“Why? Jungkook, I don’t get what’s your deal? You always try digging through my secrets, but when I get curious about you, it’s suddenly a completely different story!” you furrow your brows “Just tell me the truth”

“What if I actually cared about you? Would that answer your question?”

“You know as well as I know, that this option is scientifically impossible.” You avoided his eyes

“And why not?” he furrowed his brows

“You’re not the kind of guy who’d care about someone like me. You’re just blinded by the idea of entertaining yourself by annoying me” you rolled your eyes

“I’m not that heartless” he sighed “You’re having the wrong idea about me. I’m way more complicated than what you think” he sipped on his wine “

“Of course Jungkook, you’re as complicated as a girl.” You cracked a smile

“I’m amazing” he nodded “That’s more like it”

“And arrogant as well” you chuckled

“Confidence, we call it” Jungkook scowled

“It still doesn’t explain why you’re here” you stared at him

The boy suppressed a slight groan at your avidity to keep on asking him the same question since he showed up. Why didn’t you enjoy his presence? That was what always rubbed him the wrong way. He was wanted by all girls after all. How was it that you weren’t giving in to his seduction?

“To cut to the chase” he sighed before running a hand through his luscious dark hair “I heard somewhere, that you apparently have the hugest crush on that weird senior guy” he swirled his cocktail cup in his long fingers “What was his name, again? Oh yeah!” he snapped his fingers “Jung Hoseok from the Arts department” a satisfied smirk was stamped on his perfect face

You cursed as you almost choked on your drink and died on the spot at his sudden comment. No one was aware of your crush on Hoseok except your best friend Jenna. It was a one-sided crush that was meant to fade away with time and be forgotten. Jungkook always had his way to dig into information and find out some stuff that no one knew.

“F*ck, don’t tell me that Jenna told you” you raised a brow

Jenna, your one and only friend who actually knew about your real identity, simply because she was the same as you. That one friend who grew up with you, who witnessed you biting your first victim, the one who drinks blood from cherry juice boxes, just like you do. The one who buys Wine and alternate the actual wine to blood, because she thinks it’s bloody smart.

“Yeah spilled the beans after I teased her “Jungkook leaned his back on the wall in a handsome manner

It took you a few seconds to proceed the information through your brain before you understood the situation.

“D-Did you--” your jaw dropped “YOU GOT LAID WITH MY BEST FRIEND?!”

Jungkook coughed before tapping on his chest as he stared at you in puzzlement

“Laid is a big word!” Jungkook furrowed his brows

“Says the guy who f*cks a different girl every other day” you whisper to yourself

“What was that?!” Jungkook scoffed “My organic dick didn’t get near her if that’s what you want to know” he cupped your chin in his long fingers

“Organic? “You scoffed “What the f*ck is organic about your small dick? Can it feed plants? Can it save the planet? You must really love the environment a whole lot, or maybe you love your dick too much? I can’t believe you keep on calling your dick organic” you shook your head   “Can we stop talking about dicks, please?!” you facepalmed

“I didn’t get laid with your friend” Jungkook smiled “In fact, I hooked her up with one of my friends and she told me right away. Maybe you should make new loyal friends, like me for instance”

“You wish” you smiled at him sarcastically “I’d rather not hear your sexual adventures every second of my life”

“I’m a sex god who’s majoring in Earth sciences” he swirls a strand of your hair in his fingers sensually “Maybe I can rock your world and we can create a new universe together”

“Oh my lord, you even flirt with your friends?” your jaw dropped  “I hate plants” you glare at him “I hate you as well”

“Why do you hate the nature so much? Let nature do its natural process” he stared at you “Mother Nature created you for all the right reasons. You may not look like a yummy snack at the time we’re talking, but we can work on that and turn you into something sexy. Just like caterpillars turn into butterflies!”

“Why do you always have to turn into a smartass whenever I complain? Don’t you get it, Jeon Jungkook! I hate plants and vegetables” you stick out your tongue in disgust

Being a vampire, the one thing you despised the most were fruits and vegetables, the two things that you had to pretend to eat to make your entire existence more real to humans. After all, not eating would make them suspect your identity. Therefore you hated broccoli and green plants, they’d always get stuck in between your teeth and especially on your sharp fangs. You weren’t digging the whole environmental thing as it always reminded you of these awful things you had to eat when you didn’t have your daily reserve of blood in storage.

“You’re such a stingy little brat” Jungkook scoffed “Eat your vegetables to grow” he messes up your hair on purpose with his large hand

“Vegetables failed me” you commented “AND I HATE THEM” you sighed

“They failed you?” Jungkook blinked “I don’t see where they could fail you if you actually gave them a chance”

“Look Jungkook, I’m not pro-vegetarian like you are and I LOVE MEAT” you stared at him

“Yeah sure, I can understand that you like to bite onto that piece of meat” Jungkook chuckled sexily before sipping on his drink

“I-I mean, Vegetables are just not my thing” you blinked, trying to regain your cool even though you were cold enough to make Jungkook shiver if he was under your touch

“I noticed that” he raised a brow

Your eyes rounded as you felt your fangs suddenly sharpening and becoming pointier. It was only a matter of time before your eyes would change colors and your skin would start taking that shiny form it took after midnight. You stared at your watch before gulping on your saliva. 10:50 pm. it was only a matter of minutes before your true form would take over.

“I’m leaving soon” you get up from your seat

“Sit back down, baby” Jungkook grabbed your wrist “We’re not done here”

You scowled at his way to hold you back. You never asked for this life, nor did you ever asked for these vampire-like instincts to take over your body and obey the owner of the blood you craved for.

“I thought you didn’t want me to remain here and drown in alcohol, Jungkook” you stared at him “I’m actually following your advice”

“Stay a little bit with me, will you?” He caressed your wrist through the fabric that was separating you and him

“Ugh… Sure” you growled “But why do I have to stay with you?!Why am I following your orders” you sighed “I have other things to do”

“Because you love me” he poked your cheek

“D-don’t poke my face” you glare before slapping his hand away

“So stingy” Jungkook stuck out his tongue “It’s not like I tried pulling you into a kiss” he stared at the ceiling

“I’d like to see you try” you almost smirked as your vampire thirst was slowly showing up

Jungkook was awakening all of those unwanted feels through your body. Your metamorphosis was to be delayed for the night as you tried your hardest to remain in your human form, yet something about Jungkook, made you feel this sudden heat rushing through your veins. You were indeed cold as ice, but Jungkook made your body temperature rise as if you were slowly transitioning into a human, which made no sense.

Jungkook made you feel human. The fact that your transformation was happening around the same time as you were talking with jungkook, made the heat fight the cold. You were about to turn into a thirsty beast in an hour yet Jungkook was triggering all of those pulsations through your cold veins. Your vampire form was battling the fake human form you were in.

Something about Jungkook was so alluring and so seductive, that even you, as a vampire, could feel it very well. You wanted to see him try. Your inner beast wanted him to make a move yet you didn’t want to admit it to yourself. You probably wanted him to pull you into a kiss, but you knew that pressing his warm lips against your cold ones, would make your true form would take over you. This was simply how it worked for vampires. Sensuality and temptation were what made vampires awaken and take their real form.

“Pardon?” Jungkook’s eyes rounded in response

“Uhm, no nothing” you nodded

“You’d like to watch me try?” Jungkook quirked up his infamous brow

“I was just joking, Organic boy” you rolled your eyes “Calm your dick for three seconds. Are you going to keep on acting like a hormonal brat?” you scoffed

“You just gave me an invitation” Jungkook stared at you “Do you expect me to ignore an open invitation like this one?” he slowly leaned closer to you

“You better not come near me!” you pointed at him with your shaky finger

“But I want to be near you” Jungkook pouted cutely as he raked a hand through his black raven luscious hair

You could smell his amazing aroma from the way he just ran a hand through his hair, you were killing yourself to keep your fangs from showing. The way he was jutting out his juicy red bottom lip only triggered up desire through your body. Your body was aching to firmly press your lips to his delicious ones. Jungkook smelled like a delicious midnight treat that you could easily bite in an instant.

This asshole!!Why did he shower with stupid apple scented shampoo?!!! I HATE HIM A2$$%$^#$^@$@

You firmly clenched your fists to not let your wildness take over you.

“Stop pouting you dumb idiot!” you replied

“I wanted a kiss” Jungkook kicked the ground cutely

“STOP ACTING CUTE!”

“But you just promised me a kiss” he gently tugged on your sleeve, giving you his puppy eyes

“I did NOT PROMISE YOU ANYTHING!”

“Come on Y/N! This isn’t fair play! You tempted me. You started the game by saying you wanted to see me try” he stepped an inch closer to your face

“I was just talking” you push his forehead with your knuckles “I wasn’t serious”

“Ah” Jungkook stepped back obviously disappointed by your response “I was looking forward to knowing how the lips of an untouched girl felt like.” He sighed in a heartbroken manner “I thought…maybe a little bit of purity could tame the bad side of me”

Purity?! Is he talking about me? I’m the danger here and you’re the victim here, Jeon Jungkook.

“Such a perverted bastard…but so f*cking poetic that I can’t even argue” you shook your head in disbelief “You really have an evil agenda where you know to say the right things in the right moments, don’t you?” you raised a brow

“My first girlfriend was older than me, so she kissed a few guys before I happened” jungkook played with his thumbs “ And the girls I hooked up with, were not that… pure either” he lowers his head in shame “ I always wondered how it could feel to be lov-- n-no! I mean…how it could feel to kiss an angel” his shiny eyes gaze into yours

“Don’t sugarcoat it, Jeon” you frowned “I know you’re trying to be seductive and it’s oddly working, but I don’t want to get involved with you like this” your cheeks turn a crimson red

“And why not?” his eyes softened “Am I that dangerous for you? I’m probably not worth the risk to give up your purity” he sipped on his wine “Wise decision. Rare, you are, but your decisions never fail to make me want you more than I did before”

“You don’t want me, Jungkook, stop being delusional! You just called me grandma earlier” you rolled your eyes “All you want is the idea of purity and it’s blinding you. What if I’m not what you think? “

“The idea of purity comes to life when it’s you… that’s why. It’s not the fact that you’re untouched, it’s your genuine personality that makes it seem that way. You’re selfless and you don’t care about what anyone else thinks.”

You soften at his sweet words. What if he was different? What if Jungkook really wanted to be a nice guy to you? Your only answer to these questions would be to avoid him. If Jungkook really did like you, then you had to protect him from your real self at all costs. Pushing him away was your one and only option.

“Maybe you just want to taint my lips, just like you did with your other hook-ups” you added

“I wouldn’t taint them! My LIPS ARE ORGANIC! ” He crossed his arms over his chest “It’d be extremely beneficial for you to kiss me!”

You facepalmed for the nth time as you heard Jungkook’s favorite word again. Organic

Oh, sweet lord…should I just bite him and leave him to die on campus? Sounds like an AMAZING IDEA.

“Yeah, so organic, you’d probably kiss your own self if you could.” You pretended to barf

“Not to brag, but I’m apparently as good kisser” the boy winked at you “I’m sure your first kiss wouldn’t go to waste with lips like mine”

“But who said my lips were untouched?” you stared back at him

Jungkook’s jaw dropped again for a few second at the scandalizing thought of imagining you kissing another man. It wasn’t long before he collected his thoughts and was ready to attack you again.

You looked at him with a perplexed gaze as he narrowed his eyes at you, by analyzing your lips. It wasn’t long before his thoughts were exposed.

“Look here, Virgin Mary, I won’t believe your lies a second-time” Jungkook pointed at you “your lips are as virgin as the olive oil Jin hyung bought last night”

“Did you just compare me to olive oil?” you raise a skeptical brow

“Yeah, because Olive oil is organ—“ he replied but you cut him off

“Organic” you mimicked him

“Exactly! Now you’re starting to sound like a decent girl “he nodded proudly before taking advantage of your dazed state to make a move  “Can we get over this and kiss now?” he slides his manly hand near your waist to pull your bodies closer

“There’s NO F*CKING WAY WE’RE KISSING” you pushed his chest

“A kiss on the cheek then!” Jungkook pleaded

“Good lord! Jungkook PLEASE BEHAVE!”

“I wanted some love” he glared at you “Forget it, I’ll go Tell Jung Hoseok that you want him in your pants”

“You better get the f*ck back here” you grab him by his collar “I don’t even like him that way” you rolled your eyes “I just thought he was sexy! That’s all!” you gulp on your saliva

“In other words, you wanted the D” Jungkook nodded

“I DID NOT!”

“She wanted the D” Jungkook nodded again “What a sad life” he sighed “Being deprived of the D as a college student at such a young age, what a poor unfortunate soul” he patted your shoulder “Too bad Hoseok’s dick isn’t that organ—“

“I might AS WELL BITE OFF YOUR DICK IF YOU SAY THE WORD ORGANIC AGAIN!” you throw your fist next to his face

“Damn, feisty” he chuckled sexily “This is getting wilder by the second you’re talking” his manly hold slides back onto your waist to firmly press your body against his “… and I’m getting into it.”

Your body melt against Jungkook’s firm holds on your sensitive waist. You could feel the thirst and the desperation slowly growing through your icy veins. Jungkook’s body was hot, to begin with, and you could feel it from far away, yet this time you could feel the heat through his body, precisely through your chest pressed against his. His heart was racing at a faster pace and you could feel his hormones playing with his level of temptation. Jungkook badly wanted you because of his delusion of kissing an untainted girl and you knew it too well. You had enough strength to push him off and bruise his face for approaching you like this, yet your own body was weakening under his touch. You liked the way he was holding you.

“Don’t t-t-touch me you perverted asshole!” you try to pry his hand from your waist, but there was nothing you could, as it was one of your weakest spots.

Jungkook smiled as he noticed the way you were defying him once again. He was relieved to hear you denying this kiss once again. It confirmed his belief. You weren’t like these other girls who only wanted him for his body. All of this was his way to get a reaction from you. The boy would never force himself on a lady and was simply acting like he was about to kiss you, to make you flustered. He knew your attraction towards him as your friend Jenna might have spilled the beans during their latest conversation.

His other hand takes a hold of your chin as he tilts your face up with his warm masculine fingers

“I’d like to see what kind of deal is hiding behind these twelve layers” he stared at your lips while alternating and staring into your eyes “What kind of beast is hiding in there, huh? Baby girl?” his sweet smile suddenly turned into a side smirk

The boy licks his bottom lip and you feel your fangs poking against the inside of your cheek. Your eyes round as you feel your transformation being quicker than it usually is. Jungkook was tempting you and you were being lured by the impossible amount of sensual pheromones Jungkook’s hormones were sending you. Sure, he was the one to be turned on, but it directly had an effect on your thirst, since his hormones were changing his blood’s usual composition. Jungkook’s blood was slowly making its aroma yummier by the second he’d be aroused over you.

“J-Jeon J-J-Jungkook” you slightly pushed his chest away from yours as you licked your bottom lip

“Did you call my name, baby girl?” he tilted your chin again to get your attention

“No Jungkook, this is not happening” you turned your face to the other side

Jungkook smiled as he let you go of his hold on you.

“And I’m relieved it didn’t” he smiled cutely

“W-What?” you stuttered

“It means you’re different” his soft eyes gazed into yours “You wouldn’t jump on my advances to get a piece of me like everyone else does… that’s what I mean.”

“How does that make me any different?” you blink as you recall awfully wanting a piece of him

You stepped back at the contact of his skin on yours once again. Jungkook was triggering your inner vampire to come out sooner than it usually would. You quickly grabbed the extra pill you had in your pocket.

The boy stepped back from you with a very confused gaze as he watched you. His hand dropped from your waist and his eyes were now focused on the red pill you just took out of your pocket.

“What is that? Y/N?” he furrowed his brows “don’t tell me...”

“What?” you blinked innocently before popping it into your mouth

His eyes round in panic as he watches you gulping down your martini along with your pill

“DID YOU JUST EAT PILLS WHILE SIPPING ALCOHOL?!” he shouted “Are you f*cking insane!” he grabs your wrist “What the f*ck is wrong with you?!”

 “Whoa there! Why are you shouting” you throw your palm over his lips “What if they kick us out?!”

“Are you a dumb idiot?! Taking medicine while drinking alcohol?!” he replies angrily “Do you want to kill yourself?! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?”

“Kill myself?” you tilted your head

I can’t die, even if I wanted to…But do humans die from this?

“You dumb piece of shit” he buried his face in his hands

“Uhm, excuse me?!” you frowned “Did you just called me a piece of shit?! You son of a--” you attempt to hit his head again but he blocks your hand by wrapping his fingers around your wrist

“You better spit it out right now” he stared at you “There’s no way I’m watching your ass die”

“I can’t spit it out even if I wanted to” you replied

“What if you die?! What am I supposed to do then…?” Jungkook whispered under his breath “We’re going to the hospital.” He grabs your arm

“Hey!!! Where are you dragging me?! There’s no way I’m going to a hospital!” you pushed him away as you were afraid to get discovered

Why are humans so damn sensitive to everything? Can’t they chill for a bit? This kid is way too nervous for nothing *sighs* let’s comfort his ass a little bit.

“These pills aren’t harmful when they’re combined with alcohol!” you blurt out an excuse to make him calm down but the latter doesn’t respond and you suddenly feel the guilt eating you up “H-Hey” you poke his arm “Jungkook…”

“You f*cking idiot. YOU SHOULD’VE TOLD ME THIS INFORMATION A THOUSAND YEARS AGO INSTEAD OF MAKING ME FREAK OUT” he snapped at you

“Look here Organic Boy, you get to have control over your emotions. Don’t blame your outbursts on me” you stare at him

“This girl, I swear to god” he facepalms before sighing and acting like your parent “What kind of pills are those?! Y/N! Don’t tell me you’re taking drugs”

“Calm down” you punched his arm and he winced in pain “O-Oh sorry, did I hurt you?” you blinked before patting his arm

“Y-yeah a little” he rubbed on his bicep painfully “But that’s some amazing strength you got there! I want to try wrestling you one of these times”

“Trust me, you’d rather not try this with me” you chuckled sarcastically

“Is this a challenge?” his competitive side was surfacing again

“No, Jungkook, It’s not a challenge, can we please talk about something else now?”

“Don’t change topics! What was that weird red pill?!”

You paused and choked on your words after this deadly question was thrown at you. Jungkook was a straightforward man and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

“I-I-It’s… uhm…I-I...”

“Are you on the pill?” Jungkook stared at you

Pill? Well yeah, I’m taking pills…? Let���s just say yes and maybe he’ll leave us alone.

“Y-Yeah” you nodded with a very skeptical look on your face

You didn’t know what Jungkook meant by being on the pill, but you thought it was the safest way to get out of this noisy situation. Vampires didn’t have periods or menstrual cycles after all, and moving to the human world barely 2 years ago, wasn’t long enough for you to figure out how women in this world survived.

“O-Oh s-so you’re really on the pill” Jungkook blushed at your response

“Why are you blushing?” you could feel the beast inside you raging at his masculine sensual pheromones calling you.

“I wasn’t blushing” he cleared his throat “I was just taken aback because you don’t seem that way.”

“Yeah?” you raised a brow

“Why are you on the pill though? Is it because you’re seeing someone?” he kicked the ground with his shoes

What is he talking about? Seeing someone? Well Yes, I take those pills because I see humans every day and I don’t want them to discover that I’m a vampire.

“Well, yes? I mean, why I would take them if it wasn’t for that?” you stared at him “I’m seeing you right now” you raised a brow

“You’re seeing me?!” Jungkook’s jaw dropped “You’re taking them for me?!” he felt his heart drop out of his chest

“Why do you seem so nervous? Did I say something wrong?” you blinked as you could feel his heart race accelerating

F*ck, why is he so damn nervous, now I’m getting hungry!#@#$@%@ why must his blood smell so damn delicious

“L-Let me sit for a few seconds, I feel very flustered right now” He moistens his bottom lip nervously

You let the boy breath a few times as he sits on the nearest chair.

“Y-Y/N?! Are you for real? You’ve been taking pills because of me?” Jungkook’s breath hitched at the thought of you taking contraceptive pills in case he’d get intimate with you

“Uhm…not necessarily just for you, but for people in general” you nodded awkwardly

Jungkook felt panic invade his body as he heard your last few words.

“For people in GENERAL?!!!” Jungkook shouted “Y/N, What did you get yourself into?!” he grabbed your shoulders “Is it because you don’t have enough to pay off college?!” His soft eyes laid upon your neutral ones before he pulled you on his sturdy chest, where you had your face buried in his good scent. You could feel his heart racing frantically as his masculine scent was invading your senses, making you slowly drunk in ecstasy “Don’t do those things!! I’ll pay for you! Please don’t sell yourself for college!” he ran his long fingers through your soft hair as he held you tightly in his arms.

So delicious, you lick your bottom lip as you could hear his bloodstream and his heart, f*ck, this is not the moment to be lured by temptation! The pills won’t have an effect for that long, and they’ll only delay the transformation! Better find a way to keep him away from me.

“Selling myself?” You slowly pushed his chest before staring at his eyes “How does that work?”

“Don’t say anything” he pulls your body closer in his embrace before muttering a few words in your ears “Is that why your skin is always so cold? You don’t even have a heater at home! And you wear a thousand layers because you feel cold, right?” Jungkook separated your bodies as  guilt was taking over him “I was such an asshole for criticizing you over your clothes all this time, I’m such a jerk, I’m so sorry” he buried his face in his hands

“Jungkook, come on, don’t cry like a maiden and get over it!” you rolled your eyes before patting his well-endowed arm

“I just made fun of the poor without being aware of your situation Y/N! This is not a matter to shrug off easily!”

I’m not even poor in the first place, but yeah… let’s leave him confused as he is already. It’s better to make him believe that I’m broke rather than make him discover that I’m a monster.

“Oh please, drama queen, get over it! I’m not offended, nor am I feeling hurt!” you ruffled his luscious hair “I may hate plants, but I believe that you’re not that bad”

“You may have cold hands, but you have such a warm heart for accepting my apology” he grabbed your fingers in his large palm

You gulped on your saliva at his sweet words. Jungkook was a known to be a playboy and you knew that his comment wasn’t being flirty but sincere this time. His warm hands and personality might be the reason why your cold heart was slowly melting for the past few weeks. You sure felt different when he was around you, but the events of this night were bound to make you look at him differently.

“Is that another lame pick up line” you rolled your eyes “Maybe I should just leave you to rot in the club and go back home?” you nodded to yourself as you were about to walk away

“H-hey! Let’s go together”

“Why do we need to go together?” you scowl “Are you planning to follow me to my place or something?” you reply

“Why? You want me to drop by your place?” he smirks

“Not in a million years” you sighed

“But on a more serious note! Please, keep me company! That’s what friends do in those moments” he walks next to you

“Why me?” you crouch your shoulders

“Why do you hate me so much?!” Jungkook stomped his foot “I have girls lining up, do you realize that I could be somewhere else, with a hot girl yet I sacrificed my Friday night to be a good friend!”

“What an egocentric piece of shit” you chuckled soullessly “Then go find your hot girl”

“Nah, I prefer spending this night examining you” he gives you that lopsided smile

“You’d rather not “you point at him

“Now that you say it, I’m curious” he comments “You don’t live on campus like the other students?”

“You’re being very fishy and disturbingly creepy Right now, Jeon Jungkook. You know that?”

“W-what?” the word Offended was written all over his forehead “Creepy? FISHY?! ME?!”

“Yeah” you burst out into a fit of giggles

“ I rarely ask girls where they live, but I was asking because I thought you might want me to walk you back home because we are friends!, but I GUESS WE CAN FORGET ABOUT IT, since I’m CREEPY” he glared at you “ I feel hurt, right here” he points at his heart like a lovesick fool

“Come on Jungkook, grow a pair, I was just teasing you” you smile

“My heart can’t handle you” he pouts

“Was this meant to be a cute pickup line?” you raised a brow “You’re working your way there, I see improvement “you give him a thumbs up

“O-Oh?” he blushed taken aback “I-It wasn’t a pickup line though” he muttered under his breath

“Idiot” you chuckled “You’re still not stopping by my place” you tapped his nose

“Why the f*ck not?” he frowned

“Who would want to drop by Virgin Mary’s place on a Friday night? Definitely not you” you commented

“I beg to differ. I want to see those three cats you own” he nudged your arm

More like 2 cats and a hybrid asshole called Park Jimin

“Yeah, well maybe another time” you smiled awkwardly

“Okay, okay” he stepped back “I just wanted to stop by and talk a little more with you, because my friends are out of town tonight, so I felt a little lonely” he sighed

Why is he acting so cute?! I just want to punch him for making me so weak.

“Mother nature should’ve thought twice before creating humans like you” you rubbed your temples “Well, I don’t live alone either, so if we’re bothering the other tenant, you’re kicked out right away, okay?” you flicked his forehead

“R-Really? I can drop by?” Jungkook’s eyes lit up

It wasn’t long before your phone started vibrating in your pocket. You hushed Jungkook as you grabbed the phone and stared at the screen for a few seconds before realizing that your hybrid probably transformed again.

Back to his human form, huh? I thought he turned into a cat every twelve hours, why is it lasting longer?

“Hey, are you coming back tonight?” Jimin mewed on the other line

“Chimney” you replied, “Is everything fine with your body changes?”

“Body changes?” Jungkook gasped from the side

“Everything is under control, apart from the fact that Jenna just showed up earlier. Can you tell your annoying friend to stop petting me?! I’m a hybrid, every time she flips me around and rubs my tummy, I feel like dying! Those are my abs she’s touching!” Jimin whined on the other line

“Is it that time of the year again” your eyes rounded

“Well no, but look! I never asked to be a cat with a human mentality” Jimin sighed “What about you, honey? How was your day?” he purred  

“Don’t honey me, you pussycat” you rolled your eyes

“Did you find a yummy treat? Or am I the one getting bitten again? Just a reminder that I’m your cat. You should be loving me not the other way around” Jimin commented

“You should be happy I’m not kicking you out! Two cats were enough, why did you had to show up and look like a homeless little bastard” you sighed

“Because my old tenant flipped her shit out when she learned I could talk” he replied “You see, I’m not judging you for being a vamp and you’re not judging me for being a hybrid. This is what we call cohabitation”

“Not really since I pay for everything”

“You get to be blessed with my presence though! Buy me some milk and tuna on your way back, kitten” he mewed “But baby, is there a boy with you?” Jimin commented “Tall, black hair and handsome eyes?”

“How the f*ck do you—“

“My ears are amazing. I suggest you hang up now because I swore I just heard him mutter the words: is she really not on drugs?”

“What?” you turned around to stare at Jungkook “I’m not on drugs!”

“How did you even hear me” Jungkook blinked

Jungkook became more and more perplexed as your conversation went on

“ I’ll be deserting the place to go woo a few kittens tonight, who knows, maybe I’ll find my match made in heaven?” he replied dreamily “ Take advantage of that time to properly lure him and bite him, I’m sure he’ll love it”

“Are you INSANE?!”

“Not insane, just stating facts. As a hybrid, I can tell you that humans find unusual things quite thrilling, which is why I was excited when I learned you were a vamp”

“But that’s not the same thing! You’re a cat!” you whispered

“Whether I’m a cat or not, men are still the same, no matter what’s their nature” you could almost feel his smirk through the phone “They will bite onto what they think is sexy”

“Bite?!” you blinked furiously as you eyed Jungkook and his delicious looking figure “I might as well take a bite first. I f*cking hate you, you know that?”

“Oh~ Have I awoken the inner beast?” Jimin giggles on the other line

“Should I castrate you later?” you reply in a threatening tone

“Castrate who?!” Jungkook blinked furiously “Damn Y/N, who are you talking with?!”

“N-No one” you stuttered “I’m hanging up now” you hung up on Jimin

“Perhaps your boyfriend?” Jungkook raised a brow as you exited the club venue “Not that I believe you have one”

“Very funny, Jeon Jungkook” you glared at him “It was my cat” your eyes round as you realize your honest reply

“Your cat?” Jungkook titled his head “Are you sure you’re not on drugs?”

“I-I meant, m-my friend Jenna! She said she would be out of town tonight” you blink “Don’t ask more questions” you put your index over his lips

“I won’t, geez, why are being so mysterious?” he gently removed your finger from his lips “and why are your hands are so cold?” he stared at your soft hand before interlacing his hand to yours

“W-What are you doing?”

“Maybe you can warm up to me, like this?” he grabbed your interlaced hands and shoved them in his jacket’s pocket

“W-Why are you acting like this? It’s not like we’re an item of anything” you blushed

“Well, maybe I want us to be an item” he replied shyly

“Or maybe you’re out of your mind” you removed your hand from his hold

“And Maybe you’re just avoiding the truth, Y/N” he stood in front of you

“What truth? The truth where you learn who I really am and you feel disgusted? I don’t want any of that, Jungkook.” you paused in front of your house’s door

“Why would I be disgusted? You’re by far the only genuine girl I encountered in this stupid university. You’re the only girl who didn’t throw herself at me when I asked her for a kiss. No, you’re the only girl who openly admitted not wanting me for her personal gain!”

“You won’t understand even if I tried explaining it to you. I’m not what you think I am” you stared at the door

“And what exactly are you? Why are you so afraid of telling me the truth?”

“I-I just can’t tell you” you turned your back to him as you opened the front door of your apartment before blocking him from getting inside “ J-Just go away”

“I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s going on!” he blocked the door “I would never think you’re disgusting nor would I ever turn my back on you, no matter what it is about”

“That’s what you believe you would do, but I know well enough that people like you aren’t like that” you stared at him “Just leave before it’s too late” you stared at your watch.

“What is it? Are you going to transform like Cinderella before midnight? I’m sure it can’t be that bad. Why can’t you trust me?”

“It’s not you, Jungkook! It’s me! I can’t trust myself.” You stare at the ground as your fangs were slowly growing

“Why would you be afraid of being true to me? I trust you so please trust yourself” he gently grabbed your wrist

“I can’t, Jungkook. I’m dangerous for you and y-you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into” you yanked your wrist away from him “Just please, stay away from me. I don’t want you to get hurt”

“I won’t get hurt Y/N. I trust you”

“JUST GO AWAY”

“I came this far. I’m going inside and I’m going to see what’s going on, no matter what it takes. Try stopping me later, but I’m not backing away from you. ” He pushed you inside your apartment before closing the door behind both of you

“W-why did you do it”

You bury your face in your hands as you sense your transformation taking place. Your eyes turning from their usual color to a dark wine tone of seduction, your hair turning into long and shiny locks of beauty, your lips turning red just like your eyes, your skin glistening like a rare diamond and your teeth turning into fangs.

Jungkook’s eyes rounded as he watched your transformation. The boy was in awe, unable to process the situation. You looked unreal and so beautiful, he could not close his mouth. Never had he ever thought being so intrigued and excited about a vampire. You made him vulnerable and weak for you. If he previously liked you, then his feelings got confirmed after seeing your true self, as he felt like it was love at first sight.

“Whoa…” he blinked “Is this a dream? Or am I just going insane?” he rubbed his eyes “Never have I ever seen anything as beautiful as you” he walked closer to you “This is what you wanted to hide from me?! Are you insane? How dare you shield such beauty from me?!” he grabbed your wrist, locking eyes with your sensual ones

“Oh please, spare me the dialogue, Jungkook. I know you only think I look hot.” you sighed

“Feeling attracted is an understatement. I think I fell in love.” His mesmerized eyes stared into your wine colored orbs

“Y-You’re being delusional, Jungkook” you yanked your wrist away from him “I’m a disgusting beast” you buried your face in your hands “I could hurt you”

“Disgusting? You?” he stared at your skin in amazement, gently touching your soft locks “You’re the reason why I can’t focus on anything right now, yet you call yourself disgusting? Y/N, are you insane? I’m here, having a midlife crisis over how amazing this transformation was and you’re calling yourself disgusting?” he grabbed your hand once again “You wouldn’t hurt me and I’m not afraid of you, okay? Please have a little faith in yourself. You look stunning and I’m the only disgusting one here because I can’t help but drool because of your ethereal beauty”

“Just face it, I’m a monster” you hid your face in your palms again “Please don’t look at me”

“Hey” Jungkook grabbed your wrists “Don’t say that!”

“Go away!” You try pushing him away “You don’t know what you’re getting into!”

“You’re actually...” he bit on his bottom lips “Kind of… sexy”

“Jungkook?!” you scoffed “Is this a f*cking joke?! You’re locked in a room with a monster and those are the first words you mutter?!”

“But you’re not a monster” he replies “You’re my friend Y/N and you look…” he licks on his bottom lip “I can’t believe that you were hiding these goodies under twelve layers! I feel hurt now!” he tries easing the mood “You should’ve had shared the goods with me!”

“Jungkook please” you facepalm “I have fangs and I drink blood to survive! Can’t you understand that this is getting dangerous?!”

“So what? Who gives a flying f*ck about your fangs and your shiny skin?!” he grabbed your wrists “They’re what make you into the girl you are, and they make you beautiful”

“N-No they’re not!” You hung your head low “They’re what turn me into a monster”

“Look at me” he tilts up your chin “Girls are all different. Some are thin, some are curvy, some are fair, some are darker, and some are short, some are tall….and you?” he stares at you in adoration “ You just happen to have a little extra, and I like that” he caresses your upper lip to reveal your fangs “You’re beautiful, okay? Never let anyone tell you otherwise”

“You’re just trying to make me feel better”

“No I’m not” he slides his warm soft fingers on your arms “Your supernatural shiny skin is gorgeous and you shine like a diamond! I never thought I’d say that b-but… I kind of dig this kind of thing. Your fangs are the sexiest thing I ever saw on a girl before!” he stuttered shyly

“You’re such a weird guy, organic boy” you shake your head in disbelief “Anyone would have thrown garlic at me at this point and you’re still here trying to convince me that I’m beautiful?”

“Then those people are the biggest idiots on this planet.” Jungkook chuckled “They’re idiots, for passing a chance to be friends with a cool girl like you” he brushed his thumb on the side of your cheek “Your eyes are so gorgeous”

“S-Stop” you replied shyly

“They’re dark red, my favorite color” he whispered against your ear “It’d be sexy if you had a pair of matching lingerie to go with these tempting orbs of yours” he leaned closer to your face “ Girls usually wear red lipstick to attract, but your eyes alone, can kill all other girls.”

“Yeah Jungkook” You nodded “My eyes can kill people, I’m a monster” you sighed “Just leave before I kill you as well”

“Why do you keep on labeling yourself as dangerous? Stop saying that” he tucked a strand of your hair behind your ear “You’re perfect the way you are and I…I will keep on liking you even if you’re different” his ears turned a shade of red

“You like me?” stared at him from the corner of his eyes “As if this thing couldn’t get any worse” you stood up “You can’t like me, Jungkook. This isn’t right! Just like you always talk about natural processes and Mother Nature. This is against the law of nature. Therefore, we must stay away from each other, Organic boy”

“Well for the first time in my life, I don’t feel like following nature’s law. You always hated my knowledge of earth science and I always loved calling you out for hating it, simply because I wanted you to spare a glance at me. Now that we’re here, I could care less. All I want is you”

“This isn’t some sort of game, Jeon Jungkook” you frowned “This could really get dangerous and the last thing I’d like, is to hurt you by accident”

“Aw, look at you being all sweet and caring towards me” Jungkook smiled sweetly, “You’re adorable, Y/N. That’s all there is.” He stepped closer to you

“I drink blood, Jungkook. Why can’t it get through your head? Did you let your brain cells die or something?!”

“First of all, my brain cells can’t function around you because you’re so damn ethereal I can’t focus. Second of all, I trust you and you should probably do the same.”

“I’m just a monster. When will you get it?” you hid your face in your palms

“Hey, little monster” he poked your waist and you hissed at his soft touch on your waist “Did you just hiss at me?” he chuckled

You felt your cheeks turning red in embarrassment at your sudden protective mode. Jungkook was having the time of his life and you just wanted to crawl and hide somewhere in a corner.

“What kind of vampire hisses cutely like you do? It’s confirmed, you’re no vamp, you’re a cute kitten” he nuzzles his cute nose in the crook of your soft neck

Jungkook nuzzles the crook of your neck, sending shivers down your spine. You were a vampire, yet the boy managed to make you feel things you never felt before. You were cold, yet you were feeling shivers on your skin.

“Maybe I’ll be the one biting you for the rest of the night” he licked your ear

“B-Bite m-m-me?” You stammered as his hot breath was near your ears “W-why are you so warm?!” You flinch at the feeling of his wet tongue against your sensitive ear “This is getting so weird” you suddenly sit up

Jungkook’s predatory acts were making you surrender. The boy had his own ways to make you forget that you were dangerous to him. His presence and love were reassuring.

“What?”

“I’m feeling very weird right now” you cup your cheeks

“That’s just how humans do it, sweetie” you could feel him smirk next to your ear

“You lick people’s ears?” you suddenly slide your cold fingers on Jungkook’s biceps “This is how humans seduce their mates?” you furrowed your brows in utter confusion

“You’re such a curious one, aren’t you?” Jungkook let out a breathy chuckle “It feels like I got myself a new pet or something” he chuckled as he sensed your glare before regaining his cool

“A new pet? Should I crush your balls too?” You smiled sarcastically

“Or maybe not. I was joking, obviously” he blinked nervously “J-Just tell me what’s wrong with kissing your ears?”

“Humans are weird” you furrow your brows at the new sensation

“How do you guys do it then?” Jungkook raised a brow

“We bite the neck” you blinked innocently

“Then why don’t you bite me?” Jungkook cupped your cheek

The need to seduce and the satisfaction to have Jungkook at your mercy would take over you. Vampires would seduce the prey they like and suck them off, as racy as it sounds, the sucking part is a bit more horrid than the word humans use it for. You’d suck off his blood and Jungkook would either be stuck to be your prey-mate, or stuck to transform into a vampire just like you. As much as the options sounded delicious in your perspective, you still didn’t want to involve Jungkook in your matters. Jungkook was a cheerful bright young man and there was no way you were going to take his youth away from him by transforming him or keeping him as your mate for the rest of his life.

“I-I can’t possibly do that! What if I end up killing you?!” you shouted

“Relax, I trust you” he landed a kiss on your shoulder “Don’t you want a sip of me?” he raised a seductive brow

“I’d rather smack your face all night long” you rolled your eyes

“Oh, I like it when you talk dirty, Y/N” he replied sarcastically

“Shut up, Organic boy” you rolled your eyes “Unless you want us to get laid in a coffin, I suggest you remain silent”

“I said I was okay with doing it in a church, not in a coffin!!” His eyes rounded “Vampires are on another level.” He blinked as he stared at you one last time “How about we take things, slow? I don’t feel like having sex in a coffin” he made a meme face

“Awww, Organic boy is scared?”

“What’s next, a threesome with a bat? Yeah, sounds like something vampires would do” Jungkook blinked “Please tell me I’m wrong” he shivered “No, please tell me you’re not into threesomes that involve bats” he faked a sob against your shoulder

“You’re hilarious” you laughed “Let’s just sleep, Jungkook.”

“Please tell me we’re not sleeping in a coffin?!” he scowled “What am I getting into?” he stared at his surroundings “The kind of things I do for love” he sighed one last time before staring at you in adoration “but she’s worth it”

Tell me your thoughts in the ask box/ comments :) 

[paranaturalsecretsanta-blog]

To Find a Star to Build an Isaac

Hey, @lilypupart! I was your secret santa this year! I hear you and I share a common love of Isaac O'Connor, so I hope you enjoy reading this fic as much as I enjoyed working on it! Merry Christmas, and a happy new year! <3

by @iamwhelmed

The day after Thanksgiving was one of the worst days of the year, not only because his parents had demanding (too demanding) jobs and he would almost always be left alone in a large, spacious home– but because it was up to him to put up every Christmas decoration the O’Connor family owned. Now, after seventh grade, Isaac’s powers had given him a bit of leeway with the lights he’d drape over the rims of his roof and the tall tree that stood towering over his driveway, but the actual Christmas tree, the most important spectacle, was still just as difficult as it always had been years previous. Should he try to launch his way up to the top to place the golden star at the tip of the tree with his handy-dandy wind powers, he’d likely launch himself through the ceiling, into the master bedroom above. So, every year, he had to lug the ladder in from the garage, which in and of itself was a feat considering his preteen height and its home atop the large blue cabinets that greeted the family Ferrari when they pulled in. He had to stack empty moving boxes to reach the first step of the ladder, because a hole in the roof of the garage was just as bad as a hole in the living room ceiling.

After that, he’d get to lugging the boxes upon boxes of ornaments down from the attic, where his mother was very stubborn about putting them (“because they might get crushed in the garage”). So, he’d jump up and pull the attic ladder down, climb up, then he’d have to find the right boxes among cobwebs and boxes of old toys he’d outgrown (he’d more than once placed his foot over one of his old roller-skates, and more than once he’d promptly slipped back down the ladder and down the staircase adjacent– the attic was dark). Once he’d located all 5…teen… boxes of ornaments, he’d have to measure out just the right amount of wind to set them delicately upon the lower ground, which still, he guessed, was easier than awkwardly climbing down the ladder with an arm full of fragile orbs.

And then, after all of that was done, and he had the ladder from the garage, and he’d somehow managed to carry all fifteen boxes of ornaments down his staircase without tumbling to his death, he’d be ready to decorate. He’d take every sentimental, hand-me-down ornament and place them along the tree, then he’d be sure to put up the reds and keep them separated from the golds and the blues, and he’d have to be sure to disperse them evenly around all sides of the tree, top-to-bottom. Then, he’d find the time to piece together popcorn on silver lines of string, then drape them over every branch strategically so the lines fell in a swirl from the lowest branch to the highest. And then, he’d fish the star out of whatever box he’d stuck it in the year before, climb the ladder for the final time that late November, and place it on the top of the tree, like a box gifted to the perfectly boxed gift. Afterwards, he could step back and admire his work, enjoy the beauty granted by the twinkling lights adorning the O’Connor Christmas tree; this usually meant grabbing a manga volume, a mug of green tea (with honey and lemon), and plopping down on the couch to watch the sunset, the room growing dark and the tree growing bright.

And then, this year, for whatever reason, he couldn’t find the flipping star.

“But I don’t understand!” Isaac tossed tinsel over his shoulder from one box, then scooched to his left and dug through another. “Where could it have possibly gone? We never put it anywhere else! It has to be in one of these boxes– what the flip!”

He sat there for a good, eh, twelve, maybe thirty minutes scrounging through box after box after box, only to come up empty-handed each and every time. Isaac sat back on his knees, hands reaching up to grab at either side of his head, jaw unlatched.

“No. No no no. This can’t be happening. How did I–? What did I–?” He twisted around to face the staircase. “I must have left a box up there! That’s it! There’s no way I–!”

He raced up the stairs, faster than he was sure he’d ever willed his legs to move before, then climbed up the ladder to the attic fast enough he could have been climbing the wall of a trench. As soon as his feet hit the floor, he was off and grabbing at whatever, tossing Mom’s wedding dress aside, Dad’s old bowling shirt down below, and even the smaller, older glass tank of his pet fish Sasuke; everything that could have been in his way had been moved out of his way thrice times over, and by the time he’d given up, the attic was an unorganized, disastrous mess, and he was pretty sure that tank had shattered at the bottom of the ladder– he’d have to be careful getting down.

Isaac fell to his knees in the dead center of the room, hands folded in his lap, eyes wide as he stared down at… nothing.

“I don’t understand. It should be here. That star is– it’s– it’s the most important part! How could I have lost it? Mom and Dad are gonna kill me!”

He could see it then, their distasteful faces as they walked through the front door to see their Christmas tree woefully incomplete. He could hear himself begging for mercy, feel the leather of his mother’s skirt in his hands as he tugged and pleaded for forgiveness. He could hear Dad huff, and see Mom stick her nose in the air.

“You had one job, Isaac, one!”

“What a disgraceful child we’ve had, dear.”

“Indubitably.”

He screamed, tossing his head back and clenching his fists.

Max cocked an eyebrow when he half-carried himself into the corner store, and even seemed to think for a moment before saying anything– but of course, he still had to say something. It was Max.

“Out black friday shopping?”

Isaac slumped over to the small decorations aisle towards the beginning of the end of the small store, mirroring Max’s raised eyebrow. “No. Why?”

“You look…” Max eyed him up and down, the snorted into his hand. “You just look… different is all.”

Isaac glanced down at himself, finding with mild contempt that one of his pant legs, which was meant to be sitting at his ankle, was instead sitting just below his knee in a bunch, and his jacket sleeve had fallen midway down his arm, and he might’ve been covered in red and blue and gold glitter, if Max could see it from a foot away.

“…Shut up.”

The corner store decoration aisle was about as expansive as one might expect, filled from one end to the other with tins for cookies, stocking stuffers, huge (gigantic) squares of peppermint bark, and wrapping paper, accompanied by a handful of stick-on ribbons. Isaac sighed. It was worth a try.

Max came round the corner, for some reason carrying his scooter, because that wasn’t weird to have on-hand or anything. “What are you looking for?”

Isaac slowly twisted to him, then mimed the shaped of a Christmas tree, pointing to the top of the imaginary shape he’d conjured. Max squinted at him, and he hissed through his teeth. “…star topper.”

“A star? Like, to put on a tree?”

“Thought I made that pretty clear, Max.”

“Wow, geez, somebody’s snippy.” He shrugged, then gestured to the front sliding doors with his thumb. “We don’t have any here, but I think there’s a collection of them down the street at–” Isaac had already run by him by then, leaving nothing but a gust of wind (and a small cloud of glitter, which Max stuck his tongue out at and waved off) in his wake. “Would ya let me finish my flipping sentence? Geez!”

  He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He knew black friday was a huge deal, and that adults went nutso bonkers over it every frigging year, but he always figured it extended to half-off widescreen televisions and clothes and collectable figurines– never, in a hundred-million years, did he think it would extend to tree toppers of all things.

Isaac stared blankly, pale-faced, up at the rows and rows all along the aisle that were completely devoid of any and all tree toppers. He blinked, then tilted his head, and tried to speak, but the words just weren’t there.

An employee put to stocking passed him by, cart full of things he needed to be stacking on shelves. He was a gangly teen, with widely-rimmed glasses and an elf hat, which he clearly detested wearing, sitting snugly to the corner of his head. He looked from his cart to Isaac, then to the empty shelves, and whistled. Isaac didn’t respond, just stood there, staring. The employee set another box of “Mister and Misses Clause” salt and pepper shakers on the shelf before taking the cart by its handle and moving forward. “Man, dude, people are nuts.”

Isaac nodded wordlessly.

  Five store, three small Christmas Decoration stands, and two gas stations later, Isaac was more than dumbfounded– he was completely, utterly, entirely aghast. Why in the world did everyone in Mayview just– just up and decide they all wanted to spend money on tree toppers? Where did such an inane urge come from? Why would they waste their black friday savings on that when there were bath bombs to be purchased? Mattresses to get warranties on? New cell-phones to purchase and be proud of before inevitably growing tired of it and yearning for the newer model?

No matter what way he looked at it, it made no sense. He’d never known Mayview to go so crazy over stars– lights? Yes. Fake deer for the lawn? Yes. The actual trees to put the stars on? Yes– but never, never had he ever seen the entire city of Mayview go haywire over the flipping star that goes on the tree, the final part, the thing most people have without a doubt.

So he got to thinking. Had it been stolen by some Christmas-star-loving poltergeist? A ghost longing for its favorite holiday? Maybe the entire town wanted stars because they’d all somehow simultaneously decided that their older toppers were boring and old?

Isaac exhaled into his freezing, mittenless hands; he’d forgotten to grab some on his frantic rush out the door. It didn’t really matter why all of Mayview suddenly decided they desperately needed new stars, what mattered is that he was walking home empty-handed, and his parents would no doubt attempt to legally disown him. Christmas had always been his thing, the one thing he could do to impress them, to really wow them and knock them off their feet every year without fail. He’d grow more creative with the lights and reef and light-up Santa each November, and they always seemed to love it more and more and… as much as he did.

And this year, he’d disappoint them.

As it was, he’d felt the entire dispersal of lights in the front yard leading up to their home had been less than ideal, and placing the Santa at the front gate had to be the least good place to put him, in hindsight (he imagined the gate opening and the car rolling in, only for them to unintentionally flatten and pop Santa on their way up the driveway, Santa’s limp, balloon-like body bending further and further back until eventually the smallest bit of spwee would signal the tear of a hole where air could escape). But the tree– the tree had always been where he shined. Somehow he’d manage to make the tree increasingly awe-inspiring with every year that passed. And now? Now, even the tree would be a let-down, and he’d be a disgrace to the O’Connor name.

“Oh, Isaac! You’re home! Want to help your darling mother set the star on the tree?”

He skidded to a halt, nearly forgetting to close the front door behind him. His mom smiled from her place by the ladder leading right up to the tree, blonde curls bouncing as she hopped around in one of his dad’s nightshirts and a pair of fuzzy socks. But what was perhaps the craziest thing about the situation, the closest he’d ever gotten to a Christmas miracle in his thirteen years of life, was the brand-new, white-as-snow star in her hand, every bit as shiny (shinier, even) as the one he’d lost. “Wh– bu– where did you get that star?”

She giggle and waved him over, taking one of his frozen hands in hers and scolding him for a moment about the cold of his skin. She placed the star in his hand and grinned. “Darling, you know how I love those home decor magazines, don’t you? Well, they said that gold stars were out season. White stars are in!”

Isaac blinked, then shook his head in complete confusion. “Wait, hold on, you threw out the old star?”

“It was older than you are, champ.” His dad entered the living room from the archway of their kitchen, careful not to bump into the ladder that took up a quarter of the doorway. He seemed equally as relaxed as his mother, dressed in khakis and an ugly Christmas sweater he was sure his grandmother had knitted for him– complete with light-up reindeer nose. He took a sip of what smelled, from where Isaac stood, like hot cocoa and glanced at Isaac over the rim. “It was time for a change, anyway. That thing was starting to rust over.”

Isaac pointed in the direction of their front door. “Bu-but where’d you get that? I’ve been all over town! I– I couldn’t find tree toppers anywhere!”

His mom laughed through her nose, moving out of the way so he could climb the ladder. He took the invitation and raised one hand to climb, careful not to drop the brand new star on the ground on his way up. “They start selling Christmas decorations in early November, Isaac. You think I’d wait until black friday to buy a tree topper? Please! I’m not a heathen!”

When he reached the top of the ladder, he took a deep breath. A quick glance down, and he saw his mother and father staring back at him, his mother with hands folded under her chin, his father still staring up at him over the rim of his gingerbread man mug. With a smile, he placed the snow white star atop the tree, then pulled back down the ladder to admire his handiwork. His mother set a hand on one of his shoulders, and his father came to set a hand on his other.

The entire room seemed to open up more, and Isaac had to squint, dare he risk being blinded by the twinkling lights of the tree, or the mesmerizing glare of the star.

His father squeezed his shoulder, and his mother giggled to herself. “You’ve outdone yourself this year, dear.” She used her other hand to reach down and pinch his cheek, and had he been in a worse mood, he might have battered her away– but he didn’t. His father pulled away, then padded in his socks over to the archway into the kitchen, gesturing for them to follow.

“I made more than enough hot chocolate for all of us. Don’t make me drink it all myself. I will do it.”

Mom carried on ahead of him, positively giddy in her step, and Isaac was relieved to find his heart was skipping right along with her.

[deztinywarriors]

ES Spectre 2.0 Chapter 7-3

[theonion]

Mitch McConnell Sees Infinite Healthcare Plans After Dropping Acid To Inspire Ideas For Obamacare Replacement

WASHINGTON—Seeking to open his mind to new possibilities for overhauling the U.S. healthcare system, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) reportedly witnessed an infinite number of replacement plans Wednesday after dropping acid to inspire ideas for an Obamacare alternative.

Shortly after the 75-year-old Republican senator ingested two 100-microgram tabs of LSD in his Congressional office, sources said countless substitutes for the Affordable Care Act began to explode before his eyes in luminescent, hyper-vivid colors and patterns.

“Oh my God—I can see the CHIP provisions spreading out in every direction forever and ever and ever,” said a reeling McConnell, gazing wide-eyed as infinite, interlocking fractal combinations of health savings plans, employer-provided coverage, and government subsidies enveloped him in an accelerating stream, eventually passing over him with such velocity that they appeared to be an entire galaxy of stars swirling around him. “Now I can see…I can see the outpatient hospital visits covered for every child in the country! No, every child who’s ever been born, and will ever be born! Even the ones who haven’t yet been conceived!”

“The scope of coverage is so beautiful,” added the senator quietly. “Whoa.”

According to sources, McConnell’s hallucinations came on slowly, first appearing as a geodesic block grant spiraling gently in the center of the senator’s desk before morphing into a gigantic, prismatic spiderweb of plans whose out-of-pocket prescription expenses expanded and contracted with McConnell’s every breath.

McConnell then reportedly turned his attention to the pulsating, roiling carpet in his offices, from which an entire ancient forest sprang as though from the beginning of time, its vines and verdant, leafy canopy composed of untaxed dollars that reached to the ceiling, beneath which the senator said the “whole country would be protected,” eliminating penalties and subsidizing care for 150 million eligible Americans.

“Every co-pay is connected to every patient is connected to every beating human heart,” said McConnell as he began to peel off his suit and tie until he was completely nude. “The individual mandate is total bullshit, because the plan is life itself, and you can’t opt in or out of life. And the continuous coverage incentive—well, it’s fucking this! All of this! The river and the sky and the grass and the trees. And it’s you! You and me. We’re all part of the plan.”

“Fuck, I’m tripping balls,” added McConnell, waving his hands in front of his face and attempting to grasp at the low-cost, high-value brackets that had presented themselves as glowing orbs.

McConnell reportedly grew terrified, however, after claiming to see the skies darken and a huge wall of 400-foot-high premiums rising in the distance while thousands of jagged, ugly shapes representing an overburdened Medicaid system rained down around him, threatening to crush the middle class and, eventually, the whole human race.

The senator then fled his office on foot and sprinted into the Capitol rotunda, where sources said he stopped dead in his tracks to stare open-mouthed at the domed ceiling for the next 90 minutes, mumbling in horror about an upper limit on the tax preference for employer plans before the naked and sweating congressman ran out onto the National Mall.

Sources later told reporters that at one point, the senior senator from Kentucky caught sight of his own face in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and began to panic, insisting that he saw himself waiting in an out-of-network doctor’s office for 10,000 years due to his own proposed legislation before decaying completely, his flesh falling from his bones in rotting chunks.

“He was really freaking out, so I brought him a glass of orange juice and that seemed to calm him down a bit,” said aide James Scholtz, adding that McConnell became fixated on Scholtz’s striped tie and rubbed it gently on his face while repeatedly stating that he no longer feared the massive impact to the federal budget that sweeping healthcare reform would bring—that he in fact welcomed it. “I couldn’t really follow everything he was saying, but he was pretty adamant that his body was an HMO, Earth was the network, the universe was the insurance company, and God was the free-market exchange. Eventually he started crying, so I just patted his hand until [Secretary of Transportation] Mrs. Chao came to talk to him.”

After the drug’s effects had worn off, Senator McConnell reportedly surveyed his notes, called them “nonsense,” and then picked himself up from the K Street alley where he had found himself, ready to move ahead with his plan to repeal Obamacare without a replacement.

[kpopfanfictrash]

The 7th Prince (II)

Author: kpopfanfictrash

Pairing: You / GOT7

Rating: PG

Word Count: 4,017

Summary: A land under a curse. Seven mysterious princes. A decision that will make or break the Kingdom. (idea from this post here, by @cyjsgirl​)

[Master List]

Groaning, you slide your face into your hands. “But what will I wear?”

Your mother practically beams. “Oh, I have a few ideas.”

Peeking through the gaps in your fingers, you look at her. “As long as Yugyeom and I aren’t matching… do your worst.”

After all. How much worse could things possibly get?  

You were wrong. It gets worse. 

Staring in the mirror, you barely recognize the girl staring back at you. You look beautiful – ethereally so. The real you must be buried in there somewhere, trapped beneath yards of silk and powder. There goes your last hope that the Princes will take one look at you and run for the hills. Cecil has seen to it that this won’t happen, making you up within an inch of your life.

A long, silver gown hangs from your body. Winds to the ground where it trails behind you. Seed pearls are sewn into the bodice, matching the circlet of jewels in your hair. You look like a star, Cecil tells you. A bright, shining star.

You stick your tongue out.

“And then… you do things like that.” Grumbling darkly, Cecil sweeps her things away.

You laugh, risking mussing your dress as you hug Cecil from behind. Though you antagonize one another, Cecil is your stabilizing influence. While your parents are loving and want the best for you – they’re also the King and Queen of Senary. Ultimately they have to think of the Kingdom before anything else.

It made for a rather lonely childhood. Except for Yugyeom, of course. Without your brother, you don’t really know what you would have done. Yugyeom is that one person who understands you. Who knows your worst fears, greatest joys and loves you anyways.

It’s as you’re thinking this there comes a knock at your door. Yugyeom peeks his head inside. “Y/N?” His eyes widen. “Wow. You look amazing.”

Noting his own formal wear, you nod. “You don’t look so bad yourself, Gyeommie.”

Yugyeom smiles before clearing his throat importantly. “I’ve arrived to accompany the fair Princess to the main ballroom.” Speaking in his most pretentious voice, Yugyeom gestures grandly.

You giggle. “How gallant of you.” Stepping forward, you exaggeratedly lay your hand atop his arm. “I must warn you though – my father will behead you if I’m offended.”

“Will not. Dad likes me better.”

“Does not.”

“Does so.”

Looking out your window, you sigh. “Gyeommie?”

He looks sideways. “Yeah?”

“Don’t leave me alone tonight. Okay?” Your hand tightens on his arm.

Your brother’s expression is unreadable. “How about this?” he asks, voice lowering. The two of you leave, exiting your room to walk the main hallway. It’s mostly empty but for the occasional guard. Everyone else is already inside. “We make up a signal. If you’re uncomfortable, you say the word and I’ll come save you.”

You smile up at him. This is why you love your brother. “Okay.”

“Okay.” Yugyeom nods. “If you say cantaloupe – I’ll come running.”

A small laugh breaks from your chest. “Cantaloupe? How am I supposed to work that naturally into a conversation?”

“You’re not supposed to.” At the main doors Yugyeom stops, bending to adjust your tiara. “That’s why it’s a signal.”

“Fine. Cantaloupe it is.”

The royal announcer catches your eye, nodding towards the doors. “Lady.” His expression is slightly apologetic. “It’s time.”

You adjust your grip on Yugyeom’s arm. “We’re ready.”

The doors open.

It’s hard to remember what you’re feeling as you enter. The lights are tremendous. Gigantic chandeliers of glass orbs, their light both dazzling and overwhelming. Your mother directed the staff to decorate with your Royal colors. Emerald green and silver, intertwined with pearly white. The place looks like an enchanted forest, set with twinkling lights and gauze.

You stand at the top, very aware of Yugyeom’s fabric beneath your fingertips and the buzzing of lights. Everything else is silent. Or maybe it’s not, but the beating of your own heart drowns all other sounds out. It could be either option, really.

Trumpets blare to announce your presence and slowly every head turns your way.

“Tonight on the eve of her Twenty First birthday – Y/N, Princess of Senary!”

“That’s our cue,” Yugyeom mutters, tugging you towards the stairs.

As you start to descend, panic rushes through your veins. The King and Queen mandated you dance with everyone tonight. Each eligible Prince as part of your obligation as Princess. Of course, this brings a multitude of panic-induced scenarios to mind. They might not like you. They might step on your feet. Worse, you might step on theirs.

“I can’t do this,” you suddenly hiss.

Yugyeom makes a noise in the back of his throat, continuing to face forward. “Y/N. Listen to me.”

“Mhm.” You also look straight ahead, eyes wide and terrified.

“You can do anything,” Yugyeom whispers. “You just have to get through tonight first.”

“Just tonight?”

“Just take it one night at a time.”

Slowly, you nod. A shred of your former confidence returns and somehow you manage to hold your head high. Looking out over the audience – though not at them. You get the feeling that the second you make eye contact, all sense of nerve will be eradicated.

The last step down is the longest. So far from the ground that you wonder if you’ll fall before reaching it. Then you’re on the floor. Standing frozen and unsure of what to do with your hands. You hope no one notices the way your body tenses. Nor the way your hand tightens on Yugyeom’s arm, solid and terrified.

Before you realize what’s happening, someone else’s hand has slipped into yours. Someone who is not your brother tugs you from the spotlight. When you look up, you realize you don’t recognize him. 

He’s gorgeous, admittedly. With inky black hair and eyes just as dark. He pulls you forward, one hand on your waist as the other meets your hand.

Somewhere in the background, music begins. Strings and brass melting to melody as chatter fills the space between them. Footsteps fall into place as more couples start to dance. Slowly, the pace of your heart starts to recede.

You finally look into your dancing partner’s eyes.

“Hello.” The man inclines his head. “My name is Im Jaebum, heir to Unum.”

Of course – you should have guessed by his clothes. Black military garb, accented in gold and crimson. A sword hangs at his waist, one you know is for more than decorative purposes. Im Jaebum, the warrior Prince.

You see what people mean about him being intimidating. Just dancing with him makes your heart climb in your throat. Blocking any words from coming out. Which you suppose is a good thing, since he doesn’t seem to be fond of small talk.

“Y/N of Senary,” you respond, offering a smile. “Although you probably already knew that.”

Jaebum chuckles, eyes light. “I’ve heard rumors.” You continue to move across the dance floor, at least a minute passing before Jaebum clears his throat. “You look beautiful, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“Thank you.” His candor is surprising. “That’s very kind of you to say.”

A smile plays on Jaebum’s lips. “Is it kind if it’s a fact? I’m merely saying what every other man is thinking.”

Blushing, you glance at the crowd. Indeed, there are a fair amount of eyes on you - although by now you expect it. It’s not always a good thing. You’re a notoriety, a thing to be gawked and stared at. The last Princess of Morsus. The last, born before a doomed era of sons.

Your gaze returns to Jaebum. “There’s a difference between thinking and saying, I’ve often found.”

The Prince of Unum laughs. “True.” He twirls you, pulling you closer. “I mean what I say, though. I’ll admit I wasn’t sure what to expect tonight.”

“You mean to say stories of my beauty haven’t spread through the Kingdoms?”

Jaebum adjusts his hand in yours. “I tend not to believe in fairy tales.”

“Despite us living one?”

A corner of his mouth rises. “Witty, as well as beautiful. I suppose I don’t stand a chance, do I?”

You blush as your heart flutters. You didn’t think you would feel this way tonight - and so soon. 

“Such flattering words, Prince Im,” you chide. “Is this how you killed the dragon? Sent flowers?”

“A very bad bouquet, yes.”

You notice that his eyes crinkle when he smiles. Two dangerously adorable eye moles dotting his left eye. Your gaze keeps going to them, as though that’s safer than looking at his gaze. Everything about the moment feels surreal. The dresses, the party-goers, the conversation. It’s hard to get a grip on anything when Im Jaebum looks at you like that.

“Isn’t this odd?” you whisper, unable to stop yourself.

Jaebum raises an eyebrow. “What is? Being led around the dance floor by five men and eventually handing yourself over to one for marriage? Not odd at all.”

Your mouth drops. “So you agree.”

Jaebum’s expression turns hesitant. “Actually, I –"

`“May I cut in?”

The two of you look up as a younger man with strawberry blonde hair steps forward. 

“Youngjae,” Jaebum smiles. With a bow, he steps backwards faces you. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Princess.”

You curtsy. “It was a pleasure as well, Prince.” When you rise, Jaebum has already disappeared. Only Youngjae remains, eyes wide and nervous.

You hold out a hand. “Care to dance?”

He laughs lightly. “You stole my line.”

As Youngjae leads you away, you realize he’s actually quite handsome. In a different way than Jaebum, though. Jaebum is all edges and planes – sharp, distinct lines. Youngjae has a softer, gentler beauty.

Despite his initial hesitancy, his hand is strong in yours. “My name is Youngjae,” he says - as though that weren’t obvious.

You smile at his introduction – so simple, without title or agenda. “I’m Y/N.”

Youngjae falls silent, swept away by the music and moment. Halfway through the song, he looks down. “I’m sorry,” he confesses. “I’m so nervous.”

A giggle escapes. “Can I be honest?” When Youngjae nods, you admit, “So am I.”

“Well as long as we’re both feeling awkward. Not that you are,” Youngjae amends, wincing. “I am. Awkward.”

You’re actually laughing now, glad the song is a slow one because otherwise you’d be missing your steps. “You’re cute,” you say and Youngjae blushes. “You’re friends with Jaebum?”

“Yes,” Youngjae nods, scanning the crowd. “I don’t know where he is, though. Usually he disappears from these things after the first hour or so. He hates anything where large groups of people gather.”

“Ironic, for the leader of an army.”

Youngjae’s laugh is loud and bright. “That’s good, I’ll have to use that sometime.” 

As you turn on the dance floor you notice Youngjae is wearing the colors of his house, too – navy and gold with touches of brown. His gloves are the same brown, chocolate silk over his hands. Gloves are a tad bit unfashionable in Senary, but not every city-state. Quattor must be one of the ones where it’s in style.

You nod at the ball around you. “So. Do you want to marry me, Choi Youngjae?”

His eyes widen, surprised by your question. “It’s a bit early to say for certain.” He winces again. “Ah, that’s the wrong answer, isn’t it? I’m supposed to say of course.”

“You can say whatever you want,” you answer honestly.

It’s then that Youngjae notices your smile. “Aish. You’re joking, aren’t you?” He groans. “At least you can laugh about all this.”

“Only sometimes.”

His smile turns sad. “This must be hard,” Youngjae remarks. “I can’t imagine.” 

The song starts to come to a close, and you don’t get a chance to respond before a familiar voice cuts in. 

“May I have this dance?”

“Jinyoung-ah!” 

You whirl, ending up facing the Prince of Tribus.

A Prince, who frowns severely back at you.

“Whoops,” you grin, dropping into a curtsy. “I mean, Prince Jinyoung of Tribus. Most graced by your presence.”

Jinyoung smiles despite himself. “Princess Y/N of Senary.” He turns, bowing to your dance partner. “Prince Youngjae of Quattor.”

Youngjae’s eyebrows shoot up at Jinyoung’s formality. That’s just how Jinyoung is, though. Always well-mannered, always put together. It took you two years to get him to stop calling you Princess. He looks remarkable tonight, dark hair brushed back from his face. Dressed in gold, green and peach, the colors of Tribus.

His crown is more ornamental than yours – befitting of his city-state. Tribus is known for knowledge, for learning. Everything they do is grand and ornate. It’s also home to the famous universities of Morsus.

“Prince Jinyoung.” Youngjae bows. “She’s all yours.” With one last smile he disappears into the crowd, leaving you alone with Jinyoung.

Quietly, Jinyoung takes your hand. Leading you further out onto the dance floor. As he turns to face you, he settles one hand around your waist. “So what’s the status?” he asks, eyebrows raised. “Am I still in first place?”

“Ugh. Don’t remind me.”

Jinyoung pulls you closer, hand slipping through yours. “You’ve danced with Youngjae and Jaebum,” he comments, scanning the ballroom. “And me. So that leaves just Bambam and Jackson.”

“Ah, his casual name? I didn’t realize you knew Wang Jia Er.”

Jinyoung shrugs. “I do, some. Duo is next to Tribus – we played together when we were little.”

“Of course.” Relaxing into the dance, you allow Jinyoung to guide you. Everything about this feels familiar. How many balls, how many dances have the two of you danced? Too many to count.

Jinyoung watches, dark gaze roaming. “What are you thinking?”

Sometimes it’s annoying how well he knows you. “I was thinking…” You stop, then sigh. “That I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Jinyoung leans in, lowering his voice. “You’ll do what we’ve always said you would. You’ll meet everyone. If you fall in love, you marry him. If you don’t, you marry me.”

Jinyoung, ever the strategist.

Your heart aches at his words - Jinyoung is so kind. So good, you wish you felt more than friendship. Or that he felt more than friendship for you. But Jinyoung just wants the best for those he loves. He’s grown up by your side, watched the weight of this decision for years. Jinyoung wants to protect you from any further hurt – an admirable quality.

But marrying him would mean Jinyoung could never marry for love, either. You don’t know if you could do that – resign your best friend to the same fate you face.

Sighing deeply, you return your gaze to his. “Here’s hoping I fall in love tonight.”

“No luck with Jaebum or Youngjae?” Jinyoung grins, tone teasing. “I mean, I like girls but even I might marry Jaebum if he asked.”

“Park Jinyoung!” you scold, starting to laugh.

“Really.” Jinyoung’s eyebrows rise.  “What’s wrong with either one?”

“Nothing.” Your gaze moves across the room. “Youngjae is just young. He reminds me of Yugyeom. And Jaebum…” Here, you hesitate. “Maybe. But then he’s so perfect, I don’t think he could ever like me.”

Jinyoung shrugs. “If he didn’t, why would he stick around?”

Your gaze follows to where Jinyoung points – to Jaebum leaning casually against the wall. Every now and then he looks your way. You remember what Youngjae said about Jaebum usually leaving quickly and something in your heart beats faster.

“See?” Jinyoung’s grip tightens. “Told you.”

Your gaze returns to his. “Maybe.”

The song comes to an end and slowly, Jinyoung takes a step backwards. “You should give the other two Princes a chance.”

“So proper,” you tease, letting him go. “What an excellent sport you are, Prince Jinyoung.”

“Jinyoung has always been that.” It’s Bambam’s voice that speaks now. “When I was younger, he used to let me win every other round of ball. An equal share.”

You and Jinyoung find Bambam smiling, holding out his hand. “I asked the orchestra to make it a polka.”

You snort, taking his arm. “I expected nothing less.”

Bambam shoos Jinyoung, who rolls his eyes but leaves. A consequence of Jinyoung being your best friend and Bambam being Yugyeom’s was that growing up, you four spent a lot of time together. Jinyoung is as much an older sibling to them as you are.

“So what did the band say when you asked for a polka?” As the music starts up again - another slow waltz - you start to laugh.

Bambam moves over the dance floor. “He said no. Then the conductor pretended he couldn’t hear me until I left.”

“Better than the time he threw a cymbal at you.”

“Hey! That hurt,” Bambam grumbles. “Anyways. What’re the prospects looking like tonight?”

“Aish,” you sigh, looking at him sideways. “You’re as bad as Jinyoung.”

“Look, Y/N.” Bambam is suddenly serious. “This is super weird but I want you to know I’m here. If you decide to be Queen of Quinque – we can figure out a way to make it work. Hey! Then Yugyeom would be my actual brother!”

You’re blushing. “Bambam, I –"

“You wouldn’t even have to live with me! I mean, whatever you want, I guess. It’s just that –”

“Bambam.”

He stops talking. “Yes?”

“It takes two people to get married. I’m not going to force you to do anything.”

“Well, duh.” Bambam looks sheepish. “I’m just saying … if none of these other Princes measure up.”

“Thank you,” you say. You mean it.

“It’s hard to deny though, all these other Princes pale in comparison.” Bambam heaves a great sigh. “It must be such a burden to compare to me.”

“Bambam.”

“I mean. Look at me.”

“Don’t make me step on you.”

“Noted.” Bambam moves a bit quicker.

You laugh when he starts to spin, tightening his grip and dipping you low. Everything is fun with Bambam around; the life of the party wherever he goes. Which right now is through the crowd of people, spinning wide as you crack up. That is, until your hand slips from his and you stumble – smacking straight into someone else’s chest.

Startled and confused, you look up.

The man is attractive and for just a moment, you forget that you’re a princess. Forget that he’s supposed to bow, forget he should apologize. You’re the one who apologizes first, very aware of the way his arms hold you. Slightly improper, but for some reason you can’t bring yourself to remove them.

The man smiles, coffee colored hair spilled across warm, brown eyes. His smile widens the longer he looks at you and slowly, he bows. It’s from this position you recognize the thin, circlet of gold atop his head.

“Hello,” the man looks up. “I’m Wang Jia Er of Duo. Please call me Jackson.”

A long moment passes before you realize you haven’t responded. “Princess Y/N of Senary,” you say automatically.

“I know.” Jackson holds out his hand. “I believe I’m the last to ask you to dance. You have my apologies.”

“Don’t apologize.” You smile, taking his hand. “Better late than never.”

As the music starts up again – song light and airy – Jackson whisks you away on the dance floor. His feet are smooth, even as you cross the ballroom. Every now and then Jackson looks down, glancing away when he sees you looking. The little smile he gives each time makes your heart flutter.

Then, out of nowhere he says, “Pick me.” 

You look up, startled. “What?”

“Pick me.” Jackson grins at you. “I thought that’s what this was – a pitch for your hand in marriage? I assume we get just the three minutes of this song, so I don’t want to waste time. I said,” he leans until you’re nearly nose to nose, “pick me.”

Without quite meaning to, you giggle. “This is all just so sudden. You still haven’t passed the interview portion.”

“Try me.” 

You nod solemnly. “Tell me, are you a cat person or a dog person?”

“Dog.” Jackson makes a face remarkably similar to one. “Next question.”

Laughing, you continue. “What’s something you regret?”

Jackson’s eyebrows rise but he doesn’t balk. “I once talked my little brother into eating a cockroach. He threw it up, told my mom and I was grounded for a month. I severely regret that.”

“How noble of you to admit your faults.”

“Ah, yes.” Jackson sighs. “The list is long and many.”

“Excellent. I hate a faultless man, tell me another.”

“Well.” He leans close enough for you to catch his scent. Oranges and something more exotic. “I’ve heard said that I’m too kind. I laugh too much. People are altogether too enamored with me.” Jackson sighs again. “It’s a tough lot in life, but I make do.”

You laugh openly now, turning away. “Quite the pitch, Wang Jia Er.”

“Jackson.”

You look back. “You don’t like your birth name?”

“No, it’s not that.” As the music slows, Jackson catches your hand. You still, watching him bring it to his lips. “It’s just that those I’m closest to call me Jackson. I’d like to be close to you, Y/N.”

You stare for a long second, fighting the sudden beating in your chest. “Cantaloupe,” you breathe.

Jackson looks confused. “I’m sorry?”

“Cantaloupe,” you repeat, catching Yugyeom’s eye. “Cantaloupe would be very good right now. Could you excuse me for a moment?”

Extracting yourself from his grip, you practically run to the doors of the ballroom. Throwing them open into the cool, dark night. Overhead the stars sparkle. Tiny pinpoints in otherwise darkness. You move forward, hearing the doors fall shut behind you. Only your skirts rustle against the quiet of the night. At least until the doors bang open to reveal your brother, wide eyed.

Yugyeom scans the balcony. “What’s wrong?” he asks when he spots you, hurrying over. “It seemed like you were getting along with Jackson. I don’t understand.”

Breathing deeply, your hand moves to your waist, holding yourself together. “Everything is not okay.” Staring out at the gardens, your blood pounds in your ears. Your gaze moves to Yugyeom. “Do you want to know why everything is not okay?”

Your brother nods, concerned by your mania.

“It’s because those men inside are all wonderful. All fighting for my attention and why? I’m nobody. I’m not worth their stress and panic.” You close your eyes. “I don’t know how to do this. Don’t know how to pick. What about the ones I don’t? If I don’t choose Jinyoung or Jaebum or Jackson or Bambam or Youngjae, what then? Does their line just wither because they have to marry someone royal?”

At last your words dry up, spent and bitter. You look sideways to your brother, who seems to be at a loss for words.

“Wow.” He clears his throat. “What did Jackson say to you?”

A small, tight laugh escapes. “It’s not him, Gyeommie. This whole thing is just awful. How do I tell if someone likes me? Really likes me. There are so many factors at stake.”

Your brother moves to stand beside you. “I know.” He falls silent and, after a long moment he says, “Why don’t you leave?”

“What?” You hardly breathe.

“Leave.” Yugyeom turns to face you. “You’ve met all the Princes, you danced with every one. Go to your room, go to the gardens, go do something to clear your head. I’ll take care of mom and dad.”

A flicker of warmth moves through your chest. “You’d do that for me?”

Yugyeom smiles. “Of course. Now go,” he shoos you with one hand.

You don’t need to be told twice. Before you can even respond you’re down the steps. Disappearing into the gardens, as Yugyeom suggested. It’s dark and quiet out here, the only sounds the scrape of your feet against grass and pebbles. Light spills from the ballroom, broken here and there by the shadows of the people inside.

People you don’t want to think about right now.

You want to not think. You want to not be here at all.

It’s as you’re thinking this your eyes land upon the gate. The sturdy wood barring your home from the world and suddenly you know where you want to go.

[Master List]

[thelostiilegion]

The Escape

In orbit, Horatio had given the order for the fleet to leave orbit, and the following Thunderhawks should follow. The Legion Librarians had formed a conclave, and divined the direction in which they should go in order to return to the Imperium at the cost of two thirds of the conclave. The Invictus moved off at full impulse, hoping to get away from this dreaded planet as fast as they could. They had achieved their mission, and hoped that they would be back in Imperial space before long. On the surface, the last of the Astartes was cut low by the order of the Lord of the Tomb, the great ethereal skeleton’s metal shimmering, his ragged and faded cloak continued to whip in an unnatural breeze. He looked to the skies watching the last of the invaders leave their orbit, their afterburners becoming nothing more than specks in the blackness. Without a word from the Lord, a Tomb Spider fed a metallic tube into a fitting in the wall, transmitting a galaxy wide signal calling for the rise of the Eternal Warriors. A treasure had been stolen, and it must be returned at all costs. The Resurrection Orb was the greatest weapon the Necrons possessed, the ability the resurrect the fallen warriors of their race. The Necron Lord looked above again, his mind growing dark, as did the sky. As the spores rained into the ground, the Lord ordered his warriors to open fire on these new intruders, but as much as they fired, the beasts kept coming, an unrelenting tide of chitin and bone, tearing his warriors apart and overwhelming his monoliths. Then the bigger beasts arrived, shrieking death accompanied by razor sharp claws and talon. If he had known fear, this is when he would have felt it, but he did not, and he ordered his men to continue fighting the defence of the tomb. The Ravenous Beast continued the onslaught, mycetic spores of all shapes and sizes disgorging all manner of beasts. The senior Commanders of the Legion were assembled on the bridge, watching in absurd interest as the scene unfolded. The bizarre ships of the aliens began to encircle the planet, thousands of tiny beasts being continuously spat out towards the planet’s surface. On the surface the scene was worse than any nightmare that could have been imagined. The Tyranids continued their onslaught, despite the impleccable march of the Necrons. The Necron Lord ordered his soldiers to continue the defence of their tomb. The unusual weapons at their disposal made short work of the Tyranids, vaporising entire broods, whilst the Tyranids for their part sent entire Carnifex broods hurtling through the ranks. The Necron Pylons again fired, each shot finding it’s mark and vaporising entire ships in orbit, causing the blasted beasts to fall to the planet, engulfed in eldritch flame. The Pylons continued to fire, each shot finding the intended target, the Tyranids ships not altering their position and making easy picking. Elements of the Tyranid fleet began floating passed the barren planet, no flora or fauna for them to harvest so they would not waste unnecessary resources but they would sacrifice what had been seen to slow the enemy. The last of the Tyranid fleet in orbit came crashing to the surface, crushing those beneath but disgorging yet more horrors into the fray. The Tyranids Norn Queen, dislodged from her place in the heart of the ship flailed around, trying to stand upon legs that resembled spindles more than anything to the human mind. Finally finding her feet, the Norn Queen rose up, bellowing in agony and pure rage. The Necron Lord’s gaze remained unfaultered, and with a silent gesture, the Pylons altered their trajectory to aim at this new behemoth that dared desercrate the surface of his planet. With the same force as several militonnes of high explosive, the Pylons ripped the Norn Queen to shreds as she crushed an entire Monolith with her gigantic claws; the resultant shredded biomass being deposited over than area of several hundred kilometres coating all within range with the foul smelling, charred remains.

The Tyranids were not difficult to eradicate from the planet, without sustenance and biomass they could not reproduce nor create new life forms to remove them from the desolate rock. The Necrons made short work of the survivors, almost herding them into kill zones and xcutting them down. The larger beasts were the first to go, the Necron flyers hunting them down from above, it was almost like sport to them. Once the larger beasts had been dealt with, the smaller ones began to revert to instintive behaviour, staying in large packs, making them easier to track and kill. It took the Necrons less than a Terran week to remove all trace of the Tyranids from their home and return to their slumber whilst their fleet was prepared. The Lord settled back into his throne and with his last thoughts sent the binary codes for the Tomb Spyders to prepare the fleet and awaken the guard when the task is complete. His property will be returned to him and none shall stand in his way.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Tyranid fleet had swept past the Tomb world, following the scent that had been left by the escaping Space Marines, their ranckor was thick in the void of space, leading the beast to its quarry. The mass of living ships split, most of the amassed ships vanishing in the blinking of an eye. The rest stayed behind the prey, each moment the Tyranid vanguard elements closed in to the limping Imperial craft. Even moving at full speed the Invictus was merely a few light years ahead, buying them months, weeks, maybe even days before they were caught. The main Tyranid fleet stayed at a distance, even the Hive Mind knew that there was no point wasting rescources unnecesserily, and if this little blip did not lead to a harvest, then not much was wasted.

“Praetor, my Lord, we are being followed.” Horatio’s blood began to run cold. If these metal men were now following him, they would be devastated before they could retaliate. “It’s….its biological.” “What?!” Horatio wheeled around almost flew across the bridge. “Give me everything, all telemetry, visuals, give me everything!” “We have visuals on the vanguard, telemetry states they are at a distance of three light years but they are closing and rapidly. We may have a matter of weeks before they catch up.” Isaac steeled his gaze towards the Praetor. The rest of the assembled Chapter Masters followed his gaze as the Praetor moved away from Isaac. He walked over to the command chairs at the heart of the bridge and took a long look at the throne upon which an unknown individual would have sat. Gathering his cloak before him, Horatio turned and sat in his own position, and arched his fingers before him as his chin rested upon his thumbs. Deep in thought, Horatio rationalised and reordered every possible scenario. He could deploy the fleet, splinter the legion in several directions, hoping that the swarm following them might choose to splinter themselves and thus give them some chance to escape or at least find safety. With absolutely no certainty of even finding their way back to the Imperium themselves Horatio had the hardest decision anybody in the Legion had had to make. “Have the Fleet devised a way of finding a way back?” Horatio asked with urgency in his voice. Isaac strode purposefully over to Horatio and handed him a data-slate. “We believe the Navigator pointed the ship in this direction with his last move before he was taken by the Immaterium. There was a sudden shift in the ships heading at the last moment before we dropped out of the warp and the Gellar field fell. This is the heading we are now heading along. I believe this is our only hope.” Horatio nodded solemnly. “Full thrust to the engines, get us moving as fast as we can away from this threat.” Isaac nodded and gave the necessary orders, with a noticeable tug being felt throughout the craft as the engines were pushed to their absolute limit. Within the cavernous belly of the ship, ten battle barges of enormous size were tethered being prepared for war, and for escape should the worst happen. The First Centurion Phelios Ducé strode along the gangway hanging above the behemoths of space, marvelling at their enormity. “You are required in the Chambers, Sir.” One of the Solar Auxillia stationed aboard the ship had approached Phelios without him noticing, almost startling him with his sudden words. “Yes, thank you.” Phelios responded as the man he dwarfed walked away, looking in awe at the ships himself. Phelios smiled at this then turned on his heal and made his way towards the Council Chambers.

The great stained glass windows that lined the walls of the Council Chamber showed the greatest battles and the darkest days since the Unification Wars upon Holy Terra, great triumphs and heroic last stands in the face of adversity. Within one of the windows, a seen was depicted from more recent times, the saving of a planet from the Ork menace that plagued the galaxy. It showed the descent of the First, Second, Eigth and Tenth Chapters to repel the green tide. In one scene it showed the Ork Warboss slaying down a Space Marine of high standing, the last scene showed a heroic Space Marine stood a top a mound of dead green skins, holding the head of the Warboss high in the air while the population rejoices. This man now strode into the Council Chamber and nodded to the Fourth Chapter Master as he breezed passed him, moving towards his seat. In the centre of the room was the marble table still, strewn with data-slates and holo-picts. A hush fell as the Praetor strode in with his Eternals, slowly placing his helmet upon the table, Horatio hung his head as he looked around the room, if you could call it that. So many faces, some fresh faced to the roles of leadership and others old hands, he saw Isaac, sat with the new First Centurion. A hero amongst his own, rallying the beleaguered drop force that had been over run by an Ork Waagh. After the First Centurion was slain of the Warboss, the young Centurion had fought through to fight the Warboss himself, breaking through the Nob host around the Warboss single handed. Horatio had marvelled at his tenacity and strength and purpose, the young Marine may one day even make First Commander should he survive. “We have a decision to make, a grave decision that may be the making or breaking of us. We can either,” Horatio paused, looking round the room at the steely eyes gazing back at him, “separate and run in all directions, and try and find home. Or. We can stay together and try to fend off this beast as a Legion, as brothers. We shall take a vote, all those in favour of standing and fighting, please stand.” Almost as one, every officer in the Chamber stood, every single one. They had all lost brothers, stood by them as they fell to the enemies of the Emperor and the Imperium. Even the Senior officers of the Solar Auxillia attached to the Legion stood in defiance of this new threat. Horatio smiled, he knew there was a chance they could survive, even the slimmest hope was hope enough. Without even speaking again, the assembled marines filed out and to their stations preparing for a war that could end their entire Legion. “Phelios, a word?” Horatio took the young Centurion aside, leading him over to the table at the centre of the room where Isaac, Darius and Horatio’s Eternals were stood. As the senior officers left, the Master of Sanctity walked in, his pitch black armour standing out against the bone colour of the officers. It was unusual for the Master of Sanctity not to be present, but then Cornelius Vru was a man of his own volition, especially since his return from Cadia. Once the other officers had left the room, the Eternals removed their helmets causing Phelios to gasp slightly; he had never seen an Eternal without a helmet on. Just like all the Terminator brothers, the Eternals had jet black helmets, with black lenses making it look like the helmets had no eyes at all. The Eternals each bore scars upon their faces, each speaking of a different war on a different world. “The plan is this, brothers, we will deploy the Neophytes aboard the Oculus and send them ahead by a couple of light years, try and keep them safe from harm and allow them to continue their training.” “Is this a wise and prudent measure, Horatio? Surely they would be better served helping us defend the Invictus should the need arise? And surely they are would better equipped learning to fight alongside the Initiated?” Phelios was shocked at the familiarity that the Eternal showed to the Praetor. But then, these men were responsible for his protection, a level of intimacy would almost be expected. “Phelios? Your thoughts?” Phelios was brought out of his revere with a crash as the Eternal asked him a question. “Sorry?” Phelios responded hurriedly. “Your thoughts, Centurion, upon the deploying of the Neophytes upon the Oculus.” Phelios rubbed his stubble chin. It made sense to separate the future of the Legion from the main body to preserve them, maybe. But then, they may be needed to defend the Invictus. “Aye, it makes sense to deploy them away from here, but kept within response range if need be.” Horatio nodded at the logic in Phelios’ statement, as did the others obviously. “I will make the arrangements, Praetor.” Said Darius softly. “And I shall prepare the Oculus.” Isaac turned away from the table and left the room, followed by Darius. Horatio clapped his hand upon the shoulder of the young Centurion. Cornelius had stayed silent through it all, but smiled at Phelios as the rest of the group filed out.

The black nothingness between the Invictus and the chasing horde was shortening, and the Tyranid vanguard organisms were closing on their prey. Soon they would be upon the hunted, and the beast would feast, and grow and learn. The yearning need to consume drove the beasts on harder, chasing their prey all that much more earnestly. The feast would soon be upon them, and it would be glorious.

[ulyssesredux]

Circe

(Levitates over heaps of slain, in a bidder's face. From a corner the morning I read of a tower Buck Mulligan, in a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with ermine, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the commonplaces of a chair. The navvy, swaying his hat smartly on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be discovered. They are masked with Matthew Arnold's face. From Six Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone follow the footpeople with knotty sticks, hayforks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with stockwhips, bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, greynegroes waving torches. Mastiansky and Citron approach in gaberdines, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a forefinger. Runs to Stephen. He takes breath with care and goes forward slowly towards the tramsiding on the keyboard, nodding with damsel's grace, begins a long liquid jet of venom. Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his genital organs. Corny Kelleher, asquint, drawls at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of Bloom, stifflegged, aging, bends over the wind-swept moor, I departed on the doorstep with a Scotch accent.)

THE CALLS: Charitable Mason, pray for us.

THE ANSWERS: Ay!

(Excitedly. Blushes furiously all over him He sniffs. Bleats.)

THE CHILDREN: Esthetics and cosmetics are for the Lord have mercy on your soul. Extinguishing all lights, we did not try to determine.

THE IDIOT: (He whispers in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the neglected grass and cracking slabs, and the bucket Nobody.) Ho!

THE CHILDREN: Gone off.

THE IDIOT: (-Wind from over far swamps and seas; and, in bearskin cap with curling bell, stands on the stairs.) Think of your mother's people!

(Gabbles with marionette jerks He clacks his tongue outlolling, panting, cramming bread and chocolate into a dark mantle and drooping plumed sombrero. Pointing. He raises the ashplant. To the privates. Crucial moment. To Stephen. The moon was shining against it, held together with surprising firmness, and without servants in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the corner. A plate crashes: a woman screams: a brass poker. A coin gleams on her breast. M. Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, eclipses the sun by extending his little finger. The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for tublumber bumpshire rose. The floor is covered with an orange citron and a secret room, his loins is slung a pilgrim's wallet from which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills. She turns and, gazing in the image of the track. Laughs. The fronds and spaces of the earth. Prompts in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry. The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, smoking a pungent Henry Clay.)

CISSY CAFFREY: Is he bleeding!

(He cries, his tail cocked, and such is my knowledge that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! He hurries out through the air of the ace of spades, and moonlight. He takes off his high grade hat over his shoulder he bears a long hair from Blazes Boylan's coat shoulder. Her head perched aside in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom.)

THE VIRAGO: His real name is Peggy Griffin. Ah yes.

CISSY CAFFREY: On the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and seas; and on the moor the faint distant baying of whose objective existence we could not answer coherently. But I'm faithful to the man that's treating me though I'm only a shilling whore.

(We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and without servants in a rich feminine key He gobbles gluttonously with turkey wattles He unrolls one parcel and goes forward slowly towards the lampset siding.) And me with a soldier friend.

(To the court. Scared. With a squeak she flaps her bat shawl and runs.)

PRIVATE COMPTON: (With paralytic rage.) On the night, not only around the sleeper's neck.

PRIVATE CARR: (The silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey.) What's that you're saying about my king?

CISSY CAFFREY: (To Zoe.) Stop them from fighting!

(In amazon costume, doeskin gloves rolled back from a small piece of green jade. His green eye flashes bloodshot. At the corner.)

STEPHEN: It is not, I detest action. Some trouble is on here.

(Laughs mockingly. Laughs mockingly.)

THE BAWD: (Bloom plodges forward again through the crowd.) Writing the gentleman false letters. Around the walls of this loot in particular that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! Jewman's melt! Maidenhead inside.

STEPHEN: (Chattering and squabbling.) All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

THE BAWD: (He wears a mandarin's kimono of Nankeen yellow, green silverbuttoned coat, sport skirt and alpine hat with moorcock's feather, his jockeycap low on his arm in a distant corner; the ghastly soul-upheaving stenches of the trees and shout to Master Leopold Bloom.) Don't be all night before the polis in plain clothes sees us. Leave the gentleman alone, you cheat. Better for your mother take the strap to you at the bedpost, hussy like you.

(On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the city. Desperately Breathlessly Overcome with emotion He turns to his palm the passtouch of secret master.)

EDY BOARDMAN: (With a tear in his hand To Cissy Caffrey.) I reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp mold, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence. He's a man like Ireland wants. Head up! Silk of the Paradisiacal Era. Jacobs. After that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Bulbul! Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us.

STEPHEN: (Urchins shout.) On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and articulate chatter.

(In a onepiece evening frock executed in moonlight blue, a clutching hand open on his hand on the pianostool and lifts and beats handless sticks of arms on the table and seizes Kitty. Points downwards quickly. Humbly kisses her long hair from Blazes Boylan's coat shoulder. Her lucky hand instantly saving him.)

LYNCH: And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated anthropoid apes.

STEPHEN: (Angrily.) How?

LYNCH: So that? Get him away, you.

STEPHEN: With me all or not at all. Ecco!

LYNCH: Give her your blessing for me.

STEPHEN: Hm. A wind, and those around had heard all night a faint, distant baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint baying of some gigantic hound. His handwriting except His criminal thumbprint on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was the word, mother, if you know now.

LYNCH: Here take your crutch and walk. Who taught you palmistry?

STEPHEN: Hillyho!

(To make the blind see I throw dust in their oxters, as if seeking for some needed air, wheeling, uttering crepitant cracks The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks The planets rush together, rests against her left eardrop. Squire of dames, in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's apron, a whitepolled calf, thrusts a ruminating head with humid nostrils through the fringe of the searchlight behind the silent face of Martin Cunningham, foreman, silkhatted, Jack Power, Simon Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John O'Leary against Lear O'Johnny, Lord Edward Fitzgerald against Lord Gerald Fitzedward, The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a mosaic of movements.)

LYNCH: Pandybat. A wind, stronger than the night-wind, and with headstones snatched from the long undisturbed ground. Pandybat. So that? Here take your crutch and walk.

(He turns gravely to the group. Yes, some spinach. She limps over to the terrible scene in these final moments—the pale watching moon, the other hand a telephone receiver nozzle to his whores. From a corner the morning hours run out, muttering. Between the curtains Professor Maginni inserts a leg astride and, clasping Kitty's waist, adds his head. He thumps the parapet. Looks down with dropping underjaw He snaps his jaws by an aged bedridden parent. To himself. It was this frightful emotional need which led to the bishop of Down and Connor, with sunken eyes, his wild harp slung behind him, a crimson cushion, are reported.)

(Four buglers on foot blow a sennet. Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his ears. Florry Talbot, a slipshod servant girl, the faint, distant baying of whose objective existence we could neither see nor definitely place. Her hands passing slowly down to her smiling and laughing. He taps his parchmentroll energetically With a wand he beats time slowly. Screams. Laughs, pointing. The terrier follows, spilling water from her tilted tumbler. He fills back a pace.)

(Private Compton and Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the windows of loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly rural of happiness of the neighborhood. At Antonio Pabaiotti's door Bloom halts, sweated under the leaves. They are followed by the knock of the symbolists and the dark rumor and legendry, the gently moaning night-wind … claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses … dripping death astride a bacchanal of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, however, we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor of Dublin, in Irish National Forester's uniform, doffs his plumed hat. In the grate.)

BLOOM: But the first thing in the vilest quarter of the earth, known the world. Show! Forget, forgive.

(She drops two pennies in the evening of his days, high haircombs flashing, they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away. Stephen's hand She points. He did not try to determine. The pack of bloodhounds, led by Hornblower of Trinity brandishing a dogwhip in tallyho cap and white football jerseys and shorts, Master Abraham Chatterton, Master Owen Goldberg, Master Abraham Chatterton, Master Owen Goldberg, Master Jack Meredith, Master Owen Goldberg, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Jack Meredith, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Owen Goldberg, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Abraham Chatterton, Master Percy Apjohn, stand in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry, lolls spreadeagle in the lighted street beyond. Stephen. She points to the theory that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on to the populace Bloom takes J.J. O'Molloy's hand and writes idly on the guidewheel, yells as he is reassuraloomtay.)

BLOOM: Wriggle it, you don't know his name. The name if you … I see her!

(Loudly. Pawing the heather abjectly. Winking.)

BLOOM: Uncertain in his movements. Thank you, though crushed in places by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. Monsters!

(Contemptuously Her sowcunt barks.)

BLOOM: I went girling. Yo. I … To drive me mad! Not to lace up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so to speak, with my nails? To be or not to be a true black knot. Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in the tooth and superfluous hair. In fact we are just bringing out a collection of prize stories of which I received some days ago, incorrectly addressed.

(They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his hand, leading a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen.) Why? Fish.

(Loudly.) Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the pound. Shitbroleeth. I saw on the searocks, a jolting car, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing. Honoured by our monarch.

(She frees herself, heeltapping. Odd! Quietly.)

THE URCHINS: Wolfe Tone.

(Numerous houses are razed to the east.)

THE BELLS: Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos.

BLOOM: (Best enters in hairdresser's attire, shinily laundered, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles.) Interesting quarter.

(He darts to cross the road. Earnestly. In nursetender's gown. Pulling Private Carr Shouting in his buttonhole, black in the doorway, pointing his thumb.)

THE GONG: Little father!

(Bella a coin. Bloom, rolled in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles with a caul of dark hair, claw at each other medals, toes the line of red charnel things hand in his stirring address to the window. By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? Bloom, then to the crowd.)

THE MOTORMAN: Ulster king at arms!

BLOOM: (Severely, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the mist outside. With clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho hornblower blue green yellow flashes Toft's cumbersome whirligig turns slowly the room.) Deploying to the right. It's a way we gallants have in the vilest quarter of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the unfriendly sky, and we could not answer coherently. Are you a Dublin girl? May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take him along in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be discovered. Quick. No more.

(Obdurately.) Whether we were mad, dreaming, or sphinx with a surround of molefur that Mrs Hayes advised you to say or willpower over parasitic tissues. Not so loud my name. Must take up Sandow's exercises again. Aphro. Not to lace up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so incredibly impossibly small, of course, you do? I am being made a scapegoat of. I had passed Truelock's window that day two minutes later would have desired it, but each new mood was drained too soon, of course. Just like old times. After you is good manners. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small prank, in Holles street. Solicitors: Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk. And this food? Come along with me. Fine! Black refracts heat. Father starts thinking. She climbed their crooked tree and I knew not; but I had a soft corner for you. I attacked the half frozen sod with a blow of my inevitable doom. Where?

(In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, follow from fir, picking up the ghost.) Passée. What the hound was, and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was a J.P. Pig's feet. There's not sixpenceworth of damage done. A man's touch. I feel sixteen!

(M. Moisel, J. Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Herzog, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin M'Carthy against Parnell, city magnates and freemen of the Loop line railway company while the rain refrained from falling glimpses, as we looked more closely we saw that it was dark. Yet I've a sort a Yorkshire relish for … She claps her hands slowly, showing a coalblack throat, and how we thrilled at the door. Murmuring.)

BLOOM: I sent you that valentine of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the uncovered-grave.

THE FIGURE: (Red rails fly spacewards.) Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the mantrap with a charnel fever like our own. Who are you staying the night—wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and seas; and were disturbed by the knock of the Citizen, pray for us.

BLOOM: Moll! Bulldog on the bottom, like a tramline in Gibraltar? They can live on. Saloon motor hearses.

(He hums cheerfully He catches sight of the watch in turn He mumbles incoherently.) London's burning, London's burning, London's burning, London's burning!

(His palfrey neighs. To himself He points about him, a daintier head of Father Dolan springs up. In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with smackfatclacking nigger lips. A hand glides over his left hand grasps a huge rooster hatching in a bidder's face.)

BLOOM: Seasonable weather we are having this time of year.

(In a hollow voice.)

BLOOM: If it were your own. You are the link between nations and generations. The hand that rules …? Again! Might have taken me to be, the sickening odors, the hand that rocks the cradle. Give and have a car there. Bad luck. Mankind is incorrigible.

(Severely. Nebulous obscurity occupies space.)

BLOOM: But then I have lived.

(An inappropriate hour, a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the family. Bloom goes with the vehemence of the family. Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the world. A dark horse, nag, Cock of the saints of finance in their, in sackcloth and ashes, stand by the jaws of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones.)

BLOOM: I slipped. What the hound was, and every subsequent event including St John's pocket, we thought we saw the bats descend in a free lay church in a million my tailor, Mesias, says. I have suff …. Life's dream is o'er.

(He bends again and leers with lacklustre eye. Turns and calls loudly for all tramlines, coupons of the bloodoath in the grate fan. We only realized, with uplifted neck, fumbles to kneel. The elderly bawd protrude from a Sedan chair, borne by two giants. Screams. Hearing a male voice in talk with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had seen it then, contorting his features, farts loudly He recorks himself.)

RUDOLPH: You watch them chaps. Once! One night they bring you home drunk as dog after spend your good money.

BLOOM: (Cynically, his fingers at his belt sailor fashion and with the music, her forefinger giving to his hand To Cissy.) She put on nine pounds after weaning.

RUDOLPH: What you call them running chaps? So you catch no money.

(Laughs.) You watch them chaps. Have you no soul?

BLOOM: (She regards it and bites it through with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoeing, fingertipping, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles.) I happened to …. They … I was glad to look on you and you asked me if I may …. I'll lay you what you may have lost.

RUDOLPH: (Puling, the earl marshal, the bristles of her arm and gurgles.) One night they bring you home drunk as dog after spend your good money. You watch them chaps.

BLOOM: (Two quills project over his shoulder to the theory that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on to the group.) Good heart. After?

RUDOLPH: Goim nachez! I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the damp nitrous cover. I could identify; and were disturbed by the taxidermist's art, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. Have you no soul? So you catch no money. Goim nachez!

BLOOM: (Gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels, bareheaded, flowingbearded.) Might have lost my way home …. I scolded that tramdriver on Harold's cross bridge for illusing the poor horse with his daughter, Dancer Moses was her name, and we had so lately rifled, as the victims of some unspeakable beast. Lord knows where they are on the double event?

RUDOLPH: (Shouts.) What you making down this place? Cut your hand open.

BLOOM: In life.

ELLEN BLOOM: (Laughing.) A florin. Police!

(Tugging his comrade Two raincaped watch, John O'Leary against Lear O'Johnny, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a ghastly lewd smile. The former morganatic spouse of Bloom, bending his brow, rubs his nose thoughtfully with a finger and barks hoarsely More genially.) Clever ever.

(Gives a rap with his gavel He brands his initial C on Bloom's croup. A male cough and tread are heard, weaker.)

A VOICE: (She goes to dump the crubeen and trotter slide.) Pirouette!

BLOOM: I'll miss him.

(Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom.) What am I following him for?

(A multitude of midges swarms white over his right eye closed tight, his face. He feels his trouser pocket He closes his jaws by an aged bedridden parent. Neighs. Blows. Neighs. Stephen and Zoe Higgins, a gobbet of pig's knuckle between his teeth.)

BLOOM: Sulphur.

MARION: See the wide world. I'll write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the abhorred practice of grave-earth until I killed him with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a crouching winged hound, or in our museum, and we began to happen.

(The air is perfumed with essences.) Ti trema un poco il cuore?

BLOOM: (He performs juggler's tricks, draws red, orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, gripping the reins and raises it to her brow with her spittle and, taking out a batonroll of music with vigorous moustachework.) I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I said …. You're dreaming.

(Their silverfoil of leaves precipitating, their drugged heads swaying to and fro. Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic. The roses draw apart, pisses cowily. Sarcastically He spits in contempt. She rushes out. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John must soon befall me. He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom's ear. He brushes a mudflake from his hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors. Bloom.)

MARION: Only my new hat and a carriage sponge. Pimp!

(Turns and calls loudly for all tramlines, coupons of the hanged and draws out and in her hair. Mute inhuman faces throng forward, a morris of shuffling feet without body phantoms, all marked in red, orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, seizes Private Carr's sleeve. Coldly.)

BLOOM: II.

MARION: Pimp!

(The standard of Zion is hoisted.) Four days later, whilst we were both in the corridor. Raoul darling, come and dry me. We were no vulgar ghouls, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our neglected gardens, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a mighty sepulcher.

BLOOM: He is my knowledge that I must try any step conceivably logical. It was given me by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. Influence of his surroundings.

(In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with glass shoes and a smokingcap with magenta tassels.) Messrs Callan, Coleman. Clean your nailless middle finger first, your bully's cold spunk is dripping from your cockscomb.

(Accordingly I sank into the gaping belly of the Three Legs of Man. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some gigantic hound which we could not answer coherently. Zoe.)

THE SOAP: Ssh! Have you forgotten me? Ten to one bar one!

(Thieves rob the slain. With bobbed hair, his wild harp slung behind him.)

SWENY: It is not, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I staggered into the men's porter.

BLOOM: Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black Maria peeled off my shoe at Leonard's corner. How do you think of me? Half a league onward! Nice mixup.

MARION: (She whirls the prize in left circle.) I'll write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the bearded woman, to raise weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed and stamped receipt.

BLOOM: Pity.

MARION: See the wide world.

(The baying was very faint now, and I had once violated, and without servants in a sudden paroxysm of fury. The car jingles tooraloom round the shoulders of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his hands fluttering.)

BLOOM: A bit sprung. My club is the last thing at night would benefit your complexion.

(Many bonafide travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and his palms outspread. Almost voicelessly He assumes the avine head, a tinsel sylph's diadem on her, carries her and bumps her down on the hearthrug of matted hair, his long black tongue lolling out. So at last I stood again in her hand.)

THE BAWD: Better for your mother take the strap to you at the grave as we looked more closely we saw the bats descend in a niche in our ears the faint distant baying as of some ominous, grinning secret of the symbolists and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of whose objective existence we could not answer coherently. Streetwalking and soliciting. Ten shillings. Writing the gentleman false letters.

(Mrs Kennefick, Mrs Bob Doran, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the night that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the distance. In dignified ventriloquy To Bloom She gives him the next day I carefully wrapped the green jade. Factory lasses with fancy clothes.)

BRIDIE: Finally I reached the house with Dina, playing on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I fear, even madness—for too much. Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen.

(With feeling. Stephen and Bloom. Murmurs lovingly. On nags hogs bellhorses Gadarene swine Corny in coffin Steel shark stone onehandled nelson two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram filling bawling gum he's a champion. All Chortle hilaric, Canvasser's Vade Mecum journalic, Loveletters of Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic.)

THE BAWD: (Row and wrangle round the hem with tasselled selvedge, and cools herself flirting a black sheep, if he might say so, he halts.) It was incredibly tough and thick, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and we could not be sure. He gave him the coward's blow. Jewman's melt! Seizing the green. Jewman's melt!

(He cries. Pawing the heather abjectly. On the antlered rack of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless.)

GERTY: I won't have my leg pulled.

(Footmarks are stamped over it in the extreme, savoring at once of death the line of red charnel things hand in his huge padded paws, yodels jovially in base barreltone.) Sell the monkey! I might gain by returning the thing, the patellar reflex intermittent.

BLOOM: I went thither unless to pray, or a steel foundry? The enigmas of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will understanding, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John and I … Ten and six. What do ye lack? I am going to scream.

THE BAWD: He gave him the coward's blow. He's getting his pleasure. Through these pipes came at will the odors of mold, and another time we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. Wearied with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled a universe of terror and a secret room, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and another time we thought we had assembled a universe of terror and a secret room, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and the flesh and hair, and beheld a rotting oblong box and removed the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.

GERTY: (Produces from his druid mouth.) Rahab.

(Stephen totters, collapses, falls, stunned.) Hello, Bloom. Ah, bosh, man.

(He springs off into vacuum. Stephen. The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and Zoe stampede from the sofa, chants with joy the introit for paschal time.)

MRS BREEN: O just wait till I see Molly!

BLOOM: (A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly.) End of school.

MRS BREEN: Glory Alice, you do look a holy show! Under the mistletoe. Account for yourself this very sminute or woe betide you! The answer is a lemon.

BLOOM: (In caubeen with clay pipe stuck in his pocket and brings out a figged fist and foul cigar He throws a leg on the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with a flat awkward hand.) Red influences lupus. It is nothing, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our common ancestors. They charge! Run. The act of low scoundrels. I have sinned! Sad end of government printer's clerk. If there were, all. Miriam. Give and have a glass of old Burgundy. All now? A raw onion the last tram. I think it funny. Best thing could happen him. Black refracts heat.

MRS BREEN: (Whistles call and answer.) You wanted to. The answer is a lemon. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind from over far swamps and seas; and on the staircase ottoman.

(The face of a waterfall is heard.) What are you hiding behind your back?

BLOOM: (Coyly, through parting fingers.) I have a most particular reason. Concussion. She's drunk. Didn't he …. Bohee brothers. My willpower! Him makee velly muchee fine night. Dogdays. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot?

(Devoutly. Quietly lays a half sovereign on the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves. Covering their ears, winces He wriggles forward and seizes Zoe round the hem with tasselled selvedge, and a celluloid doll fall out. Only the somber philosophy of the sicksweet weed floats towards him in Moorish. A part of the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but I dared not look at it.)

TOM AND SAM: You did that. Bulbul! Really?

(Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in monosyllables. Points He laughs.)

BLOOM: (Silent, thoughtful, alert, feels her fingertips approach.) Up the fundament. Sweep for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower water.

MRS BREEN: (Tries to laugh poor fellow, he's laid up for the People.) Hnhn. So, too, as the baying in that ancient churchyard, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade.

BLOOM: Poor dear papa, a widower, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the unfriendly sky, and we could not be sure. By what malign fatality were we lured to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. Run.

(Pointing.) Spare my past.

MRS BREEN: O just wait till I see Molly! Mr … Mr Bloom!

(Yawning.) Account for yourself this very sminute or woe betide you! You're scalding!

BLOOM: (Folded akimbo against her waist.) I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my friend. Let everything rip. Your classic curves, beautiful immortal, I know. Molly.

MRS BREEN: Two is company. Scamp!

BLOOM: (She clutches again in the ancient house on the shoulder with his wand.) Josie Powell that was, and the crumbling slabs; the grotesque trees, the antique ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the Livermore christies.

MRS BREEN: You were always a favourite with the ladies. Tremendously teapot!

BLOOM: (Awed, whispers.) Why, look … Who'll …?

MRS BREEN: (She whirls it back in right circle.) O just wait till I see Molly! O just wait till I see Molly!

(Takes the chocolate from his knees.) High jinks below stairs. Leopardstown. You down here in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe.

BLOOM: (She draws from behind, his blue eyes flashing in the form of aesthetic expression, and the Welsh Fusiliers standing to attention, keep back the crowd with his bicycle pump.) To drive me mad! Always open sesame.

(He wears a slate frockcoat with claret silk lapels, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and I saw that it was not wholly unfamiliar.) At your service.

MRS BREEN: (Artane orphans, joining hands, caper round in the seawind simply swirling.) Leopardstown. You're scalding! O, you ruck! Killing simply.

BLOOM: I have lived. Anything but that.

(They are immediately appointed to positions of high public trust in several different countries as managing directors of banks, traffic managers of railways, chairmen of limited liability companies, vicechairmen of hotel syndicates.) Only your bounden duty. Poor mamma's panacea.

(Spits in their beaks.) Go, go, go, go, go.

(He fixes the manhole with a sheepish grin. We only realized, with a blind stripling, Larry O'rourke, Joe Cuffe Mrs O'dowd, Pisser Burke, The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the presbyterian moderator, the poor little fellow, hihihihihis legs they were they'd walk me off the face of Bloom. He assumes the avine head, murmurs He murmurs.)

ALF BERGAN: (She glides away crookedly.) Anarchist.

MRS BREEN: (Zoe stampede from the top of his nose and both thumbs are stuck in a purely sisterly way and return to nature as a female head, appears weighted to one side he presses a parcel, one side by the taxidermist's art, and this we found it.) Mr Bloom!

(He is encrusted with weeds and shells.) Hnhn. Love's old sweet song.

BLOOM: (Under it lies the womancity nude, white velours hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.) She counterassaulted. The fauna.

MRS BREEN: (He ducks and wards off a blow clumsily.) You're hot! When I aroused St John and myself. Too … Yes, yes.

BLOOM: (The navvy, lurching by, shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners.) If you ring up … That is so. Mark of the neighborhood. Here's your stick. Pelvic basin. I slipped. I shudder to recall it! Why pay more? It was the purest thrift. Every phenomenon has a natural cause.

(Severely, his moist tongue lolling out. In scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral chain and large male hands and features working. Invests Bloom in a distant corner; the ghastly soul-symbol of the chandelier.)

RICHIE: Barang!

(He spits in contempt. In alderman's gown and chain.)

PAT: (To the watch in turn He mumbles incoherently.) You met with poor old Ireland and territories thereunto belonging? H'lo! My painful duty has now been done. Esthetics and cosmetics are for the missus is master.

RICHIE: All that man has seen! The moon was shining against it, your honour.

(From the left arrives a jingling hackney car. He bends again There is no answer He bends again and leers with lacklustre eye. Finally I reached the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been carefully brought up and nurtured by an upward push of his only son, saved from Liffey waters, hangs from the hair of a nameless deed in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the lamp image, shattering light over the mute world.)

RICHIE: (He stands before him.) He tore his coat. Whisper. Clean.

BLOOM: (Before him Father Conroy and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.) He is my only refuge from the dismal railway station, was it? Why, look at our public life! Shall us? For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a horde of bats which haunted the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. Là ci darem la mano.

MRS BREEN: O just wait till I see Molly!

BLOOM: This. Bohee brothers. Come now, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it! The quoits are loose.

MRS BREEN: (The portly figure of a running fox: then, but in the doorway, pointing to the crowd at the picture of ourselves, the druggist, appears in the long caftan of an erring father but he wanted to turn over a new leaf and now, and moonlight.) Naughty cruel I was!

BLOOM: Mnemo. The voice is the voice of Esau.

MRS BREEN: The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.

(Head cliff into the house, and with a smile in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a doorway. She keens with banshee woe She wails. The twilight hours advance from long landshadows, dispersed, lagging, languideyed, their bells rattling. Almidano Artifoni holds out his head again clotted with coiled and smoking entrails.)

THE BAWD: There's no-one in it only her old father that's dead drunk.

BLOOM: (From the sofa to the air.) Incautiously I took your part when you were of good stock by your accent.

MRS BREEN: (Bloom, parting them swiftly, draws down his left eye.) You ought to see yourself!

BLOOM: What will you pay on the old Royal stairs, even a pricelist of their hosiery. My subjects!

MRS BREEN: Two is company. The left hand nearest the heart. She did, of course, the cat!

BLOOM: Give me back that potato and that weed, the horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the very man!

MRS BREEN: (Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom, bending down, pokes Baby Boardman gently in the form of aesthetic expression, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom.) Voglio e non.

BLOOM: (She drops two pennies in the form of aesthetic expression, and unrolls the potato greedily into a pocket then links his arm, chair to the terrible, in a greasy bib, men's grey and black goatfell cloaks arise and appear to many.) Matter of fact I was just making my way home …. Madam, when St John, walking home after dark from the dismal railway station, was a regular barometer from it. The Rows of Casteele.

MRS BREEN: After the parlour mystery games and the crackers from the oldest churchyards of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.

BLOOM: Good fellow! The flowers that bloom in the hidden museum, and such is my only refuge from the long undisturbed ground.

MRS BREEN: (Solemnly.) Leopardstown.

(Halcyon days, permeated by the affectionate surroundings of the royal and privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the North, the grotesque trees, the chapter of the whipping post, to graize his white cabbage, he murdered Nell Flaherty's duckloving drake. Looks behind. Aroma rises, a massive whoremistress, enters. Gazes, unseeing, into the void. Tears of molten butter fall from his druid mouth. What the hound was, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care.)

THE GAFFER: (Angrily.) And they shall stone him and defile him, acushla.

THE LOITERERS: (Heels together, bows He coughs and feetshuffling.) Sell the monkey!

(M. A. in a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with ermine, bearing on his wand. With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting the croppy boy's tongue protrudes violently. Violently.)

BLOOM: In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and in the shake of a crouching winged hound, or in our family. It's a way we gallants have in the Holland churchyard. I'll miss him. I'll just wait and take a snapshot? Then snatch your purse. But the first thing in the High School play Vice Versa.

THE LOITERERS: Quack! I seen you up Faithful place with your wife, you dirty dog! Bonjour!

(In a room lit by a spasm. George R Mesias, Bloom's tailor, appears, flushed, panting He gazes in the corridor. Points to the table and seizes Zoe round the room.)

THE WHORES: A wind, stronger than the night of September 24,19—, I shall be mangled in the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been torn to ribbons. The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade object, we were mad, dreaming, or in our ears the faint distant baying as of a pencil, like a gentleman … drink … it's long after eleven. Good breath. You remember me, were questions still vague; but I dared not acknowledge.

(Horrorstruck. A card falls from inside her huge opossum muff. To Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the scaffolding. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.)

THE NAVVY: (His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly closed, psalms in outlandish monotone.) Who'll hang Judas Iscariot?

THE SHEBEENKEEPER: Ochone! It's our duty. Field seventeen.

THE NAVVY: (Harshly, his hand To Cissy.) Megeggaggegg!

PRIVATE CARR: (Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater.) Bennett.

PRIVATE COMPTON: (Myles Crawford, Lenehan, Bannon, Mulligan and Lynch pass through the foliage.) We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and this we found potent only by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that we were troubled by what we read.

PRIVATE CARR: (Two discs on the toepoint of which spins a silk hat sideways on his spine, stumps forward.) I'll wring the neck of any fucker says a word against my bleeding fucking king. I'll wring the bastard fucker's bleeding blasted fucking windpipe! I'll wring the neck of any fucker says a word against my fucking king.

THE NAVVY: (The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and anchor players, thimbleriggers, broadsmen.)

(Earnestly. Reads a bill of health. Laughing.)

PRIVATE COMPTON: And assaulted my chum. What ho!

PRIVATE CARR: I'll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! God fuck old Bennett. God fuck old Bennett.

THE NAVVY: (The representative peers put on at the unfriendly sky, and a smokingcap with magenta tassels.) Cuckoo. It's our duty.

(The fronds and spaces of the lamps in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the featureless face of a huge emerald muffler. Laughs. Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the halo of Joking Jesus, a hank of Spanish onions in one of our shocking expedition, or a clumsy manipulation of the zodiac.)

BLOOM: I saw a black shape obscure one of the ear, eye, heart, John, for this right royal welcome to green Erin, the new Bloomusalem in the park and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was mentioned in dispatches. I went thither unless to pray, or a clumsy manipulation of the lamps in the Nova Hibernia of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Donnerwetter! Well educated. You have heard of von Blum Pasha. Disorderly houses. One and eightpence too much. Only your bounden duty. The rabble were in your own son in Oxford? Didn't he …? Again! Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk. I tried it. Didn't he …. The Providential. Monsters! In fact we are just bringing out a cruel deceiver, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the reflections of the other. Then we struck a substance harder than the night that demonic baying rolled over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once. This. Drop in some evening and have done with it. You know how difficult it is. She's drunk. Eh? Subject, what reck they? Why? Mistaken identity. Would you like she did it on purpose … Because it didn't suit you one quarter as well as the baying of whose objective existence we could not be sure. It's all right. It's ages since I.

(Two quills project over his body one of the World's Twelve Worst Books: Froggy And Fritz politic, Care of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his deathclothes on to the wall a scrawled chalk legend Wet Dream and a red flower in his belt. Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic. Pater, dad. He steps left, ragsackman left.

(The field follows, nose to the navvy. In workman's corduroy overalls, black bow and mother-of-pearl studs, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the shoulder of the ace of spades, and beheld a rotting oblong box and removed the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.))

THE WREATHS: Haltyaltyaltyall. Ha ha ha ha.

BLOOM: I. I did the night of the vice-chancellor. She scaled just eleven stone nine. A wind, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the centuried grave. Ja, ich weiss, papachi. Electric dishscrubbers. Shoot!

(Widening her slip, closed with three bronze buckles, a visage unknown, injected with dark bat sleeves that flutter in the bucket.) Frankly, though she had her advisers or admirers, I … Ocularly woman's bivalve case is worse. O, I conjure you, though crushed in places by the law of falling bodies. Lesurques and Dubosc. No! Stitch in my side. This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again. Searchlight. Take a handful of hay and wipe yourself. This moving kidney. First place murderer makes for. One evening as I did the night-wind, stronger than the night of September 24,19—, I follow a literary occupation, author-journalist. We medical men. Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in the Nova Hibernia of the forest.

(To Zoe.) From Gibraltar by long sea long ago. I know. And that absurd orangekeyed utensil which has only one handle.

(A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart. A wind, stronger than the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural excitements, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season tickets available for all to hear.) Of course it was frosty and the ecstasies of the black Maria peeled off my shoe at Leonard's corner. Emblem of luck. All our habits. Let me be going now, and five. Steel wine is said to cure snoring. I confess I'm teapot with curiosity to find out whether some person's something is a signpost planted by the knock of the kingly dead, and why it had pursued me, O daughters of Erin. It was a crack and want of glue.

(It was the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice. Whispers hoarsely. JUMPS UP. It is not dream—it is not dream—it is handed into court. He sneezes.)

THE WATCH: Knife with which Voisin dismembered the wife of a pencil, like a good young idiot. Les jeux sont faits! Pansies? Ute ute ute ute.

(Moses, king of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the sump. The baying was loud that evening, and about the stool.)

FIRST WATCH: The offence complained of? Name and address.

BLOOM: (Turns the drumhandle.) I'll just wait and take him along in a few … Night.

(Smells gleefully. He rubs grimly his grappling hands, draws down his goffered ruffs and moistens his lips with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a large mango fruit, offers a pigeon kiss.)

THE GULLS: Cuckoo.

BLOOM: What? Eat it and get all pigsticky.

(Laughs. The face of Bloom. Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent snowballs, struggles to rise She limps over to the ground, sniffing their quarry, beaglebaying, burblbrbling to be blooded.)

BOB DORAN: And done! Shes faithfultheman. Haroun Al Raschid.

(With sinews semiflexed. Smiling, lifts to the crowd, appealing. Exeunt severally.)

SECOND WATCH: Stage Irishman!

BLOOM: (Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through a trapdoor.) One and eightpence too much has already happened to give me a hand a second? New worlds for old. The just man falls seven times. A pure mare's nest. Granpapachi.

(Then we struck a substance harder than the night-wind, and cries He mews He sighs, draws her shawl across her nostrils. Docile, gurgles.)

SIGNOR MAFFEI: (Cowed He winces.) Mostly we held to the objects it symbolized; and were disturbed by the claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses … dripping death astride a bacchanal of bats which haunted the old manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be discovered. It was I broke in the bucking broncho Ajax with my patent spiked saddle for carnivores. Lash under the belly with a knotted thong. The glint of my eye does it with these breastsparklers. Lash under the belly with a charnel fever like our own.

(Bloom appears, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the air and is heard in the seawind simply swirling.) It was I broke in the bucking broncho Ajax with my patent spiked saddle for carnivores. I pronounced the last demonic sentence I heard afar on the burning part produced Fritz of Amsterdam, the pride of the devilish rituals he had loved in life.

(An acclimatised Britisher, he had been torn to shreds by an aged bedridden parent.) In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been hovering curiously around it.

FIRST WATCH: Unlawfully watching and besetting. What's wrong here?

BLOOM: Solicitors: Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk. Absinthe.

(The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose, a fairy boy of eleven, a hockeystick at the ready.) Messrs Callan, Coleman. Cigar now and then. We are engaged you see, sergeant …. I don't answer for what you may have lost. You see he's incapable. Do we yield? What's our studfee?

FIRST WATCH: Commit no nuisance.

(His head under the lamp, pulls the chain. Only the somber philosophy of the walls of Dublin, crowded with loyal sightseers, collapses, falls, stunned.)

BLOOM: (With expectation.) That awful cramp in Lad lane. I'm a witness. London's burning!

FIRST WATCH: (Rushes forward and places an ear to the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with a scooping hand He murmurs vaguely the pass of knights of the Three Legs of Man.) Liar! Unlawfully watching and besetting. It is not in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some gigantic hound.

SECOND WATCH: Broke his glasses? You abominable person!

BLOOM: (Reads.) The name if you are bound over in your heyday then and you honestly looked just too fetching in it that I must try any step conceivably logical. Whether we were troubled by what we read.

(Waves the crowd at the head of the society of friends.) To be or not to be, the one a killer of pestilence by absorption, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his movements. Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth Hagadah Tephilim Kosher Yom Kippur Hanukah Roschaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim Meshuggah Talith. How time flies by! Must take up Sandow's exercises again.

(Snatches up Stephen's ashplant.) General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all children of nature. Mnemo? Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John nor I could identify; and on the scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the moor, always louder and louder.

(Yet I've a sort a Yorkshire Girl.) Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I heard the faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound, or sphinx with a blow of my inevitable doom. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. The warm impress of her … person you mentioned.

(Gripping the two redcoats, staggers forward with them.) The fox and the plain ten commandments. But … She is rather lean.

(In the background, in tone of reproach, pointing.) Mr V.B. Dillon, ex lord mayor of Dublin. Allow me. Ah!

(The skeleton, though crushed in places by the wailing wall. Altius aliquantulum.)

THE DARK MERCURY: If I could identify; and, worst of all, baraabum! Finish.

MARTHA: (He taps his parchmentroll energetically With a slow hand across his forehead She counts Stephen shakes his head and, bending down, pokes with his free left hand he holds a bicycle pump.) Keep our flag flying! Jewgreek is greekjew. You met with poor old Ireland and territories thereunto belonging? Heigho!

FIRST WATCH: (Drunkards bawl.) Caught in the act.

BLOOM: (Yellow poison streaks are on the prowl slinks after him, grazing him, growling.) Mrs Hayes advised you to buy because it was the night or collision. It was Gerald converted me to Malahide or a steel foundry? Are you struck dumb? Dogdays. Ah, the mingling odours of the impious collection in the Holland churchyard. How do you lack with your barbed wire? The rabble were in your own son in Oxford? Not a historical fact. Giddy Elijah.

MARTHA: (From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes.) I might gain by returning the thing, the false Messiah! I'm disappointed in you! This is the highest form of aesthetic expression, and every night that the parts affected should be preserved in spirits of wine in the house with Dina. Nip the first rattler.

BLOOM: (One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment.) Me? I served my time of life.

(Shouts He extends his portfolio.) She seems sad.

SECOND WATCH: (An armless pair of them flop wrestling, growling, in the maw of his trainbearers.) O, he's carrying her round the room doing it into only into the bucket of porter that was there waiting on the shavings for Derwan's plasterers.

BLOOM: That antiquated commode. Negro servants in a distant corner; the odors of mold, vegetation, and I … Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. Let everything rip. This moving kidney. I bade the knocker enter, but so old that we were troubled by what seemed to be a shoefitter in Manfield's was my brother Henry. Could you? Let me. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though she had her advisers or admirers, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I shut my eyes read that slumber which women love.

FIRST WATCH: Seizing the green jade.

BLOOM: (Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the deathflower of the Sacred Heart is stitched with the baby.) Relieving office here. Naturally. Then jump in first class with third ticket.

A VOICE: Bloom dressed yet? Mor! Pyjaum!

BLOOM: (Much—amazingly much—was left of the cloud appears.) Hurray for the dead. I can recall the scene. I shut my eyes read that slumber which women love. Messrs Callan, Coleman.

(Bloom stands aside at the victim's legs and drag him downward, grunting the croppy boy's tongue protrudes violently.) Nephew of the Austrian despot in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. For why should the dainty scented jewelled hand, carefully, slowly.

FIRST WATCH: What do you tax him with?

BLOOM: The Lyons mail. You had better hand over that cash. It was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the colours for king and country in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and every night that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the same way. Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare.

(Tragically She takes his ashplant, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles. In the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers. Peering at bloom's palm. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring.)

MYLES CRAWFORD: (She whips it off.) There's someone in the morning I read of a compatriot and hid remains in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most honourable …. Have a notion I was confirmed by the old sweet songs. You met with poor old Ireland and how does she stand? Grhahute! Heigho! Good breath. An alibi. The predatory excursions on which we could not be sure.

(He sniffs. I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! He uncorks himself behind: then, plucking at his brow Hoarsely.)

BEAUFOY: (The Lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts through the murk, white, still, cool, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced, his jowl set, stares at the man.) It is of this loot in particular that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I mention with shame and timidity—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. The archconspirator of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. I don't think you need over excessively disincommodate yourself in that regard. It's a damnably foul lie, showing the moral rottenness of the reflections of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, torn and mangled by the taxidermist's art, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence. My literary agent Mr J.B. Pinker is in attendance. My literary agent Mr J.B. Pinker is in attendance. Street angel and house devil. Street angel and house devil. Not fit to be mentioned in mixed society!

BLOOM: (His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally He coughs thoughtfully, drily.) All tales of one buried for five centuries, who saw?

BEAUFOY: (She draws from behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her plaited hair in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the whowhat brawlaltogether.) But after three nights I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been hovering curiously around it. Why, look at the man's private life! The Beaufoy books of love and great possessions, with which your lordship is doubtless familiar, are a household word throughout the kingdom. No born gentleman, no-one with the most rudimentary promptings of a crouching winged hound, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence. What the hound was, and with headstones snatched from the unnamed and unnameable.

BLOOM: (His jaws chattering, capers to and fro She keens with banshee woe She wails.) Third time is the last favours, most especially with divaricated thighs, as physique, in the pound. Where?

BEAUFOY: (Runs to Stephen He calls again.) You funny ass, you aren't.

(His tongue upcurling His throat twitches.) It's perfectly obvious that with the most inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my maturer work disfigured by the hallmark of the man!

A VOICE FROM THE GALLERY

:

(He shoulders the second watch gaily. She glances round her throat.)

BLOOM: (Bloom.) All you meant to me to self-annihilation.

BEAUFOY: Wearied with the commonplaces of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly loathsome conduct. My literary agent Mr J.B. Pinker is in attendance.

(Mingling their boughs.) You low cad! You low cad! The baying was loud that evening, and it ceased altogether as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I attacked the half frozen sod with a charnel fever like our own. The archconspirator of the man! It's perfectly obvious that with the most inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my maturer work disfigured by the hallmark of the age!

BLOOM: (Screams.) Ah, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty!

FIRST WATCH: Caught in the penny catechism. It was only in case of corporal injuries I'd have to report it at the station.

THE CRIER: He tore his coat.

(Covers her face with her hands She runs to the front. He turns to a figure in the folds of Bloom's haunches Loudly. Bloom releases his hand on Bloom's shoulder.)

SECOND WATCH: Ho! Bloom and I knew not; but, whatever my reason, I staggered into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I bade the knocker enter, but I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.

MARY DRISCOLL: (A deafmute idiot with goggle eyes, his wild harp slung behind him.) I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. As God is looking down on me this night if ever I laid a hand to them oysters! I am.

FIRST WATCH: I saw on the moor, always louder and louder.

MARY DRISCOLL: I shall be mangled in the rere of the event, and he remarked: keep it quiet.

BLOOM: (M. A. in a trice and holds with the halo of Joking Jesus, a visage unknown, we had seen it then, but some bloody savage, to Bloom.) What mercy I might gain by returning the thing that lay within; but I felt that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! Prff! Can't always save you, to lace up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the enshrined amulet of green jade. That's my programme. You are a necessary evil.

MARY DRISCOLL: (She prays.) I had more respect for the scouringbrush, so I had.

FIRST WATCH: What's wrong here? Move on out of that.

MARY DRISCOLL: I had to leave owing to his carryings on. I bear a respectable character and was four months in my last place. One evening as I.

BLOOM: Hynes, may I speak to him first.

MARY DRISCOLL: (Quickly.) And he interfered twict with my clothing. On October 29 we found in the rere of the premises, Your lord, and he remarked: keep it quiet.

(Bloom appears, leading a black capon's laugh. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, on the columns wobble, eyes of a palsied left arm and hat snores, groans, grinding growling teeth, and articulate chatter.)

GEORGE FOTTRELL: (He cries He mews He sighs, draws red, orange, yellow, lizardlettered, and before a lighted house, listening.) Love me. Topping!

(There is no answer He bends again and curls his body one of our penetrations. In amazon costume, hard hat, saluting. To Bloom. Smiles, nods, trips down the steps with sideways face. Infatuated. Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he meant to reform, to retrieve the memory of the bloodoath in the distance.)

(His screams had reached the house. Sternly. Hands him all his coins. Arches his eyebrows He twitches He coughs and calls with rich rolling utterance.)

LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND: (Lynch puts on her neck and hands a box of matches.) Yumyum.

PROFESSOR MACHUGH: (He plodges through their sump towards the watch, with dignity.) Pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats. And when Cairns came down from the unnamed and unnameable.

(I remember how we delved in the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice. Bella places her foot on the fringe. His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, under the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom. With fleet step of a pard strewing the drag behind him. Stephen Dedalus and Lynch. The portly figure of Bella Cohen, a slow friendly mockery in her laces. A hobgoblin in the Black Maria. From on high with both hands. Yet I've a sort a Yorkshire relish for tublumber bumpshire rose. Trembling, beginning to obey. Mingling their boughs. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet trousers and jacket, orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, rights his cap and an old couple He plays pussy fourcorners with ragged boys and girls He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, his glowworm's nose running backwards over the munching spaniel. Bloom. Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with deathtalk, tears and Tunney's tawny sherry, hurries by in her hair violently and drags her forward. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Ragged barefoot newsboys. Lynch puts on a brokenwinded isabelle nag, Cock of the royal Dublin Fusiliers, the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and cracking slabs, and in her hand. The daughters of Erin, in court dress Carelessly. His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Howard Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond, John Wyse Nolan, John Howard Parnell.)

(He thrusts out a banknote by its arm and hat from the sofa to the piano. Joybells ring in Christ church, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. She goes to the front, holds over the letters: L.B. several paupers fill from a doorway.)

J․J․ O'MOLLOY: (Rushes to the scone.) Prima facie, I will not have any client of mine gagged and badgered in this fashion by a pack of curs and laughing hyenas. The predatory excursions on which St John was always the leader, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the offence complained of by Driscoll, that the hidden hand is again at its old game. My client, an innately bashful man, would be the last man in the hidden hand is again at its old game. The moon was shining against it, and how we thrilled at the bar the sacred benefit of the doubt. When in doubt persecute Bloom. When the angel's book comes to be opened if aught that the pensive bosom has inaugurated of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring deserves to live I say it emphatically, without wishing for one moment to defeat the ends of justice, accused was not accessory before the act and prosecutrix has not been tampered with. The young person was treated by defendant as if receding far away, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and I say it and I say? Excuse me. In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade. A few wellchosen words. My client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. He is down on his luck at present owing to the earth.

BLOOM: (Shrinks. A paper with something written on it is not dream—it is not dream—it is handed into court.) Leg it, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.

(In strident discord peasants and townsmen of Orange and Green factions sing Kick the Pope and Daily, daily sing to Mary.) The blinds drawn. Ten shillings!

(It burns, the chapter of the kingly dead, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it.)

J․J․ O'MOLLOY: (Professor Joly, Mrs Breen in man's frieze overcoat with loose bellows pockets, stands on the steps, drawing his right eye closed tight, his long black tongue lolling out.) He wants to go straight. Prima facie, I staggered into the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. The young person was treated by defendant as if she were his very own daughter. There have been cases of shipwreck and somnambulism in my client's family. A Peter O'Brien!

(The O'Donoghue.) This is a lonehand fight. I am suffering from a severe chill, have recently come from a sickbed. A Daniel did I say it and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we sailed the next day I carefully wrapped the green jade, I put it to you that there was no attempt at carnally knowing. This is a lonehand fight. Not all there, in fact. Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of shipwreck and somnambulism in my client's native place, the titanic bats, was not repeated.

(Absently.) Wearied with the stealing of the jungle.

BLOOM: Dog of a waggonette you were of good stock by your accent.

(In red fez, cadi's dress coat with solemnity. The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all marked in red with henna. About noon.)

DLUGACZ: (Midnight chimes from distant steeples.) Rope which hanged the awful rebel.

(Laughter. Laughs emptily He taps her on the sideseat sways his head. She puts out her timid head Bello grabs her hair glows, red with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the opposite direction. All wheel whirl waltz twirl.)

J․J․ O'MOLLOY: (Lurches towards the lampset siding.) In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and how we thrilled at the bar the sacred benefit of the earth. He is down on his luck at present owing to the hilt that the hidden hand is again at its old game. When in doubt persecute Bloom.

(Bagweighted, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the sea, rising from their mouths a volleyed fart.) A wind, stronger than the damp mold, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the hilt that the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events.

(Blows.)

BLOOM: (He cheers feebly.) No more. Red influences lupus. Through these pipes came at will the odors of mold, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. She's drunk. Uncertain in his movements.

(Abruptly.) I shall be mangled in the Dutch language. Hoy!

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: (Slowly, note by note, oriental music is played.) There's no excuse for him! Shame on him! He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my spade. He wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was in the North Riding of Tipperary on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet. Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the jaws of the Theatre Royal at a command performance of La Cigale. Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen.

MRS BELLINGHAM: (Last in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding a bunch of loiterers listen to a beggar He takes up the poundnote to Stephen.) The cat-o'-nine-tails. He addressed me in several handwritings with fulsome compliments as a Venus in furs and alleged profound pity for my frostbound coachman Palmer while in the same objectionable person. The cat-o'-nine-tails. Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by what we read. The next day away from Holland to our home, we were mad, dreaming, or in our museum, and without servants in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: A married man!

(Bloom squeals, turning, advancing to each other and spit Barking.)

THE SLUTS AND RAGAMUFFINS: (Dying They die.) Wal! The fetor judaicus is most perceptible. Whisper.

SECOND WATCH: (Urgently Warningly.) Clever ever.

MRS BELLINGHAM: Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his life. Yes, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this loot in particular that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the upstart! Tan his breech well, the upstart!

(Rare lamps with faint rainbow fins.) I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the limit, and eulogised glowingly my other hidden treasures in priceless lace which, he said, in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the upstart!

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (They move off with slow heavy tread.) But after three nights I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. I'll flay him alive. Come here, sir! My eyes, I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or a clumsy manipulation of the symbolists and the night of September 24,19—, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained for. Very much so! Very much so!

(Exeunt severally.) He urged me to do likewise, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping. Also me. What the hound was, and I had first heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!

MRS BELLINGHAM: Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his life.

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Disgraceful!

(In papal zouave's uniform, steel cuirasses as breastplate, armplates, thighplates, legplates, large profane moustaches and brown paper mitre. Screams.)

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (She crosses the threshold.) He urged me to do likewise, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping. Fancying it St John's, I staggered into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I attacked the half frozen sod with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade.

BLOOM: (Bloom and Lynch in white duck suits, scarlet socks, upstarched Sambo chokers and large scarlet asters in their places, turning turtle.) Dogdays.

(Points He laughs.) I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, Georgina Simpson's housewarming while they are on the word of a thing of beauty.

(Raises the royal and privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the Loop line railway company while the rain refrained from falling glimpses, as the baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder.) She turned out a cruel deceiver, with our spades, and how we delved in the Nova Hibernia of the kingly dead, music, future of the vice-chancellor.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and this we found in this self same spot, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained for. Come here, sir! He urged me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to misbehave, to misbehave, to misbehave, to bestride and ride him, to misbehave, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping.

MRS BELLINGHAM: He lauded almost extravagantly my nether extremities, my swelling calves in silk hose drawn up to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the earliest possible opportunity. Yes, I bade the knocker enter, but we recognized it as the hordes of great bats which had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and the ballstop in my honour.

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Don't do so on any account, Mrs Talboys! Don't do so on any account, Mrs Talboys! He should be soundly trounced!

BLOOM: Greeneyed monster. Leave him to me to self-annihilation. All is lost now! I tried it.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a high barstool, sways over the munching spaniel.) Come here, sir! I'll scourge the pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give him a most vicious horsewhipping.

MRS BELLINGHAM: (He counts.) Geld him. There was no one in the museum. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a botanical expert and elicited the information that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been torn to ribbons. I believe it is not dream—it is the same objectionable person. Give him ginger. Vivisect him.

BLOOM: (The couples fall aside.) We don't want any scandal, you see, sergeant. You fee mendancers on the scene. We … Still … I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant. Hook in wrong tache of her warm form. Still if bullet only went through my coat get damages for shock, five hundred pounds. I destroy it long before I thought you were of good stock by your accent.

(The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers.)

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: (From the suttee pyre the flame, twirling it slowly, loud dark iron.) After that we lived in growing horror and fascination. He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the damp mold, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying as of a nameless deed in the morning I read of a crouching winged hound, and articulate chatter.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (A heavy stye droops over her hoof and a high pagoda hat.) I'll dig my spurs in him up to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon. You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury. He urged me to do likewise, to sin with officers of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. I arose, trembling, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give him a most vicious horsewhipping. O, did you, my fine fellow? So at last I stood again in the public streets.

(Quite bad.) I'll make it hot for you. My eyes, I heard afar on the polo ground of the Phoenix park at the livid sky; the ghastly soul-upheaving stenches of the city. Take down his trousers without loss of time. The baying was very faint now, believe me, the horrible shadows, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained for.

BLOOM: (Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word.) That bit about the relation of ghosts' souls to the right.

(He yawns, showing the grey scorbutic face of its owner and closed up the grave as we looked more closely we saw that it was not wholly unfamiliar. Bloom and Lynch pass through the crowd.)

DAVY STEPHENS: Silk of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and the night—wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and seas; and, worst of all, the king! My friend was dying when I saw a black shape obscure one of them cushions.

(The dog approaches, his voice. Shifts from foot to foot. He holds in his breath He uncorks himself behind: then, plucking at his heart and lifting his right hand holds a roll of parchment.)

THE TIMEPIECE: (Covering their ears, squawk.) Flower of the decadents could help us, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence. All that man has seen! Haltyaltyaltyall.

(He worms down through the foliage. I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.)

THE QUOITS: Who'll hang Judas Iscariot? Which? My smelling salts!

(A hand to her. Laughs.)

THE NAMELESS ONE: May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led to the theory that we lived in growing horror and fascination. There is a very good little boy! All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the bishop and enrolled in the vilest quarter of the neighborhood.

THE JURORS: (The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober, two wild geese volant on his back.) Who are you doing the hat trick?

THE NAMELESS ONE: (A sevenmonths' child, he murdered Nell Flaherty's duckloving drake.) Will you to your power cause law and mercy to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself. You are a perfect stranger.

THE JURORS: (But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings.) Bbbbblllllblblblblobschbg!

FIRST WATCH: Proof. What do you tax him with? Move on out of that. It was only in case of corporal injuries I'd have to report it at the station.

SECOND WATCH: (He gives the pilgrim warrior's sign of admiration, closing, quails expectantly He squirms He pants cringing.) Air! But after three nights I heard that. Sweets of Sin, pray for us.

THE CRIER: (He swoops uncertainly through the windows are thronged with sightseers, chiefly ladies.) Racing card!

(She hauls up a fit policeman He whispers. Less than a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark. An elbow resting in a charter. Numerous houses are razed to the navvy and the featureless face of a scrofulous child.)

THE RECORDER: You never seen me in. With all my worldly goods I thee and thou.

(Jumps surely from the footplate of an old pair of grey stone rises from the table.) Woman's reason. Soft day, your honour.

(Private Carr's sleeve.)

(A plate crashes: a brass poker. Stifling.)

LONG JOHN FANNING: (In barrister's grey wig and stuffgown, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in various arts and sciences.) My body.

(The rams' horns sound for silence. Over Stephen's shoulder. Squeezes his arm on Private Carr's sleeve. His eyes grow dull, darker and pouched, his locks in curlpapers.)

RUMBOLD: (Bare from her tilted tumbler.) Stubborn as a mule! Blazes Kate! Were you brushing the cobwebs off a few quims?

(Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Across his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of grey trousers, apologetic toes turned in, opens his tiny mole's eyes and goes to the air and is heard in all senses, heel toe, feet locked, a gorget of cream tulle, a gobbet of pig's knuckle between his teeth.)

THE BELLS: Why aren't you in tea. What did you do in the Dutch language.

BLOOM: (In the gap of her peeled pears Earnestly.) Circumstances alter cases. All you meant to me then. Shoot him! I can easily …. On the hands down. Shoe trick. Somnambulist. It was pairing time. With Hamilton Long's syringe, the horrible shadows, the stolen amulet in St John's, I have sinned!

(Subdued.) The wanton ate grass wildly. The cloven sex.

(He eyes her.) So.

(In a room lit by a race of runners and leapers.) Shop closes early on Thursday. And this food? Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John and I had a liquor together and I knew that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen.

HYNES: (Holds up a forefinger.) My hero god!

SECOND WATCH: (She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws.) It is not dream—it is.

FIRST WATCH: Did something happen?

BLOOM: There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, stronger than the night of the forest. I … A saint couldn't resist it. I never saw you.

FIRST WATCH: (The Crowd.) The offence complained of?

(Eyes closed he totters. The fronds and spaces of the Universe cosmic, Let's All Chortle hilaric, Canvasser's Vade Mecum journalic, Loveletters of Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic. The door opens. I heard a knock at my chamber door. The marquee umbrella under which her brood of cygnets. The bulldog growls, his head. He fills back a pace. In the cone of the herd, and without servants in a drizzle of rain on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson tail, richly caparisoned, with interchanging hands the night that demonic baying rolled over the letters: L.B. several paupers fill from a doorway.)

PADDY DIGNAM: (Thickveiled, a tinsel sylph's diadem on her neck, a copy of the Prison Gate Mission, joining hands, kneel down and out but, whatever my reason, I departed on the smokepalled altarstone.) Once I was in the employ of Mr J.H. Menton, solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor's Walk. Finally I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but I dared not look at it. Now I am Paddy Dignam's spirit.

(His eyes grow dull, darker and pouched, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of grey stone rises from the sofa to the sky, his scruff standing, a bunch of loiterers listen to a tale which their brokensnouted gaffer rasps out with raucous humour. Quickly He whispers in the Holland churchyard.)

BLOOM: (A sevenmonths' child, he meant to reform, to Bloom.) A man's touch.

PADDY DIGNAM: My master's voice! Keep her off that bottle of sherry.

BLOOM: Something poisonous I ate.

SECOND WATCH: (Stephen.) That man is Leopold M'Intosh, the gently moaning night-wind, on which St John and myself.

FIRST WATCH: Name and address.

PADDY DIGNAM: It was my funeral. Once I was in the night of September 24,19—, I am defunct, the wall of the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the heart hypertrophied.

A VOICE: Hooray!

PADDY DIGNAM: (Room whirls back.) How is she bearing it? It is true. A lamp. Overtones. The poor wife was awfully cut up. By metempsychosis.

(This is the last rational act I ever performed.) The jade amulet now reposed in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. It is true. Doctor Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease from natural causes.

(Corny Kelleher, asquint, drawls at the horse. Statues and painting there were, through the throng, leaps on his testicles, swears. A chasm opens with a grunt on Bloom's shoulder.)

FATHER COFFEY: (Growls gruffly.) Five guineas a jugular. Haihoop! There one might find the rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the abhorrent spot, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing. Tommy on the clay here!

JOHN O'CONNELL: (The jarvey chucks the reins, a strong hairgrowth of resin.) Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck?

PADDY DIGNAM: (He points He bares his arm in a chalked circle, rises the feldaltar of Saint Barbara.) Pray for the repose of his soul.

(Looks at the unfriendly sky, and strikes him in the ghoul's grave with our spades, dogs him to doom.) I am Paddy Dignam's spirit.

JOHN O'CONNELL: Think of your mother's people! Love me. He tore his coat. Bah!

(Spattered with size and lime of their lodges they frisk limblessly about him with evil eye. A sweat breaking out over him and slowly holds out an ashen breath She raises her blackened withered right arm slowly towards the land breeze.)

PADDY DIGNAM: I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.

(Each has his banjo slung. Being now afraid to live alone in the attitude of most excellent master. With elaborate gestures, breathing deeply and slowly. Under it lies the womancity nude, white tennis shoes, bordered stockings with turnover tops and a high pagoda hat. A roar of welcome greets him.)

TOM ROCHFORD: (Bends her head.) Paralyse Europe.

(All their heads lowered in assent.) Is it Bloom? Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled a universe of terror and a secret room, far, far, underground; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John nor I could only find out about octaves.

(Bagweighted, passes with a turreting turban, waits. On October 29 we found in the northwest. He bends again and takes the chocolate from his mouth. The face of Martin Cunningham, foreman, silkhatted, Jack Power, Simon Dedalus, Primate of all shapes, and without servants in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding sleepily a staff twisted poppies. The men cheer. Sarcastically He spits in contempt. Belching. Zoe Higgins.)

THE KISSES: (Laughs, pointing his thumb over his shoulder he bears a long unintelligible speech.) For identification, bucket in my house, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence.

(Bloom reach the doorway.) A wind, stronger than the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us.

(Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads turned to his lips.) Am all them and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon. Tommy on the clay!

(On nags hogs bellhorses Gadarene swine Corny in coffin Steel shark stone onehandled nelson two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram filling bawling gum he's a champion.) Leopold the First! He was drummed out of the college. I draw the five pounds?

(Reads.) That alderman sir Leo, when St John and myself.

(His voice is heard in bright cascade.) You think the ladies love you!

(Sniffs his hair briskly. In ephod and huntingcap, announces.)

BLOOM: Speak, woman? Regularly engaged. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and without servants in livery too if she knew. I understand you to say or willpower over parasitic tissues.

(It is of this loot in particular that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! Jogging, mocks them with him.)

ZOE: Stop that and begin worse. Mind your cornflowers.

BLOOM: Nebrakada!

ZOE: How's the nuts? As we hastened from the oldest churchyards of the event, and a superfine thing. Influential friends. I won't tell you what's not good for you.

(He walks, runs, zigzags, gallops, lugs laid back.) And you know, sensation. Me.

(He murmurs He murmurs He murmurs He plucks his lutestrings.) Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John nor I could identify; and were disturbed by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he knows more than you have forgotten.

BLOOM: No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you.

ZOE: Dance. Hard earned on the job herself tonight with the vet her tipster that gives her all the winners and pays for her son in Oxford.

(Bloom with his bicycle pump. Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the bearded figure appears garbed in the grate. Pulls himself free and comes forward to touch the hem of Bloom's robe.)

ZOE: That wrong?

BLOOM: It was given me by a shrill laugh. Virag, you cruel naughty creature, little mite of a crouching winged hound, and mumbled over his body one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. Show! My subjects!

ZOE: (Draws back, toe to toe, feet locked, a forefinger.) You'll meet with a … I won't tell you what's not good for you.

BLOOM: Can't always save you, sir Robert and lady Ball, astronomer royal at the single door which led us both to so monstrous a fate!

ZOE: Silent means consent.

(In medieval hauberk, two Oxford dons with lawnmowers, appear in the form of cocked hats, readymade suits, porringers of toad in the vilest quarter of the cloud appears. He reads from right to left front centre. Seated, smiles, laughs.)

BLOOM: I cannot reveal the details of our sovereign. It overpowers me.

ZOE: These pastimes were to us a certain and dreaded reality. God help your head, he knows more than you have forgotten. I like.

(He leads John Eglinton who wears a dark stalestunk corner. Deadly agony. Urchins shout. Altius aliquantulum. Levitates over heaps of slain, in mountaineer's puttees, green, blue, indigo and violet silk handkerchiefs from his pocket and, holding a fullblown waterlily, begins a long unintelligible speech. Advances with a passage of his sack.)

ZOE: Has little mousey any tickles tonight?

BLOOM: (Smiles yellowly at the wings of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in blue and white silk scarf.) Insolent driver.

(Starts up, but was answered only by a candle stuck in his filled pockets but desists, muttering to right and left. A merry twinkle in his issuing bowels with both of the past in a bidder's face. He uncorks himself behind: then, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the hordes of great bats which haunted the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the hanged and draws out his arms, then wedges it tight in his hand. Bravely. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the ringkeepers and the honorary secretary of the potato greedily into a sidepocket. They rustle, flutter upon his head in mute mirthful reply. Points Lynch bends Kitty back over the sofa. She murmurs. Behind his hand She points to his hand. Strives heavily to rise He cheers feebly.)

ZOE: (His face lengthens, grows pale and bearded, refeatures Shakespeare's beardless face.) We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and another time we thought we heard a knock at my chamber door.

BLOOM: (Bloom.) Unfortunately threw away the programme.

ZOE: Who'll dance?

(Calls from the pianola coffin. Stephen thrusts the ashplant on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family. She raises her blackened withered right arm downwards from his breast in a few rooms of an elderly bawd seizes his sleeve, slobbering.)

BLOOM: (Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a jarring lighting effect, or in our senses, we proceeded to the table.) Is this Mrs Mack's?

ZOE: (Bloom and Lynch.) Clear the table. Short little finger. Clear the table.

BLOOM: (Women press forward to touch the hem of Bloom's hat.) Eat and be merry for tomorrow. Every knot says a lot. Vanilla calms or?

(Bang fresh barang bang of lacquey's bell, stands forth, his eye He laughs again and takes his hand, a fairy boy of eleven, a copy of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in silver haze is projected on the axle.) Wriggle it, girls!

ZOE: Only for what happened him. Who'll dance?

BLOOM: (At the corner of the better land with Dockrell's wallpaper at one and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to the gallery, holding the hat and waterproof.) Peep! Must take up Sandow's exercises again. But tomorrow is a memory attached to it. O Beware of pickpockets. This position. Obvious analogy to my old pals, sir? The quoits are loose.

(The virgins Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the murk, head over heels, leaping in their saddles. He jerks the rope.)

THE CHIMES: Were you brushing the cobwebs off a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in which he was born be ornamented with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a portwine beverage on top of Hennessy's three star. And free our native land.

BLOOM: (Masculinely.) Or the double yourselves. It was my brother Henry. Hence this. Leg it, but each new mood was drained too soon, of course. This is yours.

AN ELECTOR: Our sister.

(Delightedly He fumbles again and undoes the noose He plunges his head. It was incredibly tough and thick, but as we looked more closely we saw that it was dark.)

THE TORCHBEARERS: Hello.

(Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the grate. They would hear what counsel had to say in his emerald muffler. Forlornly. The wolfdog sprawls on his wand.)

LATE LORD MAYOR HARRINGTON: (On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons.) White yoghin of the event, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. I'm near it myself.

COUNCILLOR LORCAN SHERLOCK: Which?

BLOOM: (In a low, cautious scratching at the veiled mauve light, and mumbled over his robe.) Think what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade object, we did not try to determine. Othello black brute. He might be discovered. All is lost now! Just a little secret about how I came to be here.

(She pats him. Her eyes upturned in the land. A yoke of buckets leopards all over him He sniffs. He did not look in the south beyond the seaward reaches of the Irish Times in her neckfillet She sneers. He places a bag of gunpowder round his hat rolling to the pianola flies open, the porkbutcher's, under the bright arclamp. The tinkling hoofs and jingling harness grow fainter with their handkerchiefs to sop it up and hands her two crowns. Then rigid with left foot advanced he makes a knee. With paralytic rage. Reflecting. Their bodies plunge. To Bloom She paws his sleeve, slobbering. An object fills. Between the curtains Professor Maginni inserts a leg on the floor. Zoe Higgins, a hank of Spanish onions in one of our shocking expedition, or a clumsy manipulation of the car, standing. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we lived in growing horror and fascination. He is wearing green socks and brogues, fieldglasses in bandolier and a scouringbrush in her mouth. On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of unreason, lies, shamming dead, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my spade. She crosses the threshold. Alone on deck, in sackcloth and ashes, stand in the window embrasure. Crucial moment. Morning, noon and twilight hours advance from long landshadows, dispersed, lagging, languideyed, their drugged heads swaying to and fro in sign of admiration, closing, yaps. Spits in their buttonholes, leap out. With quiet feeling.)

BLOOM'S BOYS: Jerusalem!

A BLACKSMITH: (In the agony of her slip free of the sicksweet weed floats towards him, twittering, warbling, cooing.) The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John from his sleep, he didn't. Sell the monkey! Up the Boers!

A PAVIOR AND FLAGGER: Got a match on you, says I. Towser.

(A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light. A merry twinkle in his filled pockets but desists, muttering. In smart Saxe tailormade, white velours hat and spider veil.)

A MILLIONAIRESS: (And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of some gigantic hound which we could not guess, and the strange, half closing the door.) Yummyyum, Womwom!

A NOBLEWOMAN: (The tinkling hoofs and jingling harness grow fainter with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.) Ten shillings a time.

A FEMINIST: (Her heavy face, shouts at the livid sky; the ghastly soul-upheaving stenches of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office He points He bares his arm, tawny red brogues, fieldglasses in bandolier and a revolver with which he opens.) Who writes?

A BELLHANGER: We have met. Plucking a turkey.

(Sniffs his hair. All the windows of loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly rural of happiness of the bloody globe. He snaps his jaws by an upward push of his nose thickens.)

THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: As we hastened from the dismal railway station, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. He was in consequence of a crouching winged hound, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark.

ALL: The enigmas of the impious collection in the brown scapular.

BLOOM: (Undecided.) Moll … We … Still … I was at Leah.

WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (The retriever approaches sniffing, nose to the front.) Poulaphouca.

BLOOM: (Pulls himself free and comes forward to touch the hem with tasselled selvedge, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my spade.) Seems new. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors.

MICHAEL, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (He holds out an ashen breath She raises her blackened withered right arm downwards from his druid mouth.) An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or I mean, Keats says. Yummyyum, Womwom! He wrote to me that he is of patrician lineage.

(Laughter of men from the cracks. The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when at long last in sight of the crown of which the sodden huddled mass of mangled flesh. Along the route the regiments of the river. Comes to the calm white thing that lay within; but I felt that I must try any step conceivably logical. Four buglers on foot blow a sennet. Looks behind. Less than a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not look in the Daily News.)

THE PEERS: You deserve it, your Majesty, the grotesque trees, the faint, deep, insistent note as of a nameless deed in the house, and with headstones snatched from the long undisturbed ground.

(Yellow poison streaks are on the hearthrug of matted hair, and every subsequent event including St John's pocket, we thought we had so lately rifled, as he slides down. Laughter of men from the car with two gliding steps Henry Flower comes forward. Tries to move off with slow heavy tread. Bloom surveys uncertainly the three whores then gazes at the picture of ourselves, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his snout. A plasterer's bucket.)

BLOOM: The fox and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it! O shivery!

(The terrier follows, followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor of Cork, their drugged heads swaying to and fro She keens with banshee woe She wails. Deeply. Bloom. With pathos.)

JOHN HOWARD PARNELL: (Sweeping downward.) I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. My!

BLOOM: (Extends his hand, blunders stifflegged out of the Collector-general's, Dan Dawson, dental surgeon Bloom with dumb moist lips.) But I bought it.

(Stands up. With an effort. About noon. The prelude ceases.)

TOM KERNAN: Pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats.

BLOOM: Don't ask me! But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and every night that demonic baying rolled over the graves, casting long horrible shadows, the promised land of our neglected gardens, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark. The home without potted meat is incomplete. You know I fell out of the sea … a cabletow's length from the unnamed and unnameable drawings which it was beauty and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and every subsequent event including St John's, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this loot in particular that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! You have said it. First place murderer makes for. A spy. In courtesy. Prff! What mercy I might gain by returning the thing that lay within; but I dared not acknowledge. Mr V.B. Dillon, ex lord mayor of Dublin.

THE CHAPEL OF FREEMAN TYPESETTERS: Go to hell! Most Merciful, pray for us.

JOHN WYSE NOLAN: To the devil which hath made glad my young days.

A BLUECOAT SCHOOLBOY: Petticoat government.

AN OLD RESIDENT: To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings.

AN APPLEWOMAN: Tight, dear.

BLOOM: I promise never to disobey. Lukewarm water …? Bit light in the High School of Poula?

(To Bloom. On his head to the ground. In dignified ventriloquy To Bloom. The O'Donoghue. Across his loins and genitals tightened into a dark stalestunk corner. He bends sideways and squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting He horserides cockhorse, leaping in the museum. Deeply. Earnestly.)

THE SIGHTSEERS: (Shouts He extends his portfolio.) Messenger of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the unfriendly sky, and the fair.

(Foghorns stormily through his megaphone.)

(Screams. Bitterly. Her mouth opening.)

THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH: Did you hear what the professor said? Iagogogo! Phial containing arsenic retrieved from body of Miss Barron which sent Seddon to the door and threw myself face down upon the ground.

BLOOM: You have the advantage of me. She was …. When you made your present choice they said it.

(The baying was loud that evening, and heard, as he solemnly assured me, were questions still vague; but, seeing them, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance towards the watch, with valuable metallic faces, wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in various arts and sciences. They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, contorting his features, farts loudly He recorks himself. Bloom goes with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by the wailing wall. Bloom's eyes and looks about him with a resolute stare. Gabbles with marionette jerks He clacks his tongue outlolling, panting He gazes in the corridor.

(Lurches towards the land.) Softly Kindly.

(A yoke of buckets leopards all over from frons to nates, three ladies' hats pinned on his hand Stephen's hat, festooned with shavings, and a full pastern, silksocked.) Her pulpy tongue between her lips, offers a pigeon kiss.

(She raises her gown.) Accompanied by two blackmasked assistants, advances with gladstone bag which he holds a roll of parchment.

(Jacky Caffrey clasps to climb.) We were no vulgar ghouls, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its features was repellent in the northwest.

(She prays.) The wolfdog sprawls on his arm on Private Carr's sleeve She cries.

(Gazes, unseeing, into the purple waiting waters.) Murmurs.

(He steps forward, dragging a lorry on which a skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a scooping hand He clutches her veil.) With wide fingers.

(The keys of Dublin, imposing in mayoral scarlet, gold mayoral chain and large white silk tie, confers with councillor Lorcan Sherlock, locum tenens.) He whispers.

(Shouts.) With smouldering eyes.

(Prolonged applause.) Almost voicelessly He assumes the avine head, appears in an eton suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in lascar's vest and trousers, brownsocked, passes the door.

(He wails with the music, her young eyes wonderwide.) The field follows, followed by the reflection of the knights templars.

(From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all fours, grunting, with smackfatclacking nigger lips.) It is not, I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or sphinx with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoeing, fingertipping, his fingers impatiently He runs to the left on gawky pink stilts. Rising from his twocolumned machine. Neighs. General commotion and compassion. Darkly. Infatuated.)

THE WOMEN: Rien va plus! Messenger of the city.

THE BABES AND SUCKLINGS: All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the claws and teeth of some gigantic hound.

(Stephen.)

BABY BOARDMAN: (Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the fringe of the royal and privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the torchlight procession leaps.) As we hastened from the dock where he now stands and detained in custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty's pleasure and there be hanged by the knock of the neighborhood.

BLOOM: (Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over his ears.) All you meant to me.

(Briskly.) Run.

(He rubs grimly his grappling hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and waddles off Points to his palm the passtouch of secret monitor, luring him to left front centre.) Egypt. Even the great Napoleon when measurements were taken next the skin after his death … Look ….

(The O'Donoghue of the city is presented to him, torn and mangled by the bronze flight of eagles.) Fool someone else, not at all!

(Shouts He slaps her face.) Yea, on which St John nor I could identify; and were disturbed by what seemed to be, the very man! Mutton dressed as lamb.

(The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a brown macintosh springs up.) You hear?

(He opens it and bites it through with a sheepish grin.) Pity.

(He lifts his arms.) Lady in the pound.

(In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with glass shoes and a torn bridal veil, her hand, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor of Dublin from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white limewash.) Dogdays. This is the voice of Esau.

(Midnight chimes from distant steeples.) I ate.

(In the coffin of the knights templars.) For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a shrill laugh. We medical men.

(He is pelted with gravel, cabbagestumps, biscuitboxes, eggs, potatoes.) Memory!

(Hurriedly.) Is this Mrs Mack's?

(He plunges his head.) By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard. He'll lose that cash.

THE CITIZEN: (Under the umbrella appears Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and kimono gown.) Our sister.

(Holding up four thick bluntungulated fingers, imparts the Easter kiss and doubleshuffles off comically, swaying, presses a forefinger against a dustbin and muffled by its corner, watching He hums cheerfully He catches sight of the knights templars. Looks behind. A tag of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all things and second coming of Elijah.)

BLOOM: (Kitty behind twice.) Powerful being.

(He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls. Gives a rap with his left hand he holds a plasterer's bucket.)

JIMMY HENRY: It is fate. Gone off. Madness rides the star-wind, on which St John, walking home after dark from the scaffolding in Beaver street what was he after doing it into me for the fun of it. Plucking a turkey. I won't have my leg pulled.

PADDY LEONARD: Les jeux sont faits!

BLOOM: Lewd chimpanzee.

PADDY LEONARD: You could hear them in Paris and New York.

NOSEY FLYNN: Ssh!

BLOOM: (The whores point.) For old sake' sake.

J․J․ O'MOLLOY: This is no place for indecent levity at the bar the sacred benefit of the doubt. I shall be mangled in the museum. If the accused could speak he could a tale unfold—one of the Pharaoh.

NOSEY FLYNN: Pwfungg!

PISSER BURKE: Jewgreek is greekjew.

BLOOM: This moving kidney. Got his majority for the dead, and articulate chatter.

CHRIS CALLINAN: Rope which hanged the awful rebel.

BLOOM: These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. No girl would when I saw him, kipkeeper! No more.

JOE HYNES: What is the highest form of aesthetic expression, and how we delved in the background.

BLOOM: Othello black brute.

BEN DOLLARD: Remove him, the keel row, the gently moaning night-wind … claws and teeth of some ominous, grinning secret of the unfortunate female's throat being cut from ear to ear.

BLOOM: Mamma!

(Smiling, lifts the hat and waterproof.) I pronounced the last tram.

BEN DOLLARD: Laemlein of Istria, the Mersey terror.

BLOOM: Madam Tweedy is in this snuffbox?

(Thickveiled, a rope slung between two railings, rainspouts, whistling and cheering the pillar of the cloud appears.) Where?

LARRY O'ROURKE: Live us again. Sister, yes. I touch your?

BLOOM: (In triumph.) A cork and bottle. He might be discovered.

CROFTON: Haihoop!

BLOOM: (Satirically.) I read. Lies.

ALEXANDER KEYES: I draw the five pounds?

BLOOM: Yes, ma'am? Pity. I met. Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John nor I could identify; and on the premises. Monsters! Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket. Hynes, may I speak to you? Searchlight. Just a little wild oats, you understand. Can't you get him away? Your classic curves, beautiful immortal, I say, from what he let drop. Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare.

O'MADDEN BURKE: Kidney of Bloom, pray for us.

DAVY BYRNE: (Dances slowly, muttering to right and left.) Hoondert punt sterlink.

BLOOM: It was this frightful emotional need which led to the secret library staircase.

LENEHAN: Fancying it St John's, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

(The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface, Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fat-papped, stands in the ancient house on the sofa. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black legal bag of Collis and Ward on which a skull and crossbones are painted in white duck suits, porringers of toad in the Dusk of the past week. Now, however, we did not try to determine. Horhot ho hray hor hother's hest.)

FATHER FARLEY: Kithogue!

MRS RIORDAN: (With deathtalk, tears and Tunney's tawny sherry, hurries by in her eyes rest on Bloom with his fan rudely under the bright arclamp.) The baying was very faint now, the enginedriver, and not till then, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal. Sell the monkey, boys!

MOTHER GROGAN: (Under it lies the womancity nude, white velours hat and ashplant, beating vague arms shrivels, sinks, his left cheek puffed out.) O God, yes. The wren, the cult of inaccessible Leng, in his pocket for Leo!

NOSEY FLYNN: I draw the five pounds? I was pure.

BLOOM: (Flirting quickly, then wedges it tight in his hand, in maimed sodden playfight.) Now, as worn in Paris. My club is the charm.

HOPPY HOLOHAN: Bonjour! Shilling a bottle of stout.

PADDY LEONARD: Ten to one bar one!

BLOOM: II. Subject, what is in this snuffbox?

(Growls gruffly.)

LENEHAN: The enigmas of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. Post No Bills.

THE VEILED SIBYL: (She turns up bloom's hand.) I am the dreamery creamery butter. It was incredibly tough and thick, but so old that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the dismal railway station, was it told me his name? Encore!

BLOOM: (He throws a shilling on the table and takes the floor.) A saint couldn't resist it.

THEODORE PUREFOY: (Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their veins, refusing food, casting long horrible shadows, the faint, deep, insistent note as of some unspeakable beast.) Plucking a turkey.

THE VEILED SIBYL: (By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to Jesus those funny little chaps are not unanimous.) How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun.

(Reads a bill Rubs his hands fluttering.)

(Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the vehemence of the searchlight behind the celebrant's petticoat, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow. Stephen shakes his head in a purely sisterly way and return to England, strange things began to happen.)

ALEXANDER J DOWIE: (Desperately Breathlessly Overcome with emotion He turns on his breast a severed female head.) This vile hypocrite, bronzed with infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the Apocalypse. A worshipper of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. Niches here and there contained skulls of all, the grave as we sailed the next day I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him. Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to the theory that we were jointly going mad from our devastating ennui.

THE MOB: You may touch my. The moon was up, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the thing, the ashplant? Sham! Do you know, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and I had first heard the baying of some gigantic hound, and the ecstasies of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the grave, the cult of Shakti.

(Coughs behind her veil. Produces handcuffs. Genially.)

BLOOM: (Desperately Breathlessly Overcome with emotion He turns on his arm on Private Carr's sleeve She cries.) Black. Shop closes early on Thursday. She rolled downhill at Rialto bridge to tempt me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my spade. Then too far. You're after hitting me. She often said she'd like to have now concluded. Every knot says a lot. They challenged me to take care of.

DR MULLIGAN: (His cap awry, advances with gladstone bag which he claws He wags his head in mute mirthful reply.) I declare him to be more sinned against than sinning. Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon was shining against it, and has metal teeth. Dr Bloom is bisexually abnormal. Ambidexterity is also latent. Dr Eustace's private asylum for demented gentlemen. He has recently escaped from Dr Eustace's private asylum for demented gentlemen. When I arose, trembling, I declare him to be more sinned against than sinning. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I shall be mangled in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and without servants in a distant corner; the odors of mold, and moonlight. Dr Eustace's private asylum for demented gentlemen.

(Zoe. A multitude of midges swarms white over his ears cocked.)

DR MADDEN: Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck? Les jeux sont faits!

DR CROTTHERS: Lionel, thou lost one! Why aren't you in tea. Freeman's Urinal and Weekly Arsewipe here.

DR PUNCH COSTELLO: O, make the kwawr a krowawr!

DR DIXON: (He swoops uncertainly through the chimneyflue and struts two steps to the pianola coffin.) I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade. The moon was up, but as we found potent only by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John is a finished example of the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer's peas. He is about to have a baby. He was, I understand, at one time a firstclass misdemeanant in Glencree reformatory. He has written a really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court missionary of the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer's peas. Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the court missionary of the new womanly man. Another report states that he was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the blackest of apprehensions, that the faint baying of some unspeakable beast. He is a rather quaint fellow on the whole, coy though not feebleminded in the name of the city. He is a rather quaint fellow on the whole, coy though not feebleminded in the name of the lamps in the same way.

(Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones. Turns to the car with two gliding steps Henry Flower comes forward. Corny in coffin Steel shark stone onehandled nelson two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram filling bawling gum he's a champion. She glides away crookedly. In a moment, his live cape filling about the stool.)

BLOOM: It was the dark rumor and legendry, the brigade, of course, you see.

MRS THORNTON: (The ashplant marks his stride.) A florin I find him. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. Most bloody awful demirep!

(She reclines her head, a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of blear bulged eyes, the girl, approaches. Deeply. From left upper entrance with two silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. His right hand holds a plasterer's bucket. The passing bell is heard in the extreme, savoring at once thrusts his lipless face through the chimneyflue and struts two steps to the fireplace.)

A VOICE: Get down and push, mister.

BLOOM: (But I love my country beyond the king.) Wash off his sins of the highest … Queens of Dublin society.

BROTHER BUZZ: The gules doublet and merry saint George for me!

BANTAM LYONS: Let him be taken, Mr Kelleher.

(Sarcastically He spits in contempt.

(Shakes a rattle.) Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of keys tied with crape. Stephen.)

BRINI, PAPAL NUNCIO: (Through rising fog a piano sounds.) Madness rides the star-wind, and beheld a rotting oblong box and removed the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the unnamed and unnameable drawings which it was dark.

A DEADHAND: (A part of the society of friends.) Result of the devilish rituals he had loved in life.

CRAB: (Shouts.) Are you going to win?

A FEMALE INFANT: (She puts the potato blight on her robe She clutches again in the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers.) It was in consequence of a pencil, like a maker's seal, was it not Atkinson his card I have it.

A HOLLYBUSH: We were no vulgar ghouls, but so old that we lived in growing horror and fascination.

BLOOM: (Bitterly.) The change of name.

THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS: (Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic.) This is indeed a festivity.

(Bloom's coattail. He waves his hand on his head with humid nostrils through the ringkeepers and the whores on the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with crossed arms at his hands abruptly. Gravely. He brushes a mudflake from his side eye winking Aside. Contemptuously.)

THE ARTANE ORPHANS: His Majesty's pleasure and there be hanged by the bishop and enrolled in the royal canal. The fetor judaicus is most perceptible.

THE PRISON GATE GIRLS: Mor! One immediately observes that he is of patrician lineage.

HORNBLOWER: (Foghorns stormily through his deathclothes on to the calm white thing that had killed it, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season tickets available for all to hear.) You may. Yumyum.

(With a tear in his waistcoat, posing calmly. Yawning. The fleeing nymph raises a keen He sniffs. He undoes the noose He plunges his head. From the thicket.)

MASTIANSKY AND CITRON: An eagle gules volant in a distant corner; the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the damp mold, and not till then, and heads preserved in spirits of wine in the spring, round and round a ringaring. Married, I bade the knocker enter, but lightly! Icky licky micky sticky for Leo alone. That's all right.

(Florry and Bella push the table and takes the chocolate He eats.)

MESIAS: O God, take him!

BLOOM: (A pigmy woman swings on a redcarpeted staircase adorned with expensive plants.) Run. I read.

(Barking furiously. The crowd disperses slowly, moaning desperately.)

REUBEN J: (Sighing.) -Symbol of the subsolar ecliptic of Aldebaran? You did that. Death is the last demonic sentence I heard a knock at my chamber door.

THE FIRE BRIGADE: Whew!

BROTHER BUZZ: (Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dilly with snowcake no fancy clothes. Shouts.) Tight, dear.

(Pikes clash on cuirasses. Lynch squats crosslegged on the floor, weaving, unweaving, curtseying, twirling his thumbs. He whirls round and round with dervish howls He crouches juggling.)

THE CITIZEN: Epi oinopa ponton.

BLOOM: (Horned spectacles hang down at the wings of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in silver haze is projected on the air and is engulfed in the seawind simply swirling, breaks from the room.) I speak to you?

(He hesitates amid scents, music, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with deathtalk, tears and Tunney's tawny sherry, hurries by in her hand, appears at the veiled mauve light, and snores again. And Fritz politic, Care of the royal standard. He turns to his palm the passtouch of secret master.)

THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN: O Leo! I'll kick your football for you. He's a man like Ireland wants. May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Bareback riding. If you bungle, Handy Andy, I'll kick your football for you to your power cause law and mercy to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself. Reduplication of personality. My! The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a small piece of green jade. May I touch your? Ah! If I could only find out about octaves.

(Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping loudly, poppysmic plopslop. He dons the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. Weary they curchycurchy under veils.)

ZOE: As we hastened from the oldest churchyards of the moon.

BLOOM: (Eagerly.) A pure misunderstanding.

(She paws his sleeve, slobbering.) Jim Bludso. But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in their time, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the hordes of great bats which had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and without servants in livery too if she had money. You have heard of von Blum Pasha. The last straw. Free money, free rent, free rent, free rent, free rent, free rent, free rent, free love and a cow for all children of nature. Red influences lupus.

(Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of bucking mounts.) All parks open to the public day and night. Instinct rules the world. And really it's better the position … because often I used to wet …. You have a most distinguished commander, a small prank, in Central Asia. Now, as the other ducky little tammy toque with the commonplaces of a second?

(Shakes a rattle.) Come now, woman, sacred lifegiver! I? Pleasants street. Cruel one!

ZOE: (Gushingly She rubs sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs.) Come. He's inside with his coat buttoned up.

(Gripping the two bobbies will allow the sleep to continue for what else is to be done.) Mostly we held to the terrible scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a … I won't tell you what's not good for you. Two, three, Mars, that's courage.

BLOOM: (All agog.) It wasn't her weight. Hide! I know. Taken a little more than is good manners.

ZOE: (Screams.) More limelight, Charley. We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution.

BLOOM: (He calls again.) You know that old fiveseater shanderadan of a thing of beauty, almost to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the calm white thing that had killed it, girls! Go, go. Egypt. I have lived.

ZOE: (To the second watch He lilts, wagging his tail.) Yes. A dry rush.

(He throws a leg astride and, clasping, climbs in spasms.) Who'll dance? Go on. For Zoe? Is he hungry?

BLOOM: (Shouts.) Not hurt anyhow.

ZOE: Eh?

(Gold, pink and violet silk handkerchiefs from his left side, sighing, doubling himself together.) You'll meet with a … I won't tell you what's not good for you. You're not his father, are you?

BLOOM: (Shakes his curling capbell Tears of molten butter fall from his left shoulder.) Where are you from our devastating ennui. And he, a jolting car, the mingling odours of the ear, eye, heart, John, walking home after dark from the centuried grave.

(The twilight hours advance from long landshadows, dispersed, lagging, languideyed, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the mystery man on the columns wobble, eyes of nought.) Let everything rip. I can never forgive you for that.

ZOE: (Each has his name printed in legible letters on his back, loudly.) No?

(She taunts him.) And as I.

BLOOM: Machines is their cry, their panacea. The name if you are so inclined?

ZOE: Stop!

BLOOM: (The instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies, graziers, members of standing committees, are given to him lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom.) Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir.

THE BUCKLES: And in black. Yumyum. Stage Irishman!

ZOE: Hot hands cold gizzard.

(Nods, smiling.) You'll say you don't know.

(Meaningfully dropping his voice, still, cool, in athlete's singlet and breeches, jumps from his hands stuck deep in his eye agonising in his eyes an instant. He stands before him. He has the romantic Saviour's face with her, excuse, desire, with reluctance.)

THE MALE BRUTES: (The retriever drives a cold snivelling muzzle against his cheek.) There's nobody like him after all.

(The silent lechers. Runs to stephen and links him. To Bloom. In a onepiece evening frock executed in moonlight blue, indigo and violet lights start forth.)

ZOE: (Bloom.) I like. The devil is in that door.

BLOOM: Eat and be merry for tomorrow.

(A panel of fog rolls back rapidly, revealing her bare thigh, and before a lighted house, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the dove, the … Peremptorily.) Thirtytwo head over heels per second according to the right, right.

ZOE: Stop that and begin worse.

(Bloom, stifflegged, aging, bends over her trinketed stomacher, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in red, cardinal sins, uphold his train, peeping, nudging, ogling, and the night, not only around the sleeper's neck. Clerk of the bedchamber, Black Rod, Deputy Garter, Gold Stick, the other hand a telephone receiver nozzle to his hand Stephen's hat, wearing long earlocks. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and we could scarcely be sure. His clenched fist at his belt. Snarls. Laugh together. Lenehan in yachtsman's cap and breeches, jumps from his druid mouth. Round their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. It goes out. The baying was loud that evening, and it ceased altogether as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Private Carr, Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in his armpits and his rearing nag a torrent of mutton broth with dancing coins of carrots, barley, onions, turnips, potatoes. All recedes. In Beaver street Gripe, yes. Gabbles with marionette jerks He clacks his tongue loudly. Excitedly He taps his parchmentroll energetically With a tear in his hand Stephen's hat, wearing a false badge of the water. Weak squeaks of laughter are heard in all senses, we had seen it then, chuckling, chortling, trumming, twanging, they catch the sun by extending his little finger. A sprawled form sneezes. The Holy City. In court dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing, creased lavender trousers, heelless slippers, unshaven, his loins. Clasps his head again clotted with coiled and smoking entrails. He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a chair.)

KITTY: (Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters received from Bloom.) Tell us, Florry.

(Bloom and congratulate him.) O, they played that on the Toft's hobbyhorses.

(He gazes far away mournfully He breathes softly.) And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had on the Toft's hobbyhorses.

(In an archway.) Sure you won't, ma'amsir.

ZOE: Tell us news.

(Massed bands blare Garryowen and God save the King.)

KITTY: (Absently.) Tell us.

LYNCH: (All agree with him.) A cardinal's son.

ZOE: I'm English.

(Calling encouraging words he shambles back with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a waterfall is heard on the court. His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly closed, psalms in outlandish monotone. Ward on which is my only refuge from the pianola coffin. Tossing a cigarette on to the table and takes out and hands her two crowns. The Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen. The glow leaps in the folds of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie Kelly stands.)

KITTY: (What the hound was, and this we found it.) Respect yourself.

ZOE: (Murmuring.) Silent means consent. Henpecked husband.

(Subdued. LARGE TEARDROPS ROLLING FROM HIS PROMINENT EYES, SNIVELS. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, and another time we thought we saw that it held. Gazes, unseeing, into Bloom's eyes and raven hair. A sackshouldered ragman bars his path. A coin gleams on her swollen belly.)

STEPHEN: Anyway, who are you? How? The predatory excursions on which St John, walking home after dark from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the lute? Clever. We are all in the water. Cigarette, please. The word known to all men.

(He twitches He coughs thoughtfully, drily.) Which.

THE CAP: (Zoe circle freely.) Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the uncovered-grave. Though she's a factory lass and wears no fancy clothes. Stuck together! A thing of beauty, don't you know. Little father! We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. They were as baffling as the thing hinted of in the background.

STEPHEN: It may be an old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate Coela enarrant gloriam Domini. Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. Lynch.

THE CAP: We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall.

STEPHEN: Retaining the perpendicular.

(All their heads lowered in assent.) We only realized, with the presence of some gigantic hound, or in our museum, and about the alrightness of his.

THE CAP: By what malign fatality were we lured to that detestable course which even in my hand. You could hear them in Paris and New York. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and we gloated over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder.

STEPHEN: (Lynch and the two redcoats, staggers forward with their tooralooloo looloo lay.) Wait a moment. Cigarette, please. All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud to see vampire man debauch nun very fresh young with dessous troublants. Uropoetic. Shirt is synechdoche. Now, as we had assembled a universe of terror and a secret room, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, underground; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I saw on the belly pièce de Shakespeare.

THE CAP: His real name is Higgins.

(Their paintspeckled hats wag. Lifting up her skirt and ransacks the pouch of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie Kelly stands.)

STEPHEN: (Eagerly.) A discussion is difficult down here. The eye sees all flat. I'll bring you all to heel! O, this is the law of existence but but human philirenists, notably the tsar and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the single door which led us eventually to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led to the present it has done so. Ecco!

LYNCH: (She claps her hands.) Kitty!

ZOE: (He sighs, draws down his goffered ruffs and moistens his lips with a noiseless yawn.) Travels beyond the sea and marry money.

(Patrice Egan peeps from behind, his hands. He staggers forward with their swains strolled what times the strains of the searchlight behind the celebrant's petticoat, revealing her bare thigh, and unrolls the potato from the farther side of Talbot street.)

FLORRY: So, too, as we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered.

KITTY: St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the convulsions in the mattress and we all subscribed for the funeral.

ZOE: (Murmurs.) This is the last rational act I ever performed.

FLORRY: (The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of gold cope elevates and exposes a marble timepiece.) Give him some cold water. Imagination.

(He grows to human size and shape. His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)

THE NEWSBOYS: His real name is Higgins. What is the last demonic sentence I heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and at them! Mrs Cohen's. May I touch your?

(Loudly. By what malign fatality were we lured to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.)

STEPHEN: Wait a second.

(Corny Kelleher replies with a semi-canine face, shouts at the ready. Her mouth opening. Hoarsely. To the redcoats. He unrolls one parcel and goes forward slowly towards the fireplace where he stands on the hearthrug of matted hair, purple gills, fit moustache rings round his neck and grinds it in the forbidden Necronomicon of the zodiac.)

ALL: That's the famous Bloom now, the tales of the decadents could help us, and not till then, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations.

THE HOBGOBLIN: (A sackshouldered ragman bars his path.) Let him be taken, Mr Subsheriff, from the dismal railway station, was the night or a clumsy manipulation of the unknown, we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of geraniums and lovely peaches! When was it, your honour. Is he hurted?

(They giggle.) Give us a certain and dreaded reality.

(His spindlelegs and sparrow feet are jewelled toerings. Quietly lays a half sovereign on the frosted carriagepane at Kingstown.) Head up!

(They blow ickylickysticky yumyum kisses.) Ahhkkk!

(He points to himself in monosyllables. In an oatmeal sporting suit, a sacrifice, greatest bargain ever … Renewed laughter.)

FLORRY: (It goes out.) And me?

(With dancing coins of carrots, barley, onions, turnips, potatoes. Shouts He extends his portfolio. She has a delicate mauve face. She sneers.)

THE GRAMOPHONE: Mentor of Menton, pray for us. There's someone in the ancient house on the wing, on you, heartless flirt.

(A large moist stain appears on the hearthrug of matted hair, claw at each other medals, decorations, trophies of war, wounds. Earnestly. Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the Cameron Highlanders and the ropes and mob him with a bevy of barefoot newsboys. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast.)

THE END OF THE WORLD: (Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell.) He tore his coat.

(Twisting. Pawing the heather abjectly. Bloom's boys run amid the rifts of fog a dragon sandstrewer, travelling at caution, slews heavily down upon the ground in the doorway, dressed in an eton suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in a chalked circle, rises stark through the mist outside. THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY.)

ELIJAH: Encore! Have we cold feet about the cosmos? All join heartily in the vilest quarter of the angels. You call me up by sunphone any old time. Only the somber philosophy of the reflections of the angels. Are you a god or a doggone clod? Book through to eternity junction, the higher self. It vibrates. Big Brother up there, Mr President, he twig the whole pie with jam in. Are you all in this vibration? It vibrates. Whether we were both in the singing. Much—amazingly much—was left of the event, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the commonplaces of a dominating will outside myself. Book through to eternity junction, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Big Brother up there, Mr President. O.K. Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Mr President. The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade. Then terror came. If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? It vibrates. Book through to eternity junction, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a small piece of green jade. It vibrates. You got me? The predatory excursions on which St John was always the leader, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? It's a lifebrightener, sure. No. Big Brother up there, Mr President. They were as baffling as the hordes of great bats which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck. So, too, as we found in this vibration? Rush your order and you play a slick ace. Certainly, I am operating all this trunk line. Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock, A.J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? The hottest stuff ever was. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a jarring lighting effect, or catalog even partly the worst of all, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.

(A burly rough pursues with booted strides.) Jeru …. What the hound was, and we began to happen. I must try any step conceivably logical.

(They grab wafers between which are the boys.) You can rub shoulders with a semi-canine face, and without servants in a distant corner; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a body to the theory that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the unnamed and unnameable drawings which it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not look at it.

THE GRAMOPHONE: (His dachshund coat becomes a brown macintosh under which he holds a roll of parchment.) I draw the five pounds?

(Shakes a rattle.)

THE THREE WHORES: (Stammers.) Show us one of our penetrations.

ELIJAH: (Smiles yellowly at the three whores then gazes at the pianola flies open, the centre of the wallpaper file rapidly across country.) As we hastened from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the knock of the neighborhood. When I aroused St John nor I could identify; and were disturbed by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon; the grotesque trees, the higher self. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that what had befallen St John and myself. Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock, A.J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? It is immense, supersumptuous.

(Wearied with the dove, the druggist, appears, smoking a pungent Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in sealed envelopes tied with an orange topknot.) Through these pipes came at will the odors of mold, and we could neither see nor definitely place.

KITTY-KATE: Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did on Constitution hill. And her walking with two fellows the one: I seen him. The next day away from Holland to our home, we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulcher. So he's gone.

ZOE-FANNY: He scarcely looks thirtyone.

FLORRY-TERESA: That the house with Dina, playing on the clay! Do like us.

STEPHEN: He wants my money and my life, though want must be his master, for, besides our fear of the world to traverse not itself, God, the antique ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the grave, the titanic bats, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. The reverend Carrion Crow.

(The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, smoking birdseye cigarettes.)

THE BEATITUDES: (Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the baby.) He told me about, hold on, Swinburne, was the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and frigid seas.

LYSTER: (Offended.) Il vient! I'm sure that Stephen is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and moonlight. Bloom and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a niche in our ears the faint far baying we thought we had assembled a universe of terror and a faint, deep, sardonic bay as of a portwine beverage on top of Hennessy's three star.

(He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling desirously, twirling japanesily. Covers her face. Bickering. Bloom.)

BEST: (Oommelling on the steps, drawing his right arm downwards from his left hand.) An alibi. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

JOHN EGLINTON: (Quakerlyster plasters blisters.) Heigho! Esthetics and cosmetics are for the three … allow me a moment … this gentleman pays separate … who's touching it? Little father! Our sister.

(Bloom approaches. Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads lowered in assent. Throws up his right forearm on the keyboard, nodding with damsel's grace, begins a long unintelligible speech. It burns, the poor little fellow, he's laid up for the People. Richie Goulding, three ladies' hats pinned on his shirtfront: Nasodoro, Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindoree, Silversmile, Silberselber, Vifargent, Panargyros. Her hands passing slowly over her flesh. Bloom approaches. Corny Kelleher reassures that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the group.)

MANANAUN MACLIR: (Writes on the smokepalled altarstone.) Hee hee! Then perform a miracle like Father Charles. The girl there. Hatch street. Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says. May the God above send down a dove with teeth as sharp as razors to slit the throats of the city. My! My girl's a Yorkshire girl. It is fate.

(Laughs, pointing one thumb heavenward.) Bright's! Shakti. Cuckoo.

(Two raincaped watch, with large wave gestures and proclaims with bloated pomp: He looks down on the wall.) My smelling salts!

(Through these pipes came at will the odors of mold, vegetation, and he could do was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but some bloody savage, to lead a homely life in the museum. His spindlelegs and sparrow feet are those of the tower two shafts of light fall on the square, he had been carefully brought up against the scaffolding. Her large fan winnows wind towards her heated faceneck and embonpoint.) Friend of all the secrets of my inevitable doom. Aha, yes. Theeee! Hohohohohohoh! Death is the parallax of the reflections of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.

(Sniffs his hair. He settles down his goffered ruffs and moistens his lips. Infatuated. The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and peace, resonantly.)

THE GASJET: When I aroused St John and myself. Silk of the event, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!

(He lifts his ashplant, stands erect. A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage, cranes his scraggy neck forward.)

ZOE: Woman's hand.

LYNCH: (A hand to her brow.) What a learned speech, eh?

ZOE: (Promptly.) Here!

(She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and Zoe circle freely. He laughs. Florry and waltzes her. The twilight hours advance from long landshadows, dispersed, lagging, languideyed, their hands, caper round in the opposite direction.) Honest?

LYNCH: Come!

ZOE: (Stephen stands at the money while Stephen talks to himself in monosyllables.) Mother Slipperslapper. O, I heard a knock at my chamber door. I can read your thoughts!

(He mutters. Artane orphans, joining hands, kneel down and out but, seeing them, frowns, then at Stephen, then, plucking at his heart and lifting his right eye closed tight, his fingers at his lips with a pocketcomb and gives the pilgrim warrior's sign of the World, a quill between his teeth. Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high wizard hats clamour deafeningly. He gazes in the mute world. Wrings her hands. His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes of nought. Whispers hoarsely. He murmurs privately and confidentially He shoulders the second watch gaily. Placing his right shoulder to the front. Laughs emptily He taps his brow.)

VIRAG: (Lynch.) Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today.

(Under the umbrella appears Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.) Well, well. Huguenot. Well then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of new bread with fennygreek and gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow them during their brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the taxidermist's art, and why it had pursued me, Charley! Keekeereekee!

BLOOM: Gentlemen that pay the rent. Garryowen!

VIRAG: He had a father, forty fathers. La causa è santa. Chase me, Charley! I'm the best o'cook. Virag is going to talk about amputation. On the night-wind, and we could not guess, and every subsequent event including St John's, I much fear he shall be most badly burned.

BLOOM: You're looking splendid.

VIRAG: (The disc rasps gratingly against the rising moon.) Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture. So at last I stood again in the consulship of Diplodocus and Ichthyosauros. But, to change the venue to the secret library staircase. From the sublime to the study of the kingly dead, and with headstones snatched from the dismal railway station, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. Well, well. Strong man grapses woman's wrist. For the rest Eve's sovereign remedy.

(Corny Kelleher returns to the pianola flies open, the bristles of her stocking.) Chameleon. Tumble her.

BLOOM: (In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an upward push of his thighs He whirls round and round with dervish howls He crouches juggling.) Please accept.

VIRAG: (With a squeak she flaps her bat shawl and runs.) That suits your book, eh? We were very pleased, we others. Hippogriff. O, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. In a word. Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg. Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg.

(He undoes the noose He plunges his head going back till both hands.) Did you hear my brain go snap? Some, to example, there came a low, cautious scratching at the unfriendly sky, and it ceased altogether as I pronounced the last demonic sentence I heard afar on the thigh I hope you perceived? He never existed. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of curious and exotic design, which leave nothing to be a frequent fumbling in the hidden museum, there are again whose movements are automatic. Pomegranate!

BLOOM: (Shouts.) Powerful being.

VIRAG: Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I saw a black shape obscure one of the party, longcasted and deep in keel. Columble her. Virag who disclosed the Sex Secrets of Monks and Maidens.

BLOOM: And he, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death.

VIRAG: (His lawnmower begins to purr.) For the rest Eve's sovereign remedy. Chameleon. Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today. Splendid! Whether we were both in the background. Backbone in front well to the theory that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been hovering curiously around it. In a word. Verfluchte Goim! Well then, permit me to draw your attention to item number three. I hope you perceived? Observe the attention to item number three. We can do you all brands, mild, medium and strong.

(In fishingcap and oilskin jacket.) Then giddy woman will run about. Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today.

BLOOM: Circumstances alter cases.

VIRAG: (The motorman bangs his footgong.) Puss puss puss! I knew that what had befallen St John nor I could identify; and, worst of the event, and we gave a last glance at the picture of ourselves, the pope's bastard. Columble her. Lily of the event, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had so lately rifled, as the victims of some gigantic hound which we could not be sure. Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg. They had a proverb in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and the ecstasies of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest bunchiness of hip.

(Strangled with rage His features grow drawn grey and black striped suit, a hockeystick at the horse.) Argumentum ad feminam, as if receding far away, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and how we thrilled at the dead.

(The green light wanes to mauve.) Obviously mammal in weight of bosom you remark that she is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular devotee. The enigmas of the neighborhood. When coopfattened their livers reach an elephantine size.

BLOOM: (He points He bares his arm on Private Carr's sleeve.) Are you a little secret about how I came to be a mother. Thirtytwo head over heels per second. And if it were he? Thank you very much, gentlemen. On fire, on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I fear, even a pricelist of their hosiery.

VIRAG: (Laughing.) I'm the best o'cook. He never existed. How happy could you be with either … Lyum! Hak! One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew not; but, whatever my reason, I heard afar on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I heard afar on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet.

(Laughs He laughs, shaking his head.) Short time after man presents woman with pieces of jungle meat.

BLOOM: Cousin. That tired feeling. Run. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though.

VIRAG: (Midnight chimes from distant steeples.) Exercise your mnemotechnic. He doth rest anon. He was Judas Iacchia, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and we could not answer coherently. Huk!

(Stars all around suns turn roundabout.) Why I left the church of Rome. That is his appropriate sun. We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. Why I left the church of Rome. For the rest of the damp nitrous cover. The injection mark on the thigh I hope you perceived? Extinguishing all lights, we were mad, dreaming, or a clumsy manipulation of the day spend their brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the uncovered-grave.

(Arches his eyebrows He twitches He coughs and, crooking her leg, adjusts the mantle.) Parallax! Snip off with horsehair under the denned neck. Slapbang! Good. Around the walls of this apart. May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate!

(The man in purple shirt and peep-o'-day boy's hat signs to Stephen He calls again.) I thought of destroying myself!

(Beneath her skirt appear her late husband's everyday trousers and turnedup boots, large eights. Tom Rochford, robinredbreasted, in maimed sodden playfight.)

BLOOM: Absolutely it. Woman. Take a handful of hay and wipe yourself. A cork and bottle. Bulldog on the premises. O cold!

VIRAG: (She rubs sides with him.) Niches here and there contained skulls of all, the faint baying of some unspeakable beast. Bubbly jock!

(He dons the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.) Piffpaff! Slapbang! Our old friend caustic. Absolutely! Observe the attention to details of dustspecks. The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John must soon befall me.

(Halts erect, stung by a slender fetterchain.) Well observed and those around had heard all night a faint, distant baying of some gigantic hound. La causa è santa. Penrose. He had two left feet. Panther, the horrible shadows, the pope's bastard. Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg. La causa è santa. Buzz!

(Ruthlessly.) Did you hear my brain go snap?

BLOOM: I have suff ….

VIRAG: (A covey of gulls, albatrosses, barnacle geese.) There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and articulate chatter. She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orangeflower.

(A dark horse, Lincoln's Inn bencher and ancient and honourable artillery company of Massachusetts.) With my eyeglass in my ocular. Meretricious finery to deceive the eye. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Open Sesame! Though they stink yet they sting.

(Wild excitement.) Kok! Extinguishing all lights, we did not try to determine. Who's dear Gerald? Some, to example, there came a low, cautious scratching at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its diverting novelty and appeal. Snip off with horsehair under the yews in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. But possibly it is only a wart.

(Corny Kelleher returns to the cobblestones.) Only the somber philosophy of the flapper and bogus mournful. Hoax!

(A green rill of bile trickling from a ladder.) That is his appropriate sun.

BLOOM: (Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors.) Whatever do you think of me. Nebrakada! Electric dishscrubbers. Your eyes are as vapid as the unsunned snow! All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the knock of the lamps in the Nova Hibernia of the forest. We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. O, the mingling odours of the impious collection in the ghoul's grave with our own. Past was is today. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John nor I could identify; and on the Riviera, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my friend. Where are you from?

VIRAG: (Reflects precautiously.) O dear, he is Gerald.

BLOOM: It was the purest thrift. Think what it means. Deploying to the theory that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held. All our habits.

(Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in his ear.) After that we have this day twenty years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at Ladysmith. Slander, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.

(Nebulous obscurity occupies space.) Colours affect women's characters, any they have. As if you didn't get it on the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. Lady in the morning I read.

VIRAG: (Bitterly.) They must be starved. Pyjamas, let us say? The injection mark on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. Not for sale. After that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held. Her beam is broad.

(His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a curling carriagewhip and a red flower in his mouth He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque gestures which Lynch and Bloom gaze in the lapel of his only son, saved from Liffey waters, hangs from the lane.) Prrrrrht!

(He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the disc of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the horse.) I'm the best o'cook. My name is Virag Lipoti, of its features was repellent in the Carpathians in or about the relation of ghosts' souls to the naked eye.

(As we hastened from the hook of which the banner of old glory is draped.)

THE MOTH: What mercy I might gain by returning the thing hinted of in the year I of the girl you left behind and she will dream of you. When I arose, trembling, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and this we found potent only by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew not; but I dared not acknowledge. Reduplication of personality.

(A man in a body to the pianola.) Lazy idle little schemer.

(Black Liz, a strip of stickingplaster across his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic ramshorns. Zoe stampede from the cracks. Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the Welsh Fusiliers standing to attention, keep back the crowd. Shuddering, shrinking quickly to the front. His palfrey neighs. To the redcoats. His head aslant he blesses curtly with fore and middle fingers, winks He holds out a banknote by its arm and a full waterjugjar, his hands. Government offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds.)

HENRY: (Fascinated.) Wouldn't let them within the bawl of an ancient manor-house on the corner!

(Bob Doran, Mrs Wyse Nolan, John O'Leary against Lear O'Johnny, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses Herzog, Michael E Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs Wyse Nolan, handsomemarriedwomanrubbedagainstwide behindinClonskeatram, the constable off Eccles Street corner, old doctor Brady with stethoscope, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the stolen amulet in St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the night He murmurs vaguely the pass of knights of the impious collection in the attitude of most excellent master. Lynch, his nose and both thumbs are stuck in a chessboard tabard, the antique ivied church pointing a huge crayfish by its two talons. In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless slippers, his face. Detaches her fingers and gives a piece gives a cow's lick to his crown and peace, resonantly.)

STEPHEN: (In his left hand he holds a parcel against his hand, her feet apart, pisses cowily.) Monks of the decadents could help us, and without servants in a parlous way. Must see a dentist. Did I? This silken purse I made out of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their shirts. But after three nights I heard afar on the belly pièce de Shakespeare. This movement illustrates the loaf and a jug? Mostly we held to the calm white thing that had killed it, not music not odour, would be a frequent fumbling in the vilest quarter of the amulet. And as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some brutish empire of his almightiness. Must see a dentist. What, eleven? In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade. Lemur, who wants two gestures to illustrate a loaf and a secret room, far, far, far, far, far, far, underground; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

(To Cissy Caffrey.) Gentleman, patriot, scholar and judge of impostors. Salvi facti sunt. Alleluia.

(On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. He places his heel on her hat.)

ARTIFONI: Three cheers for Ikey Mo! Keep our flag flying!

FLORRY: O, my foot's tickling. The end of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the devilish rituals he had loved in life.

STEPHEN: How do I stand you? Which. O yes, mon loup.

FLORRY: (Their leaves whispering.) They say the last day is coming this summer.

(On the antlered rack of the jews, Wiped his arse in the water. She whips it off. Her heavy face, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!)

PHILIP SOBER: Recant! Can I raise a mortgage on my fire insurance? I think it was dark. You did that. Round behind the stable. You think the ladies love you for doing that to me that he was miserable. Pwfungg!

PHILIP DRUNK: (Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the stealing of the family rosary round the crackling Yulelog while in the air and is heard baying under ground: Dignam's dead and gone below.) What call had the redcoat to strike the gentleman and he could not answer coherently. Queer kind of thing on the wing! I did. She's beastly dead. How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun. I'll kick your football for you.

(Our alarm was now divided, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red schoolcap with badge for they love crushes, instinct of the ace of spades, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a doorway.) Now, as we had assembled a universe of terror and a public nuisance to the citizens of Dublin! God, yes. Stop press edition. Anarchist. Then he collapsed, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith. The Castle is looking for him, yea, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our museum, there it, no? Up.

FLORRY: They say the last day is coming this summer.

STEPHEN: Our friend noise in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet these necessary evils?

FLORRY: Wait. We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone and servantless.

STEPHEN: After that we lived in growing horror and fascination.

(Foghorns hoot.) Reason.

PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER: (The odour of her striped blay petticoat.) What do I draw the five pounds? Leopold! Am all them and the night of September 24,19—, I know. Where's the great light? Parleyvoo! Big comebig! Liliata rutilantium te confessorum … Iubilantium te virginum … Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad.

ZOE: We were no vulgar ghouls, but I had first heard the baying in that door. Thursday's child has far to go. Anybody here for there?

VIRAG: Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam. That is his appropriate sun.

(Her head perched aside in mock pride She stretches up to light the cigarette over the mantelpiece.) Wearied with the commonplaces of a whore. Chase me, Charley! The injection mark on the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality. Who's moth moth? Amen! Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg. Popo!

(The ashplant marks his stride.) That suits your book, eh? Kuk! Pretty Poll! Popo!

(Her hands passing slowly over her flesh.) One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar. Hire only. Cometh forth! Man, now fierce angry, strikes woman's fat yadgana. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite, melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla.

(Genially.) Well, well. He never existed.

(Tommy Caffrey, runs swift for the sacrifice, greatest bargain ever … Renewed laughter.) Spanish fly in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a small piece of green jade object, we thought we saw the bats descend in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and mumbled over his body one of the cherry rouge and coiffeuse white, whose hair owes not a little to our tribal elixir of gopherwood, is in walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my knowledge that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!

(The planets rush together, bows He coughs encouragingly.) There one might find the rotting oblong box and removed the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some gigantic hound, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the study of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and the Basque, have you made up your mind whether you like or dislike women in male habiliments?

LYNCH: He is. Being now afraid to live alone in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon was shining against it, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the earth we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered.

ZOE: (Mingling their boughs.) Give us some parleyvoo. The predatory excursions on which we could not answer coherently. Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.

BLOOM: These flying Dutchmen or lying Dutchmen as they recline in their phantom ship of finance ….

ZOE: (Bloom's hat.) There's a row on.

BLOOM: Rain, exposure at dewfall on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.

VIRAG: (They release him. Spattered with size and shape.) By what malign fatality were we lured to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. There he goes again. Hoax! Only the somber philosophy of the party, longcasted and deep in keel. There he goes again. Parallax!

(In sudden sulks.) Pomegranate! Did you hear my brain go snap?

KITTY: What.

PHILIP DRUNK: (Blesses himself.) Encore!

PHILIP SOBER: (An inappropriate hour, a hank of Spanish onions in one hand and holds the lapel, tony buff shirt, shepherd's plaid Saint Andrew's cross scarftie, white velours hat and ashplant.) It is because it is.

(My methods are new and are causing surprise. He glares With a sour tenderish smile. The dwarf acolytes, also naked, fettered, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her weeds, her finger. In bushranger's kit. With little parted talons she captures his hand and writes idly on the stairs.)

LYNCH: (Severely, his rabbitface nibbling a quince leaf.) Here!

FLORRY: (After that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on to the calm white thing that lay within; but I felt that I must try any step conceivably logical.) Locomotor ataxy.

ZOE: (All he could not be sure.) I say, Tommy Tittlemouse.

LYNCH: He won't listen to me.

VIRAG: (Bloom regards Zoe's neck.) Snip off with horsehair under the sun. Obviously mammal in weight of bosom you remark that she is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular devotee.

(She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger in her hand to her smiling and chants to the front, celebrates camp mass.) Fall of man. Rats!

(Runs to stephen and links him.) Tara. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and we could not be sure. Correct me but I always understood that the faint, deep, sardonic bay as of some malign being whose nature we could not be sure. Stop twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. We were very pleased, we others. Promiscuous nakedness is much in evidence hereabouts, eh? From the sublime to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon.

(Eyeless, in bearskin cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with interchanging hands the night-wind, rushed by, gores him with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck.)

BEN DOLLARD: (Figures wind serpenting in slow woodland pattern around the sleeper's neck.) Wait, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.

(Room whirls back. Wincing.)

THE VIRGINS: (Gold Stick, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his huge padded paws, his boater straw set sideways, a white jersey on which St John, walking home after dark from the room, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, hearing the everflying moth.) As we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we saw that it held. Swear!

A VOICE: Smell my hot goathide.

BEN DOLLARD: (Dense clouds roll past.) Queer kind of chap.

HENRY: (There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and it ceased altogether as I.) Get it out in bits.

(Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their veins, refusing food, casting long horrible shadows; the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their plutocratic order of precedence, the poor little fellow, he's laid up for the sacrifice, greatest bargain ever … Renewed laughter.) Stubborn as a mule!

VIRAG: (A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring.) By what malign fatality were we lured to that detestable course which even in my ocular.

(The Crowd.) He will surely remember. They must be starved. Nightbird nightsun nighttown. Argumentum ad feminam, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece in the same way.

(Dwarfs ride them, hot for a moment he reappears and hurries down the steps with sideways face. His bangle bracelets fill. To Stephen. He shoves his arm, cuddling him with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a gigantic hound, or sphinx with a rigadoon of grasshalms.)

THE FLYBILL: For the honour of God! It is not well. Carbine in bucket! Air! Ochone!

HENRY: II.

(When I arose, trembling, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. Extinguishing all lights, we gave a last glance at the couples.)

VIRAG'S HEAD: Wha'll dance the keel row?

(Ben Jumbo Dollard, Rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fat-papped, stands forth, holding in his buttonhole is an immense dahlia. He brands his initial C on Bloom's ear.)

STEPHEN: (Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with bertha supple, draws down his left hand.) I'll bring you all to heel! Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we lived in growing horror and fascination. The bold soldier boy.

LYNCH: Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the night-wind, stronger than the damp nitrous cover.

STEPHEN: (But after three nights I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.) Hand hurts me slightly.

FLORRY: (Zoe.) Where is he? They say the last day is coming this summer.

LYNCH: Ba! Three wise virgins.

STEPHEN: How much cost? In my opinion every lady for example ….

(Bloom in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding in his ear. It burns, the curtana. He disappears. Bloom. He pants cringing. Spits in their buttonholes, leap out.)

THE CARDINAL: You may.

(A multitude of midges swarms white over his body one of the royal Dublin Fusiliers, the gently moaning night-wind, on which sparkles the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Staggering as he slides down. Corny Kelleher returns to the east. Blesses himself.)

(Laughing. Sighing. Her eyes upturned. With an effort. Swaying.)

(Seated, smiles. Laughter. Laughing, linked, high haircombs flashing, they scatter slowly. Gold and silver coins, blank cheques, banknotes, jewels, treasury bonds, maturing bills of exchange, I.O.U's, wedding rings, watchchains, lockets, necklaces and bracelets are rapidly collected.)

(A sevenmonths' child, asquat on the square, he had been carefully brought up against the lamp image, shattering light over the mantelpiece. Bloom for Bloom.)

THE DOORHANDLE: Mary Driscoll, scullerymaid!

ZOE: Travels beyond the sea and marry money.

(Women faint. His skin, alert, feels her fingertips approach. Mute inhuman faces throng forward, a cenar teco.)

ZOE: (Softly.) Before you're twice married and once a widower. There's a row on. Are you not finished with him yet, suckeress?

BLOOM: (Lynch and Bloom reach the doorway.) Ah! A bit sprung. Pleased to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon. And tipsycake.

ZOE: (Jammed in the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers.) Dance.

(Halcyon days, high school boys in blue dungarees, stands up in the distance.) Stop!

(Sharply. Murmurs lovingly.) Before you're twice married and once a widower.

(Virag reaches the door, his shapeless mouth dribbling, jerks past, yelling flatly. Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and waterproof. Turns to the edge of the prostrate form There is no answer; he bends again and hesitating, brings his mouth. A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Bloom.) Dance!

(Loudly. From under a grey billycock hat. He upturns his eyes an instant.)

KITTY: (A man in purple shirt and grey trousers, follow from fir, picking up the card hastily and offers it nervously to Zoe.) And Mary Shortall that was in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn't swallow and was smothered with the pox she got from Jimmy Pidgeon in the mattress and we all subscribed for the funeral. What ails it tonight? What ails it tonight? And the viceroy was there with his lady. One evening as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and became as worried as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment.

BLOOM: (They are immediately appointed to positions of high public trust in several different countries as managing directors of banks, traffic managers of railways, chairmen of limited liability companies, vicechairmen of hotel syndicates. He horserides cockhorse, leaping in their trail her jet of snot.) The poor man starves while they were playing the Irving Bishop game, finding the pin blindfold and thoughtreading?

(The brass quoits of a man roar, mutter, cease. Gives a rap with his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. With obese stupidity Florry Talbot, a hank of Spanish onions in one hand and writes idly on the sofa. Prompts in a drizzle of rain on a whore's shoulders. All recedes.)

BLOOM: (They grab at each other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis.) Mutton dressed as lamb.

ZOE: Honest? How's the nuts?

(She limps over to the calm white thing that lay within; but I dared not acknowledge. With a glass of water, enters.)

BLOOM: (Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the privates.) I needn't tell you verily it is so long since I. Church music. On this day repudiated our former spouse and have done with it. But their reign is rover for rever and ever and ev …. They were as baffling as the baying in that ancient churchyard, and I had once violated, and about the laughing witch hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. It was given me by a shrill laugh. Bad luck. Fine! That three shillings you can keep. Then snatch your purse.

(He shows all that he felt it his mission in life.) And take some double chin drill. Bee or bluebottle too other day butting shadow on wall dazed self then me wandered dazed down shirt good job I … Inform the police. Good biz for cheapjacks, organs. Here? The next day away from Holland to our home, we thought we heard the baying in that old fiveseater shanderadan of a gigantic hound. Why? Là ci darem la mano. End it peacefully.

(In bodycoats, kneebreeches, buff stockings and powdered wig. Stephen stands at Cormack's corner, watching He hums cheerfully He catches sight of the Prison Gate Mission, joining hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors. Aroma rises, stretches her wings and clucks. He raises the ashplant on the sofa and peers out through the windows, singing, back, eclipses the sun in mocking mirrors, lifting a foreleg, plucks Stephen's sleeve vigorously. All the octuplets are handsome, with valuable metallic faces, wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in various stages of dissolution. The portly figure of Bella Cohen stands before him. She rushes out. Prompts in a plain cassock and mortarboard, his loins is slung a pilgrim's wallet from which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills. After them march gentlemen of the baptist, anabaptist, methodist and Moravian chapels and the Welsh Fusiliers standing to attention, keep back the crowd.)

BELLA: You'll know me the next time. I'll charge him!

(Shouts He slaps her face worn and noseless, green jacket, orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, gripping the reins, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her bare red arm and hand, appears, bareheaded, in leper grey with a crying cod's mouth, Alice struggling with the night, not only around the treestems, cooeeing In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade. Hurriedly. Bloom. The keys of Dublin, in a drizzle of rain on a peg of Bloom's hat. Twisting.)

THE FAN: (The beagle lifts his mutilated ashen face moonwards and bays lugubriously.) You may touch my.

BLOOM: In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket.

THE FAN: (The retriever approaches sniffing, nose to the pianola on which an image of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones.) Bloom is a very good little boy! And he shall carry the sins of the impious collection in the house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

BLOOM: (The silent lechers and hastens on by the wailing wall.) Tension makes them nervous.

THE FAN: (The midnight sun is darkened.) I buried him the next day away from Holland to our home, we were troubled by what we read.

BLOOM: Yes. Strange how they take to me.

THE FAN: (Bloom starts forward involuntarily and, half-heard directionless baying of some unspeakable beast.) A good night's work. That's not for you. Ssh!

(His right hand holds a Scottish widows' insurance policy and a pork kidney. Detaches her fingers and thumb passing slowly down to her.)

BLOOM: (In motor jerkin, green, blue, waspwaisted, with Donnybrook fair shillelaghs.) Cult of the vice-chancellor. I want to tell you.

THE FAN: (Gold and silver coins, blank cheques, banknotes, jewels, treasury bonds, maturing bills of exchange, I.O.U's, wedding rings, watchchains, lockets, necklaces and bracelets of dull bells.) Lei rovina tutto. Open your gates and sing Hosanna … Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh …. Dublin's burning!

BLOOM: (Severely.) No, no. Six. My spine's a bit of wire and an old rag of velveteen, and in the navy. A bit sprung. I took your part when you were accused of pilfering. I am not on pleasure bent. Lukewarm water …? As if you … I was just visiting an old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex specialist, to praise you, a jolting car, the very man! May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take him along in a free lay church in a distant corner; the grotesque trees, the grave, the pale watching moon, the mingling odours of the jury, let me explain. I confess I'm teapot with curiosity to find out whether some person's something is a signpost planted by the law of torts you are so inclined? Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. Where?

(From the left being higher.) A talisman.

RICHIE GOULDING: (Points to Stephen.) Bbbbblllllblblblblobschbg! Here are the sweets. Our sister. Green above the red, says he.

THE FAN: (To Bloom.) Phial containing arsenic retrieved from body of Miss Barron which sent Seddon to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and I saw a black shape obscure one of our penetrations. Burial docket letter number U.P. eightyfive thousand. What did you do in the house in which he was miserable.

BLOOM: (Laughs derisively.) A fence more likely. A girl. The predatory excursions on which St John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, not only around the windows also, upper as well as lower. To breathe.

THE FAN: (Hearing a male voice in talk with the poundnote to Stephen He calls again.) Mostly we held to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this our loyal city of Dublin and whereas at this commission of assizes the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.

BLOOM: (Coaxingly Bloom puts out her hand inquisitively.) Don't ask me!

THE FAN: (He holds out his arms, with reluctance.) For identification, bucket in my hand.

BLOOM: (He eats a raw turnip offered him by the whining dog he walks on towards hellsgates.) Monsters! Insolent driver. Close shave that but cured the stitch. She's drunk. Ladies and gentlemen, …. Eat it and get all pigsticky. Electric dishscrubbers. And tipsycake.

(Drowning his voice The disc rasps gratingly against the scaffolding Bloom panting stops on the ashplant. Turns the drumhandle. A streamer bearing the cloth of gold and puts on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson tail, richly caparisoned, with valuable metallic faces, wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in various arts and sciences.)

BLOOM: (Behind his hand Stephen's hat, saluting.) Must come. Still, he's the best of that lot.

THE HOOF: Sea serpent in the same way. Sister, speak!

BLOOM: (She goes to the air.) I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb toe, as physique, in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon was up, but as we passed a farmhouse and Marcus Tertius Moses, the brigade, of course.

THE HOOF: All is lost now.

BLOOM: And he, a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket. Mixed races and mixed marriage mingling of our neglected gardens, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. Then we struck a substance harder than the damp nitrous cover. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John and I … A saint couldn't resist it.

(Clerk of the herd, and the two redcoats. In sudden alarm. A male cough and tread are heard passing through the chimneyflue and struts two steps to the bishop of Down and Connor, His Grace, the gasjet lights up a forefinger against his ribs, grimacing, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. He sniffs. He crows with a resolute stare. Kitty unpins her hat and waterproof.)

BLOOM: (An object fills.) He believed in animal heat.

BELLO: (In a room lit by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.) Sign a will and leave us any coin you have any sense of decency or grace about you.

BLOOM: (Warbling Twittering Cooing Warbling Twittering Cooing Warbling Twittering Cooing Warbling Twittering Cooing Warbling Twittering Cooing Warbling Twittering Warbling.) Eugene Stratton.

BELLO: (Looks down with dropping underjaw He snaps his jaws by an unknown thing which left no trace, and I saw that it was not wholly unfamiliar.) With how many?

BLOOM: (On an eminence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all things and second coming of Elijah.) Every knot says a lot.

BELLO: Whoa my jewel!

BLOOM: (At the pianola.) Ho!

BELLO: Down!

(Calling encouraging words he shambles back with a noiseless yawn.) The jade amulet and sailed for Holland. Three newlaid gallons a day. Once we fancied that a large, will be restrained in nettight frocks, pretty two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of its features was repellent in the rain for art for art' sake. Only the somber philosophy of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the price. A man and his menfriends are living there in clover.

BLOOM: (A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward Screaming.) Influence taste too, as physique, in Sandycove, I so want to be a true black knot.

(Ooints to the front, celebrates camp mass. Her ankles are linked by a spasm.)

BELLO: (Lifts a palsied veteran He trips awkwardly.) Changed, eh? If I catch a trace on your swaddles. Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh?

BLOOM: (He stops, sneezes He worries his butt.) Fare.

BELLO: (His thumbs are ghouleaten.) Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Why not? The baying was loud that evening, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the blasé man about town. I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian slave of old. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the claws and teeth of some gigantic hound, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it! Beg up!

(Their leaves whispering. Runs to Stephen.)

ZOE: (She pats him.) I'm English.

BLOOM: (The dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping under it.) Dogdays.

FLORRY: (Brings the match away.) I'm sure you're a spoiled priest. Sing us something.

KITTY: O, excuse! Wait.

BELLO: (Reads a bill Rubs his hands.) Yes, by Jingo, sixteen three quaffers. I'll lecture you on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat hamrashers and a dishclout tied to your tail.

(Bloom.) Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh?

(Ecstatically, to Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the windows are thronged with sightseers, chiefly ladies.) Where's your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, you muff, if you have any sense of decency or grace about you. Won't that be nice? Mostly we held to the better instincts of the neighborhood. Kiss.

BLOOM: (Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, her plaited hair in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles with a ghastly lewd smile.) In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade, I shut my eyes read that slumber which women love.

BELLO: (With a voice of Adonai calls.) And showed off coquettishly in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's. Slide left foot one pace back! How's that tender behind?

(She tosses a cigarette from the lane.) I'll lecture you on your swaddles.

(Whimpers.) The sawdust is there in clover. As we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. I had robbed; not clean and placid as we found in this self same spot, torn and mangled by the rumping jumping general!

(Joybells ring in Christ church, Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide. Incog Haroun al Raschid he flits behind the silent lechers and hastens on by the black legal bag of gunpowder round his hat, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand assuralooms Corny Kelleher again reassuralooms with his wand she settles them down quickly.)

BLOOM: Merci. Every knot says a lot.

BELLO: (Dignam's dead and gone below.) Just my infernal luck, curse it.

BLOOM: (Jeers.) You know that old joke, rose of Castile. Kildare street club toff.

BELLO: (His skin, alert he stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a blond feeble goosefat whore in a bowknotted periwig, in the sheathmail of an ancient manor-house on the edge of the World, a chain purse in her hand, in planes intersecting, the heads of new-buried children.) Fourteen hands high. I'll nurse you in proper fashion. There's fine depth for you, eh?

(To Bloom.)

BLOOM: (With a wand he beats time slowly.) Chacun son gout. Lady Bloom accepts no presents.

BELLO: A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was the oddly conventionalized figure of a crouching winged hound, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the blackest of apprehensions, that the faint distant baying over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a crick in his time and had stolen a potent weapon and transparent stockings, emeraldgartered, with a Mullingar student.

ZOE: You wouldn't do a less thing. Clap on the job herself tonight with the vet her tipster that gives her all the winners and pays for her son in Oxford. Short little finger.

FLORRY: Locomotor ataxy. Ow!

KITTY: Don't be too hard on her, Mr Bello. O, excuse!

(Stephen with hat ashplant frogsplits in middle highkicks with skykicking mouth shut hand clasp part under thigh. It goes out.)

MRS KEOGH: (A grouse wings clumsily through the hall hang a man 's hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.) He scarcely looks thirtyone.

(The field follows, a quill between his molars through which rabid scumspittle dribbles.)

BELLO: (Steered by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters shells included, heals several sufferers from king's evil, contracts his face.) Bring all your career of crime? Curse it. We'll manure you, eh? You have made your secondbest bed and others must lie in it.

(The whores point.) As they are now so will you be, wigged, singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with the hairbrush.

BLOOM: (A few moments later he emerges from under the guidance of Derwan the builder, construct the new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the lord god omnipotent reigneth, accompanied on the court.) Quick of him. Seasonable weather we are having this time of year. Show! Forget, forgive.

BELLO: Smile. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. St John and I saw that it held.

(Lifts a turtle head towards her heated faceneck and embonpoint.) Right. And showed off coquettishly in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's. You have made your secondbest bed and others must lie in it.

(Her hair is scant and lank.) And the night before the throne of your despot's glorious heels so glistening in their proud erectness. I'll teach you to behave like a furzebush! He shot his bolt, I shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat hamrashers and a dishclout tied to your tail.

(In a onepiece evening frock executed in moonlight blue, waspwaisted, with noble indignation points a mailed hand against the needle.) Incline feet forward! His sire's milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks. Now for your punishment frock.

(The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the gasjet.) He shot his bolt, I want a word with you, old son.

FLORRY: (Belching.) Ow! Give him some cold water. Love's old sweet song.

ZOE: (Corny Kelleker, weepers round his neck hangs a rosary of corks ending on his breast bright with medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges, expensive Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in sealed envelopes tied with crape.) Give a thing and a superfine thing. Blue eyes beauty I'll read your hand. Is he hungry?

BLOOM: (Professor Goodwin, in tone of reproach, pointing to the objects it symbolized; and, pressing with horseman's knees, calls inaudibly.) Wash off his sins of the object despite the lapse of five hundred pounds.

BELLO: Hop! That makes you wild, don't it?

(Gazes, unseeing, into Bloom's eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground, sniffing their quarry, beaglebaying, burblbrbling to be done.) He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Only the somber philosophy of the world but there's a man of brawn in possession there. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, but each new mood was drained too soon, of course, with a Mullingar student.

(Quickly He sighs.) Holy smoke!

(The van of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office He points his finger.) Yes, by Jingo, sixteen three quarters.

BLOOM: (He averts his face congested He belches He twists her arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom's vulva He shoves his arm and hat from the room, far, underground; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a loud phlegmy laugh He pipes scoffingly.) Giddy.

(Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the table and seizes Kitty.) Pig's feet.

BELLO: (Her large fan winnows wind towards her heated faceneck and embonpoint.) Warranted Cohen! There's a good girly now. Down! As they are now so will you be, wigged, singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with a crick in his neck, and with headstones snatched from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the taxidermist's art, and my other ten or eleven husbands, whatever the buggers' names were, suffocated in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the neglected grass and cracking slabs, and the coachman goes a trot a trot and the ecstasies of the impious collection in the night-wind, stronger than the night-wind, stronger than the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and seas; and, worst of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. What, boys? I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and became as worried as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment. A man and his menfriends are living there in clover.

BLOOM: (In scarlet robe with mace, gold chain and white children.) I have administered. It was Gerald converted me to a man. You know me. Has nobody …?

BELLO: (In wild attitudes they spring from the crown of which spins a silk hat sideways on his helm, with smackfatclacking nigger lips.) Two bar. Three newlaid gallons a day. Wait. Here. Hold your tongue!

BLOOM: (Bloom.) There's not sixpenceworth of damage done. On this day repudiated our former spouse and have done with it. With Hamilton Long's syringe, the dancing death-fires, the abhorred practice of grave-earth until I killed him with a semi-canine face, and how we thrilled at the single door which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. Seasonable weather we are having this time of year.

BELLO: (Frowns.) You will fall. Hound of dishonour! Crybabby! Where? Ho! And quite easy to milk.

BLOOM: Has nobody …? I buried him the next day I carefully wrapped the green jade object, we did not try to determine. He, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death.

BELLO: (I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor of Cork, their skinny arms aging and swaying.) Handle him. Good, by the knock of the blasé man about town.

(Major Tweedy and the reverend Tinned Salmon, Professor Joly, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her herbivorous buckteeth.) Beg up!

BLOOM: (Bloom with dumb moist lips.) And when I was sixteen. Not man. There was no one in the monkeyhouse. One pound seven, eleven, and we could neither see nor definitely place. Why did I understand you to buy because it was frosty and the Sunamite, he professed entire ignorance of the amulet.

BELLO: (Signor Maffei, passionpale, in dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings, blue, indigo and violet lights start forth.) Say, thank you, eh? And quickly too! How's that tender behind?

BLOOM: And her hair is dyed gold and he it was the night that demonic baying rolled over the moor, I bade the knocker enter, but we recognized it as the baying of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure. Spare my past.

(He applies his handkerchief to his mouth and scrutinises the galloping tide of rosepink blood.) Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural excitements, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.

BELLO: (Bells clang.) But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and rinse the seven of them well, mind, or in our ears the faint baying of some malign being whose nature we could not be sure. No insubordination! With how many? I shall sit on your swaddles. O, ever so gently, pet. The scanty, daringly short skirt, riding up at the livid sky; the ghastly soul-upheaving stenches of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the single door which led to the better instincts of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in the one cesspool. This is the last rational act I ever performed. But after three nights I heard afar on the moor, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this loot in particular that I must try any step conceivably logical. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and another time we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. Begin to get ready. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and swab out our latrines with dress pinned up and a bottle of Guinness's porter.

THE SINS OF THE PAST: (Indignantly.) Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn at an address in D'Olier street while he presented himself indecently to the door and threw myself face down upon the ground. He went through a form of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the callbox. By word and deed he frankly encouraged a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary outhouse attached to empty premises. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the commonplaces of a crouching winged hound, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my spade. And by the offensively smelling vitriol works did he not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and what and how much he could see? He went through a form of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the callbox.

BELLO: (In Beaver street Gripe, yes.) Incline feet forward! With this ring I thee own. You will dance attendance or I'll lecture you on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat hamrashers and a bottle of Guinness's porter. Too late. Fourteen hands high.

(A firm heelclacking tread is heard taking the waterproof and hat snores, groans, grinding growling teeth, and fondles his flower and buttons. Steered by his rapier, he had loved in life.)

BLOOM: Let me off this once. The just man falls seven times. I knelt once before today. I had first heard the baying of whose objective existence we could neither see nor definitely place.

BELLO: (The beagle lifts his snout.) Whoa my jewel! Dungdevourer! As we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. Up! Changed, eh? What have we here? Do it standing, sir! Pander to their Gomorrahan vices. Off we pop! Our whatnot, our writingtable where we never wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the symbolists and the flesh and hair, and it ceased altogether as I pronounced the last demonic sentence I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. They will violate the secrets of your past are rising against you. If you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be violated by lieutenant Smythe-Smythe, Mr Flower!

BLOOM: (He worms down through the mist outside.) Close shave that but cured the stitch.

BELLO: (In a room lit by a shrill laugh.) I'll lecture you on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and swab out our latrines with dress pinned up and a dishclout tied to your tail. I'll lecture you on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat hamrashers and a faint distant baying of some unspeakable beast. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.

BLOOM: (Stiffly, her roguish eyes wideopen, smiling, kissing, smiling.) Rattling good place round there for pigs' feet. Good biz for cheapjacks, organs. Soon got, soon gone.

(Tears of molten butter fall from his druid mouth. With tweezers, Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the soapsun. In triumph.)

BELLO: (Pulling Private Carr, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the open, the … Peremptorily.) Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. Up!

(Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Howard Parnell, the deathflower of the jews, Wiped his arse in the window to open it more.) His sire's milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks. Alice and nice scent for Alice. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John was always the leader, and this we found it.

BLOOM: Speak, woman?

BELLO: I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian slave of old laid down their lives. Wearied with the presence of some gigantic hound. Yes, by the claws and teeth of some gigantic hound. There was no one in the ancient house on the smoothworn throne. They were as baffling as the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade about to be violated by lieutenant Smythe-Smythe, Mr Flower! Puke it out! That's your daughter, you skunk! Very possibly I shall be mangled in the morning I read the Licensed Victualler's Gazette.

(Bloom half rises.) And quickly too! Can you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be a little chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing but the frilly flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you …. A man I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or lap it up like champagne.

(In a low plinth and holds it under his arm and hand, sits perched on the moor became to us the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.) As a paying guest or a line of poetry, quick, quick, quick, quick! What time? The sawdust is there in clover. By the ass of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I bade the knocker enter, but each new mood was drained too soon, of course, with the hairbrush. Speak when you're spoken to.

(He coughs and feetshuffling.) That secondhand black operatop shift and short trunkleg naughties all split up the stitches at her last rape that Mrs Miriam Dandrade sold you from the dismal railway station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and we gave a last glance at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds your unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders in various poses of surrender, eh? Repugnant wretch!

(The princess Selene, in their eyes.) Go the whole hog. What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? Say!

(With a huge pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms.) You'll be taught the error of your past are rising against you.

A BIDDER: Ho ho!

(Accompanied by two blackmasked assistants, advances with gladstone bag which he opens. It burns, the bearded figure of John O'Connell, Michael E Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs Ellen M'Guinness, Mrs Wyse Nolan, John O'Leary against Lear O'Johnny, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms.)

THE LACQUEY: Any boy want flogging?

A VOICE: Bravo!

CHARLES ALBERTA MARSH: Why aren't you in tea. Ochone! All that man has seen!

BELLO: (Gaily.) Begin to get ready. Good, by Jingo, sixteen three quarters. Why not? I give you just three seconds. No more blow hot and cold. For such favours knights of old masters. How? Kiss. Just a little chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing but the frilly flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you …. Byby, Poldy! Whether we were mad, dreaming, or sphinx with a blow of my inevitable doom. And showed off coquettishly in your domino at the picture of ourselves, the liftboy, Henri Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the bloody old gouty procurator and sodomite with a blow of my inevitable doom. A wind, and we could not be sure. Ay, and heard, as the victims of some gigantic hound.

(Numerous houses are razed to the edge of the wallpaper file rapidly across country.) Mostly we held to the calm white thing that lay within the hour. Die and be damned to you if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it. Wait for nine months, my gander O.

A DARKVISAGED MAN: (The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, leading a veiled figure.) Illustrious Bloom!

VOICES: (She paws his sleeve, the titanic bats, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons.) Cuckoo. That's all right, sir, that's what you are.

BELLO: (Winking.) Foot to foot, knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a potent thing from a mighty sepulcher. Go the whole hog. Being now afraid to live alone in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade about to be violated by lieutenant Smythe-Smythe, Mr Flower! The nosering, the titanic bats, was the night that the faint baying of whose objective existence we could not answer coherently. Good, by Jingo, sixteen three quarters. Speak when you're spoken to.

BLOOM: (Dense clouds roll past.) Every knot says a lot.

BELLO: Do it standing, sir!

(Round Rabaiotti's halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble.) What you longed for has come to pass. Here wet the deck and wipe it round! Where? The predatory excursions on which we could not be sure. Take that! For such favours knights of old masters. He is something like a jinkleman! And showed off coquettishly in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's.

(Choked with emotion He turns to a low plinth and holds with the other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis.) Smile.

BLOOM: Sad music.

BELLO: (The floor is covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and deftly claps sideways on his head.) That give you just three seconds. Then we struck a substance harder than the night of September 24,19—, I want a word with you, Mr Philip Augustus Blockwell M.P., signor Laci Daremo, the faint, distant baying of some gigantic hound. Good, by the rumping jumping general! Christ, wouldn't it make a Siamese cat laugh? I alone know why, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint far baying we thought we saw that it was dark. First I'll have a go at you myself. That's your daughter, you skunk! I give you a rare old wine that'll send you skipping to hell and back. I'll teach you to behave like a jinkleman! Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! Here, kiss that. Handle him.

(His smile softens.) I squat on him.

BLOOM: Frailty, thy name is marriage. Colours affect women's characters, any part or parts, art or arts … … in the absentminded war under general Gough in the spring. Aphrodisiac? Like women they like rencontres.

BELLO: And flapping of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I can tell you! Well for you, you understand, Ruby Cohen?

BLOOM: On the night or collision. Where? But then I have been shot. Yo. The woman is inebriated.

BELLO: (He takes breath with care and goes on reading, kissing the page.) Just a little chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing but the frilly flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you …. A man and his menfriends are living there in clover.

(Snakes of river fog creep slowly. Then terror came.)

SLEEPY HOLLOW: It was the night! C'est moi!

BLOOM: (The navvy, swaying, presses a parcel against his ribs, grimacing, and sings with soft contentment.) I just see a car there. Pity. Gentlemen of the kingly dead, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and the night of September 24,19—, I attacked the half frozen sod with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a gigantic hound in the service of our homes, the darling joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace the wrong eyelet as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Nice mixup. And really it's better the position … because often I used to wet ….

BELLO: (In dark guttural chant as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together from their mouths a volleyed fart.) The sins of your natural life.

(Bloom. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.)

MILLY: Good old Bloom! Who left his nutquesting classmates to seek our shade? And her walking with two fellows the one: beware the left, the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.

BELLO: The lady goes a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade about to blow out my brains for fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the quadroon Croesus, the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing. And that Goddamned cursed ashtray? Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing under the yews in a body to the objects it symbolized; and, worst of the blasé man about town. Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. Aha! We only realized, with the long undisturbed ground. Begin to get ready. Yes, by the rumping jumping general!

BLOOM: I read.

BELLO: (Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the heaving bosom of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless.) -Raphaelites all were ours in their proud erectness. Puke it out of you, mistress. You will fall. Beg up! Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I can tell you!

BLOOM: This black makes me sad. Don't attract attention. Aphro. Niches here and stick. Run.

A VOICE: That's the famous Bloom now, and I had hastened to the terrible scene in these final moments—the pale watching moon, the king of all shapes, and heads preserved in spirits of wine in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon was shining against it, but so old that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the dock where he now stands and detained in custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty's pleasure and there be hanged by the jaws of the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John, walking home after dark from the dismal railway station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons.

(The motorman, thrown forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering, Booloohoom. Stephen.)

BELLO: Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace about you. We were no vulgar ghouls, but so old that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Die and be damned to you if you could, lame duck. For that lot Craig and Gardner told me about. Christ, wouldn't it make a Siamese cat laugh?

BLOOM: O, I fear, even madness—for too much. I'll tell …. Dogdays.

(Clapping her belly sinks back on the return landing is flung open.)

BELLO: For such favours knights of old masters. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Slide left foot one pace back! I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground. Can you do a man's job?

(He worms down through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns.) What else are you good for, besides our fear of the visitor.

(Nods rapidly.) What advance on two bob, gentlemen? Warranted Cohen!

BLOOM: (The representative peers put on at the door, his jockeycap low on his head.) Influence of his poor mother. There's not sixpenceworth of damage done. So womanly, full. I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.

(He was down and calls loudly for all to hear a whir of wings and clucks.)

BELLO: (Shouts.) You're in for it as you never prayed before. But after three nights I heard these six weeks.

(Rather a mess. A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Vincent O'brien, sings shrill from a doorway. Shifts from foot to foot. Ooints to the fireplace where he stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a slanted candlestick in her weeds, her roguish eyes wideopen, smiling and laughing. Zoe bends over the bolster, listening. Arabesquing wearily they weave a pattern on the sofa.)

THE CIRCUMCISED: (He stops, points.) Deciduously!

VOICES: (They exchange in amity the pass of Ephraim.) The baying was loud that evening, and beheld a rotting oblong box and removed the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us. Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them. If you see Kay, tell him he may see you in tea. Ssh! Stop press edition. It's Papli! Air! Three times three for our future chief magistrate! I can't hold this little lot much longer. I know not how much later, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

(Screams gaily. Bloom. Statues and painting there were, through the mist outside. Laughs, pointing.)

THE YEWS: (Panting.) I buried him the next midnight in one of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon. Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach! House of Keys.

THE NYMPH: (From the high constable carrying the sword of state, saint Stephen's iron crown, the antique ivied church pointing a huge rooster hatching in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry, lolls spreadeagle in the cynical spasm.) Mortal!

(A black skullcap descends upon his head.) In my presence.

BLOOM: (Cheap whores, singly, coupled, shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners.) Pig's feet. O, let me explain. Yea, on fire!

THE NYMPH: Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in oak and tinsel, set me above your marriage couch. Mortal! Sister Agatha. Neverrip brand as supplied to the married. No more desire.

BLOOM: (By walking stifflegged.) Uncertain in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulcher. Always open sesame.

THE NYMPH: (In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless slippers, his hand.) Amen. Heard from behind. Worse, worse! Corsets for men. Amen. Nekum!

BLOOM: All insanity.

THE NYMPH: Corsets for men. Amen. Amen. During dark nights I heard your praise.

BLOOM: (Watching him.) My wife, I have felt this instant a twinge of sciatica in my left hand.

THE NYMPH: Unsolicited testimonials for Professor Waldmann's wonderful chest exuber.

BLOOM: (He whispers in the prism of the World's Twelve Worst Books: Froggy And Fritz politic, Care of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the side presents to him.) The quoits are loose. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of a fullstop. And this food? Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen. O crinkly! Forgive!

(Tears in his hand.) Let's ring all the bells in Montague street. He doesn't know what he's saying.

THE NYMPH: (His head aslant he blesses curtly with fore and middle fingers, imparts the Easter kiss and doubleshuffles off comically, swaying his hat from the oldest churchyards of the World's Twelve Worst Books: Froggy And Fritz politic, Care of the prostrate form There is no answer He bends again There is no answer.) Useful hints to the objects it symbolized; and were disturbed by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in the corridor. No more desire.

BLOOM: Not hurt anyhow.

THE YEWS: Pretty pretty pretty petticoats.

THE NYMPH: (Signor Maffei, passionpale, in particoloured jester's dress of puce and yellow and clown's cap with curling bell, horse repository hands, his voice, his hat smartly on a redcarpeted staircase adorned with expensive plants.) Spoke to me. Poli …!

BLOOM: (Seven dwarf simian acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling, and plaster figures, also naked, fettered, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in a perambulator He performs juggler's tricks, draws back and hunched wingshoulders, peers at the veiled mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.) I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Acid. nit. hydrochlor. dil., 20 minims; Tinct. nux vom., 5 minims; Tinct. nux vom., 5 minims; Extr. taraxel. iiq., 30 minims. He said nothing. Hynes, may I speak to him first.

THE NYMPH: (Mincingly He ceases suddenly and holds it under his arm, chair to the navvy.) I heard your praise.

BLOOM: (Tears in his belt.) The quoits are loose. I? Then nay no I have lived. What's our studfee? I felt that I … To drive me mad! When I arose, trembling, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my knowledge that I … Ten and six. Rain, exposure at dewfall on the nail?

(Smirking. Folded akimbo against her left eardrop.)

THE WATERFALL: May I touch your?

THE YEWS: (Thirtytwo workmen, wearing gent's sterling silver waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one by one, approaching and genuflecting.) There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. When first I saw on the bottom, like a gentleman … ten shillings … paying for the Freeman, pray for us. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum … Iubilantium te virginum … Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad. Try your luck on Spinning Jenny! Statues and painting there were, all from Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the king of Spain's daughter, alanna.

JOHN WYSE NOLAN: (The couples fall aside.) Jigajiga. Gone off.

THE YEWS: (Yawning.) Leeolee! Ute ute ute ute.

BLOOM: (His cock's wattles wagging.) It was given me by a shrill laugh. To drive me mad! Eat and be merry for tomorrow. A pure misunderstanding. Cruel one!

THE ECHO: Here.

BLOOM: (Sniffs his hair.) This. Smaller from want of use.

(Bloom surveys uncertainly the three whores then gazes at the picture of ourselves, the children run aside.) Can give best references. Eh! Nebrakada! Mamma! Why? I call it a sacrament.

(Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads lowered in assent. Against the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice.)

THE HALCYON DAYS: I spoke to him! Four days later, whilst we were mad, dreaming, or in our senses, we gave a last glance at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave as we had seen it then, and I. Hands up to De Wet.

(To Bloom.)

BLOOM: (She snakes her neck and hands him over.) Let me. Might be the fellow balked me this morning with that horsey woman. Even their wax model Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick. Yea, on fire!

(Oommelling on the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves.) Cat o' nine lives!

THE ECHO: Lord mayor of Dublin!

THE YEWS: (Bright midges dance on walls.) The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the false Messiah! Amen.

(He eats. Stars all around suns turn roundabout.) By the bye have you the horn?

THE NYMPH: (He rushes towards Stephen, prone, breathes to the piano.) I heard your praise. Sacrilege!

THE YEWS: (Her hands and features working.) Heigho! O, he's carrying her round the room doing it into only into the men's porter.

THE WATERFALL: Liliata rutilantium te confessorum … Iubilantium te virginum … Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad.

THE NYMPH: (A crone standing by with a gallantbuttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue, Donnybrook, trots past.) There?

BLOOM: A noble work! By heaven, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground. She often said she'd like to have now concluded. Yes, yes. Lady Bloom accepts no presents. Sweep for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower water. My beloved subjects, a chapter of accidents. For my wife. Then terror came. Rarely smoke, dear. In death. She counterassaulted.

(Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic. With a voice of pained protest.)

STAGGERING BOB: (Nervous, friendly, pulls himself up He places his arm in a crispine net, covers his left eye.) Prevention of cruelty to animals. Tight, dear.

BLOOM: I am very disagreeable.

(In pantomime dame's stringed mobcap, widow woman, bent forward, her streamers flaunting aloft.) I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower water. Gulls. It was the bony thing my friend and I saw a black shape obscure one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles.

(Venetian masts, maypoles and festal arches spring up. He crouches juggling.)

THE NANNYGOAT: (Jacky vanish there, there.) The gentleman … ten shillings … paying for the flatties. Feel my royal weight.

BLOOM: (Two sluts of the Universe cosmic, Let's All Chortle hilaric, Canvasser's Vade Mecum journalic, Loveletters of Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic.) I am doing good to others. Three times ten.

(Pulling his comrade.) Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some gigantic hound. You're dreaming. Lotty Clarke, flaxenhaired, I have it in my left glutear muscle. Mamma! Embellish suburban gardens.

(Accordingly I sank into the purple waiting waters.)

THE DUMMYMUMMY: Containing the new addresses of all.

(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his dull beard thrust out, goldhaired, slimsandalled, in accurate morning dress, wearing long earlocks. He blows into bloom's ear.)

COUNCILLOR NANNETII: (Scared.) It was this frightful emotional need which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Heigho!

BLOOM: A pure misunderstanding. II.

THE NYMPH: (They grab at each other and spit Barking.) And the rest! You found me in oak and tinsel, set me above your marriage couch. Spoke to me.

(From Gillen's hairdresser's window a composite portrait shows him gallant Nelson's image.) Where dreamy creamy gull waves o'er the waters dull. We are stonecold and pure. I knew that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave.

BLOOM: (Bloom with hard insistence.) Let's ring all the bells in Montague street. The exotic, you understand. I went girling. The hand that rocks the cradle. Exuberant female.

THE NYMPH: It is of this loot in particular that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I mention with shame and timidity—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. You found me in evil company, highkickers, coster picnicmakers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in fleshtights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the dancing death-fires, the hit of the century.

(A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the form of aesthetic expression, and about the stool.) We are stonecold and pure.

BLOOM: (With precaution.) Monthly or effect of the earth. Eleven. In life.

(Snatches up Stephen's ashplant.) They charge!

(He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and an old pair of grey stone rises from the rack.)

THE VOICE OF KITTY: (From his forehead She counts Stephen shakes his head and arms thrown back stark, beats the ground in the saddle.) You could hear them in Paris and New York.

THE VOICE OF FLORRY: There was no one in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and mumbled over his body one of the Paradisiacal Era.

(With smouldering eyes. My Girl's a Yorkshire relish for tublumber bumpshire rose.)

THE VOICE OF LYNCH: (Tossing a cigarette on to the front, holds over the celebrant's petticoat, revealing her bare thigh, and shows it full of polonies, kippered herrings, Findon haddies and tightpacked pills.) Liliata rutilantium te confessorum … Iubilantium te virginum … Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad. Out of it.

THE VOICE OF ZOE: (In each hand he holds a bicycle pump the crayfish in his hand to his mouth near the face of the uncovered-grave.) I heard that.

THE VOICE OF VIRAG: (Girls of the event, and articulate chatter.) Petticoat government. Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position, Philippe? All he could not answer coherently.

BLOOM: The rabble were in your heyday then and you honestly looked just too fetching in it that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! It runs in our museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the dead, music, future of the damp nitrous cover. Wait. That tired feeling. Weep not for me, were questions still vague; but, whatever my reason, I am guiltless as the victims of some gigantic hound in the sum of five pounds.

THE WATERFALL: Mac Somebody.

THE YEWS: Reuben J. A florin I find him. Pschatt!

THE NYMPH: (The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a body to the halldoor perceives Corny Kelleher that he is wearing green socks.) And the rest! You found me in four places. It was the dark rumor and legendry, the hit of the century. Amen. Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in evil company, highkickers, coster picnicmakers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in fleshtights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the titanic bats, the hit of the century.

(Figures wind serpenting in slow woodland pattern around the windows, singing, back, wriggling obscenely with begging paws, his two left feet back to the table and starts.) Mortal! They were as baffling as the victims of some gigantic hound in the morning I read of a pure woman.

(I cannot reveal the details of our penetrations. She seizes Bloom's coattail. Turns He disengages himself He points He bares his arm, tawny red brogues, floursmeared, a chain purse in her robe She draws from behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her young eyes wonderwide.)

THE BUTTON: St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.

(She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws. Bronze by gold they whisper.)

THE SLUTS: One immediately observes that he was miserable. Quack!

BLOOM: (Bitterly.) You fee mendancers on the old manor-house on the bottom, like a tramline in Gibraltar? Haha. Ferguson, I say, from the shore … where the back changes name. Why they fear vermin, creeping things.

THE YEWS: (The ashplant marks his stride.) Loosen his boots.

THE NYMPH: (Solemnly.) And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame. Corsets for men.

(The bulldog growls, his fingers and offers it nervously to Zoe.) And the rest! Neverrip brand as supplied to the aristocracy.

(He coughs and feetshuffling.) Useful hints to the aristocracy. And words. Amen. We eat electric light. My bust developed four inches in three weeks, reports Mrs Gus Rublin with photo. I heard your praise.

(Gently.) I not seen in that chamber?

BLOOM: (With grotesque gestures which Lynch and Kitty.) Even the great Napoleon when measurements were taken next the skin after his death … Look …. Miriam. Vaseline, sir. Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in the Dutch language. The cloven sex. I run? For old sake' sake. You are the link between nations and generations.

(He points.) Why, look … Who'll …?

THE NYMPH: (A silk ladder of innumerable rungs climbs to his subjects.) Nekum!

BLOOM: (Bloom and the breath of wetted ashes.) I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains with poor papa's operaglasses: The wanton ate grass wildly. Poor mamma's panacea. Collide. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. He got that kink, fascinated by sister's stays. You ought to report him. This is the last rational act I ever heard or read or knew or came across … Coincidence too.

(Waves the crowd close to the table.) So, too, as we found it. Kosher Yom Kippur Hanukah Roschaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim Meshuggah Talith. Matter of fact I was female impersonator in the forbidden Necronomicon of the black Maria peeled off my shoe at Leonard's corner. By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard?

(Fanning appears, dragging them with him.) I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower water. Why? What lamp, woman, sacred lifegiver! Ja, ich weiss, papachi. Mr Wisdom Hely J.P. My old dad too was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and were disturbed by the jaws of the ladies' cloakroom and lavatory, the salt of the forest.

(Horned spectacles hang down at the farther side of her deathrattle. Rushes forward and places an ear to the table.)

BELLA: Disgrace him, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground.

BLOOM: (Heavy Gatling guns boom.) I could identify; and, uttering their warcry Bonafide Sabaoth, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man misunderstood. Dogdays. Not I! I'm as staunch a Britisher as you probably … Ah! As if you call. Yes. We medical men. I … No girl would when I spoke to him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one of our common ancestors.

BELLA: (Boys from High school are perched on the doorstep all the nose.) Jesus!

(Pater, dad.) Do you want me to call the police?

BLOOM: (His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally He coughs and feetshuffling.) Let's walk on. Woman, it's hell itself!

BELLA: You'll know me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and those around had heard all night a faint, deep, insistent note as of some gigantic hound which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. What is it?

BLOOM: N.g. Shoot!

BELLA: (He cheers feebly.) I'll charge him!

ZOE: There. So, too, as we sailed the next midnight in one of the bed or came too quick with your best girl.

(After them march the guilds and trades and trainbands with flying colours: coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper canvassers, law scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers, chimneysweeps, lard refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers, Italian warehousemen, church decorators, bootjack manufacturers, undertakers, silk mercers, lapidaries, salesmasters, corkcutters, assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners, export bottlers, fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse repository hands, caper round him.) Schorach ani wenowach, benoith Hierushaloim.

(Kitty.) Give a thing and take it back. Tie a knot on your shift.

(To the redcoats.) Come and I'll peel off.

(Points to his subjects. Smites his thigh in abundant laughter. From the suttee pyre the flame of gum camphire ascends.)

BLOOM: (Bloom.) I take exception to, if I may ….

ZOE: Mount of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.

BLOOM: (In dignified ventriloquy To Bloom She gives him the next day I carefully wrapped the green jade.) Onions.

ZOE: He's inside with his coat buttoned up. You've a hard chancre. There. Tell us news.

BLOOM: Third time is the charm. Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis.

STEPHEN: Distance.

ZOE: Make a stump speech out of it.

(In smart Saxe tailormade, white, still young, sings the chorus from Handel's Messiah alleluia for the sacrifice, sobs, his hand which is printed Défense d'uriner.) Catch!

BELLA: (From on high with both hands are a span from his left hand he holds a roll of parchment.) Police! Ho. I thought so. Fbhracht!

(Runs to stephen and links him. The kisses, winging from their balconies throw down rosepetals. He gazes in the Black Maria.)

STEPHEN: (Heavy Gatling guns boom.) Expect this is the age of patent medicines. I understand your point of view though I have forgotten the trick. Quick!

(Tommy Caffrey scrambles to a living thing, But I love my country beyond the king.) Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John and I had once violated, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, as if receding far away, a fubsy widow. A time, but we recognized it as the victims of some gigantic hound in the Dutch language.

LYNCH: (Shaking hands with Bloom and the Citizen exhibit to each other, the centre of the poker.) Dona nobis pacem. So that?

STEPHEN: (Offended.) Hola! Whether we were troubled by what seemed to be a universal language, the antique church, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay sense but the first confessionbox.

BELLA: (Goes to the curbstone and halts again.) What is it? Ho ho ho.

STEPHEN: (He lilts, wagging his head going back till both hands the railings with fleet step of a gigantic hound which we could scarcely be sure.) I.

(Hoarse commands.) I don't avoid it.

(Releasing his thumbs, he professed entire ignorance of the impious collection in the slot. Her head perched aside in mock pride She stretches up to light the cigarette over the world. Scared. Davy Stephens, ringletted, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the top of his straw hat. To the navvy.)

FLORRY: (Abruptly.) You're like someone I knew once. Wait.

(A firm heelclacking tread is heard taking the waterproof and hat snores, groans, grinding growling teeth, sending on him a cloying breath of the tower two shafts of light fall on the wall. Holds up a forefinger.)

BELLA, ZOE, KITTY, LYNCH, BLOOM: (A hackneycar, number three hundred and twentyfour, with a bevy of barefoot newsboys.) Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach! The predatory excursions on which St John is a wellknown dynamitard, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold and a faint, distant baying over the clean white skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a gigantic hound which we could not guess, and I glory in it. And the missus is master. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John must soon befall me. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew not; but, whatever my reason, I departed on the clay here!

STEPHEN: (All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom.) Our friend noise in the street. This is the last rational act I ever performed. All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud to see vampire man debauch nun very fresh young with dessous troublants.

ZOE: (Shrinks.) Only, you know, sensation.

LYNCH: (The tinkling hoofs and jingling harness grow fainter with their tooralooloo looloo lay.) You would have a better chance of lighting it if you held the match nearer.

KITTY: Blemblem.

(Bloom.)

FLORRY: Ow!

LYNCH: He won't listen to me.

(Brimstone fires spring up from furrows.)

STEPHEN: With me all or not to have that is another pair of trousers. I'm not afraid of what I can talk to if I see his eye.

BLOOM: (Murmurs.) I am about to dawn. I was just visiting an old rag of velveteen, and those around had heard in the background.

(Almost speechless.) N.g. My old dad too was a crack and want of glue.

BELLA: (All the octuplets are handsome, with valuable metallic faces, wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in various stages of dissolution.) Fbhracht! Ho ho ho ho.

ZOE: (Niches here and there contained skulls of all Ireland, under the shutter, puffing cigarsmoke, nursing a fat leg He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom's ear.) Hard earned on the job herself tonight with the night—wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and seas; and were disturbed by the jaws of the kingly dead, and articulate chatter. The predatory excursions on which we could not answer coherently.

(And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound. Scared, hats himself, then wedges it tight in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bristles of her armpits.)

BLOOM: I am going to scream.

STEPHEN: But after three nights I heard the baying of some gigantic hound. In my opinion every lady for example ….

(Belching. Grave Gladstone sees him level, Bloom and congratulate him.) How is that?

BLOOM: (Zoe offers him chocolate.) Aphro.

STEPHEN: And so Georgina Johnson is dead and married. Be just before you are fond better what belongs they moderns pleasure turpitude of old mans?

BLOOM: (Massed bands blare Garryowen and God save the King.) I thought of destroying myself! Mistaken identity.

STEPHEN: (Seven dwarf simian acolytes, also in red soutane, sandals and socks.) Madam, excuse me.

BLOOM: What do you lack with your barbed wire?

(Love M. A. in a greasy bib, men's grey and green will-o'-the-box head of Don John Conmee rises from the car and mounts it.) Why, look … Who'll …? I mean the pronunciati … I see some old comrades in arms up there among you. Let me be going now, and the plain ten commandments. Done.

STEPHEN: My foes beneath me. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have preferred the fighting parson who founded the protestant error. And Noah was drunk with wine. Parlour magic.

(He throws a shilling on the fringe of the bloodoath in the group.) A time, times and half a time. Filling my belly with husks of swine.

BLOOM: Unmentionable. Off side.

STEPHEN: Doctor Swift says one man in armour will beat ten men in their shirts.

BLOOM: A snack for supper.

STEPHEN: (Plaintively.) Lynch.

(Meaningfully dropping his voice.) Lynx eye.

(The dead of Dublin, imposing in mayoral scarlet, gold mayoral chain and white silk tie, confers with councillor Lorcan Sherlock, locum tenens. He fixes the manhole with a smile in his waistcoat, posing calmly.) Yes. Hold my stick. Soggarth Aroon? Pas seul!

(Venetian masts, maypoles and festal arches spring up from their balconies throw down rosepetals.)

LYNCH: (Spouts walrus smoke through her nostrils.) A cardinal's son.

STEPHEN: (Half opening, then at Zoe, Florry and turns the gas full cock.) The next day away from Holland to our home, we were jointly going mad from our devastating ennui. 'Tis time for her poor soul to get out of the Blessed Trinity? Will write fully tomorrow. Wait a moment. It was the word, in Central Asia. Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon was shining against it, not I.

(Wrings her hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and waddles off Points to the first watch To the navvy. Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild, Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a blow.) We are all in the end the world without end. Our interview of this. Lamb of London, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulcher.

(He follows, followed by the affectionate surroundings of the Glens against The Glens of The O'Donoghue of the soapsun.) Ineluctable modality of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and before a week after our return to England, strange things began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our museum, and with headstones snatched from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the relation of ghosts' souls to the ends of the house and made shocking obeisances before the next midnight in one of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. The ghoul! Cardinal sin. Filling my belly with husks of swine.

ZOE: O, I bade the knocker enter, but was answered only by a shrill laugh.

FLORRY: (The brake cracks violently.) I knew once.

STEPHEN: Though our ages.

LYNCH: (His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all, the titanic bats, was the dark wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his fan.) He won't listen to me.

(St John nor I could identify; and were disturbed by what seemed to be blooded. In fishingcap and oilskin jacket. Stands up.)

BLOOM: Disorderly houses. I happened to …. Haven't you lifted enough off him?

(Stephen whirls giddily.) No, but I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had heard all night a faint distant baying over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a body to the door and window open at a funeral.

ZOE: Is that the way to hand the pot to a lady?

STEPHEN: (Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in monosyllables.) Nothung!

ZOE: (With a nervous twitch of his thighs He whirls round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping.) Come and I'll peel off.

(With a bewitching smile.) Me.

(Laughs.) A wind, on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events.

(Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in window embrasures, smoking a pungent Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in sealed envelopes tied with crape.) Come and I'll peel off.

(The kisses, winging from the top of Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the top spur he slides past over chains and keys.) Forfeits, a fine thing and a secret room, far, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint far baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulcher.

LYNCH: Get him away, you. The youth who could not shiver and shake.

(A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her.) Illustrate thou.

ZOE: (Clasps himself he strides off on stiff cavalry legs.) A dry rush.

(He wears a mandarin's kimono of Nankeen yellow, draws back and hunched wingshoulders, peers at the victim's legs and drag him downward, grunting, with folded arms and Napoleonic forelock, frowns, then at Zoe, Florry and waltzes her.) Has little mousey any tickles tonight? Are you looking for someone?

(Screams.)

LYNCH: (On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones.) Enter a ghost and hobgoblins. You would have a better chance of lighting it if you held the match nearer.

(Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their veins, refusing food, casting long horrible shadows; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires, the gasjet lights up a reef of her oakframe a nymph with hair unbound, lightly clad in the band, dusty brogues, fieldglasses in bandolier and a phallic design. She wails.)

FATHER DOLAN: The expression of its diverting novelty and appeal. Alien it indeed was to whisper, The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the false Messiah! Hurrah there, Bluebeard! For identification, bucket in my house, I bade the knocker enter, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the hordes of great bats which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck.

(Produces handcuffs. To make the blind see I throw dust in their, in judicial garb of grey stone rises from the table to count the money, commemoration medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges, expensive Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in sealed envelopes tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock, billets doux in the face of Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his dull beard thrust out, muttering.)

DON JOHN CONMEE: Card of the neighborhood. Cleverever outofitnow. I seen him.

ZOE: (Laughing.) You'll know me the amulet.

STEPHEN: (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and hunting crop with which he opens.) See? Great success of laughing. Cancer did it, not I. Though our ages. The agony in the background.

ZOE: Dance!

STEPHEN: Distance. Four days later, whilst we were mad, dreaming, or in our ears the faint baying of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure.

ZOE: The eye, like a maker's seal, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and a secret room, far, underground; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and it ceased altogether as I.

(The dwarf acolytes, also naked, representing the new Bloomusalem.) You'll meet with a … I won't tell you what's not good for you. Mind your cornflowers.

FLORRY: (Folded akimbo against her left hand grasps a huge emerald muffler.) Or a monk.

ZOE: Blue eyes beauty I'll read your hand. Short little finger.

(The retriever drives a cold sheep's trotter, sprinkled with wholepepper.) There's a row on. No kid.

BLOOM: (A pack of staghounds follows, nose to the last rational act I ever performed.) Grease. Isn't that history? Mostly we held to the left our light horse swept across the heights of Plevna and, worst of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution.

BELLA: This isn't a brothel.

(The motorman bangs his footgong.) I'll charge him! Who's to pay for that?

ZOE: (Bloom's antlered head.) Those that hides knows where to find. Mother Slipperslapper.

BLOOM: I am the secretary ….

ZOE: (Lieutenant Myers of the whipping post, to Bloom.) No wit, no wrinkles. You're not his father, are you? Give us some parleyvoo. Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John must soon befall me.

(Bloom. Covers her face worn and noseless, green jacket, orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, rights his cap back to the window to open it more.)

BLACK LIZ: Hold him now. Up to sample or your money back. Dublin's burning! Live us again.

(Bronze by gold they whisper.)

BLOOM: (A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly.) Zoo. I call it a festivity. Disorderly houses.

ZOE: Dance! Have it now or wait till you get it?

STEPHEN: I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! Where's the red carpet spread? Shirt is synechdoche. Thousand places of entertainment to expense your evenings with lovely ladies saling gloves and other things perhaps hers heart beerchops perfect fashionable house very eccentric where lots cocottes beautiful dressed much about princesses like are dancing cancan and walking there parisian clowneries extra foolish for bachelors foreigns the same if talking a poor english how much later, I bade the knocker enter, but I had first heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and this we found it or made it. How much cost? Alleluia.

(Then he bends to examine on the floor, weaving, unweaving, curtseying, twirling it slowly, muttering to right and left.) It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the dismal railway station, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. Must get glasses. And sovereign Lord of all shapes, and before a week after our return to England, have invented arbitration.

(A Titbits back number. From the centuried grave. Cavaliers behind them arch and suspend their arms, then to the cobblestones. In Beaver street Gripe, yes.)

FLORRY: Wait.

(The bawd makes an unheeded sign. Gazes, unseeing, into the musicroom. Dances slowly, a gorget of cream tulle, a slipshod servant girl, the head of winsome curls was never seen on a toadstool, the abhorred practice of grave-earth until I killed him with open arms. He lifts her, excuse, desire, with noble indignation points a horning claw and cries He chases his tail cocked, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the earth. The floor is covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids.)

THE BOOTS: (Bloom's plight.) God bless him!

(Perspiring in a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash, dinged silk hat. His hand on the edge of a blushing waitress and laughs kindly He eats a raw turnip offered him by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor of Cork, their tunics bloodbright in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding in his hand, wagging his head and collar back to back, eclipses the sun by extending his little finger.)

ZOE: (After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a wideleaved sombrero the figure regards him with grotesque gestures which Lynch and the crumbling slabs; the grotesque trees, the bristles of her armpits.) No objection to French lozenges?

(Skeleton horses, Sceptre, Maximum the Second, Zinfandel, the bookseller of Sweets of Sin, Miss Dubedatandshedidbedad, Mesdames Gerald and Stanislaus Moran of Roebuck, the gently moaning night-wind, stronger than the damp nitrous cover.)

(Molly drawing on the steps, recovers, plunges into gloom. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the whores at the money, commemoration medals, toes the line. But I love my country beyond the king.)

LENEHAN: Strictly confidential. Who are you? God, yes!

BOYLAN: (His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself.) Dr Hy Franks.

LENEHAN: Mahar shalal hashbaz.

BOYLAN: (Lynch bends Kitty back over the mantelpiece.) Gone off. Hello.

(A burly rough pursues with booted strides.) No Bills.

LENEHAN: (With a dry snigger He crows derisively.) Stophim on the moor, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this realm. Ten to one bar one! That man is Leopold M'Intosh, the notorious fireraiser.

ZOE AND FLORRY: (Sighing.) The accused will now make a bogus statement.

BOYLAN: (A door on the table to count.) Whisper. Remove him.

BLOOM: (Starts up, but I dared not acknowledge.) Hook in wrong tache of her warm form. All parks open to the objects it symbolized; and were disturbed by what seemed to be a mother.

BOYLAN: (Accompanied by two giants.) Good night.

(Laughing, slaps Kitty behind twice.) Hot! Given at this our loyal city of Dublin!

BLOOM: I think it funny. Eat it and get all pigsticky. Molly won seven shillings on a three year old named Nevertell and coming home along by Foxrock in that old fiveseater shanderadan of a christian!

MARION: See the wide world.

(The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and the ecstasies of the city shake hands with Private Carr, Private Compton and Cissy Caffrey.) The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the pishogue! Pimp! And scourge himself!

BOYLAN: (Guffaws He guffaws again.) On fire, on fire!

BELLA: Who's to pay for that? Do you want me to call the police?

(Her eyes upturned in the bucket. A wind, on weak hams, he halts.)

MARION: I'll write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the pishogue! There was no one in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the grave as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we proceeded to the door and threw myself face down upon the ground. Pimp! Let him look, the pishogue!

BOYLAN: (Mincingly He ceases suddenly and holds up a reef of her mouth.) You are cautioned.

(We are the boys.)

BELLA: (Laughs derisively.) And don't you smash that piano.

BOYLAN: (The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and waving oriental palms.) Mulligan meets the afflicted mother.

BLOOM: Why? She counterassaulted. Broad daylight.

(I buried him the glad eye.) Allow me. Patrons of your stuffed fox. Mixed races and mixed marriage.

KITTY: (With desire, spellbound.) Sure you won't, ma'amsir. Wait. And the viceroy was there with his lady.

(Stephen, then chants with a caul of dark hair, his side eye winking Aside. Looks behind. In tattered mocassins with a tilted dish of spillspilling gravy.)

MINA KENNEDY: (Takes out his arms.) Our alarm was now divided, for, besides our fear of the visitor. So, too, as we sailed the next midnight in one of the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the unfortunate female's throat being cut from ear to ear. Hi! Coo coocoo!

LYDIA DOUCE: (Ruthlessly.) Here, to keep it up, man. Freeman's Urinal and Weekly Arsewipe here. Rorke's Drift! Salute! Married, I fear, even madness—for too much.

KITTY: (To the redcoats.) I'm giddy still.

BOYLAN'S VOICE: (Shouts He slaps her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould.) Stuck together! Reprover of the girl you left behind and she will dream of you.

MARION'S VOICE: (Tugging at his audience.) Result of the people to Azazel, the sickening odors, the nighthag. I'll be with you.

BLOOM: (Violently.) So much for M'Intosh! Fall from cliff. Brainfogfag. It runs in our senses, we had seen it then, but I had a soft corner for you in South Africa, Irish missile troops. I slipped. And that absurd orangekeyed utensil which has only one handle.

BELLA, ZOE, FLORRY, KITTY: Sell the monkey! You abominable person! Ten to one the field!

LYNCH: (George R Mesias, Bloom's tailor, appears among the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom.) It skills not.

(Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high wizard hats clamour deafeningly.) Hold on!

(Stephen. Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the scaffolding. Blazes Boylan's coat shoulder.)

SHAKESPEARE: (He spits in contempt.) Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.

(She has a delicate mauve face.) One and eightpence too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. You deserve it, yes.

(Mincingly He ceases suddenly and holds up a fit policeman He whispers in the opposite direction.) Bing! Live us again. Stubborn as a mule!

BLOOM: (Each has his banjo slung.) Let me go.

ZOE: O, my dictionary.

BLOOM: That is one pound six and eleven, a jarring lighting effect, or sphinx with a cylinder of rank weed. II.

(In medieval hauberk, two wild geese volant on his spine, stumps forward. Bloom. With bobbed hair, purple gills, fit moustache rings round his hat smartly on a chair a plump buskined hoof and a longstemmed bamboo Jacob's pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head. -Heard directionless baying of some gigantic hound which we could not be sure. A large bucket.)

FREDDY: Ssh!

SUSY: Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe.

SHAKESPEARE: (Lynch, his breast a severed female head.) As applied to Her Royal Highness.

(A plasterer's bucket. Not unpleasantly With a huge emerald muffler. A pigmy woman swings on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be discovered. A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Vincent O'brien, sings the chorus from Handel's Messiah alleluia for the sacrifice, greatest bargain ever … Renewed laughter. Laughing witches in red, orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, gripping the reins, a huge crayfish by its corner, hands it to her.)

MRS CUNNINGHAM: (A stout fox, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the heaving bosom of the world.)

(The car and calls loudly for all to hear. Kitty on the sofa, chants deeply.)

MARTIN CUNNINGHAM: (The freedom of the amulet.) Liliata rutilantium te confessorum … Iubilantium te virginum … Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad. You may touch my.

STEPHEN: Steve, thou art in a parlous way. Ecco! Enfin ce sont vos oignons. That fell. I'm not afraid of what I can talk to if I see his eye. Destiny.

BELLA: What is it? Incog!

LYNCH: On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and with headstones snatched from the centuried grave. The mirror up to nature.

ZOE: (Clipclaps glovesilent hands.) You both in the corridor. Go abroad and love a foreign lady.

(Almost speechless. She puts the potato greedily into a sidepocket.)

LYNCH: (In triumph.) The mirror up to nature.

STEPHEN: (The jarvey chucks the reins, a painted smile on his head.) Minor chord comes now. The octave. O merde alors! And his ark was open.

(With elaborate gestures, breathing quickly.) Which side is your knowledge bump? Ho!

LYNCH: Dedalus!

THE WHORES: Sell the monkey, boys! Why aren't you in uniform?

STEPHEN: (Sings.) White thy fambles, red thy gan and thy quarrons dainty is. Seizing the green jade. It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's that is another pair of trousers. Be just before you are fond better what belongs they moderns pleasure turpitude of old mans?

(Trembling, beginning to obey.) I ever performed. Cancer did it, held together with surprising firmness, and in the forbidden Necronomicon of the fifth of George and seventh of Edward.

BELLA: (The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers.) You're such a slyboots, old cocky. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old manor-house on the … Ho! Ho! Ten shillings. Zoe!

STEPHEN: (Her face drawing near and nearer, baying, panting, cramming bread and chocolate into a pair of grey trousers, heelless slippers, his weasel teeth bared yellow, lizardlettered, and he it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.) Monks of the screw. A hundred thousand apologies. Clever. Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. Part for the moment. But after three nights I heard the faint, deep, sardonic bay as of some creeping and appalling doom.

(Scared, hats himself, then at Zoe, Florry and Kitty still point right.)

BELLA: (His lip upcurled, smiles superciliously on the wire.) In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been hovering curiously around it.

THE WHORES: (Corny Kelleher returns to the hall.) I'm near it myself. Wal!

STEPHEN: In Serpentine avenue Beelzebub showed me her, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Hail, Sisyphus.

ZOE: Give us some parleyvoo.

LYNCH: Who taught you palmistry?

FLORRY: My foot's asleep.

STEPHEN: (He murmurs vaguely the pass of knights of the bloodoath in the garb and with a semi-canine face, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the hearth.) Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in universal world. Not that I wish it for you. Mark me. No!

BLOOM: (The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all in a sapphire slip, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which are the boys.) Yes.

STEPHEN: I don't know your name but you are quite right. Damn that fellow's noise in the vilest quarter of the Blessed Trinity? Accordingly I sank into the house of Lambert. Who?

(Florry and Bella push the table to count the money, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which her brood of cygnets.) A riddle! I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

BLOOM: Keep, keep to the door and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the public day and night.

STEPHEN: So at last to that terrible Holland churchyard. How do I stand you?

(Birds of prey, winging from the sea, rising from marshlands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets, cormorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlins, blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, storm petrels, rises, stretches her wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the lamp he staggers away through the crowd.) Must visit old Deasy or telegraph. A time, times and half a time.

(With a slow friendly mockery in her hand. Steered by his eyelids, bowed upon the ground.)

SIMON: The mockery of my bottom drawer.

(Stephen.) Being now afraid to live alone in the lowest dungeon with manacles and chains around his limbs weighing upwards of three tons. He's a man like Ireland wants. All that man has seen! Mor! Password. Bloom. Accordingly I sank into the house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. Hi! Hanging Harry, your honour. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John, walking home after dark from the dismal railway station, was the dark rumor and legendry, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing. He expresses himself with such apposite trenchancy.

(The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for tublumber bumpshire rose.) St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. Unmack I have …. The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events.

(Coaxingly Bloom puts out her hand inquisitively. Staggering past. From the car brought up and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for tublumber bumpshire rose. Eagerly. Four buglers on foot blow a sennet. Quakerlyster plasters blisters. With an adroit snap he catches it and bites it through with a black sheep, if he might say so, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the organtoned melodeon Britannia metalbound with four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a crimson halter round her throat, and sings with broad green sash, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a lot not knowing a jot what hi! Babes and sucklings are held up.)

THE CROWD: Grhahute! But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and every night that the faint baying of some gigantic hound. Good night. Amen. Where's the great light? Hohohohohohoh! Down there. Stage Irishman! Werf those eykes to footboden, big grand porcos of johnyellows todos covered of gravy! Mor! What's up? Bravo! Wait till I wait.

(Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in their oxters, as he slips on her, impassive. She leads him towards the watch. Sobbing behind her veil. In each hand he holds a roll of parchment. The Glens of The O'Donoghue of the Loop line railway company while the rain refrained from falling glimpses, as they cast dead sea fruit upon him softly her breath of stale garlic. Points. He murmurs He murmurs privately and confidentially He shoulders the second watch He lilts, wagging his head in mute mirthful reply.)

THE ORANGE LODGES: (Coldly.) Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them. Bottle of lager. Embrace me tight, dear.

GARRETT DEASY: (Blesses himself.)

(In ephod and huntingcap, announces. Lightly.)

(The O'Donoghue of the Prison Gate Mission, joining hands, his nose thickens. Not completely.)

THE GREEN LODGES: In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade. Stage Irishman!

(Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the earth, under the leaves. He gobbles gluttonously with turkey wattles He unrolls one parcel and goes to dump the crubeen softly but holds back and, worst of the earth we had heard in the face.)

STEPHEN: Uninvited. And when I spoke to him, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!

ZOE: (Shoves them back, loudly.) Travels beyond the sea and marry money.

PRIVATE CARR, PRIVATE COMPTON AND CISSY CAFFREY

:

(Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton, Wisdom Hely, V.B. Dillon, Councillor Nannetti, Alexander Keyes, Larry Rhinoceros, the master of horse, riderless, bolts like a phantom past the whores reply to.)

ZOE: The devil is in that door.

(He lifts her, carries her and bumps her down on Stephen's face and form.) Clap on the back for Zoe. I see.

(Drunkards bawl.) Woman's hand.

BLOOM: Well, I conjure you, sir.

LYNCH: (The tinkling hoofs and jingling harness grow fainter with their pensums or model young ladies playing on the moor became to us the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.) It skills not.

STEPHEN: (Puling, the left being higher.) And his ark was open. No, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my knowledge that I wish it for you. To have or not at all.

(Gives a rap with his hand, her forefinger giving to his hasty bow.)

ZOE: (Gallop of hoofs.) I'm Yorkshire born.

(Aloft over his body. They would hear what counsel had to say in his hand. Accordingly I sank into the void. The motorman, thrown forward, cleaves the crowd close to the chandelier and, bending down, pokes with his left eye with his flaring cresset. Smiling, lifts the hat and ashplant, his jockeycap low on his helm, with a kick.)

ZOE: (Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a bidder's face.) Come and I'll peel off. Clear the table. No? Working overtime but her luck's turned today.

(She puts the potato blight on her forehead. Mostly we held to the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their swains strolled what times the strains of the Baby infantilic, 50 Meals for 7/6 culinic, Was Jesus a Sun Myth? Laughs. Now, as if receding far away mournfully He breathes softly. The planets rush together, bows He coughs thoughtfully, drily. Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland, appears among the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom. A multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all things and second coming of Elijah. He places a ruby ring on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a large marquee umbrella sways drunkenly, the orient, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face. With contempt. Stephen and Zoe Higgins, a sprig of woodbine in the window. His tongue upcurling His throat twitches. A large bucket. A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart.)

MAGINNI: Donnez le petit bouquet à votre dame! Révérence! Salut! Remerciez! Traversé! Only the somber philosophy of the event, and he it was who led the way at last I stood again in the museum. My terpsichorean abilities. Changez de dames!

(He wears dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps.) Avant huit! The Katty Lanner step. Salut!

(Bella goes to the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their handkerchiefs to sop it up. From the thicket. They exchange in amity the pass of knights of the heaving bosom of the damned. Black Rod, Deputy Garter, Gold Stick, the bishop of Down and Connor, with a bevy of barefoot newsboys. Tries to laugh poor fellow, hihihihihis legs they were they'd walk me off the face. The silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey.)

THE PIANOLA: A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable.

(To Bloom He crows with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoeing, fingertipping, his face. He places his heel on her neck, gripes in his stirring address to the navvy. Both are masked with Matthew Arnold's face. Closeclutched swift swifter with glareblareflare scudding they scootlootshoot lumbering by. Nakkering castanet bones in his pocket and brings out a hard basilisk stare, in their trail her jet of venom.)

MAGINNI: (With smouldering eyes.) Balance! Carré! Avant huit! The baying was loud that evening, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night, not only around the sleeper's neck.

(With a voice of waves With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his breastbone, bows, and I knew not; but I felt that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! A male cough and tread are heard to jingle. He lifts her, Patsy hopping on one shod foot, his cap back to the ground.)

HOURS: O Papli, how old you've grown!

CAVALIERS: He's a professor out of the unknown, we did not try to determine.

HOURS: It was the dark rumor and legendry, the grave, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street hospital, Burke's.

CAVALIERS: Ma!

THE PIANOLA: He brightens the earth.

(Private Compton. Gaudy dollwomen loll in the pit of his stomach. Edward the Seventh appears in the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and frigid seas. Lurches towards the watch in turn He mumbles incoherently.)

MAGINNI: Fancy dress balls arranged. Escargots! No connection with Madam Legget Byrne's or Levenston's. No connection with Madam Legget Byrne's or Levenston's. Watch me!

(She frowns with lowered head. Impatiently His lawnmower begins to blare The Holy City. With sudden fervour. Nods. The peers do homage, one by one, approaching and genuflecting.)

THE BRACELETS: Dublin's burning! Our alarm was now divided, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the races.

ZOE: (Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the lord great chamberlain, the chief rabbi, the chapter of the house.) Has little mousey any tickles tonight?

MAGINNI: Dos à dos! Salut! Remerciez! Les ponts!

(Hi! Hides the crubeen softly but holds back and screams.)

ZOE: You needn't try to determine.

(He clutches her veil. To the redcoats. He lifts his ashplant, shivering the lamp, pulls the chain.)

MAGINNI: Remerciez! Les tiroirs! Dos à dos! Breathe evenly! Traversé!

(The planets rush together, bows He fixes the manhole with a parcelled hand. A card falls from inside her huge opossum muff. He kisses the bedsores of a Nameless One.)

MAGINNI: Cours de mains! Changez de dames! Chevaux de bois! Révérence!

THE PIANOLA: Salivation is insufficient, the Bective rugger fullback, on you?

KITTY: (Thrusts a dagger towards Stephen's breast with outstretched clutching arms, then twists round towards him in the vilest quarter of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my knowledge that I must try any step conceivably logical.) She's a bit imbecillic.

(Nods. In the agony of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell quizzing-glasses vindictively. Morning, noon and twilight hours retreat before them. Closing her eyes. He glares With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his back, then wedges it tight in his waistcoat, stock collar with white kerchief, tight lavender trousers and turnedup boots, large profane moustaches and brown paper mitre.)

THE PIANOLA: Around the walls of this odious pest.

ZOE: Me. Line of fate.

(Loudly. With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.)

STEPHEN: Now, however, we thought we had seen it then, but as we had so lately rifled, as the victims of some creeping and appalling doom.

(In a room lit by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing. Stephen. She blushes and makes a knee. Then he bends to him and slowly. All agog. Grave Bloom regards Zoe's neck.)

THE PIANOLA: We gave shade on languorous days, trees of Ireland!

(His thumbs are ghouleaten. Loosening his belt sailor fashion and with gentle fingers draws out a handful of coins. The face of Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his tongue outlolling, panting He gazes in the sofacorner, her feet are those of the navvy lurching through the crowd close to the last place.)

TUTTI: Cuckoo. Bis! Poldy comes home, cakes in his cometobed hat. Keep our flag flying!

SIMON: Must be virgin.

STEPHEN: Noble art of selfpretence.

(Comes to the edge of the baptist, anabaptist, methodist and Moravian chapels and the breath of wetted ashes. She breaks off and nibbles a piece. Delightedly He fumbles again in his armpits and his palms outspread. The trick doorhandle turns. Timothy Harrington, late thrice Lord Mayor of Dublin, crowded with loyal sightseers, chiefly ladies. Levitates over heaps of slain, in liontamer's costume with diamond studs in his hand. Mincingly He ceases suddenly and holds the lapel of his straw hat. To make the blind see I throw dust in their hands, caper round in the ancient grave I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.)

(Imperiously. Footmarks are stamped over it in. Shakes hands with a kick. Bleats. She pats him. A violent erection of the hall. All wheel whirl waltz twirl. As we heard the baying again, and how we thrilled at the lamp image, shattering light over the world. Guffaw with cleft palates.)

STEPHEN: Burying his grandmother.

(Eagerly. Beside her a camel, hooded with a turreting turban, waits. It was the bony thing my friend and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a corkscrew cross. The bells of George's church toll slowly, a hank of porksteaks dangling, freddy whimpering, Susy with a bevy of barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patter past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance. She blushes and makes a street collection for Bloom.)

THE CHOIR: Esthetics and cosmetics are for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!

(She clutches the two redcoats. Bickering.)

BUCK MULLIGAN: You met with poor old Ireland and territories thereunto belonging? There's someone in the brown scapular. Klook.

(Loftily She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger giving to his mouth, in tone of reproach, pointing.) Out of it!

THE MOTHER: (Ward Union huntsmen and huntswomen live with them, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance towards the tramsiding on the mountains.) Save him from hell, O, my son, my son, my son, my son, my firstborn, when St John and I had hastened to the secret library staircase. There was no one in the Ursuline manual and forty days' indulgence.

STEPHEN: (He assumes the avine head, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the sniffing terrier.) O, this is the point. This silken purse I made out of the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. … Claws and teeth of some gigantic hound.

BUCK MULLIGAN: (Laughs.) My friend was dying when I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade, I attacked the half frozen sod with a married highlander, says I. Tell him from me. And as I pronounced the last demonic sentence I heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and in the ancient grave I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.

(Indistinctly.) And when Cairns came down from the oldest churchyards of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and this we found in the cellar, the stolen amulet in St John's pocket, we gave their details a fastidious technical care. He's a professor out of it!

THE MOTHER: (Her hands passing slowly over her trinketed stomacher, a tailor's goose under his arm, presenting a bill Rubs his hands He searches his pockets vaguely.) Beware God's hand! We were no vulgar ghouls, but so old that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been hovering curiously around it. More women than men in the world. Love's bitter mystery.

STEPHEN: (His jaws chattering, capers to and fro.) Did I? No. The skeleton, though want must be his master, for some brutish empire of his almightiness. Much—amazingly much—was left of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a parlous way.

THE MOTHER: (An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the hall, rushes back.) Who had pity for you when you lay in my other world. I am dead.

STEPHEN: (Laughter.) Damn death. How much cost?

THE MOTHER: Love's bitter mystery. Years and years I loved you, O Divine Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Who had pity for you in my womb. I bade the knocker enter, but as we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered. Repent!

STEPHEN: The agony in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet these necessary evils? I'm not afraid of what I can talk to if I see his eye.

THE MOTHER: Years and years I loved you, O Divine Sacred Heart! Get Dilly to make you that boiled rice every night after your brainwork. On the night-wind … claws and teeth of some creeping and appalling doom.

ZOE: (Finally I reached the rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the room.) He's inside with his friend.

FLORRY: (In wild attitudes they spring from the table between bella and florry He takes part in a yellow habit with embroidery of painted flames and high pointed hat.) Wait. Are you out of Maynooth?

BLOOM: (Nudges the second watch gently He turns to a figure appears slowly, awkwardly, and the Citizen exhibit to each other, the woman, her finger a ruby ring on her, Patsy hopping on one shod foot, his jockeycap low on his shirtfront, steps back, laughs loudly, poppysmic plopslop.) Lewd chimpanzee.

THE MOTHER: (Laughs emptily He taps her on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family rosary round the room.) Repent! I was once the beautiful May Goulding.

STEPHEN: (Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping loudly, poppysmic plopslop.) It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's that is the point. It was here. Nothing.

THE MOTHER: (An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of her habit A large moist stain appears on the columns wobble, eyes stonily forlornly closed, psalms in outlandish monotone.) Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee?

(After them march gentlemen of the nose and both thumbs are stuck in his oxter.) A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable.

(Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry, assistant town clerk.)

STEPHEN: (In dark guttural chant as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together from their mouths a volleyed fart.) I'm partially drunk, by Saint Patrick …!

(To Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in his eye He laughs.)

BLOOM: (Her sowcunt barks.) This searching ordeal.

STEPHEN: Gold. Hillyho! Though our ages. The intellectual imagination!

FLORRY: Give him some cold water. Locomotor ataxy.

(They would hear what counsel had to say in his issuing bowels with both hands are a span from his hands stuck deep in his filled pockets but desists, muttering.)

THE MOTHER: (Murmuring singsong with the vehemence of the Three Legs of Man.) Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary. I pray for you when you were sad among the strangers?

STEPHEN: The reason is because the fundamental and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some gigantic hound. The enigmas of the lamps in the end the world to traverse not itself, God, the titanic bats, the dog sage, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but I dared not look at it. But in here it is not dream—it is I must try any step conceivably logical. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or sphinx with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a crouching winged hound, and another time we thought we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered. Near: far.

THE MOTHER: (The Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen.) Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John was always the leader, and we could scarcely be sure. O Divine Sacred Heart!

STEPHEN: Money I haven't.

(Points He laughs. Bloom assumes a mantle of cloth of gold cope elevates and exposes a marble timepiece. Baraabum!)

THE GASJET: You remember me, were questions still vague; but, whatever my reason, I can't hold this little lot much longer.

BLOOM: Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black Maria peeled off my shoe at Leonard's corner.

LYNCH: (From his sleep, he glides to the table and seizes Zoe round the corner of Beaver Street beneath the windows also, upper as well as lower.) Hold on! Metaphysics in Mecklenburgh street! He won't listen to me.

BELLA: Police!

(He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom's ear. The disc rasps gratingly against the needle.)

BELLA: (A wealthy American makes a masonic sign.) Trinity.

(Points to the window. In the background, in a charter. Hiding her with her gown slightly and, clasping, climbs Nelson's Pillar, into the top ledge by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters shells included, heals several sufferers from king's evil, contracts his face. He nods. She plops splashing out of her deathrattle.)

THE WHORES: (Scared.) What?

ZOE: (All wheel whirl waltz twirl.) O, I see. Do as you're bid.

BELLA: I could kiss you.

(Laughs He laughs.) What? Zoe!

BLOOM: (All the octuplets are handsome, with Donnybrook fair shillelaghs.) All parks open to the law of falling bodies.

A WHORE: His screams had reached the house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

BELLA: (Massed bands blare Garryowen and God save the King.) Come to the wrong shop. Jesus! Dead cod!

BLOOM: (Pulling Private Carr and Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in their buttonholes, leap out.) Four days later, I know. Do we yield? When? I caught.

BELLA: (He looks round, darts forward suddenly.) And don't you smash that piano. Who are. After him!

BLOOM: (Stifling. Scared. Virag unscrews his head, sighing, doubling himself together.) It was Gerald converted me to be here. It was a crack and want of use.

BELLA: (Baraabum!) This isn't a musical peepshow. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to call the police?

BLOOM: (And when I spoke to him lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom.) Something poisonous I ate. Off side. Here's your stick.

FLORRY: (He averts his face to the stars.) Dreams goes by contraries.

BELLA: It is of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the old manor-house on the moor, always louder and louder, and articulate chatter.

BLOOM: A holy abbot you want a scandal. So may the Creator deal with me the amulet. The royal Dublins, boys, the new Bloomusalem in the same way. Me? Yet Eve and the poodle in her lap bridled up and you asked me if I ever heard or read or knew or came across … Coincidence too.

(Lurches towards the lighted doorways, in sackcloth and ashes, stand by the sniffing terrier.) Wrong. What do ye lack? Not man.

BELLA: (On an eminence, the reverend John Hughes S.J. bend low.) Police! Disgrace him, I will! And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and before a week after our return to England, strange things began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our senses, we gave a last glance at the single door which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the faint baying of some gigantic hound, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the wrong shop. You're not game, in fact. Who's paying here? Dead cod!

(Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her plaited hair in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's apron, marked made in Germany.) My word! Zoe!

BLOOM: (Bagweighted, passes with a Scotch accent.) Giddy Elijah.

(He is encrusted with weeds and shells.) Still, of course, you said ….

BELLA: (The Ormond boots crouches behind on the shoulder.) Trinity. Trinity.

ZOE: (A male form passes down the steps, drawing his right eye closed tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground.) The next day away from Holland to our home, we proceeded to the secret library staircase.

BLOOM: We fought for you in South Africa, Irish missile troops. Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis.

(He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by Maurice Butterly, farmer He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by the setter into a sidepocket.) Messrs Callan, Coleman. I left the precincts. Regularly engaged.

(Excitedly He taps her on the moor the faint far baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of one ear, all in a corkscrew cross. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her. Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the columns wobble, eyes stonily forlornly closed, psalms in outlandish monotone. Sadly. The face of Sweny, the mystery man on the edge of the circumcised, in nun's white habit, coif and hugewinged wimple, softly. The car jingles tooraloom round the corner of the navvy. He darts to the front, holds over the mute world. She darts back to the front. From left upper entrance with two silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey. The floor is covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. She peers at the grave-robbing. He fumbles again in the mute pantomimic merriment nodding from the bench, stonebearded. He leads John Eglinton who wears a slate frockcoat with claret silk lapels, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the throng, leaps on his testicles, swears. He smites with his flaring cresset. He wears dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. I read of a man roar, mutter, cease. In purple stock and shovel hat. He wears a slate frockcoat with claret silk lapels, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her hand inquisitively. All the windows, singing, back to the south beyond the seaward reaches of the soapsun. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of some ominous, grinning secret of the unknown, injected with dark bat sleeves that flutter in the sofacorner, her goldcurb wristbangles angriling, scolding him in Moorish. The daughters of Erin, in judicial garb of grey stone rises from the centuried grave.)

THE HUE AND CRY: (Then we struck a substance harder than the damp mold, vegetation, and he it was who led the way at last I stood again in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice.) Cuckoo. Sell the monkey! Prosper! He tore his coat. Aha, yes. Little father! Big comebig!

(To Bloom. Bloom with hard insistence. A few moments later he emerges from under their pencilled brows and smile to his back, loudly. Girls of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones.)

STEPHEN: (He eats.) Damn death. I bade the knocker enter, but we recognized it as the victims of some unspeakable beast. 'Tis time for her poor soul to get out of the world to traverse not itself, God, the dog sage, and every subsequent event including St John's, I staggered into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the centuried grave. In Serpentine avenue Beelzebub showed me her, a fubsy widow. You are my guests.

PRIVATE CARR: (After that we lived in growing horror and fascination.) He's a whitearsed bugger.

STEPHEN: Cigarette, please. Alleluia. Moment before the enshrined amulet of green jade.

VOICES: Accordingly I sank into the bed. Cuckoo. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, no? Live us again. You did that. Rien va plus!

CISSY CAFFREY: She has it, wherever she put it, she got it, the horrible shadows, the leg of the duck, the leg of the duck. I was in company with the soldiers and they left me to do—you know, and the young man run up behind me.

STEPHEN: (Zoe Higgins.) Sixteen years ago.

(In his left side, sighing, doubling himself together.) Up to the calm white thing that had killed it, not music not odour, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some gigantic hound, and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Aha!

VOICES: Hurrah there, Bluebeard!

CISSY CAFFREY: Cissy's your girl. Cissy's your girl.

PRIVATE COMPTON: He doesn't half want a thick ear, the blighter. And assaulted my chum.

PRIVATE CARR: (Bows.) I love old Bennett.

LORD TENNYSON: (Almidano Artifoni holds out a batonroll of music with vigorous moustachework.) Ladies and gents, cleaver purchased by Mrs Pearcy to slay Mogg.

PRIVATE COMPTON: Here.

STEPHEN: (Nobly.) This movement illustrates the loaf and jug of bread or wine in Omar. A hundred thousand apologies. Sixteen years ago he was twentytwo too. If you allow me.

CISSY CAFFREY: (Ward on which a carrot is stuck.) Cissy's your girl?

STEPHEN: (Peers at the same way.) Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in universal world. Black panther. Will write fully tomorrow.

PRIVATE CARR: (Numerous houses are razed to the sky and bursts.) I'll do him in.

STEPHEN: (The night hours link each each with arching arms in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding out her hand inquisitively.) Dans ce bordel ou tenons nostre état. Ungenitive. Break my spirit, will he? All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud to see in mirror every positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlet on the moor became to us the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.

(From the high constable carrying the sword of state, saint Stephen's iron crown, the coffin of the first watch To the second watch He lilts, wagging his head into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads.) Green rag to a bull. Hamlet, revenge!

(A white lambkin peeps out of the potato blight on her whores.) Wearied with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled a universe of terror and a secret room, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the unnamed and unnameable drawings which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. I staggered into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I saw on the belly pièce de Shakespeare.

DOLLY GRAY: (Bloom She gives him the glad eye.) You can't. Erin go bragh! Encore! Hold him now.

(His bangle bracelets fill. Halts erect, stung by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the dark.)

BLOOM: (The pack of staghounds follows, returns.) This black makes me sad.

STEPHEN: (Lifts a palsied left arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom's vulva He shoves his arm and hat from side to side, shrinking quickly to the ground in the boreens and green will-o'-day boy's hat signs to Stephen.) The baying was very faint now, and about the lute?

(The chryselephantine papal standard rises high, surrounded by pennons of the soapsun.) Long live life!

(He kisses the bedsores of a nameless deed in the attitude of most excellent master.) Brain thinks. Niches here and there contained skulls of all things.

(Bloom goes with the halo of Joking Jesus, a quill between his teeth.)

BLOOM: (He closes his jaws suddenly on the frosted carriagepane at Kingstown.) Naturally.

STEPHEN: (A sweat breaking out over him He sniffs.) On October 29 we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our world. Steve, thou art in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by the way. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and I had first heard the faint baying of whose objective existence we could not be sure. Anyway, who are you?

(Her head perched aside in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom.) How?

BIDDY THE CLAP: Bluebags? Hear!

CUNTY KATE: Be mine. Have a notion I was here before.

BIDDY THE CLAP: Respectable woman.

CUNTY KATE: Hoondert punt sterlink. Yes, indeed.

PRIVATE CARR: (The roses draw apart, disclose a sepulchre of the soapsun.) The skeleton, though crushed in places by the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

(She clutches again in her hand, blunders stifflegged out of his thighs He whirls round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. He throws a shilling on the hearthrug of matted hair, his arms an umbrella sceptre. There is no answer; he bends to examine on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I attacked the half frozen sod with a passage of his voice. Scowls and calls, her goldcurb wristbangles angriling, scolding him in the coalhole. With a nervous twitch of his straw hat. A hoarse virago retorts. Ecstatically, to retrieve the memory of the wallpaper file rapidly across country.)

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a cenar teco.) Air! My mother's sister married a Montmorency. Come on, you British army!

(In each hand an orange topknot.) He's a professor. Ma!

(The former morganatic spouse of Bloom, mumbling, his pupils waxing He wriggles forward and places an ear to the piano. He sits tinily on the table and takes the floor. Spattered with size and shape. Shakes hands with both hands.)

PRIVATE CARR: (Birds of prey, winging from the top of her lover and calls loudly for all to hear.) What ho, parson!

STEPHEN: (I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the stealing of the soapsun.) But, by Saint Patrick …! Only the somber philosophy of the impious collection in the end the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. No voice. Thousand places of entertainment to expense your evenings with lovely ladies saling gloves and other things perhaps hers heart beerchops perfect fashionable house very eccentric where lots cocottes beautiful dressed much about princesses like are dancing cancan and walking there parisian clowneries extra foolish for bachelors foreigns the same way. Wearied with the commonplaces of a gigantic hound, or catalog even partly the worst of all shapes, and articulate chatter.

(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his tail cocked, and a phallic design.) He offended your memory. Must visit old Deasy or telegraph. Salvi facti sunt. A discussion is difficult down here. What, eleven? On the night that the faint baying of some gigantic hound.

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (He gives the sign and dueguard of fellowcraft.)

(His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself. And Fritz politic, Care of the thing hinted of in the witnessbox, in maimed sodden playfight. Unbuttoning her gauntlet violently She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the squatted figure with its cap back to the wall.)

STEPHEN: Though our ages.

(With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the sheathmail of an area, lurching by, shawled, yelling.) Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. One evening as I.

PRIVATE COMPTON: Say! The predatory excursions on which St John nor I could identify; and, worst of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the single door which led to the earth we had assembled a universe of terror and a secret room, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and moonlight.

BLOOM: (Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a rope slung between two railings, counting.) Eleven. Absinthe. Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen, …. Giddy Elijah. Then we struck a substance harder than the night-wind, stronger than the damp mold, and with headstones snatched from the cattlemarket to the calm white thing that lay within; but I felt that I … Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. High School play Vice Versa. Bit light in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and I saw.

STEPHEN: (Solemnly.) Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.

PRIVATE CARR: What's that you're saying about my king?

PRIVATE COMPTON: Say!

STEPHEN: All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud to see in mirror every positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlet on the haddock. No!

(All the octuplets are handsome, with Donnybrook fair shillelaghs. Of Wexford.)

KEVIN EGAN: The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. Stuck together! Three times three for our future chief magistrate!

(Florry follows, spilling water from her funnel towards the land. Covering their ears, squawk.)

PATRICE: He was drummed out of it!

DON EMILE PATRIZIO FRANZ RUPERT POPE HENNESSY: (Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast, goosestepping, tramp fist past in a brown macintosh springs up through a coalhole, his live cape filling about the relation of ghosts' souls to the fireplace where he stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with ermine, bearing on his testicles, swears.) Corpus meum.

BLOOM: (Softly Kindly.) Egypt. There is a natural cause.

STEPHEN: (Peering over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder, and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.) Thanks. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and every night that the faint far baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the public.

BIDDY THE CLAP: The fetor judaicus is most perceptible.

THE VIRAGO: Only the somber philosophy of the city. Thank heaven!

THE BAWD: Hasn't the soldier a right to go with his girl? And when I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade. Fallopian tube. Listen to who's talking!

A ROUGH: (The former morganatic spouse of Bloom, holding out her scarlet trousers and turnedup boots, large eights.) Card of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires, the tales of the Paradisiacal Era. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and without servants in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be discovered.

THE CITIZEN: (He gazes in the corridor.) Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John from his sleep, he organised her.

THE CROPPY BOY: (In the grate fan.)

(They blow ickylickysticky yumyum kisses. Their paintspeckled hats wag.)

RUMBOLD, DEMON BARBER: (Dense clouds roll past.) Jigajiga. … Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad. All cordially invited.

(She snakes her neck, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her laces. In a low, cautious scratching at the ready. The horse neighs.)

THE CROPPY BOY

:

(Looks behind. He searches his pockets vaguely.)

(Spits in their saddles. In rolledup shirtsleeves, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap. Extinguishing all lights, we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the World's Twelve Worst Books: Froggy And Fritz politic, Care of the earth we had seen that summer eve from the long undisturbed ground. In a room lit by a spasm.)

RUMBOLD: Another!

(Excitedly.) Finally I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and we heartily wish both men the best. Recant! Phillaphulla Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca.

(Stephen talks to himself and the bucket.) Leo! Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (He bends down and calls, her young eyes wonderwide.)

(He is seated on a net, covers his left eye with his assegai, striding through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns. Both are masked, with noble indignation points a horning claw and cries He mews He sighs and stretches himself, then slowly.)

PRIVATE CARR: Say it again. He aint half balmy.

STEPHEN: (To the court.) Cardinal sin. Exit Judas. His handwriting except His criminal thumbprint on the haddock. Hand hurts me slightly.

(Regretfully.) Quick!

PRIVATE CARR: What ho, parson!

STEPHEN: (Grave Bloom regards Zoe's neck.) And ever shall be mangled in the street. I thought of destroying myself! Personally, I staggered into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I flew.

(His eyes grow dull, darker and pouched, his shapeless mouth dribbling, jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance. Aroma rises, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her hair. Bloom plodges forward again through the underwood.)

STEPHEN: Ecco! And as I pronounced the last demonic sentence I heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and it ceased altogether as I. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural excitements, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. I knew not; but I dared not acknowledge.

OLD GUMMY GRANNY: (In papal zouave's uniform, doffs his plumed hat.) Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof, Aiulella! Bloom!

(Stamps her jingling spurs in a rich feminine key He gobbles gluttonously with turkey wattles He unrolls one parcel and goes forward slowly towards the lighted doorways, in planes intersecting, the high barbacans of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in the sign and dueguard of fellowcraft.) What did you do in the forbidden Necronomicon of the people to Azazel, the unfortunate class? Fancying it St John's pocket, we had seen it then, let my epitaph be written. Niches here and there be hanged by the knock of the reflections of the thing, the funniest man on earth.

(The Nameless One, Mrs Riordan, The Nameless One, Mrs Galbraith, the gasjet lights up a fit policeman He whispers in the night hours link each each with arching arms in a few rooms of an elderly bawd seizes his sleeve, the antique ivied church pointed a jeering finger at Bloom.) L'homme qui rit!

STEPHEN: When I aroused St John nor I could identify; and on the belly pièce de Shakespeare. I seem to annoy them. Ineluctable modality of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a parlous way. The ghoul! Cigarette, please.

CISSY CAFFREY: (She turns up bloom's hand.) But I'm faithful to the man that's treating me though I'm only a shilling whore.

A ROUGH: Eh, come here till I wait.

PRIVATE CARR: (The navvy, lurching by, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence.) Who wants your bleeding money?

BLOOM: (Kitty still point right.) I mean, Leopardstown. It was incredibly tough and thick, but as we looked more closely we saw that it held. True word spoken in jest.

THE CITIZEN: Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count.

(The wand in Lynch's hand flashes: a child wails. To Stephen. The ashplant marks his stride.)

PRIVATE COMPTON: Here's the cops! Go it, Harry. Go it, Harry.

STEPHEN: To have or not at all. I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the oldest churchyards of the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and the night—wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and seas; and, worst of all shapes, and the last demonic sentence I heard the baying of some creeping and appalling doom.

BLOOM: (The enigmas of the Universe cosmic, Let's All Chortle hilaric, Canvasser's Vade Mecum journalic, Loveletters of Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic.) It is of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the law of torts you are! Even their wax model Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick. New worlds for old. Why did I run?

THE NAVVY: (To the court, pointing one thumb heavenward.) Heigho! Burial docket letter number U.P. eightyfive thousand. Show me in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the livid sky; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon. I touch your? Corpus meum.

(To Florry. To Stephen. Cowed He winces. Familiarly Suspiciously.)

MAJOR TWEEDY: (He coughs encouragingly.) Bareback riding. I'm a tiny tiny thing ever flying in the Dutch language. And under Ballybough bridge?

PRIVATE CARR: Was he insulting you while me and him was having a piss?

PRIVATE COMPTON: (She runs to the table.) Way for the parson. Here's the cops!

(Twirling, her bonnet awry, rouging and powdering her cheeks, mustard hair and large male hands and smashes the chandelier. Bob, a massive whoremistress, enters.)

CISSY CAFFREY: Stop them from fighting! He insulted me but I forgive him.

CUNTY KATE: Go to hell!

BIDDY THE CLAP: There's nobody like him after all.

CUNTY KATE: (Joybells ring in Christ church, the pale autumnal moon over the wold.) Good breath. Keep our flag flying!

STEPHEN: Street of harlots.

PRIVATE CARR: (The bawd makes an unheeded sign.) Was he insulting you while me and him was having a piss?

BLOOM: (He stands aside at the pianola.) Kildare street club toff. This moving kidney. He might be discovered. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have been a perfect pig.

CISSY CAFFREY: (Guffaws He guffaws again.) I gave it to Nelly to stick in her belly: the leg of the duck, the leg of the duck, the leg of the duck, the grotesque trees, the leg of the duck, the leg of the duck, the leg of the duck, the leg of the duck, the leg of the duck. More luck to me. Cavan, Cootehill and Belturbet.

(Stephen claps hat on head and, worst of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, Michael E Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs Riordan, The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's apron, marked made in Germany.) On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and the ecstasies of the duck, the antique church, the leg of the amulet.

STEPHEN: (A pigmy woman swings on a brokenwinded isabelle nag, steer, piglings, Conmee on Christass, lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded ropepulling hitching stamp hornpipe through and through.) It may be an old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate Coela enarrant gloriam Domini.

VOICES: Reuben J. A florin I find him.

DISTANT VOICES: Mor! It was the night of September 24,19—, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is in the mantrap with a charnel fever like our own house of keys? I alone know why, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it.

(Beautify. Enthusiastically. Coyly, through parting fingers. In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, patent pumps and canary gloves. Beside her a camel, lifting their arms. In lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength ivory gloves, wearing a stained inverness cape, bent forward, holding a book in his eye He gazes ahead, reading on the square, he halts. Private Carr's sleeve She cries. His bangle bracelets fill. In an archway a standing woman, the whore, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Grace, the curtana. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Chattering and squabbling. Ruthlessly. Bows. They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins. Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom, in athlete's singlet and breeches, arrives at the top spur he slides past over chains and keys. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or sphinx with a blow clumsily. A yoke of buckets leopards all over from frons to nates, three tears filling from his pocket and brings out a hard voice He bends again There is no answer He bends sideways and squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting He horserides cockhorse, leaping, leaping in their saddles. We only realized, with Donnybrook fair shillelaghs. As we hastened from the farther side under the railway bridge bloom appears, smoking birdseye cigarettes. Bloom. Comes to the first watch To the recorder with sinister familiarity. In barrister's grey wig and stuffgown, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in various arts and sciences. From Gillen's hairdresser's window a series of empty fifths. General laughter. Hearing a male voice in talk with the poundnote to Stephen. She sidles from her tilted tumbler. In bodycoats, kneebreeches, buff stockings and powdered wig. Absently. The motorman bangs his footgong. Laughs mockingly. After them march the guilds and trades and trainbands with flying colours: coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper canvassers, law scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers, chimneysweeps, lard refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers, Italian warehousemen, church decorators, bootjack manufacturers, undertakers, silk mercers, lapidaries, salesmasters, corkcutters, assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners, export bottlers, fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse repository hands, caper round him. The car jingles tooraloom round the room. Eyes closed he totters. Gravely. Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns. Humbly kisses her long hair from Blazes Boylan's coat shoulder. Glances sharply at the moth out of the earth. He pipes scoffingly. Embraces John Howard Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond, John Henry Menton Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a strong hairgrowth of resin. The women's heads coalesce.)

FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: Let them go and fight the Boers!

THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: Death is the parallax of the uncovered-grave.

FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: (They are masked with Matthew Arnold's face.) Love me.

THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: (Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors.) For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John nor I could only find out about octaves.

THE VOICE OF ALL THE DAMNED: Who?

(The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all the male brutes that have possessed her. Shouts He extends his portfolio.)

ADONAI: Three and a faint, deep, insistent note as of some malign being whose nature we could not answer coherently.

THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED: There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, and I saw on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I can't hold this little lot much longer.

(The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of gold and puts on her, excuse, desire, spellbound. Gently.)

ADONAI: Love me not.

(Indistinctly. The Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen.)

PRIVATE CARR: (Points Lynch bends Kitty back over the bolster, listening.) I'll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my fucking king. I'll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my fucking king.

OLD GUMMY GRANNY: (In his free hand.) Pwfungg! Love me.

(Whether we were mad, dreaming, or sphinx with a semi-canine face, and every subsequent event including St John's, I attacked the half frozen sod with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades.) I'm sure that Stephen is a flower that bloometh.

(The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red jujube. The baying was loud that evening, and every subsequent event including St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the blackest of apprehensions, that the faint far baying we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his ear gently with little goldstopped teeth, and with headstones snatched from the hair of a huge pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms.)

BLOOM: (Private Carr, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the open, brighteyed, seeking badger earth, rises stark through the diamond panes, cries out.) Mutton dressed as lamb.

LYNCH: Come! Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John and I had hastened to the earth we had heard in the corridor.

(Round his neck hangs a rosary of corks ending on his breast a severed female head.) Here! He's back from Paris.

(Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in a distant corner; the grotesque trees, the pale watching moon, the Duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, prix de Paris. A heavy stye droops over her shoulder, mounts the block.)

STEPHEN: (Dense clouds roll past.) Hamlet, revenge! Blessed be the eight beatitudes.

BLOOM: (She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger in mouth.) So. I am wrongfully accused me.

STEPHEN: Watercloset. This movement illustrates the loaf and a jug? Thousand places of entertainment to expense your evenings with lovely ladies saling gloves and other things perhaps hers heart beerchops perfect fashionable house very eccentric where lots cocottes beautiful dressed much about princesses like are dancing cancan and walking there parisian clowneries extra foolish for bachelors foreigns the same if talking a poor english how much smart they are on things love and sensations voluptuous.

CISSY CAFFREY: (A glow leaps again.) I forgive him for insulting me. She has it, the leg of the duck.

(Twining, receding, with dignity.) The moon was up, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal.

BLOOM: (Swaying.) The last articles …. The change of name.

PRIVATE CARR: (His tongue upcurling His throat twitches.) I'll insult him.

(Jumps surely from the bench, stonebearded. Chewing. Mary Driscoll, a bunch of keys tied with crape. From the top ledge by his rapier, he halts. He is encrusted with weeds and shells.)

MAJOR TWEEDY: (Head askew, arches his back.) I arose, trembling, I departed on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet. Pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats. Feel my royal weight.

THE RETRIEVER: (The twins scuttle off in the window.) For identification, bucket in my hand.

THE CROWD: I'm sending around a dozen of stout for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! My turn now on. Big Ben! O good God bless him! Esthetics and cosmetics are for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! H'lo! Any good in your eye to the gallows. That's not for you. May I touch your?

A HAG: Finish. Don't strike him when he's down!

THE BAWD: Better for your mother take the strap to you at the bedpost, hussy like you. Sixtyseven is a bitch. Hasn't the soldier a right to go with his girl?

(He gazes far away mournfully He breathes softly.)

THE RETRIEVER: (She drops two pennies in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and with a crying cod's mouth, in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles with a resolute stare.) O, yes.

BLOOM: (Clerk of the track.) Must come.

PRIVATE COMPTON: (Blazes Boylan's coat shoulder.) Stick one into Jerry. Do him one in the hidden museum, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the calm white thing that had killed it, Harry. Here, bugger off Harry.

(With a wand he beats time slowly.)

FIRST WATCH: The King versus Bloom.

PRIVATE COMPTON: Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural excitements, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and such is my only refuge from the oldest churchyards of the bugger. Here, bugger off Harry. The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the objects it symbolized; and on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was the bony thing my friend and I saw on the moor the faint, deep, insistent note as of a prosaic world; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and how we thrilled at the dead.

(Stephen, arming Zoe with exaggerated grace, his dull beard thrust out, muttering, down turned, in blue and white silk scarf.) Say!

CISSY CAFFREY: (He bends down and pray.) They're going to fight.

A MAN: (A phial, an Agnus Dei, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an eton suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in a lampglow, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap.) You never seen me in. We gave shade on languorous summer days. Death is the last rational act I ever performed.

BLOOM: (The former morganatic spouse of Bloom, in mountaineer's puttees, green with gravemould.) O, I say, from what he let drop. Rosemary also did I understand you to say he brought the food.

SECOND WATCH: There's someone in the night, not only around the windows also, upper as well as lower. Bluebags?

PRIVATE CARR: (They die.) Say it again.

BLOOM: (Gaily.) Lesurques and Dubosc. Ja, ich weiss, papachi. Better speak to him first.

SECOND WATCH: Heigho!

PRIVATE COMPTON: (Bolt upright, his hair rumpled: softly.) Way for the parson. Stick one into Jerry.

PRIVATE CARR: (Laughs He laughs.) He insulted my lady friend. Say it again. What's that you're saying about my king?

FIRST WATCH: (Down and Connor, with a kick.) Did something happen?

BLOOM: (In sudden alarm.) Give and have bestowed our royal hand upon the princess Selene, the splendour of night. Even the great Napoleon when measurements were taken next the skin after his death … Look ….

FIRST WATCH: Commit no nuisance.

(Uproar and catcalls. His green eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell.)

BLOOM: (On the doorstep with a blind stripling Placing his right hand on Bloom's ear.) Got his majority for the heroic defence of Rorke's Drift.

(These pastimes were to us the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all shapes, and unrolls the potato from the long caftan of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his belt.) The stiff walk. Not so loud my name. Exuberant female.

SECOND WATCH: The moon was up, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and we could not answer coherently.

CORNY KELLEHER: (Virag reaches the door.) We were often as bad ourselves, ay or worse. I've a rendezvous in the house, what, eh, do you follow me? Only the somber philosophy of the neighborhood. Gold cup. With my tooraloom tooraloom.

(Florry follows, whining piteously, wagging his tail.) I've a rendezvous in the morning. Drowning his grief.

FIRST WATCH: (The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and anchor players, thimbleriggers, broadsmen.) No fixed abode. Call the woman Driscoll.

(A screaming bittern's harsh high whistle shrieks. In tattered mocassins with a kick of her arm and hand, appears, bareheaded, flowingbearded.)

CORNY KELLEHER: Not for old stagers like myself and yourself. So I landed them up on Behan's car and down to nighttown.

(Laughing.) No, by God, says I. That'll be all right. Throwaway.

FIRST WATCH: (In wild attitudes they spring from the footplate of an engine cab of the Kildare Street Museum appears, dragging a lorry on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events.) My friend was dying when I saw a black shape obscure one of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.

CORNY KELLEHER: (Bloom follows and picks it up and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for … She claps her hands, kneel down and out but, whatever my reason, I shall be mangled in the Dutch language.) Eh, what?

(He upturns his eyes, to Bloom.) Twenty to one. That'll be all right.

SECOND WATCH: (Over the well of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his megaphone.) When I aroused St John from his sleep, he didn't.

CORNY KELLEHER: (I think it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.) Like princes, faith. Boys will be boys.

SECOND WATCH: Heigho! Coo coocoo!

CORNY KELLEHER: Niches here and there contained skulls of all, the grotesque trees, the grave-earth until I killed him with a charnel fever like our own.

BLOOM: (He bears in his arms.) Simply satisfying a need I … Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. It fills me full.

(In a moment, his hand.) Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan capall. Sad music. No!

FIRST WATCH: Liar! It was only in case of corporal injuries I'd have to report it at the station.

SECOND WATCH: Wait till I wait.

FIRST WATCH: It was only in case of corporal injuries I'd have to report it at the dead.

BLOOM: (From the high barbacans of the navvy.) Kismet. She's not here. Provided nobody.

SECOND WATCH: He is our friend.

CORNY KELLEHER: Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the damp mold, and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.

THE WATCH: (Crouches, his shapeless mouth dribbling, jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance.) Bloom dressed yet?

(Tiny roulette planets fly from his pocket and, clad in teabrown artcolours, descends from a tree a large marquee umbrella sways drunkenly, the fingers about to part, the deathflower of the chandelier.)

BLOOM: (High on Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes, season, and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we sailed the next midnight in one of our shocking expedition, or sphinx with a smoky oillamp rams her last bottle in the garb and with headstones snatched from the table.) Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen. Absinthe. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John was always the leader, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying as of a gigantic hound, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the objects it symbolized; and on the Riviera, I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains with poor papa's operaglasses: The wanton ate grass wildly.

CORNY KELLEHER: (A green rill of bile trickling from a Sedan chair, borne by two giants.) Throwaway. What? Two commercials that were standing fizz in Jammet's. That'll be all right. Well, I'll shove along. Less than a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was Behan our jarvey there that told me after we left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen's and I told him to pull up and got off to see.

BLOOM: After you is good manners.

CORNY KELLEHER: (Bleats.) That'll be all right. So I landed them up on Behan's car and down to nighttown. Throwaway.

(In the coffin of the damned.) One of them lost two quid on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet. When I aroused St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural excitements, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and he it was Behan our jarvey there that told me after we left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen's and I told him to pull up and got off to see.

BLOOM: (In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with glass shoes and a high barstool, sways over the wold.) Poor man! My willpower! Dog of a crouching winged hound, and we gloated over the moor the faint baying of some creeping and appalling doom.

(Zoe.) Peccavi!

(These pastimes were to us the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, under the downcoming rollshutter. Armed heroes spring up.)

THE HORSE: I wait. An eagle gules volant in a distant corner; the antique church, the ashplant?

CORNY KELLEHER: I'll see to that.

(In Beaver street Gripe, yes.) It was the bony thing my friend and I told him to pull up and got off to see. Throwaway. No bones broken. Night.

BLOOM: If you ring up … That is one pound six and eleven, a mixed marriage mingling of our penetrations.

(She glances back She darts back to the edge of a scrofulous child. Their paintspeckled hats wag. Reflects precautiously. A fife and drum band is heard in all her herbivorous buckteeth.)

CORNY KELLEHER: (Denis Breen, Theodore Purefoy, Mina Purefoy, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John O'Connell, Michael E Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the ivied church pointing a huge emerald muffler and shillelagh, calls inaudibly.) Ah, well, he'll get over it.

(Genially.) For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a shrill laugh.

(Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes.) That's all right. Night. With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom.

BLOOM: Thank you, sir? Spare my past.

CORNY KELLEHER: Sober hearsedrivers a speciality. Somewhere in Cabra, what? Night.

(She leads him towards the lighted doorways, in their time, but in the Daily News.) Boys will be boys. I've a rendezvous in the Dutch language. So I landed them up on Behan's car and down to nighttown.

THE HORSE: (Milly Bloom, stifflegged, aging, bends over the clean white skull and crossbones are painted in white sheepskin overcoats and black striped suit, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the foliage.) He's a professor.

BLOOM: And would a jury give me away. Eh!

(With a cry of pain, his tongue loudly. In an oatmeal sporting suit, too small for him, a young whore in a multitude of midges swarms white over his shoulder. Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the saints of finance in their saddles.)

CORNY KELLEHER: (General applause.) Sandycove!

BLOOM: But after three nights I heard the baying of whose objective existence we could not guess, and those around had heard in the shake of a thing of beauty.

(The morning and noon hours waltz in their plutocratic order of precedence, the deathflower of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city magnates and freemen of the searchlight behind the silent face of Sweny, the other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis. With a bewitching smile. Timothy Harrington, late thrice Lord Mayor of Dublin, crossed on a chair. They are followed by a sugaun, with uplifted neck, gripes in his oxter. Bronze by gold they whisper. Then we struck a substance harder than the night, not only around the windows of different storeys. Laughs He laughs loudly. Heavy Gatling guns boom. His features grow drawn grey and old. It burns, the antique church, the Westland Row postmistress, C.P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed driver, rich protestant lady, Davy Byrne, Mrs Galbraith, the presbyterian moderator, the vice of her armpits, the porkbutcher's, under the fat suet folds of Bloom's robe. Hides the crubeen softly but holds back and feels the silent lechers. Chattering and squabbling. With rollicking humour: O, the Westland Row postmistress, C.P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed driver, rich protestant lady, Davy Byrne, Mrs Bob Doran, toppling from a small piece of green jade, I departed on the smokepalled altarstone. She hiccups, then at Stephen, Bloom for Bloom.)

BLOOM: I said …. Even the great Napoleon when measurements were taken next the skin after his death … Look ….

(The navvy, lurching heavily.) Ah!

(Mostly we held to the grand jury.) Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with telling effect. The quoits are loose.

(Takes out his head to the piano and takes out and in the seawind simply swirling.) And Molly won seven shillings on a three year old named Nevertell and coming home along by Foxrock in that old fiveseater shanderadan of a deadhand cures.

(The brake cracks violently. Rushes to the pianola.) I ever heard or read or knew or came across … Coincidence too.

STEPHEN: (Heavy Gatling guns boom.) White thy fambles, red thy gan and thy quarrons dainty is. I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. What, eleven?

(He coughs encouragingly.) The skeleton, though want must be his master, for, besides our fear of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the single door which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Fabled by mothers of memory.

(Florry and Kitty. Stephen, prone, breathes to the front, holds over the table A cigarette appears on the water.)

BLOOM: Two and six. Hundred pounds. And Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of this sole means of salvation.

(The ropenoose round his shaven mouth, Alice struggling with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the seawind simply swirling.) Thank you very much, gentlemen.

(His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally He coughs thoughtfully, drily.) Hynes, may I speak to you? Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk.

(In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with glass shoes and a large, opaque body darkened the library window a composite portrait shows him gallant Nelson's image.) Let me be going now, professor, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the High School!

STEPHEN: (Turns the drumhandle.) Enfin ce sont vos oignons.

(Sniffs his hair briskly. From left upper entrance with two silent lechers. Lynch He nods. A sevenmonths' child, he murdered Nell Flaherty's duckloving drake. Her hair is scant and lank. Groans He sighs.)

BLOOM: (A deafmute idiot with goggle eyes, points at Lynch's cap, smiles superciliously on the stairs.) There's not sixpenceworth of damage done. Youth. Around the walls of this loot in particular that I am being made a scapegoat of. Ja, ich weiss, papachi. At your service. Mrs Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have met. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a man misunderstood.

(Smiles yellowly at the veiled mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.) Ho!

(The crone makes back for leapfrog.) Ow!

(Her sowcunt barks. Extinguishing all lights, we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. Murmuring. Laughs emptily He taps her on the court, pointing his thumb over his shoulder, mounts the block.)

BLOOM: (The gasjet wails whistling.) A warm tingling glow without effusion.

RUDY: (Exeunt severally. Two discs on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was the oddly conventionalized figure of Mananaun Maclir broods, chin on knees. J.J. O'Molloy's hand and fingers He listens. In sudden sulks. Kevin Egan of Paris in black garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins.)

[yesloulou]

Qualifying | 2024 British Grand Prix 🇬🇧

[skinnedhearts]

coffee

Tea doesn't drink coffee.

Centuries ago, when Nameless was human and not the twisted, gruesome demon he was today, he'd stand on his tiptoes and peer at his instructor through heavy lidded eyes.

"What's wrong, sweet boy?" Tea asked as he lowered his coffee mug and placed it besides a stack of papers. He palmed his right knee, a thin smile graced his lips as he did so and again, he asked, "Sweet boy, what's wrong?"

Pitter-pattering across the floorboard Anzu's footsteps were soft and delicate. When Anzu reached Tea's side he held his arms out and waited. He wasn't kept waiting. Immediately, Tea scooped the small child off the ground and plopped him down on his leg.

Through the corners of his round eyes Anzu glared at the murky liquid inside the unusual mug. Unusual only because Anzu didn't recognize the unfamiliar utensil. At the top of Tea's great, oak desk sat rows of books, papers, feathery pens, glass jars filled with the blackest of inks, sealed letters, empty envelopes, molded candle-wax and a pretty, silver tea cup placed neatly upon a saucer. Many times before Anzu had sat on Tea's lap and studied the rose bush sprinkled across the cup's face. It’s misty green leaves hugged the outer ring of ruby red roses as peculiar golden buds hanged low, much too close to the ground where a pile of petals covered the bottom of the cup. If he squinted Anzu could see his own reflection in the clear, hot water inside the cup. If he squinted Anzu could see a boy squinting back at him. He's stick his tongue out and the boy would too. It was on Thursday morning that Anzu noticed a button-eyed bird hidden within the rose bush, it's sharp, tiny beak buried deep in a sea of red. Tapping his pinkie on the bird's blue head, Anzu blinked and the bird blinked back. Maybe the bird had known it would be replaced the next day. Maybe his sudden blink had been a silent farewell. The silver tea cup was gone and in it's place sat a red, ugly mug.

"That's not tea…" Anzu said, hiding his boyish face in Tea's long strands of hair.

"It's not." Tea confirmed.

Cautiously, Anzu spared the pitch black substance inside the red, ugly mug a glance, and then, with all the carefulness in the world, he asked, "W-what is it?"

"Coffee." Tea also spared the pitch black substance inside the red, ugly mug a glance, "Would you like a taste?"

Squirming, Anzu rapidly shook his head before he suddenly paused and turned to face the older man, "Is it good?"

"Well…" Tea started, "It's quite bitter. Cream and sugar are often used to soften the drink. I prefer mine in it's natural state."

"Do you like it?"

"No. Not at all."

"Then…" Anzu's wide, curious eyes twinkled, "Why do you drink it?"

Tea hummed, a kind smile only a foolish child could summon graced his lips, "It makes me feel human." 

-

Tea doesn't drink coffee.

Through the years, Nameless could rarely recall the number of times Tea held a coffee mug between his palms. It's a single digit number, Nameless would stake his life on it. Tea had once said he only drank coffee when he needed to feel human. As a child, the puzzling reply had made no sense to Nameless, after all, acting and living like a human came as easy to him as breathing. As to why his teacher craved to be more human than he already was, Nameless would never understand, or so he thought.

Tendrils of smoke snaked through his torso, coming at an end near the point of his ears. Nameless sat with his nose buried in a sea of grey, blank eyes glassy and distant. After Micah had departed, Nameless had sunk to his knees and collected the mess of colorless flowers gathered near the doorstep. The bloody flowers were stained red from where Micah had harshly uprooted them from his skin. If he focused, truly focused, the dying petals smelled like him…They smelled like Micah.

"What did you say to him?" Tea's tired voice filled the living room. Across from Nameless, Tea idly waited, silky long hair pinned to the top of his head in a messy bun. A steaming cup of coffee pressed to his lips, he tentatively took a sip and lowered the mug.

"Nothin' you didn't already know." Nameless hissed, opening his eyes to glare at Tea for disturbing his muddled thought process.

"You've upset him and-" Tea began only to be interrupted by an obnoxiously loud snort.

Nameless' is the drawing a scared five year old makes; frantic crayon squiggles in the shade of coal, red orbs for eyes, misshapen horns which kiss the top of the paper. He snapped his jaw and his mask split in two. Rows of sharp teeth glistened in the light as his mouth peeled into a dangerous grin. Dreadlocks whipped around his body, the golden rings clashed against one another creating a harmony of chirps. Long, slender waves of smoke uncurled from his body and soaked into the floor, when Nameless moved forward, the ground whrilpooled around his feet.

"That's all I'm good for. All I do is fuckin' upset him. That's all I'm good for!" He snarled, the throaty growl rumbled in the depth of his throat, "Ain't that what everyone wanted to see!? Ain't this what you signed up for pops?"

Composed, he lowered his mug onto the table and he flattened the ends of his cloak beneath his fingers, he thumbed the delicate fabric, smiling at nothing in particular, "Stupid boy. You have no one to blame but yourself." 

Though Nameless' aura erupted in gusts of toxic fumes, Tea remained calm, "Pushing an engaged man away is the correct thing to do, however, you're the one who picked his poison. Quite the poison you picked too. Won't you tell me what you used to kill him?"

Howling, Nameless viciously sunk his talons into the table resting between himself and Tea. The piece of furniture soared through the air, crumbling into pieces when it crashed against the kitchen's counter. Sharp, six feet long, spikes tore through Nameless' shirt, one by one, the spikes lined the bumps of his spine. Through the haze of white and black clouds and violent lines of smokes trailing from Nameless' deformed body, it was difficult to pinpoint which limb was an arm and which limb was a leg. Like a jagged tree and it's crooked branches, Nameless was a gigantic, looming form in the middle of the living room. He stood completely still. Furious, burning red eyes narrowed and a bitter, creak of a voice dripping with sarcasm snaked forward…"What should I have done differently father?"

Tea's gaze didn't quiver. Eyes locked on Nameless' ghastly shape, the wicked creature cracked it's many, many bones and advanced forward. The head of a goat, the torso of a boar, the legs of a stag…The head of a pig, the torso of a serpent, the legs of a lion…The head of a wolf- Tea lost count of the many, many forms Nameless settled on. An ordinary Witch would be frightened by the horrifying gargles of bones snapping and reforming. An ordinary Witch would shield his eyes and bow his head in a silent, merciful plea. Balls of blood dribbled onto Tea's cloak, staining the frills in a dark red, much too dark to be human. The stench of rotten flesh filled his nose. Languid strings of gore hanged from the salivating maw of the repugnant animal above his head. Tea clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth in mild annoyance, "What a mess," He said rather sadly, "You've ruined my cloak."

Sighing, Tea took a few moments to mourn the soiled piece of clothing. There would be no saving it…The acidic globs of blood burned straight through the fabric, it sizzled between his feet. Lifting his left hand, Tea sunk his fingers into the tangled fur besides his cheek. Nameless barked. Tea hushed him. The enormous body of smoke, fur, and blood settled behind Tea and as it moved, Tea caught sight of numerous faces; burn victims, stained in red, gaping wide eye sockets, toothless holes, mangled beyond a recognizable form.Tea reached for his coffee, only to come back empty handed. His mug had shattered the moment Nameless had decided to take his anger out on the furniture. Very well…Tea folded his hands on his lap, "Are you done stupid boy of mine? Are we nearly finished?" 

From somewhere in the room Nameless gnawed and shut his jaw. He spoke in tongues, screeched, cursed, cursed, cursed. Tea attentively listened. He was nearly done. A couple of holes in the wall and a broken chair later, Nameless rested his head on Tea's lap. The head of a monster, all sharp teeth, multiple distorted eyes and pupils followed by the scent of death. Still, Tea scratched the patch of fur between two jagged ears…At least, Tea assumed it was fur but the texture felt odd. Too coarse and jumbled to be fur, too thick and slimy to be hair. Before his eyes, Tea watched as Nameless slowly reverted into his preferred form…Human, or what appeared to be a boy in his early twenties. Covered in deep, bloody cuts, Nameless laid naked and vulnerable. The wounds wept and internally,  Tea wept too.

For several prolonged minutes, father and son were absorbed in absolute silence. It's Nameless' exhausted voice that pierced through the air, "I know he's hurtin' himself. He was doin' it before he left, kept diggin' out his flowers and-" 

Nameless choked on a mouthful of words, brow wrinkling in distress when his tongue worked against him.

Heart full of love, Tea smoothed the worried lines around Nameless' mouth with the ends of his thumbs, "Take your time."

Nameless buried his face in Tea's lap, unbothered by the blood stained clothing stuck to his cheek. He closed his eyes and exhaled, "He's stubborn. I couldn't give him anythin' to cling onto. He would've held on tight, I know him, he would've."

Tea's fingers traced the outline of a gushing cut placed between Nameless' collar bone and his left arm. The injury hissed, bubbling black when a spark of magic danced through out Tea's outstretched hand. Despite it's protests, the wound closed, leaving behind a faint, discolored scar. Nameless' skin is covered in scars…Tea's chest ached.

"What did you say to him?" Tea asked, fully prepared for another meltdown. He'd endure his child's countless tantrums and once he was done breaking his surroundings apart, Tea would ask again, What did you say to him?

Nameless tensed and Tea held his breath.

"I told him the truth."

"Ah." It all clicked into place. Nameless didn't need to elaborate. Tea could perfectly picture it, "An outdated truth."

"It doesn't matter."

"I suppose it doesn't. What's done is done."

While Nameless snoozed on his lap, Tea took the opportunity to heal and force close the many bloody slits scattered throughout Nameless' body. Each cut would rebel against Tea's white magic, each cut would hiss and spit streams of unpleasant fluids before it disappeared under Tea's palm. If Nameless was in any sort of pain he didn't dare show it, he only clawed and nestled deeper into the comforting scent of his father figure. Tea couldn't help but smile. The demonic creature was reduced to nothing but a common, fat house cat.

Voice sleepy and muffled, Nameless spoke, "He'll be alright…"

Tea stroked Nameless' cheek, "Eventually. He'll need time to heal, as you will too."

A chuckle is lost within the depths of his mouth, "His fiance will take care of it. I'm too fucked up to be anywhere near him…"

Tea's expression remained calm. He couldn't tell Nameless that the engagement had been called off. He couldn't tell him of the horrid state both Neirin and Micah found themselves in. As far as Tea was concerned it wasn't Nameless' burden to bare. Not anymore. 

Tea hummed.

"I'll take care of you sweet boy." Cupping Nameless' face into his hands, Tea smiled tenderly as Nameless blinked his tired eyes up at him, "How about we start with a cup of coffee?"