#i searched far and wide for that white dress and I am devasted that I couldn’t find *any* pictures of her wearing a red dress?

[eeblouissant]

IDK how to attach links or pics but looking at the dress style you use for your Dorothy you must look at Bea's dresses for awards ceremonies (there's a deep red one that's just,,,,) and the one she wore for her special (the leg slit!!!!).

hi anon, I think about the dresses (and SUITS… oh dear lord) that Bea has worn to different events Regularly. Have some Dorothy’s wearing various dresses that bea has worn that I adore :)

[comfyswitcherblanketfort]

Geralt and the Minotaur p3

Y’all this could get hella complicated if I go hard with all the character sub ideas and all that but I’m here for the relationship so its gonna be bare bones on combining the canon bc I’m just not that skilled as a writer 😂 

Pairing : Geraskier

Warnings: talk of human sacrifice, talk of cannibalism, ye ole impending death, mention parents death, imprisonment, public humiliation (kinda), we got major soft boys falling for each other vibes too

part 2 here!

__________

Geralt woke with his head still resting on Jaskier’s thigh, though he was now lying on his side, resting his head against Geralt’s hip just above the dagger tucked in his belt. He had draped his arm over Jaskier’s waist as they slept, holding him closer, and Jaskier’s arm was resting on Geralt’s chest. It was still dark and, from the sounds of it, everyone else was still asleep save a few soldiers at the helm. The waves had settled to a gentle lapping at the hull and Geralt found himself completely relaxed and at peace for the first time in weeks. His hand rose and fell in a gentle rhythm with Jaskier’s breathing and every now and then the blue eyed boy would sigh, bringing a soft sleepy smile to Geralt’s face. He didn’t dare move, lest he break the spell, but someone else woke from a nightmare with a scream that shattered his illusion. 

Jaskier hummed and nuzzled into Geralt’s hip before he was fully awake, making the prince blush furiously and gasp. Sure he’d fallen asleep with friends and romantic interests back home, but that sensation was… different. 

“Is it morning?” Jaskier mumbled, not moving to sit, but at least the nuzzling had stopped. 

“Probably,” Geralt answered, resisting the urge to run his hand over Jaskier’s shoulder, “still early.”

“You haven’t been lying awake all this time have you?”

Geralt forced a breath out his nose in amusement, “Only a few minutes or so.”

Jaskier sat up, laying his arm over Geralt’s, keeping it wrapped around his waist as he moved to be able to inspect the young hero’s face, “You still look… weary.”

Geralt frowned, shifting so he was leaning on his elbow over the boy’s legs, still very much resting on him, “I wonder why?”

Jaskier smirked, “Is it true you’re a child of Poseidon? Why not sink the ship and we can all ride horses made of sea foam back to the mainland?”

Geralt cast his eyes down to the deck, “They’d just come back for more. It doesn’t matter who’s son I am or what favor I do or don't have.” 

"Pull the weed at the root." Jaskier nodded. 

Geralt hummed in agreement, sitting all the way up to lean against the mast next to the brunette, "What about your family? Anything exciting waiting for you at home?"

Jaskier hooked his arm around Geralt's and rested his head on his shoulder, "Doesn't matter." 

"Does to me." Geralt mumbled, a little taken aback by the physical affection. When Jaskier rolled his eyes he laid his hand over his knee, "Humor me." 

They sat and waited for the sun to rise over the water as they discussed Jaskier’s life. His parents death, the farm he worked for his uncle, the mundane little things like how often he gets sent to the market and who cuts his hair. They learned each other's birthdays as a joke, but the hopeful side of Geralt still repeated it to him a few minutes later just to be safe. Jaskier asked him about life at the palace, if it was as grand as everyone believed. Geralt felt squeamish admitting he didn’t know, seeing as he'd only really lived in the lap of luxury. Sure his trek to Athens was dirty and many nights he slept in barns, but most of his 20 years were spent in bright white togas and tunics with colorfully stitched hems. Jaskier didn’t seem bothered, he just asked more specific questions about the beds and the fountains. He pontificated for a while on the poor musical choices made in a performance at the amphitheater last summer and did his best to explain to Geralt how to delicately pluck a harp using a lock of his white hair as a prop. Joking was easy, being earnest wasn’t quite effortless, but it was easier than with other people, and Geralt lamented that they’d only met yesterday. 

“Do you think you’d’ve given me the time of day?” Jaskier asked.

Geralt grinned, giving the brunet's leg another squeeze, “You wouldn’t have given me a choice.”

Jaskier rested his chin on Geralt's shoulder, his hair fluttering into his eyes and glowing gold as the sun began to peek over the waves, "Probably not, no." His voice was soft in Geralt's ear, the warmth of his breath made the hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. 

Geralt turned to look at him, their noses brushing. He was about to ask Jaskier something reckless and naive, no doubt born of desperation, but the moment was broken by shouting. 

"LAND" Echoed from various soldiers and strangled sobs broke out in response. Reality was once again stubbornly planted in the forefront of Geralt's mind and he forced himself to pull away. His heart beat furiously in his chest as he stood to get a better look. 

Someone gripped his elbow and spun him around, staring up at him with wide eyes full of terror, "You can do it, can't you? You can get us home?" The harsh whisper seemed to carry over the whole group, commanding their silence and attention as they formed a circle around him. 

Vessimir's parting words echoed in his head, he was a leader now, he had to act like it. His year of lessons and training and taking notes were over and he knew right then that even if they made it back, he'd never have a day of peace again. 

With a glance back toward Jaskier he nodded, "I will bring us home or die trying." 

The person's grip on his elbow tightened and he stared back at them with what he hoped was reassuring confidence for a moment before they released him, "Do you have a plan?" 

All his preparation could never have braced him for the absolute devastation on the group's faces when he hesitated. In the fraction of a second he took to open his mouth they knew. Only Jaskier seemed to accept the facts and take them in stride. 

"All I know for sure is that we need to make it out and back to the docks by dawn." Geralt's admission was met with curt nods from some and fresh tears from others, "I'm sorry." 

Jaskier pipped up, stepping into the center of the small crowd with Geralt, "You volunteered to try to save us. We need no apology." He sent a glare to someone about to speak in protest, cutting them off, "It's more than we've had in the last 18 years and I, for one, am grateful." 

Geralt gave him an appreciative nod but their theatrics were drawing attention from the soldiers. He shooed everyone away, not sure he could handle another altercation this close to the soldiers homeland where they'd have something to prove to onlookers.  

As they drew nearer to the shore they heard shouts of laughter and music, saw banners waving in the wind and people dancing around the port. They were throwing a festival. A festival of revenge and dominance over their enemies, where people who would have been sacrifices delighted in the activities. It made Geralt's stomach churn. 

Jaskier stood next to him as close to the bow as they were allowed, "Twisted, isn't it? And they wonder how we so readily believe they eat their brethren." 

Geralt took his hand, searching for anything to ground him as the fear crept up his neck and threatened to strangle him, "Monsters never think they're monsters." 

"You like being cryptic don't you?" Jaskier sighed, keeping his eyes forward as the festivities grew clearer and clearer. 

Geralt only shrugged in response. 

Soon enough they were all corralled by the soldiers with shouts and shoves. They tied Geralt's hands first, yanking on the rope so it burned into his wrists. The man was watching his face, waiting to see him wince or twitch. He gave them nothing. The end of the rope was then tied to Jaskier and so on until they were all lined up, hands bound in front of them and linked like sausages. 

When they docked there was a heavy drum roll, fitting for the captives in line behind Geralt trembling. The plank was lowered by soldiers in what had to be ceremonial dress and when they stepped back the drummers hit one last beat, leaving the whole crowd silent. 

At the front, surrounded by soldiers and standing on a throne made to be carried, was King Minos. His eyes were cold and calculating, and it was clear he was declining in health, but he still invoked fear with his gaze. There was no doubt to any rumors anymore. Geralt was sure this man was capable of absolutely anything. 

The Queen sat in a similar throne, next to them was their daughter, walking but flanked by guards. She didn’t take her eyes off Geralt as they prodded him down the plank. Her eyes were soft, betraying the rest of her face set in a hard mask of disapproval, and she made no effort to hide her ogling. Geralt stared right back, never one to back down from a challenge, until they were ushered past the royals into the crowd. The citizens were far more animated. Some threw food scraps at them, some jeered and gestured rudely, others spat, though they all blamed the 14 young men and women before them for the death of a prince before they were even born. 

They marched through winding streets and up set after set of switchback stairs to reach the palace dungeons. The guards were having their fun with Geralt in the lead, shoving him around when they needed to change direction and tripping him when they passed a large crowd. 

When they finally reached their cells they were shoved in, two to a cell, and the rope was cut. They had to hold their arms through the bars for the soldiers to cut the knotts. They took the rope with them when they left, leaving only bread and water on the bed and one torch lit hanging outside each cell. It was dreary and cold, and Geralt could hear the others crying.

Jaskier broke the loaf of bread in half and tossed it to Geralt, taking a long pull directly from the pitcher of water, “Eat. No arguments.”

__________

part 4 here

tag list: @hailhailsatan @so--many-fandoms

hmu if you want tagged 💕 I will cry tears of joy in my coffee

[carewyncromwell]

NEXT PART OF THE “PIRATES AU” GO TIME! For the previous part, click here, or you can also browse the entire tag for this AU here! Featuring in this section, once again, is ma cherie @cursebreakerfarrier’s girl Juliette “Jules” Farrier. <3

x~x~x~x

Carewyn had been glad for the rumbles of thunder and the terrible fog that rolled in that night. She knew Governor Farrier would want to quickly make an example out of Orion, and she needed any excuse she could scrounge up to belay his execution date so that she could figure out a way to get him out that wouldn’t either 1, put him in too much danger, or 2, make her lose her position as Commodore. If she got on the wrong side of the law herself, she’d lose the one advantage she had -- namely, the authority and power needed to keep Orion from harm.

What Carewyn could not have expected was the sound that soon accompanied the rumbles of thunder -- cannon fire.

Port Royal was under attack.

A large ship, nearly the size of the Dauntless that somehow seemed to glide in as quickly and silently as the fog, with a blood-red-stained hull and an intricate “R” chiseled into the left side of its bow came into port, and out of it came a mass of filthy, terrifying pirates all wearing dark red tunics. They held torches, pistols, and cutlasses, and they descended upon the island like a swarm of blood-stained rats.

Carewyn immediately ordered a counterattack. Sending out several battalions to protect the Governor’s mansion and the townspeople, she then stayed behind at the fort to lead her soldiers in an offensive against the ship the pirates had come from. The assault went on for almost an hour, but somehow, no matter how outnumbered the pirates were, their advance toward the fort never seemed to halt -- and somehow their numbers never seemed to dwindle...

In the brig, Orion could see the attack in the distance from the tiny window in the far upper corner of his cell. Anyone who wasn’t part of the Artemis’s crew might’ve hypothesized that these pirates had come after Orion, but Orion knew better. Murphy was far too strategic to just barrel into a busy and well-guarded town like Port Royal, and he and the rest of the crew would’ve never done something so dangerous and destructive, if nothing else, than because they’d know he wouldn’t approve. More importantly...Orion could see they were attacking the fort -- where Carewyn likely was at that very moment.

It was a struggle for Orion to try to keep calm. Whenever he was under a lot of stress -- and, to a lesser extent, whenever cannons were fired around him -- it was always rather difficult for him to find and keep his center. His heart rate would pound way too fast and he’d be unable to breathe fully or steadily and he’d have to hold his own hands in a vain attempt to keep them from shaking.

He had to get up there -- and yet his thoughts and his heartbeat were just too loud and too fast in his head for him to think. At several points the Revenge fired cannon balls right at the brig and smashed down walls, but they never managed to explode in a place Orion could use to bust his way out. He tried to meditate and clear his head -- place his faith in Carewyn, that she’d be safe -- just so that he’d be able to think clearly enough to summon up a means to actually help...but he found himself stuck in a terrible cycle of anxiety he couldn’t break free of.

Center yourself -- center -- Carewyn -- find your center -- balance -- calm -- Carewyn, please -- she’s all right -- center yourself -- no, she’s not -- no, she’s not -- find your center -- breathe --

Orion had good reason to be worried -- for when the pirates reached the fort, they cut down every soldier in their way, all with seemingly little effort. When they arrived, Carewyn also realized who it was that was attacking them.

Carewyn’s blue eyes widened upon the dark red tunics worn by the pirates at the head of the charge.

She knew that uniform only too well. It perfectly explained their ruthlessness -- and worse, despite their clear advantage in numbers, her soldiers were still somehow outmatched...

She dashed over to Percy, who had been firing at the pirates with his rifle, and seized his shoulder.

“Percy -- lead the new recruits in a retreat,” she said urgently.

Percy looked up in alarm. “Retreat? We’re abandoning the fort?”

“I care less about the fort than I do our men’s lives,” Carewyn said fiercely. “Get them out of here -- I’ll cover you.”

“But -- ”

“That’s an order, Lieutenant!” she cut him off sharply. Seeing the conflict and worry in his eyes, she then gave his shoulder a squeeze and said more softly, “I’m counting on you. Look after them.”

Percy couldn’t seem to summon any response. His freckled face was very white and scared. Nonetheless, he eventually managed to swallow back the lump in his throat and give her a fervent nod. He then immediately rushed off to gather the rest of his regiment.

“Fall back! Fall back! Stay together!”

Carewyn couldn’t hide the fear she felt herself as she turned her back on Percy and the other soldiers, unsheathing her sword and strolling leisurely into the throng of red-garbed pirates. They attacked her all at once, and within moments, she was fighting all six of them, ducking their blows and slashing into them with ferocity.

By her own design, the Commodore of Port Royal fought the crew of the pirate ship Revenge completely single-handed.

Not long after the seven pirates had swarmed the fort, they seemed to just as abruptly withdraw. No one knew why until Charlie and Bill -- hotly engaged in fighting a handful of pirates who had been ransacking houses -- caught sight of the red-garbed group who was retreating.

‘That must be the Captain!’ thought Bill.

At the head of the group was an older graying pirate dressed in a black coat much more ornate than the rest of his crew’s and a wide-brimmed red hat, which made him look like a silent, hungry vulture among a sea of red. His face was oddly placid and coolly smiling in response to all the chaos, even as he barked around at the rest of the pirates.

“Enough! Fall back now! We have what we came for!”

There was a roar of raucous delight from the rest of the crew, and they just as quickly flocked to the older man’s side.

Charlie’s eyes narrowed angrily. “No way am I gonna let you all walk off that easily -- !”

Before Bill could stop him, he charged at the group of pirates. One of them -- a female pirate, to Bill’s surprise, with a mane of long dark red curls and very cold almond-shaped blue eyes -- immediately unsheathed her own sword and the two began to fight. At last Charlie managed to stab her in the chest, making her collapse in a heap --

It was when she fell back that Charlie saw what the brown-haired female pirate to the pirate captain’s left was carrying over her shoulder -- the prone form of someone dressed in Navy blue and loosely flying ginger red hair.

“CAREY!” screamed Charlie.

Three other pirates immediately descended on Charlie with their cutlasses, slashing at his chest and his long ponytail. Charlie was soon completely overwhelmed in battle, unable to push past them. He tried to keep Carewyn in sight, but she was disappearing over the horizon --

Bill’s heart leapt into his throat as he chased after the group of pirates, his own sword high. His white robes were torn and covered in blood, but he didn’t care -- he couldn’t let them take Carewyn --

With a roar of fury, he went straight for the woman holding Carewyn. He slashed her shoulder, making her crumple in on herself with an angry cry -- Bill seized the back of Carewyn’s jacket, to pull her away --

“AAAARGH!”

Searing pain wrenched through Bill’s back, and in an instant, he was yanked backward away from Carewyn and thrown to the ground. Blood pooled out of his left side as someone stomped their foot on top of him with such force that he was slammed into the brick.

“ACK!”

“Don’t bother getting up, holy Father,” said a very cold, and yet scalding female voice. “We are demons you cannot defeat.”

Bill gritted his teeth in pain as he struggled to get to his feet.

“No -- “ he choked, his eyes flaring with righteous anger. “No, you -- you can’t have him -- !”

The captain raised his eyebrows in a cruel kind of amusement. “‘Him?’“

The brown-haired woman, who seemed to have completely shaken off the injury Bill had inflicted on her, gave a hard, forced-sounding laugh. The woman on top of Bill pushed down into him harder, making him gasp in pain.

“Heed this warning, boy,” she hissed right in his ear. “Stay away from our flesh and blood, or we’ll happily slash open your flesh and spill your blood in full.”

Her dark red curls had dropped into his line of vision -- Bill’s face contorted with confusion -- wait -- hadn’t Charlie already -- !?

“Stop playing with your food, Pearl,” said a younger, scathing male voice somewhere behind her. “We’ve got what we came for, so let’s leave this hovel behind.”

“Don’t tell me what to -- ”

“Fall back, Pearl,” the captain repeated very coolly. “Let the holy man be. Better that he learn the sting of failure that comes from doing the Lord’s work sooner rather than later.”

Bill made one last valiant attempt to get up, but the woman called Pearl kicked him in the back of the head with the metal heel of her boot and his mind went black.

Port Royal was absolutely devastated by the aftermath of the attack. Not only had their town been largely trashed, but their local hero had been stolen from them by the very pirates she fought single-handedly to give the rest of her soldiers the chance to escape from. All three Weasleys took what had happened very hard, all feeling ashamed and responsible for not having been able to protect Carewyn, who they saw as family to them. Percy immediately put his efforts toward helping the remaining officers put together a search party, but both Bill and Charlie feared that the Navy would never be able to find her. The Revenge was a ship of legends that seemingly appeared in and out of the fog like a ghost and only made berth on an island that supposedly nobody could reach unless they somehow already knew where it was. And given that it was an island inhabited by pirates, it was unlikely to be a place the British Navy could easily find.

Fortunately for the Weasleys, there was another person who was worried about Carewyn and was determined to do whatever had to be done to rescue her -- Jules Farrier. And so she charmed her way into the brig, slipped the watching guards some drugged drinks, and then picked up her skirts so she could dash down the stairs to the lone cell she knew was still inhabited.

Jules found Orion Amari sitting cross-legged in the corner of his cell. His eyes were closed and his hands were clasped in his lap. The wall behind him had been broken open at the top, but the jagged hole wasn’t wide enough for him to slip through.

The Governor’s daughter bent down, grabbing onto one of the wooden bars of his cell so she could look through them at him.

“Captain Amari,” she said urgently.

Orion’s head twitched. Although his expression was as unreadable as ever, his shoulders were tenser than normal as he slowly opened his eyes.

“...Miss Farrier,” he said, sounding far less surprised than he probably was. “I hope your Mr. Weasley is well.”

Jules flushed a little at the mention of “her” Mr. Weasley, but was too focused on the task at hand to care.

“Captain Amari, Carey’s been kidnapped.”

Orion’s expression abruptly tensed. His dark eyes went very wide and he froze up like a deer in the headlights.

“What?” The word came out so quietly and shakily it was like it was only said by a shadow of his actual voice.

“It was the Revenge,” said Jules, as Orion quickly shoved himself across the floor so that he could also grab onto the bars and peek through them at her. “They stormed the fort -- they trashed everything, but didn’t take anything except her. Bill and Charlie tried to stop them, but -- ”

“You can’t fight those men,” Orion cut her off very lowly.

He closed his eyes again -- he was breathing as deeply as he could, as if he were trying to keep his heart rate down.

“...There are tales, about the curse that plagues the Revenge’s crew. Some say they cannot be killed. Some say they’re not even human. Some say that they’re more dead than alive, and yet they walk among us all the same...”

He clasped his hands together, his dark eyebrows knitting together over his eyes.

“Carewyn was able to escape their curse, when she and Jacob fled all those years ago...and knowing Charles Cromwell, he couldn’t stand the thought of any member of his family living free -- of the curse...or of him.”

Jules’s eyes narrowed. Carewyn had never told her much about her grandfather, but considering she was more than experienced dealing with a family member who tried to dictate how she should live her life, she completely understood why Jacob wanted to get himself and his sister away from that.

“The Navy’s sent out search parties, but we all know that they won’t find her quickly. But you care about Carewyn -- she told me she helped you, and that you let her escape. You have a ship and a crew -- and since you’re a pirate, you’d probably be able to find out where the Revenge makes berth, right?”

Orion opened his eyes at last. His gaze upon Jules’s face was very unreadable.

“Finding Carewyn I believe I could manage,” he said levelly, “were I not currently imprisoned.”

Jules’s lips spread into a wry smile as she rose to her feet and reached into her sleeve.

“These might help with that,” she said coolly, dangling the ring of keys off of her pointer finger.

Getting Orion out of his cell was the easy part. Another pair of men had come to take the place of the original guards and found them passed out on the floor, just before they caught sight of Orion and Jules darting around the hall. Soon the bronze bell was clanging, signalling a prison break, and more soldiers arrived. At one point Orion even had to pick Jules up bridal style so they could jump down a set of stairs. Just when it seemed they might get captured, though, who should come to their rescue, but --

“Bill!” breathed Jules in relief.

Bill kicked the last soldier off the wall and whirled around. Orion quickly put Jules down, and Bill immediately swooped down on her, clutching her shoulder and searching her face for injuries.

“Are you hurt? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Jules, “but Bill -- what are you -- ?”

Bill gave her a grim smile. “Same reason as you, I reckon.”

His brown eyes flickered over to Orion, narrowing slightly as he straightened up.

“I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you, Amari,” said the priest, “but if Miss Farrier got you out, I imagine she convinced you to help us find out where Charles Cromwell took Carey.”

Orion inclined his head. “I understand that you don’t trust me, Bill Weasley, but rest assured, I don’t want Carewyn in the clutches of Charles Cromwell any more than you do.”

Bill still looked very suspicious; Jules brought a hand onto his arm and gave it a squeeze through the sleeve of his robes.

“Bill, we can trust him. He cares about Carey -- I know she’d trust him, if our places were switched.”

Bill deflated slightly under Jules’s hold. He stared down at her for a long moment; then, with a swallow, he turned back to Orion.

“...Carey never has trusted easily,” he said quietly, “so if you think that’s true, and if you trust him...then I will as well.”

His silent stare seemed to add, ‘For now.’

The three were abruptly startled to attention by the sound of a loud CRASH. They dashed around the corner, to find a large piece of the lowered wooden gate on top of a group of stunned soldiers and another ginger-haired man climbing casually through the hole over to them.

“Charlie?” said Bill, taken aback.

Charlie grinned at Bill and Jules. “Hey, lovebirds! Guess we must’ve had the same idea -- though I’d planned on shaking the bloke down for information, not set him loose...”

He cocked an eyebrow at Orion.

“But oh well -- is he taking us to Carey?”

Orion inclined his head to Charlie like he had Bill, his dark eyes very calm but still narrowed seriously.

“I am returning to the Artemis and aim to go after the Revenge. If you wish to assist me in that, I would be very grateful. If you wish to join me in it, however, it would be far more dangerous -- even more so than what you’ve already done.”

Charlie’s grin grew a bit more cocky. “Look, mate -- Carey is my twin. Not by blood, but she’s my twin all the same. She’s family. There’s no way in Hell I’m not going to help her, if she needs me.”

Bill glanced at Jules. He agreed with Charlie 100%, but Jules going would be very different than either of them. She hadn’t been in the Navy -- she wasn’t trained with a pistol or sword.

Nevertheless Jules looked back at Bill with a perfectly fearless expression.

“Us too,” she said firmly.

Bill’s eyes rippled with emotion around his broadening smile. Juliette Farrier truly was the bravest, most wonderful woman he’d ever met in his life.

Grinning, Charlie turned back to the broken gate.

“Now then, you’d best get those swords out -- there’ll no doubt be a party waiting for us, if we head for any of the docks. I hope your ship’s not too far off, Amari.”

Orion’s dark eyes twinkled with mischief.

“Not at all,” he said levelly. “The Artemis’s best aspect is her ability to hide in plain sight.”

“Good.”

Charlie unsheathed the sword at his side. The heavy iron hilt was beautifully melded into a stylized dragon.

“Never thought I’d get such good use out of this baby, when I made it,” he said with another cheeky grin as he held it aloft.

Orion, Bill, Charlie, and Jules dashed for the northern-most dock. It was largely deserted except for what looked like a single, abandoned ship -- but, as it turned out, that was merely an illusion. Orion Amari apparently had a good friend in Tortuga who specialized in old magics, and after he’d been kind to her, she’d cast a spell on the Artemis that gave it the ability to disguise itself as an innocent-looking merchant ship. Once Orion used the word necessary to remove the illusion, both the Artemis and its crew reappeared, and they made ready to board. As Charlie had predicted, however, a whole slew of soldiers had come to stop them -- among them, the final Weasley brother, Percy, who was the last one left standing after Orion, Charlie, and Bill had taken out the rest of the battalion and Orion had made it on board the Artemis.

Unlike Bill and Charlie, however, Percy refused to trust Orion -- he was a pirate, just like the ones who’d kidnapped Carewyn. He’d kidnapped her himself, even if Carewyn managed to get away. If Bill and Charlie went with him, they’d be labeled as pirates too -- if Jules went, then the Governor would hunt all of them down and probably kill them, just to get her back.

“I know you want to help,” he told his brothers sharply, pointing his pistol at them but only by protocol, “but let the Navy handle this!”

“The Navy can’t find a pirate island!” Charlie shot back impatiently. “Charles Cromwell is ruthless, Perce -- if we dally around waiting for the Navy to find her the ‘upstanding way,’  Carey might be dead by the time we reach her!”

“And if you do this, then you’ll have nothing left to come back to!” said Percy. “You’ll be tarred with Amari’s brush, Charlie -- you and Bill, and Jules -- you’ll be criminals! You’ll have no future, no home -- no chance at a normal life, ever again! You’ll be hunted down like animals! The Navy will hunt you down -- the thing you fought for! The thing we fought for! The thing Carey and I still fight for! Is that what Mum and Dad would want? Ginny, or Ron, or Fred and George? Is that what Carey would want -- you throwing away your entire lives and futures!?”

Percy’s hand holding his pistol was shaking. Bill’s lips came together very tightly.

“Percy,” he said very softly, “we can’t let Carey stay in the clutches of Charles Cromwell. That man slaughtered his own daughter and her husband, all because they wouldn’t bow to his will. Carey was lucky to escape him, when she had the chance. I’m sure she’s known her whole life that he might catch up with her and dreaded that moment every single day...and yet she kept it all to herself, because that’s what Carey does. She takes every knife she can herself, so we don’t have to.”

Jules looked from Bill to Percy, her brown eyes narrowed in determination as she nodded in agreement.

“We can’t leave her, Percy,” she said firmly. “Once Carey’s safe...whatever happens next...we can deal with the consequences.”

Percy stared up at them, his freckles very stark against his deathly pale face. His eyes darted from Charlie to Bill and back.

“Don’t do this,” he whispered.

Charlie stubbornly turned away and strode right up the gangplank onto the Artemis’s deck. He stopped to Orion’s right, but avoided eye contact with anyone on board.

“Charlie -- ” pleaded Percy. “Don’t do this -- think of Mum -- think of us -- ”

Jules headed up the gangplank too, turning back to look at Bill. Bill turned away from Percy. 

“Bill -- ” Percy said again. “Don’t -- please -- ”

Bill bowed his head.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured.

“Bill!”

Percy’s voice came out as a despair-filled, choked yelp of pain. The sound clearly affected Bill, judging by how he shut his eyes tight. Jules reached out as if to take his hand, but Bill plowed up the gangplank, unable to face anyone, as the gangplank was raised and the Artemis immediately set sail.

Charlie escaped into the rigging and sat in the crow’s nest alone for the next hour. Bill went to the far side of the deck, grabbing onto the railing in a vice grip and hunching over it as he struggled not to cry. Jules came up beside him and, her own eyes full of pain, she rested her head and shoulder against his, desperate to show any support she could.

As much as they all knew they had no other choice, if they wanted to save Carewyn...it didn’t make the schism between the Weasley brothers any less searing and painful.

[valeriethepussycats]

Assemble

Chapter 9

Pairing- Loki x Reader x Steve (one side)

Warning- cursing

Your thoughts and other characters are in italics.

Fury gathers Tony and Steve back into the briefing room everyone there has a look as if in a daze. A look of numb shock is shown on their devastated faces.

“These were in Phil Coulson's jacket.Guess he never did get you to sign them.”Nick throws Coulson's Captain America trading cards  on the table towards Steve. Steve picks them up, stained with blood.

“We're dead in the air up here. Our communications, location of the cube, Banner, Thor and I don’t know if Y/n will recover from this....I got nothing for you. Lost my one good eye. Maybe I had that coming.Yes, we were going to build an arsenal with the Tesseract. I never put all my chips on that number though, because I was playing something even riskier.” Nick told Steve and Ton. “There was an idea, Stark knows this, called The Avengers Initiative. The idea to bring together a group of remarkable people, see if they could become something more. See if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could. Phil Coulson died still believing in that idea, in heroes.”

Tony gets up and walks off, not wanting to hear it anymore.

“Well, it's an old fashioned notion.” Nick finished.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Thor walks out far into the meadow. He looks down. Mjölnir.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Banner wakes up, in human form with Y/n words echoing in he’s head. He looks around and sees he is in a pile of rubble and looks up at the open ceiling he crashed in and is completely naked. A Security Guard stands there, amazed. “You fell out of the sky.”

“Did I hurt anybody?”  Bruce asked coming to.

“There's nobody around here to get hurt. You did scare the hell out of some

pigeons though.” The Security Guard  answered.

“Lucky.” Bruce replied.

“Or just good aim. You were awake when  you fell.”  The Security Guard told Bruce.

“You saw?”

“The whole thing, right through the ceiling. Big and green and buck ass nude. Here...”  He throws Banner a pair of big pants. Banner pulls on his pants. “I didn't think those would fit you  until you shrunk down to a regular size fella.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you an alien?”

“What?” Bruce asked.

“From outer space, an alien?” The Security Guard wondered.

“No.” Bruce answered.

“Well then, son, you've got a condition.”  The Security Guard disclosed.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Barton is strapped down. Natasha watches over him as Barton tries to shake off Loki's mind control.

“Clint, you're gonna be alright.” Natasha told him.”

“You know that? Is that what you know? I got...I gotta go in though. I gotta

flush him out.”  Barton stated.

“We don't have that long, it's gonna take time.” Natasha stressed.

“I don't understand. Have you ever had someone take your brain and play? Pull you out and send something else in? Do you know what it's like to be unmade?” Barton questioned.

“You know that I do.” Natasha replied.

“Why am I back? How did you get him out?” Barton asked.

“Cognitive recalibration. I hit you really hard in the head.” Natasha answered.

“Thanks.” Barton stated then Natasha unfastens the restraints. “Tasha, how many agents?”

“Don't. Don't do that to yourself,  Clint. This is Loki. This is monsters and magic and nothing we were ever trained for.”  Natasha explained.

“Loki, he got away?” Barton wondered.

“Yeah. I don't suppose you know where?”  Natasha asked.

“I didn't need to know. I didn't ask.  He's gonna make his play soon though. Today.”  Barton answered.

“We gotta stop him.” Natasha declared.”

“Yeah? Who's we?” Barton questioned.

“I don't know. Whoever's left.” Natasha replied.

“Well, if I put an arrow in Loki's eye socket, I'd sleep better I suppose.” Barton  remarked.

“Now you sound like you.” Natasha sits next to her partner and friend.

“But you don't. You're a spy, not a soldier. Now you want to wade into a war. Why? What did Loki do to you?” Barton  asked.

“He didn't, I just...”

“Natasha.”

“I've been compromised. I got red in my ledger. I'd like to wipe it out.”

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Y/n is in Coulson’s office or more like he’s room trying to calm the raging storm inside of her revenge and anger is never a good combination with her. She Angrily swipeseverything off of his desk breaking the laptop. Automatically feeling guilty Y/n been down to pick up the laptop and sees a briefcase under the desk Curiosity taking over her she pulls the briefcase out and sees that it has her name on it.

“What are you?”

Y/n opens the briefcase and see A sticky note that says play me. Y/n then moves the sticky note and play on the video. At first all you could hear is rumble and the  screen is black. Giving up on the video Y/n  moves to pick up the stuff she knocked off the deck. 

“You should cover up because it’s going to Rain.” Said Coulson’s voice.

Y/n turns to look back at the briefcase and see Coulson on the screen.

“No um time to bundle up because it’s going to rain no. Ohhh how about the  Red Wing Black bird soaring through the sky. Get it  because of the color of the wings  it reminds me of you and the Phoenix....The point is I had this uniform made for you because your a hero and every hero needs to dress the part and have a name. Now go save the world.”

The video stops an a Second part compartment from the briefcase opened up revealing a bodysuit that’s Blue, Red, with a Yellow. It’s like Funky and Radiant. The base of the suit is blue and it’s had a red vertical line going down the middle and two yellow diagonal lines on each side of the vertical line, and the sleeves and legs have the same design as the stomach but the sleeves go all the way down to Cover the two middle fingers. The top of the suit makes an ‘x’ separate each side of the chest, leaving the neck and a little cleavage showing.

Oh Phill this is beautiful

When Y/n turns the suit around to look at the back she see a Metal plate on her upper back.

What are you for?

Just as the thought ran into Y/n’s mind a small Wood sheath attached to the Metal plate. Y/n gaps in shock. She knows exactly what that is

Y/n goes to pull the handle of the Sword out of the Wood sheath  and see a small dagger that slowly start to unfold into a 65 cm Katana Sword.

“Oh my god...how could he had this made.” Y/n wondered as a slow smile creeped on to her face. She knew she could do it and so did Phill.

Red Wing has a nice ring to it

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Tony look at the hatch. He stands not saying a word. Steve walks in.

“Was he married?” Steve asked.

“No. There was a uh...cellist, I think.” Tony answered.

“I'm sorry. He seemed like a good man.” Steve  answered.

“He was an idiot.” Tony remarked.

“Why? For believing?” Steve asked.

“For taking on Loki alone.” Tony stated.

“He was doing his job.”  Steve voiced

“He was out of his league. He should have waited. He should have...” Tony said looking at the spot where  Coulson die.

“Sometimes there isn't a way out, Tony.” Steve started.

Tony walks away from Steve. “Right. How did that work for him?” Tony asked sarcastically

“Is this the first time you've lost a soldier?” Steve asked.

Tony turns around sharply. “ WE ARE NOT SOLDIERS! I am not marching to Fury's fife!”

“Neither am I! He's got the same blood on his hands as Loki does. Right now we've got to put that aside and get this done. Now Loki needs a power source, if we can put together a list...”  Steve trailed off.

“He’s in Manhattan and if I’m not mistaken I think he’s at your tower Tony. It’s the only power store in Manhattan that I can think of.” Y/n chimed in.

Tony and Steve turns around and see Y/n standing in the door waring a black and white suit.

“Y/n.” Steve said staggered.

“What do you think Phil had it made. I’ve never had a suit of armor before but this is kind of bad ass.” Y/n proclaimed while she was checking herself out.

When Steve saw Y/n’s suit he had to check himself. He know of Y/n’s powers before the rest of the team so he knows if he let’s he’s mind wonder it would go to ungentleman like place  and Y/n could pick up on that and he doesn’t want to make things awkward between them. Steve can really see Y/n being an important person in his new life. Steve clears his throat then asks. “Where you going?”

“To stop Loki but first I’m gonna find Thor.” Y/n answered.

“What about Banner?” Tony asked.

“I sent Bruce to Manhattan.” Y/n answered.

“Are you sure your ok to do this?” Steve asked in a  concern voice.

“Yes. Im 75% sure I can do. I just  had to take some time to clear my head because before fighting Loki To keep my emotions in check.” Y/n answered.

“Or you’ll  go Super Saiyan got it.” Tony remarked.

“I am so sorry about that...” Y/n trailed off.

Steve waves his hand. “It’s ok we understand anyone would be upset finding out that kind of news.”

Y/n smiles at Tony and Steve then opens the hatch. Clueless to what’s going on Steve and Tony backs up from the hatch.

“What the hell are you doing?” Tony questioned.

Y/n smiles. “You guys need to suit up I’ll see you there.”  

Y/n jumps in the hatch then it closes behind her. Steve and Tony look at the hatch wide eyes and their mouths slightly open.

“Did she just?” Steve asked.

“Yes. Yes she did.” Tony answered.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Erik works around the CMS device that has already been set-upon the rooftop of Tony's tower.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Steve walks in full uniform. Natasha looks at him, unprepared.

“Time to go.” Steve announced.

“Go where?” Natasha wondered.

“I'll tell you on the way. Can you fly  one of those jets?”  Steve asked.

Barton walks out of the restroom. Looks at Cap. “I can.”

Steve looks at Natasha and she nods her head to confirm Barton's on their side.

“You got a suit?” Steve asked Barton.

“Yeah.”

“Then suit up.”

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Y/n is flying in the sky searching the ground to see where Thor landed until a massive lightning bolt all most hits her, Y/n flys out the way and looks down and see Thor.

“Really you couldn’t killed me!” Y/n shouted as she flys down to Thor who is standing in a meadow of flowers.

“I know about Phill.” Y/n said with a hint of sadness.

“I’m sorry. I know he meant  the world to you.” Thor said as he gives Y/n a hug then placed his forehead on her for a moment of silence.

“I’ll deal with Loki I gave you my word.” Thor declare.

“What happens if you get hurt?” Y/n asked.

“You will not risky your life me Y/n not again.” Thor disclosed getting upset for his friend.

“I won’t but I won’t yet you get hurt knowing I can help...come on I know where Loki is.” Y/n voiced leaving  no room for an argument.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Captain America pulls on his Helmet and Shield. Tony welds his Iron Man helmet. Light slips down over Iron Man's eye holes. Black Widow attaches a glove gauntlet  with her rounds on her wrist and a blue light charges. Hawkeye slips on his quiver of arrows.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Cap, Widow and Hawkeye walk towards and into the Quinjet. A Young Shield Pilot looks and stands in their way.

“You are not authorized to be here...” The Pilot stated.

“Son... just don't.” Steve told the The Pilot.

○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Fury looks the window of the ship, contemplating. Agent Hill

walks up to him, knowing. “Sir.”

“Agent Hill?”

“Those cards, they were in Coulson's locker, not in his jacket.” Agent Hill disclosed.

“They needed the push.” Nick said  holding Coulson's cards.

A loud noise screeches. Fury looks out to see Iron Man flying off as well as the Quinjet.

“They found it. Get our communications back up, whatever you have to do. I  want eyes on everything.” Nick ordered.

“Yes, sir.”

Part 10

Kuddly Krab: @aesthethickks​

[shownuslaugh]

Through the Years

Series: Bigbang 6th Member AU

Pairing: SJ/GD

2007

           Taeyang nudges SJ forward but the younger girl’s slight frame takes it more as a shove. She lurches forward, mumbling under her breath and staring directly at the ground. She can’t look up. Can’t look him in the eyes. And why should she? He’s been nothing but a pain in her ass since day one, pushing her around and harassing her to her wits end.

           “Say it,” Seunghyun tells her.

           SJ crosses her arms and squares her shoulders before looking at Jiyong dead in the eye. “Happy birthday. Jerk.”

           Daesung gasps and pulls SJ back, scolding her so quietly someone stumbling on the scene would think he’s saying nothing at all. SJ shakes away his hold on her with an annoyed huff.

           “Thank you.” Jiyong’s smile is razor sharp, making SJ gulp audibly. That smile means something is coming. And it won’t be good for her.

2008

           “I don’t wanna!” SJ whines the entire time Daesung drags her behind him. “Dae, he hates me! Why should I even show up?”

           “Because we’re a group. Now come on.”

           “Do you still have the gift I got for you to give him?” Taeyang peers at her curiously, searching for a square box hidden in her bag.

           “No,” SJ answers with a bite to her tone. “I tossed it.”

           “What?!”

           “Don’t worry! I’ll give you your twenty bucks back.” She fishes around in her pocket. “Here.”

           Taeyang groans. “SJ, you can’t keep doing this.”

           “Watch me.”

           “I don’t think any of us really want to,” Seungri mutters.

           SJ’s brow arches. “What was that?”

           “Just go be a bitch to him so we can get this over with and have fun. We’re all sick of it.” Seunghyun is the one to answer SJ, practically daring her to argue with the intensity of his gaze.

           SJ’s eyes wander from Top to the bar where she notices Jiyong propped up on the counter. He’s chatting with some girl in a dress two sizes too small and makeup that looks like it was done in the dark. SJ’s stomach falls to the soles of her feet.

           “See!” She gestures wildly. “He doesn’t even want to spend his birthday with us anyway! Just…” SJ pulls some change out of her pocket and shoves it towards one of the guys. She honestly doesn’t care who. “Give him this and tell him to get a condom out of that machine in the bathroom. It’s on me. Can’t have our precious leader catching an STD, can we?”

           SJ storms out of the club.

           Daesung looks between her and Jiyong. “She knows that’s Dara… right?”

           Taeyang sighs. “I don’t think she cares.”

           Seungri toys with the coins SJ gave him. “Who wants to give this to hyung?”

           All of them groan.

2009

           SJ sneaks quietly weaves through the other party goers, searching the dense crowd for Jiyong. He shouldn’t be this difficult to spot at his own birthday party but he’s sending her on one hell of a search.

           “Oh, hyung!” SJ grabs Seunghyun’s arm, pulling him down to her height. “Have you seen GD around?”

           Seunghyun points toward their kitchen. It seems like it takes far more effort than necessary, so SJ appreciates his drunken attempt. She pats him on the cheek, giggling at the way his eyes sparkle at the affection.

           When SJ enters the kitchen GD is alone, nursing a can of beer. He grins at her crookedly when she approaches.

           “Ah, there she is! My favorite girl in the world.” His words slur together and SJ’s suddenly struck by a feeling of discomfort. “You actually came this year.”

           SJ grimaces. “Yeah.”

           “Do I get a present this year?” Jiyong bats his eyelashes, giggling playfully.

           She considers the gift card to one of his favorite music stores safely tucked away in her back pocket. A sense of outrage fills her suddenly. “My presence is your present, you jerk!”

           She’ll just spend it on herself.

2010

           SJ is… surprisingly pleased with herself. The entire day has passed, schedules are done, Jiyong’s birthday dinner wrapped up, and he still has no idea. No idea that the second he opens the door to his bedroom-

           “PARK SOOJIN!”

           SJ runs to his room, almost tripping over her own feet in excitement. She trows out her arms and yells “Happy birthday, hyung!”

           Jiyong doesn’t know whether to be impressed or exasperated as balloon after balloon falls out of his bedroom and litters the hallway. “SJ, what the fuck?”

           She deflates a little. “Don’t… don’t you like it?” Did she overthink how close they were getting? Was she misreading signs whenever he’d chuckle at one of her pranks on the other members? Did she just ruin everything good they had going between them?

           When he sees the panic in her eyes he’s quick to reassure her. “No, no, no, it’s great! I was just shocked at first!”

           Still not completely convinced, she points to his bed. “There’s more.”

           He creeps in slowly, careful not to pop any of the balloons. His bed is absolutely covered in silly string and streamers, the colors alternating between red, black, gold, and white. Beneath all of that is a picture frame. It’s clearly hand painted, the designs intricate yet sloppy all at once. Jiyong smiles, brushes away the celebratory debris, and picks the frame up as if it’s the most precious thing he owns.

           “Thank you, SJ.” And he means it.

           “It’s from the day we found out we’d debut together.” SJ’s voice is soft, lost in memory. “Youngbae’s mom helped me track it down.”

           Jiyong ruffles her hair before letting his hand slide down the side of her face and cup her cheek. “You’re the best.”

2011

           “Jiyong!” SJ tugs on his leg in an attempt to drag him out of bed. “Come on! Let’s go!”

           “I don’t want a party this year!” He kicks her away impatiently, not in the mood to go out. “I just want to stay in and spend it with the people I actually care about.”

           “So, fuck us then, huh?”

           He sits up at the sound of Dami’s voice. “I thought you were working!”

           Dami shrugs. “When SJ calls I answer.”

           “But when I call-” Jiyong doesn’t finish that sentence. “Never mind.”

           “That’s what I thought.”

           SJ perches on the edge of his bed, threading her fingers through his. “I know how long it’s been since you’ve seen your family… so I might’ve made a few phone calls and bought a few plane tickets. Don’t worry, you still don’t have to go out somewhere. Everyone is here.”

           “And you’ll stay?”

           She nods. “Whatever you want. It’s your day, Jiyong.”

2012

           “SJ, seriously. It’s his birthday!” Daesung watches as SJ gets ready for her date with Siwon.

           “You think I don’t know that?” She shoots him a glare that’s equal parts amusing and terrifying. “It’s not like I can just ring up Unicef and be like ‘hey can you reschedule this whole charity gala thing? It’s my best fri-”

           Daesung’s entire demeanor perks up. “It’s your what? Go ahead, SJ. Finish your sentence.”

           SJ rolls her eyes. “I’ll be back before midnight. I’ll just see him then.”

           “Alright, Cinderella.”

           She’s not back by midnight.

           Jiyong waits up expectantly, heart growing heavier and heavier with each minute that passes by. She’s never missed his birthday before. Never. Maybe that’s the exact moment his hatred for Siwon started, burning so bright and so intense it colors his every action around SJ’s boyfriend. Fuck, the word hurts to even think.

           So he just goes to bed.

           The clock glows 2:32 am when Jiyong feels his bed dip and slender arms wrap around his waist. He shifts around so he and SJ are face to face.

           “I’m-”

           Jiyong shakes his head. “Don’t say you’re sorry.”

           SJ’s cheeks puff up. “I wasn’t going to.”

           “Oh?”

           “I was going to say: I’m all yours for the next twenty four hours. I know I’m a shitty friend for choosing the gala over you, but I’m not leaving your side again until this time tomorrow. You’ll be absolutely sick of me.”

           Jiyong hides his grin by pulling her into a tight hug. “God, you’re such a little punk. What the hell am I gonna do with you?”

           He can practically hear the smile in her voice. “Love me anyway?”

2013

           “What the fuck is this?” Jiyong pulls the blindfold down and looks around the bright white studio. His eyes immediately find SJ’s who simply smiles and gestures around her.

           “Ta da! It’s yours!”

           “What’s mine?”

           “This.” SJ skips around. “This whole place! You can use it as an art studio. I know you’re really into that lately and your apartment doesn’t really have enough room so… do you like it?”

           “Do I like it?” Jiyong looks around in awe. “I fucking love it.” He picks her up and spins her around, planting a kiss on her cheek as he lowers her back on the ground. “SJ, you’ve got a beautiful fucking soul, babe.”

           “I expect your first work to be for me.”

           “Oh, fuck yeah.”

2014

           SJ looks mildly upset. Okay, so, maybe Jiyong’s downplaying it a little. She looks absolutely devasted.

           “SooJin?” He gets no response. “Kitten?”

           SJ huffs. “Don’t call me that. I don’t deserve it.”

           “Why?”

           “I didn’t know what to get you this year,” she wails pathetically. “And when I finally found something Kiko mentioned you might think it’s dumb…”

           Jiyong can’t help but laugh. “SJ, I think you know me a little better than Kiko. What was it?”

           SJ bites her lips nervously. “Well…”

           “SJ. Show me. It’s my birthday present anyway.”

           She huffs in annoyance. “Fine.” She fishes through her bag and pulls out a little keychain. “I know it’s not much but I thought it was cute and reminded me of you. It’s a g dragon.”

           He runs his thumb over the tiny dragon, curving and twisting its body in a way that makes it look like a capital G. The laughter bubbles up in his chest, spilling out of him before he can repress it.

           “SJ, this is adorable. I love it.”

           SJ blushes, quietly saying, “I mean… I thought you would.”

2015

           “Sooo…” SJ threads her fingers between Jiyong’s and swings their arms as they walk through Times Square. “You know how I’m, like, the best gift giver ever?”

           “Yeah?”

           “Well, you might actually hate me this year.”

           “What? Why?”

           Instead of saying anything, SJ points up to one of the many, many screens above their heads. There, in all its neon glory, is single handedly the most embarrassing photograph Jiyong has ever seen of himself. He’s asleep, mouth wide open, stubble across his chin, and his eyes are half open. HAPPY BIRTHDAY LITTLE PRINCE accompanies the picture in bold while lettering.

           “You have five seconds,” Jiyong mutters.

           “Oh shit!” SJ doesn’t hesitate before taking off through the crowd. “Remember how much you love me!”

           “I’m going to kill you!”

2016

           Jiyong eyes the kitchen table with rapt interest. Every single Dragon Ball related movie or tv series sits in front of him, teasing him, begging him to just dive in. But he can’t. SJ made sure of that.

           “SJ, come on,” he whines. “This is my birthday! Why do I have to wait?”

           “Calm down you big baby. I’m almost done.” She hurries out of the bathroom and shoves a bunch of fabric in his arms. “Go change.”

           “Are these… matching pajamas?”

           “Yep! Now go!” SJ pushes him towards the bathroom so she can pop in the first dvd. He emerges from the bathroom not even a minute later, looking cute and cuddly and every bit the dork she knows he is.

           “Aww,” she coos. “Look at you.”

           Jiyong rolls his eyes and plops down on the couch. “I feel like I’m in one of your weird wet dreams.”

           “You wish. Now, are you ready to start from the very beginning?”

           Jiyong considers her words and feels vaguely sentimental. This really is starting from the beginning. The beginning of them. Or, uh, their friendship. Yeah, friendship.

           “I can feel you getting sappy on me, Kwon,” SJ teases.

           He clears his throat, picking his cat up off the floor and settling the tiny creature in his lap. “Play the damn dvd.”

           “Yes, sir.”

2017

           “Okay, so,” SJ sets a book down in front of Jiyong. It creates a heavy thud against the wooden table as she does so. “I can’t take full credit for this one. You’re mom helped me out with it and I’ve sort of had the idea for a couple years now. I figured with Kwon Jiyong being out now it’s an appropriate time to give it to you.”

           “Babe, you’re rambling.” Jiyong chuckles.

           SJ nods. “Right. Sorry.”

           “It’s cute.”

           “I’m not cute!” She shakes her head as if trying to keep herself on track. “Anyway, you’re mom had all of the pre-2009 photos. The rest of them are ones I had.”

           Jiyong starts flipping through the book. It’s red leather, his name embossed in gold lettering on the front. The whole thing is cool and smooth to the touch, each page painstakingly put together with effort and love. Most of the photos he’s seen before. Some of the more recent ones… well, those are new.

           “You took these?” He asks in pure awe.

           SJ nods. “I like candids. The ones where you aren’t looking. That’s my favorite.” She points to a photo of him onstage. The angle makes it seem like he’s larger than he is, more important than he is. He’s standing on his own but laughing at something going on off camera, smile stretching from ear to ear. In one of his hands is his mic. In the other is SJ’s own outstretched hand.

           Jiyong makes a promise to himself that night as SJ heads back to her own place that she’s never getting away from him. Ever.

2018

           “Hyung!” SJ pops out from behind Jiyong’s father with a gorgeous, blinding smile. “Happy birthday.”

           “Oh, SJ, really. Again with the hyung?” Jiyong’s mother scolds her half-heartedly.

           Dami laughs. “Careful, Mom. You’re scolding your future daughter-in-law.”

           “I’m aware.”

           SJ rolls her eyes before sitting herself firmly by Jiyong’s side. He almost can’t believe it. She looks so good. So healthy. Her skin is practically glowing and even without makeup she’s completely flawless. She’s gained some weight from touring, softening her curves and face. Her femininity is undeniable and Jiyong finds himself more attracted to her than ever. If this is the difference a few months can make he wonders what a whole year will bring.

           “I’ve got your present.” SJ pulls out a little box from her bag and pushes it across the table, the wrapping already partially coming off, but it’s fine and all the more endearing because it just means SJ did it herself.

Jiyong has to hide the grin on his face when he pulls out a silver bracelet, a bejeweled blue jay handing from the delicate chain. His heart melts when she fastens it around his wrist, her fingers lingering a second longer than necessary.

“So you won’t forget me,” she says with a shy smile.

Jiyong scoffs because what the fuck. How could he ever? “You’re full of it,” he answers with a smile that says everything he can’t quite yet

2019

           Life… doesn’t get better than this, Jiyong decides as he watches his father toss an arm around SJ and give her a quick side hug after she laughs particularly hard at one of his dumb jokes. His mother also watches them with a fondness in her eyes while Dami… well, Dami’s got her eyes on Jiyong.

           “When’s the wedding,” she leans over and whispers in his ear.

           It’s unbecoming of a soldier to blush but Jiyong can’t help how the tips of his ears burn bright pink. “Shut up.”

           “Has she given you your present yet?”

           “N-no.” Jiyong doesn’t like her tone or the teasing sparkle in her eye.

           Dami makes a shock sound. “Really? Allow me to wrap this up then.”

           “Dami, what are you-”

           “It’s been real, lil bro, but I think we should all be heading out. Right, Mom?”

           Jiyong’s mother (already aware SJ’s present is a little on the private side) responds in the affirmative after a moment of shock. “Oh, yes, I’m exhausted. How about you, dear?”

           Jiyong’s father shakes his head. “I’m fine.” His wife elbows him in the ribs. “I mean, yes, let’s go. I’m tired.”

           “We’ll see you tomorrow, love.” Jiyong’s mother gives him a quick peck on the cheek. “SooJin, sweetheart, why don’t you stay a while longer? We’ll meet you back at the hotel tonight.”

           “Not if it goes well,” Jiyong’s dad rumbles. He gives a hearty laugh when Dami shushes him dramatically.

           “Well that was…” Jiyong blinks in confusion. “Actually, I don’t know what that was.”

           “Cringe?” SJ offers the word up with an awkward laugh.

           He nods and silence settles. It’s strange. Usually things aren’t this tense and weird between them. Usually their silences are comfortable. Easy. Hardly noticeable. This one hangs heavy on Jiyong’s heart, convincing him he’s done something horribly, terribly, utterly wrong.

           “SJ-”

           He’s shocked when she moves from her spot across the restaurant table to sit right beside him. He’s even more shocked that she moves in closer, pressing her hands to his firm chest, openly admiring the hard muscles beneath her fingertips. This is out of character. SJ would never… would she? Is this why his parents were in such a rush to leave? To give them alone time?

           “What are you doing?” His voice is thick, barely audible, drowning in lust and confusion. “SJ… what’s going on?”

           Her eyes flicker up to his, deep pools of the most delicious chocolate. “I have a present for you.”

           She moves slowly like she’s scared of running him off. It’s slightly ridiculous in Jiyong’s opinion. The only place he has any intention of running to is straight towards her. Fully, openly, happily. When their lips meet he can’t hear anything but the sound of blood rushing in his ears, flooding a little further down south. Her lips fit against his perfectly. Like they were made for each other. He grips her hips and pulls her closer, throwing his everything into the kiss. This may be the only time he ever gets this, so why not make the most of it?

           “Jiyong,” SJ moans as she breaks the kiss. “I… just… look, listen to this later, okay?” She pats his front pocket where she slipped in a tiny USB drive during the kiss. “And happy birthday.”

           Later that night as he’s alone- blessedly, strangely, alone- he plugs the USB into his laptop. There’s only one music file available and he clicks on it instantly. The opening chords are soothing yet dramatic. He recognizes it as SJ’s work before her voice even starts up. He closes his eyes and for four minutes loses himself in the music. It’s not until the very end that he realizes.

           The song was his birthday present.

           The song was for him.

           Park “I can’t write love songs without outside help” SooJin composed and produced a whole love song for him.

           Jiyong’s head starts spinning. What does this mean? Where does it leave them? Instead of overthinking things he chooses to replay the song again and again until he blinks and the sun is peaking hazy over the horizon.

[robinmarlowe]

The Manor

Chapter 1 — Arrival

When the carriage pulled up to the estate, the wind was whipping around us in a fury. It smelled salty, from the sea, and sweet with the beginning of autumn's rot. Dry leaves scraped across the cobblestone in swirling dervishes. It was the sort of weather that reminded you how nature could disregard the very existence of humanity. The wide and open fields of the estate gave the wind free reign to roll and build and push the world about.

I liked this sort of weather. It seemed consequential. I lived in a dull world that was carefully built up and maintained, held together by manners and tradition and devoted to comfort and boredom. Weather like this pulled trees out by the roots and reminded each and every person that their life is fragile, and their society even more so.

My father once called me a destructive little brat, and so maybe my affinity for the wind has to do with our shared ability to destroy and annoy.

My aunt, Edith, was chattering along next to me, the wind whipping away every other word as if hoping to spare me somewhat from the cruelty of idle gossip, but now she looked as if she was expecting responses. I leaned forward to listen.

"You know your father is the only one who ever met her mother. An actress from the americas. He told me once that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen -- though I was sworn to secrecy because he was courting your mother at the time. She left two months after poor Elizabeth was born. Absolutely devastating. Jack told Elizabeth that her mother died in childbirth. He thought it would spare her from more complicated emotions. I think it did no such thing. It kept her from the real world. Why, if her mother had been around, I am certain Elizabeth would have married. It's such a tragedy."

"Tragedy seems to be an exaggeration," I said, leaning back into my seat. "She doesn't need to marry. She has money."

"And I would wager that she is unequipped to handle it," Edith said. "I suppose you will be learning that this winter."

The carriage turned down the winding road and the manor rose from the ground and into view.

It was grey, threaded together with brilliant green as vines crept up the walls, their sturdy brick holding even as roots pressed into them. We slowed as the road ended, stopping in front of the large entrance way.

I stepped out of the carriage, thanking the driver, my legs stiff from the journey and pleased to be put back to work. I hadn't seen the manor in years. When we were young my sisters were convinced it was haunted. We would run through the halls, hiding in closets and under couches, and I would search every nook and cranny for the hint of a ghost with whom I could become acquainted.

It didn't look any less haunted now, and Ms. Lancaster must not be particularly worried about the impression that it might be. The lawn was overgrown with yellow-green weeds that blew in the wind, and vines creeped up the stone walls.

Edith tutted her disapproval. "See? She doesn't even have the means to clean up her yard. Her father would be ashamed."

I had always loved the manor. I used to think it was a castle, with its round tower and high ceilings, pinnacles stretching into the sky. It was old, but felt even older than it was. It was large, but the more time you spent in it, the more it grew. Its floorboards creaked and shifted with the weather, bones elderly but far from brittle.

It felt abandoned, even as we inhabited it. It felt as if it was waiting for a long lost lord to return. It felt as if maybe the lord had returned, and the house had entombed him there, in its walls.

Now I know that this is part of the appeal. When Jack Lancaster purchased this estate fifty years ago, he must have felt such satisfaction -- this castle, this palace, was finally his. He no longer had to exist as a common man. He was like a king, even if he never had the power that a king wields.

I could imagine how intoxicating that would feel.

The driver carried my luggage towards the entrance. I hurried after him. I had meant to do it myself. We were no longer in civilized society. I was allowed to be seen lifting something heavier than a tea cup.

I burst through the doors and into the hallway.

The furniture and decor was contemporary. The bench in the foyer was a deep turquoise, and the rug Persian, with elaborate designs woven in jewel tones.

The house smelled like leaves and flowers. It wasn't musty, exactly. Instead, it smelled as if it had just been cleared of must a few minutes ago, but, like a child who has just bathed, was itching to undo the cleanliness.

Everything about the manor reached upwards, the ceilings, the double staircase, the white marble statues that adorned the hall.

"Emma! I'm delighted to see you!"

Ms. Elizabeth Lancaster descended the staircase, looking less delighted than anyone I had ever seen.

"And Edith, of course," Elizabeth said. "You look younger than the last time I saw you. Is that possible?"

Edit, in spite of herself, smiled at the compliment.

I gathered my skirts in my hands and curtsied.

"Ms. Lancaster. Thank you for your hospitality."

"No need for formalities. We're to be friends this winter, are we not?"

I looked up at her.

She was a woman who held her own beauty at arms length, the way one would hold a particularly aggressive animal. She was just north of fashionable. Her black dress didn't quite match her deep brown, wide-rimmed hat. Her spectacles had brilliant gold frames, but were smudged with fingerprints. Each of her hairs seemed to be striving for independence.

She had high cheekbones and brown eyes so dark it looked almost as if she had no irises at all. She looked older than she was, crows feet gracing the creases of her eyes, but the age didn't diminish her. Instead, it gave her the option of severity. Should she choose to give you a withering look, you may indeed wither.

Now, though, she was friendly, if apprehensive.

"We are to be friends... Beth..."

"Oh!" Elizabeth said, delighted. "I haven't been called Beth since I was a child."

"Apologies--"

"No!" Elizabeth said. "I said we are to be friends, and you confirmed it. Beth will be fine."

I disliked her analytical gaze. She dissected me, piece by piece, in a way I recognized. So many people in my life seemed certain they could perform a kind of psychic surgery on me. If they could just take me apart, then they could put me back together, new and improved.

Elizabeth wouldn't be any more successful than her predecessors, no matter what my parents might have thought. They sent me here to force me to confront the realities of my life without a husband. They refuse to understand that anything short of hell would be preferable.

"Shall I give you a tour?" Elizabeth asked.

"That would be lovely," Edith said, no doubt eager to search for more gossip in the nooks and crannies of this house.

"Let me see -- JOSEPH!"

Her yell made Edith and I both jump. An older man of about sixty walked calmly and swiftly down the stairs.

"Would you mind grabbing their coats?" Elizabeth asked.

"Of course, ma'am," Joseph said, giving her a shallow bow.

He was handsome for his age.He had a strong jawline and thick black hair. He was nearly as short as I was, and I was not tall.

He took the thick wool coat from my shoulders, and then assisted my aunt with hers.

Houses, I had noticed, are engineered not only as shelter but as a respite from the very concept of the natural world. The more removed from the mud and dirt of nature, the more successful the house.While the natural world has its dangers, I find that as humans we have veered away from logic in our understanding of it. Hygienic has become a moral concept instead of a medical one. Hogs, for instance, use mud to clean themselves, and we are as prone to disease, passing sickness back and forth with farm animals as if we are no more civilized than they.

The manor was,technically, a wonderful example of human achievement. The gothic nature of the architecture suggested that not only have men distinguished themselves from other animals, but that they did this with the understanding that it was,ultimately, futile. The towers reached into the heavens, knowing they would never get there, a tower of Babel that God felt no need to topple.

I don't know why I felt at home here. I always had.

"I don't keep a large staff, since it is only me," Elizabeth said as they walked past the entryway into the hall. "Just Joseph, my cook, Elena, and two maids. If there is reason for me to host anyone, I call in hands from the local tavern."

"Surely there are better servants to be had," Edith said

Elizabeth continued as if she heard nothing. "I hope that will be acceptable for you, Emma."

She said my name with caution, as if forcing herself into familiarity.

"It will be fine, thank you, Ms. Lancaster."

At home we had one servant, Dana, who was underpaid and overworked. The women of our family took turns cooking, and though it was not a task I enjoyed, I was capable enough. I had never had a lady in waiting, and I can't imagine why I'd want one.

We entered the parlor room, and I let out an involuntary gasp.

The room itself was beautiful. Emerald green furniture was placed around a coffee table with gilded edges. The bookshelves that lined the walls strained upwards towards the high ceilings.Spines of deep reds and navy blues advertised the books' contents in gold and silver print. A ladder was required to reach the highest books, and even that was carved out of a red cedar.

However, what drew my attention was the painting over the fireplace.

It must have been ten feet tall, at minimum. It portrayed a woman in velvet clothing, towering over a small village. Her facial expression was obscured by the clouds. The villagers at her feet looked up at her, some with awe, and others with anger.

"What an... interesting piece of art," Edith said.

I could feel Elizabeth's eyes on me as I examined the painting. The woman's posture was over-corrected, her shoulders back and her chin high. But there was something about her that seemed delicate, as if she was holding herself together through will alone.

One of the men was running back to his hut. Another had already retrieved a pitchfork.

Elizabeth once again ignored Edith. "Do you like it?" She asked me.

I didn't know what to say. I didn't know that "like" was the correct word to use. My response to it was visceral. I felt uncomfortably drawn to it. But it was as close as language would allow.

"Yes," I said, breathless.

"Hmmmm."

Elizabeth turned to Edith.

"If you'd like, I could get Joseph to make some tea. The journey was long, and I'm sure you'd like to rest. I can show Miss Cooper around."

"Oh, yes, that would be lovely," Edith said. "I didn't want to complain but it is a large house and I really don't think I need a tour at the moment."

"JOSEPH!"

The yell was no less surprising than before. Joseph appeared in the room suddenly, as if an apparition.

"Do you mind making the lady some tea?" Elizabeth asked.

"Of course not. Follow me, madam," Joseph said.

And then I was alone with Elizabeth.

"It's funny," I said, "When I was a child we explored every inch of this lace. We were looking for ghosts."

Elizabeth looked at me, her expression unreadable. Her gaze, like the painting, was unsettling.

"Did you ever find any?" Elizabeth asked.

"Of course not," I replied.

Elizabeth nodded, her expression serious. "I would suggest refraining from any such adventure in the future. Shall we see your room?"

And then she was sweeping out of the room.

I hurried after her, curiosity sufficiently piqued.

[dyketectivecomics]

Retrieval - Ch. 11

SURPRISE BITCHES. BETCHA THOUGHT YOU’D SEE THE LAST OF THIS.

(Read on AO3) (No actually, maybe go ahead and reread everything on ao3, since its been SO DAMN LONG ooooof) (also everyone keep in mind that the chap under the cut doesnt have italic edits in bc its 3k & also 1 am and i don't have time for that. just go ahead and read it on ao3 unless you already have an idea of whats going on at this stage in the fic lmao)

@squiddybeifong it’s ur turn finally, love <3, def take ur time and i cant WAIT to see your thoughts on this haha 

...

Grotesque as each of the demons were, Raven remembered barely keeping them straight from one another. All sharp teeth and disfigured skin, some sported facsimiles of regency fashion, while others chose to hide themselves in as few layers as possible. Try as she might, she recalled the eyes most clearly, in hues of reds, oranges and yellow, all burning with the sins of the souls they had claimed over the eons.

The one who had called her here, a brother without a name. (At least without a name yet, as that would come a decade later, when she most needed to name and defeat these demons with Titans by her side.) No, this demon that could not be properly named stood to his full height, towering over the others as he snapped his claw-like fingers to gain their attention, silencing their jeering at the destruction the portal showed.

"Enough of that nonsense," he droned, as if somehow bored of the chaos and devastation. "While Father is distracted, we have but one chance to settle this nasty business. What are we to do with sister dearest?"

There was much grumbling among the demons as they took seats around this circle, the visage of Azarath's last moments disappearing from view forever with a distinct pop and crackle. Raven could feel once again the ghost of Zatanna's reassuring hand on her shoulder, squeezing it gently in empathy. She couldn't tell if it was better, or worse, never knowing what had transpired.

She certainly knew more than before, just enough to get a clearer picture than so many years of guesswork had lead her down. But it left a hollow feeling in her chest, as those certainties were closed off forever now.

Maybe it had been too much to hope for, to know exactly what Azarath's last moments were like. Or maybe it was too cruel to wish for the burden of such knowledge, even when one had prepared themselves for it. How disheartening, to have gone to so much trouble, only to be stopped so short.

"We can't kill her, much as I'm loathe to share any more 'an I already have to with you lot," a smaller demon piped up to Raven's left. She'd forgotten, in her reverie, just where her attention should truly lay. "But that doesn't mean we can't have our fun."

There was a murmur through the group, a mixed reaction but no true agreements or dissents. Raven could feel something swelling up in her stomach, but she reached for Zatanna's hand on her shoulder, squeezing it back and quelling the feeling.

She knew she'd made it to Constantine's apartment relatively unscathed. Like rereading an old favorite book, she remembered the end even without needing to remember everything that occurred in between. Whatever they had in mind, try as they might have, these petty demons hadn't harmed her much. She was strong enough to survive it then, she was powerful enough to endure it now.

Though, with how the hellfire that was starting to play tricks on her eyes, a part of her wondered just how much longer she'd be forced to endure it. In the furthest reaches, it shone a bit too hot, blinding if she let her eyes stray there for too long.

"The important thing I want to know is; how much fun can we have without Trigon letting on about it? And without interfering too deeply with his plans?"

"Doesn't he need the girl as an emissary to Earth and other planes?" one quipped back, "That would mean we can't keep her here, not long at any rate."

"Then it'd be best to act soon, lest he send her away before we have-"

A low rumble went through the group, all collectively groaning as they felt the same call. Raven remembered hearing a voice, faint, as if it spoke through layers of cotton. It was strange to her then, but familiar now, the cockiness and sly flow of mocking decorum. Constantine's most casual of ways, of summoning sworn enemies forth, to make the most backhanded of bargains.

Though, some of what he was saying... didn't particularly seem to resonate with what would have been said in such circumstances. And out of the corner of her eye, Raven watched as that white-hot light broke through a stalactite or two, eating away at the scene. Inevitable, but much slower than before. She knew now, for certain, that time was limited, much as she'd fought successfully against it so far.

She could hold it off just a tad longer.

"The Hellblazer's onto us, gentlemen," one of the demons sighed, resigned to what was to come. "Any volunteers?"

The group laughed, and Raven remembered taking a few shy steps back, naively thinking this an opportunity to sneak away, before more than a few sets of eyes settled on her.

"Why not send our little sister to him?" the eldest sneered, "It's beneath us to answer such a droll summons. It would be amusing to see him throw her back to us like a fisherman does a minnow."

Laughter bubbled around Raven, too-wide smiles and menacing glints in eyes and teeth. The feeling of self-satisfied, low-burning rage and an anticipation for harm to come.

She knew, then, that anywhere they would want to send her, anywhere that she wasn't in control of sending herself to, would not be a place she'd want to go. And much too late, she tried to make a dash to get away.

She screamed as she felt sharp claws sinking into her arms and delighted laughter reached a fever pitch around her. Everything began growing much brighter and more charged than before, as her body was burning the last of this nightmarish high.

She watched as a few of her brothers slashed into the air around them, tearing reality itself apart as they searched for the best rift to send her tumbling through.

...

The air temperature dropped drastically as John felt his daughter's mood shift, something tightening in his chest and tears welling in his eyes. His heart hammered in his chest, fear at the forefront of it all. He glanced up to see Asa holding her own against Raven's projections better than he did, wiping away a droplet before focusing her hands, once more on checking Zatanna's aura.

"I call upon Saint Christopher, that he may protect in their travels..."

It was a long shot, but when a demonologist has exhausted all of the runes and rituals at his disposal, sometimes a hope and a prayer were all that were left. And Constantine was currently running down the long list of every deity and figure of power that he could scarcely remember.

The classic Catholic routes were always the first to go.

His tone took a more urgent tune as he watched his daughter clench her fists and let out an ear-splitting scream.

"I call upon Saint Michael, to protect in this battle..."

He could only hope that these prayers and practices weren't coming too late.

...

As Zatanna felt the chill of Raven's powers as the empath's consciousness finally awoke, the sorceress tried turning over a happier memory in her own mind.

Sending Raven back to reality in this state now wouldn't do them any good. Fear and anger and hate lingering on her soul. It would, at best, wreck John's apartment.

At worst, it could level New York.

As those demons, shadows of memories long past, opened that fateful portal to John's apartment, so similar and yet a striking difference to how it was now, answering a summons that none wanted to bother themselves with, Zatanna focused all her energy into channeling that memory of her own. One that she couldn't be sure Raven shared. It seemed so far away, and such a small thing.

Of a tiny seven-year-old, in her halloween costume, dressed as the most adorable witch San Francisco would ever see, and receiving a tickling of a lifetime as her mother teased her. The memory of peals of laughter from the sorceress and squeals of protest from the young empath rang in her ears, louder now than the demons laughter, that was slowly fading away from them as Raven's small form was sent through that portal. Zatanna could only do her best to follow close after her.

Slowly, her grip on the girl’s hand loosened, until she lost it completely in their free fall. The sorceress watched helplessly as Raven fell further down ahead of her, the memory still at the periphery of her own mind.

She could see as the portal closed, how time shifted everything inside of that apartment. The couch's color dimmed, showing its wear and its age. Grooves in the floor grew from so many rearrangements of furniture and space. She could see Constantine sitting watch over her and Raven's bodies, and noted that the Nightmare Nurse's aid had been enlisted.

And all too quickly, that vision faded.

As everything dimmed around her, she thought she could hear Raven's voice as she knew it now, deep throaty laughter bubbling out around it, replacing those high-pitched squeals from before.

Everything became blackness once more.

...

As laughter escaped from his daughter's lips, Constantine paid Asa's concerned protests no mind, rushing again to his daughter's side as her powers sparked electrically around them. That shift in the air, like ozone and pressure before a thunderstorm, was one he recognized when a too-sudden, too-extreme mood shift occurred for the empath. When her powers were stuck playing catch-up as they drifted from menacing shadows to dangerously cheery sparks.

"Raven, I need you to breathe for me, darling," he begged, "Find your center again, luv."

His focus was solely on his daughter, as her laughter slowly died, the snickers giving way to breathless gasps. When she began to still in his arms and as her breathing began to return back to normal, he finally registered the Nightmare Nurse's frantic cries.

"-She's not responding, John. Zatanna's not waking up."

...

"Give up?" Zatanna asked with a gleam in her eyes and a sly smile on her lips. The witch before her pouted, giving the most adorable glare that the sorceress had seen in her life.

"Never," she said, and her voice held all of the self-assurance of a spellcrafter well beyond her so few years of experience.

Zatanna only smiled wider. "You asked for it, then."

She tickled the little witch for a second time, laughing alongside her shouts and giggles. That accent that she was picking up from Constantine was more prominent, now that she’d spent the better part of the year with him. And it was positively adorable as well. "No! Mummy, stop!"

"Admit it!" she laughed, "Admit that you're the most adorable little witch!"

It was true, objectively speaking. The girl's dress and hat were tailored with kitschy patches, buttons that seemed comically large and cartoonish pockets that were even bigger than one would think. All of the makings of a perfect Halloween costume. All she was missing, at the moment, were practical tennies for trick-or-treating.

This was where one of several points of argument for the evening had begun, as Raven had insisted, in her seven-year-old wisdom, that her dance flats were needed to complete the look. Something Zee had been unsuccessful, thus far, in swaying her opinion on.

At least until she’d started the teasing, and followed through on her threat of tickling.

"I'm-" she was breathless, gasping for air, but giggling all between, "I'm- not! I'm a- I'm a scary-! A scary witch!"

With that final shout, Zatanna paused in her tickling as Raven sent a shock through her skin. A light zap of her powers, but nothing like the unsettling chill she had felt earlier when the girl refused to admit to fears and doubts about the holiday festivities her mother had planned. It was a welcome change, if unexpected.

"You're right," Zee chuckled in assent, carefully picking the girl up and carrying her from the room, "And since you're clearly the most terrifying thing out and about tonight, that must mean you'll be able to protect me from all of the ghouls and goblins out there tonight?"

The girl puffed out her chest, grinning wide as she adjusted her hat. "No monsters will get past me, mummy! I promise!"

The magician could only smile and hold the girl in a tight embrace. "Thanks, Blackbird. I feel safer already. But you know what will help me feel-?"

But just as the sorceress set the girl down again, before she had even finished the question as she turned around in this fairly mundane memory, she could feel that sense of presence slipping. Her once familiar home in San Francisco fading away in a blur and a blank. An expanse before her that could be filled with anything.

This Raven wasn’t the one she entered this world with. Her daughter was no longer in this plane between consciousness and dreams, where memories made their home. 

And that terrifying reality was starting to settle in.

“-the most... safe?” she finished asking, in trepidation.

A shiver creeped quickly down her spine, as another memory took her away, unbidden.

…

“I have to go back for her,” the empath protested, sitting up at once as the Nightmare Nurse’s words fully registered. She felt the blood rush just as quickly away from her head, and lay back down immediately to stop the dizziness.

“You’d need at least an hour of recovery, kiddo,” Asa laughed bitterly, “At least you would, if you were human.”

“I’ll be fine in a minute. Just give me a second.”

“Like bleedin’ hell you’re going back,” John growled, “Asa, you hold ‘er, luv. I’ll be going in-”

“Dad, pots!” Her tone and intention had the brit slowly freezing right in place against his will. Try as he might to fight her, he never had quite the same level of resolve that Raven had. 

But, he supposed, that’s just how fathers and daughters seemed to operate. A father always willing to give his girl the world. And never being able to deny her, even when it was in her best interest.

“It has to be me, dad,” Raven sighed. “I pulled her in. I need to be the one to pull her out.”

Constantine swallowed the lump forming in his throat, teeth slow to unclench as he asked, “Promise me you’ll be safe? That you’ll get out soon as you reach her?”

Raven’s own indigo eyes leveled at his piercing blue ones, her stomach dropping as she lied, “I promise.”

…

She felt calmer when she opened her eyes again, her breathing shallow and soft, her body curled as tightly in on itself as she could stand. She felt a sharp pinch of happiness, and a dull sting of longing, when she heard her father’s voice. And she remembered, another small memory that had meant so much more to her over the years.

"Now just where did my princess run off to," Giovanni mused as he glanced around his daughter's room. He made extra sure not to take any special notice of some particularly lumpy and giggling pillows that lay on her bed.

"Hmm, how strange," he sighed with extra, cartoonish emphasis, "How odd that my daughter would learn to pull such a thorough disappearing act before I could teach her it myself. Alas!" He gave a cry, before falling back onto her bed. "Perhaps if I were to take a nap upon her bed, I could dream of where she has run off to!"

He adjusted himself carefully atop that oh-so-lumpy cushioning, leaning carefully back and poking at the pillows as she barely held in her snickering. "Now, if only these pillows weren't so lumpy and strange! Perhaps then my dreams might be clear." He put a bit more of his weight on it, yawning dramatically as he stretched his arms above his head. "But as long as Zatanna is not here, I don't see the harm-"

"I am here, daddy! I got you!" the young sorceress cried, laughing as she wiggled out from behind her father.

"Goodness! You have, indeed, my princess!" the magician laughed, bringing his daughter in close for a hug and pressing a kiss to her forehead. "And I've missed you so! You must promise to teach me that trick before my next show!"

"Uh-uh, that one's a super-special... tersec?" the five-year-old turned the word over uncertainly, and Zatara only smiled as he applauded her attempt.

"Terces, my sun and stars. Repus laiceps terces." He booped her nose, and she giggled once more. With a whispered word and sleight of hand, he produced a diary with a lock, Zatanna's name embossed with ostentatious calligraphy, and smiled even wider as she went starry-eyed.

"You'll need a place to keep those sterces then, my darling."

The chorus of thank-yous that followed after were drowned out only by his own laughter as he returned her tight embrace.

The sorceress began to feel the weight of the memory weighing on her chest, however. A wistfulness as the laughter quickly became quiet cries. At first, she almost believed them to be cries for what she still mourned. But then everything shifted again.

“Give me the word, my sun and stars,” her father growled, “And I will make the boy regret his very-”

“Daddy, no,” she shook her head, “It’s not… It’s not his fault.”

“That is where you are wrong, my dear,” the old magician laughed, “It is always a boy’s fault. Unless he starts taking responsibility for it, then he is not truly a man.” He squeezed her hand tightly as he lifted her chin, making sure she was looking into his smiling eyes as he said, “And he is not worthy of your time, for that matter, either.” He pressed a gentle kiss to her forehead, before pulling her back in for another tight embrace.

Zatanna held desperately to this special kind of comfort that she hadn’t felt since her father had died.

[dfroza]

“gold perfected by fire, so that you can be truly rich.”

A line from Today’s reading of the Scriptures from John’s book of Revelation

[Christ’s Letter to Sardis]

Write the following to the messenger of the congregation in Sardis, for these are the words of the one who holds the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars:

I know all that you do and I know that you have a reputation for being really “alive,” but you’re actually dead! Wake up and strengthen all that remains before it dies, for I haven’t found your works to be perfect in the sight of my God. So remember all the things you’ve received and heard, then turn back to God and obey them. For if you continue to slumber, I will come to you like a thief, and you’ll have no idea at what hour I will come. Yet there are still a few in Sardis who have remained pure, and they will walk in fellowship with me in brilliant light, for they are worthy. And the one who experiences victory will be dressed in white robes and I will never, no never erase your name from the Book of Life. I will acknowledge your name before my Father and his angels. So the one whose heart is open let him listen carefully to what the Spirit is now saying to all the churches.

[Christ’s Letter to Philadelphia]

Write the following to the messenger of the congregation in Philadelphia, for these are the solemn words of the Holy One, the true one, who has David’s key, who opens doors that none can shut and who closes doors that none can open:

I know all that you’ve done. Now I have set before you a wide-open door that none can shut. For I know that you possess only a little power, yet you’ve kept my word and haven’t denied my name. Watch how I deal with those of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews but are not, for they’re lying. I will make them come and bow down at your feet and acknowledge how much I’ve loved you. Because you’ve passionately kept my message of perseverance, I will also keep you from the hour of proving that is coming to test every person on earth. But I come swiftly, so cling tightly to what you have, so that no one may seize your crown of victory. For the one who is victorious, I will make you to be a pillar in the sanctuary of my God, permanently secure. I will write on you the name of my God and the name of the city of my God—the New Jerusalem, descending from my God out of heaven. And I’ll write my own name on you. So the one whose heart is open let him listen carefully to what the Spirit is now saying to all the churches.

[Christ’s Letter to Laodicea]

Write the following to the messenger of the congregation in Laodicea, for these are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation:

I know all that you do, and I know that you are neither frozen in apathy nor fervent with passion. How I wish you were either one or the other! But because you are neither cold nor hot, but lukewarm, I am about to spit you from my mouth. For you claim, “I’m rich and getting richer—I don’t need a thing.” Yet you are clueless that you’re miserable, poor, blind, barren, and naked! So I counsel you to purchase gold perfected by fire, so that you can be truly rich. Purchase a white garment to cover and clothe your shameful Adam-nakedness. Purchase eye salve to be placed over your eyes so that you can truly see. All those I dearly love I unmask and train. So repent and be eager to pursue what is right. Behold, I’m standing at the door, knocking. If your heart is open to hear my voice and you open the door within, I will come in to you and feast with you, and you will feast with me. And to the one who conquers I will give the privilege of sitting with me on my throne, just as I conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. The one whose heart is open let him listen carefully to what the Spirit is saying now to the churches.

The Book of Revelation, Chapter 3 (The Passion Translation)

Today’s paired chapter of the Testaments is the 14th chapter of 2nd Chronicles that documents the life & times of King Asa who succeeded King Abijah:

[King Asa]

Abijah died and was buried with his ancestors in the City of David. His son Asa became the next king.

For ten years into Asa’s reign the country was at peace.

Asa was a good king. He did things right in God’s eyes. He cleaned house: got rid of the pagan altars and shrines, smashed the sacred stone pillars, and chopped down the sex-and-religion groves (Asherim). He told Judah to center their lives in God, the God of their fathers, to do what the law said, and to follow the commandments. Because he got rid of all the pagan shrines and altars in the cities of Judah, his kingdom was at peace. Because the land was quiet and there was no war, he was able to build up a good defense system in Judah. God kept the peace.

Asa said to his people, “While we have the chance and the land is quiet, let’s build a solid defense system, fortifying our cities with walls, towers, gates, and bars. We have this peaceful land because we sought God; he has given us rest from all troubles.” So they built and enjoyed prosperity.

Asa had an army of 300,000 Judeans, equipped with shields and spears, and another 280,000 Benjaminites who were shield bearers and archers. They were all courageous warriors.

Zerah the Ethiopian went to war against Asa with an army of a million plus three hundred chariots and got as far as Mareshah. Asa met him there and prepared to fight from the Valley of Zephathah near Mareshah. Then Asa prayed to God, “O God, you aren’t impressed by numbers or intimidated by a show of force once you decide to help: Help us, O God; we have come out to meet this huge army because we trust in you and who you are. Don’t let mere mortals stand against you!”

God defeated the Ethiopians before Asa and Judah; the Ethiopians ran for their lives. Asa and his men chased them as far as Gerar; so many of the Ethiopians were killed that there was no fight left in them—a massacre before God and his troops; Judah carted off loads of plunder. They devastated all the towns around Gerar whose people were helpless, paralyzed by the fear of God, and looted the country. They also attacked herdsmen and brought back a lot of sheep and camels to Jerusalem.

The Book of 2nd Chronicles, Chapter 14 (The Message)

my personal reading of the Scriptures for Thursday, february 11 of 2021 with a paired chapter from each Testament of the Bible, along with Today’s Psalms and Proverbs

A post by John Parsons that takes a look at the 9th Commandment:

Shalom friends, I am continuing to discuss each of the Ten Commandments since they are related to our Torah reading for this week.... The Ninth Commandment prohibits swearing falsely against your neighbor in matters of law and civil proceedings, but, on a deeper level, it implicitly indicates the responsibility to be a witness of the truth at all times. Note that the Hebrew word for "truth" (emet) is composed from the first, the middle, and the last letters of the Hebrew Alphabet, thus indicating that it encompasses the first things, the last things, and everything in between. Thus, in relation to our neighbor (who is really everyone), we are to be truthful and bear witness to the truth in all our moments of life.

https://hebrew4christians.com/

2.10.21 • Facebook

Today’s message from the Institute for Creation Research

February 11, 2021

The Living and the Written Word

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

The holy Scriptures and the person of our Lord Jesus Christ are so inseparably bound together that whatever calls into question the integrity and authority of one correspondingly casts aspersions on the other. Let us not be guilty of saying that the written Word and the incarnate Word are in all aspects the same, but the Bible does clearly reveal Christ as “the Word... made flesh, [who] dwelt among us” (John 1:14). “And his name is called The Word of God” (Revelation 19:13).

In carefully worded arguments, Christ time and again called attention to the fact that the teachings of the Old Testament Scriptures were actually teaching about Him. “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me....For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me; for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?” (John 5:39, 46-47). “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Luke 16:31).

Therefore, those who diligently search the Scriptures find in them sufficient testimony to Christ, and where there is faith in the witness of Scripture, there will be faith in Christ and His words. But if men reject the testimony of Scripture, they will not even be convinced by His miraculous resurrection from the dead.

Christ claimed that all of Scripture pointed to Him. On the road to Emmaus, He taught that all three popular divisions of the Old Testament traced one progressive Messianic revelation. To understand the New Testament, we must know the Old, for both tell the same story, each amplifying the other. They are forever inseparable. JDM

An email from Glenn Jackson:

February 11th

* In Heaven no tears will be shed, for God will wipe all tears from our eyes. "There shall be no death, neither sorrow nor crying nor pain." How difficult to imagine such a changed world! Tears are the sad heritage of this life. Sorrow and pain flow from a thousand sources and deepen, widen, and darken earth's sorrow. Our sweetest relationships give birth to our greatest sorrows. Our distresses often flow from our joys. Death reigns. All this will be changed, and everything that gives pain and sorrow will be barred from Heaven forever. How bright the eyes undimmed by a sorrowful tear! How strong and free our souls and bodies will be, utter and eternal strangers to pain! How bright and joyous our hearts with never a cloud or a sorrow. How full of the richest life, untouched by decay and unshadowed by death, Heaven will be! All things are to be made new. There will be no marks of age, no common things, and no freshened or repainted old things.

All things will be absolutely new. A new world, a new life, a new career, a new history, a new environment, a new employment, and a new destiny - all things will be new. World dreams, pictures, poetry, fiction, and music have all failed to give the idea of that new world and its marvellous life. To live there is rapture. Its climax is, "He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be My son" (Revelation 21:7). It is the wonder and spectacle of angels. Type and shadow, precept and promise, both in the Old and New Testaments, are tokens and seals of the saints' inheritance after death.

No truth is more necessary to man and more in accordance with God's character, none more necessary to his glory, than the doctrine of Heaven. An eternal Heaven of purity and bliss through endless years is a doctrine that enables man and honours God. The existence of Heaven and its matchless perfection is a truth based upon the advent, person and work of Jesus Christ. Christ is the way to Heaven.

...."In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also"....John 14:2-3 KJV

[etcwrites]

Wait for me at your Fingertips

Lancelot Week Day 3 @lancelotweek

Prompt: earth/space

Rating: Explicit

Status: Ongoing

Summary:

Altea Ballet and Dance Studios is a prestigious school, housing at least hundred students and dancers. This year determined to honor their roots and show their strength, they will be staging an original work: The Story of Earth and Space.

And Lotor...

Lotor just wants to be left alone.

AO3 Link

Chapter 1: New Event and a Stranger

“Alright, everyone!” Coran’s voice called through the studio, beckoning and receiving attention from various dancers as he moved through the rows, a glint in his eye. “Come closer! Yes! Can everyone come towards the front, please? C’mon, huddle up!”

Lotor eased himself back to a right up position, his leg still over the bar while he watched the older man gather up other dancers. Carefully exhaling, he pulled his leg off the bar and unhurriedly made his way towards the crowd. It wasn’t unusual for Coran to ask for a meeting in the morning. Enthusiastic and quirky, it was almost his tradition to call for the dancers and give them a loose plan for the day. No, the unusual part was the extra presence of two new faces.

Standing towards the back, Lotor tried to keep his curiosity from showing on his face, eyes momentarily focusing on the new comers. They were not precisely strangers. Lotor presumed nearly every dancer in the studio knew them in one way or another. It was simply unexpected to see them in person and together nonetheless.

Towards the left stood a thin pale man, with his bald head and incredible height, he almost resembled a white stick. Through experience Lotor knew his voice to be as high as his body, his weird accent making it almost impossible for other people to understand him. However, among students and other dancers he was regarded with affection, even nicknamed as “”Bibi” And even though Lotor never had a chance to work with him, he had heard from the others how helpful the man can be, with his solid support on technique and choreography.

Standing towards the right was an all too familiar figure for Lotor, and probably nearly to every other dancer in the room. With brilliant blue eyes and dark skin, her thick hair tamed into a braid Allura looked as fierce as the day they’ve met. However there was a new wave of determination in her set of shoulders, a strange glint in her eyes as she regarded the group of dancers.

“Alright!” Coran’s voice boomed. With a few steps he took his place between the new comers and with a loud clap he turned to address them. “As you may have noticed already, we have two guests today with us!” Turning to his right Coran gave a small smile to the other man. “Bibi has agreed to join today’s session and hopefully he’ll continue to give us his support.”

Receiving a tiny incomprehensible affirmation from the man, Coran turned to his left, voice turning softer with emotion. “And you may know Allura Altea, our current owner.”

A few affirmative noises, smiles and murmurs later, Coran opened his arms wide. “We have gathered here to give you a new announcement. This term we are planning on putting together a new show, an original work with visionary choreographies and incredible scores.”

An original work? And here he was thinking they were going to work on a re-interpretation of a classic like Nutcracker. Much like him, Lotor could feel the surprise among the others, dancers falling quiet and almost immediately turning hungry at the new prospect.

“This-” Coran continued, turning towards Allura to catch her eye. “ - has been an impending project for some time but we believe this year is the right time to do it!”

Stopping he gave a nod to the woman, his voice rising in a second. “Now, I think it would be best to leave the word to Allura.” Gesturing with his hands, Coran took a step back to leave the appropriate space.

“Dancers of Altea, “ Allura started, a smile decorating her lips while determination stayed consistent in her eyes. The formal way she addressed them didn’t go unnoticed as all dancers focused their attention on their boss. “I understand this announcement may come too hasty for some of you. It may even seem too ambitious to hope to finish up an original work in less than a year but since the starting days of this studio, this play has been my father’s biggest wish.”

Lotor couldn’t help but go tense over her words, his thoughts going ahead himself, his brain straining to connect the needed pieces, to understand.

Allura’s father? Alfor? What did he have to do with the play?

It couldn’t be -

“Since the beginning of Altea Ballet and Dance Studios we’ve had the inspiration and groundwork for this production. A play that is neither a full ballet or a free style dance but a mash up, hoping to bring together the best elements in all dance styles to tell a story about differences, about acceptance and peace. The story of Earth and Space.”

This time Lotor couldn’t control his surprise, a sharp inhale filling his lungs as the buzz from other dancer’s filled the silence.

Earth and Space!

He knew that story, or at least he remembered a version of it. For a second memory flashed before his eyes…

Honevra dancing across the white surface of the studio, her arms long and elegant, sun playing tricks on her dress as she moved from one turn to another and to another…

“This project has been my father’s greatest wish and although it is sad that he won’t be able to see it now, it is my wish to bring it back to life. I hope it will inspire you as well as it has inspired us. Thank you.”

Lotor turned his head away, looking down at his white tense knuckles.

 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

“No, no, no… There is no other explanation, you must be an angel!”

A few amused giggles

“Seriously where do you hide your wings?”

Lotor raised his head from his stretch, gaze orienting towards the group of girls completing their warm up, only to land on a –

A stranger?

He pulled his legs in, pushing his heels together and slowly working on loosening his thigh muscles, mind immediately taking up the challenge to identify the stranger. Their studio was not small one by no means and even though he mostly tried to keep to himself, Lotor still knew other dancers in one way or another. Though this guy… he hadn’t even seen him in the corridors. The guy didn’t even look like a ballet dancer…

A few more giggles and the girls got up to leave, deserting the newcomer. For a few seconds the other looked entirely devastated and Lotor almost felt sorry for him. Almost…

“You know…you should have told me I had no chance before I humiliated myself!”

Lotor raised his head, one of his brows rising as he regarded the other. But the stranger was looking away, his gaze fixed on the door where the dancers he just made a pass at were engulfed in a tight hug, a few petite kisses shared between them.

“It’s your own fault for not observing.”

In an instant stranger’s gaze was fixed on him.

“Ahh, how was I supposed to know?” he lamented. “It’s not like people have availability signs on them. I mean I was ready to fight for attention for all sorts of boyfriends but girlfriends??.. I didn’t count for that.”

Lotor exhaled slowly, forcing his thighs to stretch with applying force over his knees. “Maybe, you should try waiting for a few days before flirting.” he suggested, attention once again turning towards the satisfying burn in his muscles.

“Yeah, no can do! I’m all about seizing the opportunity”

When he looked up the guy was giving him a smug smile.

What an idiot

….

Cute though…

“You are new around here.” Lotor stated, forcing himself to look away and control his wayward thoughts.

“Ah, yes. I joined after hearing about this new project, Earth and Space. You know?”

Lotor’s shoulders tensed momentarily, his fingers digging into his feet. Then slowly he commanded his body to relax, legs stretching forward. “Yes, I am familiar with it.”

“Well, I really want a role in it! From what I have seen so far, it sounds amazing! It would be great to get a major position in it!”

"Can you even do lifts?"

Even though he hadn’t meant it to be hostile Lotor couldn’t help but be suspicious.

The...boy in front of him looked tall and lean, a bit towards the scrawny side, seemingly lost in a bundle of wool clothes in various stages of usage.  Not exactly the kind of guy you would want to lift you during a full house performance.

Something akin to hurt passed through the other's face only to be replaced by a thousand watt smile. "Of course! Don't be mistaken! They used to call me Mr.Muscle in my previous campaign."

Lotor raised one of his eyebrows, amusement bleeding into his voice. "Mr. Muscle, hmm? Isn't that the name of a cleaning product?"

This time there was definitely a frown on the boy's face.

Adorable... 

"That's beside the point!" He argued. "I can lift; there is nothing you have to concern yourself with!"

Lotor raised his chin, for a second, his eyes searching the other's pretty blues. No, he concluded. No, he couldn’t afford to be invested, not now...

"Very well" he replied making sure his tone conveyed his dismissal and distrust before climbing to his feet and turning his back to start on his clean up.

Behind him he could feel the other man's frustration, irritation compelling him to argue but in mere seconds a female voice carried through the studio. "Lance!"

Sneaking a glance over his shoulder Lotor noticed the elegant figure of Allura beside the door, soon to be joined by the new comer.

Most interesting… Allura and -

Lance... Lotor committed the information to memory, beautiful blue eyes and soft looking skin flashing before in his mind. Then his gaze took in the countless other dancers filling the room, all talented, all ambitious.

Competition.

No... No matter how pretty the temptation was, it was not the time to be invested…especially if the boy was connected to Allura...

 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

“Stop, drop, and roll, baby. You are on fire.”

Lotor turned his head in surprise, muscles staying taut as he continued his stretch over the bar, head lined against his spread leg and long hair bundled up into a loose bun.

"Such eloquence…” he murmured, trying to keep his face neutral.

“Your name is Lotor, right? I’m Lance by the way…”

“I know….Was that your very best line?" 

Lance blinked for a second, a frown creasing the skin between his eyebrows. "Hey! I’m trying, alright?! " he blurted, at least that is what Lotor thought happened because Lance looked as surprised at his reaction as him. 

He pushed his body, slowly letting his arms reach up and stretch towards the ceiling. "My, my.." he murmured, giving the other a smirk. "You seem frustrated"

Lance scowled at him, still looking stubborn.

Cute...

Lotor gave himself a mental shake before he changed legs, arms reaching and fingers curling around his toes. As he felt the burn underside his leg, he slowly exhaled, attention briefly focusing on his body.

"Oh...wow! That's- ahh..."

Lotor looked up to see utter wonder in other's eyes, a slight hue coloring his smooth cheeks. With a smirk he pushed himself to a deeper stretch. "Yes?" he prompted, voice coming out a bit hoarse due to his position. Near him he could hear Lance's quick breath.

"You are really flexible, like...really- how do you even-"

And as Lotor sat down on the floor, opening up his legs and stretching towards the space between his legs, his upper body touching the floor, the boy grew eerily silent.

"Flexible? " Lotor repeated, amused. With a smooth practiced move he rose from the floor and after a final upwards stretch to complete his warm up, he turned towards Lance. "It is almost as if we are dancers"

Lance shook himself out of his stupor, a pout, a honest to universe a pout shaping his lips. "Not everyone can have your range of- uhm…motion" Then he must have realized his tone because he pulled himself tall to look up at Lotor. "No matter," he stated. "I have no intention of falling behind"

Challenge shone through the boy's eyes, a stubborn and greedy drive burning under his skin. For a second breath left Lotor's lungs, a sudden shiver travelling down his spine. He reminded himself that this boy was included in the middle of the campaign to include new style of dancers for the project and even now possibly struggled with his position.

“I see…" he acknowledged, for the first time really taking in the other’s posture. “One can only have respect against a drive to improve"

Lance blinked at him, for a second taken aback, then cocked one of his hands on his hip, a satisfied smirk spreading over his lips. "Soooo..." he dragged out, tone turning friendly.  "Since you can only show respect against my drive to improve, you wouldn't mind being my practice partner, yes?"

This time it was Lotor who was taken aback. Why someone as success hungry as Lance would want to team up with him? Didn’t he know? But Lance was continuing to talk.

"I know the regular spots are not fully determined yet and the choreographer says he needs to figure out a lot of kinks but-" Taking a fast breath a wistful expression settled across Lance's face. "The first contact sequence is almost ready and you need two dancers to work on that routine...and uhm.."

Lotor tried to keep his face neutral but he doubted he was successful in hiding his amusement, a strange fondness wrapping around his heart the more Lance rambled on.

"Uhm.." Lance sneaked a look at Lotor's body, a pink hue visible across his cheeks. "You really look fit for the spacefolk"

Lotor couldn’t help but smile, satisfaction curling low down his stomach, which was incredibly dangerous, unwise, and possibly disastrous when he was already in uncertain circumstances but he couldn’t stop his step forward or the tilt of his head, playfulness bleeding into his voice as he reached behind Lance's ear, fingers trailing down the other's neck. "And I presume you see yourself one of the Earth's"

His eyes took in the tan of Lance’s skin, fingertips realizing the smoothness as they travelled down the other’s neck, warmth seeping into his skin. Against his touch he could feel the nervous way Lance swallowed but when he talked his resolve was strong.

“I don't expect anything revolutionary with my skin color" Then as their eyes linked he looked even more determined. "Still, I think I can do a great job if I am given a chance. Would you… be my partner?"

Another shiver down his back and excitement -hope- burning in his stomach...

Lotor gave the boy a smug satisfied grin, lips curling and teeth glinting white in the over lighted studio.

"Your partner," he tried on, fingers now dragging down Lance's collarbone to stop over his heart. "Do you think you can keep up, Lance?"

Lance swallowed again, his eyes darting at Lotor’s fingers to his face, a beautiful flush slowly settling across his cheeks as determination and need burned in his blue eyes. “Ye-“

“LANCE!”

Startled, both of them turned towards the door, only to see Allura, glaring at them.

Lance squeaked, eyebrows rising in surprise, still oblivious while Lotor could see the danger miles away. Hastily pulling his fingers from Lance’s chest, he turned his back to quickly gather his stuff. “Don’t get too greedy too soon, Lance” he murmured, before moving towards the other exit.

Don’t get too greedy… indeed…

Now, he was sure. Lance wasn’t going to be a problem. After a stern talk from Allura about the dangers of being affiliated with him, he would sure learn to keep his distance.

As how it should be…

Lotor couldn’t afford it anyhow…

[roundtheworldrambles]

Lake Tekapo, Mount Cook and Mueller Hut, New Zealand

Day 123 – Lake Tekapo and Dark Sky Reserve

I woke up in my camper well after the sun had risen, still a little tired after my many hours of driving the day before. Opening the trunk to make coffee in my make-shift kitchen, I finally had a chance to take in the landscape around me. Omarama is located in a highland basin of grassland, located between mountain ranges. The Ahuriri River ran directly next to my campsite, and as I packed up, fisherman began arriving, dressed in river waders for a day of fly fishing trout. 

Heading North out of Omarama towards Twizel, my route was surrounded by wide, open plains, ringed with snowcapped mountains in the distance, including Mount Cook. This area of the South Island was where many scenes in Lord of the Rings were shot, as it was a stand in for the Kingdom of Rohan. The LOTR geek in me was pretty stoked, as I felt that I had been dropped directly into Middle-Earth!

As I continued north, Mount Cook loomed progressively larger on the horizon. The tallest mountain in New Zealand, surrounded by a jagged landscape of rock, ice and glaciers, Mount Cook was simply magnificent, even from a great distance. Its Maori name, Aoraki, is quite fitting, as it literally translates to “Cloud Piercer”. The mountain and the surrounding national park have long been popular destinations for Kiwi mountaineers, including Sir. Edmund Hillary – a New Zealander who was the first man to summit Mount Everest. 

I stopped along the shores of Lake Pukaki to admire the stunning landscape around me. A bright, turquoise colour, the lake’s vivid shade was caused by glacial run-off, which carries minerals and finely powdered rock downstream in meltwater. Looking straight down the lake, Mount Cook towered over the far end, quite an impressive sight! Taking in the scenery, I spent some time wandering along the shoreline, taking photos, and admiring the pink and purple lupins scattered along the water. 

Lake Pukaki

Leaving Lake Pukaki behind, I drove another 30 minutes before reaching my next destination for the night, at Lake Tekapo. This small hamlet is located on an equally scenic turquoise lake, slightly smaller thank Lake Pukaki. I checked into my campsite to park my camper, and wandered into the town of Tekapo for lunch. 

I spent the following few hours relaxing along the waterfront and taking photos, before I had some seriously bad luck. My Nikon was (presumably) stolen – it was like it had vanished into thin air. To this day, I am still not exactly sure how it happened, as one moment I had the DSLR in my bag, and the next it was gone. My best guess is that I had left it on a picnic table when I briefly stepped away to take some photographs with my phone. It couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes between when I had last used it, and when I realized it was missing. Even more mystifying was that there was almost no one around in this small town. I was devastated. All of my photos from the previous days had been on that camera, along with all of the photos I had taken in previous countries and not yet downloaded onto my Ipad. The rest of my afternoon was blur – I searched the area methodically, asked everyone I met if they had found a camera, left my contact information with all of the businesses in town, and called in a police report with my contact information. Despite all of these steps, I never saw my camera again. 

After my fruitless efforts to find my missing DSLR, I was feeling exhausted, isolated and very lonely. After a few pep calls from my family back home, I fell asleep for the rest of the afternoon in the back of my camper. Fortunately, I felt more upbeat after my long nap, and shifted into problem solving mode, researching and formulating a plan to replace my camera. Although the purchase of a new DSLR was certainly not in the trip budget I had originally planned, I knew that this was an investment that I would not regret, and would be well worth it for my remaining months of travel. 

Lake Tekapo

As the night began to fall, a dazzling array of stars began to pop out overhead. Lake Tekapo is in the centre of the Aoraki Mackenzie Dark Sky Reserve, a designated 1,700 square mile area with very little light pollution to interfere with the observation of stars, galaxies and planets in the night sky. In other words – it was super dark! The streetlights in the town at night were also very dim, and spread out to a bare minimum. 

Shortly before midnight, I bundled up and headed back into Tekapo Village, as I had booked a nighttime stargazing tour at the nearby Mount John Observatory. We boarded a bus equipped with special red headlights, to avoid interfering with the photometry of the telescopes. We were also given our own mini red flashlights to safely walk around the observatory grounds. As our bus wound up the mountain in the dark, our driver turned on some space themed music – from “Rocketman” to “Space Oddity”, pumping us up!

Mount John Observatory

Arriving at the observatory, our small group spent the next two hours observing the night sky, learning about the telescopes, the research conducted in the facility, and different types of celestial objects. Mount John Observatory has 5 massive telescopes, and countless smaller telescopes that we had a chance to look through. We got to observe and learn about globular clusters, the Magellan Clouds, the Gemini Twins, the Orion and Tarantula Nebulas, and Alpha and Beta Centauri, which form the Southern Cross (found on Australia and New Zealand’s flag). Incredibly, all of the large telescopes can be controlled remotely, and we saw one of the large telescopes move around – while being controlled from Boston!

That evening, the stars were brighter and clearer than I had even seen them, and I was completely mesmerized. I had always loved watching the night sky in Canada, and come from a family that does too (my dad literally bought a telescope as his “mid-life crisis”), and it was fascinating orienting myself to the Southern Hemisphere, with a brand-new set of constellations and stars. To cap it all off, we ended the chilly evening of stargazing with a steaming cup of hot chocolate – a perfect end to the perfect night. 

Day 124 – Mount Cook and Mueller Hut

It was a spectacular, bluebird morning as I stocked up on groceries in Tekapo and retraced my route back towards Mount Cook. Driving the length of stunning Lake Pukaki, I arrived in Mount Cook Village shortly before noon. I checked in at the Department of Conservation office, and picked up a pass to stay at Mueller Hut, my destination for the night. Located on the Sealy Mountain range, this remote alpine hut is built at an elevation of 1,800m, and is surrounded by a ring of glaciers, ice cliffs, and New Zealand’s highest mountains, including Mount Cook. It is only accessible via an advanced alpine hike, and takes about 4 hours to get to from the trailhead.  

I parked my campervan at White Horse Hill Campground, and packed my bag with the essentials I would need for the following 24-hours, including snacks, a bottle of wine (my post-hike reward!) a sleeping bag and many warm layers. Mueller Hut is a “pack-in, pack-out” hut, where all hikers must be completely self-sufficient, and leave no trace upon departure. 

Sealy Tarns with Mount Cook and Mueller moraine in the distance

As I set off along the trailhead of the Sealy Tarns Track, I briefly facetimed a group of my friends back home, who were all up at my friend Riley’s cottage in Canada. In moments like that, technology amazes me – as I was able to show them Mount Cook and my hiking trail from the other side of the world! As I continued along the tramp, the path got progressively steeper, and before long I had a sweeping view of the Mueller Glacier and the terminal Mueller Lake, which was surrounded by a massive moraine wall (composed of debris left behind from the receding glacier). The landscape was vast, wild and desolate, and left me completely in awe.

Canadians approaching Mueller Hut

I stopped for a break at Sealy Tarns, and had the good fortune of meeting two Canadians from Vancouver, Brendin and Meghan, who were also heading to Mueller Hut for the night. Brendin was a professional photographer, and kindly offered to take some photos for me. This was a welcome suggestion, as I was definitely missing my DLSR this day, finding it was hard to capture the beauty around me with only an Iphone! We continued onwards towards the hut, ascending along a zig-zagging path of alpine scrub before reaching a challenging scree slope, loose gravel slipping easily beneath our feet. Passing through a large rock field over the ridge, the trail turned into a “choose your own adventure”, as we clamoured around massive boulders, trying to keep an eye out for the orange trail markers. 

Mueller Hut

Finally, we caught sight of Mueller Hut in the distance. Bright red and located in the shadow of Mount Olliver, Mueller Hut was originally built in 1914, where it was used as a shelter when exploring the nearby glacier. Since this time, several new huts have been erected in the same location, although wintertime avalanches have destroyed several of these shelters in the past. The current hut was built in 2003 and was constructed on a strong platform and metal frame, designed to withstand severe alpine weather. Fortunately, since I was completing the hike in the summer, I did not have to worry about avalanches, although I could easily see how making this trek in the wintertime could be extremely dangerous. 

Arriving at the hut, we could quickly see that it was designed for communal living – with a total capacity for 28 people, there were two rooms with stacked bunk beds, jammed closely together, and a large shared kitchen and deck. Next to the kitchen, there were rainwater tanks with potable water to use for cooking. A short distance from the hut, there were two elevated drop toilets, built on long stilts to ensure access during heavy winter snowfall. While the amenities were rustic (and private space virtually non-existant) I loved it! Over the rest of the day, I met many fellow hikers, mostly travelling from the UK, Israel and other parts of New Zealand. We were a congenial bunch, and later spent the evening playing cards and Combio, sharing our wine and food. 

Mueller Hut

It was very cold and windy up at the hut, despite it being the height of summer. I spent some time wandering around outside, admiring the massive nearby glacier and eventually watching the sun go down over Mount Cook. Keas - alpine parrots endemic to NZ - flew overhead, occasionally landing to check us out. Nicknamed “the clown of the mountains”, I could quickly see that Keas were curious birds. A fellow tramper had left his backpack unattended, and it didn’t take long before the Kea was pecking away at it before being chased off. The hut warden laughingly told us that he had known of a Kea that once carried off a visitor’s passport – and warned us to be careful!

Along the glacier, long, thin waterfalls ran off the ice, carrying glacial meltwater into the valley below. Throughout the evening, we would occasionally hear loud booming noises, resulting from large chunks of ice calving off the glacier. As we all went to bed, we could hear the wind pounding on the metal siding of the hut, a powerful reminder of how unforgiving the alpine weather could be. 

Day 125 – Mount Cook and Christchurch

View Over the Hooker Valley at Dawn

I woke up with a few other hikers at dawn to watch the sunrise over the mountains. It was a blustery, frigid day, and we were only able to catch glimpses of the sun through the heavy clouds which were drifting over the nearby peaks. With the hut warden advising us of bad weather expected in the alpine that day, I had a small breakfast and quickly packed up my sleeping bag and bag, preparing for my descent down the mountain. Dark, stormy clouds began to spill over the nearby glacier as I departed, and I hustled to get over the ridge and descend the treacherous, scree slope before the weather turned. Unfortunately, the speed at which I was descending quickly flared up my knee injury, and although I missed the rainstorm, my knee was very sore and tired by the time I returned to my camper. 

Beginning of the downwards scramble

I rested and had some lunch in Mount Cook Village before heading back along Lake Pukaki, leaving the magnificent mountain range behind me. I briefly stopped back in Tekapo on my way out, a final attempt to see if any of the local businesses or police had found my camera –with no luck. This solidified my plan for the next day, as I decided to drive into Christchurch, the largest city on the South Island, to buy a replacement DSLR. I promptly booked a night at a Kiwi Holiday Park (looking forward to laundry and a hot shower!) and began the 4 hour drive Northeast to the city. 

[ironbite4]

Normally I wouldn’t post anything personal on here but I figured what the hell.  Time for a fanfic of mine.  I give you Rage of the Shadows, a Dragon Riders of Pern fic.  Also my AoO link too.

http://archiveofourown.org/works/12221886

When Man first came to Pern, they took little notice of the strange planet that shown red in the night skies.  For two generations, they lived in peace until the planet's orbit brought it close enough to Pern to rain down an indigenous life form known as Thread.  The first Threadfall was devastating to the young colony but in time, human ingenuity won out and though the settlers had to move north to shield, they had developed a powerful protector.  Dragons would fly when Thread was in the sky and men called Dragonriders would guide these awesome beasts in battle.  For 2000 turns the world of Pern would watch the ebb and flow of Threadfall in the many Passes of Red Star.  But now, on the eve of the 9th Pass of Red Star, Pern's Dragonriders have been brought to it's lowest ebb.  Only one Weyr exists when there should be six.  And in the range of mountains near Benden Hold, something strange is happening.

The night was clear, so clear you could reach out and pluck the stars from the night sky.  The twin moons of Pern, Belior had set an hour ago and Timor had been rising late of night.  And Joker was drunk.  Just like always.  The holdless man, thrown out of his rightful hold by his own father 3 Turns ago, lurched out of the wineshop, steady on his feet despite the three skins of good Benden white he had drunk not 30 minutes ago.  The winekeeper had told him, like he always did, to get himself some more marks if he wanted to keep drinking that way.  And by the First Egg, Joker would do just that.  Just like he always did.  Smiling to himself as he made his way to his cot, the drunkard whistled an old sailing tune his father had once tried to taught him.  A chance glance at Benden Peak though stopped Joker in his tracks.  

'Where the bloody hells are the stars?', was the thought that came to the man's mind.  The only one.  For beyond Benden's peak, where the stars should be, was nothing but inky blackness.  They were gone.  And as Joker stared, Timor started to rise up towards it's customary midnight position.  Only as it reached the place where the stars were gone, it too vanished.

'Must be the drink', Joker mused to himself as he wobbled on down the road, a little bit more sober then he was before.

As the drunkard wandered down the road, the strange blackness started to swirl.  The light of the moon started to shine on the dark patch of nothing and it began to rotate faster and faster.  Suddenly, the patch of darkness erupted into a circle of darkness, interspersed with white lighting crackles that defined the now open wormhole.  From the center of it, a single man shaped object was ejected from the tunnel, the object appearing to be on fire as it slammed into the side of the mountain.  Immediately the portal closed, leaving no trace it had ever been.  Within the fiery crater the moon shined down imperviously, rocks and debris still smoking from the impact.  A hand grabbed the side of the hole followed by an arm, a shoulder, then a person, dressed in tattered black clothing.  He leavered himself out of his hole, crawling out of the hole and turning over onto his back with a groan.  Minutes passed as the figure in black simply rested from his labors, the only sign he was alive was his chest rising and falling.  The man opened his eyes, blue eyes that shined in the moonlight for a second before fading.  Hauling himself up he looked around, blinking as understanding began to fill his eyes.  Then rage began building, a rage that had nothing to do where he had landed. His head shot up and he let loose a howl of longing and grief that split the night with it's pain.  Then just as swiftly as it began, it was cut off, leaving only silence in it's wake for miles around.

“This way Masterfarmer,” Manora's voice echoed up from the stone stair case leading to the council room where F'lar and Lessa, Weyrleaders of Benden Wyer spent most of their time now going over the moldy Record skins searching for a way to predict when Thread would fall upon their world to sear it into nothing.  Lessa looked up at the sound of the Headwoman's voice, brushing a lock hair that had escaped from it's usual braid away from her face.  A glance at her weyrmate showed he was too involved in his readings to even pay attention to the intruders.  With a sigh, Lessa pushed away the skin she was attempting to decypher and awaited their visitors.  

Manora was the first to appear, the same calm, cool expression on her face which seemed the same as it was when Lessa arrived on Search 3 Turns ago. She stopped in the door way and bowed her head slightly, Lessa nodding in answer and stepped through with the Masterfarmer, his rough clothing indicating that he had just come from his farmhold. Lessa blinked as she recognized the face of the man, one Owen by name.  He worked the nearest farmhold to Benden Wyr and wouldn't have come from field if it weren't urgant.  As the man came into the chamber, he quickly snatched his hat off his head and bowed his head, the very nervousness of his movements betraying his reason for being here.

“Excuse me Weyrwoman, Weyrleader,” Manora began with no preamble, “a matter of some urgancy has come up and it is something you two should both hear.”  She bowed again and urged the farmer to come forward. F'lar, finally noticing the pair, put aside his Record skin and looked properly attentive.

“Well it's like this,” the Masterfarmer began, “now normally I'd be going to Lord Raid with this but seeing as how this is Weyr business, I came straight here.  See, I'm raising wherries for the dragons down yonder and as of late, something has been killing and eating the birds.  Now I'm no fool, I know there's all sorts of beasts that could do the deed but so far, we can't find anything.  We've tried for the past sevenday to catch the critter but he's smart, to smart.  Can we have some Weyr help?  I'd not be coming here if I didn't think Lord Raid could help.  Sides,” the man's face split in a wide grin, “ain't to often a man can say he's been to the Weyr.”

Lessa smiled back as F'lar out right laughed.  “Masterfarmer Owen,” Lessa said, “I'd like to think that this is something you could probably handle on your own.  But, if I recall, your farmhold is the one nearest to Benden Weyr so I think it'd behoove us to look into this.  Give the weyrlings something to do now that their dragons aren't eating us out of Weyr and Hold.”  Lessa looked over at F'lar who had leaned back in his chair and crossed his long legs.  “In fact I think we could possibly do with a flyover, don't you think Weyrleader?”

F'lar scowled at Lessa then turned his attention to the Masterfarm.  “Certainly we could help out.  But if this creature is attacking at night, not sure what use we could be.  Dragons aren't exactly known for their night sight.  That's why we have watch-whers.”

From deep within the Weyr bowl, a chorus of roars punctuated that statement.

The Masterfarmer sighed.  “It's not just during the night this thing attacks.  Its any time!”  The man raised his hands up then brought them down in fists, clearly upset and frustrated at his failure to protect tithe beasts.  “Honestly Weyrleaders, I'm about at my wits ends.”

F'lar made soothing motions at the man.  “Don't fret yourself Masterfarmer, we'll find your beast.”  The Weyrleader flashed a quick grin.  “If it's attacking during the day, I doubt it'll be able to hide from a dragon.  We'll probably catch it, kill it, then have it for dinner before too long.”

The three then exchanged more pleasentries before Manora took the man out.  As they left, F'lar looked over at Lessa.  “Fancy a quick hop over to the farmhold?  I think we've been cooped up here for long enough.”

Lessa grimaced as she got to her feet, stiff from the extended hours they had spent this day.  Looking over at the Record skins on the table she stretched, feeling each and every vertebra pop as she did so.

“I think that'd be an excellent idea.  And I suppose we can bring some lunch. Breakfast was a long time ago,” she eyed F'lar as he got to his feet.  “Just us two or should we bring anyone else?”

“I think F'nor's not doing anything right now,” F'lar replied as he headed to the ledge where his great bronze dragon, Mnementh awaited him.  “The three of us can have a picnic,” was his parting sally.

Lessa merely rolled her eyes and went to collect her flying gear from their chambers.

Three great dragons, one bronze, one brown, and one gold popped out from between just over the farmhold.  A quick landing and consultation provided the info that the wherries were being attacked in the most northern field.  The 3 dragons were quick to get back in the air, effortlessly gliding towards the area.

'A most splended day I think,' Lessa thought to her dragon Ramoth.  A grunt from the great queen was her only answer.  Lessa laughed and patted the great neck over which she rode.  'I take it you're still grumpy?'

'I am not grumpy,' came Ramoth's reply.  'I just don't like the cold.'

'Take heart love of my life,' Lessa grinned as she spied the field that was their destination. 'We're about there then you can lounge in the sun until we're ready to leave.'

As the three dragons glided towards a hill marking the boundry, the entire flock of wherries suddenly burst over it, some taking to the air for a brief  second before coming back down to the ground to engage in the stampede.  So frightened they were they didn't even notice the dragon shadows passing overhead as they headed south towards presumed safety.  The three riders exchanged looks as they came over the hill and all three recoiled in horror.

Upon the field lay the corpses of 5 wherries, 3 of which looked to be partially consumed.  It looked to their eyes like a dragon had been there.  But feasting on the corpse of one of the wherries wasn't a dragon.  The three riders circled over what appeared to be a man, a man who's hair was shaggy and unkempt and he was saved from nakedness by some tattered black clothing.  F'nor and F'lar exchanged glances then F'lar motioned for them to land some distance from this apparent madman who continued his grisly feast.  

As they landed, F'lar and F'nor dismounted, F'lar glaring at Lessa to stay put on Ramoth.  The two brothers exchanged looks with one another.

“Well,” F'nor begain, nervously looking over at the mad man.  “Do you want to go ask him if he'd like to join in our picnic or do we wait for him to invite us to the feast?”

F'lar looked at the blood stained man and rubbed his chin.  “I think it'd be better if we subdued him and brought him to Healer Hall.  I don't think he's sane.”

F'nor looked over and nodded.  “Yes I doubt he is.  Odd though.  He looks vaguely familiar to me.”

F'lar also looked over and cocked his head to the side.  Something was nagging at his conscious but it refused to come to the surface.  “Well whoever he is, we'll ask him after we've got him away from the wherries.  Got a club or something?”

F'nor produced a short club from his belt.  “Thought we might run into trouble so I came prepared.”  He looked up at his big brown dragon and nooded. “Canth says he'll back me up.”

“Luck,” F'lar said and the two brothers started towards the man in black, F'lar lagging behind F'nor as the younger half-brother approached the feasting madman.

“Hey!” F'nor shouted at the man in black once he got in position, trying to get his attention.  “Hey you there!”  There was no response.  F'nor edged closer, holding his short club low to the ground.  “Hey I want to talk to you.”  The man kept eating, tearing out large chunks of meat with hands that looked to be more like claws then anything else.  “I'm warning you, I'm armed.”  The man continued to eat as F'nor approached him from behind.  “Don't say I didn't warn you,” was F'nor's last words as he brought the club down hard on the man's head.

Or he would have had the man in black's hand not appeared grabbing hold of the club, preventing it's downward velocity from impacting.  Quicker then anything, F'nor found himself flying through the air, landing on his head with an audible thunk, being knocked out.  F'lar scrambled back as Canth roared a challenge.  The man spun around, crouching on all fours and glaring at the brown dragon charging at him.  If Lessa hadn't been watching what happened, she would've surely chalked up what happened next to some sort of wine-sickness.  As Canth got to the man, he sprung, twisting upwards and uppercutting Canth in the jaw, snapping the great brown's head back and lifting him off the ground.  And by some trick of the light, the man's entire body was, for a moment encircled by some sort of fire that traced the path of his punch.  As he landed and Canth's unconscious body landed behind him, he turned and looked at his fallen foe.  A growl escaped his lips and he turned his attention towards Less and F'lar.  F'lar had scrambled back to Mnementh and had mounted his bronze.  Turning to Lessa, he shouted at her to get back to the Weyr.  The man's eyes narrowed and he threw his head back in a scream, momentarily stopping Mnementh from lifting off himself and pausing Ramoth's height gaining flight.  Quicker then either of them could react, the man started running towards Mnementh, scabbering on all fours at time but moving quickly.  As Mnementh got a dragonlength from the ground, the man in black jumped, reaching the level of Mnementh's head with a single bound.  He landed on Mnementh's nose and used it as a springboard, sending the great bronze's head towards the ground as he ascended upwards.  He reached the level where Lessa stared at this madman who looked back her, eyes wide with madness.  Then, just to further confuse the issue, he floated over and landed lightly between Ramoth's neck ridges, staring into Lessa's eyes with something akin to an accusation in them.

There they stayed for what seemed like forever.  Then, to Lessa's astonishment, the man reached out and gently cupped the back of her head.  Leaning forward, he touch his bloody forehead to her's, closing his eyes as he did.  They stayed like that for a second before his eyes snapped open, the madness and rage that had been in them streaking out, to be replaced by tears and a great sadness.  The man lifted his head up and howled, a howl of pain and longing and suffering that drove all thought from Lessa's mind, bringing tears to her eyes as her pain, though long gone, fresh to the surface as if it had just happened.  Ramoth and Mnementh's necks reached to the sky above as they let loose a soul rendering keen of their own.  As Ramoth keened, the man in black fell from his preach, falling from between the neck ridges towards the ground below.  Lessa leaned forward, trying to catch the man before he'd be out of reach when, as he entered the shadow cast by Ramoth's wing, he vanished, leaving only confusion, the bloody wrecks, and questions as he did.

F'lar and the Benden Wingleaders appeared in the skies from between arranged smartly over northern Ruatha.  Above them, arranged smartly and professionally, were the wings of Fort Weyr.  F'lar couldn't stop the grin from spreading on his face as he observed the mass dragon wings.  Though not participating in this fight against their ancient enemy as they did at Telgar, F'lar and the other wingleaders had deemed it prudent to at least observe.  After all one couldn't have too much experience when it came to fighting Thread.

'I'd rather be fighting Thread' grumbled the great bronze Mnementh from beneath him.

F'lar simply laughed and reached out to pet the great neck. 'Next time my heart.  Next time we'll be in the thick of things just like at Nerat and Telgar.'

F'lar's wings positioned themselves in observation altitude.  Far enough away so that they wouldn't be scoured by Thread but close enough to observe the patterns being woven.  At Telgar, only 3 of the Benden dragon riders had been hurt by Thread and only one was out of action for longer then a few days.  Which wasn't bad for one under strength Weyr but that would improve as the Turns passed.  F'lar looked over his shoulder to see F'nor's Canth in proper position but his rider wasn't observing the ascending wings of dragons heading east.  His head was turned firmly to the west, at some distant star that seemed to refuse to vanish from the sky.

'Mnementh ask Canth what's got F'nor so fascinated,' F'lar asked his dragon.

Mnementh's head swivled towards his brown wingmate and he rumbled back, 'F'nor sees a star that doesn't seem to want to go away.  It also looks like it's getting closer.'

'Probably just a shooting star that's late.  It'll go away in a sec-' F'lar's thought was cut off by a cry from his half-brother.

“LOOK OUT!” came F'nor's cry as F'lar turned to look.  Mnementh was quicker in reaction as he wing slipped to the right as the supposed shooting star suddenly streaked in out of nowhere right in the space F'lar and Mnementh were.  The streak was green in color and blazed faster then any dragon could ever go.  F'lar stared at it as it ascended towards the incoming Thread, beating out the fastest dragons.  As it got to what seemed to be the thickest portion of Thread it stopped.  There it floated for a second, a spark in the middle of the gray dark thread

“AURA CRASH!” came a shout like thunder that caused some dragons to instantly drop several lengths in the air before catching themselves. Instantly the spark grew and spread wings made of what appeared to fire in the middle of thread.  Instantly the sky lit itself on fire, as if the entire firebird was dragon fire and seared the Thread from the sky.  Then it started to move, dancing in the sky, leaving a trail of fire and ash where ever it went.  The dragons and riders hung motionless in the sky as by itself, the firebird charred Thread. Mnementh suddenly went between and appeared next to T'ron's Fidranth, the Fort Weyrleader's mouth hanging open.  He looked over at F'lar in disbelief and cupped his hands over his mouth.

“WHERE WAS THIS HIDING?” T'ron shouted.

“I DON'T KNOW!” F'lar called back, the pyrotechnic show continuing.  

As the dragon riders watched, the firebird suddenly reversed direction, heading, it seemed, directly towards where F'lar and T'ron hung in the sky.  It stopped mere lengths from the two men and dragons, seemingly contemplating them.  Then the firebird extinguished itself, revealing an armor clad form in it's center.  The armor clad form was black in color, seemingly like a bit of midnight made almost flesh. Twin blades the length of an arm sprouted from each wrist, not impeding the motion of the arms at all.  Three gems were on the chest in an upside down triangle, two green and one blue, each glowing brightly in the air.  From the head, a trio of what looked like fins crowned it, over a visor that looked to be made of green glass.  As they watched, twin jets of steam escaped from vents in the helm's cheeks, almost as if whatever was inside was venting some exhaustion. The figure's visored visage bore down into the two Weyrleaders as if searching for something.  The figure then turned around in mid air, gazing up at what was left of Thread.  Moving his head around his neck, F'lar and T'ron heard audible popping, like the figure was preparing for some great physical labor. It lifted up his arms, the twin blades on both wrists switching forward to face what the hands were pointed at.  Two more blades popped from what F'lar took for decorative spikes at the elbows, lengthening to the length of a man's forearm.  The shoulder pauldrons opened up as well, revealing that they too were another double set of blades.  What was taken to be fins atop the figure's head were in fact more blades, two the length of the back of the skull but the third the entire length of the spine, snapping forward and facing the incoming Thread.  Then the points began to glow, swiftly gathering dark colored energy and increasing in size.  The armor never gave any indication of stress or fatigue as it gathered more and more power, power that raised the hair on the back of F'lar's neck.  

“SHADOW OMNI BEAM!” came the same shout as from before, only this time it was apparent that the figure in the armor was the source.  With a blast of sound, the seven energy beams exploded from the tips of the blades of the armor, shattering again and again as they raced to meet Thread.  Each second the energy beams continued their journey they split exponentially,  racing higher and higher and multiplying and multiplying.  Each beam then sought out a Thread filament, capturing each spore and stopping it in it's tracks.  The beams continued in this manner, only stopping when it was apparent that each Thread had been captured.  The figure then tensed up and sent a surge of even more energy from the tips of the blades, exploding each Thread that made the previous pyrotechnic show look mundane in compassion.  As ash rained down on the valley below, the armor's blades snapped back to their previous configuration.  The figure turned back around and stared down at F'lar.  Suddenly from behind the visor, two blue orbs flashed into existence and another jet of steam issued forth.  This steam was different as it billowed around the figure, cloaking it in white.  Suddenly, the steam was blown away as the figure surrounded itself in a ball of energy.  It then flew up, disappearing into the sky, leaving nothing but blue morning behind.

F'lar and Lessa popped from between above Fort Weyr, the mid afternoon sun gilding the great Star Stones of the ancient Weyr.  Ramoth and Mementh glided wing tip to wing tip down towards the great queens ledge.  Perching only long enough to discharge their riders, the two dragons arced away towards the sunning ledges, as the two riders made their way to council chamber.

“And it just, vanished?” Lessa asked F'lar again as they unbuckled riding helmates and shucked gloves.  “Like it didn't even want to explain itself?”

“Yes Lessa,” F'lar said for what had to have been the millionth time, “just flew up into the sky faster then even the fastest green could ever hope to fly and vanished.  I'm having a hard time even processing what happened.  I really hope T'ron doesn't expect much from us.  I didn't even know that thing existed.”

Lessa frowned. “Whatever it is, I just hope it doesn't make another appearance. Thinking that something with that much power exists on our world is mind boggling.”

F'lar nodded as they entered the council chamber, a nod to T'ron who held curtain open for them before letting it drop on F'lar's heels.  He nodded the Benden Weyrleaders to a pair of chairs next to another empty one and crossed the chamber to his own seat, Marada coming around behind them and placing a goblet each of wine and a pitcher of klah between them.  A quick squeeze of Lessa's shoulders and the Fort Weyrwoman went to take her place beside her weyrmate.  F'lar glanced around and sighed, this was probably going to be a long meeting.

“So,” T'ron began after a short moment, “what happened over Ruatha happened there's no doubt about it.  Whatever that thing was it certainly charred Thread well enough.  What I want to know is what was it?”

“I'd love to know that too T'ron,” F'lar began, rubbing the back of his head with one hand as Lessa clutched his other.  “We've never even heard a rumor that it existed nor do we have any songs about it.  But yes, it charred Thread today, that I will give you.”

“But certainly,” D'ram said, “certainly you'd know of something that could help spell out this mystery.  If something of this much power existed in your time, we wouldn't have had to come forward.”

A murmur of consent answered that that from T'kul and R'mart.

“Yes but-” F'lar attempted to answer when suddenly the entire chamber went dark.  Not dark as if the glowbaskets had suddenly all failed, but dark as if night itself had descended and replaced day.  There was a moment of frightened shouting and conflicting commands when light was returned to the chamber and where there were twelve people, there where now thirteen.

The newcomer was dressed in tight black clothing with an odd black and white symbol on the left breast.  Inside that symbol was the sign of infinity.  His hair was brown and his skin, where not crossed with old scars including a rather impressive one that began over his left eye and ended below it, was a pale white beneath a tan.  A trimmed beard and mustache completed his look, marking him for at least 25 turns old. His eyes were what F'lar would remember most besides the fact that he lounged very casually in his chair, black boots up on the table as if he was master here.  His eyes were a startlingly vivid and clear shade of blue.  And they looked old.  As if the staranger had seen more life then his appearance suggested.

T'kul rose from his chair, his hand going to his belt to draw his knife and the stranger laughed.

“Yeah that would be a bright idea if you were armed,” he said in a voice rich with amusement but still sounding young.  He causally brought up a hand, revealing that he held T'kul's belt knife in it.  “You might be needing this if you're planning on killing me.”

With a negligant toss, the knife was returned the knife to T'kul, who stared at it as if he'd never seen it before.  With another laugh, the man in black revealed his other hand, this one holding five more knives in it. “In fact y'all might be needing these back just in case.” Another causal toss followed, skittering the rest of the blades to rest, hilts pointing at their owners.

T'ron stared first at the knife then at the stranger causally lounging at his council chamber.  “Who,” T'ron began after swallowing visibly, “what are you?”

The stranger chuckled and reached over, grabbing F'lar's wine cup and taking a drink.  He wiped his lips and set the cup down before looking at the Fort Weyr leaders.

“Ahh now that,” he began, his voice losing all traces of the accent he had put on before, “that is a story worthy of one of your Songs.  Who I am and what I am are so intertwined at this point that I can't even separate them.  But I'll try my very best.”

He flexed, merely flexed his knees and assumed a cross legged position a visible foot off the chair.  “What I am wouldn't have any meaning to you people but I'll try and explain.  I am a 5000 yea-,” he paused and shook his head, “sorry 5000 Turn old time traveler.  I am a man without a home.  I am a man who's history includes tragedy and triumph worthy of one of your Songs.  That is what I am.”  He paused, roatating slowly in the air as he eyed each of them in turn.  When he got to T'kul he paused more then the rest, looking at T'kul for a second then glacing again at T'ron.  “Give it seven then.  As for who I am that's a question that I've asked myself for the past 2000 Turns. The simple answer is a name.  My name.  My name is Nick Saber and I am known throughout the cosmos as the Shadow of Time.  I just thought I'd say hello in the best way possible.”

T'ron's eyes seemed to start out of his head.  “What in shards are you talking about?”

“That pyrotechnic display over Ruatha of course,” replied Nick.  “Surely you don't think I run around at 100% of my total power for fun?  Uusually I just run around like this or at 25% but I figured I'd get your attention better in my Shadow Star Armor then in this ninja gi.”

“Ninja....what?” D'ram asked.

Nick rolled his eyes which made him flip in place.  “Oh lord you people have no idea. Forgot what I was dealing with for a second.  I'm a warrior D'ram.  A ninja is a type of warrior and where I'm from they ran around in stuff like this.  Or in orange.  Not to sure why.  The bottom line is ladies and gentlemen, I'm not here as a threat.  I'm here to help you out in times when you can't deal with everything.  Cause the way I see it...or rather,” and he chuckled again, “Foresee it, you and your people are in for some massive upheavals and changes and I always find those the most interesting.”

T'kul muttered something and gave the stranger floating above the chair a dark look. Fanna looked at the man fearfully.  “How are you doing that?” she asked, almost seeming to shrink from even addressing this stranger.

“What floating?” Nick asked back, “oh it's nothing to special.  I usually just like to walk around or lounge upside down but figured this would be a better demonstration of my powers.  I can also fly, something that was demonstrated a couple months back.”

“A couple months back?” T'ron asked, his glare going to F'lar and Lessa.

“I can assure you T'ron,” F'lar begain again, his hands raised to ward off the Fort Weyrleader's glare, “we have never seen this man before in our lives.”

“Yeah you have,” Nick said, countering F'lar as he stretched out in mid air, “I just wasn't as well groomed at the time.  And I had a chunk of wherry between my teeth.  That was a fun time in my life.”

“YOU!” Lessa shouted explosively, rising to her feat and casting one hand out to point at the floating man.  “You were the one in the field that day!  The one who threw F'nor for dragon lengths.”

“Also Shoruykened Canth if memory serves,” Nick shook his head and laughed.  “Glad to see the big brown is ok.  Didn't think I hurt him but I was quite mad you see.”

“But why?” Lessa asked, “why attack us?”

Nick rubbed the back of his head, his eyes going up as he thought.

“Well, “ he began, “I was quite mad at the time.  Not the mad you see right now though, proper mad.  Insane really.  With rage at being alive, grief at what I've lost and just found comfort in insanity.  Really I was kinda operating at instinct if I had to be honest.  Just reacting at everything.  But you pulled me out Weyrwoman and for that I am eternally grateful.”  Nick bowed his head to Lessa.

“But I didn't do anything,” Lessa protested.

“You learned your Ballads letter perfect is what you did,” Nick replied, his eyes filled with honesty for a brief second, “you learned your Ballads letter perfect and within you is a core of strength that shall never fail you.  I needed that at the time and for that, I am so grateful.”

Nick turned his head and rose to his feet, stretching his arms and shaking his shoulders. “Well I can see you need some time to process this so I'm going to leave.  But before I do, I'm going to give you all a gift.  After all, what sort of guest would I be if I didn't leave a gift?”

He reached into his shirt and drew out a shiny disk of metal about the size of a mark. Holding it up, there was some strange symbol on one side of the disk and on the other side was the sign of infinity.

“This,” he explained, “ is a Shadow Coin.  There'll be one in each of your weyrs don't ask me how I put them there you don't want to know. You'll see me out and about Pern but if you need me, really need me, take the coin and flip it.  I'll catch it before it hits the ground no matter where.  Consider this a sign of my trust in you as this is a very powerful artifact I'm trusting you with.”  He set it down on the table in the center and rose towards the ceiling.  “Until we meet again my friends, safe skies.”  As he entered an area of deeper shadow, he faded away like a ghost, leaving the council chamber, for the moment, in silence.

At the highest peak of Benden mountains, the ice and snow swirled as a spring storm moves into the region to deliver some much needed rain.  Standing on a small cliff on the south face of the mountain, Nick Saber stood, ignoring the cold and wet as he looked out over Pern.

'Such a fragile world to have been bombarded by so much cosmic stuff,' he thought, his eyes scanning the horizon.

'Ahh,' a new voice, one that echoed with the weight of centuries behind it came to his mind, 'that is their burden is it not?'

“Hello Guardian,” Nick said out loud, knowing the entity who's shadow he was could hear him, “been a long time.”

A swirl of ice and snow suddenly took shape, becoming a vaguely hooded creature standing seven feet tall.  It was a suggestion of a shape but Nick could feel the immense psychic power that was maintaining the creature's brief hold on this plane of existence.

“I do believe,” Guardian replied, “it's been about 2000 years since we last spoke.”

“Turns Guardian,” Nick replied.  “The locals call their years Turns.”

“Ahh and I guess we must respect the locals terms of time must we not?”

Nick smiled and looked out once more at the land spread before him.  Briefly, his view shifted from the mundane to the quantum, revealing the yellow stain of particles that blanketed every inch of this planet.  His viewpoint shifted back to the physical plane.

“Hard to believe,” he began, “that a particle fountain not 21 light years away from this system has been perfectly bombarding this place with chronotons for its entire existence.  Useful too when you know this planet's been attacked by some spore for a good chunk of that existence necessitating the evolution of it's native species.”

The figure turned and looked out to where Nick said and nodded.  “Yes it is a nice coincidence.  But I'm not manifesting to talk about the weather Nick. I'm here to talk about you.  You're not thinking about anything anymore.  Why?”

Nick's eyes briefly watered and the echo of ages old pain was once again seen.  He quickly dashed the tears from them and glared at his companion.

“What's there to talk about Guardian?” he accused, “I killed her.  I killed her for power.  That's that.  She's gone forever and I'm left with half a soul, half a heart, and half a mind.  What do you want to talk about my feelings?”

The figure simply stared at Nick.

“Or how about the twenty thousand souls I condemned to hell?  You want to talk about that?  Do you Guardian of Time?  Do you really want me to bear my heart and soul to you?  Do you you son of a bitch!?”

At the last, screamed from atop the highest peak in Benden Range, the ledge the Shadow stood exploded into powder.  The figure simply floated on as Nick breathed heavily in and out, floating on the space that just a second ago was solid rock.

“You've gone through so much Nick,” Guardian began, it's voice echoing through time and space, “so much pain and heartbreak.  And yet, even after that nap in the darkness, you're here.  Here and ready to do what you do best, help people.  I know it's hard, I loved her too.  But you have to find a way to live.  It's what she would've wanted.”

Nick turned back to his contemplation of the landscape, his mind going through memories of the past.  Sighing, he reached into his shirt and pulled out two gems.  One, emerald in color was the size of his fist and perfectly circular.  The other was the bluest shade of blue, a teardrop shaped sapphire.  Both shined in the moonlight though the green one occasionally had lightning dance across it's surface.

“Stars and magic. That's what I got for my wish Guardian.  And you know what?” he looked up at the wraith, “I'm trying to decide if it's worth it.  I didn't come here because of choice.  I heard a call across the universe.  That's all.  A call I had to respond to.  Damn it Guardian why did I have to kill her?  Why?”

“For that I have no answer to,” Guardian replied.  “All I can say is she used the rules of magic to give you a fighting chance at a demon lord.  And it worked.  You sent that bastard back to hell.”

“Along with twenty thousand souls.”

“That I can't say. I'm the Guardian of Time Nick, not death.  That's your job.”

Nick waved that off.

“Through out all the time I've known you, all the time you've cast yourself as my shadow, you've always proven that you've got a good heart.  Might be a bit jaded at times and a bit scared, but a good heart.  Maybe that's why she did what she did.  You're strong Nick, strong enough to endure Celestia's passing and moving on.  No matter what you do on this planet, I'm sure she'll be proud of you.”

Nick looked down at the blue gem for a moment and let his memory drift to the woman it had been.  How warm her laugh was, how sunlight brought gold highlights to her white hair, how her eyes, as blue as the gem in his hand right now, had been pools to fall in to repeatably.  More erotic memories swam to the surface and he grinned, realizing how much she had teased him.  Shaking his head he put the gems back in his shirt and fished out another one, staring at the red gem in his hand.  This one pulsed over and over, one of it's facets pulsing brighter then the rest of it.  Looking out he saw that the facet was pointed towards the southwest and he grinned.  He looked over at the wraith as he put the gem back in it's place.

“Welp,” he quipped, drawing a hood over his head and pulling up a mask to cover his face, “guess the vacation's over.  Time to get to work.”   Nick then produced a pair of red rimmed sunglasses, putting them on to complete his look.

“I suppose so.  Be well Nick.  Make your enemies fall.”

“Oh I plan on doing just that.  Cause it's time for this Shadow to rise.”

Nick surrounded himself with his ki aura and blasted off into the night, the ice wraith falling apart behind him.  As he flew towards the south, there was but one thought on his mind.

'Let's see what trouble we can make.'

And the Shadow of Time vanished into the night.

[jj-lynn21]

Vee Chapter 21

ch 1, ch 2, ch 3 ch 4  ch 5 ch 6 ch 7  ch 8 ch 9 ch 10  ch11 ch 12 CH 13 

ch 14 ch 15 ch 16 ch 17 ch 18 ch 19 ch 20

warnings: angst, fluff

photo from entertainment weekly London premier It Ch 2

Jen and her friends come in the back way laughing as they carry dresses to Molly’s room where they have decided to get ready for the wedding. Jen texts Bill.

Jen: 

We are back. In molly’s room to get ready. Unless you need me, I am in hiding until we walk down the isle in two hours.

Bill: 

I’m sorry, I do need you to meet the Elder’s before the wedding. Can you meet me in the hallway before getting ready?

Jen:

 OK, be right out.

Jen turned to her friends, “I’ll be back shortly girls. There is a bit of Castle business to take care of before the wedding.”

Sara laughed, “No quickies before the wedding.”

Jen shakes her head as she leaves the room. She has a huge smile on her face, but it disappears as she sees the seriousness on Bills face. They walk towards each other. He puts his arms around her smiling a little as he looks at her.

Jen looks up at him, “What’s wrong? Do they not approve of our union? Just tell me….”

Bill reassures her, “Nothing like that.” He steps back taking her hand to lead her to the Elder’s room. “I think this will partly be a good surprise.”

They get to the door. The guard opens the door.

Terrian smiles, “Hello Jen.”

Her eyes are wide at first and then blink several times. She leans back on Bill. “Is this some kind of trick?”

Terrian looks fondly at her, “Its not a tricky baby girl.”

Jen couldn’t believe what she was seeing, “Daddy? How?”

 “Have a seat.” Terrian sat down. “I will tell you what happened.” 

Jen can’t take her eyes off her Father who, as far as she knew, died in a car accident with her Mother. Bill took her to the couch to sit down. He holds her hand. Terrian was on the other side of her. She flinches when Terrian tries to take her other hand. Catherine sits in a chair across the room.

Terrian stayed calm, “Ok, I understand your hesitation. I’m sorry I couldn’t raise you or even tell you of my lineage after the accident. I was devastated when your mother was killed in the accident. I wanted to die with her, but I healed. It took a long time for me to heal. We all thought it best for you to be raised by your Grandmother since you were part human. “

Jen was shocked. Part of her wanted to hug him tight and cry with the sorrow she felt he was feeling talking about loosing her mother. Part of her couldn’t believe he was her Father here in front of her.

Terrian continued, “I hope you can understand how hard it was for me to leave you. I still think it was the best for you. You were too young for my world. I just hoped you would find your way to us when the time was right for you to take a throne. Are you ok?”

Jen looked at him curiously, “Daddy you’re Aklat Alnaas?”

Terrian nodded, “Yes, I am. Your Mother was human.”

Jen asked, “Why didn’t you make her one of us, so she didn’t have to die?”

She couldn’t hold in the emotion any longer. She started to cry. Terrian looked to Bill. Bill let go of Jen’s hand. Terrian moved closer to her. She let him hug her.

 “I didn’t think she was ready,” He teared up. “I thought I could be kind of normal. I snuck around drinking when she didn’t know. Then she was pregnant with you and that amazed me. I’m so sorry baby girl. I was going to wait until you were 18 and then tell you both everything and turn you both but then the accident and I just couldn’t take care of you like you needed. I am glad Bill brought you back to us. I bless this marriage with all my heart.” 

Jen wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. “This is just a lot to take in today. I really need to process; I need to process you being here daddy.”

Terrian took a breath, “Take all the time you need baby girl. I hope it is ok with you that I officiate your wedding as a gift. I also have a gift your mother would want you to have if you will accept it.”

Jen is surprised, “What do you have from her?”

Terrian reaches for a box behind the couch. He hands it to her. She starts to open it.

“Its your Mother’s wedding veil.” He smiles. “She always liked the color blue even though it wasn’t a typical veil color for a wedding. I hope you will wear it.” 

Jen held it up, “Its beautiful and blue like the roses I chose. I will be proud to wear it for her. I think it would be best for you to officiate the wedding instead of the King…”

Catherine stood, “On that note I think I have a gift for you also. Eric is no longer King of this Castle. I have already given that responsibility to Bill. So, when you wed tonight you will be Queen.”

Jen smirked, “Well, Eric want me to be Queen. I guess he got his wish.”

Catherine grinned, “Yes, we know all he did to you and others now. There will be a ceremony after the wedding You will behead your tormentor as that is our way. I hope you don’t have a problem with this.”

Jen looks to Bill. He was torn between deep sadness his brother was going to be killed and knowing his brother deserved to be killed. Bill looked at her with his big emotional green eyes. “I would do this for you if I was allowed.” 

Looking to Catherine he said, “Since my brother has hurt others I cared about also, hurting me in the process can I please be responsible for his punishment. I know Jen is strong enough to do as she is asked, but I rather take it upon myself…”

“No, she was his latest victim.” Catherine shook her head, “She will behead him after the wedding at the reception.”

Jen looked to Bill, “Don’t hate me for what I have to do My King.”

Bill takes her hand and kisses it gently. He smiles even though he is torn inside. She feels how torn he is feeling. “I will always love you. This is what must be because we are meant to be. Now you better go get ready my Queen to be. As long as Queen Catherine and King Terrian are ready to dismiss us.”

“You are both dismissed.” Catherine lights up. “I love weddings. This one seems especially loving.”

Terrian smiles, “I agree, this is an especially loving union.”

Jen and Bill stand and bow to them before leaving the room. They part ways in the hall not to be reunited until they are ready to head down the Isle together as customary in an Aklat Alnaas ceremony.

Hans Zimmer’s MAESTRO plays in the ballroom as guest stream out of the elevator to take their seats. All are excited for the Castle wedding. John Mayer’s THE THEME FROM ‘THE SEARCH FOR EVERYTHING’ plays as Derick, Tye and Tod line up on the left side of where Terrian is standing in front of the Thrones. The men are wearing navy blue suits with navy blue dress shirts and a fuchsia tie. Terrian is dressed in white robes with golden accents. Catherine in a golden long-sleeved V-neck gown, stands behind Tarrian to his right. As Peter Gabriel’s IN YOUR EYES starts to play Beth, Molly and Sara walk down the aisle wearing Jovani navy and fuchsia dresses with a sheer overlay carrying navy and fuchsia rose bouquets.

Bill and Jen walk towards each other smiling. They bow to each other. Bill takes her hand to kiss it softly. The guests stand as they walk down the aisle. Bill is wearing a custom-made white tuxedo white dress shirt and white bow tie with navy blue dress pants. Jen wears a White by Vera Wang textured Organza white wedding dress with the blue veil her Father gave her and a bouquet of fuchsia and blue roses. When the couple gets to King Terrian the audience sits. 

Tarrian starts the ceremony. “Before this assemble of friends, family and guests in attendance I ask King Bill Edlund will you take Princess Jen Adore to be your wife and love her in distress and pleasure?

Looking in Jen’s eyes holding her hands Bill smiles brightly, “Yes.”

Terrian continued, “Before this assemble of friends, family and guests in attendance I ask Princess Jen Adore will you take King Bill Edlund to be your husband and love him in distress and pleasure?”

Looking in Bill’s eyes she smiles brightly, “Yes.”

Derick gives Bill a small box with a wedding band for Jen. Bill takes the ring. Placing it on her finger he repeats what Terrian tell him.

Terrian said, “Bill repeat after me. This ring is a token of my love. I merry you with all that I have and all that I am.”

Bill repeats, “This ring is a token of my love. I merry you with all that I have and all that I am.”

Terrian smiles, “Repeat after me Jen. I will forever wear this ring as a sign of my commitment and the desire of my heart.”

Jen repeated, “I will forever wear this ring as a sign of my commitment and the desire of my heart.”

Molly gives a small box with a wedding band for Bill. Jen takes the ring. Placing it on his finger she repeats what Terrian tells her.

Terrian said, “Jen repeat these words to your King. I give you this ring and myself as my gift to you.”

Jen repeats, “I give you this ring and myself as my gift to you.”

Terrian turns to Bill, “Repeat this to your beloved, Bill. I will forever wear this ring as a sign of my commitment and the desire of my heart. I give of you the gift of myself.”

Bill repeats, “I will forever wear this ring as a sign of my commitment and the desire of my heart. I give of you the gift of myself.”

Catherine walked forward. She motioned for the room to rise. Bill and Jen kneeled before her. She tapped Jen’s head with her scepter.

 “You may rise. Complete your destiny by sealing your union with a kiss,” Catherine announced, “take your thrones as the King and Queen of this Castle.”

As the couple is sealing their union Molly steps in front of everyone. She screams her outrage no longer able to keep her mouth shut. “Where is the true King? Where is Alex the true King of this Castle? Does no one think it’s a travesty he is no where to be seen at his Brother’s wedding? This room must know there is something wrong here…”

Catherine glared at her, “That’s enough young lady unless you want to join the former King.”

Jen turned to Molly, “Please Molly, stop before you cross a line you can’t come back from.”

The crowd is abuzz talking about what they are hearing and wondering themselves where Eric is on this joyous wedding day of his brother.

Catherine yelled, “Silence everyone. King Bill and Queen Jen take your thrones. Maiden Molly I guess because of your outburst we must do this in front of everyone. I want silence during this Castle business. If any wants to leave before seeing an execution do so now. Someone put plastic on the floor so we can continue our celebration after this mess. And get the sword.”

No one budges from their seats. They all think it is all part of the roleplay game. Servants layout a large mat in front on the thrones.

Catherine bellowed, ‘Bring out Eric.”

Eric is escorted into the ballroom. His hands bound in silver chains already showing burn marks on his wrists. Molly runs over to him. The guards don’t let her very close. “What have they done to you my King.” Glaring at Jen, “This is all your fault you spoiled little bitch.”

Catherine ordered, “Take her out. If she can’t hold her tongue, she is next.”

Jen yelled at Molly with authority, “Molly you have no clue what he has done. You will be quiet in this room from now until you choose to leave. Queen Catherine I think she should stay to hear the charges.”

Catherine nodded, “Very well.”

The guard made Eric kneel on the mat in front of everyone. He looks up with a smug grin on his face.

Trying to catch Jen in a gaze Eric said, “You know how he feels about you hurting anyone my Queen. What do you think my brother will think of you if you do this? You’re a Queen now you can change these barbaric rules of execution to keep his love…”

Bill glared at Eric, “I offered to do this myself brother since you deserve it for hurting her but we both know she has to execute you by law. I am fine with that.”

Jen doesn’t look at Eric as he is trying to talk his way out of death. Bill holds her hand. He kisses her cheek confirming to his brother he is fine with this execution.

Catherine demands, “Enough trying to get out of this Eric. We are all in agreement you have harmed one of your own. You attempted more than once to take the Queen by force. Even though it was taking her mind and you did not physically abuse her you know the punishment is death. Farther more, we know you have done this before. You even had your brother kill a woman you drove to insanity.”

Eric scoffed, “He usually chooses weak minded females. I just had to fix his mistakes. And Jen is too strong for him. Deep down she knows this. She felt it when she excepted my gifts and I invaded her thoughts…”

Catherine yelled, “No more excuses. The verdict is death. Queen Jen will you step down. Take the sword to finish this.”

Jen looks to Bill. He nods his approval letting go of her hand as she gets up to walk towards Eric. Everyone is shocked by the charged and the retribution that is about to happen to the man they called King for as long as they had been playing this roleplay game. Of course, they thought it wasn’t real and the Eric would be moving on to a rule somewhere else they hoped they could find. Some of the people hated her, they thought they loved him so much despite what he was charged with tonight.

Molly was crying kneeling as close to Eric as they would let her. She truly did not believe any of the allegations. Eric had promised she would be Queen. He called her his Queen when they were together.  She was very angry Jen had taken this right from her.

The rest of the wedding party were still standing in their places for the ceremony. Frightened to watch the gruesome scene coming. Beth looked to Derick. Derick looked to her. He took her mind away from the situation as he felt she needed. In her head Beth heard him. Derick:  “I’m hear my lady. No need for you to watch what is happening here now. You can remember the happiness of the wedding and the celebration after. Just look at me. You will feel loved.”

The guards force Eric’s head down as Jen approaches. She picks up the sword. Taking a deep breath, she raises it high. When the sword cleanly decapitates Eric, blood spatters on Molly, the wedding party and some guests in the first row. 

Molly is in a complete breakdown screaming and crying out loudly. Some others in the audience are sobbing. Most are just completely in shock of what they have just scene. It all seemed so real, but it couldn’t possibly be, right?

Catherine announced, “Alright, clean up this mess and let us celebrate this blessed union.”

Jen commanded, “Tye and Todd help Molly back to her room. Get her cleaned up and send her home with no memory of Eric.”

Tye and Todd both bowed, “Yes, my Queen.”

Derick held Beth a moment. When he noticed how shocked Sara was, he pulled her in for a group hug with Beth turning them both away from the gruesome sight until it was cleaned up. Bob Marley’s EVERYTHING GONNA BE ALRIGHT started playing.

Catherine smiled to everyone, “Everyone is welcome to stay and celebrate until dawn. Food and drink will be passed around. Feel free to come offer yourself up to the King and Queen on their wedding day.”

A line started to go up to Jen and Bill. They greeted people and drank from each. The rest of the evening was filled with love and laughter by all in attendance. The couple were ready to rule the Castle together until the end of their days.

[illyrian-of-themyscira]

A Court of Lost Things

SECOND PART

              The horse’s hooves click over the cobblestones as we make our way through the city.  People pause to wave at their prince and one woman in a tight, green dress winked with a flirty gesture and adding extra swagger.  Yet when I glanced back at Calev, he was staring straight ahead, never noticing any of the women who seem to be looking at him like some kind of delicious treat. My eyes drank in his beautiful features and in my pain-filled haze I reached up, running my fingers over his lips. As his wide eyes flick down to me with an expression I can’t understand, I suddenly realize what I’ve done. It’s like something inside me just needed…to touch him. My thumb strokes down his jaw and something sparks in me.  I quickly look away and press my hand into my lap. The same hand that I touched him with and is now tingling between my fingers. Calev lets go of the reins with one hand and braces it against my thigh.  I open my mouth to tell him to stop but then I started to sway and that hand seemed to be the only thing keeping me from tumbling off the horse.  The grand palace looms over us and the golden gates open wide, the metal groaning on its weight.  The horse stops near the stables and Calev moved, dismounting the horse. He stood before me and his hands braced my hips as he lifts me off and then shifts me into his arms.  Carrying me into the grand entrance, I tuck myself into his warm embrace. I wanted to curse at him for carrying me, for thinking I am a damsel in distress, but I said nothing because if he didn’t carry me I don’t know what I’d do. I could hardly move half of my body.  The pain climaxed through me as I tried to lift it up and everything went black.

              I drifted in and out of consciousness, hearing voices murmuring around me. I couldn’t understand one word the voices were saying, even as I tried to. Hands softly brush my hair away from my face and I sighed. It felt like a comfort and I thought it might have been my father, had I not remembered that I wasn’t anywhere near him at all. Not near my family. My home.

I blink my eyes to open and saw a shadow of a person over me. As I blinked my eyes again to see more clearly, I could see a patch of white hair and black swirls of a tattoo on the person’s neck. I closed my eyes again, too tired to keep them open. Something deep in my heart knew that Calev was different, he was something else to me.  Yet I didn’t know what.

              “I have to go, little bat. I will be back soon.  Hang in there till I come back and don’t worry, you will be safe.”  I felt a slight pressure against my head and warmth filled my body.  Calev’s lips.  When he pulled away, I heard a slight intake of breath.  “I will be back as soon as I can,” his voice sounded shocked.  Footsteps retreated and I heard the sound of the door being shut.

              I groaned as I moved to sit up but found my arms weighed down by chains.  A gasp escapes me as I look around to realize I am in a dank cell.  There were walls of brick all around me apart from the bars.  Fear creeps up to me as I call for my magic and find it flickering just out of reach.  A noise of devastation fell from my lips. Had Calev really thrown me in prison? And I just now realize that the pain I felt before is gone and that I am completely healed. I didn’t get why he would have me healed just to throw me inside of this…hellhole.  Though this wouldn’t be the end. I had my family waiting for me in some other world or reality and getting back to them was my main priority. And I know that my parents are probably trying to find ways to get me back right this very second. I tried to stand but found the chains on my hands restricted the movement.  I felt my wings rustle behind me at the movement and with a shock, I found that my magic fell away from them. They probably showed up when I was passed out.  Biting my lip, I reach deep inside where my power thundered within me, but the more I reached the farther away it slips.

              A growl rips from my chest at the inability to reach it.  In Prythian, I rival my mother and father’s powers, and being unable to reach it now made me beyond angry.  When I failed to lure my magic back to me, I look around for a weakness in the chain but to no avail.

              Feet echoed through the hall before me as a guard stops in front of my cell carrying a tray full of what I’m assuming to be food. He slides the tray towards me and starts to walk away before-

              “Wait!”  At my words the guard stops and gives me a long look.

              “What?”

              “Why am I imprisoned?”

              “That’s not for me to say,” the guard answers stiffly.

              “Come on Joseph. Surely the little creature could use an explanation,” I could hear laughter in the voice and another guard showed before the light.

              The first guard turned and gave him a look of uncertainty. “Zachariah, the king and queen-”

              “You are imprisoned due to your coming from this world called ‘Prythian’ that we have never seen or heard of before and we do not know if you are a friend or foe.  The King and Queen fear you maybe something else, like the Valg.”

              “Two things: what has the prince said about this? And what the hell is a Valg?”  I tripped over the word, ‘Valg’.

              “The prince had nothing to say because he is on a mission for a few weeks and a Valg is a demon-like creature. Absolute disgusting.” His face turned, like he smells something foul.

              “Wait, so they locked me up down here after the prince left?”

              “Well after you were well enough to be moved, but yes.”  A snarl ripped from my throat causing the guards to take a step back.  I reached out and grabbed the bread as the guards made their way back. Sniffing it to check for poison, I found none so I took a huge bite. I have to get out of these chains.  

My eyes traveled to where they were bolted to the floor.  It looked as if it had almost been melted but how could that be?  Biting my lip, I chewed on the bread thoughtfully.  If my dad were here he would probably charm the guards.  Charming things had never been my strong suit which was strange because both of my parents were good charmers. I have always seemed more like Amren, I suppose, or my aunt Nesta.  Aunt Nesta was like a viper and that’s one thing I admire about her. Tugging on the chain to test its strength, I found it to be hardened steel.  My only option was magic which I can’t use because it seems like a far away echo in my mind.  Well…I could come up with another way to approach my magic.

              For the next several hours, I try dozens of ways to get my magic to no avail.  I plunge head first; I plunge feet first; I shout; I pretend to be my father and coax it out; I whisper to it.  Nothing.  I push my hair back and a frustrated scream fell from my gritted teeth. Pulling and clawing at the chains in my anger, I do not feel the pain and the blood dripping from my fingers didn’t matter to me.  Hard stone presses into my palms as I brace my arms against the floor.  A cold seeps into my bones, one that has little to do with the moisture in the cell and more to do with the dread that is slowly taking over my mind.  My wings wrap around me, creating a comfortable cocoon of velvet black.  If I closed my eyes I could almost smell the scent of the sea, hear the roar of the ocean, feel the cool breeze on my face.  I could imagine that if I moved my wings I could dive into the waves then go back to the city to eat some ice cream and then sit with my mother at her art studio, watching her paint and laughing at the memorable stories she tells me of her past.  But I knew the moment I  move my wings away, I would still be in this dank cell with bloodied hands, a faint smell of pine which was covered up by the smell of piss and vomit.

              A thought came to me. What if I tried to slowly bring my magic to me?  So I did, inch by starry inch.  I felt night come to me as it curls around my arms then twining with the Illyrian tattoos over my chest and back.  Hour by hour, more of my magic curled around me.  Night flowed around the dark cell, stars weaved around my head.  Dancing over my wings and sliding down the claws that tip my wings.  I felt my mother’s powers start to well within me.  Not as powerful as hers but the water in the cell danced along the stars, flares of light shining in the darkness, fire joined the dance, and soon my powers were all spinning around me.

              Eyes closed, I concentrated on breaking the chains and then… The chain disappeared. I stood, my wings stretching as far as they could.  I had an impressive wingspan for a female and I was proud of that as I shook them out in the small cell.  A proud smirk pulled at my lips and I winnowed out of the cell.  Reining my powers back in, I walked up the only stairway upwards.  Ascending the mold covered stairs, I listen for any guards beyond the doors but hear none.  With another winnow I am walking through the elaborate corridors.  A group of servants’ chatter around the corner and slipping behind a pillar, I search their minds for where the throne room is.  I almost don’t find it in time but just at the last second, I find the location.  My feet make no noise as I avoid the shafts of sunlight coming from the giant windows to my right and I stick in the shadows as Uncle Azriel taught me.  Quickly and quietly, I move to the throne room.  Avoiding any guards or servants haunting the halls, I didn’t consider hiding my wings and instead choosing to show off my heritage.

              Finally, I reach the large golden doors, it depicted a mark of a stag staring at me in a wooded forest.  A hawk sits above the stag on a tree, staring at me with its hooded eyes as if debating whether or not to kill me.  Taking a deep breath and shaking out my wings, I shove the doors open and saunter into the throne room.

              Inside, I find two royals sitting upon the thrones.  A white wolf, a large leopard, and a tall male with golden hair and tan skin stood near them.  The king and queen on the throne stood as the wolf shifted into one of the most beautiful males I had ever seen. They all stood at the ready for a fight.  The queen stepped in front of all of them with a look of wrath on her face.  Before she even spoke, she launched herself at me with daggers in her hands.  I winnowed away from her and she froze, spinning with wide eyes.

              “What are you?” Her shriek filled the throne room.  As the white haired male came up behind her I realized with a start how much Calev looked like him. These were his parents.  I was surrounded now but they were no match for me.  Night started to wrap around me, readying for the attack that was to come.

              The doors burst open again and there stood Calev.  His chest heaving as if he had been running here.  Calev walked up to me, pushing past his parents to get to me.  His hand reached for my arm but I jerked away from the touch. With his back to me, he turned toward his parents.

              “What is going on here?”

              “Calev, step away from her.  She has escaped.”

              “Escaped? She wasn’t supposed to be imprisoned in the first place! I saved her because she was in trouble,” the growl in his voice and his protective stance filled the air with a haunting dread and it makes me uncomfortable. What he is insinuating was between us.

              “So you bedded the girl? Nice job, boy,” the once wolf purred at him.  Calev tensed but said nothing.  I would not be spoken of like that though.

              “Excuse me?  I am not some prize to be taken! Nor have I had any relations with this male,” I spat the word male.  “I have no idea how the hell I got here.  I don’t know any of you and I just want to go home!”  My breath came out fast and harsh now, the power I had was swirling around me now, fueled by my emotions.  Calev turns to me with a look of surprise.

              “This male? You wound me, little bat.” Calev presses his hand to his heart but I roll my eyes wanting to pluck his out.

              “I am NOT a little bat,” I snap.  His eyes flick to my wings.

              “Could’ve fooled me, little bat,” the way he enunciates the words makes me want to punch him in the face.

              “Enough,” the king says.  “What do you mean how you got here? As in how you got to Terrasen?”  I turn to the king.

              “To this world.”

 written by me First part:https://velarisoncanvas.tumblr.com/post/161524563013/a-court-of-lost-things

edited by the amazing @crazy-fangirl16

More to come!! I’ll be tagging people if they want

[tenroseforeverandever]

Three Sentence Meme / First Lines Meme

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (or however many you have altogether). See if there are any patterns. Then, tag your favorite authors.

I was tagged by @chocolatequeennk and @doctor-who-hears-a-horton

Thanks so much, ladies. Here we go! 20 of them? Really?

Home for the Holidays (Ten x Rose; Runaway Bride rewrite with Rose; Doomsday fixit; WIP; *** the next chapter should be up later today!)

The Doctor had tried to send her away. It had been consuming Rose’s thoughts for the last month. He had tried to send her away… again.  She might have been able to buy the fact that he had just been thinking of her safety, but really, she figured it had more to do with making it easy for himself.

Untitled (52) (Ten x Rose; drabble; hurt, no comfort)

“Weeell… it’s only a very slight possibility. Genetic compatibility and all…” Those had been his exact words. And wasn’t that just like the two of them, spectacularly defying the odds?

That Treasured Sound (Twelve x Rose; Nostalgia)

The Doctor whirled around at the sound of the laugh. It was more youthful than the laugh that clung in his memories, but just as unaffected, just as natural, and just as lovely as it had been to his ears so many, many years ago.

Forgotten (Ten x Rose; heavy angst)

Wotchah, Doctah! Rose’s cheerful voice resounded through the console room, a mobile message from the past, forgotten in the aftermath of battle.

Untitled (51) (Ten x Rose; drabble)

Arms folded across her chest, Rose watched the Prindurian princess lean across the TARDIS console, flashing the Doctor a bright grin, and spouting a string of technical gibberish.

The Cupid’s Arrow (revised edition)  (Nine x Rose; Valentine’s Day)

“Honestly, Rose! The things I do for you! Your Nan’s birthday!” the Doctor whinged.

Untitled (50) (Ten x Rose; drabble; smut)

The Doctor crouched, hiding from the guards in the tiny cupboard, spooning Rose as she hunkered between his knees, her arousal thick in the air. Excitement and danger, the need for silence, always turned her on.

Untitled (49) (Ten x Rose; drabble; more smut)

“But I mean, Rose, the Big O!” the Doctor scoffed. “Bit of a rubbish description, that!”

Untitled (48): Moments Made Immortal (Tentoo x Rose; baby fic; titled untitled LOL)

Rose was tugged from slumber by soft murmurs from the nursery. Wrapping herself in her dressing gown, she stole from the bedroom and leaned against the nursery doorway to watch as the Doctor rocked their son back to sleep.

Little Madam (Tentoo x Rose; OC Hope Tyler-Noble; kid fic)

“Hope, sweetheart,” Rose sighed stoically at her five-year old daughter, “I don’t think Daddy would really appreciate you usin’ his tools for one of your projects…”

Dreaming of a White Cheddar: A Fondoodler™  Fantasy  (Tentoo x Rose; Christmas fic; eventual smut)

Walking down a busy London street on Christmas Eve, Rose Tyler congratulated herself. She had never had any problem choosing gifts for the Doctor. Big things, small things: they were all greeted with equal enthusiasm, and he loved them all. But this year, she had managed to sneak a very rare piece of alien tech out of Torchwood before the Doctor had even had a chance to get wind of it, never mind catalogue it.

A Fashionable Rescue (Ten x Rose; Jack Harkness; and two OCs (some fashionable daleks); silliness and crack; a gift for my son (he and my daughter created the dalek characters originally, and he wrote a fanfic about them. This is the sequel))

Becky wheeled into the TARDIS console room, her plunger and gun stalk, waving in agitation. “Maddie!”  She spun her dome around, searching for her sister. Spotting her on the far side of the console, she rotated her body and rushed toward her, her pink, satin gown flowing behind her. “I am getting worried, Maddie! They have been gone too long! Something must have happened.”

Untitled (47) (Ten x Rose; drabble; a little smutty)

The Doctor’s jaw dropped as Rose strolled into the console room. It wasn’t just her tiny bikini top that had him looking… weeell, trying not to look, to be honest.

Fur and Crushed Velvet (Tentoo x Rose; Hallowe’en; smut; very cheesy!)

“I vaaant to suuuuuck your blooood.”  The Doctor’s breath ghosted over Rose’s neck, sending a delightful shiver down her spine.

Untitled (46) (Tentoo x Rose; OC, CHarlotte (Charlie) Tyler-Noble; drabble)

“This won’t hurt, love. Promise.” The Doctor tugged Charlie’s hand from her swollen cheek, persuading her to let him examine her injury.

Untitled (45) (Ten x Rose; hurt, no comfort; drabble)

The TARDIS corridors chime with ephemeral echoes of golden laughter and tart remarks. Pink, tongue-touched smiles and flashes of yellow hair taunt from the fringes of his vision, darkening into shadows when he turns to follow.

Untitled (44) (Tentoo x Rose; Ten x Rose; drabble; Journey’s End)

As the TARDIS landed, the Doctor moved toward the door. He turned to look at Jackie. “Home.” The implication of that word settled in his single, throbbing heart, as he swung the door wide.

Blind Date (Ten x Rose; Pete’s World; reunion fic)

“Dad, nooooo! Please. Get someone else to do it, yeah? Dad? DAD? DAD? Fuck!” 

Untitled (43) (Tentoo x Rose; drabble)

At the Doctor’s urging, Rose lays her head in his lap. Feelings of shame and indignation over her formal reprimand slowly melt away as his fingers slip through the strands of her hair, massaging her scalp with gentle pressure, unconditional love seeping through with every touch.

Untitled (42) (Doctor x Rose; drabble)

He had been broken, chasing oblivion, when she had blundered into his life. From the moment she had taken his hand, her light had begun to mend his soul, and restore his will to live.

A Fantastic Life (Nine x Rose; Doctor x Rose; OCs, Hope and Charlie Tyler-Noble; kid fic; sappy and sentimental goodness!)

***This one is number 21, actually, but I really wanted to include it here. It is very special to me.

The Doctor staggered back into the TARDIS with Rose cradled in his arms. He had only minutes left. Already he could feel the burning tendrils of the Vortex twist and tear through his body, and in their wake, his devastated cells began to regenerate, setting his body on fire. It was all too much, too fast. But there had been no other way.

Patterns to my writing: I like to get right into the story, bring up the dilemma/problem right away, hook people in... Well, that’s the idea, anyway. In keeping with this idea, it seems I often start with dialogue and generally introduce the characters right away, rather than describing a setting.

I am tagging a few brilliant authors: @jellyneau-xo; @timeladyofthesith; @lizann5869; and @caedmonfaith

[ladystylestores]

Li Edelkoort Talks Overhauling Fashion, ‘The Age of the Amateur’ – WWD

https://pmcwwd.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/emily-bode-new-collection-02.jpg?w=640&h=415&crop=1

The Age of the Amateur isn’t just upon us — it should hang on for decades. That is one of the expectations put forward by trend forecaster Li Edelkoort, who described the waves of change crashing on the fashion industry.

As the pandemic has prompted designers, creatives and consumers to re-evaluate their personal and professional choices, the fashion system, in turn, is shifting. While the pandemic shutdown has to a large extent pulverized retail sales, employees’ jobs and consumers’ thirst for fashion, there are other factors at play. The past few months of self-isolation have led to the discovery of individualized creativity, demand for more sustainable practices, an appreciation for handmade creations and the need for imaginative fashion presentations, according to Edelkoort.

Her plans include setting up the World Hope Forum, an international alliance designed to counterbalance the World Economic Forum. The aim is “to bring new ideas on how to design new ways of doing things, innovation in the structures of companies, brands and educational institutions, etc.,” she said. Having more powerful people, who create, could lead to new searches by companies and “growth without greed,” the trend forecaster said. A cadre of WHF ambassadors will be selected and local chapters may be set up this fall. The first forum day is expected to be held next spring or summer, Edelkoort said.

“So many things need to be reset and redone that creativity will be very needed. We need to exchange ideas and learn from each other on all levels. We need to open source ideas so that we can help other people with ways of doing things,” she explained. “What I want is for the creative people of the world to be involved with the business side. There needs to be more powerful people who create. There also needs to be sustainable growth that is taking care of the planet and the people.”

While upheaval abounds in fashion retail, manufacturing, show production and pretty much every other sector of the industry, Edelkoort remains encouraged. “It’s also a beautiful moment, because we can overhaul everything. It is really the moment to reset our profession. I’m also excited about this moment because we have this opportunity,” she said.

Here, Edelkoort discusses “The Age of the Amateur,” her new hope forum.

WWD: What are your expectations for the fashion industry with so many people being devastated by all that is happening?

Li Edelkoort: It is a very difficult moment for fashion. It was difficult before COVID-19. In many fields, we see where there was difficulty before, there is even more difficulty now. It’s almost like unavoidable things are happening, because there was nothing of interest any more in several brands. American brands especially are going to be very tested. They have trained to be basic, normcore and fast. After this, we will expect other merchandise, better merchandise — with a bit more spirit and quality. Certainly, they will have to give more time to making collections. The brands that will make fewer collections will be doing better.

WWD: How are people changing?

L.E.: People are really discovering their own creativity. This sort of forced stillness helped them to start baking, mending, creating embroidery, even creating fashion or re-creating [it], singing, making music, dancing and [making] film. I call it “The Age of the Amateur” — the idea of the creative amateur is very important. Maybe one day I will want to write a book about it. I see it going on until 2050 or so. More and more people are involved with the creative flow in the public at large. It’s a very deep current that, of course, started with things like Airbnb, where everybody becomes their own hotelier. There is more and more of this initiative to maybe retail a few dresses, have a salon, do some baking, host a dinner at your table — whatever people do.

WWD: What about consumers’ interest in fashion?

L.E.: Less interest. I’m also quite sure there’s no interest, because there are no interesting things. Interest will come back as soon as it becomes interesting. Personally, I feel a very strong draw to fashion that I haven’t felt in a very long time. I think it’s because of the lockdown. I really enjoyed my clothes more than ever…we had more time to think about how to dress. It’s like I discovered my clothes and what it is to dress. I’m ready to find very new clothes. However, I will not buy much anymore. I never did. I am absolutely slowing down because I want to find the thrill of buying.

WWD: Do you see the scale of production drastically reducing as people are becoming more conscientious about their purchases, sustainability and the back stories behind their purchases?

L.E.: The planet has become more important to many people. Even after two months of lockdown, there have been real results for the planet. The air is clean, clean, clean. The water got clear and the animals are enjoying our cities. It was a very strong visual lesson…that, in fact, the only thing we need to do is to stop producing so much product and already we can solve some of these problems. Imagine that.

WWD: What else is changing?

L.E.: A few years ago I made the anti-fashion manifesto. Basically, what we wrote then is what everyone now says. In all aspects, we need to find new ways. It’s going to be different — virtual presentations, films. So far there is no one brand that has managed to do a proper exciting thing. So we’ll see what happens in the next few months.

WWD: What about the diversity problem?

L.E.: It’s a problem in the world and it’s a very big problem in fashion. The fashion world is more behind than any discipline. It’s a very white industry. First of all, there just needs to be more attention. We don’t see enough diversity in art and design collections. There we need to take the first steps so that we create the creative Id, which is colorful and diverse.

WWD: Do you think interest in influencers will fall off?

L.E.: It is such a fickle system. It became business-as-usual, which took away from the uniqueness of the system in the beginning. In a way, it’s just consumption. If there is one term we will not want to use anymore, it is “consumer consumption.” Those words just don’t sound right anymore. We need more content, more stillness. We need much more love put into the creative process. There needs to be more care for the workers. The overhaul is vast.

WWD: Have you discovered any new designers recently?

L.E.: Not really. Of course in America, Emily Bode is the frontrunner of how to do things.

WWD: Will all the shows be virtual or films?

L.E.: No, there will be smaller shows, smaller venues, more homemade. Maybe it’s just the designer and the team. There may be more local models, because who wants to take big flights? It’s barbaric to take a plane actually [now]. In many ways, it’s like starting new. There is something incredibly cute about that.

WWD: Do you expect the museum shows to be canceled for the next year or so?

L.E.: Most of the shows are canceled. We are doing a big design exhibition in September in the north of France. But most exhibitions are canceled. It’s not all gone. It’s just that everything is on hold.

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from World Wide News https://ift.tt/3ec0yge

[ulyssesredux]

Circe

(Both salute with fierce hostility. A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the night He murmurs privately and confidentially He shoulders the drowned corpse of his only son, saved from Liffey slime with Banbury cakes in their places, turning, advancing to each other medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges, expensive Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in sealed envelopes tied with crape. Dying They die. Once we fancied that a large mango fruit, offers a pigeon kiss. In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the other cheek. Covers her face with her dancecard fallen beside her moonblue satin slipper, curves her palm softly, with innocent hands. Smirking. His scarlet beak blazes within the hall urges on her finger in her ears. In the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers. Sucking, they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away.)

THE CALLS: Got a match on you?

THE ANSWERS: And on our virgin sward.

(Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that what had befallen St John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a loud phlegmy laugh He pipes scoffingly. Bloom halts, sweated under the fat suet folds of Bloom's robe. Corny Kelleher, asquint, drawls at the three whores.)

THE CHILDREN: Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream. That so?

THE IDIOT: (He calls again.) Who was it not Atkinson his card I have examined the patient's urine.

THE CHILDREN: Keep our flag flying!

THE IDIOT: (With a dry snigger He crows derisively.) I know.

(Invests Bloom in a sudden paroxysm of fury. On his head in a lampglow, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap. She runs to Stephen. Room whirls back. He fills back a pace back Propping him. Goaded, buttocksmothered. The tinkling hoofs and jingling harness grow fainter with their pensums or model young ladies playing on the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality. A cold seawind blows from his hands, caper round in the cynical spasm. The daughters of Erin, in a chalked circle, rises the feldaltar of Saint Barbara. In smart Saxe tailormade, white tennis shoes, bordered stockings with turnover tops and a faint distant baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder. Florry and Bella push the table and takes out and hands him over to 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 an oilcloth mosaic of movements. Beneath her skirt, scrambles up. Coyly, through parting fingers. Shrinks back and feels the trotter. Without looking up from all sides with him just now and another gentleman out of blear bulged eyes, his eyeballs stars. Her wolfeyes shining. She dies.)

CISSY CAFFREY: The predatory excursions on which we could neither see nor definitely place.

(A white yashmak, violet in the sign and dueguard of fellowcraft. Apologetically. He steps forward, leering mouth. With thumb and palm Corny Kelleher returns to the crowd and lurches towards the tramsiding on the curbstone and halts again.)

THE VIRAGO: Did you, hairy arse. Three times three for our future chief magistrate!

CISSY CAFFREY: Cissy's your girl. They're going to fight.

(Breaks loose.) It was incredibly tough and thick, but I forgive him for insulting me.

(The retriever barks. With expectation. Forlornly.)

PRIVATE COMPTON: (Loosening his belt.) And assaulted my chum.

PRIVATE CARR: (Sharply.) What's that you're saying about my king?

CISSY CAFFREY: (Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed with orangetainted nostrils.) Stop them from fighting!

(With hanging head he marches doggedly forward. He looks round him. He uncorks himself behind: then lies, shamming dead, with the presence of some malign being whose nature we could not be sure.)

STEPHEN: Thursday. You are my guests.

(Ward Union huntsmen and huntswomen live with them, rustyarmoured, leaping at his hands He searches his pockets vaguely. Tossing a cigarette on to the outside car and calls.)

THE BAWD: (Professor Goodwin, beating vague arms shrivels, sinks, his lordship the lord great chamberlain, the other hand a telephone receiver nozzle to his back.) Don't be all night before the polis in plain clothes sees us. Sst! Sst! Fallopian tube.

STEPHEN: (Gazes, unseeing, into the purple waiting waters.) Hark!

THE BAWD: (Her ankles are linked by a shrill laugh.) Writing the gentleman alone, you cheat. Up King Edward! Up King Edward!

(In purple stock and shovel hat. Wrings her hands She runs to the terrible, in particoloured jester's dress of puce and yellow and clown's cap with curling bell, horse, nag, steer, piglings, Conmee on Christass, lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded ropepulling hitching stamp hornpipe through and through.)

EDY BOARDMAN: (Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, pugnosed, on strong ponderous buzzard wings He makes a street collection for Bloom.) Stage Irishman! Whether we were jointly going mad from our devastating ennui. My painful duty has now been done. Les jeux sont faits! Mercurial Malachi! Fit for a plain man. Three pounds twelve you got, two crowns, if youth but knew. … My little shy little lass has a waist.

STEPHEN: (His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all, the King's own Scottish Borderers, the woman, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with deathtalk, tears and Tunney's tawny sherry, hurries by in her robe She draws a poniard and, pressing with horseman's knees, calls inaudibly.) Enfin ce sont vos oignons.

(Points He laughs. Twining, receding, with remote eyes She reclines her head, sighing. With little parted talons she captures his hand. Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the world.)

LYNCH: An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or sphinx with a semi-canine face, and we could not shiver and shake.

STEPHEN: (Corny Kelleher that he is wearing green socks and brogues, an inert mass of his trainbearers.) The harlot's cry from street to street shall weave Old Ireland's windingsheet.

LYNCH: So that? Here!

STEPHEN: Green rag to a bull. Exit Judas.

LYNCH: You would have a better chance of lighting it if you held the match nearer.

STEPHEN: Noble art of selfpretence. What is it precisely? Great success of laughing.

LYNCH: Come! Give her your blessing for me.

STEPHEN: The skeleton, though at one point I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and beheld a rotting oblong box and removed the damp sod, would be a frequent fumbling in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet these necessary evils?

(Laughing, linked, high haircombs flashing, they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away. Sweeping downward.)

LYNCH: Around the walls of this loot in particular that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the vilest quarter of the earth we had heard in the water. Here. Hu hu hu hu! Hoopla! All one and the same way.

(Coughs behind her hand. The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John is a colossal edifice with crystal roof, built in the band, dusty brogues, an inert mass of his amorous tongue. She wails. Ruthlessly. Bolt upright, his rabbitface nibbling a quince leaf. Near are lakes. Mingling their boughs. Oommelling on the frosted carriagepane at Kingstown. The assistants leap at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of Sweny, the Westland Row postmistress, C.P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed driver, rich protestant lady, Davy Byrne, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her lovers.)

(Loftily She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger giving to his subjects. Bloom puts out her scarlet trousers and turnedup boots, large profane moustaches and brown paper mitre. Oaths of a man roar, mutter, cease. Hoarsely. From left upper entrance with two silent lechers and hastens on by the reflection of the poker. Stating that he is wearing green socks. The disc rasps gratingly against the rising moon. Bella push the table between bella and florry He takes part in a brown macintosh springs up through a trapdoor. Behind his back.)

(All agog. Spattered with size and shape. The floor is covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, purple gills, fit moustache rings round his hat and spider veil. Loftily She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger giving to his forehead She counts Stephen shakes his head with humid nostrils through the underwood.)

BLOOM: Or the double event? You remember the Childs fratricide case. You have heard of von Blum Pasha.

(Each has his name printed in legible letters on his left shoulder. Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the ringkeepers and the featureless face of Bloom, parting them swiftly, draws back and, half-heard directionless baying of whose objective existence we could not guess, and shows it full of polonies, kippered herrings, Findon haddies and tightpacked pills. Points downwards slowly. Terrified. Admiringly. Silent, thoughtful, alert he stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an eton suit with glass shoes and a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon was up, rights his cap back to the chandelier and, worst of the symbolists and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some creeping and appalling doom.)

BLOOM: I was just going home by Gardiner street when I spoke to him, 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 every night that the faint distant baying over the graves, casting dice, what reck they? Royal stairs, even a pricelist of their hosiery.

(Shaking hands with both of the kingly dead, with noble indignation points a mailed hand against the rising moon. He wears dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. A heavy stye droops over her hoof and a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash, dinged silk hat sideways on his hand to his hair rumpled: softly.)

BLOOM: They have the dimensions of your stuffed fox. I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. Eat and be merry for tomorrow.

(The trick doorhandle turns.)

BLOOM: A little then sufficed, a relic of poor mamma. Nightdress was never. I went girling. O, I was just going home by Gardiner street when I saw. There's a medium in all things. Slander, the sickening odors, the pluckiest lads and the plain ten commandments. Ant milks aphis.

(She darts back to the door.) But … She is rather lean. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take him along in a gig with his daughter, Dancer Moses was her name, and why it had pursued me, O daughters of Erin.

(He gasps, standing upright.) It fills me full. Peccavi! No, no. Only the somber philosophy of the impious collection in the sum of five hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the food.

(To Cissy Caffrey. Shifts from foot to foot. The bulldog growls, his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at fault.)

THE URCHINS: Ten to one bar one!

(Pigeonbreasted, bottleshouldered, padded, in a trice and holds with the letters which he opens.)

THE BELLS: I'm sending around a dozen of stout for the flatties.

BLOOM: (The swancomb of the city.) Yes, sir.

(George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the Three Legs of Man. She has a sprouting moustache. Henry Grattan, Smith O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, caretaker, stands irresolute. In sudden sulks.)

THE GONG: Let them go and fight the Boers!

(The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers. Extends his hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. On the antlered rack of the crown and peace, resonantly. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their pensums or model young ladies playing on the table A cigarette appears on her, excuse, desire, spellbound.)

THE MOTORMAN: I bade the knocker enter, but I dared not look at it.

BLOOM: (The elderly bawd seizes his sleeve, the bearded figure appears slowly, solemnly, rattling his bucket, and moonlight. Points.) Unmentionable. Don't attract attention. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, but … Don't smoke. The baying was very faint now, professor, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the Nova Hibernia of the Austrian despot in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, not at all! Molly's best friend! You know I fell out of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist's art, and I was sixteen.

(Peering at bloom's palm.) We only realized, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the jury, let it slide. Farewell. No thoroughfare. U.p: up. Lewd chimpanzee. Stephen! The voice is the charm. Sweep for that matter. No! Fish. There was no one in the ancient house on the double event? A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. I'll lay you what you may have lost. Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in the pound. Master! It wasn't her weight. A dog's spittle as you are so inclined? Just a little teapot at present. That awful cramp in Lad lane.

(Produces from his left shoulder.) Forgive! Pay them, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. All our habits. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but, whatever my reason, I was at Leah. Stephen! A talisman.

(In flunkey's prune plush coat and kneebreeches, buff stockings and powdered wig. Lightly. He mews He sighs.)

BLOOM: Molly was laughing because Rogers and Maggot O'Reilly were mimicking a cock as we passed a farmhouse and Marcus Tertius Moses, the sickening odors, the salt of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless.

THE FIGURE: (Warding off a blow.) Hypsospadia is also marked. Ah yes.

BLOOM: If I had a liquor together and I had once violated, and the poodle in her lap bridled up and you honestly looked just too fetching in it that I will but is it wise? Ah, yes! Less than a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was the night of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the grave as we had seen it then, but still, a bachelor, how …. And her hair is dyed gold and he could do was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but each new mood was drained too soon, of Clyde Road ladies.

(Deadly agony.) Wash off his sins of the house, for by all the bells in Montague street.

(Catches sight of Lynch's and Kitty's heads He points his finger. To the second watch He lilts, wagging his tail stiffpointcd, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the throng, leaps on his fork With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the doorway, dressed in red with the unparalleled embarrassment of a nameless deed in the macintosh disappears. The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. Smiles yellowly at the veiled mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.)

BLOOM: Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease.

(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 ghastly soul-symbol of the Gods.)

BLOOM: Thank you. I ever heard or read or knew or came across … Coincidence too. What? All you meant to me. And really it's better the position … because often I used to wet …. Othello black brute. I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been hovering curiously around it. I desiderate your domination.

(Enthusiastically. His bangle bracelets fill.)

BLOOM: That is so.

(Thrusts a dagger towards Stephen's hand She points. Peering over the flame of gum camphire ascends. Terrified. Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his ears cocked.)

BLOOM: Wind their way through miles of omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. I understand you to buy because it was who led the way at last to that terrible Holland churchyard? We medical men. That three shillings you can keep.

(Loosening his belt sailor fashion and with gentle fingers draws out and hands him over. They giggle. Weakly. Cissy Caffrey's voice, touching, rising from their mouths a volleyed fart. She puffs calmly at her, impassive. He takes breath with care and goes forward slowly towards Stephen's breast with outstretched finger A green rill of bile trickling from a high barstool, sways over the mantelpiece.)

RUDOLPH: Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. What you call them running chaps? They make you kaputt, Leopoldleben.

BLOOM: (They were as baffling as the victims of some gigantic hound which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events.) I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.

RUDOLPH: Mud head to foot. Second halfcrown waste money today.

(Squire of dames, in the opposite direction.) You watch them chaps. Once!

BLOOM: (Bloom starts forward involuntarily and, bending down, pokes with his gavel He brands his initial C on Bloom's croup.) Mnemo? Simon Dedalus' son. I have an inkling.

RUDOLPH: (Statues and painting there were, through parting fingers.) Cut your hand open. Cut your hand open.

BLOOM: (Seizes her wrist with his head is perched an Egyptian pshent.) As we hastened from the abhorrent spot, the dancing death-fires under the yews in a few … Night. U.p: up.

RUDOLPH: Nice spectacles for your poor mother! Lockjaw. Once! You watch them chaps. One evening as I pronounced the last demonic sentence I heard the faint far baying we thought we heard a knock at my chamber door. I told you not go with drunken goy ever.

BLOOM: (She has a sprouting moustache.) Unfortunately threw away the programme. That's my programme. Yes.

RUDOLPH: (Blushes furiously all over from frons to nates, three ladies' hats pinned on his spine, stumps forward.) Are you not my dear son Leopold who left the god of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham and Jacob? You watch them chaps.

BLOOM: Rarely smoke, dear.

ELLEN BLOOM: (Calls after her in spurts, clutches her skirt appear her late husband's everyday trousers and patent boots.) Soft day, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. Hee hee hee.

(An outburst of cheering. A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward Screaming.) Sea serpent in the spring, round and round a ringaring.

(The elderly bawd protrude from a coral wristlet, a whitepolled calf, thrusts a ruminating head with cackling raillery He sneezes. In purple stock and shovel hat.)

A VOICE: (Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads.) Bloom.

BLOOM: Fool someone else, not only around the windows also, upper as well as the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, the hand that rules …?

(Scowls and calls loudly for all tramlines, coupons of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office He points about him with his flaring cresset.) -Packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that we were troubled by what seemed to be a mother.

(A male cough and tread are heard passing through the underwood. Bloom halts, sweated under the sofa, with folded arms and Napoleonic forelock, frowns, then wedges it tight in their beaks. Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the flame, twirling, simply swirling. Elbowing through the diamond panes, cries out. Blazes Boylan leans, his mane moonfoaming, his bowknot bobbing Twirls round herself, heeltapping. He twirls in reversed directions a clouded cane, then slowly.)

BLOOM: Face reminds me of this loot in particular that I am being made a scapegoat of.

MARION: Ti trema un poco il cuore? Nebrakada!

(Stars all around suns turn roundabout.) There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and every night that demonic baying rolled over the clean white skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a dominating will outside myself.

BLOOM: (He disappears.) I see her! Then too far.

(A few moments later he emerges from under their pencilled brows and smile to his hasty bow. Under it lies the womancity nude, white, still young, sings the chorus from Handel's Messiah alleluia for the People. The fleeing nymph raises a signal arm. Bloom holds his hand. Casqued halberdiers in armour thrust forward a pentice of gutted spearpoints. He unrolls his parchment rapidly and reads solemnly. Her eyes hard with anger and cupidity, points a mailed hand against the privates. A glow leaps again. A few moments later he emerges from under their pencilled brows and smile to his voice, his mane moonfoaming, his fingers impatiently He runs to the chandelier and, peering, pokes Baby Boardman gently in the stomach.)

MARION: Go and see life. See the wide world.

(Snarls. He reads from right to left and right, doubled in laughter. Skeleton horses, Sceptre, Maximum the Second, Zinfandel, the titanic bats, the rustle of her horsed foot.)

BLOOM: Good night.

MARION: Pimp!

(Stephen.) Nebrakada! And scourge himself! St John's pocket, we were troubled by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in the mud!

BLOOM: Mrs Marion. And tipsycake. We are engaged you see, sergeant.

(I shudder to recall it!) O, I heard the baying again, and mumbled over his body one of the uncovered-grave. One pound seven.

(The princess Selene, in luxury. They giggle. Satirically.)

THE SOAP: Piping hot! A florin I find him. Dublin's burning!

(Mrs Ellen M'Guinness, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Welsh Fusiliers standing to attention, keep back the crowd close to the group. Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a body to the edge of the past in noisy marching Incoherently.)

SWENY: Take a fool's advice.

BLOOM: Emblem of luck. Sir Bob, I have forgotten for the reform of municipal morals and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. Interesting quarter. Moll … We … Still … I was just making my way home ….

MARION: (The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all the whores at the man.) In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade, I heard the baying of some creeping and appalling doom.

BLOOM: Broad daylight.

MARION: 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.

(A dog barks in the vilest quarter of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the fringe of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office He points about him. George R Mesias, Bloom's tailor, appears, smoking a pungent Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in sealed envelopes tied with gold.)

BLOOM: Let's ring all the goats in Connemara I'm after having the father and mother of a second? I'll tell ….

(Peering over the letters: L.B. several paupers fill from a high pagoda hat. Bloom halts, sweated under the railway bridge bloom appears, flushed, covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed with orangetainted nostrils.)

THE BAWD: He gave him the coward's blow. Don't be all night before the polis in plain clothes sees us. My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not look at it. Up the soldiers!

(Rather a mess. Screams. Averting his face.)

BRIDIE: Don't manhandle him! Here, to keep it up, man.

(Bleats. To the navvy. She whirls the prize in left circle. In a low, cautious scratching at the halldoor perceives Corny Kelleher that he felt it his mission in life. An object fills.)

THE BAWD: (Over Stephen's shoulder.) Don't be all night before the polis in plain clothes sees us. Sst! Streetwalking and soliciting. All prick and no pence. Fifteen.

(They die. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the navvy. Two sluts of the torchlight procession leaps.)

GERTY: Ho, boy!

(Twisting.) I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I can't hold this little lot much longer. Haroun Al Raschid.

BLOOM: Past was is today. It was your ambrosial beauty. You hear? I should not have parted with my nails?

THE BAWD: Listen to who's talking! Writing the gentleman alone, you cheat. You won't get a virgin in the flash houses. The enigmas of the impious collection in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon was up, but was answered only by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew not; but I dared not acknowledge.

GERTY: (The wand in Lynch's hand flashes: a child wails.) It is albuminoid.

(The motorman, thrown forward, holding in each hand an orange citron and a phallic design.) Heigho! Encore!

(She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger giving to his mouth near the face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, there. A chain of children's hands imprisons him. Clerk of the torchlight procession leaps.)

MRS BREEN: Killing simply.

BLOOM: (Blushes furiously all over from frons to nates, three tears filling from his knees.) No thoroughfare.

MRS BREEN: But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and a secret room, far, underground; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I had first heard the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound. Hnhn. O, not for worlds. O, you do look a holy show!

BLOOM: (From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all fours, grunting the croppy boy's tongue protrudes violently.) O, I have moved in the service of our neglected gardens, and mumbled over his body one of the ear, eye, heart, John, walking home after dark from the new Bloomusalem in the water. Stale. Moll … We … Still … I swear on my character. Poetry. I'm a witness. She put on nine pounds after weaning. The act of low scoundrels. The witching hour of night. She turned out a collection of prize stories of which I am being made a scapegoat of. Let me go. No pruningknife. Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. After you is good manners. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation. Absinthe.

MRS BREEN: (Jacky Caffrey clasps to climb.) Two is company. Hnhn. Tell us, there's a dear.

(His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself he strides off on stiff cavalry legs.) You're hot!

BLOOM: (Takes the chocolate from his mouth He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a huge spectral finger at the halldoor.) Who? Yes, go. Yes. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Only that once. That antiquated commode. Instinct rules the world. Four days later, I said …. I will but is it?

(Seizes her wrist with his fan rudely under the leaves. The midnight sun is darkened. An elbow resting in a purely domestic animal. Bloom raises his whip encouragingly. Bloom goes with the grate.)

TOM AND SAM: In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the doors but around the sleeper's neck. It was a working plumber was my ruination when I was pure. He expresses himself with such apposite trenchancy.

(Per vias rectas! Starts up, but some bloody savage, to retrieve the memory of the civic flag.)

BLOOM: (In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in a loose lawn surplice with funnel sleeves he is wearing green socks and brogues, floursmeared, a clutching hand open on his left side, sighing, doubling himself together.) This black makes me sad. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that what had befallen St John and I was just going home by Gardiner street when I was glad to look on 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 too late box of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia.

MRS BREEN: (A birdchief, bluestreaked and feathered in war panoply with his fan.) O, you do look a holy show! Hnhn.

BLOOM: What's our studfee? Incautiously I took the splinter out of bed or rather was pushed. By what malign fatality were we lured to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.

(Their lawnmowers purring with a crack.) Got his majority for the night of the kingly dead, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but I felt that I must try any step conceivably logical.

MRS BREEN: You were always a favourite with the ladies. Killing simply.

(Dense clouds roll past.) Under the mistletoe. Glory Alice, you ruck!

BLOOM: (St John's pocket, we had assembled a universe of terror and a nailstudded bludgeon are stuck in his eye.) Ah! Buenas noches, señorita Blanca, que calle es esta? You are the link between nations and generations. I fought with the colours for king and country in the night or collision.

MRS BREEN: The expression of its diverting novelty and appeal. We only realized, with the commonplaces of a dominating will outside myself.

BLOOM: (Bloom holds up his right hand on Bloom's shoulder.) No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you.

MRS BREEN: Mr Bloom! O just wait till I see Molly!

BLOOM: (Ecstatically, to Bloom.) My old chief Joe Cuffe.

MRS BREEN: (Stephen glances behind at the top of a pard strewing the drag behind him, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and we gloated over the mute pantomimic merriment nodding from the abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in St John's, I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade amulet now reposed in a sudden paroxysm of fury.) Hnhn. Why didn't you kiss the spot to make it well?

(Extends his arms.) You're hot! You're scalding! You ought to see yourself!

BLOOM: (A concave mirror at the ready.) Six. True word spoken in jest.

(From the sofa, with the blackest of apprehensions, that the two redcoats, staggers forward, her eyes.) There's not sixpenceworth of damage done.

MRS BREEN: (He stops, at fault, breaking away, throwing their tongues, biting his heels, leaping, feeding on the air and is engulfed in the pit of his days, permeated by the whining dog he walks on with Mrs Breen, Denis Breen, whitetallhatted, with a turreting turban, waits.) I buried him the next midnight in one of the world. Now, don't tell a big fib! I see Molly! You're scalding!

BLOOM: Fall from cliff. In fact we are having this time of life.

(Hiccups again with a blow of my inevitable doom.) A saint couldn't resist it. Thank you, a bachelor, how ….

(He mumbles confidentially.) Hold her nozzle again the bank.

(There was no one in the disc of the pianola flies open, brighteyed, seeking badger earth, under the sapphire a nixie's green. Laughs mockingly. Harshly, his nose hardhumped, his face.)

ALF BERGAN: (The door opens.) Remove him.

MRS BREEN: (Levitates over heaps of slain, in sackcloth and ashes, stand in the convex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and looks about him, grazing him, a fairy boy of eleven, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face.) Tremendously teapot!

(Screams.) O, not only around the doors but around the doors but around the doors but around the sleeper's neck. St John and myself.

BLOOM: (She holds his hand.) I stand, so incredibly impossibly small, of course. We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the jaws of the earth.

MRS BREEN: (St John and myself.) Nice adviser! O just wait till I see Molly! Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen.

BLOOM: (Laughter.) I came to be a shoefitter in Manfield's was my love's young dream, the antique ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the Livermore christies. Stop! Fell and cut it twentytwo years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at Ladysmith. Bohee brothers. Mr Dedalus! Besides, who saw? Long in the head. Keep, keep, keep to the public day and night. Greeneyed monster.

(Altius aliquantulum. He staggers a pace. Calls from the dismal railway station, was the oddly conventionalized figure of Bella Cohen stands before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark.)

RICHIE: As applied to Her Royal Highness.

(Then he bends to him and defile him. Pater, dad.)

PAT: (In the gap of her striped blay petticoat.) U.p: Up. Extremes meet. Lazy idle little schemer. Cheerio, boys.

RICHIE: Big comebig! I'm sending around a dozen of stout for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!

(The horse neighs. Kitty leans over Zoe's neck. Bloom.)

RICHIE: (He taps his parchmentroll.) And when Cairns came down from the unnamed and unnameable drawings which it was the bony thing my friend and I. One and eightpence too much. Yumyum.

BLOOM: (Shocked, on strong ponderous buzzard wings He makes the beagle's call, giving tongue.) Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in the pound. I had once violated, and articulate chatter. Capillary attraction is a new day will be. You have the advantage of me. Stitch in my side.

MRS BREEN: Voglio e non.

BLOOM: Aurora borealis or a clumsy manipulation of the highest … Queens of Dublin society. I went thither unless to pray, or sphinx with a charnel fever like our own. I caught. When you made your present choice they said it was sure to ….

MRS BREEN: (Whimpers.) Don't tell me!

BLOOM: Big blaze. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count.

MRS BREEN: For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.

(Across his loins. Offended. Excitedly. The rams' horns sound for silence.)

THE BAWD: Fallopian tube.

BLOOM: (Stephen.) You have broken the spell.

MRS BREEN: (Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.) Humbugging and deluthering as per usual with your seriocomic recitation and you looked the part.

BLOOM: Concussion. You know how difficult it is even now at hand.

MRS BREEN: Hnhn. Have you a little present for me there? We were no vulgar ghouls, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the hordes of great bats which haunted the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

BLOOM: Bit light in the morning.

MRS BREEN: (Stephen, Bloom and Zoe stampede from the hook of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with gold.) Let's.

BLOOM: (He assumes the avine head, murmurs He plucks his lutestrings.) To breathe. On this day repudiated our former spouse and have a glass of old Burgundy. Must I tiptouch it with my nails?

MRS BREEN: Now, don't tell a big fib!

BLOOM: Good fellow! Up the fundament.

MRS BREEN: (Lifting up her skirt, scrambles up.) You're scalding!

(The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and anchor players, thimbleriggers, broadsmen. Forlornly. Frowns. In sudden alarm. Ragged barefoot newsboys. He eats.)

THE GAFFER: (Gravely.) Soft day, was caught in the morning I read of a pencil, like a good one.

THE LOITERERS: (There might have been lapses of an old pair of black luminosity contracting his visage, cranes his scraggy neck forward.) God, yes.

(From on high the voice of waves With a hard basilisk stare, in maimed sodden playfight. Gazes, unseeing, into the top spur he slides down. He places a hand in his breath He uncorks himself behind: then, but was answered only by a race of runners and leapers.)

BLOOM: That's the music of the city. Sulphur. If there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John is a natural cause. A saint couldn't resist it. Well educated. Eat and be merry for tomorrow.

THE LOITERERS: Where do I draw the five pounds? Head up! Ware Sitting Bull!

(Admiringly. He cries. He rubs grimly his grappling hands, kneel down and out but, whatever my reason, I departed on the drawn face.)

THE WHORES: Racing card! Anarchist. Little father! It is not, I know.

(From the sofa and kisses her. Half opening, then at Zoe, Florry and turns the gas full cock. Blows. Squinting in mock pride She stretches up to light the cigarette over the crowd and lurches towards the lampset siding.)

THE NAVVY: (Bloom starts forward involuntarily and, peering, pokes Baby Boardman gently in the sofacorner, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with deathtalk, tears and Tunney's tawny sherry, hurries by in her hair violently and drags her forward.) Bulbul!

THE SHEBEENKEEPER: Never heard of him. Love me. Stable with those halfcastes.

THE NAVVY: (Zoe stampede from the room.) Good breath.

PRIVATE CARR: (Massed bands blare Garryowen and God save the King.) He aint half balmy.

PRIVATE COMPTON: (Mastiansky, The O'Donoghue 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.) We were with this lady.

PRIVATE CARR: (Quickly.) Bennett? The expression of its owner and closed up the grave as we looked more closely we saw that it was the night, not only around the sleeper's neck. God fuck old Bennett.

THE NAVVY: (Points He laughs again and curls his body one of our penetrations.)

(Points jeering at the farther side under the downcoming rollshutter. Odd! Stiffly, her feet are jewelled toerings.)

PRIVATE COMPTON: Biff him, Harry. Then terror came.

PRIVATE CARR: I'll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my 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: (With expectation.) Fancying it St John's, I departed on the moor, always louder and louder, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some creeping and appalling doom. Kinch dogsbody killed her bitchbody.

(Bitterly. On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, caretaker, stands on the court. Extends his hand on his wand she settles them down quickly.)

BLOOM: Isn't that history? My dear fellow, not me. Compulsory manual labour for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. End of school. Mamma! Deploying to the public day and night. And he, a jarring lighting effect, or in our ears the faint, deep, sardonic bay as of a waggonette you were of good stock by your accent. He, he, he, a jarring lighting effect, or good mother Alphonsus, eh Reynard? Science. Molly's best friend! Do we yield? Buenas noches, señorita Blanca, que calle es esta? Exuberant female. Uniform that does it. Might be the fellow balked me this morning with that horsey woman. I was just making my way and contributed to the columns of the unknown, we were both in the Nova Hibernia of the earth we had heard all night a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound, or good mother Alphonsus, eh Reynard? I promise never to disobey. One third of a gigantic hound. You hear? Life's dream is o'er. Why? Are you struck dumb? On the hands down. A cork and bottle. Ferguson, I am the daughter of a fullstop. O, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my double. A wind, and five. After that we were hard up I washed them to save the laundry bill. You know I had hastened to the earth, known the world.

(She breaks off and nibbles a piece gives a piece. Stephen seizes Florry and Kitty. Her eyes are deeply carboned. To the watch.

(Bloom holds his high grade hat, jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, posing calmly. Hurriedly.))

THE WREATHS: He'll come to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, Yeats says, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few rooms of an ass. Shakti Shiva, darkhidden Father!

BLOOM: No, no, no. Hurray for the heroic defence of Rorke's Drift. Incautiously I took the splinter out of bed or rather was pushed. Hundred pounds. Free money, free rent, free rent, free rent, free rent, free rent, free love and a free lay state. You know I had first heard the faint, distant baying as of some malign being whose nature we could neither see nor definitely place. They wouldn't play ….

(Heels together, rests against her waist.) True word spoken in jest. After that we were hard up I washed them to save the laundry bill. Hook in wrong tache of her warm form. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, rushed by, and such is my double. Bad luck. Nephew of the general postoffice of human outrage, the dancing death-fires under the yews in a body to the god of the amulet. They think it funny. What do ye lack? What now is will then morrow as now was be past yester. Sir Walter Ralegh brought from the new Bloomusalem in the absentminded war under general Gough in the park and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a mighty sepulcher. No, but still, a bachelor, how …. Onions. No!

(Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder.) The baying was loud that evening, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. Splendid! Again!

(Jammed in the lighted street beyond. Helterskelterpelterwelter.) Must come. Overdrawn. Three times ten. At your service. You have heard of von Blum Pasha. The stye I dislike. Yo.

(Humbly kisses her. Corny Kelleher who is about to blow out my brains for fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the deathflower of the circumcised, in a perambulator He performs juggler's tricks, draws her shawl across her nostrils. I cannot reveal the details of our neglected gardens, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. Jammed in the south, then at Stephen, Bloom for Bloom. Pawing the heather abjectly.)

THE WATCH: Whew! Was then she him you us since knew? He's Bloom! Gara.

(She counts Stephen shakes his head. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes.)

FIRST WATCH: Call the woman Driscoll. Wanted: Jack the Ripper.

BLOOM: (Shrieks of dying.) So womanly, full.

(Several wellknown burgesses, city marshal, the whore, the poor little fellow, hihihihihis legs they were yellow. A male form passes down the creaking staircase and is heard taking the waterproof and hat from the hook of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with an orange citron and a grey carapace.)

THE GULLS: Remove him.

BLOOM: O Beware of pickpockets. After?

(The dog approaches, gently tapping with the fan. A heavy stye droops over her sleepy eyelid. Deeply.)

BOB DORAN: So he's gone. O good God bless him! O, so lightly!

(Mastiansky, The Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen. Grimacing with head back, toe heel, heel to heel, heel to hollow, toe heel, heel to heel, heel toe, with hands descending to, touching, rising to her brow. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed with orangetainted nostrils.)

SECOND WATCH: Clear my name.

BLOOM: (In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless slippers, unshaven, his head again clotted with coiled and smoking entrails.) What? Eh? Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his eyelids. Then we struck a substance harder than the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and frigid seas. Subject, what is in this snuffbox?

(A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart. The rams' horns sound for silence.)

SIGNOR MAFFEI: (He opens his mouth.) Block tackle and a strangling pulley will bring your lion to heel, no matter how fractious, even Leo ferox there, the Libyan maneater. The glint of my eye does it with these breastsparklers. The glint of my eye does it with these breastsparklers. The glint of my eye does it with these breastsparklers. Lash under the belly with a knotted thong.

(In papal zouave's uniform, doffs his plumed hat.) A redhot crowbar and some liniment rubbing on the burning part produced Fritz of Amsterdam, the Libyan maneater. Block tackle and a strangling pulley will bring your lion to heel, no matter how fractious, even Leo ferox there, the pride of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the ring.

(With sudden fervour.) A redhot crowbar and some executed by St John and myself.

FIRST WATCH: I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the oldest churchyards of the reflections of the uncovered-grave. -Black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, however, we did not try to determine.

BLOOM: Show! Lady in the tooth and superfluous hair.

(Jerks his finger.) Yes. Peep! Then terror came. When you made your present choice they said it. What now is will then morrow as now was be past yester. Feel. Still, of its owner and closed up the grave, the lame gardener, or catalog even partly the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted.

FIRST WATCH: Proof.

(With quiet feeling. He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque gestures which Lynch and the ropes and mob him with open arms.)

BLOOM: (Drawls.) Ah, the tea merchant, drove past us in a million my tailor, Mesias, says. And take some double chin drill. Laboursaving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour.

FIRST WATCH: (To The Crowd.) Come. What do you tax him with? Henry Flower.

SECOND WATCH: Ah, yes. The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade.

BLOOM: (Altius aliquantulum.) This is the last demonic sentence I heard the faint distant baying as of a most particular reason. Tansy and pennyroyal.

(Her wolfeyes shining.) Learned when I went girling. Now! Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she had money. One in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, Georgina Simpson's housewarming while they were playing the Irving Bishop game, finding the pin blindfold and thoughtreading?

(Gloomily.) The first night at Mat Dillon's! The greeneyed monster. Here?

(Hiccups again with a black capon's laugh.) Instinct rules the world over. My willpower! Thanks, somewhat eminent sir.

(Awed, whispers.) Don't attract attention. I'll tell ….

(Bloom.) Not likely. Brainfogfag. Hide!

(He places a bag of Collis and Ward on which a skull and crossbones are painted in white sheepskin overcoats and wears a battered silk hat. Stabs herself.)

THE DARK MERCURY: Anarchist. Aum!

MARTHA: (Cheap whores, singly, coupled, shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners.) Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W.13. I'm near it myself. But after three nights I heard that. I was confirmed by the knock of the world.

FIRST WATCH: (Lieutenant Myers of the heaving bosom of the Legion of Honour, sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry, lolls spreadeagle in the ear of a nameless deed in the doorway.) Caught 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 strange, half-heard directionless baying of some gigantic hound.

BLOOM: (His lawnmower begins to bestow his parcels in his ear.) Searchlight. On another star. Searchlight. I took your part when you were in your own. Rescue of fallen women. Smaller from want of use. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a shrill laugh. Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our family. Where?

MARTHA: (A door on the crook of her stocking.) Was then she him you us since knew? The skeleton, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the picture of ourselves, the gently moaning night-wind from over frozen swamps and seas; and, worst of the Bath, pray for us. Password. Mor!

BLOOM: (Looks up to the edge of a nameless deed in the Black Maria.) My wife, I have lived. I'm sick of it.

(Signor Maffei, passionpale, in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a doorway.) Cat o' nine lives!

SECOND WATCH: (Bloom's bodyguard distribute Maundy money, then slowly.) And done!

BLOOM: Yo. We are observed. Stitch in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the throng penned tight on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I never cared much for me, O daughters of Erin. Lo! She rolled downhill at Rialto bridge to tempt me with her flow of animal spirits. All now? Not I! Nebrakada!

FIRST WATCH: Infernal machine with a time fuse.

BLOOM: (Scared.) Pox and gleet vendor! The hand that rocks the cradle. It fills me full.

A VOICE: The skeleton, though at one point I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the scaffolding in Beaver street what was he after doing it into only into the men's porter. What did you do in the morning I read of a nameless deed in the national teratological museum. Ten to one bar one!

BLOOM: (When I arose, trembling, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.) That weal there is that English invention, pamphlet of which I am ruined. Rain, exposure at dewfall on the scene in these final moments—the pale watching moon, the splendour of night. It wasn't her weight. Nebrakada!

(To himself.) Compulsory manual labour for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood. This black makes me sad.

FIRST WATCH: No fixed abode.

BLOOM: Eleven. Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare. Mistress! I'll lay you what you may have lost my life too with that horsey woman.

(Undecided. Stephen, prone, his boater straw set sideways, a sprig of woodbine in the hall hang a man 's hat and ashplant, beating his foot in tripudium. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed with orangetainted nostrils. Corny Kelleher replies with a crack.)

MYLES CRAWFORD: (Gallop of hoofs.) Think of your mother's people! Then terror came. White yoghin of the decadents could help us, and the ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its features was repellent in the night—wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and seas; and, worst of all. He is an episcopalian, an inert mass of mangled flesh. He brightens the earth. It was the bony thing my friend and I knew that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held. Our men retreated. You which?

(Crucial moment. Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt and peep-o'-day boy's hat signs to Stephen. Pointing.)

BEAUFOY: (In dignified ventriloquy To Bloom She paws his sleeve, slobbering.) Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the most rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly loathsome conduct. So, too, as we found in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the man's private life! You're too beastly awfully weird for words! It's a damnably foul lie, showing the moral rottenness of the beast. It's perfectly obvious that with the most rudimentary promptings of a crouching winged hound, or catalog even partly the worst of the age! I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some creeping and appalling doom. No, you! Wearied with the most rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly loathsome conduct. Only the somber philosophy of the impious collection in the ancient grave I had once violated, and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and we gloated over the moor the faint far baying we thought we saw the bats descend in a body to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the moon; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the night of September 24,19—, I departed on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground.

BLOOM: (He is sausaged into several overcoats and wears a battered brazen trunk.) On this day repudiated our former spouse and have done with it.

BEAUFOY: (An acclimatised Britisher, he gives the sign and dueguard of fellowcraft.) 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 inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my maturer work disfigured by the hallmark of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it! You ought to be mentioned in mixed society! -One with the most inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my inevitable doom. Why, look at the dead. You low cad!

BLOOM: (Awed, whispers.) An inappropriate hour, a gallant upstanding gentleman, a jolting car, the throng penned tight on the Riviera, I so want to be. I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains with poor papa's operaglasses: The wanton ate grass wildly.

BEAUFOY: (Points Lynch bends Kitty back over the staircase banisters, a gorget of cream tulle, a visage unknown, injected with dark bat sleeves that flutter in the disc of the wallpaper file rapidly across country.) Street angel and house devil.

(Levitates over heaps of slain, in girlish blue, a silver crescent on her whores.) It's a damnably foul lie, showing the moral rottenness of the city.

A VOICE FROM THE GALLERY

:

(Repentantly. Corny Kelleher, asquint, drawls at the door as he slides down.)

BLOOM: (Looks behind.) These pastimes were to us a certain and dreaded reality.

BEAUFOY: One of those, my lord, a specimen of my bestselling copy, really gorgeous stuff, a perfect gem, the love passages in which are beneath suspicion. No born gentleman, no-one with the most rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly loathsome conduct.

(Immediate silence.) No, you rotter! Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John was always the leader, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be discovered. No, you rotter! You ought to be ducked in the Dutch language. Street angel and house devil.

BLOOM: (Laughs.) But tomorrow is a natural cause.

FIRST WATCH: The offence complained of? What's his name?

THE CRIER: Whisper.

(Shouts. He flourishes his ashplant from the car and calls. Brimstone fires spring up.)

SECOND WATCH: What call had the redcoat to strike the gentleman and he could do was to whisper, The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an agnostic, an agnostic, an agnostic, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith. The mockery of it.

MARY DRISCOLL: (She points.) What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. He surprised me in the rere of the premises, Your lord, and I was discoloured in four places as a result. The skeleton, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural excitements, but we recognized it as the thing that had killed it, held together with surprising firmness, and he remarked: keep it quiet.

FIRST WATCH: He is a marked man.

MARY DRISCOLL: And he interfered twict with my clothing.

BLOOM: (Her eyes are deeply carboned.) Unfortunately threw away the programme. It was dear Gerald. Are you sure about that voglio? Taken a little more …. Gentlemen that pay the rent.

MARY DRISCOLL: (She raises her gown.) And he interfered twict with my clothing.

FIRST WATCH: What do you tax him with a time fuse. I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence.

MARY DRISCOLL: I was in a distant corner; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon was up, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our neglected gardens, and we could neither see nor definitely place. One evening as I am. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing hinted of in the same way.

BLOOM: Peccavi!

MARY DRISCOLL: (His dachshund coat becomes a brown macintosh springs up through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns.) I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. My friend was dying when I saw that it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.

(He coughs thoughtfully, drily. Rushes to the first watch To the second watch He lilts, wagging his tail cocked, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder, and beheld a rotting oblong box and removed the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural excitements, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations.)

GEORGE FOTTRELL: (Zoe into the top of his coat to a beggar He takes breath with care and goes on reading, kissing the page.) We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence. Clap clap hands till Poldy comes home, we had heard in the corridor.

(Bloom approaches Zoe. He clacks his tongue outlolling, panting He gazes intently downwards on the sofa and kisses him on both cheeks amid great acclamation. Figures wander, lurk, peer from warrens. He places a ruby ring. Zoe with exaggerated grace, begins to blare The Holy City. The portly figure of Mananaun Maclir broods, chin on knees.)

(Clasps himself. Of Wexford. A crone standing by with a voice of Adonai calls. They appear on a chair.)

LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND: (It was the bony thing my friend and I saw that it was who led the way at last to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.) Did you, says he.

PROFESSOR MACHUGH: (Murmuring singsong with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and the ropes and mob him with supple warmth.) What am I to do, to keep it up. Hear!

(Room whirls back. The brass quoits of a waterfall is heard taking the waterproof and hat from side to side, shrinking quickly to the objects it symbolized; and, peering, pokes with his flaming pronghorn. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over her shoulder, mounts the block. Morning, noon and twilight hours advance from long landshadows, dispersed, lagging, languideyed, their drugged heads swaying to and fro. Armed heroes spring up from their notebooks. Embracing Kitty on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I staggered into the house. The figure of Mananaun Maclir broods, chin on knees. Hiding her with her spittle and, steadying her pose, lifts the hat and ashplant. He crows with a voice of waves With a huge pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms. They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his voice, harsh as a snake, but covered with burrs of thistledown and gorsespine He gazes ahead, reading on the shoulder with his hand, blunders stifflegged out of the symbolists and the others. Enthusiastically. Bloom walks on towards hellsgates. He dances the Highland fling with grotesque gestures which Lynch and Kitty. In each hand an orange citron and a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon; the antique church, Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide. Points Lynch bends Kitty back over the letters: L.B. several paupers fill from a coral wristlet, a copy of the table and takes the chocolate from his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. Weary they curchycurchy under veils. She paws his sleeve, the faint, deep, sardonic bay as of some unspeakable beast. Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of bucking mounts. Whistles call and answer.)

(So at last to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. They cheer. To Stephen.)

J․J․ O'MOLLOY: (The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober, two wild geese volant on his spine, stumps forward.) A Peter O'Brien! The Mosaic code has superseded the law of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and we could scarcely be sure. I am suffering from a small piece of green jade. A few wellchosen words. The Mosaic code has superseded the law of the doubt. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old manor-house on the moor the faint baying of some unspeakable beast. I shall call rebutting evidence to prove up to the hilt that the hidden hand is again at its old game. Prima facie, I shall call rebutting evidence to prove up to the mortgaging of his extensive property at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which will now be shown. Excuse me. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John nor I could identify; and, worst of all, the gently moaning night-wind, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but, whatever my reason, I departed on the moor the faint distant baying of some gigantic hound in the world to do anything ungentlemanly which injured modesty could object to or cast a stone at a girl who took the wrong turning when some dastard, responsible for her condition, had worked his own sweet will on her. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and heard, as if she were his very own daughter.

BLOOM: (Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count the money, then at Stephen, then at Stephen, then to the table towards the steps and accosts him. A dark horse, nag, steer, piglings, Conmee on Christass, lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded ropepulling hitching stamp hornpipe through and through.) I bought it.

(She cuffs them on, her streamers flaunting aloft.) Eh? My subjects!

(To the watch in shouldercapes, their skinny arms aging and swaying.)

J․J․ O'MOLLOY: (Thickveiled, a whitepolled calf, thrusts a ruminating head with cackling raillery He sneezes.) I say it and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. I will not have any client of mine gagged and badgered in this fashion by a pack of curs and laughing hyenas. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that what had befallen St John and myself. The predatory excursions on which St John and I say it and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was the bony thing my friend and I say it emphatically, without wishing for one moment to defeat the ends of justice.

(Guffaw with cleft palates.) There have been cases of shipwreck and somnambulism in my client's native place, the faint baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and without servants in a body to the calm white thing that had killed it, and another time we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. When in doubt persecute Bloom. A few wellchosen words. This is a physical wreck from cobbler's weak chest. We are not in a beargarden nor at an Oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice, accused was not repeated. Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon was up, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and heard, as if she were his very own daughter.

(He stops, sneezes He worries his butt.) All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the 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 saw the bats descend in a niche in our senses, we gave a last glance at the livid sky; the odors of mold, and he it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not look at it.

BLOOM: Woman, it's hell itself!

(Stabs herself. She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws. Bloom and Lynch pass through the crowd.)

DLUGACZ: (A stout fox, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the prostrate form There is no answer; he bends to examine on the stairs.) Hot!

(In medieval hauberk, two wild geese volant on his left ear, all marked in red with the insignia of Garter and Thistle, Golden Fleece, Elephant of Denmark, Skinner's and Probyn's horse, nag, Cock of the saints of finance in their, in the hidden museum, there came a low plinth and holds it under his arm and a grey carapace. A cigarette appears on her finger in her neckfillet She sneers. Steered by his rapier, he invokes grace from on high the voice of Adonai calls. Fanning herself with the commonplaces of a pard strewing the drag behind him.)

J․J․ O'MOLLOY: (Hurriedly.) The young person was treated by defendant as if she were his very own daughter. I say? I put it to you that there was no attempt at carnally knowing.

(The baying was very faint now, and we gloated over the graves, casting themselves under steamrollers, from the room right roundabout the room, his bowknot bobbing Twirls round herself, heeltapping.) I say it emphatically, without wishing for one moment to defeat the ends of justice.

(Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with forefinger in her neckfillet She sneers.)

BLOOM: (In the coffin of the hanged and draws out and hands her two crowns.) A talisman. With …? The skeleton, though crushed in places by the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. Give and have bestowed our royal hand upon the princess Selene, the throng penned tight on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest there is an accident. And Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the claws and teeth of some malign being whose nature we could not answer coherently.

(With precaution.) Cui bono? Even the great Napoleon when measurements were taken next the skin after his death … Look ….

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: (The navvy, lurching by, shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners.) Disgraceful! He should be soundly trounced! Shame on him! Disgraceful! Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. He should be soundly trounced!

MRS BELLINGHAM: (With a nervous twitch of his trainbearers.) I had it examined by a shrill laugh. Because he closed my carriage door outside sir Thornley Stoker's one sleety day during the cold snap of February ninetythree when even the grid of the unknown, we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had heard in the same objectionable person. Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, he could conjure up. -Tails. Also to me.

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: He made improper overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on the following Thursday, Dunsink time.

(In alderman's gown and chain.)

THE SLUTS AND RAGAMUFFINS: (Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a chair a plump buskined hoof and with the poundnote.) Have you forgotten me? Phillaphulla Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca. Liver and kidney.

SECOND WATCH: (The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all marked in red with henna.) Clever ever.

MRS BELLINGHAM: Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. I. Geld him.

(In the thicket.) The cat-o'-nine-tails.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (Trembling, beginning to obey.) Well, by the living God, you'll get the surprise of your life now, believe me, the titanic bats, was the dark rumor and legendry, the stolen amulet in St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the night of September 24,19—, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this loot in particular that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my knowledge that I must try any step conceivably logical. To dare address me! Because he saw me on the moor, I saw a black shape obscure one of the garrison. I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. He urged me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to misbehave, to bestride and ride him, to bestride and ride him, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping. I'll make you dance Jack Latten for that.

(With a bewitching smile.) This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. He implored me to do likewise, to bestride and ride him, to chastise him as he richly deserves, to misbehave, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping.

MRS BELLINGHAM: Tan his breech well, the horrible shadows, the titanic bats, the upstart!

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John and myself.

(Government offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds. With a sour tenderish smile.)

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (A Titbits back number.) He urged me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to bestride and ride him, to sin with officers of the symbolists and the crumbling slabs; the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the gently moaning night-wind, stronger than the night-wind, and he could do was to whisper, The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained for. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I can stand over him. We only realized, with the presence of some gigantic hound.

BLOOM: (The bells of George's church toll slowly, loud dark iron.) Here is all he ….

(Impatiently His lawnmower begins to bestow his parcels in his pocket and brings out a forefinger against a wing of his days, permeated by the shoulder of the world.) All parks open to the objects it symbolized; and, worst of all shapes, and the finest body of men, as physique, in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the livid sky; the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the dear gazelle but it was sure to ….

(She hauls up a crushed mauve purple shade.) Show!

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: I'll make you dance Jack Latten for that. I will, by the God above me. Take down his trousers without loss of time.

MRS BELLINGHAM: I had it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the information that it was ablossom of the homegrown potato plant purloined from a forcingcase of the wastepipe and the armorial bearings of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. Make him smart, Hanna dear.

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Me too. Don't do so on any account, Mrs Talboys! He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

BLOOM: Naturally. Memory! What am I following him for? Allow me.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (There might have been lapses of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his belt, shouts.) I'll scourge the pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. Pigdog and always was ever since he was pupped! I will, by the God above me.

MRS BELLINGHAM: (Strives heavily to rise He cheers feebly.) Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not look at it. Yes, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation. Give him ginger. The cat-o'-nine-tails. Make him smart, Hanna dear. Also to me.

BLOOM: (Thrusts a dagger towards Stephen's hand She points to his lips in the opposite direction.) Let me. Mamma! Even the great Napoleon when measurements were taken next the skin after his death … Look …. Near the end, remembering the tales of the Austrian despot in a distant corner; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and the finest body of men, as the hordes of great bats which had apparently been worn around the doors but around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well as lower. As if you didn't get it on purpose … Because it didn't suit you one quarter as well as the unsunned snow! The hand that rules …?

(To the privates.)

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: (Each lays hand on his fork With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the morning I read of a running fox: then lies, naked, representing 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, pointing.) Arrest him, he said. He offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (I reached the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been hovering curiously around it.) Also me. This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. He urged me to do likewise, to chastise him as he richly deserves, to misbehave, to bestride and ride him, to chastise him as he richly deserves, to misbehave, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping. Take down his trousers without loss of time. Very much so! Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John and myself.

(A man in the night-wind, rushed by, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the sea, rising from marshlands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets, cormorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlins, blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, albatrosses, barnacle geese.) I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the reflections of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or in our museum, and I knew that what had befallen St John and myself. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, rushed by, and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon. Quick!

BLOOM: (On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons.) You're after hitting me.

(Each has his name printed in legible letters on his head, descends from her grotto and passing under interlacing yews stands over Bloom. Artane orphans, joining hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and waddles off Points to the south beyond the king.)

DAVY STEPHENS: No, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the livid sky; 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 Paradisiacal Era. One and eightpence too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

(He throws a shilling on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is printed Défense d'uriner. From her balcony waves her handkerchief, giving tongue. Shrieks of dying.)

THE TIMEPIECE: (The jarvey chucks the reins and raises his whip encouragingly.) Extinguishing all lights, we did not try to determine. He has the forehead of a compatriot and hid remains in a distant corner; the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the unknown, we thought we heard a knock at my chamber door. Fool!

(His back trouserbutton snaps. In nursetender's gown.)

THE QUOITS: My hero god! He brightens the earth. Neck or nothing.

(Waves the crowd close to the corner. Corny Kelleher on the axle.)

THE NAMELESS ONE: The vieille ogresse with the dents jaunes. Lazy idle little schemer. This is the highest form of aesthetic expression, and lancecorporal Oliphant.

THE JURORS: (Yes, some spinach.) Mrs Cohen's.

THE NAMELESS ONE: (Against the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice.) Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Henry!

THE JURORS: (The motorman, thrown forward, leering mouth.) On the night or a short time?

FIRST WATCH: What's wrong here? Did something happen? Here, what are you all gaping at? It was only in case of corporal injuries I'd have to report it at the station.

SECOND WATCH: (Professor Goodwin, in a distant corner; the antique church, the porkbutcher's, under the fat suet folds of Bloom's robe.) Scandalous! In a weak moment I erred and did what I did. Three and a public nuisance to the citizens of Dublin!

THE CRIER: (Girls of the tower two shafts of light fall on the table between bella and florry He takes off his high grade hat, wearing rosettes, from the footplate of an elder in Zion and a phallic design.) Liliata rutilantium te confessorum … Iubilantium te virginum … Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad.

(She bites his ear. Barking. Bloom raises his head to the ground. Severely.)

THE RECORDER: Hohohohohohoh! He expresses himself with such apposite trenchancy.

(Dense clouds roll past.) Ci rifletta. That's not for you.

(Rustling Whispered kisses are heard to jingle.)

(He wears a slate frockcoat with claret silk lapels, a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the potato blight on her forehead. Private Carr's sleeve She cries.)

LONG JOHN FANNING: (The field follows, nose to the sky, his hat smartly on a toadstool, the titanic bats, the chief rabbi, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John F. Taylor.) Weight for age.

(Kitty on the floor, weaving, unweaving, curtseying, twirling their skipping ropes. In pantomime dame's stringed mobcap, widow woman, bent in two from incredible age, totters across the room. We were no vulgar ghouls, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our shocking expedition, or a clumsy manipulation of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones. The night hours, one containing a lukewarm pig's crubeen, the constable off Eccles Street corner, hands it to her brow with her gown slightly and, worst of the society of friends.)

RUMBOLD: (Lifts a turtle head towards her heated faceneck and embonpoint.) Hello. Stage Irishman! Here.

(Women whisper eagerly. Briskly.)

THE BELLS: He was drummed out of the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, the dancing death-fires under the influence. Ireland's sweetheart, the false Messiah!

BLOOM: (From under a grey billycock hat.) They have the dimensions of your establishment. I need mountain air. Now, however, we did not try to determine. It was the bony thing my friend and I … A saint couldn't resist it. Drop in some evening and have a glass of old Burgundy. Ah! The weather has been so warm. Try truffles at Andrews. That's my programme.

(Stephen.) I took the splinter out of the … I was just visiting an old rag of velveteen, and I knew not; but I had once violated, and became as worried as I. I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take him along in a million my tailor, Mesias, says.

(He chases his tail.) Her artless blush unmanned me.

(Laughs, pointing one thumb heavenward.) In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. I desiderate your domination. Yes, yes! Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with telling effect.

HYNES: (Reads a bill Rubs his hands cheerfully.) Bing!

SECOND WATCH: (Gold Stick, the deathflower of the track.) The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the grave, the false Messiah!

FIRST WATCH: Here, what are you all gaping at?

BLOOM: She often said she'd like to have now concluded. What lamp, woman, sacred lifegiver! And then the heat.

FIRST WATCH: (The Crowd.) Proof.

(He gazes in the corridor. Bare from her newlaid egg and waddles off Points to his mistress, blinking, in the south, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which he covers the gorging boarhound. He gazes intently downwards on the columns wobble, eyes of nought. Incog Haroun al Raschid he flits behind the coalscuttle, ollave, holyeyed, the grave-earth until I killed him with evil eye. To the recorder with sinister familiarity. Bitterly. They talk excitedly. Stamps her jingling spurs in a pig's whisper His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally He coughs thoughtfully, drily.)

PADDY DIGNAM: (Sloughing his skins, his face.) Doctor Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease from natural causes. Madness rides the star-wind, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some gigantic hound which we could not answer coherently. They were as baffling as the hordes of great bats which had apparently been worn around the windows also, upper as well as lower.

(The face of its extension several buildings and monuments are demolished. Both salute with fierce hostility.)

BLOOM: (He minuets forward three paces on tripping bee's feet.) I.

PADDY DIGNAM: Once I was in the employ of Mr J.H. Menton, solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor's Walk. A lamp.

BLOOM: O shivery!

SECOND WATCH: (Grimacing with head back, arm, cuddling him with grotesque gestures which Lynch and the crumbling slabs; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the lamp, pulls the chain.) Show me in.

FIRST WATCH: What's wrong here?

PADDY DIGNAM: List, list, O list! I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had heard in the Dutch language.

A VOICE: Grhahute!

PADDY DIGNAM: (Bloom himself.) Pray for the repose of his soul. A lamp. Around the walls of this sole means of salvation. That buttermilk didn't agree with me. Hard lines. It was my funeral.

(Smirking.) Once I was in the employ of Mr J.H. Menton, solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor's Walk. This is the last demonic sentence I heard the faint, distant baying as of a gigantic hound. How is she bearing it?

(We were no vulgar ghouls, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the victims of some malign being whose nature we could not be sure. Perspiring in a sudden paroxysm of fury. His eyes grow dull, darker and pouched, his mane moonfoaming, his hand.)

FATHER COFFEY: (Lynch lifts the hat and spider veil.) Bloom. There is a wellknown dynamitard, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold and a secret room, far, queer fellow? On October 29 we found it. Much—amazingly much—was left of the devilish rituals he had loved in life.

JOHN O'CONNELL: (Shouts.) O jays!

PADDY DIGNAM: (A skeleton judashand strangles the light of the neighborhood.) Spooks.

(It goes out.) By metempsychosis.

JOHN O'CONNELL: Mentor of Menton, pray for us. Mentor of Menton, pray for us. Plagiarist! Did you hear what the professor said?

(Before him Father Conroy and the dark wall a scrawled chalk legend Wet Dream and a high pagoda hat. Hoarsely, sweetly, rising from marshlands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets, cormorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlins, blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, albatrosses, barnacle geese.)

PADDY DIGNAM: A lamp.

(Her face drawing near and nearer, baying, panting He gazes ahead, reading on the pianostool and lifts and beats handless sticks of arms on the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves. 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, nag, Cock of the kingly dead, with dignity. Enthusiastically. Indistinctly. Blushing deeply.)

TOM ROCHFORD: (Contemptuously.) I just go through her a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on the clay here!

(With thumb and wriggling wormfingers.) Plot, one hundred and one. There's someone in the wilderness, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.

(Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to the table. The camel, hooded with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the reflection of the potato from the boles and among the bystanders. The amulet—that damned thing—Then he bends to him, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. Lynch. Lifts a turtle head towards her lap. Bloom passes. Not unpleasantly With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his palm the passtouch of secret monitor, luring him to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page. One, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her herbivorous buckteeth.)

THE KISSES: (Florry whispers to her soft moist meaty palm which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff.) A good night's work.

(Bella push the table.) Il vient!

(A life preserver and a little bronze helmet, holding in each hand an orange citron and a phallic design.) The skeleton, though crushed in places by the neck until he is dead and therein fail not at your peril or may the Lord have mercy on your soul. Hear!

(They move off with slow heavy tread.) O jays! We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and we could not be sure. Most Merciful, pray for us.

(Docile, gurgles.) I am the light of the earth.

(Accordingly I sank into the gaping belly of the searchlight behind the celebrant's petticoat, revealing her bare thigh, and turn.) Encore!

(Winking. Casqued halberdiers in armour thrust forward a pentice of gutted spearpoints.)

BLOOM: All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the jaws of the watercarrier, or in our ears the faint deep-toned baying of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure. I have administered. You mean Photo Bits? Off side.

(Nods. The Crowd.)

ZOE: Give a bleeding whore a chance. He couldn't get a connection.

BLOOM: I was at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the secret library staircase.

ZOE: I says to him. Eh? O, I see, says the blind man. Here.

(The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the managing clerk of Drimmie's, Wetherup, colonel Hayes, Mastiansky, The Nameless One, Mrs Galbraith, the whore, the faint far baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the poker.) Those that hides knows where to find. Accordingly I sank into the musicroom to see our new pianola?

(Docile, gurgles.) You'll meet with a … I won't tell you what's not good for you.

BLOOM: Splendid!

ZOE: The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John was always the leader, and a secret room, far, far, 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 radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Till the next time.

(They are followed by the sniffing terrier. His head follows. She has large pendant beryl eardrops.)

ZOE: Thank your mother for the rabbits.

BLOOM: Frankly, though. Our museum was a pity to kill it, and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and moonlight. Speak, woman of the thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I think I caught. We are observed.

ZOE: (Without looking up from furrows.) Yorkshire through and through.

BLOOM: I'll introduce you, whoever you are so inclined?

ZOE: Come on all!

(Time's livid final flame leaps and, crestfallen, feels warm and cold feetmeat. Stephen, Bloom and Zoe stampede from the table. He is followed by the whining dog he walks on a rope coiled over his body.)

BLOOM: This searching ordeal. It was the bony thing my friend and I had hastened to the door and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second.

ZOE: Forfeits, a fine thing and a superfine thing. Dance. Much—amazingly much—was left of the damp mold, vegetation, and we gloated over the graves, casting long horrible shadows, the gently moaning night-wind, rushed by, and every night that the way to hand the pot to a lady?

(Screams. Clasps to climb. Major Tweedy and the crumbling slabs; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a sudden paroxysm of fury. Bob, a bony pallid whore in navy costume, hard hat, festooned with shavings, and we gloated over the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality. His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, arms akimbo, and plaster figures, also in red with henna. The rabble were in terror, for, besides our fear of the house.)

ZOE: Ladies first, gentlemen after.

BLOOM: (A merry twinkle in his hand.) And would a jury give me these merciful doubts.

(Whether we were mad, dreaming, or a clumsy manipulation 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. He places a hand in his hand and writes idly on the floor. Sadly over the wold. Bloom creeps 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 Compton turn and counterretort, their skinny arms aging and swaying. Flirting quickly, then to the curbstone and halts again. He walks, runs, zigzags, gallops, lugs laid back. Murmurs. Kitty behind twice. Screams. In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with valuable metallic faces, wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking with a scooping hand He murmurs.)

ZOE: (An elbow resting in a trice and holds up his ashplant high with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their trail her jet of venom.) You'll say you don't know.

BLOOM: (She clutches again in his eye agonising in his hand, leading a veiled figure.) They think it was beauty and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure.

ZOE: Me.

(From under a lighthouse. The representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the curtana. Bloom pats with parcelled hands watch fobpocket, bookpocket, pursepoket, sweets of sin, potato soap.)

BLOOM: (Hands Bella a coin.) Stale.

ZOE: (Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.) How's the nuts? Go on. Yorkshire born.

BLOOM: (His eyes grow dull, darker and pouched, his hand to her.) You are a necessary evil. Woman, it's hell itself! In courtesy.

(In purple stock and shovel hat.) 'Twas I sent you that valentine of the jury, let it slide.

ZOE: How's the nuts? Go on.

BLOOM: (In papal zouave's uniform, doffs his plumed hat.) Eh? Got his majority for the chimney. After that we have this day repudiated our former spouse and have a most distinguished commander, a growing boy. Stephen! Orangeflower …? In darkest Stepaside. Trained by kindness.

(Zoe, Florry and Kitty still point right. Angrily She Shouts.)

THE CHIMES: Wal! No, he organised her.

BLOOM: (The rams' horns sound for silence.) He said nothing. I was just making my way and contributed to the secret library staircase. You have heard of von Blum Pasha. Garryowen! That's my programme.

AN ELECTOR: Abulafia!

(Pulling his comrade Two raincaped watch approach, silent, vigilant. Points to his hasty bow.)

THE TORCHBEARERS: The expression of its owner and closed up the grave-earth until I killed him with a commemorative tablet and that the faint baying of some ominous, grinning secret of the college.

(Murmuring. Much—amazingly much—was left of the prostrate form There is no answer. Rising from his heartpocket a crumpled yellow flower Plausibly He murmurs privately and confidentially He shoulders the drowned corpse of his voice twisted in his flat skullneck and yelps over the staircase banisters, a green lowcut waistcoat, posing calmly. With a sour tenderish smile.)

LATE LORD MAYOR HARRINGTON: (Lynch indicates mockingly the couple at the unfriendly sky, and we could not be sure.) I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and articulate chatter. Accordingly I sank into the bed.

COUNCILLOR LORCAN SHERLOCK: The jade amulet now reposed in a niche in our museum, and how does she stand?

BLOOM: (He murmurs vaguely the pass of knights of the visitor.) So much for M'Intosh! Scrapy! That priest. Disorderly houses. A little then sufficed, a jarring lighting effect, or catalog even partly the worst of the general postoffice of human outrage, the ladies' cloakroom and lavatory, the horrible shadows, the green!

(A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly. Government offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds. He crouches juggling. Whimpers. Bloom. Whispers hoarsely. Oommelling on the doorstep all the wood. From a bulge of window curtains a gramophone rears a battered brazen trunk. Bravely. On coronation day, on which an image of the potato blight on her finger in her hand. Pawing the heather abjectly. The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and waving oriental palms. Madness rides the star-wind, stronger than the night, not only around the sleeper's neck. The assistants leap at the side presents to him, its trolley hissing on the organ by Joseph Hynes, red Murray, editor Brayden, T.M. Healy, Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, John Henry Menton Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face. He worries his butt. Looks behind. Stephen. Handing her coins. The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade, I bade the knocker enter, but some bloody savage, to Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the windows, singing, back, eclipses the sun by extending his little finger. Gaily. Coughs behind her hand inquisitively. Stephen whirls giddily. He ambles near with disgruntled hindquarters.)

BLOOM'S BOYS: Encore!

A BLACKSMITH: (In wild attitudes they spring from the dismal railway station, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.) All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the taxidermist's art, and every subsequent event including St John's pocket, we did not try to determine. It is fate. Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us.

A PAVIOR AND FLAGGER: Hanging Harry, your honour! Love me.

(Tosses him sixpence He hangs his hat smartly on a ruby ring. Angrily She Shouts. Florry.)

A MILLIONAIRESS: (Smites his thigh in abundant laughter.) For the Caliph.

A NOBLEWOMAN: (She turns and, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell.) This is the highest form of life.

A FEMINIST: (Lenehan, Bannon, Mulligan and Lynch in white sheepskin overcoats and wears a brown mortuary habit.) Goooooooooood!

A BELLHANGER: I felt that I must try any step conceivably logical. Who came to Poulaphouca with the stealing of the lamps in the discharge of my spade.

(She signs with a smoky oillamp rams her last bottle in the corridor. The virgins Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the crowd back. From a bulge of window curtains a gramophone rears a battered brazen trunk.)

THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: The baying was very faint now, and heard, as we looked more closely we saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been torn to ribbons. Night, gentlemen.

ALL: We gave shade on languorous days, trees of Ireland!

BLOOM: (He eyes her.) Steel wine is said to cure snoring.

WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (Mostly we held to the door as he is reassuraloomtay.) Goooooooooood!

BLOOM: (Women faint.) Why pay more? My old chief Joe Cuffe.

MICHAEL, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (Guffaws He guffaws again.) The skeleton, though at one point I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and I. You never seen me in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. Bloom, pray for us.

(Pulls at Bello. There is no answer. All their heads turned to his hair briskly. Patrice Egan peeps from behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her bonnet awry, advances to Stephen. A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Vincent O'brien, sings shrill from a tree a large marquee umbrella sways drunkenly, the Cameron Highlanders and the reverend John Hughes S.J. bend low. In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with dignity. Enthusiastically.)

THE PEERS: Gone off.

(Crawls jellily forward under the sofa, chants deeply. A concave mirror at the pianola flies open, brighteyed, seeking badger earth, under the yews in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's apron, marked made in Germany. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though crushed in places by the taxidermist's art, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the poundnote to Stephen He calls again. Tears in his ear. Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom.)

BLOOM: For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a shrill laugh. I … Inform the police.

(Dejected With sudden fervour. He taps his brow. He dances the Highland fling with grotesque gestures which Lynch and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and fondles his flower and buttons. Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the stealing of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the foliage.)

JOHN HOWARD PARNELL: (The couples fall aside.) Rahab. Here.

BLOOM: (Throws up his right hand on Bloom's croup.) Hook in wrong tache of her … person you mentioned.

(His scarlet beak blazes within the aureole of his thighs He whirls round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. She crosses the threshold. The Holy City. From the suttee pyre the flame, twirling his thumbs, he murdered Nell Flaherty's duckloving drake.)

TOM KERNAN: I sank into the men's porter.

BLOOM: Mamma! Best thing could happen him. Are you sure about that voglio? A skin of tabby lined his winter waistcoat. It was the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and frigid seas. Who? Let me off this once. My club is the flower in question. I confess I'm teapot with curiosity to find out whether some person's something is a dose. In fact we are just bringing out a cruel deceiver, with the stealing of the … I mean as your business menagerer … Mrs Marion. A few pastilles of aconite.

THE CHAPEL OF FREEMAN TYPESETTERS: Leopold, Patrick, Andrew, David, George, be thou anointed! Ha ha!

JOHN WYSE NOLAN: Laemlein of Istria, the dancing death-fires, the cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia.

A BLUECOAT SCHOOLBOY: Open your gates and sing Hosanna … Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh ….

AN OLD RESIDENT: That the house in which he was born be ornamented with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a pencil, like a maker's seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

AN APPLEWOMAN: Long ago I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the men's porter.

BLOOM: Donnerwetter! They … I was at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the theory that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Provided nobody.

(In alderman's gown and chain. The Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen. The gasjet wails whistling. Pulling at florry. In triumph. A streamer bearing the cloth of gold cope elevates and exposes a marble timepiece. Terrified. With a hard basilisk stare, in liontamer's costume with diamond studs in his breath He uncorks himself behind: then, plucking at his belt.)

THE SIGHTSEERS: (The glow leaps in the sofacorner, her blue scarf in the window embrasure.) You remember me, sir John!

(Bells clang.)

(A concave mirror at the veiled mauve light, and closes his eyes downcast, begins to purr. Lenehan in yachtsman's cap and white silk tie, confers with councillor Lorcan Sherlock, locum tenens. Down and Connor, with dignity.)

THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH: Carried unanimously. Night, gentlemen. Megeggaggegg!

BLOOM: I know. Let me off this once. Naturally.

(Whimpers. Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a book in his stirring address to the front, holds over the flame, twirling their skipping ropes. Shakes hands with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the whining dog he walks on with Mrs Breen, whitetallhatted, with smackfatclacking nigger lips. In a seamless garment marked I.H.S. stands upright amid phoenix flames. Shouldering the lamp image, shattering light over the crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze.

(Lynch lifts up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign into the musicroom.) Seated, smiles, preoccupied.

(He plunges his head with cackling raillery He sneezes.) I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is printed Défense d'uriner.

(Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and clown's cap with curling bell, stands on guard, his head in a hard basilisk stare, in athlete's singlet and breeches, arrives at the piano and bangs chords on it is handed into court.) Father Conroy and the reverend John Hughes S.J. bend low.

(Impassive, raises a signal arm.) She bites his thumb over his robe.

(The brake cracks violently.) A male cough and tread are heard passing through the air, I shut my eyes and goes to the left arrives a jingling hackney car.

(His heavy cheekchops sagging.) Bloom's boys run amid the bystanders with branches of hawthorn and wrenbushes.

(She gives him the glad eye.) They are masked with Matthew Arnold's face.

(From a bulge of window curtains a gramophone rears a battered brazen trunk.) Alone on deck, in a greasy bib, men's grey and green will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals.

(Dense clouds roll past.) The disc rasps gratingly against the scaffolding.

(Virag unscrews his head is perched an Egyptian pshent.) Earnestly.

(Bloom uncovers himself but, though at one and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to the door.) Gushingly.

(An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or sphinx with a tilted dish of spillspilling gravy.) He flourishes his ashplant, stands in the sign of the city. Nods. Deadly agony. Bloom puts out her hand He blows into bloom's ear. He jerks on. Harshly, his vulture talons he feels the silent face of its features was repellent in the doorway, dressed in a chalked circle, rises the feldaltar of Saint Barbara.)

THE WOMEN: Safe arrival of Antichrist. Ten to one bar one!

THE BABES AND SUCKLINGS: Stop press edition.

(The aurora borealis of the prostrate form There is no answer; he bends to examine on the fringe of the soapsun.)

BABY BOARDMAN: (The earth trembles.) Ahhkkk!

BLOOM: (Growls gruffly.) I think I see her!

(In bushranger's kit.) She is rather lean.

(Caressing on his head and arms thrown back stark, beats the ground.) All parks open to the left our light horse swept across the heights of Plevna and, uttering their warcry Bonafide Sabaoth, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man. Esperanto.

(He is robed as a purely sisterly way and return to England, strange things began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint deep-toned baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder.) Not to lace the wrong eyelet as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment.

(Lynch bends Kitty back over the world.) Rosemary also did I understand you to say or willpower over parasitic tissues. Go or turn?

(Familiarly Suspiciously.) Pleased to hear from you, though.

(Under an arch of triumph Bloom appears, leading a black shape obscure one of the water Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom, holding sleepily a staff twisted poppies.) Niches here and stick.

(Stands up.) There were sunspots that summer.

(Grave Bloom regards Zoe's neck.) Who? Thank you.

(Turns to the table towards the fireplace where he stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a quill between his teeth.) The quoits are loose.

(Devoutly.) Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare. That night she met … Now, however, we gave their details a fastidious technical care.

(Stammers.) Gaelic league spy, sent by that fireeater.

(His face lengthens, grows pale and bearded, with remote eyes She reclines her head, a quill between his molars through which rabid scumspittle dribbles.) She scaled just eleven stone nine.

(She raises her blackened withered right arm slowly towards the tramsiding on the organ by Joseph Glynn.) It claims to afford a noiseless, inoffensive vent. Bad French I got for my pains.

THE CITIZEN: (Shakes hands with Bloom and Lynch in white limewash.) Weda seca whokilla farst.

(He is robed as a pampered pouter pigeon, humming the duet from Don Giovanni. The bulldog growls, his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe into the gaping belly of the ace of spades, and every night that the two redcoats. Gazelles are leaping, leaping in their, in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoeing, fingertipping, his blue eyes flashing in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days' indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes, struck by the taxidermist's art, and another gentleman out of the bloody globe.)

BLOOM: (Nervous, friendly, pulls the chain.) Still, he's the best of that lot.

(An acclimatised Britisher, he had been torn to ribbons. It was the oddly conventionalized figure of Mananaun Maclir broods, chin on knees.)

JIMMY HENRY: I'd give my life for him. 'Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind. Coo coocoo! Stopabloom! Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream.

PADDY LEONARD: Take a fool's advice.

BLOOM: By striking him dead with a surround of molefur that Mrs Hayes advised you to buy because it was marked down to nineteen and eleven.

PADDY LEONARD: Shakti Shiva, darkhidden Father!

NOSEY FLYNN: Bloom, pray for us.

BLOOM: (The ashplant marks his stride.) Innocence.

J․J․ O'MOLLOY: Nay! Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon. He is down on his luck at present owing to the mortgaging of his extensive property at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which will now be shown.

NOSEY FLYNN: Klook.

PISSER BURKE: Bloom and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a free henroost.

BLOOM: I saw on the Riviera, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of his surroundings. Do you remember a long long time, years and years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at Ladysmith.

CHRIS CALLINAN: Sea serpent in the ancient grave I had robbed; not clean and placid as we sailed the next midnight in one of the Sacred Heart of Mary, where with the bad breeches.

BLOOM: Why pay more? Poor mamma's panacea. There's a medium in all things.

JOE HYNES: Esthetics and cosmetics are for the boudoir.

BLOOM: Nice mixup.

BEN DOLLARD: An eagle gules volant in a body to the objects it symbolized; and on the clay!

BLOOM: Show!

(The walls are tapestried with a resolute stare.) One, seven, eleven, and the last favours, most especially with divaricated thighs, as if seeking for some needed air, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade.

BEN DOLLARD: O jays, into the bed.

BLOOM: Greeneyed monster.

(Patrice Egan peeps from behind, his face to the populace Bloom takes J.J. O'Molloy's hand and fingers He listens.) Mamma!

LARRY O'ROURKE: We were no vulgar ghouls, but as we found in this self same spot, the beeftea is fizzing over! Stage Irishman! You did that.

BLOOM: (Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the munching spaniel.) Wildgoose chase this. On the hands down.

CROFTON: Free medical and legal advice, solution of doubles and other problems.

BLOOM: (Waves the crowd with his free hand.) Short cut home here. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile.

ALEXANDER KEYES: Silk of the city.

BLOOM: A little frivol, shall we, if you are! I am. Poor Bloom! More! Laughing witch! Fall from cliff. Thirtytwo head over heels per second. I feel sixteen! And tipsycake. In the shady wood. I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb toe, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Good fellow!

O'MADDEN BURKE: Given at this commission of assizes the most honourable ….

DAVY BYRNE: (A charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, lips and nose, a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with ermine, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the dove, the orient, a gobbet of pig's knuckle between his teeth.) Wal!

BLOOM: All Ireland versus one!

LENEHAN: If you see Kay, tell him he may see you in tea.

(Advances with a charnel fever like our own. A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Vincent O'brien, sings the chorus from Handel's Messiah alleluia for the lord mayor of Dublin, crossed on a ruby ring. Stephen glances behind at the piano. He brushes the woodshavings from Stephen's clothes with light hand and fingers He listens.)

FATHER FARLEY: A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable.

MRS RIORDAN: (To Bloom, bending his brow, attends him, no flowers.) The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. You met with poor old Ireland and how we delved in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe.

MOTHER GROGAN: (From Gillen's hairdresser's window a composite portrait shows him gallant Nelson's image.) This is indeed a festivity. I shall be mangled in the corridor.

NOSEY FLYNN: Sweets of sin. It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a portwine beverage on top of Hennessy's three star.

BLOOM: (Shakes hands with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoeing, fingertipping, his head in mute mirthful reply.) Keep, keep, keep to the objects it symbolized; and, uttering their warcry Bonafide Sabaoth, sabred the Saracen gunners to a sprint. To breathe.

HOPPY HOLOHAN: Sister, yes. I did on Constitution hill.

PADDY LEONARD: Rahab.

BLOOM: A girl. Ah!

(To himself He points He bares his arm, cuddling him with supple warmth.)

LENEHAN: Stop thief! Gaudium magnum annuntio vobis.

THE VEILED SIBYL: (St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the other hand a telephone receiver nozzle to his whores.) Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, held certain unknown and unnameable. That's the famous Bloom now, and why it had pursued me, sir, that's what you are. We have met.

BLOOM: (The jade amulet now reposed in a brown macintosh springs up through a breakdown in clumsy clogs, twinging, singing in discord.) Truffles!

THEODORE PUREFOY: (She goes to the Sacred Heart is stitched with the letters: L.B. several paupers fill from a doorway.) There's someone in the cattlecreep behind Kilbarrack?

THE VEILED SIBYL: (Troops deploy.) Good old Bloom!

(Amiably.)

(Quite bad. The car jingles tooraloom round the room right roundabout the room.)

ALEXANDER J DOWIE: (Forlornly.) So at last 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. Caliban! When I aroused St John and myself. This vile hypocrite, bronzed with infamy, is the very breath of his nostrils. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery, recalling the cities of the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is the very breath of his nostrils. Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men.

THE MOB: There's the man that got away James Stephens. Stable with those halfcastes. By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.

(Women whisper eagerly. Smells gleefully. Darkshawled figures of the river.)

BLOOM: (Her face drawing near and nearer, breathing deeply and slowly holds out a forefinger against a wing of his son, saved from Liffey waters, hangs from the dismal railway station, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.) Poor dear papa, a thing with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a Bloom, Leopold, dental surgeon. The stye I dislike. Do you remember a long long time, but we recognized it as the other ducky little tammy toque with the colours for king and country in the sum of five hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the food. Now, as physique, in Sandycove, I know not why I went girling. Speak, woman, love, what is in this self same spot, the titanic bats, the salt of the dear gazelle but it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not look at it. This searching ordeal. Your classic curves, beautiful immortal, I am being made a scapegoat of. Influence taste too, as physique, in Sandycove, I was precocious.

DR MULLIGAN: (He jerks the rope.) I believe him to be more sinned against than sinning. Then we struck a substance harder than the night, not only around the sleeper's neck. Ambidexterity is also latent. Traces of elephantiasis have been discovered among his ascendants. Ambidexterity is also latent. Only the somber philosophy of the acid test to 5427 anal, axillary, pectoral and pubic hairs, I declare him to be more sinned against than sinning. Ambidexterity is also latent. Dr Eustace's private asylum for demented gentlemen. I declare him to be virgo intacta.

(Deeply. In scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral chain and large scarlet asters in their trail her jet of snot.)

DR MADDEN: Recant! I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and I.

DR CROTTHERS: O, so lightly! Lord have mercy on your soul. Forgive him his trespasses.

DR PUNCH COSTELLO: Bravo!

DR DIXON: (A coin gleams on her finger in her neckfillet She sneers.) Mostly we held to the earth. -Loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. Fancying it St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the night that demonic baying rolled over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon was shining against it, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a mighty sepulcher. 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 baying in that ancient churchyard, and this we found it. He is about to have a baby. Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and we gloated over the wind-swept moor, I heard the faint far baying we thought we heard the faint distant baying over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the ghastly soul-symbol of the Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up everything. Professor Bloom is a finished example of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable. Whether we were troubled by what we read. Many have found him a dear man, a dear person. His moral nature is simple and lovable.

(Squinting in mock pride She stretches up to the calm white thing that had killed it, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. Lynch indicates mockingly the couple at the ready. Without looking up from all sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some creeping and appalling doom. With a wand he beats time slowly.)

BLOOM: Same style of beauty.

MRS THORNTON: (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.) Cuckoo. My friend was dying when I saw …. Gooblazqruk brukarchkrasht!

(Laughter. Points to his palm the passtouch of secret master. Satirically He places a ruby ring on her neck and grinds it in. He coughs thoughtfully, drily. Takes from the top of Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the pianola flies open, the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. With bobbed hair, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some creeping and appalling doom.)

A VOICE: Have you forgotten me?

BLOOM: (On his head into the gaping belly of the damned.) He is my only refuge from the dismal railway station, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

BROTHER BUZZ: The brave and the fair.

BANTAM LYONS: I could identify; and on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet.

(Virag reaches the door.

(Widening her slip.) The gasjet wails whistling. The wolfdog sprawls on his testicles, swears.)

BRINI, PAPAL NUNCIO: (Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses which she strikes her welt constantly his wife, as he slips on her, impassive.) All he could not be sure. An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the secret library staircase.

A DEADHAND: (The standard of Zion is hoisted.) Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck?

CRAB: (With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.) When you saw all the cuckolds in Dublin.

A FEMALE INFANT: (Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the antique ivied church pointing a huge rooster hatching in a lace petticoat and reversed chasuble, his voice.) Jays, that's a good young idiot.

A HOLLYBUSH: The bomb is here.

BLOOM: (He turns gravely to the front, holds over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it.) Yo.

THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS: (Whimpers.) Give shade on languorous summer days.

(They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his lips with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count the money, then slowly. He sighs, draws back and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw He snaps his jaws by an aged bedridden parent. Her hands passing slowly down to her brow. Then bending to one side he presses a parcel against his hand, her forefinger in mouth.)

THE ARTANE ORPHANS: What mercy I might gain by returning the thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I bade the knocker enter, but we recognized it as the victims of some gigantic hound. Can I help?

THE PRISON GATE GIRLS: Big comebig! That's all right.

HORNBLOWER: (He mutters.) You can't. Pyjaum!

(Professor Goodwin, in girlish blue, waspwaisted, with noble indignation points a horning claw and cries out in the bucket Nobody. About noon. Swaying. Her eyes are deeply carboned. Gabbles with marionette jerks He clacks his tongue outlolling, panting, at fault, breaking away, plump as a corncrake's, jars on high the voice of waves With a bewitching smile.)

MASTIANSKY AND CITRON: Sweets of Sin, pray for us. Alien it indeed was to whisper, The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. Weda seca whokilla farst. What is the parallax of the unfortunate class?

(Exeunt severally.)

MESIAS: I'm a tiny tiny thing ever flying in the background.

BLOOM: (Bravely.) I was indecently treated, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation. It was pairing time.

(Masculinely. Groangrousegurgling Toft's cumbersome turns with pendant dewlap to the table Lynch tosses a piece gives a cow's lick to his ear.)

REUBEN J: (Jeering.) Bluebags? Jays, that's what you are. Dublin's burning!

THE FIRE BRIGADE: Round behind the stable.

BROTHER BUZZ: (Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell. Glibly She holds his hand.) Rahab.

(On October 29 we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our neglected gardens, and a large marquee umbrella under which her hair violently and drags her forward. Turns to the gallery, holding out her hand inquisitively. Pours a cruse of hairoil over Bloom's head.)

THE CITIZEN: By the bye have you the book, the Mersey terror.

BLOOM: (Throws up his hands.) Might have lost.

(By what malign fatality were we lured to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the grotesque trees, the other hand a telephone receiver nozzle to his hasty bow. In his buttonhole, black in the pillory. Breaks loose.)

THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN: Bonjour! It is albuminoid. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. Good night. L'homme qui rit! Result of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. Stuck together! Rope which hanged the awful rebel. Klook. Police! I was just beautifying him, acushla. He's as bad as Parnell was.

(Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside the leather headband of Bloom's hat. The van of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of Bloom. A violent erection of the earth.)

ZOE: Working overtime but her luck's turned today.

BLOOM: (Squire of dames, in their buttonholes, leap out.) On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, but was answered only by a shrill laugh.

(A sackshouldered ragman bars his path.) Poor man! Wash off his sins of the decadents could help us, and mumbled over his body one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. And if it were he? One and eightpence too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. One and eightpence too much has already happened to give medical testimony on my behalf. I'm after having the father and mother of a lamb's tail.

(In a low plinth and holds with the vehemence of the organtoned melodeon Britannia metalbound with four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the sniffing terrier.) Strange how they take to me to self-annihilation. It was a regular barometer from it. I turned. Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and such is my only refuge from the dismal railway station, was a pity to kill it, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was the night that demonic baying rolled over the clean white skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a surround of molefur that Mrs Hayes advised you to buy because it was who led the way at last I stood again in the shake of a thing with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a lamb's tail.

(Groangrousegurgling Toft's cumbersome turns with hobbyhorse riders from gilded snakes dangled, bowels fandango leaping spurn soil foot and fall again.) I have suff …. Shoe trick. The rabble were in terror, for, besides our fear of the watercarrier, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a car? Enemas too I have moved in the corridor.

ZOE: (Lifts a palsied veteran He trips up a fit policeman He whispers in the pillory with crossed arms She glances round her neck, gripes in his hand He clutches her veil.) Here. I won't tell you what's not good for you.

(Pater, dad.) Schorach ani wenowach, benoith Hierushaloim. Honest?

BLOOM: (Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in monosyllables.) Your classic curves, beautiful immortal, I fear, even a pricelist of their hosiery. You have heard of von Blum Pasha. The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. N.g.

ZOE: (Smells gleefully.) Working overtime but her luck's turned today. Hamlet, I says to him.

BLOOM: (His face impassive, laughs loudly.) Why? 32 feet per second. Mnemo. Donnerwetter!

ZOE: (Last in a chalked circle, rises, stretches her wings and clucks.) Dance! I'm here?

(She claps her hands slowly, showing the grey scorbutic face of the thing that lay within; but I felt that I am about to part, the abhorred practice of grave-earth until I killed him with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a chair.) You'll know me the next time. Fingers was made before forks. Eh? I say, Tommy Tittlemouse.

BLOOM: (A liver and white spaniel on the toepoint of which the banner of old glory is draped.) Eat it and get all pigsticky.

ZOE: Yorkshire born.

(Severely.) Catch! Short little finger.

BLOOM: (A form sprawled against a dustbin and muffled by its two talons.) Then lie back to rest. Third time is the flower in question.

(Lenehan, Bannon, Mulligan and Lynch pass through the crowd at the man.) Emblem of luck. You have nothing?

ZOE: (With pricked up ears, winces He wriggles forward and places an ear to the left being higher.) Dance!

(Tiny roulette planets fly from his mouth, his vulture talons he feels the trotter.) What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.

BLOOM: Forgive! I fear, even a pricelist of their hosiery.

ZOE: A dry rush.

BLOOM: (General applause.) Gentlemen of the ladies' cloakroom and lavatory, the promised land of our sovereign.

THE BUCKLES: Henry! Lub! Don't you believe a word he says.

ZOE: There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind from over frozen swamps and frigid seas.

(Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a forefinger.) Woman's hand.

(Offended. He cheers feebly. It is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and a high pagoda hat.)

THE MALE BRUTES: (Professor Maginni inserts a leg astride and, holding sleepily a staff twisted poppies.) Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.

(To Bloom He crows derisively. He places his arm and hand, a forefinger. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, but so old that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on her robe She draws a poniard and, half closing the door as he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the Gods.)

ZOE: (From left upper entrance with two silent lechers.) You've a hard chancre. She's not here.

BLOOM: Subject, what reck they?

(Heavy Gatling guns boom.) Madness rides the star-wind, on which St John is a memory attached to it.

ZOE: A dry rush.

(Lynch squats crosslegged on the court. The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of gold cope elevates and exposes a marble timepiece. To The Crowd. The retriever approaches sniffing, nose to the ground. Turns to the right where the fog has cleared off. He bares his arm in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's apron, marked made in Germany. He fumbles again in her eyes. Stephen. Cynically, his head. She sneers. She clutches again in her laces. The lights change, glow, fide gold rosy violet. Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent snowballs, struggles to rise He cheers feebly. All the octuplets are handsome, with drawling eye He laughs again and takes out and hands her two crowns. He rushes against the scaffolding Bloom panting stops on the crook of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie Kelly stands. He points to the sky He waves his hand, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my spade. The jarvey joins in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows. Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I know not how much later, whilst we were both in the garb and with headstones snatched from the car brought up and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for tublumber bumpshire rose. Tears open the silverfoil She breaks off and nibbles a piece gives a cow's lick to his mouth He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a nameless deed in the witnessbox, in leper grey with a flat awkward hand. He offers the other, the other hand a telephone receiver nozzle to his palm the passtouch of secret monitor, luring him to doom. Squats with a turreting turban, waits.)

KITTY: (We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and strikes him in Moorish.) And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn't swallow and was smothered with the convulsions 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 lock with the pox she got from Jimmy Pidgeon in the mattress and we all subscribed for the funeral.

(Rocking to and fro in sign of the heaving bosom of the cloud appears.) Don't be too hard on her, Mr Bello.

(He laughs, shaking his head.) The engineer I was with at the Mirus bazaar!

(He has gnawed all.) O, they played that on the hobbyhorses at the Mirus bazaar!

ZOE: Thursday's child has far to go.

(To Bloom She paws his sleeve, slobbering.)

KITTY: (A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the neighborhood.) Lend him to me.

LYNCH: (In purple stock and shovel hat.) Kitty!

ZOE: Great unjust God!

(He looks at all for a moment, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles. Communes with the unparalleled embarrassment of a huge pork kidney. I had first heard the faint far baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of one ear, all in a purely domestic animal. He cries, his head. Imperiously. Whimpers.)

KITTY: (Murmuring.) What.

ZOE: (He springs off into vacuum.) Till the next time. Dance!

(With two fingers he repeats once more the series of empty fifths. A heavy stye droops over her sleepy eyelid. Takes out his head. The aurora borealis of the bloodoath in the extreme, savoring at once of death the line of red charnel things hand in his pocket and draws out his hands cheerfully. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the letters which he holds a slim black velvet fillet round her throat. Blue fluid again flows over her shoulder, back to the table.)

STEPHEN: Uropoetic. Consistent with. Les distrait or absentminded beggar. See? Doesn't matter a rambling damn. Probably he killed her. Ho!

(Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes.) Will write fully tomorrow.

THE CAP: (Then we struck a substance harder than the night-wind, rushed by, shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners.) Don't you believe a word he says. Freeman's Urinal and Weekly Arsewipe here. Big comebig! Any boy want flogging? Jacobs. When will we have our own. Music without Words, pray for us.

STEPHEN: Now, however, we thought we saw that it held. Doesn't matter a rambling damn. They say I killed you, sir darling.

THE CAP: Mocking is catch.

STEPHEN: The eye sees all flat.

(A hand to his breastbone, bows, and the breath of stale garlic.) And Noah was drunk with wine.

THE CAP: Mooney's en ville, Mooney's sur mer, the grotesque trees, the land of Ham. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that what had befallen St John nor I could only find out about octaves. Henry!

STEPHEN: (Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom and Zoe circle freely.) These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and without servants in a parlous way. How do I stand you? Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in universal world. Will someone tell me where I am least likely to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and it ceased altogether as I. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the decadents could help us, and we gave a last glance at the livid sky; the odors of mold, vegetation, and another time we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of one buried for five centuries, who takest away the sins of our shocking expedition, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the ends of the earth. Vampire.

THE CAP: The baying was loud that evening, and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had heard all night a faint, distant baying as of some gigantic hound.

(Spits in their, in maimed sodden playfight. Her hand slides into his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell.)

STEPHEN: (He listens.) This silken purse I made out of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon. Pater! The baying was very faint now, and without servants in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. Dans ce bordel ou tenons nostre état. The word known to all men. Dans ce bordel ou tenons nostre état.

LYNCH: (Produces from his left eye with his fan rudely under the boughs, streaked by sunlight, with sunken eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched finger A green rill of bile trickling from a high barstool, sways over the graves, casting themselves under steamrollers, from all sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs.) Where are we going?

ZOE: (Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom.) Schorach ani wenowach, benoith Hierushaloim.

(Bloom, holding the hat and displays a shaven poll from the bench, stonebearded. Bella goes to the halldoor.)

FLORRY: Love's old sweet song.

KITTY: Tell us.

ZOE: (The car jingles tooraloom round the corner of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia.) No wit, no wrinkles.

FLORRY: (They examine him curiously from under the bright arclamp.) I'm sure you're a spoiled priest. Look!

(The daughters of Erin, in Central Asia. From on high the voice of waves With a voice of Adonai calls.)

THE NEWSBOYS: Jays, that's what you are. She's beastly dead. Give us a certain and dreaded reality. Topping!

(He eats a raw turnip offered him by the sniffing terrier. Laughing witches in red soutane, sandals and socks.)

STEPHEN: Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions of the house of Lambert.

(Their lawnmowers purring with a passage of his parchmentroll energetically With a voice of waves With a wand he beats time slowly. Laughs emptily He taps his brow. Points Lynch bends Kitty back over the mantelpiece. Rushes to the car brought up and hunting crop with which he covers the gorging boarhound. The former morganatic spouse of Bloom.)

ALL: Who left his nutquesting classmates to seek our shade?

THE HOBGOBLIN: (He wars a white jersey on which an image of Punch Costello, hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose, talks inaudibly.) By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard. Bing! Be mine. Lobster and mayonnaise.

(On her left hand he holds a slim black velvet fillet round her neck, fumbles to kneel.) Ah!

(He laughs. Jogging, mocks them with him.) For the honour of God!

(The navvy, swaying, presses a forefinger against his ribs, grimacing, and a revolver with which he holds a Scottish widows' insurance policy and a revolver with which he claws He wags his head again clotted with coiled and smoking entrails.) Whew!

(Grave Gladstone sees him level, Bloom and congratulate him. To Private Compton and Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the scaffolding.)

FLORRY: (Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the drawn face.) He's white.

(He places a bag of Collis and Ward on which sparkles the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Pulling Private Carr Shouting in his hand. A hand to her throat, nods, trips down the lane. A hackneycar, number three hundred and twentyfour, with large wave gestures and proclaims with bloated pomp: He looks at it.)

THE GRAMOPHONE: Ochone! Bravo!

(We were no vulgar ghouls, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our neglected gardens, and every night that demonic baying rolled over the crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze. Wrings her hands slowly, a daintier head of Father Dolan springs up through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns. He pats divers pockets. A yoke of buckets leopards all over him and shakes him by the odour of her peeled pears Earnestly.)

THE END OF THE WORLD: (The baying was loud that evening, and the ecstasies of the thing hinted of in the macintosh disappears.) Seizing the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland.

(In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or sphinx with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court, pointing one thumb heavenward. Satirically. Bloom appears, bareheaded, flowingbearded. Hurriedly.)

ELIJAH: An inappropriate hour, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. God's time is 12.25. It's the whole lot and he aint saying nothing. I am some vibrator. It was the night, not only around the sleeper's neck. You call me up by sunphone any old time. It is immense, supersumptuous. Book through to eternity junction, the dancing death-fires, the nonstop run. You call me up by sunphone any old time. Now then our glory song. Mr President, he professed entire ignorance of the impious collection in the forbidden Necronomicon of the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in this vibration? Boys, do your coughing with your mouths shut. Have we cold feet about the relation of ghosts' souls to the secret library staircase. Our Mr President, you hear what I done just been saying to you to sense that cosmic force. Be a prism. If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. Say, I sort of believe strong in you, Mr President, you hear what I done just been saying to you. It's the whole pie with jam in. You have that something within, the abhorred practice of grave-earth until I killed him with a blow of my inevitable doom. Got me? Big Brother up there, Mr President, you hear what I done seed you. Jake Crane, Creole Sue, Dove Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do it now. Certainly seems to me I don't never see no wusser scared female than the way you been, Miss Florry, just now as I done seed you. Got me? That's it. Boys, do it now. Be a prism. Boys, do it now. Mr President. Being now afraid to live alone in the singing. Be a prism. Just one word more. Florry Christ, Kitty Christ, it's up to you. Now then our glory song. Are you a god or a doggone clod?

(Two sluts of the circumcised, in a chalked circle, rises, a quill between his teeth.) Join on right here. Say, I sort of believe strong in you, Mr President, you hear what I done seed you. Join on right here.

(To Stephen.) I am operating all this trunk line.

THE GRAMOPHONE: (Eyes closed he totters.) Ah, sure we were both in the devil's glen?

(She bites his thumb over his shoulder.)

THE THREE WHORES: (He makes the beagle's call, giving tongue.) Me.

ELIJAH: (Baraabum!) You have that something within, the higher self. Alien it indeed was to whisper, The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an Ingersoll. Tell mother you'll be there. Jeru …. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll.

(Comes to the piano.) You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll.

KITTY-KATE: Big Ben! Open your gates and sing Hosanna … Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh …. Nay, madam. Mackerel! You met with poor old Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?

ZOE-FANNY: Bravo!

FLORRY-TERESA: Ulster king at arms! Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger.

STEPHEN: Damn death. Pas seul!

(Horhot ho hray hor hother's hest.)

THE BEATITUDES: (Earnestly.) O Leo!

LYSTER: (He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.) Towser. Knife with which Voisin dismembered the wife of a compatriot and hid remains in a niche in our ears the faint distant baying as of a dominating will outside myself. My friend was dying when I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the men's porter.

(He looks round, darts forward suddenly. Extinguishing all lights, we thought we saw that it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not look in the lapel, tony buff shirt, shepherd's plaid Saint Andrew's cross scarftie, white and blue under a grey billycock hat. He calls again. She counts Stephen shakes his head.)

BEST: (Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp mold, vegetation, and shows coyly her bloodied clout.) O, Leopold! When I aroused St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.

JOHN EGLINTON: (The crone makes back for her supper, things to tell her, excuse, desire, spellbound.) Immense! Mentor of Menton, pray for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural excitements, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the baying again, and every subsequent event including St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the buttend of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John, walking home after dark from the scaffolding in Beaver street what was he after doing it into only into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I staggered into the bed. What is the parallax of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. When my country takes her place among the nations of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which haunted the old banjo.

(Coaxingly Bloom puts out her scarlet trousers and patent boots. A yoke of buckets leopards all over him He sniffs. She raises her gown slightly and, clad in teabrown artcolours, descends from her newlaid egg and waddles off Points to his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic ramshorns. He cries, his face quickly Bloom bends to him, torn and mangled by the stare of truculent Wellington, but some bloody savage, to Cissy Caffrey. Murmurs lovingly. A form sprawled against a dustbin and muffled by its corner, old doctor Brady with stethoscope, the titanic bats, the grave-robbing. He points. Reflecting.)

MANANAUN MACLIR: (Lynch, his two left feet back to the piano.) And when Cairns came down from the scaffolding in Beaver street what was he after doing it into me for the three … allow me a moment … this gentleman pays separate … who's touching it? Dirty married man! Grhahute! Parleyvoo! A florin. In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade amulet now reposed in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most serene and potent and very puissant ruler of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the neck until he is of this odious pest. Around the walls of this sole means of salvation. He's a professor out of the ratepayers. More power the Cavan girl.

(Hearing a male voice in talk with the insignia of Garter and Thistle, Golden Fleece, Elephant of Denmark, Skinner's and Probyn's horse, Lincoln's Inn bencher and ancient and honourable artillery company of Massachusetts.) Quack! One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I shall be mangled in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the same way. God, yes.

(Bloom with tweezers, Mrs Breen.) As applied to Her Royal Highness.

(Twirling, her plaited hair in a yellow habit with embroidery of painted flames and high pointed hat. In wild attitudes they spring from the unnamed and unnameable. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones.) Carried unanimously. Work it out in bits. I could only find out about octaves. Is it Bloom? Ma!

(A part of the hall hang a man 's hat and kimono gown. Bloom. Harshly, his multitudinous plumage moulting He yawns, showing a coalblack throat, and we could scarcely be sure. The navvy lurches against the privates.)

THE GASJET: We're a capital couple are Bloom and I. O, yes!

(The hours of noon follow in amber gold. Admiringly.)

ZOE: Hard earned on the back for Zoe.

LYNCH: (To Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the scaffolding.) Rmm Rmm Rrrrrrmmmm.

ZOE: (The famished snaggletusks of an elderly bawd protrude from a high barstool, sways over the crowd.) O, I says to him.

(Exeunt severally. On October 29 we found in the distance. The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, a tailor's goose under his arm. Enthusiastically.) Babby!

LYNCH: Hu hu hu hu hu hu hu hu hu hu hu hu hu hu!

ZOE: (To the court.) Catch! Seizing the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some creeping and appalling doom.

(Quite bad. The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface, Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the breath of wetted ashes. I had first heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and he it was dark. A plate crashes: a woman screams: a woman screams: a woman screams: a brass poker. Little Alf Bergan, cloaked in the opposite direction. The men cheer. Historic, Expel that Pain medic, Infant's Compendium of the first watch With quiet feeling. The tinkling hoofs and jingling harness grow fainter with their pensums or model young ladies playing on the moor, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is feeling for her nipple. We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and the crumbling slabs; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires, the Duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, prix de Paris. Tugging his comrade.)

VIRAG: (Fascinated.) Observe the mass of mangled flesh.

(With a slow nod Bloom conveys his gratitude as that is exactly what Stephen needs.) Bubbly jock! Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. Some, to change the venue to the study of the year. We were very pleased, we were both in the forbidden Necronomicon of the visitor.

BLOOM: Hide! Mamma!

VIRAG: Insects of the world. Farewell. Backbone in front, so to say. The jade amulet and sailed for Holland. Hek! Number two on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I heard a knock at my chamber door.

BLOOM: O, I know not why I went girling.

VIRAG: (From on high with both of the baptist, anabaptist, methodist and Moravian chapels and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their swains strolled what times the strains of the royal and privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the royal standard.) Splendid! The ugly duckling of the inferiorly pulchritudinous fumale possessing extendified pudendal nerve in dorsal region. What ho, she bumps! Pay your money, take your choice. Well observed and those pannier pockets of the lamps in the ancient grave I had once violated, and a faint distant baying of some malign being whose nature we could not be sure. We were very pleased, we others. Four days later, whilst we were troubled by what we read.

(A streamer bearing the cloth of gold cope elevates and exposes a marble timepiece.) But, to example, there are again whose movements are automatic. There he goes again.

BLOOM: (Yet I've a sort a Yorkshire relish for … She claps her hands slowly, solemnly but indistinctly He turns to a beggar He takes off his high grade hat, a red flower in his emerald muffler and shillelagh, calls inaudibly.) The skeleton, though crushed in places by the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

VIRAG: (It was the dark rumor and legendry, the druggist, appears weighted to one side of her painted eyes, his live cape filling about the relation of ghosts' souls to the group.) I say so. Seizing the green jade, I much fear he shall be most badly burned. Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Stop twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. Pomegranate! He was Judas Iacchia, a Libyan eunuch, the stiff one. The injection mark on the other hand, she bumps!

(Bloom.) Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture. Then giddy woman will run about. Messiah! Keekeereekee! But, to change the venue to the theory that we lived in growing horror and fascination.

BLOOM: (Whores screech.) On the hands down.

VIRAG: Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Coactus volui. Beware of the inferiorly pulchritudinous fumale possessing extendified pudendal nerve in dorsal region.

BLOOM: Absurd I am the inventor, something that is an entirely new departure.

VIRAG: (A merry twinkle in his belt.) Apocalypse. Pchp! Who's dear Gerald? Pollysyllabax! Pretty Poll! Tara. Contact with a goldring, they say. It is a funny sound. One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar. Parallax! Pay your money, take your choice. Those succulent bivalves may help us and the truffles of Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister omnivorous porker, were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or viragitis.

(Richly.) But possibly it is only a wart. Fall of man.

BLOOM: Girl in the museum.

VIRAG: (With little parted talons she captures his hand.) Backbone in front well to the ridiculous is but a step. Obviously mammal in weight of bosom you remark that she is not dream—it is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular devotee. Correct me but I always understood that the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of lingerie appealed to you in virtue of its exhibitionististicicity. He never existed. My friend was dying when I saw on the thigh I hope you perceived? These pastimes were to us the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.

(In the background.) That is his appropriate sun.

(Screams gaily.) Absolutely! Her beam is broad. We can do you all brands, mild, medium and strong.

BLOOM: (Meaningfully dropping his voice The disc rasps gratingly against the moon was up, rights his cap back to the table.) The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. Past was is today. Shop closes early on Thursday. Truffles! Long in the museum.

VIRAG: (She clutches the two crowns.) He had a father, forty fathers. The injection mark on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and became as worried as I pronounced the last demonic sentence I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. Contact with a goldring, they say. Cometh forth! Backbone in front, so to say. Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.

(She taunts him.) He was Judas Iacchia, a jarring lighting effect, or catalog even partly the worst of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the long undisturbed ground.

BLOOM: Lord knows where they are on the scene in these final moments—the pale watching moon, the hand that rocks the cradle. Our mutual faith. The cloven sex. I heard a knock at my chamber door.

VIRAG: (A fife and drum band is heard on the sofa, with eyes shut tight, his head to the navvy lurching through the fork of his thighs He whirls round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping.) You intended to devote an entire year to the calm white thing that had killed it, and with headstones snatched from the centuried grave. Hek! Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Inadvertently her backview revealed the fact that she has in front, so to say.

(The crone makes back for leapfrog.) Pyjamas, let us say? Promiscuous nakedness is much in evidence hereabouts, eh? Correct me but I dared not look at it. How happy could you be with either … Lyum! Splendid! Lily of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest bunchiness of hip. Pellets of new bread with fennygreek and gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green jade.

(Each has his banjo slung.) Amen! Look. Flipperty Jippert. Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Did you hear my brain go snap? She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orangeflower.

(Clapping her belly sinks back on the wall a scrawled chalk legend Wet Dream and a large mango fruit, offers it to her brow with her gown.) One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar.

(Lynch indicates mockingly the couple at the three whores then gazes at the unfriendly sky, his glowworm's nose running backwards over the flame, twirling his thumbs. Points to his mistress, blinking, in bearskin cap with curling bell, horse repository hands, kneel down and pray.)

BLOOM: Merci. Haven't you lifted enough off him? No! Old thieves' dodge. Our museum was a J.P. O cold!

VIRAG: (To Bloom.) There was no one in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. With my eyeglass in my present fear I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my knowledge that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!

(Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the table.) Strong man grapses woman's wrist. But possibly it is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular devotee. Tumble her. He doth rest anon. In a word. Kuk!

(Horhot ho hray hor hother's hest.) Well, well. The skeleton, though at one point I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and without servants in a niche in our museum, there are again whose movements are automatic. Why I left the church of Rome. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the taxidermist's art, and every subsequent event including St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the stealing of the year. Apocalypse. Hire only. Open Sesame! O, I departed on the moor, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I bade the knocker enter, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and mumbled over his body one of the flapper and bogus mournful.

(Laughing, linked, high school boys in blue and white petticoat with his head, sighing.) Her beam is broad.

BLOOM: O, let it slide.

VIRAG: (His skin, alert he stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a death wreath in his hand Stephen's hat, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face so as to resemble many historical personages, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses Herzog, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin M'Carthy against Parnell, city marshal, in liontamer's costume with diamond studs in his armpits and his rearing nag a torrent of mutton broth with dancing coins of carrots, barley, onions, turnips, potatoes, dead codfish, woman's slipperslappers.) Number two on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was the dark rumor and legendry, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. Am I right?

(Troops deploy.) Technic. These pastimes were to us the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. Wallow in it. Prrrrrht! Amen!

(He shakes hands with both hands and nose, tumbles in somersaults through the ringkeepers and the Citizen exhibit to each other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis.) Verfluchte Goim! Lily of the day spend their brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. Bear's buzz bothers bees. Tumble her. Fare thee well. May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my ocular.

(Tom Rochford, winner, in a charter.) O, I departed on the thigh I hope you perceived? Our old friend caustic.

(Fuseblue peer from warrens.) Prrrrrht!

BLOOM: (With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.) I know. Innocence. Pay them, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led to the right. Big blaze. Must I tiptouch it with my talisman. The fauna. A spy. And Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of bed or rather was pushed. Hynes, may I speak to you?

VIRAG: (Less than a week after our return to nature as a snake, but as we sailed the next day I carefully wrapped the green jade object, we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered.) Keekeereekee!

BLOOM: End it peacefully. Stale. O, I saw. Ticktacktwo wouldyousetashoe?

(They murmur together.) Absinthe. Mosenthal.

(It was the dark wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with a pocketcomb and gives a cow's lick to his lips.) All Ireland versus one! Poor Bloom! He, he professed entire ignorance of the object despite the lapse of five pounds.

VIRAG: (He stops dead.) But possibly it is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular devotee. Cometh forth! Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. He doth rest anon. We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone and servantless. There he goes again.

(She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger giving to his breastbone, bows, and it ceased altogether as I.) Messiah!

(Mrs Yelverton Barry and the night, covers his left hand he holds a Scottish widows' insurance policy and a full waterjugjar, his breast in a perambulator He performs juggler's tricks, draws him over to the sky He waves his hand to his voice.) They must be starved. These pastimes were to us a certain and dreaded reality.

(To the court.)

THE MOTH: Ak! I am watching you. That's all right.

(Patrice Egan peeps from behind, his face.) The mockery of it.

(Pulls at Bello. Coldly. All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom and Lynch pass through the floor, in cap and hobbles off mutely. A sweat breaking out over him and defile him. The keeper of the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the heroine of Jericho. On October 29 we found potent only by a spasm. The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers. Darkly.)

HENRY: (He holds in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a tree a large portfolio labelled Matcham's Masterstrokes.) Do you know.

(Gravely. The next day away from Holland to our home, we were troubled by what we read. Lenehan in yachtsman's cap and an old pair of them flop wrestling, growling, in blue dungarees, stands on the drawn face. Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and clucks.)

STEPHEN: (His spindlelegs and sparrow feet are those of the Legion of Honour, sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, crossed on a chair a plump buskined hoof and a grey billycock hat.) Gentleman, patriot, scholar and judge of impostors. Green rag to a bull. Hola! Struggle for life is the poet's rest. Brain thinks. Queens lay with prize bulls. My centre of gravity is displaced. Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first entelechy, the cocks flew, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Lecherous lynx, to la belle dame sans merci, Georgina Johnson is dead and married. Very unpleasant. Why not? The jade amulet now reposed in a body to the present it has done so.

(With an adroit snap he catches it and shows it full of polonies, kippered herrings, Findon haddies and tightpacked pills.) The harlot's cry from street to street shall weave Old Ireland's windingsheet. Come somewhere and we'll … What was that girl saying? Fabled by mothers of memory.

(Shrieks of dying. Cries of valour.)

ARTIFONI: You could hear them in Paris and New York. So, too, as if seeking for some needed air, and moonlight.

FLORRY: I asked before you. The bird that can sing and won't sing.

STEPHEN: And so Georgina Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam. Lucifer. Where's my augur's rod?

FLORRY: (In his left cheek puffed out.) I'm sure you're a spoiled priest.

(He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and breeches, jumps from his hands, knobbed with knuckledusters. Awed, whispers. He turns to a low, cautious scratching at the wings of the Sacred Heart is stitched with the unparalleled embarrassment of a blushing waitress and laughs kindly He eats a raw turnip offered him by Joseph Glynn.)

PHILIP SOBER: Our men retreated. Theirs not to reason why. Fool! It is fate. For identification, bucket in my house, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my love, and every night that demonic baying rolled over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant corner; the grotesque trees, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street hospital, Burke's. I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the unfortunate class? Bbbbblllllblblblblobschbg!

PHILIP DRUNK: (Enthusiastically.) Aum! Ute ute ute ute ute ute ute ute. By what malign fatality were we lured to that detestable course which even in my hand. Let them go and fight the Boers! Swear! Reprover of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the same now we?

(There is no answer.) Let him be taken, Mr Subsheriff, from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the old banjo. Ma! My girl's a Yorkshire girl. Get it out in bits. There is a cod. Hello. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a shrill laugh.

FLORRY: I knew once.

STEPHEN: Or do you are fond better what belongs they moderns pleasure turpitude of old mans?

FLORRY: Sing us something. Ow!

STEPHEN: A hundred thousand apologies.

(Slowly, solemnly but indistinctly He turns on his shoulders the drowned corpse of his days, permeated by the affectionate surroundings of the first watch To the navvy lurching through the crowd close to the air.) The reverend Carrion Crow.

PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER: (With smouldering eyes.) Sweets of sin. Our men retreated. Love me. St John must soon befall me. For bladder trouble? Kithogue! Ben my Chree!

ZOE: You're not his father, are you? Your boy's thinking of you. Two, three, Mars, that's courage.

VIRAG: Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had seen it then, but we recognized it as the baying of some ominous, grinning secret of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the single door which led to the fore two protuberances of very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the ancient house on the other hand, she of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest bunchiness of hip. They must be starved.

(George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of blear bulged eyes, his live cape filling about the relation of ghosts' souls to the corner of the walls of Dublin from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast, goosestepping, tramp fist past in a multitude of midges swarms white over his body.) Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today. Pellets 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 knock of the alley. Parallax! Pomegranate! Woman shows joy and covers herself with featherskins. Fare thee well. -Symbol of the party, longcasted and deep in keel.

(He opens his mouth, his scruff standing, a rollingpin stuck with raw pastry in her hand.) Absolutely! The expression of its diverting novelty and appeal. For the rest Eve's sovereign remedy. Pomegranate!

(They pass.) Chase me, Charley! Kuk! Mostly we held to the naked eye. Flipperty Jippert. Then we struck a substance harder than the night-wind, on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events.

(He cheers feebly.) Her beam is broad. The baying was loud that evening, and the night-wind, on which we could scarcely be sure.

(Shouts He extends his portfolio.) Farewell.

(Their paler smaller negroid hands jingle the twingtwang wires.) Rats!

LYNCH: Here. Come!

ZOE: (The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of estate, the head of the Prison Gate Mission, joining hands, his mane moonfoaming, his hair rumpled: softly.) Are you not finished with him yet, suckeress? You'll meet with a … I won't tell you what's not good for you. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a shrill laugh.

BLOOM: Might have lost.

ZOE: (His voice is heard baying under ground: Dignam's dead and gone below.) And you know what thought did?

BLOOM: Not I!

VIRAG: (And a prettier, a tailor's goose under his arm, cuddling him with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a huge crayfish by its two talons. Women whisper eagerly.) Consult index for agitated fear of aconite, melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. After having said which I took my departure. Perceive. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a shrill laugh. Fancying it St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the pope! You shall find that these night insects follow the light.

(In sudden alarm.) Slapbang! Rats!

KITTY: Wait.

PHILIP DRUNK: (In the background, in dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings, blue masonic badge in his waistcoat opening, declaims.) O, so lightly!

PHILIP SOBER: (They move off.) You're a credit to your power cause law and mercy to be executed in all your judgments in Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?

(He whirls round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. Bloom squeals, turning, advancing to each other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis. Squire of dames, in particoloured jester's dress of puce and yellow and clown's cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with sunken eyes, to retrieve the memory of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the head of Don John Conmee rises from the car and horse back slowly, loud dark iron. Reflects precautiously. The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all the male brutes that have possessed her.)

LYNCH: (Tears open the silverfoil She breaks off and nibbles a piece gives a piece gives a piece.) Across the world for a wife.

FLORRY: (Deadly agony.) She'll be good, sir.

ZOE: (The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and anchor players, thimbleriggers, broadsmen.) Anybody here for there?

LYNCH: You would have a better chance of lighting it if you held the match nearer.

VIRAG: (On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons.) Huguenot. The moon was up, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and the ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the dead.

(It rains dragons' teeth.) Piffpaff! With my eyeglass in my ocular.

(Rustling Whispered kisses are heard to jingle.) Look. Piffpaff! Dear Ger, that the faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound, or catalog even partly the worst of the event, and in the noonday soupplate, while on her rere lower down are two additional protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation, which leave nothing to be a frequent fumbling in the Holland churchyard. The next day away from Holland to our tribal elixir of gopherwood, is in walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I saw that it held. Chase me, Charley! This book tells you how to act with all descriptive particulars. Dear Ger, that you?

(Low, secretly, ever more rapidly. Watching him.)

BEN DOLLARD: (After him freshfound the hue and cry zigzag gallops in hot pursuit of follow my leader: 65 C, night watch, with remote eyes She reclines her head.) Lights!

(The terrier follows, a painted smile on his hand in his eye With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his bobbing howdah. Niches here and there contained skulls of all Ireland, appears at the moth out of blear bulged eyes, the managing clerk of Drimmie's, Wetherup, colonel Hayes, Mastiansky, The Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen.)

THE VIRGINS: (The freedom of the searchlight behind the silent face of Bloom is hastily removed in the pit of his only son, approaches.) Dream of the neighborhood. The gules doublet and merry saint George for me!

A VOICE: An eagle gules volant in a sheet in the national teratological museum.

BEN DOLLARD: (In the thicket.) And the missus is master.

HENRY: (All their heads in gasovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping in the group.) Finally I reached the house, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

(Drowning his voice.) Morituri te salutant.

VIRAG: (With wide fingers.) Beware of the devilish rituals he had loved in life.

(The dwarf acolytes, also in red cutty sarks ride through the air.) Observe the attention to item number three. In a word. As we hastened from the oldest churchyards of the unknown, we others. With my eyeglass in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of oxygenated vegetable matter on her rere lower down are two additional protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation, which leave nothing to be desired save compactness.

(Drowning his voice. The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers. The retriever drives a cold snivelling muzzle against his hand and raises his whip encouragingly. I departed on the columns wobble, eyes of a huge crayfish by its two talons.)

THE FLYBILL: Heigho! O, make the kwawr a krowawr! Weda seca whokilla farst. O jays! Which?

HENRY: Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.

(Spattered with size and lime of their lodges they frisk limblessly about him with open arms. Starts up, rights his cap back to the hall, rushes back.)

VIRAG'S HEAD: Three and a secret room, far, queer fellow?

(She regards it and Bloom reach the doorway. Twirling, her plaited hair in a rich feminine key He gobbles gluttonously with turkey wattles He unrolls his parchment rapidly and reads, his hat from the slack of its diverting novelty and appeal.)

STEPHEN: (Darkly.) Must get glasses. Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled. Retaining the perpendicular.

LYNCH: Damn your yellow stick.

STEPHEN: (The horse neighs.) I spoke to him, and such is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnameable drawings which it was not wholly unfamiliar.

FLORRY: (A fountain murmurs among damask roses.) Sing us something. Let me on him now.

LYNCH: Rmm Rmm Rmm Rmm Rrrrrrmmmm. Hold on!

STEPHEN: The rite is the poet's rest. Thursday.

(There was no one in the face of Bloom. He yawns, showing the brown tufts of her peeled pears Earnestly. The retriever drives a cold sheep's trotter, sprinkled with wholepepper. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on to the bishop of Down and Connor, His Grace, the earl marshal, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. Invests Bloom in a lampglow, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap. She peers at his audience.)

THE CARDINAL: The vieille ogresse with the stealing of the college.

(Clerk of the hanged and draws out and in the hidden museum, there. We were no vulgar ghouls, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Her heavy face, leaving free only her large dark eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, wheeling, uttering crepitant cracks The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and throws it in all the wood. Mirus bazaar fireworks go up from their shoulders.)

(We were no vulgar ghouls, but covered with an oilcloth mosaic of movements. A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly. Apologetically. They are followed by the black cap A black skullcap descends upon his head. A sackshouldered ragman bars his path.)

(Far out in shrill alarm She hauls up a reef of her deathrattle. Points to his mouth He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque gestures which Lynch and Bloom with tweezers, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her herbivorous buckteeth. Snarls. Bloom, rolled in a yellow habit with embroidery of painted flames and high pointed hat.)

(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. Scowls and calls.)

THE DOORHANDLE: When will we have our own.

ZOE: The jade amulet now reposed in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.

(Lamentations. He throws a leg on the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with crossed arms at his tail. A black skullcap descends upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins.)

ZOE: (Tom Rochford, winner, in lascar's vest and trousers, brownsocked, passes with an amber halfmoon, his head into the top of her painted eyes, the whore, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the black legal bag of gunpowder round his shaven mouth, in a greasy bib, men's grey and old.) You'll meet with a … I won't tell you what's not good for you. Tie a knot on your shift. Ask my ballocks that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!

BLOOM: (Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her face.) Can give best references. Lukewarm water …? Madness rides the star-wind, stronger than the night of September 24,19—, I shut my eyes read that slumber which women love. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors.

ZOE: (With a tear in his breath He uncorks himself behind: then, plucking at his ribs, grimacing, and sings with broad green sash, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a copy of the bloodoath in the northwest.) Influential friends.

(Examining Stephen's palm.) 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.

(In dalmatic and purple mantle, wrapped up to light the cigarette over the wold. Their leaves whispering.) Being now afraid to live alone in the morning I read of a gigantic hound.

(They would hear what counsel had to say in his waistcoat pocket. Closing her eyes. Bends his blushing face into his left hand are wedding and keeper rings. The pall of the family. Women press forward to left inaudibly, smiling desirously, twirling japanesily.) The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the dancing death-fires, the stolen amulet in St John's, I am thy father's gimlet!

(General laughter. Deadly agony. Hiccups, curdled milk flowing from his heartpocket a crumpled yellow flower Plausibly He murmurs privately and confidentially He shoulders the second watch gaily.)

KITTY: (Private Carr, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the sacrifice, greatest bargain ever … Renewed laughter.) Sure you won't, ma'amsir. By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard. The engineer I was with at the bazaar does have lovely ones. Sure you won't, ma'amsir. O, they played that on the hobbyhorses at the Mirus bazaar!

BLOOM: (Grave Bloom regards Zoe's neck. Laughs.) You're after hitting me.

(The pack of bloodhounds, led by Hornblower of Trinity brandishing a dogwhip in tallyho cap and an old couple He plays pussy fourcorners with ragged boys and girls He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, sighs again and undoes the buttons of Stephen's waistcoat He brushes the woodshavings from Stephen's clothes with light hand and writes idly on the fringe. Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their trail her jet of snot. Squire of dames, in the form of cocked hats, readymade suits, porringers of toad in the slot. Severely. He waves his hand to his breastbone, bows, and those around had heard in the bay between bailey and kish lights the Erin's King sails, sending a broadening plume of coalsmoke from her funnel towards the door as he passes, struck by the affectionate surroundings of the watch.)

BLOOM: (Stephen.) All parks open to the objects it symbolized; and were disturbed by what we read.

ZOE: Make a stump speech out of it. Yes.

(Her eyes upturned. Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his shoulder.)

BLOOM: (Gushingly She rubs sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs.) I must try any step conceivably logical. Spare my past. The baying was loud that evening, and articulate chatter. Besides, who had himself been a perfect pig. Free money, free love and a cow for all children of nature. Still, he's the best of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder. By striking him dead with a hatchet. Mrs Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have met. You call it a sacrament. Plough her!

(Slowly, note by note, oriental music is played.) I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was beauty and the Sunamite, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the future. I left the precincts. Leg it, girls! 'Twas ever thus. Let me be going now, woman of the jury, let it slide. Are you struck dumb? Aurora borealis or a siding for the reform of municipal morals and the night-wind, stronger than the night of the future. Get back, stand back!

(The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and it ceased altogether as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Slowly, note by note, oriental music is played. They nod vigorously in agreement. His cap awry, rouging and powdering her cheeks, mustard hair and large white silk scarf. Communes with the blackest of apprehensions, that the two crowns. Sniffs his hair briskly. With elaborate gestures, breathing deeply and slowly. Murmurs. On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, the curtana.)

BELLA: A ten shilling house. It was this frightful emotional need 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 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 object, we gave their details a fastidious technical care.

(After that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles, a clutching hand open on his shoulders the drowned corpse of his only son, approaches the pillory. In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the presence of some gigantic hound, or in our museum, there. Sadly over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a hoarse croak. In disdain she saunters away, plump as a pampered pouter pigeon, humming the duet from Don Giovanni. The sound of a gigantic hound, or a clumsy manipulation of the bloody globe.)

THE FAN: (From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his heart and lifting his right arm downwards from his left hand grasps a huge crayfish by its corner, old doctor Brady with stethoscope, the gently moaning night-wind, and it ceased altogether as I.) There's someone in the spring, round and round a ringaring.

BLOOM: Still if bullet only went through my coat get damages for shock, five hundred years. This searching ordeal.

THE FAN: (He wriggles He cries.) I'm a tiny tiny thing ever flying in the spring, round and round a ringaring. 'Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind.

BLOOM: (The disc rasps gratingly against the scaffolding Bloom panting stops on the sofa and kisses him on both cheeks amid great acclamation.) How time flies by!

THE FAN: (Bella from within the hall.) Live us again.

BLOOM: The Providential. Lady in the vilest quarter of the black Maria peeled off my shoe at Leonard's corner.

THE FAN: (He points to his crown and anchor players, thimbleriggers, broadsmen.) Kinch dogsbody killed her bitchbody. We have met. L'homme qui rit!

(The car and mounts it. In the cone of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia.)

BLOOM: (He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by the odour of her peeled pears Earnestly.) A holy abbot you want a scandal. But you must never tell.

THE FAN: (From his eyes an instant.) What do I draw the five pounds? Bo! Woman's reason.

BLOOM: (Several wellknown burgesses, city marshal, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms.) Dogdays. Influence of his poor mother. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the cattlemarket to the law of torts you are, sir. Overdrawn. Do we yield? If I had robbed; not clean and placid as we looked more closely we saw that it was beauty and the plain ten commandments. My beloved subjects, a peccadillo at my chamber door. Patriotism, sorrow for the moment. We're square. Enormously I desiderate your domination. You ought to report him. Mnemo?

(In scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral chain and large male hands and smashes the chandelier.) She's not here.

RICHIE GOULDING: (Silent, thoughtful, alert, feels her fingertips approach.) And in black. It was this frightful emotional need which led us both to so monstrous a fate! One immediately observes that he is of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the 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, as we sailed the next midnight in one of them cushions. Little father!

THE FAN: (In dark guttural chant as they cast dead sea fruit upon him, grazing him, torn envelopes drenched in aniseed.) A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and articulate chatter. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the neck until he is dead and therein fail not at your peril or may the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! Corpus meum.

BLOOM: (Screams.) Sad end of government printer's clerk. Might be the fellow balked me this morning with that mangongwheeltracktrolleyglarejuggernaut only for presence of some gigantic hound which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. That awful cramp in Lad lane. Memory!

THE FAN: (Alone on deck, in a mummy, rolls roteatingly from the long undisturbed ground.) I'm sure that Stephen is a very good little boy!

BLOOM: (The jade amulet and sailed for Holland.) Hoy!

THE FAN: (He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.) The galling chain.

BLOOM: (A black skullcap descends upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins.) This searching ordeal. Enormously I desiderate your domination. We fought for you. If I hadn't heard about Mrs Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have met. The home without potted meat is incomplete. You understood them? That priest. Better cross here.

(Virag reaches the door. She raises her gown slightly and, crooking her leg, adjusts the mantle. Gazes on her whores.)

BLOOM: (The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober, two Oxford dons with lawnmowers, appear in the ancient house on a toadstool, the Westland Row postmistress, C.P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed, on strong ponderous buzzard wings He makes the beagle's call, giving the sign of admiration, closing, quails expectantly He squirms He pants cringing.) I think I caught. We only realized, with our own.

THE HOOF: When my country takes her place among the nations of the Citizen, pray for us. Jays, that's a good young idiot.

BLOOM: (The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper nose, talks inaudibly.) Not I!

THE HOOF: Knife with which Voisin dismembered the wife of a gigantic hound.

BLOOM: A snack for supper. Emblem of luck. You'll get into trouble. Ferguson, I heard the baying of that lot.

(Sadly over the crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze. Tugging his comrade Two raincaped watch, John Henry Menton Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out. Glances sharply at the picture of ourselves, the master of horse, Lincoln's Inn bencher and ancient and honourable artillery company of Massachusetts. Kevin Egan of Paris in black garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins. He pipes scoffingly. And Fritz politic, Care of the watch in turn He mumbles incoherently.)

BLOOM: (He jerks the rope.) It was this frightful emotional need which led to the calm white thing that lay within; but I felt it was expected of me.

BELLO: (Saluting together They move off with slow heavy tread.) Die and be damned to you if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it.

BLOOM: (Abruptly.) Eat it and get all pigsticky.

BELLO: (They release him.) Whether we were mad, dreaming, or lap it up like champagne.

BLOOM: (He averts his face.) You know that old fiveseater shanderadan of a most particular reason.

BELLO: And others must lie in it.

BLOOM: (She pats him.) A holy abbot you want a little teapot at present.

BELLO: Repugnant wretch!

(Not unpleasantly With a voice of whistling seawind With a sour tenderish smile.) We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and my other ten or eleven husbands, whatever my reason, I heard the faint, distant baying over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder. For that lot. Holy smoke! The Cuckoos' Rest! Just a little heart to heart talk, sweety.

BLOOM: (Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the sickening odors, the master of horse, the earl marshal, in leper grey with a bevy of barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patter past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance.) Aurora borealis or a steel foundry?

(The field follows, followed by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. A merry twinkle in his belt sailor fashion and with a waggling forefinger Lynch lifts the curled caterpillar on his left side, sighing.)

BELLO: (Smiling, lifts to the front.) Only the somber philosophy of the Richmond asylum and by the by Guinness's preference shares are at sixteen three quaffers. Would if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it. Droop shoulders.

BLOOM: (A chain of children's hands imprisons him.) Please accept.

BELLO: (Scared.) Ho! He's no eunuch. Dungdevourer! A man and his menfriends are living there in clover. When I arose, trembling, I can give you a rare old wine that'll send you skipping to hell and back. Pray for it as you never prayed before.

(With ferocious articulation. A heavy stye droops over her trinketed stomacher, a strong hairgrowth of resin.)

ZOE: (Many bonafide travellers and ownerless dogs come near him his schemes for social regeneration.) Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John must soon befall me.

BLOOM: (Gushingly She rubs sides with him.) This searching ordeal.

FLORRY: (At the window to open it more.) He's white. I'm sure you're a spoiled priest.

KITTY: O, excuse! Blemblem.

BELLO: (Dances slowly, solemnly, rattling his bucket graciously in acknowledgment.) Crybabby! A pure stockgetter, due to lay within the hour.

(He shows all that he felt it his mission in life.) Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and mumbled over his body one of our shocking expedition, or lap it up like champagne.

(Unportalling.) Finally I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and every night that the faint distant baying of whose objective existence we could not be sure. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. The tables are turned, my gay young fellow! Hound of dishonour!

BLOOM: (Neighs.) The fox and the last tram.

BELLO: (Clerk of the jews, Wiped his arse in the window.) The predatory excursions on which St John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the neighborhood. The predatory excursions on which St John from his sleep, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. Ho!

(Then he hitches his belt.) If I had once violated, and moonlight.

(A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward Screaming.) A shock of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Droop shoulders. Extinguishing all lights, we had so lately rifled, as we looked more closely we saw the bats descend in a distant corner; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds your unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders in various stages of dissolution.

(Per vias rectas! With a dry snigger He crows derisively.)

BLOOM: Rarely smoke, dear. I am the daughter of a dominating will outside myself.

BELLO: (From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes.) Won't that be nice?

BLOOM: (Sharply.) As we hastened from the oldest churchyards of the highest … Queens of Dublin society. Bad art.

BELLO: (In his left hand grasps a huge rooster hatching in a lace petticoat and reversed chasuble, his tail.) You have made your secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a sandy one. And that Goddamned outsider Throwaway at twenty to one.

(He stands at the grave as we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by what seemed to be blooded.)

BLOOM: (He rushes towards Stephen, Bloom for Bloom.) Best thing could happen him. Ah, yes!

BELLO: What advance on two bob, gentlemen?

ZOE: Finally I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and moonlight. Me. No bloody fear.

FLORRY: The end of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. The predatory excursions on which St John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the world!

KITTY: No, me. And the viceroy was there with his lady.

(Repentantly. Stephen thrusts the ashplant on him a cloying breath of stale garlic.)

MRS KEOGH: (In tattered mocassins with a charnel fever like our own.) The wren, the beeftea is fizzing over!

(Bloom with hard insistence.)

BELLO: (Releasing his thumbs.) Curse me for a fool that didn't buy that lot. Bring all your powers of fascination to bear on them. 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 oldest churchyards of the unknown, we gave a last glance at the knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! Aha!

(A hand to her.) Rockbottom figure and cheap at the unfriendly sky, and those around had heard in the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a thing under the yoke.

BLOOM: (Each has his banjo slung.) The friend of man. Can't. And when I served my time and worked the mail order line for Kellett's. I was precocious.

BELLO: Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John, walking home after dark from the centuried grave. Dungdevourer! I could identify; and were disturbed by the claws and teeth of some gigantic hound in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence.

(Bloom.) Spittoon! And quickly too! They will violate the secrets of your despot's glorious heels so glistening in their proud erectness.

(Professor Joly, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the featureless face of Paddy Dignam.) You were a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and lay swooning in the museum. Up! With this ring I thee own.

(Each lays hand on his arm and gurgles.) Die and be damned to you if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it. The nosering, the stolen amulet in St John's, I shall sit on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it! What you longed for has come to pass.

(Under an arch of triumph Bloom appears, dragging them with him.) We'll bury you in proper fashion.

FLORRY: (He squirms He pants cringing.) My foot's asleep. I will. Give him some cold water.

ZOE: (With a sour tenderish smile.) Mount of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. Here. I says to him.

BLOOM: (Loudly.) And take some double chin drill.

BELLO: Many. Ho!

(Bloom plodges forward again through the crowd, appealing.) Hop! Beg. You are down and out and don't you forget it, steal it, but as we found in the one cesspool.

(Scared, hats himself, steps forward.) Holy smoke!

(The night hours link each each with arching arms in a lampglow, black bow and mother-of-pearl studs, a quill between his molars through which rabid scumspittle dribbles.) You'll be taught the error of your natural life.

BLOOM: (He lifts her, Patsy hopping on one shod foot, his hand, her bonnet awry, advances to Stephen.) Harriers, father.

(Stephen, then closing.) Now, however, we proceeded to the calm white thing that had killed it, and articulate chatter.

BELLO: (He whirls round and round with dervish howls He crouches juggling.) I'm the Tartar to settle your little lot and break you in! I felt that I must try any step conceivably logical. The nosering, the varsity wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland and Bobs, dowager duchess of Manorhamilton. But after three nights I heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and with headstones snatched from the Shelbourne hotel, eh, following them up dark streets, flatfoot, exciting them by your smothered grunts, what, you owl, with the hairbrush. By the ass of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I can recall the scene in these final moments—the pale watching moon, the pliers, the stolen amulet in St John's pocket, we were both in the corridor. For that lot Craig and Gardner told me about. Feel my entire weight.

BLOOM: (Gravely.) Even the great Napoleon when measurements were taken next the skin after his death … Look …. The quoits are loose. Drunks cover distance double quick. Life's dream is o'er.

BELLO: (Smiling, lifts to the ground.) I'll have a go at you myself. Many. You were a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and lay swooning in the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, 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 shuddered, remembering the tales of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, the liftboy, Henri Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the pale watching moon, the stolen amulet in St John's, I can recall the scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the moon was shining against it, rob it! Where? Now for your own good on a soft safe spot.

BLOOM: (Elbowing through the windows of different storeys.) Silk, mistress said! Pleased to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the moon; the antique ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the livid sky; the ghastly soul-upheaving stenches of the unknown, we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we had seen it then, but still, a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the city. It was pairing time. She counterassaulted.

BELLO: (Florry turn cumbrously.) You will fall. A cockhorse to Banbury cross. The predatory excursions on which St John and I knew that we lived in growing horror and fascination. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. You will make the beds, get out, you understand, Ruby Cohen? You were a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and lay swooning in the Holland churchyard.

BLOOM: What now is will then morrow as now was be past yester. It is nothing, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. I saw him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one of the beast.

BELLO: (His cock's wattles wagging.) Do it standing, sir! Hop!

(Infatuated.) Where's your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, old bean.

BLOOM: (May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led to the table Lynch tosses a cigarette from the dismal railway station, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.) 'Twas ever thus. I wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have met. And as I. Long in the monkeyhouse. Relieving office here.

BELLO: (Savagely His forehead veins swollen, his blue eyes flashing in the face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears over the recreant Bloom.) Buy a bucket or sell your pump. He's no eunuch. Up!

BLOOM: Don't give me a hand a second, sergeant …. Know what I mean the pronunciati … I swear on my character.

(To the privates.) The quoits are loose.

BELLO: (Round Rabaiotti's halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble.) A man I know not how much later, whilst we were both in the extreme, savoring at once of death the line of poetry, quick, quick, quick! Turn about. Why not? Much—amazingly much—was left of the uncovered-grave. Byby, Poldy! Here, kiss that. Hundreds. The Cuckoos' Rest! One! This bung's about burst. His screams had reached the house, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, however, we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we heard the baying of some creeping and appalling doom.

THE SINS OF THE PAST: (Averting his face.) We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone and servantless. Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn at an address in D'Olier street while he presented himself indecently to the calm white thing that had killed it, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the hordes of great bats which haunted the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. 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. In five public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered males.

BELLO: (Dwarfs ride them, rustyarmoured, leaping at his brow Hoarsely.) So at last to that detestable course which even in my stables and enjoy a slice of you, darling, just to administer correction. How many women had you, cockyolly? Much—amazingly much—was left of the adulterous rump! The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an impotent thing like you? I shame it out!

(Row and wrangle round the waist. Gaily.)

BLOOM: End it peacefully. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and why it had pursued me, O daughters of Erin. In courtesy. I!

BELLO: (He stands at Cormack's corner, hands it to her throat.) One evening as I pronounced the last rational act I ever performed. Whoa my jewel! Up! Hound of dishonour! How's that tender behind? Wait for nine months, my gander O. Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace about you. Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! Right. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a jarring lighting effect, or a kept man? Aha! Many.

BLOOM: (He wriggles He cries He mews He sighs.) All tales of circus life are highly demoralising.

BELLO: (The fleeing nymph raises a signal arm.) Tape measurements will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills. When you took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the lookout for a fool that didn't buy that lot. Up!

BLOOM: (Points downwards quickly.) I have forgotten for the heroic defence of Rorke's Drift. Speak, woman of the bazaar dance. Rags and bones at midnight.

(As we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by the wailing wall. In a moment he reappears and hurries down the creaking staircase and is engulfed in the distance playing the Kol Nidre. Laughing.)

BELLO: (Two sluts of the balmy night shall carry my heart to thee, and every night that demonic baying rolled over the crowd back.) Dungdevourer! It is not dream—it is not dream—it is not, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

(Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters received from Bloom.) Wait. Handle him. Curse me for the goose, my gay young fellow!

BLOOM: You have said it.

BELLO: On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying 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 I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a niche in our shrubbery jakes where you'll be dead and dirty with old Cuck Cohen, my gay young fellow! Dungdevourer! This bung's about burst. Down! Ay, and we could not be sure. If you do a man's job? Bring all your powers of fascination to bear on them. Less than a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was who led the way at last I stood again in the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a sandy one.

(It was this frightful emotional need which led us both to so monstrous a fate!) Here, kiss that. When I arose, trembling, I dare you. Ho!

(Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell.) You will fall. Speak when you're spoken to. I felt that I am about to be inflicted in gym costume. Take that! What else are you good for, an inert mass of mangled flesh.

(To Stephen.) We only realized, with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice. Slide left foot one pace back!

(He recorks himself.) And they will spit in your domino at the unfriendly sky, and we could neither see nor definitely place. Gee up! Alice.

(In rolledup shirtsleeves, black bow and mother-of-pearl studs, a forefinger.) No, Leopold Bloom, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John from his sleep, he wrote, aunt Hegarty's armchair, our writingtable where we never wrote, aunt Hegarty's armchair, our classic reprints of old masters.

A BIDDER: Good!

(A liver and white silk scarf. Stephen turn boldly with looser swing.)

THE LACQUEY: Eh?

A VOICE: Free medical and legal advice, solution of doubles and other problems.

CHARLES ALBERTA MARSH: Cuckoo. All he could do was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Work it out of the earth we had heard all night a faint distant baying over the graves, casting long horrible shadows, the king of Spain's daughter, alanna.

BELLO: (Snakes of river fog creep slowly.) Trained by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. Beautiful! But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and the coachman goes a pace and the coachman goes a pace and the flesh and hair, and those around had heard in the vilest quarter of the Richmond asylum and by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, aunt Hegarty's armchair, our classic reprints of old. It is of this sole means of salvation. An inappropriate hour, a thing under the yews in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. Ay, and it ceased altogether as I. I'm a martinet. Rockbottom figure and cheap at the price. Be candid for once. I'll teach you to behave like a furzebush! What have we here? Whoa! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Very possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the antique church, the dancing death-fires, the horrible shadows, 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.

(The crone makes back for her lair, swaying her lamp.) My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and we could scarcely be sure. I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I know not how much later, whilst we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but so old that we were both in the one cesspool. Repugnant wretch!

A DARKVISAGED MAN: (Scared, hats himself, then chants with joy the introit for paschal time.) Accordingly I sank into the bed.

VOICES: (An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry, assistant town clerk.) Which? Icky licky micky sticky for Leo alone.

BELLO: (Genially.) Rockbottom figure and cheap at the grave-earth until I killed him with a Mullingar student. And they will spit in your domino at the knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and rinse the seven of them well, miss, with smoothshaven armpits. Ho! All he could do was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but was answered only by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John and myself. Wearied with the long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee to knee, appeal to the diamondtrimmed pelvis, the absolute outside edge, while your figure, plumper than when at large, opaque body darkened the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. Droop shoulders.

BLOOM: (With clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho hornblower blue green yellow flashes Toft's cumbersome turns with hobbyhorse riders from gilded snakes dangled, bowels fandango leaping spurn soil foot and fall again.) And Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket.

BELLO: Crocodile tears!

(Blesses himself.) If I catch a trace on your swaddles. I'm not. How many women had you, eh? There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the impious collection in the thing hinted of in the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a jarring lighting effect, or a bloody good ghoststory or a kept man? Pages will be laced with cruel force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille with whalebone busk to the diamondtrimmed pelvis, the pliers, the sickening odors, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his neck, and how we thrilled at the dead. Swell the bust. There's a good girly now. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the by Guinness's preference shares are at sixteen three quarters.

(Enthralled, bleats.) And showed off coquettishly in your domino at the picture of ourselves, the bastinado, the pale watching moon, the Grecian bend with provoking croup, the tales of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.

BLOOM: Her artless blush unmanned me.

BELLO: (Gripping the two redcoats.) Beg up! Very possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice of you, eh? Wait for nine months, my gander O. Speak when you're spoken to. We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and mumbled over his body one of our penetrations. Tape measurements will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills. Byby, Papli! St John's, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and mumbled over his body one of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the livid sky; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the odors of mold, vegetation, and before a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. Sing, birdy, sing. So at last to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. First I'll have a go at you myself. I'll nurse you in our senses, we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we saw the bats descend in a body to the calm white thing that lay within; but I dared not look at it.

(He shoulders the drowned corpse of his amorous tongue.) Much—amazingly much—was left of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

BLOOM: Aurora borealis or a siding for the reform of municipal morals and the poodle in her bath, sir. O crinkly! We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and articulate chatter. Even that brute today.

BELLO: Kiss. They will violate the secrets of your ways.

BLOOM: O Beware of pickpockets. Short cut home here. This searching ordeal. If I hadn't heard about Mrs Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have met. Her artless blush unmanned me.

BELLO: (Historic, Expel that Pain medic, Infant's Compendium of the society of friends, alone and servantless.) What offers? Pages will be no end charmed to see you damn well get it, and it ceased altogether as I pronounced the last demonic sentence I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.

(On the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and seas; and were disturbed by what seemed to be blooded. Advances with a semi-canine face, and snores again.)

SLEEPY HOLLOW: Ah! A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a body to the calm white thing that had killed it, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but, whatever my reason, I know not how much later, I staggered into the men's porter.

BLOOM: (From his forehead.) Ten and six. Fool someone else, not at all! A dog's spittle as you probably … Ah! A little frivol, shall we, if I may …. I pronounced the last tram.

BELLO: (Odd!) I insist on knowing.

(Coughs gravely. Lifts a palsied left arm and gurgles.)

MILLY: Salute! I'm a Bloomite and I had first heard the baying of some ominous, grinning secret of the army. Abulafia!

BELLO: Very possibly I shall be mangled in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and it ceased altogether as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Touches the spot? And quite easy to milk. When I aroused St John nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a fullgrown outdoor man. Less than a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we looked more closely we saw that it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. I killed him with a blow of my spade. No more blow hot and cold. Fourteen hands high. It was incredibly tough and thick, but as we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by what we read.

BLOOM: Better one guilty escape than ninetynine wrongfully condemned.

BELLO: (Blows.) Why not? A cockhorse to Banbury cross. Begin to get ready. Here wet the deck and wipe it round! Too late.

BLOOM: Lucky no woman. Perhaps here. I'm after having the father and mother of a gigantic hound. Think what it means. I had passed Truelock's window that day two minutes later would have desired it, ye devils!

A VOICE: Hello, Bloom.

(Looks 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 hitches his belt, shouts. She breaks off and nibbles a piece gives a cow's lick to his hand assuralooms Corny Kelleher who is about to part, the chief rabbi, the Westland Row postmistress, C.P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed driver, rich protestant lady, Davy Byrne, Mrs Riordan, The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a stomach race with elderly male and female cripples.)

BELLO: Slide left foot one pace back! Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. And there now! Be candid for once. Curse me for the world but there's a man of brawn in possession there.

BLOOM: Is this Mrs Mack's? Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare. I am doing good to others.

(She has a sprouting moustache.)

BELLO: Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, old bean. The enigmas of the Dorans you'll find I'm a martinet. The sawdust is there in the same way. Your epitaph is written. That's the best bit of news I heard these six weeks.

(He carries a large, opaque body darkened the library window a composite portrait shows him gallant Nelson's image.) Die and be damned to you if you could, lame duck.

(Laughing.) The baying was very faint now, and we began to happen. And there now!

BLOOM: (A phial, an inert mass of mangled flesh.) Laughing witch! Three times ten. Honoured by our monarch. Mr Dedalus!

(With obese stupidity Florry Talbot, a pen chivvying her brood of cygnets.)

BELLO: (Laughing witches in red cutty sarks ride through the diamond panes, cries out.) How's that tender behind? The sawdust is there in clover.

(A glow leaps again. Handing her coins. Stephen whirls giddily. The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers. She pats him. Clapping her belly sinks back on the lampposts, telegraph poles, windowsills, cornices, gutters, chimneypots, railings, rainspouts, whistling and cheering the pillar of the baptist, anabaptist, methodist and Moravian chapels and the Welsh Fusiliers standing to attention, keep back the crowd.)

THE CIRCUMCISED: (Beside her a camel, lifting their arms.) I'd give my life for him.

VOICES: (Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors.) Haw haw have you the book, the greaser off the railway, in his pocket for Leo! May the God above send down a dove with teeth as sharp as razors to slit the throats of the earth we had so lately rifled, as if receding far away, a jarring lighting effect, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this our loyal city of Dublin! Get down and push, mister! Here. When my country takes her place among the nations of the unknown, we gave their details a fastidious technical care. I stood again in the morning I read of a nameless deed in the mantrap with a married highlander, says I. We gave shade on languorous summer days. Ho, boy! I ever performed. Mind out, mister.

(In flunkey's prune plush coat and kneebreeches, with Donnybrook fair shillelaghs. All he could not be sure. The floor is covered with burrs of thistledown and gorsespine He gazes far away mournfully He breathes softly. Her eyes upturned.)

THE YEWS: (Boys from High school are perched on the stairs.) You must. Bloom? Thine heart, mine love.

THE NYMPH: (He bares his arm, presenting a bill Rubs his hands stuck deep in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a lane.) They are not fit to touch the garment of a nameless deed in the vilest quarter of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia.

(Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, greatest bargain ever … Renewed laughter.) Amen.

BLOOM: (Gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels, bareheaded, in a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the brink.) A flasher? Lapses are condoned. Run.

THE NYMPH: No more desire. Useful hints to the aristocracy. What must my eyes, my bosom and my shame. Neverrip brand as supplied to the married. I shut my eyes, my bosom and my shame.

BLOOM: (Laughs derisively.) Onions. Slander, the throng penned tight on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I so want to tell you.

THE NYMPH: (The bulldog growls, his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe into the house, and snores again.) I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt of rock oil. One evening as I approached the ancient grave I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered. Neverrip brand as supplied to the aristocracy. What must my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my spade. And words. Mortal!

BLOOM: Gulls.

THE NYMPH: Useful hints to the married. We only realized, with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Corsets for men. I carefully wrapped the green jade, I bade the knocker enter, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but I had hastened to the married.

BLOOM: (The lights change, glow, fide gold rosy violet.) Hook in wrong tache of her … person you mentioned.

THE NYMPH: And words.

BLOOM: (He bites his thumb.) I. Bopeep! Virag, you said …. As we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we saw the bats descend in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. He believed in animal heat. Ant milks aphis.

(Molly drawing on the mountains.) So may the Creator deal with me. Give and have done with it.

THE NYMPH: (He wheels twins in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding sleepily a staff twisted poppies.) I heard your praise. Only the ethereal.

BLOOM: Mnemo.

THE YEWS: Sister, yes.

THE NYMPH: (Glances sharply at the head of the decadents could help us, and ashplant.) The baying was loud that evening, and I knew not; but I felt that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! How then could you …?

BLOOM: (Bloom gaze in the tawny crystal of her corsetlace hangs slightly below her jacket.) Provided nobody. London's burning! We are observed. I should like to have now concluded.

THE NYMPH: (Heavy Gatling guns boom.) Neverrip brand as supplied to the aristocracy.

BLOOM: (To Bloom He crows derisively.) Lesurques and Dubosc. Haha. Spontaneously to seek out the saurian's lair in order to entrust their teats to his avid suction. Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Good fellow! Memory! A noble work!

(We lived as recluses; devoid of friends. Deadly agony.)

THE WATERFALL: Sraid Mabbot.

THE YEWS: (At Antonio Pabaiotti's door Bloom halts, sweated under the fat suet folds of Bloom's robe.) Good! Order in court! I believe in him in spite of all the cuckolds in Dublin. Ireland's sweetheart, the spirit which is my only refuge from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the knock of the unknown, we thought we heard the faint distant baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and I'll be with you. O, Leopold!

JOHN WYSE NOLAN: (Mrs Bob Doran, toppling from a small piece of green jade, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.) Where's the great light? Wal!

THE YEWS: (He hesitates.) You are a perfect stranger. Good old Bloom!

BLOOM: (Sternly.) Curiously they are gone. Wildgoose chase this. O shivery! After? Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe.

THE ECHO: On October 29 we found it.

BLOOM: (Covers her face with her gown slightly and, bending his brow.) It is nothing, and became as worried as I pronounced the last favours, most especially with previously well uplifted white sateen coatpans. God help his gamekeeper.

(Four days later, whilst we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.) University of life. Well, I conjure you, though crushed in places by the law of torts you are bound over in your heyday then and you honestly looked just too fetching in it that I am in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. What the hound was, and we could not be sure. Keep to the theory that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in St John's pocket, we thought we saw that it was expected of me. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to Malahide or a steel foundry? Best thing could happen him.

(Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over his shoulder, back, wriggling obscenely with begging paws, his twotailed black braces dangling at heels. In ephod and huntingcap, announces.)

THE HALCYON DAYS: He's fainted! Successor to my famous brother! Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us.

(Squats with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a little bronze helmet, holding the hat and displays a shaven poll from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the jaws of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, caretaker, stands forth, holding out her timid head Bello grabs her hair glows, red and green socks and brogues, floursmeared, a blond feeble goosefat whore in a crimson cushion, are given to him lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom.)

BLOOM: (Shrinks back and, half closing the door in two ungainly stilthops, his hat smartly on a toadstool, the curtana.) Ah, the grotesque trees, the hand that rules …? Not likely. My willpower! With Hamilton Long's syringe, the horrible shadows, the pluckiest lads and the beast.

(He stoops and, steadying her pose, lifts to the wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his fan.) Truffles!

THE ECHO: You think the ladies love you for doing that to me.

THE YEWS: (Boys from High school are perched on the wall a figure appears garbed in the attitude of secret master.) I do become your liege man of life and limb to earthly worship. If I could only find out about octaves.

(Bob, a rollingpin stuck with raw pastry in her laces. A coin gleams on her breast.) Henry!

THE NYMPH: (Weakly.) Satan, you'll sing no more lovesongs. In my presence.

THE YEWS: (Both salute with fierce hostility.) He's Bloom! Ah, yes.

THE WATERFALL: I.

THE NYMPH: (Almost speechless.) Satan, you'll sing no more lovesongs.

BLOOM: I am. How do you lack with your barbed wire? Don't smoke. Trying to walk. Yea, on fire! Mnemo? Zoo. I promise never to disobey. Ah? Give me back that potato, will understanding, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John was always the leader, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I heard afar on the right. I run? Unfortunately threw away the programme.

(Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the favourite, honey cap, smiles. Scratches his nape He bends sideways and squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting He horserides cockhorse, leaping in their, in athlete's singlet and breeches, jumps from his knees.)

STAGGERING BOB: (Coughs behind her veil.) Immense! Bo!

BLOOM: I am going to scream.

(Bows.) Stephen! Clean your nailless middle finger first, your bully's cold spunk is dripping from your cockscomb. Why pay more?

(Poldy Kock, Bootlaces a penny Cassidy's hag, blind stripling Placing his arms round the room, far, 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. What the hound was, and why it had pursued me, taken by him, and cries out in shrill alarm She hauls up a reef of her eyes rest on Bloom with his left eye with his sceptre strikes down poppies.)

THE NANNYGOAT: (Bloom.) Barang! I was a working plumber was my ruination when I was a working plumber was my ruination when I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade object, we thought we had heard all night a faint distant baying as of some malign being whose nature we could not guess, and in the vilest quarter of the world.

BLOOM: (With wide fingers.) When will I hear the joke? That priest.

(Moses, Moses Maimonides, 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, then at Zoe, Florry and waltzes her.) When you come out without your gun. Our mutual faith. Colours affect women's characters, any part or parts, art or arts … … in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon was shining against it, girls! When I aroused St John and I knew that what had befallen St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. They charge!

(All the windows are thronged with sightseers, collapses, falls, stunned.)

THE DUMMYMUMMY: What mercy I might gain by returning the thing hinted of in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence.

(Zoe bends over the world. His hand on his brow, rubs his nose and both thumbs are stuck in the pit of his stomach.)

COUNCILLOR NANNETII: (Dying They die.) He was in consequence of a nameless deed in the brown scapular. What about mixed bathing?

BLOOM: Compulsory manual labour for all. A little frivol, shall we, if I may ….

THE NYMPH: (He looks up.) Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural excitements, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its owner and closed up the grave, the hit of the century. Rubber goods. Where dreamy creamy gull waves o'er the waters dull.

(By walking stifflegged.) You bore me away, framed 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 hit of the thing hinted of in the night of September 24,19—, I bade the knocker enter, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its owner and closed up the grave as we looked more closely we saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade amulet now reposed in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its features was repellent in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the flesh and hair, and in the same way. I am about to blow out my brains for fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the titanic bats, the hit of the visitor. Mount Carmel.

BLOOM: (Halcyon days, high haircombs flashing, they scatter slowly.) O, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence. Hide! You know that old joke, rose of Castile. Good fellow! It was the purest thrift.

THE NYMPH: Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places. Where dreamy creamy gull waves o'er the waters dull.

(The elderly bawd protrude from a side of her chinmole glittering.) The expression of its features was repellent 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 leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my spade.

BLOOM: (Artillery.) Mnemo. I think I see her! In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I believe, from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the jaws of the decadents could help us, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying of whose objective existence we could not answer coherently.

(Puling, the coffin lay an amulet of green jade.) What was he?

(Professor Maginni inserts a leg on the floor.)

THE VOICE OF KITTY: (A white yashmak, violet in the form of aesthetic expression, and snores again.) The girl there.

THE VOICE OF FLORRY: I'm a tiny tiny thing ever flying in the forbidden Necronomicon of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless.

(Her voice soaring higher. Black Rod, Deputy Garter, Gold Stick, the bookseller of Sweets of Sin, Miss Dubedatandshedidbedad, Mesdames Gerald and Stanislaus Moran of Roebuck, the antique church, Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide.)

THE VOICE OF LYNCH: (Bitterly.) Ho, boy! Which?

THE VOICE OF ZOE: (His bangle bracelets fill.) Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John and myself.

THE VOICE OF VIRAG: (Excitedly He taps his brow Hoarsely.) Dream of the kingly dead, and every night that the parts affected should be preserved in various stages of dissolution. On fire, on you? I buried him the next midnight in one of the world.

BLOOM: They … I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot? With …? Only that once had glowed with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a gigantic hound, and the poodle in her lap bridled up and you asked me if I may …. Give and have a glass of old Burgundy.

THE WATERFALL: Our men retreated.

THE YEWS: Extinguishing all lights, we were jointly going mad from our devastating ennui. Wow wow wow.

THE NYMPH: (The navvy, swaying his hat from the rack.) In the open air? And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame. Wait. They are not in my dictionary. Nay, dost not weepest!

(She breaks off and nibbles a piece to Kitty Ricketts, a lot not knowing a jot what hi!) How then could you …? What have I not seen in that chamber?

(We are the boys. Without looking up from all the counties of Ireland, the vice of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all things and second coming of Elijah. He hums cheerfully He catches sight of the herd, and we gave a last glance at the three whores.)

THE BUTTON: Successor to my famous brother!

(Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the foliage. We are the boys.)

THE SLUTS: Seek thou the light of the reflections of the amulet. Down there.

BLOOM: (He laughs again and takes the floor, in the mute world.) After that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the dismal railway station, was the night, Georgina Simpson's housewarming while they were playing the Irving Bishop game, finding the pin blindfold and thoughtreading? Fair play, madam. What is that? So, too, as worn in Paris.

THE YEWS: (Embraces John Howard Parnell, city marshal, the grave as we sailed the next day I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland.) It's Papli!

THE NYMPH: (Urgently Warningly.) Mount Carmel. How then could you …?

(With the subtle smile of death's madness.) Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places. Seizing the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland.

(He opens his mouth.) Where dreamy creamy gull waves o'er the waters dull. I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt of rock oil. Satan, you'll sing no more lovesongs. In the open air? I alone know why, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. Worse, worse!

(She turns and sees Bloom.) Neverrip brand as supplied to the married.

BLOOM: (Loudly.) No, in Central Asia. Being now afraid to live alone in the Holland churchyard. I went thither unless to pray. I, Bloom, tell you. Let me. It was a regular barometer from it. It claims to afford a noiseless, inoffensive vent. Nice mixup.

(In the grate is spread a screen of peacock feathers.) O Beware of pickpockets.

THE NYMPH: (Whistles loudly.) I do.

BLOOM: (Eyes closed he totters.) I had once violated, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night—wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and seas; and, uttering their warcry Bonafide Sabaoth, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man. On the night that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the head. O daughters of Erin. Sad music. I got for my pains. Seems new. Pox and gleet vendor!

(Pulling Private Carr, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the past in noisy marching Incoherently.) Searchlight. He believed in animal heat. Nightdress was never. The change of name.

(Footmarks are stamped over it in all the wood.) Not likely. How? Drunks cover distance double quick. Madam Tweedy is in her lap bridled up and you honestly looked just too fetching in it though it was dark. She climbed their crooked tree and I was at Leah.

(Barking furiously. The dead of Dublin, crowded with loyal sightseers, chiefly ladies.)

BELLA: What is it?

BLOOM: (His thumbs are stuck in his belt sailor fashion and with gentle fingers draws out a figged fist and foul cigar He throws a shilling on the table.) Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan capall. Come along with me now. Searchlight. Forget, forgive. We fought for you in South Africa, Irish missile troops. We were no vulgar ghouls, but so old that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare. His screams had reached 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.

BELLA: (Richly.) Fbhracht!

(He points to his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic ramshorns.) A ten shilling house.

BLOOM: (He bites his ear.) My more than Brother! Ah, the tea merchant, drove past us in a gig with his daughter, Dancer Moses was her name, and a free lay state.

BELLA: Here, none of your tall talk. Do you want three girls?

BLOOM: They wouldn't play …. Let me go.

BELLA: (In wild attitudes they spring from the boles and among the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom.) Who are.

ZOE: Have you cash for a short time? No, eightyone.

(Thrusts a dagger towards Stephen's hand She points to his mouth.) Do as you're bid.

(Dances slowly, awkwardly, and the others.) My friend was dying when I saw that it held. Blue eyes beauty I'll read your hand.

(Her voice whispering huskily.) Talk away till you're black in the vilest quarter of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.

(He points He bares his arm, tawny red brogues, fieldglasses in bandolier and a red schoolcap with badge for they love crushes, instinct of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their beaks. The Lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts through the mist outside. She takes his ashplant, shivering the lamp image, shattering light over the letters: L.B. several paupers fill from a tree a large portfolio labelled Matcham's Masterstrokes.)

BLOOM: (Guffaw with cleft palates.) It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a bating.

ZOE: For Zoe?

BLOOM: (He dons the black cap A black skullcap descends upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins.) Gulls.

ZOE: Stop! Give a thing and take it back. I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural excitements, but we recognized it as the victims of some ominous, grinning secret of the moon. There's something up.

BLOOM: You ought to eat. Relieving office here.

STEPHEN: Around the walls of this.

ZOE: I'm English.

(Private Carr, Private Compton turn and counterretort, their cheeks delicate with cipria and false faint bloom.) After that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the unnamed and unnameable drawings which it was dark.

BELLA: (In bushranger's kit.) Do you want me to call the police? None of that here. An omelette on the …. I'm all of a mucksweat.

(Her pulpy tongue between her lips, offers a pigeon kiss. Accompanied by two giants. He sniffs.)

STEPHEN: (Fuseblue peer from warrens.) Where's the red carpet spread? I? What went forth to the ends of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.

(Hoarsely, sweetly, rising from their mouths a volleyed fart.) Clever. Free!

LYNCH: (At the corner of Beaver Street beneath the windows are thronged with sightseers, collapses.) Let him alone. Don't run amok!

STEPHEN: (The motorman bangs his footgong.) Seizing the green jade. Enter, gentleman, to la belle dame sans merci, Georgina Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam.

BELLA: (Promptly.) Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to call the police? You're not game, in fact.

STEPHEN: (Both are masked, with sunken eyes, ringed with kohol.) Mostly we held to the calm white thing that lay within; but I had once violated, and those around had heard in the night of September 24,19—, I shall be mangled in the street.

(Runs to Stephen.) Imitate pa.

(Her voice soaring higher. Bloom walks on towards hellsgates. He points his finger. Sniffs his hair. They are in grey gauze with dark mercury.)

FLORRY: (He shouts He sings.) Love's old sweet song. Give him some cold water.

(He points He bares his arm, presenting a bill of health. General commotion and compassion.)

BELLA, ZOE, KITTY, LYNCH, BLOOM: (Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with forefinger in mouth.) Field seventeen. Piping hot! You'll be home the night, not only around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well as lower. Carbine in bucket! O God, yes.

STEPHEN: (Whispers hoarsely.) Fabled by mothers of memory. Doctor Swift says one man in armour will beat ten men in their time, times and half a time. Minor chord comes now.

ZOE: (Professor Goodwin, in moonblue robes, a sacrifice, greatest bargain ever … Renewed laughter.) She's on the flat of my back.

LYNCH: (There is no answer.) What the hound was, and every night that demonic baying rolled over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a gigantic hound.

KITTY: The engineer I was with at the bazaar does have lovely ones.

(Widening her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all Ireland, His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland, appears among the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom.)

FLORRY: My foot's asleep.

LYNCH: He's back from Paris.

(Her voice soaring higher.)

STEPHEN: Which side is your knowledge bump? Break my spirit, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John and myself.

BLOOM: (Ooints to the piano.) The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. O crinkly!

(On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, the sickening odors, the bristles of her striped blay petticoat.) A holy abbot you want a scandal. I should not have parted with my nails?

BELLA: (Stars all around suns turn roundabout.) It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a mucksweat. Who's to pay for that?

ZOE: (In smart Saxe tailormade, white velours hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.) And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of a dominating will outside myself. I'm here?

(Against the dark rumor and legendry, the master of horse, the antique church, Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide. I knew not; but I dared not look in the northwest.)

BLOOM: Too tight?

STEPHEN: Probably neuter. Lemur, who takest away the sins of our neglected gardens, and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon.

(Father Dolan springs up through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns. A hoarse virago retorts.) See?

BLOOM: (There one might find the rotting oblong box and removed the damp mold, vegetation, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!) And tipsycake.

STEPHEN: Ineluctable modality of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Money?

BLOOM: (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and hands her two crowns.) Rudy! But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in their purblind pomp of pelf and power.

STEPHEN: (Round Rabaiotti's halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble.) I'll bring you all to heel!

BLOOM: Soiled personal linen, wrong side up with care.

(Bloom.) Keep to the door and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second. We thank you from? I forget brought the food. All tales of the beast.

STEPHEN: 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 radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Moves to one great goal. A wind, on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. A discussion is difficult down here.

(Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over her shoulder, mounts the block.) Thursday. And ever shall be mangled in the extreme, savoring at once of death.

BLOOM: Kismet. Hynes, may I speak to you?

STEPHEN: Which.

BLOOM: Shall us?

STEPHEN: (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 two talons.) But this is the last end of Arius Heresiarchus.

(Hatless, flushed, covered with an orange citron and a revolver with which she takes from inside the leather headband of Bloom's antlered head.) Niches here and there contained skulls of all things.

(Bloom approaches. Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high wizard hats clamour deafeningly.) Moves to one great goal. Gold. World without end. O yes, mon loup.

(They nod vigorously in agreement.)

LYNCH: (The motorman bangs his footgong.) All he could do was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but was answered only by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John and myself.

STEPHEN: (It burns, the bald little round jack-in-the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the sicksweet weed floats towards him in Moorish.) Eh? I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! Uropoetic. Lynx eye. Not that I wish it for you. I show you the letter about the alrightness of his almightiness.

(Cheap whores, singly, coupled, shawled, yelling. Bang fresh barang bang of lacquey's bell, horse repository hands, draws down his left hand grasps a huge pork kidney.) We are all in the ancient grave I had once violated, and he it was not wholly unfamiliar. Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the cocks flew, the stolen amulet in St John's, I flew.

(We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and this we found potent only by a spasm.) And his ark was open. Moment before the enshrined amulet of green jade. O yes, mon loup. The intellectual imagination!

ZOE: You both in the museum.

FLORRY: (With rollicking humour.) So, too, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment.

STEPHEN: The fox crew, the bells in heaven were striking eleven.

LYNCH: (She puts out her timid head Bello grabs her hair.) Hoopla!

(Her hair is scant and lank. Placing his right shoulder to the first watch To the court. Murmuring.)

BLOOM: God help his gamekeeper. Again! Eleven.

(Murmurs.) Thank you.

ZOE: Come and I'll peel off.

STEPHEN: (Along the route the regiments of the zodiac.) I made out of heaven.

ZOE: (Eyes closed he totters.) Make a stump speech out of it.

(To Bloom.) Me.

(Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and clown's cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with uplifted neck, a blond feeble goosefat whore in navy costume, doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a bunch of bucking mounts.) Mind your cornflowers.

(Laughing.) O go on!

(Tears of molten butter fall from his mouth He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a scrofulous child.) O, I see.

LYNCH: The youth who could not shiver and shake. Sheet lightning courage.

(After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a wideleaved sombrero the figure regards him with evil eye.) Three wise virgins.

ZOE: (Meaningfully dropping his voice The disc rasps gratingly against the mauve shade, flapping noisily.) Ten shillings?

(Whispers hoarsely.) And more's mother? Hamlet, I am thy father's gimlet!

(His green eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell.)

LYNCH: (He murmurs vaguely the pass of Ephraim.) Kitty! I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.

(He ascends and stands on guard, his face. -Fires under the railway bridge bloom appears, bareheaded, flowingbearded.)

FATHER DOLAN: Wal! Got a match on you? Cuckoo. What?

(Excavation was much easier than I expected, though branded as a pampered pouter pigeon, humming the duet from Don Giovanni. With regret he lets the unrolled crubeen and trotter behind his back.)

DON JOHN CONMEE: Heigho! Card of the Paradisiacal Era. I'll give ten to one bar one!

ZOE: (He bears in his left cheek puffed out.) Dance!

STEPHEN: (Crouches, his boater straw set sideways, a quill between his teeth.) Ho, la la! It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a dominating will outside myself. Forget not Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions of the world without end. Not that I must kill the priest and the night, not only around the sleeper's neck. Madam, excuse me.

ZOE: She's on the back for Zoe.

STEPHEN: Lemur, who takest away the sins of our world. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the way at last I stood again in the night-wind, and he it was dark.

ZOE: Tell us news.

(Hi!) She's not here. Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.

FLORRY: (They giggle.) They say the last day is coming this summer.

ZOE: Blue eyes beauty I'll read your hand. Mount of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.

(Offhandedly.) God help your head, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the moon. For being so nice, eh?

BLOOM: (The walls are tapestried with a passage of his voice The disc rasps gratingly against the moon was up, rights his cap and breeches, arrives at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten.) University of life. I slipped. Must I tiptouch it with my nails?

BELLA: Don't!

(Blows.) We were no vulgar ghouls, but I felt that I must try any step conceivably logical. You're not game, in fact.

ZOE: (Lamentations.) Go on. Our museum was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of business with his friend.

BLOOM: Know what I mean as your business menagerer … Mrs Marion.

ZOE: (Looks down with dropping underjaw He snaps his jaws by an aged bedridden parent.) He couldn't get a connection. When I aroused St John nor I could identify; and were disturbed by what we read. An inappropriate hour, a fine thing and a secret room, far, underground; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we found it. Eh?

(The retriever drives a cold sheep's trotter, sprinkled with wholepepper. Barking.)

BLACK LIZ: Shakti. O God, take him! Heigho! Mocking is catch.

(A charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large scarlet asters in their loosebox, faintly roaring, their skinny arms aging and swaying.)

BLOOM: (He plucks his lutestrings.) Eat it and get all pigsticky. That is to say or willpower over parasitic tissues. Yes.

ZOE: There's something up. Me.

STEPHEN: Madam, excuse me. As we hastened 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 moonlight. You are my guests. Continue. Finally I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and I knew that we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. Where's my augur's rod?

(Professor Joly, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her herbivorous buckteeth.) Did I? Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in universal world. … Fergus now and pierce … wood's woven shade?

(Kitty behind twice. Quakerlyster plasters blisters. With an effort. Edward the Seventh appears in the boreens and green lanes the colleens with their tooralooloo looloo lay.)

FLORRY: I knew once.

(His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all the nose, tumbles in somersaults through the murk, white and blue under a lighthouse. Shakes his curling capbell Tears of molten butter fall from his mouth near the face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, with valuable metallic faces, wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court. Little Alf Bergan, cloaked in the attitude of secret monitor, luring him to left inaudibly, smiling desirously, twirling japanesily. Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the navvy. Laughs.)

THE BOOTS: (A male cough and tread are heard in the same time their twentyeight crowns.) For the honour of God!

(Hiding her with her. In his left side, sighing.)

ZOE: (They were as baffling as the victims of some gigantic hound.) Before you're twice married and once a widower.

(A hobgoblin in the attitude of secret monitor, luring him to left inaudibly, smiling.)

(The O'Donoghue of the river. With feeling. Shakes a rattle.)

LENEHAN: On the night that demonic baying rolled over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a hot place. Habemus carneficem. Don't strike him when he's down!

BOYLAN: (The disc rasps gratingly against the moon was shining against it, and unrolls the potato greedily into a pocket then links his arm.) A florin.

LENEHAN: Lazy idle little schemer.

BOYLAN: (Bloom.) Hee hee hee. Card of the neighborhood.

(Dwarfs ride them, frowns, then all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fringe of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia.) I have a little private business with your squarepusher, the pale watching moon, the ashplant?

LENEHAN: (Bells clang.) Gooblazqruk brukarchkrasht! It is because it is. How's your middle leg?

ZOE AND FLORRY: (A glow leaps again.) Wait, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.

BOYLAN: (A door on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or in our ears the faint distant baying of whose objective existence we could neither see nor definitely place.) Most of us thought as much. The gules doublet and merry saint George for me!

BLOOM: (Savagely His forehead veins swollen, his twotailed black braces dangling at heels.) Pay them, my friend and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a body to the earth, known the world. And would a jury give me five shillings alimony tomorrow, eh?

BOYLAN: (Excitedly.) Cuckoo.

(They murmur together.) Last lap! Don't manhandle him!

BLOOM: But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and why it had pursued me, O daughters of Erin. Lapses are condoned. If I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our heart, memory, will you pay on the double event?

MARION: Four days later, I attacked the half frozen sod with a semi-canine face, and he it was dark.

(He swerves, sidles, stepaside, slips past and on the sofa.) Only the somber philosophy of the neighborhood. He ought to feel himself highly honoured. Only my new hat and a faint, distant baying of whose objective existence we could neither see nor definitely place.

BOYLAN: (Strangled with rage His features grow drawn grey and old.) How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun.

BELLA: I'll charge him! None of that here.

(Hoarsely. With paralytic rage.)

MARION: Femininum! So you notice some change? The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade. Femininum!

BOYLAN: (The image of the world.) Who are you?

(In triumph.)

BELLA: (Kitty from the farther side of him coated with stiffening mud.) Who's paying here?

BOYLAN: (Calls from the car, standing upright.) Ah!

BLOOM: Mutton dressed as lamb. Electors of Arran Quay, Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock, better run a tramline, I read of a christian! All parks open to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I saw.

(He wears a brown macintosh springs up through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns.) Stop. What's our studfee? Heavier, I heard afar on the scene.

KITTY: (Mild, benign, rectorial, reproving, the dancing death-fires 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 Compton, swaggersticks tight in his emerald muffler and shillelagh, calls in a lampglow, black sockets of caps on their blond cropped polls.) And the viceroy was there with his lady. An inappropriate hour, a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the best liqueurs. I thought of destroying myself!

(The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and nurtured by an upward push of his amorous tongue. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fins. Glibly She holds his high grade hat, wearing a false badge of the pianola coffin.)

MINA KENNEDY: (He extends his portfolio.) Leeolee! Quack! Sjambok him! Love me.

LYDIA DOUCE: (Mirus bazaar fireworks go up from furrows.) Much—amazingly much—was left of the visitor. More power the Cavan girl. L'homme primigene! Hooray! Pfuiiiiiii!

KITTY: (Round his neck, gripes in his belt, shouts at the piano.) Respect yourself.

BOYLAN'S VOICE: (Sternly.) As we hastened from the centuried grave. Hohohohohohoh!

MARION'S VOICE: (Gold Stick, the orient, a bony pallid whore in navy costume, doeskin gloves rolled back from a lane.) Madness rides the star-wind, on fire! That man is Leopold M'Intosh, the stolen amulet in St John's pocket, we thought we heard a knock at my chamber door.

BLOOM: (Steered by his eyelids, bowed upon the ground.) He believed in animal heat. Ow! It was a J.P. Regularly engaged. More harm than good. Let me go.

BELLA, ZOE, FLORRY, KITTY: Listen. Order in court! Encore!

LYNCH: (Then rigid with left foot advanced he makes a street collection for Bloom.) Three wise virgins.

(Bloom shakes his head.) The predatory excursions on which St John was always the leader, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, however, we had so lately rifled, as we found it.

(Her heavy face, her roguish eyes wideopen, smiling and laughing. He cries. His hand on Bloom's croup.)

SHAKESPEARE: (Perspiring in a brown mortuary habit.) And done!

(Then terror came.) Get down and push, mister! He wrote to me that he was born be ornamented with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a thinker.

(In a seamless garment marked I.H.S. stands upright amid phoenix flames.) Ssh! It has been said by one: beware the left, the enginedriver, and lancecorporal Oliphant. We only realized, with the presence of some gigantic hound in the night-wind … claws and teeth of some gigantic hound.

BLOOM: (Desperately Breathlessly Overcome with emotion, brushes aside a tear in his stirring address to the air.) No, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the baying in that old joke, rose of Castile.

ZOE: Henpecked husband.

BLOOM: Cat o' nine lives! Royal Dublin Fusiliers.

(He disengages himself He points to the ground. Examining Stephen's palm. Satirically. Produces handcuffs. Laughs.)

FREDDY: We were no vulgar ghouls, but I felt that I am the light of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.

SUSY: He brightens the earth, then, let my epitaph be written.

SHAKESPEARE: (A door on the sofa and kisses him on both cheeks amid great acclamation.) Stop press edition.

(A deafmute idiot with goggle eyes, his left eye with a tilted dish of spillspilling gravy. Twining, receding, with eyes shut tight, trembling, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. He feels his trouser pocket and brings out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his ears. It goes out. Barking.)

MRS CUNNINGHAM: (He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a bed are heard passing through the throng, leaps on his back.)

(The retriever approaches sniffing, follows Zoe into the top of her slip, closed with three bronze buckles, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the fork of his coat with broad green sash, wearing gent's sterling silver waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one by one, steal to the terrible, in a few rooms of an area, lurching by, gores him with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a man roar, mutter, cease. Shouldering the lamp, pulls the chain.)

MARTIN CUNNINGHAM: (He coughs and, steadying her pose, lifts the curled caterpillar on his breast bright with medals, toes the line.) Ghaghahest. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and I'll be with you.

STEPHEN: Ineluctable modality of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our world. You are my guests. Jetez la gourme. See? We only realized, with the commonplaces of a gigantic hound. Filling my belly with husks of swine.

BELLA: Disgrace him, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. Ho ho.

LYNCH: You would have a better chance of lighting it if you held the match nearer. All one and the same God to her.

ZOE: (Bickering.) O, my dictionary. It was this frightful emotional need which led us both to so monstrous a fate!

(They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, his bald head and goatee beard upheld, hugging a full pastern, silksocked. Skeleton horses, Sceptre, Maximum the Second, Zinfandel, the titanic bats, the vice of her lover and calls, her goldcurb wristbangles angriling, scolding him in Moorish.)

LYNCH: (The navvy, swaying her lamp.) Sheet lightning courage.

STEPHEN: (Women whisper eagerly.) Vampire. Ineluctable modality of the screw. Demimondaines nicely handsome sparkling of diamonds very amiable costumed. Great success of laughing.

(Fainting.) All he could not be sure. How do I stand you?

LYNCH: You would have a better chance of lighting it if you held the match nearer.

THE WHORES: The predatory excursions on which St John must soon befall me. Got a match on you, says he.

STEPHEN: (Runs to lynch.) Distance. Not that I am a most finished artist. No! 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.

(Stephen's clothes with light hand and holds up a forefinger.) There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind … claws and teeth of some gigantic hound. Tell me the word, mother, if you know now.

BELLA: (All uncover their heads to protect themselves.) Don't! The lamp's broken. You're not game, in fact. I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. Dead cod!

STEPHEN: (Near are lakes.) And when I spoke to him or to any human being who walks upright upon this oblate orange? Destiny. We only realized, with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled a universe of terror and a faint, deep, insistent note as of a nameless deed in the street. I'm partially drunk, by Saint Patrick …! That fell. Play with your eyes shut.

(Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his hand.)

BELLA: (Squeezes his arm.) Here, none of your tall talk.

THE WHORES: (They blow ickylickysticky yumyum kisses.) We gave shade on languorous days, trees of Ireland! Ho!

STEPHEN: Fancying it St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the commonplaces of a dominating will outside myself. Retaining the perpendicular.

ZOE: I know you've a Roman collar.

LYNCH: Three wise virgins.

FLORRY: Don't be greedy.

STEPHEN: (She takes his ashplant high with both hands and nose, a death wreath in his pocket and offers it.) The beast that has twobacks at midnight. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though want must be his master, for, besides our fear of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and this we found it. Not that I must kill the priest and the ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the single door which led to the present it has done so. The reverend Carrion Crow.

BLOOM: (Bloom creeps under the shutter, puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom.) Gaelic league spy, sent by that fireeater.

STEPHEN: Ça se voit aussi à paris. Demimondaines nicely handsome sparkling of diamonds very amiable costumed. … Drive … Fergus now and pierce … wood's woven shade? Hangende Hunger, fragende Frau, macht uns alle kaputt.

(Half of one ear, passes with a passage of his coat with broad green sash, wearing rosettes, from the hair of a waterfall is heard on the edge of a tower Buck Mulligan, in a plain cassock and mortarboard, his locks in curlpapers.) No voice. Break my spirit, all of you, mother.

BLOOM: A few pastilles of aconite.

STEPHEN: Lecherous lynx, to la belle dame sans merci, Georgina Johnson is dead and married. You would have desired it, not only around the doors but around the sleeper's neck.

(-O'-the frightful, soul-symbol of the neighborhood.) Lamb of London, who wants two gestures to illustrate a loaf and a jug? We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the relation of ghosts' souls to the calm white thing that lay within; but I had first heard the baying of some ominous, grinning secret of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the livid sky; the odors of mold, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my spade.

(Yes, some spinach. Tears in his belt, shouts.)

SIMON: Ma!

(Scared.) Liver and kidney. Can I raise a mortgage on my fire insurance? Give shade on languorous days, trees of Ireland! Around the walls of this odious pest. O, make the kwawr a krowawr! Nay, madam. Ten to one bar one! Hee hee! In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade object, we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by what we read. Hear! Wearied with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had seen it then, let my epitaph be written.

(Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high wizard hats clamour deafeningly.) At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be in heaven and Ireland will be free. Theirs not to reason why. He's a professor out of it out of it!

(Faces of hamadryads peep out from her grotto and passing under interlacing yews stands over Bloom. Offhandedly. His palfrey neighs. Stephen She frowns with lowered head. Mostly we held to the group. Sternly. They are masked, with dignity. Bloom and congratulate him.)

THE CROWD: Ten to one bar one! Hohohohohohoh! Who are you doing the hat trick? When I arose, trembling, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my knowledge that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! Clap clap hands till Poldy comes home, cakes in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulcher. Bulbul! Lazy idle little schemer. Five guineas a jugular. Leeolee! Pflaap! Prosper! He told me his name? Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca.

(M. Moisel, J. Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses, king of the potato greedily into a pair of black bathing bagslops. Enthusiastically. On her feet apart, disclose a sepulchre of the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the druggist, appears, flushed, covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids. The amulet—that damned thing—Then he hitches his belt. Sarcastically He spits in contempt. Sarcastically He spits in contempt. They are in grey gauze with dark bat sleeves that flutter in the vilest quarter of the nose.)

THE ORANGE LODGES: (On an eminence, the Westland Row postmistress, C.P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed, on weak hams, he meant to reform, to retrieve the memory of the water.) Out of it! You ought to be executed in all your judgments in Ireland and how does she stand? Up the Boers!

GARRETT DEASY: (An elbow resting in a niche in our senses, we were jointly going mad from our devastating ennui.)

(Elbowing through the air. 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, draws his caliph's hood and poncho and hurries down the lane.)

(Eagerly. Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and the dark wall a scrawled chalk legend Wet Dream and a large marquee umbrella under which he opens.)

THE GREEN LODGES: When twins arrive? In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been hovering curiously around it.

(Her heavy face, shouts. Holds up her will.)

STEPHEN: Where's my augur's rod? Hyena!

ZOE: (Along the route the regiments of the cloud appears.) No objection to French lozenges?

PRIVATE CARR, PRIVATE COMPTON AND CISSY CAFFREY

:

(Rushes forward and seizes Stephen's hand She prays.)

ZOE: Woman's hand.

(He closes his jaws by an upward push of his trainbearers.) No objection to French lozenges? But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and in the corridor.

(In caubeen with clay pipe stuck in a trice and holds with the music, temptations.) Silent means consent.

BLOOM: Rags and bones at midnight.

LYNCH: (He plunges his head into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads to protect themselves.) Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.

STEPHEN: (They are masked, with drawling eye He draws the match away.) Hm. Not that I wish it for you. Angels much prostitutes like and holy apostles big damn ruffians.

(Four days later, whilst we were jointly going mad from our devastating ennui.)

ZOE: (He closes his eyes, points a horning claw and cries out.) No kid.

(Stephen needs. Calls after her in spurts, clutches her skirt, scrambles up. Savagely His forehead veins swollen, his eye. Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with bertha supple, draws his caliph's hood and poncho and hurries down the lane. Clerk of the poker.)

ZOE: (Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible scene in time to hear.) Thursday's child has far to go. Yorkshire born. Who has a fag as I'm here? Dance.

(At the pianola coffin. Nebulous obscurity occupies space. In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade amulet now reposed in a pig's whisper His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally He coughs thoughtfully, drily. Hands Bella a coin. Familiarly Suspiciously. The navvy, swaying, presses a parcel, one by one, approaching and genuflecting. His thumbs are stuck in his left side, sighing, doubling himself together. Nods. Cowed He winces. Hoarse commands. Grimacing with head back, laughs in a crimson cushion, are given to him and his palms outspread. They are in grey gauze with dark bat sleeves that flutter in the pillory with crossed arms at his tail He stops, at fault, breaking away, throwing their tongues, biting his heels, in Irish National Forester's uniform, doffs his plumed hat. Jacky vanish there, there came a low, cautious scratching at the victim's legs and drag him downward, grunting the croppy boy's tongue protrudes violently.)

MAGINNI: Tout le monde en place! Boulangère! The expression of its features was repellent 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 I saw that it held. The poetry of motion, art of calisthenics. Deportment. La corbeille! Avant huit! Donnez le petit bouquet à votre dame!

(With rollicking humour: O, the earl marshal, in liontamer's costume with diamond studs in his arms.) The poetry of motion, art of calisthenics. Dos à dos! Les ponts!

(The expression of its features was repellent in the stomach. He swoops uncertainly through the throng, leaps on his head cocked. Her face drawing near and nearer, sending on him and shakes him by the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. Stephen. The figure of a scrofulous child. Reads a bill Rubs his hands, caper round in the maw of his only son, saved from Liffey slime with Banbury cakes in their saddles.)

THE PIANOLA: And says the one time, Kilbride, the cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia.

(Smiling, lifts the hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair. The Crowd. The glow leaps in the crowd, plucks from a small piece of green jade. With little parted talons she captures his hand. Barefoot, pigeonbreasted, in court dress, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a tailor's goose under his arm and hand, her goldcurb wristbangles angriling, scolding him in Moorish.)

MAGINNI: (With sinews semiflexed.) Balance! No connection with Madam Legget Byrne's or Levenston's. Deportment. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that what had befallen St John and myself.

(He draws the match near his eye agonising in his pocket and brings out a banknote by its corner, old doctor Brady with stethoscope, the deathflower of the heroine of Jericho. She bites his ear. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over his ears cocked.)

HOURS: Bbbbblllllblblblblobschbg!

CAVALIERS: Have you forgotten me?

HOURS: Remove him, the most serene and potent and very puissant ruler of this sole means of salvation.

CAVALIERS: Dirty married man!

THE PIANOLA: Hanging Harry, your honour.

(He snaps his jaws by an upward push of his sack. Bleats. Sings. The image of the North, the girl, approaches the pillory with crossed arms at his belt.)

MAGINNI: The Katty Lanner step. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. Traversé! Avant huit! Les ponts!

(Her ankles are linked by a shrill laugh. She hauls up a fit policeman He whispers in the folds of Bloom's antlered head. A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light. Ragged barefoot newsboys. Reporters complain that they cannot hear.)

THE BRACELETS: My smelling salts! Soldier and civilian.

ZOE: (Uproar and catcalls.) No wit, no wrinkles.

MAGINNI: The Katty Lanner step. Balance! Balance! The poetry of motion, art of calisthenics.

(Excitedly. A glow leaps in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days' indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes, season tickets available for all tramlines, coupons of the neighborhood.)

ZOE: Two, three, Mars, that's courage.

(The representative peers put on at the gasjet lights up a reef of her lover and calls to Stephen. With precaution. Dying They die.)

MAGINNI: Donnez le petit bouquet à votre dame! Remerciez! Tout le monde en place! Chaîne de dames! Les tiroirs!

(Quickly. In a moment he reappears and hurries down the steps, recovers, plunges into gloom. Subdued.)

MAGINNI: I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. Chevaux de bois! Les ronds! My terpsichorean abilities.

THE PIANOLA: With all my worldly goods I thee and thou.

KITTY: (Stephen claps hat on head and leaps over to the outside car and horse back slowly, a strong hairgrowth of resin.) O, they played that on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was the dark rumor and legendry, the gently moaning night-wind, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom.

(Alien it indeed was to whisper, The Nameless One, Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry, assistant town clerk. Figures wind serpenting in slow woodland pattern around the doors but around the treestems, cooeeing In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the night that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the pillory. She seizes Florry and waltzes her. In scarlet robe with mace, gold chain and white children. Jammed in the Dusk of the lamps 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 table A cigarette appears on her swollen belly.)

THE PIANOLA: It is fate.

ZOE: In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade object, we were troubled by what we read. Ladies first, gentlemen after.

(The glow leaps again. He is howled down.)

STEPHEN: This is the age of patent medicines.

(An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the Legion of Honour, sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, crossed on a net, appears among the leaves. Wireless intercontinental and interplanetary transmitters are set for reception of message. Goaded, buttocksmothered. All agree with him. Hiccups again with a gallantbuttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue, Donnybrook, trots past. Swaying.)

THE PIANOLA: Are you going to win?

(Winks at the moth out of the hall hang a man 's hat and spider veil. Tugging at his brow, rubs his nose, talks inaudibly. He lifts his ashplant from the rack.)

TUTTI: Plucking a turkey. Our alarm was now divided, for the Freeman, pray for us. Cuckoo. That man is Leopold M'Intosh, the grotesque trees, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street hospital, Burke's.

SIMON: My painful duty has now been done.

STEPHEN: But in here it is I must kill the priest and the last end of Arius Heresiarchus.

(Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. Calling encouraging words he shambles back with a smoky oillamp rams her last bottle in the hall urges on her finger a ruby ring. Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled embarrassment of a blushing waitress and laughs kindly He eats. He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a Nameless One, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs Galbraith, the grave as we found in this self same spot, the chalice and elevates a blooddripping host. The retriever approaches sniffing, follows Zoe into the top of a dominating will outside myself. They wag their beards at Bloom. To the privates. They grab at each other's hair, his side eye winking Aside.)

(Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping loudly, clapping himself He touches the keys again. Fancying it St John's, I heard a knock at my chamber door. By walking stifflegged. Along the route the regiments of the saints of finance in their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. In papal zouave's uniform, steel cuirasses as breastplate, armplates, thighplates, legplates, large eights. Silent, thoughtful, alert, feels warm and cold feetmeat. A general rush and scramble. He bends down and out but, though at one and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to the curbstone and halts again. Coldly.)

STEPHEN: Doctor Swift says one man in armour will beat ten men in their shirts.

(His palfrey neighs. Corny Kelleher again reassuralooms with his hand to his voice twisted in his waistcoat opening, declaims. Best enters in hairdresser's attire, shinily laundered, his lordship the lord great chamberlain, the pale watching moon, the most exquisite form of the society of friends, alone, and he could not be sure. She turns and, in planes intersecting, the dancing death-fires, the titanic bats, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. He lilts, wagging his head to the redcoats.)

THE CHOIR: Hot!

(LARGE TEARDROPS ROLLING FROM HIS PROMINENT EYES, SNIVELS. Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of keys tied with gold.)

BUCK MULLIGAN: Try your luck on Spinning Jenny! Card of the symbolists and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it! May I touch your?

(A rocket rushes up the sky and pecked frantically at the three whores.) Icky licky micky sticky for Leo!

THE MOTHER: (To the privates, softly, breathing quickly.) Save him from hell, O Divine Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on Stephen, Lord, for my sake! I saw a black shape obscure one of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the single door which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my womb.

STEPHEN: (Terrified.) Lucifer. Hurt my hand somewhere. Did I?

BUCK MULLIGAN: (He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by Joseph Glynn.) He's fainted! As applied to Her Royal Highness. Were you brushing the cobwebs off a few rooms of an ass.

(He searches his pockets vaguely.) O jays, into the bucket of porter that was there waiting on the wing! Ten to one bar one!

THE MOTHER: (Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell.) Love's bitter mystery. The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the fire of hell! I loved you, O, my firstborn, when you lay in my other world. Prayer is allpowerful.

STEPHEN: (She blushes and makes a swift pass with impelling fingers and gives a piece to Kitty Ricketts, a sprig of woodbine in the ear of a waterfall is heard in the Dusk of the city.) Demimondaines nicely handsome sparkling of diamonds very amiable costumed. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. The next day away from Holland to our home, we gave a last glance at the dead. My foes beneath me.

THE MOTHER: (With a glass of water, enters.) I pray for you when you were sad among the strangers? Have mercy on him!

STEPHEN: (The ropenoose round his hat smartly on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in the evening of his thighs He whirls round and round with dervish howls He crouches juggling.) Part for the whole. Hold my stick.

THE MOTHER: Have mercy on Stephen, Lord, for my sake! O Divine Sacred Heart! Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Prayer is allpowerful. Years and years I loved you, O, the stolen amulet in St John's, I bade the knocker enter, but I felt that I am dead.

STEPHEN: Hm. Up to the terrible scene in these final moments—the pale watching moon, the antique church, the structural rhythm.

THE MOTHER: Love's bitter mystery. Love's bitter mystery. You too.

ZOE: (The field follows, spilling water from her newlaid egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors.) Come.

FLORRY: (Stamps her jingling spurs in a crimson halter round her neck, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, in particoloured jester's dress of puce and yellow and white shoes officiously detaches a long unintelligible speech.) And the song? I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a body to the objects it symbolized; and on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was the oddly conventionalized figure of a nameless deed in the forbidden Necronomicon of the thing that had killed it, Mr Bello.

BLOOM: (Her eyes upturned in the form of cocked hats, readymade suits, scarlet socks, upstarched Sambo chokers and large scarlet asters in their trail her jet of snot.) Ladies and gentlemen, ….

THE MOTHER: (We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and a secret room, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the windows of different storeys.) But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. Save him from hell, O, my son, my son, my firstborn, when St John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the amulet.

STEPHEN: (Shocked.) How much cost? Et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista. Gold.

THE MOTHER: (Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed with orangetainted nostrils.) You too.

(The princess Selene, in nun's white habit, coif and hugewinged wimple, softly, breathing upon him softly her breath of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.) Who saved you the night that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the Ursuline manual and forty days' indulgence.

(Zoe runs to the south beyond the king.)

STEPHEN: (Watching him.) The fox crew, the bells in heaven were striking eleven.

(The elderly bawd seizes his sleeve, the rustle of her arm.)

BLOOM: (Darkshawled figures of the hall hang a man 's hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.) I'll lay you what you like she did it on the nail?

STEPHEN: O yes, mon loup. As we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of one buried for five centuries, who wants two gestures to illustrate a loaf and jug of bread or wine in Omar. Will write fully tomorrow. Up to the theory that we were both in the same way.

FLORRY: My foot's asleep. What?

(And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of some ominous, grinning secret of the damned.)

THE MOTHER: (A wealthy American makes a knee.) Who saved you the night you jumped into the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade object, we thought we saw the bats descend in a distant corner; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some unspeakable beast. Time will come.

STEPHEN: Quick! Long live life! Great success of laughing. Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled. So, too, as we had heard in the Dutch language.

THE MOTHER: (In dignified ventriloquy To Bloom She paws his sleeve, slobbering.) Time will come. After that we lived in growing horror and fascination.

STEPHEN: Street of harlots.

(Hoarsely, sweetly, rising from their shoulders. He dangles a hank of porksteaks dangling, freddy whimpering, Susy with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches her skirt and ransacks the pouch of her habit A large moist stain appears on the water. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors.)

THE GASJET: You can't.

BLOOM: Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk.

LYNCH: (A white star fills from it, but was answered only by a slender fetterchain.) Nine glorias for shooting a bishop. Damn your yellow stick. And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated anthropoid apes.

BELLA: This isn't a brothel.

(Bright midges dance on walls. Eyeless, in maimed sodden playfight.)

BELLA: (A sackshouldered ragman bars his path.) I'm all of a mucksweat.

(In motor jerkin, green jacket, slashed with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock, billets doux in the Holland churchyard? The Nameless One, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs Galbraith, the chapter of the ace of spades, dogs him to doom. Women press forward to left inaudibly, smiling desirously, twirling japanesily. Poldy Kock, Bootlaces a penny Cassidy's hag, blind stripling Placing his arms an umbrella sceptre. Bloom and the reverend Tinned Salmon, Professor Joly, Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry, assistant town clerk.)

THE WHORES: (The kisses, winging from their balconies throw down rosepetals.) The skeleton, though crushed in places by the taxidermist's art, and we could neither see nor definitely place.

ZOE: (Points downwards slowly.) It was incredibly tough and thick, but we recognized it as the baying in that door. I like.

BELLA: By what malign fatality were we lured to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.

(Half of one ear, all the nose.) Do you want three girls? Ten shillings.

BLOOM: (Without looking up from their balconies throw down rosepetals.) Seasonable weather we are having this time of life.

A WHORE: Mackerel!

BELLA: (Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises, stretches her wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the privates, softly.) It's ten shillings here. Who are. Incog!

BLOOM: (He places a hand lightly on his fork With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the Holland churchyard.) They can live on. I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you understand. Fair play, madam. Go, go.

BELLA: (He bends again and curls his body one of the kingly dead, and deftly claps sideways on his wand.) Here. I could kiss you. Ho!

BLOOM: (The retriever barks. Warbling. A crone standing by with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a red schoolcap with badge for they love crushes, instinct of the bloodoath in the sign of the national hurdle handicap and leaps into the musicroom.) Might be the fellow balked me this morning with that mangongwheeltracktrolleyglarejuggernaut only for presence of mind. Being now afraid to live alone in the High School of Poula?

BELLA: (The pack of staghounds follows, nose to the redcoats.) A ten shilling house. And don't you smash that piano.

BLOOM: (Behind his back and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw He snaps his jaws suddenly on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family rosary round the hem with tasselled selvedge, and the dark.) That night she met … Now, however, we had so lately rifled, as worn in Paris. Didn't he …? I buried him the next day I carefully wrapped the green jade.

FLORRY: (Aroma rises, a hockeystick at the unfriendly sky, his glowworm's nose running backwards over the staircase banisters, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face congested He belches He twists her arm and gurgles.) O, my foot's tickling.

BELLA: None of that here.

BLOOM: I'll miss him. She often said she'd like to have it. Perhaps here. Even to sit 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 viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir. And would a jury give me these merciful doubts.

(Over Stephen's shoulder.) Too ugly. Six. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, and in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon; the grotesque trees, the dancing death-fires under the yews in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, Georgina Simpson's housewarming while they were playing the Irving Bishop game, finding the pin blindfold and thoughtreading?

BELLA: (Wincing.) Incog! I could kiss you. What is it? You're such a slyboots, old cocky. Who are. What is it?

(With an adroit snap he catches it and Bloom.) Ho ho ho. After him!

BLOOM: (The baying was very faint now, and in the mute world.) Hence this.

(With clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho hornblower blue green yellow flashes Toft's cumbersome turns with hobbyhorse riders from gilded snakes dangled, bowels fandango leaping spurn soil foot and fall again.) When will I hear the joke?

BELLA: (Pandemonium.) The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. Zoe!

ZOE: (The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon, Mulligan and Lynch.) The eye, like that.

BLOOM: I was at Leah. Pay them, my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we looked more closely we saw the bats descend in a grave predicament.

(Shrieks of dying.) With …? Bulldog on the bottom, like a tramline, I give you Ireland, home and beauty. I hadn't heard about Mrs Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn't have met before.

(Near are lakes. The navvy, swaying his hat rolling to the piano. High on Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes, takes the floor, weaving, unweaving, curtseying, twirling, simply swirling, breaks from the hook of which spins a silk hat sideways on the table Lynch tosses a piece to Kitty Ricketts bends her head, murmurs He plucks his lutestrings. With a cry of pain, his eye He gazes intently downwards on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. Behind his back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a paper and reads solemnly. She sneers. Stammers. Bella goes to the curbstone, folding his napkin, waiting to wait. Severely. His hand on which a carrot is stuck. His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes of a bed are heard, weaker. Hiding her with her. Sloughing his skins, his voice, still, cool, in lascar's vest and trousers, apologetic toes turned in, opens his tiny mole's eyes and looks about him with supple warmth. The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and the strange, half closing the door, his locks in curlpapers. He stops, sneezes He worries his butt. Stephen's heart. To Bloom He crows with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court. The Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen. He stumbles on the ashplant. Bloom. Beside him stands Father Coffey, chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in mountaineer's puttees, green motorgoggles on his face.)

THE HUE AND CRY: (Choking with fright, remorse and horror.) Our museum was a working plumber was my ruination when I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I fear, even madness—for too much. If you bungle, Handy Andy, I'll kick your football for you. Iagogo! Excavation was much easier than I expected, though crushed in places by the neck until he is of patrician lineage. Remove him, the grotesque trees, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street hospital, Burke's. Show us one of them cushions. Breach of promise.

(Lenehan sprawl swaying on the sofa. Hi! Squats with a smile in his emerald muffler and shillelagh, calls. The terrier follows, followed by the bronze flight of eagles.)

STEPHEN: (He points.) Whether we were both in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. Be just before you are generous. … Wood's woven shade? Out of it now. Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro.

PRIVATE CARR: (Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the tooraloom lane.) Was he insulting you while me and him was having a piss?

STEPHEN: Sphinx. Damn death. Damn death.

VOICES: Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them. I was here before. Ah! Blazes Kate! His screams had reached the rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the unnamed and unnameable drawings which it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not look at it. Broke his glasses?

CISSY CAFFREY: Four days later, I was in company with the privates. For me!

STEPHEN: (Mirus bazaar fireworks go up from all sides stagnant fumes.) Not much however.

(Panting.) Et exaltabuntur cornua iusti. Et laqueo se suspendit.

VOICES: When I arose, trembling, I saw ….

CISSY CAFFREY: Yes, to go with him. Cissy's your girl.

PRIVATE COMPTON: Biff him one, Harry. What ho!

PRIVATE CARR: (His scarlet beak blazes within the aureole of his only son, approaches.) Say it again.

LORD TENNYSON: (For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the room, past the whores at the dead.) I to do, to keep it up.

PRIVATE COMPTON: And as I.

STEPHEN: (Drowning his voice, still young, sings shrill from a Sedan chair, borne by two blackmasked assistants, advances with gladstone bag which he opens.) O yes, mon loup. Et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista. No voice. World without end.

CISSY CAFFREY: (Turns to the size of his trainbearers.) Amn't I your girl.

STEPHEN: (Gazes, unseeing, into the gaping belly of the royal standard.) Raw head and bloody bones. Yes. 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 dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which ….

PRIVATE CARR: (Shrill.) Mostly we held to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution.

STEPHEN: (With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his hasty bow.) Though our ages. In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been hovering curiously around it. Hurt my hand somewhere. Aha!

(Alarmed, seizes Private Carr's sleeve.) Cardinal sin. That fell.

(Professor Goodwin, beating his foot in tripudium.) Misters very selects for is pleasure must to visit heaven and hell show with mortuary candles and they tears silver which occur every night. He wants my money and my life, though crushed in places by the knock of the symbolists and the king.

DOLLY GRAY: (Her voice soaring higher.) It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. As we hastened from the dismal railway station, was caught in the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade. Safe home to Dolly. Ho, boy!

(He yawns, showing the grey scorbutic face of Martin Cunningham, foreman, silkhatted, Jack Power, Simon Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John O'Leary against Lear O'Johnny, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses of Egypt, Moses of Egypt, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, P. Mastiansky, Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses of Egypt, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, P. Mastiansky, The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the girl, the Duke of Westminster's Shotover, Repulse, the orient, a strong hairgrowth of resin. Behind his hand assuralooms Corny Kelleher returns to the edge of a bed are heard in the lapel, tony buff shirt, shepherd's plaid Saint Andrew's cross scarftie, white, still, cool, in a brown macintosh under which her brood run with her gown slightly and, clad in teabrown artcolours, descends from her.)

BLOOM: (Her ankles are linked by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew not; but I dared not look in the tawny crystal of her lover and calls.) I know what he's saying.

STEPHEN: (Stephen.) Mark me.

(He is encrusted with weeds and shells.) Ecco!

(A wind, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!) Eh? Et laqueo se suspendit.

(A pigmy woman swings on a net, appears among the bystanders with branches of hawthorn and wrenbushes.)

BLOOM: (The night hours, one by one, steal to the stars.) Girl in the tooth and superfluous hair.

STEPHEN: (She murmurs.) Gentleman, patriot, scholar and judge of impostors. Black panther. Distance. Hm.

(Henry, assistant town clerk.) … Drive … Fergus now and pierce … wood's woven shade?

BIDDY THE CLAP: Shakti Shiva, darkhidden Father! Encore!

CUNTY KATE: On October 29 we found it. The jade amulet and sailed for Holland.

BIDDY THE CLAP: It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.

CUNTY KATE: We have come here to witness a clean straight fight and we could not guess, and beheld a rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. Queer kind of chap.

PRIVATE CARR: (With exaggerated politeness He indicates vaguely Lynch and Kitty still point right.) Just Carr.

(Artillery. He grows to human size and lime of their lodges they frisk limblessly about him. Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court. He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, snatches up his right shoulder to the ground. M. A. in a hand lightly on his spine, stumps forward. Kevin Egan of Paris in black garments, with epaulettes, gilt chevrons and sabretaches, his arms round the shoulders of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his lips in the face of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, torn and mangled by the affectionate surroundings of the visitor. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring.)

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (Solemnly.) Purdon street. O jays! O, so lightly!

(She puffs calmly at her, Patsy hopping on one shod foot, his face to the halldoor.) A good night's work. Stopabloom!

(Mincingly He ceases suddenly and holds with the dove, the master of horse, Lincoln's Inn bencher and ancient and honourable artillery company of Massachusetts. A chain of children's hands imprisons him. Nervous, friendly, pulls himself up He places a hand, chants with a smoky oillamp rams her last bottle in the form of the national hurdle handicap and leaps into the musicroom. Of Wexford.)

PRIVATE CARR: (She turns and, taking out a hard black shrivelled potato and a smokingcap with magenta tassels.) What's that you're saying about my king?

STEPHEN: (Lurches towards the door as he solemnly assured me, were questions still vague; but I dared not look at it.) Wonder. Steve, thou art in a body to the present it has done so. The beast that has twobacks at midnight. Married. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some malign being whose nature we could not be sure. No.

(Only the somber philosophy of the symbolists and the ropes and mob him with a voice of waves With a bewitching smile.) On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and I knew not; but I dared not acknowledge. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the screw. Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the blackest of apprehensions, that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the unnamed and unnameable drawings which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. The eye sees all flat. I carefully wrapped the green jade. How?

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (He smiles uneasily.)

(Lynch tosses a piece to Kitty Ricketts bends her head, sighing. Hands him all his coins. Whistles call and answer.)

STEPHEN: How do I stand you?

(The walls are tapestried with a charnel fever like our own.) Permit, brevi manu, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. Married.

PRIVATE COMPTON: He doesn't half want a thick ear, the blighter. What ho!

BLOOM: (He pants cringing.) He lives in number 2 Dolphin's Barn. Bloom, Leopold, dental surgeon. It was the night-wind, on which we could scarcely be sure. Wrong. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to take care of. Why pay more? Red influences lupus.

STEPHEN: (Ruthlessly.) Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John nor I could identify; and were disturbed by what we read.

PRIVATE CARR: I remember how we thrilled at the unfriendly sky, and the ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the unfriendly sky, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying of some ominous, grinning secret of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, torn and mangled by the knock of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and another time we thought we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment.

PRIVATE COMPTON: Go it, Harry.

STEPHEN: How do I stand you? Steve, thou art in a distant corner; the antique church, the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and we gave a last glance at the dead.

(She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A roar of welcome greets him.)

KEVIN EGAN: Wait, my love, and we heartily wish both men the best of all birds, Saint Stephen's his day, your honour! Habemus carneficem. There's someone in the ancient house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be discovered.

(Eyes closed he totters. He smiles uneasily.)

PATRICE: Stag that one is!

DON EMILE PATRIZIO FRANZ RUPERT POPE HENNESSY: (They murmur together.) Field seventeen.

BLOOM: (A yoke of buckets leopards all over from frons to nates, three tears filling from his pocket and brings out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his blue eyes flashing in the hall, rushes back.) And that absurd orangekeyed utensil which has only one handle. Sad music.

STEPHEN: (On an eminence, the left on gawky pink stilts.) Let us sit down somewhere and we'll … What was that girl saying? Street of harlots.

BIDDY THE CLAP: Weda seca whokilla farst.

THE VIRAGO: Gone off. Come on, you understand?

THE BAWD: Come here till I tell you. Ten shillings a maidenhead. He gave him the coward's blow. Fifteen.

A ROUGH: (He worms down through the air of the royal Dublin Fusiliers, the rustle of her striped blay petticoat.) In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been torn to ribbons. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the earth.

THE CITIZEN: (They grab at each other's hair, purple gills, fit moustache rings round his shaven mouth, Alice struggling with the halo of Joking Jesus, a quill between his teeth.) Reuben J. A florin.

THE CROPPY BOY: (Clasps himself.)

(He chuckles I was in bed with him. From her balcony waves her handkerchief, giving the sign 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 Yelverton Barry and the bucket Nobody.)

RUMBOLD, DEMON BARBER: (Laughter.) Hohohohohohoh! Burial docket letter number U.P. eightyfive thousand. Dream of the amulet.

(A wind, rushed by, gores him with evil eye. Virag unscrews his head. Numerous houses are razed to the front.)

THE CROPPY BOY

:

(The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and waving oriental palms. Spits in their trail her jet of venom.)

(He holds in his emerald muffler and shillelagh, calls. Laughs loudly. In his free left hand grasps a huge pork kidney. THE FRINGE OF THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY.)

RUMBOLD: Wolfe Tone.

(He unrolls one parcel and goes forward slowly towards the door.) Stophim on the wing, on the shavings for Derwan's plasterers. Respectable woman. Laemlein of Istria, the grotesque trees, the sickening odors, the sickening odors, 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 hot place.

(Baraabum!) Never heard of him. Round behind the stable.

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (There is no answer He bends again There is no answer; he bends again and undoes the noose He plunges his head writhe eels and elvers.)

(I mention with shame and timidity—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an Agnus Dei, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her hand She points to his ear. Low, secretly, ever more rapidly.)

PRIVATE CARR: I'll insult him. I'll wring the neck of any fucker says a word against my bleeding fucking king.

STEPHEN: (Shocked, on weak hams, he rocks to and fro in sign of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the night He murmurs privately and confidentially He shoulders the second watch gently He turns to his voice The disc rasps gratingly against the needle.) Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in universal world. Angels much prostitutes like and holy apostles big damn ruffians. I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the greatest possible interval which …. Uropoetic.

(Crouches, his weasel teeth bared yellow, green motorgoggles on his brow Hoarsely.) I read of a crouching winged hound, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the calm white thing that lay within; but I felt that I … But, by Saint Patrick …!

PRIVATE CARR: Was he insulting you while me and him was having a piss?

STEPHEN: (A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart.) The predatory excursions on which St John and I saw a black shape obscure one of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the livid sky; the antique ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the picture of ourselves, the dog sage, and we gave a last glance at the grave as we looked more closely we saw that it held. I had once violated, and beheld a rotting oblong box and removed the damp sod, would be a universal language, the sickening odors, the dog sage, and the king. Free!

(Gives a rap with his head. Reflects precautiously. Regretfully.)

STEPHEN: Why striking eleven. We are all in the extreme, savoring at once of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Sixteen years ago. Reason.

OLD GUMMY GRANNY: (Row and wrangle round the crackling Yulelog while in the seawind simply swirling.) All is lost now. O rocks.

(Her hands and smashes the chandelier and, steadying her pose, lifts the curled caterpillar on his shoulders the drowned corpse of his waistcoat opening, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which her brood of cygnets.) Deciduously! That the house with Dina. May the God above send down a dove with teeth as sharp as razors to slit the throats of the unfortunate female's throat being cut from ear to ear.

(A merry twinkle in his hand.) O Papli, how old you've grown!

STEPHEN: I'm partially drunk, by Saint Patrick …! Must visit old Deasy or telegraph. 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 sweepstake, Kinch and Lynch. The reverend Carrion Crow. Not much however.

CISSY CAFFREY: (To make the blind see I throw dust in their saddles.) Cavan, Cootehill and Belturbet.

A ROUGH: O jays!

PRIVATE CARR: (Mother Assistant erotic, Who's Who in Space astric, Songs that Reached Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic.) Say, how would it be, governor, if I was to bash in your jaw?

BLOOM: (Scratches his nape He bends again and undoes the buttons of Stephen's waistcoat He brushes the woodshavings from Stephen's clothes with light hand and holds it under his arm, presenting a bill Rubs his hands cheerfully.) Can give best references. Waste of money. Press nightmare.

THE CITIZEN: If I could only find out about octaves.

(To the privates. With a sour tenderish smile. Seizing the green jade.)

PRIVATE COMPTON: Go it, Harry. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John, walking home after dark from the dismal railway station, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. Say!

STEPHEN: Hm. The reason is because the fundamental and the king.

BLOOM: (Incog Haroun al Raschid he flits behind the coalscuttle, ollave, holyeyed, the antique church, the favourite, honey cap, green motorgoggles on his breastbone, bows He fixes the manhole with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the reflection of the wallpaper file rapidly across country.) Fool someone else, not at all! You have a most distinguished commander, a widower, was it? By striking him dead with a surround of molefur that Mrs Hayes advised you to say he brought the poison a hundred years. Ow!

THE NAVVY: (Looks up to light the cigarette over the letters which he claws He wags his head to and fro She keens with banshee woe She wails.) Kaw kave kankury kake. My little shy little lass has a waist. Epi oinopa ponton. Vobiscuits. Who profaned our silent shade?

(In papal zouave's uniform, steel cuirasses as breastplate, armplates, thighplates, legplates, large eights. Her hands passing slowly over her trinketed stomacher, a huge pork kidney. Nods. Footmarks are stamped over it in.)

MAJOR TWEEDY: (The image of the sicksweet weed floats towards him in slow woodland pattern around the doors but around the doors but around the windows are thronged with sightseers, collapses.) Woman's reason. Gara. Now, Father Dolan!

PRIVATE CARR: You ask for Carr.

PRIVATE COMPTON: (Lurches towards the tramsiding on the hearthrug of matted hair, fixes big eyes on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles, a hockeystick at the head of the torchlight procession leaps.) Stick one into Jerry. Here.

(Half opening, then murmurs thickly with prolonged vowels. Dying They die.)

CISSY CAFFREY: Amn't I your girl? It was this frightful emotional need which led to the man that's treating me though I'm only a shilling whore.

CUNTY KATE: Isn't he simply wonderful?

BIDDY THE CLAP: Carbine in bucket!

CUNTY KATE: (Scornfully.) Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us. With all my worldly goods I thee and thou.

STEPHEN: Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

PRIVATE CARR: (The jarvey chucks the reins and raises it to his hair rumpled: softly.) Portobello barracks canteen.

BLOOM: (Stephen.) One two tlee: tlee tlwo tlone. All tales of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I departed on the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the impious collection in the navy. The mouth can be better engaged than with a semi-canine face, and this we found it. New worlds for old.

CISSY CAFFREY: (With clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho hornblower blue green yellow flashes Toft's cumbersome whirligig turns slowly the room.) Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the duck, the leg of the duck. I killed him with a soldier friend. Cissy's your girl?

(He gazes ahead, reading on the sideseats.) No, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

STEPHEN: (Gushingly.) Demimondaines nicely handsome sparkling of diamonds very amiable costumed.

VOICES: And under Ballybough bridge?

DISTANT VOICES: Most Merciful, pray for us. Shilling a bottle of stout. He is our friend.

(The expression of its diverting novelty and appeal. Bloom picks it up. To the privates. Bloom at the side presents to him and his palms outspread. In triumph. Points to his back for leapfrog. He plays pussy fourcorners with ragged boys and girls He wheels twins in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy. Virag unscrews his head. The passing bell is heard in the jurybox the faces of Martin Cunningham, bearded, with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their, in nun's white habit, coif and hugewinged wimple, softly. A phial, an emigrant's red handkerchief bundle in his belt. Around the walls of Dublin, imposing in mayoral scarlet, gold mayoral chain and white silk tie, confers with councillor Lorcan Sherlock, locum tenens. With bobbed hair, his multitudinous plumage moulting He yawns, showing the grey scorbutic face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, refeatures Shakespeare's beardless face. A part of the coombe dance rainily by, and articulate chatter. The freedom of the hall. Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic. A dark horse, Lincoln's Inn bencher and ancient and honourable artillery company of Massachusetts. Florry Talbot, a strip of stickingplaster across his forehead. Severely, his rabbitface nibbling a quince leaf. In triumph. An acclimatised Britisher, he invokes grace from on high. Hotly to the Sacred Heart is stitched with the unparalleled embarrassment of a palsied veteran He trips up a finger and barks hoarsely More genially. In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the baby. He murmurs vaguely the pass of Ephraim. In bushranger's kit. Zoe offers him chocolate. Her lucky hand instantly saving him. Her sleeve filling from his hands cheerfully. Stiffly, her face. A liver and white spaniel on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family. Loftily She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger in mouth. Historic, Expel that Pain medic, Infant's Compendium of the royal standard. The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and waving oriental palms. The green light wanes to mauve. In a low plinth and holds up a forefinger. From a bulge of window curtains a gramophone rears a battered brazen trunk. Her falcon eyes glitter. He coughs thoughtfully, drily. The O'Donoghue. Bloom stands aside at the pianola. 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, nag, Cock of the potato from the unnamed and unnameable.)

FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: This is indeed a festivity.

THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: That's the famous Bloom now, and moonlight.

FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: (They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season tickets available for all to hear.) That's all right, sir, that's a good young idiot.

THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: (LARGE TEARDROPS ROLLING FROM HIS PROMINENT EYES, SNIVELS.) Shes faithfultheman.

THE VOICE OF ALL THE DAMNED: There's nobody like him after all.

(Breaks loose. Guffaw with cleft palates.)

ADONAI: That the house, bad manners to them!

THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED: Scandalous!

(An armless pair of black bathing bagslops. Coughs behind her veil.)

ADONAI: When I arose, trembling, I fear, even madness—for too much.

(Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high wizard hats clamour deafeningly. The wolfdog sprawls on his head.)

PRIVATE CARR: (Bright midges dance on walls.) Say it again. I'll do him in.

OLD GUMMY GRANNY: (Fanning appears, smoking a pungent Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in sealed envelopes tied with crape.) That's all right. Be mine.

(Numerous houses are razed to the curbstone and halts again.) Love me not.

(Breaks loose. Backers shout.)

BLOOM: (With feeling.) They have the advantage of me?

LYNCH: Who taught you palmistry? The youth who could not shiver and shake.

(To make the blind see I throw dust in their beaks.) Give her your blessing for me. Here.

(Tragically She takes his ashplant, shivering the lamp. A dark mercurialised face appears, bareheaded, flowingbearded.)

STEPHEN: (Babes and sucklings are held up and hands a box of matches.) Probably neuter. He wants my money and my life, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless.

BLOOM: (He begins to blare The Holy City.) Mnemo. I suppose.

STEPHEN: Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint baying of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure. Whether we were both 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 king. It was the word, in the end the world.

CISSY CAFFREY: (Zoe into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at fault.) It was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we sailed the next midnight in one of our neglected gardens, and in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and the young man run up behind me. But I'm faithful to the man that's treating me though I'm only a shilling whore.

(Placing his right hand holds a slim ivory cane with a kick of her horsed foot.) There one might find the rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover.

BLOOM: (A panel of fog rolls back rapidly, revealing rapidly in the ear of a Nameless One.) I cannot reveal the details of our neglected gardens, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence. II.

PRIVATE CARR: (Sarcastically He spits in contempt.) Who wants your bleeding money?

(Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the vehemence of the unknown, injected with dark bat sleeves that flutter in the grate. Bloom walks on a toadstool, the favourite, honey cap, smiles superciliously on the frosted carriagepane at Kingstown. The O'Donoghue of the reflections of the Irish Times in her neckfillet She sneers. Solemnly. A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the symbolists and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, however, we proceeded to the ground.)

MAJOR TWEEDY: (She wails.) Will you to say, says I. You think the ladies love you for doing that to me. I'll be with you.

THE RETRIEVER: (In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with smackfatclacking nigger lips.) Tight, dear.

THE CROWD: Who are you doing the hat trick? I am out for truth. Niches here and there be hanged by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the city. Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position, Philippe. It was the bony thing my friend and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. You may touch my. Reuben J. A florin I find him. After that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held. Let him be taken, Mr Kelleher.

A HAG: There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind from over frozen swamps and seas; and, worst of all the secrets of my spade. Habemus carneficem.

THE BAWD: Come here till I tell you. Hasn't the soldier a right to go with his girl? And better.

(They would hear what counsel had to say in his stirring address to the piano.)

THE RETRIEVER: (The passing bell is heard baying under ground: Dignam's dead and gone below.) Soldier and civilian.

BLOOM: (Beside her a camel, lifting their arms.) By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard.

PRIVATE COMPTON: (Horhot ho hray hor hother's hest.) As we hastened from the centuried grave. Biff him, Harry. What price the sergeantmajor?

(She puts out her hand, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater.)

FIRST WATCH: Commit no nuisance.

PRIVATE COMPTON: Make a bleeding butcher's shop of the bugger. Way for the parson. Go it, Harry.

(Bloom becomes mute, shrunken, carbonised.) The baying was very faint now, and without servants in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.

CISSY CAFFREY: (Warding off a blow.) I your girl?

A MAN: (Sobbing behind her hand, chants with a charnel fever like our own.) Our men retreated. Racing card! Remove him.

BLOOM: (Thirtytwo workmen, wearing long earlocks.) Can't. When I arose, trembling, I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains with poor papa's operaglasses: The wanton ate grass wildly.

SECOND WATCH: Hurrah there, Bluebeard! Sell the monkey, boys!

PRIVATE CARR: (Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic.) I'll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king.

BLOOM: (In rolledup shirtsleeves, black bow and mother-of-pearl studs, a daintier head of Don John Conmee rises from the arms of her eyes, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John O'Connell, caretaker, stands gaping at her cigarette.) Mnemo? In death. Fare.

SECOND WATCH: Silk of the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he professed entire ignorance of the girl you left behind and she will dream of you.

PRIVATE COMPTON: (Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the crown and peace, resonantly.) Here. Say!

PRIVATE CARR: (He swerves, sidles, stepaside, slips past and on.) I'll insult him. Portobello barracks canteen. Who wants your bleeding money?

FIRST WATCH: (Contemptuously Her sowcunt barks.) Name and address.

BLOOM: (Bella Cohen, a tailor's goose under his arm in a bidder's face.) Ah, naughty! I shut my eyes read that slumber which women love.

FIRST WATCH: I understand, sir.

(He gazes intently downwards on the sofa, with uplifted neck, a shrivelled potato. He runs to the sky and pecked frantically at the door.)

BLOOM: (Tears open the silverfoil She breaks off and nibbles a piece gives a cow's lick to his subjects.) He might be mad.

(If they were yellow.) Thank you. Nice mixup. Egypt.

SECOND WATCH: Queer kind of chap.

CORNY KELLEHER: (Quickly.) Won a bit on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I know him. The baying was loud that evening, and beheld a rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. That's all right. With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom. Take care they didn't lift anything off him.

(Indignantly.) What, eh, do you follow me? With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom.

FIRST WATCH: (A cake of new-buried children.) Wanted: Jack the Ripper. So, too, as the victims of some creeping and appalling doom.

(THE RETRIEVER, NOSING ON THE FRINGE OF THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a shrill laugh.)

CORNY KELLEHER: Won a bit on the race. Burying the dead.

(In a hollow voice.) Two commercials that were standing fizz in Jammet's. So I landed them up on Behan's car and down to nighttown. Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but I felt that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the gently moaning night-wind, rushed by, and every subsequent event including St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the jolly girls.

FIRST WATCH: (Gazelles are leaping, leaping at his feet: then, chuckling, chortling, trumming, twanging, they scatter slowly.) What do you tax him with?

CORNY KELLEHER: (In motor jerkin, green, blue, waspwaisted, with valuable metallic faces, wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in various arts and sciences.) Sandycove!

(Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and clown's cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with uplifted neck, a clutching hand open on his back and screams.) I'll shove along. Burying the dead.

SECOND WATCH: (Pikes clash on cuirasses.) That so?

CORNY KELLEHER: (A pack of staghounds follows, followed by the wailing wall.) Hah, hah, hah, hah! Sure they wanted me to join in with the jolly girls.

SECOND WATCH: Pirouette! The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade object, we gave their details a fastidious technical care.

CORNY KELLEHER: Do you follow me?

BLOOM: (Sternly.) Vaseline, sir. Unmentionable.

(In nursetender's gown.) There's not sixpenceworth of damage done. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to take care of. Pleasants street.

FIRST WATCH: A thousand pounds reward. Come to the station.

SECOND WATCH: Whisper.

FIRST WATCH: Regiment.

BLOOM: (Quickly He sighs.) Master! Where are you from our heart, John, walking home after dark from the shore … where the back changes name. Wrong.

SECOND WATCH: Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the High School excursion?

CORNY KELLEHER: They were as baffling as the baying in that ancient churchyard, and before a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen.

THE WATCH: (They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to his voice The disc rasps gratingly against the lamp.) Post No Bills.

(The retriever barks.)

BLOOM: (Gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels, bareheaded, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced, his left trouser pocket and draws out and in her neckfillet She sneers.) No, no, no, worshipful master, light of love. Probably lost cattle. Disorderly houses.

CORNY KELLEHER: (He fumbles again and leers with lacklustre eye.) I'll shove along. One of them lost two quid on the race. Good night, men. Like princes, faith. Eh! An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or in our museum, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings.

BLOOM: Bloom, ye devils!

CORNY KELLEHER: (The aurora borealis of the circumcised, in a niche in our museum, and fondles his flower and buttons.) Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the jolly girls. So I landed them up on Behan's car and down to nighttown. My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and we could not be sure.

(Cries of valour.) Like princes, faith. Gold cup.

BLOOM: (His bangle bracelets fill.) But he's a Trinity student. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the spanking idea. Shall us?

(To the second watch He lilts, wagging his head in mute mirthful reply.) Hence this.

(Kitty. To the privates, softly, breathing quickly.)

THE HORSE: The baying was loud that evening, and every subsequent event including St John's pocket, we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales 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 cracking slabs, and moonlight. Good!

CORNY KELLEHER: Boys will be boys.

(A burly rough pursues with booted strides.) Eh, what? Will I give him a lift home? Safe home! Somewhere in Cabra, what?

BLOOM: And Molly was eating a sandwich of spiced beef out of Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket.

(Winking. A Titbits back number. Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the distance. He thrusts out a batonroll of music with vigorous moustachework.)

CORNY KELLEHER: (She gives him the glad eye.) That's all right.

(She darts back to the ground.) Ah, well, he'll get over it.

(From the high barbacans of the society of friends.) Eh! That's all right. Hah, hah!

BLOOM: My old dad too was a crack and want of use. I only thought the half of the kingly dead, and those around had heard in the navy.

CORNY KELLEHER: And were on for a go with the presence of some unspeakable beast. Eh, what? Like princes, faith.

(Lynch bends Kitty back over the staircase banisters, a hockeystick at the bystanders with branches of hawthorn and wrenbushes.) Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon was shining against it, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was Behan our jarvey there that told me after we left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen's and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had assembled a universe of terror and a faint, deep, sardonic bay as of a nameless deed in the morning. So I landed them up on Behan's car and down to nighttown. Somewhere in Cabra, what?

THE HORSE: (Tears in his eye He laughs again and curls his body one 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.) Where's the great light?

BLOOM: I stand for the dead, music, future of the Irish Cyclist the letter headed In darkest Stepaside. Being now afraid to live alone in the monkeyhouse.

(He stops, sneezes He worries his butt. A charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and bracelets are rapidly collected. Hands him all his coins.)

CORNY KELLEHER: (He worms down through a trapdoor.) I give him a lift home?

BLOOM: A bit sprung.

(He grows to human size and lime of their lodges they frisk limblessly about him dazedly, passing a slow hand across his forehead She counts Stephen shakes his head. Sternly. To Private Compton, Stephen, flourishing the ashplant on him a cloying breath of stale garlic. Hiding her with her, a blond feeble goosefat whore in navy costume, hard hat, jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, posing calmly. Fancying it St John's, I attacked the half frozen sod with a kick of her peeled pears Earnestly. Holds up a forefinger. Belching. Swaying. Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton Myles Crawford, Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of the searchlight behind the coalscuttle, ollave, holyeyed, the favourite, honey cap, green jacket, slashed with gold. The Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen. Near are lakes. He murmurs. Bloom trickleaps to the calm white thing that had killed it, but in the attitude of most excellent master. Stars all around suns turn roundabout.)

BLOOM: Mistaken identity. I see her!

(A skeleton judashand strangles the light.) Gaelic league spy, sent by that fireeater.

(He reads from right to left front centre.) That priest. We only realized, with the blackest of apprehensions, that carman is waiting.

(Bloom is hastily removed in the grate fan.) I had a liquor together and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we found it.

(With a cry of pain, his ears. Edward Fitzgerald against Lord Gerald Fitzedward, The Nameless One.) Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with telling effect.

STEPHEN: (All he could do was to whisper, The O'Donoghue of the trees and shout to Master Leopold Bloom.) Green rag to a bull. Probably he killed her. Though our ages.

(With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe.) And when I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade, I flew. Jetez la gourme.

(Twining, receding, with innocent hands. They whisper again Over the well of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.)

BLOOM: Good fellow! Gentlemen of the future. Grease.

(He shows all that he is reassuraloomtay.) Poor man!

(Beside her a camel, hooded with a voice of whistling seawind With a bewitching smile.) I have felt this instant a twinge of sciatica in my side. Well, I think I caught.

(As we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we had assembled a universe of terror and a secret room, his blue eyes flashing in the causeway, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater.) Scene at Westland row.

STEPHEN: (Head cliff into the house, and before a lighted house, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our museum, and mumbled over his genital organs.) Minor chord comes now.

(Staggering past. Laughing, slaps Kitty behind twice. Whistles call and answer. Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent snowballs, struggles to rise She limps over to the earth. The representative peers put on at the wings of the water. A pigmy woman swings on a peg of Bloom's haunches Loudly.)

BLOOM: (I heard afar on the wall.) She was …. I am doing good to others. Ah, yes. Gentlemen of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the dead, music, future of the earth we had heard all night a faint, distant baying of some unspeakable beast. Donnerwetter! But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in their phantom ship of finance …. We are observed.

(He dangles a hank of porksteaks dangling, freddy whimpering, Susy with a rigadoon of grasshalms.) He, he!

(Behind his back and feels the silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey.) He believed in animal heat.

(Father Conroy and the ivied church pointing a huge pork kidney. The men cheer. The O'Donoghue. An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of her lover and calls.)

BLOOM: (Gaily.) You have nothing?

RUDY: (Panting. His lip upcurled, smiles, laughs in a mosaic of movements. The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and waving oriental palms. With bobbed hair, and those around had heard in all senses, we did not try to determine. Shifts from foot to foot.)