The Chronicles of Jonathon Postlethwaite : The Seed of Corruption

By David S Denny

Deep in the dark depths of the dystopian city of Dubh, a young man begins his battle against a being with no soul. With all his family murdered by the sadistic Silus Flax, Jonathan Postlethwaite beings his campaign to avenge his family and destroy his evil nemesis and the city that has spawned him. Page turning plot propels the story to a scintillating and apocalyptic finale ... Novel entirely self published from editing to cover, expect a few typos and warts, but get a great story! Recently re-edited!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781326524746

David S Denny

David Denny was born in Uttoxeter England in 1959. He grew up in a working class family of 5 on one of the UKs new red brick housing estates in the housing developments of the late 50's, where a mish mash of people and cultures from all around the UK relocated, and made for an interesting cultural mix in a small market town and a well rounded childhood. David has spent his professional life helping others as a career and employment adviser in schools, colleges, universities and in prisons and the community. He is also a qualified counselor and a hypnotherapist. He is the author of CV Create, a self help guide to CV writing available on Smashwords also. He writes poetry and prose and has a degree in philosophy. This is David's first novel and he is looking for an ambitious agent.

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The Chronicles of Jonathon Postlethwaite : The Seed of Corruption

To Tamsin

May all your dreams come true…?

THE CHRONICLES OF JONATHAN POSTLETHWAITE

VOLUME ONE

Jonathon Postlethwaite

And the

Seed of Corruption

By David S Denny

Copyright all rights reserved 2015

Published by Greenman Publishing

2015 First Edition

Other Works by this Author.

Published Poetry:

The Siege of Beacon Hill

Incident at Congleton

Transformations.

All are available at www.thepoetryofdaviddenny.co.uk where you can also hear him read his work.

Twitter : #Englishpoet

Facebook : The Poetry of David Denny & Chronicles of Jonathon Postlethwaite.com

Web : www.doomofdubh.com

Chapter One

Jonathon Postlethwaite ran as he had never run before. Soon his pounding feet would carry him far away from his home of fourteen years, as he travelled swiftly through the shadowy tunnels of filth that twisted through the Underworld of the City of Dubh. He was running for his life.

Danger lurked behind and ahead of him. Few able-bodied or sane people ventured   to   the   lowest of Dubhs' inhabited levels. For those who lived on the Upper levels there was the constant threat of disease and attack from the creatures that hunted and haunted these lost and half forgotten subterranean realms of darkness and depravity. Yet ironically it was those from the Upper Levels who offered the most serious danger to the young boy, yet his journey took him towards them now.

So,   following   his    grandfathers instructions he covered himself in a greasy, woollen cloak and protected by the historically protective chant of the leper, Jonathon became one of them for a time. In his guise he was ignored or avoided, safe as a member of a paradoxical fraternity of the depraved and the diseased. Here he was temporarily part of the fellowship of living shadows that lurked in deepest pits of a corrupt and malevolent city; shadows who preyed only on the healthier specimens who strayed from the higher levels. Unclean! Unclean! Jonathon shouted and even the hungriest of morons and cretins ignored him. As he moved amongst his unlikely companions, Jonathon saw sights to curdle the stuff of the soul, the corruption of mind and flesh was everywhere, as if here in the forgotten lanes and tunnels of depravity beneath the surface streets, here the corruption of   Dubh was distilled. The stale underworld air and ether were rank with it. He scuttled quickly past a group of grey, gaunt women, who sat around a fire feverishly gnawing on blackened bones. An aroma like pork reached him, but he knew their victim was not a pig. At regular intervals, he had  to  skirt  around  the  corpses  that  lay  in pools  of  unctuous filth. Their demented eyes stared wide above twisted terminal smiles frozen by rigour mortis, their last memories the drug or disease induced hallucinations of a world that cried out for compassionate end. Here the unclean copulated in the inky shadows, moans and groans echoing around him as he sped past.

Jonathon closed his eyes to the physical manifestations of corruption around him as the spirit of this world assaulted his soul, enveloping him with a spiritual caress so different from his Grandfathers.

Join with us. it hissed inside his head, Become! it cackled. Be free! With a great effort, Jonathon managed to cut the invasive voice out of his mind. The voice had chilled his bones. At every stairway, he moved quickly upwards from the threats that inhabited the lower levels.

Through grim level after grim level, he moved onwards and upwards toward his initial goal of the surface streets of Dubh. As he moved upward the number    of inhabitants increased. Here they appeared physically healthier, but still they exhibited the slow degradation of the soul that was rife in this malignant metropolis.

If they had sensed what he was he would have been seized immediately. He was a prize they all sought - that of innocent, young and yielding flesh. He would have been repeatedly raped and abused, then ended up on the roasting knives of those grey, snickering, denizens of the deepest, darkest pits of the Underworld, or worse. However, they saw him as a leper. Even killing a leper had its risks of disease beneath the city, so he was given a wide berth and relatively unhindered passage.

Finally, after hours of twisting and turning Jonathon reached a level where the shadowy, underworld warrens opened  out  to  the  lacklustre,  sour  lemon  light  of  an artificial,  sky  which  seeped  in  between  the gigantic,  towering  tenements of the surface levels.

The streets here were packed with screaming, bellowing crowds. People milled around in a state of drunken and drugged release. Crowded alehouses lined the streets, their occupants spilling out to be consumed by a churning, clamouring mass of humanity, a tumultuous sea of shifting and vying flesh.

This scene was always repeated when a work shift was returned from the forced labour beyond the Great Gate. After weeks of hard labour in an uncompromising world and under the incessant whips of the Tans, the work slaves of Dubh returned for their day of liberty. On this day they  celebrated  their  survival and now  they  attempted  to  escape  into  pleasure for a while, before being returned to the draining toil of the mines, farms and production plants beyond the Great Gate. They were little more than slaves, slaves to their Tan Overlords and slaves to their own acute Hedonism. To work meant life, food, and the occasional release to rest and pleasure.

The pursuit of that pleasure was evident everywhere.  Prostitutes   of   every   sex   and   age were paraded to all that passed by, absolutely every taste catered for and new tastes developed daily. Dubh was the ultimate market for all physical desires. Huge muscled pimps discouraged those who could not pay, those unfortunates lying bruised and battered, bones broken, in the gutters alongside those overcome by the excesses of drugs and alcohol.

Here Jonathon quickly discarded his bell and cloak, lepers were not tolerated in this part of the city his grandfather had instructed him. Here, it was not unusual for the diseased or merely odd person to be shot or beaten to death for sport. He pushed his way through the sickening throng, following the shadows wherever he could, avoiding the moaning, entangled forms that had secreted themselves in every doorway and darkened niche they could find.

Jonathon was terrified by what he experienced here, before he had always had Cornelius his Grandfather to protect him, a skilled psychic who deftly used his powers to avert hungry, seeking eyes  from them both when they travelled. Now he was alone; and he already felt something hideous stalking him.

The City of Dubhs' parasitic gist waxed and waned with the coming and going of the shift workers from the Great Gate. They were its sustenance. That spirit was like the heartbeat of some gigantic and yet insubstantial beast, that consumed yet sustained, always wearing down the uninitiated with its lure of uninhibited pleasure. There where few uninitiated in Dubh and Jonathon's soul burned in the midst of this dark forest of withering spirits like a beacon.

The corrupting being was always here, even when the shifts returned back through the Great Gate. It whispered in the minds of those who remained, in those exempt from the Tans' labour  conscription,  and schemed  with  those  permanently   resident   in   the dark underworld streets through which Jonathon had passed to reach the surface levels of Dubh.

Now it had felt Jonathon, but could not touch him since Jonathon had inherited some of this Grandfathers psychic skills and was able to keep mind closed to its attack. It became angry, its silent wail of frustration causing a thousand revellers, in whose minds it presently worked, to clutch their heads and stare and scream in unconscious accord.

Jonathon kept up his mental defences. He was tired, but dared not rest. He had already narrowly escaped being accosted by numerous men and women as he had struggled through the crowds, all of them intent in practising their own unique brand of perversions on his young and desirable flesh.

He pressed onward with his journey through the narrow and winding streets of the surface levels and, after hours of   following   the   landmarks   given   to him by his Grandfather, Jonathon realised he had arrived close to his destination. It was growing dark and the advent of a synthetic dusk accelerated the city's inhabitants into renewed and most debased of hedonistic frenzies, the city echoed with the howling of thousands.

Now Jonathon was moving away from the crowded centre. He felt safer and relaxed his guard as he walked down an almost deserted street toward a bridge over the black, silent river which marked the boundary between the Upper and Lower cities of Dubh.

He crossed the bridge quickly, not daring to look over its sooty, weathered parapets and moved into the tenements beyond. As he slowly ascended a steep street, its cobblestones shining darkly with the wash of the City's perpetual misty drizzle, he could see the far boundaries of the Dubh. The gigantic Halls of Machines were silhouetted against the eerie dome of an apricot sky and beyond them; the Towers of the Tallmen thrust their nine mysterious, phalluses like towers upwards into the carbon monoxide smog which mantled them.

Jonathon shivered as he looked to the horizon. Although the air of the city was always warm and humid, he felt cold. He knew that one day, in the not too distant future, he would travel to the great Halls of Machines where his Father had worked when Jonathon was younger. Jack Postlethwaite had worked beneath those cathedral-like domes as a mechanic, a privileged Mek, as they where known to the less fortunate citizens of the Lower City where Jonathon now stood. That was before his sudden and unexpected dismissal.

Jack Postlethwaite was soon to learn that he had become a rare commodity - skilled labour, uncommon in the Lower City - and hence became the human merchandise in a business deal between the Hall Engineer and the Tans, the tyrannical rulers of the Lower City.

As soon as he and his family had been expelled from the Upper City, the Tans had taken him and his wife. Jack was quickly transported to supplement the Tan's skilled labour force beyond the Great Gate and his Mother sold into one of their brothels in the midst of the Lower City.

Jonathon had escaped abduction, left in the care of Cornelius for that day. He was safe with his Grandfather, but it was with him that he suffered the grief of his Mother's death and the beginning of his Father's insanity.

His Mother died three months later at the hands of sadistic pervert in the Tan brothel. His Father, in revenge for his abduction, had cut off his fingers in a rotating fan whilst at work, the act of revenge making him useless to them. Then he escaped whilst being prepared for execution, only to hear of his Wife's death which drove him over the edge of   sanity   and   into the vile and welcoming embrace of the City's corrupt soul. Jonathon stared at the distinctive domes of the Upper City and wiped a tear from his face. Anger swept up suddenly, a raging fire heated by the revived grief at the loss of his Mother and the new anguish from the death of Cornelius and his Father.

It was the latter that he ran from now. His insane Father had been killed by Cornelius defending Jonathon from him, and now Cornelius was dead by his own hand. The last thing Cornelius had done was to send Jonathon away to a place of safety, to meet friends at a pre-arranged destination.  Now all Jonathan's family were dead and he knew who was responsible. It was a man known as the Black Gaffer.

He directed his hatred at the man he saw as the author of the grief carved deeply into his being; a man who ruthlessly pursued his unrelenting appetite for power in the Halls of Machines; a man who would come to know and curse the young Postlethwaite as a thorn in his side and man who would, in the future, find his insane ambitions threatened by the son of a victim he did not remember at all.

This   mans   the   ‘Black   Gaffer’,    whose presence the young Postlethwaite was always aware of like a permanent shadow on his soul, their destinies entwined in a way they would both soon discover.

Jonathon could not resist the temptation to send out his mind and seek out the mind of the man who had filled him with a grief and anger so deep it seemed as if it flowed through the marrow of his bones like a dark faith.

He gasped and recoiled in shock. The Black Gaffer was less than an individual, less than human; he was now an instrument and extension of the city's perverted soul, bent to its whim and will.

Pre-occupied with his anger and grief, Jonathon had unwittingly stood too long and too still in the night of a corrupt and dangerous place.  Something in the shadows noted this and giggled and slobbered in perverse delight and expectation. The watcher grinned sickeningly, licked its sore riddled and pus laced lips, and then slid silently like liquid shadow, towards its young and unwary prey.

Chapter Two

Deep  in  a  small  room   in   the   depths   of the  Dubhian  Underworld  a  great  and   ancient wooden clock, swathed in swirling gun smoke and speckled with Postlethwaite blood, ticked on regardless of the terrible events which had taken place in its proximity. It was oblivious too of the hollow and perpetual hum from the Halls of Machines which permeated every level of the city of Dubh and which raised the dust of decay from its few dry places, painting a soothing backdrop to the chaotic lives of the city's wretched denizens.

Here in this world hot iron and howling engines that was the Halls of Machines worked the man who had traded Jonathon's Father for Tan favours; his name was Silus Flax, the Black Gaffer.

As a man born and raised in the Upper City, Flax found himself a member of the skilled caste, the Meks, by virtue of his parentage.  He was ambitious and gifted and soon surpassed his Father's position as mechanic and rising to the position of Line supervisor of Line Nine in the Primary Drive Hall.

In these huge Drive Halls, a thousand huge internal combustion engines were coupled together in lines of one thousand to transfer kinetic energy to the Generator Halls on the next level.

Flax's post gave him the responsibility for the day to day management of mechanics and machines. His goal, through servicing and maintenance, was to produce optimum efficiency through almost continuous operation of the line. And his engines were rarely idle. Flax's line was considered as an example of perfection. His ingenious maintenance schedules prevented, to large extent, the breakdowns that plagued other lines. This, combined with his savage man management, ensured that his line was by far the most efficient of all lines in all of the exalted Halls of Machine.

As a Line Supervisor Flax, ruled over the men under him with a rod of iron. There was no excuse for failure; mistakes were not tolerated under any conditions. One lapse of concentration meant dismissal     of     the     perpetrator   from   his   post   and expulsion to the Lower City -usually for a price. Not that any dismissed from Line Nine ever got to the Lower City.

Somehow the displaced mechanics found grateful Tans waiting to spirit them away from the gates Upper City to their harsh regime in the mines, farms and production plants beyond the Great Gate. Skilled mechanics were a rarity outside of the Upper City, belonging by blood to the caste of the skilled, the Meks, and protected by the laws of the Upper City Council.

But skilled workers were in great demand by the Tans who needed them to tend their machines in the lands beyond the Great Gate. Silus Flax was well aware of the Tans' need. He had valuable skilled men at his disposal and he knew it. The Tans would pay generously for engineers and mechanics and Flax exploited this fact for his own personal gain.

Payments to Flax varied, the Tans ordered replacements when death or injury depleted their work force. For most in Dubh payment would have involved commodities of pleasure, drugs, and the free use of prostitutes of either sex or any age, or a night of acute perversion in a Tan brothel perhaps, but for Silus Flax these types of pleasure were never enough, never completely fulfilling.

His tastes were distinctly different, his sense of enjoyment came from inflicting pain and he was a sadist beyond compare, even in this foul city. A gift to Silus Flax would die slowly in a dark place in acute agony, whilst he watched on, savouring the results of his handiwork, a slobbering, laughing, dark-eyed beast fuelled towards toward hi own ecstasy by the cries of pain and despair from his usually young victims.

His appetite for such pleasures was seemingly insatiable. Then one day his demands to the Tans for this type of payment ceased. During the course of a normal transaction, Flax's Tan contact was surprised when he demanded information, maps of the city and the pressing of adult, healthy and able men into his service in exchange for providing skilled mechanics.

His contact obliged, a little confused, but willing to comply with the Line Supervisors new requirements. When Flax was asked why, he answered dryly that he was to become 'an explorer', the greatest explorer Dubh had ever known. As the Tan negotiator left, he laughed all the way to the Lower City, reporting to his superiors that Silus flax had gone mad, syphilis he suggested, which rotted the  brains of so many of the inhabitants Dubh, was now chewing on Flax's sanity.

But Flax was neither mad nor ill, he was a man obsessed  with  the  pursuit  of  power  and  now  had  the means of achieving his goal. Consequently, when Flax was promoted to the position of Hall Engineer, his supply of skilled men increased and he traded them for healthy but unskilled workers, who were pressed into his service in the Lower City.

Flax organised these men and unobtrusively his organisation, dedicated towards his own personal goals, grew. They were known to the Tan's as the `High Hats' because of their distinctive and somewhat eccentric attire, of black, long tailed suits and top hats.

The High Hats were immune from any type of harassment from the Tans. Thanks to Flax's usefulness to the Tan hierarchy in the supply of skilled men into their service. The High Hats activities did, to some degree impinge on the business ventures of the Tan's, but never affected their revenues unduly. Flax made sure of that.

The High Hats, as far as the Tan's were aware, ran a string of the usual, lucrative businesses in Dubh food shops and drug stores, whore-houses and drinking halls - all which brought in revenue to  fuel Flax's real venture.

Flax's new pursuit was truly that of exploration, as he had told the Tans and been pronounced insane. But there was   method   in   Flax's   'madness'.   He explored Dubh  for  doorways  to  power,  literally  'doors' to other worlds, which he knew existed in the wavering Field Walls which contained the realm of Dubh and its malignancies, and prevented its corruption from spreading into other dimensions.

If the Tallmen could open gates to other places and times, as they did when they needed to 'vent' Dubhs' persistently polluted atmosphere and as they had done with the Great Gate, then Flax realised there  were ways out of  Dubh. He had also heard tales of places of instability in the city's Fields Walls, where for a while, the retaining energy walls opened up worm holes to other realms. Such a dimension  door  would  be found  by  exploring  the  Field  Walls  of   this   world, Flax  rationally  deduced  and  had  actually dreamed.

His High Hats would, inch by inch, search for his precious   dimension   door.   No   level    would    be left undisturbed, no field wall anomaly left uninvestigated. This was Flax's obsession, a door to another world and to the means to power Flax knew lay there. The Tans saw no part of the High Hats exploratory operations; they watched his legitimate businesses closely, but saw nothing to surprise or threaten. It was true that for a time the ranks of Flax's High Hats swelled, but slowly their numbers and interests stabilised. Flax knew his value to the Tans was worth only so much and he would not exceed his usefulness. His organisation, therefore, grew no larger than needed to finance the search for his dimension door, the only other things he needed were time and luck.

Initially, the master of the High Hats was surprised at how unstable the Field Walls were. His explorers had found or heard stories about hundreds of rifts and places of instability. Holes, which opened invitingly, only to snap, shut, like giant, energy jaws. Brief glances tantalised Flax and his minions and at these places.

They saw deserts and forests, mountains - cities even, which could be glimpsed before the doors closed before his men had the chance, or mustered the courage, to dash through.

At other places the instabilities were less tangible as dimension doors. From the maps supplied by the Tans, Flax's High Hats were able to judge where the city ended and the Field Walls lay. In very few places were the Walls were actually visible and readily accessible.

Most of them had been physically blocked off, at a time when the inhabitants of Dubh had some degree of feeling for one another's well being, with concrete and brick to prevent the unwary from straying into them. The normal appearance of the city’s Field Walls, when unobstructed, resembled a hazy extension of the city which  became  less  distinct  as the view beyond receded, but, as  an  individual advanced toward it, a solid, yet invisible barrier was encountered.

At other points, usually where it had been hastily walled off, it was possible to walk into this mirage of an extension of the city. Flax's servants, forever willing to please their tyrannical master, often took this trip, but none of them ever returned. In most instances, those who stayed behind and watched saw the men, who had entered these unstable areas, slowly disintegrate as the vibratory rates in the Field WallandthatofDubh changed. The man's  body  would  shudder  and  sag  or collapse  as  bones softened  or  as  internal  organs exploded,  to leave  only  a  thickredmistto disperse intothe  shifting  currents  of  energy  that made  up  the  barrier. The unfortunate High Hats colleagues then would  studiously  mark  down  the position on their maps and make theirobservations beforereporting back to an increasingly frustrated Silus Flax,  at  other  locations the dimension doors would collapse  periodically into tunnels of multicoloured light which shifted across the colour spectrum the further in the explorers ventured in, but such 'doors', although promising, were rare and dangerously unpredictable.

On all occasions when the High Hats had ventured into such a portal, it had collapsed around them, adding their number to the increasing casualties the High Hat exploration teams suffered for the sake of Flax's obsession.

Progress  towards  the  goal   of   finding   a stable `dimension door' was slow, frustrating and, it could be said, costly in terms of human lives, although, of course in Dubh human lives were cheap, especially to men such as Silus Flax.

The High Hats persevered and continued to record and explore every type of Field Wall anomaly, their positions and duration of opening, Flax's disciples always eager to please him. Eager, because Flax's harsh and uncompromising management extended beyond the Halls of Machines to them. Eager because working for the High Hats meant  special  privileges,  rewards,  immunity from Tan laws and enslavement, privileged access to all the High Hats facilities offered by Flax's business ventures  and  favourable  terms  for  payment  of services received such establishments.

Being a High Hat was a desirable alternative to everything else the city had to offer or the punishing work regime and danger beyond the Great Gate. Flax's captains now recruited from those who had somehow escaped Tan conscription as well as by the direct exchange of skilled men for unskilled workers to make up for their losses during the exploration of the Field Wall irregularities.

Flax’s organisation worked tirelessly, but it was

over two years before they found a dimension door that was both stable and predictable. Silus Flax was overjoyed, his belief that such a door existed out of control of the Tallmen seemingly justified. He hoped that now that world beyond the 'door' was what he desired to further his plans for power. His joy was short-lived.

On their first excursion through this tunnel of light to the dimension beyond, his exploratory party had suffered a similar fate as others had before in different 'doors', despite this one's supposed stability. It was no different from the rest in the initial effect it had on the first unfortunate High Hat explorers who ventured through it.

The transition through the gate had transformed the High Hat party into creatures almost unrecognisable as human beings. Some had lost limbs or whole parts of their bodies. For others their bodies intact were hideously deformed by the apparent loss of bone in limbs or facial structures. All were insane.

Flax slaughtered them all, partly out of frustration and partly to allay fears that all his expeditions into the 'doors' guaranteed a living death to his currently loyal High Hats. He did not need his organisation to decide that Tan employment was   preferable   to   being   turned   into a vegetable. Why did this happen anyway think Flax? He searched desperately for a solution to this macabre puzzle and was soon to find it.

After lengthy and subtle investigations   into the transportation of work crews through the Tan controlled Great Gate, Flax discovered that when workers entered or returned through it their rate of passage was strictly regulated to ensure that the denser parts of the human anatomy adjusted gradually to the vibratory rate of the gate itself and the dimension beyond. The speed, he learned, at which human beings travelled through a dimension door was critical if they were to survive. Flax's men had sprinted there and back fearing that the 'door' would collapse at any moment and consequently their bodies had not properly adjusted, leaving bones and limbs in suspension somewhere in between.

Whilst Flax’s recently   discovered   'door' remained open, he frantically experimented.   Firstly, he tried the same rate of travel as the Great Gate demanded. His volunteer High Hats never returned. Again and again ignorant and newly  recruited volunteers, armed  with  stopwatches  and  plied  with the promise of incentives, trooped eagerly into the undulating  orifice  never  to  be  seen again.

Eventually, after much trial and error and a terrible drain on Flax's human resources, one volunteer returned unharmed and still relatively sane. One pace every two seconds had allowed this man to pass through to the other side of the 'door' without any major ill effects.

Flax celebrated, hugging his bemused, but terrified High Hats and shrieking unintelligibly. Now all he required was an answer to what lay behind this 'door'. The successful traveller held out his hands to an attentive Flax, displaying his blackened fingers.

A great coldness lies beyond and a great blinding whiteness too, no man could ever live there for long. the survivor informed Flax through black, frost bitten lips.

Flax was angered that he had been again foiled by circumstances. The `door' opened into certain death! From his High Hats' meticulous records Flax knew that this portal would remain open for perhaps another twenty hours before it gradually began to close until only a thin and inaccessible crescent remained.

Donningwarmclothingandarmedwitha stopwatch,Flaxdecidedtoseeforhimself the inhospitable, white and cold world beyond this particular dimension door. Once inside the door, Silus found  himself in a swirling, shifting, rainbow coloured tunnel  of light that wormed its way through  the  fabric of  space  and  time  from  one  dimension to another.

Flax nervously paced and counted out the seconds. One AND two AND one AND two AND....

Flax felt his body tingle slightly as he moved slowly along the tunnel. After several nervous minutes, counting out the seconds with a loud and savage accuracy, the coloured light faded and he found himself in a tunnel of blue-white ice. His breath frosted and billowed out into the bright whiteness of the tunnel. It was indeed cold he thought. The High Hat leader moved cautiously forward to where the tunnel opened into the vast empty spaces ice and snow beyond, devoid of anything at all except the viscous wind sculpted and curious monuments to itself in the snowdrifts and on the ice mountains.

Flax stared out into the bleak and forbidding arctic wastes which seemed to stretch out to infinity. This was not it; there was nothing that he needed here.  He knew what he was looking for – a city  or  maybe a town; a place to seek what he needed, a place to prepare his High Hats and then return to Dubh to lead them against the Tans and then the Tallmen themselves.

Silus   Flax   despised    the    Tans'    dominance of Dubh.  Although  he  took  from  them  it   was never enough,  he  desired  something  which  they could never give him. They had power and endured him, so long as he was useful. Eventually he would outgrow his usefulness to them, he knew, and then they would find someone else to fill their needs.

Flax was no fool. He had seen the signs already, the Tans no longer co-operated in the ways they had in the early days, now they questioned his requests and on the streets there was an ominous tension between his men and theirs.

If the Tans no longer needed him, he and his High Hats would become no more, become nothing, and he would die. Flax would not allow it to happen. He needed power, not just the power that the Tans had, but absolute power; that which the enigmatic Tallmen held in their blazing towers of light. He would take it from them and they would bow   to   Emperor   Silus   Flax,   master of Dubh. He would have god like powers like they had now. All this was powered by the yearning of a corrupted and perverse soul that demanded that Flax the rational animal use his intellect to fulfil its needs by any means. No morality or dogma, only the breadth and dark depth of his imagination bound him; and it was deep and boundless.

He was a slave to part of him, that part gave him the power when he demanded it and he did so by withdrawing from the pleasurable activities that it fed on. Then it screamed and gave Flax the power to act and think beyond himself and towards the unspeakable pleasures he consciously imagined. It had given him the premonition to search for the dimension doors and to see in dreams that beyond one lay what he would need to destroy the Tans and wrench power from the Tallmen.

But it, this internal yearning, was not just part of him, it was part of most of the unshackled hedonists of Dubh, It drove them all to consume pleasure in its vilest forms. It lived off them and it used Silus Flax. It, the malignant soul of the