The morning after Lawson's daughter arrived there, I had a call from Yaxley.

"I want you to fetch some things for me," he said. "A few things."

Prominent among these was a shoebox of Polaroid photographs he had taken himself, but which he never kept by him, I suspect out of fear. Magic had exhausted him sexually long before Pam, Lucas and I met him. He found it difficult to reach the levels of arousal necessary for a demanding operation. Neither was ordinary pornography of any use. One of the first tasks of my apprenticeship to him--though at the time I didn't think of it in that light--had been to accompany him on a round of the Cambridge public lavatories once a week. He preferred the older ones, seeping and cracked, reeking of piss, which you approached down a dozen greasy stone steps. There would be a soaked uneven floor in the gloom; three stalls with shiny black doors; blue distemper flaking away above the chipped white tiling. Homosexual graffiti covered the walls, done in straight lines and little boxes, in careful expressive designer handwriting. Heterosexual commentary blundered over and around it, in a vigorous but barely-legible scrawl. Where Howard had articulately written that he owned his own place and would be happy to try you out any Friday evening--including for your information a hyper-realist illustration of what he claimed to be his penis in an erect state--some drunken boy had added:

YOU POOF.

"These simple endearments," Yaxley said. He photographed them all. "See that no one comes in for a moment."

It was an unnecessary precaution. Places like that are always empty when you go in. A sound in the cubicles turns out to be the trickle of the cistern. Nevertheless, unwilling to be blinded however briefly in such circumstances, I was grateful to establish myself in the doorway and stare across the road--at the rain, the railway station, the woman with the dog--while Polaroid flashbulbs etched at the gloom behind me, and panel by panel Yaxley built his reredos and altarpiece.

"That man," he had told me the day I first saw Lawson, "knows four things about the Pleroma. Three of them he learned from me. He is unaware that he knows the fourth, or that he is keeping it from me." In some sense I couldn't comprehend, Lawson himself was to be made to stand, by metonymy, for that fourth item of knowledge, so that its resources could be drawn upon without it being present in the world. Yaxley called this metaphysical sleight of hand an "infolding". I pondered it as I bought or collected objects and artefacts from all over London--books from dealers in Shepherd's Bush and Camden; secondhand garden statuary from Kent; dusty artificial flowers, hanks of hair and a jar of something which looked like preserved ginger from a woman in Golders Green--and delivered them, over the next week, to Peckham.

The upstairs flat at Number 17 could not simply receive these things. First, David must strip it bare. The furniture and carpets came out. The floorboards were scrubbed. In certain places, to erase some stain Yaxley thought might interfere with the operation, they were sanded down to reveal pinkish new wood. All stains, spills, dirty marks, carry an energy of their own. Particular attention was paid to the walls. To ensure success, all the old paper had to be taken off: above the fireplace and near the windows, Yaxley had got down through the old plaster and into the brick. Another kind of magician might have wished to preserve the resonances of Number 17; in other circumstances Yaxley himself would have valued them. But recourse to pornography is by definition a loss of confidence. Where previously he had conceived and assembled the details of such an operation on impulse, holding them together by sheer force of will, he now let caution undercut insight. He made David hire a steamer from a DIY in Nunhead, and watched thoughtfully as twenty or thirty years of interior decoration bagged and blistered away from the yellowed, sugary plaster in front of his eyes.

"The stuff underneath's not much better," David told me one evening, when we met on the stairs outside his mother's door. "These old places are rotten to the core."

He was sweating. His clothes were covered in dust from the plastic bags of lino, plaster and broken furniture he had been carting down to the bins in the street. Clearly though, it was an effort he enjoyed: something to do. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and had a look at the parcel under my arm.

"What you got there ?"

"Gethsemane."

"You what ?"

Gethsemane, in a plastic frame the colour of bone. Painted in greens and golds by someone with no sense of perspective, nevertheless it had in some lights a strange stereoscopic quality. Christ swam out past the picture-plane with his arms spread wide in a gesture of welcome difficult to understand, while the trees and rocks of the Garden, laid on with a palette knife, roiled and eddied behind him like bad weather. It had been much stocked by Catholic outlets a decade before, but after scouring the second hand shops for two or three days without result, I had taken Yaxley's advice and tried boarded-up premises on the Old Kent Road, under the sign "ICTURE, Sean Kelly". Icture, I thought, would resemble ichor, that fluid which runs in the veins of angels as well as kitchen beetles. Or perhaps it was a service, like acupuncture. Anyway, there the picture was, not even dusty, hanging up in a smell of old men and milk bottles, while in the back room an American pit-bull terrier fought with silent determination against its tether to get at me.

"Somethink else for His Nibs eh ?" said David.

He winked.

"Is he mad, or what ?

"Make your own mind up." I said. "How's the girl ?"

"Hardly a peep out of her. She's with Mum most of the time." In the day, she stuck pictures in a book, or helped with the housework. "Watches telly a lot." It made you wonder what she did at home. You had to give her full marks for quietness, though.

"Mum's teaching her to knit."

I knew Lawson was in the house with us. I had passed his BMW in the street, black and shiny among the rubbish skips. I could hear his voice, ba-luddy caw-pawking away in the flat upstairs. Somehow this magnified David's good will and made it all the harder to bear. I wanted to shock him out of it. I wanted him to feel the girl's danger. Most of all, perhaps, I wanted him to feel guilty. I pushed him into the corner of the landing and said urgently:

"This is the real daughter."

He gave me a puzzled look.

"Yaxley's substituting the real daughter," I said.

"What ?"

"He's going to use Lawson's real daughter for the operation! You must
have known that!"

"Operation ? I don't--"

"Hasn't he told you anything ?" I shouted. "For Christ's sake, David!"

He stared at me.

"I'm just helping him out," he said eventually.

"Shit."

The door to the top flat banged open, and down came Lawson. He was in a hurry. He had on a beautifully tailored overcoat in grey wool, which somehow accentuated the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of his neck, the forward thrust of his head; and he was carrying a bottle of Louis Roederer champagne as shiny and incongruous under the yellow forty watt light as the car outside at the kerb. "I can't be bothered with that now," he called back up to Yaxley. "Get someone of yours to do it." There was no answer. When he reached the landing, he inspected David, as if he had never seen him before.

"Just as a matter of interest," he said, "what does your bloody mother cook all day in there ?"

I don't think he once suspected his daughter was behind the same door, watching "Game for a Laugh" and "Celebrity Squares" every evening when he went past.

David, who had never understood Lawson well enough to defend himself, could only laugh and shrug. Lawson laughed too. "Well, best be off, eh ?" he said. I was in his way: he started to shove me aside, then stopped abruptly and, his hand still resting on my arm, eyed me with hatred. Yaxley appeared at the top of the stairs and smiled weakly down on all three of us, his face damp and indescribably vacant in the yellow light. Leaning forward, he looked as if he might launch himself off the top step and float out over us; or else cover us with vomit.

"I'll remember you," Lawson promised me softly, as if he had only now understood something.

"Oh, I'll remember you."

The infolding took place two or three evenings later, in the main room of the upper flat, at about nine o' clock. I arrived late, and in the end, saw very little of it.

The room was cold. On the wall surrounding the empty fireplace, Yaxley had pinned a dense mass of overlapping polaroid photographs. From a distance, these tiny, often blurred images seemed to condense into a single sign from some randomly-devised but powerful magical alphabet. Above them, like a lock to keep their meanings under control, he had hung the Gethsemane I had found on the Old Kent Road. Its central figure swam out of the cheap frame with motions of despair. In front of the fire had been placed a stripped-pine table with short bulbous legs, which in any other ritual would have taken the part of the altar. Since no actual sacrifice was to occur here, I wondered how Yaxley would use it. For a moment I had a clear vision of Lawson with his trousers down round his ankles, trying to mount his own daughter as she clung pale and goosefleshed to this object, with its cigarette burns and whitish ring-shaped stains. Then I caught a glimpse of the girl, and saw what they had done to her.

She was sprawled legs apart in a corner, naked but for a pair of white briefs designed for someone twice her age, with lace detail and legs cut very high to accentuate the pubic mound. Her ribcage and immature nipples stood out in the forty-watt light. Shadows pooled in the hollow of her collar bone. A musing, inturned expression was on her face; but every so often she laughed inappropriately at something Yaxley or her father said. They had got her drunk on some kind of cherry liqueur, which I could smell from where I stood in the doorway at the end of the passage.

Yaxley and Lawson were occupied burning something in the grate. Yaxley's wrists were covered in new scabs; Lawson blew on the pale blue flames until his cheeks were red. I could hear them murmuring excitedly, but I couldn't quite see what they had set on fire--glossy paper, I thought, of the sort used for soft pornography: I could see it, wadded, reluctant to catch, curling at the edges. But its thick, stale odour was of something else entirely, wood, hair, kitchen waste. The fourth person in the room was David. David seemed drunk too. He had propped himself up against the wall near Lawson's daughter and was staring at her small white shoulders and arms. Every so often his gaze would fix with a kind of wonder on the place between her unformed thighs where the lips of her sex were quite discernible beneath the thin white fabric.

Apart from the girl they were all fully dressed.

I watched for a minute or two in silence. Lawson was the first to notice me standing there.

"I told you he'd turn up in the end," he said to Yaxley; and then to me: "Traffic bad, was it ?"

His daughter laughed.

"See any dead cats ?" she asked me.

"Christ, Yaxley!" I appealed.

He turned away from whatever he was doing. His eyes were yellow and empty, his face grey. He looked like a cancer patient.

"I'm not going to be involved in this," I told him.

"Yes you are," he said.

David laughed suddenly.

"Fucking hell," he said. "Eh ?"

"Yes you are," Yaxley repeated.

"Come here lovey," Lawson said absently to the girl.

She pulled herself to her feet, then clutched at herself with both hands.

"Daddy I've wet my knickers."

I took a pace into the room, said, "Lawson, this is your daughter," then when I saw the expression on his face, turned round and walked straight out down the stairs and into the street. Rain was falling through the sodium light, pattering on the leaves of the sycamore trees. It would have been easy enough to walk into Peckham and catch a train into London Bridge. I meant to go home to St Marks' Crescent and tell Katherine everything. I knew she would help me. Instead I crossed the road, positioned myself in a doorway with the collar of my coat turned up, and stared numbly at the lighted upper windows of 17, Hill Park.

At about a quarter past ten, the glass blew out of them and tumbled into the basement area beneath. Smoke poured into the air, grey at first then thick black then back to grey again. Shortly afterwards, amid cries of fear and pain, the front door slammed open; Lawson, David and the girl appeared at the top of the steps. Lawson and his daughter were naked, but David still had on his Union Jack underpants. The girl ran off immediately, zigzagging away into the uncertain light of the sodium lamps like some quite new city animal, a vulnerable slip of flesh with a face pale and streamlined to featurelessness--frightened yet touched with all the triumph of the victim. I expected Lawson to follow. Instead he stared after her; said something incoherent; then, suddenly aware that he was being watched, stormed across the road towards me. The whole left side of his body was scorched and reddened, so that he looked as if he had been dyed. His genitals hung shrivelled and vestigial-looking beneath a belly larded with middle age. He thrust his face very close to mine. Expecting him to hit me, I stepped back into the doorway: but all he did in the end was shake the keys of his car under my nose and shout:

"I've still got these, you bastard!"

And then:

"I remembered you. Don't think I didn't!"

He ripped open the driver's door of the BMW, made one or two hasty attempts to start it, then drove away at high speed.

This left only David, running helplessy about in the street in front of me, trying to say one word over and over again, as if it might describe what had happened in the upper room.

"Ungestalten, Ungestalten, Ungestalten--"

Ungestalten: the shapeless. The pain of being without shape. Some days before, prowling restlessly round the High Street Smith's in search of--as he put it to the assistant-- "Anything about concentration camps," he had bought the newest Primo Levi. At home, sitting with a can of Harp in the television half-light, he had foundered immediately on this reference to Nietzsche and the suffering of the underclass. It was a strange idea to have encountered between biographies of Myra Hindley and David Niven. I had tried to explain to him the "price that must be paid for the advent of the reign of the elect". From the beginning, though, David had understood it all literally and personally. The pain of being without shape. It was not the idea that frightened him, so much as the question of who--or what--might suffer this pain.

"Ungestalten, Ungestalten--"

As Lawson turned the BMW out on to the main road at the bottom of Rye Hill, the fire brigade was turning in. They crowded into the narrow street in front of number 17, the back of one appliance lit up silver by the headlights of the next. The heavy grinding sound of pump engines filled the night. David seemed not to notice them. He ran up and down between the engines, repeating "Ungestalten, Ungestalten," in a kind of formless whine; then fell over suddenly. When he got up again, his mouth was slack. Blood and mucus ran out of his nose. Eventually one of the firemen captured him and he was put into an ambulance. His mother was still inside the house.

"Ungestalten."

Unable to act, I remained in the doorway for some time after he had been taken away. Yaxley's will was like glue: it was all round me still. Brought steadily under control, the fire began to smell like burning rubbish in the distance on a clear day; a human, domestic smell, rather more frightening because of that. They had illuminated the front of Number 17 with a powerful floodlamp, but its white glare revealed nothing. How Yaxley had escaped, I don't know. I hoped at the time he was dead, but I knew it was unlikely. Everyone who lived in the street came out on the pavement to watch the firemen at work--there were frail but cheerful old men and women from the flats, families with children not much younger than Lawson's daughter, a woman who brought her baby with her as if to accustom it early to tragedies and occasions. Someone said:

"They've burnt the dinner again, then."

Firemen were in and out of the house now. Much of their activity seemed aimless. Blue lights flickered down the hallway, reflected from the pictures on the walls. ("There!" they said in the street: "Look there!") The smoke abated briefly, the beam of a torch struck out through it: a fireman was in the upper room! Flashes, as the torch moved about. I wondered what he could be possibly be seeing, there in that exhausted, sticky zone of Yaxley's will. Finally, a figure in a yellow helmet leaned out of the window and, framed against faint grey smoke, looked down, shrugged. Two hours from the first appearance of the engines, it was all over. People went back to their own houses, a little subdued, whispering, "Doesn't a woman with kids live there ? Ain't that a family with kids ?"

"I don't think anyone was in there."

"There must have beeen someone."

I was left in the rain, soaked to the skin, still looking upwards.

What happened that night ? It would be naive to think that Lawson's sexual satisfaction was at issue. A facsimile would have done for that. Yaxley had planned all along that real incest should be committed in the upper room at 17 Hill Park. He had planned all along to reveal this to Lawson as soon as it was too late to withdraw. But though he enjoyed these layers of deception for themselves--it was the mark of his increasing impotence--he must also have had a clear magical purpose, some assumption upon which was predicated the whole ritual of "infolding". What this purpose was never really became clear. Neither was any help forthcoming for Pam Stuyvesant or Lucas Medlar. I don't think he had ever meant to keep his word on that. Along with the two Asian women, David's mother died of smoke inhalation. I'm not clear why David had to lose so much.

copyright M.John Harrison 1992