Brenda had tried every trick but the Book. She soon let two schoolfriends take her for Christian Sundays. Elisha and Corntrough were Evangelicals, and there was something haunting about the way they spoke, with everything “special,” and “calling out” and “rising up” for everything else, and so much “really just” whatever it was. Brenda was a vegetarian. And the loveliness and purity of their jumpers, and the way sometimes they gazed contentedly on you because you were hurtling on Hell. Brenda liked that peace. Her parents had hustled sorcery, here was its trajectory.

She stood bent in her shower. She shook hot diamonds from her hair.

Sunday’s come. Brenda sits on the edge of her bed, a woman in a child’s room. “Oh Lord, Heavenly father,” she murmurs, “please suck my wart from off my body. For thine is the power, the Heaven and the glory, forever and ever, amen.” 

Any moment the doorbell. 

Brenda paused to enter her ostentatious sunglasses, so encompassing they included a breathing tube and cup size. These monsters gave her the reassuring sensation of being bent over a well in a glade. 

“Hi Brenda.” They are all white. 

“Hi Brenda.” 

“Hiya guys. My hair’s a little damp.” 

 God’s sun shone. A parade of blinging blacks moved past on bicycles and mobile phones.  

“That’s so not legal,” Brenda commented anxiously. “Or maybe it is. I don’t know. It so shouldn’t be legal.” 

Though neither friend remarked on it, there was something in their free and relaxed manner to suggest that a tiny fellow, about a foot high, completely naked with bright red skin, would spoon lumps of molten brimstone into Brenda’s scorched and overflowing anus often and forever. “It’s so not safe,” said Brenda. 

Nonetheless, how great, to be the springiest things in a muffled lull. Brenda smiled, feeling her face tilted up by the smile as if by ropes. Energised by the thought of God, she lifted clumps of fallen petals and threw them up, and ran past their rain, spinning. 

The mood was all over Cambridge – see short promotional film for mood.

Contagion at our Gates

BY FRANCIS CROT

Scene 1

It is a sunny week towards the end of Spring, in Cambridge, England, a cul-de-sac town for privilege, and calibre, and brooding royalty of all races but especially the rat and fish people.

We seem to see a man with a guppie for a head. The fish flutters away: we are looking through a fishtank at a man (named PREGNANT), brooding on a chair. But he does actually have a guppie for a head. The guppie gasps and the man dies, his crown clatters out of shot.

The shot pans away . . . out the window . . . a street scene . . . an observant viewer may spot CORNTROUGH wheeling his bicycle through the crowds . . . title, “Francis Crot’s Scrum in the Cum” and opening credits . . . as a suicide jumper lands on a mattress . . . several children shouting whee! come onto it after him . . . pans farther . . . another window . . . into another apartment.

A man apparently with a goldfish for a head. The fish flutters away: we are looking through a fishtank at a young man (named LEMON), brooding on a chair. He has a normal head – frankly, perhaps a shade more pensive than normal.

Lemon arises and approaches the tank.

Scene 19

Inside a church. Sunny, spacious, full. An ENGLISH MINISTER, a LAY PRIEST and two ALCOLYTES, all in muftis, FATHER PATRICK, a visiting American, in vestments.

The observant viewer will spot in the pews BRENDA, ELISHA and CORNTROUGH near the exit, TOBY near the front on the left hand side.

LAY PRIEST: It’s the good at are scared, assa fing. It’s them at ave Jesus in they hearts, as are likely a ave pup in they pants. Just a little play on words folks a get the ball rolling. Sermons don’t ave a be all boring you know. I’ll try a keep it short.

Beat.

LAY PRIEST: But it also contains what I believe to be a very important message, which is fear.

Beat.

LAY PRIEST: We all, live with fear. Fear of crime, fear of illness, fear of redundancy, of personal, financial, loss. And I just fink . . . it’s really important that we sometimes take a moment, to step back and say . . . hang on . . . ‘the Lord . . . is my Shepherd. Wiff Im by my side, what can go wrong?’

Beat.

LAY PRIEST: What can go wrong? I’ve already mentioned a few. Illness . . . can go wrong. Monetary investments . . . can go wrong. Faith itself can, sometimes, go wrong. I ave ad the fortune, never to ave to part . . . wiff a thumb. Not so, Mr. Blackwell, who lost is, four years ago, in a lemon cutter, while he was tending the bar, in a night club. Mr. Blackwell . . . is ere today. What I’m tryin a say is . . . you look around you sometimes donchya and you fink . . . fiddle-dee-dee! I’m glad I’m not Jesus! You turn on the telly and you see these pictures of these starving kids and they legs blown off and there’s some bloke telling you the earth is actually warming up and that’s actually going to kill us all. I am in amazement, suffering is totally victorious holdin the floor no effort. And outside for all you know it’s your car at’s getting nicked.

Beat.

LAY PRIEST: Faith and love are the core of the Christian faith. This as a knock-on effect in almost every area of Christian life. Once you ave developed these key skills it will impact charity, it will impact . . . and it will impact hope. Because hope is the only solution to fear. It is only through hope that we can ever hope to combat fear.

The camera drifts across Brenda’s parted lips, and frenum and septum and across the bridge of her nose and her eye and down her cheek and her neck and her top and her lap, and crash zooms through the fibres of her denim and her knickers and focuses on the wart in her pants. A grand, slow, zoom begins. As the lay preacher continues through his next speech, he gradually fades down as choral music fades in. It is an intricate setting of Delerious?’s “Deeper” somewhat in the manners of Orlando Gibbons. Eventually, deep within the florets we see Mary’s beautific face. Cut music.

The lay priest has tidied his notes. He makes his way into the pews.

The English priest or whatever he is is about to continue when he is stopped by an urgent whisper by the American priest or whatever he is. They bend their heads together, for a frivolous moment Lisa imagines that the ceremony has been delayed so that the American priest or whatever he is could get a light.

ENGLISH: Father Patrick informs me that God has spoken to him. He has warned Father Patrick that there is someone among us today who does not know Jesus. If this is you, step forward.

There is a hush. Lisa notices one or two heads twirling and straining, as if they know she is on her way to the front, and are trying to see what’s keeping her. Elisha and Corntrough both look thoughtful, with downcast eyes and little smiles.

ENGLISH: No? Is there not someone here today, who is without Jesus? Who cannot feel Jesus’ . . . hand . . . on their heart?

Lisa is terrified that if she doesn’t pipe up, Elisha or Corntrough will dob her in. She stares ahead blankly. The hush. Corntrough clears his throat.

ENGLISH: No? We all know Jesus, then!

There is relaxed laughter. The gentle commotion at the front begins to bristle with the next item on the agenda. Lisa feels relief.

Elsewhere, Julian shook a sieve. He was shirtless. It was a warm evening and he the central heating on. It had been on since Winter. In his sieve hills of flour crumbled. Purer hills grew, by layers and landslides.

Joe and Lisa walked. They walked along the curb – and one of them sometimes off it – from time to time glancing consciously at the other’s face. Then the moon came into view and mediated between them. They relaxed. They addressed themselves to the moon. Oh moon! So like a chef! And so useful to Lisa and Joe. When they arrived at Lisa’s, Joe hugged her. They hugged and they thought about things that were pretty obvious to both of them, like that one has just impulsively hugged the other and that here they were under the spry candy of the moon hugging at a gate and it was nice.

Elisha saw, “For example, feminist attempts to isolate a common experience of maternity feel the mountains tremble, did you hear the oceans roar.” Elisha stretched and rose from her desk. Her notes basked in lamplight something garish. Elisha highlighted every word Elisha read in one of three colours. It was “[her] way of working.”

Brenda struggled on her eiderdown. What if an animal, and its net, were evenly-muscled? Then we would have the measure of Brenda on her eiderdown.

She was not asleep. She only allowed herself to think of him for one hour an evening.

But put it this way, she had already been walking the pot-bellied daschund of his favours for some time without knowing it.

All her doubts converged on her wart. He hated her, she disgusted him! Nothing focuses a teenage woman’s vast insecurity quite like pubic fungus.

Chinwag’s collar was a dumb noose. He could relieve the chafe with a certain ponderous nod, as though passing under a low beam. His mouth was dry. Chinwag knew his neck was not really irritated by his collar, but by a nervous tic. If he varied his tic frequently, maybe no one would pick up on it. He would try and transfer it to a compulsive fist. Chinwag clenched and unclenched his right hand. He watched Chinwag. “Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?”

Corntrough tested his body and spirit. He sat nude on the edge of his bed. By, ahem, pure thought he hardened and by, amen, pure thoughts softened himself once more. The rule was he could not touch it. He had done it for half an hour, hard, soft, hard, soft, hard, soft and now he was hard again. He’d do it for that again.

Miffed, joyous, spirit-walking: barnacles don’t share.

Julian’s Morris dancing clothes lay on the kitchen table, intricate patchwork, neatly folded. He drank cider from a pint glass. There was a thumb of flour on it. “G’day mate, I’m from Australia,” he said. “I’m from Austraylyia. What iz op, mon, I am from Jamacia.” Corntrough was damp with sweat. There would be buffer zones of prayer at either end of the fantasies, and complicated hybrids at the boundary between prayer and fantasy. Sex is always a boundary circumstance. In terms of sexual phantasy, Elisha’s practice was more easy-going and sustainable. She tended towards abstinence lobbying, the US import which let one speak in public venues about fucking, often about children fucking, and then in private, plan further such speaking. Elisha turned up the music and did star jumps until the end of the track. It was Elisha’s way of taking a break. Perhaps it upset the bald man next door but he poured sausage fat into their communal sink. She could smell his sizzling them even now. Lottie moved a ladybird. A girl of grave kindnesses, Elisha, with the rare condition of a frowning skull. She wouldn’t be surprised if he was lowering whole strings of cooked sausages into the drain, all the while listening nervously into the rapture of Delirious? for the faltering of her star thuds, the sc-rape of her door. Twisting on his fat neck while the sausages’ fat necks twisted down into the darkness. Brenda peered defiantly into her closet as she still always did each night at this moment. Lottie switched off the overhead light at the moment Lemon switched on the bedside lamp. Elisha chose neon green. Corntough thought, “He felt her warm, wet mouth close around his member.” Chinwag cracked his knuckles. Julian pulled apart an egg with his thumbs. Why are you even reading this crap? You could put it down right now. The Cam flowed and the Thames flowed. And Lisa stood in her hallway and hugged herself. Plenty of things are left unfinished. It’s not too late. Pestilence tensed. And Joe walked down the road and hugged himself. You could be at a surprisingly accurate re-creation of the golden years of Motown for example and either because you are swept up in it or because you are explicitly encouraged to so do by Marvin Gaye you could lay down your Kate Atkinson novel, and perhaps you might leave it there, or one of the other patrons might crawl under the rows of seats and rob you of it. Either way you might decide not to source another copy. That might be it. I do my best. Julian poured batter. Lottie dreamt you stopped reading now. That’s how serious I am. She dreamt it and purred and champed. My hatred for you is pretty astonishing. You, Mike, and you, Carlton, and you, Bradley, and you, Justin, and you, Jefferson, and you, Samantha, and by increments, by deductions from the earliest, by mutation of the earliest, all you readers, gobbling, snuffling, tailoring, testing, clogging reality with your attributes.

Meat-Filled Chapel

BY FRANCIS CROT

Brenda stood in the softly-lit queue, sucking in her lower lip and peering up to the transept, where shadows moved behind a rather perfect Charles Eamer Kempe. There an elfin child perched easily upon His virgin ledge, but at this time of day there was little light to make them glow. Up front, the wafer had billowed, the supplicant found herself poked with a meat bun. The wine scabbed.



The faithful wavered, then slipped diversely forward to see the commotion, the queue disintegrating, but the Church assembling itself in their muttered and sung astonishment and prayer.

Though Brenda was aware that what happened was unparalleled, except perhaps in the early days of the Church, nevertheless she hung back, beckoned - or transfixed, it seemed to her - by whatever little dark triangle scratched against the stained highborn seraphs glass.

As old and young, lay and cleric, thronged in the nave, the large constellation of tapers and candles occupying the chapel all in one instant flared up, as if the building had drawn in breath, though the air was quite dead and close, and dazzlingly sent shadows scuttling into its nooks, then in another darkened so every shadow blackly wavered back over the stones it had covered and father across the walls. There were fifty-three inside the chapel, not counting the useless wizards. Forty-nine of them now thronged in the nave.

Some deep and small part of Brenda cogitated rapidly. It was as though a thought, authentically new, immediately was buried by the several contraries it unfortunately gave rise to. It seemed to her that she yearned to think of incantations, energy, honour, misery, Black Masses, creation, the caress of her eccentric sex, The Consoler, the triangle cut out of his silver tongue. But this other main part of her – this sluggish, rivetted, sick yet calm person, who saw her own hair at her vision's edge, who watched the manta in the half-lit glass, this main part, in ever-improving obedience to her holy and righteous Father, threw out every profane flutter the instant it had form.

Energy, honour, misery. It is some trick, to hesitate, to loiter near to the back, given the Body of the Church – vivified by the Holy Ghost, discrete and distinct in its different members in various times and ages and divided in its distributed receipt of gifts, yet as one certain husk, wherein His Love ever pours, united – began with Abel, the first just man, and given that it will be consummated in the last of the Elect. The triangle withdrew. The lidded mountaineer seemed to have wrenched off His mother’s breast, or else packed a spongy hip flask.

“Sanctus!” reiterated Father Jeremy, who already knew better. “Hallelujah! My brothers and sisters, from the pews all of us can –”

There was a staunch *GLOP* and the altar wine spat a missile out of, it was apparent, membranous clot, falling providentially upon Father Jeremy’s foot, a little sacramental hacky sack ready to go. “Hallelujah,” persisted Father Jeremy glumly. An aroma had arisen. In the ciborium, a sausagey and black puddeny muffin had begun to slop.

Then the widow Mrs. Williamson, who of all the inspired crept into the zone they all exalted littlest by littlest, was beside Brenda, coming past her. Brenda sought Mrs. Williamson’s expression, but could only meet it at an angle, for the woman was engrossed by the marvellous events ahead of them both. Still Brenda could make out, in those offset and darkly-lit looks, what was probably peace and zeal, the bingo-wings of Mrs. Williamson’s highest humour unfurled to their fullest, and this had an awakening effect on Brenda, so that she did not return her gaze to the transept, but fixed it forward, riveted beside Mrs. Williamson’s, and felt for the first time the kind of cloudy joy that had stolen into her own limbs, which dreamily she reined onward, to join those who ecstatically bore witnessed to congealing estuaries of coarse flesh. And Mrs. Williamson, still as agile as she had ever been upon her cemented femoral stem, matched Brenda’s pace. The air was now as though agitated by small insects. It smelled singed, or Mrs. Williamson did.

The meat pumped from the ciborium and the chalice. Mrs. Beckett, keeping an eye on the vicissitudes of thes gibs, stretched her hand into her handbag and begain anxiously to unwrap her untouched lunch of corned beef sandwiches. Meat paving progressed. Toby gazed casually upon squirts of nearly liquid muscle and then was seized by that, as the glass and light and other thing had transfixed Brenda. His heart overflowed with tenderness. A dampness in the air.

Brenda uncertainly sought among the many who sleepstood her amigos’ faces. Fruit pastilles; a wet, black bough. Elisha’s was radiant with joy, song and reproof. Toby's and Corntrough’s were . . . somewhere else, for now, to be seen. Elisha looked pale and rather frightened now. Fifty-one of them, of us, assembled in the brawn’s drainage basin; three frightened by the entrance, the notional meatshed, one of those, him the communion wafer first had touched. Ground wandered into figure. Meat by now had filmed over all the sacraments and was rolling slowly outward from a puddle some four feet long. Strange qualms and misgivings, and what, if Brenda did not take it wrong, felt like xenophobia. Yet there were only a few in the congregation. There! – now Chanique was wrong-footed, and to steady herself put her palm in a griseous creek, and her ducking showed Brenda Corntrough, whose face was darkened, as though he were struggling with a morsel lodged down his throat. The stained glass distinguished its parts somewhat, it turned out its compartments like flaps, what was the sun doing out there? Hideous sunlit numbers. Calf calf calved from a calf floe in a flow of choppy chops. Teddy stretched his hand into his bag as withdrew his mobile, which he waved over the cramming out ham. He turned it to his fellows. The face of the paladin Martin swam through its screen and was ill. Shapes could be perceived in the flesh as in clouds: dogs . . . only dogs. Cartilage’s naiad.

The pressing meat flopped and winced; a vast cephalopod unpacking itself from a I’m On Jesus’s Team lunchbox. Like waves at the sea side in the evening it came except not usurping one another: layering.

When Toby turned his head from the zigzag of mellifluously wiggling faggots his eyes fell upon Brenda. On her lips words were forming which Toby felt sure would begin to recapture the marvellousness of the brute nature afoot, the the butchery food dangled in every wave. Time elapsed without anything like that feat. When Elisha’s voice not Brenda’s did reedily begin an assay which was to have risen ponderously above the dispirited murmur of rote rite and inundation of suet gunk slap, it seemed the container of a death’s head screech, for Corim, the first of the three finally to leave his threshold linger, shrinking aghast into the light, was seized immediately by the arm and not seen again. Gelatin ligaments turned in colon marsh.

It had become clear that the life of those who made to leave was being exacted at the circumference, but that, on the other hand, the enginery of the most profound incongruity which ripened and grew in strength on the altar beside them was as revolted by them as they by It.

The worshippers’ wandering and fiendish glances roved freely about the mass of accumulating muscle subtleified by currents of gristle and embedding flecks of bone like pigment in eye, the productive yet sepulchural force compelling them back, for a norm was made when the first few would not let it flow over them. Corntrough skipped shakily across a purplish-red oxbow lake the size of a child and came beside his chums. Brenda herself moved back from a cut of brook, queerly quivering. It was oozing from its own frayed streaks, like a birch-taught buttock. Martin's foot ploughed into fat sleepless ligaments spurting regurgitated skin and was sucked fast.

But the meat was climbable on, just. Though forcemeat, surely, showing them who was boss, it was not mince: a forest of membranes occupied the slurry, a venous patchwork of ad hoc cauls forever bursting and leaking compartment into compartment and regrowing, diversified moreover according to the paths selected by sick-backboned deltas. There were harder and spongier areas, and Corntrough was treadmilling upon a sluggishly convulsing verge of melted carrion, without sinking too deeply into its gamy flutters. A red rotisserie rolled out for Elisha and she against convention floundered towards the holy articles, tongues of grisly gills sickly nourished by pungent stir cutlets sliding against her shins, still softly singing. Elisha's feet learnt the cadence of the nomadic bleed, and teetering upon the gristlier outpourings in flume she had elected of drainage plasm flop cartilage flume, neared the fountain wherefrom it flowed. But when a wave of thews, nails, spittle, rushing with viscous callous and crested by a plethora of sustaining meat gases swole to her right side and proceeded, Elisha smelling its fretful provision grew giddy and as its diarrhea gristle flushed up her legs and torso she stumbled and slipped, a raising bolus of river hemorrhoids covered her. You may recall Brenda's vegetarianism.

Brenda thought for herself that they would be buried hastily and without ceremony if at all. Elisha's face gasped upwards from the shallots watercourse, laughing up skin cud wall mixed with topple-gush and fitful stagnant continuance nerves. The illness of many lay in the pouring flesh. Chanique knelt by a turning colon marsh for another spate of ill at the meat's inconstant viscous beck.

They looked at the embarrassing bait. They who had reserved the life of the mind for situations of surpassing deadliness, so they thought, surveyed a ground of pig, disarrayed by breakers of fine cartilage flop and rills of rheumy sustenance, and knew themselves to be trapped, maybe doomed, flown with wine and insolence. Their limbs stiffened and their hairs erected, their eyes half shut, and their mouths gaped.

All That Meat

BY FRANCIS CROT

And away in Malton Julian unpeeled the stock cube like it was his special nut.

And on Parker's Piece, Lottie’s woe was a little assauged when her love began to nibble her cheek.

And one of the kids, Seth, recognising what was happening, raced home to put his ninja costume on.

And in the chapel, the tide of flesh was herding Mrs. Williamson towards the exit. As the shadow of sunlight fell across her, her frail, uncertain feet encountered a streak of blood and she slipped violently. For a moment Brenda thought the stone floor would crack open her head but the flesh caught that and nestled it and kept seeping, with Mrs. Williamson as its figurehead, lifting up her shoulders, a bad mixture of ship and sea, peeling back her dress against the floor, despite her little fretting and patting and smoothing hands, and feeding her feet-first to a pack of dead doormen. As the blood began to whiz the floral sneer flipped up past her swollen thighs to reveal an adult nappy, an unexpectedly stark canvas, quickly painted with the red of Mrs. Williamson’s varicose sewers amid Mrs. Williamson’s dying whimpers.

The revolting anomaly winnowed their ranks by driving them into the undead killers at the door, by colliding them into stone so that their heads smacked hard against it, and if they survived those attentions, by flowing meanderingly into their heads and chests and by compressing and popping all their structure, closing fistlike about their bodies and rousing them like puppets then crunching them and deforming them like living Paintshop pixels and disseminating them into the flow.

Eight of them however survived by running past the fell guards whose carious and baneful gaze did not find them through the enormous floods of crimson juice they beckoned from the melting bodies of others, into the little church lawn.

Here they saw one who might have been Mrs. Williamson’s gentler elder sister who had perhaps had the good fortune to arrive late to the ceremony and thus never to have set foot inside the chapel spongebathed with a manhole cover by a revenant. The idea that the inwardly brittle formation of bone was a definitely limited union had taken the eight escapees with surprising force. Did the dead, come sprightly from their beds beside the chapel, motion to one another, as if with positive judgement? Surely they bade, one to the other, to carouse and prosecute the banquet.

A tithe of your leg. Different dead people waited at the entrance to the little lawn to eat them. Damned in concentric traps. Yet between frying pan and fire, a world of difference – for all that they each pitilessly asserted the priority of tactics. Curiously difficult and unsatisfactory was the bloody and grass green lawn, of funereal trenches, and sprinting and young in a sense worshippers. Inside there the meat had the upper hand and wouldn’t let you forget it.

Stained glass shattered. Now bodies within were pushed through the rafters. Out their bones came, crinkle-crankle, through the stained glass and the brickwork. The flesh posies from the chapel’s surface soon began to wave in no wind. These chaoses of human bodies, enormous, blood-woozy ganglia, soft tissue and bone sprouting somewhat like gore-soaked and filled clusters of ultra-thin flourescent tubes, were also possessed by the dark reanimating morphological field, but did not threaten the escapees.

The chapel was clogged, sealed off. A wall of invisible force marked the boundary and the evil meat flowed to exactly that line. The rotting gents slit blue sacks and whirling red rope from your warm screaming friends.

"You can't reap me," Brenda trilled, "I used to draw you!"

"Everyone's just running away," Corntrough called to her, "especially me!"

"Do you have a better idea? You suck at this!"

"Hallelujah!" called Father Jeremy archly.

The relation between aesthetics and ethics is both overtheorised and undertheorised. The key question is, alot of sentences are bad, but are any equally as bad as the holocaust? It is problematic because according to most people the question itself is in the same neighbourhood. The whole struggle is to go beyond satire and just be plain rude, like the chapel, 100% full of meat, did. Were the meat to tense, it could launch a spire like a rocket. That was so not revealing Himself through the beauty of His creation.

We're Going To Eat You!

BY FRANCIS CROT

So ardently and so eagerly did the one lot go prying meat out of the other lot, and so spirited and wriggle-some were the latter in their reluctance, that amid the frolics points of extraordinary and fell localised stress, like that point where the revenant Missus Williamson lent all her eight stone onto the olecranon fossa of Brenda’s humerus, came frequently into being, and as these little systems discharged themselves, as when Missus Williamson’s smashed hose thwuck'd heavily into Brenda’s forehead and then hip, this or that liberated component, a rib perhaps or an eyeball with a trailing ribbon, regularly would ping in a high arc away from its unfortunate, who knelt and wept from its middle its intestines, for instance, criss-crossing oftentimes aloft with more such morsels, and, indeed, it was just these little impulses, these moments of gore pinging to and fro above the chapel lawn, which sometimes decided other highly-pressurised engagements at the margin, as for example the jolly-hockeysticks SMUCK of a triangular piece of Elisha’s cranium, and its subsequent whizz twixt Henry and wee Marco startled the one without bothering the other, whose childish hands then quickly pliered ribs from him and lit his nerves as they did, such that, taken at an airborne view, the bright lawn about the chapel had the aspect of a touch-me-not, or impatiens bush, whose distended seed pods, if disturbed in one place, may ripely cannonade and crackle left and right and up and down the whole foliate structure, without regard for the artificial membrane of organism, pod setting off pod till the next nervous equilibrium arrives.

So complicatedly elegant – and so laden with humane significance like pain and death – were the forces that vomited and tumbled themselves about the dead things’s feedground, that we can at best make of them a very brief and arbitrary tour.

Congregations boast crazies. Most of these cravens had been among the first fallen, stampeding through the sly slaughter mouth. Henry, a legendary psychopath who always wore his kilt like a true Scotsman so to keep a spare skein-dugh under his foreskin, appreciably reduced their numbers before being clawed and bludgeoned to death. In the corner of her eye – so it seemed to Brenda – it tore off his dick, which was hard with fear, and stabbed him in the eye with it, and his brains and blood landed up Elisha’s vagina, causing her to vomit her unborn child into his pelvic wound, which was unfortunately brimming with piss and shit.

Who loaded the tennis ball machine with black pudding? In that sunlit rift, Brenda had misperceived, and Elisha yet lived. And who were the eight survivors? They were Brenda, Elisha, Toby, Corntrough, Henry McDonagle – no longer, let the foetus have his place – Chanique Akinfemu, Helen Freemantle and Father Jeremy Farrier.

“Oh gosh. We’re not getting out of here in one piece,” said Toby. “Are we?”

“We’ll get out in loads of pieces!” said Brenda, and Toby smiled tolerantly, but took his leave.

The inflamed meat sprouted from every chapel aperture but there ceased, quivering, advancing no further. It was not bashful. “Could I be possibly insane?” Brenda entreated an emo Jesus, “Um. Just because I don’t say anything . . . doesn’t mean I don’t like you . . .” Brenda stared at the pert door and began to trace in it a nebulous logic of Satanic cautery. Brenda determined never to go back there. But flesh-eaters interrupted her reverie, as was becoming more widespread.

Brenda saw a dead man stagger towards Toby, his own headstone (either) held before him. Toby, ever socially awkward, misinterpreting the gesture, leant in, trying to read the worn stone. The rotter flogged him to paste right down to the torso with that immense slab.

A cohort of sandy zombies straightened from where they had fed, along with what they had fed on, and all together staggered and skipped towards Brenda, gesticulating their arms like slave oars in a wilderness, chattering their soaking mouths and braying through the wrecks of their throats. If she fell into the hands of the sinuous, segmented, misshapen men, who were about ten yards away, they would tear a hole in her midriff and eat her. She ran, but where? Arabesques. Helen Freemantle reached the outer gate, and a shoal of hands covered her.