Hellsborough Exposed

Made means created rather than born, which at the small end means Woad offcuts that caught the animating spark by accident and walked off before anyone had finished the paperwork — hand-sized things of scrap wood and paper that never hold one shape for long, because whatever animates them is attached to the motion and not to the form. At the other end it means The Nascenti building people out of other people, by surgery and skin grafting and whatever else was on the bench that morning. They made boggy Lomas in 1947 and called the project Genesis; he is a solicitor now, he drinks on Middlewood Road, and as far as I have ever been able to establish nobody has told him.

Number four stopped me today to talk about his barker's hip trouble, under the impression that Shad is one — Shad being a barghest whose carcass, as Van puts it, hasn't bothered him for many a year passed. The delay put me past number one at entirely the wrong hour and she was there waiting regardless, which rather settles the question of whether the seven co-ordinate on the hive mind. Being monitored that precisely is oddly reassuring, which I accept is not a normal thing to write down.