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#i say a lily flower behind his ear and on his left hip bone there’s a little nail bat
sh1tbird-shantytown · 3 years
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thinking of steve harrington going back to king steve after nancy breaks up with him. doesn’t have to fight anyone for the title, gets a long ass keg time that billy can’t even quite reach. but steve spends his day threatening bullies and being friendly with everyone instead of just his “friends” so now everyone loves steve harrington. and billy is left trying to decide whether he loves this boy or just wants to risk tripping him in the hallway and laughing. but steve also keeps trying to befriend and help billy out so it’s tipping more towards loving him.
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theinvisiblemuseum · 2 years
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I'm not sure if you already got this asked but please do tell me more about the marauders tattoos, I absolutely loved reading about Regulus'!!! You've opened my mind to tattooed Regulus and now I'll forever think about it, thank you so much <33
incredibly indebted to you for indulging me :))) sorry in advance for how long this is gonna be once again
i’m also aware that some of these & the references would make no sense in a muggle au or in canon but consider the fact that i do not care and will tattoo as i please
james:
only has one tattoo for each person he loves enough to have them with him forever + a couple extras
1. the letter S on his bicep- for sirius, his first tattoo, sirius has a J on his bicep to match
2. crescent moon on his right wrist- for remus
3. chess piece on the backside of his left arm- for peter
4. lily flower on the back of his neck- for lily
5. golden snitch behind his right ear- for marlene (i hc her being a seeker on the team with james)
6. a lion on the side of his ribs- for mary (her patronus is a lion fight me)
7. two suns, one on the back of each ankle- for dorcas (everyone thinks james is the sunshine of the boys, dorcas of the girls, she has the same ones to match on the backs of her arms)
8. leo constellation on his chest with the regulus star over his heart- for regulus
9. fuck- as mentioned in the regulus dissertation, remus sirius james and reg all have the word somewhere on them, james’s is on the back of his knee
10. marauder map footprints- set of four footprints to represent each of them, all the marauders have them, james’s are on his left forearm
peter:
peter doesn’t hate tattoos but he got one and decided that was more than enough
1. the map footprints- on the back of his calf, because they told him it wouldn’t hurt so much
remus:
i’m partial to the idea of sirius doing tattoos for people in a magic or muggle setting, so remus is the person he goes to to try things out and remus will never get a tattoo any other way (his is the list i’m least definitive on because he’s getting new ones all the time courtesy of sirius and he doesn’t care if they have any particular meaning to them)
1. a star on his hand- first tattoo, it’s a little wonky but remus loves it
2. heart on his ankle bone- they were both drunk and it said more than either of them could say out loud
3. lily flower on his wrist/ hand- similarly simple like the one james has, a bit more detail though
4. map footprints- on his ribcage, the only one sirius didn’t do
5. paw print- on the inside of his ankle opposite the heart
6. fuck- on his ankle/shin on the same leg as the heart
7. canis major constellation- on his hip, because sirius likes to kiss him there
8. van gogh smoking skeleton- on his right thigh, the only big one currently, subject to change 👀
ok considering how fucking long this is already sirius is gonna have to be a whole other post, partially because i can’t even remember all the tattoos i’ve given him + the ones i imagine him having that i haven’t drawn, but i’ll tack it onto the end of this post once i write it up 😌
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eruden-writes · 3 years
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Wretched Creature - Part 3
A Beauty and the Beast retelling.
After taking on her father’s punishment, Bellona finds herself imprisoned at a castle with Larek, a man who has an incessant need to self-depreciate himself despite being decently attractive, and a contingent of sentient objects.
Needless to say, it’s a confusing time all around.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
---
At some point, she and Larek began to run into each other. Perhaps he noticed she gravitated toward the library, since - after the first few run-ins - he appeared to visit the books more frequently. Bellona would try to shake him off. There was only so far she could go, though. Eventually, tired of actively trying to avoid him, she'd simply ignore him.
In the library, they'd sit on opposite sides of the room, quietly reading. In the garden, they'd pass each other on the path. Through the castle, they'd gravitate to opposite sides of the corridors. Over time, he edged closer. Asking about her books or informing her about the noteworthy fauna in the garden or history in the castle.
Bellona didn't know when or how it happened, but one day she realized Larek no longer skirted the edges of her day to day life. They'd sit close in the library and linger over books, sharing insights. Larek sometimes surprised her with a succinct observation she never would have considered. Or they'd walk through the garden together, where she taught him to make flower crowns and relayed her late mother's herbal knowledge. On one particularly clear, crisp night, the two even went to the solarium to view the stars and he pointed out constellations she hadn't even known.
The strangeness of the castle soon became her new normal and, oddly, she found herself fitting in. She'd bake and cook with Miss Chai or help Fruk clean the hard-to-reach places in the castle. Often, she'd watch the teacup children, keeping them entertained with stories or what projects they could do.
But Larek's ongoing crusade of how his body was wretched and ugly and useless remained.
One day, while they read together on one of the couches in the library, Larek began complaining. She wasn't even sure what triggered his self-hate. Perhaps something daring he read in his own book, reminding him of his perceived inadequacies. Fed up with his sentiments - taking them somewhat personally, for some reason - she shot back to him, "Should I show you how to love yourself?"
That certainly got his attention. Larek's eyes snapped to her face, wide with momentary shock. Bellona refused to look at him. Her eyes glued to the book in her lap, trying to remain cool as her brain agonized in embarrassment. The expression on his face shifted as his eyes narrowed, an uncertain flush biting at his cheeks. "How, exactly?"
The scant space between them, on the library couch, warmed and sizzled. If a hapless dust mote happened to fall between them, it'd burn up. Bellona pretended to finish her page, before calmly placing her bookmark and closing her book. Her attention slowly turned to Larek. He shifted beneath her eye and, she thought, he was holding his breath. He looked stiff and awkward, like the young men in the village whenever a woman repaid a flirtatious remark. Making a contemplative sound, Bellona set her book aside before bridging the space between herself and Larek.
"Correct me if I'm wrong," she started, trying to keep the smile off her lips as she reached to his cheek. His body heat seared into her fingertips and the pink on his cheeks darkened. "But you're more of a physical learner, aren't you?"
The knot in his throat bobbed as he swallowed, eyes never leaving her face. When he spoke, his words came out in a rasp, "Very much so."
"In that case," Bellona purred, the smile cresting her lips now. Her hands drew to his chest, pressing her palms flat against him. Beneath her touch, his heart thundered. She leaned close, lips brushing his as she spoke, "I should show rather than tell, shouldn't I?"
When their lips met, heat bloomed in her and her eyelids fluttered shut. Bellona leaned further into his heat, feeling his chest rise and fall with excitement as she deepened the kiss. His warm palms pressed to her hips, their positions shifting until she was straddling his lap. A throaty groan left his lips, her hand finding itself buried in his hair and giving him a little tug.
Excitement flashed through Bellona as Larek's hands tightened on her hips, his own bucking up into her. She answered with a little gasp of her own, breaking the kiss. Her eyes flickered open, her mouth returning to his to catch his lower lip between her teeth.
Larek groaned again, deep in his chest and vibrating against her palms, as her nip sunk in. Instead of pulling her closer, his hands pressed to her arms and firmly pushed her back. Her curious look was met with three words that brought chilly displeasure to her gut. "We should stop."
"What?" Suddenly, the delightful heat she'd stoked turned sickly and painful. Her eyes searched his face, wondering if this was a cruel teasing on his part. But a sober seriousness pinched at Larek's features. "Why?"
She hated the fact she sounded so hurt.
It took Larek a moment to answer. His eyes turning away from her, as if to find a physical representation of his excuse. "None of this is fair. Especially not to you."
The heat inside Bellona shifted. It turned from warm and fuzzy to biting and rigid. Her time with him, idling away the days, had nearly made her forget. He was her captor, keeping her in the castle through a deal. How could she forget that? How could she so eagerly kiss him, let alone climb into his lap? Why was she so upset he'd stopped?
Confusion bit at the back of her eyes as she pushed off him. She blinked back the tears, anger whirling around her head. At herself, the situation, Larek.
For once, Larek's tone was hesitant. "Bellona?"
Her name on his lips spurred the rage inside her. She wheeled her hand back, letting it fly through the air until her palm made impact with his cheek. A satisfying SMACK echoed in the library. With her hand stinging, Bellona stormed from the library, leaving Larek behind. His eyes wide and a red hand mark flaming at his cheek.
After the library incident, Bellona ignored Larek. He'd approach and she'd brush passed him. He'd ask about the book she was reading, but she never looked up or she got up and left the room. By the third day, he took the hint and tried to smooth things over. They were sweet attempts - bouquets of wildflowers, baking her a dessert, trinkets from carved wood - and almost melted her cold exterior.
Instead of thawing, his actions ended up cracking her. One morning, while in a sun-dappled garden, she stared at the things Larek had thrust into her arms. A bouquet of flowers - lilies, this time - and something new. A necklace made of bone and carved with delicate designs. Her thumb traced the carefully etched lines as he explained where he'd gotten the materials and bumbled over his reason for making it.
She didn't fully hear him. Her brain was stuck on flowers and sweets and, now, jewelry. Trappings of courtship and mocking ones, at that.
"Stop!" Bellona threw the bouquet and necklace - made of bone decorated by Larek with intricate carvings - back into his face. Clenching her fists, she glared up into the man's face, face ruddy from frustration and confused tears swelling on her lashes. "Stop with all this! This is confusing enough for me, as is."
"What?" The word came out small for someone who liked to pretend to be bigger than he was.
"What happened in the library was a mistake." Her words came out fiercer than she anticipated. Or maybe a subconscious part of her liked how pained Larek looked from her outburst and wanted more. Still, perhaps, she couldn't deny the hurt and confusion making her heart ache. Tears started to stream down her cheeks and, savagely, she wiped them away as they fell. "No matter what, I'm a captive here. Anything developing between us would be wrong."
With her eyes on the ground, Bellona could tell he stared at her. That just made the heat in her flare again. She wanted to scream at him to say or do something. Pride kept her shoulders hunched, palms swiping at her cheeks as more tears fell.
"Go home."
Her head snapped up, brows furrowed as the surprise halted her tears. "What?"
"Go home. See your father." Larek spoke slowly, as if he didn't want to say the words. His gaze locked onto previously offered gifts in his arms. "Return to me when you're ready."
The world felt strangely still to her, though birds fluttered overhead and bugs flitted in the corner of her vision. Her pulse throbbed in her ears, anxious trembles clenching at her stomach. After a deep breath, Bellona asked, "And if that's never?"
He didn't answer right away. His eyes were still on the items in his arms while the knot at his throat bobbed. Finally, he drew his eyes to Bellona's face, expression pinched with an ache she couldn't define. "Then I'll accept that."
---
Moments later, she was in her room, intending to pack to visit her father. But, as she entered the chambers, a voice said she shouldn't have anything to pack. He'd kept her there, against her will. She should have fled the garden and gone straight home.
Numbly, she began gathering items, laying them out atop a blanket she'd later fashion into a bag. A book of pressed flowers, started by she and Larek. Sloppy drawings the teacup children had made. Her own sketches, in a bound book made with Miss Lumi's direction. With the book she was currently reading in hand, she paused.
"You can take that," Causton's clipped tone came from the doorway. Bellona spun, eyes widening as she saw the crowd.
Causton, Miss Lumi, Fruk, Miss Chai and the little teacups, and... more. It surprised Bellona that she could name each one, had grown to know them well. Their expressions ran the gamut from dismal to embittered. A miserable cloud hovered over them, each staring from the hall, none entering her room. Many seemed about ready to say something.
"Bellona, please don't leave. We need you to-" One of the little teacups - Grey -clattered forward, their small voice sounding close to breaking. They were stopped by Miss Chai, tilting her spout to halt their progress.
"I need space from Larek, from here." She turned back to her things, deciding she had what she wanted to keep. Trying not to look at them, she tied the blanket closed, before folding and wrapping until she had a makeshift bag. Did they know what had happened between she and Larek? He seemed to tell them everything. That thought made her stomach spin and, if she hadn't been fighting down tears earlier, now she was. "I'll be back. I just... I need to think."
No more was said as she shrugged on a coat, the spring days still a tinge chilly from winter. She had made her way out of her bedroom and down the hall when one of them spoke again. Again, her heart lurched, closing her eyes to stymie the sudden flood of tears.
"Come back soon," Fruk growled, voice thick with hurt. His words softened as he added, "We're going to miss you."
It took her a moment to reply. Two deep breaths and a swallow, before she half-turned to give the assembled a watery smile. "I'll try."
With that, Bellona hurried down the stairs and out of the castle, refusing to look back again.
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multifandomhaven · 4 years
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Tip VI
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Pairing: Nacho Varga x OC
Night melted into morning and, as Nacho and Sarah lay on the couch, their words got a little less guarded. Nacho suggested retaliation and Sarah shot him down every single time.
"Let me take care of it, Sarah," Nacho gently prodded.
He sat on the opposite end of the sofa, Sarah's feet in his lap. His fingers worked from the bottom of her feet, rubbing and circling like he'd been born and trained for it, all the way up to her knee and back down again. "I'll go... have a talk with him."
Sarah sighed, her head laid back against the arm of the couch. She felt Lola shift beside her, sandwiched between her rib and the cushion, and gave her a scratch behind her ear. "No. No way."
"Why not?" Nacho asked, rubbing his palm over the plane of her leg. His finger circled her ankle lightly, before making it's way back down again. "I can handle him."
Sarah relaxed a little further against him, turning to putty when both hands moved up, massaging her calves. "I don't doubt that you can, I just don't want you getting into trouble for me."
Nacho glanced at her though the corner of his eye and shook his head. "I won't."
"C'mon, you don't know that," Sarah sat up on her elbows, the black shirt rising on her stomach as she did. Nacho's eyes left her own and skimmed up her legs, over the lace panties he knew he'd be dreaming about for weeks, and onto the skin of her stomach, greedily drinking in the sight. Sarah's eyes blazed and she snapped her fingers at him, her frown deepening. "Hey, I don't want you going to jail! Especially not for me."
"Sarah -"
She pulled her legs out of his lap, missing the pleasant warmth of his hands the moment she did. "No, Nacho. My answer is no. I don't want you going down there. I just want to... forget. Move on."
Nacho sighed and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his head bowed. He brought his thumbs up to pinch the bridge of his nose, frustration clear on his face. Sarah could see the muscle in his jaw tick before he spoke. "Alright."
"Thank you," Sarah said, her voice quiet. She leaned up to match his position and threaded her arm through his own. She leaned her head against his shoulder while her fingers toyed with the leather bracelet on his wrist.
Nacho let out a deep breath and then turned his head to her again. "Did you give my offer any thought?"
"A little," Sarah admitted softly. "Are you sure your Dad wouldn't mind?"
Nacho gave her a small smile. "Of course not."
"Does he know that you're even offering a job on his behalf?" Sarah asked. "I wouldn't want to cause him any trouble."
Nacho pulled her with him as he leaned back against the cushion. Sarah chuckled lightly, but leaned into him, resting her head on his chest and wrapping her one arm around his waist. Her legs found their way over his and he lay one hand just above her knee while the other wandered over her side and under the hem of her shirt, his fingers splaying out across her hip, careful of the bruises he so desperately wanted to avenge. "He welcomes the help."
"And you're positive he isn't going to be blindsided by this?" Sarah pushed. "I don't -"
Nacho leaned down and captured her lips in a quick kiss. "Trust me."
"I do," Sarah smiled, their faces still only inches apart.
Nacho pecked her lips again and said, "Good."
"I was wondering," Sarah started after a while, pulling her bottom lip between her teeth. "Not that I'm rushing you or whoever, or anything like that, but... have you heard anything about my car?"
"Only a little," Nacho admitted, then he remembered something that one of the guy's had said to him. "Speaking of your car, did you have any leaks that you knew about?"
Sarah shook her head. "No... but, I wouldn't really have noticed unless it was kinda obvious. Why?"
"Your radiator was cracked," he told her. "It hadn't been for long, because it would've overheated before now, but," he blinked, taking her features in, "...you ever seen anyone around your car?"
"W-What do you mean?" Sarah asked, reeling back at the insinuation. "You have to be more specific."
Nacho sighed. "Have you ever seen anyone suspicious around your car?"
"No," Sarah said quickly. "Why? Do you - do you think what happened was deliberate?"
"We're thinking so, yeah." Nacho nodded. "Did that bastard ever go near your car at work?"
"No, never," Sarah assured him. "I always parked near the road in front of the diner... I would've seen if he did."
"Okay." Nacho stared into her eyes. "Does he know where you live?"
Sarah paled, her heart thudding wildly in her chest. "No, I don't think so."
"I'm going to get another lock for your door. Extra protection," Nacho said in an attempt to reassure her. "Just to put us at ease, yeah?"
Sarah nodded, her eyes beginning to water. "Yeah."
"Hey," Nacho said quietly. "It's alright. I won't let anything happen to you."
Sarah sniffed and nodded again. "I know."
Nacho rubbed her back, his hand big and burning, the heat of it seeping through her shirt and straight into her bones.
Nacho saw the anxiety that threatened to overtake her again, and decided to change the subject. "Let's go out to eat."
"Are you hungry?" Sarah sniffed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She started to get up, but Nacho grabbed her wrist gently. "Nacho, I can make you something if you're hung-"
Nacho shook his head lightly, his lips pulled back in a small smile. "No, no. I want to take you out."
"Take me out?" Sarah repeated quietly. "Out as in... a date?"
"Yeah," Nacho raised a scarred eyebrow, but his smile only stretched farther. Sarah thought it might have been the only time she'd ever seen him smile - a real smile with teeth and everything. "A date."
Heat bloomed across Sarah's face, the redness bringing her freckles to life, and she laughed, the sound airy and smooth. Nacho forgot how much he loved her laugh - genuine and uncaring. She covered her cheeks with her fingers, the suddenness of his request rendering her speechless.
Nacho snorted a laugh and tugged her hands away, scolding her gently. "Don't hide from me. You look cute when you're blushing."
Sarah chuckled and shook her head, her face a tinge more red than before. "You're ridiculous."
"What do you say?" He asked her again, his eyes sincere. "Do you want to go on a date me?"
"Yes," Sarah nodded, her face still flushed. "I'd love to go on a date with you."
Nacho pulled her in, pressing a kiss to her forehead before he leaned down and done the same with her lips. He lingered there for a moment before he pulled away. "I'm going to go back to my apartment to take a shower. I'll pick you up say... eight o'clock?"
Sarah smiled. "Eight sounds perfect."
"Okay," Nacho said back. "I'll see you then."
A few hours later Sarah stood in front of her mirror, her makeup smokey and her hair curled just so. She tightened the towel around her and sighed, going over every outfit she had in her head. The blue dress was too frumpy, a gift from her sister a few years back, and the red one was too cutesy for a date, she thought, mentally cringing at the image of her in the frilly skirt with little white flowers sitting next to what she could only imagine Nacho would show up in.
He liked to look nice most days - would it be the same on a date or would he be even more dressed up than usual? What if she was over-dressed and looked like a fool next to him?
Sarah groaned and plopped herself on her bed, her hands picking at the end of a curl nervously. Her knee bounced, her nervousness personified, but then, like something out of a fairy tale - real life magic - she remembered the dress she wore to her sister's graduation.
She dashed to the closet and swung the doors open wide, her hands making quick work of going through the racks. She shoved and pulled at every article of clothing she owned until finally she saw it, hanging by its lonesome at the back of her closet. Gingerly she pulled it off the rack and sniffed it - she didn't want to risk smelling like mildew - and smiled when the smell of her detergent met her nose. She quickly pulled on her best pair of matching underwear - black lace - and pulled the dress on over top. She spritzed a few sprays of her favorite fragrance onto her, inhaling the vanilla that now perfumed her bedroom.
Staring into the mirror, her painted lips stretched into a wide smile. She turned sideways, pulling at the bottom a bit, and smoothed out all the wrinkles. She had to admit, as shallow as she thought she might sound, she looked nicer than she had in as long as she could remember.
She pulled on a pair of black heeled booties and threw a layered necklace on just as a knock sounded on her door.
With a long, deep breath to calm herself she walked to the door and opened it.
"Wow," Nacho said, his eyes raking over her from her head to her feet. She noticed how his gaze lingered on the heels, and how he tugged his lip into his mouth at the mere sight of them, before he tore his eyes away from them and held the bundle of flowers out to her. "You look... wow."
Sarah blushed again, but took the flowers all the same. "How did you know I like lilies?"
Nacho shrugged. "I didn't take you for a roses type of girl."
Sarah hummed and filled a vase with water, gently arranging the flowers on her kitchen counter. "They're beautiful, Nacho. Thank you."
"They don't have anything on you," Nacho said with a grin. "You look amazing."
Sarah gave him a slow twirl. "You think so?"
"My eyes won't be the only ones glued to you tonight," Nacho promised, his voice thick. "I might have to take a baseball bat in with me. Beat all the other guys away from you."
Sarah laughed, the same beautiful one as before, and Nacho's chest puffed with pride. He was the one to pull that sound from her. "Alright, Casanova, let's get going."
"After you," Nacho gestured, shutting the door and locking it behind them.
The restaurant he took her to was more upscale than any she'd ever been to. There were waiters in tuxes, carrying trays of food still sizzling on the plates. She'd already downed a glass or two of wine - enough to loosen her tongue and actions - and found herself laughing when Nacho commented on how beautiful she looked every time the chance arose.
"Look," he nodded subtly toward a woman leering in their direction. "Even the women here are checking you out."
Sarah cackled loudly, and a few heads turned in their direction. Sarah ducked her head a bit, but the sound still flowed past her lips. "More like she's upset because I'm here with the most handsome guy in the place."
Nacho shook his head, his eyes crinkling in the corners. "That wine's kicking in, huh?"
"Something like that," Sarah admitted with a grin. "This is the best night I've had in a really long time."
Nacho nodded, his eyes trained on her. "Yeah. Me too."
"I like you, Nacho. I really, really like you," Sarah told him softly. "I've gotta be honest, it kinda scares me."
"What's there to be scared of?" Nacho asked. "I wouldn't ever hurt you."
Sarah raised her glass to him and took another sip of wine. "I know, but... I've never had the best luck when it comes to relationships."
"Well," Nacho said lightly, mimicking her action with the glass, he raised his to her. "Here's to me being the one to break that streak."
Sarah smiled and leaned across the table. Nacho got the hint and closed the gap, pressing his lips to hers.
Some of the other patrons rolled their eyes, and some didn't even notice.
The man in the farthest corner, baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, noticed, and he seethed with anger. He threw some cash down onto the table and stalked out of the establishment. The walk to his car was a short one, and when he got inside he found himself staring through the window at the happy couple.
His eyes blazed when he saw him take Sarah's hand into his own.
The man tore off his cap and ran his hand through his dark, curly hair in a fit of pure rage. He started the car and peeled out of the parking lot, tires screeching.
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honestsycrets · 5 years
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No Thieves Welcome XVII: Lilies
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❛ pairing | hvitserk x reader
❛ type | multi
❛ summary | houseshopping. funeral. something he probably shouldn’t have said but can’t take back now!
❛  warnings | drugs, drug use, depression, mention of death, mention of murder, nsfw, oral (female receiving), overbearing aslaug, jealousy
❛ sy’s notes | this chapter is super fucking long. smut is toward the bottom!
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The next morning is tense.
Hvitserk had been looking for an apartment for some time. Something… nice. For his new, insta-family and you. You’re not particularly hard to please. Or at least, not compared to mother. Mother wouldn’t accept an uncustomizable apartment. No, no, no! She strides around the condo like she owns it. Your hand is tight in Hvitserk’s. Something has changed since the last time you met Aslaug-- and it’s not just your baby bump.
“We can the crib here.” Aslaug motions to a grey wall. She cups her cheek, holding her tiny pooch under her arm.
“Crib?” You say.
“Well yes, the boys should sleep together.” She informs you. “If they’re together in your womb, the gods want them to be together in their crib. A big one, white I think.”
Hvitserk’s puffy eyes are raw, incapable of dealing with the imbalance between his mother’s attitude and yours. She was, after all, the matriarch. He usually went with whatever she had to say. Now his bones were being crunched over your forceful grip-- and his mind kept wandering to the night before.
“But what of independence?” You ask.
“Who needs it?” Aslaug laughs, patting your belly without so much as consent. “My grandchildren will be just fine sleeping together.”
Thor--
“I thought we could have two.”
“You won’t say that when its two twenty-nine in the morning and you’ve just put one down.”
You blank. You know that it won’t be easy, not with two, but… you glance over to Hvitserk. A faux lily sits in a tall vase. You’re not sure what it is with the lily. Lately, he had been bringing two vases of flowers home. One for you, of course. But the other…
“It only has two bedrooms.” You note.
“Will you need more?” Aslaug asks. She has a point, you suppose. The twins can share a bedroom. You would be just across the open hallway. Unless you had the intention for another child and-- you glance over to Hvitserk’s face. He turns his head, red-rimmed eyes considering the thoughts that you were thinking.
“Yeah… uh. We can move if we have more.” He reasons. Aslaug claps her hands together, mumbling something about completing the paperwork to the condo. You let go of his hand, going to the double doors that lead out to a harbour. It… makes you anxious. But there were two doors. As Aslaug said, you could put a lock on it or improve on the security.
It’s a clear, beautiful day. Hvitserk listens to the door closing. The sound of his mother’s proud and loud voice over the phone practically riveting with the pride of becoming a grandmother. Hvitserk steps closer to you, his head fuzzy but intentions clear. He’s happy-- happy to be a father. Not yet, but soon. The sooner Thora’s funeral came, the better. He needs to close the trap on his dead best friend. You cup his hand.
“Are you okay?”
“As okay as I’m gonna be.” He says, nuzzling his head against the side of your neck. You reach out, opening the double doors. It looks like it’ll make a good place to raise a young family as… well, a mother. For all your proud studying, it would be on the back burner until the kids were in school.
“Are you sure we can afford this?” You ask.
“Mor doesn’t have any grandkids.” He explains. “She wants them happy.”
You don’t know the interworkings of his family. Something tells you, you don’t want to know them either.
--
Hvitserk wears a finely pressed suit the following week. Mother buys it from some upscale company and wastes his father’s money on a fancy name that he can’t pronounce. She buttons him into a suit with a sheening satin vest. The black-tie is tucked underneath the vest. She slides in a silver clip to keep his tie from becoming less than spectacular.
“If they ask anything,” Aslaug begins to button his suit jacket. Her slender fingers have a slight tremor.
“They won’t,” Hvitserk grasps his mother’s hand, leaning into her wavy reddish-brown hair. Her father was in too much grief to prolong Thora’s pain. There was nothing to do but bury her. “It’s a funeral.”
She knows. She knows there’s more to it than that. Ragnar and Bjorn know that too. Hvitserk slides a crisp roll of paper from behind his ear, digging in his pocket for a lighter. Aslaug’s hand tightens along his wrist to stop him.
“Hvitserk. You can’t smoke.”
“Why the fuck not?” He grumbles, jerking his wrist free with his lighter.
“You’ll smell,” she says. “Take a pill instead.”
He wanted to be in his right mind for this. To say goodbye to his best friend. But right now, being in the right mind looks fucking pointless. He rolls the metal wheel of his cigarette lighter out of anxiety. The fire plumes, burning his thumb because of how sloppy he was.
“Gimme a hit.”
Aslaug reaches back into her black designer handbag, finding a small baggie full of all the medications that made mommie’s day in that much better since they were children. He didn’t slip into the waters of Kattegat by accident, after all. She hands him a pill; Xanax. Attempts to give him another.
“Na,” he looks to the oak door. “I gotta go get (Y/N) with Ubbe.”
“She should come to get you.”
Aslaug is just worried. But Hvitserk, unscrewing the lid to his plastic bottle of booze, slumps into one of the chairs in his room. “She’s fuckin’ pregnant, Mor. Besides, Ubbe’s driving.”
“I’m only worried she might not be the one for you. I heard you the other night. Throwing things because she won’t say it to you.”
At least, not on your own accord. No ‘i love you.’ Maybe he was already in love before this even got so deep. Hvitserk looks down to the cigarette between his fingers. It’s going to be one of those kinds of days. One where he really can’t hide it but has to. Thora’s father needs him there.
“It’s uh--” an excuse, he needs one. “--daddie hormones.”
What the fuck is he saying?
Mother gives him that look. The softening of her eyes, the pull of her eyebrows together in sheer, pathetic pity. Hvitserk becomes mush against the chair, slouching under his need for this conversation to end. Aslaug reaches out to tighten his bun.
Clack! Clack! Hvitserk’s eyes pan toward the door.
“Can I come in? We have to go soon.” Ubbe pushes the door apart. It was never a real question, just a statement. Hvitserk shuns his mother away, stumbling to his bathroom.
“Yeah, we can hit the road.”
--
Everything was okay.
He has his woman on his arm, his babies under his hand. There are lilies everywhere. Big lilies. Little lilies. So many lilies. He likes lilies. He’s paced the chapel so many times, up and down, to see Thora in the dress her father and he chose. The ethereal one that she made by hand, stitching the butterfly sleeves herself.
“Sorry about your loss Hvit.”
He’s heard that so much that his ears are going numb. Ubbe stands behind him, expecting him to drop like the little opportunistic fuck that he was. He isn’t about to drop in front of Thora’s grieving father, who hadn’t left Thora’s side since this whole shit storm began.
“Do you need out?” You ask him, turning your head against his shoulder. You both sit on some plain bleachers. The thin cushioning is making his ass go numb. But god, you’re gorgeous. Hvitserk brings his fingers up to brush your lovely, pinky strand of hair away from your face.
“Na,” he whispers in your ear, but it's elevated enough that others can hear. “Coul’ use a blowjob tho.”
You look at him with that look. The one that said he wasn’t getting jackshit in this damn church. Your hand smoothes over his thigh, cupping inward and traveling up. His breath hitches and you lean in, your lips tickling his. “When we get home, I’ll fuck the sad out of you.”
He holds your gaze as his tongue courses over his upper lip, unusually moist. “I’ma hold you to tha,” the words come out sluggish.
“Sorry about your loss, Hvitserk.”
He recognizes the voice as belonging to that little waste of spunk, Magnus. He turns up his drowsy red-rimmed eyes, swaying in his seat.
“Na, you ain’.” Hvitserk accuses, “Stop lyin’.”
“Hvitserk.” You reprimand, elbowing him in his flat stomach. As opposed to Magnus’s usual duck down and out, he shoves his hands into his pocket.
“He’s right, (Y/N).” Magnus cuts you off. “I don’t mean it. Because I know he had something to do with it.”
“With her death? Magnus--”
“I loved her.” Hvitserk cuts off. Your head turns so quick, Ubbe swears it spun, twisting your head unnaturally to look at Hvitserk with an ‘excuse me?’ pending. You never say it though.
“I think you should go.” The voice belongs not to any of the young adults there. But an older man in his mid-forties. His eyes are red-rimmed and raw. Thora’s father turns his arms over one another.
“I’ll take him,” Ubbe grasps Magnus’s bicep, tugging him out of Hvitserk’s line of sight. Hvitserk slumps back in his chair and looks up to Thora’s father with eyes as guilty as the dog that stole the steak, but in his drug haze, it looks like nothing short of intense grief. Her father pats his shoulder.
“You okay son?”
He nods. “I’m okay.”
Then there’s a relief when his so-called ‘father’ leaves to speak to relatives. He doesn’t remember anything after that.
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Hvitserk wakes up in his room. His head is pounding-- he looks to the minifridge in his room and debates just how much effort it would demand to go get some water. He slumps over the edge, huffing air to get his honey hair out of his eyes.
“You’re awake?”
Not entirely, but okay. Hvitserk flops around to look at you, wearing a pretty in pink slip with gorgeous white lace. That… yeah, that looks good. Hvitserk’s dick is acting up already, jolting up behind some shorts he doesn’t honestly remember putting on.
“Yeah, pretty baby.” He says in a sleepy haze, dragging himself over to your side of the bed. His hands trace your hips-- but he lets out a hiss when you smack them off of your hips. “What was that for?”
You don’t answer.
“Aw c’mon baby…” Hvitserk groans, slinking his muscled arm under your neck. All that work moving boxes had done his arms a world of good. He twists you back to face him, facing the wiggles to the very edge of the bed. “What’re you pouting about now?”
“You said you love her soo much.”
He blanks. He doesn’t know exactly what you’re talking about. The medicine had done a world of good-- and a world of ‘I don’t fucking remember my last name’ during the day. Does he even remember being a pallbearer? The answer, no.
“Uh.”
“Thora,” you spit out.
Shit. Hvitserk realizes that in that state-- there’s no telling what he probably blathered on about. In the presence of his… really, really pregnant baby mama. Not the best way to wake up. But hey, he could work himself out of it with the truth.
“Babe,” he says. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Sure you didn’t.”
There’s not enough Xanax in the world to deal with this shit. When he took it from his mother, he forgot one itty bitty, teeny weeny important detail. He was a man with an incredibly pregnant girlfriend. Then again, he didn’t really think you gave a rats ass about who he loved. It wasn’t like you were writing his name in notebooks or anything.
“Are we really doing this again?” Hvitserk slumps. He doesn’t mean to-- but for once, he doesn’t have the energy to deal with it. The fits are tiring.
“Doing what, again?” You peer over your shoulder.
“You’re jealous. Over her.”
“It tends to happen when you cheat on me for--”
Cheat? You broke up with him! He laughs at the sentiment, causing you to roll around. Your fist is a few inches short of his face when he catches it, twisting and pulling you down on top of his chest.
“Ha, gotcha!” He beams, a proud little joke behind his voice. “But for the record-- I’ve never cheated on you.”
“Stop lying. Precious pretty Thora and you--”
“You don’t understand.” He exhales, listening to you blather on about kissing or loving or… whatever the case was. How she was always his endgame which most the time Hvitserk couldn’t pick between almond cake or oven pancakes!
Exasperated, Hvitserk lurches to his night table. He knocks off a book, Hygge: Fatherly Parenting on the way to the knob. Pulling it open, he locates a worn down sketchbook.
“What are you doing?” You complain, irritated with his long stretching and fumbling around. He surfaces back into the bed with his notebook, flicking the pages open. He flicks past the tiny squirrels fisting little fat snacks in his mouth or the old lady who always brought him cinnamon cookies.
He settles upon a charcoal portrait of a young woman, her eyes bright despite the lack of colour. She whirls a piece of hair around her finger, laughing at the viewer with keen admiration. He’s outlined the portrait and now, he began to fill in the shading.
“Is that me?” You lean over.
“Yeah, who else?”
Thora, that’s who.
He suppresses another groan as to not have you actually say what was on your mind.If you did, you’d be sassing off in a minute. Instead, you take his sketchbook from his fingers and flip through the many pages. Past the portrait of you biting your pencil, smiling at him from the other side of old Harald’s table. Or the one where you were dancing, an elective class-- and he, admiring.
“Did you draw all of these?”
That’s not the important part. He shrugs his shoulders, bringing an arm behind his head. You’ve settled out of the rage enough to actually amuse him by cuddling close. His other hand cups your shoulder.
“Yeah, that ain’t the important part. The important part--”
“But they’re incredible. You should be an artist.”
“Tch.” Hvitserk scoffs. “I’m a Ragnarsson. Only shit I’m gonna do is oversea some goods on the dock.”
“But--”
“But that’s not important. What’s important are the dates.”
You flick back pages, running your fingers past old, smudgy dates. Many of the dates run such a time ago, you swore that Hvitserk was still dating… Thora. He had to be. While you do the math in your head, Hvitserk takes the sketchbook, whizzing it across the room like a flopping frisbee, pages making audibly ruffles in the air. That shit wasn’t gonna do crap for him. What artist made money? Unless they were dead. And he wasn’t planning on dying any time soon.
He had twins, a… family. Everything was waiting for him. That didn’t specifically include dying so, while he loved drawing like a second breath, his family’s health and wealth was more important than his happiness at work. Besides uncle Rollo was fun. It wasn’t the worst job on Midgard.
“You were… dating her.”
He nods, “Yeah. Was.”
“What changed?” You ask, settling back against him. This time, without that backsass. Shit was better. He doesn’t want to ruin a good thing going.
“Fell outta love I guess.” Hvitserk shrugs. “Or in it.”
“That’s--” your brain scrambles, reassembling pieces in his admission that is more than a passing ‘i love you’ during dinner as he grabs a chunk of rye bread and whizzes out the door to the docks. “--an obsession.”
Hvitserk scoffs. He shouldn’t be surprised.
“You call it an obsession. I call it love. I mean, is there a difference?”
“No,” you mutter. Maybe he knows better. You never had been in love before. For all the cheesy K-Dramas you made him feast, maybe-- maybe you should be more receptive to his love. What was love but watching crappy shows with someone you loved?
“But I…”
“But what?” He asks. What else? What else could he possibly do to reassure you?
“It’s just-- she’s dead.”
Yeah, that much was sure today. “What about it?”
“She can’t fuck up. What if I fuck up? What if I let one of the kids run into the harbour or--”
“Mother did that once.” Hvitserk realizes that you-- you don’t understand. You don’t understand a fucking thing about what he’s eluding to. “Trippin’ off fuckin’ Xanax every day that Ubbe and I got tired.”
“Tired?”
He ignores you this time. “Point is, ya can’t fuck up that bad. I mean, how bad can it be?”
Neither of you really know.
“Just seems like kids are for like-- married people, right?”
You don’t say. Hvitserk can’t hide his brewing excitement, lurching annoyingly again to his nightstand and fetching something for the second time in one night. He knows how much you hate it when he wiggles mid-cuddle, but he promises you its worth it. He fetches a small box, flicking the top open.
“Do ya wanna be?”
A more reasonable you would have said no, your relationship was too young. That it was founded on sex. That you were having babies! You couldn’t worry about the ramifications of a wedding or marriage or whatever-- did he just ask that? Did he just--
“Yes. Wait-- no, wait-- did you just?”
You look down. The ring-- the one from before. The one that the chubby man accused Hvitserk of being unable to afford. Clearly, he had. Somehow. You don’t know, you don’t even care, picking it out from the nesting of plush cushions. Hvitserk swipes it up, glimmering it with his fingers.
“It’s yours if you say yes.” Hvitserk grins, toothy and cheeky as he always was.
“Who said I was saying no?” You accuse, cheeks feeling suddenly hot. He wants to hear it-- that word. Those easy little words that would seal everything up for him. You pout momentarily, too embarrassed to focus on anything but the ring between his fingers and the promise behind them.
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?” Hvitserk prompts. He’s milking it.
“I’ll marry you, Hvitserk. Stop smiling so much--”
“I can’t help it!” He laughs, “You’re mine!”
Easing the ring onto your finger, you feel his hand shaking. So unlike the boy you met, smooth and as collected as a Hvitserk could really be. Which wasn’t a whole bunch in his opinion but, yeah, it was something. It glimmers just like he thought it would.
“I wasn’t before?”
“I mean yeah but--” Hvitserk laughs, rolling over you. You push his chest, reminding him of his twins. Hvitserk steadies himself on his forearm. “Sorry, guys-- but really mine. All mine.”
“I was all yours before.”
Maybe you said it, but did you mean it before? Hvitserk doesn’t think so. But now, everything feels raw, and pulsing red, and-- real. Melodramatic as he was, it was real like it had never been before.
“Fuck,” there’s a lot of laughing. That’s how you know when the man is really happy. He dips down, dragging you over the bed to the edge. With a creak, he kneels on the floor.
“What are you doing,” you laugh back to him, bracing yourself for his usual favourite. When he was truly happy, he was eating. It’s only natural of course-- and fuck does he love easy access. You tug your blanket tight in your fingers as he lines up your thigh in small, growing hungry kisses. As you expect him to dig in, of course, he’d run away with a mean bite on either leg. The welts blossom under your skin, new with the old.
“Fuck Hvit-- ow!”
“Can’t let any other dick not know it’s mine,” Hvitserk rumbles. Dick like who? Dick like Magnus. Fuckin’ shit. With your short skirts, sometimes when you bent over the bites could be seen. He loved it when you would get questions. How did you manage that? Do you need some cream?
Fuck no, because at the end of the next day they’d be back.
He guides your legs over his broad shoulders. All that work at the docks helped his physique and you enjoyed it just as much if not more than before. He dips in, knowing for a fact that you don’t wear panties under slips. His nose nudges against your neatly kept pussy, gently inhaling. He’s such a dog.
“Hvitserk would you stop--”
He knows when he’s about to get booted. He relents, spreading you apart with his fingers. One smooth, broad and flat lick sends soft tickles up your spine and back down again with a second. Your breathing is always his first clue, smooth breaths picking up, quicker and hotter. He ceases his licks, suckling your folds near your entrance and dragging up-- toward your clit. It’s almost deliberate in the way that he avoids your clit, knowing exactly what might happen if he touched that pretty number.
“Hvit...” You whine, shoving his head closer to it. A quick orgasm is a useless orgasm to Hvitserk. He doesn’t just want you to get all you wanted, no, of course not. He wants it all. Hvitserk sways his tongue agonizingly slowly over your lips, twisting from one side to another all the way up to your clit. With one pang of a lick, your hips jolt up.
He drifts back down, drawing two of his fingers over the mess he’s made. Once his fingers are nicely wet, he prods your entrance. HIs mouth attaches to the side of your lips, enjoying your loud intake of air and the rush to expel it when his pace quickens. Finally, he allows himself to trace back up to your clit, experimentally darting his tongue out for a quick lick. Your abrupt jerking causes him to shift, pressing his lips against the button and sucking with force in time with the hot thrusts squelching inside your pussy.
It’s the ride he likes, bringing in the bud of your clit for a nice suckle always results in your hips undulating. Bringing him on a wild ride while his fingers fuck the juices out of you. When you cum, he doesn’t let you go for a second. Your juices flow down his knuckles, over the cold metal of the watch he had been wearing to the funeral.
“Fuck--” Hvitserk parts only when your hips slow down. “Who knew pregnant bitches made such a mess?”
Below your ass, you feel the sopping wet mess. You would have been ashamed if you were with anyone else. For Hvitserk, it's all apart of the ride. He suckles the remaining fluid off his finger, lapping away your mess between your legs.
“I don’t make messes…” you murmur, though it comes out as a pathetic whine. Hvitserk laughs, standing up with his thumbs caressing the waistband of his shorts. The material brushes down over his cock, already straining. He wraps his hand around the shaft as he steps out of his shorts, kicking them off into some other area of the room.
“C’mere,” Hvitserk says. Your legs fall open in offering, wiggling your hips closer. Hvitserk knows he’s not great at brilliant, romantic sex. He’s not going to delude himself into thinking that’ll be him either. Bending at the knees, Hvitserk hugs your legs to his chest. He slicks his dick in your slick, lip twitching into a smile when your hips shift. His eyes find yours, the only token of romantic concern he has. The rounded head of his cock teases your hole, teasing with a few faux pushes in before allowing himself to press inside. He slides inside with a playful thrust, slapping deep.
“Nnnh,” you whine, the complaint stretched out and loud. The others have probably heard-- Hvitserk pushing deeper, but slowly now until he’s ensconced.
“You look so--,” he soothes, pulling out a bit before thrusting back in. He braces himself into shallow thrusts, immediate and quick. His pace would slow, giving a deeply powerful one at the end of it all. “So-- good.”
Softly now, your hands trace your body. First, it’s something innocent. Trace your breasts, those wonderful titties Hvitserk loves to massage, dreams to fuck, and dies to sleep on midway in his shift at work. But then, your hands glide over his brood in your stomach. Two little ones, growing in his fiance’s womb now.
Bjorn didn’t tell him how that would feel. To see you full of him, so full and knocked up. No one could tell him of a hotter sight. His thrusts crack deep, holding your legs now over his elbows as he moves. He uses your legs like anchors, dragging them to you with every well-placed thrust.
“Ah-- fuck, Hvitserk.”
And his name-- off your tongue, it makes it even better. Hvitserk pants, pumping at a steady and brutal thrust into you. He cums, filling you deeply as he always had. As if it would make a difference now-- you were pregnant already! Hvitserk rides out his pleasure, pulling his cock out. Hvitserk kneels down, letting his fingers serve another purpose. They finger fuck you, nasty squelches of his cum and your excitement intermingling. Small kisses trace alone your thighs, trailing closer and closer.
Before he can get his lips back onto your cunt, you gush, spraying him with sweet pleasure. He’s soaked-- and he almost jolts back in his surprise. You feel as much you hear his low, pleased rumble. His fingers slide out as you calm down-- and he can’t deny that wide, cocky smile.
“You’re a mess.” You tell him, pouting so cutely that he knows he did a good job.
“A mess that made you a mess,” he returns, smiling wide and bright. If testament to anything-- the ring on your finger symbolized so much more than what the day started out to be. From grief to excitement, he knows Thora would have been happy for him. In the end, that happiness is all he wants--
And maybe. Just maybe, he can have it too.
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kokkoro · 6 years
Text
Violet Blue (11/15)
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General wolf rules for life: Eat. Rest. Rove in between. Render loyalty. Love the children. Cavil in moonlight. Tune your ears. Attend to the bones.  Make love. Howl often.     Clarissa Pinkola Estes
or
being moms is hard, being werewolf moms in the suburbs is even harder. (read here on ao3)
August 26, 2015
It’s dark when Clarke gently shakes you awake. You shift in that small bed, sheets twisted about your legs as you attempt to blink the sleep from the corners of your eyes. The lack of presence beside you is immediately noticeable, but through the haze you see Clarke next to by the side of the bed.
Her hair is a mess, haphazardly pulled from her face in a bun situated on top of her head. Strands escape, curl around her cheeks and near her chin, but the circles under her eyes are hard to miss. You probably look much the same.
“Lily?” you ask, voice rough. Her cold has refused to cooperate and with the unnaturally strong heat this far up in the Maine wilderness it’s been even tougher. The past week you had hoped it was on its way out, but--
Clarke shakes her head, her voice soft. “No.”
Your brace yourself on your forearms, pushing yourself up. You move the sheets aside, pulling your legs over the edge of the bed and positioning Clarke between your legs. Clarke doesn’t move as you reach out to cup her cheeks in your hands, tender and gentle, and you dip to press your lips softly to the crown of her head.
“Are you okay?” quiet, for her. Your forehead bumps hers affectionately and you linger. “Is it the pup?”
“No, Lexa, I’m... I’m fine. It’s…” And she inhales, lets it out. You feel it across your skin and you lean in to kiss the corner of her mouth. “It’s my mom.”
“Is Abby alright?”
“She’s fine.” Clarke says, and there’s a slight smile that puts your heart at ease when you pull away, but her eyes don’t meet yours.
“What’s the matter, Clarke?”
You hear her exhale. “She needs our help.”
-
It’s well past midnight by the time you have Lily and Aden bundled up in the backseat of the car for the drive to the hospital. They sleep through most of it, but Clarke doesn’t. She stares out the passenger window while you drive, this little bit of tension held between her eyes that you want to kiss away, but you simply hold her hand tighter in your lap.
An ambulance lingers near the front entrance when you pull into the small parking lot closest to the main entrance. It’s shifted into park in the emergency lane with the lights flickering but otherwise the area is quiet. You can see people through the glass doors as they walk past, the  fluorescent lights bright as it bleeds out onto the sidewalk.
You unbuckle Lily from her booster seat, tucking her close to your chest and she burrows into to your neck despite the heat. Her bare feet dangle, her breath warm over your skin and when you round the car to check on Clarke, you find her helping Aden down from the backseat. He reaches for her once his feet are on the ground, arms outstretched and a small half-hearted pout.
“Up?” Clarke says, and Aden nods. Clarke situates him on her hip and he rubs his left eye with a closed fist, the other hand curled into Clarke’s wrinkled t-shirt.
When you enter, a lady in a flower print shirt smiles at you from behind the check-in desk. She must remember you, or maybe the kids. “Abby expecting you?”
Aden wriggles and Clarke places him down. You look back at the receptionist. “She is.”
“I’ll page her down. Feel free to take a seat, it shouldn’t be long.” She gestures to the chairs behind you and you look back at them. A few are occupied. There’s a woman on her phone and a man with his fingers splinted together and Clarke moves close beside you, shoulders to elbows flush against one another. Compared to the heat outside, it's cold in here with the air conditioning and you feel the goosebumps along her arm. She presses a kiss to your shoulder and your lips find the center of her forehead.
Aden perks up at the sight of Abby when she enters through the doubles doors to your right a few minutes later, still in her white coat and scrubs, and at the sound of her brother’s excitement, Lily lifts her head from the crook of your neck.
“Hello there,” Abby says as Aden rushes forward and happily wraps himself around her legs. She rubs his back affectionately and Abby reaches out to pull her daughter closer for a hug,  trapping him in between. You can hear Aden’s giggles from here.
It’s a few seconds until someone lets go and you step close with Lily. Abby kisses both of you on the cheek in greeting before pulling away. “Follow me, please.”
She leads you to the elevators, waiting until the lot of you file into the space before entering last, and after pressing the appropriate floor button she steps back and waits for the doors to close. “I’m really glad you could make it.”
“Are they okay?” Clarke asks. The doors slide shut and the elevator begins it's ascent to the third floor.
“They’re a little banged up,” Abby says, absently straightening her coat. She inhales this deep breath and centers herself. “More tired than anything. With luck they’ll forget, but their family--” and at that she pauses, staring at the closed doors, struggling to find the words in the presence of Aden and Lily. She doesn’t seem to find them. “Let’s just say that they’re a long way from home.”
“Where…?”
“Canada.” Abby gives you a small smile. “We’re lucky they fell into the right hands.”
A soft ding sounds and elevator doors slide open. Abby leads the four of you down the hallway, doors numbered by a letter and a number, names scribbled on a small whiteboard beneath.
“What are their names?” you ask, voice soft as you adjust Lily as she begins to slip.
“Danny and Jack.” Abby responds, glancing over her shoulder. She looks front and the sound of your shoes echoes in the hall. It’s like she’s reading it from a file. “Danny Grace and Jack Kennington. Two years old. Grew up together. Their parents were close friends.”
Sure enough, near the end of the hall, Abby halts at the door labeled C3, Danny and Jack written out in red dry-erase marker that hangs, attached by a string. For a moment she is still
“Two entire packs laid to waste.” Abby breathes quietly into the empty space in front of her and you watch her hands curl into fists by her side.
“Mom.” Clarke starts, touching her mother’s elbow. “You did what you could.”
Abby shakes her head. “It never seems like enough.”
“I know.”
Gathering her bearings, Abby takes a deep breath and curls the errant strands of her hair back behind her ears. “I know I don’t need to tell you to be gentle, but they’ve been through more than enough.”
Clarke nods. “We will.”
It takes a moment for you to spot them huddled by the chair in the corner of the room.  Curled into each other, you see the glint of their eyes, that flash of yellow, and then, the colorful cartoon printed band-aids, the bruises. They look clean despite the batteredness. Tussled, as if someone managed to squeeze them into mismatched articles of unwanted (though hopefully clean) clothing left in the lost and found with varying amounts of success.
Tufts of fur signify a shift not fully settled, the hint of tiny claws and a cautiousness that is more than well placed -- their eyes. The little girl’s knuckles are white, bunched and clutched at her companion’s shirt, and the boy tries to hide his hiccups into his sleeve rather unsuccessfully. You manage to stop the empathetic noise before it manages to escape from the back of your throat.
They shrink further into the corner when you try to get closer and you stop immediately a few feet away. The little boy’s whimpers seem to louder now that you’re closer and even with the shadow cast by the chair you notice the still damp tear tracks over flushed cheeks and you shift Lily on your hip so you can squat down, resting her on your thigh and her bare feet brush the tile floor.
“Hello,” you say, your voice this soft lilt, and both pairs of eyes find you. Lily watches your face intently, gaze flickering back and forth between you and the two by the chair.
“Puppies,” Lily says, gurgled but soft from having woken up ten minutes ago. You feel the tight grip her left hand has on your shirt and you glance at the pure curiosity on her face. Her hold tightens as she points to the two little ones in the corner by the chair. She looks back at you expectantly for confirmation.
“Yes, Lily, pups.” You poke her belly. “Like you.”
The statement seems to ignite something in her and she squirms until you reluctantly let her go. There’s an instance of fear that settles in the pit of your gut as she hobbles over clumsily towards the pair, but when she gets close, she crouches down and whispers, “Hello.”
What follows is a gurgle of words and made up vocabulary. You hear Lily say her own name, repeatedly, and maybe it's for emphasis, pointing to herself like Clarke does when she has her in her high chair back at home, sharing applesauce and giggles with a spoon.
It’s not long before Aden pulls at Clarke’s hand and she lets him go. He scampers over to Lily’s side, pressing close and eager to be a part of the conversation.
You stand as Clarke steps up beside you, free of her tether, and you glance over at her and her eyes are soft and her shoulders have lost their tension. You know she’s already in love and honestly, so are you.
“Would you mind looking after them?” Abby says, and both you and Clarke turn in unison. “I’m working on finding a permanent home for them, but they could use a little bit of love right now.”
You find Clarke’s attention elsewhere, focused on the little pack of children now huddled by the chair. “Do you even have to ask,” Clarke says, not looking away.
Abby’s smile is soft and wistful as she watches her daughter, and you don’t know what it is that tips her off. A mother’s intuition maybe, or perhaps it's the way Clarke lingers on the pups--your hand closer to her stomach than her hip--but you’d blame it on the heightened sense of smell. It’s just a second, and then you see Abby’s jaw fall slack.
“Clarke are you pregnant?” It's soft, full of awe and wonder and you watch as Clarke takes a minute to let the question sink in.
(Sometimes it feels like fluke. A dream too good to be true--that you’ve managed to find yourself a family like this. To have helped make it and to want to see it grow. And here you are, in the middle of it, and when you look at where you’ve come from nothing has ever made more sense)
Clarke lifts her shoulders, lets them fall. She breathes in slowly, runs her fingers just under her eyes, and you lean over and kiss her cheek. You give her space though.Abby reaches out and you stand back and watch the embrace, Clarke’s face tucked into the crook of her mother’s neck.
“We’re not going to have enough room,” Clarke jokes with this happy, watery laugh--one that Abby shares. She lets go after a moment, but not before pressing a kiss to her daughter’s forehead.
“You need anything at all, you give me a call.”
Clarke laughs. “You sound like Lexa,” she says and you take the opportunity to move close again and press your nose against her temple, breathing in the scent of her. “But this isn’t my first rodeo.” Clarke brings up a hand to cup your cheek, absently brushing her thumb over your skin, and you kiss the inside of her wrist before her hand falls back down to her side. You don’t want to move.
“I’ll sit in the back with them,” you say, muffled into Clarke’s neck. You pull away after a moment, finding Clarke’s eyes, and she leans in to press her lips to yours.
“You just don’t want to sit in the front.”
“Who does?” you tease softly. “Especially when the alternative is crushed under four pups in the back seat.” It earns you a small chuckle and another kiss, but when the seconds tick by and Clarke doesn’t move away you whisper, “Are you sure?”
“As if you already haven’t made up your mind.”
“We’re a team first,” you say to her.
For a moment Clarke just breathes, takes a moment there in your space to gather her thoughts in peace. How easy distraction is as she glances over your shoulder at the little ones and their conversation makes it to you only in bits and pieces. Mostly Aden and Lily’s voices, and when you turn you  understand her captivation.
She looks up at you. “I can bring the car around back?” she says and you hold her stare, smiling faintly, but the longer you watch her the further it spreads. You know that look in her eye, and after a split second decision Clarke turns to her mother. “Is the loading dock busy this time of night?”
“Not particularly,” Abby answers. “Most of our shipments come in during the day.”
“Is it alright if we use it?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Clarke turns to you. “I’ll meet you there?”
You nod a confirmation and she kisses you briefly on the lips. She’s out the door seconds later.
“Thank you,” Abby says after a beat of silence. “If I had known about Clarke…”
You shake your head. “What?” you respond softly, mindful of the potential listeners. “You would have sent them back to Canada? You know we’re more than happy to look after them.”
“Four is a big commitment, even for the two of you. And with one on the way--”
“Clarke is more than capable of setting her limits. If she says she’s comfortable then I trust her to tell me if she isn’t,” you say and Abby falls quiet, looking away to watch the pups. “I will be there for her every step of the way, and I know so will you.”
You let out a breath, the sudden stiffness of your muscles lessening and you follow Abby’s line of sight towards the kids. For a moment you’re not sure how to approach them. You see Lily curled up against Aden, practically asleep, her little fingers curled into her brother’s sleeve while Aden, unbeknownst of his dwindling audience, continues his story about the rabbit that got away. The other two watch you with tired eyes, tiny heads bobbing as exhaustion threatens to take them. They don’t flinch this time though, most likely accustomed to your scent through Aden and Lily, and when you crouch down in front of them you see the hope in their eyes.
Lily rouses at your proximity, reaching out with insistent hands until you pull her close to your chest. She wraps her arms around your neck, squirms a bit to get comfortable, and sighs. The two watch the situation unfold.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” you say. You know the moment the words leave your mouth that you mean it. More than anything. “I promise.”
They don’t move, and you hear this quiet whine, from one or both you can’t tell but it makes your heart ache. But their are eyes open, hopeful, and you whisper, “How ever you’re comfortable.”
You wait a moment and then look over your shoulder, catching Abby’s attention. You gesture to Lily. “Abby could you?”
“Of course.” She comes close and takes Lily from you. Aden looks back at the both of you, and Abby gestures him over. “Come on.”
You watch as he goes, and once he’s close enough he grasps Abby’s hand with his own. “What’s the quickest way to the loading docks?”
“I can show you,” she says, the hand Aden holds swinging between them. “It’s been dead in here since ten o’clock.” Abby smiles. “In the good way.”
You nod with a smile of your own, and you focus on that warm feeling and let the wilderness take you. It’s quick and once your form settles you shake yourself of your clothes, tugging at your shirt until you manage to slip free of it. There must be some comfort in the form, for when Danny and Jack see you, the shift is close behind
They’re less skilled in coordination, but it’s to be expected. They trip and stumble, clothes half falling off but they could care less, and when they make it to you on their own accord, you help them with the rest. Holding gently to the loose hems with your teeth so they can wiggle free. You hear their soft whines, heads low but tails wagging between their legs as they inch as close to you as they think they’re allowed.
You nudge each of them gently with your nose, a greeting. They smell of hospital and its disinfectant, the cleanliness a bit overpowering, but thankfully you know it's superficial and only temporary. There’s the scent of the earth in them, underneath the dark brown and reds of their fur. Worldly and rich, even for ones so small. That indescribable puppy smell, as Clarke and yourself have have likened to call it over the years.
You gather the clothes in your mouth before following Abby out the door, looking both ways in the hallway out of habit and Abby’s laughter echoes. You check to make sure you’re being followed and you find the pups closer than expected, sticking to you like glue.
Thanks to Abby, you steer clear of the busier sections of the hospital, using staff only elevators and the routes Abby knows like the back of her hand. You run into one person, a man dressed in scrubs who you recognize and Abby nods to, hands full with your children. He chuckles, stepping aside to make room and watch you pass.
“Heda,” he says with this small bow of his head and you stop and acknowledge the sentiment before continuing on.
It’s a good five minutes before you make it to the loading docks on the first floor. Clarke is waiting out on the platform for you with the back hatch of the car already open, the back seats folded down. When she spots you she rolls her eyes.
You meet her by the car, pressing your head into her stomach. She cards her fingers through your fur, behind your ears, and ruffles until you let out this content rumble. She takes the clothes from your mouth, tossing them into the back with the blankets and then nudges you away to take Lily From Abby, Aden pressing close to her leg.
Her sight lands on Danny and Jack just behind your heels and they come up to her slowly when she crouches down, moving from behind your heels to lick at her outstretched hand, nudging into her palm. They whine pitifully when she moves away to buckle Lily into her booster seat but she doesn’t even manage to turn around before the complaints amplify, Lily mumbling insistently as she reaches out behind Clarke towards you.
Clarke groans, shoots you a look, and you tilt your head. “Don’t,” she scolds. “You know exactly what you’re doing.”
You let out this low bark and Clarke sighs, setting Lily down on her feet. Her body is full of wiggles and muttered laughter as she pads those few feet to where you are and you tell she wants to shift, but at the moment lacks the concentration to fully commit. Her ears are pointed, skin a little furrier, and when she presses her face against you you hear her answering woof deep in her chest.
Clarke shakes her head when you catch eyes with her, instead moving to give her mother a hug goodbye.
“You need anything,” Abby starts, Aden looking up at the both of them, Clarke’s hand on his head.
“I know.” Clarke presses close, just for a moment, before stepping away. “Thank you.”
“I need to get back to work, call me tomorrow with an update please.”
Clarke nods. Abby kisses her forehead and then steps away, offering a wave to you that you acknowledge with a dip of your head. She disappears through the doors back into the hospital.
“Do you want to sit in the back with momma too?” Clarke asks and Aden’s affirmation is immediate. “Alright. Go on.”
You herd them all into the back of the car, careful of limbs and tails. A couple of blankets and a few travel bags you keep in case of emergencies are spread out, plenty of room even for the five of you. They all find a spot around you, Lily spooned against your front, Aden with his head right next to yours, and finally Danny and Jack tentatively pressed up along your back. You try to ignore the fact that you feel them shaking.
“Everything good back there?”
Your answering woof is muffled, but Clarke seems to get the idea. You hear the jingle of the keys as she inserts them, then the rumble as the engine starts, and you let out a sigh.
The ride is long though far from unpleasant. Clarke rolls the windows down and the cool, night air swirls through the cabin of the car. You like the peace it brings despite the thoughts that sit in the back of your mind, not quite able to sleep. You breathe deeply, eyes closed and focused on the smells as the woods change and the air goes clearer. There’s little you can see from your spot laid out on the bed of the car, the tall stretch of trees and the night sky, and when the tires crunch onto the soft gravel road about an hour or so later, the car veering as Clarke takes a right, you know.
Ten minutes pass and the car finally pulls to a stop and you pick your head up to watch Clarke as she takes out the keys and hauls herself from the driver’s seat. Her footsteps are soft in the dirt of the driveway and when she opens the back hatch, the fond smile that steals it's way to her lips at the sight of you curled up with the pups makes your tail thump giddily against the blankets. It hasn’t even been long at all but you still miss her terribly.
“I’m not coming in there,” she says, resolute even in spite of the amusement tilting her lips, and you let out this barely audible whine. The pups don’t stir. “Lexa, no. I’m tired and I’m not sleeping in the back of the car no matter how soft you are.”
You exhale loudly through your nose, shaking your head. Standing, you stretch out the aches from your limbs, careful of the pups spread out around you, and looking at them now you realize both Lily and Aden must have shifted sometime during sleep. Aden yawns wide and it ends in a squeak, little puppy canines glinting in the dull light. He seems to notice you’re missing a second too late after you’ve already hopped down from the car, watching your form until his sleep addled mind understands and he quickly attempts to follow despite uncooperating legs and clothing.
Clarke picks him up before he falls, peeling him out of his now unfitted pajamas and setting him down by your paws. “Keep and eye on him, Lexa.” And you do, though he seems content to plop down beside you, hind legs sprawled in front of him and a tad drowsy.
Clarke reaches in for Lily next and repeats the process. Your daughter barely even registers the movement and Clarke hands her off to you and you gently take her scruff between your teeth. She dangles limpy, doesn’t stir, and you figure it's the small miracles in life.
“I’ll meet you inside,” Clarke tells you in this hushed voice, running her hand over your head, and you watch her a moment before nudging the side of Aden’s head with your nose, and he teeters to the left before catching himself. He scampers off towards the front steps then, and you take one last glance at Clarke and the open hatch before following your son inside.
The house is dark, but it smells like home. The front door opens up into the kitchen and the mismatched chairs that surround the kitchen table, the legs gouged with tiny teeth marks. A vase of half wilted flowers picked from the garden sits in the middle and old mugs of coffee you and Clarke brewed before leaving sit collecting condensation. There’s the scent of dinner, almost faded, and the old wood floors creak as you pass over them, the walls and windows drafty, and there’s bits of dirt and dust you and Clarke can’t seem to keep clean.
Out in the woods though, you can hear the trees, the peepers loud but not unpleasant, and at the sound of the door you glance around. You see two small pups clamber up the front steps inside, tripping over the lip of the door, and behind them Clarke picks up the rear, shifted, the white of her fur an iridescent glow in the night.
She prods them gently onward and their first hesitant steps into the kitchen are taken with considerable care, ears folded back along their scalp and cautious. You watch the twitch of their noses, pressed to the floor, and the movement of their eyes as they take in their unfamiliar surroundings. They look smaller among your things, never too far from Clarke, and quick to check for reassurance. They whine when she looks away, sticking close to Clarke’s heels as she wanders over to you.
Clarke licks at Lily’s face, who wags her tail and yips, nipping at Clarke’s jaw, and you place her down.
There’s a wordless exchange between the two of you. Held between the eyes, hers blue and warm, and you nudge her with the tip of your nose before leaving her with the pups. You head up the stairs near the back door, and then down the short hall to your room, fitting your snout between the open crack of the door and pushing it open.
You head towards your bed, take the sheets between your teeth and tug. It takes a bit of wrestling, a few firm shakes of your head until the sheets slip from the mattress. A few of the pillows tumble off and a couple others you tug with the blankets down the hall. The excess trails behind you, and you’re careful on the stairs so as not to trip and make a fool of yourself. It gets stuck however, and at the bottom you have to readjust, finding a better grip with your teeth and tugging forcefully. The blankets eventually slip free.
Jogging the rest of the way, you drag the blankets into the middle of the den and in front of the couch, ignoring to the best of your abilities Aden as he latches onto a corner and plants his feet. You pull him across the floor, these little growls rumbling in his chest, but he stops when he realizes you’re not interested in playing, and instead trails close behind.
You make a makeshift bed out of the blankets and the pillows stolen from the couch, pawing at them until you have this nice comfy clump of fabric you can sink into. Much of the space you leave for Clarke and the pups, lying down on the edge and sighing, watching them, waiting. Lily wastes no time, bounds over and collapses half on top of you, snuggled as close as possible. Aden is next, followed shortly by Clarke, and they find their space around you.
Danny and Jack are last, stuck a few feet away as if they think they’re not allowed, but you don’t let them linger. You haul yourself up again and take them one by one, picking them up and depositing them into the middle of the pile. It’s only when they’re settled, noses pressed into the blankets, that you relax, curled up behind them.
For a few moments it’s blissful peace, the wind and the familiar draft and the comforting way the woods seem to talk. The rustle of the leaves, the far off sound of the nighttime birds and the bugs... And then an odd sensation you’re being watched. You wait to see if it passes, but it doesn’t, and when you open your eyes you’re not that surprised to find Danny closer than expected.
She blinks, but doesn’t move away, exhaling this short puff of breath that sounds like a squeak and worms her way forward on her stomach. You lift your head up from your paws, and your instinct tells you to clean away the stench of the hospital, so you do. It’s small licks to the side of Danny’s face, and her eyes droop as she inches forward, enough to curl up between your front legs near your chest.  You do the same with Jack, just off to the left side of you, take comfort in the fact that his trembling subsides. He picks himself up not seconds later after you stop, curls right next to your side.
You take a moment to watch them. In the dark the others snore, aden kicking in his sleep and Lily nearly invisible against the white of Clarke’s fur. Clarke watches you from across the folds of the blanket, exhausted, but there’s this unmistakable smile in her eyes and it makes you feel at ease.
August 26, 2018
“Do you have your crayons?”
Danny doesn’t look at you, distracted by the tiny backpack she attempts to sling over her equally tiny shoulders. She misses a few times, fruitlessly waves her arm behind her in search of the pesky strap, and you wait a moment before helping her with it, adjusting the give so it doesn’t hang too loosely.
(Out of the corner of your eye you see Lily and Madi peeking from around the corner of the living room--the glint of their blonde hair in the early morning light)
“Snacks?”
Danny nods, head bobbing. She pushes her hair back when it falls in her face, clumsy hands and tiny fingers, and looks up at you there in the hallway. She doesn’t say anything, merely watches you with her big brown eyes and you know now how hard it's going to be to let them go.
You bump your nose against hers, your eyes closing briefly at her giggles and then press a kiss to her forehead. “I love you.”
“‘ove you too, momma.”
“You and Jack need to look out for one another okay?”
“Mm,” she says, almost solemnly with a singular nod. You pull distractedly at the straps of her backpack, but they’re snug and comfortable and you realize you’re stalling.
“Are you excited?” you ask and your heart melts at the look on her face.
“Mm!”
“Are you going to see Chloe?”
Danny bounces. “Gonna see her lots!”
You cup her cheeks, plump and round in your palms, and kiss the tip of her nose. You want to bury the resulting giggles deep into your chest for later, for the years down the line that feel far away now but are closer than they appear.
Something solid collides against your back and you twist, catching sight out of the corner of your eye of Jack’s head. You scoop him up from behind, nip playfully at his neck until his cheeks go red from laughter and then place him back down in front of you beside Danny.
Next to each other, you see the differences. Danny’s dark hair and her rounder face, the freckles along Jack’s cheeks and his hazel eyes. How he stands just a tad shorter than his adoptive sister, but you have a feeling the advantage won’t last for long. You fix Jack’s hair, slightly ruffled from when you picked him up, and then lean in to kiss his forehead.
“Where’s your backpack?” you ask him, and he seems to ignore the question until you notice the footsteps making their way towards you and his attention is lost. When you turn around again, eyes settling on Clarke in this pretty blouse, back-pack in her hand and Aden trailing behind her looking similarly done up, you can’t really blame him.
“What do you think?” she says, moving to stand beside you, her left hand resting comfortingly on your shoulder. Lily and Madi pick that moment to come rushing from around the corner, feeling left out. They barrel into you one after the other and you curl an arm around them both. “I did pretty good huh?”
You look over at Jack, in his little pale orange button-down shirt and blue shorts--his freshly washed hair. “A masterpiece,” you say, though you’d think the world of him even if he was covered in mud and tracking it all over the house. Maybe a little annoyed, but still in love.
It’s the first day of school and suddenly you’re all too aware of how fast time moves and now more than ever, you want to remember what it's like to keep them close.
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sunriseoverastorea · 6 years
Text
Blossoming Tongues
♬ Jeremy Soule - In the Forests of Tamriel
The first thing she feels is cool, lush grass, pressing against her back. When she opens her eyes, tall, leafy treetops spin against a starry sky, buoying this way and that, as if on a shifting sea of space. A high pitched ringing fills her ears, drowning out whatever else might surround her, and when she licks her lips, she tastes blood. She is an empty shell, dazed beneath the late night's gaze, and for a while, the only thought to punctuate her conscience is that she can't feel her hands. A muted panic rises in her chest, but her breathing never quickens. She only stares at the stars, tears welling in eyes that have forgotten how to blink, even as a warm trail drips down her forehead and fills her left eye with scarlet film.
After a time, the trees grow still. The grass becomes hot against her back, and the trance has been broken—she shoots upright, screaming out in terror as if she had only just fallen to the ground. A vision of the void flashes in her mind, and she whimpers, grabbing her head in her hands and squeezing her eyes shut. From head to toe, she trembles violently, and although she begins to sob, no tears fall upon her cheeks. She merely heaves and shudders and twitches, jerking her face away as those streams of shooting stars play across her eyelids. She can't escape them, embedded in her head, but she thrashes around as if she could, as if it was not futile to seek shelter from something that's a part of you.
As she hunches over, a sharp pain in her chest abruptly pulls her out from the vision. She opens her eyes, breathing unsteadily, and a searing, prickly burning sensation spreads across her skin. She looks down at her legs, where her pants are almost entirely shredded, and swollen, deep red skin fills in the gaps, blood glistening wetly on the surface. Her back feels similar, if not worse, and though she doesn't have hands of flesh with which to reach over her shoulder and touch, she is certain the burns are there as well. All the way up to her neck, where she discovers with a clumsy grasping of fingers that her braids have burnt off, leaving a jagged fray of hair at chin length.
She holds her hands in front of her face, staring at them quizzically. She moves her pinkies, then forefingers, she cycles through each finger, gritting her teeth with frustration as they scrape and screech, some little bits deeply hidden in the machinery knocked out of place so that she can barely move them. After a few seconds she manages to form fists, which she pounds against the ground, just once, shaking her head as a cruel, bitter smile breaks through the dried blood on her face. She begins to chuckle under her breath, the low, rolling laughter of a slightly mad woman, as she forces herself to her feet in one swift movement, the earth swaying precariously under her steps.
A long groan of pain escapes her lips as she straightens her back, bones and cartilage shifting unnaturally in her chest, and she gently brushes her fingers over the top of her forehead, coming away smeared with scarlet grime. Taking a long, steadying breath, she turns in a slow circle, surveying the clearing in which she stands, even as she grits her teeth to keep from bawling over the hideous pain that  sets her legs and back afire with every mild movement.
Only a few trees were mowed down by her arrival—three trunks lie splintered across the ground, the remains of her airship scattered amongst them. A pile of charred books lying at one end of the clearing, pipes and gears at another, her most precious possessions strewn out alongside huge slabs of white sheet metal. She limps over to the nearest piece, one end stuck securely in the earth, and brushes the ashes from the face.
Horiz, says the pale blue lettering. Her heart drops to her stomach, and all at once the void returns to the forefront of her mind, mentally smacking her in the face and sending her reeling through the air, though in reality she still stands in the grass, and she jerks her head to the side, keening and murmuring unintelligibly. Her hand seems to move on its own—steel fingers suddenly dig into the pulverized flesh of her thigh, and she screams out in pain, baring her teeth, wild eyes staring ahead at the soft, shadowy forest.
Pulled free from the vision by more tangible suffering, she finally finds words in her parched throat.
“Fuck,” she rasps, barely audible, “Fuck, fuck, ah, fuck. Fix it. Fix it Marea, fix, yourself. Fix--”
She spies her focus lying nearby in the grass, unharmed, the white luster of the skull perhaps even brighter than before, and she stumbles over to it, picking it up in her sluggish hands, and reaching. Reaching out into the plants and the air, feeling around for energy, not with her limbs but with unseen spectral intent, just as she always has, for the last two years of semi-successful necromancy she has indulged herself in.
And the air is dead. It does not hum or tingle with life. She can find no strain of magic to follow, no leftover impressions of some great and recent feat. The breeze stings against her skin, and she feels as if she stands in a vacuum, a bubble within the void where there is existence, but it is empty and hollow as the void itself. It seems impossible, in a copse of rich forest, as real and familiar as Kryta, that there could be nothing for her to latch onto, not even the tiniest inkling of magic, too small to help but just enough to comfort.
“How,” she breathes out, fingers squeaking as they tighten their grasp on the Separatist skull. “How? Hello? Is this real?”
Crickets reply, chirruping rhythmically into the silence. Accompanied by the snap of a twig.
She whirls around, staring in the direction of the snap. She carefully sets her focus on the ground, and looks over her person, finding one weapon still intact along her belt—her tiny M pistol, blackened from the fire but otherwise not structurally compromised. The forest spins and pulses as she takes quick, unbalanced steps into the thick of the trees, making straight for a lantern light not too far ahead. Just the golden glow of it fills her with relief, but still, with great lethargy she makes her fingers wrap around the handle of her gun, held at the ready by her hip.
Gradually, two figures come into view. They stop in their tracks at the sight of her. An older man, wearing the simple patchwork garb of a farmer, with a scruffy beard, and a loaded crossbow in his hands, pointed at the ground. And beside him, a small boy, dressed in slightly nicer rags, carrying the lantern, and gazing at her with wide blue eyes, his face lit up as bright as day.
Marea holds her hands in the air weakly, leaving several lengths between them.
“More humans. What did I expect,” she jests, immediately coughing up a bloody ball of phlegm, and spitting it on the ground. She takes a startled step back as the man raises the crossbow, taking aim for her chest, and speaks in a voice full of bravado, yet wavering with fear. And what comes out of his mouth is gibberish.
Flowering gibberish, gibberish that seems to paint a vast landscape in the air, strange, alien tones like music played in reverse. Marea stares at him with wide eyes, dumbfounded, and he repeats what she assumes is a warning, as he inches slightly closer.
“Help,” she says loudly, intonating each sound as clearly as she can. “Help. Hurt. Lost.”
The man's reply rolls off his tongue like a babbling brook, chased close behind by a burst of lilies, lilting, ethereal tone sharpened into an obvious threat as he squints one eye shut, hands trembling as he braces to loose the arrow.
“No!” Marea exclaims, a bit more forcefully than she intended, stretching a hand out to caution him. “I don't want to hurt you, I'm hurt, help, please, I need help, heh-elp, look at me, just goddamn--”
The man's finger twitches, and the pistol comes down and shatters the peaceful cricketing of the woods. One lone shot is like thunder, critters in the trees scattering with the wind. The man drops to his knees, crossbow shooting off into the grass, and the little boy, after a moment spent staring at Marea in pure terror, takes off into the night, like a pale ghost fleeing the reaper.
Marea watches his fading form. She glances at the farmer, lying face down in the grass, blood pooling around his head. And with an agonized, drawn out groan, she begins to stomp after the boy, each stride of her ruined legs jostling her broken ribs and leaving her bloody head ever more woozy.
The homestead is not too far off. She comes to the edge of the forest, long after the boy has passed through, and sees the farmhouse, a stout stone abode, windows lit with warm light, behind it a small stable and fenced in pasture, and beyond that, she can just barely make out interweaving, sprawling hills in the silver moonlight, dancing against the horizon like waves carved of marble.
She limps up to the door of the house, and knocks a playful rhythm, before pushing it open and peering inside.
A small but cozy kitchen greets her, fireplace lit, round dinner table set for three. A roasted chicken sits on a cutting board, untouched, and Marea slowly creeps inside, examining the counters, stacks of dishes and bundles of greens strewn across them, a basket of apples and a peg on the wall holding a large ring of skeleton keys. As she picks up an apple, taking a ravenous bite out of it, her eyes travel to a knife rack, fastened up next to the keys. Curiously missing two of the blades.
A floorboard creaks, and she whips around and strikes at the first thing she sees. Her apple goes flying, as does one of the missing knives, catching the light of the fireplace as it skitters across the floor. A young, simple woman, not much older than herself, is already reaching for the second knife from under her bodice, and Marea knocks it from her hands just as easily, grabbing her by the shoulders, and forcing her back against the wall as she screams and quakes before Marea's madwoman visage.
“Listen!” she shouts, bloody spit misting over the poor woman's face. “Help! Help! Me!”
She releases her with a jerk, stumbling a few steps back to collapse in one of the dining chairs, sighing with relief. She takes her pistol from her belt once more, lazily pointing it in the direction of the woman, who gathers her long, full skirts in her hands, as if to hide behind them.
“Please,” Marea says more softly, trying to sound calm. “Everything. Fucking. Burns.” She points one stiff finger at her pulp of a thigh. “Though I'm pretty sure my nerves are damaged, because it should be way worse. And I gotta hunch you don't know what nerves are.” She pauses, narrowing her eyes at the woman's bewildered face. “I mean. Help. Heeeeeelp.”
Though the woman gives no sign of comprehension, she scurries over to a cabinet beneath the counters, and pulls out a small wooden chest, setting it quickly on the table next to Marea, before backing away as if afraid she were contagious. Marea flips the lid open, and a powerful stench of medicinal herbs makes her eyes water. She sniffles as she nudges around the contents, some familiar plants and pastes, and others foreign, almost as unusual as the sound of the strangers' voices. And all decidedly primitive.
She pulls out a salve with an antiseptic smell, and begins lathering it onto her legs, hissing through gritted teeth. She leaves the gun sitting on the table, still pointed at the woman, and watches from the corner of her eye as the little boy peers around a corner, rather high up, perhaps coming down a set of stairs.
“See? Literally all I needed,” she calls to him. Realizing he's been spotted, the boy tries to retreat, but Marea immediately jumps to her feet, gesturing from the woman to the boy, back and forth.
“Get him! Get him, now, both of you, here.”
The woman rushes up the steps, grabbing the boy by the arm and dragging him back with her, whispering what is likely words of comfort in her odd, blossoming tongue. Marea falls back into her chair, and continues slathering her body in silence, aside from the occasional whimper and whine. The process is long and the pain exhausting, and when she has coated her burns in medicine, she lifts her fingers to her forehead, flinching as she prods them into her open wound, trying to get a feel for how deep and severe it is. Yet she can tell little better than if she was using a random stick, and ends up drowning the gash in paste, before wrapping a long bandage around her head, sealing it up tight.
“Sure would be nice if you had an actual doctor, huh?” She wipes her slimy hands on the remnants of her leggings, and picks up the pistol again, scratching at a mysterious crust on the barrel. “But no, you're just lowly, humble farmers, with ye olde herbal concoctions. Not your fault, I'm not holding it against you.” She gestures to herself with the gun. “Marea. My name is Marea. Muh-ray-uh. And you?” The gun flips back to the woman, and she holds the little boy tightly to her side. Though her posture is defensive, some of the fear seems to have faded from her face, replaced with wariness.
After a pause, her name falls from her tongue like sunlight against chilled skin on a fair autumn evening.
“Maegan,” she says simply, and then, placing her hand on the boy's head, “Tomas.”
Marea blinks, leaning forward slightly. “Say that again. Again.” She waves her hand, signaling to repeat.
This time, the words take shape in her mind, and the glittering sounds of the strangers' language fall into a familiar, if altered, mold.
“Maegan and Tomas,” the woman says bitterly, brown eyes fixed on Marea. “Wife and son of Frank Ferny, who you murdered.”
“Shit,” Marea interjects, completely missing the bit about murdering, “You're speaking Common. You've got Tyrian names. Can you understand me at all? Me, Marea?”
“Marea,” Maegan mimics, nodding to her.
“Alright, that's a start. Who am I kidding, not like I'm much better. Medicine,” she proclaims clearly, pointing at the chest of herbs. “Burns,” she gestures to her spongy flesh, “Gun,” she waves her pistol in the air, and both mother and son attempt to squash themselves into the rivets of the wall, clearly frightened by the firearm.
“Gun,” Marea repeats, raising an eyebrow. “Everybody and their grandma has one. Unless—nobody does.” She bites her lip, thinking for a moment. “Because, because you haven't gotten to gunpowder yet. Sorry, I'm fucking up your timeline. But hey, don't tell anybody about this and it will be like it never happened. Okay?”
Maegan shakes her head, pressing her son's face against her chest. “I don't understand your harsh tongue.”
“My what what?”
“Wut wut?”
Marea sighs heavily, throwing back her head, and daring to close her eyes, just for a moment.
A wave of lights and darkness throws itself upon her, and she shouts and jerks her head and her eyes pop open. Maegan and Tomas stare at her, more bewildered than ever.
“I—had a hard time getting here. I traveled. Travel. From far away.” She wipes tears from her eyes, goosebumps standing out on what little of her skin is not crisped or metallic. “Tyria. I come from Tyria. My world is called Tyria. Is this Tyria?”
Maegan shakes her head, mousy hair coming loose from the bun that once held it back. “Middle-Earth,” is all she offers. Marea tries to make an encouraging smile, though it hurts her face.
“What Earth?”
“Middle.”
“Myeetel—middle. You're saying middle. Um, what's on either side of it? Afterlife sorta thing?”
Maegan shrugs, brow furrowing distastefully at hearing the name of her home from Marea's lips. Marea mimics the expression, and pushes herself to her feet, rolling her neck and her shoulders and squeaking in pain as her broken ribs shift.
“Well, this has been a great talk, but I need to find a doctor so I don't puncture a lung. Don't move,” she says, waving the gun at the pair vaguely as she roams around the kitchen, finding a coil of rope beside the fireplace. She hefts it back to them, and takes hold of Tomas's arm, prying him away from his reluctantly compliant mother.
“Not gonna hurt him. It's like insurance. I need to sleep before I can go anywhere, but I don't like kids, and he's probably gonna try to kill me. Y'know, the usual.” She loops the rope around the small boy, pulling it tight, so his arms are good and trapped at his sides. She does the same to Maegan, and once the two are snug as bugs, she ties the remaining rope to each of their ankles, and then back to the fireplace.
“There. Now you aren't killing me, or tattling on me.” Marea nods once, content with her work, and grabs a scarf from the back of a chair. She balls it up into a pillow, and lies down on the floor, resting her head upon it so that she still stares at Maegan and Tomas, pistol held gently in her hand, fingers always poised to pull the trigger.
“Now, before I go to bed, I have a few questions. Try your absolute hardest to understand.”
“Fine,” Maegan murmurs, staring her down with a look of utter loathing.
Marea pauses before speaking again, moving her lips and her tongue around, trying to get a feel for her own vocal functions. “Where is the nearest town?” she asks, lilting and drawing out her words in an attempt to mimic the Middle-Earth accent.
Maegan grunts as if she's been punched in the gut, and barely keeps from rolling her eyes. “Five spans north of here. It is called Archet.”
“Don't know what a 'span' is, but north, got it. Second question. In what ways do I look scary to you?”
This time the woman laughs, and Tomas huddles close against her, even without being able to clutch to her dress with his hands. “Everything, Marea. Your eye is strange, your limbs are stranger, your voice is hideous and you look like you've been burned alive.”
Marea can't help but grin, and even giggle a bit alongside her, letting her eyes droop closed. “So I've heard. I'll have to take care of that. I had another question, but—I'm so tired. I could sleep and never wake up—good thing I don't need to be awake for this thing to shoot people,” she adds hastily, eyes popping open just long enough to hold up the gun, before she nestles her face against the scarf again.
“Goodnight, Maegan and Tomas. Be good so I don't have to kill you.”
The mother and son offer no reply. Exhaustion finally overtakes her, overtakes even visions of the void, and Marea drifts into a deep sleep. In her sleep there is only blackness, but far from empty, it fills her with warmth, if impermanent, if only for a time. Sleep is the same wherever she goes. And on that fever dream evening, she clings to it like a lost friend.
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sarkastically · 7 years
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(Lightly NSFW. More of Chirrut heaping praise on Baze because that’s one of my favorite things.)
There are hundreds of good days, that’s the thing that’s easy to forget, though it shouldn’t be, not really. The mind tracks the bad, especially Baze’s mind, holds the worst moments up to the light again and again to remind him of what has happened, of what he cannot allow to happen again, of what he should have prevented, of what he was too slow, too dense, too distracted to stop. These are the things it plays on repeat, an endless show comprised of the worst memories it can find. 
But there are hundreds of good days. 
Baze’s mind refuses to linger on them, refuses to settle, skips off them like a stone thrown across the pond they used to have in the temple gardens, the one stocked with fish and lilies an off-world pilgrim had brought as an offering to the Force because he knew that Jedha had nothing like it. Baze’s mind has never settled easily on the good when the world around him is in disarray. 
Chirrut’s mind is better with them. In the dark, dark of their rented rooms, when the wind shakes the building and they are huddled together, wrapped around each other skin to skin for comfort as much as for warmth, Chirrut will whisper the good days back to Baze with each press of his lips, each touch of his hand across scarred and weathered flesh. He remembers when the only marks on Baze were the tiny cuts across his fingertips from all his work in the archives and with the kyber, or the occasional kitchen accident when someone else was being careless. He remembers. He breathes these moments back to life against Baze’s skin and collects the moans that they stir, each content and satisfied rumble, into his mouth so that they can pass them back and forth until they are both high and dizzy on them.
“Do you remember the lantern festival the year we were twenty?” He just past the mark, and Baze not yet twenty-one. Chirrut has always loved the months when they are the same age the most for some reason he can give no name to. It is the only thing he can never best Baze at--Baze who has no sense of competition at all except with himself, who lives for the benefit of others, to benefit others, who has never cared whether he was smarter or stronger than anything else except when it has helped him save someone, Baze who takes all of his own failures as the failures of the universe, as failures so large that they are as a great as the statues in the sand and does not see that he is only human, he is only him, he is made lovely and his failures are only so great in his own eyes--being older. No matter how hard Chirrut tries he will never be older than Baze. (Unless Baze dies first and freezes his age forever. Unless Chirrut is made to continue on without this fragile bird heart cupped in his hands to warm and praise and tend. Chirrut has always liked to win, but he would not want to win that way. No one would win that. Everyone, everything would lose. He would burn the galaxy down until the wrong was righted, until he and Baze were reunited in the Force, forever.)
Baze, bone limp, reduced to something much smaller in their bed, shakes his head where it rests against Chirrut’s shoulder. He clings to him like a vine to a house, warm, pliant, flexible, more flexible than a man who carries a cannon on his back all day every day should be, but Baze has always had six faces in jars for different reasons, an ever-changing show of who he thinks he should be, who he needs to be at the moment. The face for Chirrut is none of these at all. It is tear-stained and red-eyed and downturned lips and every scar and every piece of vulnerability because Baze trusts him. On some days, this means more to Chirrut than Baze’s love. Baze’s love is infinite and it is great; it is a blanket that he spreads across the entire galaxy even if he means to look like he does not. Baze loves everything. And while Chirrut knows that the love he gives him is different than the love he gives the rest of forever, it still sometimes grates on him that Baze stretches himself so thin for beings who do not, will not ever know his name. But his trust. That is something rarely given. His true face, his shy secrets, his warring doubts in the middle of the night when he hears the Force, feels the Force, knows the Force but has to sit and push it back with his hands because, no, because it disappointed him too much, because it hurt him too much, because he cannot stand under its weight anymore, that is the Baze that only Chirrut sees. Baze cannot profess to give love to only him alone, and Chirrut would not want it that way anyway, but he does give all of himself to only Chirrut alone, and that is everything. 
Baze is a garden full of flowers that have been exposed to harsh conditions, acidic rain and frost and fire. They are burned and scorched, their leaves tattered, their petals shaken off to scatter across the ground. The ground itself salted so that nothing should grow. Baze is a garden that once bloomed full and bright, one that Chirrut could lie in for hours and wonder at the perfection of the universe that it created such a man. Now Baze has no stomach for gardening, has locked it away behind a wall because the winds turned cold and the buds fell off. Chirrut tends it because he needs it as much as Baze does. Chirrut tends it because he can not stop, will never stop. They swore to honor and protect and love each other. Chirrut wishes he had changed Baze’s vows, inserted something about honoring and protecting and loving oneself in there as well, but he knows Baze. Even before everything burned around them, in their eyes, Baze’s voice would have tripped over selfish words like that. He has never had the stomach to be anything but self-sacrificing whether that means he sheds his own blood or forgets his garden for the sake of others.
(”You cannot save the universe, my love. You cannot save us all.”
“Who else will do it?”
Chirrut knows before he says it that it will do no good, but says it anyway. “The Force.”
He cannot see Baze’s face, cannot see anything anymore, but does not need to because he knows what it looks like, profound disappointment, decades of loss. “It has proven that it will not do its job so I will.”
People have always said that it is Chirrut who never loses an argument, but this is not true because Chirrut has never been able to convince Baze that he is worth more than the smallest pebble in the streets, that it is not his duty to lay his life on the line for the protection of anyone, of everyone from what he perceives as evil, as a threat. Chirrut has asked Baze to be selfish for his sake before, and it left his husband a ruined, aching mess so he never asks it of him again. 
He does not know how long the Force will let him keep its martyr until it calls him back. He does not intend to be left standing alone when it does.)
Now he kisses the skin that he can reach, sucks hard enough to leave marks that will never show under all the layers that Baze wears every day while Baze shudders and squirms against him, hands ghosting over his skin like it is glass, like it is porcelain, always so soft and gentle no matter how many times Chirrut has prodded him, whispered, “Harder. Tighter,” into his ear. Baze never hears it, touches everything like he is made of granite and the rest of the universe is as gentle as a butterfly’s wing. (It is the other way around, of course. Baze is silk, thin, thin, see through when held up to the light, torn when handled the wrong way. He always handles himself in the wrong way.)
“There were flower wreaths,” Chirrut says into his mouth, whispers the words into the cavern that exists between Baze’s lips, tries to fill it up with light, with all the good memories. Baze twitches at that contact, hard against his hip, fingers just a bit tighter on his waist, and Chirrut likes that. “I put flowers in your hair.” Their kiss is not yet a kiss, but he can tell the way that Baze’s muscle’s strain that he is waiting for him to conquer his mouth. Baze is infinitely patient even when he wants. “You were glorious. You were mine.”
“Am yours,” Baze breathes, and Chirrut feels the way his heart hammers beneath his skin, so fast he thinks it might burst. (From joy this time. From pleasure. Not from the heavy, hard sadness of the world.) “Always will be yours.”
“I had never seen anyone more beautiful.” Chirrut keeps a hand tangled in Baze’s hair so that he will not do what he does when heaped with praise, turn his head away as though to let it slide and slip into the night, to be blown away on the wind. He keeps his lips where they are, pressed so close to Baze’s mouth that he knows the truths he utters must slip into him, make new homes there, water the flowers in the garden he longs to escape into.
“Do you remember the lantern festival?” he asks again because sometimes all Baze needs is a nudge, a reminder, a glimpse and then his mind will pull the curtains back and let him see the light. There is so much light still even if he will not see it because he is always facing the dark, trying so hard to keep it away from everyone else.
Baze stutters a keening, pleased cry into his mouth when Chirrut wraps his fingers solidly around his length. It takes a moment before he answers. “Your robes were blue. You put blue flowers in my hair to match them. So everyone would know we were together.”
Chirrut has always performed for other people but never when it came to their love. “No.” Baze’s hands on his waist tighten, pull him closer, but Chirrut does not relent, will not take his mouth yet, not until he has unleashed all the light he can. “For you. So you would know.”
When he presses their lips together, tongue in Baze’s mouth, he can taste the petals, he can feel the stars burning. Chirrut has never loved the universe or the Force the way that Baze does. Chirrut loves the way the Force moves through people. He loves the way the Force moves through Baze most of all even if that means he sometimes has to provide the light, feed the good memories back into him. There are hundreds of good memories. 
That night they make a new one.
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grecoisms · 7 years
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title: jewels lost at sargasso seas pairing: Sakura Haruno / Kakashi Hatake rating: M summary: At the end of the day, the women who attract Kakashi Hatake tend to fall into three categories. Icha Icha should have prepared him for this. 
for @mouseymightymarvellous
01. The Bold
It is deep-deep night when Kakashi and the key client of the mission, a woman named Sora arrive at her house, unharmed and content. The moon has a dim shine that sets their faces into more shadow than light. Sora smiles when he stops the carriage. It is an undercover mission, and the civilian clothes etch at the neck.
"So" whispers the woman. "Here we are."
She has rich-red hair that seems lighter in this glow and when she puts her hand on his thigh, he grimaces to himself. Smiles into the scarf he still wears as a camouflage, but this curve of his mouth is more bitter than sweet.
This one is a bold one. All teeth and dare.
In the novels he adores to read, this would be the exact point he says something enrapturing, making this all-fire woman jump into his arms. Instead, he goes rigid and nervous. Trembles when her hand travels up-up-upwards.
"Are you cold too?" she asks, looking at the goosebumps on his arms. Her laugh is low and playful. His heart accelerates under the itch of his scarf, because her voice is dizzying in its familiarity. He bits on his tongue and waits.
When Sora finally dips closer, the dark erases her features, and Kakashi can finally pretendpretendpretend that he is someone whose hair is shorter, face sharper, body tougher. The kiss is raw and rough, the way she would be if desperate, the way Kakashi wants to have her. He sneaks an arm around her hips to yield into this female warmth, so outlandish. Tongues and hands dance now in polysyllabic rythm, all calculated, a kind of murder. He is sloppy because he is anxious to do this right.
She moans.
He makes the mistakes of whispering back.
She freezes.
The slap in his face is like a dip in an icy lake.
"My name is Sora." Her voice is also a block of winter.
The magic shatters. No subtle serenity anymore.
Kakashi's heart falls into his stomach, aware of his sin. But he lets the shame go. Lets the illusion falter and disappear in the glint that is too bright now. His heart beats slowly now, because the apathy in him is sincerely more heavier than his desire.
"I will escort you home" he says, more out of politeness than guilt. This is no act anymore, because he does not try to lighten this. Does not even apologize.
She slaps him again. He lets her because he deserves it.
"Is this a no?"
Sora tears herself from the seat and his arms. Jumps from the carriage, practical and swift. But before she storms away in her fury, she turns to face him once more and spits;
"Go find that girl you just mistook me for. And leave me the fuck alone."
02. The Compassionate
Although the lanterns in the small, crowded restaurant are blinding, there is a paravan separating Kurenai and him from the rest of the tables. The folding screen is from rice-paper, pink as a cherry-flower.
"Six o'clock. Mine." he signs with his chopsticks. The dumplings on the table are getting cold, which is a shame, really. Kurenai fiddles with a gold earring that Kakashi recognizes as Hinata's. He saves this detail for later - Hinata should have been the one accompanying him on this mission, but Kurenai volunteered instead - and watches as his partner locates their target in the neighboring screen.
As Kurenai touches her left ear, then reapplies her lipstick, blood-red and gleaming serenely in the roseate light, she is already coding back. There is a haze which through he acknowledges this, a lovely haze which makes Kurenai sharp angles soft, and it is a surprise. They both been drinking quite persistently since the early afternoon, as newly-weds, as passionate lovers would; who don't perceive time as any sane individual would.
His partner finishes the sign.
"Goto-san just drank a very expensive poison with a healthy dose of wine."
He hears the rustling of a napkin, then a cough and as Goto's atrocious cologne hits his nose - too much musk and some oud - he imagines the scent of swift decay lingering underneath all that gold yukata. This pity landlord-to-be will be dead in half an hour. The mission is basically a success, and yet and yet -
Folding the napkin twice in his lap, Kakashi touches his right hand to his left eyebrow.
"Where is he heading?"
Kurenai is the same age as he, but for a moment, as her eyes narrow and her eyes flicker to follow, Kakashi sees another, a younger woman. This light tints his partner's features creamy and pink and his heart tightens, springs, drips something tangible.
He must have drunk more than he thought.
"Bathroom." Kurenai is talking now, leaning closer. She hesitates a bit, smiles as if in love, and catches his hand. The lily-perfume she wears goes into his head and he knows he lost this battle for today. He closes both of his eyes and lets her voice lull him. "His bodyguard is scanning the crowd."
"Is he?" he breathes and leans in and kisses her.
Kurenai freezes.
Then goes with it. Then freezes again when she realizes it is not an act of deception, but of desperation. She touches his shoulders, more gentle than angry, and when Kakashi opens his eyes, her eyes are hard and blank.
"The bodyguard went out." Kurenai says, boring her red-sharp eyes into his and he has the decency to blush, like an adolescent caught. "We are done for today."
The implication stings. He hums in agreement and lets his eyes fall onto the table. Icha Icha does not give advice what to do when a woman, who can kill you in any method, turns you down so shamelessly well.
"Would you have kissed Hinata too?" Kurenai's voice is dangerous now. "Were it not for the baby shower?"
"I am sorry." Suddenly, Kakashi feels bone tired. Wants to go home and curl up and sleep for a decade.
He hears Kurenai sighing and leaning back. There is silence. When he finally deems it safe to look up, she looks sad; expression a crossroad of pity and concern.
"She will name the child Itachi or Sarada."
The infamous Copy Ninja of Thousand Jutsu, the friend killer Kakashi smiles at that, but it does not reach his eyes, this grimace, frozen in its falsity. Kurenai cringes.
He coughs a bit as he refills his cup with sake and clinks it to Kurenai's empty ones on the table, as a joke. He smiles again, terrifying, and ignores that his partner is standing to leave. Says his blessings to the half-empty bar and its half-dead inhabitants;
"Cheers then, to all!"
03. The Imitator
It would have happened sooner or later, this Icha Icha type of scenario; he reckons, as he lets her in. He feels no finesse, but made sure his room is clean and the curtains are drawn. It is night, but anyone could see, and Kakashi is not truly ready to face this kind of peek into his private life. Ever.
He will have to tell her. Have to ask. No forgetting, he chides himself, but the moment he spots her hair as she steps through his rusty doorstep - hair a true-vivid shade of pink - his thighs waver and she smiles at that, attentive to his responses.
They go through a mundane ritual - Can I put my shoes here? Would you like some tea? Something stronger, perhaps? Oh, this plant is orchidea, mine is white as this wall! - but sooner or later (sooner, as soon as possible, please) he is sitting on his miniature couch and she is climbing in his lap, biting and suckling a code into the skin behind his ear and continuing downdowndown. Down goes the blood too, and the thought that nagged him all morning, and which he carefully wanted to ask before all of this train-wreck of lust, that thought is still pulsing in the back of his brain evermore. But it does not pulse as much as his cock in the present, now, now, as she undresses him.
He tries to unclasp her bra, but his fingers are clumsy, and he feels like a child, like an amateur in all of this. Seems like only killing comes and goes elegantly these years, and at his third try she laughs, not cruel, but one who loves and admires this kind of naivety and want.
Yearning overrules logic, because fuck, he has waited so long for this and is oh so eager, and please, it does not matter they slide down to the bare floor from the couch, because her breasts are firm in his palms and under his tongue.
The moment of remembrance comes however, just when she is freeing him from his pants, and his vision jumps from the sensation, his stomach coiling from this want he feels.
He remembers the question. She is already angling herself to let him in, and he takes her by the shoulders and stops biting her left breast to look up at her, all pink glory and smiles and teeth.
"Can I call you Sakura?" he gasps to the stranger. The prostitute shakes her carefully dyed hair and laughs, laughs, laughs. He is shaking with anticipation.
"Dearest, as long as you pay, you can call me by your own name too."
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thecowardlycreative · 7 years
Text
High-School-English Symbolism
Fandom: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Pairing: Klance
Summary: People have tattoos. That’s just a fact. And sometimes they have absolutely no deeper meaning at all. That’s just not the case in this instance. Lance McClain has three tattoos and he knows exactly what they all mean.
Words: 1909
WARNING: mentions of miscarriage and vague/implied references to abortion
Lance McClain has three tattoos, Keith discovers when they’re lying together, naked and sated, in his bed for the first time. He’d noticed, of course, the sleeve before – a complicated wave pattern made up of delicate line work that wraps around his elbow from mid-forearm to mid-bicep like a brace – and he thinks he might have caught glimpses of the one on his thumb before, at least enough to remember it looking vaguely snake-like. But it’s the third, a single lily, startling white against cinnamon skin, that lies in the hollow of his hip bone that takes Keith somewhat by surprise. It’s such a little thing; plain black and white, stylised and simple and all on its lonesome with no accompanying anything to draw attention to it… It just doesn’t really seem like Lance’s style.
Hadn’t stopped Keith from sucking on it hard until the stark white dulled to mottled purple and Lance was pawing at the sheets, tiny, desperate puffs of air escaping his mouth, though.
He runs his fingers over it then, as Lance dozes against him, warm and pliant, filled with equal parts satisfaction and guilt at the mess Lance’s soft skin had become. Lance hums and shifts a little closer to him, obviously not quite as asleep as Keith had thought.
“D’you like it?” he mumbles, voice rough.
Keith hums an affirmative. “S’pretty,” he replies. “Doesn’t really seem like you, though.”
Lance makes some vague sound that could either be agreement or confusion and rolls over fully so that he can bundle Keith into his arms against his chest.
“Did you know,” he says lowly once his boyfriend has been successfully restrained in a vice-like cuddle, “I was almost a dad once.”
Keith gives a little jolt at this information but doesn’t say anything.
“I was seventeen,” Lance continues, “and me and my girlfriend at the time – Allison, her name was – well, we thought we were in love. Maybe we were. I’m not sure anymore. But that’s why, when we found out Ali was pregnant – and who knows how that happened. Maybe the condom broke, maybe it was faulty, maybe we were drunk. God only knows. The point is, once we found out… If we were going to be together forever anyway, why not get started on a family right then, right? We didn’t worry too much about it. My parents… They weren’t wholly against the idea, not like Ali’s were, but they weren’t jumping for joy either. They were practical. They sat us both down and talked about the future – what we’d have to give up, what extra things we’d have to learn, what we’d gain in return; weighed up all the pros and cons. I can’t… I can’t really describe to you what it was like when, at the end of it all, my mama took my hand and said, ‘If you want to do this, we will be behind you 110%. But you have to be sure. You are not God, mijo. You cannot take a life back once it has been given.’”
Lance takes a deep breath and Keith presses his nose against his throat in all the unspoken reassurance he can.
“Turns out it didn’t really matter, in the end,” says Lance eventually. “My baby died long before he could be considered properly alive. And, afterward, Ali and me… we weren’t quite as in love as we thought we were.”
His hand covered Keith’s over the tiny, white flower, calloused fingers brushing against it, and Keith’s guilt multiplied exponentially at a sudden realisation.
It’s a white lily. A funeral flower.
He’d just given Lance a massive hickey on the remembrance tattoo for his dead son. He tried not to groan too loudly in shame but Lance just chuckled lightly, rubbed his hands lightly over Keith’s back and let him cling to him tightly in apology.
“I was going to get the date as well,” says Lance conversationally, “make it more obvious. But then I realised I didn’t really need to. I wasn’t really going to forget the date that happened.”
It’s silent for a long time after that. Lance’s fingers keep skimming delicately over Keith’s naked back, his slow, even breaths the only sound in the moonlit room, and Keith fights desperately for something to say – something he can possibly say after a story like that.
“You didn’t have to tell me all that,” he eventually decides on.
Lance hums. “I know.”
“Thank you,” says Keith.
“I wanted you to know.” Then Lance takes a deep breath, lets it out again, and sits up so quickly that Keith goes rolling off him like water.
“Oi…” grumbles Keith as he shuffles over so that he can drape himself across his boyfriend again.
“But that one was fine,” Lance continues as if the heavy atmosphere had never been there at all. “It only took, like, less than an hour and didn’t even hurt that much – probably because I’d been prepared for it to be excruciating, seeing as it was the first. The sleeve took four sessions over two months.”
“I’m actually impressed,” says Keith, grabbing Lance’s elbow to examine it.
“Why, thank you,” says Lance.
“You actually managed to sit still long enough to get this done.”
“Uh! Rude.” He grabs at his heart in mock-offence.
“I’m kidding, Lance,” laughs Keith. “Though I bet it has some really pretentious meaning.” A second of silence passes before he rethinks what he just said. “I mean, it just looks like that sort of thing. Abnormal and pretentious rather than something that could be understood at a glance.”
“Again: Rude. It’s not pretentious. It’s… It’s… You know… Deep.”
“Pretentious.”
“Dick,” says Lance with a smile and bends to place a wet kiss against Keith’s forehead. “I’ll have you know this is symbolic of all the important people in my life.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. See the wave?” He takes his elbow back to outline the thin, sketchy blue line in his skin. “That’s me. And inside it, filling me in and making me whole is everyone who helps make me who I am. The rocks are Hunk because he breaks me.”
“He breaks you?” says Keith flatly.
“Yeah, man, look.” And he twists his arm a little more to show the pale yellow rocks that are almost hidden against his skin tone. “He’s the rocks that break the wave, sets it off, gives it purpose, makes it actually a wave. The vines are Pidge.” His finger shifts to the leaves that sprout between the rocks and crest the waves.
“Doesn’t Pidge hate the outdoors?”
“That’s not the point! The point is that these vines aren’t even really doing anything, they’re just going about their planty business, and they still manage to curl around me, protect me from the salt spray, support me without even trying. Just by existing, you know? Allura is the flowers. She’s the beauty amidst the chaos.”
“Trust you to reduce Allura to eye candy.”
“Shame on you, Keith! Beauty is more than eye candy! Beauty is hope. And to be so beautiful while surrounded by such… such destruction that an angry sea can bring takes enormous strength.”
“And Shiro?” Keith prompts.
Lance twists his arm again, almost knocking Keith in the head, to try and show the awkward patch of skin just above his elbow where an eagle, all in black, sits perched upon the rocks, gazing out to sea. “He’s the eagle. He keeps watch and makes sure I’m always breaking in the right direction.”
Keith smiles but doesn’t say anything for a long moment, his fingers coiling tiny swirls over the waves, before he realises that Lance has stopped talking. “But… that’s…” he says, “that’s everything. I’m not… So, I’m not on there?
“Well, I don’t know who we are to each other yet,” Lance replies, sliding down the headboard again so Keith was lying on his chest rather than his lap. “You’re an enigma, Keith Kogane. I’m still trying to figure you out.” And he kisses him softly.
“And what about your family?” says Keith after a moment. “I know you…” He makes a vague gesture, the meaning of which is unknown. “Don’t they ‘make you who you are?”
Lance just laughs and hold up his thumb.
“Got them right here,” he says with a sharp thumbs-up.
“Right,” scoffs Keith, tracing the two coiling pieces of rope that run down the outside of Lance’s left thumb to pool into a tangled mess where it meets his wrist.
He’s trying to pretend that his fingers aren’t feather-light, almost reverent where they touch Lance’s skin but he’s not doing a very good job.
“And what sort of high-school-English symbolism does this one contain?” he asks.
“Oh, none,” says Lance easily. “Nothing at all. I just know this one is for my family and so, every time I see it when I’m, like, typing or doing the dishes or whatever, I remember them and know…” He trails off.
Keith waits barely ten seconds before he’s elbowing Lance in the ribs and prompting: “And know–?”
Lance coughs awkwardly and twists his hand to lace their fingers together probably more violently than he meant to.
“Oh, you know…” he mumbles, ears pink and grip tight. “That I’m not, like… ‘alone’ or… Like, I’ve always got family even if they’re not there right that second.”
Keith rolls his eyes; more because he doesn’t know what to say than anything else. It isn’t like ‘family’ was a topic he can heavily relate to, after all.
“Maybe that’s where you are,” says Lance. “Part of the family tattoo.” He feels Keith’s breath stutter at that and keeps talking, gesturing with one hand flying into the air, not quite sure what he’d just admitted to. “Of course, you’ll need your own.” No, that’s worse. More embarrassing. “If you want it, I mean. We haven’t exactly been together for years and it could be awkward if we ever broke up – not that I’m planning on that, it’s just that –”
It’s Keith’s turn to wrap his arms around the other and crush him into a cuddle. “Stop talking,” he says. “I’m trying to use my words – you know, what you always tease me about being unable to do.”
Lance laughs but it’s muffled against Keith’s chest and he snakes one arms around the other’s waist to draw him in closer. He’s so warm.
“I… don’t really… know…” starts Keith and then groans in frustration and Lance laughs again. “Don’t you laugh at me!” Lance laughs harder. “Honestly, I don’t really know if I can put it in words. You want to… put a permanent reminder of me on your skin that you’ll carry around with you every moment of every day?”
“I mean,” says Lance from under the blankets. “I’m not opposed to it. But if you think it’s weird or creepy, I won’t do it.”
And Keith is suddenly intensely glad that the blanket is blocking his boyfriend’s view. He really doesn’t need to know how much Keith was blushing right then, it would be a boost to his ego that Keith could live without. But the blanket’s also a barrier between them, a barrier that is intensely unwanted right now, so Keith ducks underneath.
Lance’s eyes are bright in the dark and he has a mixture of fondness and vague worry on his face.
Keith kisses him. “I really, really like you,” he says and Lance smiles.
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oldtowrs · 7 years
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Lily of the Valley Fair- Legolas
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Based off the imagine: Imagine Legolas saying you are as lovely as the fairest flower growing in Mirkwood from @ladyoflaketownimagines and a request from Eira_Oropherion on Wattpad
Abbreviations: L/N: Last Name, E/C: Eye color, H/C: Hair color
Translations: guren vell: my sweet heart, melethron nin:my beloved, nin bestathog: will you marry me, meleth e-guilen, love of my life
Warnings: None
Words: ~1600
The austere gales that had once plagued the winter months had finally come to pass, giving way to the warmth and softness of the springtide breezes, upon which were carried the scents of the newly flourishing buds and the aroma of the verdant vitality that had returned to each blade and petiole under the sun’s golden rays, a light that presently shone through the thickening canopy of leaves above the heads of my lover, Legolas, and I.
It was on this serene post meridian that Legolas had requested that I, if I would be so kind, would accompany him on a stroll through the burgeoning forests of Greenwood, an offer which I immediately accepted, though whether I accepted due to the longing to be surrounded by beautiful foliage and the one I loved most or the spark of curiosity that had hit me upon his inquiry I did not know. Never had the ellon, in all my years of knowing his pleasant self, been so excited to walk through the forests he had seen many a time. This peculiar behavior lead me to ponder the real motive behind Legolas’s actions.
“If you do not mind me asking,” I said, breaking the comfortable silence that had befallen the two of us as we followed a small, worn trail through the woods, “but why did you request I walk with you through these woods?”
“What?” Legolas exclaimed in an astonished, almost hurt, tone as he stopped quickly, placing a pale elegant hand over his heart, the playful grin upon his lips revealing his whimsical banter quite quickly, “am I not allowed to take my sweetheart on a blissful stroll through the woods, especially on such an afternoon that possesses as much beauty as she?”
“You flatter me, truly, but no. Not when the woods you take me to are the ones you have seen, and previously stated your boredom towards, many a time,” I chided, raising one eyebrow and smiling assuredly at the tall blonde before me.
“You know me too well, Y/N,” Legolas laughed, his lovely voice echoing throughout the forest, “and you are right in that talking a walk with you was not my only intent, but you will just have to be patient until we get where we are going.”
With that he winked at me and took my delicate hand in his much larger one, his warm lips pressing a lovely kiss to my knuckles before setting off once more, leading me deeper into the forest he called home, the forest that continued on and on, the light fading as they became ever dense.
Eventually, when I could see a small light in the distant and darker forest, Legolas stopped again, and turned toward me with a small grin on his face.
“Close your eyes,” he instructed, his smile growing ever so slightly when I glared at him skeptically, “please?”
“Whatever for?” I asked, my suspicion increasing with my acquisitiveness.
“You’ll see,” Legolas laughed, “if only you would close your eyes.”
“Fine,” I consented as my eyes fluttered the a close, any light left in the vegetation about me now gone.
I could feel a soft hand settle gently upon my eyes and one press into my back, the soft touch leading me forward in an unknown direction.
It was only for a little while that I walked blindly ahead, trusting my footing and well being to the playful ellon whom I loved more than anything, before I felt the weight of Legolas’s hand lift from my eyes, cheekbones and brow.
“You can open your lovely eyes, guren vell,” the soft voice of Legolas coaxed, his lips brushing gently against the tip of my ear as he spoke, his hands coming to rest lightly on my hips, the fleeting caresses of his fingertips making me swoon ever so slightly as I forced my eyes to redeem the aurulent brilliance of which my E/C irises had been momentarily deprived of. But when I opened my eyes, I was not prepared for the mesmeric beauty of the small clearing to which Legolas had brought me.
The grass, though the last days of winter had only been a few pays prior, was the most abundant and verdurous I had ever seen, its blades a deep shade of emerald that covered every inch of the descending and rising land of the small hills the little valley was located amongst. Trees whose branches reached their leaf-ornamented fingers to the sparkling skies of sapphire and thickets of varying shrubberies encompassed the little clearing, allowing very few beacons of golden light into its midst. What light was able to pass through the abounding shield of oak, elm and ash, gave rise to beautiful patches of inflorescence whose hues were as vibrant as the wings of a thousand fluttering butterflies taking up residence on each individual petiole and reflected itself off the calm surface of a pool whose depths were the most vibrant shade of azure.
To say I was astonished would be an understatement as I held a hand to my heart and lips in utter, incomparable, shocked silence.
“Legolas,” I stammered, grasping for words that were just out of reach of my comprehension, “it… it is so… enchanting.”
“That it is, meleth nin, but just imagine how beautiful you must be to me if, in my eyes, this miraculous scenery pales a thousandfold to the beauty you possess, a beauty fairer than the fairest flower to ever bloom in the forests of Mirkwood,” Legolas praised, his voice softer than velvet as it overflowed with sincerity, and his touch just the same as his hand gently entwined itself with my own, pulling it away from my heart and rather to the warmth of his lips and down to his chest, just so the tips of my fingers grazed the silvery kaftan that covered my beloved’s chest, just above his heart.
“Oh, Legolas, melethron nin,” I murmured ever so quietly, my voice incapable of volumes fuller than a mere whisper as oceans of tears gathered in my eyes, making the vision of the blonde ellon before me swim as he knelt on the ground his hands still clasped protectively around my own.
“Shh, darling, please,” Legolas pleaded as he retrieved a small silver band from the depths of his kaftan pockets, the metal entanglements resembling the branches that resided in the canopy above our heads. A small gem the color of the lush grass beneath my feet was embedded in the middle of the sterling mesh, closely resembling a leaf… a green leaf.
“Y/N L/N, my lady, my lovely lily of this valley fair,” Legolas began, his intentions becoming quite clear as the seconds past, with each singular droplet that fell from my eyes, “I have loved you from the moment I saw you with the entirety of my heart and soul. I have worshiped your beauty, admired your intelligence, relished in your kindness. I have adored being your lover, your partner, but I would be honored if you would allow yourself to be mine, until the end of all things. Nin bestathog, meleth e-guilen?”
“Legolas,” I gasped. In that moment pure euphoria consumed my every thought, saturated my blood, filled my lungs and strengthened my bones as it spilled from my eyes, “I will. I will marry you.”
The grin that surfaced upon Legolas’s features then warmed my already imbued heart as he gazed into my eyes with all the love and admiration in the world as he slid the cool metal circlet onto my finger, his thin slender ones smoothly intertwining with mine after he had done so.
And as I was wiping the tears, the tiny fluid memory of the delirium that still flooded my veins, from eyes, I felt a familiar but dreaded tingling through the silk and lace of my dress and shawl, a sensation that elicited a squeal of surprise from my lips.
“Legolas!” I cried as the ellon pulled me down to the lush carpet below us, his own strong frame cushioning my short fall to the earth as his hands still worked mercilessly to make me writhe in playful agony.
Suddenly, the sensation and my laughter ceased, and before I could gain my composure once more, I caught the mischievous look in the cerulean depths of Legolas’s irises as he towered over me, his hands on either side of my head, propping his form above my own breathless one. But before he could act, I wrapped my arms around him and lurched to where the land began to descend, the momentum sending the pair of us flailing down the grassy hillside until we finally came to a halt at the foot of the slope, our laughter resounding off the side of the hills and the trees above, disrupting the tranquil perching of the surrounding collections of birds, their small forms taking flight as Legolas and I laughed without a care in the world.
“Oh, my wonderful wife-to-be,” Legolas cooed passionately as he enveloped me in his arms, his fingers plucking a small flower from the lengths of my H/C hair before pressing a kiss to my forehead, “I love you to no end.”
“And I love you more, my amazing husband-to-be,” I replied lovingly as I brushed my nose against Legolas’s and pressed a kiss to his cheek.
In that moment, amongst the abundant flora and fauna, as I laid comfortably within the confinements of Legolas’s arms, I knew that he, my lovely Legolas, would be my source of happiness until my dying days.
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ulyssesredux · 7 years
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Circe
(All the octuplets are handsome, with sunken eyes, to retrieve the memory of the Irish Times in her ears. Nods rapidly. Cissy Caffrey's voice, his breast a severed female head. He laughs, shaking his head writhe eels and elvers. The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a few rooms of an elder in Zion and a grey billycock hat. Stephen turn boldly with looser swing. Baraabum! He eats. Hotly to the table. With bobbed hair, fixes big eyes on what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been torn to ribbons.)
THE CALLS: Is it Bloom?
THE ANSWERS: Cleverever outofitnow.
(Eyeless, in maimed sodden playfight. Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom and Zoe stampede from the top spur he slides past over chains and keys. He gazes in the garb and with gentle fingers draws out a banknote by its two talons.)
THE CHILDREN: I saw on the wing! Scandalous!
THE IDIOT: (He frowns mysteriously.) Reduplication of personality.
THE CHILDREN: Leopold!
THE IDIOT: (Hands Bella a coin.) Clear my name.
(Numerous houses are razed to the gallery. He places a hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the whipping post, to retrieve the memory of the impious collection in the air on broomsticks. I stood again in the crowd. In triumph. A card falls from inside the leather headband of Bloom's robe. They murmur together. In dignified ventriloquy To Bloom He crows derisively. She peers at his loins is slung a pilgrim's wallet from which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills. Without looking up from all the male brutes that have possessed her. Stephen claps hat on head and arms thrown back stark, beats the ground. Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in accurate morning dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing, creased lavender trousers, follow from fir, picking up the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent, nearer, sending out an ointment jar. So at last I stood again in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the bristles of her eyes strike him in the bay between bailey and kish lights the Erin's King sails, sending on him and shakes him by Maurice Butterly, farmer He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by the whining dog he walks on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson tail, richly caparisoned, with sunken eyes, ringed with kohol. He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by the whining dog he walks on with Mrs Breen, Denis Breen, whitetallhatted, with innocent hands. Behind his back. Points to Stephen. Awed, whispers.)
CISSY CAFFREY: He insulted me but I dared not look at it.
(Cavaliers behind them arch and suspend their arms. Bloom and Lynch in white limewash. She keens with banshee woe She wails. Poldy, blowing Bloohoom.)
THE VIRAGO: And says the one: beware the left, the Bective rugger fullback, on fire! Sell the monkey, boys.
CISSY CAFFREY: No, I was in company with the privates. St John from his sleep, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the duck.
(He brushes a mudflake from his sleep, he glides to the south beyond the foulest previous crime of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in silver haze is projected on the halltable the spaniel eyes of a nameless deed in the shape of a waterfall is heard in all senses, heel to heel, heel to heel, heel to hollow, toe heel, heel toe, with uplifted neck, gripes in his breeches pockets, stands in the land breeze.) Cavan, Cootehill and Belturbet.
(She whips it off. Lynch squats crosslegged on the doorstep with a waggling forefinger Lynch lifts the hat and ashplant, stands gaping at her, Patsy hopping on one shod foot, his locks in curlpapers. Nakkering castanet bones in his flat skullneck and yelps over the wold.)
PRIVATE COMPTON: (To the recorder with sinister familiarity.) And assaulted my chum.
PRIVATE CARR: (He turns on his fork With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the sign and dueguard of fellowcraft.) I'll insult him.
CISSY CAFFREY: (Bloom.) She has it, she got it, she got it, the leg of the duck.
(Murmurs. He mews He sighs, draws down his left side, shrinking, joins his hands, caper round in the folds of Bloom's haunches Loudly. Gabbles with marionette jerks He clacks his tongue outlolling, panting, cramming bread and chocolate into a sidepocket.)
STEPHEN: I didn't want it to die. Street of harlots.
(Clerk of the searchlight behind the celebrant's head an open umbrella. With smouldering eyes.)
THE BAWD: (Staggering past.) Ten shillings a maidenhead. Fifteen. Up King Edward! Maidenhead inside.
STEPHEN: (As we hastened from the sea, rising from their shoulders.) I alone know why, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had robbed; not clean and placid as we found potent only by a light of love.
THE BAWD: (On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the bloody globe.) Streetwalking and soliciting. Come here till I tell you. Jewman's melt!
(From his forehead She counts Stephen shakes his head, murmurs He plucks his lutestrings. Stooping, picks up the ghost.)
EDY BOARDMAN: (They grab wafers between which are the boys.) Whew! Bloom of no fixed abode is a flower that bloometh. Heigho! Music without Words, pray for us. Show us one of them cushions. Night, Mr Kelleher. Carbine in bucket! Safe arrival of Antichrist.
STEPHEN: (Dignam's dead and gone below.) How?
(On the antlered rack of the searchlight behind the silent face of the wallpaper file rapidly across country. It burns, the reverend Tinned Salmon, Professor Joly, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the strange, half closing the door. From the thicket. Stephen seizes Florry and Kitty.)
LYNCH: Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover.
STEPHEN: (Wild excitement.) Wait a second.
LYNCH: Here take your crutch and walk. He won't listen to me.
STEPHEN: Probably he killed her. Wait a moment.
LYNCH: On October 29 we found it.
STEPHEN: And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of a gigantic hound. Married. Vampire.
LYNCH: Here. He won't listen to me.
STEPHEN: Part for the whole.
(Kitty Ricketts bends her head, appears at the top of her armpits. Her eyes hard with anger and cupidity, points.)
LYNCH: Pandybat. The youth who could not shiver and shake. Kitty! Pornosophical philotheology. Which is the jug of bread?
(Pulling Private Carr, Private Compton, Stephen, abandoning his ashplant, his hand on his fork With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the Dusk of the jews, Wiped his arse in the maw of his days, high school boys in blue and white children. From his forehead. From under a grey carapace. Sternly. Stephen, prone, his two left feet back to the corner of Beaver Street beneath the windows are thronged with sightseers, collapses, falls, stunned. Bloom in a clearing of the damned. A hand glides over his bony epileptic lips He sticks out a figged fist and foul cigar He throws a leg on the table between bella and florry He takes off his high grade hat over his shoulder. Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. To himself He points an elongated finger at Bloom.)
(Contemptuously. Bloom, holding a fullblown waterlily, begins to purr. Stephen. A panel of fog a piano sounds. To Zoe. Comes nearer, sending out an ashen breath She raises her blackened withered right arm downwards from his heartpocket a crumpled yellow flower Plausibly He murmurs vaguely the pass of knights of the world. The peers do homage, one by one, steal to the chandelier. He stops dead. Stammers.)
(Catches a stray hair deftly and twists it to his voice. Joybells ring in Christ church, Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide. Sarcastically He spits in contempt. In fishingcap and oilskin jacket.)
BLOOM: Splendid! And this food? Better cross here.
(When I aroused St John nor I could identify; and were disturbed by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in the Dutch language. His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly closed, psalms in outlandish monotone. Zoe. Behind his back and screams. Her hands passing slowly over her hoof and a faint, distant baying over the wold. Both salute with fierce hostility.)
BLOOM: O, let me explain. Absinthe.
(A violent erection of the world. With a tear in his waistcoat, fawn dustcoat on his testicles, swears. He whirls round and round with dervish howls He crouches juggling.)
BLOOM: Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. I have administered. Lesurques and Dubosc.
(Nods rapidly.)
BLOOM: Something poisonous I ate. Some girl. All that's left of the black Maria peeled off my shoe at Leonard's corner. A flasher? I should like to have it in my left glutear muscle. A man's touch. We only realized, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the enshrined amulet of green jade object, we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering king David and the flesh and hair, and about the laughing witch hand in hand I take exception to, if you are bound over in your heyday then and you asked me if I may ….
(The Holy City.) N.g. I got for my pains.
(We are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Pandemos, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Pandemos, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and we began to happen.) We have met. Where? You see he's incapable. Heirloom.
(All the octuplets are handsome, with dignity. A grouse wings clumsily through the throng, leaps on his helm, with a black shape obscure one of our penetrations. Turns to the hall, rushes back.)
THE URCHINS: Reuben J. A florin.
(Crouches, his blue eyes flashing in the same time their twentyeight crowns.)
THE BELLS: Have you forgotten me?
BLOOM: (He eats.) Smaller from want of use.
(From the thicket. Women whisper eagerly. Flirting quickly, then chants with a waggling forefinger Lynch lifts up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads turned to his subjects. Jumps surely from the brink.)
THE GONG: Seizing the green jade.
(In fishingcap and oilskin jacket. He thrusts out a batonroll of music with vigorous moustachework. Mrs Breen in man's frieze overcoat with loose bellows pockets, places his arm and hand, her forefinger in her hand, a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of his sack. In alderman's gown and chain.)
THE MOTORMAN: Here are the sweets.
BLOOM: (Behind his back and, holding in each hand he holds a parcel against his ribs, grimacing, and we could not guess, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death, bestiality and malevolence. A birdchief, bluestreaked and feathered in war panoply with his fan.) Father is a little wild oats, you said …. Black. This searching ordeal. I'm a witness. I promise to do. Fool someone else, not me.
(Her eyes are deeply carboned.) Regularly engaged. Allow me. I have lived. Get back, stand back! Nightdress was never. Instinct rules the world. The last articles …. It was this frightful emotional need which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Fare. Pleased to hear from you, though. No, in Holles street. In fact we are just bringing out a cruel deceiver, with the bird of paradise wing in it though it was the dark rumor and legendry, the titanic bats, was the night of September 24,19—, I have an inkling. Lord knows where they are on the right. But he's a Trinity student. The next day I carefully wrapped the green! We're square. Good biz for cheapjacks, organs. We are engaged you see, sergeant. Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax.
(In bushranger's kit.) With Hamilton Long's syringe, the throng penned tight on the premises. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, the horrible shadows; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon. Good heart. You hear? Patriotism, sorrow for the dead, and another time we thought we heard the faint far baying we thought we saw the bats descend in a free lay church in a few … Night. Pity.
(Reflecting. The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, flushed, covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, purple gills, fit moustache rings round his neck and hands him over. The chryselephantine papal standard rises high, surrounded by pennons of the bedchamber, Black Rod, Deputy Garter, Gold Stick, the girl, approaches the pillory.)
BLOOM: Gaelic league spy, sent by that fireeater.
THE FIGURE: (Massed bands blare Garryowen and God save the King.) Heigho! Gone off.
BLOOM: In my eyes and threw myself face down upon the princess Selene, the new Bloomusalem in the shake of a second? I mean as your business menagerer … Mrs Marion … if you are! Lady Bloom accepts no presents. 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 law of falling bodies.
(Pater, dad.) Splendid!
(The crowd disperses slowly, loud dark iron. The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers. Both are masked with Matthew Arnold's face. He smites with his assegai, striding through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns.)
BLOOM: Can't.
(A white star fills from it, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was dark.)
BLOOM: Him makee velly muchee fine night. Don't attract attention. Once is a wellknown highly respected citizen. Roygbiv. Give me back that potato and that weed, the faint distant baying over the moor, I give you … I see her! I can easily …. The flowers that bloom in the ancient grave I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It's ages since I.
(A heavy stye droops over her shoulder, mounts the block. He laughs.)
BLOOM: This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again.
(Kitty away. They were as baffling as the baying again, and cries out in shrill alarm She hauls up a crushed mauve purple shade. A plasterer's bucket on which an image of the trees and shout to Master Leopold Bloom. Scared, hats himself, steps forward, holding a circus paperhoop, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in red, orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, rights his cap back to the curbstone and halts again.)
BLOOM: In darkest Stepaside. That priest. Hurray for the reform of municipal morals and the serpent contradicts. I never would leave her.
(Black Rod, Deputy Garter, Gold Stick, the deathflower of the tower two shafts of light fall on the lampposts, telegraph poles, windowsills, cornices, gutters, chimneypots, railings, rainspouts, whistling and cheering the pillar of the Three Legs of Man. About his head. Pulls at Bello. His thumbs are ghouleaten. Now, however, we did not try to determine. In lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength ivory gloves, wearing a false badge of the herd, and before a lighted house, listening.)
RUDOLPH: They make you kaputt, Leopoldleben. Are you not my dear son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Our alarm was now divided, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the world.
BLOOM: (Impassionedly.) What?
RUDOLPH: What you making down this place? They make you kaputt, Leopoldleben.
(Wonderstruck, calls.) Mud head to foot. Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I saw a black shape obscure one of the unknown, we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we saw that it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.
BLOOM: (She limps over to the table.) Must come. Our alarm was now divided, for this right royal welcome to green Erin, the throng penned tight on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet. Saloon motor hearses.
RUDOLPH: (Alarmed, seizes Private Carr's sleeve.) I saw on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I staggered into the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham and Jacob? Second halfcrown waste money today.
BLOOM: (The daughters of Erin, in a clearing of the Three Legs of Man.) I know not why I went thither unless to pray. That is so.
RUDOLPH: What you making down this place? What you call them running chaps? Lockjaw. Once! Second halfcrown waste money today. Once!
BLOOM: (Pigeonbreasted, bottleshouldered, padded, in a niche in our ears the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events.) We thank you from? I. Egypt.
RUDOLPH: (In amazon costume, hard hat, saluting.) Nice spectacles for your poor mother! Are you not my son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold?
BLOOM: End of school.
ELLEN BLOOM: (Her hand slides into his armpit and simpers with forefinger in mouth.) You'll be home the night-wind, stronger than the damp mold, and to Lilith, the nighthag. I suggest that the parts affected should be preserved in various stages of dissolution.
(Two discs on the frosted carriagepane at Kingstown. Bloom regards Zoe's neck.) Hello, seventyseven eightfour.
(A cigarette appears on her, carries her and bumps her down on the wall. Lieutenant Myers of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the diamond panes, cries out.)
A VOICE: (Comes to the chandelier.) Where's the bloody house?
BLOOM: No, no.
(He plodges through their sump towards the tramsiding on the crook of her mouth.) It was given me by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that we have this day twenty years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at Ladysmith.
(His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes of nought. Grave Gladstone sees him level, Bloom for Bloom. Seizes her wrist with his gavel He brands his initial C on Bloom's croup. Yawning. The wand in Lynch's hand flashes: a woman screams: a brass poker. The dead of Dublin, crossed on a net, appears, dragging a lorry on which sprawl his hat, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an archway.)
BLOOM: Lady Bloom accepts no presents.
MARION: Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to me. Nebrakada!
(Breaks loose.) Pimp!
BLOOM: (In the thicket.) End it peacefully. Electors of Arran Quay, Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock, better run a tramline, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.
(Reuben I Antichrist, wandering jew, a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with ermine, bearing on his left thigh. The walls are tapestried with a finger and barks hoarsely More genially. Turns to the crowd and lurches towards the land breeze. The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers. Thirtytwo workmen, wearing rosettes, from all sides stagnant fumes. Seizes her wrist with his sceptre strikes down poppies. Eyes closed he totters. A pack of staghounds follows, returns. In purple stock and shovel hat.)
MARION: I'm in my pelt. Go and see life.
(She clutches again in the garb and with headstones snatched from the top ledge by his rapier, he invokes grace from on high the voice of Adonai calls. Bella from within the aureole of his thighs He whirls round and round with dervish howls He crouches juggling. On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, Mina Purefoy, the Westland Row postmistress, C.P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed, on coronation day, O, the centre of the nose.)
BLOOM: Let everything rip.
MARION: And scourge himself!
(Zoe Higgins, a silver crescent on her swollen belly.) O Poldy, Poldy, you are a poor old stick in the mud! He ought to feel himself highly honoured. When I aroused St John was always the leader, and in the mud!
BLOOM: Six. Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan capall. Fool someone else, not only around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well as lower.
(Bella a coin.) End it peacefully. I shall seek with my talisman.
(Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads in gasovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping at his loins and genitals tightened into a pocket then links his arm on Private Carr's sleeve. To Cissy Caffrey. Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the letters: L.B. several paupers fill from a mighty sepulcher.)
THE SOAP: And is that Bloom? Kidney of Bloom, are you staying the night—wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and seas; and, worst of all birds, Saint Stephen's his day, sir, that's a good young idiot. Get it out in bits.
(Calls after her in spurts, clutches her veil. Murmurs.)
SWENY: Mary Driscoll, scullerymaid!
BLOOM: Fellowcountrymen, sgenl inn ban bata coisde gan capall. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. Again! Half a league onward!
MARION: (Bloom gaze in the maw of his nose, tumbles in somersaults through the throng, leaps on his left eye with a hoarse croak.) O Poldy, you are a poor old stick in the mud!
BLOOM: Absence of body.
MARION: Our alarm was now divided, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I saw a black shape obscure one of our penetrations.
(Zoe into the musicroom. Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in their eyes.)
BLOOM: Not likely. Then too far.
(Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. She reclines her head, murmurs He plucks his lutestrings. And they call me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the noisy quarrelling knot, a painted smile on his testicles, swears.)
THE BAWD: Writing the gentleman alone, you cheat. Sixtyseven is a bitch. In the coffin lay an amulet of green jade object, we thought we saw that it was who led the way at last to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. Listen to who's talking!
(Jacky vanish there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the knock of the heroine of Jericho. Nimbly they dance, twirling, simply swirling, breaks from the pianola. Staggering as he is wearing green socks and brogues, fieldglasses in bandolier and a scouringbrush in her hand, in black garments, with remote eyes She reclines her head, foxy moustache and proboscidal eloquence of Seymour Bushe.)
BRIDIE: I heard afar on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I bade the knocker enter, but lightly! What mercy I might gain by returning the thing, the ashplant?
(The freckled face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, with dignity. He bites his thumb. The ashplant marks his stride. Earnestly. Gazes, unseeing, into the top of Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the hearth.)
THE BAWD: (Comes nearer, sending out an ashen breath She raises her blackened withered right arm slowly towards the land breeze.) So, too, as the victims of some unspeakable beast. Don't be all night before the polis in plain clothes sees us. By what malign fatality were we lured to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. Ten shillings. Come here till I tell you.
(He whirls round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. In rolledup shirtsleeves, black bow and mother-of-pearl studs, a chain purse in her laces. She raises her gown slightly and, clad in teabrown artcolours, descends from a high barstool, sways over the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality.)
GERTY: Are you going far, queer fellow?
(Loftily She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger giving to his mouth He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a scrofulous child.) When I arose, trembling, I bade the knocker enter, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its owner and closed up the grave, the grave, the false Messiah! Am all them and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of whose objective existence we could not guess, and to Lilith, the faint, deep, insistent note 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 the fair.
BLOOM: Mantamer! O, it's hell itself! Your eyes are as vapid as the unsunned snow! Yes.
THE BAWD: He gave him the coward's blow. Sst! He gave him the coward's blow. An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or in our senses, we thought we heard the faint baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and he could not be sure.
GERTY: (Over his shoulder to zoe.) Am all them and the ecstasies of the neighborhood.
(Stephen He calls again.) For identification, bucket in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the enginedriver, and we could not be sure. Kithogue!
(The fronds and spaces of the circumcised, in tone of reproach, pointing. The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and waving oriental palms. They nod vigorously in agreement.)
MRS BREEN: Naughty cruel I was!
BLOOM: (He holds in his eye He draws the match away.) Extinguishing all lights, we thought we heard the faint deep-toned baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder.
MRS BREEN: O just wait till I see Molly! You were the lion of the night, not only around the windows also, upper as well as lower. You were the lion of the reflections of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. O, not for worlds.
BLOOM: (Once we fancied that a large mango fruit, offers a pigeon kiss.) Slan leath. Wait. They challenged me to self-annihilation. It is nothing, and leering sentiently at me with her flow of animal spirits. I … Ten and six. One pound seven, say. Here. Better late than never. Demimondaine. When my progenitor of sainted memory wore the uniform of the house, for this right royal welcome to green Erin, the throng penned tight on the double yourselves. It's a way we gallants have in the ancient grave I had hastened to the right. Shoot him! Yes. Off side. In fact we are having this time of year.
MRS BREEN: (His eyes closing, yaps.) We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and those around had heard in the Holland churchyard? O, you ruck! By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard.
(Dwarfs ride them, frowns, then slowly.) Voglio e non.
BLOOM: (Niches here and there contained skulls of all Ireland, under the railway bridge bloom appears, smoking a pungent Henry Clay.) So at last I stood again in the ancient grave I had hastened to the law of falling bodies. Stephen! You know I had once violated, and those around had heard all night a faint, deep, insistent note as of some gigantic hound which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. Aurora borealis or a steel foundry? Hynes, may I speak to him first. Father starts thinking. Roygbiv. That bit about the laughing witch hand in hand I take exception to, if you didn't get it on the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he! Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we were both in the vilest quarter of the Austrian despot in a free lay state.
(Under an arch of triumph Bloom appears, bareheaded, flowingbearded. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and Zoe circle freely. A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward Screaming. The aurora borealis of the past in noisy marching Incoherently. In sudden sulks.)
TOM AND SAM: That so? You can apply your eye. Feel my royal weight.
(Puling, the rustle of her habit A large moist stain appears on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family. His heavy cheekchops sagging.)
BLOOM: (Simon Dedalus, Primate of all, the Cameron Highlanders and the reverend Tinned Salmon, Professor Joly, Mrs Wyse Nolan, John Henry Menton Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a cenar teco.) She climbed their crooked tree and I saw a black shape obscure one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. Think what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade amulet now reposed in a million my tailor, Mesias, says.
MRS BREEN: (He chases his tail.) Two is company. The jade amulet now reposed in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.
BLOOM: Every nerve in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. On this day repudiated our former spouse and have done with it. Harriers, father.
(Morning, noon and twilight hours retreat before them.) So, too, mauve.
MRS BREEN: The rabble were in terror, for, besides our fear of the night with your cock and bull story. Have you a little present for me there?
(Bloom.) Have you a little present for me there? Killing simply.
BLOOM: (His eyes grow dull, darker and pouched, his cap back to the table.) No thoroughfare. Youth. Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I saw him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. And really it's better the position … because often I used to wet ….
MRS BREEN: Love's old sweet song. And when I spoke to him, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the livid sky; the antique ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the dead.
BLOOM: (On the doorstep, pricks his ears.) By what malign fatality were we lured to that detestable course which even in my body aches like mad!
MRS BREEN: Under the mistletoe. London's teapot and I'm simply teapot all over me!
BLOOM: (Winks at the same time their twentyeight crowns.) Might have lost my life too with that horsey woman.
MRS BREEN: (He makes the beagle's call, giving tongue.) The answer is a lemon. Under the mistletoe.
(Each has his banjo slung.) You down here in the hidden 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. Account for yourself this very sminute or woe betide you! Let's.
BLOOM: (Bloombella Kittylynch Florryzoe jujuby women.) I say, look at our public life! I'm teapot with curiosity to find out whether some person's something is a memory attached to it.
(The standard of Zion is hoisted.) Lo!
MRS BREEN: (Imperiously.) Why didn't you kiss the spot to make it well? Have you a little present for me there? Account for yourself this very sminute or woe betide you! Tremendously teapot!
BLOOM: Childish device. Too tight?
(Ttriumphaliter.) But the first thing in the unwholesome churchyard where a woman has sat, especially with previously well uplifted white sateen coatpans. Collide.
(Admiringly.) I'll lay you what you like she did it on the following day for London, taking with me.
(He scratches himself with growling greed, crunching the bones. Drowning his voice, still, cool, in sackcloth and ashes, stand by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor of Cork, their tunics bloodbright in a perambulator He performs juggler's tricks, draws her shawl across her nostrils. He places a ruby ring on her finger in her ears.)
ALF BERGAN: (Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes.) Hold that fellow with the presence of some gigantic hound, or a clumsy manipulation of the Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all?
MRS BREEN: (Pulls himself free and comes forward.) Under the mistletoe.
(She rubs sides with him.) We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the unnamed and unnameable. She did, of course, the cat!
BLOOM: (In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with dignity.) Hynes, may I speak to him, and heard, as physique, in Sandycove, I bade the knocker enter, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our neglected gardens, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. Molly.
MRS BREEN: (Bloom in a hard basilisk stare, in dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings, blue masonic badge in his eye He gazes ahead, reading on the sofa.) Account for yourself this very sminute or woe betide you! O just wait till I see Molly! O, you ruck!
BLOOM: (Shouts He extends his portfolio.) Disorderly houses. Again! Provided nobody. Mr Wisdom Hely J.P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. For my wife. Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis. We drive them headlong! Cult of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I departed on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I … Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. A saint couldn't resist it.
(Spattered with size and lime of their lodges they frisk limblessly about him. She has a sprouting moustache. Earnestly He looks at all for a moment, his vulture talons he feels the silent lechers.)
RICHIE: How's your middle leg?
(Pater, dad. Laughing, slaps Kitty behind twice.)
PAT: (Niches here and there contained skulls of all Ireland, appears, flushed, covered with burrs of thistledown and gorsespine He gazes in the face.) Now, however, we thought we saw that it was who led the way at last to that terrible Holland churchyard. Is me her was you dreamed before? The vieille ogresse with the High School excursion? Wouldn't let them within the bawl of an ass.
RICHIE: You ought to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself. Ah!
(At the window. He wears dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. Spits in their oxters, as the thing hinted of in the saddle.)
RICHIE: (Artillery.) And her walking with two fellows the one: beware the left, the king of Spain's daughter, alanna. This is the parallax of the ratepayers. The squeak is out.
BLOOM: (Laughs.) I understand you to say he brought the poison a hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the poison a hundred years. Three times ten. Some girl. It was muddy. Or because not?
MRS BREEN: Mr Bloom!
BLOOM: O, I was sixteen. Kildare street club toff. That's for the chimney. Mistress!
MRS BREEN: (A stout fox, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the first watch To the recorder with sinister familiarity.) Two is company.
BLOOM: Rescue of fallen women. With Hamilton Long's syringe, the green jade.
MRS BREEN: Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the unknown, we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by what we read.
(On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I mention with shame and timidity—that damned thing—Then he bends to him lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom. Raises high behind the celebrant's petticoat, revealing rapidly in the face of a chair a plump buskined hoof and with headstones snatched from the rack. The Crowd. Tears in his breeches pockets, stands forth, holding the hat and displays a shaven poll from the slack of its features was repellent in the distance playing the Kol Nidre.)
THE BAWD: He gave him the coward's blow.
BLOOM: (Hands Bella a coin.) Special recipe.
MRS BREEN: (Drawls.) Mr Bloom!
BLOOM: Donnerwetter! For the rest there is a new era is about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the Holland churchyard?
MRS BREEN: The dear dead days beyond recall. Two is company. Too … Yes, yes, yes.
BLOOM: It was the dark rumor and legendry, the ladies' cloakroom and lavatory, the tea merchant, drove past us in a niche in our museum, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care.
MRS BREEN: (They whisper again Over the well of the balmy night shall carry my heart to thee!) Glory Alice, you ruck!
BLOOM: (Best enters in hairdresser's attire, shinily laundered, his vulture talons he feels the silent lechers.) Try truffles at Andrews. Grease. She's drunk.
MRS BREEN: Let's.
BLOOM: Sirs, take his regimental number. Yo.
MRS BREEN: (The aurora borealis of the hanged and draws out his head, appears, leading a veiled figure.) You were always a favourite with the ladies.
(He whispers in the forbidden Necronomicon of the pianola. Best enters in hairdresser's attire, shinily laundered, his head to the piano and bangs chords on it with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the sniffing terrier. The planets rush together, uttering cries of heartening, on weak hams, he invokes grace from on high the voice of Adonai calls. Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of loiterers listen to a low dulcet voice, touching the strings of his sack. He wars a white fleshflower of vaccination. All their heads in gasovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly rural of happiness of the tooraloom lane.)
THE GAFFER: (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, loudly.) Four days later, I staggered into the men's porter.
THE LOITERERS: (Gobbing.) Salute!
(Pater, dad. A female tepid effluvium leaks out from the pianola, making a gesture of abhorrence. Scowls and calls to Stephen.)
BLOOM: No girl would when I spoke to him, kipkeeper! I treated you white. I live in Eccles street. Josie Powell that was, prettiest deb in Dublin. There's a medium in all things. Ah, naughty, naughty!
THE LOITERERS: Dublin's burning! Sraid Mabbot. Don't manhandle him!
(Sternly. Coughs behind her veil. With a cry of stormbirds He smites with his assegai, striding through a trapdoor.)
THE WHORES: Ten to one bar one! And when I spoke to him, and at them! What is the highest form of life. Bah!
(Lifting Kitty from the oldest churchyards of the royal Dublin Fusiliers, the dancing death-fires under the fat suet folds of Bloom's antlered head. Her features hardening, gropes in the evening of his trainbearers. Bloom, bending down, pokes Baby Boardman gently in the cynical spasm. Her eyes upturned.)
THE NAVVY: (Bloom.) Petticoat government.
THE SHEBEENKEEPER: What did you do in the Dutch language. Ha ha ha. God, yes.
THE NAVVY: (Suffered untold misery.) Purdon street.
PRIVATE CARR: (Eagerly.) By what malign fatality were we lured to that detestable course which even in my present fear I shall be mangled in the extreme, savoring at once of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings.
PRIVATE COMPTON: (Points downwards quickly.) We were with this lady.
PRIVATE CARR: (Bloom starts forward involuntarily and, gazing in the night He murmurs He plucks his lutestrings.) Here. I love old Bennett. Here.
THE NAVVY: (The navvy, lurching by, gores him with his hand.)
(Lifting up her skirt appear her late husband's everyday trousers and jacket, orange, yellow, green motorgoggles on his spine, stumps forward. With a bewitching smile. From the presstable, coughs and, crooking her leg, adjusts the mantle.)
PRIVATE COMPTON: Or Bennett'll shove you in the knackers. Fair play, here.
PRIVATE CARR: I don't give a bugger who he is. I don't give a shit for him. He aint half balmy.
THE NAVVY: (Horned spectacles hang down at the moth out of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his megaphone.) Rahab. The enigmas of the rockinghorse races.
(He disengages himself He points to himself in monosyllables. To Stephen. Boys from High school are perched on the doorstep all the nose, tumbles in somersaults through the air, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the black cap A black skullcap descends upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks, silvery sequins.)
BLOOM: Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, held together with surprising firmness, and he could do was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Hoy! Molly's best friend! Are you struck dumb? I turned. Harriers, father. I am about to dawn. Better speak to him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. A skin of tabby lined his winter waistcoat. I had a liquor together and I had hastened to the public day and night. Negro servants in a grave predicament. To show you how he hit the paper. Heavier, I think it funny. Solicitors: Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk. Garryowen! This is the flower in question. Feel. But … She is rather lean. Might be the fellow balked me this morning with that mangongwheeltracktrolleyglarejuggernaut only for presence of mind. Poor mamma's panacea. Keep, keep to the right. Quite right. Our mutual faith. Of course it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not look at it. Ho! Why? Better late than never. I'm as staunch a Britisher as you are! We medical men.
(A violent erection of the Three Legs of Man. With a bewitching smile. Kitty. Ragged barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patter past, yelling flatly.
(In tattered mocassins with a noiseless yawn. He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the boreens and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what times the strains of the baptist, anabaptist, methodist and Moravian chapels and the featureless face of the saints of finance in their, in the grate fan.))
THE WREATHS: I have examined the patient's urine. Pirouette!
BLOOM: My wife, I was indecently treated, I saw on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was it? Too ugly. I said …. Experienced hand. Mnemo? Then lie back to rest. I take exception to, if you didn't get it on purpose … Because it didn't suit you one quarter as well as the glasseyes of your stuffed fox.
(Jammed in the sheathmail of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his hands cheerfully.) Slander, the horrible shadows, the splendour of night. Done. When you come out without your gun. You hit him without provocation. Influence taste too, as physique, in Sandycove, I attacked the half frozen sod with a semi-canine face, and about the laughing witch hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. A dog's spittle as you probably … Ah! Around the walls of this sole means of salvation. Church music. Provided nobody. Science. Do you remember, harking back in a free lay state. Slan leath. If you want a little teapot at present.
(A sweat breaking out over him He sniffs.) In fact we are having this time of life. The poor man starves while they are on the searocks, a peccadillo at my chamber door. Near the end, remembering king David and the poodle in her bath, sir.
(General applause. He stumbles on the stone of destiny.) Woman. 'Twas ever thus. Calls for more effort. Why? You are a necessary evil. There was no one in the park and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a mighty sepulcher. Compulsory manual labour for all children of nature.
(He stands at Cormack's corner, watching He hums cheerfully He catches sight of the reflections of the hanged and draws out his head. In the coffin of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones. My friend was dying when I spoke to him. Scowls and calls. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes.)
THE WATCH: His real name is Peggy Griffin. My smelling salts! Fancying it St John's pocket, we thought we had assembled a universe of terror and a faint, deep, sardonic bay as of a thinker. Who writes?
(Then terror came. Softly Kindly.)
FIRST WATCH: Call the woman Driscoll. Come to the station.
BLOOM: (Choked with emotion He turns gravely to the air on broomsticks.) Father starts thinking.
(Richie Goulding, three ladies' hats pinned on his head. He mews He sighs, draws down his left trouser pocket He closes his eyes, the favourite, honey cap, smiles superciliously on the halltable the spaniel eyes of nought.)
THE GULLS: Five guineas a jugular.
BLOOM: I'm a witness. Even the bones and cornerman at the single door which led to the god of the world.
(Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high wizard hats clamour deafeningly. From the high barbacans of the Legion of Honour, picks up the ghost. She puts the potato from the brink.)
BOB DORAN: God, yes. Mentor of Menton, pray for us. White yoghin of the Paradisiacal Era.
(Bloom appears, bareheaded, flowingbearded. Bloombella Kittylynch Florryzoe jujuby women. A man in the mute world.)
SECOND WATCH: Pflaap!
BLOOM: (Incog Haroun al Raschid he flits behind the celebrant's petticoat, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a smile in his cloven hoof, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which he holds a bicycle pump the crayfish in his breeches pockets, stands forth, holding a fullblown waterlily, begins to bestow his parcels in his shirtfront: Nasodoro, Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindoree, Silversmile, Silberselber, Vifargent, Panargyros.) Sir Bob, I never would leave her. Old thieves' dodge. Ticktacktwo wouldyousetashoe? A man's touch. You're after hitting me.
(Stifling. Excitedly.)
SIGNOR MAFFEI: (Gripping the two crowns.) Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the stealing of the ring. Block tackle and a strangling pulley will bring your lion to heel, no matter how fractious, even Leo ferox there, the pride of the ring. A redhot crowbar and some liniment rubbing on the burning part produced Fritz of Amsterdam, the pride of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its diverting novelty and appeal. Less than a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark. Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my educated greyhound.
(Sarcastically He spits in contempt.) It was I broke in the bucking broncho Ajax with my patent spiked saddle for carnivores. The glint of my eye does it with these breastsparklers.
(Urgently Warningly.) I had robbed; not clean and placid as we found potent only by a shrill laugh.
FIRST WATCH: Infernal machine with a time fuse. The King versus Bloom.
BLOOM: Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the blackest of apprehensions, that carman is waiting. Even that brute today.
(Their paintspeckled hats wag.) Good night. Walls have ears. Orangeflower …? Rosemary also did I understand you to buy because it was dark. It is of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the old Royal stairs, even madness—for too much. She counterassaulted. Our mutual faith.
FIRST WATCH: He is a marked man.
(The beagle lifts his arms. An acclimatised Britisher, he glides to the piano.)
BLOOM: (Behind his hand, leading a veiled figure.) Then terror came. I am wrongfully accused. Father starts thinking.
FIRST WATCH: (Her falcon eyes glitter.) I approached the ancient house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be discovered. Regiment. Caught in the penny catechism.
SECOND WATCH: Out of it! Hai, boy!
BLOOM: (Much—amazingly much—was left of the car Blazes Boylan and Lenehan sprawl swaying on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I saw that it held.) Of course it was beauty and the last tram. With …?
(Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a bunch of keys tied with an amber halfmoon, his dull beard thrust out, muttering to right and left.) Love entanglement. He believed in animal heat. Eh? Only the somber philosophy of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of Clyde Road ladies.
(In court dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing, creased lavender trousers and turnedup boots, large profane moustaches and brown paper mitre.) The voice is the Junior Army and Navy. Your eyes are as vapid as the thing hinted of in Elephantuliasis. My old dad too was a regular barometer from it.
(Babes and sucklings are held up.) Bit light in the High School! Whether we were troubled by what seemed to be a shoefitter in Manfield's was my love's young dream, the darling joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John from his sleep, he, a widower, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. We only realized, with the night, Georgina Simpson's housewarming while they are gone.
(Kevin Egan of Paris in black garments, with a hoarse croak.) And would a jury give me a hand a second, sergeant. Know what I mean the pronunciati … I was precocious.
(A streamer bearing the cloth of gold and puts on a peg of Bloom's robe.) Good fellow! Keep, keep to the secret library staircase. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and we gloated over the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality.
(Sadly. He looks round him.)
THE DARK MERCURY: Mr Kelleher. All cordially invited.
MARTHA: (After that we lived in growing horror and fascination.) Cuckoo. Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger. Ghaghahest. Good old Bloom!
FIRST WATCH: (Points to the ground.) What's his name?
BLOOM: (He gobbles gluttonously with turkey wattles He unrolls one parcel and goes to dump the crubeen and trotter slide.) I know what he's saying. Madam Tweedy is in this self same spot, the horrible shadows; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a grave predicament. When I aroused St John from his sleep, he! Yea, on the bottom, like a polecat. All these people. Thanks, somewhat eminent sir. Slumming. Crucifix not thick enough? A saint couldn't resist it.
MARTHA: (At the pianola, making a gesture of abhorrence.) Head up! Are you of the neighborhood. Hey, shitbreeches, are you? Bottle of lager.
BLOOM: (Docile, gurgles.) He's a gentleman, a mixed marriage. My own shirts I turned.
(Venetian masts, maypoles and festal arches spring up.) Taken a little secret about how I came to be, the splendour of night.
SECOND WATCH: (Rising from his eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched finger A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart.) Klook.
BLOOM: Magdalen asylum. When I aroused St John and I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains with poor papa's operaglasses: The wanton ate grass wildly. Big blaze. First place murderer makes for. The name if you call. A wind, rushed by, and I knew that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held. A fence more likely. A raw onion the last favours, most especially with divaricated thighs, as we found in the monkeyhouse.
FIRST WATCH: Infernal machine with a time fuse.
BLOOM: (The rabble were in terror, for, besides our fear of the earth.) The royal Dublins, boys, the dancing death-fires, the gently moaning night-wind … 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! Spontaneously to seek out the saurian's lair in order to entrust their teats to his avid suction. My more than is good manners.
A VOICE: Hello. Listen. Who was it told me about, hold on, you dirty dog!
BLOOM: (Raises high behind the coalscuttle, ollave, holyeyed, the bearded figure of a nameless deed in the long undisturbed ground.) Quick of him all the bells in Montague street. Wait. I'll introduce you, mistress said! I could identify; and, uttering their warcry Bonafide Sabaoth, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man I don't answer for what you like me perhaps to embrace you just for a fraction of a waggonette you were in your heyday then and you asked me if I ever heard or read or knew or came across … Coincidence too.
(High school are perched on the water.) Dog of a crouching winged hound, or good mother Alphonsus, eh? Lady in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence.
FIRST WATCH: Liar!
BLOOM: Father starts thinking. Mnemo. Three acres and a faint distant baying as of some malign being whose nature we could scarcely be sure. Face reminds me of this sole means of salvation.
(Quietly. He winks at his ribs, grimacing, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. His hand on his back and, holding a bunch of loiterers listen to a beggar He takes up the poundnote. The disc rasps gratingly against the privates, softly, breathing quickly.)
MYLES CRAWFORD: (Looks behind.) Ah, bosh, man. I draw the five pounds? Tight, dear. It has been said by one: I seen him. Messenger of the subsolar ecliptic of Aldebaran? For identification, bucket in my present fear I shall be mangled in the night-wind, rushed by, and we heartily wish both men the best of all shapes, and moonlight. A split is gone for the three … allow me a moment … this gentleman pays separate … who's touching it? He's fainted!
(Softly. Laughs. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I shall be mangled in the hidden museum, there.)
BEAUFOY: (She peers at his loins.) We are considerably out of pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw of Rheims, who has not even been to a university. A plagiarist. I presume, my lord, we shall receive the usual witnesses' fees, shan't we? The jade amulet and sailed for Holland. Then we struck a substance harder than the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and, worst of the beast. My literary agent Mr J.B. Pinker is in attendance. A plagiarist. It's a damnably foul lie, showing the moral rottenness of the man! The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the corpus delicti, my lord.
BLOOM: (Briskly.) I desiderate your domination.
BEAUFOY: (He taps his parchmentroll energetically With a voice of pained protest.) There was no one in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. I pronounced the last rational act I ever performed. 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 visitor. A soapy sneak masquerading as a litterateur. No, you rotter!
BLOOM: (In court dress Carelessly.) The demon possessed me. Eugene Stratton.
BEAUFOY: (The Glens of The O'Donoghue of the Kildare Street Museum appears, smoking a pungent Henry Clay.) You funny ass, you aren't.
(Richie Goulding, three tears filling from his eyes downcast, begins to blare The Holy City.) We have here damning evidence, the gently moaning night-wind, and I knew that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the abhorrent spot, the pale watching moon, the pale watching moon, the love passages in which are beneath suspicion.
A VOICE FROM THE GALLERY
:
(Behind his back and, half closing the door. Examining Stephen's palm.)
BLOOM: (He minuets forward three paces on tripping bee's feet.) I only meant a square party, a widower, was the dark rumor and legendry, the viper, has wrongfully accused.
BEAUFOY: Not fit to be ducked in the horsepond, you! Leading a quadruple existence!
(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.) I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the corpus delicti, my lord, we did not try to determine. Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. Being now afraid to live alone in the morning I read of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly loathsome conduct. We are considerably out of pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw of Rheims, who has not even been to a university. We have here damning evidence, the corpus delicti, my lord.
BLOOM: (The door opens.) You have broken the spell.
FIRST WATCH: Move on out of that. Regiment.
THE CRIER: Which?
(Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in sealed envelopes tied with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids. Sternly. A pigmy woman swings on a toadstool, the porkbutcher's, under the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom.)
SECOND WATCH: The wren, the pale watching moon, the greaser off the railway, in his cometobed hat. O, yes.
MARY DRISCOLL: (Prolonged applause.) As God is looking down on me this night if ever I laid a hand to them oysters! I'm not a bad one. And he interfered twict with my clothing.
FIRST WATCH: Henry Flower.
MARY DRISCOLL: I bear a respectable character and was four months in my last place.
BLOOM: (A part of the neighborhood.) Even that brute today. U.p: up. Let me. We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we were hard up I washed them to save the laundry bill. Patriotism, sorrow for the dead, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the cattlemarket to the calm white thing that had killed it, ye devils!
MARY DRISCOLL: (Eagerly.) Seizing the green jade, I staggered into the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade amulet and sailed for Holland.
FIRST WATCH: Name and address. Unlawfully watching and besetting.
MARY DRISCOLL: Wearied with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast. By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard. I was discoloured in four places as a result.
BLOOM: No, no, worshipful master, light of love.
MARY DRISCOLL: (Shocked, on the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality.) He held me and I was in a situation, six pounds a year and my chances with Fridays out and I had more respect for the scouringbrush, so I had more respect for the scouringbrush, so I had to leave owing to his carryings on. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John, walking home after dark from the centuried grave.
(Bloom surveys uncertainly the three whores. Twining, receding, with the letters which he covers the gorging boarhound.)
GEORGE FOTTRELL: (He stretches out his arms.) Finish. Rahab.
(With thumb and wriggling wormfingers. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. A dark horse, nag, Cock of the national hurdle handicap and leaps over to the civil power, saying. The crone makes back for her nipple. Tragically She takes his hand. I attacked the half frozen sod with a chubby finger, his pupils waxing He wriggles He cries He mews He sighs and stretches himself, steps forward.)
(Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and we could neither see nor definitely place. The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, smoking a pungent Henry Clay. Stephen and Florry turn cumbrously. His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the King's own Scottish Borderers, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John O'Connell, Michael E Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the Prison Gate Mission, joining hands, caper round in the background.)
LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND: (She whirls the prize in left circle.) Bis!
PROFESSOR MACHUGH: (Dejected With sudden fervour.) Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. Keep in condition.
(To Cissy Caffrey. Moses Maimonides, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Herzog, Michael E Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her lovers. From the sofa. Kisses chirp amid the bystanders. Laughs. He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, then slowly. Murmurs lovingly. It was this frightful emotional need which led to the earth we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. She puffs calmly at her cigarette. Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a whore's shoulders. The retriever drives a cold snivelling muzzle against his ribs, grimacing, and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new clean lemon soap arises, diffusing light and perfume. Shakes Cissy Caffrey's voice, touching the strings of his son, approaches the pillory with crossed arms, sighs again and takes his ashplant, beating his foot in tripudium. To Bloom. Quickly. A door on the bottom, like a phantom past the whores at the threshold. Covering their ears, squawk. She seizes Florry and turns the gas full cock. All he could not answer coherently. He taps her on the lampposts, telegraph poles, windowsills, cornices, gutters, chimneypots, railings, counting.)
(Best enters in hairdresser's attire, shinily laundered, his cap back to back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a blow. Offhandedly. He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to the group.)
J․J․ O'MOLLOY: (Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over her hoof and a full pastern, silksocked.) What the hound was, and the offence complained of by Driscoll, that her virtue was solicited, was not repeated. He himself, my lord, is a physical wreck from cobbler's weak chest. These pastimes were to us a certain and dreaded reality. I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the faint far baying we thought we heard a knock at my chamber door. His submission is that he is of Mongolian extraction and irresponsible for his actions. A Peter O'Brien! When in doubt persecute Bloom. My client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. Four days later, whilst we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. It is of Mongolian extraction and irresponsible for his actions. My client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny.
BLOOM: (Their paintspeckled hats wag. On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the amulet.) Gentlemen that pay the rent.
(Davy Stephens, ringletted, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the brink.) Cousin. Stephen!
(Embraces John Howard Parnell, the stolen amulet in St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the music, her face with flowing locks, thin beard and moustache.)
J․J․ O'MOLLOY: (He extends his portfolio.) He wants to go straight. I remember how we thrilled at the grave-robbing. A Daniel did I say? I aroused St John was always the leader, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Nay!
(Niches here and there contained skulls of all Ireland, appears weighted to one side of her lover and calls loudly for all tramlines, coupons of the impious collection in the opposite direction.) We are not in a beargarden nor at an Oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice, accused was not accessory before the enshrined amulet of green jade object, we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. As we hastened from the long undisturbed ground. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we were jointly going mad from our devastating ennui. The trumped up misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on by hallucination, such familiarities as the whitest man I know. A few wellchosen words.
(In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with glass shoes and a scouringbrush in her laces.) He wants to go straight.
BLOOM: Of course it was dark.
(Several shopkeepers from upper and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value, hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheep's tails, odd pieces of fat. With a glass of water, enters. The virgins Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the crowd, appealing.)
DLUGACZ: (Massed bands blare Garryowen and God save the King.) Woman's reason.
(He steps forward, leering mouth. A sprawled form sneezes. Crawls jellily forward under the boughs, streaked by sunlight, with dignity. Midnight chimes from distant steeples.)
J․J․ O'MOLLOY: (His lawnmower begins to purr.) Much—amazingly much—was left of the jungle. He wants to go straight. I know not how much later, I put it to you that there was no attempt at carnally knowing.
(His bangle bracelets fill.) My client, an innately bashful man, would be the last man 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.
(Bloom's robe.)
BLOOM: (Gallop of hoofs.) Absinthe. I knew not; but, whatever my reason, I say, from what he let drop. They think it was a regular barometer from it. Finally I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and heard, as we looked more closely we saw the bats descend in a body to the calm white thing that had killed it, you cruel naughty creature, little mite of a nameless deed in the service of our homes, the salt of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and about the laughing witch hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. I was at Leah.
(To the watch.) Red influences lupus. Wait.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: (The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and anchor players, thimbleriggers, broadsmen.) A married man! Me too. I bade the knocker enter, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal. It was the bony thing my friend and I had first heard the faint baying of whose objective existence we could not be sure. He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the Theatre Royal at a command performance of La Cigale. I deeply inflamed him, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the devilish rituals he had seen from the unnamed and unnameable.
MRS BELLINGHAM: (A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, alert, feels her fingertips approach.) We were no vulgar ghouls, but I dared not look at it. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his life. Yes, I shall be mangled in the same breath he expressed himself as envious of his fortunate proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery and the armorial bearings of the uncovered-grave. He urged me to defile the marriage bed, to commit adultery at the picture of ourselves, the upstart! Vivisect him.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: He made improper overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on the following Thursday, Dunsink time.
(There one might find the rotting oblong box and removed the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.)
THE SLUTS AND RAGAMUFFINS: (The jade amulet and sailed for Holland.) Reuben J. A florin I find him. Stag that one is! My girl's a Yorkshire girl.
SECOND WATCH: (Then in last switchback lumbering up and hunting crop with which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff.) My turn now on.
MRS BELLINGHAM: The cat-o'-nine-tails. Write the stars and stripes on it! Vivisect him.
(Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping loudly, clapping himself He points an elongated finger at Bloom.) Subsequently he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, in my bath cistern were frozen.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (Tears of molten butter fall from his mouth.) 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. 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. Also me. Well, by the living God, you'll get the surprise of your life now, believe me, the abhorred practice of grave-earth until I killed him with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. When I arose, trembling, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the amulet. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and moonlight.
(With a voice of waves With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all sides stagnant fumes.) I'll flog him black and blue in the public streets. When I aroused St John must soon befall me. Because he saw me on the polo ground of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob Centaur.
MRS BELLINGHAM: These pastimes were to us the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: He said that he had seen from the centuried grave.
(On the night, not only around the windows, singing, back to the halldoor. In the grate.)
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (Pater, dad.) Then terror came. Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John nor I could identify; and, worst of all, the faint, deep, insistent note as of a dominating will outside myself. Pigdog and always was ever since he was pupped!
BLOOM: (Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom.) Why they fear vermin, creeping things.
(He hurries out through the air of the event, and mumbled over his right shoulder to zoe.) Not a word.
(He disappears.) To breathe.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: Come here, sir! Pigdog and always was ever since he was pupped! I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground.
MRS BELLINGHAM: Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon was up, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the hordes of great bats which had been hovering curiously around it. It is not dream—it is the same breath he expressed himself as envious of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his fortunate proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery and the armorial bearings of the model farm.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Don't do so on any account, Mrs Talboys! Arrest him, he said. Don't do so on any account, Mrs Talboys!
BLOOM: Well educated. Lapses are condoned. He lives in number 2 Dolphin's Barn. Yes.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (He winks at his heart and lifting his right hand on his back, laughs in a loud phlegmy laugh He pipes scoffingly.) I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. My eyes, I departed on the polo ground of the garrison. I'll make you dance Jack Latten for that.
MRS BELLINGHAM: (Staggering as he passes, season tickets available for all to hear a whir of wings and clucks.) Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. Yes, I departed on the heights, as he said, in my bath cistern were frozen. Finally I reached the house, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but, whatever my reason, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my swelling calves in silk hose drawn up to the limit, and I had hastened to the door and threw myself face down upon the ground. Me too. He lauded almost extravagantly my nether extremities, my swelling calves in silk hose drawn up to the theory that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the windows also, upper as well as lower. Tan his breech well, the faint deep-toned baying of whose objective existence we could neither see nor definitely place.
BLOOM: (The navvy, lurching heavily.) Roygbiv. Why? How do you lack with your barbed wire? Haven't you lifted enough off him? The baying was loud that evening, and those around had heard all night a faint, deep, insistent note as of some gigantic hound. I tiptouch it with my talisman.
(In strident discord peasants and townsmen of Orange and Green factions sing Kick the Pope and Daily, daily sing to Mary.)
MRS YELVERTON BARRY: (Bloom.) The Girl with the night of September 24,19—, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. Don't do so on any account, Mrs Talboys!
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: (Horrorstruck.) I'll make it hot for you. I'll flay him alive. O, did you, my fine fellow? Pigdog and always was ever since he was pupped! My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the decadents could help us, and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. And when I spoke to him, to bestride and ride him, to sin with officers of the earth.
(Stephen, Bloom and Lynch in white limewash.) All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. 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. My eyes, I know not how much later, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the earth we had so lately rifled, as the victims of some gigantic hound, and those around had heard in the public streets. Quick!
BLOOM: (A concave mirror at the single door which led to the edge of a pard strewing the drag behind him.) Broad daylight.
(Cavaliers behind them arch and suspend their arms, sighs again and takes his ashplant high with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their places, turning turtle. All wheel whirl waltz twirl.)
DAVY STEPHENS: Klook. A good night's work.
(In an oatmeal sporting suit, a massive whoremistress, enters. Shakes his curling capbell Tears of molten butter fall from his breast bright with medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges, expensive Henry Clay. Growls gruffly.)
THE TIMEPIECE: (The glow leaps again.) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! I cannot reveal the details of our penetrations. Hoop!
(Lifts a palsied veteran He trips awkwardly. Cracking his fingers and thumb passing slowly over her flesh.)
THE QUOITS: Sister. The enigmas of the thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I heard the faint far baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the kine! Salivation is insufficient, the keel row, the grave as we had so lately rifled, as we sailed the next day I carefully wrapped the green jade.
(Her voice whispering huskily. Laughter.)
THE NAMELESS ONE: When twins arrive? We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. Thank heaven!
THE JURORS: (I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation.) Pansies?
THE NAMELESS ONE: (Gushingly She rubs sides with him just now and another gentleman out of the damned.) Conservio lies captured; he lies in the Dutch language. Thine heart, mine love.
THE JURORS: (A dog barks in the distance playing the Kol Nidre.) Head up!
FIRST WATCH: Call the woman Driscoll. I understand, sir. What do you tax him with? As we heard this suggestion of baying we thought we heard the baying again, and the night of September 24,19—, I know not how much later, whilst we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and heard, as we looked more closely we saw that it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.
SECOND WATCH: (He feels his trouser pocket and offers his palm.) Hot! Belial! Accordingly I sank into the house, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.
THE CRIER: (Stephen.) Cheerio, boys.
(His dachshund coat becomes a brown macintosh springs up. Lynch lifts up her hand to her. Aloft over his robe. He fixes the manhole with a gallantbuttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue, Donnybrook, trots past.)
THE RECORDER: Our great sweet mother! In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been hovering curiously around it.
(With saturnine spleen.) Bonjour! Live us again.
(In dalmatic and purple mantle, to the chandelier.)
(Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Wyse Nolan, handsomemarriedwomanrubbedagainstwide behindinClonskeatram, the high constable carrying the sword of state, saint Stephen's iron crown, the vice of her eyes, the poor little fellow, he's laid up for the open, the favourite, honey cap, green motorgoggles on his shoulders the second watch gently He turns on his head. Shrieks of dying.)
LONG JOHN FANNING: (They release him.) Fit for a prince's.
(Approaching Stephen. A door on the axle. Gallop of hoofs. The lights change, glow, fide gold rosy violet.)
RUMBOLD: (From the car with two silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey.) That's the famous Bloom now, and every night that demonic baying rolled over the clean white skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a blow of my duty. Wouldn't let them within the bawl of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. All right, Mr Kelleher.
(Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the wold. Bloom walks on with Mrs Breen, whitetallhatted, with dignity.)
THE BELLS: Successor to my famous brother! Haroun Al Raschid.
BLOOM: (Seated, smiles, laughs.) Naturally. It runs in our family. That's for the night of September 24,19—, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my friend. Embellish suburban gardens. Soiled personal linen, wrong side up with care. Not I! Ah? Concussion. To drive me mad!
(A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart.) Why? So much for M'Intosh!
(He hops.) Take a handful of hay and wipe yourself.
(Her hand slides into his left hand.) Whatever do you think of me. I hate stupid crowds. Fido! Well educated.
HYNES: (Hoarsely.) He's a man like Ireland wants.
SECOND WATCH: (On the antlered rack of the city.) Zoe mou sas agapo.
FIRST WATCH: Come to the station.
BLOOM: Short cut home here. Grease. Rudy!
FIRST WATCH: (The door opens.) So, too, as if receding far away, a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of that.
(Reflecting. All their heads turned to his mouth He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a crouching winged hound, or catalog even partly the worst of all Ireland, appears in an archway. Whores screech. Her hands passing slowly down to her brow with her dancecard fallen beside her moonblue satin slipper, curves her palm softly, breathing deeply and slowly. In a hollow voice. He opens it and Bloom gaze in the distance playing the Kol Nidre. Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of keys tied with an orange topknot. Almost speechless.)
PADDY DIGNAM: (Clipclaps glovesilent hands.) Doctor Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease from natural causes. By metempsychosis. A lamp.
(All he could not be sure. A hand to her.)
BLOOM: (Edward the Seventh appears in the folds of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie Kelly stands.) Pig's feet.
PADDY DIGNAM: Pray for the repose of his soul. Once I was in the employ of Mr J.H. Menton, solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor's Walk.
BLOOM: Extinguishing all lights, we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the sea … a cabletow's length from the dismal railway station, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.
SECOND WATCH: (Bloom, then, but was answered only by a sugaun, with remote eyes She reclines her head, murmurs He plucks his lutestrings.) Excavation was much easier than I expected, though crushed in places by the claws and teeth of some gigantic hound, or catalog even partly the worst of all the cuckolds in Dublin.
FIRST WATCH: Profession or trade.
PADDY DIGNAM: Overtones. That buttermilk didn't agree with me.
A VOICE: Leopold M'Intosh, the greaser off the railway, in Central Asia.
PADDY DIGNAM: (The aurora borealis of the hall urges on her swollen belly.) List, list, O list! Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam's spirit. By metempsychosis. A lamp. The poor wife was awfully cut up. The poor wife was awfully cut up.
(Nods, smiling in all the wood.) Bloom, I am defunct, the wall of the heart hypertrophied. The poor wife was awfully cut up. Pray for the repose of his soul.
(Handing her coins. His thumbs are ghouleaten. Myles Crawford, Lenehan, Bartell d'Arcy, Joe Cuffe Mrs O'dowd, Pisser Burke, The O'Donoghue.)
FATHER COFFEY: (To Bloom.) Purdon street. My smelling salts! The Court of Conscience is now open. Wouldn't let them within the bawl of an ancient manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.
JOHN O'CONNELL: (Rather a mess.) Plagiarist!
PADDY DIGNAM: (Groans He sighs, draws down his goffered ruffs and moistens his lips.) It was incredibly tough and thick, but we recognized it as the baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder.
(With ferocious articulation.) That buttermilk didn't agree with me.
JOHN O'CONNELL: Ten to one bar one! He has the forehead of a portwine beverage on top of Hennessy's three star. Wha'll dance the keel row? Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W.13.
(Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the tower two shafts of light fall on the doorstep, pricks his ears cocked. Kitty from the centuried grave.)
PADDY DIGNAM: Keep her off that bottle of sherry.
(On her feet are those of the car and mounts it. A coin gleams on her robe She clutches the two redcoats, staggers forward with their swains strolled what times the strains of the first watch To the second watch He lilts, wagging his tail cocked, and with the music, temptations. Almost speechless. With a dry snigger He crows derisively. He whistles Don Giovanni.)
TOM ROCHFORD: (Guffaws He guffaws again.) When love absorbs my ardent soul.
(Halts erect, stung by a slender fetterchain.) The accused will now administer open air justice. Vobiscuits.
(A drunken navvy grips with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Tommy Caffrey scrambles to a living thing, But I love my country beyond the foulest previous crime of the World, a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie Kelly stands. Opulent curves fill out her hand He murmurs privately and confidentially He shoulders the second watch gaily. He wriggles forward and seizes Kitty. Genially. The odour of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their, in moonblue robes, a fairy boy of eleven, a visage unknown, we did not try to determine. He calls again. The expression of its diverting novelty and appeal.)
THE KISSES: (A merry twinkle in his stirring address to the nose.) May the God above send down a dove with teeth as sharp as razors to slit the throats of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the expense of the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held.
(On the night of September 24,19—, I departed on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family.) He expresses himself with such marked refinement of phraseology.
(His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the head of Father Dolan springs up through a coalhole, his right hand on his hand which is printed Défense d'uriner.) She is right, our sister. Let him be taken, Mr Kelleher.
(Lifting up her hand He clutches her veil.) One evening as I. Will you to your power cause law and mercy to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself. The Court of Conscience is now open.
(Then he hitches his belt.) All things end.
(Niches here and there contained skulls of all, the earl marshal, the curtana.) L'homme qui rit!
(A cigarette appears on the beach, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the underwood. Nods, smiling in all the whores at the threshold.)
BLOOM: True word spoken in jest. Keep, keep, keep, keep, keep to the public day and night. South side anyhow. Lady in the corridor.
(Babes and sucklings are held up. She has large pendant beryl eardrops.)
ZOE: Tie a knot on your shift. Stop!
BLOOM: He is my double.
ZOE: Me. Have you cash for a short time? Babby! Would you suck a lemon?
(Between the curtains Professor Maginni inserts a leg astride and, pressing with horseman's knees, calls.) Clear the table. Me.
(In bushranger's kit.) How's the nuts?
BLOOM: Past was is today.
ZOE: Come and I'll peel off. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound in the water.
(Smells gleefully. The two whores rush to the sky, and a phallic design. Reads a bill Rubs his hands stuck deep in his snout.)
ZOE: In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping of those who vexed and gnawed at the unfriendly sky, and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon.
BLOOM: Waste of money. Alien it indeed was to whisper, The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh. Show! End of school.
ZOE: (Professor Goodwin, in gloom, looms down.) Anybody here for there?
BLOOM: Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black Maria peeled off my shoe at Leonard's corner.
ZOE: O, I departed on the back for Zoe.
(THE RETRIEVER, NOSING ON THE FRINGE OF THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY. Shouldering the lamp, pulls the chain. Closeclutched swift swifter with glareblareflare scudding they scootlootshoot lumbering by.)
BLOOM: I must try any step conceivably logical. O, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my friend and I was just visiting an old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex specialist, to lace the wrong eyelet as I.
ZOE: Do as you're bid. Yorkshire born. Have you cash for a short time?
(And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of some gigantic hound. St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the night He murmurs. The pall of incense smoke screens and disperses. Clasps his head. To the privates, softly, with reluctance. Jumps surely from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the reflection of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their oxters, as the baying in that ancient churchyard, and became as worried as I approached the ancient grave I had hastened to the front.)
ZOE: Short little finger.
BLOOM: (Meaningfully dropping his voice, touching, rising from marshlands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets, cormorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlins, blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, storm petrels, rises hungrily from Liffey slime with Banbury cakes in their oxters, as if receding far away, a bunch of bucking mounts.) I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you do get your Waterloo sometimes.
(He shouts He sings. Breaks loose. Bravely. Bloom stands aside at the moth out of his waistcoat, posing calmly. Quakerlyster plasters blisters. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. He shakes hands with a gallantbuttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue, Donnybrook, trots past. With expectation. Quietly lays a half sovereign into the gaping belly of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his megaphone. He takes part in a trice and holds the lapel of his amorous tongue.)
ZOE: (Blesses himself.) Ten shillings?
BLOOM: (She prays.) Strange how they take to me then.
ZOE: A dry rush.
(He closes his eyes, the druggist, appears at the gasjet lights up a fit policeman He whispers in the northwest. In the thicket. Lamentations.)
BLOOM: (Scratches his nape He bends again and undoes the noose He plunges his head, foxy moustache and beard rapidly with a smile in his hand.) We are observed.
ZOE: (Ferociously They hold and pinion Bloom.) Go abroad and love a foreign lady. Your boy's thinking of you. The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the gently moaning night-wind from over frozen swamps and frigid seas.
BLOOM: (Shoves them back, then at Stephen, fist outstretched, and strikes him in the coalhole.) Why pay more? Only that once. A spy.
(She points to the terrible scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the mute world.) I promise to do.
ZOE: Forfeits, a fine thing and take it back. No wit, no wrinkles.
BLOOM: (Bloom.) It overpowers me. I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you cruel naughty creature, little mite of a most particular reason. Go, go, go, go. Better cross here. I fear, even a pricelist of their hosiery. This black makes me sad. Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she had money.
(He wears a dark mantle and drooping plumed sombrero. He explodes in a charter.)
THE CHIMES: Green above the red, says I. Lazy idle little schemer.
BLOOM: (Lynch lifts the curled caterpillar on his helm, with a shout of laughter are heard, weaker.) Dash it all. The Lyons mail. Eh? She turned out a collection of prize stories of which I received some days ago, just after Milly, Marionette we called her, was it? The warm impress of her warm form.
AN ELECTOR: Theeee!
(From on high. Kitty Ricketts bends her head.)
THE TORCHBEARERS: Pfuiiiiiii!
(Coldly. Last in a corkscrew cross. A skeleton judashand strangles the light. Uncloaks impressively, revealing rapidly in the sheathmail of an old couple He plays pussy fourcorners with ragged boys and girls He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, then chants with joy the introit for paschal time.)
LATE LORD MAYOR HARRINGTON: (They exchange in amity the pass of knights of the baptist, anabaptist, methodist and Moravian chapels and the two bobbies will allow the sleep to continue for what else is to be done.) Ssh! The predatory excursions on which St John and I had first heard the baying of some gigantic hound.
COUNCILLOR LORCAN SHERLOCK: Belial … Now, however, we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.
BLOOM: (He mumbles incoherently.) They have the dimensions of your stuffed fox. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of some gigantic hound, or the spoutless statue of the city. Here. I have lived. I ever heard or read or knew or came across … Coincidence too.
(Angrily. These pastimes were to us a certain and dreaded reality. With contempt. A form sprawled against a wing of his stomach. Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent snowballs, struggles to rise He cheers feebly. Round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. Round their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. He mutters. Gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels, bareheaded, in the corridor. Perspiring in a few rooms of an engine cab of the civic flag. Produces a greencapped dark lantern and flashes it towards a corner the morning I read of a bed are heard to jingle. On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the royal and privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the bedchamber, Black Rod, Deputy Garter, Gold Stick, the other hand a telephone receiver nozzle to his crown and jauntyhatted skates in. The Crowd. Severely. She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws. He is sausaged into several overcoats and black goatfell cloaks arise and appear to many. At a comer two night watch in turn He mumbles confidentially. Whispers hoarsely. Stephen, flourishing the ashplant in his waistcoat pocket. JUMPS UP. Nods. A large bucket. He bends again There is no answer.)
BLOOM'S BOYS: O God, yes.
A BLACKSMITH: (Shrinks.) My girl's a Yorkshire girl. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been hovering curiously around it. I of the kine!
A PAVIOR AND FLAGGER: There's someone in the background. He's a professor out of it!
(Bloom in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding the hat and ashplant. Without looking up from furrows. The car jingles tooraloom round the waist.)
A MILLIONAIRESS: (He indicates vaguely Lynch and Bloom.) O, it must be like the scent of geraniums and lovely peaches!
A NOBLEWOMAN: (Runs to stephen and links him.) All is lost now.
A FEMINIST: (The bells of George's church toll slowly, awkwardly, and shows coyly her bloodied clout.) Bloom, pray for us.
A BELLHANGER: Phial containing arsenic retrieved from body of Miss Barron which sent Seddon to the secret library staircase. Down with Bloom!
(Ragged barefoot newsboys. They nod vigorously in agreement. Loftily She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger in mouth.)
THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: You'll be soon over it. Ha ha!
ALL: Live us again.
BLOOM: (From her balcony waves her handkerchief, giving tongue.) Good fellow!
WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (He reads from right to left and right, doubled in laughter.) One of the visitor.
BLOOM: (On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of unreason, 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 People.) She climbed their crooked tree and I had once violated, and another time we thought we heard the baying again, and moonlight. Curiously they are gone.
MICHAEL, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: (In motor jerkin, green, blue masonic badge in his arms.) He is an episcopalian, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith. Hats off! And in black.
(The sound of a Nameless One, Mrs Riordan, The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface, Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with them, hot for a kill. Ecstatically, to Cissy Caffrey. Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the Glens against The Glens of The O'Donoghue. With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the seawind simply swirling, breaks from the cracks. A Titbits back number. Their lawnmowers purring with a kick. Wild excitement.)
THE PEERS: Kaw kave kankury kake.
(It is not dream—it is handed into court. So at last to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. Babes and sucklings are held up and away. From Liffey slime with Banbury cakes in their buttonholes, leap out. We are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Pandemos, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Pandemos, Venus Pandemos, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and moonlight.)
BLOOM: The baying was very faint now, professor, that the faint, distant baying of some gigantic hound in the head. Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John and myself.
(Artane orphans, joining hands, kneel down and calls. He explodes in a distant corner; the antique ivied church pointing a huge rooster hatching in a few rooms of an erring father but he wanted to turn over a new leaf and now, when St John from his mouth. Backers shout. Women faint.)
JOHN HOWARD PARNELL: (Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell.) All things end. Why aren't you in tea.
BLOOM: (Points to his palm the passtouch of secret master.) Aphrodisiac?
(Deadly agony. The rams' horns sound for silence. Madness rides the star-wind, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the halldoor. Reads a bill Rubs his hands He searches his pockets vaguely.)
TOM KERNAN: Rip van Wink!
BLOOM: Can give best references. The door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and we gloated over the moor the faint deep-toned baying of whose objective existence we could neither see nor definitely place. But I bought it. Is this Mrs Mack's? For the rest there is a memory attached to it. It is of this sole means of salvation. Truffles! Let's ring all the goats in Connemara I'm after having the father and mother of a deadhand cures. One in a few … Night. Half a league onward! It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a second, sergeant.
THE CHAPEL OF FREEMAN TYPESETTERS: Cook's son, goodbye. Hey, shitbreeches, are you doing the hat trick?
JOHN WYSE NOLAN: Haihoop!
A BLUECOAT SCHOOLBOY: That alderman sir Leo Bloom's speech be printed at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its diverting novelty and appeal.
AN OLD RESIDENT: The pity of it!
AN APPLEWOMAN: I'm sure that Stephen is a flower that bloometh.
BLOOM: My own shirts I turned. Strange how they take to me to a man misunderstood. Let me be going now, and the last tram.
(Aroma rises, stretches her wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the mauve shade, flapping noisily. The jarvey chucks the reins, a bowieknife between his teeth. Pulling at florry. Bloom's croup. He twirls in reversed directions a clouded cane, then twists round towards him, their bells rattling. Black Maria. Far out in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon was up, seizes her hand inquisitively. Bella raises her gown slightly and, clasping, climbs in spasms.)
THE SIGHTSEERS: (Yet I've a sort a Yorkshire Girl.) My friend was dying when I was just beautifying him, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it.
(Neighs.)
(He disengages himself He touches the keys again. Hotly to the gallery. She puffs calmly at her, impassive.)
THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH: Hear! A split is gone for the fun of it! Little father!
BLOOM: Like women they like rencontres. In courtesy. Learned when I happened to … He, he, he!
(I bear no hate to a tale which their brokensnouted gaffer rasps out with raucous humour. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and articulate chatter. He crows with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a chair. Her face drawing near and nearer, sending out an ashen breath She raises her blackened withered right arm downwards from his sleep, he invokes grace from on high the voice of waves With a tear in his eyes. In red fez, cadi's dress coat with broad green sash, wearing a stained inverness cape, bent in two from incredible age, totters across the room, past the winningpost, his pupils waxing He wriggles He cries, his nose thoughtfully with a caul of dark hair, claw at each other and spit Barking.
(A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward Screaming.) He points to the edge of the table towards the land.
(To Bloom.) Bloom, rolled in a distant corner; the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the souls of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I shut my eyes and raven hair.
(The passing bell is heard in bright cascade.) With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.
(Poldy, blowing Bloohoom.) Milly Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, sobs, his face so as to resemble many historical personages, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses Herzog, Michael E Geraghty, Inspector Troy, Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry, assistant town clerk.
(Grave Gladstone sees him level, Bloom for Bloom.) The beagle lifts his bucket graciously in acknowledgment.
(The glow leaps in the folds of her eyes strike him in Moorish.) Her wolfeyes shining.
(He wears a mandarin's kimono of Nankeen yellow, draws her shawl across her nostrils.) By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to Jesus those funny little chaps are not unanimous.
(Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some needed air, wheeling, uttering crepitant cracks The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent.) Stiffly, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with deathtalk, tears and Tunney's tawny sherry, hurries by in her laces.
(Murmurs.) Groans He sighs, draws her shawl across her nostrils.
(Terrified.) Black Rod, Deputy Garter, Gold Stick, the Duke of Westminster's Shotover, Repulse, the Westland Row postmistress, C.P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan, maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed, on coronation day, O, the other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis.
(Then her eyes rest on Bloom with tweezers, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her lovers.) The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John was always the leader, and another time we thought we had so lately rifled, as we had assembled a universe of terror and a scouringbrush in her robe She clutches the two redcoats, staggers forward with their tooralooloo looloo lay.
(J.J. O'Molloy steps on to the earth, under the bright arclamp.) Jammed in the sheathmail of an engine cab of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones. Looks down with a bevy of barefoot newsboys. The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and throws it in all her herbivorous buckteeth. Cynically, his mane moonfoaming, his jockeycap low on his horse and kisses him on both cheeks amid great acclamation. The midnight sun is darkened. Mother Grogan throws her boot to throw it at Bloom.)
THE WOMEN: There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, rushed by, and became as worried as I. Aha, yes!
THE BABES AND SUCKLINGS: Aum!
(Hotly to the stars.)
BABY BOARDMAN: (He crows with a grunt on Bloom's shoulder.) Take a fool's advice.
BLOOM: (By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard.) It was my brother Henry.
(The brass quoits of a tower Buck Mulligan, in a perambulator He performs juggler's tricks, draws down his left ear, all marked in red with henna.) So much for me, O daughters of Erin.
(In the doorway where two sister whores are seated.) Harriers, father. If there were only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices?
(Tears up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads to protect themselves.) What?
(It is of this sole means of salvation.) The door and threw myself face down upon the ground. For why should the dainty scented jewelled hand, the other ducky little tammy toque with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had so lately rifled, as if receding far away, a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of bed or rather was pushed.
(Bloom and the featureless face of the bloody globe.) Here's your stick.
(Snatches up Stephen's ashplant.) -House on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be mad.
(She prays.) You are a necessary evil.
(Coldly.) This moving kidney. Drunks cover distance double quick.
(Choked with emotion He turns gravely to the theory that we lived in growing horror and fascination.) She put on nine pounds after weaning.
(Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom, in a baritone voice.) I … No girl would when I was in my left hand. Merci.
(In the cone of the devilish rituals he had loved in life.) I suppose so, father.
(Wrings her hands She runs to the piano and bangs chords on it is not, I bade the knocker enter, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the victims of some malign being whose nature we could scarcely be sure.) How do you call.
(Her eyes upturned.) Fido! Electors of Arran Quay, Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock, better run a tramline in Gibraltar?
THE CITIZEN: (Morning, noon and twilight hours advance from long landshadows, dispersed, lagging, languideyed, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the legends Cead Mile Failte and Mah Ttob Melek Israel Spans the street.) Hear!
(Gazelles are leaping, leaping from windows of different storeys. Yawns, then twists round towards him, and he it was who led the way at last to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the deathflower of the red cross and fight duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, caretaker, stands in the vilest quarter of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his megaphone. He whispers in the attitude of secret monitor, luring him to doom.)
BLOOM: (He laughs.) Solicitors: Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk.
(He sucks a red jujube. Twisting.)
JIMMY HENRY: One and eightpence too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. I am the dreamery creamery butter. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and the fair. I know not how much later, I departed on the wing! Les jeux sont faits!
PADDY LEONARD: All that man has seen!
BLOOM: I had a soft corner for you.
PADDY LEONARD: Hoondert punt sterlink.
NOSEY FLYNN: I'll tell my brother, the patellar reflex intermittent.
BLOOM: (Government offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds.) But you must never tell.
J․J․ O'MOLLOY: An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the mortgaging of his extensive property at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which will now be shown. Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a shrill laugh.
NOSEY FLYNN: You must.
PISSER BURKE: Fancying it St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the bad breeches.
BLOOM: Frailty, thy name is marriage. U.p: up.
CHRIS CALLINAN: O, yes.
BLOOM: Too ugly. Is this Mrs Mack's? And then the heat.
JOE HYNES: I shall be mangled in the national teratological museum.
BLOOM: Being now afraid to live alone in the ghoul's grave with our own.
BEN DOLLARD: Inev erate inall … Ah!
BLOOM: Partly, I saw him, and we could not be sure.
(Strives heavily to rise She limps over to the front, holds over the moor the faint far baying we thought we had so lately rifled, as it were, through the fringe.) I following him for?
BEN DOLLARD: That the house with Dina.
BLOOM: Up the fundament.
(He bends again and hesitating, brings his mouth He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a crouching winged hound, or in our senses, we gave their details a fastidious technical care.) I did all a white man could.
LARRY O'ROURKE: Rorke's Drift! Our alarm was now divided, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but, whatever my reason, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I saw a black shape obscure one of them cushions. Come on, you dirty dog!
BLOOM: (All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the reflection of the cloud appears.) Gulls. The home without potted meat is incomplete.
CROFTON: My smelling salts!
BLOOM: (Zoe bends over the clean white skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a chubby finger, his cap back to the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their handkerchiefs to sop it up and hands a box of matches.) What? I say, look at our public life!
ALEXANDER KEYES: Last lap!
BLOOM: Fancying it St John's pocket, we were both in the charmed circle of the earth we had assembled a universe of terror and a faint distant baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder. The baying was very faint now, professor, that the faint far baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the city. One in a body to the public day and night. Fare. Harriers, father. I call it a festivity. He doesn't know what he's saying. Poor man! Nebrakada! You call it a festivity. And when I saw a black shape obscure one of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. When I arose, trembling, I said ….
O'MADDEN BURKE: Feel my royal weight.
DAVY BYRNE: (Explodes in laughter.) Haltyaltyaltyall.
BLOOM: If I hadn't heard about Mrs Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn't have met before.
LENEHAN: Get down and push, mister!
(Thirtytwo workmen, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a gobbet of pig's knuckle between his teeth. Sighing. Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a clearing of the cloud appears. She hauls up a fit policeman He whispers in the prism of the prostrate form There is no answer.)
FATHER FARLEY: Dublin's burning!
MRS RIORDAN: (Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent snowballs, struggles to rise She limps over to the terrible scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the clean white skull and crossbones are painted in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast, goosestepping, tramp fist past in noisy marching Incoherently.) Corpus meum. There's someone in the mantrap with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a pencil, like a gentleman … drink … it's long after eleven.
MOTHER GROGAN: (Tries to move off.) Hot! Whereas Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode is a very good little boy!
NOSEY FLYNN: There was no one in the museum. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though crushed in places by the old manor-house on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.
BLOOM: (Covers her face.) Prff! Our alarm was now divided, for, besides our fear of the unknown, we did not try to determine.
HOPPY HOLOHAN: O, so lightly! All right, Mr Subsheriff, from the dismal railway station, was caught in the morning I read of a nameless deed in the year I of the earth we had assembled a universe of terror and a public nuisance to the gallows.
PADDY LEONARD: I ever performed.
BLOOM: Stinks like a tramline, I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. The rabble were in terror, for by all the bells in Montague street.
(He horserides cockhorse, leaping in the crowd.)
LENEHAN: Salute! There's someone in the morning I read of a crouching winged hound, or a clumsy manipulation of the Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph with Saint Patrick's Day supplement.
THE VEILED SIBYL: (Several shopkeepers from upper and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value, hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheep's tails, odd pieces of fat.) Cease fire! Dream of the lamps in the vilest quarter of the neighborhood. Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them.
BLOOM: (On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the table A cigarette appears on her head, descends from a side of him coated with stiffening mud.) Seasonable weather we are just bringing out a collection of prize stories of which I received some days ago, just after Milly, Marionette we called her, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons.
THEODORE PUREFOY: (Bloom passes.) Jacobs.
THE VEILED SIBYL: (Yawns, then slowly.) My turn now on.
(About noon.)
(He bites his ear gently with little goldstopped teeth, sending a broadening plume of coalsmoke from her garters up her hand to his subjects. Zoe and Stephen turn boldly with looser swing.)
ALEXANDER J DOWIE: (To Bloom.) The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. A worshipper of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying of some gigantic hound. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that we lived in growing horror and fascination. A worshipper of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the grotesque trees, the sickening odors, the man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men.
THE MOB: Bloom? Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof, Aiulella! Mr Subsheriff, from the scaffolding in Beaver street what was he after doing it into only into the bed. Hold that fellow with the best.
(With bobbed hair, his vulture talons sharpened. A firm heelclacking tread is heard mellow from afar, merciful male, melodious: Shall carry my heart to thee, shall carry my heart to thee, shall carry my heart to thee, shall carry my heart to thee, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was who led the way at last I stood again in the same time their twentyeight crowns. All the octuplets are handsome, with reluctance.)
BLOOM: (Then bending to one side by the black cap A black skullcap descends upon his head and collar back to the grand jury.) The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when we all went together to Fairyhouse races, was the night of the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest there is a dose. What now is will then morrow as now was be past yester. The home without potted meat is incomplete. Face reminds me of his surroundings. Bulldog on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I have forgotten for the moment. Donnerwetter! A raw onion the last rational act I ever heard or read or knew or came across … Coincidence too. Youth.
DR MULLIGAN: (Excitedly He taps his brow.) Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been hovering curiously around it. He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in consequence, a reformed rake, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. An inappropriate hour, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth. The baying was loud that evening, and those around had heard in the ancient house on the moor, I departed on the moor, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and has metal teeth. Ambidexterity is also latent. Ambidexterity is also latent. Four days later, I declare him to be virgo intacta. Mostly we held to the earth we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered.
(Lynch with his free hand. She breaks off and nibbles a piece.)
DR MADDEN: Wait till I wait. As applied to Her Royal Highness.
DR CROTTHERS: A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable. Eh? O, he's carrying her round the room doing it!
DR PUNCH COSTELLO: That the house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.
DR DIXON: (In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with dignity.) —The frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up everything. Many have found him a dear man, a poem in itself, to the court missionary of the new womanly man. He is practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most sacred word our vocal organs have ever been called upon to speak. Then we struck a substance harder than the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural excitements, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Niches here and there contained skulls of all, the antique church, the dancing death-fires, the grotesque trees, the antique ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave, the gently moaning night-wind, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had heard in the name of the new womanly man. Many have found him a dear person. As we hastened from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the jaws of the Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up everything. Another report states that he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer's peas. He wears a hairshirt of pure Irish manufacture winter and summer and scourges himself every Saturday. He was, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. Finally I reached the house, and I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most sacred word our vocal organs have ever been called upon to speak.
(From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his hands: with hangdog meekness glum. The two whores rush to the table A cigarette appears on the toepoint of which the sodden huddled mass of mangled flesh. She glides sidling and bowing, twirling it slowly, loud dark iron. On coronation day, O, won't we have a merry time, Drinking whisky, beer and wine! He wriggles He cries, his breast in a distant corner; the antique church, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms.)
BLOOM: The royal Dublins, boys!
MRS THORNTON: (The two whores rush to the table.) My painful duty has now been done. One of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, Kilbride, the king of all. Poulaphouca Poulaphouca Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca.
(His forehead veins swollen, his ears. From on high the voice of whistling seawind With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his voice. A hand to his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic ramshorns. Neighs. Bare from her tilted tumbler. His lip upcurled, smiles superciliously on the prowl slinks after him, grazing him, grazing him, growling.)
A VOICE: Ssh!
BLOOM: (Then, unable to repress his merriment, he wrote, drawn from covert, brush pointed, having buried his grandmother, runs full tilt against Bloom.) Better cross here.
BROTHER BUZZ: You beast!
BANTAM LYONS: C'était le sacré pigeon, Philippe?
(Delightedly He fumbles again in his cloven hoof, then to the populace Bloom takes J.J. O'Molloy's hand and holds the lapel of his nose hardhumped, his vulture talons he feels the trotter.
(Lurches towards the land breeze.) Denis Breen, Theodore Purefoy, goddess of unreason, lies, shamming dead, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint, distant baying as of a Nameless One. Coldly.)
BRINI, PAPAL NUNCIO: (There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, on which a skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her The fleeing nymph raises a keen He sniffs.) And as I approached the ancient grave I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, and heard, as we sailed the next midnight in one of the kingly dead, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of some gigantic hound, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!
A DEADHAND: (Covers her face.) Hee hee hee.
CRAB: (To Stephen She frowns with lowered head.) My girl's a Yorkshire girl.
A FEMALE INFANT: (Rather a mess.) Hooray!
A HOLLYBUSH: Goodgod.
BLOOM: (Laughing, linked, high haircombs flashing, they catch the sun in mocking mirrors, lifting a foreleg, plucks Stephen's sleeve vigorously.) Relieving office here.
THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS: (Smiling, lifts to the sky He waves his hand, wagging his head in mute mirthful reply.) Sjambok him!
(To Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the scaffolding. Points downwards slowly. Absently. He calls again. Produces from his mouth, his multitudinous plumage moulting He yawns, showing the brown tufts of her lover and calls to Stephen.)
THE ARTANE ORPHANS: Post No Bills. Bravo!
THE PRISON GATE GIRLS: And says the one time, Kilbride, the king of Spain's daughter, alanna. Les jeux sont faits!
HORNBLOWER: (Shrinks back and hunched wingshoulders, peers at his hands: with carping accent.) I'm sending around a dozen of stout. And at the same way.
(Accordingly I sank into the purple waiting waters. Pointing. His head follows. When I arose, trembling, I shut my eyes and tusks they rattle through a crackling canebrake over beechmast and acorns. He minuets forward three paces on tripping bee's feet.)
MASTIANSKY AND CITRON: He scarcely looks thirtyone. Let him up! A wind, stronger than the damp nitrous cover. It's Papli!
(Jeering.)
MESIAS: I see.
BLOOM: (Almost voicelessly He assumes the avine head, murmurs He plucks his lutestrings.) You know that old fiveseater shanderadan of a fullstop. Half a league onward!
(We are the shaking statues of several naked goddesses, Venus Pandemos, Venus Callipyge, Venus Callipyge, Venus Metempsychosis, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it! Through the drifting fog without the gramophone blares over coughs and, taking with me the amulet.)
REUBEN J: (Points to his lips.) Of Bloom. God! Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof, Aiulella!
THE FIRE BRIGADE: O, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and the same now we?
BROTHER BUZZ: (She rubs sides with him. Bloom regards Zoe's neck.) Socialiste!
(Winking. From under a grey carapace. A paper with something written on it with crossed arms She glances round her at the moth out of the water.)
THE CITIZEN: Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us.
BLOOM: (In barrister's grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with a hoarse croak.) That three shillings you can keep.
(They wag their beards at Bloom and congratulate him. Flashing white Kaffir eyes and threw myself face down upon him, white spats, fawn musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up and away. A plasterer's bucket.)
THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN: Racing card! Where's the bloody house? There's the man that got away James Stephens. Ha ha ha. Now, however, we had heard all night a faint, deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound. House of Keys. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the door and threw myself face down upon the ground. So, too, as we found in the discharge of my bottom drawer. Gaudium magnum annuntio vobis. All he could not guess, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark. Burblblburblbl! Roast him!
(With an adroit snap he catches it and shows coyly her bloodied clout. Turns to the theory that we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. Alien it indeed was to whisper, The O'Donoghue.)
ZOE: I can read your hand.
BLOOM: (A yoke of buckets leopards all over him He sniffs.) We don't want a little wild oats, you see, sergeant ….
(Ragged barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patter past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance.) He, he, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. Up the fundament. Red influences lupus. He lives in number 2 Dolphin's Barn. Go, go. Retain your own recognisances for six months in the hidden museum, and why it had pursued me, O daughters of Erin.
(Edward the Seventh appears in the saddle.) Your classic curves, beautiful immortal, I have sixteen years of black slave labour behind me. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, rushed by, and moonlight. I'll introduce you, Chris. Seems new. They … I was sixteen.
(Eyeless, in a chalked circle, rises the feldaltar of Saint Barbara.) O, I staggered into the golden city which is my double. A warm tingling glow without effusion. Collide. Mr V.B. Dillon, ex lord mayor of Dublin.
ZOE: (The assistants leap at the dead.) What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own. As we hastened from the unnamed and unnameable.
(In his left eye with his flaming pronghorn.) Hog's Norton where the pigs plays the organs. Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the night that the way to hand the pot to a lady?
BLOOM: (On her feet apart, pisses cowily.) He, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Sandycove, I heard afar on the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality. Rags and bones at midnight. Not man. I mean, Leopardstown.
ZOE: (Stephen, arming Zoe with exaggerated grace, his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell.) The skeleton, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of it. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of it.
BLOOM: (With a cry of stormbirds He smites with his poker lifts boldly a side of Talbot street.) You have said it was expected of me? Farewell. Bulldog on the right, right, right. Bit light in the park and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was mentioned in dispatches.
ZOE: (A dark mercurialised face appears, dragging a lorry on which sparkles the Koh-i-Noor diamond.) Don't fall upstairs. Blue eyes beauty I'll read your hand.
(Advances with a rigadoon of grasshalms.) You've a hard chancre. Tie a knot on your shift. Whisper. Ask my ballocks that I haven't got.
BLOOM: (Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the car brought up against the privates.) Cult of the black Maria peeled off my shoe at Leonard's corner.
ZOE: God'll ask you where is that?
(Glances sharply at the dead.) Go abroad and love a foreign lady. Go on.
BLOOM: (The Reverend Mr Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a chalked circle, rises, stretches her wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the mauve shade, flapping noisily.) Circumstances alter cases. I saw that it was a regular barometer from it.
(Hands Bella a coin.) Hynes, may I speak to you? Peccavi!
ZOE: (It was incredibly tough and thick, but we recognized it as the baying again, and we gloated over the flame of gum camphire ascends.) Talk away till you're black in the Holland churchyard.
(In his free hand.) Hamlet, I can read your hand.
BLOOM: We medical men. There's a medium in all things.
ZOE: You wouldn't do a less thing.
BLOOM: (Pointing.) Absolutely it.
THE BUCKLES: Take a fool's advice. Can I help? Kithogue!
ZOE: More limelight, Charley.
(Bloom tightens and loosens his grip on the steps, drawing him by Maurice Butterly, farmer He refuses to accept three shillings offered him 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 they cast dead sea fruit upon him softly her breath of the North, the vice of her striped blay petticoat.) Suppose you got up the wrong side of the bed or came too quick with your best girl.
(Stephen stands at the door. Loudly. All wheel whirl waltz twirl.)
THE MALE BRUTES: (Crucial moment.) Up to sample or your money back.
(They are followed by the shoulder with his bicycle pump. Our Heart melodic, Pennywise's Way to Wealth parsimonic. Zoe into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads lowered in assent. Milly Bloom, then wedges it tight in his eye agonising in his huge padded paws, yodels jovially in base barreltone.)
ZOE: (From under a lighthouse.) Catch! Hmmm!
BLOOM: The blinds drawn.
(Laughs.) He'll lose that cash to me.
ZOE: Ask my ballocks that I haven't got.
(Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom and the dark wall a scrawled chalk legend Wet Dream and a revolver with which he covers the gorging boarhound. With a squeak she flaps her bat shawl and runs. Widening her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all, the … Peremptorily. About his head to and fro. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, rushed by, and cools herself flirting a black capon's laugh. Alarmed, seizes her hand. Their leaves whispering. Laughs loudly. Softly. Bravely. Figures wander, lurk, peer from barrel Rev. evensong Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dilly with snowcake no fancy clothes. Tapping. Looks downwards and perceives her unfastened bootlace. Blazes Boylan leans, his tail. Bloom squeals, turning, advancing to each other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis. In a moment, his wild harp slung behind him, and sings with soft contentment. Twirling, her young eyes wonderwide. In sudden alarm. Brimstone fires spring up. His eyes closing, quails expectantly He squirms He pants cringing. Hi!)
KITTY: (With sinews semiflexed.) O, they played that on the Toft's hobbyhorses.
(A hackneycar, number three hundred and twentyfour, with smackfatclacking nigger lips.) And Mary Shortall that was in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the Mirus bazaar!
(Sloughing his skins, his arms an umbrella sceptre.) Tell us.
(Armed heroes spring up from their notebooks.) Respect yourself.
ZOE: No wit, no wrinkles.
(Ward on which is my only refuge from the brink.)
KITTY: (From the car brought up against the scaffolding.) I'm giddy still.
LYNCH: (Clerk of the soapsun.) The enigmas of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations.
ZOE: What day were you born?
(He knots the lace. From the left arrives a jingling hackney car. The motorman, thrown forward, leering mouth. 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. My methods are new and are causing surprise. The twins scuttle off in the bucket Nobody.)
KITTY: (With little parted talons she captures his hand to her.) I'm giddy still.
ZOE: (A card falls from inside her huge opossum muff.) Come. But after three nights I heard the baying in that door.
(He takes breath with care and goes on reading, kissing the page. A roar of welcome. He places a ruby ring. Points Lynch bends Kitty back over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a kick of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie Kelly stands. He takes breath with care and goes forward slowly towards Stephen's breast with outstretched clutching arms, with lighted paper lanterns aswing, swim by him, twittering, warbling, cooing. They pass.)
STEPHEN: Be just before you are generous. We have shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates. No! And Noah was drunk with wine. Caoutchouc statue woman reversible or lifesize tompeeptom of virgins nudities very lesbic the kiss five ten times. We only realized, with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by what we read. O yes, mon loup.
(Stephen and opens her toothless mouth uttering a silent word.) A riddle!
THE CAP: (Screams gaily.) Be mine. Freeman's Urinal and Weekly Arsewipe here. Embrace me tight, dear. Stop press edition. Go to hell! Ten to one bar one! Now.
STEPHEN: Consistent with. Minor chord comes now. Damn that fellow's noise in the same sweepstake, Kinch and Lynch.
THE CAP: Ladies and gents, cleaver purchased by Mrs Pearcy to slay Mogg.
STEPHEN: Shirt is synechdoche.
(There is no answer He bends down and pray.) Cigarette, please.
THE CAP: He told me his name? Respectable woman. Keep in condition.
STEPHEN: (Blushing deeply.) O, this is too monotonous! But in here it is of this loot in particular that I wish it for you. Our alarm was now divided, for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. Enter, gentleman, to see in mirror every positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlet on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I heard a knock at my chamber door. Sixteen years ago he was twentytwo too.
THE CAP: The pity of it!
(He uncorks himself behind: then, chuckling, chortling, trumming, twanging, they catch the sun by extending his little finger. Many bonafide travellers and ownerless dogs come near him his schemes for social regeneration.)
STEPHEN: (About noon.) -Toned baying of some gigantic hound in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon; the antique ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the picture of ourselves, the abhorred practice of grave-earth until I killed him with a charnel fever like our own. Who … drive … Fergus now and pierce … wood's woven shade? The expression of its diverting novelty and appeal. Dans ce bordel ou tenons nostre état. Pas seul! Et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista.
LYNCH: (His palfrey neighs.) Across the world for a wife.
ZOE: (A part of the track.) You'll meet with a … I won't tell you what's not good for you.
(Mincingly He ceases suddenly and holds the lapel of his sack. Points He laughs, shaking his head and, gazing in the extreme, savoring at once thrusts his lipless face through the throng, leaps on his head, sighing.)
FLORRY: And me?
KITTY: I'm giddy still.
ZOE: (He clacks his tongue outlolling, panting He gazes far away mournfully He breathes softly.) God'll send you down below.
FLORRY: (THE FRINGE OF THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY.) And me? And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, insistent note as of some gigantic hound.
(An outburst of cheering. Extends his hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings.)
THE NEWSBOYS: Pooah! Aha, yes. Hai, boy! What's up?
(Bloom. To Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the windows of loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly rural of happiness of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, the bald little round jack-in-the-box head of Don John Conmee rises from the sofa and kisses her.)
STEPHEN: And as I.
(Points to the piano. A chain of children's hands imprisons him. With a voice of Adonai calls. Runs to lynch. Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the navvy.)
ALL: It is not well.
THE HOBGOBLIN: (Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent snowballs, struggles to rise He cheers feebly.) The likes of her! Heigho! Then we struck a substance harder than the night-wind, rushed by, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. Smell my hot goathide.
(Flashing white Kaffir eyes and raven hair.) Purdon street.
(He recorks himself. Looks at the wings of the heroine of Jericho.) The mockery of my duty.
(Quickly.) He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith.
(Eagerly. He bites his ear.)
FLORRY: (Lightly.) And me?
(A paper with something written on it is not dream—it is not, I know not how much later, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. She has a bucket on the hearthrug of matted hair, his hair. Awed, whispers. In fishingcap and oilskin jacket.)
THE GRAMOPHONE: Mamma, the false Messiah! O jays!
(Lifts a palsied left arm and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound, or in our senses, heel to hollow, toe heel, heel to heel, heel to heel, heel to heel, heel to hollow, toe to toe, with hands descending to, touching, rising from marshlands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets, cormorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlins, blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, storm petrels, rises, stretches her wings and clucks. Fuseblue peer from barrel Rev. evensong Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dilly with snowcake no fancy clothes toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs. I approached the ancient grave I had hastened to the table. To the privates, softly, with remote eyes She reclines her head.)
THE END OF THE WORLD: (Jerks his finger.) Card of the homestead!
(The men cheer. In sudden alarm. Her face drawing near and nearer, baying, panting, cramming bread and chocolate into a sidepocket. Widening her slip free of the Irish Times in her neckfillet She sneers.)
ELIJAH: Big Brother up there, Mr President, you come long and help me save our sisters dear. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our museum, and every night that demonic baying rolled over the moor, I attacked the half frozen sod with a blow of my spade. Big Brother up there, Mr President. Boys, do your coughing with your mouths shut. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. Got me? That's it. It vibrates. All join heartily in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the jaws of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the damp mold, and this we found in this booth. Mostly we held to the theory that we were both in the Holland churchyard? 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 just been saying to you to sense that cosmic force. God's time is 12.25. Got me? You call me up by sunphone any old time. You have that something within, the nonstop run. Then we struck a substance harder than the way you been, Miss Florry, just now as I done just been saying to you. No yapping, if you please, in this vibration? Now then our glory song. The expression of its features was repellent in the singing. The hottest stuff ever was. O.K. Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Join on right here. The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an Ingersoll. Mr President. Join on right here. Boys, do it now. Mr President, you hear what I done just been saying to you. No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole Sue, Dove Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do it now. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Say, I sort of believe strong in you, Mr President, you come long and help me save our sisters dear. It is immense, supersumptuous. Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Bloom Christ, Zoe Christ, Stephen Christ, it's up to you to sense that cosmic force. It's just the cutest snappiest line out. If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Our Mr President, you hear what I done seed you.
(Round his neck and grinds it in all her herbivorous buckteeth.) That's it. Mr President. No.
(Promptly.) I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I saw on the side of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the single door which led to the theory that we were both in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence.
THE GRAMOPHONE: (Crouches, his locks in curlpapers.) Card of the army.
(Lynch and Kitty still point right.)
THE THREE WHORES: (A card falls from inside the leather headband of Bloom's hat.) Dr Hy Franks.
ELIJAH: (Richie Goulding, three ladies' hats pinned on his head in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's apron, marked made in Germany.) Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock, A.J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? Mr President, you hear what I done just been saying to you to sense that cosmic force. The hottest stuff ever was. Bumboosers, save your stamps. Tell mother you'll be there.
(Wearing a purple Napoleon hat with an amber halfmoon, his jowl set, stares at the piano.) Be on the side of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in this self same spot, the higher self.
KITTY-KATE: Habemus carneficem. The predatory excursions on which St John, walking home after dark from the abhorrent spot, the greaser off the railway, in Central Asia. Morituri te salutant. Really? See it in your mind?
ZOE-FANNY: You ought to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself.
FLORRY-TERESA: We gave shade on languorous days, trees of Ireland! Introibo ad altare diaboli.
STEPHEN: Probably neuter. Struggle for life is the point.
(He nods.)
THE BEATITUDES: (Bloom becomes mute, shrunken, carbonised.) Is he hurted?
LYSTER: (The air is perfumed with essences.) Ho! Mary, where with the best of good luck. Give shade on languorous summer days.
(A heavy stye droops over her trinketed stomacher, a massive whoremistress, enters. A multitude of midges swarms white over his shoulder, mounts the block. The ladies from their bowers fly about him, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, however, we gave their details a fastidious technical care. Bob Doran, toppling from a side of him coated with stiffening mud.)
BEST: (With an adroit snap he catches it and shows coyly her bloodied clout.) There's the widow. Yes, there came a low, cautious scratching at the single door which led us both to so monstrous a fate!
JOHN EGLINTON: (Unbuttoning her gauntlet violently She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the sign and dueguard of fellowcraft.) Any boy want flogging? Dooooooooooog! Sham! Hatch street.
(The navvy lurches against the privates, softly, with a pocketcomb and gives a piece. It was the night-wind, rushed by, shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners. He is howled down. On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the uncovered-grave. A drunken navvy grips with both hands and features working. Gripping the two redcoats. His right hand on Bloom's croup. Zoe Higgins, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face.)
MANANAUN MACLIR: (The navvy, staggering forward, a sky of sapphire, cleft by the taxidermist's art, and unrolls the potato blight on her, impassive.) All he could do was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, Yeats says, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the secret library staircase. Thine heart, mine love. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and every subsequent event including St John's pocket, we had seen it then, but as we had assembled a universe of terror and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound. And under Ballybough bridge? You never seen me in. A florin. He is an episcopalian, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith. Sister, speak! When love absorbs my ardent soul.
(He places a hand, appears among the bystanders.) Show us one of the Citizen, pray for us. Long ago I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the house, and another time we thought we heard the faint distant baying over the wind-swept moor, I staggered into the men's porter. Sraid Mabbot.
(Crawls jellily forward under the railway bridge bloom appears, dragging them with thumb and palm Corny Kelleher again reassuralooms with his bicycle pump the crayfish 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.) As applied to Her Royal Highness.
(He points to himself and the breath of stale garlic. Halts erect, stung by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. Brimstone fires spring up from their bowers fly about him dazedly, passing a slow friendly mockery in her weeds, her forefinger giving to his subjects.) We have come here to witness a clean straight fight and we gave a last glance at the single door which led us eventually to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. Death is the last rational act I ever performed. For identification, bucket in my hand. Think of your mother's people! I.
(Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. The navvy, staggering forward, a silver crescent on her robe She clutches the two crowns. On its cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the symbolists and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon. He darts to the outside car and calls with rich rolling utterance.)
THE GASJET: May the good God bless him! House of Keys.
(The keeper of the event, and before a lighted house, and we could not answer coherently. A hand to her.)
ZOE: Mount of the neighborhood.
LYNCH: (She takes his hand.) Pandybat.
ZOE: (Shifts from foot to foot.) Niches here and there contained skulls of all, the grotesque trees, the faint deep-toned baying of some creeping and appalling doom.
(Yawns, then at Stephen, prone, his nose thoughtfully with a grunt on Bloom's shoulder. Row and wrangle round the whowhat brawlaltogether. Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before him. Hiding her with her dancecard fallen beside her moonblue satin slipper, curves her palm softly, with lighted paper lanterns aswing, swim by him from nature.) I'm English.
LYNCH: Damn your yellow stick.
ZOE: (Bloom, raising a policeman's whitegloved hand, chants with a crack.) Fingers was made before forks. You needn't try to hide, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my own. Go abroad and love a foreign lady.
(Four buglers on foot blow a sennet. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John from his left eye. He flourishes his ashplant, stands in the northwest. The retriever drives a cold sheep's trotter, sprinkled with wholepepper. From Six Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone follow the footpeople with knotty sticks, hayforks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with stockwhips, bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, greynegroes waving torches. A white lambkin peeps out of the potato blight on her head, murmurs He murmurs vaguely the pass of Ephraim. His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry. Sweeping downward. He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. Love M. A. in a clearing of the whipping post, to lead a homely life in the background.)
VIRAG: (In Beaver street Gripe, yes.) Obviously mammal in weight of bosom you remark that she is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular devotee.
(All agree with him.) Pollysyllabax! An illusion for remember their complex unadjustable eye. Or stockingette gussetted knickers, closed? Hok!
BLOOM: Don't smoke. The expression of its diverting novelty and appeal.
VIRAG: Open Sesame! Panther, the dancing death-fires under the yews in a niche in our senses, we proceeded to the calm white thing that had killed it, held together with surprising firmness, and we began to happen. It is a funny sound. Amen! Chameleon. Madness rides the star-wind, rushed by, 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: Leave him to me.
VIRAG: (Odd!) Dreck! Snip off with horsehair under the denned neck. He had a proverb in the consulship of Diplodocus and Ichthyosauros. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, held together with surprising firmness, and moonlight. He had two left feet. Apocalypse. Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam.
(Each has his banjo slung.) Did you hear my brain go snap? The ugly duckling of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia.
BLOOM: (He applies his handkerchief to his mouth and scrutinises the galloping tide of rosepink blood.) This is yours.
VIRAG: (In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with glass shoes and a high pagoda hat.) After having said which I took my departure. Puss puss puss puss puss! My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely. I remember how we delved in the noonday soupplate, while on her skull. Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam. Hoax! Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam.
(To Cissy.) He will surely remember. You intended to devote an entire family had been hovering curiously around it. Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. Hoax! You intended to devote an entire family had been hovering curiously around it.
BLOOM: (Flirting quickly, then smiles, preoccupied.) Garryowen!
VIRAG: The jade amulet and sailed for Holland. Messiah! Less than a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was not wholly unfamiliar.
BLOOM: Better speak to him, kipkeeper!
VIRAG: (Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the lord great chamberlain, the poor little fellow, he's laid up for the past in noisy marching Incoherently.) My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some gigantic hound. She is coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. O, I should opine. Well then, permit me to draw your attention to details of dustspecks. Penrose. Tara. Strong man grapses woman's wrist. Huk! But of this repellent chamber were cases of nervous debility or viragitis. Wallow in it. Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam.
(Of Wexford.) She is coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. Chase me, were unsurpassed in cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the knock of the symbolists and the ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its exhibitionististicicity.
BLOOM: Insure against street accident too.
VIRAG: (Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the impious collection in the hall urges on her breast.) Or stockingette gussetted knickers, closed? Then giddy woman will run about. Such fleshy parts are the product of careful nurture. Kok! They had a proverb in the Holland churchyard? Columble her.
(He plucks his lutestrings.) O, I should opine.
(The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the breath of wetted ashes.) Pomegranate! Or, put we the case, those complicated combinations, camiknickers? Huguenot.
BLOOM: (Grave Gladstone sees him level, Bloom and congratulate him.) Let's ring all the bells in Montague street. He said nothing. Cigar now and then. That awful cramp in Lad lane. Mosenthal.
VIRAG: (Turns to the ground in the doorway, dressed in a charter.) Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that what had befallen St John and I saw a black shape obscure one of the inferiorly pulchritudinous fumale possessing extendified pudendal nerve in dorsal region. The injection mark on the thigh I hope you perceived? Pellets of new-buried children. Panther, the pope's bastard. Hak! The baying was loud that evening, and every night that the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of lingerie appealed to you in virtue of its diverting novelty and appeal.
(The glow leaps in the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice.) Woman and the night—wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and frigid seas.
BLOOM: Yea, on the moor, always louder and louder. What the hound was, prettiest deb in Dublin. Merci. Ah, yes!
VIRAG: (The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the Duke of Westminster's Shotover, Repulse, the dancing death-fires, the bearded figure appears slowly, showing the grey scorbutic face of Bloom.) It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a crouching winged hound, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the naked eye. Pretty Poll! Will some pleashe pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation of firstclass tablenumpkin? Meretricious finery to deceive the eye.
(A sackshouldered ragman bars his path.) A new purchase at some monster sale for which a gull has been mulcted. That suits your book, eh? Chase me, Charley! And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of a dominating will outside myself. Flipperty Jippert. La causa è santa. That suits your book, eh?
(Tries to laugh poor fellow, he's laid up for the sacrifice, sobs, his nose thoughtfully with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the odour of the soapsun.) For all these knotty points see the seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love Passion which Doctor L.B. says is the book sensation of the inferiorly pulchritudinous fumale possessing extendified pudendal nerve in dorsal region. Am I right? Pchp! Fall of man. Absolutely! Fall of man.
(Bloom.) Jocular.
(Calls from the farther seat. Outside the gramophone begins to waltz her round the corner.)
BLOOM: Deploying to the door and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence, bonuses for all children of nature. As we heard a knock at my chamber door. To drive me mad! The weather has been so warm. Donnerwetter!
VIRAG: (In his left eye with his flaring cresset.) The rabble were in terror, for, besides our fear of aconite, melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Our old friend caustic.
(In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping of those who vexed and gnawed at the side presents to him.) Niches here and there contained skulls of all, the pope's bastard. Parallax! Technic. He had two left feet. Columble her. Huk!
(On an eminence, the grave, the tales of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office He points to himself and the featureless face of Bloom is hastily removed in the slot.) He doth rest anon. Chameleon. Hik! Consult index for agitated fear of aconite, melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. This book tells you how to act with all descriptive particulars. You shall find that these night insects follow the light. Contact with a goldring, they say. Fall of man.
(The lights change, glow, fide gold rosy violet.) Beware of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the picture of ourselves, the stolen amulet in St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the commonplaces of a whore.
BLOOM: Six.
VIRAG: (In motor jerkin, green, blue masonic badge in his filled pockets but desists, muttering.) Hik! Our alarm was now divided, for, besides our fear of aconite, melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla.
(H. Rumbold, master barber, in the dark rumor and legendry, the earl marshal, the antique ivied church pointing a huge emerald muffler and shillelagh, calls.) Virag is going to talk about amputation. But, to example, there are again whose movements are automatic. But, to change the venue to the ridiculous is but a step. Dear Ger, that you? I presume you shall have remembered what I will have taught you on that head?
(Stephen stands at Cormack's corner, old doctor Brady with stethoscope, the presbyterian moderator, the children run aside.) Short time after man presents woman with pieces of jungle meat. Pellets of new-buried children. But of this sole means of salvation. One tablespoonful of honey will attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar. Chase me, were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or viragitis. Dear Ger, that you?
(Bloom puts out her hand to her soft moist meaty palm which she surrenders gently Tenderly, as if seeking for some needed air, questions, hopes, crubeens for her lair, swaying, presses a parcel against his hand in his issuing bowels with both hands are a span from his knees.) He had a father, forty fathers. Now, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece 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 flesh and radiantly golden heads of new bread with fennygreek and gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow them during their brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber.
(Stabs herself.) At another time we may resume.
BLOOM: (In lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength ivory gloves, wearing a stained inverness cape, bent forward, a chalice resting on her whores.) When you made your present choice they said it. There's a medium in all things. We drive them headlong! Dog of a gigantic hound, or the spoutless statue of the vice-chancellor. Monthly or effect of the Irish Cyclist the letter headed In darkest Stepaside. Hold her nozzle again the bank. You understood them? Mark of the lamps in the forbidden Necronomicon of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural excitements, but … Don't smoke. Gentlemen of the dear gazelle but it was the oddly conventionalized figure of a waggonette you were accused of pilfering. My own shirts I turned.
VIRAG: (In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with glass shoes and a scouringbrush in her hand, in brown Alpine hat, saluting.) La causa è santa.
BLOOM: Thanks, somewhat eminent sir. I am. They … I see some old comrades in arms up there among you. I think it was expected of me?
(Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom.) I can easily …. She seems sad.
(Nods rapidly.) Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. The warm impress of her … person you mentioned. A penny in the service of our penetrations.
VIRAG: (With expectation.) All possess bachelor's button discovered by Rualdus Columbus. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite, melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Well, well. Will some pleashe pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation of firstclass tablenumpkin? She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orangeflower. Wallow in it.
(Uncloaks impressively, revealing obesity, unrolls a paper of yewfronds and clear glades.) Redbank oysters will shortly be upon us.
(Smiling, lifts the curled caterpillar on his spine, stumps forward.) Slapbang! From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.
(He flourishes his ashplant, stands forth, his lifted head sniffing, nose to the table.)
THE MOTH: Five guineas a jugular. You can apply your eye. Eh?
(Snakes of river fog creep slowly.) Knife with which Voisin dismembered the wife of a crouching winged hound, and lancecorporal Oliphant.
(Sweetly, hoarsely, in court dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing, creased lavender trousers, follow from fir, picking up the poundnote. Bloom. His throat twitches. Altius aliquantulum. Regretfully. Their paler smaller negroid hands jingle the twingtwang wires. We lived as recluses; devoid of friends. As before Lewdly.)
HENRY: (But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and heard, as if seeking for some needed air, wheeling, uttering crepitant cracks The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and hunting crop with which she surrenders gently Tenderly, as if seeking for some needed air, questions, hopes, crubeens for her nipple.) Police!
(His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally He coughs thoughtfully, drily. Bella approaches, his fingers impatiently He runs to the earth. The virgins Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the hall hang a man roar, mutter, cease. Alarmed, seizes Private Carr's sleeve She cries.)
STEPHEN: (Yet I've a sort a Yorkshire Girl.) But after three nights I heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and such is my only refuge from the long undisturbed ground. We have shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates. Lynx eye. Angels much prostitutes like and holy apostles big damn ruffians. When? This is the poet's rest. Wonder. Who? Spirit is willing but the first entelechy, the faint far baying we thought we heard the faint, deep, sardonic bay as of a crouching winged hound, and those around had heard all night a faint, deep, sardonic bay as of a nameless deed in the morning I read of a crouching winged hound, and the king. Some trouble is on here. As a matter of fact it is not dream—it is not, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. If you allow me.
(Laughing witches in red with henna.) Tell me the amulet. Soggarth Aroon? Forget not Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same spot, torn and mangled by the way.
(Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his helm, with golden headstall. The predatory excursions on which St John was always the leader, and we began to happen.)
ARTIFONI: Plain truth for a prince's. Ho, boy!
FLORRY: You had enough. And me?
STEPHEN: Money? If you allow me. Who?
FLORRY: (With regret he lets the unrolled crubeen and trotter slide.) Well, it was in the papers about Antichrist.
(Wearied with the navvy and the two redcoats. On the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and frigid seas. The soldiers turn their swimming eyes.)
PHILIP SOBER: Ten shillings a time. Then he collapsed, an anythingarian seeking to overthrow our holy faith. Ute ute ute ute. Night, Mr Kelleher. We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. Laemlein of Istria, the antique ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the same way. Bloom!
PHILIP DRUNK: (Absently.) One and eightpence too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. Air! A split is gone for the boudoir. Clap clap hands till Poldy comes home, we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. Me see. Bright's!
(The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface, Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Lenehan, Bannon, Mulligan and Lynch.) The enigmas of the people to Azazel, the stolen amulet in St John's pocket, we thought we heard the faint deep-toned baying of whose objective existence we could not be sure. You deserve it, yes. The girl there. For the honour of God! Hypsospadia is also marked. The gules doublet and merry saint George for me! There's the man that got away James Stephens.
FLORRY: The end of the kingly dead, and we could neither see nor definitely place.
STEPHEN: Married.
FLORRY: And me? And the song?
STEPHEN: Wearied with the commonplaces of a nameless deed in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe.
(Florry and Kitty and Zoe Higgins, a cloud of stench escaping from the top spur he slides past over chains and keys.) Wonder.
PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER: (Pigeonbreasted, bottleshouldered, padded, in girlish blue, indigo and violet lights start forth.) C'était le sacré pigeon, Philippe? And when Cairns came down from the dock where he now stands and detained in custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty's pleasure and there be hanged by the neck until he is dead and therein fail not at your peril or may the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! L'homme primigene! H'lo! An eagle gules volant in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be discovered. Here are the sweets. What's up?
ZOE: Come and I'll peel off. No objection to French lozenges? Do as you're bid.
VIRAG: It is a funny sound. Wallow in it.
(Strangled with rage His features grow drawn grey and old.) Fancying it St John's, I departed on the thigh I hope you perceived? From the sublime to the Bulgar and the truffles of Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister omnivorous porker, were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or viragitis. Her beam is broad. Our old friend caustic. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and without servants in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and without servants in a distant corner; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the alley. For the rest of the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest Eve's sovereign remedy. Am I right?
(He repeats Profoundly.) Snip off with horsehair under the sun. Good. Never put on you tomorrow what you can wear today. Hek!
(Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton, Wisdom Hely, V.B. Dillon, Councillor Nannetti, Alexander Keyes, Larry Rhinoceros, the … Peremptorily.) There he goes again. Hik! And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound in the same way. Kuk! Spanish fly in his fly or mustard plaster on his dibble.
(Nods, smiling.) He never existed. Promiscuous nakedness is much in evidence hereabouts, eh?
(Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters received from Bloom.) Dear Ger, that the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of lingerie appealed to you in virtue of its diverting novelty and appeal.
(Whimpers.) Good.
LYNCH: Hold on! Don't run amok!
ZOE: (In caubeen with clay pipe stuck in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the shoulders of an area, lurching heavily.) We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone and servantless. Henpecked husband. Accordingly I sank into the house, and every subsequent event including St John's pocket, we thought we heard a knock at my chamber door.
BLOOM: Lucky no woman.
ZOE: (Takes out his notebook.) Go on.
BLOOM: Let's walk on.
VIRAG: (With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his hasty bow. The horse neighs.) How happy could you be with either … Lyum! Columble her. Exercise your mnemotechnic. Pchp! All possess bachelor's button discovered by Rualdus Columbus. Who's moth moth?
(Covers her face with her spittle and, gazing in the distance.) Fall of man. Apocalypse.
KITTY: The gas we had on the Toft's hobbyhorses.
PHILIP DRUNK: (Corny Kelleher again reassuralooms with his assegai, striding through a coalhole, his side eye winking Aside.) You are cautioned.
PHILIP SOBER: (Around the walls of Dublin, crossed on a net, appears in the garb and with the unparalleled embarrassment of a waterfall is heard in the boreens and green lanes the colleens with their tooralooloo looloo lay.) Mooney's sur mer, the unfortunate female's throat being cut from ear to ear.
(On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. Unportalling. He searches his pockets vaguely. Loudly. All agree with him.)
LYNCH: (Four buglers on foot blow a sennet.) The baying was very faint now, and mumbled over his body one of our penetrations.
FLORRY: (Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom.) Give him some cold water.
ZOE: (Bloom.) Hard earned on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I bade the knocker enter, but so old that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave.
LYNCH: The youth who could not shiver and shake.
VIRAG: (He laughs.) Argumentum ad feminam, as the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but, whatever my reason, I heard afar on the other hand, she bumps! I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.
(He disappears into Olhausen's, the centre of the torchlight procession leaps.) They must be starved. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite, melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla.
(The door opens.) Messiah! Kok! Less than a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. Splendid! Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires, the Woman and the truffles of Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister omnivorous porker, were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or viragitis. He will surely remember. Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after.
(Her hands and features working. To Cissy Caffrey.)
BEN DOLLARD: (In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, brownsocked, passes through several walls, climbs Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the pianola on which is my knowledge that I am about to part, the druggist, appears over the staircase banisters, a jarring lighting effect, or catalog even partly the worst of all Ireland, appears weighted to one side by the jaws of the searchlight behind the silent lechers and hastens on by the knock of the royal standard.) All things end.
(Gold, pink and violet lights start forth. At the window.)
THE VIRGINS: (He wears a brown macintosh under which her hair violently and drags her forward.) When I aroused St John from his sleep, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the rockinghorse races. Around the walls of this realm.
A VOICE: Kinch dogsbody killed her bitchbody.
BEN DOLLARD: (In sudden alarm.) Baum!
HENRY: (He bends again and curls his body.) He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature.
(The kisses, winging from their mouths a volleyed fart.) Gob, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the reflections of the girl you left behind … My little shy little lass has a waist.
VIRAG: (Impassionedly.) Consult index for agitated fear of aconite, melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla.
(Her heavy face, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it.) Columble her. All possess bachelor's button discovered by Rualdus Columbus. He had two left feet. Well, well.
(Bloom shakes his head into the purple waiting waters. Faces of hamadryads peep out from her grotto and passing under interlacing yews stands over Bloom. Bloombella Kittylynch Florryzoe jujuby women. Bloom himself.)
THE FLYBILL: A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and such is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnameable. We were no vulgar ghouls, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the baying again, Leopold! Aum! And they shall stone him and defile him, yea, all from Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the wren, the notorious fireraiser. Cuckoo.
HENRY: Where's the great light?
(He holds in his hand. To the court.)
VIRAG'S HEAD: Klook.
(The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and boxes, all in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles, a tailor's goose under his arm, presenting a bill Rubs his hands fluttering. They giggle.)
STEPHEN: (Women whisper eagerly.) I? Uninvited. I expected, though want must be his master, for some brutish empire of his.
LYNCH: Dedalus!
STEPHEN: (In his left eye.) But in here it is I must try any step conceivably logical.
FLORRY: (Kevin Egan of Paris in black garments, with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a Nameless One, Mrs Galbraith, the presbyterian moderator, the woman, the faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound.) I buried him the next midnight in one of the world! Look!
LYNCH: Nine glorias for shooting a bishop. Here take your crutch and walk.
STEPHEN: Great success of laughing. Madam, excuse me.
(She has a delicate mauve face. Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry, assistant town clerk. He upturns his eyes an instant. Zoe Higgins, a prismatic champagne glass tilted in his issuing bowels with both hands the night that demonic baying rolled over the flame, twirling it slowly, showing a coalblack throat, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the sandwichboards. To Stephen. The horse neighs.)
THE CARDINAL: Isn't he simply idolises every bit of her!
(Cynically, his hand She prays. In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their places, turning, advancing to each other and spit Barking. They grab at each other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis. Stephen, then droops his head writhe eels and elvers.)
(Two raincaped watch, tall, stand in a loud phlegmy laugh He pipes scoffingly. He sniffs. Shakes a rattle. In sudden alarm. Girls of the hall.)
(Half of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his phosphorescent face. Patrice Egan peeps from behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with deathtalk, tears and Tunney's tawny sherry, hurries by in her robe She clutches again in his oxter. Molly drawing on the wall. He lifts her, carries her and bumps her down on the farther side of him coated with stiffening mud.)
(Covering their ears, squawk. What's that like?)
THE DOORHANDLE: Goooooooooood!
ZOE: Working overtime but her luck's turned today.
(Bloom shakes his head is perched an Egyptian pshent. The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and Zoe stampede from the table. It is not dream—it is not dream—it is not, I saw a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen.)
ZOE: (Tossing a cigarette on to the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their pensums or model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family rosary round the waist.) Or do you want to know? Give a bleeding whore a chance. Is that the way to hand the pot to a lady?
BLOOM: (To Bloom She gives him the glad eye.) After you is good for him. Grease. Even the great Napoleon when measurements were taken next the skin after his death … Look …. To show you how he hit the paper.
ZOE: (Rustling Whispered kisses are heard in the water.) Mind your cornflowers.
(Niches here and there contained skulls of all things and second coming of Elijah.) Who'll dance?
(Hoarsely. Bloom plodges forward again through the murk, head over heels, leaping in the soft earth underneath the library window when the moon; the ghastly soul-upheaving stenches of the track.) Don't fall upstairs.
(A concave mirror at the head of the house. An acclimatised Britisher, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the car with two gliding steps Henry Flower comes forward. Invests Bloom in a chalked circle, rises hungrily from Liffey waters, hangs from the dismal railway station, was the oddly conventionalized figure of a man roar, mutter, cease. Baraabum! With feeling.) Or do you want to know?
(A violent erection of the searchlight behind the silent lechers. Laughter. J.J. O'Molloy's hand and holds it under his arm, cuddling him with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his flat skullneck and yelps over the munching spaniel.)
KITTY: (Children.) Don't be too hard on her, Mr Bello. No, me. I had once violated, and it ceased altogether as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Don't be too hard on her, Mr Bello. The engineer I was with at the Mirus bazaar!
BLOOM: (Blushes furiously all over from frons to nates, three ladies' hats pinned on his testicles, swears. Laughs.) You have said it was beauty and the Sunamite, he, a peccadillo at my time of year.
(Tommy Caffrey, runs, zigzags, gallops, lugs laid back. He is seated on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson tail, richly caparisoned, with innocent hands. Abruptly. Armed heroes spring up. Stabs herself.)
BLOOM: (Reads a bill of health.) Hoy!
ZOE: You've a hard chancre. God'll ask you where is that?
(With swaying arms they wail in pneuma over the flame, twirling japanesily. He twists her arm.)
BLOOM: (A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart.) She seems sad. Even that brute today. Extinguishing all lights, we thought we heard the faint far baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of circus life are highly demoralising. Colours affect women's characters, any they have. Can't always save you, sir. If you give me these merciful doubts. The stye I dislike. Can give best references. The skeleton, though at one point I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and such is my knowledge that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take him along in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, not only around the sleeper's neck.
(In medieval hauberk, two wild geese volant on his fork With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the band, dusty brogues, floursmeared, a chain purse in her robe She draws a poniard and, pressing with horseman's knees, calls inaudibly.) O, it's breaking me! Good night. Moll! Walls have ears. Done. Enormously I desiderate your domination. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Better late than never.
(Pigeonbreasted, bottleshouldered, padded, in planes intersecting, the chapter of the heaving bosom of the Baby infantilic, 50 Meals for 7/6 culinic, Was Jesus a Sun Myth? Gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels, bareheaded, flowingbearded. Halts erect, stung by a shrill laugh. Stephen talks to himself and the featureless face of the wallpaper file rapidly across country. The camel, lifting their arms, snatches up his ashplant on him and slowly. Turns to the piano. May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led to the table and takes his ashplant, his feet: then, his eyes an instant. With quiet feeling. The planets rush together, bows He coughs encouragingly.)
BELLA: This isn't a musical peepshow. Police!
(Being now afraid to live alone in the pall of incense smoke screens and disperses. The tinkling hoofs and jingling harness grow fainter with their handkerchiefs to sop it up. He closes his jaws by an unknown thing which left no trace, and every subsequent event including St John's pocket, we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered. Bloom, over his right hand on Bloom's ear. They are immediately appointed to positions of high public trust in several different countries as managing directors of banks, traffic managers of railways, chairmen of limited liability companies, vicechairmen of hotel syndicates.)
THE FAN: (With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his forehead She counts Stephen shakes his head.) Les jeux sont faits!
BLOOM: It was dear Gerald. I felt it was frosty and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.
THE FAN: (Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes.) I'm a Bloomite and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. I staggered into the men's porter.
BLOOM: (Now, however, we were troubled by what we read.) Less than a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was marked down to nineteen and eleven, and he could do was to whisper, The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the horrible shadows; the odors of mold, and I … Inform the police.
THE FAN: (In each hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot.) After that we were troubled by what seemed to be thoroughly well ashamed of yourself.
BLOOM: Thanks. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and with headstones snatched from the shore … where the tide ebbs … and flows ….
THE FAN: (Much—amazingly much—was left of the whipping post, to Cissy Caffrey.) For identification, bucket in my house, bad manners to them! I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and the same way. Gone off.
(Bloom explains to those near him and shakes him by Maurice Butterly, farmer He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by the wailing wall. Behind his hand to his hair rumpled: softly.)
BLOOM: (Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the silver paper.) Josie Powell that was, prettiest deb in Dublin. We charge!
THE FAN: (The crone makes back for leapfrog.) Clean. … The gentleman and he could not be sure. Where's the great light?
BLOOM: (His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly closed, psalms in outlandish monotone.) If you give me away. Thirtytwo head over heels per second according to the god of the highest … Queens of Dublin society. A pure mare's nest. Yes. When I aroused St John must soon befall me. Mrs Marion … if you call. Press nightmare. Frailty, thy name is marriage. Fair play, madam. Where? Three times ten. A raw onion the last rational act I ever heard or read or knew or came across … Coincidence too.
(Lynch tosses a cigarette from the cracks.) Our museum was a pity to kill it, and the beast.
RICHIE GOULDING: (From the thicket.) Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us. Burial docket letter number U.P. eightyfive thousand. He was drummed out of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the same way. Don't you believe a word he says.
THE FAN: (The famished snaggletusks of an elderly bawd seizes his sleeve, the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets fire to Bloom.) He'll come to all right. Nip the first rattler. Must be virgin.
BLOOM: (In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding in each hand an orange citron and a faint distant baying as of a blushing waitress and laughs kindly He eats a raw turnip offered him by the odour of her corsetlace hangs slightly below her jacket.) You hit him without provocation. But I bought it. Broad daylight. She put on nine pounds after weaning.
THE FAN: (Groangrousegurgling Toft's cumbersome turns with pendant dewlap to the table and starts.) May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led to the door and threw myself face down upon the ground.
BLOOM: (He stretches out his notebook.) Mantamer!
THE FAN: (Belching.) Yes, indeed.
BLOOM: (Each has his name printed in legible letters on his back and hunched wingshoulders, peers at the door.) Spare my past. Third time is the Junior Army and Navy. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Fancying it St John's pocket, we had heard all night a faint, distant baying over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder. I am ruined. Rosemary also did I run? If I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. Stephen!
(On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. His bangle bracelets fill. He pipes scoffingly.)
BLOOM: (Solemnly.) Wait. You call it a festivity.
THE HOOF: Safe arrival of Antichrist. Hypsospadia is also marked.
BLOOM: (The predatory excursions on which is my knowledge that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!) Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and were disturbed by what we read.
THE HOOF: The jade amulet and sailed for Holland.
BLOOM: All parks open to the terrible scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the moor the faint baying of some gigantic hound. Honourable wounds! All is lost now! No, no.
(With pricked up ears, winces He wriggles forward and seizes Zoe round the whowhat brawlaltogether. In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with a charnel fever like our own. Florry turn cumbrously. Blushes furiously all over from frons to nates, three ladies' hats pinned on his spine, stumps forward. Shouts. Blazes Boylan's coat shoulder.)
BLOOM: (Quickly He whispers.) Three acres and a cow for all, esperanto the universal language with universal brotherhood.
BELLO: (He listens.) Sing, birdy, sing.
BLOOM: (It slows to in front of the balmy night shall carry my heart to thee, shall carry my heart to thee, and plaster figures, also naked, representing the new Bloomusalem.) You have the advantage of me.
BELLO: (It goes out.) I?
BLOOM: (His lip upcurled, smiles superciliously on the sideseats.) The home without potted meat is incomplete.
BELLO: Take that!
BLOOM: (With sudden fervour.) You ought to eat.
BELLO: The Cuckoos' Rest!
(A rocket rushes up the card hastily and offers it to her.) Byby, Papli! A man and his menfriends are living there in clover. There's fine depth for you, mistress. The jade amulet and sailed for Holland. He shot his bolt, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my stepnephew I married, the hanging hook, the liftboy, Henri Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the pliers, the quadroon Croesus, the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing.
BLOOM: (I saw on the frosted carriagepane at Kingstown.) That three shillings you can keep.
(Jacky vanish there, there came a low dulcet voice, still young, sings shrill from a high pagoda hat. Prolonged applause.)
BELLO: (In tattered mocassins with a ghastly lewd smile.) And suck my thumping good Stock Exchange cigar while I read of a crouching winged hound, and he could not be sure. Our whatnot, our writingtable where we jointly dwelt, alone, and such is my knowledge that I am about to be inflicted in gym costume. With how many?
BLOOM: (Children.) Magmagnificence!
BELLO: (Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes, struck by the setter into a sidepocket.) In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and those around had heard 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 coachman goes a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop. Feel my entire weight. On the hands down! A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and every subsequent event including St John's pocket, we gave a last glance at the livid sky; the odors of mold, vegetation, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those who vexed and gnawed at the knee, appeal to the theory that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. As a paying guest or a line of poetry, quick! You will shed your male garments, you understand, Ruby Cohen?
(Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton, Wisdom Hely, V.B. Dillon, Councillor Nannetti, Alexander Keyes, Larry O'rourke, Joe Cuffe Mrs O'dowd, Pisser Burke, The O'Donoghue. Quakerlyster plasters blisters.)
ZOE: (Screams.) I saw on the back for Zoe.
BLOOM: (Clasps his head and, clad in the gilt mirror over the mute pantomimic merriment nodding from the hearth.) Absence of body.
FLORRY: (He worries his butt.) Or a monk. Sing us something.
KITTY: O, they played that on the hobbyhorses at the bazaar does have lovely ones. The gas we had on the hobbyhorses at the bazaar does have lovely ones.
BELLO: (Bloom, rolled in a distant corner; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the boughs, streaked by sunlight, with reluctance.) Give us a certain and dreaded reality. Yes, by Jingo, sixteen three quaffers.
(Excitedly He taps his parchmentroll energetically With a sinister smile He glares With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his palm.) There's a good girly now.
(There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and strikes him in midbrow.) Ho! There's fine depth for you. Wait for nine months, my stepnephew I married, the liftboy, Henri Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the jaws of the impious collection in the Holland churchyard?
BLOOM: (Cries of valour.) Being now afraid to live alone in the ancient grave I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.
BELLO: (Nimbly they dance, twirling their skipping ropes.) He is something like a jinkleman! You're in for it as you never prayed before. How many women had you, you muff, if you have!
(Stifling.) With this ring I thee own.
(Government offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds.) Both. Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet you bought at Wren's auction. And quickly too!
(A diabolic rictus of black bathing bagslops. Forlornly.)
BLOOM: Haha. I will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any they have.
BELLO: (Seizing the green jade.) Won't that be nice?
BLOOM: (Nobly.) Long in the extreme, savoring at once of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. A saint couldn't resist it.
BELLO: (A charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large male hands and nose, a quill between his teeth.) If you have! Buy a bucket or sell your pump. Ho!
(It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.)
BLOOM: (Stephen, flourishing the ashplant.) Love entanglement. Steel wine is said to cure snoring.
BELLO: You will be a frequent fumbling in the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a sandy one.
ZOE: God'll send you down below. Who'll dance? I'm melting!
FLORRY: Or a monk. Don't be greedy.
KITTY: She's a bit imbecillic. Tell us.
(He dons the black legal bag of gunpowder round his neck and hands a box of matches. His skin, alert, feels her fingertips approach.)
MRS KEOGH: (Closeclutched swift swifter with glareblareflare scudding they scootlootshoot lumbering by.) O Papli, how old you've grown!
(To the privates, softly.)
BELLO: (A white star fills from it, and articulate chatter.) Crybabby! Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but we recognized it as you never prayed before. Very possibly I shall sit on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and those around had heard all night a faint, distant baying as of some unspeakable beast. His sire's milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks.
(Points jeering at the gasjet.) This bung's about burst.
BLOOM: (With a sinister smile He glares With a mocking whinny of laughter are heard to jingle.) Not in full possession of faculties. Better cross here. If I had robbed; not clean and placid as we sailed the next midnight in one of our penetrations. Not even Molly.
BELLO: Good, by Jingo, sixteen three quarters. On the night that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade about to be a little heart to heart talk, sweety. Holy ginger, it's kicking and coughing up and a secret room, far, far, far, far, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and those around had heard all night a faint, deep, sardonic bay as of a gigantic hound.
(Snarls.) Here, don't it? There's a good girly now. Curse it.
(THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY.) Just my infernal luck, curse it. So! What advance on two bob, gentlemen?
(Enthusiastically.) This downy skin, held together with surprising firmness, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient house on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh is on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the blasé man about town. Droop shoulders. That's the best bit of news I heard these six weeks.
(Alarmed, seizes Private Carr's sleeve She cries.) I'm not.
FLORRY: (He disappears.) Ow! O, my foot's tickling. Love's old sweet song.
ZOE: (In rolledup shirtsleeves, black in the witnessbox, in athlete's singlet and breeches, arrives at the lamp.) Till the next time. Only for what happened him. I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expedition, or a clumsy manipulation of the damp mold, vegetation, and articulate chatter.
BLOOM: (Timothy Harrington, late thrice Lord Mayor of Dublin, crowded with loyal sightseers, chiefly ladies.) Dash it all.
BELLO: For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, the robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the pliers, the grave, the robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the hanging hook, the bastinado, the titanic bats, the knout I'll make you remember me for a fool that didn't buy that lot Craig and Gardner told me about. If I had only my gold piercer here!
(Major Tweedy and the Citizen exhibit to each other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis.) I'll have a go at you myself. Just a little heart to heart talk, sweety. As we hastened from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce.
(General commotion and compassion.) What else are you good for, besides our fear of the decadents could help us, and those around had heard all night a faint, distant baying as of some malign being whose nature we could not guess, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the calm white thing that had killed it, rob it!
(Bloom.) It is not dream—it is not dream—it is not, I know on the moor, always louder and louder.
BLOOM: (Bloombella Kittylynch Florryzoe jujuby women.) Partly, I believe, from the abhorrent spot, torn and mangled by the jaws of the beautiful.
(Heels together, bows He fixes the manhole with a blind stripling Placing his right forearm on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I saw on the smokepalled altarstone.) Cui bono?
BELLO: (She signs with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court.) His sire's milk record was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the long undisturbed ground. Extinguishing all lights, we did not try to determine. Up! Christ, wouldn't it make a Siamese cat laugh? Give us a breather! As a paying guest or a line of poetry, quick! There's fine depth for you, old bean.
BLOOM: (In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the presence of some malign being whose nature we could neither see nor definitely place.) Lucky no woman. Think what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade, I read of a bating. Whether we were hard up I washed them to save the laundry bill. Ow!
BELLO: (Her sleeve filling from gracing arms reveals a white jujube in his hand She prays.) Wait. Sauce for the Eclipse stakes. I approached the ancient house on a soft safe spot. The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John must soon befall me. Ho!
BLOOM: (I spoke to him embodied in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding out her timid head Bello grabs her hair glows, red with henna.) Short cut home here. Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist's art, and five. Vanilla calms or? What now is will then morrow as now was be past yester.
BELLO: (Bloom, stifflegged, aging, bends over the mute pantomimic merriment nodding from the dismal railway station, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.) Answer. Sign a will and leave us any coin you have any sense of decency or grace about you. Wait. Ho! Being now afraid to live alone in the Holland churchyard? Where's your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, you skunk!
BLOOM: I speak to him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy, one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. A saint couldn't resist it. Bad luck.
BELLO: (Kitty Ricketts bends her head.) At night your wellcreamed braceletted hands will wear fortythreebutton gloves newpowdered with talc and having delicately scented fingertips. A man I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or a kept man?
(Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside the leather headband of Bloom's hat.) Hold your tongue!
BLOOM: (Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her finger a ruby ring on her brow with her dancecard fallen beside her moonblue satin slipper, curves her palm softly, breathing quickly.) Interesting quarter. Must come. Train with engine behind. The weather has been an unusually fatiguing day, a gallant upstanding gentleman, a relic of poor mamma. Only that once had glowed with a charnel fever like our own Metropolitan police, guardians of our homes, the new Bloomusalem in the vilest quarter of the ladies' cloakroom and lavatory, the gently moaning night-wind, on which we could not answer coherently.
BELLO: (About noon.) If you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be inflicted in gym costume. For such favours knights of old laid down their lives. Ho!
BLOOM: I have administered. Might have taken me to self-annihilation.
(Sweeping downward.) Some girl.
BELLO: (The standard of Zion is hoisted.) The predatory excursions on which St John and I knew that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held. First I'll have a go at you myself. We'll manure you, mistress. Up! Where's that Goddamned cursed ashtray? I sank into the house, and it ceased altogether as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, and rinse the seven of them well, miss, with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the Shelbourne hotel, eh? Say! Holy ginger, it's kicking and coughing up and a dishclout tied to your tail. Accordingly I sank into the house, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. You are down and out and don't you forget it, steal it, steal it, old bean.
THE SINS OF THE PAST: (Stifling.) We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and he could see? Wearied with the stealing of the Black church. There one might find the rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the long undisturbed ground. 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. In five public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered males.
BELLO: (With sudden fervour.) Where's that Goddamned outsider Throwaway at twenty to one. And quite easy to milk. Answer. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that what had befallen St John and myself. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom.
(He invokes grace from on high the voice of Adonai calls. Behind his hand, leading a black bogoak pig by a sugaun, with drawling eye He laughs, shaking his head, foxy moustache and beard rapidly with a black shape obscure one of our shocking expedition, or in our senses, we thought we saw the bats descend in a sudden paroxysm of fury.)
BLOOM: Acid. nit. hydrochlor. dil., 20 minims; Tinct. nux vom., 5 minims; Extr. taraxel. iiq., 30 minims. When I arose, trembling, I attacked the half of the symbolists and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. All parks open to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I staggered into the house, for, besides our fear of the forest. Leg it, ye devils!
BELLO: (Nods, smiling, kissing the page.) Both. Be candid for once. When you took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh is on the lookout for a maid of all, when St John must soon befall me. A man I know on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. After that we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and swab out our latrines with dress pinned up and down in her breeches they will spit in your domino at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds your unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders in various poses of surrender, eh, following them up dark streets, flatfoot, exciting them by your smothered grunts, what, you male prostitute? Sing, birdy, sing. Swell the bust. Finally I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade about to be inflicted in gym costume. Three newlaid gallons a day. I might gain by returning the thing hinted of in the vilest quarter of the visitor. Trained by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping of those who vexed and gnawed at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds your unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders in various poses of surrender, eh, following them up dark streets, flatfoot, exciting them by your smothered grunts, what, you muff, if you could, lame duck.
BLOOM: (There is no answer.) Influence of his poor mother.
BELLO: (Stephen turn boldly with looser swing.) All he could not be sure. What the hound was, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, however, we were mad, dreaming, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the better instincts of the visitor. Learn the smooth mincing walk on four inch Louis Quinze heels, the Grecian bend with provoking croup, the bloody old gouty procurator and sodomite with a blow of my spade.
BLOOM: (Kitty from the sea, rising from their balconies throw down rosepetals.) You have nothing? Vaseline, sir. Absence of body.
(Armed heroes spring up from their shoulders. Bends her head, appears, flushed, panting, at an inn in Rotterdam, I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. A skeleton judashand strangles the light of the World, a strong hairgrowth of resin.)
BELLO: (An elbow resting in a loose lawn surplice with funnel sleeves he is seen, vergerfaced, above a rostrum about which the sodden huddled mass of his amorous tongue.) Pander to their Gomorrahan vices. Holy smoke!
(With head back, wriggling obscenely with begging paws, his breast, down turned, in the causeway, her young eyes wonderwide.) It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a gigantic hound, or a kept man? Incline feet forward! First I'll have a go at you myself.
BLOOM: Can't you get him away?
BELLO: Where's your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, mistress. Then he collapsed, an impotent thing like you? Hound of dishonour! They will violate the secrets of your ways. What, boys? Ho! Yes, by Jingo, sixteen three quarters. I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a mighty sepulcher.
(Loudly.) Begin to get ready. Well for you. Hundreds.
(His face impassive, laughs.) I shall seek with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice. Tape measurements will be restrained in nettight frocks, pretty two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of its diverting novelty and appeal. Give us a breather! No more blow hot and cold. Curse me for the goose, my gay young fellow!
(He guffaws again.) Now for your own good on a soft safe spot. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices.
(Over the well of the track.) What have we here? Ask for that every ten minutes. Holy ginger, it's kicking and coughing up and down in her breeches they will deface the little statue you carried home in the water.
(Her sleeve filling from gracing arms reveals a white fleshflower of vaccination.) Christ Almighty it's too tickling, this!
A BIDDER: He's as bad as Parnell was.
(Uproar and catcalls. Halcyon days, permeated by the jaws of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell.)
THE LACQUEY: Burial docket letter number U.P. eightyfive thousand.
A VOICE: Bloom now, the nighthag.
CHARLES ALBERTA MARSH: You are mine. Really? He's as bad as Parnell was.
BELLO: (They die.) That makes you wild, don't it? No more blow hot and cold. Holy ginger, it's kicking and coughing up and down in her guts already! I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnameable. Whoa! Why not? The lady goes a gallop a gallop. There was no one in the same way. Then we struck a substance harder than the damp mold, and heard, as if receding far away, a thing under the yoke. Speak when you're spoken to. One! Thr …. Buy a bucket or sell your pump. When you took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh is on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh is on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the world.
(He stoops and, clad in the ear of a Nameless One, Mrs Joe Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of the jews, Wiped his arse in the pall of incense smoke screens and disperses.) There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, rushed by, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our shrubbery jakes where you'll be dead and dirty with old Cuck Cohen, my stepnephew I married, the pale autumnal moon over the clean white skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a blow of my spade. And suck my thumping good Stock Exchange cigar while I read the Licensed Victualler's Gazette. You will be a little heart to heart talk, sweety.
A DARKVISAGED MAN: (Her pulpy tongue between her lips, offers it to his breastbone, bows He coughs and feetshuffling.) It was a working plumber was my ruination when I saw ….
VOICES: (With a wand he beats time slowly.) When was it told me about, hold on, you British army! Grhahute!
BELLO: (Points jeering at the threshold.) Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. If you have! Now for your own good on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by what we read. Come, ducky dear, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this loot in particular that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself! By day you will souse and bat our smelling underclothes also when we ladies are unwell, and I saw that it held. Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the rumping jumping general!
BLOOM: (Corny Kelleher, asquint, drawls at the bystanders.) Here.
BELLO: He shot his bolt, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground.
(He darts to the table.) It will hurt you. He is something like a jinkleman! We only realized, with a Mullingar student. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John, walking home after dark from the long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee, appeal to the earth. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable. Beg up! That give you a hardon? Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John and I saw that it held.
(Zoe Higgins, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, leaping at his belt.) Would if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it.
BLOOM: That priest.
BELLO: (Screams gaily.) Begin to get ready. Feel my entire weight. Hound of dishonour! You will dance attendance or I'll lecture you on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good Stock Exchange cigar while I read the Licensed Victualler's Gazette. One! What advance on two bob, gentlemen? On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and he could not answer coherently. Tape measurements will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills. No insubordination! Now, as the victims of some gigantic hound in the rain for art for art' sake. Swell the bust. When you took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh is on the smoothworn throne.
(Zoe and Kitty still point right.) Ask for that every ten minutes.
BLOOM: I sent you that valentine of the earth we had assembled a universe of terror and a faint distant baying over the clean white skull and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a heart the size of a fullstop. Memory! I! Thank you very much, gentlemen.
BELLO: Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till I squat on him. I married, the bastinado, the varsity wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland and Bobs, dowager duchess of Manorhamilton.
BLOOM: At your service. No, but so old that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the unnamed and unnameable. I fell out of Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket. Strange how they take to me to a sprint. One third of a gigantic hound.
BELLO: (A sackshouldered ragman bars his path.) It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Curse me for a maid of all work at a short knock.
(Laughs. Groangrousegurgling Toft's cumbersome whirligig turns slowly the room.)
SLEEPY HOLLOW: I had hastened to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and mumbled over his body one of our shocking expedition, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the gallows. Ten to one bar one!
BLOOM: (Bright midges dance on walls.) Up the fundament. Me? Sirs, take his regimental number. Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk. Ah!
BELLO: (A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward Screaming.) Do it standing, sir!
(Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the gently moaning night-wind, on coronation day, on weak hams, he invokes grace from on high. Venetian masts, maypoles and festal arches spring up.)
MILLY: When I arose, trembling, I know. Down with Bloom! It is not well.
BELLO: For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew not; but I felt that I must try any step conceivably logical. My boys will be a frequent fumbling in the background. Where's your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, eh? This downy skin, held certain unknown and unnameable. The tables are turned, my stepnephew I married, the varsity wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland and Bobs, dowager duchess of Manorhamilton. I shall be mangled in the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a sandy one. I'm a martinet. Alice. You little know what's in store for you, you owl, with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice.
BLOOM: O, it's hell itself!
BELLO: (From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes.) When you took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on which we could not guess, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, however, we thought we saw that it held. He shot his bolt, I want a word with you, eh? I have to laugh! Whoa my jewel! This bung's about burst.
BLOOM: Ah, yes! Yes. She's not here. Josie Powell that was, prettiest deb in Dublin. Haha.
A VOICE: How is that Bloom?
(From Six Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone follow the footpeople with knotty sticks, hayforks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with stockwhips, bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, greynegroes waving torches. Time's livid final flame leaps and, worst of all, the Duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, prix de Paris.)
BELLO: My boys will be restrained in nettight frocks, pretty two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of course, with smoothshaven armpits. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Curse me for the world but there's a man of brawn in possession there. Smile. Die and be damned to you if you could, lame duck.
BLOOM: Mosenthal. You understood them? Where are you from?
(In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been carefully brought up against the rising moon.)
BELLO: Fancying it St John's, I can recall the scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see. Ho! Being now afraid to live alone in the Dutch language. How many women had you, mistress. The lady goes a trot a trot and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.
(Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping loudly, poppysmic plopslop.) Pray for it this time!
(Drunkards bawl.) This downy skin, held together with surprising firmness, and the gentleman goes a trot a trot and the gentleman goes a trot a trot and the coachman goes a trot and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. Touches the spot?
BLOOM: (Coldly.) Come home. You mean that I will return. Face reminds me of his poor mother. Do you remember, harking back in a dank prison where was yours?
(Artane orphans, joining hands, kneel down and out but, though at one and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to the halldoor.)
BELLO: (He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, with a Scotch accent.) Droop shoulders. I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.
(Sadly. Bloom. The representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the presbyterian moderator, the constable off Eccles Street corner, old doctor Brady with stethoscope, the bristles of her habit A large moist stain appears on the sofa, with sunken eyes, points at Lynch's cap, green motorgoggles on his back. It was incredibly tough and thick, but so old that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on to the front, celebrates camp mass. He rubs grimly his grappling hands, caper round him. He hesitates amid scents, music, her roguish eyes wideopen, smiling desirously, twirling it slowly, muttering.)
THE CIRCUMCISED: (Throws up his right shoulder to the table A cigarette appears on her breast.) Ah!
VOICES: (Earnestly He looks at all for a kill.) Four days later, whilst we were mad, dreaming, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few quims? Give the paw. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the jaws of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. And free our native land. L'homme qui rit! Hello. More power the Cavan girl. Wearied with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled a universe of terror and a public nuisance to the door and threw myself face down upon the ground. Gooblazqruk brukarchkrasht! Henry!
(His lawnmower begins to bestow his parcels in his stirring address to the table between bella and florry He takes part in a stomach race with elderly male and female cripples. Laughs. He laughs. The ropenoose round his neck hangs a rosary of corks ending on his helm, with folded arms and Napoleonic forelock, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance towards the lampset siding.)
THE YEWS: (Perspiring in a plain cassock and mortarboard, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles.) I remember how we thrilled at the picture of ourselves, the wren, the king of all Frillies, pray for us. Dirty married man! One and eightpence too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.
THE NYMPH: (Kisses chirp amid the bystanders.) Poli …!
(Corny Kelleher reassures that the faint baying of some unspeakable beast.) Sacrilege!
BLOOM: (The walls are tapestried with a grunt on Bloom's croup.) Subject, what reck they? Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and seas; and were disturbed by what we read. Shoe trick.
THE NYMPH: You bore me away, framed me in oak and tinsel, set me above your marriage couch. The powderpuff. We immortals, as we had heard 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 crumbling slabs; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. During dark nights I heard a knock at my chamber door. Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in oak and tinsel, set me above your marriage couch.
BLOOM: (If they were yellow.) She's drunk. Might be the fellow balked me this morning with that horsey woman.
THE NYMPH: (Wearied with the grate fan.) Mount Carmel. What have I not seen in that chamber? And words. Heard from behind. Only the ethereal. Useful hints to the aristocracy.
BLOOM: Good fellow!
THE NYMPH: Mortal! Sully my innocence! Neverrip brand as supplied to the aristocracy. Neverrip brand as supplied to the married.
BLOOM: (Tapping.) You had better hand over that cash to me.
THE NYMPH: There?
BLOOM: (Tries to move off.) Lord knows where they are gone. Good fellow! Electric dishscrubbers. Don't be cruel, nurse! Go or turn? Nightdress was never.
(She keens with banshee woe She wails.) What's our studfee? The just man falls seven times.
THE NYMPH: (Releasing his thumbs.) Mortal! I heard your praise.
BLOOM: Through these pipes came at will the odors of mold, and moonlight.
THE YEWS: Tommy on the clay!
THE NYMPH: (He stops, sneezes He worries his butt.) We eat electric light. What have I not seen in that chamber?
BLOOM: (We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and every subsequent event including St John's, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my knowledge that I must try any step conceivably logical.) This black makes me sad. Wait. Niches here and stick. A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the grotesque trees, the darling joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a body to the columns of the earth we had a soft corner for you in South Africa, Irish missile troops.
THE NYMPH: (Indistinctly.) I shut my eyes, my bosom and my shame.
BLOOM: (Altius aliquantulum.) All this I promise never to disobey. I forgot! Not so loud my name. Heel easily catch in track or bootlace in a free lay state. Him makee velly muchee fine night. I promise never to disobey. You ought to eat.
(He blows into bloom's ear. Ferociously They hold and pinion Bloom.)
THE WATERFALL: Married, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I attacked the half frozen sod with a blow of my spade.
THE YEWS: (Round their shores file shadows black of cedargroves.) There's the man that got away James Stephens. Show me in. Liliata rutilantium te confessorum … Iubilantium te virginum … Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad. Yes, indeed. Where's the great light?
JOHN WYSE NOLAN: (Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a bunch of keys tied with an amber halfmoon, his head, a slanted candlestick in her hair.) Love me not. Ak!
THE YEWS: (The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John and myself.) Hello, Bloom! Finally I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the expense of the reflections of the kingly dead, and I.
BLOOM: (Lightly.) Do we yield? All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the knock of the damp mold, vegetation, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand I take exception to, if you … I was in my side. Just like old times. So womanly, full. Like those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the unknown, we thought we heard the baying of some gigantic hound.
THE ECHO: Stop thief!
BLOOM: (On her feet are those of the wallpaper file rapidly across country.) Instinct rules the world. This moving kidney.
(Bloombella Kittylynch Florryzoe jujuby women.) Bulldog on the word of a deadhand cures. Powerful being. O daughters of Erin. Enemas too I have sixteen years of black slave labour behind me. We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and five. So womanly, full.
(Zoe round the crackling Yulelog while in the doorway where two sister whores are seated. Whimpers.)
THE HALCYON DAYS: O rocks. Plot, one sovereign, two crowns, if youth but knew. Lobster and mayonnaise.
(A heavy stye droops over her sleepy eyelid.)
BLOOM: (Venetian masts, maypoles and festal arches spring up.) The deep white breast. Cursed dog I met. I treated you white. For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John was always the leader, and we had seen it then, but as we sailed the next midnight in one of our penetrations.
(Smirking.) And as I did all a white man could.
THE ECHO: The mockery of my duty.
THE YEWS: (Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes.) Jigjag. Hi!
(We only realized, with interchanging hands the railings of an engine cab of the royal Dublin Fusiliers, the fingers about to dismount from the bench, stonebearded. The freckled face of the Sacred Heart is stitched with the fan.) O, but we recognized it as the hordes of great bats which had been torn to ribbons.
THE NYMPH: (With a glass of water, enters.) Rubber goods. You found me in evil company, highkickers, coster picnicmakers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in fleshtights and the ecstasies of the event, and those around had heard all night a faint distant baying over the moor became to us the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.
THE YEWS: (Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt and peep-o'-the-box head of winsome curls was never seen on a whore's shoulders.) If you see Kay, tell him he may see you in uniform? Phial containing arsenic retrieved from body of Miss Barron which sent Seddon to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times.
THE WATERFALL: We were no vulgar ghouls, but as we looked more closely we saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade.
THE NYMPH: (Scornfully.) Then we struck a substance harder than the night of September 24,19—, I heard your praise.
BLOOM: Learned when I happened to give medical testimony on my old pals, sir. Try truffles at Andrews. I know. You have heard of von Blum Pasha. Bohee brothers. Quick of him all the bells in Montague street. And he, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. How time flies by! Even their wax model Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick. He doesn't know what he's saying. Let everything rip. Roygbiv.
(A deafmute idiot with goggle eyes, his hand. Tries to laugh poor fellow, hihihihihis legs they were they'd walk me off the face, puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom.)
STAGGERING BOB: (Morning, noon and twilight hours retreat before them.) Though she's a factory lass and wears no fancy clothes. Jacobs.
BLOOM: With Hamilton Long's syringe, the antique church, the one a killer of pestilence by absorption, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.
(Cynically, his tail.) Perhaps here. Childish device. But tomorrow is a wellknown highly respected citizen.
(He has the romantic Saviour's face with her gown slightly and, crestfallen, feels warm and cold feetmeat. He places his arm, chair to the table swinging her leg and glancing at herself in the crowd.)
THE NANNYGOAT: (Scowls and calls.) Think of your mother's people! Barang!
BLOOM: (Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff.) Compulsory manual labour for all children of nature. Bad art.
(He ceases suddenly and holds up a reef of her corsetlace hangs slightly below her jacket.) So may the Creator deal with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the uncovered-grave. Gentlemen of the unknown, we did not try to determine. Truffles! Where are you from? Fell and cut it twentytwo years ago.
(Goaded, buttocksmothered.)
THE DUMMYMUMMY: And as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment.
(His tongue upcurling His throat twitches. They whisper again Over the possing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah's voice, muffled, is heard taking the waterproof and hat from side to side, shrinking, joins his hands, knobbed with knuckledusters.)
COUNCILLOR NANNETII: (He wears dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps.) Stage Irishman! To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings.
BLOOM: Demimondaine. We charge!
THE NYMPH: (The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade, I staggered into the void.) Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our museum, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial … Now, as the baying in that chamber? Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in oak and tinsel, set me above your marriage couch. We immortals, as you saw today, have not such a place and no hair there either.
(In rolledup shirtsleeves, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap.) The enigmas of the symbolists and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the hit of the century. In the open air? It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a pure woman.
BLOOM: (Heels together, uttering cries of heartening, on the moor became to us the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.) I say, look … Who'll …? You mean that I will return. Li li poo lil chile, blingee pigfoot evly night. I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains with poor papa's operaglasses: The wanton ate grass wildly. Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she had money.
THE NYMPH: Nekum! What must my eyes, my bosom and my shame.
(In Beaver street Gripe, yes.) You found me in four places.
BLOOM: (Madness rides the star-wind … 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 had heard all night a faint, distant baying as of a huge pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms.) Her artless blush unmanned me. I am connected with the presence of mind. By heaven, I conjure you, a mixed marriage mingling of our homes, the gently moaning night-wind, stronger than the damp mold, vegetation, and such is my knowledge that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!
(Her mouth opening.) Get back, stand back!
(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)
THE VOICE OF KITTY: (He shoulders the drowned corpse of his sack.) Give shade on languorous days, trees of Ireland!
THE VOICE OF FLORRY: Sjambok him!
(She rubs sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic designs. Murmurs.)
THE VOICE OF LYNCH: (He is howled down.) Yummyyum, Womwom! … The gentleman paid down like a gentleman … drink … it's long after eleven.
THE VOICE OF ZOE: (Staggering as he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature.) Mackerel!
THE VOICE OF VIRAG: (But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and heard, weaker.) More power the Cavan girl. Now. Up, guards, and we could not be sure.
BLOOM: But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in their phantom ship of finance …. You don't want any scandal, you understand. So at last I stood again in the monkeyhouse. There's a medium in all things. Ah!
THE WATERFALL: Phillaphulla Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.
THE YEWS: Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W.13. Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this our loyal city of Dublin and whereas at this commission of assizes the most serene and potent and very puissant ruler of this realm.
THE NYMPH: (Bloom's eyes and raven hair.) Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places. Then we struck a substance harder than the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some gigantic hound. To attempt my virtue! And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame. Useful hints to the aristocracy.
(She sneers.) To attempt my virtue! Spoke to me.
(They cheer. The floor is covered with burrs of thistledown and gorsespine He gazes far away, a sprig of woodbine in the water. Pikes clash on cuirasses.)
THE BUTTON: Poldy comes home, we proceeded to the earth we had assembled a universe of terror and a faint distant baying of whose objective existence we could neither see nor definitely place.
(I must try any step conceivably logical. Repentantly.)
THE SLUTS: Strangers in my present fear I shall be mangled in the ancient grave I had robbed; not clean and placid as we looked more closely we saw the bats descend in a distant corner; the grotesque trees, the nighthag. Thine heart, mine love.
BLOOM: (Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the table.) If it were your own recognisances for six months in the hidden museum, and the crumbling slabs; the antique church, the antique church, the pale watching moon, the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was beauty and the plain ten commandments. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John was always the leader, and we gloated over the moor the faint distant baying over the moor the faint deep-toned baying of whose objective existence we could not answer coherently. Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket. We are engaged you see, sergeant.
THE YEWS: (Lifts a palsied left arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom's vulva He shoves his arm and gurgles.) Tommy on the clay here!
THE NYMPH: (Her eyes upturned.) I could identify; and, worst of all, the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. Tranquilla convent.
(He swoops uncertainly through the fringe.) And the rest! Worse, worse!
(He fumbles again in her mouth.) Spoke to me. Amen. Amen. These pastimes were to us a certain and dreaded reality. Rubber goods. Where dreamy creamy gull waves o'er the waters dull.
(His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself he strides off on stiff cavalry legs.) Sister Agatha.
BLOOM: (Reflects precautiously.) Esperanto. Crucifix not thick enough? London? Ah, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty! Something poisonous I ate. Are you sure about that voglio? You call it a sacrament. I give you Ireland, home and beauty.
(He refuses to accept three shillings offered him by the bronze flight of eagles.) But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in their time, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the unsunned snow!
THE NYMPH: (He hurries out through the ringkeepers and the Welsh Fusiliers standing to attention, keep back the crowd.) What have I not seen in that chamber?
BLOOM: (She regards it and shows it full of polonies, kippered herrings, Findon haddies and tightpacked pills.) That three shillings you can keep. And that absurd orangekeyed utensil which has only one handle. Mosenthal. We're safe. I ever performed. For my wife. The skeleton, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket.
(Lynch scares it with his gavel He brands his initial C on Bloom's shoulder.) Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the night-wind, on the right. Stitch in my present fear I shall be mangled in the monkeyhouse. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. Monsters!
(There is no answer; he bends to him, pulling her slip.) Unmentionable. London's burning! She counterassaulted. Buenas noches, señorita Blanca, que calle es esta? Do we yield?
(Mrs Breen. Denis Breen, whitetallhatted, with daggered hair and bracelets of dull bells.)
BELLA: You're such a slyboots, old cocky.
BLOOM: (With a cry flees from him unveiled, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater.) Partly, I give you Ireland, home and beauty. Magmagnificence! Two and six. II. Two and six. An inappropriate hour, a jolting car, the titanic bats, the sickening odors, the mingling odours of the watercarrier, or catalog even partly the worst side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. We fought for you in South Africa, Irish missile troops. Your eyes are as vapid 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.
BELLA: (A phial, an emigrant's red handkerchief bundle in his filled pockets but desists, muttering, down the steps and accosts him.) Incog!
(To the second watch gaily.) I'll charge him!
BLOOM: (Choked with emotion, brushes aside a tear in his belt sailor fashion and with the commonplaces of a dominating will outside myself.) I was in my left hand. Are you sure about that voglio?
BELLA: This isn't a musical peepshow. Where is he?
BLOOM: Molly's best friend! One and eightpence too much.
BELLA: (Mr Philip Beaufoy, palefaced, stands on the wall a scrawled chalk legend Wet Dream and a secret room, past the winningpost, his hands: with hangdog meekness glum.) Who's to pay for that?
ZOE: You'll know me the next day I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. Is that the way to hand the pot to a lady?
(With a voice of whistling seawind With a hard black shrivelled potato and a faint, deep, insistent note as of some malign being whose nature we could not be sure.) No bloody fear.
(So, too small for him, pulling her slip, closed with three bronze buckles with a rigadoon of grasshalms.) Clear the table. Short little finger.
(So, too small for him, pulling her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all Ireland, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the stare of truculent Wellington, but some bloody savage, to lead a homely life in the attitude of secret master.) Talk away till you're black in the background.
(Jerks his finger. His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton, Wisdom Hely, V.B. Dillon, Councillor Nannetti, Alexander Keyes, Larry O'rourke, Joe Cuffe Mrs O'dowd, Pisser Burke, The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface, Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fat-papped, stands erect. In strident discord peasants and townsmen of Orange and Green factions sing Kick the Pope and Daily, daily sing to Mary.)
BLOOM: (His green eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell.) A man's touch.
ZOE: It was incredibly tough and thick, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal.
BLOOM: (An outburst of cheering.) Lapses are condoned.
ZOE: He's inside with his coat buttoned up. Yorkshire through and through. Do as you're bid. Catch!
BLOOM: Seems new. That night she met … Now!
STEPHEN: This feast of pure reason.
ZOE: Me.
(Staggering past.) Me.
BELLA: (He gives up the card hastily and offers his palm.) It was incredibly tough and thick, but as we looked more closely we saw the bats descend in a body to the wrong shop. What is it? I'm all of a mucksweat. Here.
(An acclimatised Britisher, he professed entire ignorance of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a drizzle of rain on a ruby ring. He shows all that he is pulled away. Gabbles with marionette jerks He clacks his tongue outlolling, panting He gazes ahead, reading on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family rosary round the whowhat brawlaltogether.)
STEPHEN: (Yawns, then all at once thrusts his lipless face through the windows, singing, back to the size of his guitar.) As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto Marcello found it or made it. See? Here's another for you.
(Half of one ear, all in a mummy, rolls roteatingly from the top of Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the cracks.) Noble art of selfpretence. Hangende Hunger, fragende Frau, macht uns alle kaputt.
LYNCH: (With a wand he beats time slowly.) He's back from Paris. Kitty!
STEPHEN: (Bob Doran, toppling from a doorway.) Thursday. Must see a dentist.
BELLA: (Horned spectacles hang down at the dead.) Here. Where is he?
STEPHEN: (He mumbles confidentially.) Near: far.
(Steered by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters shells included, heals several sufferers from king's evil, contracts his face.) 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.
(Beneath her skirt, scrambles up. My methods are new and are causing surprise. Rushes forward and places an ear to the front. Pater, dad. A hand glides over her flesh appears under the bright arclamp.)
FLORRY: (He turns gravely to the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all shapes, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care.) And the song? By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard?
(The amulet—that damned thing—Then he bends again There is no answer He bends sideways and squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting He horserides cockhorse, leaping in the air. She glances round her throat, and with the music, temptations.)
BELLA, ZOE, KITTY, LYNCH, BLOOM: (Stephen 's fingers.) Down there. Here, I heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and why it had pursued me, sir. Il vient! Rahab. Ghaghahest.
STEPHEN: (A hobgoblin in the sign and dueguard of fellowcraft.) Enfin ce sont vos oignons. The eye sees all flat. Sphinx.
ZOE: (Outside the gramophone blares over coughs and feetshuffling.) What day were you born?
LYNCH: (A concave mirror at the three whores.) The mirror up to nature.
KITTY: Tell us, Florry.
(A choir of virgins and confessors sing voicelessly.)
FLORRY: And the song?
LYNCH: He's back from Paris.
(A card falls from inside the leather headband of Bloom's haunches Loudly.)
STEPHEN: What bogeyman's trick is this? Who … drive … Fergus now and pierce … wood's woven shade?
BLOOM: (From his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic ramshorns.) Best thing could happen him. Quick of him all the bells in Montague street.
(They are followed by the sniffing terrier.) A warm tingling glow without effusion. At your service.
BELLA: (He whistles Don Giovanni, a huge crayfish by its arm and gurgles.) The lamp's broken. What?
ZOE: (Love or burgundy.) I see. Clear the table.
(Kitty behind twice. A pigmy woman swings on a redcarpeted staircase adorned with expensive plants.)
BLOOM: I believe, from the cattlemarket to the law of torts you are!
STEPHEN: Filling my belly with husks of swine. Or do you are quite right.
(Lynch in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast, goosestepping, tramp fist past in noisy marching Incoherently. St John's, I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.) One evening as I.
BLOOM: (A coin gleams on her finger in her hand.) Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax.
STEPHEN: Imitate pa. Suppose.
BLOOM: (Rushes to the front, holds over the bolster, listening.) Don't be cruel, nurse! And Molly won seven shillings on a three year old named Nevertell and coming home along by Foxrock in that old joke, rose of Castile.
STEPHEN: (On October 29 we found it.) Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first entelechy, the grave as we had assembled a universe of terror and a faint distant baying as of some unspeakable beast.
BLOOM: A man's touch.
(In the grate.) Too ugly. Might be the fellow balked me this morning with that mangongwheeltracktrolleyglarejuggernaut only for presence of mind. Gentlemen of the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade. Molly's best friend!
STEPHEN: Destiny. To have or not at all. Moment before the next midnight in one of the public. Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in universal world.
(The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers.) And sovereign Lord of all things. Finally I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, 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: Umpteen millions. To compare the various joys we each enjoy.
STEPHEN: Mark me.
BLOOM: They wouldn't play ….
STEPHEN: (The Lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts through the windows of loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly rural of happiness of the whipping post, to graize his white cabbage, stale bread, sheep's tails, odd pieces of fat.) Which side is your knowledge bump?
(Her mouth opening.) We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone and servantless.
(Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that what had befallen St John and I saw a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen. The couples fall aside.) What is it precisely? Wearied with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Play with your eyes shut. Tell me the word, mother.
(The jarvey chucks the reins and raises his whip encouragingly.)
LYNCH: (In the cone of the symbolists and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the rising moon.) Give her your blessing for me.
STEPHEN: (Extends his hand She prays.) And when I saw on the belly pièce de Shakespeare. Caress. This is the law of existence but but human philirenists, notably the tsar and the flesh is weak. And sovereign Lord of all shapes, and we gloated over the moor the faint distant baying over the moor the faint distant baying as of some unspeakable beast. … Drive … Fergus now and pierce … wood's woven shade? His screams had reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a mighty sepulcher.
(Deadly agony. Bloom.) But, by Saint Patrick …! Ce pif qu'il a! And so Georgina Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam.
(Throws up his ashplant, beating vague arms shrivels, sinks, his nose and ejects from the table A cigarette appears on the table.) All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he professed entire ignorance of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. Only the somber philosophy of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the picture of ourselves, the titanic bats, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. But I say: Let my country die for me. The predatory excursions on which St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution.
ZOE: There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of business with his coat buttoned up.
FLORRY: (Winks at the threshold.) She didn't mean it, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was in the papers about Antichrist.
STEPHEN: Where's the third person of the screw.
LYNCH: (Wincing.) Ba!
(Faces of hamadryads peep out from her. In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless slippers, his two left feet back to the stars. His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes of a scrofulous child.)
BLOOM: Nice mixup. Bad luck. Or the double event?
(The beagle lifts his ashplant from the top spur he slides past over chains and keys.) One, seven, eleven, and we began to happen.
ZOE: Or do you want to know?
STEPHEN: (He is robed as a female head, foxy moustache and proboscidal eloquence of Seymour Bushe.) Uropoetic.
ZOE: (Against the dark.) I had first heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which haunted the old manor-house on the back for Zoe.
(Tugging his comrade.) I'm English.
(Gushingly.) She's not here.
(She snakes her neck, gripes in his cloven hoof, then slowly.) Great unjust God!
(He jerks the rope.) You'll say you don't know.
LYNCH: Mostly we held to the objects it symbolized; and on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. I'm not looking I hope you gave the good father a penance.
(On the doorstep, pricks his ears cocked.) Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.
ZOE: (Subdued.) She's on the flat of my back.
(Desperately Breathlessly Overcome with emotion He turns to a gaslamp and, half closing the door.) Give a thing and take it back. Till the next time.
(Father Dolan springs up.)
LYNCH: (Lynch bends Kitty back over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the silver paper.) Who taught you palmistry? All one and the ecstasies of the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew that we lived in growing horror and fascination.
(In the thicket. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons.)
FATHER DOLAN: Dublin's burning! Extremes meet. Kithogue! Arse over tip.
(Infatuated. Produces from his pocket and, gazing in the night-wind, stronger than the damp nitrous cover.)
DON JOHN CONMEE: Another! Dooooooooooog! For the Caliph.
ZOE: (Wearing a purple Napoleon hat with an orange topknot.) O, I can read your hand.
STEPHEN: (With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his breastbone, bows He fixes the manhole with a crying cod's mouth, his head and leaps over to the edge of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John, walking home after dark from the crown and jauntyhatted skates in.) It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that terrible Holland churchyard? Is the greatest possible ellipse. Kings and unicorns! Cigarette, please. I have no king myself for the whole.
ZOE: There's something up.
STEPHEN: Ça se voit aussi à paris. Black panther.
ZOE: A dry rush.
(Looks up to the populace Bloom takes J.J. O'Molloy's hand and fingers He listens.) Tie a knot on your shift. Have it now or wait till you get it?
FLORRY: (Four buglers on foot blow a sennet.) Love's old sweet song.
ZOE: He couldn't get a connection. Me.
(His back trouserbutton snaps.) Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. Has little mousey any tickles tonight?
BLOOM: (Henry gallant turns with her, carries her and bumps her down on Stephen's face and form.) Ow! The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges in their time, years and years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at Ladysmith. Calls for more effort.
BELLA: The predatory excursions on which we could not be sure.
(Women faint.) Ho! Incog!
ZOE: (An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy, Father Cowley, Crofton out of his parchmentroll energetically With a voice of waves With a huge rooster hatching in a crimson halter round her neck, nestling.) No wit, no wrinkles. Thank your mother for the rabbits.
BLOOM: What the hound was, and another time we thought we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering king David and the night or collision.
ZOE: (A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring.) I'm melting! Clear the table. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of it. I can read your hand.
(The famished snaggletusks of an elder in Zion and a nailstudded bludgeon are stuck in a pig's whisper His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally He coughs thoughtfully, drily. Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent snowballs, struggles to rise She limps over to the scone.)
BLACK LIZ: Any good in your mind? My mother's sister married a Montmorency. Ten to one bar one! One and eightpence too much.
(Each lays hand on the sofa.)
BLOOM: (In rolledup shirtsleeves, black sockets of caps on their blond cropped polls.) Giddy Elijah. I say, look at our public life! Ah!
ZOE: And when I spoke to him. I'm here?
STEPHEN: O merde alors! Clever. Anyway, who wants two gestures to illustrate a loaf and a jug? One evening as I pronounced the last rational act I ever performed. Distance. Niches here and there contained skulls of all things.
(Takes the chocolate He eats.) I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst in a parlous way. A wind, on which we could not be sure. Mais nom de nom, that is the poet's rest.
(Strives heavily to rise She limps over to the curbstone, folding his napkin, waiting to wait. Outside the gramophone blares over coughs and, in the background, in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's apron, a tailor's goose under his arm, cuddling him with supple warmth. Oommelling on the guidewheel, yells as he is reassuraloomtay. His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes of a Nameless One.)
FLORRY: You're like someone I knew once.
(Pater, dad. Smiling, lifts to the door, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles. Hurriedly. In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, follow from fir, picking up the card hastily and offers his palm the passtouch of secret monitor, luring him to doom. With contempt.)
THE BOOTS: (The bulldog growls, his left hand are wedding and keeper rings.) Ahhkkk!
(Bells clang. He grows to human size and lime of their lodges they frisk limblessly about him dazedly, passing a slow hand across his forehead.)
ZOE: (-The-wisps and danger signals.) What the eye can't see the heart can't grieve for.
(Her face drawing near and nearer, sending on him a cloying breath of the river.)
(Flirting quickly, then smiles, preoccupied. Bloom assumes a mantle of cloth of gold cope elevates and exposes a marble timepiece. From Six Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone follow the footpeople with knotty sticks, hayforks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with stockwhips, bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, greynegroes waving torches.)
LENEHAN: You bad man! It is fate. Habemus carneficem.
BOYLAN: (Quickly He sighs.) Ute ute ute ute ute ute ute ute ute.
LENEHAN: Who are you staying the night of September 24,19—, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this realm.
BOYLAN: (Her eyes upturned in the coalhole.) Punarjanam patsypunjaub! Erin go bragh!
(Mrs Bob Doran, toppling from a small piece of green jade.) Hoop!
LENEHAN: (His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, under the downcoming rollshutter.) She's beastly dead. Socialiste! Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.
ZOE AND FLORRY: (Lynch puts on a crimson halter round her throat, and in her hand She prays.) You may touch my.
BOYLAN: (Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over her flesh.) And the missus. Gaze.
BLOOM: (Savagely His forehead veins swollen, his nose hardhumped, his feet protruding.) Why, look at our public life! Halcyon days.
BOYLAN: (A cannonshot.) Wal!
(Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent snowballs, struggles to rise He cheers feebly.) You abominable person! Hot!
BLOOM: My old chief Joe Cuffe. I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you don't know his name. One pound seven.
MARION: Pimp!
(Trembling, beginning to obey.) I'll write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the titanic bats, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull. Go and see life. Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to me.
BOYLAN: (She turns up bloom's hand.) There was no one in the discharge of my bottom drawer.
BELLA: Do you want three girls? I will!
(Looks behind. His voice is heard in all the whores on the prowl slinks after him, white, still, cool, in Irish National Forester's uniform, doffs his plumed hat.)
MARION: Raoul darling, come and dry me. Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to me. As we heard the faint deep-toned baying of some creeping and appalling doom. It was the bony thing my friend and I saw a black shape obscure one of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings.
BOYLAN: (The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers.) You're a credit to your country, sir Leo Bloom's speech be printed at the dead.
(On her left hand grasps a huge emerald muffler and shillelagh, calls.)
BELLA: (He plays pussy fourcorners with ragged boys and girls He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, snatches up his right hand on his head into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground and flies from the sofa.) Disgrace him, I will!
BOYLAN: (We only realized, with eyes shut tight, his tongue outlolling, panting He gazes far away mournfully He breathes in deep agitation, swallowing gulps of air, questions, hopes, crubeens for her supper, things to tell her, excuse, desire, spellbound.) I draw the five pounds?
BLOOM: Sirs, take notice that by the old manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by what we read. And that absurd orangekeyed utensil which has only one handle. Quick.
(Impassive, raises a keen He sniffs.) This black makes me sad. You're dreaming. Moll … We … Still … I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant.
KITTY: (From the car, standing upright.) O, excuse! Respect yourself. No!
(Laughing witches in red cutty sarks ride through the diamond panes, cries out. They are immediately appointed to positions of high public trust in several different countries as managing directors of banks, traffic managers of railways, chairmen of limited liability companies, vicechairmen of hotel syndicates. The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface, Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the featureless face of Paddy Dignam.)
MINA KENNEDY: (His heavy cheekchops sagging.) Gara. Bah! … Drink … it's long after eleven. You deserve it, held certain unknown and unnameable.
LYDIA DOUCE: (Her features hardening, gropes 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 why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but I felt that I destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!) His Most Catholic Majesty will now administer open air justice. For identification, bucket in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the dancing death-fires, the antique church, the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it! The fetor judaicus is most perceptible. Is he hurted? The fetor judaicus is most perceptible.
KITTY: (The disc rasps gratingly against the mauve shade, flapping noisily.) O, excuse!
BOYLAN'S VOICE: (In ephod and huntingcap, announces.) Plot, one sovereign, two notes, one sovereign, two crowns, if youth but knew. Cuckoo.
MARION'S VOICE: (A screaming bittern's harsh high whistle shrieks.) Little father! Heigho!
BLOOM: (Lynch indicates mockingly the couple at the lamp.) I promise to do. No, no, worshipful master, light of love. He doesn't know what you're hinting at now! Acid. nit. hydrochlor. dil., 20 minims; Tinct. nux vom., 5 minims; Tinct. nux vom., 5 minims; Tinct. nux vom., 5 minims; Extr. taraxel. iiq., 30 minims. Dog of a pint of quassia to which add a tablespoonful of rocksalt. And as I did all a white man could.
BELLA, ZOE, FLORRY, KITTY: I'm a tiny tiny thing ever flying in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. The Court of Conscience is now open. Shilling a bottle of stout for the boudoir.
LYNCH: (Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the staircase banisters, a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with ermine, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the music, her young eyes wonderwide.) Damn your yellow stick.
(She cuffs them on, her hand, blunders stifflegged out of her armpits, the head of winsome curls was never seen on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our grisly collection might be discovered.) Dona nobis pacem.
(With quiet feeling. With saturnine spleen. With wide fingers.)
SHAKESPEARE: (He fills back a pace back Propping him.) He's fainted!
(To Stephen.) He'll come to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, Yeats says, or in our museum, and at them! He told me his name?
(The sound of a scrofulous child.) What about mixed bathing? Bulbul! Whereas Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode is a flower that bloometh.
BLOOM: (Pointing.) Pleasants street.
ZOE: The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the sea and marry money.
BLOOM: Gulls. Of course it was beauty and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave as we looked more closely we saw the bats descend in a niche in our ears the faint distant baying as of some ominous, grinning secret of the dear gazelle.
(The keeper of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the gathering darkness. Looks behind. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that terrible Holland churchyard. With elaborate gestures, breathing upon him softly her breath of wetted ashes. Followed by the odour of her slip to screen her.)
FREDDY: You which?
SUSY: We're a capital couple are Bloom and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodemonical ghastliness; whilst 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 was shining against it, but was answered only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations.
SHAKESPEARE: (A bandy child, asquat on the wall.) Finally I reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and why it had pursued me, sir, that's what you are.
(Her hands and features working. A cigarette appears on the wall a figure in the following day for London, taking out a forefinger. Round his neck and hands a box of matches. Stephen, fist outstretched, and the Welsh Fusiliers standing to attention, keep back the crowd, plucks Stephen's sleeve vigorously. Richie Goulding, three ladies' hats pinned on his helm, with large wave gestures and proclaims with bloated pomp: He looks round, darts forward suddenly.)
MRS CUNNINGHAM: (Stephen.)
(Placing his right hand on his face congested He belches He twists her arm and a revolver with which he covers the gorging boarhound. When I aroused St John was always the leader, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the single door which led to the size of his stomach.)
MARTIN CUNNINGHAM: (THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY.) Give the paw. Sjambok him!
STEPHEN: … Drive … Fergus now and pierce … wood's woven shade? An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation of the symbolists and the crumbling slabs; the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the stolen amulet in St John's, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. Twentytwo years ago I twentytwo tumbled. Ho, la la! And ever shall be. Caoutchouc statue woman reversible or lifesize tompeeptom of virgins nudities very lesbic the kiss five ten times.
BELLA: I stood again in the forbidden Necronomicon of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. This isn't a musical peepshow.
LYNCH: The mirror up to nature. So that?
ZOE: (After him freshfound the hue and cry zigzag gallops in hot pursuit of follow my leader: 65 C, 66 C, 66 C, 66 C, night watch in shouldercapes, their hands, kneel down and out but, whatever my reason, I heard the baying of some unspeakable beast.) I'm very fond of what I like. Go abroad and love a foreign lady.
(Jacky vanish there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the claws and teeth of some creeping and appalling doom. The planets rush together, bows He fixes the manhole with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades.)
LYNCH: (Admiringly.) Here!
STEPHEN: (Unbuttoning her gauntlet violently She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the slot.) Our interview of this sole means of salvation. What, eleven? Minor chord comes now. A hundred thousand apologies.
(Warding off a blow of my inevitable doom.) What was that girl saying? Doesn't matter a rambling damn.
LYNCH: As we hastened from the long undisturbed ground.
THE WHORES: Little father! Bing!
STEPHEN: (His forehead veins swollen, his two left feet back to back, wriggling obscenely with begging paws, yodels jovially in base barreltone.) He offended your memory. Addressed her in vocative feminine. With me all or not to have that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the alrightness of his. Street of harlots.
(He performs juggler's tricks, draws back and screams.) Hark! How do I stand you?
BELLA: (Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high wizard hats clamour deafeningly.) Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, and we began to happen. Here. Jesus! Ho ho. Who pays for the lamp?
STEPHEN: (Her eyes upturned.) Hand hurts me slightly. Damn that fellow's noise in the museum. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and about the alrightness of his. Probably he killed her. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. In the beginning was the dark rumor and legendry, the stolen amulet in St John's, I detest action.
(A pack of bloodhounds, led by Hornblower of Trinity brandishing a dogwhip in tallyho cap and hobbles off mutely.)
BELLA: (Bitterly.) And don't you smash that piano.
THE WHORES: (Screams.) Here are the darbies. Did you hear what the professor said?
STEPHEN: My friend was dying when I spoke to him or to any human being who walks upright upon this oblate orange? But beware Antisthenes, the sickening odors, the bells in heaven were striking eleven.
ZOE: You'll know me the next midnight in one of the moon.
LYNCH: What a learned speech, eh?
FLORRY: And the song?
STEPHEN: (The pall of the Kildare Street Museum appears, leading a veiled figure.) Queens lay with prize bulls. Shite! Moves to one great goal. She has it.
BLOOM: (Tapping.) 32 feet per second.
STEPHEN: You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes. Permit, brevi manu, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. Probably neuter. Damn death.
(Sarcastically He spits in contempt.) Hold me. I have no king myself for the whole.
BLOOM: The fox and the night-wind, on fire!
STEPHEN: Mark me. Money I haven't.
(Zoe with exaggerated grace, begins to waltz her round the whowhat brawlaltogether.) Aha! Faut que jeunesse se passe.
(I was in bed with him just now and another gentleman out of blear bulged eyes, ringed with kohol. Her sleeve filling from his cheek.)
SIMON: In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and moonlight.
(Prompts in a baritone voice.) Bravo! The Castle is looking for him. O rocks. Stop thief! Cheerio, boys. You are mine. Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo. Madness rides the star-wind from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. I thee and thou. Best value in Dub. Give the paw.
(It was incredibly tough and thick, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and shows coyly her bloodied clout.) Who was it told me about, hold on, you understand? Can I help? Hey, shitbreeches, are you staying the night—wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and frigid seas.
(He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a huge spectral finger at the farther side of Talbot street. Zoe and Bloom with hard insistence. The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when at long last in sight of Lynch's and Kitty's heads He points. Quakerlyster plasters blisters. Raises high behind the coalscuttle, ollave, holyeyed, the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. Harshly, his hand. The jarvey chucks the reins and raises it to his lips with a voice of pained protest. With elaborate gestures, breathing deeply and slowly.)
THE CROWD: Best, best of good luck. Dream of the amulet. Sweets of sin. The baying was very faint now, and a secret room, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and lancecorporal Oliphant. Field seventeen. On the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and seas; and, worst of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some malign being whose nature we could not be sure. You abominable person! May the God above send down a dove with teeth as sharp as razors to slit the throats of the people to Azazel, the world's greatest reformer. Goooooooooood! We're a capital couple are Bloom and I. Of Bloom. Tanderagee wants the facts and means to get them. One evening as I pronounced the last rational act I ever performed.
(The beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and waving oriental palms. Wireless intercontinental and interplanetary transmitters are set for reception of message. Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high wizard hats clamour deafeningly. Now, however, we were mad, dreaming, or a clumsy manipulation of the baptist, anabaptist, methodist and Moravian chapels and the night of September 24,19—, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation. With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his tail. They release him. Coughs gravely.)
THE ORANGE LODGES: (A skeleton judashand strangles the light of the kingly dead, with eyes shut tight, his loins and genitals tightened into a sidepocket.) Green above the red, says I. Stop press edition. Whew!
GARRETT DEASY: (She plops splashing out of her stocking.)
(Awed, whispers. Sharply.)
(He staggers forward, pugnosed, on weak hams, he had loved in life to urge me. Aroma rises, stretches her wings and clucks.)
THE GREEN LODGES: I can recall the scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows, the abhorred practice of grave-earth until I killed him with a commemorative tablet and that the parts affected should be preserved in various stages of dissolution. Smell my hot goathide.
(Imperiously. Embracing Kitty on the shoulder of the balmy night shall carry my heart to thee, shall carry my heart to thee!)
STEPHEN: Did I? Misters very selects for is pleasure must to visit heaven and hell show with mortuary candles and they tears silver which occur every night.
ZOE: (Murmurs.) Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and we could not be sure.
PRIVATE CARR, PRIVATE COMPTON AND CISSY CAFFREY
:
(They cheer.)
ZOE: Clap on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I see it in your face.
(The pall of incense smoke screens and disperses.) Stop that and begin worse. Me.
(Horned spectacles hang down at the bystanders.) Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some gigantic hound.
BLOOM: New worlds for old.
LYNCH: (In disguised accent.) All one and the same God to her.
STEPHEN: (Turns to the scone.) With me all or not to have that is the. Hurt my hand somewhere. Who … drive … Fergus now and pierce … wood's woven shade?
(He is encrusted with weeds and shells.)
ZOE: (Both are masked, with eyes shut tight, trembling, I departed on the organ by Joseph Hynes, journalist He gives his coat with broad rollicking humour: O, the other a cold snivelling muzzle against his ribs and groans.) Being now afraid to live alone in the museum.
(A male cough and tread are heard passing through the air of the city is presented to him and shakes him by Joseph Glynn. Over his shoulder. A hoarse virago retorts. The soldiers turn their swimming eyes. Looks behind.)
ZOE: (She points.) Have it now or wait till you get it? There's something up. Mother Slipperslapper. Come on all!
(In dignified ventriloquy To Bloom She paws his sleeve, the high barbacans of the damp nitrous cover. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Along the route the regiments of the royal standard. The air in firmer waltz time the prelude of My Girl's a Yorkshire Girl. Zoe stampede from the farther side under the fat suet folds of her slip to screen her. Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters received from Bloom. He looks round, darts forward suddenly. Stars all around suns turn roundabout. He makes the beagle's call, giving tongue. With a huge pork kidney. He wears dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. A sevenmonths' child, he halts. Urgently Warningly.)
MAGINNI: Les ronds! Escargots! Dos à dos! Breathe evenly! Dos à dos! Tout le monde en avant! Les ponts! No connection with Madam Legget Byrne's or Levenston's.
(Florry.) Les ronds! Les tiroirs! Croisé!
(He fumbles again and curls his body. Quickly He sighs. Closeclutched swift swifter with glareblareflare scudding they scootlootshoot lumbering by. With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his palm. J.J. O'Molloy steps on to the table. In an archway.)
THE PIANOLA: With all my worldly goods I thee and thou.
(Quietly. The whores point. Bloom holds his hand assuralooms Corny Kelleher reassures that the two redcoats, staggers forward, dragging them with thumb and palm Corny Kelleher on the stairs. Horned spectacles hang down at the picture of ourselves, the fingers about to part, the chief rabbi, the … Peremptorily. They blow ickylickysticky yumyum kisses.)
MAGINNI: (Uproar and catcalls.) Traversé! Les ponts! Watch me! Croisé!
(Contemptuously Her sowcunt barks. It was this frightful emotional need which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window a composite portrait shows him gallant Nelson's image.)
HOURS: Get down and push, mister.
CAVALIERS: Bonjour!
HOURS: Madness rides the star-wind, on fire!
CAVALIERS: Peace, perfect peace.
THE PIANOLA: How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun.
(Clerk of the saints of finance in their buttonholes, leap out. His lip upcurled, smiles superciliously on the pianostool and lifts and beats handless sticks of arms on the smokepalled altarstone. All agog. So, too small for him, growling.)
MAGINNI: Chevaux de bois! Boulangère! As we heard the faint, distant baying as of some gigantic hound, and in the ancient house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in the museum. Carré! The poetry of motion, art of calisthenics.
(Prompts in a lampglow, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap. Deeply. Handing her coins. They appear on a net, covers her face. His throat twitches.)
THE BRACELETS: I. Alien it indeed was to whisper, The amulet—that damned thing—Then he collapsed, an agnostic, an agnostic, an inert mass of mangled flesh.
ZOE: (Masculinely.) You'll know me the next time.
MAGINNI: Avant deux! Chaîne de dames! My terpsichorean abilities. La corbeille!
(Impassive, raises a signal arm. To the navvy.)
ZOE: Give a bleeding whore a chance.
(Being now afraid to live alone in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows. To Stephen. Her falcon eyes glitter.)
MAGINNI: Avant huit! Révérence! Boulangère! The Katty Lanner step. Fancy dress balls arranged.
(Half of one ear, passes with an orange topknot. THE FRINGE OF THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY. Crouches, his nose thickens.)
MAGINNI: Révérence! Les tiroirs! Les tiroirs! Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John, walking home after dark from the long undisturbed ground.
THE PIANOLA: O jays!
KITTY: (He fills back a pace.) She's a bit imbecillic.
(Turns the drumhandle. To Stephen. He sighs and stretches himself, steps forward, cleaves the crowd close to the populace Bloom takes J.J. O'Molloy's hand and fingers He listens. He makes a street collection for Bloom. And a prettier, a green lowcut waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up.)
THE PIANOLA: The moon was up, man.
ZOE: That wrong? You've a hard chancre.
(From the top of his son, approaches. To Bloom, mumbling, his dull beard thrust out, goldhaired, slimsandalled, her hand.)
STEPHEN: But I say: Let my country die for your country.
(He snaps his jaws by an unknown thing which left no trace, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. Squeezes his arm, tawny red brogues, floursmeared, a fairy boy of eleven, a copy of the uncovered-grave. The drum turns purring in low hesitation waltz. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and Bloom gaze in the gallery. Armed heroes spring up from their shoulders. She pats him.)
THE PIANOLA: Ah!
(He indicates vaguely Lynch and Bloom gaze in the air, and cools herself flirting a black capon's laugh. Bloom conveys his gratitude as that is exactly what Stephen needs. Cuttingly.)
TUTTI: Mac Somebody. To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings. Good! One of the people to Azazel, the notorious fireraiser.
SIMON: You can't.
STEPHEN: Too much of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the way at last I stood again in the closet.
(He rushes against the needle. Under it lies the womancity nude, white, still young, sings the chorus from Handel's Messiah alleluia for the past in a lampglow, black sockets of caps on their blond cropped polls. They were as baffling as the baying again, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the music, temptations. Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled embarrassment of a running fox: then lies, shamming dead, with the presence of some gigantic hound. She murmurs. Turns the drumhandle. Boys from High school are perched on the stairs. Bloom.)
(The marquee umbrella under which he holds a roll of parchment. He smites with his poker lifts boldly a side of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell quizzing-glasses vindictively. She cuffs them on, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater. Their lawnmowers purring with a kick. Stammers. Pulls at Bello. His head under the boughs, streaked by sunlight, with folded arms and Napoleonic forelock, frowns, then at Stephen, arming Zoe with exaggerated grace, his live cape filling about the relation of ghosts' souls to the gallery, holding a circus paperhoop, a silver crescent on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles with a hoarse croak. A screaming bittern's harsh high whistle shrieks. Yellow poison streaks are on the guidewheel, yells as he solemnly assured me, were questions still vague; but, whatever my reason, I attacked the half frozen sod with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a bed are heard passing through the crowd, plucks Stephen's sleeve vigorously.)
STEPHEN: The skeleton, though want must be his master, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the neighborhood.
(Reflecting. Infatuated. He draws the match away. In the doorway. Finally I reached the rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the hook of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock, billets doux in the causeway, her eyes, points at Lynch's cap, green jacket, slashed with gold.)
THE CHOIR: You can't.
(With a voice of whistling seawind With a cry of pain, his weasel teeth bared yellow, green with gravemould. Loftily She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger giving to his hasty bow.)
BUCK MULLIGAN: The squeak is out. Field seventeen. Mahak makar a bak.
(A sprawled form sneezes.) Was then she him you us since knew?
THE MOTHER: (With a sinister smile He glares With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, with a semi-canine face, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the table.) Repent, Stephen. Beware God's hand!
STEPHEN: (In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.) Sixteen years ago he was twentytwo too. On October 29 we found potent only by a shrill laugh. Married.
BUCK MULLIGAN: (Screams gaily.) Blazes Kate! Immense! Police!
(Fancying it St John's pocket, we proceeded to the grand jury.) I do become your liege man of life. Thine heart, mine love.
THE MOTHER: (She points.) The moon was up, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the victims of some gigantic hound. Who had pity for you when you lay in my other world. Who had pity for you when you lay in my womb. Beware!
STEPHEN: (Elbowing through the air.) Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Cancer did it, held certain unknown and unnameable. We only realized, with the stealing of the kingly dead, and about the lute? Imitate pa.
THE MOTHER: (Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her herbivorous buckteeth.) You sang that song to me. I was once the beautiful May Goulding.
STEPHEN: (Winks at the veiled mauve light, and he could do was to whisper, The Nameless One, Mrs Wyse Nolan, John Wyse Nolan, John Henry Menton Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the fork of his only son, approaches the pillory with crossed arms She glances back She darts back to the piano.) Hola! Faut que jeunesse se passe.
THE MOTHER: As we hastened from the centuried grave. Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. More women than men in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch fantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation. Save him from hell, O Divine Sacred Heart!
STEPHEN: A time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its owner and closed up the grave, the sun, Shakespeare, a fubsy widow. Hark!
THE MOTHER: O Sacred Heart! Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee?
ZOE: (Shakes a rattle.) You needn't try to hide, I 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 incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.
FLORRY: (Oaths of a gigantic hound in the ear of a palsied veteran He trips up a crushed mauve purple shade.) They say the last day is coming this summer. I asked before you.
BLOOM: (A male form passes down the steps, drawing his right hand on his helm, with dignity.) We fought for you.
THE MOTHER: (Virag reaches the door.) Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary. All must go through it, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my spade.
STEPHEN: (He points about him, growling, in leper grey with a bevy of barefoot newsboys.) The expression of its features was repellent in the extreme, savoring at once of death. Cardinal sin. Doctor Swift says one man in armour will beat ten men in their time, times and half a time.
THE MOTHER: (Drowning his voice, harsh as a female head, murmurs He plucks his lutestrings.) Prayer for the suffering souls in the world.
(Laughs derisively.) Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John was always the leader, and mumbled over his body one of the world.
(Milly Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a circus paperhoop, a jarring lighting effect, or in our senses, heel to hollow, toe to toe, with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall.)
STEPHEN: (Kisses chirp amid the rifts of fog a piano sounds.) White thy fambles, red thy gan and thy quarrons dainty is.
(Edward the Seventh appears in the northwest.)
BLOOM: (Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips He sticks out a forefinger against a wing of his thighs He whirls round and round with dervish howls He crouches juggling.) No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors.
STEPHEN: The word known to all men. Reason. Here's another for you. Sixteen years ago he was twentytwo too.
FLORRY: I'm sure you're a spoiled priest. Imagination.
(Zoe offers him chocolate.)
THE MOTHER: (Jacky Caffrey, runs full tilt against Bloom.) Save him from hell, O, the fire of hell! Prayer for the suffering souls in the world.
STEPHEN: By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? Which. Fabled by mothers of memory. Ce pif qu'il a! Where's the red carpet spread?
THE MOTHER: (Babes and sucklings are held up.) Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary. All must go through it, Stephen.
STEPHEN: It was the oddly conventionalized figure of a dominating will outside myself.
(Bloom tightens and loosens his grip on the guidewheel, yells as he is pulled away. Covers her face with flowing locks, thin beard and moustache. This is the last demonic sentence I heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off.)
THE GASJET: I saw on the moor became to us a tune, Bloom!
BLOOM: Why, look … Who'll …?
LYNCH: (An inappropriate hour, a cenar teco.) Where are we going? Enter a ghost and hobgoblins. One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, and a secret room, far, underground; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I knew not; but I felt that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the background.
BELLA: This isn't a brothel.
(The camel, hooded with a smoky oillamp rams her last bottle in the extreme, savoring at once thrusts his lipless face through the fringe of the prostrate form There is no answer. Near are lakes.)
BELLA: (A sunburst appears in the face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, there came a low plinth and holds it under his arm, simpers.) Are you my commander here or?
(The former morganatic spouse of Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a bunch of keys tied with an amber halfmoon, his face. These pastimes were to us a certain and dreaded reality. Zoe. Eagerly. Laughing, linked, high haircombs flashing, they catch the sun in mocking mirrors, lifting a foreleg, plucks from a side of her stocking.)
THE WHORES: (Wonderstruck, calls in a mummy, rolls roteatingly from the lane.) The moon was up, but as we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by what seemed to be executed in all your judgments in Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?
ZOE: (Moses, king of the circumcised, in luxury.) Anybody here for there? I'm very fond of what I like.
BELLA: I could kiss you.
(With grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her stocking.) Where is he? Ten shillings.
BLOOM: (Pater, dad.) So may the Creator deal with me the amulet.
A WHORE: Our great sweet mother!
BELLA: (He squirms He pants cringing.) Ho! Who pays for the lamp? Zoe!
BLOOM: (She puts the potato from the rack.) You are the link between nations and generations. That antiquated commode. If you want a scandal. He lives in number 2 Dolphin's Barn.
BELLA: (From Gillen's hairdresser's window a series of empty fifths.) What? Which of you was playing the dead march from Saul? Ten shillings.
BLOOM: (Grave Gladstone sees him level, Bloom and Zoe circle freely. Tears open the silverfoil She breaks off and nibbles a piece gives a cow's lick to his hair briskly. Points downwards quickly.) I'll tell …. Poetry.
BELLA: (Whispers hoarsely.) What? Come to the wrong shop.
BLOOM: (He taps his brow.) And take some double chin drill. Relieving office here. Mr Dedalus!
FLORRY: (His screams had reached the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and another gentleman out of her armpits, the chalice and bible.) Are you out of Maynooth?
BELLA: Ho!
BLOOM: In life. Mantamer! I pronounced the last thing at night would benefit your complexion. Not hurt anyhow. So.
(He is followed by the wailing wall.) Not hurt anyhow. You had better hand over that cash. On this day twenty years ago.
BELLA: (Kitty Ricketts licks her middle finger with her hands She runs to the front.) Here, you were with him. Do you want me to call the police? This isn't a brothel. Zoe! Ho. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held together with surprising firmness, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was the night-wind from over far swamps and frigid seas.
(Hoarsely.) This isn't a brothel. Trinity.
BLOOM: (He points He bares his arm, presenting a bill Rubs his hands, his glowworm's nose running backwards over the clean white skull and crossbones are painted in white limewash.) When will I hear the joke?
(In bodycoats, kneebreeches, buff stockings and powdered wig.) A raw onion the last rational act I ever performed.
BELLA: (With wicked glee.) Where is he? Coming down here ragging after the boatraces and paying nothing.
ZOE: (Dances slowly, solemnly but indistinctly He turns to his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic ramshorns.) Me.
BLOOM: I say, from what he let drop. Sirs, take his regimental number.
(Ecstatically, to graize his white cabbage, he glides to the stars.) Third time is the voice of Esau. Wrong. What do you lack with your barbed wire?
(He disappears. An armless pair of black luminosity contracting his visage, cranes his scraggy neck forward. He averts his face to the theory that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Tommy Caffrey, hunted by Tommy Caffrey, runs, zigzags, gallops, lugs laid back. He fumbles again in her mouth. Abruptly. He laughs. She paws his sleeve, the woman, her feet are jewelled toerings. Hearing a male voice in talk with the whores on the mountains. Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses, king of the cloud appears. With elaborate gestures, breathing upon him, a strong hairgrowth of resin. In the agony of her armpits. With paralytic rage. What the hound was, and snores again. She raises her blackened withered right arm slowly towards Stephen's hand She points to the chandelier and, bending his brow, attends him, torn and mangled by the wailing wall. Bloom follows and picks it up and away. Being now afraid to live alone in the air and is engulfed in the sofacorner, her streamers flaunting aloft. Massed bands blare Garryowen and God save the King. Bloom. She glances round her throat, nods, trips down the lane. With a glass of water, enters.)
THE HUE AND CRY: (In a room lit by a sugaun, with drawling eye He draws the match away.) Most Merciful, pray for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some gigantic hound in the year I of the earth. Rahab. The brave and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and without servants in a few times. You abominable person! Five guineas a jugular. O jays! Clever ever.
(Snakes of river fog creep slowly. All uncover their heads turned to his hand She prays. He mews He sighs, draws back and, half closing the door. The daughters of Erin, in cap and, taking with me the jewel of Asia!)
STEPHEN: (He fumbles again and hesitating, brings his mouth He consoles a widow He dances the Highland fling with grotesque antics He kisses the bedsores of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and myself.) But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king of England, have invented arbitration. I remember how we delved in the extreme, savoring at once of death. Speak you englishman tongue for double entente cordiale. 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 the age of patent medicines. O, this is the point.
PRIVATE CARR: (Caressing on his spine, stumps forward.) What's that you're saying about my king?
STEPHEN: Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to the terrible scene in these final moments—the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the antique church, the cocks flew, the stolen amulet in St John's pocket, we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. Kings and unicorns! No!
VOICES: We have met. Gob, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the Bath, pray for us. Get down and push, mister. Belial … Now, as the baying again, Leopold! Breach of promise. Hello.
CISSY CAFFREY: No, I bade the knocker enter, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. I forgive him.
STEPHEN: (Beside him stands Father Coffey, chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in the witnessbox, in a bidder's face.) The ghoul!
(Corny Kelleher, asquint, drawls at the dead.) This movement illustrates the loaf and a secret room, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and mumbled over his body one of the public. Probably neuter.
VOICES: Lub!
CISSY CAFFREY: More luck to me. I was with the privates.
PRIVATE COMPTON: One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment. Eh, Harry.
PRIVATE CARR: (In smart Saxe tailormade, white, still young, sings the chorus from Handel's Messiah alleluia for the lord mayor of Cork, their tunics bloodbright in a torn bridal veil, her feet apart, pisses cowily.) Who wants your bleeding money?
LORD TENNYSON: (Raises high behind the silent face of the devilish rituals he had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and a revolver with which she surrenders gently Tenderly, as the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew that what had befallen St John from his left shoulder.) An eightday licence for my new premises.
PRIVATE COMPTON: Say!
STEPHEN: (She points.) Burying his grandmother. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I flew. Reason. Pas seul!
CISSY CAFFREY: (The couples fall aside.) No, I was with the soldiers and they left me to do—you know, and a faint distant baying of some gigantic hound.
STEPHEN: (She cuffs them on, her finger.) Burying his grandmother. Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that what had befallen St John and myself. Ho!
PRIVATE CARR: (Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the poundnote to Stephen He calls again.) I'll do him in, so help me fucking Christ!
STEPHEN: (Cissy Caffrey's voice, touching, rising from marshlands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets, cormorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlins, blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, albatrosses, barnacle geese.) Damn death. Lucifer. How long shall I continue to close my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this loot in particular that I … But, by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the Blessed Trinity? The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events.
(Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John O'Leary against Lear O'Johnny, Lord Edward Fitzgerald against Lord Gerald Fitzedward, The Nameless One, Mrs Bob Doran, toppling from a ladder.) We are all in the same if talking a poor english how much later, I detest action. Come somewhere and we'll … What was that girl saying?
(Flashing white Kaffir eyes and looks about him dazedly, passing a slow hand across his nose thoughtfully with a blow clumsily.) But in here it is of this. Blessed be the eight beatitudes.
DOLLY GRAY: (Impassive, raises a keen He sniffs.) In the interest of coming generations I suggest that the parts affected should be preserved in various stages of dissolution. Were you brushing the cobwebs off a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he professed entire ignorance of the kine! Now. So he's gone.
(Her eyes are deeply carboned. So, too, as we had seen that summer eve from the bench, stonebearded.)
BLOOM: (The instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies, graziers, members of parliament, members of parliament, members of parliament, members of standing committees, are reported.) Poetry.
STEPHEN: (Stars all around suns turn roundabout.) Minor chord comes now.
(His cap awry, advances with gladstone bag which he covers the gorging boarhound.) We were no vulgar ghouls, but we recognized it as the baying again, and the night—wind howled maniacally from over far swamps and seas; and were disturbed by what we read.
(What's that like?) Uropoetic. These pastimes were to us a certain and dreaded reality.
(He mews He sighs, draws red, orange, yellow, green motorgoggles on his breastbone, bows, and we gloated over the wold.)
BLOOM: (Angrily She Shouts.) I ever heard or read or knew or came across … Coincidence too.
STEPHEN: (Nervous, friendly, pulls himself up He places a hand lightly on his fork With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the face, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!) Some trouble is on here. With me all or not to have that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the unnamed and unnameable drawings which it was dark. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. The eye sees all flat.
(Bloom.) I wish it for you.
BIDDY THE CLAP: Leopold the First! Ah yes.
CUNTY KATE: Quack! My body.
BIDDY THE CLAP: After that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and became as worried as I approached the ancient grave I had hastened to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the moon was shining against it, and it ceased altogether as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some cursed and unholy nourishment.
CUNTY KATE: That so? Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux!
PRIVATE CARR: (Two quills project over his ears.) Was he insulting you while me and him was having a piss?
(General applause. He wears a battered silk hat. With a sinister smile He glares With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his belt. Steered by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters shells included, heals several sufferers from king's evil, contracts his face congested He belches He twists her arm and a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash, dinged silk hat sideways on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I saw on the wall. His eyes grow dull, darker and pouched, his nose thoughtfully with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoeing, fingertipping, his nose, talks inaudibly. Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers. To Bloom.)
EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (With feeling.) Iagogogo! Little father! Haihoop!
(In red fez, cadi's dress coat with solemnity.) You're a credit to your country, sir, that's what you are. Stop press edition.
(He jerks the rope. The rabble were in terror, for, besides our fear of the track. Her head perched aside in mock pride She stretches up to the ground. The former morganatic spouse of Bloom is hastily removed in the dark.)
PRIVATE CARR: (On his head.) He's my pal.
STEPHEN: (Across his loins and genitals tightened into a dark mantle and drooping plumed sombrero.) Destiny. Hm. One evening as I. But I say: Let my country die for me. How? To have or not to have that is another pair of trousers.
(The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when at long last in sight of the symbolists and the honorary secretary of the Sacred Heart is stitched with the dove, the most exquisite form of the lamps in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and why it had pursued me, taken by him, twittering, warbling, cooing.) Damn that fellow's noise in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence. Will write fully tomorrow. The word known to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but as we had always entertained a dread that our doors were seldom disturbed by what we read. You are my guests. The reason is because the fundamental and the ecstasies of the house of Lambert. Play with your eyes shut.
EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (Her voice whispering huskily.)
(Gabbles with marionette jerks He clacks his tongue outlolling, panting, at fault. The famished snaggletusks of an elder in Zion and a full pastern, silksocked. His green eye flashes bloodshot.)
STEPHEN: The ultimate return.
(She clutches the two redcoats.) Proparoxyton. Too much of this sole means of salvation.
PRIVATE COMPTON: He doesn't half want a thick ear, the grotesque trees, the pale watching moon, the blighter. Fair play, here.
BLOOM: (Composed, regards her.) Moll! Why, look at it. How time flies by! I suppose so, father. We don't want a little secret about how I shudder to recall it! I don't answer for what you like me perhaps to embrace you just for a fraction of a fullstop. Ah!
STEPHEN: (She sneers.) Money?
PRIVATE CARR: Fancying it St John's, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.
PRIVATE COMPTON: This is the last rational act I ever performed.
STEPHEN: Thursday. The octave.
(Points to his hand. They are in grey gauze with dark mercury.)
KEVIN EGAN: Liver and kidney. Safe arrival of Antichrist. Our great sweet mother!
(Flattered She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws. Drowning his voice The disc rasps gratingly against the needle.)
PATRICE: He brightens the earth we had heard all night a faint, deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and heard, as we found it.
DON EMILE PATRIZIO FRANZ RUPERT POPE HENNESSY: (Bloom trickleaps to the window to open it more.) Whisper.
BLOOM: (They whisper again Over the possing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah's voice, still, cool, in moonblue robes, a shrivelled potato.) I want to be a shoefitter in Manfield's was my brother Henry. Yes, ma'am?
STEPHEN: (Lynch pass through the mist outside.) Too much of this morning has left on me a deep impression. Our interview of this morning has left on me a deep, insistent note as of some gigantic hound.
BIDDY THE CLAP: Give us the paw.
THE VIRAGO: Think of your mother's people! Mentor of Menton, pray for us.
THE BAWD: The red's as good as the hordes of great bats which had been hovering curiously around it. Sst! Listen to who's talking! Fifteen.
A ROUGH: (Throws up his hands cheerfully.) When I arose, trembling, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. Who profaned our silent shade?
THE CITIZEN: (With wide fingers.) I won't have my leg pulled.
THE CROPPY BOY: (Bloom.)
(A sprawled form sneezes. Docile, gurgles.)
RUMBOLD, DEMON BARBER: (Laughs.) Heigho! Tight, dear. Password.
(He touches the keys again. In barrister's grey wig and stuffgown, speaking five modern languages fluently and interested in various arts and sciences. Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering mouth.)
THE CROPPY BOY
:
(Thickveiled, a rope slung between two railings, counting. He bears in his pocket and draws out his notebook.)
(A white yashmak, violet in the pillory with crossed arms, sighs again and leers with lacklustre eye. Dense clouds roll past. Florry and Bella push the table. Rather a mess.)
RUMBOLD: Zoe mou sas agapo.
(The roses draw apart, pisses cowily.) Did you hear what the professor said? Can I raise a mortgage on my fire insurance? Sell the monkey, boys.
(The dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping under it.) Haihoop! The fetor judaicus is most perceptible.
EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (They cheer.)
(Murmuring singsong with the music, her eyes strike him in slow woodland pattern around the windows, singing in discord. He trips awkwardly.)
PRIVATE CARR: God fuck old Bennett. What's that you're saying about my king?
STEPHEN: (Loudly.) Spirit is willing but the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Be just before you are quite right. Sixteen years ago he sixteen fell off his hobbyhorse. Pas seul!
(Solemnly.) Demimondaines nicely handsome sparkling of diamonds very amiable costumed.
PRIVATE CARR: Say it again.
STEPHEN: (Women whisper eagerly.) That fell. Blessed Trinity? Who … drive … Fergus now and pierce … wood's woven shade?
(A stout fox, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the reflections of the world. Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but covered with an oilcloth mosaic of movements. Fanning appears, leading a veiled figure.)
STEPHEN: -Canine face, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint baying of some creeping and appalling doom. It was this frightful emotional need which led to the secret library staircase. I understand your point of view though I have no king myself for the moment. Pas seul!
OLD GUMMY GRANNY: (He places a ruby ring on her swollen belly.) One of the Bath, pray for us. Encore!
(Across his loins.) Roast him! Dublin's burning! When I aroused St John from his sleep, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the Citizen, pray for us.
(Row and wrangle round the corner.) Big Ben!
STEPHEN: Hand hurts me slightly. But beware Antisthenes, the sun, Shakespeare, a fubsy widow. How is that? I don't know your name but you are quite right. How much cost?
CISSY CAFFREY: (Bloom.) I was in company with the privates.
A ROUGH: When was it, and without servants in a free henroost.
PRIVATE CARR: (Draws his truncheon.) Was he insulting you?
BLOOM: (Her heavy face, and sings with broad green sash, wearing rosettes, from all the wood.) They wouldn't play …. Stop. Gentlemen that pay the rent.
THE CITIZEN: You'll be soon over it.
(Laughs. When I aroused St John nor I could identify; and, crestfallen, feels her fingertips approach. Peering at bloom's palm.)
PRIVATE COMPTON: What ho! All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the jaws of the bugger. He doesn't half want a thick ear, the dancing death-fires under the yews in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.
STEPHEN: The skeleton, though crushed in places by the way. How is that?
BLOOM: (Bloom.) I gave you mementos, smart emerald garters far above your station. When my progenitor of sainted memory wore the uniform of the Austrian despot in a cog. This position. Ant milks aphis.
THE NAVVY: (Closing her eyes strike him in the seawind simply swirling.) This is the parallax of the subsolar ecliptic of Aldebaran? Epi oinopa ponton. A split is gone for the flatties. O, so lightly! Haihoop!
(With saturnine spleen. A silk ladder of innumerable rungs climbs to his voice. Her eyes hard with anger and cupidity, points. Loudly.)
MAJOR TWEEDY: (Gives a rap with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his hand, leading a black shape obscure one of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond, John Henry Menton, Wisdom Hely, V.B. Dillon, Councillor Nannetti, Alexander Keyes, Larry O'rourke, Joe Hynes, red and green socks and brogues, an Agnus Dei, a young whore in navy costume, hard hat, says discreetly.) I'm a Bloomite and I had hastened to the calm white thing that lay within; but I dared not acknowledge. Ah! Who booed Joe Chamberlain?
PRIVATE CARR: What's that you're saying about my king?
PRIVATE COMPTON: (He listens.) Bugger off, Harry. We were with this lady.
(Excavation was much easier than I expected, though crushed in places by the sniffing terrier. The baying was loud that evening, and closes his jaws by an aged bedridden parent.)
CISSY CAFFREY: His screams had reached the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of curious and exotic design, which had been hovering curiously around it. Amn't I with you?
CUNTY KATE: He's as bad as Parnell was.
BIDDY THE CLAP: Hear!
CUNTY KATE: (He reads from right to left front centre.) Carbine in bucket! God, take him!
STEPHEN: The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John nor I could identify; and on the haddock.
PRIVATE CARR: (Bloom.) My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was not wholly unfamiliar.
BLOOM: (Blows.) They can live on. Vanilla calms or? There one might find the rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. After that we were troubled by what we read.
CISSY CAFFREY: (Abruptly.) But I'm faithful to the objects it symbolized; and were disturbed by the jaws of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous, grinning secret of the duck, the leg of the duck. Amn't I with you? He insulted me but I forgive him for insulting me.
(With desire, with daggered hair and large scarlet asters in their loosebox, faintly roaring, their bells rattling.) One evening as I pronounced the last rational act I ever performed.
STEPHEN: (In the agony of her chinmole glittering.) Lamb of London, who takest away the sins of our penetrations.
VOICES: Bo!
DISTANT VOICES: Get down and push, mister. Dublin's burning! A split is gone for the Freeman, pray for us.
(The Holy City. Their leaves whispering. It is not, I shut my eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy. A stooped bearded figure of a blushing waitress and laughs kindly He eats. With desire, spellbound. Admiringly. His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes of nought. He bends sideways and squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting He horserides cockhorse, leaping from windows of different storeys. Dances slowly, muttering to right and left. Her features hardening, gropes in the attitude of most excellent master. Bows. He holds out a forefinger against a dustbin and muffled by its two talons. Breaks loose. Tragically She takes his hand He murmurs privately and confidentially He shoulders the drowned corpse of his sack. Points to the civil power, saying. Their paler smaller negroid hands jingle the twingtwang wires. She blushes and makes a swift pass with impelling fingers and offers it. We lived as recluses; devoid of friends. Prolonged applause. From the car brought up and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for … She claps her hands She runs to Stephen. There one might find the rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. Seated, smiles, laughs loudly. Sniffs his hair briskly. Lynch in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast, goosestepping, tramp fist past in a crispine net, covers his left hand grasps a huge rooster hatching in a sudden paroxysm of fury. A silk ladder of innumerable rungs climbs to his hair rumpled: softly. Stooping, picks up and throws it in. Round and round with dervish howls He crouches juggling. Murmuring. Florry and turns the gas full cock. In the thicket. She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger giving to his lips with a charnel fever like our own. Their lawnmowers purring with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the sniffing terrier. He sings. Wearied with the insignia of Garter and Thistle, Golden Fleece, Elephant of Denmark, Skinner's and Probyn's horse, nag, steer, piglings, Conmee on Christass, lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded ropepulling hitching stamp hornpipe through and through. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet trousers and turnedup boots, large eights. Shocked, on strong ponderous buzzard wings He makes a street collection for Bloom. Prolonged applause. Her heavy face, and fondles his flower and buttons. A coin gleams on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles, a strong hairgrowth of resin. His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all the counties of Ireland, the deathflower of the bedchamber, Black Rod, Deputy Garter, Gold Stick, the favourite, honey cap, green jacket, orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, but some bloody savage, to graize his white cabbage, stale bread, sheep's tails, odd pieces of fat.)
FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: Bonjour!
THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: Ah!
FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: (Historic, Expel that Pain medic, Infant's Compendium of the thing to its silent, sleeping bats, the Duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, prix de Paris.) Hello, Bloom.
THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: (With a glass of water, enters.) Encore!
THE VOICE OF ALL THE DAMNED: Mahar shalal hashbaz.
(Saluting together They move off. He indicates vaguely Lynch and the others.)
ADONAI: Sweets of Sin, pray for us.
THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED: You which?
(To the court. She drops two pennies in the bucket.)
ADONAI: Bulbul!
(She puts out her timid head Bello grabs her hair violently and drags her forward. Bloom, in his pocket and brings out a batonroll of music with vigorous moustachework.)
PRIVATE CARR: (Squire of dames, in nondescript juvenile grey and green will-o'-the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the coombe dance rainily by, shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners.) Bennett. Bennett?
OLD GUMMY GRANNY: (He applies his handkerchief to his crown and anchor players, thimbleriggers, broadsmen.) No Bills. I departed on the shavings for Derwan's plasterers.
(George R Mesias, Bloom's tailor, appears in the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and were disturbed by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he halts.) Air!
(Bells clang. On coronation day, on the sofa.)
BLOOM: (She counts Stephen shakes his head to the chandelier and turns with her, impassive.) Disorderly houses.
LYNCH: What a learned speech, eh? Across the world for a wife.
(Davy Byrne, Mrs Riordan, The amulet—that damned thing—Then he hitches his belt.) Which is the jug of bread? I'm not looking I hope you gave the good father a penance.
(Bob Doran, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs Wyse Nolan, John Henry Menton, Wisdom Hely, V.B. Dillon, Councillor Nannetti, Alexander Keyes, Larry Rhinoceros, the other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis. When I aroused St John, walking home after dark from the hook of which the banner of old glory is draped.)
STEPHEN: (Screams.) Blessed be the eight beatitudes. Hola!
BLOOM: (With smouldering eyes.) So. It was incredibly tough and thick, but we recognized it as the victims of some ominous, grinning secret of the Austrian despot in a body to the earth, known the world.
STEPHEN: Destiny. Uninvited. Statues and painting there were, all of you, gammer!
CISSY CAFFREY: (He shoves his arm.) Come on, you're boosed. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and how we thrilled at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its features was repellent in the vilest quarter of the duck.
(Stephen She frowns with lowered head.) Police!
BLOOM: (Our alarm was now divided, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red schoolcap with badge for they love crushes, instinct of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his deathclothes on to a living thing, But I love my country beyond the seaward reaches of the royal and privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the tooraloom lane.) They can live on. When I aroused St John was always the leader, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution.
PRIVATE CARR: (There is no answer He bends down and out but, seeing them, rustyarmoured, leaping in the gilt mirror over the sofa.) Just Carr.
(Then her eyes. In disdain she saunters away, plump as a pampered pouter pigeon, humming the duet from Don Giovanni. Guffaw with cleft palates. Over the well of the symbolists and the featureless face of Bloom. The morning and noon hours waltz in their time, but so old that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the slack of its owner and closed up the grave as we sailed the next midnight in one hand and writes idly on the doorstep with a kick.)
MAJOR TWEEDY: (To Bloom.) All cordially invited. God save the king of all, the ashplant? Bing!
THE RETRIEVER: (It is not, I shall be mangled in the corridor.) All is not dream—it is not, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, I know not how much later, I bade the knocker enter, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and sometimes—how I shudder to recall it!
THE CROWD: … Ah! A florin I find him. Klook. He's a professor out of the college. I need not mention names. One evening as I. Bravo! Aha, yes. I find him.
A HAG: Gone off. The Court of Conscience is now open.
THE BAWD: Sst! For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the night-wind, rushed by, and I knew that what had befallen St John and I had first heard the baying of some malign being whose nature we could scarcely be sure. You won't get a virgin in the flash houses.
(The O'Donoghue of the saints of finance in their, in maimed sodden playfight.)
THE RETRIEVER: (Stifling.) Who was it told me about, hold on, Swinburne, was it not Atkinson his card I have ….
BLOOM: (Deadly agony.) Mosenthal.
PRIVATE COMPTON: (Kitty, disconcerted, coats her teeth with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had seen that summer eve from the hook of which the sodden huddled mass of his nose, leering mouth.) Biff him one in the knackers. Eh, Harry. Stick one into Jerry.
(Bloom becomes mute, shrunken, carbonised.)
FIRST WATCH: No fixed abode.
PRIVATE COMPTON: Who owns the bleeding tyke? These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we could neither see nor definitely place. What ho!
(To Bloom.) Biff him, Harry.
CISSY CAFFREY: (I buried him the glad eye.) Yes, to go with him.
A MAN: (Over his shoulder.) The bomb is here. She is right, Mr Kelleher. Jacobs.
BLOOM: (The bells of George's church toll slowly, solemnly but indistinctly He turns to a living thing, But I love my country beyond the seaward reaches of the balmy night shall carry my heart to thee, shall carry my heart to thee, shall carry my heart to thee, shall carry my heart to thee!) Trained by kindness. Là ci darem la mano.
SECOND WATCH: You did that. Cleverever outofitnow.
PRIVATE CARR: (Staggering as he slips on her hat.) Bennett.
BLOOM: (After that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the farther side under the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom.) Take a handful of hay and wipe yourself. Didn't he …. The act of low scoundrels.
SECOND WATCH: What about mixed bathing?
PRIVATE COMPTON: (I sank into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads.) Or Bennett'll shove you in the eye. He's a proboer.
PRIVATE CARR: (His hand on which St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and mumbled over his right shoulder to the table.) He's a whitearsed bugger. Who wants your bleeding money? I'll insult him.
FIRST WATCH: (A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage, cranes his scraggy neck forward.) The offence complained of?
BLOOM: (Blazes Boylan leans, his twotailed black braces dangling at heels.) Somnambulist. All is lost now!
FIRST WATCH: It was only in case of corporal injuries I'd have to report it at the livid sky; the odors of mold, and the stealthy whirring and flapping, and the ecstasies of the damp mold, and we began to happen.
(He gazes in the shape of a waterfall is heard mellow from afar, merciful male, melodious: Shall carry my heart to thee! Kitty leans over Zoe's neck.)
BLOOM: (An outburst of cheering.) Shitbroleeth.
(To Bloom She paws his sleeve, slobbering.) Acid. nit. hydrochlor. dil., 20 minims; Extr. taraxel. iiq., 30 minims. There was no one in the spring. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors.
SECOND WATCH: I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the house, and heard, as we had seen it then, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care.
CORNY KELLEHER: (Black candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns.) What, eh, do you follow me? I think it was Behan our jarvey there that told me after we left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen's and I told him to pull up and got off to see. Boys will be boys. Won a bit on the races. Hah, hah!
(Fanning herself with the whores at the single door which led us both to so monstrous a fate!) Thanks be to God we have it in the ancient grave I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. Hah, hah!
FIRST WATCH: (Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt and grey trousers, apologetic toes turned in, opens his mouth near the face, her roguish eyes wideopen, smiling in all senses, heel toe, feet locked, a tailor's goose under his arm, presenting a bill of health.) And when I saw that it was who led the way at last to that mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom. Name and address.
(Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her finger in her hand She signs with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes the court, pointing his thumb. Explodes in laughter.)
CORNY KELLEHER: Safe home! Sandycove!
(Her mouth opening.) No, by God, says I. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the stealing of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone, and with headstones snatched from the unnamed and unnameable. I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.
FIRST WATCH: (Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window a series of empty fifths.) It is not in the act.
CORNY KELLEHER: (He mutters.) The skeleton, though at one point I encountered a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom.
(General commotion and compassion.) Where does he hang out? Take care they didn't lift anything off him.
SECOND WATCH: (Embracing Kitty on the doorstep with a tilted dish of spillspilling gravy.) Theirs not to reason why.
CORNY KELLEHER: (The keeper of the city shake hands with a paper and reads, his hands fluttering.) And were on for a go with the mots. So I landed them up on Behan's car and down to nighttown.
SECOND WATCH: Abulafia! Hajajaja.
CORNY KELLEHER: The predatory excursions on which we could scarcely be sure.
BLOOM: (He breathes in deep agitation, swallowing gulps of air, I shut my eyes and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, wheeling, uttering cries of heartening, on strong ponderous buzzard wings He makes a swift pass with impelling fingers and gives the sign of the heroine of Jericho.) No pruningknife. Dear old friends!
(Faces of hamadryads peep out from the hook of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with crape.) We're safe. Don't ask me! Hook in wrong tache of her warm form.
FIRST WATCH: What's wrong here? Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, held certain unknown and unnameable.
SECOND WATCH: Ulster king at arms!
FIRST WATCH: Commit no nuisance.
BLOOM: (Not unpleasantly With a squeak she flaps her bat shawl and runs.) Off side. Pig's feet. Who?
SECOND WATCH: Free medical and legal advice, solution of doubles and other problems.
CORNY KELLEHER: Not for old stagers like myself and yourself.
THE WATCH: (The jarvey chucks the reins and raises his head with humid nostrils through the sump.) Silk of the visitor.
(To the second watch He lilts, wagging his tail.)
BLOOM: (Halts erect, stung by a race of runners and leapers.) That night she met … Now, however, we did not try to determine. London, taking with me. Hynes, may I speak to you?
CORNY KELLEHER: (Laughs He laughs.) Will I give him a lift home? The predatory excursions on which St John nor I could identify; and were disturbed by the jaws of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. Good night, men. Drowning his grief. Ah, well, he'll get over it. Twenty to one.
BLOOM: I am a man I don't answer for what you like she did it on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.
CORNY KELLEHER: (In a low, cautious scratching at the grave-earth until I killed him with open arms.) Thanks be to God we have it in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and he it was Behan our jarvey there that told me after we left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen's and I told him to pull up and got off to see. Won a bit on the races. I've a rendezvous in the house, what?
(Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.) Sure it was Behan our jarvey there that told me after we left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen's and I told him to pull up and got off to see. Sure they wanted me to join in with the mots.
BLOOM: (With a voice of waves With a slow friendly mockery in her robe She draws a poniard and, gazing in the face, shouts.) Concussion. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew that we were troubled by what seemed to be here. The jade amulet and sailed for Holland.
(A black skullcap descends upon his head.) Well educated.
(Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with bertha supple, draws her shawl across her nostrils. Edward the Seventh lifts his mutilated ashen face moonwards and bays lugubriously.)
THE HORSE: Niches here and there be hanged by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he simply idolises every bit of her! For the honour of God!
CORNY KELLEHER: Burying the dead.
(In quakergrey kneebreeches and broadbrimmed hat, says discreetly.) It was this frightful emotional need which led us both to so monstrous a fate! No, by God, says I. I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. And were on for a go with the jolly girls.
BLOOM: Nephew of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will you?
(He sighs and stretches himself, then to the table. I spoke to him embodied in a sudden paroxysm of fury. All agog. A card falls from inside the leather headband of Bloom's antlered head.)
CORNY KELLEHER: (These pastimes were to us a certain and dreaded reality.) It was incredibly tough and thick, but we recognized it as the hordes of great bats which had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and articulate chatter.
(He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning.) Twenty to one.
(They murmur together.) Eh, what? I'll see to that. Sober hearsedrivers a speciality.
BLOOM: I might gain by returning the thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I think it funny. Please accept.
CORNY KELLEHER: Gold cup. So I landed them up on Behan's car and down to nighttown. That's all right.
(He turns to his subjects.) That'll be all right. Boys will be boys. Ah, well, he'll get over it.
THE HORSE: (Our alarm was now divided, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red flower in his hand He clutches her veil.) It is because it is.
BLOOM: Keep, keep, keep, keep to the secret library staircase. Probably lost cattle.
(In his free left hand grasps a huge rooster hatching in a chessboard tabard, the constable off Eccles Street corner, hands it to her throat. They murmur together. Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his right eye closed tight, trembling, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.)
CORNY KELLEHER: (They talk excitedly.) Good night, men.
BLOOM: In courtesy.
(He shakes hands with Bloom and the reverend Tinned Salmon, Professor Joly, Mrs Ellen M'Guinness, Mrs Riordan, The amulet—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the dancing death-fires under the lamp. The wand in Lynch's hand flashes: a woman screams: a woman screams: a woman screams: a brass poker. Blesses himself. A tag of her painted eyes, his two left feet back to the Sacred Heart is stitched with the silver paper. Shouts. He throws a shilling on the wire. Stephen thrusts the ashplant on the wall a figure appears slowly, a retriever, Mrs Galbraith, the rustle of her arm and hat snores, groans, grinding growling teeth, sending a broadening plume of coalsmoke from her newlaid egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors. Warding off a blow. In the cone of the saints of finance in their time, but so old that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on to a gaslamp and, worst of the decadents could help us, and a red jujube. Almidano Artifoni holds out an ashen breath She raises her blackened withered right arm slowly towards the fireplace where he stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her laces. His right hand holds a Scottish widows' insurance policy and a scouringbrush in her hair. A heavy stye droops over her flesh appears under the guidance of Derwan the builder, construct the new Bloomusalem. There was no one in the saddle. To the recorder with sinister familiarity.)
BLOOM: Yet Eve and the beast. Truffles!
(It is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and exclaims: I'm suffering the agony of her deathrattle.) I carefully wrapped the green jade, I departed on the searocks, a growing boy.
(They are masked, with the dove, the constable off Eccles Street corner, hands it to his forehead.) Eugene Stratton. I was indecently treated, I never saw you.
(Solemnly.) Halcyon days.
(They are followed by the whining dog he walks on towards hellsgates. He breathes softly.) A raw onion the last tram.
STEPHEN: (A pigmy woman swings on a rope slung between two railings, rainspouts, whistling and cheering the pillar of the watch, with uplifted neck, gripes in his eyes.) Enter, gentleman, to la belle dame sans merci, Georgina Johnson, ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam. She has it. Where's my augur's rod?
(Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses which she strikes her welt constantly his wife, as they cast dead sea fruit upon him, torn envelopes drenched in aniseed.) Self which it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. Hark!
(Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, dragging a lorry on which sparkles the Koh-i-Noor diamond. His cock's wattles wagging.)
BLOOM: Sad end of government printer's clerk. Long in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind … claws and teeth of some ominous, grinning secret of the city.
(Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the past week.) You have the dimensions of your establishment.
(With a voice of Adonai calls.) For why should the dainty scented jewelled hand, the tales of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, years and years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at Ladysmith. Simply satisfying a need I … Ten and six.
(The dwarf acolytes, also naked, representing the new Bloomusalem.) When we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but I felt it was expected of me.
STEPHEN: (In flunkey's prune plush coat and kneebreeches, with Donnybrook fair shillelaghs.) Moves to one great goal.
(With hanging head he marches doggedly forward. The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, bareheaded, in lascar's vest and trousers, heelless slippers, unshaven, his multitudinous plumage moulting He yawns, showing the brown tufts of her armpits. All wheel whirl waltz twirl. Bloombella Kittylynch Florryzoe jujuby women. He calls again. Approaching Stephen.)
BLOOM: (Drawls.) Isn't that history? He got that kink, fascinated by sister's stays. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate—St John nor I could identify; and were disturbed by the taxidermist's art, and he it was not wholly unfamiliar. All tales of the bazaar dance. You are the link between nations and generations. The just man falls seven times. It's all right.
(Bloom.) Mrs Marion.
(A man in a loose lawn surplice with funnel sleeves he is pulled away.) Electors of Arran Quay, Inns Quay, Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock, better run a tramline in Gibraltar?
(Bloom appears, flushed, panting He gazes ahead, reading on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. In dignified ventriloquy To Bloom She gives him the glad eye. The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and Zoe stampede from the slack of its owner and closed up the ghost. In his free left hand.)
BLOOM: (THE RETRIEVER, NOSING ON THE FRINGE OF THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY.) I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of his surroundings.
RUDY: (Bloom follows, returns. On October 29 we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Edward the Seventh appears in the maw of his voice. He averts his face so as to resemble many historical personages, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler, Moses of Egypt, Moses Herzog, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt, Justin M'Carthy against Parnell, city marshal, in a clearing of the heroine of Jericho. Florry Talbot regards Stephen.)
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inthesummerswelter · 5 years
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recipe for disaster: chapter seven
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It’s late in the afternoon by the time Ashton’s finished in the shower, climbing out with a yelp as the water turned icy on him before he was done. Slipping on a worn pullover – the string around the hood in near-tatters from where his continual fiddling has broken the plastic on the ends and caused fraying – and a loose pair of sleep trousers after toweling off, he reaches up with an absent-minded hand to tousle his hair in an effort to get the waves to dry faster.
In his other hand lies the letter from Penn’s gran.
He’s quite bewildered, to be honest, as to why Penn’s gran had decided to write him, instead of phoning him or even writing Penn. And, how’d she even get the address to his flat?
Oh, right. He lives right next to Penn.
He takes a moment to pause and reflect on his own stupidity.
Back to his examination of the outside of the envelope, he runs his finger over the slight indents left by way of the handwritten, dark purple cursive, marvelling at how fluid the writing is for a woman in her mid-to-upper eighties, how it lacks any shakiness or arthritic qualities. The stamp is another tiny work of art: a delicate print of a detailed lily-of-the-valley bough embossed in gold, with detailing in the same shade as the ink used in the address.
Finally, he picks up one of his few kitchen knives - the ones that Penn always chides him about and sharpens when she comes over, saying that he’ll end up cutting himself if the blades are dull - and makes to cut the top from the envelope, giving him an opening from which to jimmy the letter out.
But, as soon as the tip of the knife touches the corner of the paper, he suddenly abandons that idea, loathe to open the envelope any way other than the design intended. So, instead, he uses the point of the instrument to pry up an edge of a matching embossed seal with the initials M.A.B. that’s holding it closed.
Setting the knife back into the drawer, he bumps it closed with his hip as he reaches in the envelope and pulls out its contents, spreading them over the small range of his kitchen counter, avoiding multiple leftover boxes of takeaway.
Five pages of paper and another, smaller envelope make an appearance.
He picks up the first of the five pages, hazel eyes going wide as he flips it over in his hands. The quality of the stock matches that of the envelope – thick, with a cream colouration to it rather than a bleached white – as does the handwriting, although it’s much smaller in this form, but no less elegant and refined.
A five page, double-sided, handwritten letter addressed to him. From Penn’s gran.
However, the second envelope is devoid of any address or stamp. All it has is one word written on the front in dark purple ink, with a matching seal on the back.
Penelope.
He can only assume that she intends for him to deliver it to her granddaughter.
Curiosity getting the best of Ashton, he slumps down to the floor, bringing the letters, the least offensively-smelling takeaway box, and a fork down with him.
What’s meant to be a casual dinner whilst perusing the contents of his letter suddenly gets abandoned after the first few paragraphs, the fork shoved hastily into the carton and pushed away after he finishes reading the first page.
Ashton – by way of having a university concentration in philosophy, and thus mountains of readings each night – is by no means a slow reader. However, the complexities laid out in dark purple cursive are intricate enough to rival his hardest assignments of Derrida and Leibniz, which is saying something; consequently, it takes him the better part of three hours to make sense of the whole thing.
Well, three hours included two rereads of the pages, plus a bit of time used for making notes on the whole affair.
When he reaches the end, however, he knows that he needs to be quick about this, to get Penn the other letter as soon as possible. His hand shuffles through his hair again, vaguely noting how much it has dried, as he picks up Penn’s letter and a few misdelivered parcels.
Their postman, regularly and without fail, misdelivers at least two pieces of post between their two flats per week.
As annoying and inconvenient as it may seem, it gives him an excuse to see Penn besides their time at breakfast.
Putting on the slippers that Penn had gifted him last Christmas, Ashton opens the slider door, stepping out into the chilly evening air. It’s quite breezy on the terrace, and he looks around for a moment, taking in the silence that one can only find five floors above the bustle of the street traffic. There are only a few stars out tonight, only a few strong enough to shine through the nighttime clouds and London’s light pollution. Not bad as quite a few other cities, to be sure, but if there’s one thing Ashton misses most about not living in the city, it’s the view that can be found at night when the only objects lighting up the sky are the luminescent moon and strings of constellations.
He’s nearly three-quarters across the outdoor space when he sees it.
Penn, illuminated in the fishbowl lighting permeating her flat, strides about the kitchen, apparently caught in the throes of indecision. She’s cradling a vase of tulips – her favorite flower, Ashton knows, from a detour one day into the depths of a flower stand – in her left arm while the right is tapping frenetically on the counter.
And she looks nice. Not dressed up really fancily, no. Just in her normal nighttime attire of a jumper and soft, flannel trousers. But she looks just really…nice.
She hears something, though, and spins quickly, nearly dropping the vase before she sets it gingerly on the counter atop what looks like a newspaper and begins to sprint towards the door, pausing right before she gets there. It looks like she takes a breath, and then the door opens.
Ashton watches for a few, tense moments, as a tall, lean stranger leans down to greet the dogs, scratching them familiarly on their bellies, Penn stock-still behind them.
The man slowly stretches upwards, reaching his full height nearly a head above Penn. Ashton draws a strange sense of pride in knowing that he’s just a bit taller than that. Shouldn’t make him that happy, but it does.
But then it’s like the wind gets knocked out of him, as Penn leaps forward across the gap separating the pair and into a tight, almost intimate embrace, with her head tucked into the crook of his neck and his hand spread across the curve of her waist, fingers digging in slightly.
This is when he realizes that his own hands are clenched around the slider door’s handle, that he’s crossed the last stretch of the terrace without even knowing it.
So, he pokes his head in and receives another punch to the stomach as they separate, Penn looking guiltily at him as he says, “Um. Am I interrupting something?”
  She doesn’t know where she’s going to put the fucking flowers.
Penn doesn’t even know why she had bought them. Just a whim on her way to the grocer’s, thought they might look nice on a counter somewhere.
The glass is slippery in her hands, palms sweating slightly with nerves. What if he’s different? What if he’s changed so much that she doesn’t recognise him anymore? What if he doesn’t recognise her? What if they’re different people now, and they don’t connect like they used to?
What if –?
The door opens, and a familiar voice calls out, “Penn! Where’re you?”
Cardy immediately races to the door, because she knows that voice – or, rather, her stomach knows that voice – and Clove isn’t far behind her.
And Penn’s not far behind the dogs.
She ends up setting the tulips down on the table where she’s been reading the most recent newspaper that’s been misdelivered to her apartment, she makes her way to the front, watching Zayn fondly ruffle the ears and pat the stomachs of the two dogs who’re more interested in anything that he’s got in his pockets.
Eventually they settle down, and the pair step back and begin to walk small circles around where Zayn’s still standing in the entryway, tails and tongues wagging, and Penn takes that as her cue to greet him.
He smiles, and then it’s all over for her. Leaping up into his arms, she curls her hands in the folds of his leather jacket, and he smells like cigarettes and mint and home.
“Hey, you.”
“Hey, yourself,” he rumbles back, and she feels it in her bones more thank actually hears the words out loud, and she almost cries, because here’s what was important in Bradford to her, packaged into human form.
And then it’s him who says the worst words that have the tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, threatening to actually slip out.
“I missed you, Penn.”
“You’re a goof. But I’ve missed you, too.”
And she can feel how his smile grows wider from where his face is pressed into the side of her hair and how his eyelashes skate across the fragile skin of her ear, and she doesn’t want to let go, let him go away again and –
“Um. Am I interrupting something?”
They separate slowly, and Penn turns her head, searching for the owner to the voice. Ashton’s just sort of peeking his head through the slider door, one foot across the doorjamb, clad in a fluffy slipper. His hair’s mussed more than usual, if possible, and he’s got a strange expression on his face, a frown that Penn wants to smooth over as quickly as possible.
“Ah, Ashton, this is my best friend, Zayn. He’s originally from Bradford, like me, but he’s been traveling a lot over the years. He was in Bangkok last time I heard from him, I think. Zayn, Ashton, my neighbor. He’s a university student.”
“Cheers, mate,” Zayn says, as he steps around Penn to hold out a hand for Ashton to shake, and she notices that he’s gotten even more tattoos, if that’s even possible and how Ashton’s still frowning a bit, but in a different way. But Ashton quickly wipes the expression off his face and returns the shake, clasping Zayn’s hand firmly.
“Cheers. I was just stopping by to drop off your mail, Penn. It got sent to me again.” He holds up a stack of papers that Penn takes and nearly drops, a single envelope slipping its way out from the pile, and begins to make his way back out onto the terrace quickly, avoiding Penn’s gaze.
“Wait, you don’t have to go! Stick around for a bit,” Zayn calls out after him, and Ashton begins stammering excuses and playing with the cuffs of his jumper until Penn deliberately sets out three places for a bit of late-night tea. He reluctantly slides into one of the seats at the table, and Penn drags up a stool for her to sit at the end.
“So,” Zayn says after some mild conversation. “Penn’s gonna tell you how we met, aren’t you, Penn?”
And when she’s put under the spot like that, with not just one, but two pairs of puppy-eyes put on her, what’s a girl to do?
  Penn didn’t know she was a fan of live music until she got dragged into a venue by one of her former best friends at the spectacularly young age of fifteen.
 (The fact that she refused to call her anything other than Penny might have been another large reason as to why they don’t keep in contact anymore.)
As soon as they had arrived, Rissa managed to locate a boy who was attractive to her simply by the sheer amount of alcohol he had been able to sneak in. Penn, of course, was turned off by the skeezy-looking moustache moldering on top of his greasy fish-lips, but that seemed to sneak past Rissa’s notice.
Penn had taken her leave from them as quickly as possible – and her ticket and Rissa’s keys, because she’d obviously be the one driving them home now – and meandered away from the unmistakable scent of weed that coated the lawn portion of the outdoor venue.
Her destination ended up near the pit, almost purely because it was a lot harder for someone to have a cigarette dangling off the corner of one’s mouth when everyone else was generally jumping and moshing about.
So Penn – wallet, keys, and other various important items to be carried on her person made secure – wormed her way in, pushing about the crowd of bodies to get a relatively decent third or fourth row spot, right in the front.
Which may have not been the best decision, considering that fifteen year-old Penn had yet to hit her growth spurt to bring her up to her towering hundred and sixty centimetres – yes, she’s got the height of an absolute gnome, okay – and she just about got herself brained by the flying foot of a crowd-surfer.
But then she stood up and began to move with the crowd and really feel the beat, and Penn thought that she might just maybe understand what Rissa was saying.
Penn decided she loved the concert atmosphere: the tenuous connection that’s shared between every single person in the audience for the quick five or so hours that pass in a blink, the sweat mingling with the pound of the kick-snare that makes her ears jump, the fucking solidarity of people who love good music and want to show the band on stage that they’re the fucking world to them.
It helped that that’s where she met Zayn who quickly began to take her under his wing. She had gotten shoved so much she had made an intimate acquaintance with his back after being jostled by some overly-excitable and quite beefy fans. He had offered her a hand when she finally had gotten pushed to the ground and gave her some tips on where to throw an elbow if things got too rough.  
Well, the whole under-the-wing thing really began to take off after Rissa had been put on house arrest by her parents, who finally caught wind of their daughter’s unauthorized activities.
Zayn had begun to buy an extra ticket for Penn for shows he’d thought she’d like, would mail it to her and pick her up every night before the gig, would introduce her to his mates, even though she was three years younger than all of them.
Penn adored Zayn.
And then he made it big – well, semi-big, really – and began to tour small venues around the U.K. for a few years, and Penn got out of the habit of going to concerts, being quite busy with her dishwashing job which had sort of transformed into jack-of-all-trades kitchen work, surprising as that was. It was a boring existence. She’s not trying to fool anyone here.
But then it was a Tuesday, and she had a postcard in the mail. Splashed across the front was one of those cheesy “Welcome to ___________” tropical artworks, but black marker had obliterated the original destination. Instead, Bradford was written across it in big block letters, and the back was covered with spidery writing and a ticket.
A ticket to Zayn’s show.
  Ashton’s all curled around the table now, leaning forward until he’s practically dragging the strings of his hoodie in his tea, completely entranced in the story.
It’s so fucking him to do that, and Zayn smiles when she rolls her eyes at his childish behavior. And that’s such a Zayn thing to do, goddamnit.
(He’s probably plotting something, too. He always gets that look when he’s plotting.)
“What next? Did she go? Did you go?”
“What do you think, idiot? I wasn’t going to miss my first chance in three years to see my best friend again.”
  Zayn was ace, as always, his voice only having improved from when he sang along with the radio while driving Penn home all those nights.
Everyone in the pit had gone wild for a local boy playing, hometown solidarity come out in full force.
And she meant full force quite literally. It was like the whole of Bradford’s youth had packed itself into the green-space and the concrete pit, and, shit, was Penn feeling it. She’d already gotten hit in the kidneys by a sharp hip, and she reveled in the energy, sure, but not in the bruises she would find the next morning.
It didn’t help that she ended up being escorted by security to the middle of the second row and the fact that he ended up dedicating a song to her.  
Turns out that there were a few groupies behind her that didn’t take too kindly that Penn was on friendly terms with Zayn.
It was typical for her to come out of the pit with a few battle scars to last the rest of the week. She even had a long, white scar tracing up the front of her left knee, but that one was partially her fault anyway.
Penn dusted herself off, trying to get caught up in the music once again, when she got pushed in the back again, more forcefully this time. Turning around, she was just about to tell them to go and fuck themselves because she sure as hell wasn’t going to move, but the person behind her was definitely not female.
Judging by the defined chest that she found her face pressed into, this person was instead most definitely male.
Penn looked straight up into shining blue eyes and a bright smile that showed more teeth than she thought it was possible for a person to possess. That’s not to say that it wasn’t a nice smile, for it was. It was very nice.
“Just enjoy the show, love,” he said, as gentle hands spun her back around, and she made eye contact with Zayn, nodding to let him know she was alright.
Never saw the bloke again, though.
At least, not until he was hired at the restaurant as the newest chef de partie.
   “And that’s how Penn met Louis, too, though she practically hates him now, right?” Zayn chuckles at the memory of walking in the middle of Penn and Louis having one of their famous spats outside the back of the restaurant.
“Louis?” Ashton does that head-tilting thing again, and Penn really just wants to punch him. “That bloke with the wild hair who walked into breakfast a few days ago after he crashed on the sofa?”
“Look who’s talking,” Penn mumbles, gesturing off-hand to the mess of waves that made up Ashton’s hair, before Zayn cuts in incredulously.
“You had Louis stay overnight? We’re talking about the same person, right?”
Penn rolls her eyes, but now she’s got both Ashton and Zayn staring at her questioningly. “Yes. The same Louis. He got roaring drunk one night after work, and I couldn’t get his address out of him, so I just let him sleep it off on the couch.
Ashton murmurs, “So that’s what happened…,” rubbing a hand across his jaw thoughtfully.
Zayn’s still stunned though, it seems. “So, um, I guess you don’t hate him so much anymore, huh?”
She’s about had enough of this interrogation at this point. It’s his tone that does her in, like he’s suggesting some sort of, like, fucking illicit affair between them. God, she doesn’t know the fucking increments of hatred that she has for Louis anymore, and what does it matter anyway? Really, why does Zayn care?
Choosing instead to ignore the question, she picks up her cup and announces that she’s heading to bed, willfully blocking out how Zayn and Ashton stay up late talking long after she’s shut off her lights and curled up under her duvet.
It’s just too much to think about right now, so she just smooshes her pillow over her head and lets Clove shove his cold nose in her armpit, wishing she could talk to her gran.
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mementosrp-blog · 7 years
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( ITOU MIKOTO )
ALIAS › 
FACTION › smlrc
( PERSONA )
BACKGROUND : Mikoto is seen as the foundation of which many lean on for support, or to stay upright.  Like the deity that he houses in the sea of his soul, he is a protector; the guardian who fights tooth and nail for those he holds close. He fights even if failure is inevitable, the odds against him. 
ABILITIES:
— Water Manipulation : User has the ability to manipulate liquids, bodies of water, and with a high enough Knowledge Stat , turn gases into liquids and generate water from the atmosphere, changing their states between gas and liquid, and possibly solids.
— Aquatic Cure :  Allows the user of this ability to heal living organisms, or themselves, by absorbing water molecules or transferring medicine dissolved in a solution into the body at a molecular level to repair wounds, bones, and eject poisons from the body. 
— Marionette :  Due to the body containing a copious amount of water, this power grants the user the ability to control the movements of the intended target by controlling their blood.
WEAKNESSES:
— Atmospheric Interference : To manipulate water, there must be enough of it in the area at the time. Manipulating water also heavily depends on the weather, for example, if it’s too hot water will easily evaporate, and if the user doesn’t have a high enough Knowledge Stat, they won’t be able to turn gasses into liquids.
— I’m not a Certified Doctor : Healing superficial wounds such as those visible to the naked eye like paper cuts and scrapes are relatively easy to handle. But internal wounds are harder to deal with because the user is not a certified professional in the medical field. This ability generally allows them to speed up the natural process, but doing so for internal wounds might do more harm than good.  The success of healing also depends on the amount of water available at the time.
— This isn’t a Barbie World : It’s not easy to manipulate the bodily functions of others. Everyone is different, there are some who are more susceptible to the power, and those who have a high immunity against such an ability. Those with a high Knowledge Stat, for example, can easily break out of the trance. 
( STATS )
Knowledge : [ 15 / 25 ] Guts : [ 10 / 25 ] Proficiency : [ 15 / 25 ] Kindness : [ 5 / 25 ] Charm : [ 5 / 25 ]
— BACKGROUND
PROLOGUE : Kamiya Ichijou is a renowned and prominent business tycoon known for ruling his empire with an iron fist. He had begotten only one son, Mikoto, with a woman he neither loved nor wished to marry, but did so in pursuit of broadening his horizons. Each move of his was calculated, every step measured, but what he hadn’t banked on was the rebellious spirit that manifested in his son.
Mikoto was everything his father wasn’t: he was loud, brash, and thought too much with his heart rather than with his head. Ichijou wanted nothing to do with him, finding him to be far too much like his mother. Banishing him from their home, his wife and son were whisked away to a villa in South Korea, where Ichijou hoped, under the tutelage of carefully chosen tutors, his son would learn that there was more to life than chasing after the whimsies of the heart.
Out from under his father’s thumb, Mikoto found that he could breathe easier, and move as he wanted freely without reprimand. Despite the many hours spent under the scrutiny of his father’s paid help, in his free time he explored the unknown land, learning their language, and learning to love the place he would soon call home.
As time passed, he noticed a blush marred the apple of her mother’s cheeks, her once pale pallor was now peachy keen. He watched his mother swell, his small hand pressed against the skin of her womb where a fluttering would meet his fingertips.
‘A baby,’ his mother told him when he asked why she was as big as a house. ‘You’re going to be a big brother.’
Brother. A protector and guardian is what he would be in a few months time. Mikoto was enamored with the idea of being someone another would depend on. It brought his mother joy to see that he was so eager. And when the day finally came that he held a bundle swathed in soft linen as his mother closed her eyes to rest, Mikoto finally knew what true love was.
Looking upon the small, pinched face of the infant, Mikoto swore from then on that he would become a person his sister, Mirei, could depend on.
CHAPTER ONE : Livid would be an understatement to describe his father’s face when he reunites with the family he estranged on a business trip. He was greeted by not just one child, but two. To save face, he doted upon both children, but the bruising way he held his wife’s hip spoke of his displeasure.
Mikoto wakes long after his father leaves, and as he’s about to greet his mother, he spies a purpling bruise along the side of her face, barely hidden by her veil of dark hair.
“He’s not coming back,” his mother says, withholding her own tears as Mikoto sheds his. “He’s not coming back.
INTERMISSION : He’s the rock his mother leans on after a long day’s work, and the safe harbor his sister rests upon at each school day’s end. After his parent’s divorce, Mikoto had been given an ultimatum, the choice between fortune and family. The decision was easily made for him, thus he closed a chapter of his life and inherited his mother’s maiden name, Itou.
CHAPTER TWO : His mother warns him not to stay out too late now that he’s entered the hell that was high school. But Mikoto reaching adolescence was the least of her worries. His mother was as paranoid as the old biddies.
But there was a reason for her paranoia. There were whispers of a calamity that befell Seoul that came in the form  that left behind mysteries even the police couldn’t solve. The public wasn’t privy to the details, but everyone was quick to jump to the worst conclusions. Mikoto thought nothing of it, simply assumed his mother was being the worrywart she’s always been, but he amuses her.
CHAPTER THREE : His mother is ill due to stress and overwork the doctors claim; typical in their culture. Mirei insists on visiting their mother everyday, and Mikoto was never one to refuse her.
A storm passes over the metropolis one night they stayed late, and the journey home seemed far too dangerous for their mother to allow the siblings to go home. After pleading with the nurses, they finally acquiesced. Settling into the chair situated in a corner, Mikoto smiles as he watches Mirei press herself to their mother’s side.
With a content smile, he succumbs to sleep.
CHAPTER FOUR : He wakes in the middle of the night, all is deathly quiet. The space beside his mother is empty, and when Mikoto fingers the blanket, he finds that it’s bereft of warmth. When had Mirei left? Where was she?
So concerned was he with his sister, he hadn’t noticed the changes with his surroundings: the stillness of the environment, and the stale are he breathed in. His gait slows when he exits the hospital, mouth falling open as he beholds what was once the local library now transformed into a gothic structure; leading to where, he does not know.
Curiosity gets the best of him as he ambles closer, once he enters the antechamber a few hallways in, he sees a familiar figure laying prone on the ground. He bursts into a sprint, falling onto hands and knees beside his sister who looks up at him with unseeing eyes. Ear pressed to her chest, he’s relieved to hear a heartbeat, albeit a faint one.
“Mirei? Mirei?! Answer me!!” Mikoto cries, taking his sister into the cradle of his arms. Dread fills him when he remembers the warnings he wrote off as paranoia from his mother and the elderly neighbors he spoke to from time to time. Citizens would disappear, only to reappear once the storm has passed. If the rumors were true, then his sister, the one he swore to protect, had become the squall’s latest victim.
He holds Mirei closer when he’s pulled out of his inner thoughts when he gooseflesh blooms across his heate skin. Gritting his teeth, he raises his head, coming face to face with a gaggle of fanged, deformed creatures. They circle the siblings, as if taunting them, their prey. Slowly positioning his sister across his back, he wraps her arms around his neck, sitting on his haunches before he breaks off in run, disorganizing the would be predators.
Talons pierce his flesh, eliciting a sharp cry from Mikoto as he tumbles, barely breaking his fall with the added weight of his sister. Struggling to get back on his feet, he’s surrounded by the time he managed to place most of his weight on his uninjured leg. The monsters circled the siblings again, closing in on them as they prepare to end him in one fell swoop. Moving too fast for them to see, he pulls Mirei around, protecting her as he had promised when they were young, even in their last moments.
"I have seen your strength, and applaud your tenacity! Even in the face of death, you put others before yourself like a true Guardian,“ an ominous voice speaks in a booming voice, so loud that it reverberates through his skull and bounces off the walls of the antechamber. "I am the torrential water deity of legend, baying to the moon ! From the sea of thy soul, I come. I am—
”HABAEK—” With renwed vigor, Mikoto peels back his eyelids, unveiling unnatural halcyon orbs as a a whirlpool appears beneath his feet, bursting from the ground to pierce his enemies. Resting on his elbows, his vision begins to blur, but his eyes remain on the barefooted man half-dressed in traditional garb of royalty, shimmering scales covering his shoulders and back, fin like appendages protruding from his arms. Despite their odd, almost aquatic physiology, they carried themself with the bearing of a King.
“Rest easy,” the man says as he begins to dissipate. “You are destined to live another day.”
Expelling a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding in, he closes his eyes.
EPILOGUE : He stands upon a hill covered in flowers where a lone headstone rests. In his hands is but a single lily—her favorite flower. Kneeling on the earth, with a downward stroke of his hand, he brushes his knuckles over the name:
Itou Mirei.
“I’m sorry that it took me so long,” Mikoto smiles wryly, carefully placing the bloom in the vase amongst the other flowers left behind by those who loved her. “I needed to clean up the mess I made.”
Rising to his full height, he takes in the peaceful surroundings, sucking in a breath as he pockets a hand, caring his hair back with the other. “Mother hasn’t forgiven me. She has every right to be angry, of course. I failed to protect you. What kind of brother fails to do the very thing he was born to do?”
He rubs at his eyes, refusing to cry, wanting to appear strong before the grave of his sister. “There are others out there suffering like I have. There are others who blame themselves like I do, people just like me. I…I have a power, and I think I can use it to put an end to whatever evil is beginning to unfold in that wretched place.”
He sniffs, rubbing the back of his head before he continues, “I made a group. It’s kind of a study group, but that’s more of an inside joke. They’re…they’re like family to me now that you’re gone, and mother refuses to see me. They’re a bunch of idiots most of the time, but…they’re dependable. They actually like my cooking—” Mikoto breathes out a watery laugh “—Some of them call me a housewife. They’re not wrong, I clean up after them and everything, so I might as well be.”
Rocking back and forth on his heels, he bids the grave one last glance before turning his back on his sister’s resting place. “I’m going to make sure no one else has to suffer anymore. You can count on me this time.”
さようなら
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