Text of short teasers for the Video-Book format of The Host in the Attic by Rohan Quine

On this page are the full texts of the teasers excerpted from The Host in the Attic’s video-book format. On this page is a list of the teasers’ headings only. On both pages, the headings are linked to the teasers on Vimeo.

 

Teaser II(i), bronze me some more

An hour later in an East London film studio, acclaimed film actress Angel Deon is seated on a high chair, being powdered by a make-up artist named Celine. “How much longer is all this going to take?” asks Angel. “Does anybody even know?”

“The director’s assessing that,” replies Angel’s assistant, Robin.

“Well, can we put a rocket up the director’s arse, perhaps? We’ve been shooting all day… Work with me, somebody, please. What, am I all alone here?”

A production assistant hurries across the set to join them. “Ms Deon, I apologise for the delay.”

“Is it going to be fifteen more takes? How long are we going to be? I’m getting vertigo every time I go up there.”

“It won’t be long now. You’ve been doing ever so well and the Director loves your work.”

Jaymi appears beside them. “Hi. I’m Jaymi Peek, account manager for the client.”

“Pleased to meet you. Do you know how many more times I’ll need to be hoisted up on that wire?”

“They’re just bringing in more fans, to make more breeze. I’d say just a few more takes now.”

“What does the director want, a wind tunnel?”

“No, merely perfection. The client is paying us for perfection.” They all turn, as three industrial-size fans are wheeled in, positioned and switched on, followed by much trial and error and billowing fabric. The cameras are then re-positioned around the fans. The lights dim. “Looks like you’re on, Ms Deon,” says Jaymi and heads back to set.

“At last. Let’s see if they can get it right this time. Celine, bronze me.”

“Er, pardon me, Ms Deon,” says Celine, “but I think perhaps you’re bronzed sufficiently already.”

“Bronze me some more. And Robin, get me another bottle of water please.”

“Close your eyes a moment,” says Celine, powder-puff poised beside Angel’s face.

 

Teaser II(ii), your image multiplied

Jaymi thinks a moment. “Well, sure, but ultimately this is only a computer program we’re talking about here.”

“Only! It’ll be the program, and do you understand what that’s about to mean? When the program is universally adopted, your face will become the face of computing—adviser, mentor, companion, friend and alter ego for an entire generation.”

Topping up their glasses, Marc glances to left and right around the club, which is filling up. Then he leans impressively closer to Jaymi. “Knowing you, you won’t have dwelt on this; but the people in this building don’t yet know that they are poised to see your image multiplied more than anybody else’s image ever has been, throughout the ages…”

He leans further forward, beckoning Jaymi a little closer still. “And like one who holds a glass of vintage wine, Jaymi, you should hold aloft and savour the sublime beauty and power of the awesome visibility that you’ll soon establish for yourself through that little lens, when that camera rolls next week. Think on it now: these, your very last days of obscurity…”

Marc sits back. Expressionless, Jaymi watches individuals in the club carrying on with their business, laughing, drinking, talking, oblivious to both of them here; and the hint of a smile passes somewhere behind his eyes.

 

Teaser II(iii), The Picture of Jaymi Peek

Unfazed, Jaymi meets Marc’s eyes, without specific expression but with an equally sharp stare, which they maintain for a long moment before both breaking it off at the same instant. “Well, I perceive it too,” continues Marc’s echo, as measured and relentless as water carving rock, “though it hides in plain view from the dull gazes of the mob who pass you by and don’t see…”

But the culmination of Marc’s words occurs next day, live and in person. For on this day there arrives the event towards which all these gentle words have been shepherding Jaymi: a complex, exacting close-up shoot in a small green-screen studio in Soho on a Friday morning.

Rik is also present, but is so absorbed in technical discussions with the Director of Photography, that he registers little of Marc’s skilfully cat-footed, bright-eyed presence near Jaymi throughout the shoot. Little does he hear of the words Marc murmurs near the ear of their silent conduit, those quiet but irresistibly eloquent panegyrics delivered close at Jaymi’s side, concerning the sublime beauty and power of the awesome level of visibility Jaymi will establish for himself through this single camera lens: “That mob cannot see, in fact, because—you may not know this, Jaymi, but your presence is somewhat like a mirror, so when they look at you, then I’m afraid they cannot but see their own selves mixed in with you…”

And so Marc Albright warms to his theme, observing in Jaymi’s eyes the glow of machines, and with pleasure hears his own honeyed words imprint his own wry love-bite on humankind’s future, at fifty frames a second, through this hologram-destined and fatally iconic moving Picture of Jaymi Peek.

 

Teaser II(iv), high above the continents

In due course Rik’s revolutionary Web-guide program is finished and released, through investments springing from an entire long career’s worth of Champagne Marc’s business connections, on a good solid advertising basis. And being the first of its kind off the starting-line, this program is indeed as universally adopted as Marc predicted—its hold over the majority of global information growing, within just a few months, into a nascent stranglehold, through its ever-deepening knowledge of most individual Web-users everywhere.

Around the globe in jagged staccato there rises a worldful of HOST-related still images from websites, TV technology reportage, TV news, magazines and books—a kind of planetary spume embodying the cumulative global momentum of HOST’s universal spread, during the two years following Marc’s and Rik’s encounter in Golden Square, until HOST does indeed become the Google-Windows-Amazon-iTunes among that small handful of other holographic operating systems that have arisen in its wake and tried in vain to compete. This spume coalesces into a smooth wave, swirls high above the continents, accelerates with a whirl of sound, diminishes and vanishes into what looks like a black hole but is revealed, as we zoom back out of it, to be the pupil of one of Jaymi’s eyes in a single still photograph.

 

Teaser II(v), above the cities of the earth

In tandem with this, the simultaneous spread of Jaymi imagery around the world is embodied likewise, by a smooth wave of multitudinous iconic stills of him, crowding densely in from billboards and screens of every size. For as HOST’s skin, he has automatically become the Google-Windows-Amazon-iTunes among Web-guides’ skins. His simulacrum has swelled into a great ballooning presence, often silent but operating at a new and unholy level of visibility as an unassailable brand serving almost everyone, such that wherever he looks in the media it is difficult to avoid seeing the mainstream global power of his own image—an image universally trusted to mine the Web for each user, to show them the results of this mining, to track their digital footprints and preferences and keystrokes, and to present them with intelligent options based on their interests and personalities. By the end of those initial months, images of him are floating in the sky above the cities of the earth, incorporeal and ambiguous, like gigantic posters rippling in a breeze, so high up that sound itself has fallen away into nothing, leaving just the majestic silence of a solo trajectory through space…

Every minute, everywhere, these abstracted still-images and freeze-frames burst into motion, the resultant montage being sound-tracked by an exhausting, exhilarating, fractured audio comprising shards of human chatter and snatches of violent hard-edged dance music. These moving pictures show Jaymi at the apex of the high life, across five continents: lionised by all who can gain access to him, he finds no door closed to him or to his constant good-time companion, that indefatigable voluptuary, Champagne Marc. And the heat-lamps irradiate the rooftop terraces, the cocktails flow, the private jets and private nightclub rooms are his, the sex is easy (though never with the still-smitten Rik) and the ecstasy and coke and methamphetamines swirl. But all these moving images have a kind of “cut-off” unreality to them: whether they are glimpses through mobile phone cameras, CCTV cameras and binoculars, or reflections in casino mirrors, limousine windows and cocktail-bar optics, or solarised or negative video images, they are always somehow as if behind a pane of glass…

 

Teaser III(i), the twins in the mirror

In the main atrium of his apartment, Jaymi sits on a leather sofa by a panoramic wall of windows, facing south-west across the river towards a lush sunset. He stares down at his own hologram where it hovers beside his laptop. The screen says “THIRD UPGRADE OF HOLOGRAM FULLY INSTALLED”. He smashes his fist down onto the sofa, then remains immobile.

In recent weeks, a truth has started occurring to him with unwelcome frequency. The more bewitchingly powerful his hologram image grows, the more painful it is to know that its beauty will always remain quite unchanged, despite Rik’s every upgrade of the program’s underlying code—whereas his own appearance will change, and eventually for the worse, rendering him at last a mere shadow of his global image. “If only the hologram could assume all signs of my future loss of beauty, and of my sins, forever,” he murmurs, grabs a hand-mirror from the side-table, holds it up and stares in it. He puts the mirror back down, picks up the laptop, rises and heads for the hallway.

He enters the bathroom, noticing as usual its corners with their strange shadows, which he has discovered to be bizarrely unbanishable by any wattage of available light-bulb.

He positions the laptop’s hologram and his own head in front of the wall-mirror, such that the hologram’s head appears, in his current sphere of vision, to be only somewhat smaller than his own.

Each of the two faces is spotlit bright against the background of the dim room. Each of these is staring at the other in the mirror.

The effect is gigantically disconcerting.

Silence reigns, while the sole movement to be seen is that of Jaymi’s own eyes, flicking minutely from left to right, from right to left, scouring the two twins hard, seeking any differences…

However, whether zooming in to each face in turn or panning between them, he has to conclude he can find no difference.

 

Teaser III(ii), yes Norbert, for the third time

Despite these concerns, his addiction to seeing his own ubiquitous image keeps increasing, obligingly fanned by Champagne Marc, whose delight in his role as Jaymi’s best friend and mentor is unending. By now, the pair of them work only part-time at the agency, being less hands-on managers than abstract, lucrative figureheads. Of course, this role involves a great due diligence of necessary socialising. So it is, a few evenings later, that they find themselves sitting in a glitzy hotel bar.

In an ornate and multiply-mirrored alcove of the bar, a group of six or seven Beautiful People surround Jaymi, female and male, chatting and laughing, relaxed but high-octane. Marc is there, with an attractive girl sitting on his knee. With the exception of Jaymi’s bodyguard—an intimidating figure named just “The Bodyguard”, who goes wherever Jaymi goes, hovering in the background with a face of implacable stone—all of the assembled are engaged in a kind of guessing game, evidently trying to guess the identity of someone whom Jaymi is thinking of.

“OK,” says one Beautiful Person: “if this person you’re thinking of were a tree, what kind of tree would they be?”

Jaymi thinks a moment. “They’d be a flowering pine on a mountain slope, silhouetted on an orange winter sky,” he replies.

This goes down pretty well, piquing an appreciative curiosity.

“All right,” says a second Beautiful Person, “if this person were an animal, what kind of animal would they be?”

“A black lynx with yellow eyes, pointy ears and latent leukaemia.”

Mild shock, feigned indifference and further conferring.

“I think I know who it is!” says somebody. “No, hold on. First let me ask one more question: what kind of weather would this person be?”

“Oh, I’d say a sunny spring morning at Chernobyl,” says Jaymi.

“Creepy but cool! Who the hell is this one? Anybody?”

“Er, does it have to be a famous person he’s thinking of?”

“Yes, Norbert—for the third time. OK, Jaymi: what would this person be, as a sexual disease?”

“General Paralysis of the Insane.”

“For pity’s sake, Jaymi,” says Marc. “I guessed this one, two or three questions ago!”

 

Teaser III(iii), the knife in the mirror

Jaymi is spotlit before the immaculate wall-mirror in his dim bathroom, attired as sleekly as ever, eyes stark and cold, staring dead-still in dead silence.

With his right hand he raises into view a long, red-handled carving-knife, brings it to a gradual halt pointing up at his face, and holds it there a long time.

The explosive and protracted convulsion of deafening violence in which he stabs and stabs his face—including numerous horrific images of a growing bloodbath of facial injury and then ever-larger chunks of his face cut away until only a neck-stump is left—is brutally terminated and revealed as a fantasy, leaving him still intact, beautiful and spotlit in silence as before.

He raises the carving-knife again, presses its point by degrees into his throat, presses more and twists … drawing one drop of blood, with three spotlights reflected like pinpricks on its surface.

He keeps the knife-point there, uncomfortably long.

His stark cold stare softens into an innocent little ghost of a smile, and for the first time in the scene he blinks.

 

Teaser III(iv), love and poison of incarnation

“Just for now, let’s return to earth with a bump, right here by this venerable old river that I love, and look afresh at human society. What do we see? Well, straightaway we see the self-justifying beauty and power of your level of visibility everywhere, and its status as genuine contemporary Divinity.”

“Yet here I find myself incarnated,” muses Jaymi. “So bizarre, this incarnation business … and so crude and analogue, don’t you think? There are wonders within physical embodiment, true, but it was surely a dysfunctional avenue, all in all. Despite its pleasures, for me it has always involved a faint undercurrent of existential nausea and entrapment. Not that those things are devoid of their own love and poison, mind you, like the delicious tone of a cracked bell ringing. Still, let’s hope for a more intelligent design choice in future.”

“Well,” says Marc, “if being flesh and blood has been so delightfully flawed, then I’m glad I’ve been of service in easing your transition into hologram form.”

There are shouts of Jaymi’s name across the street, some argument and a brief scuffle, as The Bodyguard frightens off a group of kids who have recognised him and would have come interfering.

“But is that it? Just visibility?” continues Marc. “What’s missing there? I’ll tell you what’s missing: actual power for you. Real, practical power—an omnipotence to match your omnivisibility—an efficacy wherewith to live up to your ubiquity!”

 

Teaser III(v), eyes sharp as skewers

Jaymi smiles, then agrees, with a quiet anger, “That is so true. All my apparent ‘power’ is such an illusion, because I’m just the program’s skin. I can’t actually access what my hologram accesses. If only I could see what it sees, before its findings get filtered. Then I would have such opportunities, such power over other people, such a destiny as no one’s ever had before. I could speed evolution along a bit. That would be a sight to see! In fact, it would be a crime if it didn’t happen. Frankly, it’s a joke that it hasn’t happened already. A bad joke.” His eyes are sharp as skewers across the river, and then they grow calmer and colder. “OK. May this intention click quietly into place in me now. I will wipe the smile off that bad joke. I will gain access to what my own hologram can see…”

Strolling with his hands together behind his back and his lips compressed in thought, Marc glances across at him and opines with irrefutable gravitas, “It’s the least you deserve…” The towers shine mutely on, for another long beat, then he adds, “You’ll break yourself yet.”

 

Teaser III(vi), lie down and take a tablet

A small door opens beside a Mainframe commercial shoot the following afternoon at Three Mills, Bow, and Marc and Rik slip into the studio. Not having expected a royal visit from Marc today, a couple of production assistants stand up in surprise, but with an avuncular gesture Marc bids them sit. Remaining in the shadows, he draws Rik’s attention to Angel, who is standing on set, centre-stage beneath the lights. “She’s the one I’m talking about,” Marc whispers. “I don’t believe you’ve met her.” Rik peers across the set at Angel, who is confronting the commercial’s director, Ray. Her body language emanates regal complaint and an elegant sense of entitlement.

“You’re not the easiest to work with,” Ray is telling her.

“On the contrary, I’m impeccably professional.”

“OK, I won’t say ‘not the easiest’. I’ll just say ‘very difficult’.”

Marc grins in genial approval. “Good, good,” he whispers to Rik. “All serene on set, I’m glad to see!”

Rik stares at him. “I’ve only seen one moment of her, so far,” he says, “but already I’m quite exhausted. I may even need to lie down and take a tablet. Can’t we all just get along?”

“Certainly not,” chuckles Marc. “No matter, she keeps us all on our toes—but the important thing is, she has it! You can see that, I hope?” Angel and Ray wander further away offstage, so their continuing debate falls out of earshot. Marc turns squarely to Rik, with a gleam in his eye. “So. Are you on for the challenge, old boy?”

“Does it have to be her?”

Marc nods. “It has to be her. She’s our female Jaymi. Trust me, Rik, I’ve got a nose for these things.”

 

Teaser III(vii), cut through firewalls globally

Two days later in the morning, Jaymi’s tinted-windowed car approaches the Ontario Tower’s underground car-park entrance. The gate opens, the car draws up in Jaymi’s parking bay, and the hacker and Jaymi’s chauffeur get out and walk into the empty waiting lift, whose doors close after them.

Throughout the day, other unidentified vehicles and individuals come and go through the car-park, seen in fast motion.

Late in the evening, the hacker and Jaymi’s chauffeur emerge from the lift, walk to the car, get into it and pull out of his parking bay. The gate opens, then closes again as the car emerges from under the Ontario Tower and drives off.

Through such unusual circumstances does it come to pass that Jaymi Peek becomes equipped with a file-searching engine empowered to cut through firewalls globally.

 

Teaser III(viii), echo of relentless spells

Jaymi stands alone in the yellow-white light on his balcony, overlooking the Thames. With close-creeping insistence, behind his face, coil the echoes of Marc’s effusions spoken to him in the club or over there across the river on the Rotherhithe waterfront, or murmured from nearby on the Soho soundstage. These echoes gain in volume, speed and intensity, to an overwhelming crescendo, from Marc’s having repeated them like spells throughout Jaymi’s rise, easing up their heat a little higher every time he spoke them, then mercilessly a little higher still: “Your appearance, as the skin of HOST, is about to become not merely recognisable, as other faces on the Web are, but in many ways the face of the Web itself… Your face will become the face of computing—adviser, mentor, companion, friend and alter ego for an entire generation… To play a part in shaping humankind’s next leap in digital evolution—and to embody the accompanying leap in the possibilities of fame too… Accept it with the grace it deserves—and step up onto the stage that’s about to open itself to you here!… Your presence is somewhat like a mirror, so when they look at you, then I’m afraid they cannot but see their own selves mixed in with you… They are poised to see your image multiplied more than anybody else’s image ever has been, throughout the ages… You should hold aloft and savour the sublime beauty and power of the awesome visibility that you’ll soon establish for yourself through that little lens, when that camera rolls… What bleeds out through the air from your eyes, just from their being open, is light and intelligence, sweetness and charm and open thinking. In short, the highest evolution, quite simply… Straightaway we see the self-justifying beauty and power of your level of visibility everywhere, and its status as genuine contemporary Divinity…”

 

Teaser IV(i), Alaia’s novel (to be titled)

Late next morning, Jaymi reclines on his sofa. The hologram beside his laptop is a blur as it throws onto the screen a series of pages from around the world, of an evidently private nature, in response to his spoken navigation and search commands.

Prominent among these search results are images of animals savaging one another, war, violence, rape, medical operations, military installations and sinister-looking building plans, with pulses of light and a chaos of noise including the sounds of pain and suffering, the bleep of racing heart monitors, the wail of wartime sirens and the ticking of financial markets all across the globe.

Amid this onslaught, somewhere down the rabbit-hole of one fascinating search through a myriad private files, Jaymi is surprised to see his screen display the title-page of a novel, still in typescript form, called Alaia’s novel (to be titled), with the breathless sub-title “Monument to one woman’s love for Jaymi Peek”.

He starts forward, curious. It is a simple Word file, last modified a few days ago. The only other information this title-page gives him is the author’s name, Alaia Danielle, and her home address, which is some obscure street in E16. He proceeds to the first page, starts reading at high speed and becomes hooked, sucked in by the book’s strange intensity and febrility, as well as by its focus on himself. His screen soon displays page 3, page 10, page 30, 60, 120, all sense of time dropping away … until several hours later he reaches the very last words of the whole novel: “…glinting against the deepening ultramarine of the eastern sky with a hard, cold beauty.”

Lightning flashes in him and he snaps back into the leather sofa as if electrocuted—his mind churning hard and his eyes shining out a thousand metres through the wall ahead.

 

Teaser IV(ii), her aerodynamic face

Outside Royal Victoria station, Alaia is aware of every approaching car. One or two stop outside the station, but are not black. A black car then approaches, indicates it will be stopping and draws to a stately halt in front of her. Its windows are tinted (of course they are!), she prepares herself for the grand moment, the car door eases open—and an enormous ginger-haired woman gets out.

Alaia sits back down. Within a minute, however, another black car approaches. She braces herself again. The car slows down, slows—and drives straight past. Peering after it, she is startled when a third black car pulls up beside her without warning and coasts to a stop, with its tinted rear window directly beneath her, reflecting her watchful face on its opaque sheen.

She takes a step back.

After a long, full second, the window winds slowly down…

And up looks Jaymi at her, clear as a bell.

He takes her in, fascinated. Her long straightened hair is pulled back from a smooth black face that he thinks of straightaway as “aerodynamic”, and is held in a small band at the back, from which it falls to her shoulders; and her expression is sleek and sharp, with something in the poise of the eyes that promises not to suffer jerks gladly.

 

Teaser IV(iii), Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession

A few evenings later, the two of them are once more sprawling on the sofa, this time watching his home-cinema-sized TV screen. It’s a juicy scene from Zulawski’s Possession, as confirmed by the packaging of the DVD case beside them.

Forty-five minutes later, they are having sex on the sofa, with both the DVD case and the insert booklet for Possession lying open nearby.

 

Teaser IV(iv), identical-twin heads

Later in the evening, in that spookiest of bathrooms, the laptop’s hologram and Jaymi’s head have again been positioned together in front of the mirror.

Again they are both spotlit, stark against the backdrop of the room’s shadowy corners, one of the two identical-twin heads somewhat smaller than the other, staring at themselves or at each other…

Again, the effect is hugely disconcerting.

Jaymi’s eyes make minute flicks from side to side, scouring the twin faces hard, for any differences. As before, however, whether he zooms in to each face or pans between the pair, he can discover no difference, as yet.

 

Teaser IV(v), hopelessness over cocktails

“Now gentlemen, name your cocktails?”

“A dry gibson for me,” says Marc. Then with a wink at Jaymi, “Rik—what are you having?”

“Oh, Jeez,” says Rik, heavily. “I’m so hopeless with cocktails, I never know what they are…”

“Ah, what a bracing tonic your heavy hopelessness over cocktails always is! The cocktail hour wouldn’t be the same without it. Have a tom collins, old boy. Jaymi, a tom collins for Rik, if you please. —By George, I think the printer’s exploding.”

“It’s only out of paper, Marc,” says Rik. “Have you ever had to load paper, all by yourself? Jaymi, I’m putting more paper in.”

“Thanks. So, you two make yourselves at home, I’ll get the drinks and we’ll be on our way.”

Soon they each settle down with a cocktail and a still-warm copy of the novel, and start reading.

From the speed with which they become engrossed, it is apparent what a voice Alaia Danielle has. Page 5 lies open on all their laps at almost the same time, then before long, page 10 and page 20. “Hmm, I don’t know,” says Marc. “It’s a bit febrile, wouldn’t you say?”

“It’s meant to be a bit febrile,” retorts Jaymi.

“OK,” says Marc, “I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, for now. But I can’t help feeling she needs a good slap. And possibly a good poke too, while we’re at it.”

“Marc, please,” says Rik.

“Well, don’t you think it’s a bit febrile?” Marc asks him.

“There are a few breathless moments, perhaps, but let’s not blame the messenger for that. She’s just reflecting the world as she sees it. She’s clearly a sensitive flower.”

Marc grunts grudgingly, and they take up their pages again.

 

Teaser V(i), its expression looks crueller

Late that night, Jaymi has occasion to pass from the lighted main space of his apartment, through the hallway and into his darkened study. He fetches a book and sets off back towards the door, not far from his laptop and the hologram, which he half-glimpses on his desk as he passes it.

About a metre past the hologram, he freezes in his tracks.

He remains standing there in the darkness, breathing a little louder than usual, thinking hard … and not turning round, in dead silence, for several seconds.

At last he cannot stand it. He wheels around and stares at the hologram.

Its eyes have swivelled up to follow him as usual, but now seem to be staring into his own eyes with more of an impudent connection than before. It is different, too… Its expression looks crueller.

He flings the book down and grabs the laptop, without looking further at the hologram but pulling it alongside the screen, so it sweeps through the air beside him as he darts from the room.

 

Teaser V(ii), creeping closer to the mirror

He strides through the hallway into the bathroom and flicks the lights on, ineffectual though they are. Taking care to avoid appearing in the mirror at all, as yet, he holds the laptop up beside his own head and stabilises his grip on it, with the hologram on the other side of the keyboard from himself.

Then he sidles closer to the wall-mirror, cautious and crab-like, with terror mounting in him.

By degrees he creeps and agonises nearer to the point where he starts to see, reflected in the mirror, first his own image, looking murderous … and then the laptop … and then, very slowly, the hologram.

The head inches painfully into view, staring straight at Jaymi where it hovers in the spotlight. Jaymi’s eyes bore into it, caressing its face with minute, probing flicks across its width and height…

And there’s no avoiding it. The face is still beautiful, but there’s an unmistakably increased touch of cruelty in its lineaments.

There arises the echo of his unheeded utterance in the Mainframe conference room when the hologram was first presented: “And there I am, immortal…” This is followed by another, much more recent echo: “You have disappointed me.” And like a thunderclap comes the third echo at last, as the horror of truth slides into place: his urgent wish, “If only the hologram could assume all signs of my future loss of beauty, and of my sins, forever.” With vertiginous fear and fascination, he understands that this is indeed now happening: the look of the prototype hologram is changing, according to his own behaviour.

As he stares at the little head, a soft streak of pity for it flickers through his own face—and then is gone.

 

Teaser V(iii), Alaia’s novel, The Imagination Thief

Marc shakes his head. “No, you mustn’t be hard on yourself. It’s tragic and it’s simple, I’m afraid: when you phoned her and began your affair, her endless unattainable fantasy of you came to an unexpected thumping end, because you’d been wondrously attained.”

“And all that fierce, artistic, emotional idealism of hers,” says Jaymi, “which I’d read in her book, could then be forgotten while she luxuriated in her new reality with me.”

“So the only stuff left in her was that damnable, limp, soggy ending. I don’t wonder it enraged you.”

“I suppose you could say,” ponders Jaymi, “that this is, at heart, just a rather uncompromising conclusion to an unforeseeable drama that seems to have left me marvellously unscathed. For which, I hasten to add, I’m both grateful and humbled.”

“That’s the spirit; and yes, that rather sums it up, I think.”

“In any case, I’m damn well going to rewrite her ending. I’ll chop out those extra new mini-chapters 121-130—the ghastly lingering death in suburbia. It can simply end at mini-chapter 120 instead, just as it did before, which’ll leave it dark and bright and sharp, as it should be. It’s the least I can do, for her legacy.”

“It’ll be a noble sacrifice,” nods Marc gravely.

“Also, a title for it: we can’t just leave it called Alaia’s novel. I was thinking of using the title of one of her mini-chapters, Shrieking Eyes in the Ghost Town.”

“A shade too gothic, I’d say. How about The Imagination Thief?”

“Sure, it’s a possibility. Thanks, I’ll give it some thought.”

“In heaven’s name, why am I supplying you titles?” snorts Marc. “Much more importantly, Jaymi, please change all our names before any publication. Can I trust you to do that?”

 

Teaser V(iv), caged in his movements

Jaymi enters his apartment alone, tipsy from what became a long and liquid lunch at the club. He goes to his study, walks to the desk, strokes his finger across the laptop’s touch-pad to reactivate it from sleep mode, sees the hologram leap into being, and bends down to inspect it.

He straightens up. “Why are you still the same as this morning? Didn’t you hear all the further good sense Marc and I spoke today?” He heads back towards the door to the main space. “I guess you don’t work that way.” He stops in the doorway, turns back and points right at it, flushed and grinning. “So, I’m warning you, homunculus—I’m gonna bring it on! Oh yes. Let all such effects be visited upon you, my little friend!” He shudders. “And if I go at you hard enough, then maybe, just maybe, one day, I may even get to watch an increase of those effects on you in real time, while we stare at each other! Wouldn’t that be something? Because you know, I’m gonna go the whole way, baby: ‘Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joy and wilder sins’! Oh yes! I’m going to have all those sweet things, my little Jaymi, my little Jaymi-boy!” He stands there in the doorway, looking sorrowful of a sudden, then blows the hologram an extravagant kiss. “The only one I pity here is you, my little lover. Don’t worry, though, I’ll kiss you later and make it up. Can’t kiss you now, you’ll smudge my make-up…”

He exits the room unsteadily, back into the hallway, then prowls the apartment, his face immobile, with something caged in his movements.

 

Teaser V(v), a picture of dignified pain

“This may sound odd to the hologram’s designer, but she and I came to look upon it as something like the visual equivalent of ‘our tune’! To me it therefore means Alaia; so I would prefer, if you don’t mind, to keep it to myself, in her memory.”

Rik goes quiet. “Oh, I see. Yes, of course. How funny: to you it means her. Whereas, to me it means … well, I think you know very well that it means you, Jaymi. I made the program for you, originally. Sort of for you, anyway, in the sense that my love for you made me walk with the angels in designing it—made me inspired, in the programming, to such an extent as I’d never been inspired before.” He is a picture of dignified pain now, almost in tears. “Which is why it turned out so well. And I clothed it in you, as an ever-burning flame and memorial to a love I knew could never happen, because you didn’t feel the same kind of love back for me. Never did, never could and never will, although I could see that for a while you were trying to.” He smiles through his tears, then turns and walks to the door. “Goodbye, Jaymi.” He opens the door and passes into the darkness of the landing, not looking back.

“Goodbye, Rik,” calls Jaymi after him. “Let’s do lunch next week… I’ll call you…”

But his front door has swung shut. He turns towards the panoramic window and stares out, unfocused.

 

Teaser V(vi), the hologram as virus

This moment of apparent relaxation is deceptive, though; because there is another set of computer-related actions for him to perform next, which may not appear so dissimilar to those he has just performed, but whose import will be so radically different as to nudge him across a threshold that’ll change his life forever. For in making the laptop arrangements he is about to make, he knows he will be consenting to lose altogether what remains of his power to resist the temptation to look through the prototype hologram’s eyes at everything it can see around the world. This part of his volition is about to be taken over by the prototype, as by a virus. In continuing to lend his human abilities to the prototype’s programmed hunger to learn and spread, he will be making himself an adjunct to it. He will become part of its evolution, in the sense that its evolution is about to take a little leap, from occurring just internally to occurring also externally by means of Jaymi’s own actions too.

Yes; by this stage he is past the point of no return, he has to admit. Any further sitting-around would therefore just be wasted time, which would be silly. So, leaving his brand-new laptop on the desk in front of him, he gets up and steps quietly across that life-changing threshold, by stepping across his study towards his old laptop. He picks the old laptop up and carries it out of the study, sweeping along with him that rather more experienced, quite unique and faintly crueller-looking hologram…

 

Teaser V(vii), introducing the corridor

So… Near the end of his hallway, leading off it to the left, away from all warmth and light, there is a narrow, low-lit side-corridor, whose length includes two or three changes of direction around corners. The sole function of this corridor is to lead to a fire-exit. It hasn’t escaped Jaymi’s notice that such a corridor is not included in any of the neighbouring apartments he has been into. However, this is doubtless just a quirk deriving from the irregular elements in the architecture of the Ontario: first, its oval footprint; then even more relevantly here, the iconic oblique angle of the building’s upper section, topped by its crisp ring of blue light and slicing up through several storeys, which must have inflicted numerous delightful complexities on the layouts of all apartments on these levels here.

Still carrying his old laptop with its experienced hologram, Jaymi now stands at the very furthest end of this thin side-corridor, where there is a windowless door with a yellow and black label saying “Fire exit—alarmed”.

Just in front of this fire-door, set into the corridor walls opposite each other, are two smaller, dark, open doors.

The door on the left leads into a cramped, poky store-room, which Jaymi hardly ever finds himself needing or wanting to enter.

The door on the right leads into a second bathroom, which neither he nor his guests ever seem to feel like using either, though it is quite functional.

 

Teaser V(viii), back through the ceiling hatch

The hologram flickers up, with its crueller mien, just as before.

Feeling something feverish in his eyes, Jaymi blows a little kiss towards it, dark and delicate; then he exits the attic through the hatch, turning the light-switch off as he goes.

He sets off down the ladder, step by step. As he descends, the face of the hologram—alert and bluer-bright in the absence of the yellowish bulb’s light, but somewhat too far away to see in detail from right here—is gradually obscured as Jaymi steps from rung to rung, until its watchful gaze is cut off from view by the hatch’s edge.

Scuttling down the lower rungs at greater speed, Jaymi reaches the corridor’s floor. He slides the two sections of the ladder upwards along its built-in rails, so that it becomes shorter, and pushes it towards the hatch. Holding it there with one hand, he reaches with his other hand for a long hook-ended stick that leans against the end of the corridor. With this dedicated implement he completes the ladder’s smooth ascent through the hatch with a push, takes hold of the hanging hatch-door by sticking the hook through a metal loop attached to the door, and swings the door upwards on its hinges. A last strip of faint blue glow, emanating from that now-unseen little face, becomes thinner as the hinges squeak, and is blocked off at last when the hatch-door snicks shut.

Leaning the hook-ended stick back against the end of the corridor, Jaymi catches his own reflection in the mirror, through the door of the small second bathroom. The mirror is oddly sweaty with condensation, so he is somewhat indistinct where he stands half-illuminated against the darkness of the reflected store-room door behind him. He steps forwards, towards the reflection, and reaches for the hanging light-switch inside the bathroom door … but something makes him stop right there. He turns away; then with a last glance back at the reflection, he sets off down the corridor and around its two or three corners, peering back over his shoulder after every few steps.

 

Teaser VI(i), corruptive explosion

For the first time Jaymi picks up the mysterious unmarked black DVD case from where Marc tossed it down on the sofa. He opens it and finds an unmarked disc. He gets up, turns his TV system on and loads it into the deck. He returns to the sofa, dons a pair of high-end headphones and sits back.

The screen shows a film-style countdown of numbers inside dissolving circles, beginning from 10 and descending, one each second, to a blackout.

From here on, the screen monopolises him. He is captivated, often horrified, sometimes terrified, but in no simple way. At times he is almost giddy and his hands grip the leather sofa. Though he’s never quite smiling, it is clear some gorgeously corruptive explosion of rottenness is flowering inside him. It’s as if he is seeing from the point of view of the spirit that entraps us here among the molecules, locking us into this human endeavour with a motivation both sadistically vicious and poetic at once, despising us while it fills us with sensuous blood.

 

Teaser VI(ii), staring us all in the face

“So you’ve watched it,” says Marc. “I knew, as soon as I heard your voice on the phone this morning, though you didn’t mention it.”

“Everything looks different now. Different from what I thought it was like.”

“Everything is different from what you thought it was like—from what nearly everyone thinks it’s like.”

“…What am I meant to do with this?”

“You can’t do anything with it. You just have to take it on board. What choice do you have, after all, now you’ve seen it.”

“You didn’t have to show me.”

“You don’t really wish that I hadn’t—because you were ready to know. You’re among us, now. It’s better to know, if you’re capable of it.” He reflects for a moment. “Rik isn’t capable of it, as I suspect you’d agree. So he’ll never know. Not ahead of time, anyway.”

“It’s almost too much.”

“Of course it’s too much. Way, way too much. But don’t dwell on that, for there lies madness. Just incorporate it within yourself, as best you can, and press on.”

“A lie,” says Jaymi. “A gigantic lie.”

“I know!” Marc cackles with a brief, expansive laugh. “And it’s staring us all in the face. Square in the face. Yet the vast majority of us can’t see it, not until we’re shown.”

 

Teaser VI(iii), darkness in the store-room

Jaymi walks along his main hallway, until the mouth of the narrow corridor stands clear, ahead of him on the left. He slows for a moment, contemplating the mouth, and then resumes his prior speed in approaching it, injecting a touch of jauntiness into his step.

He turns into it. He proceeds along its initial straight stretch. He follows it around its two or three corners. The view straight down to the end of it appears, and he stops altogether.

The walls, for a moment, appear strange, seeming perhaps imperceptibly baggier than before … or perhaps not.

Reaching the end, between the two dark doorways, he reaches for the stick, raises its hooked end, inserts the metal hook through the metal loop attached to the hatch-door, and pulls down. The hatch-door hangs open, displaying a square of darkness with a faint bluish glow within.

He pulls at the ladder with the hooked stick, and slides its lower half down to the floor, aware of that half-lit reflection in the bathroom mirror through the doorway on his right. He sets off up the rungs.

Halfway up, he feels for an instant as if something may just have moved in the darkness of the store-room on his left. He stops, peering down through the store-room’s doorway, but can see nothing untoward.

 

Teaser VI(iv), yellow in its cunning eyes

The hologram’s glow gets a little closer to him with every step he takes up the ladder … till there, over the edge of the hatch, it pokes up into view, high on the table-top at the far end of the attic.

It is just a little too far away to be seen in any real detail from here.

In a single rush of determination, he beetles up the remaining steps, wriggles through the hatch, stumbles along the attic (without yet looking at the hologram), braces himself—then halts and stares straight at it, in bold challenge.

It still looks like Jaymi, is even still handsome in a way; but it exudes corruption, as if evil and moral infection pump through its insides. Its face is sallow and lined, and its intense gaze is knowing, with a hint of sickly yellow in its cunning eyes. Jaymi drags a high stool over to the table from nearby, sits and starts issuing hectic commands to it, in standard question formulations that might be used for any instance of the Web-guide. The hologram mines away for him, in instant dutiful response, gathering files and pages from around the world, of an ever more private nature, and throwing them up onto the screen for him.

 

Teaser VI(v), gibbering ululations

Settling more comfortably onto the stool, Jaymi redoubles his deluge of commands and sharpens his focus; for the night is young.

Thus does this attic laptop become the conduit, over many months, for a mesmerising deluge of Internet imagery from around the world. It begins at a modest pace but soon accelerates to a mad speed, with a rising onslaught of disembodied voices in all languages and a churning surge of music fragments and sounds of every kind. This deluge becomes increasingly peppered with sick and sordid pages of imagery and text, often not publicly accessible but rather from the Dark Web, escalating up to twisted levels, and all shot through with blips, bleeps, hums, grating whines and gibbering ululations.

The months-long data orgy is interspersed with Jaymi calling phone numbers onscreen … Jaymi talking sinisterly on the phone, and frightened people answering their phones in the dead of night … Jaymi installing industrial-strength firewalls and other mysterious security devices around the laptop and telephone … Jaymi making notes, sealing envelopes, hammering out emails, tapping out texts and telephoning online again, while pinned-up print-outs of the darkest material imaginable proliferate across every rafter of the attic space.

—The deluge slams to a halt: dead silence in the attic.

The plain black screen-saver comes on, returning the laptop’s monitor to darkness, so Jaymi sees a sudden close-up of his own motionless face reflected in the black, wearing a thousand-metre stare straight ahead, glassy-eyed and bathed in the sickly yellow-green glow of the hologram beside him.

 

Teaser VI(vi), your face as humankind’s face

“Well my girl, here’s to it!”

“Cheers, Marc!” twinkles Angel and they clink glasses and drink.

“So before we embark on this, there’s one thing I want to be sure you understand. As a new skin for HOST, you will rise as the face of everything that you and I know is right and bright and evolved and intelligent. And that means beauty, pure and simple—that is ‘beautiful’. For as HOST’s face, you’ll represent humankind’s most incredible achievement yet. Your face will push outward, for all of us, out against the darkness of the universe, the darkness of our ignorance—against it and into it. We’re piercing through that darkness with HOST, as we never have before. We’ll be drilling through the blackness of unknowing, with your face for our drill-bit!”

Topping up their glasses, he continues: “As presenter of humankind’s quest for ever greater knowledge, ever higher evolution in the upward journey of this highest of species so far, you have a noble and grave responsibility, for which you’ve been selected by the natural course of things, as cream rises through milk. —Yes, don’t be modest now. Since the first days of radio, the flicker of our electronic media has travelled outward from this planet in a huge bubble of signals, from every kind of broadcast, expanding at the speed of light … so understand, my dear woman, what we’re doing here, and what you are.” He leans impressively closer. “For the next spell of history, and I don’t mean years but decades, you and Jaymi will front and lead that great bubble of our ever-developing broadcasts and signals—our footprint on the universe, as we look outward and inward through the cosmos in every direction, down the corridor of every single infinitesimal solid-angle, every hair-thin steradian—your face being humankind’s face, to be seen by everything else and everybody else that may be out there, above us or beneath us!…”

Marc sits back.

Angel’s eyes are on fire.

 

Teaser VI(vii), the Ontario Tower’s blue ring

A black car with tinted windows pulls up in front of the Monolith. Jaymi alights and approaches the building, where the words “MAINFRAME CORPORATION” span the glass above the front doors. He walks through the lobby to a bank of lifts, glancing up at the wall above Mainframe’s name and logo, where a large copy of the classic Jaymi hologram image is mounted like a fanfare, high on the expanse of black stone.

Thirty minutes later, in a conference room many storeys above this image, he sits on a dais, facing an audience of corporate big-cheeses. He has not been in this room before, he reflects. Gazing over the heads of the waiting audience, he can see through the windows a fine panorama of East London, including a view straight down the River Lee for a couple of miles: there are the towers of Canary Wharf; there’s the Balfron Tower; and there’s his very own home, of course, the Ontario, behind whose distinctive slanted top, with its sharp blue ring of light, is an attic where is hidden—

He wrenches his attention back to the present moment in this conference room, and shakes his head, to clear it.

 

Teaser VI(viii), a fixed smile

“As I hand you over to our CFO, Eugene Poindexter, for an in-depth discussion and analysis of financial results over the twelve-month period, I should just like to remind you there can be no assurance that share prices will continue to rise—but we shan’t be at all surprised if these do!” The audience emits a ripple of appreciative noise and Jaymi sits back down.

A beaming Eugene Poindexter rises to his feet. The room quietens.

He takes his glasses off thoughtfully.

And then, on an impulse, he puts his glasses back on again.

Then deep in thought, he takes his glasses back off.

Sitting behind Poindexter, and intent upon him, Champagne Marc’s smile becomes the tiniest bit fixed.

 

Teaser VI(ix), The Picture of Angel Deon

A couple of mornings later, with much technical business, Angel is being filmed on the same stage where Jaymi was filmed, for the making of the new Angel-branded skin for HOST. Though Marc is not present in person as he was for the Jaymi shoot, his Mephistophelean words echo in her head throughout the scene, as a deliciously quiet and honeyed whisper complementing all the hardware around her. And the results of these words are captured with minuteness on camera, in the eyes of every last frame of this Picture of Angel Deon: “You will rise as the face of everything that you and I know is right and bright and evolved and intelligent. And that means beauty, pure and simple—that is ‘beautiful’… Your face will push outward, for all of us, out against the darkness of the universe, the darkness of our ignorance—against it and into it… We’ll be drilling through the blackness of unknowing, with your face for our drill-bit!… You will front and lead our footprint on the universe, as we look outward and inward through the cosmos in every direction—your face being humankind’s face…”

 

Teaser VI(x), he curls up and cries

Jaymi reclines on his bed, staring into the distance. Though physically unchanged as always, and with that febrile glow that has become permanent in him, he looks under pressure and a little confused, as if trying to work out a meaning in a whirlwind. He curls up and starts crying, in silence.

Nevertheless, week by week, month by month, like the tick of a bomb, Jaymi’s laptop continues flickering with Web pages, data files, TV clips and screen projections of all kinds, signalling his ever-deepening knowledge of Internet users worldwide, for whom he is now an indispensable part of life, and signalling the stranglehold on global information that he now maintains by means of a billion radiant public holograms … plus one single, secret, corrupt one, hidden just upstairs.

 

Teaser VI(xi), pristine and bland and opaque

Emerging from the Monolith Building’s bank of lifts and setting off across the lobby in the late afternoon, Jaymi pauses in his tracks, beneath the large image of himself on the wall above the company name and logo.

His image is unchanged. However, underneath it, and underneath the company name and logo, there now hangs a similarly-sized image, there on the black stone—the Angel hologram. It must have been added during today, while he was up in the office.

He stares at her for a moment, impassive. Then he resumes walking across the lobby to the exit. He emerges from the all-black tower, stops near the waiting tinted-windowed car, glances round this Three Mills enclave in the late afternoon light, and looks back.

From across the lobby, those two giant faces stare out at him through the glass doors and windows, each face with its classic demeanour of expressionless expectancy: pristine, reassuring, blandly inviting and altogether opaque…

 

Teaser VI(xii), back down the corridor

He stares into the distance. Then he turns his head, slowly, towards the closed door leading to the rest of his darkened apartment.

He rises from his bed, pads across his bedroom, opens his door and stands there, in silence, staring out into the shadows.

He sets off towards the main hallway.

When he reaches the hallway, he stops and looks intently down it. He looks in particular to the end, where on the left there opens the mouth of that narrow side-corridor leading to the fire-door. There, as Jaymi well knows, there are also those two poky rooms on either side of the fire-door, as well as the hatch in the ceiling of the corridor…

There is dead silence throughout the penthouse.

He steps on down his main hallway, until he comes level with the narrow corridor’s mouth. He stops.

Slowly, he turns to face the corridor. He peers down the initial stretch of it, which is empty, claustrophobic and dead-straight as far as those corner-turnings halfway down.

And down it he goes, of course.

 

Teaser VI(xiii), queasier and churning and aslant

First, he creeps down the growing dimness of the straight stretch. Next, through thickening air, he makes a queasy, dream-like progress around each one of the several corner-turnings halfway down, which surely seem to number one more corner-turning than they did before; and how strange it is, he reflects, that he never has been able to recall exactly how many corner-turnings there are…

As soon as he reaches the point where he has a straight view down to the fire-door, he is hit by a vision of terror: with a grating rush, the corridor walls and ceiling and floor are all made of wet-breathing grey meat, bellowing in vicious pain, impaled by a dozen twitching meat-knives—

The vision slams away, echoes down and is sucked into silence in an instant.

Quiet and still again, the remaining half of the corridor stretches ahead, from Jaymi’s feet, just as close and thickly-aired as before, and dim-lit from nowhere.

And now he has to carry on down it, as he knows very well.

He waits a moment longer, but it’s really no use: for there go his feet, yes, stepping forward, down there underneath him…

While he goes, he next becomes aware that he is seeing every slanted ceiling angle, every leaning wall and object, with an odd kind of floatiness. And he’s also seeing all of these things from a little bit lower than his usual eye-height, as if he’s looking out of eyeballs that are embedded in the front and the sides of his neck, instead of embedded in his face.

The walls’ sallow flickering is hopeless and queasier than ever now: churning, aslant, darkly founded on an alien discomfort and disjunction…

He slows, as he draws near the fire-door and clenches his teeth between the two dark doorways yawning on either side of him.

 

Teaser VI(xiv), the hatch-door swings

He pulls down the hatch-door, and then the ladder attached to the door, as far down as the ladder will slide under its own weight. He reaches up to the latch on the side of the ladder, unhooks it and slides the ladder’s lower half down until it clangs onto the sweaty concrete floor of the corridor beside his bare toes.

Squinting, Jaymi forces his face to look straight up. A dim, cloudy green glow suffuses the square of black inside the hatch. He starts climbing the ladder, rung by rung, his feet weak and slippy on the cold metal, his entire body streaming sweat and shivering.

Hanging open just beneath the ceiling, the hatch-door swings away from the ladder by itself, right in front of his face, then continues to swing back and forth on its hinges, for longer than it should. He puts his hand out to stay it—but just before his hand can reach it, it stops swinging, more abruptly than it should.

He pushes himself onwards, upwards. The cloudy green glow reaches down at him. His head rises level with the hatch…

And over the edge of the hatch, at last, it is visible, up there on the table-top.

It is too far away to be seen in great detail. But even from here, it’s clear that things have changed quite a lot now. The situation has evidently reached some other level altogether.

 

Teaser VI(xv), its terrible eyes

He scuttles up the remaining steps, half-falls into the attic, rises again, shuffles down the central aisle of the attic with his head lowered, and approaches the hologram’s table with his eyes lowered, like a murderer approaching an altar.

At last he looks up at it.

The hologram is pure evil.

Beneath its head, a feral, skunk-like body has grown, which seems coiled as if to spring at him, revealing an enormous, sleek erection beneath the smooth, muscular flesh of its haunches. Atop this obscene body, its face remains recognisable but has now become a feyly sinister, ambisexual pastiche of Jaymi’s face, its canines sharp and blood-stained, its skin erupting everywhere—and its terrible eyes still the same colour and shape as Jaymi’s but now quite outsized, unbearably malevolent, and quite dominating this cramped attic with the glaring enormity of their double-cannon presence.

Jaymi perches on his accustomed seat, stares like an automaton at the laptop screen and starts issuing feverish commands. Obedient in this, the hologram mines diligently away, throwing up material and arraying it onscreen in response to him … thus leading into an accelerating sequence of bits and bytes, imagery and sound that encapsulates Jaymi’s escalating pursuit, over an ensuing four-year era, of the full evil that has awoken in him.

For owing to his peculiarly merciless combination of thoroughness and megalomania, this little attic sees Jaymi use his own gifts and his universal Internet access to divert all accessible resources of every kind, from around the world, to the universal deification of his own image and name, and to the untraceable desecration and slurring of anyone else whose image or name manages to come close to the same magnitude or flavour as his.

Throughout the course of these years, sizeable funds intended for famine relief, or for humanitarian aid in the aftermath of earthquakes and other natural disasters, are mysteriously lost in transmission, before being invisibly bent to the ends of his own vanity and self-obsession.

Growing more frequent throughout the sequence are images of assassinations arranged by Jaymi—many of the victims evidently those whose onscreen interpersonal and stylistic vileness transgresses too far Jaymi’s fascistic sense of the aesthetics of what should and should not be allowed in pixel form.

 

Teaser VI(xvi), the space around a dictator

Amid recognisable faces, flamboyant outfits, flash-bulbs and early-evening guest-lists outside the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, Marc gets out of a limousine and is ushered through the outer velvet rope, wearing impeccable old-style evening-dress. Preceded by The Bodyguard, Jaymi gets out of another limo, in a high-fashion designer suit, wearing exquisite make-up and carrying an apricot-coloured love-bird on his left shoulder. Even in such a crowd, this rare appearance on a public street is enough to cause a stir. Not for a second does The Bodyguard, discreet and expressionless in basic black-tie, allow himself to be anywhere other than among those who are closest to Jaymi. Yet even while people smile and gush and their phone cameras flash, Jaymi’s uniquely international profile, his mirror-like ambiguity and blankness and the terrifying rumours whispered everywhere about him ensure that a noticeable space remains around him wherever he walks—like the unbridgeable space that travels around a dictator or a plague victim.

Seeming not to notice this space, however, is Marc. He claps Jaymi genially on the back, then salutes Rik, who now appears from along the pavement, struggling towards them with a plastic carrier-bag and a bundled coat.

“Rik! We thought you’d never make it. Where have you come from, old boy?”

“From the Tube,” pants Rik, out of breath.

Marc and Jaymi burst out laughing. “Rik, must we?” asks Jaymi.

“Must we what?” asks Rik, looking harried.

“You’ve got enough money to buy the Tube,” says Marc, as they head up the steps to the entrance. “I suspect you could stretch to a taxi ride!”

 

Teaser VI(xvii), terror behind the smiles

Before long the party is in full swing, with much dancing on the strobe-lit dance-floor, many pills popped, bumps of coke snorted and even the occasional copulation in a dim corner.

The indefatigable Champagne Marc is in his element, pacing himself with sureness through a gargantuan intake of alcohol over many hours, and generous in the fattened swing of his own pleasure, which he spreads with good-humoured taste among the hundred faces that float through his conversational bubble throughout the evening.

With equal ease but less verbiage, sometimes in Marc’s company and sometimes not, Jaymi glitters charismatically throughout those same hours—always in control, opaquely charming and untouchable, everywhere stared at, and whispered of with terror behind the smiles.

At some point in the later part of the evening, he is standing prominent and alone on the wide balcony overlooking the ballroom, as the party continues beneath. From a distance, his stillness is eloquent: it is the stance of one who has reached a point of being utterly alienated by his power and very deeply alone, near the end of some enormous, unique and unrepeatable journey that could not now be stopped or undone by any means whatever.

Presently he senses a movement that is small but noticeable for being located elsewhere than within the stew of humanity below him. This movement occurred on a balcony straight across from this one, he realises, at the same level on the opposite side of the ballroom, where Angel has just appeared and is now standing alone in a bold mirror image of Jaymi.

For one protracted moment their two gazes meet and hold each other. Then invisibly, a dragon coils out of him towards her, through the space above the party, breathing cold fire at her—

She steps back in haste and slips away between the curtains into shadow.

 

Teaser VI(xviii), followed by a portrait’s eyes

Thirty minutes later he alights, pays foggily and totters into the Monolith Building. Tipsy and glum at his desk upstairs, he starts fiddling fecklessly with paperwork. A large poster, an item of Mainframe publicity, hangs framed on the wall near his desk, displaying his own twin marvels of programming. It shows the two HOST skins, arranged just as they appear on the wall of the front lobby downstairs—the classic Jaymi image printed above Mainframe’s name, and the new Angel image below the name.

He glances through an internal window, down onto a big dim-lit room containing numerous work-stations. Beside every terminal that is still turned on, one of the two holograms hovers with its famous image of expressionless expectancy.

He gets up, still staring through the internal window, then steps out of his office, descends to the large room and wanders around it, treading softly. He grunts, as he notices the Jaymis still outnumber the Angels by quite a big margin.

Here in the dim quiet of night, without the light and distractions of the day, the floating faces are beautiful but also deeply spooky, as he now perceives more than ever before. Just as he designed them, their holographic eyes seem always to stare directly at one, wherever one may go in a room, just as a painted portrait’s eyes might follow a viewer around an art gallery at night or around a locked old school room…

 

Teaser VI(xix), something hidden, something wicked

He wanders on, into the unlit conference room where the shareholder presentation was held. At the window, he stares a couple of miles down the River Lee, to the skyscraper night-shine of Canary Wharf.

Demure on the left-hand side of that clump of buildings, modest in height beside many of its companions, stands the Ontario Tower with its obliquely-angled ring of blue light curling alienly sharp on the black sky: encircling Jaymi’s penthouse flat, as Rik knows; encircling Jaymi himself at night; encircling Jaymi’s attic … and as Rik suddenly feels, also encircling something else too.

Something hidden.

Something wicked.

Something foul.

He fixes his gaze upon this oblique sliver of blue, with a growing focus; and the hair on the back of his head crawls and prickles uncontrollably.

He scurries back to his desk and turns his laptop on. Angel’s hologram flickers up.

 

Teaser VI(xx), venom is whispered

“Though now I’m beginning to remember that a couple of drinks are not the best basis for writing computer code!” He wags his finger at her, as if imparting a secret, and his eyes slightly cross.

“Booze and code don’t get on,” she agrees. “Though booze and English get on quite well together, so I’m told. What party was this?”

“Oh, some huge, intimidating one. I forget what it was all about, to be honest. Not my scene at all. Marc and Jaymi were there, though, and they were having a grand old time, of course.”

“Marc and Jaymi,” she muses. “I hardly ever see them here any more, these days. Do they travel a lot on business?”

Rik decides to confide, rather than to be discreet. “Evelyn … Jaymi and Marc have become nothing but the biggest pair of international party monsters who ever lived. Too ridiculously rich and powerful for their own good. They have legendary alcohol and drug benders and binges of insane decadence, among the ‘elites of media and nightclub society’, IF you please.” He darkens now, speaking with pain. “And I’m sorry to say that sometimes they deliberately—I don’t think they know that I know this—they deliberately do so in the company of somebody who, as they very well know, will not be able to keep up with their own superhuman capacity for booze and drugs, so that more than a few of those unfortunate fools have suffered permanent brain-damage or even death thereby.” Evelyn frowns. “Oh, it’s always hushed up, don’t you worry. News of it is always muted, through the power of unlimited money. But it’s happening, though they try to keep me in the dark. Yes; whatever they touch, they destroy, with a touch of death… And I know it’s a universal taboo to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway, because I’m drunk and you’re Evelyn, and if we’re honest then it’s staring us all in the face, though nobody dares to admit it, do they: the name ‘Jaymi Peek’, in particular, has become notoriously associated with the ruin of the reputations and the lives of many, many, poor, sad, sick individuals whom his influence has lured downwards”—Rik hiccups, then continues in a whisper—“downwards, into excess, into addiction, into horror … even suicide. And venom is whispered of him…” He puts his finger to his lips, as if bidding discretion.

Evelyn stares at him, lost for words, then nods and looks away.

 

Teaser VI(xxi), half-profile in the darkness

Late next evening Jaymi has positioned himself, as before, in front of his bathroom wall-mirror. This time, the mirror’s surface is not far from his right shoulder. His newer laptop’s clean hologram is right in front of him, just centimetres from his eyes, so it fills up his vision in an extreme close-up.

He kisses this unmoving, incorporeal face, with a deep, serious and unsmiling tenderness; then he swivels his gaze to the right, to watch himself and the hologram together. Their reflection fascinates him, and he carries on kissing for quite a while—not salaciously but romantically, even chastely.

His memory flashes back to himself with the other hologram, spotlit here: before any visible corruption in it but still very disconcerting nonetheless, with Jaymi’s eyeballs flicking across those twin faces, scouring them for any differences…

He returns to his kissing now, watching himself and the hologram out of the corner of his right eye, his kisses becoming fractionally steamier.

His memory flashes back, too, to himself and the other hologram staring at each other here on their follow-up visit—Jaymi’s gaze skewering it once again, flicking from left to right—and this time that unmistakable new touch of extra cruelty in its lineaments, while his own remained as sweet and youthful as the day he was filmed.

He withdraws his mouth from the other’s face, and glances in the mirror at his own in half-profile against the darkness.

 

Teaser VI(xxii), dimmer and narrower than ever

Then slowly, inexorably, his gaze travels away from the mirror.

It travels upwards and somewhat to one side, as if in order to see up through the walls and through the ceiling … to the attic.

He gets up. He moves towards the doorway. He emerges from his bathroom door, looks to his hallway, and sets off towards it.

Reaching the hallway, he pauses, looking intently down its length. Looking, in particular, at the mouth of the narrow side-corridor that leads to the fire-escape door, the two smaller doorways, the ceiling hatch with the ladder…

He steps towards that mouth. Soon he reaches it.

And into it he turns.

He sets off down that initial, straight length of the narrow corridor.

He then makes a queasy, dream-like progress around those several corner-turnings, which seem, perhaps, to number even one more than they did last time.

Reaching the point where he will be able to see down the final stretch to the fire-door, he braces himself for a grating rush and that vision of the corridor walls as wet-breathing grey meat stuck with carving-knives … his eyes now squinting and oozing tears in anticipation of it … but this time it doesn’t happen.

Instead, the corridor just stretches ahead of him: quieter, dimmer and narrower than ever.

He presses on, starting again to register his perceptions with that familiar floating motion, from lower down than his usual eye-height—from lower down, even, than he did before, so that this time it’s not as if he’s perceiving through eyeballs that are buried in his neck, but rather through eyes that peek from between the prison-bars of his ribs.

 

Teaser VI(xxiii), the screech in the mirror

At last, almost crying with fear of the dark poky store-room beside him on his left, he squeezes the metal hook through the loop. He pulls the hatch-door down, then carelessly forgets his vigilance, such that his eyes wander to peep at the bathroom mirror; and his chest cavity lies wide open, containing an obscene black pulsing thing with teeth, around a hideous gape of a mouth, with eyeballs peeping out from between the stumps of his sawn-off ribs—

This vision screeches up out of the mirror, streaks past him, and gibbers and chatters away down the corridor at his back, leaving just his accustomed reflection on the sweating surface of the bathroom mirror.

Grimly, he looks up; for he’s only just begun here.

 

Teaser VI(xxiv), their awful sight and knowledge

He pulls at the end of the ladder with the hook, draws it down through the hatch and slides its lower half to the floor. Starting up the rungs, glancing often at the store-room doorway nearby on his left, he puts his hand out towards the hanging hatch-door, expecting it to start swinging, but it doesn’t.

He climbs on, and now the metal rungs start bending with a slight rubberiness beneath his slippery toes, which causes him to speed up, so as to make it up there in time. The hologram’s glow gets closer, closer … and then, over the edge of the hatch, it comes into sight: up there, at the far end of the attic.

Like last time, the situation is evidently rather different from before: things, to say the least, have somewhat escalated.

Unlike last time, the hologram is no longer too far away to see in detail, however—because it fills the further half of the attic.

Its features, moreover, are so large, and so dominant, and so intent upon Jaymi, that apprehending them in detail has become compulsory. The bulges of its eyes pull him physically towards them, up the central aisle of the attic, as if he’s sliding along the planks—sliding wetly along, without needing to take any steps at all, up into the gigantic double glare of green radiation sickness that fills out their volume, their awful sight and knowledge.

Pulled in closer, he is slanted in and down, till the heat hits his face from its sex, huge and sleek beneath its body from its haunches to its chest, like a bomb-nose protruding from an undersized fuselage, and somehow then he’s naked, penetrated, filled-out, groaning, and the hologram is ever more empowered and colossally alluring—its face still his own, yet warped as in a nightmare.

As soon as they’ve convulsed at length, it’s clear they crave the next time already. And this helpless, endless bliss of self-entrapment in Jaymi, conjoined with such magnificent corruption of himself, is horrific and obscene at its core—perhaps defining obscenity.

It’s a one-way road ahead from here, with many years to travel yet.

No way out; no way back; and no redemption offered.

This attic is a place where the sun doesn’t shine.

 

Teaser VII(i), wail of horror and understanding

Ten minutes later Jaymi lets them both into his hallway and closes the front door. “OK, soul first, cocktail second. I think you’ll see all you need to see, if you go down that side-corridor at the end of the hallway on the left there. Climb up the step-ladder at the end and look through the hatch in the ceiling. I’ll wait here for you. Then we can talk.”

In the context of his truth-hunt, Rik is without fear. With a last piercing glance at Jaymi, he goes to the corridor and walks down it. Jaymi waits in the hallway. Soon comes the faint distant sound of Rik’s shoes stumping heavily up the metal rungs of the ladder, one by one.

Then five seconds of silence.

Then a wail of horror and understanding.

The shoes are heard descending the rungs at high speed, his footsteps thud down the corridor and Rik comes bombing out of its mouth, pointing at Jaymi down the hallway.

 

Teaser VIII(i), snuff-site

Later that evening, like one struggling to escape something, Jaymi is issuing a semi-audible barrage of navigational commands, while staring at the laptop screen in the attic. The hologram is a big, bestial blur of activity, periodically licking around the screen. After a few more arcane but well-practised verbal commands suggestive of some unusual kind of security code, there appears onscreen one of the more inventive “snuff-sites” he is wont to haunt.

To anyone entering this website, it soon becomes clear he has stepped into some real but unidentified corrupt regime, where a group of prisoners are housed together in an unknown location, constantly observed and listened to by inaccessible cameras and microphones, with semi-simultaneous translations by subtitle… On a regular basis, those connoisseurs of human nature from around the world who subscribe to this site submit a secure electronic vote for the prisoner whom they choose to be sent to the electric chair for not “fitting in” as well as the others, so that after the filmed execution there is one less prisoner. The second- and third-last prisoners left at the end of this twisted game have their lives spared, and the last one left is released from incarceration with no information as to where the prison was.

 

Teaser VIII(ii), ghastly old waxworks

“That in itself is unforgivable,” says Marc. “By the way, Jaymi, I damn well hope we’re still on for my hunting trip tomorrow?”

Jaymi raises his eyes. “Marc’s insisting on dragging us all out hunting tomorrow. You see, he may have the good taste to hang out with us glamour-pusses, but he also hobnobs with a load of ‘hunting-shooting-fishing’ types, whose barbarous pastime he’s intending to inflict on us tomorrow.”

“They’re very fine company, I’ll have you know,” says Marc.

“Ghastly old waxworks,” says Jaymi. “Oh all right, we’ll go on this hunting trip.”

“I shouldn’t be allowed to join in,” says Angel, “because I wasn’t given a pony for my tenth birthday. But I’ll gladly make suggestions about whom to shoot at, if you like?”

“Angel my dear, I will not be mocked,” says Marc. “We’re all going to hunt for our supper tomorrow, and there’s an end of it. A weekend in the country, a fine estate and no hunt? Unthinkable.”

“Alright,” says Angel. “But I’m not going on a horse.”

“No, indeed you’re not,” he snorts. “We shall be on foot. Or does her ladyship expect to be carried?”

 

Teaser VIII(iii), the grandest non-association

He reflects on the irony of Angel’s presence here. Ever since Marc first insisted on casting her and filming her for the very same purpose Jaymi himself had been cast and filmed, the online ubiquity of her face as an alternative to his own has of course been tiresome in the extreme. Her online image has never really approached his own, in prominence or public favour; and if it had shown signs of doing so, then his uniquely empowered access to the traffic of the Internet would have found a way of contriving a reversal of this. But what an unnecessary and annoying intrusion she has always been, frankly! One of Marc’s major blunders, without a doubt. Many times, over the years, he has been tempted to have her destroyed in real life, or to destroy her image online, either of which he could have arranged in many ways. However, he made a grudging decision long ago that he would never lift a finger in either of these directions, but would just leave her to continue as one of the two faces of HOST, under her own momentum. This decision didn’t derive from any mutual fondness, for the two of them maintained what was surely one of the grandest and archest “non-associations” on the planet. He simply recognised that her presence in the public eye alongside him was of considerable value as a distraction whose dazzle and movement made it easier for him to hide the dark side of his own activities in plain view of everyone: after all, as a comparably privileged face of HOST, Angel shows no signs of being engaged in anything nefarious (nor of being any kind of saint, indeed), so why would anyone think he is engaged in anything nefarious either, since they are evidently both employed in the same capacity? On the infrequent occasions they meet each other, they are careful to keep the surface of their non-association respectful, even cordial. And sometimes, if Marc is a guest, then she must be a guest too. Hence, here she is at his own country house.

 

Teaser VIII(iv), the face behind the window

He turns into a long, deserted conservatory with greenery rising to its ornate metal-framed roof. He becomes sharply aware that behind the foliage are stretches of glass walls, beyond which the dark of evening presses in, so the contents of the conservatory, sporadically spotlit, are reflected against the blackness.

Noticing himself in half-profile passing under a spotlight, he slows his pace.

He flashes back in memory, to himself in half-profile in the mirror, steamily kissing his new laptop’s pristine hologram … and himself in the mirror beside the pre-corrupted prototype hologram … and himself in the mirror beside the prototype hologram with its ominous first streak of cruelty … and then that hatch, up there in the ceiling at the end of the corridor.

Stopping to stare at himself full-on in the glass, he senses some small, unexpected movement or sound. He listens hard, noticing for the first time a grandfather clock’s tick from the hallway, his own heartbeat, a twig scraping on the glass roof above him…

He creeps down the aisle, glancing between tall plants at the black-lit glass.

He sees a ladybird on a frond, entices it onto his finger, admires it, brings his thumb slowly towards it as if about to crush it—and leaps back, as a man’s big face presses at the glass right in front of him, with murderous vengeance in its eyes, followed by shocked recognition.

Jaymi sprints away down the aisle towards the kitchen, whispering in terror, “James Danielle!”

When he reaches the old kitchen, which is as deserted as the conservatory, he dashes about, pulling every kitchen blind down to the level of its window sill, wherever possible. Painfully aware of the gaps still left beneath or beside certain blinds, where thin strips of black glass stand revealed—and horribly aware of the open cat-flap set into the kitchen’s back door, where a hand may burst through, and of one small frosted window that has no blind at all—he sets about making a dozen cocktails at warp-speed, muttering, “It was just an illusion. It was just an illusion. It was just an illusion.”

 

Teaser VIII(v), the waving patch of grass

Late next morning, the party is loosely spread out across the grounds behind the house, all holding guns with varying degrees of ineptitude and unfamiliarity, but safe under the eagle-eyed tutelage of an enthusiastic Marc, who is in his element. The sinister bulk of The Bodyguard hovers at all times in the middle distance.

The intended targets of these guns are birds, rabbits or hares, even perhaps a small deer or two; and frankly, all these are in little danger from most members of the shooting party. Marc spies a duck not far ahead of him, sitting fatly on the ground in plain view, almost asleep. He turns to his companions, puts a commanding finger to his lips, then braces himself upright with a solid, Churchillian swagger. Soon he has the bird in his wavering sights, and pulls the trigger. As the gun’s recoil sends Marc staggering backwards to keep his balance, the duck stands up, seems about to flap off, thinks better of it and waddles away instead.

“Damn and blast this gun,” mutters Marc, “it needs cleaning.”

The party prowls on, past an extended patch of long grasses. Angel spots an oddly waving patch of grass, puts her finger to her lips, and starts to take aim at it. Marc tiptoes up beside her.

“What do you think it is?” she whispers to him.

“Not sure,” Marc whispers back. “It’s too big to be a rabbit, and the deer don’t go into the grasses much, so I’d guess a large hare.”

 

Teaser IX(i), I’m very frond of you

“I must say you seem out of sorts, my boy,” says Marc, handing a drink to Jaymi and peering at him, as they step out of the room through double doors into the quiet of the conservatory.

Jaymi feels a mounting urge to confess—to confess to the slaughter of his and Marc’s dear mutual friend from long ago before the poison—and thereby perhaps to lighten the unbearable weight that bears down on him. “Marc, I need to tell you something.”

“I’m all ears.”

They stroll on in silence for a full minute, as Jaymi’s mind churns with the problem of how he can begin this confession, whose ramparts seem to rear above him with unassailable precipitateness and an infernal lack of footholds by which to scale them.

Marc draws to a halt, stopping them in their tracks beneath the overarching fronds of a giant fern. He turns a gentle gaze upon his friend, takes idle hold of a fern frond and raises it to his own face, with a look of tender care and concern. “You know, I’m very frond of you, Jaymi!”

Jaymi shuts his eyes with exasperation. “Marc, that is ridiculously inappropriate. Now please listen. I’m trying to be serious here.”

“Oh dear. Attacks of seriousness… No, I’m sorry, my boy. Pray continue.”

They turn and resume their slow stroll, back down the conservatory in the other direction. Jaymi closes his eyes again for another half-minute, so as to frame this most delicate of confessions in just the right way.

“Well, out with it, then!” chivvies Marc at last. “What-what-what?! We don’t have all day, you know.”

 

Teaser IX(ii), what an exquisite life

“Ah, what an exquisite life you’ve had, Jaymi, I do declare,” Marc muses, through a fat glow of champagne and pleasure and friendship, as they wander along. “I’ve not done too shabbily myself either, but you—my goodness, what a world-class destiny! And who on earth could have predicted it? For anybody at all, I mean. It’s quite extraordinary how things have worked out, isn’t it? Especially when so many people around the world are stuck in vicious chasms of sadness or madness or pain, of one kind or another—unimaginably unbearable chasms, which they often remain in for decades, day-in-day-out, month-in-month-out, with no hope of escape at all… What does it all mean, eh? Still, it couldn’t have happened to nicer chap, I must say. And as I’m sure you don’t need telling, it’s not over yet, by any means. In fact, you’ve only just begun, I should say. For one thing, you still look identical, dammit, to how you looked when the Web-guide was designed. And that, my dear Jaymi—that makes me very cross indeed! Ah well, come on back inside, and let’s get ourselves another champagne, the first of many more.” And he takes Jaymi’s arm and guides them both back into the main house.

 

Teaser IX(iii), eyes behind his ribs

He looks down the hallway—in particular at the mouth of the narrow corridor, just near the end there. He steps on down towards it, and reaches the mouth.

Down the narrow straight beginning of the corridor he goes; and then around those several corner-turnings, his eyes wide and glassy.

The corridor is too long, of course. And far too quiet. And the walls press in, too much. But there can be no wavering in him now.

At last he reaches the point where he can see down to the fire-door at the end, and stops.

There is no repeat of that vision, which he has never stopped fearing since it happened so very long ago, of the corridor walls and ceiling and floor being wet-breathing grey meat stuck with carving-knives … but his scanning gaze is grabbed by the silhouette of a single, real knife, which has been stabbed savagely into the wall.

Yes. Halfway down the corridor, there it is: a long, lethal, red-handled carving-knife, at chest-height…

With growing terror he creeps onwards, surprised and suspicious to be perceiving things this time from his natural eye-height, rather than from eyeballs peeping out from in between his sawn-off ribs.

He stops in front of the knife and advances his fingers softly towards it, wary lest it zing out of the wall and slice his hand off, to be cooked.

He touches the knife-handle, peering closer in, until his face is a mere few centimetres away…

 

Teaser IX(iv), the hatch and the carving-knife

He continues, pointing the carving-knife ahead of him, maintaining his field of view so that it doesn’t quite extend high enough to include that ceiling hatch…

He approaches the end between the two doorways. Glancing painfully to the right, his entire body now streaming with sweat, he sees his reflection in the ever-moist surface of that bathroom mirror: the cage of his ribs is intact, this time.

He reaches through the half-light towards the stick, grasps it with his free hand, feels the hook with the fingers of his knife-bearing hand, and verifies that the hook is metal.

He raises the hooked end, looks up—and with a burst of sickened alarm he sees the hatch is already a wide-open square of darkness.

The ladder remains folded away, up inside the hatch.

His eyes travel downward.

And leftward, to the dark store-room door just beside him on the left: dirty-framed, narrow, tall, and pitch-black inside.

He peers into its poky interior, creeping infinitesimally forward as he does so…

There’s a grating squelch in the shadows and something half-seen. Clenching the carving-knife and the hook, pointing them both straight ahead, Jaymi leans in down, behind his weapons, eyes blazing.

 

Teaser IX(v), too much seen

He becomes aware of a new and majestically slower feeling, too: his final arrival, after all these years, at a point where he is desperate for simple escape, at last, from this relentless, escalating poison. Through all these years, the space that has travelled immediately around him wherever he’s walked—the unbridgeable space that travels around the body of a dictator or a plague victim—has sealed him in with this poison, which is the poison of too much power, too much knowledge, too much seen, too much damaged.

No way back down.

No way across that space.

No way to warmth and light again.

 

The above teasers for The Host in the Attic‘s Video-Book are here too:

And in the Vimeo showcase “Teasers for THE HOST IN THE ATTIC by Rohan Quine”.

And in the YouTube playlist “Teasers for THE HOST IN THE ATTIC by Rohan Quine”.
 

Here are the basics of what the novella is all about.

Here are some great reviews of it.

Buy The The Host in the Attic in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.

 

To watch any of the nine complete and unabridged chapters of the novella’s video-book format (for which the above little video snippets on this page are just short teasers), see:
here for chapter I;
here for chapter II;
here for chapter III;
here for chapter IV;
here for chapter V;
here for chapter VI;
here for chapter VII;
here for chapter VIII; and
here for chapter IX.

Buy The Host in the Attic in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.

 

Add Rohan Quine’s The Host in the Attic in Mobi or ePub or paperback format to Goodreads.

 
Rohan Quine, The Host in the Attic, literary fiction, litfic, magical realism, horror, dark fantasy, cyberpunk, contemporary, scifi, London, Docklands, Ontario Tower, hologram, search engine, attic, corridor, hatch, ladder, corrupt, Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde