That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote by K.J. Bishop

swiped across a sensor on the handles started the motor. Since I had no card, I had to make do with Shanks’s pony.
    The tunnels were painted in shades of grey, grey -green and grey-blue, with polished concrete floors. They all had the same fluorescent lights and No Smoking signs, and they all smelled faintly of fly spray. There were cafeterias down there, with plastic tables and chairs and menus offering tea and coffee, chips, ham sandwiches, noodles and buns. Although people were buying meals without identifying themselves, I was concerned that something in my manner would give me away as an intruder, so I went without eating. I kept a lookout for a vending machine, but never saw one. At least toilets were fairly frequent, and I was able to drink at the washbasins.
    Nor was there a shortage of doors, marked with green signs, exiting the tunnels. I decided to follow someone who appealed to me, and if they went through an exit, to follow them. If I encountered someone who appealed more, I would switch to following that person, as long as it was possible to do so discreetly. Sometimes I had to let opportunities go, when to suddenly change direction in order to follow someone would have risked drawing too much attention. I simply did the best I could.
    After a few hungry and footsore days of this, one of my stalkees left the tunnels. When I followed (after resorting again to the pretence of tying a shoelace so as not to be too close behind), I found stairs that led up to the cheaper end of the casino mall, where there was a food court. The door at the top where I exited was lettered Only Authorised Personnel on its other side. Before letting it close I looked around to see if someone else like me was nearby, hoping to go through, but there was no one. After I had eaten and rested, I wandered through the shopping mall, found the atrium and climbed the stairs, and so came to meet the talkative woman. She spoke to me first, while I was leaning on the balcony, watching the light-show year cycle through for the third time.
    ‘ This is a holy place,’ she said. She had been writing in a book covered in red velvet, which she closed and put away in her handbag as she spoke. ‘It’s a place of sacred energy. Only our poor whitefella sacred, mind you. In effect, a cathedral.’
    I believed I knew what she meant. ‘A place of soul,’ I suggested.
    ‘ I knew you’d understand,’ she said. ‘Too many people don’t get it. Come and sit down. You look tired.’
    I sat. She kept talking about the casino.
    ‘Maybe I should go in there, then,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for something.’
    ‘ You mean someone,’ she said shrewdly, ‘don’t you? But you’re not thinking about them quite as much as you used to. Are you sure you’re still sincere in your quest?’
    I felt guilty. You were still on my mind, very much so. I wanted to find you, and I didn ’t want to find someone else instead of you. But somewhere along the path, I’d left behind the feeling that my own being was defined by yours. If anything, yours was defined by mine. I had lived so long without you that to say I couldn’t live without you would have been silly.
    ‘ One might consider,’ the woman said, ‘the influence of your work with the Department. It distracted you with the allure of procedure. In the bazaars, you imagined your goal in terms of a conclusive distraction. You committed mental adultery with the mansions, just because they were there. Passionate yearning for the unattainable is hard to sustain. You have to die, or go mad; or find something else, a good enough diversion. Like this,’ she said, gesturing at the atrium, where the coins of summer were dropping again to the strains of a cool oboe.
    I wondered how she knew these things about me. Even I didn ’t know about the Department, although it sounded familiar.
    ‘ It’s because I know you,’ she said. ‘I know plenty about you. For instance, you didn’t like the demons. You didn’t