He was a nobleman. In name, indeed, yet of a house that had dwindled into mere insignificance. His once fantastic and colourful ramparts, flying flags of opulent greatness, were no longer colourful and the flags were mouldering, holey relics of glory. The size of his house, commensurate to it’s perceived importance in the Eerie, had also diminished - unsought tragedy after tragedy had befallen the patrons of his namesake. Strange events which struck in such regular patterns were such that mere coincidence itself could by no means explain. The very hot eyed Devil himself seemed to have lifted his gnarled and bony fingers in his families direction and claimed them for his own. Even then, as he was, sitting hunched over ruinous tomes of occult blathering, the call of the Devil’s hissing whispers bid him much the same - that he may succumb to that demented, spastic evil that had spent the lives of his forebears. All of his line were dead. Each falling before any great age and each to a set of mysterious and prodigiously evil circumstances.

  This was the house of Destruction and he its Duke. Jimmy B the Duke of Destruction. They the high priests, those forgotten Funky Monks of the Church of Mad Love. The old faith.

  Resigned as he was to a short life (he could not see why this cruel curse should pass him by) he lived his days in as much profligacy as the waning coffers of his house could afford. He had given himself over to the use of liquor and drugs to provide comfort to his existence. Truly, when Jimmy B was flying high the worries of an early and painful death seemed less cumbersome - in fact, blow it, he would say ‘bring it on! How should the destroyer destroy destruction?’ A lark, of course, but his point in tact.

  Dolefully he’d wander around his families mansion with no exact company. Of course there was his servants, low born squibby shits as they were. Dimwits with dimshits and dim eyes in dim lives. Yet above these he flew, drunkenly, as if they just automatons. Also there were those whorish woman. Prostitutes, maybe, vocationally, he never knew. Those plump woman strewn across divans with their pinkish womanhood spilling from between rosy thighs still slick with last nights sticky icky. Doughy breasts rising and falling like clockwork. Just play things, sweet nothings - the morning playing little mischief with his pecker arousing in him more sickness than playfulness. This is the come down and the soft, flaccid grub in his pants weren’t in no mood to rear it’s vein head.

  He was awake and very much sober, a bad time for him. The smell of soiled, sexy yesterday fell ghastly on his nose. He was fucking sick, and those putrid, automatons needed to leave now. She on the couch, there, asleep - her ruined, de-masked cunny looking at him, winking. Fuck being sober. OUT! Did he shout that or merely think it?

  Nothing happened.

  He stalked to the barren fireplace. It had been time and time again since he’d the resource to fill his mansion with the stink-less, refined gas pumped up to the Eerie at ridiculous prices. The prices were inordinately high, too high. Not because of the scarcity of the fuel but it had become a symbol of status in the Eerie, a thing only for the richest. Jimmy was too proud to suffer using wood in front of guests so he’d just pretend that he wasn’t fucking freezing and he happened to like it that way.

  Still, at the fireplace. He picked up a poker, ancient with a carved head in the likeness of the great Saint Jimmy - the God of fire - and weighed it in his hand... It’ll do...

  Whip, crack, snickedy snack. Bam he landed blow after blow on the oversized, swollen puss ball of an arse. ‘Let me stand next to your fire,’ he sang in his delirium.

  The poor woman opened panicked eyes, screaming, she scrambled to get out of Jimmy’s way. She gained her podgy feet and ran, her body jiggly jangling in the pale half-light. Powdered cheeks scored with tears and quiffed wig hanging askew on her otherwise repulsively bug like, bald head.

  That feels better, he thought as he stalked off around the mansion looking for other sleeping women to awake. A drifting, nebulous horniness woke his slumbering grub. Hello old friend, he thought and by the time he was finished with the last of the women his grub had stiffened to a painful extremity... He almost felt alive.

  These fucking women were undeserving. The seed of Destruction ought not be spent among the ugly faux nobles. His blood was meant for royalty, for the elite, the Queen maybe - there he’d happily spill seed over the hugely fat, sweaty loins of the Queen - but for now, his sexual appetite served by these hangers on. Women, some of houses lesser than his who wanted a leg up or the others. The others were just bored housewives, married to immensely rich chaps all sucked dry of womanly lust and interested only in money - dreamily cumming over bulging sacks of golden coins... oh man... hot, wet cum, spilt miles from their wives.

  This is life, Jimmy thought. But what next?

  Them old gods, those dry bones? A glass peered through darkly? How much faith had he left? This hellish existence had wrecked havoc on his soul. No longer was religion enough. Saint Jimmy, his namesake, that afro’d monk of stellar complexities, flying unbound through the cosmos on flaming guitar, was dead, to him at least, dead as dead man Jesus on dead wood - that holy, miserable rood vainly puckered by ill aimed spear marks. Fuck The Jimmy, the mystical He. And then Ziggy, the venerable She-he’d sexless incubus. Sweetly, dazzling in suit of purple, mismatched eyes glowing in androgynous cold beauty, where was The Ziggy? Man religion was dead, RockNrolla man, it has gone. Bye bye says those of Holy Seat, as they piss off down unknowable highways faraway, farrago, Figaro, done. SeeYaLater.

  ...Time waits for no man Jimmy...

  Satisfied that he was exactly alone Jimmy sniffed the air. Felt out the day. Some of the coldness had ebbed from his muscles, after the vigorous beatings, and was replaced with tired hotness. He scampered to the bathroom - appointed, once immaculately, with luxurious profligacy. He ran a scatty hand over filigreed shelf until he found the bottle. The bottle, in hand, brownish, filled with that tooth rotting, clinical sweetness he had come to love. His pecker slithered and jostled in his pants, ready to accept horny blood. Jimmy depressed the nipple of the pipit and drew liquid into the chamber.

  Unscrewed and lifted to slithering, ruddy lips. Drip, Drip, Drip, fucking bliss, let’s fade away Jimmy, out on sonic highways, in lands preternatural, stolen from vividly faraway dreams. BeBapDooBap.

  Hoodoo Jimmy? Jimmy Hoodoo? Time to go man, Hoodoo, let’s go.

  He opened crusty, puss filled eyes. He smiled. He felt himself. He got up from the bathroom floor where he’d been laying ever so quietly. His head swam comfortably. The drug was at work, wrapping him in a gooey bubble, providing a blessed cushion between him and the ‘everything else’. Yeah, man, today was going to be just fine.

  Snuff, nose, let’s go... Hey Ho. He was out in the disconcertingly clean streets of the Eerie. He stopped a less than human squibby shit, some ugly, pig faced, urchin child its dirtiness ruining the cleanness. Neither boy nor girl, just sexless something - who cares? ‘Vodka!’ shouted the Jimmy shoving some small coins into terrified hand.

  ‘Yes sir!’ squeaked Pig Face.

  ‘Fucking now!’

  Flip flop, bare feet slapping immaculate cobbles. Jimmy waited. He lit a smoke with a match and thought about life for a while. Pig Face flopped back, bottle in hand. Jimmy snatched it and let the waif off with a clip behind the ears.

  Jimmy stalked away. He was dressed in clerical clothes. Clothes of the Duke. Purple lightning bolts aglitter on his black robes which were cinched, painfully, at the waist by a golden cord. His heavy boots clipped a slightly off rhythm on the floor, musically, if you thought to listen to the beat. He swigged as he walked - the rancid liquor spilling down ruined gullet into the painful knot of stomach which pushed against ravaged half liver. His body was falling apart. Still, he thought, what life have I left?

  He arrived at the top of Terwall Station. The huge cavernous hole dug into raw earth. It was circular in shape the base of which was bored with unfathomably large archways the tops almost imperceptible in the darkness. The inside was floored entirely of white marble adorned here and there with ornate mosaics of lapis lazuli and emerald, polished to a shine so severe that the reflection of the stinkless gaslights could be uncomfortable in a moment of forgetful surveying. The centre of the station was taken up by the statue. The Statue was a monolith, a colossus of stupidly vain proportions. It depicted, in rich, shiny gold, the likeness of Queen Lyn Wyre as she lay on a divan carried by half squashed paupers - their malformed backs bearing great, fat brunt - yet all of them with a mask of grotesque happiness on their faces... Oh so very glad to be carrying the Queen.

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  Jimmy had been in audience with the Queen on no few occasions, he however had never spoken a word to the monarch. Just bowed his head as she floated past on her divan. He noted, on this morning, the heretical thought that as far as he could remember the slaves carrying her divan had never quite had that look of bliss about them. Rather terror, masked behind concentration. She was however that fucking fat - obscenely fat - rolls spilled from the divan in lava like viscosity. Forgotten jewels embedded and, in some cases, grown into fatty folds. She was most often naked, her divan itself having its own stink-less gas source, plate like nipples swinging limply off of the sagging flaps of fleshy tits, her oversized labia sorely moist with constant podgy fingered attention unless some poor soul was slurping hungrily at her folds trying to extend erect penis into the waiting cavern. It was status, rearing a Queen child, and Jimmy had never had the opportunity to mount most monstrous dragon to inseminate and engender prince-ling. Such was his thoughts on that morning as he gazed up at the statue. One day, maybe, he thought as he remembered the vainly spilt semen of the squalid night before.

  He stalked onwards, across the station to Terminal 4. Each terminal, 72 in all, were each their own bubble like chambers inside Terwall, and they housed elevators.

  The elevators were man sized metal containers set in masses of tubes all of which plummeting earthward towards the City, Lux proper. Jimmy stepped into a vacant cannister and pressed the downward arrow. He heard a pneumatic hiss and a brief puff of putrid gas smell and he began the descent towards the lower level of Terwall station.

  The cannister slid down its tube at a slight angle until it reached the outside edge of the monolithic tower whereupon it corrected its angle to vertical. Jimmy was looking out of the riveted porthole suspended in front of him at face level. From his vantage point he could view the whole of the East side of Lux... all the way to World’s End some 7 miles away. To his immediate right was MachineTown, the TinkerBelt, as the locals called it - esoteric machines rat-a-tatting to obscure rhythms. Who knew what them grease monkeys were up to. Some Catastrophes were clanking down streets pissing out blackish smoke, one or other of them breaking down only to be immediately set upon by shadowy figures holding wrenches and other tools. Fucking Greasers, Jimmy thought surveying the stocky mechanics in their dirty overalls.

  Beyond the skyline of cranes and factories, Jimmy set his gaze upon the rest of the city. The nexus of fly carts shooting here and there like little spiders sneaking up and down spun web. Below the fly carts were the ramshackle mess of buildings. Haphazardly leant against each other, drunkenly supported in endless stacks like an ill-organised library. The ancients, upon founding the city, had apparently made whatever shelter they could without any particular building skill nor the appropriate tools to hand - then generation after generation had built upon those unfortunate foundations, merely reinforcing shitty work to the effect of creating a most shitty city.

  Jimmy fucking loathed the city, he looked over it in disgust. The myriad of stinky gaslights creating a noxious, shitty haze so that all of everything seemed to waver, more likely to topple and crumble into just another ‘yesterday’ in human history. Heading downward he began to breathe through his mouth to avoid the fetid, overripe pungency that would shortly assail his nostrils. He thought of home, the beautifully manicured order of the Eerie. The gorgeous stone palaces, carved, lovingly, into living rock. The literless cobbles streets. The grandiose supremacy of Terwall Station. Yet still he continued his descent, he had work to do... He took a long, cramped swig of Vodka.

  Jimmy, at length, emerged into the crowded Terminal 4 in Terwall Station the Lower. He set about, heading, straight as he could, to the church. Terwall Station the Lower was a replica of that in the Eerie. The same massive archways and the marble floor littered with the same Lapis Lazuli mosaics. The only difference was the insidious grime which covered each surface. The sticky, grubby, pauper fingers dragging themselves over everything - filthy shoddy boots and scampy blackened bare feet muddying everything. Jimmy cursed the fact that he had to share part of his life with these sickeningly disgusting runts as he watched the ratty mass of humanity filling each and every nook and cranny. The whole plaza within the station was full to bursting beating like a jack-hammer. Sirens wailed, pedallers peddled the fanciful tune of their wares and passers-by shuffled by. Jimmy felt sick to his bleeding stomach.

  The centrepiece in the Lower Station was not some statue or other. It was The Train.

  The Train was a monster. The grill held the likeness of a gnarled, snarling demon with fangs protruding some three metres from lower lip. The funnel set with carvings of brutality and sordid sexual doings. The tip culminating into a pulsing penis, and when fire stoked, issued out plumes of reddish smoke. Each carriage inlaid with scores of paintings, inscriptions and decals. The Queen’s carriage, third back, read along its side ‘To be human is to be citizen. To be citizen is to love your Queen. For without love and without citizenship you are nothing, and nothing you will become’. Jimmy regarded the mild threat fondly. He tongued wispy thoughts in his mind, wondering what love he held for the Queen. The proletarian, these hoggish gremlins, bought each word and each gesture with fanatical devotion. On a visit men would slaver roguishly in her direction - whipping out swelling phalluses for her approval. Women would spend months fattening themselves, most being too poor would stuff clothes with hay and such, just to try and match her magnitude - they would wait in line for hours, days even, just to catch a glimpse of the obese monarch. Jimmy smirked to himself. He loved the Queen in as much as she may be his ticket to drag his dwindling house out of obscure decadence and back into the game. That twisting and turning of power distribution and table turning that preoccupied the noble houses. It was beautiful thing. Jimmy hadn’t the resources to play, though he dearly wished to. It was a dangerous game, perhaps what he found most intriguing about it considering his apparent affinity with an early grave.

  Time to go Jimmy, we gots to get on.

  Jimmy strode purposefully through the throngs of filth. The multitude, recognising the unmistakable air of ‘better than you’ that oozed from his distinctly silver hair to his polished, buckled shoes, moved out of his way. He swagged and sauntered through them, parting them, feeling the power that came with prodigal birth. He smiled cruelly, no one could confuse that visage with anything but sadistic malice. Jimmy felt king of the squibs. He liked it, this power was his and these pathetic fucklings were his loyal subjects. Long live the king - it echoed in his head, he wanted it.

  His side was clanging with painful organ failure by the time he reached the church. He stopped briefly before tackling the heavy wooden door which led to the narthex. The church was a mound of living rock, sticking conspicuously out of wooden apartments either side which, ill made, were slowly sagging closer and closer to the holy building.

  He entered into the Church. The blessed church of the RockNrolla. Ain’t it so? Bursts of colour in grey world. Sweet tendrils of candle smoke licking carved walls. Saint Jimmy - laid out in vibrant paint - clinging to the Cross. Fettered by nails driven through sacrificial limbs. Still, he croons on, that blessed song upon lips and seeping into flaming guitar. With his song he made the world, his tuneful voice crafting all that is beautiful. Blissful, sexy, beating on and on in the hearts of man and his conduit? Ain’t that the Duke? The Duke of Destruction himself. Ain’t it Jimmy B? Woo Wee, we in love with the mystical He. ‘Who’s he?’, ‘he be the Jimmy.’

  Peace surrounded Jimmy. The calm stillness of rock. The purple drapery. The eternally burning sweetness of the candles. He stood in the centre of the church and breathed it all in. His mind simmered into stillness. His restless spiritual antipathy receded - still there, just a little way aways, a spider on corner web, waiting - faith was still alive. Somewhere, he thought, somewhere indeed. Thought he was painfully aware how the Devil had crept into his heart and there made his shitty home.

  Jimmy strode to his office. Cluttered with books and tomes. Ancient artefacts from ancient days that had lost appeal to the educated at large. People, simply didn’t care about the old days - they prayed to Saint Jimmy, and dearest Ziggy and the other pantheon of gods who occupied the lore of Lux. Dylan the Jester, Curtis the Unfortunate, the list spilled on into the countable infinity, yet the mythology was lost; the stories, those that reached into Jimmy B’s decrepit heart and squeezed it into exhilarated beating, were dead. Though, the regular folks gave not a scuttering fuck. It was sad. The magic Jimmy B grew up lost in was no more. The church had failed.

  It was sobering yet Jimmy was used to it. He opened a tome - The Most Unfortunate Curse of Saint Curtis - it was bookmarked near the end wherein Saint Curtis was about to ‘drape said dreaded cord around mournful neck whilst beauteous Deborah had taken leave. He left once blessed yet wholly cursed note upon mantel for beloved failed’. Jimmy thought about the ‘Other’ the ‘notness’, that gate that he should pass through soon to live, as though new, in plains as yet unvisited.

  He smiled, Jimmy was coming. He could almost reach out and touch that noose.