We walked into the Seven Sins. Two little girls danced barefoot in the sawdust, and a bottle splintered on their legs. A Negress loosened the straps of her yellow frock and bared a breast, holding a plate under the black flesh. Buy a pound, she said, and thrust her breast in Daniel’s face. He faced the women as they moved, a yellow, noisy sea towards us, and caught the half-naked Negress by the wrist. Like a woman confronted by a tower, You are so strong, my love, she said, and kissed him full on the mouth. But before the sea could circle us, we were out through the swing-doors into the street and the midwinter night where the moonlight, salt white no longer, hung windlessly over the city. They were night’s enemies who made a lamp out of the devil’s eye, but we followed a midnight radiance around the corners, like two weird brothers trod in the glittering webprints. In their damp hats and raincoats, in the blaze of shopwindows, the people jostled against us on the pavements, and a gutter-boy caught me by the sleeve. Buy an almanac, he said. It was the bitter end of the year. Now the starfall had ended, the sky was a hole in space. How long, how long, lord of the hail, shall my city rock on, and the seven deadly seas wait tidelessly for the moon, the bitter end, and the last tide-spinning of the full circle. Daniel lamented, trailing the midnight radiance to the door of the Deadly Virtue where the light went out and the seven webprints faded. We were forever climbing the steps of a sea-tower, crying aloud from the turret that we might warn us, as we clambered, of the rusty rack and the spiked maiden in the turret corners. Make way for Mister Dom and friend. Walking into the Deadly Virtue, we heard our names announced through the loudspeaker trumpet of the wooden image over the central mirror, and, staring in the glass as the oracle continued, we saw two distorted faces grinning through the smoke. Make way, said the loudspeaker, for Daniel, ace of Destruction, Old Dom the toper of Doom’s kitchen, and for the alderman of ghosts. Is the translator of man’s manuscript, his walking chapters, said the trumpet-faced, a member of my Deadly Virtue? What is the colour of the narrator’s blood? Put a leech on his forearm. Make way, the image cried, for bald and naked Mister Dreamer of the bluest veins this side of the blood-coloured sea. As the sea of faces parted, the barebacked ladies scraped back from the counter, and the matchstick-waisted men, the trussed and corsetted stilt-walkers with the tits of ladies, sought out the darker recesses of the saloon, we stumbled forward to the fiery bottles. Brandy for the dreamer and the pilgrim, said the wooden voice. Gentlemen, it is my call, said the live loudspeaker, death on my house. It was then, in the tangled hours of a new morning, surrounded by the dead faces of the drinkers, the wail of lost voices, and the words of the one electric image, that Daniel, hair-on-end, lamented first to me of the death on the city and the lost hero of the heart. There can be no armistice for the sexless, golden singers and the sulphurous hermaphrodites, the flying beast and the walking bird that war about us, for the horn and the wing. I could light the voices of the fiery virgins winking in my glass, catch the brandy-brown beast and bird as they fumed before my eyes, and kiss the two-antlered angel. No, not for nothing were these two intangible brandymaids neighboring Daniel who cried, syringe in hand, Open your coke-white legs, you ladies of needles, Dom thunder Daniel is the lightning drug and the doctor.