I made it back to my hotel room and promptly lost my burger and beer in the toilet. I was sick off and on all night with a chilly sweat and the shakes. I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. Every time I shut my eyes, the room would begin to spin, circling in slow revolutions, like a record on a turntable, like a carousel beginning its circuit. Round and round and round I went, round and round, and from a long way off I could hear the music of the Golden Gallopers on the Brighton Palace Pier, the Wurlitzer playing its mad fox-trot to the night, while children screamed, whether with laughter or terror, I could not tell you.

These days it is all the same to me.

Wolverton Station

SAUNDERS SAW THE FIRST WOLF AS the train was pulling in to Wolverton Station.

He glanced up from his Financial Times and there it was, out on the platform, a wolf six feet tall with a scally cap tucked between his bristly, graying ears. The wolf stood on his hind legs, wore a trench coat, and held a briefcase in one paw. A bushy tail whipped impatiently back and forth, presumably poking out from a hole in the seat of his pants. The train was still moving, and in a moment the wolf blinked out of sight.

Saunders laughed, a short, breathless sound that did not quite convey amusement, and did the reasonable thing: looked back at his paper. It didn’t surprise him, a wolf waiting on the train platform. The devil would probably be at the next stop. Saunders thought there was a good chance the fucking protesters would be parked in every station between London and Liverpool, parading around in costume, hoping someone would point a camera at them and stick them on the telly.

They had staked out his hotel in London, a raggedy-ass pack of a dozen kids, marching back and forth on the sidewalk directly across the street. The management had offered Saunders a room in the rear, so he wouldn’t have to see them, but he insisted on a suite up front just so he could look down on them. It was a hell of a lot more entertaining than anything on British TV. He hadn’t spotted any wolfmen, but there had been a dude on stilts in an Uncle Sam costume, with a three-foot rubber dong hanging out of his pants. Uncle Sam’s features were stern and hateful, but the dong was scrubbed and pink and had some cheerful bounce to it. Slammin’ Sammy carried a sign in both hands:

UNCLE SAM PISSES IN A CUP
& WE ENGLISH PAY TO DRINK IT
NO JIMI COFFEE! NO SLAVE CHILDS!

Saunders had a good laugh at that, had enjoyed how it trod the line between righteous anger and mental deficiency. “No slave childs”? What had happened to the legendary British educational system?