I am quite and very dead now, I thought, and yet, I thought, and yet, I reasoned, and yet, I fathomed, I’m thinking this. And yet I feel myself breathing on and yet I seem to be in the same place, and yet there are my feet before me, and yet here are my legs and yet here is my chest, still waistcoated, and yet then, am I not dead? And what then is that terrible blackness just in front, and that great screeching and flapping and yipping in and out, and swooping? And is there between the flaps and shrieks still yet some Roberting? Still a definite evidence of Burringtoning? Indeed, indeed, there was.

As the long man stamped towards me, he had awoken the ceiling and he was now thick with it. Robert Burrington was bat-battling, and there I was scrambling up at last and was upright and heading away from the terrible screams and yelps and I found a ladder and climbed it, and then a skylight and shoved it and then was gasping upon the roofs of Heap House and then, in an instant, I could hear nothing, nothing at all.

On the Top of Things

I could hear nothing out there, nothing at all, because I could hear everything. Everything was calling out at me, every object that had a voice was roaring and wailing and singing, whispering, laughing, jeering, sneezing, talking and ranting, and I could discern no one noise out of so many, all was a hideous rush, a wall of sound, a great tidal wave that turned me deaf. I was an in-house thing, meant for the indoors. It was best for me to see the world through a window but not to step out, not to come so close to so many, many things. I was deaf, out there on the roof of Heap House, the heaps swirling beneath me in storm.

The rooftops of Heap House were the great province of the birds, the wattle and daub of this highest landscape were feathers and excrement. There were other feathered things beside the seagulls, there were pigeons too, scabby city pigeons with one foot or one eye. Though not as dangerous as the bats, it would not be good to upset the seagulls. They had terrible tempers. This was their home, after all, not mine. I should scramble over the top of a dome or two and find my way to the outside spiral staircase which ran the length of the building and was taken from libraries all across London. I looked about. I looked down. And all the view was rubbish.