They emerge slowly from cellars, sewer grates, tunnels and culverts, panting and grinning, like dead men drawn from their graves by the pull of a magic song. I can hear a sound coming up all around me, like chuckling, muffled and reverberating in burrows and caves. Catching sight of each other they begin to draw together at crossroads, walking with swift little steps, like a trot-walk, with their heads down, smiling bizarrely to themselves, passing and repassing each other in back-and-forth walking, and when they pass they touch each other lightly on the chest or shoulder, or on the back. That muttering chuckle rolls around them like smoke; I feel my throat tighten as if these chuckles were being forced down into it.

I can see some of them tremble. They fidget as they walk back and forth, they are becoming weightless, they are overflowing with energy. Now at no signal their walking becomes dancing, they link arms and spin in a crouch counterbalanced, they break ranks and radiate outward clapping their hands and stomping in unison. Two white shapeless flapping things batter against the chest of the one nearest to me, like moths ramming a lamp. I can feel the bow wave of their force roll me back from the inside and then I see those two white things are severed human hands hanging from a lanyard around his neck. Many of them are so adorned, with hands, feet, and dried hearts.

They all crack a riotous human whip in the streets. They brandish riding crops and woolly flails of human hair, thongs of pale curious leather—they charge through the streets shrieking like banshees lashing out at each other and everyone they see with their crops thongs and flails. The lifers recoil and dodge away laughing as they are struck. I see a streaked stark-eyed face whiz by flapping its arms, a soft blow flutters down my face and breast and power crackles down my body, I catch my breath and my legs and arms shiver with a mindless desire to leap and flail.

I’m in a group of lifers following the students now, panting and shivering. The students are clashing in the crossroads; some have picked up heavy steel garbage cans and bang them one-handed on the ground in a swift driving rhythm while others whirl with locked arms and stamp their feet. Rushing together in pairs, they take each other by the waist, and butt heads with a sound like wood mallets striking wood. They bash their skulls against each other, and their top hats seem riveted in place never budging, seize each other and hurl each other up ten feet in the air—now they have pulled searing-white knives from their coats and slash each other across the face, knife arms swinging regularly backhand and forehand. I can hear the thud of the knives as they hit, but there is no blood, their faces are unmarred, even when the knives hack at their eyes.