The nausea had also receded, but he didn't want to risk any motion until he was certain it had passed completely, so he stayed where he'd found himself when the episode had passed, kneeling by the light of a single candle-flame. Drew would come up the stairs very soon, he thought. He'd look at Will and take pity: come to him, soothe him, cradle him. All he had to do was be patient. He knew how to be patient. He could sit in the same position for hours. It wasn't hard.

Just breathe evenly, and empty the mind of useless thoughts. Sweat them away; then wait.And look! His waiting was already over. There was a shadow on the wall. Drew was climbing the stairs right now. Thirty seconds and he'd be on the landing, and the moment after he'd be coming to help Will back to sanity. There he was, with a glass of water in his hand, his trousers barely hanging on his hips, his body piebald with the marks Will had left on him. The flesh around his nipples flushed. The teeth marks on his neck and shoulders neat as a tailor's stitch. His face mottled. He raised his head, oh so slowly (in this grey world nothing had urgency), and a puzzled look came over his face as he stared towards the bedroom door. It seemed he couldn't make out Will's face in the murk; or if he could, failed to make sense of what he saw. He smelled the vomit, however, that much was plain. A look of disgust disfigured his face, the ugliness of his expression troubling to Will. He didn't want to see that look on his saviour's face. He wanted compassion, tenderness.Drew had hesitated now, and was staring through the open door. His disgust had turned into fearfulness. His breath had quickened, and when he spoke - 'Will?' he said - the word was barely audible.Damn you, Will thought; don't stay out there. Come on in. There's nothing to be afraid of, for God's sake. Come on in.

But Drew didn't move. Frustrated now, Will put his hand down into the muck in front of him, and raised himself up. He tried to say Drew's name, but for some reason his throat loosed a vile din, more like a bark than a name.

Drew dropped the glass of water. It smashed at his feet.

'Jesus!' he yelled, and started to back away towards the stairs. What nonsense was this? Will thought. He needed help and the man was moving away?

He lurched towards the bedroom door, trying to call out a second time, but his throat again betrayed him. All he could do was to stagger out onto the landing, into the light, where Drew could see him. His legs were no more reliable than his larynx however. He stumbled at the door, and would have fallen amongst the broken glass had he not caught hold of the jamb. He swung around, realizing in this ungainly moment that for some reason his witless dick was hard again, slapping against his stomach as he lurched out onto the landing.And now, by the light thrown up the stairwell from the hallway below, Drew saw his pursuer.

'Jesus Christ,' he said, the fear on his face becoming disbelief. 'Will?' he breathed.

This time, Will managed a word. 'Yes,' he said.

Drew shook his head. 'What are you playing at?' he said. 'You're freaking me out.'

Will's bare feet trod the glass, but he didn't care. He had to stop Drew abandoning him. He caught hold of the banister and started to haul himself along the landing to the top of the stairs. His body felt utterly alien to him, as though his muscles were in the business of re-orienting themselves. He wanted to drop back down on his knees to ease their motion; wanted to move sleekly in pursuit of the animal in front of him. He'd been patient, hadn't he? He'd waited in the grey until the quarry showed itself. Now it was time to give chase

'Stop this, Will,' Drew was saying. 'For God's sake! I mean it!' Fear had made him shrill. He sounded comical, and Will laughed. Short and sharp. A yelp of a laugh.

The din was too much for Drew. What little courage he'd had broke, and he stumbled backwards down the stairs, shouting at Will as he went - something incoherent - and snatching up his jacket at the bottom of the flight. He was bare-chested and barefoot, but he didn't care. He wanted to be out of the house, whatever the discomfort. Will was at the top of the stairs now, and began his descent. The slivers of his glass in his soles were agonizing however, and after two steps - knowing he was in no condition to catch up with his quarry - he sank down onto one of the stairs and watched Drew while he struggled to unlock the door. Only when it was open, and Drew had sight of the street, did he look back and yell

'Fuck you, Will Rabjohns!'

Then he was gone, out into the night and away.

Will sat on the stairs for several minutes enjoying the cold gusts through the open door. His gooseflesh did nothing to dissuade his erection. It ticked on between his legs, reminding him that for many the pleasures of the night were only just beginning. And if for others, why not for him?

i

There was a club on Folsom called The Penitent. At the height of its notoriety in the mid-seventies, it had been called The Serpent's Tooth, and had been to San Francisco what the Mineshaft had been to New York: a club where nothing was verboten if it got you hard. On the wild nights, moving down the streets of the Castro, the serious leather crowd had counted off their pleasuredomes on the knuckles of one wellgreased fist, and the Tooth had always been one of the five. Chuck and Jean-Pierre, the owners of the club, had long since gone, dying within three weeks of one another in the early years of the plague, and for a time the site had remained untaken, as though in deference to the men who'd played there and passed away. But in 1987 the Sons of Priapus, a group of onanists who'd restored masturbation to the status of a respectable handicraft, had occupied the building for their Monday night circlejerks. The ghosts of the building had smiled on them, it seemed, because word of the atmosphere there soon swelled the number of the Sons. They organized a second weekly gathering, on Thursdays, and then when that become overcrowded, a third. Almost overnight the building had become a paean to the democracy of the palm. An element of the fetishistic gradually crept into the Thursday and Friday assemblies (Monday remained vanilla) and before long the leaders of the Sons had turned into businessmen, leased the building, and were running the most successful sex-club in San Francisco. Chuck and Jean-Pierre would have been proud. The Penitent had been born.

ii

The club wasn't particularly busy. Tuesdays were usually slow, and tonight was no exception. But for the thirty or so individuals who were wandering The Penitent's bare-brick halls, or chatting around the juicebar (unlike the backroom, this was an alcohol-free party), or idling in the television lounge, watching porno of strictly historical interest, there would be reason to remember tonight.

Just before eleven thirty, a man appeared in the hallway, whose identity would be described variously by people who later talked about the evening's events. Good-looking, certainly, in a man-who'd-seen-theworld kind of way. Hair slicked back or receding, depending on who was telling you the story. Eyes dark and deep-set, or invisible behind sunglasses, depending, again, on who was recounting the tale. Nobody really remembered what he was wearing in any detail. (He wasn't naked, as a few of the more exhibitionist patrons were; that was agreed). Nor was he dressed for casting in any specific scenario. He wasn't a biker or a cowboy, or a hardhat or a cop. He didn't carry a paddle or a whip. Hearing this, a certain kind of listener would inevitably ask: 'Well what the hell was he into?' to which the storytellers universally replied: sex. Well, not universally. The more pretentious may have said the pleasures of the flesh, and the cruder said meat, but it amounted to the same thing: this man - who within the space of an hour and a half had created a stir so potent it would become local myth inside a day - was an embodiment of the spirit of The Penitent: a creature of pure sensation, ready to take on any partner heated enough to match the fierceness of his desires. In this brave brotherhood, there were only three or four members equal to the challenge, and - not coincidentally - they were the only celebrants that night who said nothing about the experience afterwards. They kept their silence and their fantasies intact, leaving the rest to chatter on what they'd seen and heard. In truth, no more than half a dozen people remained purely witnesses. As had happened often in the long-ago, but infrequently now, the presence of one unfettered imagination in the crowd had been the signal for general licence. Men who had only ever come to The Penitent to watch dared a touch, and more, tonight. Two love-affairs began there, and both prospered; four people caught crabs, and one traced his gonorrhoea to his loss of control on the stained sofa of the television lounge.