Opium Nights (Sell Me More, Sell Me More) (Aeris)

Above the black ditch, over Blackstock Road, an astral Highbury of the air: the element of mind, a stratosphere in which rarefied intellects might dance. In 1922 Aleister Crowley and his scarlet woman, Leah Hirsig, trust an occult print-job to a Highbury engraver—so impressed by the result that they move in with him. Hammond, the man in question, has psoriasis, complexion like confetti. Crowley reasons that exposure to the ninth-degree sex magic ritual of the OTO will clear it up. Leah is sick and thin, a baby lost the year before. She's finished typing Diary of a Drug Fiend so the Great Beast packs her off to Cefalu, the Abbey of Theleme. Lonely in his first floor Highbury flat, he feels the asthma coming back, reaches for his heroin, his storm fiend, with an easy, practised rhythm. He begins to nod. The cold pinfeathers of his holy guardian angel brush the shaven skull. There comes a gap, an abyss, a hiatus in magical consciousness.

From 1816 Samuel Taylor Coleridge lives near Archway with a Doctor Gillman and his wife. A lodger and a patient, Coleridge wears his habit like an albatross. The Gillmans treat him well, lend him their valet as a minder, following the poet at a discrete distance on his Holloway Road jaunts to drag him out of chemists' shops. Some nights he'll wander down to Highbury. On every girl he passes, he hallucinates the same dark features. Sarah Hutchinson, lost beyond light.

She calls him.

Gaslight and horse dung smeared against the cobbles. On his left, Whittington Park, the point where London's first mayor turned again. For Coleridge, there's no going back. Spread under a wide sky like toys downhill before him, Islington and Shoreditch. He can feel the city drawing him, its awful gravity compels a stumbling, tripping gait. He finds a resting spot near Seven Sisters Road. Above the Hercules Inn, turning gradually against the void, the Pleiades are visible.

Surrendering, he shuts his eyes.

And she is there, inflamed and nude, save for the ultraviolet veil and bridal train. Taking his hand, she leads him down Holloway Road and out of time, as if he never lost her. She breathes roses on his cheek, whispers futures that can't happen. Straddling the crescent moon, they sail above north London. Her pubic hair has been replaced with tiny peacock feathers, his saliva tastes like stars. Highbury coruscates, crusted with sixty-million-year-old nautiloids. He tries to kiss her and she breaks against his lips, disintegrates, was never more than a misunderstanding. He cries out, and remembering his eyes are closed, he opens them.

The sudden weight and impact of his own flesh. He's not passed a stool in weeks. Laudanum constipation. Rising to his feet unsteadily, he veers against the wind. Further downhill, terrible sounds leak from a sole illuminated upper window. Nightmare musics. There appears to be a plaque fixed to the wall, too high to read. He carries on, through an increasingly unrecognisable terrain. Ahead, the road spanned by an unfamiliar bridge, covered in scrawl. The phrase 'vandals for life' unsettles him. Behind him in the dark, the hideous tune falls silent. There's a rifle shot, and then another. Coleridge staggers on. Something is dreadfully wrong.

He can no longer see the Pleiades. He passes Dorset House, which seem a dirty hulk. A poster promises 'live Chinese evils' but he can't read properly, his vision swimming. Lanterns everywhere. A garish building looms at Highbury Corner. Outside, there's a girl with tea in one hand, napkin in the other. Sweat of horses.

Everything goes black.

Waking in Highbury Field with one cuff button gone, frost-patterned grass against his cheek. Ground fog encircles him, burning away in the first morning gold. Strange tunes still rattling in his ears, he stumbles off into the light. Into the Sunday bells.