This begins when I was still trying to grow things in the flower beds outside. I’m on all fours, plucking the scraggly weeds that sprawl between my hyacinths and begonias when I hear footsteps behind me. Unsteady and hesitant and slow, for a human. But of course, they mightn’t be human.

Finally, I think. A customer.

I stand and wipe my hands on my apron and immediately wonder if anybody would be put off buying a drink from a muddy barman. Behind me is the bridge, arcing over the abyss to the gravelly causeway running like a dull steel tongue from the great iron loop of the Inverse Gate on the right to the Obverse, on the left. Overhead is the rest of the Between, a great faceted dome of other iterations of my reality, billions upon billions of them. Each one with its own version of me and of the Gates. each resolving into more detail the closer you look and revealing its own sky with its own billion neighbours.

Beneath all this, standing on the causeway, is an old woman— a scar-faced, grey-haired, slope-shouldered old wreck. She’s staring at me. I’ve learned to tell who’s who, here in the Between. Who wants to talk and who wants to be left alone. Who wants a drink and who wants to talk. Who has time to burn, and who doesn’t have any to spare. And so I can tell in an instant that this old woman has nothing to spare. No time and no joy and no energy. Nothing that would make serving her worthwhile. Just looking at her makes me glum.

I go back to my weeding, but I can feel her gaze on my back, hot and probing and vaguely accusatory. The Inverse Gate’s lights flicker like an aging fluorescent, and some of the other gates in some of the other permutations arrayed overhead flicker too. The echoes redshift as they propagate off into the unfathomable causal distance. When things like this happen it’s all too obvious I’m living in a dimensionless bubble with neither up nor down nor yesterday nor tomorrow. I’m just a person and it’s entirely reasonable for all this to give any creature born of a mother a headache. Or so a troll told me once. A shame they’re extinct in my iteration, but genocide is to complex life as nausea is to eating.

I head back into the bar and a couple of guests have slipped in through the back entrance while I was out. One is some kind of fleshy flower curling in on itself and blooming again out of its own behind and I wonder briefly what sort of anatomy could possibly allow for that. The other’s some sort of flapper girl, with a bob and rosebud lips and long-gloved hands, except she’s got no eyes and no mouth and her cigarette holder, long and glossy like a black needle, sticks out the side of her head. They’re both sitting in a booth in the far dark corner where the air’s thin and the temperature’s low and turn to me when I walk in.

‘Anything to drink, ladies?’ I say.

‘Children’s tears,’ says the flower. The flapper mumbles something I can’t understand. The flower translates. ‘She’ll have a couple of shots of incest.’

‘Incest? I’ve got an old vintage around here. None fresh, I’m afraid.’

‘Which vintage?’

I head for the sin cabinet behind the bar and press open the red-hot doors and remember idly when words like hot and cold meant anything to me. Inside is an array of bottles each shaped like a little screaming head, and they leer as I pluck one and hold it up to my face.

‘Book of Leviticus,’ I say. ‘I think this one was an animal, though.’

The flapper nods. I take the drinks over and they leave fifty-two years as a tip. Then they resume talking, voices low and hissing like a river of razors.

The door opens and the old woman walks in. Closer now, I can see her face is fat-cheeked but hollow, a face gone stale with time. Her eyes are hooded and dull, and her mouth works slowly as if words were forming in her throat and evaporating on her tongue. She halts at the counter and stares at me.

‘Welcome to Between,’ I say. ‘What can I get you?’

‘I ...’ The old woman glances at the other guests. ‘Don’t you remember me?’

I squint.

‘Sorry, madam.’

‘Bourbon. Straight.’

‘That’ll be two years in human money, madam.’

She shakes her head, slowly, without taking her eyes off me.

‘I don’t have two years,’ she says.

I hesitate, and then pour her the drink anyway. She shoots it and shudders and puts the glass down. Her fingerprints are damp and oily on the clean glass and her undernails bulge with grime.

‘You could have told me,’ she says quietly.

‘Sorry?’

‘You could have told me. You could’ve told me what would happen.’

‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about.’

She spits on the floor and jabs a finger at me over the counter. Her hand lost most of the skin on it at some point in the past. Now it’s healed over and looks half-melted.

‘I made the worst mistake anyone in my entire world ever made and you ... you didn’t even bother to tell me.’ Tears follow the words. Strange crystal droplets more beautiful by magnitudes than the eyes producing them. ‘You could have told me to stop. You could have told me to just go home.’

She holds my gaze until I look away. Then she wanders out.

I follow her, half-unwilling, but dragged along still like a jellyfish in some deep ocean current. She heads down the gravel path to the bridge, and then to the causeway between the Gates. They calibrate into time dimensions. The Inverse lights up with the sweet blue glow of the future and the Obverse with the aching red light of the past. The old woman stands between them, at the edge of the path, with her shadows splayed at her feet like black petals. She looks at me, and there’s so much grief and hate in her gaze I can barely stand to look back.

‘You were right, though. I figured out what you meant,’ she says. ‘I figured out how not to have existed at all.’

She hugs herself. Then she leans back, and falls.

I watch her go. Then I look at the other permutations of the bridge in the firmament above and below. There should be infinite variations of her. There should be some where she’s dancing a jig and some where she’s turning into a flowerpot and some where she’s being beaten with a cricket bat. But in all of them, she’s falling. Falling left and right and up and down. Falling through the void surrounding the Gates. Falling in endless recapitulation like infinite glum seeds on a windless night.

It takes a while, but eventually she redshifts and disappears. I walk back into the bar and find flower alone.

‘Well,’ it says, turning inside-out and outside-in. ‘That was odd.’

*     *     *
At the end of each day I pour myself a nice tall glass of milk stout and head out onto the porch. When there’s customers about it's easier for me to forget that I’m nowhere, but silence makes it impossible to ignore. The Between’s silence isn’t of a sort that you, who live somewhere, who exist in worlds full of change and motion, could ever comprehend. It’s the silence of utter nothing. You can hear the valves in your veins flicking. You can hear a door closing six worlds away. You can hear the voices of your ancestors, telling you to fear snakes, and the dark, and a future spent alone.

I sit on that nice comfy chair Ichabod made for me as payment for a sack of salted nuts he used to buy a monkey’s soul. He still joins me, sometimes. Mostly he comes in the form of a drooling black dog with its tail high in the air and its mouth drawn wide in goofy greeting. If he’s in a bad mood he’ll come as a bat or a scorpion. Once he came as a giant oily protozoan oozing its way out of the Obverse Gate like a living slick. He slithered up next to me and sprawled by my left leg, stinking and silent, until finally I couldn’t stand the stench anymore.

‘Bad day?’ I said.

‘The worst.’

‘What happened?’

Silence. Then:

‘A whole world lost its imagination.’

‘How’s that even possible?’

‘They discovered money.’

That’s what Ichabod’s like. He’s good company most of the time, but he’s better company if you don’t speak to him too much.

While I drink I look up at the fractal permutations of the realities arrayed around me and watch the dramas unfolding in those distant and reflected reaches. A while ago a great empire lost a war a few realities over from mine and their defeated gods all trudged, war-weary and heartbroken, from the Inverse to Observe Gates. They had turquoise feathers in their hair and their faces were proud and grim, even though some of them were crying, and all of them were bruised. Another time a novelist finally got the recognition she deserved and her characters paraded between the Gates playing flutes and wearing shimmering waterfalls. Some of them were so bright I could see them without my binoculars, like novas flaring in some distant galaxy. But like novas also they faded in time, and soon there was nothing but the spasmodic rumble and glint of the many universes and their many peoples slowly turning experience into memory and then memory into myth.

There’s the sad ones too. The clutch of little girls in rags, sobbing as they marched from gate to gate, hounded by their own sharp-fanged shadows. A downcast looking werewolf-thing holding a bag of oranges like it was a baby. A little rat, terrified and confused, that stared for hours at the Inverse Gate before finally slipping through it. Stories forgotten before their time. Maybe they were conceited enough to think they’d be remembered forever. Maybe they forgot that memory is capricious and callous and cruel.

I get to the end of my pint and Ichabod leaves and there’s nothing for it but to be myself absolutely. This is when I begin to wonder about the big things. What does it mean to exist between worlds? Does it mean being real and unreal at the same time, like some self-aware wavefunction waiting for collapse? Isn’t this all just another way of saying I’m nothing at all? The questions drive me to my pallet behind the bar, with my cricket bat to my left and, to my right, my little golden alarm clock counting backwards from infinity. Then, I sleep. Then, I forget, just a little. Just enough so that when I wake, and my customers offer me their days, their weeks, their years, I take them. Just enough that I can tell myself that whatever I am, real or unreal, dream or story, it’s good to know that to everyone else, I exist, and will exist, forever.

*     *     *
The demon walks into the bar, naked and sneering and sharp-faced, thin dribbles of liquid fire plunging from the corners of his mouth and tip of his erect cock. He sees me alone and grins and his teeth are serried and needly in a mouth full of breath so hot it makes the air ripple. The bar’s coloured lights glint off them in demented rainbows. He cricks his back and flexes his hands, ready for torture, and doesn’t realize anything’s wrong until I’m nearly on him with the huge clinking cylinder balanced on my shoulder.

‘If you please,’ I say, pushing him back.

He looks down at his chest where the blackened print of my hand is slowly warming back to crimson. A few droplets of his fiery leakages have already scorched black freckles onto the wooden floor. I unroll the fireproof carpet at his feet, and once it reaches the bar I step back and nod.

‘Welcome to Between,’ I say. ‘The seats at the bar are suitable for you.’

Understanding blooms like rot on his face, and he deflates. Unpostured, he’s smaller and his little horns droop and his face is lined with something heavy and exhausting that looks an awful lot like regret.

What a peculiar form of hell it must be, I think, for a creature bound to sin to have a conscience.

‘Figures, on a day like this,’ he mumbles. I expect a demon voice, guttural and abrasive, but he sounds like a depressed accountant. ‘You serve my kind?’

‘I do not discriminate.’

‘How do I pay?’

‘Time.’

‘My time?’

‘Paying with anyone else’s would be theft.’

He snorts and schleps up to the bar and perches on one of the stools. Then he stands again and peers at it, suspicious, until he’s satisfied it’s not burning. He sits back down and points to the line of little blue bottles up near the ceiling and holds two fingers up. I pour him the screaming and begging liquid and he flings both shots down his throat one after the other and his guts darken, grey-black tubes pulsing like giant worms in the infernal depths of his belly.

‘I—’

The door opens again and a woman walks in, tousle-haired and wide-eyed and panting. She shrieks when she sees the demon and dives back out. Presently she appears at the window, staring. The more I look the more she seems familiar, and then finally I realize—she looks an awful lot like the old woman from before.

I turn to the demon.

‘You’re not going to bother her, are you?’

The demon licks his lips.

‘Would you let me?’

‘I have a cricket bat.’

‘Fine. Let her in.’

I beckon to the woman. She stares at the demon for a while and then slinks in and sits at the far end of the bar.

‘Are you here for me?’ she says.

A pause. The demon looks up, and at her.

‘Who, me?’

She nods.

‘Nope. Don’t know who you are.’

The woman sniffs. Her face crumples.

‘You should. I’m ... you should.’

The demon glances at me. I shake my head, and he sighs.

‘How much?’ he says, tapping the glasses.

‘Two years.’

‘Two!’ His eyes flare and his lips peel back from his teeth. ‘Fine. Take it.’

He stomps out grumbling about injustice and rumours and without him the bar is cooler and calmer and less interesting. I turn to the woman and now she’s staring at me, tight-lipped, eyes narrowed.

‘You knew, didn’t you?’ she says. ‘You knew what would happen.’

I take a minute to process. Then:

‘I don’t, yet,’ I say. ‘We’re not going the same way. Through time, that is.’

She looks at her fingers.

‘So you know who I am?’

‘I met you once. In your future, and in my past.’

‘But then how could I ...’ She shakes her head. ‘Never mind. None of it makes any sense anyway, now I think about it. Is it ... is it better? Have I solved it?’

I say nothing. She watches me awhile, then blinks. Tears fall onto her wrists like droplets of perfume.

‘I just wanted to make their lives better, you know?’ she says. She wipes her face. ‘Can you tell me, please? When we meet? Tell me not to?’

‘It would be too late by the time we meet. You’ll have already opened the Gate,’ I say. I pour her a shot of bourbon. ‘You’ll already be here.’

‘I wish I could take it all back. I wish I could close the Gates.’

‘You’ll find a way.’

Her drink halts halfway to her mouth. She looks at me, eyes wide.

‘Do I?’

‘Yes. I find all problems have solutions, in the long run. One just has to ask oneself what one is willing to do.

‘And my solution? What do I have to do?’

‘You have to never exist.’

She scowls. I see now the old woman lurking inside her. I see the regret and the unwelcome memories that will one day crust her soul like barnacles. I wonder how she’d feel about her older self. Would she appear as a stranger to her? Would she hate her, or pity her, or envy her? Would it be possible to do any of that without thinking, I’m doing this to myself? Meeting oneself from another time must be like placing mirrors in front of mirrors.

I pour her another shot and let her go without charge. She pauses at the door.

‘We’re not going the same way, right?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve not seen what happened, yet?’

‘I have not.’

She purses her lips.

‘When you do,’ she says. ‘Remember it wasn’t what I wanted. OK?’

There’s a strange dignity to her. She must have been magnificent once, I think. A burning sunlet all her own.

‘I will,’ I say.

She leaves. I look over at the little scorch marks on the floor and realize the woman’s left something behind too. Nothing as crass as the burns. But, a lot more interesting.

*     *     *
It happens the next day. Or maybe the next year—when you have so much time, the pocket change doesn’t matter. It’s after I’ve closed up, after I’ve finished my pint, after I’ve sat in my chair a while, desperately wishing I had a mobile or a laptop or one of those spinning gizmos from a couple of dimensions over that project visions into your head. I threw mine away because when I had it, I stayed up all night watching succubi fight-dancing with flaming swords and lizards skittering on the lush flanks of volcanoes and chocolate softening slowly on windowsills.

I have small dreams, you see.

So. I’m just about to head in when the Inverse Gate lights up. Not just mine—every single one in every permutation at every angle in the Between. In an instant it’s as if the far reaches of the universe had caught fire. I can just about make out other iterations of me, some in nightgowns and some naked, some half-werewolf and some with tentacles for limbs, wandering out of their bars, dumbstruck. There’s a hum in the air like a distant turbine overheating. It peaks. Then, a dense and tumescent silence.

Flaming demons and amorphous Old Gods and assorted other tumbling horrors pulse out of the Gate in clots, like flecks of scab in a fresh bleeding. They’re not what this is about. They’re just crocodiles, heading to the ford, waiting for whatever herds are about to arrive. I head inside and grab my cricket bat, and when I return I find a gaggle of demonic homunculi sniffing around my flower bed. The plants wither at their touch and the soil turns sour with dead bacteria. One of them looks at me and leers, innocently malicious, like a dog presenting the mangled corpse of a cat to its owner.

I wave the bat at them and they scatter. Their mother comes round the corner, a heaving heap of flesh, and they clamber into her through gaping sphincters.

‘There’s no need to be rude,’ she says.

‘Look what they did to my flower beds!’

She sniffs. I’m not certain with what.

‘They didn’t know any better.’

‘You should learn to control your offspring.’

‘I’ll thank you, sir, not to presume your parenting is better than mine.’

I glare at her. She glares back, first with one eye, then two, then a whole cluster that pop out of her flesh and bloom like milky tumours. I lower my bat.

‘What’re you doing here, anyway?’

She grows a mouth for the sole purpose of grinning.

‘Fresh meat, sirrah. Someone’s broken the rules. Someone’s opened the doors too early.’

I turn to the gates, aghast, as they light up again. The noise returns, growling, rising. I have enough time to whisper ‘Oh, no.’ Then the herd arrives.

They come through the Gate smiling and wide-eyed. What they were expecting I don’t know. Elysian Fields and dreamscapes, probably. Secret satisfactions to keep them going during the long grey of their real lives. I never find out what they were sold, but whatever it was it isn’t what they get. A young woman comes first, skinny and tall and dark-skinned, a piercing in her nose glinting in the unnatural light. Then comes another woman, older and larger and wearier. They see each other. They don’t expect the other to be there and they’re torn between gaping at the Between or speaking. In the end wonder wins over doubt and they just smile at each other and resume gawping. More join them. A man with a giant belly in jeans and a dirty checked shirt. A tall and handsome fellow with pocked skin and clean and slender hands. An owl-faced woman, scowling and bottle-blond, interrogating the others with buzzing and unwelcome insistence.

I wave at them. I point to the gate. I yell that they’re not ready, that this isn’t a place for them, this is a place for things that belong neither here nor there. That their smell and moist flesh will attract demons and spectres and other things, ancient things, things that sleep like giant snakes and wake only to feed. Mostly they don’t hear me. Some don’t understand. One, at least, listens and obeys, and she jogs back into the gate while her friends laugh at her.

So, I saved one. I did some good.

Then, the horrors attack.

I don’t watch for long, but it’s long enough. I see faces ripped off and souls dragged screaming from limp bodies. I see brains sucked out of ears. I hear screaming, and the worst part of that is how it ends. Sometimes suddenly and completely. Sometimes dwindling into whimpers. Sometimes, worst of all, decomposing from horror to despair and finally into moans of subhuman pleasure. Listening to those is like having a hand crawl up my throat.

I close my eyes, but it’s not enough. I walk back into the bar, but I can still hear the clamour. So I pour myself a drink, and then another. After the third the sounds don’t bother me so much. After the fourth I don’t remember a thing.

*     *     *
The next time I see her she’s young. She has a great mane of thick hair and bright eyes and the smile of someone who’s certain that other people want to be smiled at. She walks into the bar and looks around with her mouth open. The green lights from the signs, and the red and blue also, lick her mahogany skin in technicolour welcome.

I try not to look at her, but she won’t be ignored. She wanders over to the bar and sits with her hands on the countertop. She looks at me.

‘What is this place?’ she says.

‘It’s a bar, madam.’

‘Obviously. What’s it doing here?’

‘Where else would it be?’

She tilts her head.

‘Who’re you?’

‘I’m the barman, madam.’

‘Right, obviously. But—’

‘And I’m supposed to be here.’ I put a shot glass down and pour some bourbon into it and slide it, dark amber and crystalline, towards her. She picks it up and sniffs.

‘How did you know?’ she says.

I take a deep breath and break the rules.

‘You shouldn’t be here, madam.’

‘What? Why not?’

‘It’s not your time. You haven’t earned it.’

‘Of course I’ve earned it.’ She shoots the whiskey and puts the glass down and slides it back to me. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

‘This isn’t the sort of place you come to uninvited.’

‘Were you invited?’ She squints, piercing and analytical. ‘You’re human.’

‘I was. Once.’

‘So you shouldn’t be here either.’

I was tricked. I was coerced. I was seduced. ‘I was invited.’

She grins. ‘Lies.’

‘It doesn’t matter if you believe me. But this is not the place for you and yours. This is Between, and you’re still Of.’

Her eyes widen.

‘That’s who you are!’

‘Sorry?’

‘The Waykeeper. You’re here to tell me that this is a realm of half-thoughts, right? Of dreams unfulfilled? Of things halfway between reality and unreality, or something like that?’

‘This is all those places, but I’m no Waykeeper.’

‘Where is he, then?’

‘I don’t know anyone by that name.’

She licks her lips, victorious.

‘Well, it must be you. You’re warning me off, so it must be you, even if you don’t know it.’

‘Madam—’

‘Mademoiselle.’ She winks.

‘Mademoiselle. I repeat. This place is not for you. Terrible things will happen if you persist.’

‘I’ve opened the gate to dreams!’ She claps, and runs her hand through her hair. ‘Do you know how big this is? People will be able to explore their subconscious. We’ve already identified hardwired archetypes—what makes us afraid of snakes, and the dark, and ...’ She frowns. ‘I don’t know. Loneliness. I’ve already encountered a pair of Hero Twins. Like, I could actually touch them. I think they were Mesoamerican. But I could smell them. I could hear their feathers rustling.’

‘Mademoiselle—’

‘Do you realize what we can do with this? We can cure madness. We can cure neuroses. We can take trips to literal dreams. This place is amazing! What I’ve done is amazing!’

‘It isn’t for you.’

She scowls, petulant.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s not only for you. This space. This isn’t just the subconscious, as you put it. This is Between.’

‘Between what?’

‘Between everything.’

I come around the bar with my heart pounding and my throat dry and walk out. She comes with me and out through the flower beds with the gravel crunching beneath our feet. She slows, almost swelling with wonder. She takes in the arcing bubble of reflected realities stretching like a trillion-faceted gem overhead. Also the Gates, and their glyphs in languages from another universe, another time, another way of being that bloomed and grew and died its own long death from before any of the atoms of our reality even existed.

‘What is this?’ she breathes.

‘This is the Between. What you saw—what you’ve seen—was probably just ... It wasn’t things as they are. You came in through there, that gate, to the right, with the bluish light. Some of the things from your world will head across the causeway and through that gate, there, with the red.’

‘Where does that gate lead?’

‘To forever.’

‘Forever?’

‘I don’t know how else to put it. I don’t know how you’d understand.’

She looks from one to the other. As she does Ichabod comes up next to me, a tiny black fly, and settles on my shoulder.

‘You’re breaking the rules,’ he hisses.

‘I have to try,’ I hiss back.

‘Look at her face. You shouldn’t have brought her here. She thinks she’s going to live forever.’

‘I’m going to live forever,’ she whispers, eyes wide. ‘We’re going to travel the highways of time, my people.’

‘It’s not ...’

I want to say, it’s not worth it. But Ichabod’s right. I’m wasting my time. I’ve learned to tell who’s who out here in Between. I’ve learned to tell when people don’t really want to listen, they just want to be heard.

She wanders down the path to the purple confluence of the light of the Gates. Some of the other mes in the other iterations are watching her too. I look at them and some of them look back, melancholy and knowing. One of them spreads her arms and shrugs.

‘Come on,’ says Ichabod. ‘Sometimes you only learn you were fighting a battle when you lose it.’

I leave her, between the gates, between her future and my past. At least she got three free drinks from me, I think. At least I could give her something.