Free One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel by Julian Cope

not the time for such enjoyment. No, now was the time only for Truth.
    Currently replete with ephedra for the foreseeable future, or so I imagined from the current swing in my step, one recurring event in my hotel room nevertheless disturbed and tormented my senses. It was the sound of the trains going over the points that crossed the main street barely 200 metres away. For I had experienced that exact sound whilst being held hostage chained to a wall during the kidnap sixteen years previously. But so similar was the rumble of those trains from my Su Talleri bedroomthat I knew our prison
must
lurk extremely close by. And despite my earlier Pavlovian nodding in response to Anna’s emphatic assertion that I must remain in my room, each successive train that clicked and clattered across those Macomér points only urged me more and more to slip outside this house briefly and discover precisely wherein we had all been incarcerated.
    And so, at midnight, I slipped the Yale lock of Su Talleri’s side entrance on to its latch. Heading to my right, I walked just 100 metres up the side road away from the main drag to the end of the street. But as I turned that immediate left I recoiled in horror and stopped dead. What? Right there before me, in all of its squared-off 1930s moderne grandiosity, stood the Fascist Cheese Factory of our nightmares, viewed now in brutal profile, crouched and stewing in its own shadows, its continued local infamy apparent by the sheer accretion of youthfully sprayed Pronouncements Diabolical and its crumbling façade still surmounted with those enormous and uniquely Art Deco concrete capital letters:
L. DALMASSO, PRODUZIONE ESPORTAZIONE FORMAGGI
. Great hunks of the factory’s walls lay as rubble around the base of the building, the second ‘g’ of ‘FORMAGGI’ target-practised to the floor in a hail of bullets, hefty slabs of cornering dragged right across to the opposite side of the street. Ultimate in its attitude, however, was the presence of two bent crowbars cast down idly upon the factory’s front delivery platform, two fabulous implements each more than a metre in length, and each tossed away as though nothing more important than a teatime break had curtailed the high jinks of the demolition engineers. More sprayèd spew from some local Black Metal kids decorated the iron grilles of the barred front windows, whilst the featureless ribbed industrial pull-down metal doorway was scribbled upon conscientiouslytop-to-bottom and signed simply with the name of the in famous torturess ‘Madame Bathory’.
    I ventured slowly past the cheese factory frontage, awed by its sudden proximity. Oh, my fucking fuck! Nervously I slipped down the narrow alley that led to the rear of the building. Halfway along, I kneeled down at the low windows and peered into the utter blackness. Having no flashlight available, I simply pointed the camera of my mobile phone at the window glass and pressed. Whoa. Immediately, the camera’s flash illuminated the whole of that creepy underworld, the rows and rows of tables, the stacks of wooden pallets, and those inhuman white wooden stalls in which we’d been incarcerated, chained. Now, even without the benefit of the flash, I remained compelled and still kneeling, staring into the blackness of those windows. I stared and still I stared. Then at last, I stood up and continued my way down that dark alley to the rear of the factory, where its foundations terminate in that spectacular ravine along which Brent and I had made our naked escapes sixteen years previously. But as I again traced with my eyes the path of dear Brent Garrett’s near-spectral escape route, it was for Dean Garrett that my heart now raced. Poor surviving Dean. Brent’s suicide after the kidnap had been instant, unequivocal, final. Dean on the other hand had become sensitive, New Age, mystical, fatalistic … Dean the Survivor they called him, more as a convenient mantra than as any real truth. Even I’d