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             ALAN MOORE'S HYPOTHETICAL LIZARD PREVIEW

                                                                                             by Alan Moore & Loren Lorente

Alan Moore's most critically acclaimed novella is coming to comic book form with stunning art by new sensation Lorenzo Lorente. This multi-layered story is set in a fantastic world of wizards and magical creatures, but still a place where human desires motivate everything. 
This special preview book shows some of the amazing pages, character designs, and costumes from Lorente as well as the first few pages of Alan Moore's story. Don't miss out on this sneak peak of the biggest Alan Moore book of the summer. 
 

        A HYPOTHETICAL LIZARD

                              Alan Moore

     Half her face was porcelain.

     Seated upon her balcony, absently chewing the anemic blue flowers she had plucked from her window garden, Som-Som regarded the courtyard of the House Without Clocks. Unadorned and circular, it lay beneath her like a shadowy and stagnant well. The black flagstones, polished to an impassive luster by the passage of many feet, looked more like still water than stone when viewed from above. The cracks and fissures that might have spoiled the effect were visible only where veins of moss followed their winding seams through the otherwise featureless jet. It could as easily have been a delicate lattice of pond scum that would shatter and disperse with the first splash, the first ripple...

     When Som-Som was five her mother had noticed the aching beauty prefigured in her infant face and had brought the uncomprehending child through the yammering maze of nighttime Liavek until they reached the pastel house with its round black courtyard. Yielding to the tug of her mother's hand, Som-Som dragged across the midnight slabs with the echo of her shuffling footsteps whispering back to her from the high, curved wall that bounded all but a quarter of the enclosure. The concave facade of the House Without Clocks itself completed the circle, and into its broad arc were set seven doors, each of a different color. It was at the central door, the white one, that her mother knocked.

     There was the sound of small and careful footsteps, followed by the brief muttering of a latch as the door was unlocked from the other side. It glided noiselessly open. Dressed all in white against the whiteness of the chambers beyond, a fifteen-year-old girl stared out into the dark at them, her eyes remote and unquestioning. The garment she wore was shaped to her body and colored like snow, with faint blue shadows pooling in its folds and creases. It covered her from head to toe, save for the openings that had been cut away to reveal her right breast, her left hand, and her impenetrable masklike face.

     Staring up at the slim figure framed in its icy rectangle of light, Som-Som had at first assumed that the girl's visible flesh was reddened by the application of paint or powder. Looking closer, she realized with a thrill of fascination and horror that the skin was entirely covered by small yet legible words, tattooed in vivid crimson upon the smooth white canvas beneath. Finely worded sentences, ambiguous and suggestive, spiraled out from the maroon bud of her nipple. Verses of elegant and cryptic passion followed the orbit of her left eye before resolving themselves into a perfect metaphor beneath the shadow of her cheekbone. Her fingers dripped with poetry.

     She looked first at Som-Som and then at her mother, and there was no judgment in her eyes. As if something had been agreed upon, she turned and walked with tiny, precise steps into the arctic dazzle of the House Without Clocks. After an instant, Som-Som and her mother followed, closing the white door behind them.

     The girl (whose name, Som-Som later learned, was Book) led the two of them through spectrally perfumed corridors to a room that was at once gigantic and blinding. White light, refracted through lenses and faceted glassware, seemed to hang in the air like a ghostly cobweb, so that the shapes and forms within the room were softened. At the center of this foggy phosphorescence, a tall woman reclined upon polar furs, the cushions strewn about her feet embossed with intricate frost patterns. The glimmering blur of her surroundings erased the wrinkles from her skin and made her ageless, but when she spoke her voice was old. Her name was Ouish, and she was the mistress and proprietor of the House Without Clocks.

     The conversation that passed between the two women was low and obscure, and Som-Som caught little of it. At one point, Mistress Ouish rose from her bed of white pelts and hobbled across to inspect the child. The old woman had taken Som-Som's face lightly between thumb and forefinger, turning the head in order to study the profile. Her touch was like crepe, but surprisingly warm in a room that gleamed with such unearthly coldness.

Evidently satisfied, she turned and nodded once to the girl called Book before returning to the embrace of her furs.

     The tattooed servant left the room, returning some moments later bearing a small pouch of bleached leather. It jingled faintly as she walked.

She handed it to Som-Som's mother, who looked frightened and uncertain. Its weight seemed to reassure her, and she did not resist or complain as Book took her lightly by the arm and guided her out of the white chamber. Long minutes passed before Som-Som realized that her mother was not coming back.

     The first three years of her service at the House Without Clocks had been pleasant and undemanding. Nothing seemed to be expected of her save for the running of an occasional errand, or the proffering of some small assistance with the pinning of hair and the painting of faces. Those who served in the brothel were kind without patronage, and as the months passed, Som-Som had come to know all of them.

     There was Khafi, a nineteen-year-old dislocationist who, lying upon his stomach, could curl his body backward until the buttocks were seated comfortably upon the top of his head while his face smiled out from between the ankles. There was Delice, a woman in middle age who used fourteen needles to provide inconceivable pleasures and torments, all without leaving the faintest mark. Mopetel, suspending her own heartbeat and breath, could approximate a corpse-like state for more than two hours. Jazu had fine black hair growing all over his body and would walk upon all fours and only communicate in growls. And there was Rushushi,and Hata, and unblinking Loba Pak...

     Living amidst this menagerie of exotics, where the singular was worn down by repeated contact until it became the commonplace, Som-Som was afforded a certain objectivity. Without discrimination or favor, she spent the best part of her days observing the animate rarities about her, wondering which of them provided a template for what she was to become.

Eavesdropping upon Mistress Ouish and her closest associates, patiently decoding their under-language of pauses and accentuated syllables, Som-Som had determined that she was being preserved for something special. Special even amid the galleryof specialties that was the House Without Clocks.

Would she be instructed in the art of driving men and women to ecstasy with the vibrations of her voice, like Hata? Would Mopetel's talent of impermanent death become hers? Smiling as she accepted the candied fruits and marzipans offered by her indulgent elders, she would study their faces and consider.

     Upon her ninth birthday, Som-Som was escorted by Book to the dazzling sanctum of Mistress Ouish. Her parched smile disquieting with its uncharacteristic warmth, Mistress Ouish had dismissed Book and then patted the wintery hides beside her, gesturing for Som-Som to sit. With what looked like someone else's expression stitched across her face, the proprietor of the House Without Clocks informed Som-Som of what might be her unique position within that establishment.

     If she wished, she would become a whore of sorcerers, exclusive to their use. Henceforth, only those cunning hands that sculpted fortune itself would have access to the warm slopes of her substance. She would come to understand the abstracted lusts of those that moved the secret levers of the world, and she would be happy in her service.

     Kneeling at the edge of the bed of silver fur, Som-Som had felt the world shudder to a standstill as the old woman's words rolled about the inside her head, crashing together like huge glass planets.

     Sorcerers?

     Often, sent to fetch some minor philter or remedy for the older inhabitants of the House Without Clocks, Som-Som's errands had taken her to Wizard's Row. The street itself, shifting and inconstant, full of small movements at the periphery of the vision, presented no clear and consistent image that she could summon from her memory. Some of its denizens, however, were unforgettable. Their eyes. Their terrible, knowing eyes...

     She pictured herself naked before a gaze that had known the depths of the oceans of chance in which people are but fishes, a gaze that saw the secret wave-patterns in those unfathomable tides of circumstance. In her stomach, something more ambiguous than either fear or exhilaration began to extend its tendrils. Somewhere far away, in a white room filled with obscuring brilliance, Mistress Ouish was detailing a list of those conditions that must be fulfilled before Som-Som could commence her new duties.

     Firstly, it seemed that many who dealt in the manipulation of luck would themselves leave nothing to chance. Before such a sorcerer would enter fully into physical congress with another being, the inflexible observation of certain precautions was demanded. Foremost amongst these were those safe-guards pertaining to secrecy. The ecstasies of wizards were events of awesome and terrifying moment, during which their power was at its most capricious, its least contained.

     It was not unknown for various phenomena to manifest spontaneously, or for the name of a luck-invested object to be murmured at the moment of release. In the world of the magicians, such indiscretions could be of lethal consequence. The most innocent of boudoir confidences, if relayed to an enemy of sufficient ruthlessness, might yield a dreadful harvest for the incautious thaumaturge. Perhaps he would be plucked from the night by cold hands with unblinking yellow eyes set into their palms, or perhaps a sore upon his neck would blossom into purple, babyish lips, whispering mad obscenities into his ear until all reason was driven from him.

     The intangible continent of fortune was a territory steeped in hazard, and she who would be the whore of sorcerers must also undertake to be the bride of Silence.

     To this end, Som-Som would be taken to a specific residence in Wizard's Row, an address remarkable in that it could only be located upon the third and fifth days of the week. Here, the child would be given a small pickled worm, ocher in color, the chewing of which would render her unconscious and insensitive to pain. As she slept, her skull would be carefully opened, revealing the grayish pink mansion of her soul to the fingers of one who abided in that place, a physiomancer of great renown. At this juncture, the Silencing would commence.

     Connecting the brain's hemispheres there existed a single gristly thread, the thoroughfare by which the urgent neural messages of the preverbal and intuitive right lobe might pass to its more rational and active counterpart upon the left. In Som-Som, this delicate bridge would be destroyed, severed by a sharp knife so as to permit no further communication between the two halves of the child's psyche.

     Following her recovery from this surgery, the girl would be granted a year in which to adjust to her new perceptions. She would learn to balance and to pick up objects without the benefit of stereoscopic sight or depth of vision. After many bouts of tearful and frustrating paralysis, during which she would merely stand and tremble, making poignant half-completed gestures while her body remained torn between conflicting urges, she would final