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swing-kick through the sidescreen of the ornithopter, jackboot heels connecting with the pilot's side so hard he's kicked straight out the opposite door. The thopter rears and gyres wildly in the air as I swing into the vacant seat, grab its controls and rein it in.

So far, so good. Now all I have to do is get back to Fox's den in the Rookery before another flip-flop through the folds, and hope to hell there's some way he can patch this little rip in time.

Circus swarm above, roofs of the Rookery below, stray chi-beams pierce the air around me, friendly fire and enemy attacks; I swoop the thopter through and round the blasts of color, flick back the covers for the trigger buttons on the joysticks, and aim for an enemy thopter. Both buttons, keyed to the pilot's thumb-prints, lock me out.

Not good.

As a chi-blast rocks the whole machine, I whip out my Curzon-Youngblood Mark I chi-gun, shoot out the windshield of the thopter and start firing at the enemy, flying my thopter one-handed, dancing with danger, spinning through the air, a whirling dervish of the skies. Enemy thopters try to follow my maneuvers, guns blasting. One just manages to shoot another out of the sky. Keen.

It's like the Battle of Britain fought with waltzers—man, it's kinda lucky I don't get motion sickness. I turn to fire at a thopter coming in from my side and see my friend the pilot clinging desperately to the open door with one hand, scrabbling for purchase with a foot as, with the other hand, he aims his chi-gun
at my head. I duck as both of us fire simultaneously. He takes out the controls above my head; I send a chi-beam straight into his stomach, knock him out into the blue.

The thopter screams, the sound of metal shearing, and it starts to buck insanely in the air. Looks like it's time to go, and so, with consummate skill and truly freakish luck, I send the ruined thopter careering across the sky into the enemy vehicle marked by its position as group leader, while I twist out of the seat and kick-jump backward through the shattered windshield, using a two-handed chi-gun shot to blast me free from the ensuing carnage. I spin in the air and straighten out just in time to grab a handhold on another thopter as I slam into its wing. The pilot tries a desperate flip to shake me and to get the machine back under his control. I cling on, and the unbalanced thopter spirals downward.

As it reaches the right spot, I swing out and let loose, launched by centrifugal force in just exactly the direction that I want. I hit the bay window feet-first and come crashing through it into the rebel headquarters, Fox's den. Fast Puck stands to one side of the window, chi-lance blazing out into the sky. Coyote's lying bleeding on the Persian rug.

“You're back,” he says. “You better not have fucked it up.”

I kick my heels, sheepishly.

“How
exactly
do you define ‘fucked up’?”

“Look it up the dictionary,” he says, “under ‘Jack Flash.’ “

I clock the room. Something's missing.

“Where's Fox?” I say.

“Who?” ask Puck and Coyote simultaneously.

And suddenly the temporal aftershock hits us.

21 st March. I look for some sign in Samuel's notes, some scrap of shorthand telling of this world, my world, that it is the right one and that it ends well; but I can find none that shows the truth I know, with us holed up here in this ancient temple under the watchful eye of a Virgin Whore. The variants are endless— worlds where MacChuill is captured, where von Strann is killed—but in all that I've found so far we have been trapped, eventually, back in von Strann's apartment, retreating from the patrols, our escape routes blocked by all the checkpoints that have sprung up overnight. I have been trying to glean the positions of these all from the variants, but the picture is not complete; and how can I even be
certain these alternative scenarios are close enough to ours that I can treat them as intelligence? How can I know that the differences are not more substantial than the similarities?

I take hope from the fact that the world I know differs so much from all these others. Here it is the Beth Ashtart in which we are pinned down, biding our time until the Turks find us. Here all it took was a word from Tamuz to persuade me, and I ceased my foolish blustering at the Baron. With my help rather than hindrance, here Tamuz was back with the Scotsman before we even knew it, the car still running as we clattered down the steps onto the road, MacChuill standing behind the wheel, urging us to make haste, in his own colorful and guttural tongue of course, more understood by tone and context than by anything else. Here I almost think we might have made it out had we been just a little quicker. We almost did. As it was, we made it to the Avenue of Palms before all hell broke loose.

The car rattles a sharp right onto the Avenue of Palms, then shudders into an even sharper turn as MacChuill slams the brakes on, yanks the steering wheel even further round.

“Fuckin shite!” he says. “Haud on!”

The wheels spin, burning rubber, as the turn becomes a full 180 degrees. Along the avenue, soldiers are already running from the makeshift roadblock—a truck parked across the road—their rifles raised, calling for them to halt. Jack shoves Tamuz down to safety with a rough hand on his shoulder, trying to aim his Webley as the spinning car throws him off balance. MacChuill wrestles the Rolls to a stop. The engine roars. The wheels spin.

“Fuckin bastard fuckin come on tae—”

FUCK.

Jack hears the crack of the rifle and the thud of the impact almost simultaneously—is it himself that's hit?—and the car judders forward, stalls, MacChuill flopping down across the steering wheel, sliding down to one side. A spray of blood and brains on the windshield. God Almighty. Then Jack is firing at the Turks as—
move!
—the three of them jump from the car, from the crack and
tungoi
bullets hitting metal. They're retreating down the street, cover to cover. He's firing round a corner, holding the last two Turks back while von Strann and Tamuz run ahead to the next street where—

Von Strann spins off his feet as if a sledgehammer has slammed into his
shoulder. Tamuz is skidding, turning, running back toward Carter as the soldier steps out behind him, takes aim with his gun and—

Crack!

Tamuz stumbles—
crack!
—and then just drops.

Jack stares at the soldier. He's bringing his pistol round, but there's another shot already fired, a splatter of blood and bone from the man's face. Von Strann on the ground, rifle still pointed at where the Turk was standing.

Jack makes it as far as Tamuz's body before he falls to his knees.

And so, if we look at what survives of the original scripts and storyboards for
The Sins of Sodom
, we see many elements that foreshadow not only Griffiths's later oeuvre but also epics by directors such as Kubrik in
Spartacus
, Lean in
Lawrence of Arabia
, or Korda in
Achilles.
We cannot help but recognize, for instance, something of
The Ten Commandments’
Exodus scene in the escape of Lot and his household, especially when we consider that Griffiths planned to hire two thousand extras to make up Lot's “household.” Many comparisons have been drawn between the famous “snails and oysters” speech in
Spartacus
and the “milk and honey” speech spoken by the young slave boy Tamuz to the Hebrew warrior, Jonathan, in
The Sins of Sodom;
while
Spartacus
reverses the roles of seducer and seduced, slave and master, it may well be that Kubrik's script was in some way influenced by a passing acquaintance with the Griffiths script (s). Similarly, the subtle homoeroticism of Achilles mourning Patroclus in Korda's 1957 classic may well have some of its roots in the scene of Jonathan weeping over Tamuz's body.

But, as it was, the studio balked and the funding for
The Sins of Sodom
fell through; had Griffiths been granted the opportunity to follow through on his ideas, however—our imagination reels. The film would certainly have generated a level of controversy greater than
Intolerance
when it was released, or
Birth of a Nation
today. Even the ending of the film, in which God destroys the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, saving only the pure and good people of the household of Lot, owes more to pragmatics than to ethics, exemplifying the so-called Hypocritic Code of the time—if you play, you gotta pay—whereby the most heinous (and of course thrilling) crimes could be enacted onscreen as long as the perpetrator was punished at the end of the movie. With the ending as a start
point, then, as we can see from the surviving scripts, Griffiths seems to have set out to test the tenuous boundaries between the permissible and the permissive, with scenes of hedonism and excess patently contrived to sate a prurient public's appetite for the scandalous and the sensual.

It is, indeed, little wonder that Erich Von Strohn, the author of the pious and somewhat turgid doorstop of a biblical blockbuster on which the script was based, decried the proposed movie as “a vile perversion not only of my own humble but honest work, but of the Good Book itself.” Von Strohn threatened to file a lawsuit, claiming that the script was obscene and, in effect, a defamation of his character, since it gloried in the very outrages that he reviled. With the Church, the censors and all the powers of the Moral Right charging Griffiths with gross sensationalism and flagrant blasphemy, the pressure on the studio rose until even the potentials of such explosive hype were outweighed by the threat of outright hostility. Such was the venom and invective of the campaigners that one almost wonders whether, had the film ever actually been shot and screened, great mobs of torch-brandishing peasants would have swept across the country, burning every movie theater in their path in their righteous zeal and indignation, heaping up great bonfires of the sordid and salacious reels.

And of course, shamefully, this might as well have been the actual scenario; of the all-too-few copies of the original script and its rewrites the vast extent of it has long ago been either lost or destroyed. Over the years the abandoned project was forgotten, buried in a drift of Hollywood dream-dust, until so much is lost now that even the hope of reconstructing any one version of the script in its entirety must be, like the film itself, abandoned to the sands of time. Bibliographies of Griffiths make no mention of
The Sins of Sodom.
Why should they? After all, he never made the film. And to all too many serious students of the cinema, why, it is little more than a brief hiccup in the great man's career, one which to all intents and purposes might never have happened. And yet, like some archaeologist of the silver screen, we
can
uncover some of the forgotten fragments, perhaps dust them off and see how they fit into the history of cinema.

The fall of Sodom, for instance, at the climax of the movie, resonates with everything from the Odessa Steps scene in
Battleship Potemkin
to the closing of the Warsaw Ghetto in
Schiniler's List.
And then of course there is the capture and torture of the heroes, the Hittite prince Istran and the young Hebrew warrior Jonathan…

21 st March. So we wait now in the Beth Ashtart, behind a barricade of old church pews and display cases—the heritage of this place all turned now to the most pragmatic purposes, lifted and dragged from their places across the mosaic floor, piled up with a desperate compromise of haste and quiet that has left both the Baron and myself exhausted.

It is a strange scene, quiet and dark. The clutter of cabinets and cases cleared from the center of the hall and heaped in a jumble at the door, there is a strange tranquillity to the place now. Von Strann lies, passed out, on one of the pews, pale and weak from the loss of blood, but patched up to the best of my abilities. Tamuz lies upon the altar, watched over by the Weeping Angel, as she's known, this painted statue that might be the prototype of all Madonnas, the original Venus weeping for Adonis. I can imagine this museum as it once was, as a temple, a place of healing and mourning, prayers for the dying and the dead.

Von Strann should pull through though, I think; he has more strength by far than I'd given him credit for; he's twice the man of many soldiers I've known, I should say, the way he suffered my clumsy excavation of the bullet from his shoulder. I'm no surgeon at the best of times; it's only fortunate that, with no windows in this place, no danger of the Turks spotting our candlelight, at least I wasn't digging around in the pitch-black.

There is a part of me that wants to pray now to this last teraph, this heathen goddess with her glory long gone, scarlet and purple peeled or faded to plaster white and pale blue, one jeweled eye and one empty socket, with the deep gouges on the cheek below that give this Ashtaroth her modern name. I want to pray to this Weeping Angel, to watch over us now the best she can.