Excerpt from "Castle Meregost"
“You’re
not going in?”
I
turned around. It was Max. He was
even more intimidating close up, standing in his long wool coat and roll cap.
He looked a little like pictures I’d seen of Shel Silverstein, and I
remembered how frightened I’d been of Shel Silverstein as a kid.
But
I gathered my courage. “Gloria’s
in there. I think she’s in
trouble. I don’t know what to
do.”
Max
looked at the line going into the warehouse.
“If she’s in there, she is in trouble.
The Arioch’s a Castle club. You
did know that, right?” I nodded. He
frowned for a minute, looking me over. “Well,
come on, then. Let’s go.”
“You
can get me in?”
“Mmm.”
He nodded. “I shouldn’t.
I don’t think it’s going to make a difference.
But you should see for yourself in any case.” He shrugged, a strange
gesture on a big man. “Yes,
I’ll get you in. But be quiet
until we’re inside. Don’t say
anything until I can get us to a place we can talk.”
I
nodded. Whatever it took.
The
wait in line seemed interminable, and the night air was cold, a creeping
early-autumn chill that fogged our breaths;
I envied Max's overcoat. But
I was good to my word and stayed quiet. After
what felt like hours, we were stopped at the door by a tall, pale bouncer with
sunken eyes and multiple rings in his lip.
He leaned over and said something to Max, who answered him in low,
equally inaudible tones. I was afraid for a moment that I’d been led on, but the
bouncer waved us through, and we stepped through the cold vestibule into the
Arioch.
It
was very loud inside, and very crowded, and full of sweat and smoke.
It took me a moment to place the song that was playing: the Cure’s
“Why Can’t I Be You,” turned all the way up and with extra bass.
More bodies than I could count were gyrating, or thrashing, or simply
standing and swaying, while red and blue lights flashed from somewhere overhead. Between the teeming crowd and the lights, it was nearly
impossible to stay oriented, and I had a moment of panic until I felt Max’s
hand on my arm. He pointed the way with a nod, and I let him lead me.
It
was then that I saw that the whole interior of the warehouse had been gutted,
and along the walls a grid of scaffolds and platforms had been put in to provide
a number of little upper levels, like opera boxes – or, it occurred to me,
chambers in a hive. It was up a
narrow staircase leading to one of these that Max took me, while I pushed down
my mounting vertigo and desperately scanned the crowd for Gloria.
I didn’t see her.
Thankfully,
the platform was enclosed, and draped with curtains along its interior.
I had another dizzying moment looking over its railing to the club floor
below; I hadn’t realized how high we were climbing.
There was a little table inside, and we sat down at it.
Between the elevation and the heavy draperies, the noise was muted enough
so we could hear each other.
I
went first. “You got us in.
You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
He
gave another shrug. “’We both read the bible day and night, but he reads
black where I read white,’” he said.
“What’s
that supposed to mean?”
“It’s
Blake.” No other explanation,
though that name jogged something.
“Alright,
be vague, then. But if you’re
helping me, help me. I want to get
Gloria out of here.”
He
shook his head. “You saw how it
works. Nobody just walks in.
Out, either. I brought you here to show you what you’re up against.
Look there.”
He
gestured to another box, across and down from us, bigger than the one we were in
and more elegantly curtained. Inside
it were eight or nine people of indeterminate sex, draped in long folds of gauzy
black, with faces painted dead white – not the black-and-white death-mime of
Goth fashion, but a pure, solid white over eyebrows, lips, everything.
They were sitting immobile and watching the floor, expressionless.
I felt cold.
“The
Ascenzi,” said Max. “They’re
running the show. You go hauling
your friend out of here, you can bet they’ll notice.
And you don’t want that, believe me.”
As
I watched, there was movement at the back of the box, and the beautiful blond
kid from the coffeehouse, the Angel, appeared behind one of the seated figures
to whisper something. The pale face
didn’t turn or change expression, but there was a barely perceptible nod.
The Angel withdrew – but not before turning his eyes up to where I was
sitting, and smiling. A dead weight dropped in my stomach.
Max
was pulling at his beard and muttering angrily, the first sign of agitation
since we’d come in. “A peryton. Dammit,
dammit, dammit. It couldn’t have
been a myrmidon or a harrower or something else ruthless and stupid.
A fucking peryton. I should have seen this.”
I
didn’t have time to ask him what he was talking about.
There was a shift in the atmosphere of the club, a tensing.
The music stopped, and started again: this time the Doors, and the weird,
not-quite-melodic tones that open “The End.”
A space cleared down on the floor. And
then I saw Gloria.
She
was in lavender gauze and black lace, a translucent gown that flowed over her
body in such a way that showed clearly she wore nothing underneath it, and there
was a silver chain like a tiara on her dark hair.
Her eyes were distant, glazed. A
murmur of appreciation went through the crowd, but to me she seemed terribly
small and vulnerable and frail. I
choked back the need to cry out to her, and felt sick.
I didn’t notice at first that Max had put his hand on my shoulder;
whether to comfort or restrain me was hard to tell, but I found, distantly and
to my surprise, that I welcomed it.
The
crowd parted, and the Angel stepped out of it to meet Gloria in the middle of
the floor.
“.
. .this is the end . . . beautiful friend, the end . . .”
They
started to dance, slow, elegant, erotic. The
Angel was looking right into her liquid eyes; he moved like a knife-fighter,
like a cat. And she moved in answer
to him, with her easy, fluid grace.
“.
. . of all elaborate plans, the end . . . of everything that stands, the end . .
.”
The
heat between them was palpable. I
was gripping the rail hard. Other
patrons in the crowd began to pair off or cluster in small groups, touching and
kissing or moving against each other. In
the box high above them, the Ascenzi looked down, cloaked and pale and
passionless.
“.
. . can you picture what we’ll be? . . . so limitless and free . . .”
Max
shook my shoulder. “Here.”
I looked over, and he was cupping a tiny cut-glass vial in his hand.
“What?”
“Drink
this. Don’t let the Ascenzi see
you do it.”
“Why?”
“Same
reason I brought you here. You need
to see what’s really going on. I
was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but I don’t see any other way.
Take it.”
I
took the little bottle, uncorked it behind the curtain, and tipped it back.
It was half a swallow of oily,
syrupy liquid that tasted a little like flowers and a little like spoiled fruit,
sweet and bitter at the same time. I’m
not sure why I drank it without question. I
trusted Max somehow, in a way I can’t explain, even though I found him
frightening too.
He
took the bottle back and tucked it into his coat pocket.
“Sit still for a while and let it do its work.
Some people think the Crystalia is a hallucinogen.
It isn’t. Almost the
opposite. It lifts the veil between
what you think you see and what’s actually there.
It opens the doors of your senses, just enough to show you what’s . . .
beyond.”
Doors
of the senses. Blake.
The Doors. That was it.
Soemthing about cleansing the doors of perception and seeing infinity.
So limitless and free. Max’s
voice went on, but it was a way off now.
“The
Ascenzi have been taking Crystalia for years now, of course, until it flows
through them with their blood. I
believe thay have senses we can’t even properly describe, now.
But it’s forbidden to take it if you haven’t been initiated in their
ceremonies, and come a certain way in the ranks of Castle Meregost.
To take it directly, anyway. They
have some diluted stuff in the incense they burn here, just enough so everyone
gets a little feeling of what’s out there.
Keeps them coming back.”
I
was losing sense of depth. Everything
in the club seemed terribly close and infinitely far off all at once.
I couldn’t tell how much time was passing; the sense of one moment
following another was almost an absurdity. And
everywhere I looked, people were surrounded by light, auras that glimmered and
flared and left long tracers whenever anyone moved.
The pattern they made as people circled and wove around one another was a
labyrinth, a mandala, a Word; I knew it had a sound, and if it were to be Spoken
in the right way, the world would split open.
And
Gloria was like a little sun among them, a halo of shimmering orange and blue
and purple flares that leapt and danced and spun, the Seven Veils done with pure
light. I wondered what had been
done to her to make her burn so bright, and I wondered where the Angel had gone.
Then
I saw the peryton.
The
Angel, the beautiful, grinning blond boy I had seen a few minutes ago, was a
gray shadow pressed against Gloria’s fire, a puppet. Behind it was what the Angel really was.
More than anything else, it was like a colony of iridescent flowers,
opening and closing on long stalks, fluttering and waving as if moved by strange
currents. It had tendrils too,
coiling and uncoiling, which it sent out caressing and probing and sometimes
moving through the dancers around it. And
there was something about it that seemed somehow inside-out, like something from
the deep sea that had vomited up its entrails.
Flexing, rootlike pseudopods shifted underneath it as it swayed from side
to side.
“The
peryton.” Max’s whisper was very close.
“They cast a human shadow. And
they’re hungry for something that we have.
You still want to go down there and pull Gloria away from it?”
I
shook my head. And then, before Max
could stop me, I looked at the Ascenzi.
I
saw the cold, pale fires that burned on them.
And I saw the things that were sitting with them.
I didn’t realize for some time that I was screaming.