by S. A. Sidor
“I’d believe it.” I looked at Balthazarr. He turned to meet my gaze. Raised his glass. Did Preston know about his friend’s temper?
Preston waved to a cigarette girl.
She saw him and smiled, sashaying our way. Everyone in the room noticed her. Short brassy curls and dancer’s legs, her sparkly red and gold skirt bounced with each step. That didn’t completely explain the attention. There was an energy in her, bright and infectious, you knew she’d have a husky laugh and brains to match her sassy looks. She might be a cigarette girl tonight. She wouldn’t be for long. The world had big plans for her. She did too. When she arrived at our table, a sea of faces directed themselves to our table. There might as well have been a spotlight on her. She waved her hand in a practiced motion over her tray of goods. “What’ll you have, gentlemen? Cigarettes, chewing gum, candy. A flower for a lady.”
“Do you have cigars?” Balthazarr said.
“I sure do. How many?” Her gold pillbox hat tilted on her head so it made you worry it might slip off. You wanted to catch it before it fell. But she knew what she was doing. It stayed put. Her eyes were dark like buckwheat honey; her skin held a misty golden shimmer.
“One will do.” Balthazarr pressed coins into her palm.
“I’ll take a pack of cigarettes. Those right there with the dromedary.” Preston pointed. “Say, do you know if they have any champagne tonight?”
“Is it your birthday?”
“No, I’m getting married.”
“What a lucky lady.”
Preston took the cigarette pack from her, letting his fingers graze her wrist.
She pushed out her lower lip. “You might ask Glenda about the champagne. She’s the girl in the Egyptian getup.”
“Thanks,” Preston said. “Keep the change.”
She looked at the bill he gave her. “Thank you!”
Heads turned as she passed by.
The lights came down so the room was almost black. After that, the jazz played even louder. People crowded the dancefloor. Others shimmied wherever they were, at the tables – or on top of them – pressed against the bar rail, even the most hardcore gamblers couldn’t help but tap their toes to the drums and bass.
Preston got his bottle of champagne. It tasted like ice-cold liquid money.
As the night wore on, we hardly left our seats. I felt my face growing numb. Devereaux stopped by for a drink, reporting that Whipple and Fowler were winning at baccarat. He’d lost his last few bets and was taking a break to change his luck. He went off into the dark confusion of bodies to talk to a girl at the bar. He appeared ashen and either he’d had a drink poured over him or he’d broken out in a drenching sweat. In the men’s room I met him again. He was hunched over a sink, coughing or sobbing. When I asked what was wrong, he waved me away. Somebody’s night had taken a bad turn. Whipple and Fowler did win some money. But Fowler drew the ire of a Russian aristocrat at the baccarat table, and the Slav challenged him to a duel. Fowler laughed in reply, setting the man off, and the Slav exploded, clawing at Fowler’s face, getting both men tossed from the club. Whipple agreed to take Fowler to the hospital for sutures.
Despite the lateness, or earliness, of the hour, the crowd only swelled to greater numbers. Lights brightened and went low again. At some point, without my noticing, the musical act changed, a woman was singing, but I had trouble making sense of her words. It was like one of Devereaux’s poems, a jumble, with vowels missing or added in, ululations that didn’t seem like jazz at all but a spiritless cry from centuries and continents away. Nothing energetic, only pain. I even thought I heard her sing something like, “Yuyu, Yuyu.”
But I was drunk by then and doubting my own ears.
The singer announced they were taking a break. I was surprised to see Balthazarr standing in the shadows on the stage. The house manager came up to the microphone.
“We’ve got a real treat in store for you tonight. Who likes magic?”
The intoxicated crowd cheered.
The manager hushed them. “Easy now, my celebrants. I give you Balthazarr the Magnificent!”
I poked Preston. He shrugged and blinked, glassy eyed at the circle of light on stage.
Balthazarr approached the microphone. He had his black cane and a gleam in his smile. “I will need two assistants from the audience.” He shaded his eyes as he pretended to seek in the crowd for volunteers. For all our carousing, he seemed as sober as a hatchetwielding teetotaler. I could barely keep from toppling out of my chair. What was he doing?
“I hope he doesn’t pick us. I don’t think I can walk,” I said.
Preston put his head down on the table.
“You… and you, sir. Yes, you. Please, everyone. Encourage the fine gentleman.” Balthazarr began clapping. The audience joined him with vigorous applause.
Preston looked up in a panic. But Balthazarr hadn’t chosen us.
The cigarette girl and the bullish goon in a tuxedo stepped into Balthazarr’s light.
“Thank you. Now, I need everyone to concentrate on the top of my walking stick. Look at it. Empty your minds of thoughts, logic, and reason. Think only of a depthless void.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard for–” a heckler tried to interrupt.
“Silence!” Balthazarr’s command quieted the man, and the rest of room as well. The gambling rooms had emptied. No dealers dealt cards, no dice rolled, every wheel ceased its spin. People were transfixed on the stage. Every eye focused on the Surrealist.
“Stand next to each other. Very good.” He guided the girl and the goon together.
From behind the two, Balthazarr lifted his stick overhead. The cycloptic handle was too far away from the table for me to pick out any detail, or really to see it at all.
Yet I did.
I saw the wood-carved eye, the lidless orb no bigger than an ordinary glass marble – it glowed, and I looked at it as if it were right before my face, a few inches away, burning and wide open. How was this possible? I blinked, but nothing changed. The eye burned into me.
“This is an illusion called The Two Keys. I am the Locksmith, if you will. They are the keys.” The crowd chuckled nervously. “I use them to unlock…! What? What do you see?”
The silence continued. I heard not a breath being drawn, not a crinkle of clothing.
Nothing.
I was somehow seeing everything on stage in perfect clarity. I was at the same time staring into that wood pit, that unpeeled lidless orb, the cyclops Balthazarr raised into the air.
“Do you see it? Answer me!”
“We see it!” My lips moved. I felt the involuntary spasm of my vocal cords, the vibration of words formed in my throat and mouth, my teeth and tongue and lips, but without my control.
Everyone in the room had spoken simultaneously. Our voices speaking as one.
“Do you see a doorway opening, perhaps?” Balthazarr said.
“We see it!”
The orb expanded. It was like looking into a telescope. Stars, galaxies, dusts and gases. Nebulae. The cosmos. An immense shape swam across the vastness. Both dead and alive, for whom life had no meaning, death no consequence, it turned its intelligence toward the watchers.
Toward us.
On the stage, a long, looping tendril dropped from the murky ceiling. Then another and another. Dozens of them. They danced and interwove their lengths. One bundled cluster of thick, vine-like appendages braided themselves together and coiled around the cigarette girl with her tilted pillbox hat and her brassy curls, her sparkly red and gold skirt and her stockinged legs. The other tendrils entwined and tightened around the stocky neck of the tough bruiser beside her.
“Beholder from Beyond, God of Dimensions Unimagined, Lord and Servant of None and Nothing, I call to Yuyu! Take this Man and Woman. Falling Star! Un-Sun, be born!”
“Falling Star! Un-Sun
, be born!” every person in the Clover Club repeated.
The conjured cords snapped tight around the two volunteers and lifted them off their feet, carrying them high out over the crowd. Transfixed, we watched as they began to choke.
The man’s legs kicked. He grabbed at the coils cinching taut, closing his airways.
The cigarette girl twitched, her whole body encased in a bone-crushing vise. I wanted to react but could not. I felt at a distance from myself. An observer. A disembodied eye.
Behind Balthazarr, as if projected on the wall, a vision of the cosmos swirled. Inside that deeply dizzying vision, the immensity that pulsed and swam, came closer.
Closer.
Balthazarr’s body became a blur, vibrating with the Thing invading dimensions.
Colors beyond our visible spectrum of light radiated. But I could see them! Patterns overlapped. Ribbons and wavy bars of shifting fluorescence. Scribblings, blooms, and radiances like ink drops falling into dark water. I rubbed my burning eyes. Panic erupted from within me. The deeper I gazed into the wall, the deeper I was able to see. I peered out over vast distances, across the universe, agape, awestruck at its endlessness. While, at the same time, the objects floating before me were being x-rayed by unseen, increasingly powerful machines, exposing their underlying structures and the essential building blocks of all creation. Dizzyingly, my perception zoomed in and out. My brain felt pulped. My senses stretched past reasonable limits.
Others were experiencing it too, a stomach-churning cosmogonic seasickness.
The immense void loomed.
Then it roared. I have never listened to a dragon’s roar, but this one also breathed fire.
The crowd suddenly awakened from their communal trance.
Men and women screamed. A gun went off. The club guards drew their weapons and began shooting haphazardly, without targets, at the stage. Bystanders were struck down in the barrage of gunfire. A stampede for the door started without warning. Clubgoers trampled one another. They tore at anyone they perceived in their way, blocking their escape. From what?
They couldn’t name it. From fear. The spiking blood-rush of pure, insanity-inducing fear. It didn’t matter who they were outside the club. Outlaws, judges, and regular joes. Jazz lovers, flappers, or busboys. Rich or poor, society page veterans or everyday citizens out for a night in the city of Arkham. Everyone was included.
They all picked the wrong night, the wrong place to be.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I don’t remember going outside. Preston and I somehow fought our way through the river of Clover Club customers flooding out of La Bella Luna’s doors. When the rush to exit through the restaurant momentarily screeched to a standstill – after a clumsy, sozzled couple tripped and went sprawling over the threshold – a frustrated group of men picked up La Bella Luna’s choicest table and tossed it through the plate glass window. Shards sprayed onto the sidewalk. Marco the concierge looked on, mystified.
I couldn’t tell if I was leading Preston or he was leading me. We seemed to switch back and forth, one of us supporting the other who lagged behind, physically and mentally exhausted, our minds hindered by too much hooch and champagne and lingering visions of impossible geometries, the abysmal field of swirling objects conjured on the Clover Club’s brick back wall.
I must’ve blacked out briefly. I remember grabbing hold of Preston’s hand and hauling him down the block, dodging away from the police cars and paddy wagons racing to the club. We cut through an alley and hopped a fence, delirious with dread and a case of uncontrollable nervous laughter. Shadows darted past us. Ghostly human-sized smudges hastened down gloomy avenues, their features appeared partly erased; pencil sketches of people, quick facsimiles, running amok. Were these the other Cloverites fleeing a scene that got too hot?
It must’ve been so.
I was covered in cold sweat.
Preston gasped. His ribs rattled with spasms.
I was about to ask him what he saw at the club when a sliver of the void must have caught up with me, because the next thing I knew I was sitting with my back against the hard, weathered contours of Founder’s Rock, noticing my sock and my wriggling toes. “Hey, would you look at that?” We were still holding hands. I shook our conjoined fist. “I lost a shoe somewhere in the melee.”
“You lost a shoe, but you gained a glimpse into something beyond.”
It wasn’t Preston’s hand I was holding.
“How did you get out? You started the whole damned thing!” I let go.
Balthazarr held up his empty palms, defensive of my accusation. “What did I do?”
“Are you kidding me? People died back there!” I glanced around the side of the rock. Then I got up. Not a black Oxford wingtip in sight. My shoeless foot was freezing on the cobbled path.
Balthazarr waved for me to sit next to him. “I did a magic trick. An illusion.”
“You call that a trick? No way, Juan Hugo. Pardon me, but that was not hocus pocus.”
“Hypnotism. I put the audience in a trance. And you saw what you wanted to see. Somebody panicked and started shooting. That club was filled with drunken gangsters. Don’t blame me.” Balthazarr was taking slugs from a bottle of champagne.
“Where’d Preston go?”
“Home. His driver picked him up. You don’t remember?”
“It’s almost as if I were drugged. This has happened to me several times in the last few months. Maybe I have a problem with my brain. My toes are turning to ice. End to end I’m falling to pieces.” I sat, crossing my ankle over my knee and massaging my numb foot. Spain and the Colony’s Winter Show. It had happened to me again. A brain fog. Confusion.
“Let me see,” Balthazarr said, passing me the champagne bottle.
“What? My foot?”
He nodded. Before I could object, he pinched the toe of my sock and pulled it off. Then his rough sculptor’s hands began to knead at my chilled flesh. I expected to feel something like shock or embarrassment, at the least an awkwardness from the physical contact. But it felt marvelous. Instant warmth, an almost ecstatic relaxation. Tension was leaving my body through the sole of my foot. Balthazarr removed my other shoe and sock, without my stopping him. Two men in the park after hours, one undressing the other. There was an aura of social impropriety, but despite the incredible strangeness of this unexpected act, it didn’t strike me as weird. I was like a patient seeing his physician. I wouldn’t have wanted to explain that to the police. But they were otherwise occupied this night.
I tipped the bottle, closing my eyes. Balthazarr’s soothing voice surrounded me.
“My friend, Luis Buñuel, is a film director. He is also a hypnotist. He claims that motion pictures are a form of hypnotism. He writes that he is working on a picture in France. His boss tells him, ‘Luis, you seem rather surrealist. Beware of surrealists, they are crazy people’. Do you think that’s true, Alden? Are we like the unfortunates who live across the street?” Balthazarr gestured to Arkham Asylum, the hospital lit up like a haunted ruin. Were the massive gray cobwebs in the windows spirits or patients? The moon attracted them like bugs.
“I don’t know what you are,” I said.
“I am you. We are the same thing.”
“Who is Yuyu-Va’badaa?” I blurted out. “I’m not sure I’m saying that right.”
Balthazarr smiled. “It sounds like your own invention. I like it. Baby talk. A word the Dadaists might’ve come up with.”
“It isn’t. I heard it in Spain. And around Arkham, at the Colony. Now again at the Clover Club. All places you’ve been, coincidentally.” I watched him for signs of recognition.
The Spaniard shrugged. “Maybe it comes from your imagination. I cannot say.”
“I’m not making it up.” Was he calling me crazy? A person who hears voices.
“If you were… is there anything wrong with t
hat?” He stood, stretched. Letting out a gaping, cavernous yawn. “We must get you home before you doubt your sanity, eh? I will telephone for a cab.” Balthazarr marched off across the street to the asylum. Taking the steps two at a time, rap-rapping loudly on the doors. I was certain they would turn him away. But they didn’t. They let him inside. Minutes later he reemerged. “Your cab is on its way. I’m walking back to the Silver Gate. The air does me good. Ah, look, your ride is already here.”
A black cab slid to the curb. Shining, insectile. The driver: gloomy and lumpen.
I got in. Balthazarr murmured something to the cabbie. His voice buzzing in my ears.
As the car was about to pull away, I touched the cabbie’s shoulder. “Wait.”
I leaned out of the window. Balthazarr watched me, amused.
“Why don’t you live at the Colony with us, Juan Hugo?”
He considered my question. His eyes gleamed like smoky brown gemstones.
“Because, Alden, mi amigo, gods dwell apart from their followers.”
I sat there, unable to tell if he was being serious.
His caped figure turned, melting away into shadows and river fog.
I told the driver to take me home.
•••
Upstairs, I hesitated outside my apartment. I looked at Nina’s door. I wondered if she was still awake. Would she be angry with me still? If I woke her up, would I make things worse?
I decided to take the risk. I needed to tell her what happened at the Clover Club, everything I’d seen and heard. My conversation with Balthazarr. I needed her to tell me I wasn’t losing my mind.
As I knocked on her door, it swung open.
Nina would never go to sleep and leave her door unlocked. I felt panic rising in me.
“Nina!” I called out, rushing inside. I raced room to room. Empty, empty, empty.
Her bed was made. She hadn’t gone to sleep there. But her purse was in the kitchen. Cash in her wallet. Her apartment hadn’t been broken into by thieves. Nothing was missing.