As I measured the wood and cut it, I fought with the urge to walk away from Julian and his craziness. I’d never heard of Charles Manson then. I didn’t even know the word “cult”, but I knew Julian had some kind of hold over the troupe that was spooky. The other kids obeyed his every word. But why not? Julian had endless supplies of good dope. He treated the girls well and every guy had a girl whenever he wanted one, sometimes two of them. If Uncle Sam had offered as good a deal, I would never have left the army.
I figured I’d stay with Julian a little longer. I wouldn’t let his horseshit drive me away.
I could leave whenever I wanted to.
I worked till past midday then knocked off to look for the others and found the theatre empty. I was starving. Julian hadn’t given me the key to the shop’s padlock and I hated to leave it open, but I figured it would be okay if I grabbed a quick bite at Red’s. The worried look in the waitress’s eyes had nagged me all morning, so I closed the door tightly and made my way to the diner.
Velma came straight to me. She was pretty and maybe not as old as I had first thought, like the lines around her eyes and mouth came more from smiling than from age. She smiled now as she took my burger order, but I saw the same concern in her eyes. When she brought the food back, I took the plunge.
“Something on your mind?” I asked pleasantly.
She looked around the sparsely occupied room, gave a nod to the other waitress, and plopped down on the stool beside mine.
“None of my business,” she said, “but I’m kinda surprised you’ve taken up with Julian and his bunch. You don’t seem like an actor or a dancer.”
“I’m the . . . a carpenter,” I said. “I took that job.”
“I figured, but his last carpenter was an actor too, and a singer. He sang really pretty.”
I saw she was holding back, so I asked, “What happened to him?”
“He’s . . . You might’ve seen him. He’s still around. The local cops don’t have much use for panhandlers, but I guess he doesn’t really ask people for money and they haven’t gotten sick enough of him to run him off. I think they feel sorry for him.”
I knew she was talking about the grey-faced bum I had seen a couple of times since I hit town.
“What happened to him?”
“Can’t say for sure. One day he seemed fine, then I didn’t see him with the others for a few days, then next time I did, he was like he is now.” She smiled when she looked away. “He had a really nice singing voice.”
An overdose of something, I thought, but I just nodded. I’d done enough dex to know what being strung out felt like and, of course, I had read all the stories about LSD and what it could do to your head. One pill makes you smaller, another makes you crazy. “Do you know his name?”
“Bill maybe, but Julian always called him Brilly. You seem like a nice guy. I’d hate to see you get in trouble with . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence, but I understood well enough.
“I’ll be careful, Velma,” I told her, and smiled as reassuringly as I could. She patted my hand and went back to waiting on tourists. When she brought my burger, it was world class, though I hardly tasted it. I left her a dollar tip and gave her a wink and a smile as I headed back to finish my work.
As soon as I closed the Fantasia door behind me, I relit the joint Julian had left me, wondering if the troupe had returned. Listening as I passed through the theatre, I heard nothing besides creaks and stage ghosts. The pot turned my legs a little rubbery but I knew I’d be fine once I got to work.
Where were the others? On the beach, I guessed, with a little pang of lonely anger. Was this Julian’s way of making me take a part in the play? Or maybe he really needed the sets done that day so they could be painted before the weekend. I didn’t have more than another two hours’ work and I was already planning the cuts and joints as I walked out of the theatre towards the work shed, opened the door, and stepped into darkness.
Someone kicked the door out of my hand, slamming it. Combat instincts came back in a stoned rush as I swung into the absolute black and missed.
“Don’t,” a voice hissed, rasping and desperate, but not threatening. “I just want to talk.”
I reached for the light switch, but the voice repeated, “Don’t.”
I smelled him then, over the cut wood tang and the stale dope smoke. He stank like cat pee and rotten fruit.
“Brilly?” I guessed.
He grew very still and, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw his shape and knew I’d guessed right.
“Not Brilly,” he corrected me. “Brillig. ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves . . .”
I waited for him to start making sense. I remembered the knife rack and my hand found the handle of a big carving knife. The hair at the base of my neck stood up and I sensed the imminence of blood.
Brillig sang, his voice just as nice as Velma had described it, “He took his vorpal sword in hand: long time the manxome foe he sought . . .” Then he watched me in the near darkness. “You don’t know the song.” He sounded disappointed. “But you will, one way or another. Julian will show you.”
“Not me, man. There’s nothing Julian can show me.”
“I thought so too.” Brillig giggled. “And here I am.”
“He didn’t make you a bum. You did that to yourself.”
He made a grunting, growling sound. “Now I can’t be too near people,” he said when he found his voice. “You don’t know what it’s like, but you will. One way or another.” To punctuate his words, he opened the shed door, startling me with how close he had crept in utter silence. I gripped the knife, more than ready to use it.
I let him go, leaving a rank wake behind him as he shuffled across the courtyard and into the alley. Just as he reached the shadows, he looked back over his shoulder, and called out, “Beware the Jabberwock, my son.”
In the sudden afternoon light, I saw his face gone almost to bones, skin stretched and pitted, his eyes dancing mad foxfire when they caught the sun. He smiled and I must have hallucinated, because it seemed like he had double rows of teeth.
I finished the sets in an anxious blaze, focusing my tensions into the saw and the drill. I worked warily, facing the open door of the shed, but Brillig didn’t return. When I finished, barely an hour later, I closed up the shed and locked it. I figured if Julian didn’t have the key, he could break the fucking door down.
Just to be on the safe side, I took the carving knife with me, wrapped its blade with cloth, and stuck it in my pocket. I’d get a clasp knife soon, or maybe a gun, and if that fucker Brillig came near me again, I’d be ready. The theatre still echoed emptily, so I headed down the boardwalk, rigid with nerves. Julian’s pot had done nothing to calm me. I vibrated with paranoid intensity, trying not to look at the tourists as I passed them, afraid of what I would see in their eyes, or what they might see in mine.
When I got to the end of the boardwalk, I remembered what Velma had told me that first morning, that a bunch of the local kids lived at an old hotel, the Marlin, on East Thirty-Eight. I started the Galaxy and sprayed sandy gravel as I hit the blacktop, weaving eastward among the Winnebagos and Airstreams. Past the town limits, I saw the Marlin on the right side of the highway, behind a broken neon sign with a tailless, smiling fish, and an asphalt parking lot full of sorry cars and Julian’s rabbit-branded bus. Behind the motel, a line of low, grass-spotted dunes marked the edge of the beach.
When I climbed out of the Galaxy, I saw, past the parking lot, a line of weathered, coral-pink cottages and, beyond them, a swimming pool shining under a couple of sunburned palms. Laughter and music swelled from the cottages and hippies cavorted in primeval abandon all around the pool, tribal dancing to amped whoops of electronic noise, feedback from a tormented Gibson. I followed the siren’s call and saw Julian’s troupe at the centre of the orgy, a dance of naked frenzy.
It was more than just Julian and the Fantasia players. There must have been twenty or thirty kids in the dance, mo
st of them bare-assed. Sheena spun out of the sweaty storm and caught me in a hard hug, rubbing her breasts against me, licking my neck. She tore my shirt and bit me just under my nipple; she drew me with her teeth into the dance.
Someone gave me a joint and the pot bloomed, scattering my fear, rendering it irrelevant. I felt the music throb, my cock hardening as Sheena stroked it through my jeans, her lips red with the trickle of my blood, her tongue teasing my nipple.
We danced, vertical fucking to the crazy noise and then she pulled me breathless and insane, out of the dance, to Julian.
He handed me a glass of crystalline liquid. “Drink me,” he said.
I drained the glass. Sheena’s hands worked in my pants now, jacking me. I tried to meet Julian’s gaze, but he smiled and looked away. The dance had disintegrated into knots of people sprawled around the pool in inventive patterns of mutual orgasm.
Sheena’s hands insisted and all my anger and tension melted under her touch, the extremity of sensation burning new fire as she pulled me down to the ground, stripped away my jeans and took my cock in her hands. I had never been so hard.
She sat on me sure and fast, impaling herself and riding wild, until she came with a scream of pure abandon. I stayed hard, the world beginning to shimmer, my breath bright light, the space above me arced, the sky a ceiling and Julian’s face looking down, beatific, his cock hanging over me, until Sheena leaned out to take him between her lips. She ground down on me, gripped with the wet heat of her cunt, pulled me up into her, until she came in shattering colours, Julian’s spunk on her chin, then all of us together, in the moment, the golden glow of perfect orgasm.
Wonderland.
My anxiety uncoiled slowly, like a snake in winter, and Julian must have felt it because he kissed Sheena and told her to leave. I sat up, aware of how close I was to him. He was heavy but the weight of his naked body appeared solid, not flabby. His cock must have been eight inches long, even spent. I reached for my pants, stood up and slipped them on, carefully checking to be sure I still had the knife.
My heartbeat shook my ribs and the sky turned entirely to shades of gold and brown. What had he given me? LSD? Something stronger?
Julian put his pants on too and ordered quietly, “Come.” My feet moved like he was pulling their strings, like I was nothing more than a tripping marionette. I followed him away from the moans and the cries of the kids, all of them fucking and high.
We walked past the cabins, afternoon sun turning everything to crystals, the weedy grass on the dunes twitching and pulsing with the rhythm of wind and my own blood. As we cleared the last of the buildings, I saw Lorina – Julian’s Alice – waiting for us, wearing a short white skirt and a bikini top to match. Her eyes were black saucers and her smile was sweet and open.
Julian kissed her cheek and said, “Come and walk with us.” He gave me her right hand to hold and then he took her left and led us both into the dunes, towards the laughing splendour of the sea.
“This has been a good day,” he told me. “We rehearsed the play for the brothers and sisters who live here and now they see with new eyes that Wonderland is all around us if we want it, that the hang-ups and hassles of the world don’t matter unless you let them.”
“You got them high,” I said. “That’s all.”
Julian laughed, his bare belly shaking with amusement. “Oh what will it take to convince you?” he said, as much to the wind as to me.
The three of us walked barefoot through the sand, up the sloping warm dune to its crest, then down towards the beach. A nearly flat surf sparkled in breaker lines, foaming on the shore, washing soapy white, then gone again.
“Paradise is ours for the taking, Tom.” He embraced me, his bare, sturdy flesh against mine, still holding Lorina’s hand. She broke the grip and put her arms around both of us. I saw the moon like a faded ghost on the horizon, a pale, hopeless sphere. Lorina smelled like honey and roses and my cock grew hard when she laid her hands on my shoulders and back. Julian turned me towards her and I drowned in the dazzling gold of her hair, in the depthless pits of her eyes.
Alice kissed me and her lips were life itself, the promise of the world that I had earned by my survival, as precious and arousing as any kiss I ever knew, her tongue tasting me and pushing deeper, inviting a duel. I crushed her to me. She felt as ethereal as a woman in a dream, a spectre of infinite desire.
I loved her more than any woman I had ever loved and I wanted her with my soul.
She drew me down, Julian helping me because the sand beneath my feet felt treacherous as slippery glass. Together they removed my pants and Lorina lifted her skirt to show me a tangle of golden hair and the glistening cleft of her cunt. I moved over her, intending to fuck her, but Julian put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me down.
“With your mouth,” Alice said and she widened her legs so I saw her pussy lips and the wetness between them.
I had never gone down on a girl before that night. She smelled sweet, a little like vanilla, as I touched my nose to the ash-pale curls above her pussy. The afternoon light glowed golden around us and I pressed my lips against her cleft, then the tip of my tongue, tentatively at first, until I tasted her. Sweet as honeysuckle, slippery. I pushed deeper, opening her, finding complexities, folds of flesh, an evasive knot I knew was called a clitoris.
Her scent and slick heat amazed me. I had a lysergic vision of the first ocean pouring out of the cunt of a mother goddess and I drank it from Alice, even as Julian reached under me and took hold of my cock.
I’d never been touched by a guy before but it seemed right and natural. Julian handled me with rough expertise, jacking my shaft and lifting my arousal to new heights. Alice – Lorina – moaned, and I echoed her when Julian’s thumb brushed my asshole.
Lorina was the lush land below the earth and Julian the sky god manifest in the wizard, the mathematician, his lust measured and ruler-exact, and his touch upon materiality hot and irresistible.
Lorina began to cry out as my tongue and lips attacked her clit mercilessly. The rhythm was mine now, the same as the sea, the wind, the pulse in the sand, reverberations all the way to the heart of the world. Something cool and gooey creamed my rectum, then the thick head of Julian’s cock penetrated me, the sky god claiming the red horizon. Of course he knew the rhythm and he fucked me, sliding in and out of my ass in glorious, pulsing strokes as he worked my cock with his hand. Alice came, her legs wrapping my head, her hands tangled in my hair as my senses burned between gifts and giving.
She moved against me until she lost the breath to scream and, beyond her, I saw the sea turn to fire, felt the gush of my own orgasm over Julian’s relentless hand and felt him claim me, wet and hot, as he came.
We collapsed and shifted, then lay in the sand together, Lorina between us. My mind whirled and spread upon the dusk, but there was no shame, no regret, only wonder.
“Remember what I have showed you,” Julian whispered against my ear. “We are gods, all of us. We can be whatever we allow ourselves to be. Now, there is an important question I must ask you. Consider your answer carefully.”
I waited, watching the ocean whitecaps trace sunset fire.
Julian began to giggle. He seemed to suppress the laughter at first then gave way to it, merry and open. Lorina laughed too, until I couldn’t help myself and laughed with them.
We laughed until the sea stopped burning.
Then he found his voice and asked, still breathless. “So, Carpenter, how did you like the oyster?”
Thing about acid is, sometimes you can’t sleep for hours. After we left the beach, I wandered away by myself. The cascade of colour and sensation faded into grey and pearl. I embraced the encounter and accepted. I believed Julian and I thought I understood the lesson of his wonderland. So simple and so hard.
Julian had shown me true freedom.
I found a mat in one of the old motel rooms and stretched, watching the shadows crawl in pastel patterns until flickering darkness claimed t
he ceiling and then my eyes. I slept deep and without dreaming.
On Saturday, I watched the matinée premiere of Alice, Baby! from backstage, numb and placid with hashish. I had not seen the costumes before, had not seen the troupe in its glory, razor sharp in the delivery of their lines, each dance step perfect and professional. Every worn seat held a tourist; pudgy parents and wide-eyed kids. Sheena told me the evening crowd would be hippies, teenagers, and younger couples and there would be joints passed down the rows. When I wasn’t mesmerized by the vibrant motion on stage, I watched the faces of the audience, frowns on some of them, but most as entranced as I felt, caught in the glamour of Julian’s vision.
Alice danced better than anyone else, animated and innocent. I remembered how she’d tasted and how she’d screamed. I couldn’t wait to be with her again.
Near the end of the performance, two of the Waling cops, a big one and a little one, came into the theatre and stood at the back.
“Stuff and nonsense,” Alice said on the stage. “The idea of having the sentence first.”
“Hold your tongue,” cried the queen.
“I won’t!”
“Off with her head!”
The two cops looked at each other.
“Who cares for you?” Alice shouted. “You’re nothing but a pack of cards.”
The dancers whirled in a hallucinogenic rainbow, catching Alice and the queen up in their frenzy, spinning them, then all collapsing in a heap as the liquid, psychedelic lights dimmed to blackness absolute; even the exit signs extinguished for a moment.
Alice’s voice, Lorina’s voice, amplified and muted into an enormous whisper that settled on the hall like a veil, “Oh! I’ve had such a curious dream!”
Then the lights came back up and the tourists clapped and whistled before they shuffled to their feet and out into the afternoon sun, but the cops stayed until the audience had gone. As they came towards the stage, I looked around and realized everyone else had split too.
“What’s your name?” the big cop asked.
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