by Skyler White
Exhausted, Dominic sat on the little settee and rubbed his sleep-starved eyes. The air around Gaehod’s newest conquest had seemed to shimmer, giving her a momentary illusion of ghostly wings behind her slender back. Dominic needed to get some rest before he ended up babbling on the ground beside his new acquaintance.
“… can’t figure it out,” the rambling drunk concluded.
“Can’t figure what out?” Dominic asked, holding his focus to the collapse of a man at his feet.
“Jesus. I thought shrinks were supposed to be good listeners.”
“Shrinks are good listeners when they’re paid to be,” Dominic said. “Besides, I’m not a psychiatrist,” he clarified. “I’m a neuroscientist.”
“What’s the difference?” The pale man was tipping again.
“Neuroscience is science. It deals with objective reality. Things you can prove and test. Real things. Brains, chemicals.”
“That’s bad shit.”
“What?”
“Brain chemicals.” He nodded gravely.
Dominic decided not to argue, although the statement was absurd. The brain was chemicals. Chemicals and electricity and very little else.
“You wanna scan my brain?” Craning his neck over his sagging shoulder, the dissipated ruin eyed Dominic through thick bronze lenses. What flesh was visible behind his goggles, hair, and stubble was pale and bruised. Everything about him, from his poor muscle tone and slurred speech to his disheveled bathrobe and smell of gin, indicated a state of chronic physical crisis, but he was still vaguely, irritatingly familiar to Dominic. At least he triggered no taste aura and no memory-like seizure.
“Do I know you?”
“No, I’m famous. I’m Alyx—Alex with a ‘y.’ It’s just my rock star name. I can’t remember the other one.”
“Oh.” Dominic was relieved. “Are you ill?”
“Nah, just fucked. Like the rest of us.”
“What has Gaehod told you about yourself?”
The tilting head nodded.
“Did he tell you you’re damned?” Dominic pressed him.
“Just cursed.”
Dominic stifled a grunt of rage. Gaehod was a menace to the mental health of anyone he got close to: this wreck of a man on the ground beside him, that intriguing, beautiful woman he’d just led off. Moral outrage twisted in Dominic’s empty stomach.
“Gaehod has taught you to think of yourself as cursed,” he said with a calm held between gritted teeth, “but you don’t have to think of yourself that way. You can learn to challenge that kind of thinking, to interact with more compassion toward yourself.”
“Damn, so that’s neuroscience, eh?”
“Well, no.” Dominic drummed his fingers on the strap of his laptop bag in irritation. “Changing thinking habits is more the work of therapy.”
“You said you’re not a shrink.”
“I’m not. I just want you to know you don’t have to think of yourself as cursed.”
“Don’t you?”
“Think of myself as cursed? Absolutely not.”
Dominic was here to do Madalene’s research, but there was nothing saying he couldn’t do a little evangelizing on his own while he was underground. Gaehod wouldn’t like it, but if Dominic registered, there would be nothing to stop him from reaching out to people like this poor, muddled man and that captivating proto-vampire. He could study and influence. Observe and persuade.
“Damn, I can’t imagine what that would be like—to feel all squeaky clean.” Confusion played over the rock star’s lax face like shadows over mud. He hiccupped. “Must be nice. It’s not me though, I’m cursed all right. Everything looks like bullshit to me.” Alyx hugged the halves of his bathrobe closed across his emaciated chest. “I can’t believe in anything, so I got no meaning. And I can’t do shit about it. No power.”
He tightened the frayed bandanna that served as his filthy bathrobe’s makeshift belt and curled up on the floor. “The curse of modernity, Gaehod calls it. Meaninglessness and powerlessness—the ‘twin horsemen our alienated and depressed apocalypse.’ ” Alyx chuckled. “Gaehod says that if Armageddon is headed our way, it’s all going to end in a shrug. Smart fucker, that one.”
———
I watch the beauty in the gaslight. The damned swarm in elegant trios and couples around me chatting and laughing. Graceful brass beverage carts circulate smoothly in the floor tracks, their whirring gyros easily correcting for the shifting weight as full glasses are lifted and emptied ones returned. The perpetual movement of the damned and the machines that serve them soothes me.
“Olivia!”
I recognize the touch of the old man’s eyes from the elevator. Now they reach into mine, searching. I had drawn myself to standing tall and proud within the gilded box, but in the open space of the lobby, his clear eyes pull me, bending toward him, into the stooped embrace the healthy young bestow on the infirm aged. The momentary taste of my smoky homeland makes me close my burning eyes.
“I give up,” I whisper into his hair of fire and ash. “I’ve come back. I can’t do it. Can’t fake it. I’m ready to sign your damn registry and be home.”
Gaehod’s flawless hand, with long fingers tapering to perfect teardrop-shaped matte gold nails, takes my arm. He’s speaking softly to me, but my attention wanders over the eddying beauty of the hall. But a dam of stillness in its unending stream arrests my lazy survey. A solitary man stands across the lobby from me. He’s tall, and so still amidst the commotion that I suffer a momentary vertigo. Eyes, blue as a gas flame, in the tangled heat of a redhead’s complexion—purple, russet, pure pale white—meet mine. I taste, for the first time since I mated the devil with the blinking red eye, the shiver of hunger.
“Who is that man?” I ask Gaehod as he steers me through reception.
“One of the Reborn.”
“What’s his name?”
“He has not registered. But come and see me tomorrow for tea. Perhaps I will be able to tell you more then.”
Gaehod’s graceful hand holds open the arched door of the Registry Turret and I step alone into its small, circular reach. The book is ancient. The ink is red. I can no longer lie or hide.
I slip the waiting rings onto my left thumb. The first one slides all the way to the base, while the second one stays on the top joint. I connect the delicate metal hosing that bridges them at their jewel’s domed center, and stick my thumb-tip into the inkwell. There’s a low clicking as the rings’ bands begin to spin. I watch the stone blush deep red. When the rings are still and silent once more, I take them off and nestle them back into their velvet box. I dip the waiting black quill into the inkwell, and inscribe my one, true name, “Olivia,” on Gaehod’s magic list with my crimson ichor.
———
“Dominic, you haven’t moved.”
“Jetlagged, I guess.”
“Ah, of course.” The old man sat beside Dominic.
“Who was that woman you just took in?”
“Like you, she has returned from a long absence.”
“What is the nature of her, er, curse?”
“She is among the Undead. She can feel neither pleasure nor pain. She is not truly dead, nor can she be fully alive.”
“A vampire, right?”
“Her vitality depends on others.”
“Gaehod, is she a vampire?”
The old man inclined his rust-and-ice-crowned head. “I thought you did not believe in such things,” he said, rising. “Would you like to meet her? She’ll be at Pandemonium tonight, I should think.”
Dominic stood and pulled his battered laptop bag over his head. Its strap rested like familiar armor across his chest. “What’s Pandemonium?” he asked.
A bark of laughter erupted from the floor. “It’s my home!”
“Good morning, Alyx.” Gaehod beamed down at the heap of fabric and bone. “Pandemonium is our exquisite and divine retreat,” he said to Dominic, “a place to gather, to debate and dance.”
&n
bsp; “It’s a kick-ass bar.” Alyx said, pulling himself up. He stood swaying behind Hell’s dapper innkeeper. “All kinds of girls there, if you know what I mean.” He tried to elbow the old man in the ribs, but missed and staggered against Dominic.
Dominic hefted the reeling man onto the sofa behind them. The momentum of Alyx’s fall was redirected through the sofa’s legs rather than being absorbed and wasted. Distant cogs whirred. “Gaehod, I’m willing to register, but I’m not interested in bringing my life story up to date for you.”
“I’m sorry, Dominic.”
“Nobody is only a little damned,” Alyx noted, face planted in the sofa.
“Dominic, what threat could writing pose to you? Ideas are not so contagious, my friend, that mere exposure can infect the well indoctrinated—I mean inoculated. Damnation is not viral.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” Dominic said grimly.
“Come, Doctor! An epidemiology of sin?”
“I don’t believe in sin.”
“Then how could you be at risk here?” Gaehod rolled Alyx onto his narrow back and lifted his lolling head onto the arm of the sofa, sending shivers of black metal balls cascading into tracks. “Young Alyx here is making himself sick trying to change his perception with anything he can get his hands on”—Gaehod tucked the hem of Alyx’s stained bathrobe around the frail body—“while you worry that simply being here might alter yours without your consent?”
“It’s not that.” Dominic shrugged and followed the old man away from the unsleeping wreck of man on the sofa. “I’d just rather live on dry land than in a swamp. This place is not conducive to health.”
“You have your quinine, I believe?”
Dominic’s jaw gripped. There was no way Gaehod could know he was self-medicating. “I have a strong physiological constitution, if that’s what you’re implying,” he said icily.
“Precisely. Which is why you can allow your curiosity to lead you, even into Hell, for answers.” Gaehod beamed. “I think you will not be disappointed. Come to Pandemonium tonight, and I promise I will help you.”
“What about the woman who just checked in?”
“She would be an ideal subject for your research, I should think. And she’s newly returned, just as you are, and likely to be at Pandemonium tonight as well. But I am afraid, Dominic, that it is a very exclusive club.”
“Members only?” Dominic grimaced. “All right, you win. I’ll sign your damn registry.”
“And update your vitae?”
“Vita. If you insist.”
“I’m afraid I must.”
“Lead on.” But they had already arrived. Gaehod opened an arched door for Dominic, but did not follow him into the room. It was no larger than a closet, but perfectly round. On a podium, in the center, a massive book, a scalpel, and fountain pen waited. Despite everything he knew about self-mutilation, Dominic picked up the blade with untrembling hands and opened the cephalic vein of his left hand. He positioned the precise cut over the brass-rimmed bone pot on the podium and looked away from it. The room appeared to have no ceiling, reaching upward infinitely. If he could scale the walls, he would arrive, not on an Irish street, not atop the ancient ruin, but in the sky itself, among the stars, in Heaven. Dominic scowled. Already his imagination was becoming tainted in this place. Despite the calm and confidence he felt, he was in grave danger.
He mashed a gauze pad over the incision and pressed it against his thigh to apply pressure. “Never again,” he whispered to the boundless ceiling before he picked up the fragile glass fountain pen and dipped it in the bone inkwell. The weathered page before him bore a list of names in handwriting too similar to his. Shambhu, Bel-nirari, Gnith Cas, Antonius Musa, Huáng Z?ngx?, Venerio lo Grato, Ambrose Wellesley, Nat Love. He signed on the last line: Dominic O’Shaughnessy.
5
THE FIRST THING WHICH GOD’S EYE NAMED
Ophelia rolls onto her delicate back, grinning at me. Her tiny body writhes on the velvet sofa as the long wail of spriek tears through her. Head back, mouth gaping, feeding edges quilled, my youngest sister screams until her lungs are emptied, airless. The next inhalation makes the spriek. Inaudibly high, it strikes as an almost-pain in the sockets of our jaws. This is the way we summon one another. She should not use it now, no matter how long I have been absent from our ancestral home.
“What the fuck?” The door of L’Otel Matillide’s Quarry bursts open behind me and Sylvia sweeps in, red hair flying, cheeks flushed in outrage. Seeing me arrests her. “Oh, hello, Ollie,” she purrs.
“Hi,” I say.
“Ophelia, that was completely inappropriate.” Sylvia’s voice is harsh even through her lilting Irish accent.
“I know, Sylvie. Sorry?” Contrite Ophelia perches on the couch edge, her kneesocks slipping, but Sylvia stays near the door, beside me—her long-straying sister. She studies me a moment, then wraps her porcelain, adamantine arms around me and kisses both my cheeks. Together Sylvia and I walk over to the bank of low velvet sofas and join our younger sisters. But Sylvia doesn’t glance my way again. Her steel eyes are plowing the one-way glass that separates our luxurious lounge from the sparsely furnished covert where our naked victims wait.
L’Otel Matillide’s Quarry is newer than New York’s and decorated in the same eclectic style that the old man uses elsewhere in his opulent hotel, a blend of modern high style with priceless antiques. No electricity or plastic. Hell is built to be self-sustaining.
“Only six?” I ask, counting naked bodies in the covert.
“That’s the rule, even here. I must wait. Mine is not available.” Sylvia leans back against the overstuffed sofa arm and stretches her stocking-clad legs on the soft cushions. She turns to our tall, muscular sister whose short-cropped blond hair accentuates her ridiculously high cheekbones. “Vivian, why don’t you go ahead and pick one so they’ll let another up?”
Vivian re-cinches the shiny vinyl straps across her chest and rings for the quarrymaster without rising. A weird tension spikes the room, which I hadn’t sensed when it was just me and the younger girls. Sylvia, and her obvious impatience, has changed something.
Ophelia walks up to the glass. “I think you should pick the baby-blond fig,” she teases Vivian, tracing the outline of a very young, exquisitely pale girl who leans against the pane. “Or maybe I will take her”—Ophelia grinds her delicate features in a lewd wink toward me—“to spare her sweet pussy the shaving.”
“No. I hunt the redhead tonight,” Vivian says with no expression on her marble face. Sylvia doesn’t even blink. She’s still watching the covert.
“Vivian’s insistence on hairless women is well gossiped, if not fully understood,” Ophelia prattles in the gaping silence. She looks like a Victorian schoolmarm gone bad. “But I know her secret desire to incise just over the pubic mound so that what she has begun between the legs of her prey with her lips and tongue, she can continue at puncture. It is her endless quest to cause simultaneous blood release and orgasm.”
The quarrymaster peers into the room from a door in the back wall.
“Release the tall female, with hair like my sister’s,” Vivian tells him, running her tapered fingers through Sylvia’s Irish tresses. I have a moment of pity for the masses of luxuriant copper hair that will fall to the razor tonight.
“She likes to meet them first, you know.” Ophelia giggles, nuzzling next to me.
Vivian’s tall, freckled redhead straightens. An overly muscled man touches her hand. It is such a tender gesture. A human one.
Vivian flips her long, muscular legs over the sofa end and waggles an impatient steel stiletto. “I’m a traditionalist,” she says. “I hunt with seduction. I pull up alongside them in a car and offer them a ride. But they’re not allowed to get into a car; that’s against the rules. So they decline. When I get out, they’re so grateful for the company, for the offer of help, for the distraction when I touch them—”
Vivian’s fig walks, with as much dignity as is possible
barefoot, to the trapdoor in the floor of the covert. She bends from the waist, deliberately exposing the split orange of her still-unshaven sex, and grasps the ring in the floor. Swinging it upward, she turns and descends backwards from our view, pulling the trapdoor closed.
“Angelic charisma doesn’t hurt either,” Ophelia stage-whispers in a mock aside to Sylvia, who ignores her, and leans forward, watching the covert eagerly.
“No,” Vivian admits. “I touch their minds, it’s true. I calm them, lull them. I offer the backseat. They are so unresisting. I serve them, worship breast and belly, undress yielding arms, and open unprotesting legs. They give themselves to me so completely. They never ask if I’m the hunter, never question the way their fate unfolds, since it feels good.” Vivian towers over Ophelia. Our baby sister slides sensuously to her feet, running rosy fingers up Vivian’s lean thighs to stand, tiny and innocent, before her.
“Yes, and you taste them, don’t you?” Ophelia whispers hoarsely, the olive velvet of her frilly frock brushing Vivian’s slick jet latex. “You taste the soft and salty, red and white, opening them and opening them again. How many times? How many have you done? Gotten both?”
“Together, at the same time? Never.” Vivian flexes her jaws and takes Ophelia by her slender throat. “They’ll come in my mouth before they feed me. But never in the moment that they do. I don’t know, maybe it’s the pain. Or the surprise.”
“Maybe it’s like keeping your eyes open to sneeze,” I suggest.
Sylvia barks a laugh—she’s listening after all—but Vivian ignores me.
“No.” Vivian easily detaches herself from Ophelia, who crumples to the plush rug. “I cannot find one to combine her pleasure and mine, to be both sacrament and satisfied.” Vivian strides to the door in the back of the lounge, looking every bit the prowling dominatrix in her latex catsuit and metal heels.
“Thus Sister Vivian goes to seek the blood sacrifice of love,” Sylvia declaims, her brogue stronger, but her body still unmoving.