and Falling, Fly

by Skyler White

  “She wants to taste the pleasure in their blood, I think,” Ophelia whispers, sliding up the couch to me. She rests her ringletted head in my nerveless lap. “Already Vivie is scenting her prey,” she murmurs. “At this moment, only a thin wall separates her from the woman who might finally fulfill her.

  “Stay here a while,” she whispers, her swollen lips puckering. “Stay and play with someone your own strength, who you don’t have to be careful not to break, someone who does not fear you.”

  “Fear me,” Sylvia growls, rising. She grasps a fistful of Ophelia’s tawny hair in her white fingers and rings for the quarrymaster.

  “Open your mouth,” Sylvia commands her. Ophelia nods meekly, the back of her head pressing hard into my thighs, and parts her lips, pink tongue touching her teeth tips, the edges erupting. Sylvia stretches her jaws and drops her mouth over Ophelia’s to grind her razor points to lethal sharpness.

  “Fetch the largest man in there,” Sylvia barks at the quarrymaster, and drags the trembling Ophelia to her feet. “Go claim your fig and never spriek in this place again.” Her voice is a cruel whisper. She glares into Ophelia’s liquid eyes, then throws her at the door in the back wall and sits down hard beside me.

  “Ophelia will take the strongest man in the tank,” Sylvia tells me as our chastened baby sister retreats through the rear door, “and still be fined for damages.”

  I say nothing, and together we—Hell’s two senior citizens—stare into the one-way glass at the four remaining figs in the covert. The downy blonde keeps glancing at her bare wrist, anxiously.

  “Are you well, Ollie?” Sylvia reclines into the sofa’s soft cushions. In a symphony of coursing sinews, the man who will feed Ophelia tonight sits up straight in response to his summons.

  “Ophelia wants to give up control, or have it wrested from her,” Sylvia says, her lilting Irish voice expressionless. “She wants to be dominated, but she is an angel, too powerful for mortals to claim. So she breaks them.”

  “It is our legacy to desire what we can’t possess,” I say.

  “Thou shalt not,” Sylvia mimics our father, “desire to know God biblically.” I arch an eyebrow in her direction, but she’s still staring into the covert. The fringes of her red hair graze the delicate bow of her collarbones, and her tailored black dress sets off the perfect whiteness of her marble flesh.

  A sly smile parts her pale lips. “You should have seen His face,” she intones, picking up our father’s story in his voice, scrubbed of all but the faintest traces of Eastern Europe.

  “All aflame!” I join in, and together we recite, “your mother and I—angels!—cast out to bear you, like Eve’s children, in suffering, outside the gates of Eden.”

  “Oy, the suffering!” Sylvie puts in for Mother. “And they—given dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creeping thing that crawls upon the earth. And you, angel-born, cannot plant vineyards and eat their fruit, or take cup and drink.”

  “So take Eve’s children, and divide them between you,” I chime in to finish my father’s story with my sister, “and eat their blood given for you!”

  “Ah—” Sylvia sits bolt upright, pointing to the trapdoor in the floor of the covert. It rises and she leans forward in hungry anticipation. The sight of blond hair further excites her, but she sags into the couch again. A rippling muscular Adonis emerges, and begins to pace the covert.

  “Damn!”

  “You are waiting for someone in particular?” I ask, carefully casual.

  “It shows, eh?”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Her. No.”

  Movement in the covert pulls her searching eyes again. She stands and presses her voluptuous body against the glass. “Please,” she whispers.

  A blond woman climbs into view.

  “Ah!” Sylvia leaps to ring for the quarrymaster, and then sits down again by me, a little unsteady.

  Sylvie’s fig is young and appealing, but unremarkable except for the rather shocking paleness of her nipples and the defiant tilt of her pointed chin. She makes a slow parade around the covert. She’s tall, with the sort of ridiculous long legs you only see on fashion models and teenagers. She knows who hunts her, and she knows she is already there.

  Sylvia watches her haughty fig circle, enthralled. “I always drank full-tooth. Even before we started building quarries and paying our figs to let us. But this girl is different. The dreams I see in her blood are so vivid, so rich.”

  “You’re in love with her?”

  “I just want to see myself in her dreams.”

  “That’s what kills them,” I say.

  “I know. And that would ruin it. I found her pole-dancing in London and brought her here, and everything I’ve done for ethical consumerism, setting up the Quarries, starting the initiatives and the committee, all of it has been for this—for her.” Sylvia is rigid, watching her.

  The girl in the aquarium freezes, listening, then walks back to the trapdoor. “I let her see me sometimes, as she slips away.” Sylvia slides the brass key around its fine chain clockwise on her wrist until it hits the lock, then counterclockwise away from it and back again and again. She doesn’t meet my eyes. “We’re not supposed to, I know. But, Olivia, do you think she’s conscious enough then to remember my face? Do you think she maybe wonders about me during her recoup days?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think about her constantly in the days between. I plan our hunts, dream her flavor, imagine her life. She is always crawling over my thoughts.” Sylvia’s haunted eyes meet mine. “She consumes me,” she whispers. Her fig pulls back the trapdoor and descends from view.

  “Good luck.” I say. And I actually mean it.

  Alone in the Quarry, I press my body against the covert’s cool glass. Inches away from me, a nubile girl twists her coiled hair around a fragile ebony finger, but no sound or scent of her reaches me. So very young and almost wild with suppressed anxiety, she stands up and sits back down. She knows time is passing, but she, of course, is not allowed a watch. The covert, with its waiting room magazines and upholstered chairs, has no clock. Vampiric altruism extended only to our own comfort.

  Another man climbs the stairs into the covert, the replacement for the fig Ophelia now hunts. The illusion of clothing clings to his sculpted body, ruddy tan except across the luminous white flesh of his ass where wicked red wheals stand in narrow strips. He has been whipped recently and sits gingerly. The Quarry recruits figs from Dublin and Cork, even Belfast, and pays them very well, but this man, slender and hard, and lithe as a flamenco dancer, is here for his own pleasure. He wants to be hunted. He is hoping to be attacked in the night.

  I can’t help him. Nor any of them waiting, in dread or anticipation. Even the figs who are not summoned have sold, at the very least, their peace for tonight. I have not sharpened my quills in so long that to feed full-tooth now would risk killing. I leave the Quarry and return to the public rooms of Pandemonium, rejoining those mortals who are cursed by only the will of God, and not their own as well.

  ———

  Dominic fished in his jacket pocket for his room key to the rasping accompaniment of Alyx’s tortured breathing. The poor bastard had followed him up the winding central hall from the lobby to the second floor and down one of the radiating corridors to this familiar doorway. It hadn’t been a long walk, but it had exhausted Alyx, and he leaned woozily against the wall while Dominic flipped past the shiny, flimsy keys for his town house, office, and lab, to the dull iron key he’d thought of as merely decorative for years. He slotted it into the ornate lock and pushed the door open.

  The room was unchanged, unused since he’d left it. But it was tidy, dustless, and the potted plants had thrived. Dominic put his laptop bag down on the bedside table, noting an aging red leather diary strategically positioned there. Alyx collapsed on the bed, a cascade of ball bearings harvesting the energy of his fall and noiselessly shunting it down through the floor. T
he hinges on the door, the feet of the desk chair, were all the same, rigged to recycle the momentum of every human motion. Alyx reached into the filthy pocket of his bathrobe and extracted a pair of blue lenses, which he began to switch with the bronze ones in his complicated goggles. Dominic turned his attention to the computer terminal—the only change in the room since he’d left it.

  An erratic hybrid of modern science and timeless materials, the monitor used the latest (and sickly expensive) display technology. Dominic whistled between his teeth. He needed to see what that looked like lit up. He felt around the brass base for a power button and pressed it. A mechanical drone muttered as the machine’s small wooden fan blades spun up.

  He had forgotten how gracious this old room was. He had furnished his Cambridge town house himself, and lived in it every day since he’d bought it, but it still felt less homelike than this strange, underground hotel room that had stood empty for the last nine years. Dominic shrugged and opened the closet. There, looking fresh out of the box, were a pair of his favorite running shoes. He chuckled and picked them up.

  “So you’re a runner?” Alyx had a voice like hot asphalt.

  “It’s good exercise.”

  “It’s more than that, or the shoes wouldn’t be here.”

  Dominic looked at Alyx curled up in a miserable ball on his clean bed. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  Alyx rolled his rheumy eyes. “I’m losing confidence in your ability to solve anything, Doc. I bet you go to the gym—big, healthy guy like you?” Dominic nodded curtly, pulling sweatpants and a T-shirt from the heavy metal-strapped dresser drawer. “But there’re no weights in your room here, right? No fancy dress-up clothes in your closet either I bet. Why? ’Cause you wear that shit, but it’s not who you are.”

  “You’re trying to suggest only things intrinsic to us are here?”

  “Yup. You don’t get stuff here, you get props. That new vampire chick we saw today? She’ll have a closet full of latex. Viv’s got whips and ball gags. Pandora gets a row of jars. Whatever.”

  “What’s here for you?”

  “Liquor.”

  “You’re telling me Gaehod supplies you with alcohol?”

  “Or I bring my own. I never quite worked that out.”

  “God!” Dominic exclaimed, “that’s just unconscionable. I was hoping I could work with him to make some improvements here, help some people, but he’s poisoning his so-called children. He makes a big show of how much he loves us, and then supplies us with exactly what we need to destroy ourselves. This is bullshit. I came here to do research. I came here—”

  “You came here ’cause you got called,” Alyx said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If you’re here, Gaehod sent for you. That’s the only reason anyone gets back here.”

  “Gaehod did not send for me.”

  “Yeah he did.”

  “How?”

  Alyx shrugged. “I dunno. You ask him. That fucker can mainline the memestream. Whatever he needs, he puts it out there, and we all just breathe it in. Might have been a movie that summoned you, or a song. It doesn’t matter. You were walking around on the surface, then before you knew what happened, bam! you’re in Hell.”

  “Why would he have sent for me?”

  “I dunno.”

  “You do. You have an idea.”

  Alyx regarded Dominic’s ceiling studiously. “I thought maybe he brought you here to help me.”

  Clearly, the man needed help. “I don’t think Gaehod would like my way of helping you.”

  “How come? What would you do?” Alyx pushed the goggles onto his forehead and struggled to focus his bleary eyes on Dominic.

  “Well first,” Dominic said, “I’d recommend you eat more and stop drinking.”

  Alyx made a coarse, derisive noise. “Alcohol is not my problem.”

  “Look, Alyx, I don’t know what Gaehod has told you about alcoholism being a symptom of a deeper spiritual problem, but it’s bullshit. What the hell difference does it make whether it’s demons or drugs that’s possessing you? You still don’t belong to yourself. Something else owns you, and that’s no way to live.”

  “You sound like Gaehod. ‘Alyx, stop giving your power away.’ But maybe it’s just my brain chemistry, right?” Alyx adjusted his blue-tinted lenses over his blood-tinged eyes. “Like you were talking about. Maybe there’s something screwed up in my head that makes me this way. Maybe you’ve got some pills—”

  “Did Gaehod tell you I had medication?”

  “No, but you’re a doc, right? Even just something to help me sleep…”

  “You followed me up looking for drugs?” Dominic towered over the wreck in his bed, grinding his fingers into his palms to keep from grabbing Alyx by his sticky bathroom lapels and pitching him out of his room. “You think I’m going to write you a prescription?”

  “I don’t give a shit. Whatever you wanna try on me, I’m game. Drugs, scans, tests—bring it on. I’m your goddamn guinea pig. You can’t fuck me up any more than I am. If there’s a chance, man. If you can figure it out…”

  Dominic turned away, investigating his computer terminal to save Alyx the humiliation of being seen so close to tears. The warm yellow light of the monitor undulated softly, and Dominic picked up the slender metal pen beside it and touched the screen. A swirl of liquid color opened from the contact point and letters materialized from the patternless soup. {Hello, Dominic. Login, please.} He looked around for some other input device.

  “It’s the roll,” Alyx said from the bed.

  Dominic untied a satin bow and unrolled a thick velvet rectangle with letters painted on the fabric in gold. He placed it on the desk before the monitor and sank his wrists into the pillowy softness. He touched his fingertips to yielding bubbles beneath the letters and typed in his birth date.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Alyx, motionless, eyes peeled and riveted to the ceiling above him, a look of stark terror on his ruined face.

  Dominic called to him, but the man stayed frozen—suffering some sort of seizure? Dominic touched an emaciated shoulder gently. “Alyx?” he said again.

  “Oh shit. Thanks, dude.” Alyx blinked and shifted on the bed. “I was having a bad dream.”

  “Oh.” Dominic stood up and looked back at the glowing monitor. “Did you know you sleep with your eyes open?”

  “I don’t sleep.”

  “Sleep paralysis,” Dominic explained. “You’re awake but you can’t move. It happens sometimes coming out of REM sleep. You probably just dozed off without knowing it.”

  “I don’t fucking doze off. Told you already. You can’t hear much but your own theories, eh? I don’t sleep. At all. It’s why I’m following you around like Hell’s fucking puppy dog. I want you to help me. I’ve taken so much shit, coke, meth, ket—whatever was around to keep me going—that my fucking body has forgotten how to sleep. Or believes I don’t need sleep. Or some stupid shit. I have to have my nightmares awake.”

  “Alyx, I don’t know much about sleep disorders. I don’t think I can help you. Have you tried a sleep clinic?”

  Alyx rolled into a fetal ball facing the wall and said nothing.

  Dominic turned back to the beautiful monitor. A photo of eight bundled packets, some of parchment, some scrolls, some tanned skin, filled the screen. Dominic shuddered and toggled the monitor off. He turned for the bedside diary just in time to catch Alyx as he stumbled.

  “You’ve fucking got to have something to help me, man!”

  It occurred to Dominic that Alyx’s erratic movements were attempts at fighting him.

  “You’re taking something, right? Give me some of that.”

  “It wouldn’t help you.” Dominic tried to steady the man’s flailing body.

  “Cut my head open, fix it that way. I don’t give a shit. I just need something.”

  “You need to get a fucking grip.”

  “On what! There’s nothing left. Nothing holds still.” Alyx r
eeled wildly, fists flailing at the air. Dominic allowed him to land a punch against his ribs to save his dignity. Then he bent from the waist, picked Alyx up, carried him to the bed, and dumped him on it. “You have to change what you’re doing. Nothing else, no drugs, no operation, nothing is going to make it better if you don’t change what you do.”

  “I’m too fucked up to change.”

  “You don’t have to change what you think, just what you do.

  Decide to do something different, then don’t change your mind back, not matter how bad you want to.”

  “Fucking New Year’s resolutions?”

  “Make any resolution and refuse to reconsider it in the face of desire.”

  “My will power’s broken. Got anything for that, Doc?”

  Dominic started to explain why this wasn’t a medical issue, but caught the laugh choked in Alyx’s throat.

  “Let’s get drunk tonight.” Alyx pulled the halves of his bathrobe together and pushed himself up against Dominic’s pillows. “The vamps hang out at Pandemonium most nights, and I know you’d like to meet that new gal. She’s gotta be one of them. There’s this other one, Vivian, you gotta see her. Smokin’ hot. Wears all this leather and bondage gear. Now that’s a woman who could make a man behave.”

  “I want to run,” Dominic said. “And I’ll need to shower after.”

  “All right. I’ll come get you in a couple hours then.” Alyx staggered to his feet, and sat down abruptly.

  “I need to change,” Dominic prompted, shrugging off his jacket.

  “Oh right.” Alyx stood up again more cautiously. “You’re going to run.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It won’t help, you know.”

  Dominic held the door open for Alyx, who slouched through it. “I’ll see you tonight,” he said. “We’ll go look for Vivie and the new girl downstairs.” He gave Dominic a wicked grin. “When you’re done with your exercise in redundancy.”

  ———

  Pandemonium is crammed with the meat of sex, the bone and blood of human hunger. It pulses with the endlessly throbbing, indifferent drone of every nightclub in every city. The smell of blood and desire rub against my spine, vibrating with the painless, rageless music. Beautiful bodies flow around the bar in delicious bloody excess, pumping dance and talk. They stand in clots, or bind one to another in corpuscular pairs and trios, men and women, men and men, homocytes and heterocytes. I slip into the stream like nicotine.