by Skyler White
If he was right—and he needed to be more certain first—if the AEDvIII.0s were really as effective as he suspected, convincing Gaehod to close this madhouse would be a much simpler effort. With the hotel closed and Olivia in agreement with him, he would certainly be able to convince her vampire sisters to participate in a drug trial. Madalene would be beyond pleased. Dysart would have to forgive him for keeping his experimentations secret. He would get tenure, and marry Olivia.
The excitement coursing through him made it impossible for Dominic to stay in his comfortable chair. He got up and paced the lobby, marveling at the cobweb of energy-capture channels in the floor. L’Otel Matillide was certainly a miracle of engineering. Dominic stopped before a strange, empty hearth made of three massive stones and cocked his head at the cantilevered hallway above him, tracing the graceful metal struts with his eye. He had to make sure he got at least an afternoon of photography in before Gaehod closed the place down. There was so much to document. Or perhaps the old man would convert the place to a real hotel. The naked gas flame walls would never pass code. Not even in Ireland. But the rest… Dominic rested a hand on the cozy green wingback by the fireplace and smiled.
The four brass columns formed when Olivia’s spiraling elevator walls folded in on themselves caught Dominic’s eye, and he wandered over to investigate their construction. Still marveling at Hell’s vast beauty, he tripped over a pile of filthy rags and hair dumped against one of the bright pillars.
“When you’re quite done gazing about you in delight and surprise like fucking Harry Potter, you might help me up. Or maybe you’d like to kick me again?”
“Sorry, Alyx. Didn’t see you.”
“No, how could you, being all starry-eyed and shit.”
“Sorry,” Dominic said again, and wiped the idiot grin off his face. “I just ordered some breakfast. Want to join me? You should eat something.”
Alyx raised a scarred arm. Dominic grasped the tumble of bathrobe and bones by the wrist and pulled. To his surprise, Alyx peeled up from the ground and landed across his chest with a muffled grunt. Dominic hadn’t meant to pick the man up, but he weighed less than a child. He returned to his vacated chair, deposited the rock star, and sat down across from him.
“So what’s got your handsome head in the clouds, oh you great god of reason and science?” Alyx asked.
Dominic stretched his legs out before him, leaning into the chair’s soft embrace. “I was just wondering what this place would be like if Gaehod opened it to the public.”
“It’d die.”
“Do you think so?”
“It’s what happens to anything when it stops being used and starts being saved.”
“I bet UNESCO would designate it a world heritage site.”
“Have to be dead before you can be preserved.” Alyx tugged his bathrobe closed, clinching the shoelace harder around his skinny waist. “What are you trying to shut down Hell for anyway?”
“How do you know about that?”
“You just don’t fucking listen, do you? I already told you. That bastard up there, in all his chaos and mechanical bits, and books, and tea, is just fucking sitting on the goddamn inlet to the memepool we’re all drowning in. He’s the Typhoid Mary of ideas, the ultimate replicator. If he thinks it, we all know it. Without knowing how we know it. It just gets into the water.”
“Alyx, that’s really not possible.”
“I know you’re the poster child for the Hell-closure faction.”
“You make it sound like a war. Gaehod’s just thinking over his options.”
“Bullshit. It is a war. And you’re the enemy general.”
“I’m not. I’ve just been putting together a proposal.”
“It’ll be the Israelites and the fucking Philistines, down to a battle of chosen champions, one per side, to the death.”
“It’ll be a PowerPoint presentation.”
“Trial by combat.”
“Me versus Gaehod?”
“Can you really be that stupid?” Laughing shook Alyx until the danger he would tumble out of his chair forced him silent. “Guess I’ve got no worries about being turned out of my home if you don’t even know who you’re fighting.” Still gulping back giggles, Alyx struggled nearly upright in his chair. “Hey,” he asked Dominic, “you still looking for victims?”
“Research participants?”
“Whatever.”
“I am, but honestly, Alyx, I think you need sleep and food more than medicine. That and to stop medicating yourself.”
“I wasn’t talking about me, you dick. I know you can’t help me. I’m looking for the Reset button.”
“Alyx—”
“Cause David’s sister’s walking this way.”
“What?”
“You are the dumbest motherfucker I ever met. And I’ve known plenty of people up to their assholes in denial. But you, my friend, have got your eyes about sewn closed.”
From behind Dominic, a stunningly tall, muscular woman in vampire-black fetish wear swept past.
“Hello, Vivian,” Alyx managed to squeak out before the woman leapt onto the arms of his velvet chair. Silver buckles glinted down her rippling back. She had undergone extensive back surgery, Dominic noted, but seemed agile enough now. She lowered herself in a predatory crouch over Alyx’s wasted body and grasped his head, one gloved hand in his long, thin hair, one gripping his jaw. She lifted the man by his face to her mouth and kissed him.
Dominic looked away from the rock star’s opening bathrobe, returning to his studious examination of the miraculous architecture of Hell’s front parlor. He had actually distracted himself when he heard Vivian spring down from her perch over Alyx. He was paler, but smiling.
“Dominic, this is Vivian, one of Olivia’s sisters.”
Dominic stood to shake hands with the striking blonde.
“Eyes, Alyx!” Vivian barked.
Dominic glanced at the collapsed rock star, who made no attempt to conceal his lecherous study of Vivian’s high breasts. Dominic valiantly kept his eyes from the black-and-red-iron-cross latex pasties barely covering the prominent tips of the exposed flesh escaping her tightly cinched corset. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, hand out.
Vivian shook her spiked white hair and laughed. She grasped his hand with surprising strength and yanked his wrist so forcefully Dominic nearly fell into her. She sniffed at his wrists and released his hand.
“Have you seen her?” she hissed. “We’re supposed to meet Gaehod for tea.”
“Olivia? Not in the last half-hour. You might look in the kitchen. She said she was hungry.”
Vivian’s glance toward Dominic dripped distain.
“Hey, Vee—” Alyx called, but she turned on her steel stiletto and stalked out of the lobby. “I think she kinda likes me,” Alyx murmured.
Dominic sat back down. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. She does that sometimes. Just walks up and kisses me.”
“Does she ever talk to you?”
“No. But it’s me. What’s to say?”
Like a riderless unicycle, another service tray wheeled up beside Dominic’s chair bearing a pure white porcelain teapot with matching sugar dish and creamer. Dominic fixed himself a heavily sweetened cup and dismissed the tray with a gentle push.
“I’d imagine you’ve got some pretty good stories,” he said, taking a long sip.
“What? From the rock star days?” Alyx snorted and rolled over in his chair. “Tales of drugs and debauchery? Cautionary stories about sex and drugs? About pride before destruction?”
“What kind of music did you play?”
“Straight-on, hard-driving rock and roll. None of that nasal whiner shit the pussies in their jackets and Vans make now. I was a fuckup from the get-go.”
“But you were good at it.”
“Good at being a fuckup? It’s all I know, bro.”
“No. I meant at singing.”
“Hell yeah. But it broke me. You’ve got no idea, m
an, what it’s like to stand up there every night and let it hit you. All the kids out there, all their ugly faces, all of them screaming every goddamn word you wrote. It comes at you like a train, and you send it back to them. They put their hands up. Like they’re gonna throw their souls at you. And you gotta catch it or it’s all these souls just raining down around you. You gotta catch every one and channel it back. Your body just rattles with it for hours after, all that attention driven through you. All that energy… All that…”
“Love?” Dominic asked.
Alyx shrugged. “That’s what they think anyway. They yell it at you, ‘I love you, Alyx.’ Even the dudes. But they say ‘man,’ instead of my name. And I’ll tell you something else. Those fuckers will eat you alive. I mean really. They want to own you. You need body-guards and shit to keep them away.” Alyx shook his head. “Nah. That’s not love.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. They want you to see them. Every goddamned one of them. And you can’t.”
“But you touch them.”
“Just the ones with the really great tits.” Alyx chortled into his robe.
“No,” Dominic said. “I mean your music, your voice—it must have touched them, or they wouldn’t feel that way about you. I mean, even if it isn’t love, it’s something. You’ve made them feel something.”
“Yeah? My songs weren’t great art, you know. Mostly about girls and being angry.”
“But they worked.”
“This some lame-ass shrink trick to make me feel better about my sorry-ass life?”
“Did it work?”
“Fuck. It’s just a line: ‘You touched people, man.’ Doesn’t make me any less a fuckup.”
“How things look depends on where you sit sometimes.”
“So I should just sit in a happy chair and see my life as being this great, meaningful thing? Like I mattered?”
“Why not?”
“ ’Cause it’s bullshit.”
“So you’d rather have a fifth of Jack?”
“Fuck, yeah.”
“Because that’s more real?”
“Fuck you. I know you’re fucked up, same as me.”
“No, I’m fucked up different.”
“Whatever. You’ve just got better drugs.”
Dominic leapt to his feet. Adrenaline stung his palms and feet.
“Shit, dude,” Alyx said. “What’s got you by the throat?”
“My bag.” Dominic’s mind raced backwards through time. Not at the abbey. Not at the tree. The river. “Fucking Lethe,” he whispered.
“What?”
“My laptop,” he explained. “I’ve been making my damn diary entries in the journal Gaehod gave me, but all my work, my lab notes. My latest batch of—” He turned back to Alyx, bruised and ghostly in the armchair. “For Christ’s sake, when my breakfast gets here, eat it, okay? I have to go.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Okay,” Dominic said, and set off at a dead run. It was a pace he knew Alyx couldn’t match at all, but he was still surprised, turning over his shoulder, to realize the rock star hadn’t budged. Dominic ran, uncertain he remembered the way back to the garden, desperate to get there. He had traveled all over the world, into dangerous places and exalted ones, and never once forgotten that bag. And it had never mattered more. That bag held the last few AEDvIII.0 capsules and their chemical formula. Its loss would be apocalyptic.
———
The hotel sounds like the house of war—silent as divorce and dissolution—thundering soundlessly with what’s left unsaid. I stand in the old man’s doorway.
“Did you tell the new Reborn that you might close Hell?” I demand.
“Yes.” Gaehod beams down at me from his unsteady perch, seated atop a teetering stepladder in a butler’s long starched apron.
“Is that true?”
“That I might disband the hotel? Yes.” Gaehod plucks another book from the towering shelves that line his chaotic study and adds the tome to the precarious stack balanced on his up-drawn knees.
“You can’t!” I struggle not to scream.
“I was thinking I might open it to the public.”
“That’s the same thing as closing it,” I cry. “That will ruin it!”
“Archeologists could excavate it, bring the past into the light.”
“We will all die! We can only survive underground. Gaehod, I need this place!”
He beams warmth down on me. “Have you found something here that pleases you, my dear? I am so glad! I would love for you to tell me about it, but first, come help me a moment won’t you?”
“No! I haven’t found anything here that pleases me.” My voice makes a detestable shrill. “I’ve only found things that irritate or depress me.” I stride across the litter of the old man’s office—mounds of books, towers of letters. “I came here to escape. I came to learn from my sisters how to be the proper kind of damned—cool, cynical, aloof—but I find even they are not free from tyrannical hope. Each of them is trapped in helpless quests for something. They believe. They still believe. And as long as belief clings to desire, there is no escape from hope.”
Gaehod nods cautiously to avoid toppling his precious books. “Hope cannot be sheared as swift as wings.”
I grasp the rails of his delicate ladder, forcing him to steady books with one hand, and his diminutive body against the bookcase with the other. “I haven’t found what I’m looking for, damn it, because what I want is an end to searching.” I shake the steps beneath him.
“Get a grip on yourself, my dear!”
“Why? I have a grip on you.”
“Impossible.”
I give the ladder a vicious rattle.
“Self-possession is freedom.” Gaehod smiles, clasping toppling books against his narrow chest.
“Everyone has something to clutch,” I rage. “Vivian claims the pleasure of her victims. Ophelia wants to be possessed. Sylvia is possessed—or was until she killed the girl. Blood communion for Sylvia, blood sacrifice for Vivian, blood brothers for Ophelia. You and your damnable books. I want out of this hell of blood and possession! ”
“I think Dominic feels much the same way. Which is why he is encouraging me to close the place down.”
“I’ll kill him,” I say. And I mean it. I would enjoy that.
“Why?”
“I don’t want to hide who I am.” I climb the ladder toward him. “I don’t want the reciprocal pretend love of my sisters who only listen so they can talk, who only kiss so they’ll be kissed. I don’t want to only use and be used.” I am standing one rung below him. The ornate, carved ladder shudders and pitches under our combined weight.
“And you are ready to kill, which you have never done, not in the name of something you desire, but only for what you do not want?” Gaehod is calm on his reeling ladder.
I claim the last rung between us and face him squarely. “It is only over what is unwanted that battles are ever waged.” My height more than makes up for the difference in our positions on the sea-sick ladder. He presses the top third of his toppling tower of books into my unready hands. “Do you want to serve your sisters?” he asks.
“What’s the difference between serving them and being used by them?” I am balancing, hands full of books.
“The same as between holding a belief and having an idea.”
I climb down the ladder backwards.
“These are all cookbooks.” I say.
“I, for example, have the idea that L’Otel is no longer necessary.”
“What the hell are you doing with cookbooks, Gaehod?”
“Here, love, take the next stack from me,” he says as soon as I touch down. I climb the ladder and retrieve another portion of the books that threaten, at every movement, to unbalance the old man and send him, his heavy books, and his light ladder clattering to the ground.
“The surface world has grown very tolerant, from what I understand.” Gaehod piles the slim Twenty-Fou
r Rose Petal Cakes for Weddings and the massive Traditional Cross-Quarter Feasts onto my precarious stack.
I deposit them with the others and sink into the worn pink chair by Gaehod’s smoky fireplace. “Not tolerant, really,” I tell him. “It accepts a broader range of beautiful, but it still loathes ugly.”
“And love?” Gaehod lifts another book from the towering shelves. A low pneumatic moan registers the energy released.
“Adultery is still rampant, but now they tell each other.” I tuck my legs up into the chair’s thin embrace, willing to spill some of my collected vitriol on humanity in general since I can’t pour it over one man in particular. “Having mistaken the ideal of fidelity for an achievable goal and being therefore bitterly disappointed, today’s modern couple settles for cold reality. They show themselves to one another, naked in fluorescent light, every vein and pimple exploited. It’s ugly. I miss the eras when every woman strove for beauty and thought herself the only secret sinner in a room. Shame is sexier than truth. Exhibitionism is not honesty.”
“And evil?”
“Nope. They’re still perfectly okay with evil as long as it looks good.”
Gaehod grunts and climbs down at last. “All frosting and no cake. Would you like some?”
“What?”
“Anything, a little snack? You look famished.”
“I have not fed.”
“No?” He regards me shrewdly. It embarrasses me, for him to see me needy. “Do you want Dominic?”
“What, for a snack?” My laugh rings too harsh.
“We were talking about what you did not want. I would like to understand what you do.” Ever the innkeeper, the old man drops another square of peat onto the fire and pushes the kettle into the flames.
“He wants me,” I say.
“Naturally.”
“He can’t see me. Desire blinds men.”
“Really? I think it rather sharpens my eyes.” He regards me again, steadily. “I think I see you very clearly,” he says, sitting cautiously into the armchair on the fire’s other side.