The Janus Cycle

by Tej Turner

  “Hey, I tell you what,” I said. “I’m on my way to a rave if you want to come?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. I must go now.”

  “No you don’t, the night is young,” I said, trying to make a charming smile. I wasn’t sure how charming it was, I have never tried one before.

  Just then I realised that I could see through her. The pavement, the walls of the house behind her, all glowing through her clothes and pale skin. I blinked a few times, but the effect was still there. She had a hazy translucence, like a ghost.

  “It’s happening again,” she said, looking down at her glowing hands. She didn’t seem surprised at all.

  I was speechless. I had taken hallucinogenics before, but as far as I know there was none in that cocktail of drugs I swallowed earlier, and I had never had a trip that was so vivid. She was real. She was a person. Her eyes were like shining sapphires, and her face was set with grim acceptance.

  She was fading away.

  “Wait!” her eyes suddenly lit up, as if she was remembering something. She reached into her pockets and pulled out a piece of card. “Take this! It’s how you find me!”

  I grabbed hold of it.

  “Don’t go!” I blurted, unable to understand this unfamiliar emotion I was feeling. I didn’t want her to leave, I wanted to know who she was.

  She smiled at me faintly, as her face faded away, into the night. “I’ll see you soon, Pikel.”

  I reached to grab hold of her but my hands passed through the faint outline of her shoulders and she was gone.

  I stood there for a few minutes, and stared at the place she had been standing. I wanted to tell myself that I had just been tripping, but deep down I knew there was something more to this. The fact that it made no sense made me angry.

  Suddenly my head began to tingle, and I felt waves of heat streaming through my body and my heart pounding against my ribcage. I suddenly remembered the drugs I had taken, and realised I was coming up.

  I rested my hand against the wall and concentrated on feeling the cold night air on my face. Slowed down my breathing. Looked up to the sky as my vision blurred, and the euphoria of the MDMA took over.

  I opened my eyes and looked at the piece of card in my hands. She had given me this – it looked like some kind of flyer.

  “It’s how you find me,” her voice echoed in my mind.

  I held it up to my face and tried to make sense of the lines and shapes on it but the drugs were making them jump around and distort.

  I sighed and placed it into my wallet.

  “I must be going insane...”

  The K-hole was over, and I once again became aware of the walls of Kev’s living room around me.

  I had been talking the whole time without even realising it.

  “I dunno man,” Kev muttered beside me. “I’ve seen some fucked up shit before—”

  “But it’s the drugs!” I interrupted him. “I know I hadn’t come up on them at that point but maybe I have done too many and fucked my head up or something.”

  Kev shook his head. “Man... You’re always like this. I mean, that part where you said you felt angry cause you couldn’t explain it. That’s you all over!”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, sourly.

  I must be going insane if I needed K-Hole-Kev of all people in the world to impart wisdom upon me.

  “I mean – you, you’re so... rational and you like the world to be simple,” Kev tried to explain. “And if something weird happens you don’t like it cause it, like, breaks your vision of reality. But sometimes weird things happen, dude, and not everything can be explained.”

  “You’re not going to start telling me that ghosts, elves and UFOs and all that shit is real, are you?”

  “I’ve seen some weird shit in my time,” Kev replied. “And not all of it when I was on drugs!” he added, scowling when he noticed the expression on my face. “I think a lot of people do, you know, but they deny it because it threatens their… their idea of the world. They try so hard to explain it that they distort their own memories.”

  I sat there for a few moments and tried to take in what Kev was saying. Yeah, he was a burnt-out drug-user who was a few cans short of a six-pack, but he does sometimes surprise you when he opens his mouth. When you spend most of your life taking narcotics in your living room alone, and your TV is broken, you’ve got to end up thinking about some things, I guess.

  “I mean, remember that time I got you to try those mushrooms?” he asked.

  I winced at the memory of that incident.

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “Hated those things, they just made me think about all this stuff I didn’t want to.”

  “Is that really it, Pikel? Or was it that they were making you realise things about the world you didn’t want to know? Anyway, the fact that you have come here means that deep down you know it happened.”

  I didn’t really know what to say to that. So I decided to push it into my big hole of ‘think about later’, which is always a convenient place to sort things that make me feel uneasy. I don’t think much.

  “Anyway, I have some good news. While we were in the K-hole I found your wallet,” he said, throwing it onto my lap.

  I felt like a giddy child as I ripped it open. This girl was having an effect on me and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  “What does it say man?” Kev asked.

  “It’s a flyer,” I replied. “It’s advertising some night in a club called Janus. It’s this Friday... but where the fuck is Janus?”

  She could’ve at least given me her number or something.

  “I know it,” Kev said “Been there a few times. Remember when Dave was seeing that girl who—”

  “But you know where it is?” I interrupted him.

  “Oh yeah,” Kev nodded his head. “I think so...”

  Throughout the next week I told myself that I wasn’t going to Janus on Friday. That it was a waste of time. She wasn’t going to be there because she wasn’t real, she was someone my imagination had created when life got a bit boring, and I had picked up that flyer from somewhere to give my fantasies more substance.

  That is what I told myself all week, but when I finished work on Friday I realised that I had no intention of going to the rave that night, and a few minutes later I found myself outside K-Hole-Kev’s house.

  K-Hole-Kev has been to a few free parties and most of his friends are ravers, but he is not one himself. He doesn’t go outside much. The reason for this I believe to be not far from agoraphobia, though leaning more towards plain lazy. K-Hole-Kev would much rather spend Friday night in a K-hole on his couch than get off his arse and venture into the scary world outside. In the early hours of Saturday morning, when the rave is coming to an end, we usually go to his place with the intension of crashing out but, after a quick nap, the weekend’s bender is resumed.

  But this weekend was going to be different.

  True to his name, when K-Hole-Kev does anything it is usually to the extreme. When I entered his house he was waiting for me in the kitchen, prepared for what appeared to be an epic quest. He had wrapped himself in abundant layers of clothes, a big brown coat, beanie hat, and boots.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I’m taking you to Janus,” he replied.

  “But I never said I was going,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest, feeling angry that he was being so presumptuous. I had been telling both him and myself all week that I wasn’t going to do this.

  “I knew you would,” Kev said, as he tucked the ends of his trousers into his boots, and zipped up his coat. “Let’s find your girl.”

  My girl? Not only is she not my girl but I am pretty sure she doesn’t even exist.

  Kev led me to a part of the city not far from where I met her last week. I had no drugs on me that night; I wanted to keep a clear head so that on the off-chance that I saw her again I would know it was real.

  We eventually came across a street busy with people, an
d a girl in a bright orange dress and blue stockings caught my eye. She had a collection of bizarre symbols painted over her face and was walking alongside an extravagant crowd of people who were almost as eye-catching as her. They were heading towards a building which had been discoloured by time and had only a few small windows. The gaps in the roof had been haphazardly covered with planks of wood, and the place gave me the general impression that it could collapse at any moment.

  When I realised that Kev was also leading me towards it I came to a terrible realisation.

  “Oh no,” I said. “Not here!”

  Kev smiled. “Yep, here it is. This is Janus.”

  “But it’s full of freaks...”

  I took another glance at the mishmash of clothes, hairstyles, piercings and jewellery around me. Some of these people looked very much like their parents had been too busy with their middle class jobs to give them much attention and now they were making sure the rest of the world did.

  “Do you want to find your girl or not?” Kev asked as he made his way to the door. I shook my head, realising that I had found a social setting which K-Hole-Kev, the borderline agoraphobe, was more comfortable entering than me.

  As soon as I entered the dark, ill-lit room my ears were filled with angry rock music. I cast my gaze about the place to see all kinds of people dressed in distinct fashions sitting around tables together or standing by the walls with drinks in their hands.

  “I think the bar’s this way,” Kev said as he guided our way through the darkness.

  We sidestepped around a group of drinkers to a counter where a shabby looking man with a beard was serving drinks. Kev leaned over and asked for two pints of beer while I scanned the crowds of people around us for her face. She was nowhere to be seen.

  All the time I was thinking; what the fuck am I doing here?

  Kev was taking longer than I expected to get drinks so I checked on him to see that he was waving his arms around, engaged in some kind of debate with the barman. I stared, wondering how Kev had managed to turn the purchase of two drinks into such an ordeal. Eventually the barman seemed to back down and Kev handed him some money.

  “Why’d you take so long?” I asked as he passed me a drink.

  “Ah, he didn’t recognise me. He always tries to swindle new people.”

  “You were bartering?”

  Kev nodded simply.

  I took my first swig of beer and, at the stale taste, hoped Kev didn’t pay too much for it.

  As I downed the rest of it I realised that in some ways this place wasn’t too different from the parties I usually go to. The place was dark, noisy, crowded; the air had that rundown smell of stale smoke and spilled beer, and there didn’t seem to be any security guards snooping around.

  The people and the music were different, but the essential feel of the place was the same. It had that essence of bedlam – where it feels like almost anything could happen. Raves are places you can party without restriction, and escape from the consumerism of nightclubs. The people in this place seemed to be trying to escape the chains of conventions – of identity, fashion, gender.

  In my opinion some of them had taken it a little too far, but the place wasn’t too bad.

  Just then I caught sight of a familiar face and I almost dropped my drink.

  “What’s the matter, man?” Kev muttered into my ear.

  I could see her at the top of a staircase. The girl from last Friday.

  Kev grabbed my shoulder and shook me. “Pikel! Man, what’s up with you?”

  “It’s her!” I gasped.

  “Where?”

  I rushed towards the stairs, but the place was getting busier now and I had to sidestep around a group of punk kids who didn’t seem to want to budge. Eventually I got impatient and shoved my way through, leaving a trail of annoyed comments behind me.

  I raced up the stairwell two steps at a time and the punters had to cling to the banisters to let me past. When I reached the top, I swung a wooden door open and found myself in a wide corridor filled with people.

  “Pikel!” Kev called, as he caught up with me. “What’s going on?”

  “She’s not here anymore,” I said.

  The hallway was big, and had a line of doors on each side. Lingering drinkers were coming and going between the different rooms or talking to each other in the hallway.

  “Where did you see her?” Kev asked.

  We passed the first room, and I peered inside. It stank of dope, and between the clouds of smoke I could just make out a group of guys sitting in a circle, puffing away at large hookah pipes.

  “Whoa, man,” Kev’s eyes lit up and he paused at the doorway. “You wanna?”

  I shook my head. “No! Not tonight! Didn’t you hear me? I saw her!”

  Kev’s shoulders dropped like a child just denied access to Disneyland.

  “Where do you think she went, then?” he asked, looking back up the hallway.

  “I think she was running away from something,” I replied, recalling the look on her face before she fled.

  I looked up the corridor and tried to put myself in the shoes of someone running away. There were rooms on each side, but they were all filled with people and I couldn’t see an end to the corridor yet, only darkness.

  “How far do you reckon this corridor goes, Kev?”

  There was no reply.

  “Kev?”

  I turned around and caught Kev busily leant over a windowsill with a note stuffed up his nostril.

  “Kev!”

  I had only let him out of my sight for a few moments and he was already on the horse tranquilisers.

  “Hold on,” he muttered. “Was just a little one.”

  “This isn’t the time or the place!”

  “There’s loads of people on drugs here! Look at them!”

  “It isn’t the time then. I said earlier! No drugs!”

  “You said it was because if you saw her you, like, wanted to know it wasn’t because you were trippin’,” he recalled.

  “Yes! Now come on!”

  “But you’ve already seen her now, and you were clean. Go on, just a little one!”

  Well... He did have a point...

  A few seconds later, our nostrils were filled and we were ready for the quest.

  The corridor was now much narrower than I remembered, but we compensated for our lack of balance by taking heavy strides. The floor was swaying like a seesaw. Why people make floors in such a way has always been a mystery to me but I always come across them when I have had a bit of K.

  I could see all these faces in the corner of my vision leering down at us. They were pissing me off. Why were their faces so big? Why did their mouths keep gaping open like big, black holes? It’s the colours. Their clothes were too bright. My eyes didn’t like them. My ears weren’t keen on their rippling choruses of laughter either.

  Why are they all staring at me?

  K disassociates your limbs from your body, makes you walk like an insect climbing up a wall. You look like a twat, Pikel. That is why they are staring, a voice in my head reminded me.

  I kept my head down and, for a while, became fascinated by the patterns on the floor. Lines, you can always trust lines. Better than those people back there. They were all circley.

  I then realised that the chatter of voices had quietened down, the only noises I could hear now were Kev walking beside me, and the faint thumping of the music coming through the walls.

  “How far does this tunnel go?” Kev murmured.

  I squinted my eyes at the darkness ahead but it seemed to stretch to infinity and I had no idea how long we had been walking for. This place seemed more like some kind of abandoned mansion than a nightclub.

  “It’s just the K playing tricks with our heads,” I replied.

  I turned around but there was no one behind us either, the people with big faces and bright clothes had vanished. I shook my head. We must have passed through a door, or turned a corner without realising it.
/>   And then we heard footsteps.

  “Someone’s coming!” Kev gasped, his eyes widening as paranoia set in. “Quick! Hide!”

  Before I could object, he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into the nearest doorway.

  “Kev!” I hissed, as he shut the door behind us. “Do you see two girls and a big, brown, talking dog with us?”

  He cast his eyes around us, just to make sure, and then shook his head.

  “And you know why that is, don’t you?”

  He stared at me with a baffled expression.

  “Because we are not the fucking Scooby Doo gang, that’s why! This isn’t a fucking film either. We are not on the run, and no one is out to get us. You’re just drugged up and paranoid!”

  “Why are you whispering then?”

  “I don’t know...” I admitted.

  “You said that girl was running away from something,” Kev reminded me. “I just thought that might mean someone’s following her.”

  “Hold on,” I sighed, and peered through a crack in the door, hoping that if I humoured him he would stop acting like such a fruitcake.

  The footsteps on other side became louder, and I watched a shadow stretch across the floor. I held my breath, feeling chills going down my spine as I recognised the dark figure in a black cloak.

  “What’s going on, man?” Kev whispered in my ear, a few moments later. “He’s gone, right?”

  “I think it was the man from the other night,” I whispered back in disbelief. “The one who disappeared.”

  “The one who was chasing her down the street?” Kev remembered. “Are you sure? Shit, mate, what should we do?”

  “Follow him,” I replied, as I gently pushed the door back open.

  He marched down the corridor, turning his head left and right to peer into the doorways he passed. I could never catch a glimpse of his face, just the outline of his black cloak that covered him from head to boot. There was something menacing about his presence, it was obvious he was looking for something and he was in a hurry.

  We followed him from a distance. At one point he drew to a sudden halt so I pulled Kev into the nearest doorway, and we found ourselves in a small cupboard jumbled with furniture and junk. I smothered Kev’s mouth with my hand to stifle his breathing, and peered down the corridor. The cloaked stranger was standing in front of one of the doorways. He lifted his arm and a pale, white hand slipped out of the sleeve of his cloak and grasped hold of the handle, pulling it open.