by Jeremy Reed
The chant stayed unwaveringly level, once it had established its own autonomous volume. He experienced it as a sort of molecular energy, something almost palpably alive in the dark.
He didn’t know how long he had been chanting, only that the fire had caught to a sharp blaze and the acrid smoke prickled his nostrils. Somebody was in the process of building up the flames, and the chant had dropped to a barely audible hum, like it was shortly about to end.
The group remained sitting, and Jim opened his eyes to catch the circle in a state of meditative repose. He could hear nothing now, but a branch lifted by the wind and the accompanying volley of raindrops. They could have been seated in deep countryside rather than in an area of woodland tracked by officious police, the place seemed so remote.
As Jim continued to stare at the flames he became aware of a noise in the bushes that sounded like someone coming towards them dragging a chain over the ground. He immediately thought of Slut. It was the sound he had heard the previous night when Slut had entered the room, the jangle of a masochist’s self-chosen instruments of punishment, this time forcing a way through undergrowth.
The sound grew closer, the indiscriminate snapping of branches suggesting the person was wading through obstructive growth without concern for safety. The crackle sounded like fire as it travelled steadily towards them with its snappy commentary. When Jim opened his eyes he could see Slut standing there in the reflected light. His torso was naked, with chains roped around his jeans at the waist. He looked every bit the self-professed martyr, body strafed by the lacerating whiplash of branches. He stood with his face turned to the ground, as though self-debasement was something that set him apart from humans. He carried the same air of perverse distinction that Jim remembered from last night, only now Slut was there as a nocturnal journeyer, someone who belonged to this wooded precinct and who had evolved from its indigenous culture. He half expected to see leaves sprouting from his skin and hair, his identification with the Heath was so complete.
Jim rose with the others as they stood to form a circle around the fire. Slut made a deferential sign that they were to resume sitting, and Jim selected a dry spot at the bole of a silver birch. He could hear the rain coming and going in short-lived attacks, the sudden ripple of it in the leaves sounding like small stones pinged at glass.
Slut stooped over the fire, warming his emaciated body, and put his hands out to the flames. He could have been someone partially screened by dry-ice on a low-lit stage, as his spare gestures asserted their usual hypnotic fascination. His body language clearly substituted for words, and he continued to use the fire to advantage, moving in and out of the light to stage his drama. He went through the contortions of what looked like a shamanic dance, arms thrown out to the trees, his wasted body showing its ribcage and the taut stretch of tattooed skin over bone. The firelight threw now orange, now blue choreographed patterns of light over him. Jim thought of Slut as a demented fire-eater, someone swallowing his cult and their orgy-tree in a series of omnivorous gulps.
Without warning, or it may have been a trick of the light, he appeared to walk straight through the fire, but it happened so quickly that he couldn’t be sure if he hadn’t imagined the whole thing. The smoke was growing cloudier and transmitting dense blue clusters that worked themselves upwards through the trees. The whole scene was like a chiaroscuro painting, and Jim followed Slut’s movements in and out of the light with polarized concentration. He had forgotten even his sense of resentment at being brought here against his will and of the danger in which he was placed.
One of the circle got up, moved towards Slut and placed an ivy wreath over his head. It was clearly, Jim observed, part of the ritual, and Slut responded by engaging in a jerky, animalistic dance around the flames. When the smoke cleared he could make out Slut’s body posted against a tree-trunk.
The group now rose and formed a circle around their leader. They were chanting again, but this time in a manner that incited frenzy. Slut had adopted a crucifixional pose against his tree and had thrown his arms out horizontally, so that he appeared to be an integral part of the rough bark. Although the group seemed to have forgotten about him, Jim followed, feeling totally absorbed by the action.
The dance had begun, and he felt too stunned by events to stand back from them and too engaged in the ritual to think. As people joined hands in their celebratory romp, he had the feeling that the whole wood had come alive and that the trees were also participants in the ritual. Someone had fed the flames with a swatch of branches, and the fire busied itself with renewed energies. Jim was breathless as the tempo continued to quicken, the momentum sustained by group impulse. He felt hot, dazed and on the point of dropping, only to be forced around on the muscular circuit that kept Slut at its core. Just when he felt like giving up, his lungs full of smoke, a new jab of current would inject him back into the dance.
They were trampling the undergrowth flat as they pursued a groove around the orgy-tree. The whole wood crackled with their animalistic stamping out of a territory in a manner that was defiantly unlawful. The heat was turned up, and Jim felt the circle start to contract as it narrowed in on its victim. The pace had slackened, but the chanting continued to assert a powerful, rhythmic hold. It was the force managing them as they closed in on Slut.
Jim watched as one of the group broke rank and pulled a torch from the flames and brandished it at the night sky. People were growing increasingly reckless as they narrowed in on their target. The excitement raced through Jim’s blood, propelling him forward. He was beyond exhaustion and impelled to live out the experience to its end. He wondered what Masako would think if she could see him now, transformed into a horned creature ravaging through heathland with a group of sexual outlaws.
They moved in closer on Slut, who remained motionless, head thrown back in what looked like a state of ecstatic trance. He was fascinated by the man’s ectomorphic body and how his skin was a road-map of grainy scars. He could see clearly now that Slut had ropes attached to his wrists and was probably waiting to be lifted and tied to the tree.
Jim felt himself choking as the smoke thickened like fur inside his throat. He noticed how the wind pushed the full assault of it in Slut’s face and how he never once flinched from the billowing irritant. He remained rooted in the position he had adopted, like he had grown into the tree’s body and had taken on its punished and twisted anatomy.
When the chanting stopped the circle came to an abrupt halt. The man carrying the torch held it up as a fisted salute, its signal raging in the solid dark.
Jim watched as two of the group climbed to an overhanging branch and, assisted by those below, managed to lift Slut up and tie his hands as two horizontals to the branch. With his feet lifted off the ground his ankles were fastened to the tree by rope secured around the trunk. Slut’s identity as the wounded god had been achieved with a facility that shocked Jim, so quickly had it been managed.
He squinted through the diffused smoke at Slut who had thrown his head to one side, looking like a giant lizard slung across the warped bark. The man holding the torch continued to thrust it up vertical towards Slut’s face, so that the light crawled over him in an orange flickery shimmer.
The group set up a slow liturgical chant that hung on the air. The torch-carrier now stood directly beneath Slut’s raised body, and Jim could sense the sexual expectancy shared by the group. He, too, felt the excitement rush to his groin, as the measure of an experience that both thrilled and terrified him. The wind dragged bushy clusters of smoke back at them, and he temporarily lost sight of Slut through the dense, curling clouds. Suddenly he froze, as a voice like a bird’s cry issued from the tree, inhuman, raspingly pitched and shredding the silence. He knew instinctively that the sound was coming from Slut and that it was the cry of the wounded man strung up on the orgy-tree.
It happened a second and a third time, as the note of a shaman communicating with his tribe through the pitch black. The group responded with similar bird-li
ke cries, having Jim think they had been transformed by the rite into ground-hopping owls. He could see that the two men nearest the tree were in the process of stripping off their jeans and that the anticipated orgy was about to begin.
There was rain again slashing through the foliage, cracking the leaves like the sound of nuts being shelled. It was coming on harder now and drumming the flames with an insistent sputter.
Jim lost his footing for a moment and fell back into bracken exhausted, his face exposed to the cold night rain. He lay there gasping, up-ended and unwilling to rise. As he sat up he heard shouts coming from the bushes, followed by a piercing succession of whistles. There were lights moving through the trees, and he knew without doubt it was the police.
He got up and listened to the sound of people crashing through the wood, flashlights advancing ahead of them in crazily shifting radials of light. He guessed immediately the Heath Police had been alerted by the blue rollers of smoke surfing above the tree-tops.
They were coming closer, and he stood there confused, uncertain whether to stay or run. He looked towards the orgy-tree at Slut’s immobile body grafted to the bark and heard someone shout, ‘Quick. Get out of here. It’s the police.’
He didn’t waste a second. Without knowing where he was he took off into the dark, forcing his way through the wood in the opposite direction to the fire. He ran with his hands stretched out in front of him for protection, terrified that he was being pursued. He could hear shouts behind him and guessed that the police had discovered Slut roped to the tree and were rounding up whoever had remained behind.
He continued running, tripped over on his face, got up again and zigzagged his way across a clearing. The rain was coming on hard, and he was soaked through, but he was off again, this time in a different direction, the whistles cutting in behind him and the shower steadily increasing.
He thought of the warmth and safety of Masako’s studio and of his need to get back there. He cursed Danny for the trouble he had landed him in and kept on running. He had never before realized the effects of darkness and the way it came up as a tangible wall to impede his progress. It felt solid as it opposed his body, like he was up against a resistant mass of grainy energies. Whenever he advanced, he felt immediately displaced and thrown back on himself, his tracks reversed. His hands were cut by brambles and his clothes torn by snagging branches.
He made a sudden detour and reasoned that if he continued in one direction he was sure to meet up with the road. He went left again, up steep ground overhung by hawthorns, and made out lights in the distance. He didn’t know at first if they were headlights from passing cars or windows sunk in houses, only he needed to reach them and fast. He slowed his pace now that he knew he wasn’t being pursued and longed only to be out of the night and the blinding rain.
The ground was slippery under foot, but he was determined to find his way and get his bearings. He wondered if Danny had stayed behind with Slut and been taken off by the Heath Police to the station. He didn’t care, and the night’s proceedings confirmed his belief that Danny was into a dangerous scene.
Jim reckoned he must be up high, probably behind Squire’s Mount, and hit in the direction of the road ahead. He came down a side path into a quiet street and guessed from the landmarks that he was somewhere in Frognal, up above the High Street. He stood under a streetlight’s halo and read the name Branch Hill posted on a wall. His clothes were dripping, and he thought of himself as someone who had swum across one of the ponds and emerged as a night-chilled amphibian trailing a slimy signature across a residential precinct. His trousers looked like fatigues, and there was a long tear incised in the left sleeve of his jacket. His normally elegant appearance had been trashed by his encounter with the Heath, and he shuddered from what he recognized as a travesty of himself. The shower had lifted, its massive chandelier had been drawn up into the sky, and he took advantage of the break in the downpour to organize his thoughts.
He needed to find a taxi and get out of the district. His middle-class values ruled out the possibility of taking the tube in such wrecked clothes. He had no intention of being viewed in this disordered state and made whatever repairs he could to his appearance, while sloshing a defeated trail down the hill.
He was confused, too, as to how much he should tell Masako about what had happened. It all sounded so improbable, the idea of him having been kidnapped and taken to the Hampstead woods to witness a crucifixion. It would be almost too much to ask of her to believe that such bizarre practices took place at night in London. Besides, he felt guilty about his involvement in the ritual and knew that he had only just narrowly missed being arrested. He had let himself go and wasn’t sure where in the proceedings he would have stopped. He knew he had let himself down, and the rain doubling again provided a fitting soundscape to his mood. His sense of dejection was acute as he stood in Heath Street looking to left and right for a taxi. He could have let Masako know he was all right by using his mobile, but he decided not to, preferring instead to tell her the edited highlights in person.
Jim cursed the misfortune that had brought him to this and blamed Danny for his involvement with the group. To console himself, Jim thought of taking Masako with him to Rome and of getting away from it all. Going there, he hoped, would be like cleaning his blood and making a new start.
He stood outside the tube station and waited disconsolately for a taxi to show. He no longer cared about the downpour, he was too destroyed by the night’s experience, too shredded by the whole thing. He thought of going back to his own flat to clean up, but the idea of being alone was intolerable.
He could hardly believe his luck when a taxi strolled down the hill, its amber light swimming through the rain. He threw up his hand just in time, and without consulting the driver jumped into the rear.
‘You looked half drowned, mate,’ the cabby joked, before taking Jim’s instructions to head for Soho.
7
Against all advice, he had gone ahead and married Hierocles. That Rome had taken the matter seriously bit into his sleep as he sat up in the empty dawn hours, listening to a subdued roar surf over the city.
Sometimes, when he awoke before daybreak, a nerve resonating in his unconscious told him he had gone too far. While he couldn’t locate the exact source of his unrest, he knew it existed somewhere within the modalities of his confused gender. He had risked a same-sex marriage, despite it being regarded as a violation of taboo by almost everyone, including the Army. And that he had insisted his bride dress as a woman had been considered detrimentally faggy even by the gay community.
Hierocles had taken to going out at night and sometimes not coming back for two or three days at a time. Heliogabalus had grown to despise Hierocles for his reckless hedonism, and propped up on a couch, counting his thoughts, he wished him dead.
He thought of Nero, who had been terrified to go to sleep for fear of encountering those he had murdered in his dreams, and now insomnia had overtaken him, but for different reasons. He had committed no atrocities in his reign, but pacifism and a refusal to become involved in political issues had turned the Senate against him.The one war he could have staged – against the Marcomanni – he had refused to initiate on the grounds that Commodus had subdued this state by Chaldean magic and it was dangerous to risk lifting the spell. He stood by his decision, proud of having avoided a bloody offensive.
Giving up all attempts at sleep, he took himself out to the terrace and looked up at the shattered stars exploded across the galaxy. It would be light soon, and his thoughts were busy with the coming day’s agenda. He reminded himself that he was due to address a convention of rent boys later in the day and that he was to be given first choice from a priceless cargo of silks recently arrived from China.
He was drinking already, but he didn’t care. His mind raced with buzzy data. Finance, he assured himself, was stable. Under him the government had increased its volume of credit by depreciating the standard of the currency. Gold was still relatively p
ure, and he had succeeded in keeping the weight of the aureus at 6.55 grams, no mean feat given its significant reduction under Caracalla.
He was about to go inside and fetch another bottle when he felt Hierocles’ hand on his shoulder. He could smell the alcohol on his breath as an undeclared roster of drunken nights. He knew the procedure backwards now, his lover’s appeals for forgiveness, followed by the usual vicious recriminations that he was being used and forced to live in the emperor’s shadow.
This time Hierocles looked ravaged by the scene. He was losing weight and the story of his nights was written in his face. Heliogabalus didn’t like the look of this waste: it seemed to cut to the bone like the inroads of plague. He turned away as Hierocles searched for the obligatory drink and went inside to collect a bottle, seething with a catalogue of hidden reproaches he felt bound to contain. He realized their relationship lacked the contrast of opposites, that it was one fired by an attraction to each other’s shadow. They had no shared culture, no proper meeting-point, and the conflict of their interests struck a succession of ugly chords.
He came back to the terrace carrying a bottle black as storm. Hierocles had thrown himself on a couch and looked bruised by the orange rift of light that had broken over the eastern suburbs. The cloud-break looked like an orange being peeled slowly, and Heliogabalus searched the horizon for his temple, which dominated a cluster of multiplexes.
This time he was determined to avoid a scene. He promised himself he wouldn’t get involved in arguments even if Hierocles wound him up. He would play dumb and let it go.