by Mike Hockney
That was when a stunning figure in a gold skull-mask appeared – Zara. No one else could make an entrance like that. In a beautifully-cut black dress with a slit all the way up her left thigh, and Viktor & Rolf crystal high heels, she strode in like a supermodel, accompanied by heart-stopping music: Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem.
Zara was also wearing elegant long black opera gloves, and the sort of headline-grabbing Bulgari diamond necklace that Oscar-nominated actresses loved to flaunt. She took up position in front of the largest headstone at the front of the hall. A microphone stand had been prepared for her.
As she waited for the smoke to clear, she stood perfectly still, almost seeming to merge with the grave. She looked around the room and I was sure she was smiling to herself beneath her mask.
‘Welcome to the Day of the Dead,’ she said. ‘This is our time for honouring the souls of the departed. Tonight, cemeteries are transformed. They are no longer the abode of the cold dead; now they are the kingdom of the reawakened.
‘On this night, the boundary between life and death disappears, allowing the dead to return. Tonight we will welcome back the most noble of us: our absent friends Lawrence, Chloe and Marcus.’
I felt vaguely queasy, as if some dark spirit were crawling inside me. There was a unique quality to Zara’s voice, something piercing. You didn’t so much hear the voice as feel penetrated by it. Her words reached much further into your head than anyone else’s, as though they were sharpened arrows, aimed perfectly.
‘We gather at the graves by candlelight and bring flowers and food,’ she went on. ‘But these are no ordinary flowers, and the food is a very special bread. These are the Flor de Muertos and the Pan de Muerto. All the time we are illuminated by Lux Perpetua – the perpetual light of sacred candles that stay lit day and night forever.’
There was enthusiastic applause as photographs of Lawrence, Chloe and Marcus were held up. Moments later, people began smashing the red skulls and eating them…candy!
‘Long ago in Mexico,’ Zara declared, ‘the Mayans said, “We only come to dream, we only come to sleep. It’s not true that we come to live on Earth.” For Lawrence, Chloe and Marcus, the dream is over. Now they’ve started their true lives.
‘Never forget, the life you lead is inconsequential. It’s how you die that’s important. That alone determines your rank in the afterlife.’
I wondered how Zara became so morbid, how she’d roped all these others into her death fixation. As I stared down the line of gasmasks on my side of the room, and across at the weird beaks of the plague doctors on the other, I realised I wasn’t in the normal world any longer. This was the Top Table’s greatest skill. With their odd costumes, strange talk and bizarre events, they succeeded in separating you from any sense of normality. Life was painted in brighter, bolder colours. Was that why Sam was so hooked? Whatever Hollywood could offer, it was nothing like this. This was Zara’s realm, and there was no one on earth like her.
A spotlight picked out three ten-foot-tall skeleton puppets and we all turned to watch their strange disconnected dance at the other end of the hall. The music blared as all kinds of weird lighting tricks took place. As I watched, the puppets’ skeletal faces morphed into those of Marcus, Chloe and Lawrence. I couldn’t see who was pulling the strings: true of so many things when I was with the Top Table.
Zara clapped her hands and I followed the other women as they removed their gasmasks. At the same time, the men removed their plague-doctor headwear.
I picked out Sam and started edging across the graveyard to speak to him when I was stopped by a sudden scream. One of the girls pointed at three plague doctors who, for some reason, still hadn’t removed their masks. Blood dripped from their beaks. Everyone backed away.
Zara raised her hands and made a calming gesture. ‘No need to be alarmed. Our three friends have returned, as we always knew they would.’
I glared at the three figures, trying to make sense of them. Seconds later I felt a tap on my shoulder. I spun round. Zara was right behind me, still wearing her gold skull mask.
‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Show me how brave you are. Go over there and greet the dead.’
‘Alright, I will.’
I was acutely aware of how cold it was in the room. I drew in a deep breath and began to slowly inch my way towards the three figures. I stopped a few feet short.
‘You can’t, can you?’ Zara sneered. ‘You’re just a frightened little girl.’
I took another long breath and stepped forward. The eye sockets of the figures’ goggles were filled with luminous blue light. I raised my hand and reached towards the nearest figure’s mask. As soon as I touched it, the figure collapsed; its hat, mask and coat sinking to the ground in a heap. The other two did the same without my touching them. I looked down at the empty costumes. It would be easy enough to prop them up as though they had people inside. Then someone simply had to pull a string and they’d fall down. The trouble was, as with the puppets, I couldn’t see any strings.
‘Looking for something?’ Zara was still behind me.
‘I…well…I…’
Zara nudged one of the costumes with her toe. ‘Why don’t you believe, Sophie? Is it really so hard?’
‘I’ll never swallow any of this nonsense.’
‘Oh, but you will. The truth is always the last thing people accept, but in the end it’s the only thing left.’
I stumbled away, making a beeline for the sommelier. I needed a drink. Badly.
Later that night, after an elaborate buffet amongst the graves, Leddington took me aside and showed me a small painting hanging near the door at the side of the hall. I recognised it instantly. I first came across it in the Tate about a year earlier. I gazed at the old man with a long grey beard hovering in mid-air over five despairing men on the point of death. On the right of the picture was the extraordinary figure that made it such a memorable painting – a muscular, hairless, naked man with green skin. The figure’s head was bowed as though a great weight were pressing on it. In his left hand, he clutched a dagger.
‘What do you think?’ Leddington asked. ‘Macabre?’
‘Genius.’
‘Oh, you’re familiar with it?’
‘It’s The House of Death by William Blake.’
‘Very good,’ Leddington said condescendingly. ‘Why don’t you explain it to me?’
I knew he expected me to screw it up and make a fool of myself, but I straightened up and girded myself. I pointed at the old man and said it was Jehovah, or Urizen, as Blake liked to call him, looking down on all the death and decay he’d created. The green figure, I said, was the creature who killed humanity, hence the dagger. ‘It’s the personification of death,’ I said.
Leddington stared at me.
For a second, I felt he was genuinely surprised me and I grinned, savouring the moment.
‘Well, well, Sophie York,’ he said slowly. ‘To think I was only interested in you for your body. There I was, neglecting that dazzling mind of yours.’
‘You just can’t be nice to me even once, can you?’
‘What’s the alternative name of this painting?’ he rasped.
‘Alternative?’ I couldn’t avoid the glint of triumph in his eyes.
‘It’s The Lazar House.’
I bristled. ‘Is this mansion the Lazar House?’
Leddington’s eyes flicked towards Zara. ‘No, but maybe you’ll see the real thing one of these days.’
‘So what is a Lazar House?’
‘In medieval times, beggars afflicted with dreadful chronic diseases, usually leprosy, were called lazars. Where they lived was the Lazaretto, the Lazar House.’ He reached out and took my hand. ‘You don’t like thinking of death, do you?’
‘Who does?’
‘Nothing teaches us more about life than death.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Why do people like you never want to learn? Does thinking nauseate you?’
I wanted to say F
uck off, wanker! but I knew that if I walked away he’d take it as proof that I was stupid, so I stood my ground.
‘Everyone ends up in the Lazar House in the end, Sophie. Why not celebrate it?’
‘I don’t see anything cool about worshipping death.’
Without any warning, he roughly pulled me into him and kissed me full on the lips.
I shoved him away as hard as I could and ran the back of my hand over my mouth in disgust. I headed straight for the bar. I ignored the sommelier, filled a large glass to the brim with the strongest red wine I could lay my hands on and gulped it down.
After that, I tried to keep as far from Leddington as possible, but if I thought I was escaping, I was wrong. Zara now sidled up to me.
‘Have you been upsetting Charles?’ she said. Her next remark startled me. ‘Take off my mask and hand it to me.’
‘Take it off yourself.’
She placed her hands over mine. ‘But you know you want to.’
Almost against my will, I lifted her mask over her head. We were so close our breasts were practically touching. She gazed into my eyes and, for once, I didn’t notice the usual contempt.
‘Everyone needs a little strange from time to time, don’t you think?’ she said.
I wanted to…I don’t know what I wanted.
‘Do you think you have a good personality?’ Zara asked.
‘Pretty good, yes.’
She took her mask from me and held it in front of her. ‘The word personality comes from the Latin word persona, meaning mask. Don’t you think that’s incredible? The thing that makes us unique, our personality, is a mask, something designed to conceal. What’s underneath? – that’s what we ought to be asking.’ She brandished the skull-mask in front of my face. ‘The real individual is so well hidden we never see him.’
‘Very interesting.’ I was desperate for an escape route.
‘Of course, it’s right that some things should remain hidden,’ she said. ‘Take omerta: that’s a powerful concept, don’t you think?’ Her eyes bored into me. ‘The art of keeping your mouth shut.’ She leaned forward, as if she were about to rub noses with me, or even kiss me like Leddington. ‘No one likes a rat, do they?’
‘No,’ I said, pulling away from her.
She smiled. ‘That’s right, Sophie. Honour is everything to us.’
‘I told you already – I’m no rat.’
‘Even if you were, we’d deny everything. We leave no traces so there would be nothing for your police friends to find. It would be your word against ours.’ Her voice had become a sinister rasp. ‘We’re not in the habit of forgiving our enemies.’ She stabbed a finger through one of the eye-sockets of the skull mask. ‘And we never forget them.’
She brought to mind those terrifying blonde children with gold eyes in that old horror movie The Village of the Damned; telepathic aliens whose powers grew stronger every day. They’d have destroyed the human race if they’d been allowed to grow up. Except now, it seemed, one had reached adulthood and she had her full alien powers at her disposal. I had been well and truly warned. Jesus, threatened.
‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ I said.
Zara smiled. She tipped her chin and looked into my eyes. ‘Do you know what you must do if you want the answers to all of this?’ She abruptly stepped behind me. Before I knew what was happening, she had reached round and cupped my breasts. I nearly screamed with the shock. ‘You must come into my world,’ she whispered, breathing softly over the nape of my neck, her voice simultaneously forceful and seductive.
The world of the damned, I thought. I was certain she was offering me the chance to find out what the Top Table’s secrets were. I didn’t know if I was brave enough. I couldn’t even tell her to take her hand off my breasts. Did I want her to?
‘You have a beautiful body,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you hate me so much. After all, you want to be me. I saw it in your eyes the first time we met.’
When I tried to respond, not a thing came to mind, nothing whatever. I was like a cow in an abattoir, dumbly awaiting the terminal bolt in the brain.
‘Have you any idea how lucky you are?’ At last she took her hands away. ‘We plucked you from the ranks of the nameless, the ciphers, the flatliners to give you an opportunity you can scarcely conceive. Nothing comes close to what we have to offer.’
‘Plucked me?’
She walked round me in a circle. I felt stark naked, like a new harem girl being inspected by the sultan. What the hell was happening?
‘I’m the gateway, the door,’ she stated imperiously. ‘As Jim Morrison said, “There are things known and things unknown and in between are The Doors.” Believe me, I can open the door to a world you never dreamt of. I’ll show you every unknown thing. You just need the courage to follow me.’
My head was beginning to spin. I could scarcely bear her looking at me.
‘Would you accept the greatest pleasure imaginable if it were offered to you, no matter the cost?’ Her eyes drilled into mine. ‘A perfect moment to echo in eternity?’
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ I said.
Chapter 35: Alone
My eyes sprang open. I didn’t understand why I was so cold. Shit, where was I? I tried to move, but my limbs were reluctant to co-operate. My head felt fuzzy, as though someone was trying to force kitchen sponges between my brain and my skull. Slowly I began to focus. I was still in the Great Hall. Daylight was flooding in. Last night…Christ Almighty…I experienced that shiver of panic you get when you wonder if you’ve made a complete drunken arse of yourself, and realise the answer is almost certainly yes.
I was lying on a wooden floor in nothing but my bra and knickers. My clothes were neatly folded in the corner, next to my shoes. The mansion was eerily quiet. I dressed quickly and started searching each room, looking for signs of life.
Nothing. Plain walls and bare floorboards in every room: the mansion was deserted!
When I gazed out of one of the upper-floor windows, I was astonished to see that a For Sale sign had been erected in the middle of the lawn. Jesus, how long had I been asleep? Another Top Table stunt? I stared at the sign and it began to swim in front of my eyes. They couldn’t vanish like this, they just couldn’t.
I went back downstairs into the Great Hall. Somehow I’d slept through what must have been a massive removal operation to vacate the mansion. Had I passed out? I remembered helping myself to as much red wine as I could guzzle, like an alcoholic who’d just been told that the Last Drink Ever saloon was closing in the next five minutes.
Everything I wanted to forget about last night insisted on marching to the front of my mind. After my close encounters with Leddington and Zara, I’d spent most of my time dodging them and gazing at Sam. He planted himself in the corner of the hall and stood there all night, his eyes glued to Zara. He wouldn’t let anyone come near him – except her, of course. Now and again, she stepped close to him, whispered something then moved away again without waiting for a response. The more she did it, the more beguiled Sam seemed. He was like one of those cult members whose attachment to the cult becomes stronger the worse they treat him. I couldn’t bear to watch, yet found it even harder not to. The car crash syndrome, I guess.
Yet my eyes had occasionally strayed from Sam. More than occasionally, perhaps. I didn’t like to admit who it was I had been looking at. It made me wonder if I’d taken off my own clothes or someone else had stripped me. Leddington – our nation’s future glorious leader? I didn’t dare contemplate the other possibility.
Even though no one was around, I felt myself blushing. I tried to concentrate on other things. I walked around the Great Hall, listening to my echoing steps, recalling all the odd things that had happened here, the strange paintings, the weird parties, the glittering students and their fascination with death. I could detect it all even now, somehow ingrained in the fabric of the building. Were the Top Table putting it all behind them? Was that why Zara was selling up? In
a few months she and the others would graduate, but what could the normal world possibly offer them? They seemed far beyond the touch of everyday things.
I went upstairs again and stood outside the one room I’d never been allowed to enter. The silver plaque with the quote from The Aeneid had been removed from Zara’s door, but I could still see it just as clearly as on that first night. I repeated aloud the translation Marcus gave me: These are the tears of things, and the stuff of our mortality cuts us to the heart. My voice rebounded off the ceilings and floors, reverberated from the walls of the deserted hallways, flew at me like darts from every direction. Just like they did that first time, the words made me tearful in a way I didn’t understand. They were even more poignant now.
I opened the door and stood on the threshold of the empty room, trying to imagine Zara here. A palatial space, it was somehow anonymous, with a simple white ceiling, magnolia walls and gleaming maple floorboards. It had an old-fashioned bay window, no doubt commanding a wonderful panorama over Green Park.
I wondered how many men Zara had devoured in this chamber. Were their charred bones hidden beneath the floorboards; the mortal remains of the poor legions of previous Sams who approached too close to the flame? There was no flame quite like her, was there? I’d burned when she touched me, but, if she’d kissed me, I feared I wouldn’t have pulled away.
When I tried to take a step inside, my foot froze in the air, powerless. This room had been explicitly forbidden to me on the first night and nothing had changed. Zara’s perfume lingered in the room; the scent her lovers must have associated with heaven or – after she’d tired of them – hell. I hurried away, leaping down the staircase in my haste to get out of this place.