Midnight Lamp

by Gwyneth Jones

  ‘Oh!, God!’ cries elegant-Allie. ‘He’s right! Off, off, off!’

  ‘And Stonefish!’ yells Dora.

  ‘What’s wrong with Stonefish?’ demands the aggrieved Immix maestro.

  ‘Some bits are okay,’ concedes Dora. ‘I like the start of “Kythera”. But then, hohum, we have to have the blackened corpses swaying in the breeze-’

  ‘You watch your mouth, that’s my Baudelaire quote-’

  The cat steps on the remote again, the music becomes unbelievably loud and strange. ‘Why d’you call the cat Tommy?’ shouts DK. ‘Is that an ironic Tommy?’

  ‘No. It’s because it’s—’

  ‘WHAT-?’

  ‘DEAF!’ bawls Fiorinda…but now the cat has vanished.

  ‘The cat’s disappeared again!’

  The watcher leaned over to make a check on the Strange Cat Incidents log.

  ‘That cat is weird!’ shouted one of the armed guards from the cab.

  ‘What’s the music?’

  ‘The soundtrack of Stonefish, I think.’

  Late on the third night they came in from a restaurant party (promotion gig) and went straight to their basement bunker. Technically they’d have been equally safe upstairs, but no one felt comfortable in those haunted rooms. Chip and Ver set up the projector, to find out what the unmarked van was viewing.

  Hey hey, it was Cactus Room cabaret.

  ‘Escape from the Panopticon,’ crowed Chip, ‘Heeheehee! I love it.’

  ‘Like shooting fish in a barrel!’ gloated Verlaine.

  ‘Could you turn that thing off?’ said Ax.

  They were alone, the security crew had moved into the ranchero’s gatehouse. They settled in the kidney-shaped jacuzzi, expectantly—and Ax remembered a meeting long ago, in the vandalised breakfast courtyard of a Park Lanehotel. They had survived a bloody coup, they were prisoners of the monstrous Green President Pigsty Liver. Ax had given them his Utopian manifesto, and his shattered friends had let themselves be recruited. He saw the marks of time, invisible until you’ve been away, and then leaping to the eye when you meet your friends again. There’s Rob, paterfamilias, thicker in the middle, soft around the jaw. Felice and Dora are plumper too, Cherry’s all grown up. Ah, those three used to be such babes, dooling round Lambeth in their old pink Cadillac. Allie looks worn out. Dilip has aged, suddenly. Roxane Smith, veteran music critic ought to be here, but s/he had decided hir health wasn’t up to it. Anne-Marie Wing and Smelly Hugh had still been on the bad guys’ team, that grim morning when the Reich was born.

  Sometime soon he must convince them it was time to quit: stop clinging to the wreckage back in London. But not tonight.

  ‘Okay, we’re as secure as we can be, bar sitting out on the beach, which might not be secure at all, given the futuristic devices of the modern world—’

  ‘How much trouble are we in?’ asked Rob. ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘More trouble than we thought,’ said Sage.

  Ax sighed. ‘Well, it’s like this—’

  He explained the situation they’d walked into. The President’s letter, Harry’s Fat Boy pitch. The mysterious werebears; the butcher’s shop in the wasteland. Philemon Roche’s casenotes; the secret Committee.

  Sage made some additions. Fiorinda said very little.

  Out in the Anza-Borrego desert, a hundred miles east of San Diego, volunteer military neuronauts were having their brains rewired, by something like the same method that had taken Sage to the Zen Self…but different in closely-guarded technical detail. In another age, the very existence of this project would have been wrapped in lead and buried deep. In post-modern America Vireo Lake had its media coverage, its camp followers, its faithful protestors: but the PR firewall was magnificent. Even President Eiffrich, expressing his distaste at the development of ‘human weapons’, never hinted at the occult connection. Of course, it helped that vanishingly few people in the USA knew about the assassination of Rufus O’Niall, or the reason for it—

  Chip, Verlaine and Dilip had been Zen Self labrats along with Sage,–until he’d left them far behind. The others weren’t weird science nuts, but you could say they had a grasp of the issues.

  Verlaine broke the silence first. ‘But that’s… I mean, apart from the incredible scandal if they got busted, the Vireo Lake people must know the blood sacrifices won’t work! You can’t boost a normal brain to fusion by exposing it to horrors, no matter what. Even if you were flaying people alive in the same room—’

  ‘Thanks for the charming image,’ said Ax.

  Verlaine glanced at Fiorinda. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said the rock and roll brat, haggard and bright-eyed in her dinner party finery. ‘Horrors have no effect. I’m over-conditioned.’

  ‘I think the Committee is ahead of you, Ver,’ said Ax. ‘The implication of everything we’ve been told, and shown, is that they believe the Vireo team has given up on rewiring normal brains. They’re trying to weaponise natural magic.’

  ‘Holy fuck.’

  ‘But if that’s so, why this pussyfoot FBI investigation?’ demanded Dilip. ‘Why can’t your Committee insist on seeing the experimental data?’

  ‘It could be they’ve found out that Vireo Lake is a blind,’ said Ax. ‘If the real business is going on elsewhere, and the Vireo team knows nothing, then raiding the labs is just going to issue a warning, and achieve nothing. I don’t know, DK. All Roche will say is there are reasons, and Fred Eiffrich will explain, when he finally finds time to have his urgent meeting with me. But maybe we’re better off finding our own answers. Put it this way, we’re not absolutely sure that we have the same agenda as the Committee.’

  ‘But…’ Rob rubbed his forehead. ‘This, er, Fat Boy? That’s what you get if you weaponise someone like Rufus O’Niall…? Isn’t that what they’re supposed to be doing at Vireo Lake? Trying to make a human magic weapon?’

  ‘Wash your mouth,’ said Sage, ‘Fat Boy is not what anybody wants. The official line is that they’re building a stable form of fusion consciousness, which could, say, vaporise a few Islamic missile silos, thousands of miles away, with no loss of life. It’s the clean, green future of warfare.’

  ‘So, really, it wouldn’t be too terrible if they were to succeed? I mean, with the official program. As weapons of mass destruction go-’

  ‘No, not really, because in my opinion, in many opinions, it’s impossible. If you reach the Zen Self, what they call fusion over here, Rob, then you either stay there, and you’re in no state to be nuking missile silos. Or you come back, and you very rapidly lose your ability to win an argument with Rufus O’Niall.’

  ‘And that’s why they gave up and started on the Fat Boy.’ said Dora.

  ‘And if you have a Fat Boy, then you’re into the “It’s a Good Life” scenario,’ explained Chip, helpfully. ‘Meltdown, hell dimension. Rufus could think nasty thoughts about you, and you’d drop dead. The Fat Boy decides Saudi Arabia is a bad place: make it gone. Gone.’

  ‘Could that happen?’

  ‘Anything could happen, Dor. The moon could turn to green cheese. The Fat Boy could decide to abolish electricity, and then we’d be in trouble. Mr Eiffrich’s rogue weapon-mongers cannot possibly be aiming to create the Fat Boy. They could be trying to create a natural magic weapon, out of some crew-cut soldier who can guess Zener cards better than chance, or make a pencil wiggle without touching it. If that’s what’s happening we’re in no danger, no matter how many blood sacrifice raves they sponsor.’

  ‘But if they have a candidate who can touch Fiorinda,’ said Dilip, ‘that would be different. And maybe they would not know, until too late.’

  Rob shook his head. ‘Fuck. We’re a long way from building Utopia, Ax.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  The hollow shell of the spa echoed around them. Dilip leaned back on his elbows and stared at the ceiling: imagining phantom ripples of light on water, shimmering up there. What games were played in this temple of pleasure, be
fore the microbes of disillusion crept in? And what astonished ghosts are here, he wondered, listening to this surreal discussion? There is no way back, and no place to hide, even in the heart of empire… But I knew this.

  ‘I’m confused,’ said Allie, at last. ‘I thought Rufus was the only monster that there’s ever been, and there could never be another-’

  ‘Well, there’s me, Allie,’ Fiorinda reminded her.

  ‘But you’re not a monster! Nothing could make you into a monster!’

  ‘I’m glad you think so,’ said Fiorinda, with a wry little smile, ‘But here I sit, proving that monsters exist. I thought the way you did Allie. I’ve been trying and trying to convince myself it was over, but I’m still here, so that was a problem. Now there’s someone else. It isn’t any kind of military volunteer. I knew that the moment Ax and Sage told me Harry’s story. If there’s a Fat Boy candidate, it has to be someone exactly like my father: a freakishly talented natural magician, who is also the idol of millions. I’m right, aren’t I Sage?’

  ‘Hm…well…’

  Fiorinda tugged at a lock of her ragged mass of hair. ‘Yeah, sorry: an inconvenient truth. Magicians get their power from other peoples’ arousal. It’s how conjurers work on stage, it’s what ritual magic assumes, and what happens if you have the freak wiring matches the…the instinct about “magic” that everyone has, the world over. I don’t know the information space equations for it, but I know that because I know. It’s not a strong force. You need access to a huge number of people before you achieve anything spectacular. My father was the perfect storm, in terms of “psychic powers”: but he’d have stayed a suburban monster, wrecking a few lives—except that he became a rock god, with hordes of fans, and he was up there for decades. That’s when he achieved fusion, and he never came back.’

  She swallowed, as if trying to get rid of a foul taste. ‘At Rivermead, in the winter of the occupation, I used to listen to the Green Nazis saying they must get more blood sacrifices going, because this would make Rufus stronger. I’m sure he appreciated their efforts. Fear, disgust and horror pump up arousal: the occult tradition has always known that. There’s sex too, but fear and horror and disgust are much more reliable. But he didn’t need what they did. He was already weaponised. All the Celtics did was to tell him what he was capable of.’

  ‘I’ve always had the gift,’ volunteered Anne-Marie, uneasily. ‘It needs the right light, but I see the colours around people, and it tells me things. When I’m making medicines, if I’m meant to heal that person, I feel somethink pass from me, I mean, through me, into the spirits of the herbs. It’s not all wicked.’

  Fiorinda gave her a pitying glance. ‘Not all of it. Just the sort that works.’

  ‘One idea in fusion theory says all the weird phenomena are big number artefacts,’ murmured Verlaine. ‘We reached a critical mass point, with the billions of people, and the globalization of everything, and that’s what flipped us. The Zen Self route was opened by tech advancement, which is closely related to population size. The Rufus O’Niall route was opened by the explosion of the global audience, which also needed tech advancement—’

  ‘Techno-utopia, the Dark Ages,’ said Chip, balancing these imaginary choices on his palms. ‘Or, hey, a third way! Previously impossible hell-dimension! We could give it a name. We could call it Fiorinda’s Hollywood Conjecture!’

  Sage gave him a hard stare.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘So, this is what you’re going to tell the President?’ said Rob, trying to sound businesslike. ‘That his weapon-mongers have recruited a global megastar with a strange, nasty reputation—?’

  ‘I’m sure there are one or two of those around here,’ muttered Felice.

  ‘I’m not going to tell the President anything,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I don’t talk to Presidents. I don’t think it matters what Fred Eiffrich knows. I think this is ours: or at least mine. I didn’t come here for any reason except to find the Fat Boy candidate. If you want to help me, that would be good.’

  ‘Fiorinda,’ Dilip sat up. ‘Whatever you say: but what do you want us to do? We’re minor players here, we have no contacts, no clues.’

  ‘I know how it sounds, but we’re not completely helpless, DK. The bear said kill me. It could have been a challenge or a cry for help, but it tells me we were summoned here to Hollywood; and not by Harry Lopez. The candidate will be someone we know, someone we meet, someone who gets involved with us-’

  ‘Would you recognise them?’ asked Dora, ‘Are there signs?’

  ‘Like I recognised my own father, you mean? When he turned up wearing Fergal Kearney’s body?’

  ‘Auras can be disguised,’ put in Anne-Marie, wisely.

  ‘There are no signs,’ said Fiorinda. ‘It doesn’t have to be a man, it doesn’t have to be someone with an evil reputation, and the Committee can forget about evidence connecting this person to the blood sacrifices. It just has to be someone with superb access to the big feeding trough.’

  ‘And a motive,’ said Chip. ‘Some reason why they’d be prepared to do this.’

  ‘No motive. Or none we’d understand.’

  ‘But what if we nail him for you?’ asked Allie. ‘What then?’

  ‘I’m hoping it will be obvious what to do when the time comes, but meantime you’ve all got to be very careful. One thing we know for sure is that committing effective magic makes you crazy, and the more you do it, the crazier you get.’

  ‘I’m still hoping Fiorinda’s wrong,’ said Ax, into a lengthening silence.

  Sage nodded. ‘Me too. Everything Fee says makes sense, but there could be other explanations. Equally screwy, but not so drastic.’

  ‘Well,’ said Ax. ‘That’s it. You won’t see the Celtic murders getting media coverage, and we’ve been told to keep our mouths shut, so whatever we do in the way of investigating, it has to be discreet. Meanwhile, weird as it may seem we’re supposed to be promoting movie. Frankly, I find the whole idea ridiculous, but it’s our alibi, and I suggest we can also make it work for us. I can’t tell you how shit I feel, that you wasted those years, and came out of the blood sweat and tears with nothing—’

  This roused them, startled and indignant.

  ‘What-?’

  ‘Ax, how can you say that?’

  ‘Nobody thinks like that!’

  Shit, thought Ax. Why did I start? This is not the moment… ‘Okay, but I never intended to leave you lumbered, when I quit the dictatorship. There comes a time to move on, folks, and here you are in Hollywood. You should make the most of this chance.’

  Dilip said, ‘No!’: lay back and looked for his ghost-ripples.

  ‘All we got to do is stick together,’ said Smelly Hugh.

  Allie sighed. ‘I’m exhausted, it’s nearly three am. Shall we go to bed?’

  Felice stood by the windows of the master bedroom in the Snake Eyes suite, staring out. Rob sat on the end of the bed: head bowed, hands clasped between his strong thighs. The morning sunlight glinted on his rings.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ said Felice, ‘Listen to me. Before Dissolution, you were the guy, and Ax Preston was the country boy, friend of ours. There were choices Ax made, that you would not make. I loved you for it, I love you for it now. You are a rare and righteous soul. But we got to get away from the Reich. We have kids.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want to talk about it now.’

  ‘The fuck, when?’ Her voice rose, controlled but furious. ‘When the fuck else? We at home, you always with the fuckin’ brothers, never ARE with me. My house is full of guns! Fucking yardies, white desperanto gang boys, and do you think that’s going to last? There’ll come that knock on the door, one dark night!’

  Keep your head down, he thought. When two people lose it at the same time, it’s carnage. That strange expression, Fat Boy, jarred on his mind, and he felt that Fiorinda’s bleak conviction was working on F’lice too. You have to trust Fiorinda, she always knows. Sometimes with a shock you re
member the world that was, and you know you can’t stand any more of this unbelievable shit; but you have to. Close your eyes and pray.

  Dora and Cherry, in the next room, had been been with the babies: Felice’s daughter Ferdelice, and Mamba, Dora’s little boy. How they envied and despised Anne-Marie, who had left behind six kids behind, ranging from young adult to infant, without a qualm. To hold a child in your arms, b-loc, is like holding a dream.

  Dora wiped her eyes. ‘We can get them over.’

  They couldn’t hear the fight, but they knew it was happening: trouble in heaven. They didn’t need to hear the lines, they knew them all backwards.

  ‘Chez, are you really thinking we should stay? Would they let us stay?’

  ‘Why not? We have marketable skills.’

  ‘Are you kidding? The USA has a shortage of black musicians?’

  Cherry got down on the rug beside sister Babe and hugged her. ‘Listen, Dor. I would never, never quit the Reich, but Ax is not coming back to us, he good as said it, and we can’t survive in London without him. It’s the end.

  They had given Dilip the watchtower, a square turret above the upper floor. DK always liked to be high. He sat in the lotus, as easy to him as breathing, and watched the analysis of his blood. He had been sero-positive for seventeen years, no, longer. So many returns to life, so many respites, but oooh, this time I’m going down. The figures were not so bad, he had seen worse: but he knew. For the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul outwears the breast.

  Ram Ram, Ram Ram. I am dying.

  Allie Marlowe paced her room. I am thirty four years’ old. She had to talk to someone, but she was too proud to knock on DK’s door. That’s over, we were just fuck-buddies for a while. She stared into the open closet: comforting herself with good decisions. The silver tunic, I thought that wouldn’t work, but it does. My antique red leather Gucci jacket, which I love more than my life.

  Am I shallow?

  Fuck it.

  She knew she would find Sage in the dance studio. Ax was there with him. She stood at the door, watching. Sage was teaching Ax a routine that was doable, but challenging for the non-dancer. They moved together, absorbed in each other, and in the music she couldn’t hear. Name that classic video, she thought, with a pang for Bridge House days. We were in all kinds of shit, but we were happy then… She slipped off her shoes. Sage would kill her if she walked into his temple with shoes on.