“Beroald, will you accept me as a member here?”
Beroald smiled. “As I said, the Society of the Red Door is not a club. None of us may give or deny admittance. We are each here simply because we found a path to the Door, and can find it again whenever we desire.”
King’s hopes leapt. “Then I can return?”
Beroald’s smile disappeared. “I fear not.”
King felt a surge of fear and anger. “Why not? I found a path.”
Beroald waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “Ah, but could you find it again? The Song led you tonight. But the Song plays for one soul and one soul only—the Dancer.”
“Yet it played for me,” King argued.
Beroald frowned. “No doubt your unprecedented exposure to our lady today fooled the Song into accepting you tonight. Indeed, you still reek of her.” Beroald wrinkled his nose, and King wondered at this remark. “But, I assure you, it will not play for you again.”
King turned to where the Dancer had disappeared. “Why does it play only for her?”
Beroald shrugged again. “Who knows? The Song will pass to another only upon her death, which is happily unlikely, given her access to the elixir.” Beroald rose. “Now I must pay my respects to some friends. It has been a pleasure.” Shaking King’s hand, he moved to another table.
Oblivious to conversations around him, King sat there stunned, imagining his freshly won vitality draining out of him with every heartbeat. To discover immortality and then to lose it . . .
No! He would not let this happen. He belonged here, among the elite, the powerful. There must be a way.
In front of him, the carving knife still lay beside the roast. King stared at the knife. He picked it up. The blade was sharp, slicing through the bloody meat easily. When no one was watching, he wiped the knife clean with his napkin and carefully slid it up his sleeve. He sat there trembling for a moment, then he rose.
Walking the length of the room, he climbed the stairs and went through the alcove where the Dancer had disappeared. He found himself on an outdoor terrace, halfway up the pyramid.
Beside a low stone wall at the terrace’s edge, staring up at the red moon and the strange starless sky, stood the Dancer. He touched her elbow. She cried out and drew away, staring at him with wild, clouded eyes. Then a look of recognition danced over her face.
“You came,” she whispered.
She flew into his arms, kissing him hard, twining her fingers in his hair, forcing his mouth onto hers. She pulled back. “Free me,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Take me away from here. Never to return,” she pleaded.
King shook his head. “Are you mad? The Red Door offers freedom from death.”
She laughed bitterly. “This place offers many things, but freedom is not among them.”
King pushed her away. “I wish to return here, not leave.”
The Dancer looked at him, her shoulders slumping. “You will not free me?”
He ignored her. “Can you teach me to find the path to this place?”
“I don’t know the way,” she said, her voice a dead thing. “I know only the Song.”
“Then teach me the Song.”
She stared silently at the dark jungle below. Then she straightened, as if reaching a decision. She turned back to him. “I cannot teach it, but I can give it to you.”
“How?”
She stroked the outline of the knife under his sleeve. He stiffened. Drawing out the knife, she pushed its grip into his now shaking hand, its tip resting beneath her sternum.
“Free me, as you planned,” she said, looking up into his eyes.
The Song will pass to another only upon her death.
“Freedom for me. Immortality for you,” she said softly, pressing closer to him until the tip of the knife cut through her thin gown and into her pale flesh.
“Free me,” she said again. A patch of blood blossomed around the wound.
Immortality. Only upon her death.
“Free me!” she cried.
Immortality.
With a sob, King stepped forward, thrusting the blade up and into the Dancer. She spasmed, and her head jerked backward. Blood gushed from her chest, soaking her once-beautiful gown and King’s hands and shirt. Crying out, he pushed her from him, and she slumped to the cold stone, no longer something elemental, just a dead thing.
What had he done? King stumbled away from her in horror.
And the Song exploded in him.
Before, it had often been so faint he could barely hear it. Now it pounded in his skull, filled his entire being. His very heartbeat seemed to match its rhythm. Beneath the music, he heard a chanting, whispers born in hidden places, words strange and sinister, rasped in cruel guttural tones from throats not human. A paralyzing cold crept into King’s limbs. They felt numb, no longer under his control. His legs began to twitch. His arms jerked.
He began to dance.
He twirled around the terrace, leaping over the corpse of the Dancer, his toes drawing patterns in her blood. He kept dancing, unable to stop, even when Beroald entered.
Beroald looked down at the body of the Dancer. He smiled. He spoke.
“These are fools that wish to die!
Is’t not fine to dance and sing
When the bells of death do ring?”
He turned to King and laughed. “She had become . . . unreliable, as you saw tonight. She would have killed herself, but the Song would not allow it. Any of us would have killed her, but again, there was the Song. On the death of a Dancer, it inhabits the nearest person. And none of us wish to know the Song that intimately.” He looked at King who was still spinning around the terrace. “That is, none of us who know its true nature.”
Inside, the band began to play again, the same music that now pounded incessantly in his head, the Song that King, to his horror, knew would never stop playing for him.
“Mr. King,” Beroald said with a smile, “I believe they’re playing your song.”
King felt himself pulled by invisible hands as strange strings strummed the night air. He began a tarantella, his steps matching the rhythm of tambourines and castanets from the band. Glowing as if on fire, he spun down the great staircase, across the dance floor, and onto the stone dais.
Alexander King danced that night, danced for the pa trons of that strange society, danced for the things behind the black portal, danced and danced.
As he would every night until his death, puppet to the Song, Dancer at the Red Door.
For the city has a song, and it plays in a minor key.
Douglas Smith is a Toronto writer whose stories have appeared in over sixty professional magazines and anthologies in twenty-five countries and twenty-one languages, including Interzone, The Third Alternative , Amazing Stories, Cicada, On Spec, Oceans of the Mind, Prairie Fire, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, as well as anthologies from DAW, Penguin/Roc, and others. He has been interviewed in the national magazine, Saturday Night, and his work has been studied in an “SF in Literature” course at the University of Washington.
Doug was a John W. Campbell Award finalist for best new writer in 2001 and since then has twice won the Canadian Aurora Award for best speculative short fiction. Doug is an eleven-time finalist for the Aurora and has had several honorable mentions in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror.
Doug is currently working on his first novel based on his award-winning short story, “Spirit Dance.” His web site is www.smithwriter.com. He lives in Unionville, Ontario, with his wife and younger of two sons, and works in downtown Toronto where he is still searching for that phantom subway stop.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Julie E. Czerneda is not a member of a secret society. Really. She doesn’t know those people. They just happen to visit. When not practicing her secret handshake, Julie is a fulltime author and editor. Her tenth science fiction novel from DAW, Regeneration, Species Imperative #3 came out in 2006. Next comes a prequel to her Trade Pa
ct Universe series, Reap the Wild Wind, out in July 2007. Her anthology Space Inc. won the Prix Aurora Award (Canada’s Hugo). Julie has conspired with other editors before Jana, namely Isaac Szpindel (ReVisions from DAW) and Gene vieve Kierans (Mythspring from Red Deer Press). Otherwise, she works alone and in . . . the shadows . . . editing the science fiction anthology series Tales from the Wonder Zone (next title Polaris) and Realms of Wonder, original fantasy. Oh, the secret handshake? When she gets it right, Jana’s promised to let her help take over the . . . well, she can’t tell you. You understand.
Jana Paniccia is not a member of a secret society either, though some may have their suspicions. After all, she’s lived in six cities on three continents, once worked for the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada and for the Ontario Ministers of Energy and Finance, has an MBA in International Business, and is presently working for an international advisory services firm. In her covert writing life, her stories have appeared in the anthologies Summoned to Destiny, Women of War, Children of Magic and Fantasy Gone Wrong. Instead of world domination, she decided to branch out into editing—after all, it’s pretty darned close.
Under Cover of Darkness Page 28