All Our Pretty Songs

by Sarah Mccarry

  “Okay?” Aurora is staring at the road, her mouth set.

  “Okay,” I say, although I’m not sure what I just agreed to. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  Aurora stops the car in front of a high-rise downtown, one of those horrible glass and steel monstrosities that’s sprung up here and there in the last few years out of the old brick buildings and shabby warehouses. A valet opens her door and she hands him the keys like she’s done this all her life. I wonder if she has. Wonder what she’s been up to on the nights I spend with Jack. She doesn’t look at me as she gets out of the car. Whatever I did wrong, I am not forgiven. I want to go home. “Hey,” I say to her back, “I don’t feel great all of a sudden. I might go.”

  Aurora pretends not to have heard me. Jack’s opening his door, stops with one leg outside the car, touches my shoulder. “Please,” he says into my ear. “Please come.” The valet comes around to my side of the car. He’s wearing sunglasses, and there is something about his still face and too-white skin that makes me uneasy. He offers me his hand and I take it. His skin is cold and I drop his hand as soon as he’s helped me out of the car, resisting the urge to wipe my palm on my jeans. Aurora’s already inside. “Please,” Jack repeats. He’s as nervous as I am. More nervous.

  “What do you know that I don’t?” I ask.

  “Just come,” he says. I sigh and let him lead me inside.

  I can’t shake my growing dread as the elevator climbs to the top floor. The sleek steel doors open onto an empty hallway, as white-walled and harshly lit as a dentist’s office, with a single door at the far end. Aurora skips down the hall. Jack balks, then takes a deep breath and grabs my hand. I give him a reassuring squeeze and he looks down at me. His face is serious and still. “It’s a party,” I say. “Not an execution.” He flinches.

  “Not for you,” he says. I drop his hand.

  “I would really, really like to know what it is you are not telling me.”

  He shakes his head. “Not now. I need you to understand—” He pauses. “Think of it like an audition.”

  “Audition for what?” He doesn’t answer, turns away from me and walks down the hall, guitar case banging gently against his long legs. “Audition for what?” The door shuts behind him with a cool snick. “I am going to kill both of you,” I mutter to the white walls, and follow them.

  Behind the door is the biggest apartment I have ever seen. Apartment is the wrong word. Penthouse, I think. I am in a penthouse. At first I think the walls are made of glass, but then I see they’re a series of enormous windows so cleverly installed that they are nearly seamless. Chandeliers filled with real candles hang from the ceiling. The room is dark. Despite the sweeping expanse of space, it is very hot and very crowded. Throngs of tall pale people, holding wineglasses or thick crystal tumblers, draped in fur and silk despite the summer heat. A silvery-eyed woman with a glossy curtain of dark hair spilling down her naked back. A broad-shouldered man with a fierce, handsome face and terrifying eyes. A group of girls who look more or less my age, heads bowed, whispering to each other. One of them turns to look at me and smiles a cold little smile without any kindness in it. Jack and Aurora are nowhere to be seen.

  I shrink back against the door, whacking my elbow on the knob. Pain flares through me, and for a second the room sharpens somehow, like before I was trying to look at everything through a haze of fog and now it’s fallen away. But what I’m seeing now isn’t real, can’t be real—men and women with skulls where their faces should be. A woman wearing a dress that looks like it’s made out of deerskin stumbles into me, laughs in my face. Jesus. Not deerskin. Parts of a deer. I can see the head with the tongue lolling, the neck smeared with blood. Her hot breath stinks of something awful, like rotten meat. She laughs again at my expression and dances away. I grind the heels of my palms into my eyes, look again. The pain in my elbow fades to a dull throb, and as it does, the faces around me go ordinary again; unfriendly, maybe, but not inhuman. I touch my shirt where the leather bag Cass gave me rests against my chest. I can feel the reassuring lump of it through the worn fabric. I could turn around and leave, right now, leave this place where I clearly do not belong. Money, I think, these people have money, but it is more than money that smoothes their skin and gives their eyes an uncanny light, shapes their rich clothes so perfectly against the lines of their bodies. They are gorgeous, but there is the same cruel cast to all of their mouths and they stand too straight, hold their long slender limbs with a grace that is designed to make the observer seem graceless. I feel like a heifer at the racetrack. I catch a flash of white hair and wave, see it move toward me. “There you are!” Aurora yells in my ear. “Come outside! Jack’s going to play.” She’s at home here, the beauty of the people around us no match for the light that shines from her, her lanky body, the luscious curve of her very human mouth. She takes my hand and pulls me through the crowd, leads me to a rooftop balcony that’s easily four times the size of the apartment.

  Out here the press of bodies is a little less, and I take deep gulps of fresh air. Far below us the city is still and dark. A darker shadow of mountains rings the black water of the sound. I want, more than anything, to be out there instead of here, rolling out my sleeping bag under a clear sky disordered with stars. Both of them with me, faraway and safe. There is still a chance for us, I want to say. We can go. We can walk away from this, from all of it. But Aurora’s eyes are big with delight and she’s pressing a glass into my hand, chattering away at me. In her element. So lovely that everyone around us turns toward her, moves closer, brushes up against her as if the magic she has is somehow transferable. I take a sip of what she’s given me and the liquor courses through me, fiery as acid.

  “Holy shit!” I cough. “What is that?”

  “Don’t know!” she says. “Crazy stuff, right?” She whoops, throwing her head back, white hair flying. “Come on, I want you to meet someone.” I finish the rest of what’s in my glass and she finds me another. In for a penny, in for a pound, I think, and gulp it down, too. Aurora’s hand in mine is cool and light. Whatever I’m drinking scrubs the fear right out of me, sends the edges of everything spinning. Aurora is at home here, Aurora will keep me safe. Aurora would never lead me into harm. I’m seeing things, foolish me, sent aflutter by a few rich people in a fancy room. I’ve been around rich people before. Rich people are very specific but not particularly harmful. Specifically dressed. Specific in a specific way, like they have weird parties in their clothes. This is profound. I’m going to explain to Aurora about rich people, but my whole body is blooming. Here we are, reckless and young and free as animals. If I jumped off the roof right now I bet anything I’d grow wings and fly. No wonder Aurora wants this. I want it, too, now, want to feel like this forever, want this the way I want sex or music or the feeling of my muscles moving as I run farther and farther into the hills. The warm air buoys me up in the limpid night. My glass is full again and I drink, keep drinking. The air tastes like candy.

  Aurora narrows her eyes at me, her mouth moving, saying something, laughing, is it important, probably it’s not important, I don’t care. The mountains are talking to me, the water singing, all the salt in the ocean calling to the salt in my blood, Aurora, I can feel my heart beating, I mean really feel it. Did I say that out loud, or not, I can’t tell, is it important, probably it’s not important, I don’t care. Did I say that already? It’s pretty funny, I’m laughing. She’s laughing. The two of us laughing, together, arms around each other, laughing from someplace all the way in the soles of our feet, it’s really funny. The no-longer sinister faces around me are suffused with a soft glow, rictus grins smoothing out into smiles of real warmth and affection. How could I ever have been afraid of this? I want to find Jack and drag him off into a corner, I want to tell him that I love him, but more importantly I want him right now. I want to tell Aurora I was wrong, wrong about everything, how nothing that makes me feel this good could be a bad idea, but she’s talking to someone, telling him my name, pushin
g me forward. A white hand reaching toward me, long pale fingers on my skin. The touch of them burns like someone’s thrown me naked into a snowbank.

  The man in front of me is impossibly tall and so white he glows with a phosphorescent light of his own against the velvet dark. Eyes the watered-down blue of ice chips, hair as pale as Aurora’s falling to his shoulders. Cold bores through me, cold mouth, cold still face. The twin vortices of his merciless eyes, filled with a hideous, intelligent cruelty. All the liquor in the world could not insulate me from the terror of this man, and the luscious haze runs out of me so fast it sets me reeling. His ice-colored gaze pins me where I stand. He takes his hand away, and I half expect to see blistered skin where his fingers touched me. “That’s Minos’s boss,” Aurora whispers in my ear. “He’s going to make Jack famous.”

  “Delighted,” he says. The laughter in his eyes is infinitely more awful than Minos’s dead stare. My mouth opens, jaw working, but nothing comes out. I’m saved from having to say anything by Jack’s first perfect chord. Aurora tugs me away from the awful man and toward the source of the music. I can feel his stare on my skin even as the crowd closes in around us. I want nothing more than to lie down and let the balm of the drink wash over me again. “Come on,” Aurora says. “He needs us.” For once she’s the strong one. “Come on.” Her pupils are so huge they’ve nearly swallowed her irises whole.

  The patio is thick now with people, their conversation unintelligible and raucous, rising all around me like a murder of crows. Aurora holds my hand tight and we stare around us at the sea of strangers. Jack is standing at the very edge of the roof, his head down, his face hidden behind his hair. A fat man in a donkey mask runs laughing in and out of the crowd, followed by the girls I saw before, half-naked now and wreathed in grape leaves. I see a man whose torso ends in goat’s legs and another crowned in antlers. You are drunk, I tell myself. You are drunk, you are drunk, you are drunk.

  Jack strikes another chord, and that terrible audience howls aloud with one voice, the unearthly shriek growing louder and louder until I clap my hands over my ears. The music is a huge and terrifying thing that sends flights of dark birds spinning into the night sky. The air is growing hotter, thicker, unbearably stifling. A storm front is rolling in, moving so quickly across the sky that it looks as though someone has spilled a bottle of ink across the stars.

  Bodies dance past me, stinking of filth and sulfur. Hands grab at my hair, my arms, tearing at the thin fabric of my shirt. Women whirl by, clawing at each other until blood runs down their shoulders and their naked breasts. Men and things that are not men loom over me, some of them masked and some of them with faces that are worse than masks. A man with the head of a bull. A woman with a swan’s wings and a swan’s serpentine neck. A woman with a quiver of arrows strapped to her back, cool grey eyes. A swarm of beetles streams over my feet. Still Jack plays, and the mass of bodies twists and seethes. Over it all I hear the groaning rumble of thunder. The sky flashes white, and Jack falters. The dancers freeze in place, teeth bared, smeared in blood and sweat. The air around me is fuzzing like static on a television, cutting to images of the bone-white trees. The noise of the river, the howling dog. A great black palace rising out of the distance, its edges sharpening. Aurora is no longer at my side, and I look around, frantic, see her leaning into Minos, his fingers a bony cage around her shoulders. Her mouth is slack, her eyes empty. “Aurora!” I scream, but my voice is lost in a crack of thunder, the rising wind. The tall pale man is behind them, watching Jack play and smiling. Cass’s amulet feels like a stone around my neck and I fumble at it with my free hand, trying to undo its knots. My palm bumps against the leather bag, and I can hear Cass’s firm voice cutting through the chaos around me, clear as if she’s right next to me. “Go. Get out of there. Go.” But Aurora. Jack. “I mean it. Go.”

  I stumble through the crowd, punching and kicking until the packed mass of bodies parts to let me through. Back to the apartment, the chandeliers dripping wax in searing droplets that land in my hair, on my shoulders. Hands grab at my body, my breasts, my clothes. Like you’re running a marathon. Go. Go. Go. Head down, battering ram, out, out, out. I reach the door, the knob burning my skin, the door sticking, pulling with all my strength, screaming in terror as the surge of people presses me up against the metal and wood and I think for a second I am going to die here in this awful room—and then with a crack the door springs free of its frame and I’m falling into the hallway, the door slamming shut behind me.

  The hall is absolutely silent. I lie panting on the spotless white carpet. There is no hint of what I’ve left behind on the other side of the door. The walls are lurching around me, and I realize for the first time how drunk I am. I crawl to the elevator on all fours, slap at the down button, roll myself in when the doors open with an ordinary ping. The ride down takes forever. My stomach is roiling, and I wonder what happens if you puke in the elevator to hell. Bad things. I’m using the walls to get to my feet when the elevator stops with a jolt and I fall again out the open doors, landing in an undignified heap at the feet of the valet. “Sorry,” I manage. He offers me his hand, and I take it, trying not to flinch at the touch of his clammy palm as he helps me stand. He doesn’t say anything. Turns the sunglasses toward me, holds my shoulders until I’m steady. Smiles. There’s no way I am imagining it: His teeth are pointed, and I think I see the flicker of a tongue forked like a snake’s. Holy shit. I back away, trying not to panic. “That’s some costume,” I whisper. His lips close over the terrible teeth, making the smile somehow even more ghoulish. I stumble past him, out of that awful building, out into the safety of the night.

  I walk for a long time before I find a phone. I am drunk and my clothes are torn and I can only imagine what I look like; I caught a glimpse of the smeared mess of my eyeliner in the valet’s mirrored sunglasses. Even Cass will never let me out of her sight again if she sees me like this. I dial Raoul’s number instead of my own. He answers on the tenth ring, his voice sleepy.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m in trouble,” I whisper.

  “Tell me where you are,” he says, the sleepiness gone. “And don’t go anywhere until I get there.”

  Raoul rubs my back while I throw up in his toilet, and I am so miserable I don’t even feel shame. When I’m done I curl up on the floor of his bathroom and whimper.

  “Come on, kiddo,” he says. “Let’s get you to bed.”

  “Your bathroom is very clean.”

  “I like to maintain an appropriate convalescing environment for underage substance abusers at all times.” He tugs me to my feet and steers me back to the couch, covers me with a blanket, brings me water. Throwing up has made me feel only marginally better.

  “Your apartment won’t stop moving. I’m going to die,” I wail.

  “Eventually,” he agrees, “but probably not in the immediate future.”

  “I want to die.”

  “That’s different.” He strokes my forehead and the coolness of his touch soothes the throbbing. “You want to tell me about it?”

  I tell him. I tell him everything. About the deer dress, the ice-eyed man. The black birds that came out of nothing. Cass’s amulet saving me. The valet and his forked tongue. When I’m done, Raoul is silent.

  “I was really drunk,” I say. “I’m still really drunk.”

  Raoul nods. “You are very drunk.”

  “You think I’m making it up.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I don’t.” Raoul doesn’t know Aurora well, although he’s met her a few times. He’s never liked her parties, says he doesn’t feel safe. I never knew what he meant until now. “There are different kinds of real,” he says. “For now, I think you should get some sleep. And I would like you to promise me you will never drink that much again.”

  “I will never drink that much again. Will she be okay?”

  “Sweetheart, I don’t know. Maybe not.”

  I left her
there, I think. I left her there. Like Cass. Scorched earth, cut and run. Cass’s amulet got me out, but it sure didn’t do much for my friends.

  “Raoul, what do you do if you fucked up and you don’t even know how?”

  He kisses my forehead, straightens the blanket. “You’ll figure it out. I know you. Now go to sleep. When you wake up I’ll make you breakfast.”

  “When I wake up it will be the middle of the afternoon.”

  “Breakfast is a state of mind, not an hour.”

  “I love you, Raoul.”

  “I know. I love you, too.”

  “I’m scared.”

  He takes my hand. “It’s always okay to be scared,” he says. He holds my hand until I fall asleep.

  No hangover in my life has ever compared to the staggering misery that greets me the next day. The light streaming through Raoul’s open windows pierces me like a hundred terrible knives. The clank of Raoul’s spatula against his frying pan is as loud as a freight train derailing. I moan feebly, shielding my eyes from the sun’s blinding assault, and Raoul peers over at me. “How are we feeling?” he asks cheerily.

  “Why are you shouting,” I croak.

  “My goodness,” he says. “You really did have a lot to drink.”

  “I am definitely going to die.”

  “Have some potatoes first. It’ll help, I promise.” He brings me a plate piled high with greasy breakfast delights. The smell of food nearly sends me running to his bathroom again. Raoul offers me a forkful of potato and chilies. I open my mouth obediently, manage to gum the potatoes into a paste and get them down. He’s right; they do make me feel better. “Do you need to call your mom?”

  “It’s fine. She thinks I’m at Aurora’s.” Raoul feeds me more fried potatoes until I can sit up, cradling my pounding head in my hands.

  “Do you want to call Aurora?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Not that late. Around one.”