Blood dripped down his skin and he collected it into the bowl. Blue energy merged with the red and the bowl looked as if it were full of living fire. The blood is the life. Maybe it was Crowley who had said that. He wasn't sure.
There was a perverse excitement in the bleeding, in the incense and her picture and the glittering power that he commanded. He felt detached and floating, watching himself perform each gesture perfectly, each intonation without flaw. Only the energy here was focused and clean, not the screaming raging congregation in the pit, slamming and crushing the life from each other while they paid homage to their own violence.
The crowds had excited him. The blood excited him. The razor was sharp and at first there was no hurt at all, only the disconcerting feeling of the blade moving under his skin. His pain, when it finally came, was piquant and pleased him.
The bowl filled slowly. He didn't need much. When he had maybe half a cup he dropped his sleeve again and left the cuts untended. The photograph he placed in the bowl, bound with life, and raised the sword once more.
More words. Infinitely more words. He used only his right hand on the sword, commanding, his thumb hooked over the guard and placed directly on the steel. He had forgotten who had showed him that trick, probably one of the fever-eyed slamming legions who had invited him to partake of more intimate rites after the shows.
The first few years they were playing out he had done all the rounds. There were the witches, traditional and Gardenarian, the Golden Dawn revivalists, members of both factions of Crowley's O.T.O. fan clubs, and a single alchemist who insisted on drinking tinctures of plants and minerals and poisons diluted in pure vodka. Tim McKeon had participated with all of them, often invited to play a prime role. Everyone knew that McKeon was a magician. He had done it for the excitement, the theater. Even his publicist found McKeon a little too close to the edge for her taste. It was fine and well to cultivate the reputation in the gothic subculture; it was quite another to insist on starting recording at the "correct" astrological hour.
But this time he needed results. It had never mattered before. Always there had been the audience, the fullness of the words and the delicious pleasure of going beyond the rational, breaking all the rules.
He lowered the sword and laid it carefully in place. Now he only had to wait. He sat down on the cushion he had stored under the altar, his eyes focused on the picture and the bowl, trying to focus on one desire. Her. Mary.
Concentration was difficult. His mind wandered off onto the song that was only half finished in his head, that he couldn't quite get to come together. Back, he forced himself. Think about Mary.
He had spent hours reading about her, even about the world in which she had lived. A world that thought of itself as upright and rational and godly all at once. A world that had had a gothic movement all its own, where rebel anarchists and free thinkers and occult charlatans had inflamed the underbelly of the night. He found that world very seductive.
He forced his thoughts back to Mary alone. How she had twisted the creation of life into something dark and shapeless and mute, a monster that was his private self. She would not be horrified by the razor scars that striped his arms. In her soul she had scars to match...
But there was a change in the room. The bluish energy darkened into violet and appeared to hover over the bowl. Then it shivered once, twice.
Tim McKeon strained forward and blinked. He thought it might be his eyes, the drugs, the dim light. But something was happening and it was real.
Girlish laughter broke the silence. "It's only imagination," he heard a young woman's voice say. She laughed again. She sounded muffled, far away, lost in the wires of a transAtlantic call.
Then he saw her. She appeared like a hologram made from the violet mist trembling over the bowl. She was not the way he imagined her at all, nothing like the portrait painted when she was in her middle forties, ten years before her death. Although the large, overly intelligent eyes were the same.
This was not the Mary-mother to whom he had intended to bring his sorrows. Instead this was the nineteen year old girl of popular imagination, the one who had run off with a poet to Switzerland and spent a summer on a storm-tossed lake, in a villa where Milton had once stayed. This was the Mary who still had her talent and her nerve, who was not afraid to look at the darkness in herself and display it to the world. Who had the words he couldn't write, the calm courage he needed.
She was him, a creature from the center of his own mind. A projection of the creative within him was the way he phrased it.
It was hard to believe that the creature that stood like a violet hologram, taking more solidity from the blood, was a creation of his own mind. She was not only far younger than he had imagined, but more beautiful as well. Her expression, reflecting the haunted nightmares of her psyche, was the one he had cultivated so carefully and so rarely achieved. And in her hands she held a long narrow pipe.
She puffed on it and then held it thoughtfully away. She looked at him, and those overly large, lipid eyes were alien. She measured him. "I see an illusion," she said quietly. "I think it must be from within my own imagining, a man. But I think he must be myself, a piece of myself. From the opium."
"No," Tim whispered harshly. "You are my dream."
She cocked her head to the side, thinking. "No, sir, I do not believe that is possible," she said. "But I am not certain that you are myself, either. Or my self is bleeding and fearsome, and I do not believe that. Any more than any of us are fearsome, that is." She turned slightly and it looked to McKeon as if she were listening to someone speak. Her lips moved but he heard nothing, as if this part of the dream was barred to him.
"Tell me where you are," she said serenely.
"I'm in a house in London," he said quickly. "A small house near the London Dungeon."
She smiled. "I am familiar with that area. Although I cannot imagine how anyone could tolerate the constant stream of thrill seekers and nannies trying to scare their charges with implements of torture closed away in cases. I have not lived in London in a while. A friend of my father's has offered to introduce me to Society in the season there, but I have always managed to decline. The glitter of ball gowns and titles and vying for invitations is not to my taste. All that matters in Society is making an advantageous match. But, my demon sir, I believe in free love and the natural superiority not of the titled classes but of the creative mind."
"Yes," McKeon hissed. The wild abandon in her words was an anthem that echoed in his own soul, that made the ardent iconoclast in him quiver with desire. "But where are you, and how are you breaking those rules? Because I am doing it by summoning you."
She looked at him quite sternly. "You did not summon me at all," she said. "I smoked the pipe of my own will. It is a journey of discovery, of finding the truth behind the illusion. Though I am not certain that you are any more substantial or have any more truth than do I."
"You are at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where Milton once stayed," McKeon said, almost languidly. "And one night you will tell ghost stories and all try to scare each other. And yours, Mary, yours will be the best. A hundred years after you're dead I will read your book and think of the infinite twistings of my own mind. And because you wrote it I will know that I am not alone. Someone else knows my secrets, my vices. Someone else did not find them too terrible. I am not the only monster."
"But the monster is innocent and beautiful," she protested vehemently. "It is the proper Society man, the doctor, who is evil."
A violet tinged hand reached out to him and her bottomless eyes showed only calm acceptance.
McKeon tasted the words with disbelief. He had been called beautiful before, but for his face and not for his deepest identity, the self that was too horrific to see in the mirror. But she had seen the very worst, and there was only serene approval in her expression. And she had called him innocent. The depraved, created gothic hero tried to sneer at the word, and shattered.
"Then you think I oug
ht to write it?" she asked.
"You must," he answered, startled. "If you don't then I won't be able to write anything either."
Her smile was grave. "Then we shall both write," she said. "It will be a sacred trust, an agreement. George and Percy do this often, have competitions as to who can compose a better poem about some subject. So you and I shall have a pact. I shall write the story for you. And you must read it and be a fair judge. Although, of course you are only an opium dream." She sighed and looked sad.
"You're the dream," he said, but already her image was fading, the violet fading, separating, and the solid three dimensionality dissolving.
He was aware of the room again. The candles were low and there was a draft coming in under the floor. His left arm ached miserably.
All the books he had ever read on the subject of magic insisted that he had to close the ritual space, no matter how spent it was. He skimmed the book, left it on the floor and picked up the sword again. The closing was almost identical to the opening. He had memorized most of that. But this time the movements felt flat and he was aware that he looked silly, saying words he didn't understand wearing what amounted to an expensive bathrobe waving a sword around. Tim McKeon swore he would never bother with this magic business again. Obviously it was a complete crock.
* * * *
His arm was still sore when he woke up. According to the red LED on his clock it was eight in the morning. He groaned. The last time Tim McKeon had seen eight in the morning was when he had gotten lost on his way home from a party in the country and stopped at a local lorry drivers' cafe for directions and ended up buying breakfast for half the room.
He must have fallen out right after the ritual and slept straight through. He was better rested than he remembered being in a very long time. Something, some weight or burden was gone. The ritual seemed part of the night before, a dream perhaps. He'd been toking up, maybe he had been high and imagined the whole thing.
He enjoyed feeling free, feeling alive this morning. He took a shower, left his hair towel dry and put on a clean pair of black jeans. The day was slightly overcast, grey. It made him think of light on a lake, on silent deep water. Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where once three famous writers had spent a summer of wild abandon.
He went down to the basement, to the studio he had set up. The studio he hadn't entered for nearly a year. His hands were flying over the keyboard and the words and melodies were thick in the air around him.
He completely lost track of time, until suddenly he realized he was screamingly hungry and went up to the kitchen. The clock there said it was ten at night. He hadn't noticed. He didn't care.
He brought some provisions down with him, a couple of tins of sardines, half a loaf of bread, two bags of crisps and a large box of chocolate biscuits. Then he went back to work until he fell asleep in the deep carpeting on the studio floor.
He dreamed of Mary. He had forgotten she was so beautiful, so perfectly serene and still like the grey glass water of the lake. Not his anima at all, but his muse. He had never had a muse before and suddenly realized that he was writing for her. Because he wanted to share it with her, because if she saw it then she would know that he was real and worthy, and she would smile at him. He was writing because he had fallen in love with her, with his idea of her. And she was more than a hundred years dead.
The truth did not stop the work, did not impinge on the fevered creativity. Everything and everywhere was music, songs that were impatient to be captured by his sixteen track, to be embellished and supported later with fine production and flawless craft. This was raw, new, but it was all of a piece.
He couldn't stop. The music was greater, stronger than he was. His own lust fueled it, every finished song was one more to play for Mary, to make her see him as himself. To make her love him back. The women he had known in their whiteface and black leather seemed only a pallid imitation of the deep core of brilliance and sadness that he had seen for those few moments in the opium dream. Maybe she wasn't always so grave, so gothic, maybe it was just another illusion. But the doubts were smaller than the songs.
Tim McKeon stayed in the studio for five days, emerging only to use the bathroom and get more food. He was down to the stale donuts when the jag finally ended. After five days he had written nearly seven hours of music, culled down to four hours and twenty minutes of which was positively earth shattering.
He called the guy at Capitol, who was thrilled. He called Andrew and Gordon, and they listened to his tape twice, silent.
"It's better than good, man, it's bloody insane," Andrew said softly after the second time. "I'm impressed. This is going to blow everyone away."
Andrew normally didn't get excited about anything. Tim was gratified. To celebrate they went out on the town, down to the clubs on King's Road where everyone wore black and the music was loud and harsh and the lyrics were all about death.
Tim stood at the bar, a beer in hand, and surveyed the scene. He'd practically lived in this place for weeks on end, he knew every one of the people here. They were dancing, sweating, trying to impress each other with their chatter, which was all inane. There was Lisa who danced the night to forget the days working as a hotel chambermaid, and Jay-jay who drank and looked cool to be more important than everyone else on the dole. There was Spider the bouncer who was bored to death and read historical romances perched on his stool near the door, and Bajit who walked up to every stranger in the place at least once and told them about her academic career.
It made him sick, suddenly. After the creative glut of the past days he could hardly bear the uninteresting sameness in the lives around him. He wanted to be out of here. He wanted to be in a villa in Switzerland with the Alps high all around, and have Lord Byron and Percy Shelley for conversation over dinner.
He left the club, waved down a cab and went home. The house was silent, almost comforting. He went in, dropped his leather duster on the first chair he encountered, and went to the living room directly to rummage for his pipe. He had to open at least three drawers in the living room side tables before remembering that he had stashed it in the kitchen under the sink.
It was an effort, but he took the large bubble-pipe upstairs to the room that was still set for the ritual. Week old blood clotted and congealed on the picture that had been cut out of a book. Tim looked at that picture and trembled. He had to get back to her. He had to give her the music.
He sank into the cushions and started up the pipe. The water like the blood was stale. It tasted gummy and the pipe took a long time to start. Finally he got it going. He took three, four deep hits off the pipe. It tasted foul, as if it had been left to lie more than a week. More like a century. And then the deep relaxation came, the false sense of drug-comfort that made everything sensuous and secure and perfect. Detached from the causality of daily life, he entered the illusion desperately, praying it was the door he wanted but strangely aloof at the same time. As if he knew, but was afraid of knowing.
He let the drug take him. The thick cushions on the carpet were like a pasha's palace, and he stretched out and felt embraced by oriental splendor. Coleridge had described it all so well. At a wave of a little black box he commanded the music on. It saturated his consciousness, as if it was in his head and his ears at once. He sank into the music until it filled his whole range of perception.
And then he saw her. Her long dark hair was free on her shoulders and she was wearing a white night dress with cascades of lace over her arms and breast like snow, and a single white rose in her hair. White on white, innocent and unredeemed, predator and victim all at once.
She did not appear to notice him at first. She was seated on a large canopy bed with pages in front of her, reading them over feverishly. And then she looked up and met his eyes.
"It is not finished yet," she said gravely. "We have been so busy on the lake and there was the matter of Claire's pregnancy, you understand. But I have begun and am committed to finishing. Even if you are only part of myself, it
seems you are a part of myself which must be obeyed."
"You must finish, Mary," he said softly. "We have an agreement, you and I. You promised you would finish the book for me. I finished the songs for you. Listen. I wrote it for you. Because of you."
She cocked her head and her mouth tightened into a line as if she were straining. "It is so distant," she said. "Like the thunder on the lake, like something from Hell. So perhaps when I think of you as my demon I am not so wrong."
"It'll go platinum," he said firmly. And then he realized that was not even close to anything he wanted to say. The words were all for her in the lyrics he had written down, the words that she could barely hear through the veil of a century.
"Please," he said softly. "It's my gift to you."
The music embraced them both, relentless rhythms driving it through them, primitive, free, abandoned and wild. Her dark eyes shone in the candlelight, tied and twisted on the bed, caught and pinioned and unafraid all together.
Then she turned as white as her starched lace. "But I was never gifted in music, I could not call up an illusion like this from my own mind. And you, you seem so very far distant and so real. But I cannot..."
He reached out, desire burning more sharply than the razor ever cut. He reached toward the white shadowed form, and for an instant he thought he touched cool yielding flesh. A lock of hair brushed his face and he was lost in the clean scent of rain.
"I love you, Mary," he whispered into her neck.
Ice ghost fingers snaked through his hair, traced the scars on his arms, on his chest. She leaned down and kissed the healing cuts he had made when he had summoned her, cuts deep enough that they were still black in the center and angry red across the white skin. She smiled at the self-inflicted injuries like a blessing, then shook the layers of downy lace away from her own sleeves and showed him neat white cuts that were more demure from being longer healed than his own. She looked at him, into him, and she knew him and took possession of his darkness. She enhanced it, reflected it like moonlight, like the black ink lake under the stars, like death.
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