Meet Me in the Strange

by Leander Watts

  FIVE

  If every room at the Angelus was booked, the hotel could have held over five hundred guests. That, in my memory, had never happened. Business was still good though. And when I wandered through the lobby, there were usually people arriving or leaving with their small mountains of baggage. Uniformed porters stood ready to carry the bags. Either Armand or Arthur, who I swear were twins, welcomed new guests at the main desk. The concierge, with a pink carnation in his lapel, waited in his office to assist in any way he could. Money flowed, phones rang, long-term residents and overnight guests came and went.

  My great grandfather had founded the Angelus. My grandfather had expanded it to its current size and made it the most famous hotel in the city. My father had run the Angelus his whole life. But things had changed since the glory days, when dukes and prime ministers and princes of the Church had stayed here. I’d heard rumors that my father was selling his shares slowly, losing control as the city changed, and the hotel business changed with it.

  Something new, something powerful, like the swell of a midnight tide, had come moving into the city. Some people, such as my father, denied it was real. They kept on pretending that things would always be the same. Some people, my sister Sabina for instance, thought it had to do with ghosts and ancient waking spirits. And some people—like the girl with the glasses and me—opened our eyes and ears and said yes.

  Something new was happening. That much everyone understood, though nobody talked about it. Tourists still flooded into the city, spending money and their time among the old decaying churches and shrines. The Crimson Carnival would always be a huge draw for gawkers and true believers. The Great Rites of St. Florian still brought in thousands of travelers and sightseers each spring. The biggest film festival on the continent attracted celebrities from around the world. And of course there was the old concert music that pulled people to the city. Vivaldi, Verdi, von Weber had their loyal followers. When they weren’t being played at the Maxima, however, then Django Conn or the Starry Crowns, V-Rocket, the Witch-Babies or the Invisible Boys might be found there blasting away at the Old World shadows.

  SIX

  Glam and glister had swept over the continent just the year before. The most famous bands in the world all of a sudden seemed deader than Tosca and Toscanini. That was a big part of the change. Stars who’d been huge, selling millions of albums and filling the biggest stadiums, looked old and sounded fake. But there was more to it than just new bands with wild hair and capes, kids wearing turquoise amulets and gobs of purple makeup.

  Mostly it was signs. In the ancient High Church days, people saw them in the heavens. The sun would turn blood-red, comets would appear as warnings of war or disaster, stars would fall, wailing from the sky. It was like that, but not exactly, because no one knew how to interpret these new signs. I heard rumors of winds from the eastern deserts carrying poisonous dust. What did that mean? No one could say for sure. The dolphins in the Fountain of Poseidon, in the grand piazza, turned overnight from bright bronze to charred black. No explanation made sense. Messages and quavering pictures—like something seen under water—appeared on people’s TV screens. The Great Zeppelin of the North was blown off course by an icy December storm and disappeared. The Apollonauts had landed on the moon, harvested their magic rocks, and headed back. This world where I lived would never be the same once boots had walked in the lunar dust and gloved hands had poked in the piles of moon rubble.

  At least that’s how it felt the night we all stayed up until three o’clock to see the silver machine come down from blackness and settle in that stony crater. Most people had gathered together for parties, watching the final approach and moon landing on big screens. My father had put on a huge celebration in the hotel ballroom. Champagne flowed and cigars made a swirling blue cloud. Sabina had gone with her friends to see actors put on a show of the landing on the Maxima stage, exactly as it was happening two hundred thousand miles away. I’d stayed in my room and watched it all by myself. I turned the sound on the TV off and put on the Starry Crowns’ first album. Exactly as the lander’s retro-fires hit the lunar surface, my favorite song broke from the speakers. Cold ringing gamba-riffs and the girl-boy voice filled my room and my brain as the six metal feet touched down on the moon.

  And the next day, when the Apollonauts finally opened up the hatch and stepped out, was the first time I heard the Witch-Babies’ new song “Raving and Craving.” I was looking out my window, over the city, when the song’s riff came churning through my headphones. The sun was out, bright and hot, but I was safe inside my room, standing behind the curtains.

  The change began before the sun had gone down. There was a new guy telling the news, or maybe it was the old one, but they’d done something to make him look different. His hair was darker and longer. His eyes were a sharp, metallic green. He even talked in a different way, using some words that I’d never heard before: parallax, widdershins, sidereal. There were commercials for brand new products with connections to the Apollonaut mission. Astro-foods, cosmic drinks, a hairstyle called the Artemis (named after the ancient goddess of the moon).

  And Django Conn came like a comet streaking across the sky. The biggest, the brightest, the best thing I’d ever seen.

  SEVEN

  I’d always had two rooms at the Angelus, on the seventh floor: numbers 777 and 779. My sister Sabina was down the hall in 783 and 785. Between us, when we were younger, was our duenna. But she was gone now. It had been three years ago, when Sabina turned fifteen, that she announced to everyone that there was no point anymore in having a creaky, nearsighted black-dress hag-lady to watch over us.

  So the room between stayed empty. At the end of the hall was another suite, abandoned for years. It had been set up for our schooling with a blackboard, two big oak tables, crowded bookshelves, and even some old equipment for science experiments. There was a stuffed monkey, pickled frogs floating in big glass jars of formaldehyde, and a collection of sea shells from around the world. For our anatomy lessons, our father had bought us a real human skeleton. We’d named him “The Monsignor” and dressed him up in a long red robe.

  Sabina liked reading, especially books about mythical beings, spiritual secrets, séances, theosophy, and lost lore. I didn’t mind learning history and music. But between Sabina’s vicious tongue and my daydreaming, we’d made life miserable for every one of our tutors, and they never lasted long. Eventually our father gave up trying to get us properly educated, and the room had been unused ever since.

  So I was left alone with my records and my stacks of fan mags. And Sabina could do as she pleased, which lately meant having séances and tarot card readings in her room. Mostly, I thought Sabina’s talk about psychic powers and spirit-guides was not much more than a joke. But sometimes, especially when I’d done something I shouldn’t have, it felt like she could see into my thoughts. She claimed that she was clairvoyant—that she could actually see things that weren’t there in front of her eyes. And when I was little, she’d tell me that she’d looked around inside my head and knew all the bad thoughts I had. She hadn’t bothered with that in a while. I didn’t believe it anymore, but still, it spooked me when I remembered her giving me that I-know-everything-about-you look.

  EIGHT

  That afternoon, lying around paging through my stack of Creedos, I heard footsteps and voices in the hallway. This was odd, because normally Sabina had no visitors in the daytime. And other than Gio, who’d been the desk clerk at the Angelus when my grandfather was the owner, we had the whole corridor to ourselves. Gio stayed in his room, listening to operas on the radio. Weeks would go by without us ever seeing him. The maids checked in on him to make sure he was still alive, and one of the old waiters would bring him his supper on a zinc-plated cart. Other than that, our hallway was usually as desolate as the tombs of St. Sebastian.

  I assumed at first it was just some adventurous kids who’d wandered off from the main guest wings. Then I thought it might be a couple of new laundr
esses who’d snuck away from the basement to steal a cigarette break and didn’t know that anyone lived in this corridor. They were girls’ voices, however they didn’t seem secretive or worried. And one of them laughed, high and loud and unafraid of being caught. Then I heard a guy—it was Carlos, my sister’s boyfriend—knock on a door and say, “Come on. Open up, Sabina. It’s us.” After a minute, he knocked again, louder.

  The door to Number 783 opened, and Sabina let them in. Then silence for a long time. But eventually I heard something that might have been music. Low and steady, a swelling current of chords, like an organ prelude in the cathedral. I knew my mind had been seriously shaken up by Django and the band. The girl with the glasses, of course, remained in my thoughts—a glimmer, a ghost, a strobe-lit face.

  The Angelus too, the huge building itself, sometimes made sounds that were almost music. The radiators moaned slithery, Middle Eastern melodies in the winter months. The wind, now and then, came off the canals and filled the Angelus with a sad, solemn chorus. Doves cooed in the eaves, the elevator cables made a gigantic three-note groaning, and the water pipes sang like far-off spirits. This sound from my sister’s room was not anything I’d heard before. So I did something that I hardly ever allowed myself to do anymore. After getting dressed quickly, I snuck into the room between to eavesdrop on Sabina and her guests.

  NINE

  Listening in secret was one of my favorite things to do. And having lived my whole life at the Angelus, I knew a hundred ways to get close to other people, to eavesdrop, without them knowing I was there. Sabina had caught me a few times, and we’d made a deal: she wouldn’t tell and I wouldn’t sneak around behind her with secret ears. The room between was part of our arrangement. We’d both agreed to leave it as a buffer, a dead zone between us.

  But a change had happened: in me, in the Angelus, in the city. Since Django’s show, everything felt different. The rules I’d gone by for years hadn’t been totally thrown away, but I understood them differently now. And if Sabina was going to change—having guests in her room in the daytime—then I could change too.

  I used the key that no one knew I had and entered the abandoned room. It smelled of dust, of rust, and of old lady lilac perfume. The curtains were drawn, making a blurred, reddish afternoon gloom. The bed had never been stripped, and the desk still had a crystal vase holding the dried bones of a very dead rose.

  Going to the closet, I edged the door open just enough to get inside and put my ear to the listening spot I’d made years before. The music was definitely coming from next door. It wasn’t so mysterious now: a reedy little organ making soft minor church chords. And a voice was speaking something that might have been a prayer.

  I’d spent my whole life in a city full of churches, but only been to mass a few times. Our father had to get along with the Archbishop and the monsignors who ruled. So he showed respect and paid the right tithes to the right accounts. A few times a year, he attended services at St. Florian’s, paying with his time, with his kneeling and bowing, another kind of debt to the Archbishop. I liked the spicy traces that clung to his clothes when he came home from church: burnt sandalwood, myrrh, frankincense. Other than the change in the tolling of the bells, however, Sundays were no different at the Angelus than any other day. All of this is to say I didn’t know much about religion, and I cared even less. The old music, the capes and crowns, the robes and relics were beautiful. Gorgeous church spires and domes surrounded the Angelus. Still, religion itself didn’t mean much at all to me.

  So hearing what sounded like prayer from my sister’s room was odd indeed. And even odder were the bursts of high, riotous laughter, as though one of her other guests thought the whole thing was a joke or a ridiculous put-on. I leaned in closer to my listening spot, pressing my ear hard against the bare wood where I’d scraped off the plaster. At first, it was just a cloud of noise.

  TEN

  Then a girl’s voice, darker and lower and more serious, came out of the blur.

  “Impossible? So what? You’re going to let that stop you?”

  My listening spot was tight, hot, and airless. The closet smelled of old shoes and moth-eaten taffeta dresses. My knees already hurt and my ear was burning. Hearing those words, though, I felt a current of life flowing to me and through me.

  “You know what else is impossible? Apollonauts landing on the moon, but they did it. Am I right? Not just landing on the moon, but coming back—all the way back through how many thousands of miles of absolute nothing?—and landing here in the ocean with a box full of rocks they took from the moon. I saw one with my very own eyes, a rock that came all the way from the moon. It didn’t look any different than any other rock I’d ever seen. But I knew what it was and I knew where it came from, and it was absolutely impossible and absolutely true. So don’t get all weak-kneed and worried about what other people are saying.”

  “But you don’t have all the facts,” Sabina said. “When you understand better, then you’ll see—”

  The other voice cut her off, not angry, just impatient, wound-up with excitement. “I see just fine. I understand just perfect. If you really want your ritual to be true, then it is. Don’t tell me you’re serious and then go all giggly and imbecilo on me. Carlos said you were serious, and I thought he meant it.”

  “Of course I did,” Carlos said. “I had a good feeling about you and how you’d fit in here.” Depending on her mood, how grand and pretentious she was feeling, Sabina called Carlos her boyfriend, her soul mate, or her spiritual advisor. He was a few years older than her, confident and cool, supremely good-looking, and she’d fallen for him hard. She thought she was Mistress Sophisticato now, having her séances and swanning around with him.

  The girl started up again. “You can light candles and sing your cute little woo-woo spirit-songs and tell yourselves that you’re raising the angels from their secret places. But if you’re not serious then I’m going.”

  The voice stopped suddenly. I heard the rustling of cloth and a chair being dragged across the floor. For a long second I thought that I’d been found out. I held my breath, straining to hear what was going on. The girl started up again at last, with an edge to her voice that hadn’t been there before.

  “You’re doing it all wrong. Church music only works if you believe it. Consecrated wine? It’s just wine. And stealing holy water from the Dome? It’s just water that a priest muttered over. But if you want to raise some power then you’ve got to take some risks. You need the real and true things: blood, fire, moonlight, and music.”

  The girl sounded totally sure of herself. She knew what was real and what was fake. She knew and she had nothing to lose by saying it.

  “So if you want to make the mutation, then good. I’m in. All the way in. I’ll stay around and show you what it means to make the change. But if you’re just going to…”

  ELEVEN

  The voice died. Maybe the girl turned suddenly or moved away, or somebody made a sign to silence her. Other voices, much more muffled, came and went. I heard a sudden wheezing outburst of notes, as if the girl had leaned her elbow on the keyboard. Something metal, a cup or plate, dropped on the floor. Footsteps, the rattle of something, probably Sabina’s little divining bones, being dropped into a jar, and my sister telling the others to stop talking.

  Then I heard a knock on Sabina’s door. Panicking, I pulled myself out of the closet and crossed the middle room. I listened, holding my breath, heard nothing and slipped out. Back in my room, I felt safer but my heart was still pounding.

  Soon, I heard my sister’s door open and her guests heading down the hallway to the stairs. They were talking, but too quietly for me to make out a word.

  I wanted to see. I had to see. Voices are fine. But sound and sight together makes something real. So, still buzzed on the adrenaline of secrets and panic, I opened my door and took a peek. Three people were moving together toward the stairs. One was separate, lagging a little behind. Wild black hair, tight crimson jeans, some kind
of Arctic-white jacket. And even though I couldn’t see her face, I knew it was the girl, the one from the Maxima, the one who’d been talking about Sabina’s rituals being fake. She was there in my hallway, but moving away from me, into shadow.

  The sight of her hit me like a jolt of two hundred-volt Django-juice. It didn’t hurt, but it came close. It didn’t scare me but almost. It was like magnetism, maybe, both negative and positive, an invisible push and pull. I wanted to yell out to her, “Hey! It’s me. I was at the show too.” And at the same time, I wanted to close my door and hide.

  Carlos, wearing a silver-studded vest and silver-heeled boots, hung back, waiting for her. He said something I didn’t catch, then I heard some names: Luigi, Lukas, Santa Lucia, Jules. All the names blurred together, a cloud of oohs and liquid L’s.

  I was never sure how to take Carlos. He pretended to like the new bands sometimes, at least when Sabina wasn’t around. He claimed that he’d hung out with the Invisible Boys after a show. Was this true or false? I never found out. He’d traveled and he seemed to know a lot about a lot of things. He showed me an autographed copy of Red Chaos by Hakim Hakim. And it was the real thing. Still, there was always a sliminess about Carlos. It was more than the fact he couldn’t tell the truth: I never really understood what he wanted from me. Or why.

  He turned, saw me, and gave me a smirky smile, as though to say, “Back way off, kid. Don’t even think about messing with this.”

  For a second, I thought he was going to put his arm around the girl’s shoulder, but she veered away from him. I heard him say “D’Annunzio,” which was the street on the east side of the Angelus. He gave me his king-of-the-world warning sneer and went with the girls to the elevator. Another second or two, and then they were gone.