Dark Matter
Modern Erotic Classics
The Houdini Girl
Martyn Bedford
The Phallus of Osiris
Valentina Cilescu
Kiss of Death
Valentina Cilescu
The Flesh Constrained
Cleo Cordell
The Flesh Endures
Cleo Cordell
Hogg
Samuel R. Delany
The Tides of Lust
Samuel R. Delany
Sad Sister
Florence Dugas
The Ties That Bind
Vanessa Duriès
3
Julie Hilden
Neptune & Surf
Marilyn Jaye Lewis
Violent Silence
Paul Mayersberg
Homme Fatale
Paul Mayersberg
The Agency
David Meltzer
Burn
Michael Perkins
Dark Matter
Michael Perkins
Evil Companions
Michael Perkins
Beautiful Losers
Remittance Girl
Meeting the Master
Elissa Wald
House of Lust
Michael Hemmingson
Dark Matter
Michael Perkins
Modern Erotic Classics
Series Editor: Maxim Jakubowski
Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Eros Plus,
an imprint of Titan Books, 1996
This ebook edition published by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012
Copyright © Michael Perkins, 1996
Series Editor: Maxim Jakubowski
The right of Michael Perkins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-47210-554-7 (ebook)
Contents
I
The Spiral Dance
II
Star the Skin Artist
III
How I Began
IV
Sex is Everything
V
A Nest of Perverts
VI
California Here I Come!
VII
Anyguy at Home
VIII
Tattoo Me!
IX
Lightning, Meet Thunder
X
To Hell and Back
XI
Evangelical Evening News
XII
Healing and Dealing
XIII
Buddy on the Loose
XIV
Buddy has a Vision
XV
Asmodeus Rising
XVI
The Blood in Buddy’s Eye
XVII
Blood Ritual
XVIII
The Castro Street Fair
XIX
Baring Her Bosom
XX
The Hot Spring
XXI
Running into the Future
XXII
Pagan Goddess
XXIII
Buddy in the Lion’s Den
XXIV
“If Thy Right Eye Offend Thee...”
XXV
“...And Cast it From Thee...”
XXVI
Bad Little Girl
XXVII
The Prodigal Daughter
XXVIII
Night of the Living Dread
XXIX
Play Party
XXX
Blood Wedding
XXXI
End Times
XXXII
Exorcism
TO CHARLES GATEWOOD
1
The Spiral Dance
Gods, from your rocky home in the highest snow-capped Sierras of the imagination, swoop down now on San Francisco, the City of Perpetual Indulgence. Blot out all other sounds from your hearing and attend to the dark passage of one in your indifferent keeping — one touched by you, and like you, possessed....
Yet another turn of the wheel, another rotation of the earth: darkness is cast like a spell. A night without fog.
Straddling her snorting, fire-breathing Harley, Robin Flood roars up the steep undulating streets that slant to the sky and then down them to the Bay. She cuts a loud eructative path through the Marina and rumbles into stern Fort Mason, a former military facility converted into a cultural centre with shops, museums and a famous restaurant.
A bleached full moon leers down at her, one roguish lunar eyebrow cocked; clouds of galaxies extend from it into forever. The dark matter that makes up the unseen universe holds the stars apart. The Gods pay casual attention.
It is the beginning of November, final year of the century, on the night of the Spiral Dance — a Saturday night that falls on Samhain, when the dead pierce the veil that hangs between breathing and not, children who will never die (at least not in the twentieth, accursed century) eat sugar skulls, and a thousand boisterous pagans gather to celebrate the disappeared.
Robin joins the crowd cloaked in the exclusionary circle she draws around herself with strangers. She does not know anyone in the laughing, gesticulating, high-spirited gathering of animals with horns, birds of prey, devils of all designs, medieval jongleurs, Green Men, maenads and vampires. Here, New Agers rub shoulders with Dark Agers. Here, imagination expresses the divine with profligate abandon.
Robin regrets momentarily that she has not worn a costume, but her eyes attract more attention than a mask would: they are an unfathomable cerulean, like the sea. Her glance when unguarded can be frightening in what it reveals of the cold wildness inside. Her features are small and finely chiselled, her mouth wide and lush. Her hair is cropped like glossy black feathers. One seashell ear is studded with five expensive earrings, the kind ear-nibblers cut their lips on. She’s prettier than the Queen of Heaven tonight, but there is something indistinct, unformed, indefinable but dangerous about her, as if she might be willing to do anything.
Hidden behind their masks, people stare at her. Aware of the impression she makes, she tucks her ambient rage in a pocket of her black motorcycle jacket and grins like an ingenue on crack. She waits patiently in the line, examining everyone for signs of the roles they might play in the drama of her life. She has a hunger to find out who she is, and she can only learn this from others; she is unknown to herself. Tonight her whim is that she is a temple prostitute come to worship the Goddess, weep for her dead, and party down with the pagans. Her fantasies are usually realised.
The motley line snakes around the pier to Herbst Pavilion, a giant former troop embarkation shed surrounded by choppy Bay waters. The huge space is sombre and magnificent, a maritime cathedral filled with the anxious ghosts of the hundreds of thousands of apprehensive young men who passed
through the building on their way to war, and the unhappy spirits of those who never sailed home. It is an appropriate place to celebrate Halloween.
After surrendering her ticket, Robin enters the Pavilion through a maze of long white curtains and is greeted by two beaming wood sprites in mossy green, and a motherly crone in a black bustier who speaks the traditional greeting, “Welcome home”, to her. Inside, Robin’s boot heels make dull clicking sounds on the concrete floor. She feels herself opening inside and decides to lift herself higher. Because pagans don’t drink or do drugs at public gatherings, she sneaks a few guilty hits from a roach and quickly waves the smoke away.
She is new to San Francisco, having lived in Paris for over a year, and before that in various university towns; now she is seeking out her own kind. She walks in the direction of the stage, looking frankly and openly at everyone she passes, wondering if the women she sees are turned on as she is. She imagines herself swimming alone in a great ocean of space more vast than whales could comprehend. Schools of fish move past her....
Because she stands alone, each pagan who enters sees in her a reflection of the goddess, dorsal view. She is small and slender, and her tight black vinyl pants offer the viewer who looks closely an unforgettable image of desire. She is posing, but lost in the pose so that she is unaware of the many who stream in, an endless cavalcade. They surround her, spreading blankets and placing cushions to sit on. A vulpine woman in a derby hat wearing a fake handlebar moustache nurses a baby from her fat hard breast, and Robin imagines squeezing that breast and making the milk stream into her own mouth.
A musician tuning up on stage breaks a guitar string, snapping her out of her wicked fantasy. A choir of witches is being assembled on the other end of the stage. Awkwardly, Robin folds herself in with her fellow beings, plugging into the building energy, feeling a charge of anticipation. The music gets better and louder. A few people dance half-heartedly and then sit back down. Robin moves to the apron of the stage and watches the people in charge. They prepare calmly and efficiently the myriad details of a Samhain ceremony for one thousand. They laugh easily with each other.
For a moment she fades into a memory of other ceremonies — Christian and far from joyous ones: pursed mouths, hell-fire and damnation voices, burning eyes, pinched souls. Blind faith in a book and man: her father, Thomas Flood.
A heavy touch on her shoulder startles her from this reverie. She recoils, about to snarl, but checks the impulse. Shivers.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
The voice is obnoxiously self-confident. She turns and looks up at a well-browned, prime California hunk. She can tell he is a dedicated New Ager by his optimistic, sincere gaze and the t-shirt he is wearing, which boasts ‘A Higher Power Within’. Even his eyebrows are earnest strokes in his bland face. He wears loose pants, so she can’t see if he has genitals. She sneers, half-closing her eyes. If he came closer, she thinks she would bite his throat. Her hidden dark wings would unfold and envelop him, and she would soon have his blood on her tongue, running sweeter than semen down her throat.
But he keeps his distance and continues to talk. She sees that he will not be useful to her, that he is neither food nor fuck. He hears the echo of his own music, believes his own affirmations, and drops his shallow lines. She listens to him with the difficulty that even the hungry feel swallowing flies.
“Yes, my name’s Tom, you sweet goblin, but I won’t linger if you don’t want me to....” he finishes, aware she is not with him. His name is not the least of his offensiveness.
“I don’t want you to,” she says softly. He’s so dumb he still breathes through his mouth. Little gasps, as he tries to understand her.
He can’t decide how to respond. The turmoil on his face makes her smile at how easy it is to fuck men up. She sticks out her small hand as if in surrender. He takes it and she presses down on a judo point and he nearly faints.
She releases him. It is unsatisfying to inflict pain on someone she doesn’t know. He retreats with muttered imprecations indicating a lack of schooling and a deprived background.
The music from the stage insinuates its rhythms into her consciousness. The sound system is inadequate for the cavernous space, but the beat warms her. The band is playing, and a choir is singing an old pagan anthem. A bass drum booms as the divine array of mummers enters the hall and the magic show begins. First comes Cernunnos, the Celtic horned male god — she recognises him from her reading, and his identity is confirmed by the comments of people around her — striding with graceful giant steps on stilts taller than a tall man. He seems all-powerful and complete, his muscular acrobat’s body worthy of a god’s. The old god of the Underworld, the opener of the Gates of Life and Death.
His mask, Robin thinks, is terrifying. The stag’s antlers, the snake coiled around his neck are symbols she can read. He moves with grace and speed like a giraffe, accompanied by Apollo and Mercury, who move on their stilts with equal skill and assurance.
Robin is stirred to an emotion something like worship by this manifestation of the old gods. It is my birthright to worship, she thinks heretically. Perhaps it is my aesthetic, too. As a temple prostitute, perhaps it will be the Horned God himself to whom I will offer my tribute.
The fantasy pleases her. She is getting wet.
The lights dim and the crowd’s attention is focused on the pagan parade. Spotlights hit a troupe of beautiful naked dancers with painted bodies, their breasts bouncing, long hair whipping back and forth. Their movements are sexual and serpentine and joyful, drawing on the energy building in the great hall. They perform a ballet of orgasm; its explosive movements convey the sacredness of lust.
Robin looks away from the dancers for a moment, distracted by the dizzy argument of two greying lesbians, and when she looks again magic is happening, magic greater than her father’s Christian god has shown her in the twenty-six years since she was baptised.
Acrobats are descending on spidery ropes from the girders above and they seem to fall forever in slow motion while the excited crowd sets up a chant:
“Climb down, climb up!
Up to the bottom,
Down to the sky!”
Or so she hears. The words might have been different but she is transfixed by the acrobats, and cannot be certain of what she hears. She is in heat, glorious feline heat. She wonders, but only fleetingly, if her arousal is not simply keyed to the familiar pageantry of the circus, or to ceremonies she has attended in Catholic churches. But no: for the first time religion is part of her sexuality, not smothering it. The stilt walkers, dancers and acrobats are the gods who turn her on. The experience of conversion makes her tremble.
The music stops and the lights are lowered so that the crowd sits in darkness. There is a brief salutation to the four directions and the four elements, and then announcements are made from the stage. The purpose of the evening is to honour and mourn the dead who wait, in the minds of those who have gathered, just beyond the veil.
Candles are lit. A light show begins. Huge, breathtaking images of the beauty and brevity of life are projected on the walls and ceiling. Gaia, the blue planet, her jungles, forests, mountains and rivers of home; and then the faces of the beloved dead. The names of the dead, hundreds of them, are read by a woman with the voice of a doleful gatekeeper between the worlds. Most of the departed are unknown to Robin, but there are a few she recognises:
“Former President Jimmy Carter; Pinky Lee; Roy Rogers; the man known as Mr. Marvellous; Pat Robertson....” The list is endless, Robin thinks, like St. Peter reading the roll call at the Gates of Heaven. But the conjunction of famous names with one’s own dead creates the sense of a community of grief.
After twenty minutes of sitting cross-legged or standing with bowed head, Robin no longer hears the names. She is restless, perhaps because she finds it so difficult to honour her own dead. Her anger prevents her tears from falling. Half aloud, she calls out to her mother. In her mind is stamped the image of the
crematory flames that reduced her mother to bone fragments and white dust. Her mother who had been so alive eaten by the flames.
“Gods rest the soul of Rebecca Flood!”— loudly, to no one, and then the rest came, the bitter memories spilling forth.
“You left. You left me to him. You thought I would be kept safe, but you were never safe from him. The Devil!”
The author of her being, Robin’s father, the Reverend Thomas Flood, said that her mother was not good, but bad; not a real mother or wife, but a slut, a whore of Babylon — a thing from the black pit flown up to liquefy his soul and drink it like blood. And Robin, eight years old at the time of her mother’s death, was afraid he was right.
Wasn’t he her flesh and blood, who seemed to sit at the right hand of God? Who actually talked with God?
Her mother’s spirit whispers in her ear:
“He killed me. He entered my body in the night not like a man but a devil. He went all the way inside and I couldn’t get him out, so I had to run...but by then he was always right there inside me, choking me. You are not safe while he is alive.”
Hot tears form. Robin lets them roll down her face and jacket and onto her hands, which she lifts in helpless offering to her mother and to the careless cruel gods.
The crowd quiets its wailing and grieving when a tall woman with a midwestern accent begins speaking, in a mellifluous storyteller’s voice, of the pagan legends. She guides them in a meditation, taking them with her across the River Styx, showing them Atlantis and Avalon, the Isle of Apples.
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