Tesseracts Seventeen

by Colleen Anderson

  She could have searched for keys, but considering what she had already surrendered, under questionable circumstances, to this stranger, she barely hesitated before shattering the glass of the cabinet with the foot of a table lamp. Even as she gave herself that excuse, she knew that the obsession had ensnarled itself so deeply into her mind that she would have perpetrated the same offence, regardless. Still, she paused. Which of the two objects should she take? Which of the two would most likely quench her thirst for knowledge? She touched one, then the other; as she pondered a deep growl issued from her stomach and hunger assailed her once again. Why was she trying to choose? She wanted both items, and she wanted them now. She grabbed the two objects of her obsession a little too hastily and cut her forearm on the broken glass.

  The wound was closer to a nick than a gash, but it nevertheless bled profusely. Monica lost focus, her mind exploding chaotically with conflicting ideas, fears, and impulses. Paralysed into inaction, she collapsed onto one of the rococo divans, her blood staining the period upholstery. Unsure whether or not she had lost consciousness for a brief time, Monica regained volition when panic at the thought of running the risk of meeting the stranger if she lingered here any longer spurred her to rise and leave. She carefully fingered her small wound; it had scabbed over, and she was no longer bleeding. She resisted the impulse to unscrew the as yet untampered twist cap and take a sip of the vermilion wine. Not yet. Not here.

  Finding the correct door to exit the premises turned out to be tricky. She couldn’t get a handle on the layout of the place. She stumbled upon more rooms filled with cabinets of curiosities, but she resisted the urge to inspect their contents. With increasing frustration, she opened doors to utility closets and wardrobes. She fell upon a closet filled with hundreds of women’s shoes; they were of various sizes and had clearly never been worn. They, too, were a collection.

  Monica, who was still shoeless in the wake of her debacle with the acqua alta, decided to purloin footwear as well. She settled on a pair of vermilion leather open-toe dress sandals with two-inch heels. They were probably worth hundreds of euros. Perhaps thousands, or even more. These were mint-condition vintage designer shoes, with an aura of the 1960s about them.

  She finally located the exit door: the one that had a rack with umbrellas and tote bags next to it. She grabbed a bag to lug her loot, then: outside. She felt conspicuously and fraudulently glamorous as she clickety-clacked her way to a restaurant near her hotel and ordered a full five-course meal. No wine this time, though.

  No, the only wine she wanted any knowledge of was now at her fingertips, in the tote bag she held tightly against her ribs: vino vermiglio, the vermilion wine of Venera.

  The bottle rested unopened by Monica’s bedside. The dawn sunlight caught on the vermilion glass and reminded her of its tempting, teasing, confounding presence. She had spent the entire night reading and rereading select passages from La storia segreta dei vini sacri, and she had finally come to the conclusion that it must be a work of fiction, a fantastical alternate history written in the form of nonfiction.

  But then: the bottle. How to explain the bottle? And all those other Veneran objects in the cabinets of curiosities? Had an Italian film or TV series been made, based on this book, and these were the props that had been created for it? Perhaps her secret lover had been the director, a producer, a designer, or an actor associated with the project? Maybe even the original author, this so-called “Magus Amore.”

  La storia segreta dei vini sacri, as far as her imperfect Italian allowed her to comprehend, was written in the form a pop history book, but the world it described was not the one she knew. The focus of the book was ostensibly the ritualistic role of wine — any number of wines, not just vino vermiglio — among minor cults, secret societies, and arcane religions. The text lingered on the details of lurid rites and the hallucinatory experiences of those who performed these often brutal, obscene, and even pornographic rituals. Peppered throughout were passing allusions to wars, disasters, and other events that diverged from what she knew of history. Also, there was somewhere in the Mediterranean (the text seemed to provide contradictory information as to its exact location) an island city-state called Venera; this make-believe land appeared to be a nexus for the otherness of the world imagined by the author. If Venera was indeed the catalyst for the creation of this rich, bizarre world of atavistic debauchery, then it loomed large over the text by its absence more than by its presence. Outside of occasional oblique references to both the fictional city-state and its signature wine, there were only three brief sections that dealt directly with Veneran cults and vino vermiglio. Why write a book in which the world was transformed by the presence of an invented nation to then barely explore it directly?

  It was as if this book expected its readers to take for granted and be familiar with the existence of Venera. As if this book had in fact been written in the world of Venera. There were no characters as such, beyond the names of some religious figures and brazen iconoclasts. There was no plot per se; it was little more than an embellished catalogue of the various uses of wine within (presumably entirely fictional) underground religious cultures. It was hard to conceive that such a peculiar work could be popular enough to be adapted for television or cinema, if that was indeed the source of all those Veneran artefacts she had perused.

  Still wearing the shoes she had stolen from her mystery man’s collection — she had never worn anything so chic and refined, and she luxuriated in the decadent feeling it gave her to be shod in such exclusive footwear — Monica picked up the bottle of vermilion wine and scrunched herself down on the floor of the hotel room’s tiny balcony. The ambiguous descriptions on the hotel website had led her to believe that the balcony would be standing over the water of Venice; instead, her view was of a narrow winding inner calle, but she could still smell the brine of the lagoon wafting through the Venetian air.

  Contemplating the bottle, Monica once more reflected on what she could decipher of the vino vermiglio rituals recorded in La storia segreta dei vini sacri. Venera was the name of both the city and of its matron goddess, but Venera was not the only goddess worshipped in her eponymous city-state. The book also described rites pertaining to the worship of Nayadaga, a fish goddess associated with amphibious mermaids purported to live in the underbelly of the island city, and of Santadonnamaria — a perversion of Christianity’s Mary, Mother of God — whose mass involved the ritual sacrifice of a prepubescent boy, mixing the blood of his slaughter with vermilion wine for the communion of the congregation.

  Nayadaga’s cult was something out of a pulp magazine, with lesbian orgies, half-human secret societies, and goddess-fuelled shapeshifting. Monica hadn’t clearly understood that section, as several words seemed neither Italian nor like anything she’d ever encountered and some details were too fantastical and grotesque for her imagination to fully grasp.

  Amore’s descriptions of the cult of Venera herself were somewhat tamer. He mentioned two competing denominations devoted to the matron goddess. One, the Venera Church of Mother Earth, was the official state religion and equated Venera with the Earth Goddess of so many world religions. Its mass was open only to the members of the Church’s various orders — all of whom were women — and Amore claimed its practices were descended from Greek mystery cults: the wine offered communion with the Goddess while ritual enactments, sometimes erotic and always mystical in nature, served to cement Church hierarchy. The other, unnamed sect devoted to the goddess Venera was banned by state orthodoxy, and those found guilty of practicing that cult were punished by banishment from the city-state. This secret sect claimed that the goddess and the city were one — a divine duality — and that the Church of Mother Earth neither celebrated nor communed with Venera: instead, it caged and suppressed her. In this passage, finally, Amore revealed the nature of vermilion wine: despite its reddish hue, it was in fact a fruity white wine that derived its color from an extract
of a plant called vermilion, which grew only in Venera. Consuming the plant resulted in euphoric, hallucinogenic, and transcendent experiences that could be channelled by ritual. According to Amore, the vermilion in the wine, coupled with orgiastic rituals, allowed the male and female congregants of this underground sect to commune directly with the Goddess and lend her the strength of their spirit so that she could eventually break free of the shackles of the Church of Mother Earth.

  The rest of the book was no less strange and lurid — violent lucha libre bacchanals from Mexico City; sake-imbibing lizard worshippers from Tokyo; Catholic cannibals in Paris who used the metaphorical blood of Christ to wash down the meat of their victims — but Monica had hurriedly skimmed the parts that mentioned neither Venera nor vino vermiglio.

  Staring at the reflection of the morning sunlight on the glass bottle and on the liquid inside, Monica’s sleep-deprived imagination could almost taste the vino vermiglio and accept as true Amore’s outré and sensationalistic scribblings.

  A passing cloud obscured the sun and broke the spell. Exhaustion overcame Monica; she stumbled back into bed fully dressed but, haunted by the weird, grotesque imagery from Amore’s book, could not fall asleep. The bottle once again rested unopened by Monica’s bedside, tempting her, teasing her, confounding her. Finally, she succumbed. She twisted open its screw cap, and the delicate fragrance hit her like an enchantment. Monica sipped directly from the mouth of the bottle, and, although the fluid was unmistakeably wine, it was the smoothest she had ever savored— a liquid orgasm. After only one taste she calmly drifted to sleep.

  Monica dreamt of Venice, aware of simultaneously watching and experiencing the dream. She soon recognized it as a memory, but a doubt lingered: perhaps it was her mind filling in the blanks for time that alcohol had wiped from her consciousness.

  In the dream, she was pathetically drunk, harassing the other patrons of the restaurant by interrogating them in a slurred jumble of English and Italian about Venera, vino vermiglio, and Magus Amore. The Venetians ignored her, pointedly avoiding eye contact. Soon, a waiter ejected her from the premises. She stumbled through the otherwise calm, serene streets of nighttime Venice, continuing to shout her questions at passersby.

  …Until a man grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her away from the main thoroughfare, and slammed her against the wall of a shadowy calle. Fear and, to be honest with herself, excitement jolted her out of her drunken obsession; with soft fingers he touched her lips delicately and said in a kind voice, “Hush. I know the answers to your questions. No, I can see in your face that it is more than that: to your quest. But there is no need to shout and disturb the quietude of others. Come, and I will reveal all there is to know.”

  His voice was melodious and mesmerizing; it eased her way down into a haze of drunkenness and sexual readiness, where she could hide from the embarrassment at her uncouth behavior, an emotion that had briefly surfaced along with the momentary fear.

  He took her by the hand, and at a slow but deliberate pace led her deeper into Venice. He was tall, slim, and at least twenty years older, with long grey hair tightly pulled back. He was dressed with stagelike, antiquated formality, giving him the air of a performing illusionist. His grip was firm and commanding; she abandoned herself to it as they progressed in silence.

  The man paused in front of a doorway, took out his keys, and unlocked the door. “Before we continue on inside, I should introduce myself, especially as I heard you shout my name through the streets. I am Magus Amore.”

  In her bare feet, obeying an impulse she did not want to control or question, Monica stood up on tiptoe, grabbed his hair, pulled his mouth down to hers, and kissed him. His mouth was spicy and moist— and responsive. Monica let herself sink deeper, closer to unconsciousness.

  He picked her up in his strong, taut, wiry arms; they crossed the threshold.

  Monica woke up in darkness. She glanced at the open bottle of vino vermiglio by her bedside and took another intoxicating sip. Soft, muted sounds wafted in through her open window: the murmur of conversations, the slow clickety-clack of heels on cobblestone, the subtle vibrations of live acoustic music, the almost imperceptible damp resonances of the sea. Still shod in the stolen vermilion shoes, still holding the bottle of vino vermiglio, Monica followed the siren call of the nightlife. Out she went. Around her, people walked unhurriedly, talking in calm tones, leaning into each other with complicit intimacy. Almost every voice spoke a language she could not quite identify. It had the musicality of Italian, but the words were subtly different and sometimes utterly alien.

  The shoes seemed to guide her; she followed them to wherever they might lead her.

  The city Monica wandered through she could not recognize as Venice. Already the architecture of Venice was otherworldly, unlike that of anywhere else on the planet, but what she now beheld was exponentially stranger. The buildings had a partly biological feel to them, the shapes obeying a geometry that defied her comprehension. The cityscape was so alive that it appeared to change and shift as she stared at it, a perpetually metamorphosing mosaic work of art. The clothing of the people around her, although modern, followed fashions unfamiliar to her and were often more risqué and revealing than any city she knew would normally allow. Sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, she thought she espied denizens who might not be quite human. The very air around her shimmered with the potentiality of the impossible.

  The word drifted to her ears from the conversations that wisped by: Venera.

  Monica weighed the heft of the bottle in her hands. Once more, she drank from the vino vermiglio, the vermilion potion that had somehow transported her here, to this imaginary city dreamt up — she knew now beyond a doubt as more of the potent beverage seeped into her — not by Magus Amore and not by any person. Venera was the city of Venice’s dreams: unfettered by the constraints of mundane reality, petty mores, or dreary human concerns. A phantasmagorical city-state dreamt up by an over-commodified city yearning for weird intrigue and grotesque romance, yearning to seduce and fulfill the fantasies of those with enough imagination to perceive the dark, ineffable mysteries that inspire its innermost heart.

  Monica drank again from the vermilion wine. She drank deeply, then continued to wander the impossible streets of Venera.

  * * * * *

  CLAUDE LALUMIÈRE is the author of Objects of Worship and The Door to Lost Pages and the co-creator of the multimedia cryptomythology project Lost Myths. He has edited or co-edited twelve anthologies, including Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction. His fiction has appeared in volumes 9, 11, 14, and 15 of the Tesseracts series. Claude was born in Montreal but now hops around the world, including a recent extended stretch in Vancouver. He wrote “Vermilion Wine” — an episode of his Venera Dreams cycle — while travelling through Italy.

  Night Journey: West Coast

  Eileen Kernaghan

  this is a landscape

  that swallows strangers

  the ones who vanish

  like ships sliding over the world’s rim

  into the mouths of dragons

  in the rainforest myths breed

  under wet earth, among the cedar roots

  walk half-invented in the shadows

  between ditch and trees a shape moves

  owl deer or some forest god with no form

  but the one we have imposed upon it

  let our glance wander into the dark spaces

  under the cliffs beneath the trees

  and we too will be lost

  will become

  the ones who vanished

  * * * * *

  Eileen Kernaghan was born and grew up in Grindrod, a farming village in British Columbia’s North Okanagan Valley. For most of her adult life she’s lived on the Lower Mainland of BC.

  Her speculative poems have appear
ed in various North American magazines and anthologies, including Prism International, The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Dreams & Nightmares, Weird Tales, and several of the Tesseracts anthologies. Tales from the Holograph Woods, a collection of her speculative poetry, was published in 2009 by Wattle & Daub Books. She has also published eight historical fantasy novels.

  The Wall

  Rhea Rose

  The plastic bags rustled in the back of the car. I checked the rear view mirror. Baby slept soundly in her car seat. The van’s rear windows were closed. The groceries looked fine. I continued driving, but when the soft quiet rustle of grocery bags started up again, I pulled over to the side of the road to check them more carefully.

  I dumped every bag and checked for rodents, but found nothing.

  Baby continued to sleep.

  When I reloaded the car, the frozen food had melted. I left the ice-cream, orange juice and a few other soggy foods at the side of the road.

  I drove the rest of the way home, relieved to finally get there.

  My shadow on the garage wall showed a thin silhouette with my hair sticking out like devil’s horns. I hadn’t showered or done my hair in weeks. I couldn’t leave Baby unattended. It was always a challenge to shower or shop or eat, but now she slept so quietly in her car seat I didn’t dare try to take her out. I checked under the car to make sure she was safe, and then I unloaded the groceries. When I brought the groceries to the kitchen, I checked the inside of the dishwasher to make sure there was nothing to harm her.

  I reminded myself to check the microwave.

  Then, I remembered I’d given it away. I hadn’t wanted those unseen waves hurting my delicate Baby.

  I checked inside the oven and found Lolly, our pet cat, curled asleep inside.

  Who had put her there?

  I shooed her outside.

  I wouldn’t give her the opportunity to steal Baby’s breath.