by Paul Haines
'You don't like?' she whispered hotly into his ear as he stood.
Towards the rear of the cave, on a crude earthen throne, sat the piper, his ruby red and yellow sun cloak tattered and slashed from his murder. A young boy, Otto, sat naked on his knee, kissing the piper's neck. A girl of no more than five straddled the piper's thigh. Her eyes glittered menacingly, seductively.
'Ah, Günter, my child,' said the piper, his voice a languid measure of silk. 'Such strength to resist the desires my vermin servants secreted into your blood. And now here you are, returned to the fold. Such timing. Now that winter begins, we were just about to go hunting in Hamlyn for provisions for the journey back to Romany.'
The children advanced on Günter, their mouths wet and shining in the torchlight. He made the sign of the cross.
The piper grinned, his lips peeling back over glistening vampiric fangs. 'You can join us if you like.'
***
Afterword: Hamlyn
I belong to a Melbourne-based writing group called SuperNOVA, and this story has its genesis not only in the Pied Piper myth itself, but in discussions at our monthly critique meetings. Adam Browne was throwing around ideas about the original myth being based upon paedophile rings operating in Europe, and Brendan Duffy suggested that the Haines touch would be perfect for it. When I began researching the myths, references to the Roma and gypsies appeared regularly, and also that children were possibly being transported back to Romania to be sold through an underground network, literally represented as the cave in the myth.
And who lived in a big scary castle in Transylvania, Romania? And all those vampire legends bound in erotica and forever-young nubile teens? At that point, it all came together.
When I was seven-years-old, my class at school put on a play based on the original Robert Browning poem, so I felt it necessary to weave that most famous of interpretations into my story as well. After all, I did play one of the councillors in the staged performance. I thought I was very good and even had one mimed line. Some of the other councillors didn't have that.
"Hamlyn" found a home in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, a market known for not publishing this sort of story. In fact, this sort of story was exactly what it was not going to publish. The editors of that issue received a lot of flak and controversy for sticking to their guns with this story.
***
I've Seen The Man
The man giving the sales pitch is a liar. I can see it in the way the skin sits comfortably over the flesh on his bones, in the slight jowl under his chin, the bulge of the belly beneath his shirt and jacket.
'Yeah, man,' he croons. 'This is the jizz, the shit, the buzz. This is the poison you be looking for.'
The whites of his eyes are still white, his hair thick and luxurious. To him, this is simply a job, some cash coming to pay his bills, get his cock sucked, oil his scalp, preen his clothes. He's a liar, every fucking word oozing from his full lips and pink tongue is just more noise getting in the way of what I want and where I need to go.
He nods towards the door, grinning slyly. 'This way, man, you'll love it. See the world with new eyes. It's like you're reborn.'
He holds his hand out, rubbing forefinger and thumb.
I press the Benefits Card into his palm and he swipes it through the reader, taps something onto the screen, grins a mouth of pearly whites and clean saliva, and hands me back the card.
'Come on in, man. We can give you everything.'
Above us the sky looms heavy and dark, like a disease sweeping in under the skin of the sun. I push past him, eager yet hesitant to get back into the Shrine. I hate him. I love him. He is an innocent, a naïve newborn; bless him and his life.
Fuck him.
What does he know about life? What does he know about anything?
#
The first time I went to a Shrine—the original, the one in the abandoned warehouses down near the old docks that started all this—I was terrified.
Back then it wasn't cool and underground, it was just underground, hard to find, harder to get into, and very expensive.
I'd been ushered in, my heart beating and fluttering in my chest, my chakras awash and whirling. The sweat on my palms hot and insistent. Pressure on my bladder. Internal fingers prodding my belly, urging me to throw up the nerves. I expected semi-naked Asiatic women clad in silken veils offering me needles and pipes, a room swirling with the dragon, chased with psychedelic whispers, of me reclining, a sheen of sweat coating the body, head tilted back, face raised in transcendence.
It wasn't like that at all.
It was like this:
The room was sterile. Posters covered the wall. It was footy season and enemy teams were featured. A talking point, just in case we needed one. A dozen fat, comfortable leather recliners lined three of the walls, each with an IV drip and machine. A flat-screen TV was mounted on the opposite wall, so all the chairs and their occupants, the clientele, can see what is on it, although the volume was turned down so low it was only a muted garble. Several nurses, men or woman, moved amongst the chairs, adjusting IVs, providing small talk, occasionally stroking a brow, wiping away an escaped tear.
The occupants of the chairs, they're you and me. Normal. Mundane. Everyday. Their faces were creased with wrinkles, smoothed with youth, jaundiced, sallow, sunken, puffed, pristine, flawless, exposed and raw. Hair hung lank, scalps were shaved, stubbled, grey, peroxide, bleached and au naturel. Clothes were creased and clean, labelled and branded, patched, denimed, cotton and silk, baggy, tight, ragged and styled with grime; everything and nothing.
Normal. Mundane. Joe Public. Jane Private. Jesus and Mohammed adrift in a boat crafted from Vishnu's suffering with Thor's hammer, blessed with Buddha's semen and then leased from Lucifer at a cutthroat price.
The occupants of the chairs, reclining, breathing, dying a million deaths with every inspiration, a million more on expiry.
Their souls burned brightly in their eyes.
#
There's only three of us here today, not counting the two nurses controlling the Shrine. A woman in her fifties, me, and Tiki.
I take a seat next to Tiki, and roll up my left sleeve. 'How you going, man?'
'Hey, bro!' Tiki's eyes are yellowed, and jaundice shines through the once-tanned pallor of his skin. The Polynesian in the man is slowly leeching out. He's shaved his skull. An IV line snakes from beneath his shirt up to the drip on the stand next to his chair. 'Going good, eh? Closer to God, bro, closer to God. Every day. How about you? Haven't seen you around for a couple of months.'
'Finances. Hey, thanks for fixing me up with that new card.'
'No probs. Should tide you over for about a year before they figure it out. Let me know with plenty of time when you need a new one. Getting harder to get hold of my man in the trade, eh? Business is booming he reckons.'
'It's the way of the world, Tiki.'
'Yeah, don't I know it. Sorry, bro, I gotta ... I gotta ... go ...' He leans back into the chair, eyes closed, riding the waves. His fists are white knuckles clenching the arms of the chair.
Tiki has been playing this game longer than anyone I know.
#
Why do people take drugs? There are more reasons than there are pharmaceuticals, but I took them primarily for pleasure. Sure, curiosity was a factor, but I was only curious about how it would make me feel. I was never a rebel; I wasn't doing it as a means of defiance, nor enacting a defence mechanism. I had no problems to escape from.
I liked to get fucked up, plain and simple.
Tiki? Well, he was another story. We used to play rugby together at school. He was big, as a lot of Polynesian kids were, and fast, too. The by-product of sexual genetic engineering, slung from the vagina of a Samoan/Maori half-breed inseminated by Dutch ancestry that traced itself back to pirates roaming the Indonesian spice trade routes.
He was anything but plain and simple. He'd watched his old man get beaten to death with crowbars outside their garage one wintr
y weekend. Apparently Tiki's father had overstepped his mark on the local patch, and after ignoring the first warning, had his body bludgeoned as a statement to the rest of the neighbourhood. His mum lost most of her teeth that day, and spent the next few years whoring to make ends meet. Tiki didn't mind the fact that his old lady fucked for a living, but he resented her for bringing business back home. By then, home was pretty much broken, and though Tiki didn't tell me any of this until years later, I knew he was broken, too.
But if there was anything you wanted—pot, E, speed, P, heroin, ice—then Tiki was your man. And it was always Good. A-Grade Good.
I'd always figured that Tiki needed saving and I sure as hell wasn't going to do it. Then one day I realised I'd put so much money into Tiki's pockets over the years that I'd lost my house and my wife to go with it. Tiki needed saving, but the bastard turned it all around and tried to save me.
#
'Nice to see you again. It's been a while.' Tony is looking clean, his beard trimmed close to his chin. He pulls on gloves, takes a swab, doses it in alcohol then wipes the vein in the crook of my elbow. 'What'll it be today?'
'What's on the menu?'
Tony smiles mercurially, raises an eyebrow. 'What's not on the menu?'
I suspect Tony gets a kickback from the fake Benefit Cards that are used, and I know he takes a lot of electronic cash payments up front. He's not the dealer, he's the dispenser. A qualified oncological nurse and an auric reader. Quite the package.
'A little sting,' he says, as the needle slides into my vein, then he's taping it tight, putting in a block and screwing it off, while attaching another line to the IV pole. 'You have a blood sheet?'
'Sorry, Tony, I haven't had one done for a while.'
'How come? Dr Zing not filling them out for you?'
'Finances, you know. Haven't been able to afford to see Dr Zing lately.'
'Well, your blood results will really help me tailor the effect ...'
'I know, I'm sorry. What about my chakras? Can you use them? See what I need most?'
Tony grins. His teeth are white and pristine. 'Your Manipura is off, but you knew that.' His gloves are off and his hands hover around my body. 'And we definitely need to do something about the Vishuddha; the energy is so confused. Have you been having any side-effects with your thyroid?'
'Like what?'
Tiki begins to convulse in the chair next to us. His legs jerk, kicking off the blanket, as his arms shake. His body is heaving, slapping the chair with sudden rapid thuds.
'Shit,' hisses Tony between his teeth. 'Kara! Get 25 mils of Phenergan into him quick.' He turns to me again, a smile curling his lips, his eyes kind. 'You should see his Sahasrara. He's almost there. Please, excuse me for a minute.'
Kara injects the sedative into one of the taps on the IV. 'I'll get some morphine, just in case.'
Tony's hands massage the energy surrounding Tiki's head. 'Get some warm blankets, too. He's going deep.'
#
'People hate junkies,' Tiki said to me one night while speed was racing through our veins. His dark-brown eyes were both glazed and manic, as he threw back another shot of sambuca. He grimaced. 'You know why?'
We were standing at the bar of a seedy joint in Port Melbourne, one where the walls used TAB screens to scare off patrons. Hardcore only. Down and derelict. Make mine a double.
'Because they're junkies,' I replied. The sambuca didn't even touch the sides. Lately, nothing seemed to.
Tiki laughed. 'Everyone hates them. Selfish motherfuckers. They're not part of society. They do what they want. They waste their life. They flaunt that waste. The junkie is a portal into a world of anarchy. Society can't have that. Society shuns the junkie.'
'Sally's kicked me out,' I said.
'And why are we doing this, bro?' Tiki hadn't heard a word I'd said. 'Because we're looking for something. Something inside. Something to ease the pain.'
'She's changed the locks, man. I got nowhere to stay.'
'We take all this shit, we do all this shit to ourselves, because we want to belong, bro.' Two more shots had appeared before us. Tiki necked his. 'Belong.'
'She's taken out a fucking restraining order, Tiki! The bitch. Can you believe it? My own fucking wife!'
'Deep down, bro, we all just want to belong. And the more shit we take, the further away from society we fall.'
I stared at Tiki. He was lost.
He turned to face me, a thin line of black liqueur leaking from the corner of his mouth, those brown eyes shining and earnest.
'There's a new world revolution coming, bro. If you want in, I can get you in. After this, you'll never want for narcotics again. Guaranteed. And society? They're going to bend over backwards to eat their own shit to help you. This stuff will take you closer to God than you've ever been before. Guaranteed.'
I wasn't looking for God. 'Can I crash at your place for a while?'
#
Tiki's lying still, the Phenergan kicking in. A thick hospital-issue blanket smothers his body. His skin is so pale now he could be mistaken for an Anglo. Except for the jaundice. The Polynesian has fled in his waka back out to sea, leaving the Dutch pirate behind to pillage the scant remains.
Tony's back, pulling on his latex gloves, dragging the drug tray towards my chair, its wheels spinning quickly over the carpet.
'If you'd had your bloods, it would make this a much better experience. Tailored to a T. We need to get the clouds out of your Vishuddha, get that sky blue again.'
He checks the needle in my vein, then the IV attachments and plugs.
'You thought of getting a portacath put in?' He attaches a saline bag to the hooks on the IV stand. 'Makes it a lot easier. We don't have to worry about your veins drying up. Saves us a lot of time pricking holes in you.' He grins, all those white pearls.
'Tiki's got infected,' I say.
'One in twenty chance. You keep it clean, no problems.'
'Finances, Tony, you know. Sally's taking me to the cleaners.'
'Tiki sorted you out with a new Benefits Card, didn't he?' Tony injects premeds into one of the plugs on the tap into my arm. 'We can use that.'
My anus burns and itches for a few seconds as the antibiotics enter my bloodstream.
'A licensed doctor at the public hospital. Even better, it will show up on your medical history, making everything we do look that little bit more authentic.'
'Really?'
'Sure. Operation takes about forty minutes. We'll stick a plastic tube into one of those big veins in your chest and bury a plastic nozzle just beneath the skin.' He nods at the contraption feeding into the crook of my elbow. 'Holes. Punctures. People shake their heads and think 'junkie'. We don't want that, do we?'
#
Doctor Zing was a pharmaceutical paradox of Western medical science married to Eastern esoteric philosophy. Her office, her official one anyway, seemed crammed with oncology medical journals, Chinese herb manuals, Buddhist meditation guides and biographies about Tom Holt, Ken Kesey, Howard Marks, Timothy Leary and William S Burroughs.
'Hey, sunshine! Good see you.' She leant back in her recliner, a yellowing smile stretching her acne-scarred cheeks. Her hair was tied back in a short, black, greasy ponytail, and she wore dark Gucci sunglasses (with magnified lenses). A faint scent of tobacco lingered in the air around us. 'Been long time. You looking good. Your hair grown back already.'
'I never lost it.' I sat in the chair next to her and nodded. 'I've signed them.' I handed her the papers. 'You'll get twenty percent of my profits from selling the house or on any rents earned. All legit and drawn up like you wanted.'
She snatched up the papers, her finger racing down through the text, quickly flipping the sheets until she reached the last page. 'Good good. I read over tonight, you come back in morning. I sign them.'
'So, when can I restart?'
Doctor Zing laughed, a short, high-pitched series of wheezes. 'The ox is slow, but the earth is patient.'
She slipped me
a business card. The address placed it in the abandoned warehouse complex in Spotswood, down near the river. 'For your rituals,' she said. She wrote a phone number on a piece of loose-leaf paper, tore it off and handed it to me. 'Call this number. They set you up with new Health Benefits Card. Guaranteed for one financial year.'
'And then?'
'You still here and you still keen? We get another.'
I nodded again, then made to rise from the chair. Her leg shot out, dropping onto my lap. The shoe on her foot was scuffed leather, the heel worn and flat.
'Not so fast.'
I tried to put a smile on my fast, but inside I grimaced. She wiggled the shoe off in my lap, using my groin as leverage. A warm damp smell rose from her toes.
'You looking good. And you got twenty minutes left before next appointment.'
#
I hated her. But Doctor Zing was the lynchpin and I needed her. I'd done worse in my previous life, before I'd taken my first steps down this path. She could connect us all, me, Tiki, every last one of us sad lost souls looking for a communion we could never get on our own.
How many whores had had to fuck Jesus? How many?
#