3.a, Descent Into Darkness
Up ahead, even deeper into this underground chamber (which had all the charm of the basement level of a multi-storey car park, but grown from organic matter), a kaleidoscope of light danced at the edge of the darkness. It was as if a rainbow had got lost down here and was disintegrating into a swarm of bees.
Had Billy not furnished me with his gift, I would have sworn that the buzz of colour swam way off in the distance. I suppose in the context of a human, the lights were a goodly distance hence. But, to my awakening vampire train of thought, they were within spitting distance.
The smell of ancient, musty air pervaded every orifice, every pore; the very atmosphere adhered to the skin like some virulent, bacterial body stocking. Someone (or something) had recently disturbed the dust that looked to have otherwise lain here undisturbed for years. Motes floated in the foreground against the backdrop of the haphazard, chaotic light show, giving the panorama an aged, dream-like quality.
Had Billy not furnished me with his gift, I would have sworn that the buzz of colour swam way off in the distance. I suppose in the context of a human, the lights were a goodly distance hence. But, to my awakening vampire train of thought, they were within spitting distance.
The smell of ancient, musty air pervaded every orifice, every pore; the very atmosphere adhered to the skin like some virulent, bacterial body stocking. Someone (or something) had recently disturbed the dust that looked to have otherwise lain here undisturbed for years. Motes floated in the foreground against the backdrop of the haphazard, chaotic light show, giving the panorama an aged, dream-like quality.
Also, Billy and I were no longer alone. When I'd come to after my olde street had disappeared, he'd been in conference with three others. One of those others was a vampire; what the other two were I hadn't yet worked out. They weren't all human, for sure. Perhaps they were something like me, an in-between. That might explain why I couldn't latch onto their thoughts or work out what type of being they were.
The other vampire, though, I could tell what he was thinking. Not that I intentionally eavesdropped; my mind seemed to navigate its way to his thoughts of its own accord. When I interpreted what he was communicating, it wasn't like reading a book. Words, sentences and phrases that he was about to say out loud (or think to himself) formed in his own personal ether, like pictures, gestures, concepts. Not in a bubble or cloud above his head; rather, indelibly printed upon the (psychic?) connection between our minds.
What I found striking, although the penny didn't drop at the time, was that pictures that supplement words take on the perspective of the individual saying or thinking them. Or the context of the conversation or thoughts which have their root in that flow, and their relationship to the progenitor of the mind I was 'reading'. It was as if the preformed thoughts took on a dialect, an accent of their own relative to the speaker or philosopher.
So, in theory, two people could say the same sentence, but the picture they formed to say it could be totally different. Dangerous, especially if someone happened to catch half of a conversation. The potential for getting the wrong end of the stick was immense. For the first time since English Language classes, I made a mental note to be clear and concise in everything I said. Or thought. Or wished for.
As if reading my mind (or becoming aware of me awakening from my stupor), the other vampire looked over at me, immediately nudging Billy and nodding in my direction. The four of them got up as one and began walking over to where I'd been laid. Instinct was to think, 'Guys, give me a minute to come around, won't you?'. But I didn't need to. Energy coursed through my veins and I was aware of everything in an instant. It must be another advantage of this new life: you're either asleep or awake; there's no in between.
And now, they were escorting me towards this living light show, and, I now knew, my test beyond. I'd gleaned as much from the vampire, who was now thinking about anything other than my test. At first, his thoughts were entertaining, I assumed for my benefit.
He was old, I could tell and had seen much; figures from history danced here and there, but were gone before I could put a name to their 'faces'. But he soon got bored, angry, even. Instead, he began imagining brutal vampiric slaughters of the old, young, infirm and crazed. It was like watching the Angel of Death coming at Passover, or King Herod's paranoid biblical slaughter, but with no restrictions on the type of victim. I hoped they were his fantasies; if he was running replays from memory, I had a lot of thinking to do.
Had I only the time. Within three minutes, we'd covered an astonishing amount of ground and had reached a cavern far beyond the charcoal columns, in darkness as black as pitch. Its dirty-snow white, craggy walls, having the impression of ice, were in fact a rugged, iridescent white crystalline matter, which looked millennia old. Its organic, any which-way pointing outcrops danced and shone with the translucence of opal. Greens, pinks, oranges and blues flickered like the Aurora Borealis in reflected torch light, dozens of which were held aloft by an anticipant crowd that danced and chanted as one in an ancient language.
The guttural timbre filled the cavern so that it pulsed to a beat from an invisible instrument, but which was nonetheless alive in the ether. If you'd blindfolded me, spun me around, took off the blindfold and told me that we were in a 1980s discotheque, it would have taken some convincing on your part to make me believe otherwise. The heavy beat, the dancing primary and neon lights and the pulsating air resembled any mid-late '80s nightclub you cared to mention.
That was, except for the partygoers. Their writhing forms were not human, at least not by 21st Century standards. They looked to be from some distant point backwards along the evolutionary chain, thousands of years hence. Their crouched large fangs and overall countenance placed them from a time before the homo sapiens came to dominance, somehow outliving the super eruptions and ice ages that these fellows, or their ascendants, must surely have endured. Stooping, half-ape/half-boy, they hopped and skipped in unison, their flattened, high-browed skulls bowing to the floor, then rising to the low ceiling, bowing and rising, bowing and rising…
Snatching my attention back, looking through the line of these primitive beings, I noticed a hand-carved trench in the 'ice' running the length of the far, glistening wall where it abutted the floor. As the five of us approached, the wall of ape-men parted. In the trough lay a shivering body, turned on its side towards the wall, hugging itself in the foetal position. Its head was covered in a rough, fawn-coloured Hessian sack, tied coarsely around the neck.
So, this was what we had come here for. My test. I tried to compose myself, but a feeling of dread—as if something was off—crowded my senses. I sensed familiarity, but how could I?
I focused on sack cloth and knew in an instant: beneath the coarse fabric struggled my sister. I could tell her outline anywhere, even in the very way she writhed in defiance in this alien place; it was as good as her signature. When they pulled her out of the trough into the middle of the cavern, there was no mistaking her: the Chinese tattoo for inner strength across the five digits on her right hand were unmistakable.
For a second, I was horrified. But not for what was about to happen; I doubted not that her demise was imminent, though by what Draconian method her captors intended I forced my not to consider. I had no doubt, either, that the outcome would be the same with or without my cooperation: she was doomed.
No, my fear was that my sister should see-or at least sense-me in this state. So sheepishly weak, yet hungering for a life (as it turned out, her life) that had the potential to wring more from her mortal existence than I could ever hope to achieve as an immortal.
Billy placed a rough-hewn cup into my right hand and walked me to the edge of the trough, voicelessly asking me if I understood. The need to visually acknowledge this undertaking was moot; he knew from my startled eyes: before us lay my sister, but seconds away from certain death. If I moved to stop this sacrifice, I would surely join her beyond the grave. But my sense of propriety was changing, evolving. I neither felt moved to stop the show, nor that I should. That she should give her life unwillingly in order for me to move up the evolutionary chain? It seemed an acceptable pay-off in my clouded mind.
Once all the canes had been inserted and twisted, they made an inverted teepee frame, fashioned into an almost perfect African collar around my sister's nape, neck and décolletage. The frame swept upwards, looking like a windswept, inside-out umbrella stripped of all its fabric ceremoniously plunged into a sister-shaped umbrella stand.
As if by some inaudible command, the cave dwellers twisted their individual canes another half-turn as one until the collar and the rope cinched yet tighter. The teepee frame drew in at the neck, down at the peripheries and more obtuse with each turn by their hairy, sinewy forearms.
With each turn, my sister fought with more strength than I had shown in my entire life. Another turn, the canes puncturing further, flattening out more. Yet more resistance from my sister; I could only imagine the cursing going on inside her mind, which, for whatever reason, I couldn't access.
At long last, the writhing stopped; the head beneath the sack was so far from her collar bones on an impossibly stretched neck, it looked obscene. One more twist of the sticks and, finally, that head-once so wise and thoughtful-popped from the neck that had once secured it to her delicate frame. Now I understood why they'd placed a bag over her head and had not just inserted the canes into a bare noose. The dancing and chanting had stopped, the whole cave now hanging upon my reaction.
Should madness and guilt have brought me to my knees at that instant, like it would any normal human in the circumstance, my fate (and as it turned out, my sister's) would have been sealed. But my reaction surprised (horrified/scared/disgusted - delete as applicable) even me. I nodded with a satisfied grunt and stepped forward with my cup ready to drink from the suspended cadaver.
At once, the dancing and chanting and circling of the trough recommenced, even more raucous than before. The canes were slipped out of the noose and the bag removed. It was like a spell had been lifted from me, and I panicked.
To my utter surprise, my sister stood there, whole; asleep but, apparently, unharmed. Her hand instinctively, absent-mindedly went to rub her throat. The relief when that hand didn't pass straight through or come away soaked in crimson was overwhelming. First, relief that my sister was okay; secondarily, that I had not yet become the monster who'd so nonchalantly permit such a sacrifice to happen without flinching.
What sorcery had been applied to carry out the apparition I know not. Even though I'd only stood yards from that terrible passage of events designed to test my mettle, the decapitation looked decidedly legitimate. All throughout, the act had convinced me that the ape-men had beheaded my sister in some ancient ritual designed by a god who had visited, conquered and presumably disappeared back whence they'd came a long time ago.
Back in the cavern, Billy was already leading me away from the furore. I was glad of that. Those other two indeterminable souls, who'd walked with us through the charcoal columns to this cavern from which all time had been banished, followed.
But we were not walking away from the cavern, as the vampire who'd taken my sister had. We were heading deeper into the crystal chamber. The floor changed, its surface clambering with growths that looked like boa-feathers, but whose ridges were hard, like upturned clam-shells. With those growths and the crystalline walls, it seemed as though we were walking on a great coral reef, the floor a tidal carpet of glistening calcium, refracting all the colours of the spectrum and thousands in-between.
Then, the cave came to an abrupt end in a bubble-shaped alcove, a little like those nose cones on World War II bombers. Billy thrust me down into its furthest recess.
For the first time since being given the Rite of Passage, I felt uncomfortable. The crystalline ridges, as sharp as the edges of the clam shells they purported to be, cut into my thighs and calves, leaving just a memory of physical pain. From a sheath on his thigh, Billy slid and then raised a small Mohawk axe, more like a Gil Hibben throwing axe, but wrought from some ancient iron. Its blade he'd sharpened a thousand times over countless centuries, so that now its keen edge glinted the reflection of the pearlescent surroundings.
Had my subsequent sliver of passion for my sister's survival betrayed me, even at this late stage? What had I done to try Billy's patience so?
For the first time, I tried to resist Billy's advances. A grimace, maybe of surprise or resentment, stretched his clown-mouth across the entirety of his white-painted face in a mask that made The Joker's make up look understated. Billy's tombstone teeth, webbed and dripping with blood and drool, clenched together, forcing that insane grin wider still.
Too fast for my eyes to follow, he brought the axe crashing down towards my skull, cutting the stagnant air with a whoosh and a whistle; I raised my arm instinctively to shield the blow and then…
The other vampire, though, I could tell what he was thinking. Not that I intentionally eavesdropped; my mind seemed to navigate its way to his thoughts of its own accord. When I interpreted what he was communicating, it wasn't like reading a book. Words, sentences and phrases that he was about to say out loud (or think to himself) formed in his own personal ether, like pictures, gestures, concepts. Not in a bubble or cloud above his head; rather, indelibly printed upon the (psychic?) connection between our minds.
What I found striking, although the penny didn't drop at the time, was that pictures that supplement words take on the perspective of the individual saying or thinking them. Or the context of the conversation or thoughts which have their root in that flow, and their relationship to the progenitor of the mind I was 'reading'. It was as if the preformed thoughts took on a dialect, an accent of their own relative to the speaker or philosopher.
So, in theory, two people could say the same sentence, but the picture they formed to say it could be totally different. Dangerous, especially if someone happened to catch half of a conversation. The potential for getting the wrong end of the stick was immense. For the first time since English Language classes, I made a mental note to be clear and concise in everything I said. Or thought. Or wished for.
As if reading my mind (or becoming aware of me awakening from my stupor), the other vampire looked over at me, immediately nudging Billy and nodding in my direction. The four of them got up as one and began walking over to where I'd been laid. Instinct was to think, 'Guys, give me a minute to come around, won't you?'. But I didn't need to. Energy coursed through my veins and I was aware of everything in an instant. It must be another advantage of this new life: you're either asleep or awake; there's no in between.
And now, they were escorting me towards this living light show, and, I now knew, my test beyond. I'd gleaned as much from the vampire, who was now thinking about anything other than my test. At first, his thoughts were entertaining, I assumed for my benefit.
He was old, I could tell and had seen much; figures from history danced here and there, but were gone before I could put a name to their 'faces'. But he soon got bored, angry, even. Instead, he began imagining brutal vampiric slaughters of the old, young, infirm and crazed. It was like watching the Angel of Death coming at Passover, or King Herod's paranoid biblical slaughter, but with no restrictions on the type of victim. I hoped they were his fantasies; if he was running replays from memory, I had a lot of thinking to do.
Had I only the time. Within three minutes, we'd covered an astonishing amount of ground and had reached a cavern far beyond the charcoal columns, in darkness as black as pitch. Its dirty-snow white, craggy walls, having the impression of ice, were in fact a rugged, iridescent white crystalline matter, which looked millennia old. Its organic, any which-way pointing outcrops danced and shone with the translucence of opal. Greens, pinks, oranges and blues flickered like the Aurora Borealis in reflected torch light, dozens of which were held aloft by an anticipant crowd that danced and chanted as one in an ancient language.
The guttural timbre filled the cavern so that it pulsed to a beat from an invisible instrument, but which was nonetheless alive in the ether. If you'd blindfolded me, spun me around, took off the blindfold and told me that we were in a 1980s discotheque, it would have taken some convincing on your part to make me believe otherwise. The heavy beat, the dancing primary and neon lights and the pulsating air resembled any mid-late '80s nightclub you cared to mention.
That was, except for the partygoers. Their writhing forms were not human, at least not by 21st Century standards. They looked to be from some distant point backwards along the evolutionary chain, thousands of years hence. Their crouched large fangs and overall countenance placed them from a time before the homo sapiens came to dominance, somehow outliving the super eruptions and ice ages that these fellows, or their ascendants, must surely have endured. Stooping, half-ape/half-boy, they hopped and skipped in unison, their flattened, high-browed skulls bowing to the floor, then rising to the low ceiling, bowing and rising, bowing and rising…
Snatching my attention back, looking through the line of these primitive beings, I noticed a hand-carved trench in the 'ice' running the length of the far, glistening wall where it abutted the floor. As the five of us approached, the wall of ape-men parted. In the trough lay a shivering body, turned on its side towards the wall, hugging itself in the foetal position. Its head was covered in a rough, fawn-coloured Hessian sack, tied coarsely around the neck.
So, this was what we had come here for. My test. I tried to compose myself, but a feeling of dread—as if something was off—crowded my senses. I sensed familiarity, but how could I?
I focused on sack cloth and knew in an instant: beneath the coarse fabric struggled my sister. I could tell her outline anywhere, even in the very way she writhed in defiance in this alien place; it was as good as her signature. When they pulled her out of the trough into the middle of the cavern, there was no mistaking her: the Chinese tattoo for inner strength across the five digits on her right hand were unmistakable.
For a second, I was horrified. But not for what was about to happen; I doubted not that her demise was imminent, though by what Draconian method her captors intended I forced my not to consider. I had no doubt, either, that the outcome would be the same with or without my cooperation: she was doomed.
No, my fear was that my sister should see-or at least sense-me in this state. So sheepishly weak, yet hungering for a life (as it turned out, her life) that had the potential to wring more from her mortal existence than I could ever hope to achieve as an immortal.
Billy placed a rough-hewn cup into my right hand and walked me to the edge of the trough, voicelessly asking me if I understood. The need to visually acknowledge this undertaking was moot; he knew from my startled eyes: before us lay my sister, but seconds away from certain death. If I moved to stop this sacrifice, I would surely join her beyond the grave. But my sense of propriety was changing, evolving. I neither felt moved to stop the show, nor that I should. That she should give her life unwillingly in order for me to move up the evolutionary chain? It seemed an acceptable pay-off in my clouded mind.
3.b, The Test
The Neanderthals took their long, thin canes of bamboo, weapons they'd been shunting and shaking and raising and rattling during their dance, and inserted them, one by one, into the rope collar that secured the bag around my sister's head. Upon breaching the 'noose', each cane was twisted half a turn clockwise, cinching the characterless fabric.Once all the canes had been inserted and twisted, they made an inverted teepee frame, fashioned into an almost perfect African collar around my sister's nape, neck and décolletage. The frame swept upwards, looking like a windswept, inside-out umbrella stripped of all its fabric ceremoniously plunged into a sister-shaped umbrella stand.
As if by some inaudible command, the cave dwellers twisted their individual canes another half-turn as one until the collar and the rope cinched yet tighter. The teepee frame drew in at the neck, down at the peripheries and more obtuse with each turn by their hairy, sinewy forearms.
With each turn, my sister fought with more strength than I had shown in my entire life. Another turn, the canes puncturing further, flattening out more. Yet more resistance from my sister; I could only imagine the cursing going on inside her mind, which, for whatever reason, I couldn't access.
At long last, the writhing stopped; the head beneath the sack was so far from her collar bones on an impossibly stretched neck, it looked obscene. One more twist of the sticks and, finally, that head-once so wise and thoughtful-popped from the neck that had once secured it to her delicate frame. Now I understood why they'd placed a bag over her head and had not just inserted the canes into a bare noose. The dancing and chanting had stopped, the whole cave now hanging upon my reaction.
Should madness and guilt have brought me to my knees at that instant, like it would any normal human in the circumstance, my fate (and as it turned out, my sister's) would have been sealed. But my reaction surprised (horrified/scared/disgusted - delete as applicable) even me. I nodded with a satisfied grunt and stepped forward with my cup ready to drink from the suspended cadaver.
At once, the dancing and chanting and circling of the trough recommenced, even more raucous than before. The canes were slipped out of the noose and the bag removed. It was like a spell had been lifted from me, and I panicked.
To my utter surprise, my sister stood there, whole; asleep but, apparently, unharmed. Her hand instinctively, absent-mindedly went to rub her throat. The relief when that hand didn't pass straight through or come away soaked in crimson was overwhelming. First, relief that my sister was okay; secondarily, that I had not yet become the monster who'd so nonchalantly permit such a sacrifice to happen without flinching.
What sorcery had been applied to carry out the apparition I know not. Even though I'd only stood yards from that terrible passage of events designed to test my mettle, the decapitation looked decidedly legitimate. All throughout, the act had convinced me that the ape-men had beheaded my sister in some ancient ritual designed by a god who had visited, conquered and presumably disappeared back whence they'd came a long time ago.
3. c, The Afterparty
What has become of my sister? I think that part of this story is yet to unfold. They did not kill her for a reason, one as yet unknown to me. But I do know that she is not dead. Do not ask how. I just know. I know also that she is captive, for the vampire in our party led her away sleepwalking as soon as the 'show' was over. Unless he'd used thoughts to misdirect me, he was headed back to whatever shadow world it is that he (we?) and others of his (our?) kind inhabit.Back in the cavern, Billy was already leading me away from the furore. I was glad of that. Those other two indeterminable souls, who'd walked with us through the charcoal columns to this cavern from which all time had been banished, followed.
But we were not walking away from the cavern, as the vampire who'd taken my sister had. We were heading deeper into the crystal chamber. The floor changed, its surface clambering with growths that looked like boa-feathers, but whose ridges were hard, like upturned clam-shells. With those growths and the crystalline walls, it seemed as though we were walking on a great coral reef, the floor a tidal carpet of glistening calcium, refracting all the colours of the spectrum and thousands in-between.
Then, the cave came to an abrupt end in a bubble-shaped alcove, a little like those nose cones on World War II bombers. Billy thrust me down into its furthest recess.
For the first time since being given the Rite of Passage, I felt uncomfortable. The crystalline ridges, as sharp as the edges of the clam shells they purported to be, cut into my thighs and calves, leaving just a memory of physical pain. From a sheath on his thigh, Billy slid and then raised a small Mohawk axe, more like a Gil Hibben throwing axe, but wrought from some ancient iron. Its blade he'd sharpened a thousand times over countless centuries, so that now its keen edge glinted the reflection of the pearlescent surroundings.
Had my subsequent sliver of passion for my sister's survival betrayed me, even at this late stage? What had I done to try Billy's patience so?
For the first time, I tried to resist Billy's advances. A grimace, maybe of surprise or resentment, stretched his clown-mouth across the entirety of his white-painted face in a mask that made The Joker's make up look understated. Billy's tombstone teeth, webbed and dripping with blood and drool, clenched together, forcing that insane grin wider still.
Too fast for my eyes to follow, he brought the axe crashing down towards my skull, cutting the stagnant air with a whoosh and a whistle; I raised my arm instinctively to shield the blow and then…
« « Chapter 2
Edited and republished 22nd April, 2020
ReplyDelete