by Skyler White
That the ruined stones of Cashel stood stolidly in tower and spire somewhere above them all became unthinkable to Dominic. The weight of all the earth bore down on him despite the sailing brass buttresses and ornately wrought, cantilevered platforms. He looked up. Graceful folded metal webs of glass and carpet, brass and hewn stone flew into a slowly closing dome unreachably high above him. Jetlag and low blood sugar added to a vertigo so overwhelming Dominic shut his eyes.
Just before crossing the county line into Tipperary, Dominic had stopped for the night. From his window at the bed-and-breakfast, he had looked out over the rooftops of a small, remote Irish town and marveled at the climbing vines that draped every structure in flowers. In this land, Nature aggressively reclaimed her own from any incursions by the work of merely human hands. Dominic was determined not to be so swallowed.
He drew himself up to his full height, testing his own strength, closing his fists into hard rockets of compressed anger. Already, nothing made sense. Corsets and hoopskirts swayed beside prowling latex and dog collars. There was nothing extreme or profane enough to elicit censure in this great hall of the damned. Dominic was the only ordinary, unremarkable man, eccentric in jeans and a jacket. Even so, he felt no shadow of judgment in this alien den of freedom and perversion. Normal was invisible. A hot prickle of shame snaked across the back of his neck. He was the outsider here.
He was curious about the light. It seemed to have no central source, and gave a strange, live quality to even the shadows. Dominic touched the camera pocket of his laptop bag unconsciously with fingers that itched for the F-stop dial. The light was so diffuse he could probably shoot straight up into the gigantic globe of brass-veined glass that capped the space. He wandered toward the center of the lobby, looking up, wanting to frame a shot from dead-center below the dome.
“A very different sort of laboratory for you, I believe?” The old man smiled serenely, arms outstretched in greeting, walking toward Dominic like Fate itself.
He dodged the embrace by taking an ageless hand to shake. “Hello, Gaehod,” he said stiffly.
“I must confess I am surprised to see you back so soon, Dominic. You were quite angry with me when you left nine years ago.”
“I need your help.”
“Indeed?” The old man kept both irony and surprise from his supple voice, although either would have been understandable.
Dominic’s eyes, uncomfortable being held by Gaehod’s keen gaze, scanned the hall. A vast network of corridors wound through every artery of the hotel’s Byzantine complex of madness to spill into this central meeting space, each marked with a sign above the passageway.
“Are you interested in our different branches, Dominic? I would be happy to take you on a walking tour tomorrow, once you’ve signed in and updated your vita.”
Dominic recoiled, barely masking his horror. That damn thing.
“I believe you’ll be impressed, my old friend,” Gaehod beamed. “We’ve made quite a few updates. There’s a computer terminal in every room now. Your eight vitae, as well as what we had of the one in progress have been scanned and put online. No need to face the scriptorium again. Your most recent incarnation date is your log-i n. You just pick a password, and jot down what you’ve been doing since you visited here last. At your leisure of course.”
“I have no intention of doing that.”
“I’ll have your diary from your last visit delivered to your room, then.”
“I won’t be checking in.”
“No, of course not.” The innkeeper gestured toward a delicate Victorian settee on the far wall. “Let’s have a seat, my friend.” Dominic followed the old man’s graceful back to a discreet sofa masked by a potted fruit tree that flourished strangely in the firelight. Here they could talk unseen. Nobody noticed Dominic, but Gaehod, in his subdued pinstripes and graying auburn hair, drew everyone’s eyes.
As the old man settled his coattails with a magician’s elegant flick and seated himself, Dominic watched tiny ball bearings in the settee’s legs spin down into channels that scored the floor. He had forgotten the bizarre ecology of Hell, where each expenditure of energy is harvested. He shuddered and plunged in. “Gaehod, I’ve come back here to study—and I believe to help—your, ah… the hotel’s guests?”
“My children.”
“Fine, your children. I know you believe you’re helping them with your record keeping and storytelling, diaries for the reborn, dances for the Bacchae, but I am working on more concrete ways to improve these people’s lives.
“You told me once that I would return here when my desire for truth outweighed my fear of it. I’m back. I would like to administer some standard psychiatric tests to your… children, and interview a few of them. I have arranged to have some detailed chemistry work-ups done, particularly on the vampires, and by incredible good luck, there’s a magneto-encephalography lab in Dublin. They are willing to let us use their fMRI machine for a half-dozen brain scans.”
“You have returned to understand the nature of your curse.” The calm old man nodded.
“I’m not damned, Gaehod. I’m ill.”
“You appear to me to be in perfect health.” The old man scanned Dominic’s athletic frame with crystal eyes that almost lingered.
“I don’t mean physically ill.”
“Are you now willing to admit a distinction between body and soul?”
Dominic suppressed a shudder, tired from travel and irritable with fear. “Actually, the connection of body and mind is exactly what I’m interested in. What pathologies in thought can be traced to abnormalities in brain structure…”
“You’re looking for the line between your physical health and your spiritual illness?”
Dominic drew a slow breath. “It’s a mental illness,” he said.
The confession hung between the two men like an insult, heavy in the soft and fragrant air.
“Bringing your vitae up to date may help you feel well.”
“Damn it!” Dominic sprang to his feet, his voice too loud in the underground birdcage, but the innkeeper did not move, did not startle, and the resplendent clientele decorously ignored the agitated man by the potted plants. Gaehod patted the seat beside him.
“I can’t keep a journal.” Dominic’s voice was fierce. “Certainly not here. Not for you.” Gaehod’s assigned exercise was an absolute trigger for visual and auditory seizures. He remembered its iterations in completely unacceptable ways. He remembered pages beneath his drying brush, scratching quill, and flowing ballpoint. He remembered its vellum and paper, hundreds of years filled with the same flat script. “It almost broke me last time.”
“You almost believed.”
“I almost snapped.”
“We are all broken, Dominic, all of us—cursed, or damned. Our fragile minds cannot span the paradox. We wish to stand out and fit in, to be unique but not alone, one with God and still ourselves.”
“I don’t believe in curses, Gaehod. Or God. I believe in reality.”
“Reality is only half the story.”
“Fine. Maybe. But I intend to work in the half that I can prove. The half that makes sense.”
“Science can prove much that does not make sense.”
“That just means we’re not done. Gaehod, let me come back and study your children. If I can find a physiological source for their feelings of damnation, maybe I can cure them. Think what it would mean to free them.”
The innkeeper’s eyes pierced Dominic’s for a brief but unnerving moment, in which Dominic held the fleeting conviction that nothing could be hidden. “Very well, my son. Register and update your vitae, and you may have unfettered access to every hall and quarter. I can, of course, give only my permission. Any subject you select must also give his or her own informed consent. We do not lie amongst the damned.”
Gaehod froze as though summoned. His keen eyes shone eerily, and Dominic, even through his agitation, recognized the signs of the entranced. Did Gaehod have auditory hallucinati
ons?
“There’s a bed-and-breakfast just bordering the rock,” Dominic interrupted. “I’ll stay there, and work and study here.”
A warm smile creased the old man’s features. “I’m afraid it is impossible. Legends is a charming establishment—I know the innkeeper well—but you cannot work here and stay on the surface. You must sign into your room or stay in our nonresident rooms. But they will not meet your needs, I fear. Limbo is comfortable enough, but you would be unable to…”
Gaehod glanced toward the center of the hall. “You must excuse me,” he whispered and vanished from Dominic’s side.
———
The typical manhole cover in Cashel boasts an ornate Celtic tri-spiral bordered by knot work. I have come to loathe these ancient Irish glyphs for being such fitting symbols of modern Irish inefficiency. Surface navigation here, no matter what lies the map tells, is never a matter of intersecting roads and steep-angled turns. The only approach is oblique, a slowly closing spiraling-in on a destination.
The driver I hired to bring me from Dublin traced his country’s arcane pathways with native contempt, but I feigned sleep during most of the twisting, turning drive. His youthful hunger made me itchy. The surfaces of my peasant’s body prickled as they paled to match his nationalist preference for fair-skinned girls.
The eyes of men, the smiles of women crawl across my flesh like maggots. The woman on the plane smiled larvae. The driver leered worms. I told him my name was Olivia Patrick and paid him cash, slipping a fingertip along the outside of his hand. Without hunger, I sucked the nicotine and whiskey blood from beneath my unbreakable nail as I watched him drive off. He would believe he had a paper cut, if he noticed the scratch at all.
I spent what remained of the day searching the forsaken roads for the one manhole cover upon which serpents form the twisting border knots. I found it on the fourth of five lanes which terminate at the base of the towering limestone acropolis known, with typical Irish understatement, as “the rock” of Cashel.
I have returned to it now, at night, a dull matte bruise on the shimmering blackness of wet street. It does not glint or reflect. It is as invisible as the black sky, invisible as I am, standing rigorously casual nearby. I push an organic smell from the leaves that stick to the boundary of metal and asphalt with the toe of my boot. No need for expensive shoes now.
At four in the morning, the narrow streets of Cashel twine solidly silent. Certain, at last, that no one is watching me, and swiftly casual no more, I drop to my knees, shift the black metal sewer disc, and drop without a sound into the darkness. I crouch beneath, grating it—too loudly—across the asphalt. It clangs into place above my head like an inverse halo, absorbing all the light. Dark envelops me like water, touching every surface all at once. I am black as you are wet, diving into a summer lake, as suddenly and as totally immersed. Drying out takes longer.
I am less than an hour away from the old man. Underground now, I can almost sense him. I stand inside an iron pipe, metallic like blood and as cold. I touch the walls with the white tips of my fingers. Revolving, I explore the rough surfaces until I find a colder vein of silver. This I trace down the wall to where it bubbles into a spherical indentation. I grip the key I wear on my left wrist with my right hand and slot it into the crevice, pushing until my flexed wrist presses against the stone. Deep in the rock, I hear the mechanical whir of lockwork come to life. The sound radiates from the insertion point like fractures across glass. Reluctantly, I lean my scarred shoulders against the wall. It gives without a creak or whisper, easing open against the force of my senseless body pressing into it. Not much farther now.
A narrow stone pathway slopes down into a damp, subterranean darkness. I trail a hand across the rough walls, stepping down and down, looking for the dull metallic faces, eyes shrouded, blind and mute, which mark the way toward the hotel and the old man. A brass gargoyle grimaces. His tarnished automaton’s eerie face contorts in greeting. I turn left. The underground damp travels up my fingers, shivers along the bones of my arm, and worms its way into me like terror.
Will Gaehod be happy to see me after so many years? No, I don’t care. His buried hotel is the closest thing I have to an ancestral home. He has to take me in. I will sign his fucking registry and trade him my last angelic blessing for the freedom of being fully damned. My fingers brush another contorted face whose tiny, machine teeth snap at me. I turn toward it, searching for the hidden door. My fingers crawl the surface, my cheek against the moist chill, legs braced, for the subtle flinch in the stone. I push my body against the naked, scraped rock.
Nothing shifts, and the very immobility shivers me against the implacable stone. The iciness seeps, stone to flesh, into me, in tiny quivering tendrils, melding with me, absorbing me, nerveless, hard, and creeping. I begin to shudder in frissons down my arms and up my legs until the shaking in my frame translates to the wall itself and, with a low rumbling resonance, the stone vibrates with me and dissolves. The old man might have engineered this new-style threshold just for me, but of course not. He has no way of knowing I am on my way home.
I walk the ancient tunnels now, not the temporary, shifting labyrinths of mingled path and sewer intended to misdirect and confuse the uninitiated. No, I am headed straight toward the belly of the rock, straight down, straight to him, still shivering.
The brass elevator-call button houses a glowing red fire trapped in glass. I push it without fear or hope. I have come back to surrender. Crawling, like a wounded warrior who expends his last, failing strength to drag himself from the field of battle to die in the shadow of the medic’s tent, I have come home.
A single word crowns the door, but I can’t read it. I memorize the Greek sigils as I wait, and step into the elevator car when the doors slide apart. My only goal, my last effort, has been to reach this place and turn myself over to the tender cruelties of my sisters and the old man who will surely be waiting for me on the other side of these elevator doors when they open.
Bright metal and firelight shine inside the elevator capsule. All four walls look the same, two glittering polished brass panels sealed with a black gasket at the center. There’s nothing to push, no buttons or dials, no speaker grille or telephone receiver. I listen instead to the machinery of the thing, gears engaging, cogs spinning. I revolve, looking for, but not finding, myself reflected, rippling golden in the gleaming surfaces. But I am being watched. It’s a familiar awareness, the sense that I am being scanned, but for once without the attendant subtle shift in my shape and hair. My body is not reforming to please the eyes that touch me. I am only being seen. Seen for what I am—damned.
I am a vampire. The carriage moves imperceptibly. I am the Undead. I cannot sense the direction it carries me, but I know I’m moving. I am desire without hope. The elevator carries me, but more than that, it encases me, senses me, transports me. I am impulse without promise. And although nothing changes, I know that I have reached my destination. I am instinct without life. All four metal doors slide apart soundlessly to become four shimmering lamp posts in a lush, Victorian salon. I am home.
———
A brass capsule rose, twisting from the center of the reception hall. It corkscrewed from the earth’s core, to deliver a woman onto the carpeted floor. Her black hair, sunglasses, and vinyl coat made it seem as though pale cheeks, forehead, and jaw had spiraled, disembodied, through the floor, and for a moment Dominic froze. Had full-blown hallucinations joined his repertory of dysfunction?
Gaehod swept up to the apparition, and as she bent to embrace the old man, the supernatural illusion passed. Dominic saw simply a sleek and stunning woman whose pale lips barely moved in the innkeeper’s ash and auburn hair.
“She’s smokin’ hot, yeah?” a throaty chuckle issued from behind Dominic.
He scanned the parlor unsuccessfully.
“Down here, yo.” A nicotine-stained hand waved from beneath the sofa where Dominic and Gaehod had sat. From under the drooping upholstery, a disturbingly
familiar face pillowed its unshaven cheek on the carpet.
“Are you okay?” Dominic asked.
“You’re pretty fucking stupid for a medical genius, huh? Do I look okay?”
“No.” Dominic straightened and returned his attention to the slender, latex-clad woman standing with Gaehod. Sin-black hair and virginal skin, the newcomer offered such a stunning exemplum of her type that Dominic registered a grudging admiration.
“Hell’s full of gorgeous girls,” the ruined voice croaked from under the sofa. “And they’re easy, most of them. Fucked up and angry and ready to work out their insecurities on your cock, if you know how to play them.” Dominic looked down with distaste at the tumble of legs and hair rolling out from under the sofa. “But even by our standards, that girl’s awesome.”
“Do you know her?”
“Nope. Just saying. But I don’t know you either, and I thought I knew most of the fuckers registered down here.”
“I’m not staying.”
“Sure you are. Hell’s the only game going that isn’t about location.” The emaciated man fished a pair of goggles from the pocket of a filthy bathrobe and fitted them over his stringy hair. “That’s better,” he said looking up at Dominic. “So you’re a shrink, eh?”
“No,” Dominic said.
The tilting man on the ground righted himself by sticking his scrawny legs straight out in front of him, a dirty tube sock hanging on one foot, the other one bare. “You’re not a shrink, but you want to do brain scans and shit? How come?”
“Were you listening to my conversation with Gaehod?”
“You were sitting on me.”
“You were sleeping under the sofa?”
“Shit man, I don’t sleep.”
Dominic wasn’t aware of staring at the striking woman talking with Gaehod until she glanced across the room at him. He scanned everything he knew about chronobiology, but couldn’t find anything to account for the sudden spike in heart rate he suffered when their eyes met. Was it possible that beauty alone had physiological repercussions? She was extraordinary, with an eerie grace to her movements that entranced him. Then Gaehod took her black-gloved hand in his, somehow both soft and strong, and led her across the room.
