*Flash*
Antony standing over the body of Cleopatra, holding a live asp. Or maybe it was a boa constrictor. I don’t know my snakes as well as my Shakespeare. And I think Cleopatra was a mannequin in a black wig.
*Flash*
A room full of Puritans, standing watch over a gallows lit by a spotlight. It looked as if we were back in the Firefly Room. There were three women hanging with nooses around their necks, black bags tied over their faces. I’d have thought they were fakes, but their feet were twitching….
*Flash*
There were hands on my shoulders, walking me down the hall, but whoever placed the blindfold over my face after the Salem room wasn’t too careful. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a tiny flash. Light, bouncing off metal zippers. They removed the blindfold to view the next tableau—something about a bowl full of fruit and the groaning of ghostly souls in torment—but I was too interested in those zippers, and the person wearing them. It was George Harrison Prescott in the hall outside the room, and he was being stripped of his offensive jacket and—yes, shoved into a smallish plywood coffin. They’d clearly staggered our entrances and were amusing each of us in turn with the various aspects of the initiation. I wondered what still lay in store.
*Flash*
They shoved me into a seat and secured my hands behind my back. Something was placed over my face before the blindfold was yanked down. When I opened my eyes, I saw that I was looking through tiny eyeholes in a mask. At first I thought I’d been placed in front of a mirror, because before me I saw another masked figure tied to a chair. Her mask was elaborate and golden, with an elegant bird’s beak and shimmering jewels that suggested arched brows and a cruel, predatory mouth. But she struggled against her bonds while I remained still. At last her hands came free and she pulled her mask off her face.
Clarissa Cuthbert.
I gasped and she reached across to snatch my mask away. I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye. A crone.
She frowned. “So you are here,” she said, before they took her away. My blindfold was replaced before my hands were released or my mouth remembered how to work.
*Flash*
A vampire rising from his coffin, blood dripping down his chin.
*Flash*
A pale young man sat on a toilet seat in his underwear. He had a gun pointed to his head, and he was repeating the same phrase over and over again. In Latin.
*Flash*
George Harrison Prescott turned to me, in a room where Othello was strangling Desdemona, and said in a tone entirely unsuited to the bizarre situation, “The matches didn’t work, by the way. I had enough sulfur on me to bring down half a dozen Diggers.” I was hurried away before I had a chance to ask him what he meant.
*Flash*
The scenes began to blur together after a while, and over everything there were voices screaming phrases in other languages, shouting obscenities, chanting in gibberish, shrieking, “The President Is Dead!” “The End Has Come!” “The Devil Has Risen!” and other dire warnings. I felt a strange headiness, and wondered if there had been alcohol in the “blood” or if I was just succumbing to the magic of the evening. The downtimes seemed to float by as if in a dream and I stopped counting steps from room to room. I don’t know how many times I made the circuit, or how many costume changes the players underwent. But at last I was shoved in a room, and I heard a door slam behind me as the racket was suddenly cut off.
By this point, I was so used to the tableaux being revealed that it was several heartbeats before I reached up to remove my own blindfold.
Before me stood the Grim Reaper in his black robe. He carried a scythe in his hand, and a grinning death’s head hung with flaps of rotted flesh stared out at me from beneath the hood. I glanced around, but we were the only people in the room. The Reaper turned toward a cabinet that contained two skeletons.
“Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, wer Bettler oder Kaiser?”
He pointed at each of the skeletons in turn, then handed me a crown. It was heavy in my hands, and I wondered for a moment if the jewels and gold around the red velvet base were real.
“Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, wer Bettler oder Kaiser?” he said again, a little more insistently.
“I never took German,” I replied helplessly.
He pointed at the crown, then at the two skeletons.
He wanted me to put the crown on one of their heads? Ah! Kaiser. “Kaiser” meant king in German. Enlightenment hit, and with it, another little lesson from history class. The Dance of Death from the Middle Ages. Alas, poor Yorick, and all that Hamlet jazz. The king was not either of the skeletons, but the force that had defeated them both.
I stepped forward and placed the crown on the head of the Reaper.
“Gut! Ob Arm, ob Reich, im Tode gleich.”*[3] He captured my hands in his. “Nice move, Neophyte. You’ll learn yet.” He pulled me forward until my face was inches from his putrid one, and for a very scary moment, I was afraid the thing was going to kiss me, which was a little too Goth for my taste. I locked my elbows and resisted, and he released me, triumph glinting in his pale eyes.
I stumbled backward as the light went off, and I felt myself being whisked away once again.
This time, when the blindfold was removed, I was standing before a long wooden door, with two tall men flanking me. Before me was a knocker engraved with the Rose & Grave seal. The hooded figure to my right reached up and thumped the knocker three times, then once, then twice again.
“The Neophyte approaches!” someone inside yelled, and a bone-chilling din began beyond the doors. They screamed and shouted, hooted and groaned. Finally, beneath it, I could make out a chant that soon overwhelmed every other element of the noise. “Who is it? Who is it! Who is it? WHO IS IT?”
“Amy Maureen Haskel.” I smiled. “Neophyte Haskel!”
The doors flew open and I blinked. This was by far the most elaborate of all of the tableaux. It looked like a carnival inside, and it was obvious I was the main attraction. The round room had a domed ceiling painted dark blue and dotted with tiny golden stars. Around me stood players, all masked, in the most outlandish costumes. They were all shouting my name.
The two hooded figures shoved me against a carved teak desk and pushed my head toward a piece of parchment.
A man in a gold, jewel-encrusted robe put down wizened hands on either side of the page. His half mask had hexagonal eyeholes and was covered in real roses, and above it his hair was gray. “Read it! Read it! Read it now, or look your last upon the Inner Temple!”
This is the vow I took:
I, Amy Maureen Haskel, Barbarian-So-Called, do hereby most solemnly avow, within the Flame of Life and beneath the Shadow of Death, never to reveal, by commission or by omission, the existence of, the knowledge considered sacred by, or the names of the membership of the Order of Rose & Grave.
When I read it aloud, everyone cheered. They picked me up and whirled me around to face a tiny engraving of a woman in a Doric chiton, holding a skull in one hand and a flower in the other.
“Behold our goddess!” shouted one, and the others set up a chant.
“Persephone! Persephone! Persephone!”
Persephone, Goddess of Spring. Daughter of the Goddess of the Earth, Demeter, and wife of the King of the Underworld, Hades. According to what I remember from my World Mythology survey class, she was doomed to spend half of every year as the Queen of the Underworld—one month for each pomegranate seed she’d eaten in his gloom-filled garden. The other six months of the year, she was able to return home to her mother, who was so happy to see her daughter that she brought life back to the earth. Suddenly, the “rose” and “grave” of Rose & Grave made perfect sense.
I was yanked back to the desk bearing the oath, with another injunction to “Read! Read!”
“I, Amy Maureen Haskel, Barbarian-So-Called, do hereby most solemnly avow, within the Flame of Life and beneath the Shadow of Death, never to reveal, by commission or by omi
ssion, the existence of, the knowledge considered sacred by, or the names of the membership of the Order of Rose & Grave!” When I read the oath of secrecy this time, I was louder, more sure of myself.
And then back to the engraving, which was set by itself on an altar in a little wooden cabinet. The plaque shone with the patina of age and care.
“Persephone! Persephone! All hail Persephone!”
I pictured the scores of men who had come before me—raised in their fancy, rich boarding schools, destined to become captains of industry and leaders of nations. Good thing they took a vow of secrecy. Bunch of heathens. What would their constituents and boards of directors have thought had they known these guys had spent their senior year of college professing to worship a minor goddess of ancient Greece? Persephone? Please!
I read the oath one more time before they took me to another side of the room. On the wall hung a glorious oil painting of a nude with a come-hither look in her eye. A figure dressed as the pope and wearing a white bird’s mask pumped his fist in the air. “Behold, Connubial Bliss!”
“Yeah, looks like it,” I said, noting the woman’s ample curves. God bless 19th century ideals of feminine beauty. If the men of today had commissioned that portrait, she’d have as much meat on her as one of the skeletons.
This time, when I was returned to the teak desk, there was a different parchment waiting for me.
“Read it! Read it! Read it!” the crowd yelled.
I, Amy Maureen Haskel, Barbarian-So-Called, do hereby most solemnly avow, within the Flame of Life and beneath the Shadow of Death, to bear the confidence and the confessions of my brothers, to support them in all their endeavors, and to keep forever sacred whatsoever I may learn beneath the seal of the Order of Rose & Grave.
Aww, that’s sweet.
The company cheered again after I read it, and they rushed me around the room three times. I began to feel dizzy and more than a little breathless, and they deposited me on the ground in front of another skull full of red liquid. This time, when I drank the sweet “blood,” I recognized the flavor immediately. Pomegranate juice. How fitting.
Two more trips back to the oath of constancy—and in between, one trip around the room, then two—and they deposited me in front of the golden-robed man with the gray hair.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” he said in a booming voice. “I am Uncle Tony Cthony Carnicks Carnage Carthage Parnassus Phinneas Philamagee Phimalarlico McPherson O’Phanel.”
“Say it!” They all shouted at me. “Say it! Say it! Say it!”
So, not a student? But I bit back the smarm, for this didn’t seem the time. “Uncle Tony…um, Carnage…”
“She can’t say it! She can’t! She can’t!” A figure bounced up, dressed in red and painted to look like Lucifer. He swung his long, forked tail at me, whipping my face and arms playfully as he taunted me. Beneath the grease paint and prosthetic hooked nose, I noticed a set of sparkling white teeth.
They shoved me toward a guy dressed in 19th century garb, holding a leather-bound book marked all over with the Rose & Grave seal. He showed me the book—upside-down Greek. I think.
“Read it! Read it! Read it!”
Yeah, right! But this time, they hardly gave me a second before beginning to cry, “She can’t read! The neophyte can’t read!”
Their teasing seemed to have reached a crescendo, though, and I suspected it was because they were drawing to the end of the allotted time to issue such abuse. The golden-robed Uncle Tony propelled me back to the teak desk, where there stood a third and final oath. The oath of fidelity. “Let’s see if she can read this!” he shouted.
I, Amy Maureen Haskel, Barbarian-So-Called, most solemnly pledge and avow my love and affection, everlasting loyalty and undying fealty. By the Flame of Life and the Shadow of Death, I swear to cleave wholly unto the principles of this ancient order, to further its friends and plight its enemies, and place above all others the causes of the Order of Rose & Grave.
Ah, this was the oath that the conspiracy theorists loved to point at. This was the reason they attacked the President for being a member of Rose & Grave. I admit that even I, who was not a leader of men and had no intention of ever being so, faltered at the wording of the vow. Did I know these people enough to cleave wholly unto their principles? What were their principles? What if the causes of Rose & Grave were to destroy democracy, outlaw pizza, and overcome the knee-high leather boot industry? What if the enemies I was supposed to plight included the Dalai Lama, or Brad Pitt? I cast a furtive glance at the ridiculously dressed figures surrounding me.
Nah, probably not.
I spoke the oath of fidelity three times, and as the final words fell from my lips, the room seemed to crackle with the power of my promise.
(Although, in these pages, I have broken the first two vows, I have kept the third, and always shall, until the end of my days. Those of my brothers who believe my transgressions unforgivable, look again at my oath, and tell me if I am indeed forsworn.)
They lifted me up and placed me gently at the feet of a man dressed like Don Quixote. He wore a suit of ill-fitting armor and had scraggly gray whiskers beneath a long-handled saucepan hat. He lifted a rusty, ancient-looking sword and tapped me on the left shoulder. “From this moment on, you are no longer Barbarian-So-Called Amy Maureen Haskel. By the order of our Order, I dub thee Bugaboo, Knight of Persephone, Order of Rose & Grave.”
Someone struck a tocsin thrice, once, and twice again, and everyone shouted, “Diggers!”
And that was it. I was a Digger.
Named Bugaboo.
6. Party
When I stepped through the doors into the two-story Grand Library (room 311, since the Inner Temple had claimed the sacred designation of 312, according to the intelligence I gleaned from the two thirty-something alumni who showed me the way), everyone looked up and gave me a little toast with pomegranate juice—filled punch cups. There were already close to twenty people in the room—maybe ten college students and a handful of older men in suits.
“So you’re number eleven,” said a stocky black girl with hair the color of my Friday night date panties and a woven hemp shirt. “Welcome to our loony bin.” I knew this girl by reputation—I’d seen her protests and her rallies—Demetria Robinson.
“You’re Lydia’s friend, right?” A guy with reddish-brown hair stepped up next and glad-handed me. “I think we met once, sophomore year.”
I nodded in recognition. Leave it to Joshua Silver, political wunderkind, to never forget a face or a network connection. Only twenty-one and already the manager of several successful local election campaigns. To Lydia, he was both her hero and her rival in every Poli-Sci class they’d taken together. Joshua wore khaki pants and a rumpled white oxford liberally spattered with red juice. He gestured to the HELLO MY NAME IS sticker on his shirt. “I’m, uh, Keyser Soze.”
“Now, there’s a society name!” I wrinkled my nose. “I’m Bugaboo.”
“Could be worse,” Demetria said. “Some soon-to-be-dickless fuckwad thought it would be funny to christen me Thorndike.”
Josh/Soze sniggered and Clarissa Cuthbert materialized by my side, holding two silver punch cups. She handed one to me. “It’s a historical name. You should be proud of it. President Taft was a Thorndike.”
“President Taft was a fat white fuck,” Thorndike replied.
Clarissa clinked her glass against mine. Her HELLO MY NAME IS sticker read Angel. “Welcome, Bugaboo,” she said. “Glad to see you slumming with us after all.”
I flinched. Of all the secret societies in all the colleges in the world, Clarissa Cuthbert had to be tapped into mine. So that’s what she’d wanted to discuss with me.
But Angel didn’t seem interested in rehashing our earlier conversation. She turned to the others and said, “I guess there’s just George Harrison Prescott left now, huh?”
“Yeah,” said a short Asian guy joining the group. “But I hear they had to drag him into the tomb kicking and scr
eaming.” He stuck his hand out at me. “Hey there, I’m Frodo.”
“At last, someone with a worse name than mine!” Thorndike sniffed.
“Do not go gently into that sweet night, GHP,” said a young man with a completely edible English accent. “But rather…make your daddy force you.” He winked at me. “I’m Bond…Barbarian-So-Called Greg Dorian. I hear you’re the writer.”
“Another creative type?” Frodo asked. “I’m a filmmaker. And Little Demon is a…singer, of sorts. This is one artsy class.”
I looked down into my punch cup. “I’m not really a writer.” Thirty pages of a wretched novel does not count.
Soze shrugged. “Then what are you?”
“The editor of the Lit Mag.”
They all exchanged glances.
“Why aren’t you in Quill & Ink?” Thorndike asked. “My ex-girlfriend Glenda Foster is in that one.”
TWO POINTS
1) Very good question.
2) Glenda Foster is a lesbian?!? You think you know someone….
“ ‘Girlfriend’ is a relative term.” A slender, stunning woman with waist-length red hair joined our group and extended a graceful hand toward me. Now, this chick I knew. But of course, you all know everything about Odile Dumas as well. She’d been tabloid fodder since she was 15. Her matriculation to Eli had been largely viewed by all to be an attempt to present herself as less Lindsay Lohan and more Natalie Portman. But to the media’s shock, she’d taken to collegiate life with gusto and all but dropped out of public view. Odile hadn’t had an album or movie out in three years, and the word around campus was that she was smarter (and less slutty) than anyone had expected (or hoped).
“Little Demon,” she purred, “but if I end up pursuing that hip-hop career, I’ll change it to Lil’ Demon.” The name rolled off her tongue with such ease that we all knew at once—hip-hop career or no—what we’d end up calling her.
“How droll.” Thorndike rolled her eyes and Lil’ Demon turned to her.
“Just because you get a poor girl drunk and seduce her once or twice does not make her your girlfriend. Bad as a man. Behavior like that is a disgrace to lesbians everywhere.”
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