Babylon

by Richard Calder

  We dream our dark dreams night after night, I thought. And if we dream too long, too greedily, and too well, is it possible that there may come a time (if that time has not come already) when we may not be able to discern dreams from reality}

  ‘Fantasy,’ stated the Serpentessa, with all the enthusiasm of a clerk making an entry in a ledger, or a shop girl engaged in stocktaking, ‘has colonized everything that was once real.’

  And then, for a moment, I seemed to see through her eyes. No matter that Babylon’s moon cast its silvery glow over towers, spires, and gaping rooftops. The darkness outside—as rich as the shadows in the equatorial forests of Africa and as mean as Whitechapel’s midnight wastes—was a summum genus of darkness. It was the darkness of all cities, all times. It was the darkness of the city I had never left. Babylon, London, London, Babylon. Both names were subsumed and became one in the grand vista that extended in all directions before me: the nameless place I could never escape. Both were indistinguishable in that great black mirror that reflected the inner darkness of my own heart.

  ‘None of it is real,’ the Serpentessa continued. ‘It is all a game. But they might be real. The ones we call the Men. Oh, tell me, somebody, tell me at least that they might be real!’

  ‘I’ve told you: they are,’ I said, stunned into bluntness.

  ‘But what are they like?’ she said, frantically. ‘Tell me, tell ine, please!’

  She pressed her face against the windowpane, as if she hoped to cool her smouldering cheeks by application of a vitreous poultice. ‘I didn’t have to come here. I could have remained on Earth and still been a High Priestess. Tell me, you two—you two who have actually seen the Men—why did I cross over? Why, why?’

  I spoke before I had time to think. ‘Because they are wonderful,’ I said.

  ‘Maddy!’ hissed Cliticia.

  ‘The Men are wonderful,’ I repeated, putting my arm around her and abandoning myself to blind faith. ‘And it’s no game, I assure you. The masked ball ended at midnight. From now on, everything is real.’ Gently, I began to rock her.

  ‘The city is of night,’ she whispered, from the folds of my embrace.

  ‘Perchance of death,’ I said. Once again, I gazed out at the prospect beneath me. Babylon stretched out as far as the horizon. Things had always been so, I told myself. The Modern Babylon was, and would always remain, my own world’s underlying reality. ‘But everything will be well,’ I whispered, as I continued to rock her in my arms. ‘I know it. Everything will be well... ’

  Cliticia tried to separate us.

  ‘Are you crazy,’ she said, in as low a voice as she could manage.

  I looked her in the eye. ‘Go outside and get the nurse.’ I still cradled the Serpentessa’s thin, enervated, almost ectoplasmic body, in my arms, though by now I was beginning to tire, and was barely able to prevent her from slipping through my aching fingers. She was mad. All that she had said was mad. ‘Please,’ I added, ‘we’re finished here.’ Cliticia ran towards the door.

  It didn’t matter, of course. If everything went to plan—the plan that had swum in and out of focus of my mind’s eye ever since we had left the Men’s encampment—Ereshkigal would soon be in need of another Serpentessa, and indeed, several hundred attendant maidens.

  We stood on the balcony of our apartment. Gas brackets and chandeliers with crystal lustres illuminated the rooms opposite. Their windows glittered like prisms—prisms that had exploded to fill the intervening air with splinters of hard, white light. The light was incestuous, propagating itself shamelessly, each room, corridor, stairwell, chapel, and refectory seething with glassware and mirrors, so that the temple seemed like a big, ornate jewellery box, or a shrine dedicated to the brilliance of female vanity. It was a fairy-grotto, the retreat of the Lady of Shalott, and the haunt of the Lamiae and Lilim.

  Below, walking across the inner courtyard, were a handful of temple-maidens wearing crescent-moon headdresses and black muslin evening gowns. The train had been unloaded, and the girls who had earlier laboured to fill the storerooms with provisions had taken the opportunity to change into the new dresses and bonnets that had arrived in the consignment from Earth Prime.

  One of them led a black unicorn by its bridle. Having seen so many wonders, and grown incapable of feeling surprise, I looked more closely. The fabulous beast shook its sable mane, as if eager to conform to mythological type, surrender itself to caresses, and lay its noble head upon a maiden’s lap.

  Staring out over the shimmering roofs, I spied a crossroads from which railway lines sprouted towards unseen termini, and, a little farther off, the magnificent Processional Way. There, rising from the tangled wreckage of antiquity, was Esaglia, the Temple of Marduk, and the towering ziggurat Etemenanki. Towards the east lay the Temple of Ninmah—another goddess of the dead— and St Lucy’s, St Agatha’s, and St Theodora’s. And nearby stood the Temple of Ishtar of Agade, which was omphalos of the abandoned residential quarter known as Merkes, the most ancient precinct in southern Babylon. But despite these markers and signposts—so clear now, so easy to discern—I could no longer orient myself. If the temple was overflowing with glass, I saw through a glass darkly, lost in a directionless night.

  ‘It’s a mad world,’ said Cliticia, leaning against the convoluted, brass railing, her long fingernails idly picking at its flakes of verdigris as she cast her gaze about the temple grounds.

  ‘It would be nice if things would just... slow down,’ I said.

  In the far distance was a tiny, oblique plume of smoke. It rose above the ruins as the train it emanated from passed silently on its journey to an outlying temple. And, high above, like a great, bloated sac of liquid silver, the moon loomed over the city walls and the great wildernesses and seas that lay beyond.

  ‘We ’ave to do it now,’ said Cliticia, staring up at the mad, mad moon. ‘We ’ave to do it before it’s too late.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now. Before it’s too late.’

  ‘I am deflowered, yet a virgin; I sanctify and am not sanctified.

  Happy is he that embraceth me: for in the night season 1 am

  sweet, and in the day full of pleasure. My company is a harmony

  of many symbols, and my lips sweeter than health itself. I am

  harlot for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not. ’

  ‘Dark is she, but brilliant! Black are her wings, black on black!

  She is left-handed Ishtar! Venus Spermatrix! She is Lilith,

  who leadeth forth the succubi of the abyss, and leadeth man to

  madness, ruin, and death! She is the irresistible fulfller of lust, and her

  kiss bringeth forth the revolution of the Will and true freedom/’

  Ereshkigal’s complement of temple-maidens retired to bed at the same hour, and at that hour Cliticia and I stole from our apartment, descended to the inner courtyard, opened the unattended gates—we discovered it was something that was scandalously easy to achieve once a person was actually inside the temple—and slipped out into the grounds, taking up position close to the railway siding where The Empress Faustina still languished, waiting for its Duennas to take it back to Earth Prime.

  Earlier, we had invoked the dark side of Ishtar: Lilith, the Black Mother, Queen of the Dark Phase of the Moon. And we had asked for her aid.

  I felt the Goddess beside me. She told me to acknowledge my own moon nature, my own black, witchlike side.

  We were in our nightgowns. Ankle-length, with short, ruffled, gigot sleeves, and a front panel decorated in broderie anglaise, they could, I suppose, have passed for shrouds. Not ones, of course, that you would expect to find in an East End undertaker’s, but rather in one of the swish, new emporia that I had heard about, such as Whiteley’s or Liberty’s.

  Here, in the far south, the undying night was hot, and the thin, white cotton stuck to our perspiring flesh.

  Crouched behind a cistern, we gazed out into the luminous darkness.

  The foregro
und was of indefinite depth. It was impossible to gauge distance. But the force-field was plainly visible. It revealed itself, this close up, as a watery membrane streaked with variegated filaments of oil. And it sang, as if a church choir comprised entirely of basso prof undos was humming a single note. I strained my eyes to take in what lay beyond, and spied façades, colonnades, and lonely piazzas bathed in the same indigo light that stained the rest of the city like a dilute, yet indelible, ink. It was a landscape at once familiar and utterly strange. And it was made stranger by the silence—a silence thrown into relief, italicized, and made doubly manifest, by the force-field’s monotonous continuo. That silence: it was a grand, architectural form as real, perhaps more real, more palpable, than the dreamlike temples and palaces that surrounded us, and the equally distempered, rectilinear insistence of the streets.

  I nudged Cliticia with my elbow.

  ‘Would you prefer that I did it?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said, with a slight curl of her lip. ‘I’m not totally stupid, Madeleine Fell.’ She got up.

  ‘It has to be placed right next to the electromagnetic field.’

  ‘I know,' she said, between her teeth. She flicked a damp strand of hair out of her eyes and continued to stare at the shimmering curtain of energy.

  The air was filled with the susurration of insect song, the perfume of night-scented flowers.

  ‘It has to be this way,’ I said, attempting to embolden her. ‘It has to be done from inside the force-field, otherwise it won’t work.’ Cliticia raised her eyes to heaven. ‘That’s why they need us,’ I added, wondering, then—and odd as it might seem, for the first time, I think—if it might be the only thing they needed us for.

  ‘Hoorah for Joy Division,’ she said, grinning wryly.

  Taking up a bag, she walked forward to a point where she bumped into the force-field’s invisible wall. She glanced back at me, rubbing her forehead with one hand, and choking back an imprecation. Then she knelt down and attended to her task.

  She opened the bag and removed a big, silken handkerchief that had been tied up into a ball. She placed it on the sandy ground. Then, after she had untied the knot, she spread the handkerchief out, as if she were about to picnic. Lying at its centre was a black, pear-shaped crystal similar to the one used by Lord Azrael to open Christ Church’s interdimensional portal.

  Cliticia rose to her feet. Executing a half-turn, she looked up at the temple, its great central archway and bronze doors, its towers, gaily-tiled minarets, and the ziggurat at whose summit the Serpentessa raved in her sleep like Mrs Rochester in her attic. Her eyes filled with pity, and then with spite. She glanced back down at the ground, treating the crystal to a last, cursory inspection, as if unable to bring herself to quite believe in its efficacy, and then, spinning about on her elegant, louis heels, ran back and rejoined me behind the cistern.

  No sooner had she done so than the crystal began to glow, releasing the electromagnetic vitality of the Black Sun: vril.

  Once again, I looked about me to check that we had not been observed, my gaze at last falling upon the two gynosphinxes that flanked the temple’s gates. Their elliptical, somewhat Oriental eyes gazed back evilly. They knew, of course. They knew everything there was to know about deceit and forbidden love. But those paragons of the Via Felinus would, I knew, keep silent, just as they had when Cliticia and I had crept through Ereshkigal’s corridors, down its staircases, and out into the surrounding grounds. And they would keep silent not merely because they were carved out of mute stone, but because they were our fellow conspirators. Men had long known as much, even during the days when Babylon was hidden. In Medieval Europe, State and Church would periodically decree that cats be ritually slaughtered, and all because of the atavistic suspicion that amongst the living walked creatures from another world—beautiful, promiscuous, and infinitely treacherous young women who brought princes and cardinals under the yoke of the Goddess’s dark will.

  The force-field shuddered, its multicoloured striations deliquescing into the same deep-blue light that pervaded all Babylon—a light that, however beautiful and mysterious it might be, possessed no virtue of interdiction. The humming stopped.

  Out of the shadows stepped a small party of Minotaurs, one of the many Einsatzgruppen whose camps were deployed throughout the ruins. Amongst their number were Lord Azrael and Malachi. They wore the same kind of leather tunic and peaked cap that Cliticia had briefly appropriated and which had contributed to her impromptu little performance in our tent. Tight-fitting leather breeches, riding boots, and shoulder holsters completed their uniform.

  As did the insignia of the Black Sun.

  Cliticia and I ran to greet them.

  PART

  THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The train sped through the night.

  Lord Azrael sat opposite me. ‘The clearest notion we can form of degeneracy is to regard it as a morbid deviation from an original type,’ he said. ‘Patricians, who rightfully rule those who worship earthly gods and mother goddesses, know this well: that the modern world is characterized, not by upward evolution, but by a downward path into the degeneracy that I have spoken of.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘I understand. Given what I’ve done, I can hardly consider myself exempt from such criticism.’ Lord Azrael and his irregulars had commandeered The Empress Faustina. The train had idled in its sidings, a cocotte that—if seemingly cold as iron—had, like us, been merely waiting to be taken.

  I glanced down the carriage. It was packed, of course, with girls who, it must be admitted, had joined this excursion somewhat less willingly than Cliticia and myself. (Indeed, many had been dragged screaming from their beds). But it was equally evident that each glum, apprehensive, or frankly shock-stunned face was invested with a barely concealed taint of excitement. My sympathies were compromised. If I shared a train with several hundred young women bound for captivity, or worse, then the concomitant feeling—however misplaced—of belonging to a party of fidgety schoolgirls on a day trip to Clacton or Southend-on-sea made it difficult to feel genuine pity.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it. ‘Once,’ I said, ‘my own Order argued that men couldn’t meet the Goddess face to face. Not if men wished to preserve their sanity. And so Ishtar incarnated herself in our flesh. We became intermediaries. But now—’

  ‘Now your Order is corrupt.’ He sawed his hand through the air. ‘It must be cleansed, must it not?’

  I shook my head, once, twice, and then again and again, each time more wildly than before. ‘Am I really so like the others?’ I bit my lip, forced myself to sit ramrod straight, and then looked him squarely in the face. ‘I mean, I’m a member of Joy Division, aren’t I? Not just, not just—’ Vermin, I thought, with unwonted acuity. That is how they thought of us, after all. To the men of the Black Order, we had renounced our humanity upon volunteering, and become vermin, beautiful vermin. The marginal sense I had had of being on a holiday jaunt swiftly left me, romantic excitement replaced by a thrill of panic. ‘Oh God, please tell me I’ve done the right thing. Please!’

  He let his head loll onto the back of his seat. ‘Oh, Miss Fell, Miss Fell, Miss Fell... ’

  I felt the blood rising to my cheeks. I looked away, thinking my eyes might be growing as glazed as the insect-slicked window-pane, and as full of strange, too-revealing sights.

  The Euphrates lay to the west, the Processional Way to the east, and the canal Libilhegalla to the north.

  Three- and four-storey houses lined the canal, their brickwork enamelled with a green crust. The stagnant water had, at some indeterminate time in the past, obviously colonized the surrounding flatlands. There was a rumble as the train passed over an iron bridge, the noise of the wheels eliding from their usual clickety-clack into a dull, booming ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum. Dragonflies impacted against the windows; a smell of wet decay filled the air; and then Libilhegalla was behind us.

  To the fore was the delirious mélange of arc
hitecture that had, by now, become a commonplace sight. But the confusion of form had become unusually concentrated. So much so, in fact, that it became impossible to tell where the ancient left off and the modern began.

  Everything suggested a terminal stage of monumentality—a transformation of shadows into matter that, here, at the city’s blighted heart, had come to an evolutionary dead-end. Everything suggested the oeuvre of a megalomaniac: piazzas; watchtowers; colossal stone figures petrified as if by the lethality of the moonlight; giddy flights of stairs running nowhere; landings, scaffolding, twilit halls; colonnades receding into infinity; massive siegeworks; gaping holes in visionary Bastilles that revealed mighty engines, wheels, cables, treadmills, and catapults; Elysian pleasure gardens that had come to resemble the overgrown exercise yards of abandoned Bedlams and Pandemoniums; roofless cathedrals whose rose windows displayed gigantic iron crosses commemorating the crucified Magdalene, or the Goddess herself; spider webs spun by the equally gigantic, man-eating wolf spiders of the Sumerian jungles and marsh lands that lay beyond the city walls to the far south.

  The mass of crazed, anarchic architecture had overwhelmed the city’s precise, mathematical ground plan. And all this monstrous tumult of line and perspective—this realization of a fever dream, or the gloomiest of Gothic novels—languished in an unholy disquiet of silence, like a scuttled ocean liner beneath the cruel, voiceless waves.

  Yes. I had been a stowaway, and my voyage was coming to an end. I had come to the very centre of the labyrinth. Oh, Mum and Dad, I thought, I’m so sorry, so sorry. But all this is inevitable. I never had a choice. When I was little, the labyrinth opened, and— like a child weaned upon the night—I began to explore its perilous depths. Soon, I was lost, and all my attempts to find a way out only led me further in. Forgive me. But this is the place I have been travelling to all my life. And if I am cruel, it is only because the labyrinth has always been my only hope of love.