The Society of S

by Hubbard, Susan

  She slammed the door as she left. For a moment I fantasized about going after her, yanking her chin hairs, slapping her — or doing something worse.

  Instead, I went upstairs and called Kathleen.

  “My school has been cancelled today,” I told her.

  As I pushed my bicycle along the gravel driveway that led from the garage to the street, I noticed that the car from the funeral home was gone. Perhaps my father was on his way upstairs again. I hesitated, but decided to press on. Kathleen was waiting for me.

  It was a dull day in mid-November, the smell of dead leaves in the air. As I rode through the streets, the wind stung my face. Soon we would have snow, and the bicycle would stay in the garage until April, or even May.

  As soon as I entered the soda shop I saw her, sitting in a booth. She wore a black sweater and black pants, and she was drinking coffee. I sat down and ordered a cola.

  “That’s an interesting necklace,” I said. A round silver pendant hung from a silk cord, next to the flannel bag of herbs.

  “It’s a pentacle,” she said. “Ari, I have to tell you. I’ve become a pagan.”

  The server brought my soda. I unwrapped the straw slowly, not sure what to say. “That could mean several things,” I said finally.

  Kathleen ran her hands through her hair. Her fingernails were painted black, and her hair looked freshly dyed. Next to her, in my fleece jacket and jeans, I felt dull and ordinary.

  “We practice spells,” she said. “And we’re into role-playing.”

  I had no idea what role-playing meant. “Is that why your mother is worried about you?”

  “My mother!” Kathleen shook her head. “She’s impossible lately. She really doesn’t have a clue.” She took a long sip of coffee, which also was black.

  I couldn’t drink that stuff, and I watched her with awe.

  “She found one of my notebooks and got all alarmed about it.”

  Kathleen reached into a battered backpack on the seat next to her, and pulled out a spiral notebook with a black cover. She opened it, and slid it across the table to me.

  Under the heading Magick Chants was written what looked like poetry.

  Oh, do not tell the Priest of our Art,

  Or he would call it sin;

  But we shall be out in the woods all night,

  A conjuring summer in!

  And on the next page:

  When Misfortune is enow, wear the Blue Star on thy brow.

  True in Love ever be, Unless thy Lover be false to thee.

  I knew better than to ask what it meant. My father had taught me that one never asks what poetry means.

  “I don’t see anything so worrisome in that,” I said.

  “Of course not.” Kathleen gave a withering look at the seat next to me, apparently imagining her mother sitting there. “It’s really cool stuff. You’ll see. We’re going over to Ryan’s house to do some role-playing.”

  “We are?” I said. “When?”

  “Now,” she said.

  We left our bikes in the rack outside the soda shop and walked to Ryan’s house, a few blocks away. It was a small shabby house, very like the McGarritts’ place, but a new-looking greenhouse had been attached to one side. We paused for a moment to peer through the steamed-up glass walls, but saw only vague green shapes and purplish overhead lights through the condensation-beaded panes.

  “Ryan’s dad’s hobby is growing orchids,” Kathleen said. “He sells them to those rich old women on the other side of town. They even have an orchid club.”

  Ryan answered the doorbell. His short blond hair had been spiked with some sort of hair gel. Like Kathleen, he wore black. “Merry meet,” he said.

  “Merry meet,” Kathleen said.

  I said, “Hello.”

  Inside, all the lights were off, and candles burned on every available surface. Four people reclined on floor cushions; I recognized two from the dance. Michael was not among them.

  “Who did you bring?” someone asked Kathleen.

  “This is Ari,” she said. “I thought the game needed some fresh blood.”

  The next hour seemed interminable to me, thanks to an interminable amount of dice-rolling, paced movements around the room, and shouts: “Vanquish!” or “My invisibility is almost depleted!” or “Regenerate!” or “My rage is empty!” Two of the boys played werewolves (they had the letter W taped to their shirts), and the rest were vampires (wearing black t-shirts and rubber fangs). I was the only “mortal” in the room. Because it was my first time, they advised me to watch rather than play — and I sensed that they liked having an audience.

  Nearly everything they said and pretended to do was consistent with what the Internet said about vampires. They shuddered at the sight of a crucifix; they turned into imaginary bats at will; they “flew”; and they used their virtual powers of agility and strength to scale imaginary walls and jump imaginary rooftops — all within a fifteen-by-twenty-foot living room.

  They moved through the alleyways of an imaginary city, picking up cards representing coins and special tools and weapons, feigning at fighting and biting while barely touching. In fact, all five of the boys struck me as shy by nature, overacting in their attempts to socialize. Besides me, Kathleen was the only other woman present, and she moved around the room aggressively, as if she owned it. At times the others tried to gang up on her, and she fended them off almost effortlessly. She knew the most spells, and apparently she had the most detailed notebook.

  Occasionally the players robbed one another and deposited their stolen coins in imaginary banks — ever the good capitalists, I thought. The game centered less on fantasy than on greed and domination.

  The room’s air grew stale with the intensity of their efforts and with the noxious smells of their orange-colored snack foods. I stood it as long as I could. Finally, claustrophobia and boredom drove me out of the room. I went through the kitchen, visited the bathroom, then followed a corridor that ended at a thick door with a glass window: the entrance to the greenhouse.

  Once I opened the door, humid air washed over me, carrying a lush scent of vegetation. On table after table, potted orchids seemed to nod slightly in breezes generated by the slow revolutions of ceiling fans. The violet-tinged overhead lights made me a little dizzy, so I made sure not to stand directly beneath them. They turned the colors of the blooms luminous: deep violets and magentas, ivories veined in palest pink, yellows spotted with amber — all vivid against deep green foliage. Some orchids looked like tiny faces, with eyes and mouths, and I walked down the aisles, greeting them: “Hello, Ultraviolet. Bon soir, Banana.”

  At last, I thought, an escape from the gray winter of Saratoga Springs. Ryan’s father should charge admission. As I breathed, the humid air circulated through my body, making me relaxed, almost drowsy.

  Then the door swung open. A heavyset, freckled boy in black strode in. “Mortal, I am here to sire you,” he said, his voice quavering. He opened his mouth to reveal fake fangs.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  I stared into his eyes — small and dark, but somewhat magnified by his eyeglasses — and held them steady.

  He stared back. He didn’t move. For a while I looked at him, at his reddened face, at the two nascent pimples eager to erupt on his chin. Nothing about him moved, and I wondered if I’d hypnotized him. “Get me a glass of water,” I said.

  He turned and lumbered off toward the kitchen. As the door swung open, I heard the sounds of the others, biting and shouting, and as it shut I savored the tropical solitude, the only sound a slow dripping of water from a place I couldn’t see. For a moment I entertained myself by imagining turning the tables on the boy — biting his throat amid the orchids. And, I confess, something like lust stirred in me.

  A minute later the door opened again and the boy came back, a glass of water in his hand.

  I drank it slowly, then handed him the empty glass. “Thank you,” I said. “You’re free to go now.”

  He
blinked. He sighed a few times. Then he walked away.

  As he opened the door, Kathleen pushed her way past him, into the greenhouse. “What was all that about?”

  She must have been watching through the door’s window. I felt embarrassed, but I wasn’t sure why.

  “I was thirsty,” I said.

  It was already dark when I left the game. Kathleen had run out of powers and was lying on a sofa while Ryan and the others stood over her, chanting, “Death! Death!” I waved goodbye, but I don’t think she saw me.

  I walked alone to the soda shop, unlocked my bike, and headed for home. Cars passed me, and once a teenaged boy shouted “Babe!” from a car window. Such things had happened before, and Kathleen advised me to “simply ignore them.” But the shout distracted me enough to make my bike wobble and skid on the wet leaves, and it took effort to regain control. Out of vanity I wasn’t wearing the bike helmet my father had bought, and as I pedaled on it occurred to me that I might have hurt myself.

  After I put the bike away in the garage, I paused a moment and looked at the tall, graceful silhouette of the house, its left side traced by a woody vine. Behind those lighted windows were the familiar rooms of my childhood, and in one of them I’d find my father, no doubt sitting in his leather chair, reading. He might be thus forever, and the thought comforted me. Then, unbidden, a second thought struck me: he might be there forever — but what about me?

  I recall vividly the smell of woodsmoke in the cold air as I stood, watching the house, wondering if I was, after all, mortal.

  I looked up from a dish of milky macaroni and cheese. “Father?” I asked. “Am I going to die?”

  He sat across from me, gazing at the food with visible disgust. “Possibly,” he said. “Particularly if you don’t wear your bicycle helmet.”

  I’d told him about the close call I’d had on the way home. “Seriously,” I said. “If I had fallen and hit my head, would I be dead now?”

  “Ari, I don’t know.” He reached across the table for a silver cocktail shaker, and poured himself a second drink. “So far you’ve recovered from the minor scrapes, yes? And that sunburn last summer — you were over that in a week, as I recall. You’ve been fortunate not to have any more serious health issues so far. That might change, of course.”

  “Of course.” For the first time, I felt jealous of him.

  Later that night, while we were reading in the living room, I found I had another question. “Father, how does hypnosis work?”

  He picked up his bookmark (shaped like a silver feather) and inserted it into the novel he was reading — I think it was Anna Karen-ina, because not long afterward he urged me to read it, too.

  “It’s all about dissociation,” he said. “One person focuses intently on the words or eyes of another, until his behavioral control is split off from his ordinary awareness. If the person is highly suggestible, he will behave as the other prescribes.”

  I wondered how far I could have taken the boy in the greenhouse. “Is it true that you can’t make someone do something they don’t want to?”

  “That’s a matter of considerable debate,” he said. “The most recent research suggests that under the right circumstances, a suggestible person can be made to do almost anything.” He looked across at me, his eyes amused, as if he knew what I’d been up to.

  And so I changed my focus. “Did you ever hypnotize me?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “Don’t you remember?”

  “No.” I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of anyone controlling my behavior.

  “Sometimes, when you were very young, you had a tendency to cry.” His voice was low and quiet, and it paused after the word cry. “For no apparent reason, you would make the most unearthly sounds, and of course I tried to placate you with formula, with rocking, with lullabies, and everything else I could think of.”

  “You sang to me?” I’d never heard my father sing, or so I thought.

  “You truly don’t remember?” His face was wistful. “I wonder why you don’t. In any case, yes, I did sing, and sometimes even that had no effect. And so, one night out of sheer desperation, I looked steadily into your eyes, and with my eyes I told you to be at peace. I told you that you were safe, and cared for, and that you should be content.

  “And you stopped crying then. Your eyes closed. I held you. You were so small, wrapped in a white blanket.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “I held you close to my chest, and I listened to your breathing, until morning.”

  I had an impulse to get up from my chair and embrace him. But I sat still. I felt too shy.

  He opened his eyes. “Before I became your father, I didn’t know what worry was,” he said. He picked up his book again.

  I stood up and said goodnight. Then I thought of another question. “Father, what lullaby did you sing to me?”

  He kept his eyes on the page. “It’s called Murucututu,” he said. “It’s a Brazilian lullaby, one that my mother sang to me. It’s the name of a small owl. In Brazilian myth, the owl is the mother of sleep.”

  He looked up then, and our eyes met. “Yes, I will sing it to you,” he said. “Sometime. But not tonight.”

  Do you see letters and words in color? Since I can remember, the letter P has always been a deep emerald shade, and S has always been royal blue. Even the days of the week have special colors: Tuesday is lavender, and Friday is green. The condition is called synesthesia, and it’s been estimated that one in two thousand people is a synesthete.

  According to the Internet, virtually all vampires are synesthetes.

  And this is how I spent my mornings: surfing the Internet on my laptop computer, looking for clues, which I copied into my journal. (I’ve torn them out since, for reasons that will soon become clear.) Page after page of Internet lore I copied, and I realized I wasn’t any less inane than Kathleen and her role-playing friends with their black notebooks filled with chants and spells.

  But even though at times I doubted my research and questioned what I learned, I kept at it. I didn’t know where it was going, but I felt compelled to proceed. Think of a jigsaw puzzle. Even when the puzzle isn’t assembled, the pieces scattered in the box contain the picture.

  Mrs. McG made a big point of insisting that I spend the weekend with Kathleen. She reminded me of it every day that week, and on Friday, when she drove home, I was with her. (For me, Friday is always vivid green. For you, too?)

  Kathleen didn’t seem different to me. By now I was accustomed to her dark clothing and excessive makeup. She looked a little more on edge, perhaps. We spent Friday night watching television and eating pizza with the family. Michael sat apart, not saying much, watching me, and I allowed myself to relish his attention.

  On Saturday Kathleen and I slept late and then went to the mall, where we wandered for hours, trying on clothes and watching people.

  It was an ordinary weekend until Saturday night. Mrs. McG insisted that we all go to Mass. Kathleen said we had other plans. Her mother said those could wait.

  Without much more protest, Kathleen gave in, and I sensed that this fight was part of their weekend ritual.

  “I’ve never been inside a church,” I said.

  The McGarritts stared at me as if I were a space alien.

  Kathleen muttered, “Lucky you.”

  The church was rectangular, built of dingy bricks — not at all the imposing structure I’d expected. It smelled musty inside, like old paper and stale cologne. Behind the altar, several stained-glass windows depicted Jesus and his disciples, and I kept my eyes on them through most of the service. Stained glass always makes me daydream.

  Among the congregation sitting in the pews, I saw three of Kathleen’s friends from the vampire game, including the boy who had wanted to “sire” me. He saw me, too, but pretended he didn’t. All of the role-players were wearing black, and it struck me as a little strange to see them mouthing the words of hymns and prayers.

  Next to me, Kathleen kept crossing and uncrossing her legs
and sighing. Later tonight the role-players would be meeting at Ryan’s house for another session, and she’d promised me a real part to play. I wasn’t much looking forward to it.

  At the altar, the priest was quoting the Bible. He was an old man with a singsong voice, easy to ignore — until suddenly his words broke through my reverie.

  “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life.” He raised a silver goblet in both hands.

  And he went on about eating flesh and drinking blood, and people began filing down the aisle toward the altar. All of the McGarritts stood up and moved out of the pew, but Kathleen whispered to me, “Wait here. You can’t take Communion.”

  And so I waited and watched as the others ate the flesh and drank the blood and were consecrated. The priest murmured, “Memento homo quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris” (Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return).

  A strange buzzing began in my head. Was someone watching me? As the McGarritts filed back into the pew, the buzzing grew to a drone. Mrs. McGarritt’s face looked refreshed, and she smiled with contentment. You shouldn’t be here, a voice inside me said. You don’t belong.

  Michael had outpaced Bridget to sit next to me. While the others sang and prayed, he pressed his hand into mine, and the buzzing began to fade.

  “Look at this garbage.” Kathleen tossed a book onto my lap.

  I read aloud the title: “A Guide for Catholic Teens. Is it better than On Becoming a Woman?”

  We were in her room, and she was putting on her vampire makeup before we headed over to Ryan’s house. I sat cross-legged on the bed. Wally the dog curled up next to me.

  “It’s exactly the same stuff.” Kathleen had teased her hair into small mounds, to which she now applied gel, then twisted the mounds into spikes. The procedure fascinated me. “It’s all this crap about saving your virginity until your honeymoon, and taking Jesus with you wherever you go.”