Glimmering (53 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Hand

BOOK: Glimmering
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“Hey, man—acid? X? Ice?”
A tattooed girl in ripped tunic and leggings stopped in front of him. Within her flat grey eyes the pupils had almost disappeared; the corners of her mouth were cracked and raw.
“Ice, man?” Her voice rose a little desperately. Trip was unsure whether she was looking to buy or sell. He glanced down, saw her bare feet shuffling restlessly back and forth across the dirty floor. When he looked up again she licked her lips and made as though to grab him, her hand twitching ineffectually a good six inches from his chest.
“Eeeeyyesssss
. . .” She coughed, then wiped her eyes. With a beseeching expression she raised her hand, so that Trip could see a greenish crust glinting on her fingertips.
“Izzit?”
the girl croaked, blinking.
“Whadizzit?”
Her hand flailed, trying to grasp him again, but Trip turned in disgust.
He saw Clovis talking to a cluster of dreadlocked men in kilts and sleeveless flannel shirts. Clovis dug into his pocket, handed one of them a small object that sparkled; the man looked away from him, his eyes locking for a moment with Trip’s as he palmed something to Clovis. Trip hesitated, then began edging through the crowd toward them. Music flowed from unseen speakers, switching from techno to jackhammer to Japanese covers of antediluvian disco to enhanced versions of TV music—commercial jingles, theme songs—that Trip recalled from childhood. He edged past a jury-rigged DJ’s booth laid out across a long table, a tangle of power cords and speaker wire and equipment, some kind of video projector. In the middle of it sat a woman, headphones threaded into her shaven skull, fingers stabbing at a knee top. Her eyes glittered metallic red, her cheeks were pierced with dozens of long silver needles. He could smell her, patchouli and another smell—that weirdly familiar, corrosive scent he’d first noticed when he entered the library. Like hot metal or burning plastic or gunpowder.
He frowned, trying to place it; and stumbled over a knot of electrical cords.
“Watch it!” the red-eyed woman shouted.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. He picked his way carefully back into the mob of dancers, his eyes fixed on the floor. When he looked up, Clovis was gone.
Trip clutched his knapsack, trying to still the panic boiling inside him. Someone jostled his arm, a dreadlocked boy wearing a velvet smoking jacket and very little else.
“Uh—sorry, hey man, I’m sorry—” The boy’s eyes were preternaturally wide. Sweat blackened the velvet jacket and matted the tangled hair across his forehead. “Are you—you—?”
Cigarette smoke, and that same sharply unpleasant odor again. The boy stuttered, bewildered; then stammered something incomprehensible and shambled off. Trip watched him go, neck hairs prickling.
And suddenly he remembered Leonard Thrope pressing an emerald ampoule against the crook of his elbow, hand splayed across his leather trousers. The smell was everywhere, Trip knew what it was.
IZE.
He was in an icehouse. All around the music soared and stuttered; someone bumped into him. Trip whirled and struck out with his arm.
He panted, pausing to catch his breath. His heart pounded, his sides were hot and damp with sweat; he had to blink furiously to clear his vision, focus on something besides glittering pinwheels and faces like exploded blossoms. His breath caught in his throat.
Because suddenly the smell was no longer all around him. It was
in
him, it filled his nostrils like rank water and coursed down his throat, coated his tongue as he felt that same liquid heat flashing through him, the same prickling of his flesh. He shuddered, clutching at his stomach; squeezing his eyes shut so he wouldn’t see a garden of faces turned rapturously sunwise where there was no sun, hair moving like sea anemones. Even with eyes closed he saw them: disembodied arms and legs, mouths and eyes swarming like plankton; a scintillance exploding upon his flesh. And sound, too, that he felt as a thinning in his blood, skin taut between his fingers, a saline film clotting tongue and gums. A girl walked past him, laughing. Her eyes were wide and staring. Flecks of emerald glittered in their corners.
“I’m a hive,” she said, grinning to show a cracked front tooth. “Buzz buzz.”
Trip clenched his fists, fighting the realization that his body could be so terrifyingly free of his control. Strands of percussion and synthesizer fused into a relentless high-pitched drone. His ears ached; the bitter taste flooded his mouth again and he spit, wiping his mouth on his shirt.
“—yo there, buddy, looks like you drank the wrong punch!” A hand clasped his shoulder. Trip looked up to see Clovis Tyner, his tattooed face creased with amused concern. “First time?”
“Ahh—” Trip gasped and shook his head. “Nooo.”
Clovis nodded. His eyes were wide, a shimmering blue; the pupils were all but invisible. “That can make it worse. You get the surge but not enough to carry you through. An’ all this—”
He cocked his head to indicate the room around them—the quickening dance, speakers humming like wasps, abandoned shoes and empty bottles spinning across the floor. Within all the frantic revelry Trip glimpsed flickers of blinding white light, as though someone was aiming a laser at the crowd.
“—it just makes it worse. Contact high.” Clovis laughed, a sound that made Trip’s skin crawl. “What you
oughta
do is take some more—now, before things get really crazy. Once they get the light show going—”
Trip shook his head so fast he felt dizzy; felt again as though he were perched above the whirlpool at Hell Head. “No! Just tell me how I can get
out
—”
“I told you, buddy: you’re
in
here now.” Clovis stood swaying at Trip’s side, his gaze unfocused. “They never open the doors till morning. Especially tonight. Cops. Can’t have all these fucked-up people spilling in the streets—that’s a bad fucking scene, man, I saw it in Austin once, and here they don’t even have anyplace to put you, I mean it’s not like they got spare room in the Tombs or something. I heard they just like, dump you in the river. Bodies wash up—But you don’t need to hear
that,
right? You’ve been in the scene, right?”
Trip shook his head.
“No? Well, shit!” Clovis whistled. “What the fuck you
doing
here? ’Cause I was gonna say it’s like
that
scene—”
“Hive?”
“Yeah, man. ’Cause of the ice. I mean, you’ve done it, right? You know what I’m talking about. Contact high.
Contact
. . .”
Clovis repeated the word under his breath, as though he’d never said it before. “Contact—yeah, that’s what I mean. Like X, you know? You get that rush . . .”
His voice drifted off. The music shifted, channeled into a familiar backwash of guitar chords and feedback and gongs, a shrieking dub version of a song Trip recognized but couldn’t name. His skin yawned open, his mouth filled with saliva, salt; the scent of roses and lilacs. A girl’s breathy voice plucked at his spine—
And she was there, her kingfisher, her small hands pressed against him, her fingers icy as they kneaded his skin, her breath hot and coming in quick bursts.
“Marz—” He tried to pull her to him, felt her hair between his fingers like water. “Marz—”
She was gone. Another girl stood in front of him, long dark hair whipping around a heart-shaped face, eyes carefully outlined in kohl and gold dust. Skin glowing as though doused in flame. She was singing, and as she sang her arms threw off birds like sparks. There was an odd perturbation in the air around her, a cloud of grey and white that was like a hole. Trip could see through it and glimpse the ruined library, flailing shadows. The dark-haired girl laughed, a sound thick with the scent of burning grass, and reached for his hand. He felt her fingernails drag across his palm and shook his head, took a shuffling backward step as she sang.
Her body shimmered. He could see vines tattooed upon her bare arms and a tiny green lizard skittering down one leg. Her voice rose into a howl as she twirled into a thicket of flame. Behind her another figure knelt, a black-skinned man coaxing a blaze from something on the floor, smoke and scorched metal. Trip swallowed as it all came together, words and music and a movie he’d seen once in a hotel room. For an instant the man raised his head. His eyes were yellow, like a cat’s. Iridescent green beetles crawled inside them.
Then a shaft of brilliant white light ripped through the air. The dark-haired girl and the kneeling man blinked from sight, then back again. Feedback echoed. Streamers of lavender and lilac threaded down through the crowd. The dark-haired singer stared right at him, her eyes flexing like wings.
She began to dissolve into blobs of yellow and orange and chartreuse. People were cheering and shouting. Where the girl had been fiery letters traced across the air, like the tracks left by sparklers on a summer night.
HALEY OZ
“PROPHECY”
MUDFISH MUSIC
 
 
Above him ripples of green and gold and violet lashed the air. There was a brilliant pulse of orange in one corner of the room, a sound like low thunder. Then it was as though the ceiling were torn away. Trip blinked, staring into the prismatic sky. The room grew still, voices hushed, feet shuffling impatiently. There was a smell of the sea; there was the scent of lilacs. Something damp pressed against the palm of his hand, like an open mouth. He jerked backward, saw more words spinning in the air.
WHEN THE WHEEL OF TIME SHALL HAVE COME
TO THE SEVENTH MILLENNIUM, THERE WILL
BEGIN THE GAMES OF DEATH.
 
 
Small teeth tried to pierce his skin. Warmth probed his ear, a woman’s voice that made him go rigid.
“Enticing magicians are performing; fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga. Enticing magicians are performing
. . .”
Something began to spin in front of Trip’s face: a golden pyramid no bigger than an insect. As he watched it began to grow larger. Beams of light played across it, a clamor of gongs and bells where they intersected. The sky was gone, and the hive of stoned dancers. There was only that monolithic golden shape, and within it a pulsing core that resolved into a vast irradiating eye, its iris sky-blue. The eye wheeled away, growing smaller yet more brilliant, until it hung like a tiny perfect star upon the brow of a boy with glowing blue eyes and sinuously moving hands.
“
I possess the keys of hell and death,”
he sang, “
I will give you the morning star: the end of the end
. . .”
It was the icon. Face tilted upward as it sang, eyes staring into the shattered sky as it danced. From its head reared a glittering ornament like a pagoda that sent forth dazzling sparks of aquamarine and ruby and emerald green.
Fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga
Fear the end of the end.
 
 
Trip felt the same stirrings of bewitchment that he had in the studio at MIT. The icon grinned. It was
real.
Between the crowd of dancers and the earlier image of the girl singing there had still been a veil, the blinkered effect of senses struggling with what was before them.
This icon was different. It was beautiful. It was perfect. It was all but unrecognizable as an analogue of Trip Marlowe, even to Trip himself: if he hadn’t experienced it before, if he hadn’t remembered writing the words and melody it sang, would he have known it wasn’t real? He wasn’t sure; and the uncertainty terrified him. His entire body yearned for it, even as some spark of his consciousness recoiled.
He felt sick and feverish; revolted. The icon commanded desire and adoration and awe: it danced upon an invisible plane several inches above the library floor, and its dance made that unseen stratum more real than anything else. Something crashed beside Trip. He wrenched his gaze from the icon and saw a weeping girl sprawled beside him, her eyes huge and black and staring, though it was not Trip they saw. She had tried to follow the dancer, and fallen.
I will give you the morning star . . .
 
 
The icon spun and flashed. Trip could hear people talking to themselves, whispers of recognition; cries of grief. The music roared on, bells and gamelan; but now Trip could hear how insignificant the song was. Too clumsy, with its words and trumped-up tracking; too
corporeal.
Like the girl pawing pathetically at Trip’s feet: an ugly reminder that, despite the IZE, they were all still bound to earth by filaments of muscle and meat and memory. They were all still flesh, inherently flawed.
And the icon was not.
He glanced down, saw the girl had been sick. The icon shimmered. There was a break in the image, a subtle rippling that for an instant distorted its eerily beautiful face. Trip felt a brisk clarity at the foul smell that rose from the floor behind him. He shut his eyes, but the impulse to see the icon was irresistible.
“Make it stop,” someone cried out. “Oh God make it
stop
. . .”

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