I stared at him, surprised, even a little angry. Then I pulled my clothes off, thinking that might be the problem.
“Hey,” I said thickly, dropping my shirt. He seemed not to hear. I frowned, reached for one of the bottles on the floor. It was three-quarters full, the cork protruding a good inch from the top. I took the cork between my teeth and pulled it out, hefted the bottle and drank.
I drank way too much. But I drank anyway, until my mouth burned and my head buzzed, until I felt the same familiar three A.M. twanging in my skull that presaged those wild bursts of clarity I lived for at Deer Park with my friends, mad jangling music and ragged black light just outside my range of vision. When I tried to set the bottle down, it slid from my hand and smashed onto the floor.
“Shit,” I mumbled. “God damn it…”
I leaned over to survey the damage. I saw no broken glass, no spilled wine; just a drift of white poppies, wrinkled as tissue, and here and there one red petal like a bloody thumbprint. I blinked and turned back, feeling as though the whole room turned with me. The ivy-crowned man was still cross-legged on the bed. His eyes were open, verdant eyes shot with amber like the surface of a stream.
“Lit.”
He smiled and took my hand, pulled me close to kiss him. This time he tasted not of wine but of blood, a taste that maddened me. I tried to pull away but he wouldn’t let go. I pushed at him, pounded ineffectually with one fist, struggled and kicked and flailed: no good.
So I bit him. On the cheek—there was a metallic spate of blood in my mouth, as though my own cheek had been pierced by a needle. He moaned. I shoved him onto the mattress and he fell onto the heaped scarves, their folds rippling so that I saw the pattern that had been there all along: scarlet vines and purple leaves, glistening black figs and clusters of grapes that exploded where he touched them, so that threads of red and purple radiated like cracks around his body, a living mosaic.
“Your turn now,” I said drunkenly. “Drink…”
I straddled him, placed my hands on either side of his head. I kissed him, my tongue lingering on his cheek, the taste of salt and wine; rubbed my face against his until it was raw and left a smear of blood across his chin. Then I moved away, raising myself until my cunt was above his face. I lowered myself carefully, resting against his solar plexus as I inched forward, until his mouth was under me. I felt his lips, and his tongue: barely touching me at first but then harder as I moaned, his tongue tracing the edges of my labia and then flicking at my clit as I rocked back and forth. I felt wet, not just my cunt but all of me, arms and legs and breasts. I glanced down, gasping, saw my body mottled red and white and the air around me filled with blossoms. When I came it was like watching that small throbbing vein in his arm, a rhythmic pulse that finally burst, a wash of red across my eyes and petals on his tongue. I cried out and pushed myself from him, sprawling on the mattress with my hand across my eyes. I could feel him alongside me, his chest and the little hairs around his nipples, his cock nudging against my stomach.
“Take me, Lit.” I opened my eyes. He was staring at me, his expression yearning, almost desperate. “Now…”
I forced a smile. “In a minute.” I was exhausted, too drunk to think about fucking right now; almost certainly too drunk to focus on anything else. “Can’t we, uh, just rest for a—”
“No.” He sat up, his eyes wide and staring. “Now. The harvest cannot wait, ever.”
I started to giggle, clapped my hand over my mouth. “That’s a new one—”
He gave me a thin smile, his green eyes feverishly bright. “Bound and scored, flailed and bled, burned and consumed,” he whispered.
He raised his arms above his head, crossed them at the wrists. I watched, unsure whether to laugh or run.
“One buries children,” he recited, “one gains new children, one dies oneself; and this the race of men take heavily, carrying earth to earth. But it is necessary to harvest life like the vine, and that the one may be, the other is not. I am the son of the earth, and the stag that treads upon it; son of the earth and the starry sky.”
His voice rose, cracking like a young boy’s.
From overhead came a rustling. I looked up.
The ceiling was alive, a thrashing sea of vines and leaves, tendrils like grasping green hands and the dark filigree of exposed roots. In a writhing curtain they fell around us. I yelled, kicking at a long strand of ivy that encircled my bare leg, in a frenzy grabbed it and tried to pull it off. With a hiss like burning grass the ivy lashed itself around my wrist. I held not a vine but a snake, its triangular head set with eyes like obsidian flakes, its yellow tongue tasting the air as it tightened around me.
“God, no—”
I staggered backward and fell. The snake slid from my hand as my head banged against the edge of the platform. I felt dizzy, no longer drunk but delirious. Around me swept a coruscating tide of green and gold and black and brown, serpents and field mice, oak leaves and gnarled husks of beech-nuts, withered poppy blooms and bunches of grapes like dusty pearls. I flailed and beat my hands against them, but still they came: a yellow-and-black mat of crawling honeybees, ermines in their fuscous autumn coat, boughs thick with figs and olives and a tumult of coppery acorns: all of October’s woodland harvest, a golden flux burying me, drowning me, devouring me—
And then it was gone. I blinked and let out a shuddering breath, looked around at the room. All was as it had been, save for scattered leaves and seeds, the slithering echo of something taking refuge in a dark corner. On the bed reclined the man who had been Axel Kern. The crown of ivy still rested upon his brow, and at first I thought there were vines across his lap; but when I pulled myself up, I saw that he held several coils of rope. Coarse hempen rope, the same kind of rope used to hang terracotta masks when autumn came to Kamensic Village.
“Where—where did they go?” I asked hoarsely. “Where did they come from?”
“It is always here,” he said, his eyes dull. “I told you: it is my kingdom. That is why they name me Kissos, lord of the ivy, and Dendrites, the one in the tree…”
His voice died, but I heard another voice then, Balthazar Warnick’s—
…the god of ecstasy; the god of illusions…
I stared at the man on the bed. Hatefully, feeling a new rage clawing at my chest; rage intense and raw as grief, less an emotion than another being struggling to escape from inside me.
“You did that,” I said. There was a blackness in the middle of my eyes, a darkness in my head that told me I should stop now, I was too drunk, I should run away…
But I couldn’t stop. I said, “You drugged me, like you drugged Ali—” He shook his head. I went on, my voice rising. “—you’ve made all these things happen, it’s like a—a sickness, like some kind of delusion. I don’t know how you do it but you made it come—”