Avoidance of police detection was essential. The theme of every illegal rave party — as opposed to tamer imitations in the legitimate rave nightclubs — was sex, drugs, and anarchy.
Harry and Connie walked past the bouncers, through the door, and into the heart of chaos, but a chaos to which the Pause had brought a tenuous and artificial order.
The cavernous room was lit by half a dozen red and green lasers, perhaps a dozen yellow and red spots, and strobes, all of which had been blinking and sweeping over the crowd until the Pause stilled them. Now lances of colorful, fixed light found some partiers and left others in shadows.’
Four or five hundred people, mostly between eighteen and twenty-five, but some as young as fifteen, were frozen in either the act of dancing or just hanging out. Because the disc jockeys at raves invariably played highly energized techno dance music with a rapidly pounding bass that could shake walls, many of the young celebrants had been Paused in bizarre poses of flailing and gyrating abandon, bodies contorted, hair flying. The men and boys were for the most part dressed in jeans or chinos with flannel shirts and baseball caps worn backward, or with preppy sportcoats over T-shirts, though some were decked out all in black. The girls and young women wore a wider variety of clothes, but every outfit was provocative — tight, short, low-cut, translucent, revealing; raves were, after all, celebrations of the carnal. The silence of graves had replaced the booming music, as well as the screams and shouts of the partiers; the eerie light combined with the stillness to impart an anti-erotic cadaverous quality to the exposed curves of calves, thighs, and breasts.
As he and Connie moved through the crowd, Harry noticed that the dancers’ faces were stretched in grotesque expressions which probably had conveyed excitement and hopped-up gaiety when they were animated. In freeze-frame, however, they were eerily transformed into masks of rage, hatred, and agony.
In the fiery glow produced by the lasers and spots, and by the psychedelic images that film projectors beamed onto two huge walls, it was easy to imagine that this was no party, after all, but a diorama of Hell, with the damned writhing in pain and wailing for release from their excruciating torment.
By seining out the rave’s noise and movement, the Pause might have captured the truth of the event in its net. Perhaps the ugly secret, beneath the flash and thunder, was that these revelers, in their obsessive search for sensation, were not truly having fun on any fundamental level, but were suffering private miseries from which they frantically sought relief that eluded them.
Harry led Connie out of the dancers into the spectators who were gathered around the perimeter of the enormous vaulted chamber. A few had been caught by the Pause in small groups, in the midst of shouted conversations and exaggerated laughter, faces strained and muscles corded in their necks as they had struggled to compete with the thunderous music.
But most seemed to be alone, disengaged from those around them. Some were slack-faced and staring vacuously into the crowd. Others were as taut as stretched wire, with unnervingly feverish stares. Perhaps it was the Halloween lighting and the stark shadows, but in either case, whether hollow-eyed or glaring, the petrified ravers on the sidelines reminded Harry of movie zombies paralyzed in the middle of some murderous task.
“It’s a regular creepshow,” Connie said uneasily, evidently also perceiving a quality of menace in the scene that might not have been so obvious if they had wandered into it before the Pause.
“Welcome to the nineties.”
A number of the zombies on the periphery of the dance floor were holding balloons in an array of bright colors, though not attached to strings or sticks. Here was a red-haired, freckled boy of seventeen or eighteen, who had stretched the neck of a canary-yellow balloon and wrapped it around his index finger to prevent deflation. And here was a young man with a Pancho Villa mustache, firmly pinching the neck of a green balloon between thumb and forefinger, as was a blond girl with empty blue eyes. Those who didn’t use their fingers seemed to employ the type of hinged binder clips that could be bought by the box at stationery stores. A few ravers had the necks of their balloons between their lips, taking hits of nitrous oxide, which they had bought from a vendor who was no doubt working out of a van behind the building. With all the vacant or intense stares and the bright balloons, it was as if a pack of the walking dead had wandered into a children’s birthday party.
Although the scene was made infinitely strange and fascinating by the Pause, it was still drearily familiar to Harry. He was, after all, a homicide detective, and sudden deaths occasionally occurred at raves.
Sometimes they were drug overdoses. No dentist would sedate a patient with a concentration of nitrous oxide higher than eighty percent, but the gas available at raves was often pure, with no oxygen mixed in. Take too many hits of the pure stuff in too short a time, or suck too long on one toke, you might not merely make a giggling spectacle of yourself but induce a stroke that killed you; or, worse, one that was not fatal but caused irreparable brain damage and left you flopping like a fish on the floor, or catatonic.
Harry spotted a loft overhanging the entire width of the back of the warehouse, twenty feet above the main floor, with wooden steps leading to it from both ends.
“Up there,” he told Connie, pointing.
They would be able to see the entire warehouse from that high deck — and quickly spot Ticktock if they heard him enter, no matter which door he used. The two staircases ensured an escape route regardless of the direction from which he came at them.
Moving deeper into the building, they passed two bosomy young women in tight T-shirts on which was printed “Just Say NO,” a rave joke on Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign, which meant these two said yes to nitrous oxide, NO, if not to anything else.
They had to step around three girls lying on the floor near the wall, two of them holding half-deflated balloons and Paused in fits of red-faced giggles. The third was unconscious, mouth open, a fully deflated balloon on her chest.
Near the back, not far from the right-hand stairs, an enormous white X was painted on the wall, large enough to be visible from every corner of the warehouse. Two guys in Mickey Mouse sweatshirts — and one of them in a mouse-ear hat — had been frozen in the middle of bustling commerce, taking twenty-dollar bills from customers in return for capsules of Ecstasy or for disco biscuits saturated with the same stuff.
They came to a teenager, no more than fifteen, with guileless eyes and a face as innocent as that of a young nun. She was wearing a black T-shirt with a picture of a shotgun under the words PUMP ACTION. She had Paused in the process of putting a disco biscuit into her mouth.
Connie plucked the cookie from the girl’s stiff fingers and slipped it out from between her parted lips. She threw it to the floor. The cookie didn’t have quite enough momentum to carry it all the way down, halting inches above the concrete. Connie pushed it the rest of the way with the toe of her shoe and crushed it underfoot. “Stupid kid.”
“This isn’t like you,” Harry said.
“What?”
“Being a stuffy adult.”
“Maybe someone’s got to.”
Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or Ecstasy, an amphetamine with hallucinogenic effects, could radically energize the user and induce euphoria. It could also generate a false sense of profound intimacy with any strangers in whose company the user happened to be when high.
Although other drugs sometimes appeared at raves, NO and Ecstasy were far and away predominant. NO was just nonaddictive giggle juice — wasn’t it? — and Ecstasy could bring you into harmony with your fellow human beings and put you in tune with Mother Nature. Right? That was its rep. The chosen drug of ecologically minded peace advocates, well consumed at rallies to save the planet. Sure, it was dangerous for people with heart conditions, but there was no recorded death from its use in the entire United States. True, scientists had recently discovered that Ecstasy caused pin-size holes in the brain, hundreds or even thousands of them from continued use, but there was no proof that these holes resulted in diminished mental capacity, so what they probably did, see, was let the cosmic rays shine in better and assist enlightenment. Right?