After the first few, the clubs became a blur to me: the architecture became variations on an already tired temple floorplan; neon signs became obscure bursts of hieroglyphics; the bored and laconic expressions of the dancers morphed into Grecian masks stamped from rust-stained copper.
And the names. Characters who stoked the imagination with their multi-syllabic exoticism: the Middle Eastern mystique of Saffron and Esmeralda, the Oriental inscrutability of Yukiko and Aniko, the European decadence of Chaumineux and Antoinette, and the Egyptian mystery of Cleopatra and Isis.
Too many of them had brittle shells, their shiny war paint translucent to our mystic eyes. We Saw their submerged personalities, their hidden rage at the dull pawing and heavy breathing. We knew their hidden sadness. While their eyes were brilliant reflections of the mirrors and their mouths rich fruit ripe for plucking, the motion of their hands-toward my thigh, toward a watered down drink which they barely touched, toward a cigarette-betrayed their exhaustion.
Part of me understood Bernard's goal with the mirror, what he and the Anointed wished to do with the souls of the world. How many of these people-dancers and patrons alike-would leap at the chance for a new Aeon? For a tabula rasa moment when all their sins were wiped away? How many eager souls were there in this city-in any city-who were waiting for a chance to make a break from their torrid existences?
I started seeing Bernard's mirror in every disco ball; the play of reflected light mocking me with the promise of a new world, a better world built from the darkness of this one.
Our plan was a bust, made worse by the emotional toll it took on us. The few who had an instinctive sense of the city's energy flow weren't self-aware enough of their intuition to focus it to our inquiries. We had our faces stroked, our crotches teased, and our wallets emptied, but found no oracular prescience to guide us.
We stank of arousal, fetid air, and cigarette smoke as we wandered out of a club shoved into the front end of an old warehouse down in the industrial district. The sky was a burial shroud stretched tight.
Nicols started to shake out a cigarette from his nearly empty pack and stopped, his tongue touching the edge of his lips. "I think I'll wait awhile before the next one." He tipped it back into the pack. The color had been leached from his face by the dead sky. "We're not going to find anything."
I agreed. "It's not the right approach. Maybe if we had a few days, we could find one who could articulate her understanding of the city's energy flow, but which one? Which club? There are too many choices and we don't have that kind of time."
"We're going to have the same problem with bartenders and cab drivers." He shrugged. "And getting anything useful out of the local drug dealers is going to be impossible, even if I could find them. They'd never talk to me." He barked out a short laugh. "Especially when I explained what I wanted to know."
"We could try the fortune tellers, but. ." I raised my shoulders in an empty shrug.". .how many and how spread out they are is going to be an issue again. It's already too late to start."
He looked toward the blocky line of downtown visible beyond the row of low industrial buildings that surrounded the club. The lighted windows of the skyscrapers were tiny beacons, small dots arrayed in a chaotic pattern against the backdrop of stone and steel. "Which one are they in?" he wondered.
The Chorus had been no help. As we had drifted across Portland-crossing and recrossing the river that split the city in two-they had looked for an abnormal energy signature. The concentration of souls in the device should have been a bright star, should have been obvious to anyone who could read urban flow patterns, but I detected nothing. Portland's grid was tainted, I could read that much, but the source of the disturbance was hidden. I could feel the ripples on the surface of the river but, try as I might, I couldn't locate the stone beneath the surface that was the cause.
"Are you sure about the card?" he asked. "The Princess of Cups. Are you sure of your interpretation?"
"Pretty sure. I don't know them as well as Piotr, but I know them well enough."
"Maybe we should focus on something more concrete. What about Thoth? Didn't I see a Book of Thoth at the bookstore? Why aren't we just reading that?"
"Because it's the wrong book. Crowley liked to pretend his book was the formative realization of the secrets of Thoth. It's an in-joke. One of the myths is that the copy in the Library of Alexandria was rescued, and its pages became the first tarot deck. But it's a story."
"A library would help, though. Something like Van Groteon's collection?"
"Something like. Thoth-and Hermes Trismegistus, his manifestation in the flesh-is credited with writing forty-two books. The whole range of human knowledge. Nearly all of them have been lost. The two that are most complete make up TheCorpus Hermeticum, and are philosophical discussions about the soul. There are references to the other books, oblique mentions in early alchemy tracts, and even a few extracts, but nothing complete. Not enough to re-create the originals."
"But if you were going to piece one together, it would be TheBook of Thoth."
I nodded. "Yes, that'd be the one."
"You can't rule out the possibility that he really did it, can you?"
I shook my head.
Nicols' gaze wandered across the line of warehouses and buildings. "There's a bookstore downtown. Powell's. It's an entire city block of books. I know we're the backwater and all out here, but maybe they've got something in their rare book room that can help us." He shrugged. "Hell, they've probably got a decent tarot section. We can get a second opinion on the Princess of Cups."
"Even if they had the books," I said, "The clues aren't going to be labeled in the table of contents. It'll take me hours to decipher anything of use. You've read the Emerald Tablet. On a literal level, there's nothing practical in those eighteen lines. Yet it was the core instruction manual for centuries of alchemical research."
He sighed. "We need a good librarian."
An idea struck me, a sudden blossoming in my head as if a flower had just erupted from rich loam. "A librarian," I said. "That's it. The scholars at the Library of Alexandria were the keepers of secret knowledge; they were the oracles of their age. Booksellers aren't the same, but they are kin to librarians. With the right influence, we might be able to get one to speak for us. To See something that will help us."
Her name was Devorah and she worked in the Red Room at Powell's, surrounded by tarot cards and metaphysical books. Her mousy brown hair was pulled back from her heart-shaped face by butterfly barrettes, and her eyelids were painted like stylized abalone shells. The logo on her maroon t-shirt was for a local punk band who had downloaded graphics from the Key of Solomon to use as a background texture. I wondered if she knew the source of their symbolism; if she knew they had been so perverted from their actual intent that they were useless as magickal seals.
T-shirts are the unconscious nametags of the psyche. In symbols and shorthand, they identify their wearers to like-minded souls: eye contact in a crowded room, conversation starters at the punch bowl, warning signs by which certain types are told to steer clear. Vestments as personality shortcuts.
Whether she knew it or not, her shirt told me she was going to be our oracle.
"Can I help you?" she asked as we approached her counter. She was reading a worn paperback of Milton's Paradise Lost. Up close, I noticed her eyes were green and she had a honeyed smell like her namesake. Just a hint, floating amid the scent of paper and glue that permeated the building. Curled around the arc of her left wrist was a tattoo of flowers and honey bees.