Samuelson smirked, and there was something sinister there. “Exquisite, isn’t it? The effects are almost immediate.”
Ryan barely heard him. It was as if he had swallowed fire. The flame coursed down his throat and into his stomach, and then it was flowing through his arteries and his veins. Every inch of him burned, and even the sweat that drenched his clothes could not smother the conflagration that engulfed him.
“Come,” he said, “I have much to show you.”
If his legs hadn’t begun to move of their own volition, Ryan would have sworn that he was unable to follow the old man’s command. And yet, move they did. It was a bizarre sensation, a passenger in his own body, watching as his feet carried him into the great, vaulted chamber. His movements were swift, if unsteady. He passed through the archway into what could almost be called an amphitheater. There were four different entrances to the circular hall, cut into the rock at diagonals. In the center was a massive, raised stone slab. And surrounding it were men standing in ascending rows five deep. In another circumstance, Ryan would have felt underdressed, for all of them wore their finest outfits. The noise of their chatter had been deafening, but when Ryan entered, their roar fell steadily down to silence. They turned their faces upon him, and in their eyes, Ryan saw recognition.
“Yes,” Samuelson said, “the guest of honor has arrived.”
The old man led him to an empty spot a few feet from the stone slab, positioning him so that he faced it. And then it wasn’t just Ryan’s physical body that was affected, but his mind as well. The world seemed to shutter and then crack. The flames that leapt from the torches that flickered around the hall seemed to dance before him, as if they had a mind of their own, as if some hand guided them. The faces of those who surrounded him melted and reformed, and in the shadows that played upon the walls of that accursed place danced creatures that no mortal man has ever gazed upon and lived.
“The wine is powerful, yes? Tis the blood of the gods, or so the Greeks would have told you. The Christians too, if the rites are said properly over the fruit of the vine. And I can assure you, the rouge to which you were privy is most sacred indeed.”
For a moment, the storm within Ryan’s mind seemed to ebb, and he thought the room grew dimmer. But this was not his mind playing tricks on him, but rather the image of the truth as the men who stood guard extinguished all but one of the torches that had lit the chamber before. It was as if the sun set in that place, and in the coming dark Ryan’s eyesight grew sharper, and although he should have been able to see little, his mind perceived all.
From the portal immediately across from him emerged a figure. He wore a cloak, long and black, and the hood obscured his face. The room grew still except for his movements — the exquisite, graceful flow of his body as it moved. And it was from those delicate sliding footfalls that Ryan realized — this was no man.
Her body flowed around the stone slab and came to rest in front of Ryan. His eyes grew wide as she removed the hood that had obscured her face. He had the same feeling of lightheadedness as he had experienced the first time he’d looked upon her. But the bright, crashing red of her hair had an unholy shimmer that night, and her eyes, those pale green flashes, glowed with a light of their own. But there was yet one more thing that was different from that first night in Hendricksville Community College. As the robe slipped off her shoulders into a black puddle around her feet, she was completely nude. And then she began to dance.
At first she moved to nothing, her hips swaying to the sound of silence. But then there was a change in the air, an almost imperceptible drumming sound, the beat growing louder with every second, but never so much that Ryan could say from where it came or that it was anywhere other than his own mind. And the piping, the demonic flutes that called from some swirling chaos.
“Why does she dance?” asked Samuelson. “She dances not for us, but for the gods to come. For dancing is like singing, don’t you think? An expression of pure, human emotion. This one through action, rather than sound. It is a beautiful thing.”
He removed a silver case from the pocket of his jacket, pulling a cigarette from inside. With a flick of his wrist he struck a match. The flame glowed brightly in the darkened chamber, and the smoke, more pungent than any Ryan remembered, stung his eyes.
“It’s the dance of the seven veils, you know?” the old man said, gesturing towards Katya with the lit end of his cigarette. “’Tis an ancient dance, the one that cost John the Baptist his head in the long ago. Of course, in this instance at least, the veils are left to the imagination.”
He took a deep drag from his cigarette, and as he flicked ash to the stone ground below, he blew the smoke in Katya’s direction. But it did not dissipate as Ryan would have expected. Rather, it seemed to surround her, to cloak her in a translucent shroud. She moved within that mantle, her hands traveling over her body, starting with her hair and moving down her neck, farther, to her breasts. And then farther still, while her lips parted in the ecstasy of her fingers.
“Yes,” Samuelson said, throwing the dying end of his cigarette down on the ground and crushing it beneath his heel, “she dances for they who are, for they who were, and for they who will be. For those who rumble in the darkness, who walk in endless night through the vast infinity of the cosmos. And for they who seek their return. She calls to them with her body, just as those nameless cults that built this temple — supplicants who never died and never will — shout and gibber their names into the howling winds in the lonely and forbidden places of the earth. And they hear them too, Ryan.
“They hear them, just as surely as you hear me. They seek a return, when the stars are right. As they shall be one night hence, when the Beltane moon rises above this place, and the night of Walpurgis begins. They who were can be again. But of course, their entrance into this world is no easy one. For there can be no birth without pain, no forgiveness of sin without the shedding of blood.”
Ryan’s eyes grew wide as it happened. As he saw. From behind where she stood, where she swayed to the deep drumming of the earth. And the piping, those insane, discordant melodies. The black figure rising, hooded and cloaked. Ryan sought to cry out, but he was only a mute witness, as much a prisoner as if chains bound him. On she danced, oblivious to her fate. As all are.
The hulking beast behind her — for Ryan could not be sure if it was a man or something else — produced a long, curved blade from somewhere within the folds of his cloak. He pressed the sharp metal edge to her throat. And yet still, she danced. Then, in one movement, he severed skin and tendons and arteries and veins. Her head hung in space, still attached to her body only by a thin flap of skin and the merest of pale, white bones.
As the bright, crimson fountain sprung from her throat, showering Ryan in her thick, sweet, viscous blood, she still danced. Until Ryan, the sound of distant laughter dying in his ears, collapsed into the black oblivion of throbbing drums and maniacal piping.
Ryan awoke to sunlight as it poured through his open window on to the bed on which he lay. His hand went immediately to his chest, and he fully expected it to come away covered in crimson ichor. But there was nothing, even if he could still taste the metallic tang of the unspeakable in his mouth. He threw the sheets away, and only then did he realize he was naked. He flung himself out of bed, nearly stumbling over his open suitcase. The clothes that he remembered wearing were draped over a chair, just as he had left them when he had showered the night previous. For a moment he paused, wondered if it had all been some sick dream. The darkest, most vivid nightmare he’d ever had. More real than even the visions of war-torn lands that had invaded his consciousness, memories of that awful day in the deserts of Afghanistan. Dreams of things that had been real.