This suited him down to the ground. He had a great deal of thinking to do and he had always found that he thought most creatively while staring blankly at a TV screen. British TV took a little getting used to, with its impenetrably mannered comedies, ultraviolent cop shows, and documentaries that seemed determined to educate the masses whether the masses liked it or not, but it was TV and it was in English and it would suffice. He wished that he had a little more of Windemere's opium but he felt that it would be churlish to come right out and ask. Contenting himself with the cognac, he stretched out on the drawing room couch and attempted a review of his situation.
He didn't imagine that he'd make any real sense of what was happening to him, but he was getting heartily sick of the way that his ignorance was being used to constantly force him into a role of total passivity. Okay, so he was a drunk and a wastrel, and a bunch of stuff that he had never dreamed of in his philosophy was dropping on him like the proverbial shitstorm, but he had to start making his own moves. One of the few constants in the whole sorry business was that everyone he encountered went to some pains to warn him not to trust anyone else. The streamheat didn't trust Windemere, Windemere warned him against the Nine, everyone warned him against Yancey Slide, and Slide played right along with the game by telling him not to trust any of them. Let the circle be unbroken. Unfortunately the circle was wrapped around the outside of his skull and being slowly tightened. His first task was to break out and stop allowing himself to be run from hither to yon like a lab rat in a behavioral study. Independence of action had to be the next item on the agenda.
He wasn't going to achieve independence, though, until he found out why everyone was so interested in him and why the explanations of that interest were so uniformly vague. If he was playing a role in this movie, it was high time he got himself a copy of the script. Enough of all the Shirley MacLaine bullshit about fulcrums, auras, and destiny-if no one was going to tell it to him straight, he was going to have to figure it out for himself. There had to be one among this bunch who knew the score. The streamheat definitely knew a great deal more than they were telling, but he didn't think any one of them was going to get stinking drunk and spill the beans or otherwise let anything slip. He wished that he'd been able to talk to Slide for a while longer. The demon seemed inclined to boast, and after eighteen thousand years, he ought to know a thing or two. In spite of Windemere's warning about not letting himself be charmed, Gibson couldn't shake the feeling that Slide and his bunch were probably fun to be around.
The ITN News at Ten carried a small joke item about the crew of an Air India 797 claiming to have spotted a UFO over the Atlantic the previous night, and this somehow added to his general sense that nothing was quite real. After the news, he found himself faced with The Poseidon Adventure. He drifted with the ponderous stupidity of the inverted ocean liner without coming up with any fresh revelations. Sure, he knew what he had to do; how to go about doing it was the hard part. It was about the point Shelley Winters was making her heroic underwater swim that his peace and quiet started to noticeably decay.
Through most of the evening muffled sounds had drifted up from somewhere below; for a while it had been a high-pitched electronic hum, and then that had been replaced by shouts in a strange language, bursts of drumming and clusters of sub-bass harmonics. He had assumed that Windemere was doing something in the basement and left it at that. It was only when a strange smell seemed to be creeping through the house-a jungle-sweet, heavy scent like damp vegetation burning-that it became impossible to ignore. The smell clung and infiltrated and seemed to insinuate its way into his pores. His legs and arms grew heavy, and a dull weight settled on his brain. At first, he resisted, but very soon just let it drift around and over him while he listened to the increasing volume of sound that came from the basement. The random bursts of harmonics had been replaced by an almost hypnotic pulsing, and Gibson caught himself nodding in time and all but drifting into a shallow trance.
Gas! The smell was a colorless gas. He didn't want to think about gas. It was just a smell. He had to focus his eyes and concentrate. Thinking required effort, as did willing himself back to functioning reality, and, once back, he was both suspicious and a little alarmed. Was someone trying to fuck with him again, or was the effect a by-product of the party down below? Either way, he decided that he had the right to take a look. Just a glance down the basement stairs to see what he could see was hardly an invasion of his host's privacy, particularly when whatever his host was doing in private was noticeably leaking through into the rest of the house. He stood up, turned off the TV, and suddenly felt dizzy. Was the smell causing it, or just a delayed reaction to the events of the last few days? The world seemed to have taken on a greenish tinge. Indeed, the greening of the room seemed to have extended to his own face. He groaned as he caught a glimpse of it in the mirror above the fireplace.
"You poor-ass bastard, you look like the walking dead."
He leaned into the mirror and pulled down the lower lid of his left eye. The white of the eye was more than bloodshot. It looked like a color photograph of the planet Mars.
"No wonder, this shit's killing you."
He took a deep breath but it didn't help; the smell was still there, like a warm night on the Amazon. He started for the door. He was definitely going to have a look in the basement.
The pulse was louder and the smell thicker and more pungent as he stepped out onto the first-floor landing. He looked down the stairs into the ground-floor hallway. The door that led to the basement was open, and weirdly oscillating lights were reflected in the polished wood-red, yellow, and orange, like strobing electronic hellfire.
He reached the front hallway but hesitated at the top of the basement stairs, standing just outside the door, just listening to the complex weave of the outlandish rhythm pattern. It wasn't merely a pulsing hum. Rising and falling tones were punctuated by shimmering flutters and mutters that could almost have been human voices except that, without warning, they would lift through eight-octave runs like the music of an Inca Sundance and then roll away with the finality of a breaking wave.
He pushed the door open a little wider and put his foot on the first step. He knew that he was completely out of line, and he was suddenly a little scared. Windemere could be doing practically anything down there. Suppose it was something serious and bad? He took another step; now he was committed.
Going down the basement stairs, he could see only a small area of floor. The red and orange lights flashed through curls of heavy vapor that slowly undulated across it like phantom snakes.
As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he realized that he had intruded on something decidedly private. He was turning to go when Cadiz bore down on him and seized him by the arm with an angry, almost desperate whisper.
"Not here, Senor Gibson. Not here."
As Cadiz propelled him back up the stairs, Gibson wondered at what he had seen. Windemere had been sitting naked inside a pyramid in the center of the floor that appeared to be constructed out of some kind of sheet crystal. Windemere wasn't alone in there. A woman was with him. She was also naked, muscular and very black, and her body was in violent motion. Her mass of braids swung like whips each time she moved her head, and she was moving her head a great deal. Windemere and his companion were seated facing each other with their naked torsos pressed together and their legs and arms wrapped around each other's bodies, but within these confines,they writhed against each other like twining snakes. Light reflected from bodies that were slick with either oil or mingled sweat, and Windemere's back was daubed with a large single ideogram that seemed to have been painted in what looked uncomfortably like blood.