She'd come, it seemed, for hours on end.
"Morning," he said.
"Good morning."
"Any regrets?"
"Not a one."
"Good. That's good."
Her eyes took him in. Her thoughts could not. The words just seemed to slip out of her.
"Who are you?" she said.
He smiled. "A collector, nothing more. Rich by accident and then design. Much like you." She watched him idly trace a scratch on his neck with his index finger. A scratch she'd made the night before.
"I collect little pieces of cultures, anything that's left. So damn much has been plundered. There's truth in those pieces, you know — and power in truth. You could say I try to collect some of that power. All too often those little pieces scattered all the hell over the world provide the only remnants of entire civilizations."
Little pieces? Her eyes accessed the room. His nonchalance astonished her. So much of what he referred to as "little pieces" were actually priceless relics. Each room in his apartment could be a mini-museum worth millions.
"You must've been everywhere," she said.
"Nearly, I suppose. From Troy to Knossos to Ninevah. From Hastings to Golgotha to the Seven Hills of Rome. Yes." His voice darkened. "From cenotes to ziggurats."
Fascinating. But his previous words resurfaced, like shadows standing just behind her. Little pieces. Power. Truth.
The wounds of his passion radiated on her skin.
She shook her head. "I wish I could remember…"
"What happened? Last night?"
"Yes. Not that it really matters. It was… wonderful."
His face grew stolid. Like a mask.
"Of course it matters. Do you want to know what happened? I mean what really happened?"
She nodded.
"It was the masks. The masks happened."
"The masks…yes, but…"
He leaned up on one elbow. "We're living in an age that's been so thoroughly demythologized, there's nothing left. You know that Christine — you know that as well as anybody in our field because you see it every day in your gallery. Art today has no mythology. Which is why so much of it is empty, drained of its real vitality, exsanguinated. And why we prefer the works of former eras, other cultures, things…so…old."
He was right of course. They'd known instantly they had that in common.
"People think that masks are about nothing more than children at Halloween. But take a good look at Mardi Gras and you see what masks can do. Even today. People get monumentally, fabulously drunk. They trash the streets. They do drugs they wouldn't ordinarily touch. And they fornicate with anything that moves — regardless of gender. The masks release them, Christine. The masks separate the chaff from the real seeds of the soul. But what they forget, and what we know, is that all they're doing is tapping into a kind of vestigial power based on a much, much earlier magic. When the powers that the masks invoke weren't just psychological. They were far-reaching. Cosmic, limitless, without parameter."
He smiled.
"There are no parameters," he said.
"You're saying we did that? Tapped into…"
"Something we don't understand. And why? Because the parameters don't belong to us. So much is scattered. So many cultures, so many different visions… There's so much to dissimulate, you know?" His bare shoulders shrugged. “What do you think?"
He lifted a finger, traced the claw marks on her breasts, then down her belly, then across her soft white thighs.
She shuddered, then laughed.
"I think it bears…further investigation," she said.
"So do I."
They arrived in a Rolls Royce White Shadow. Date of manufacture: 1916. Original owner: Nicholas Romanov.
The crowd at the door parted for them immediately.
The Rolls matched their own plumage. The white owl was Athena's bird.
Athena. Wisdom. War.
The feathers of her mask were real, luxuriantly arranged over a light wire frame with a soft satin lining, which was then affixed to the lined insert. The beak was a carven???(carved or craven?) horn.
Stephen's was a faceplate of pressed gold — the image, perhaps, of the sun god Apollo. Athena's brother.
They wore white satin floor-length cloaks and when they handed them to the woman at the club entry they were naked but for the masks, and wholly anonymous. She stood silent while patrons stared. To the pressure rings on her nipples he attached two long silver chains, trailing them down across her belly and reattaching them to two more rings on each of the lips of her labia.
They moved slowly side by side down the long dark hall and the crowd parted for them a second time.
Heavy chains and black leather manacles hung from walls and ceiling. A fat man tied by ropes to the steps of a wooden ladder was being whipped with a riding crop by his mistress. Few bothered watching.
Another man hung suspended from the roof of an iron cage. A crowd had gathered inside to watch two women insert needles through the flesh of his thighs and arms, swabbing at the specks of blood with balls of cotton. Further on, a rail-thin, multi-tattooed young woman was being racked by two hooded men in black leather pants and naked to the waist. They too had attracted their admirers. But Christine felt all those eyes shift to her as they passed in a tide of speculation.
Many had begun to follow.
He led her to a low dais inside another cage. She raised her arms to the manacles above her head and spread her legs wide to the shackles on the floor. The crowd gathered, grew, jockeyed for position. Captive bird. He gently removed the first chains and then the rings from her nipples and labia and then turned and spoke to the crowd.
Behind them, music blared. Slayer. Danzig. Killing Joke.
They heard him in spite of it. Not quite believing at first — not quite having heard or seen exactly this before. There were sidelong glances and nervous laughter. They hadn't seen this coming.
Nor, for that matter, had she.
"My sister," he said. "I give her to you. To touch, to know. To love as you see fit. One caveat. No pain."
Nods from the crowd, eagerly submitting.
The hunger in their eyes, and the smell of oil and leather.
He stepped aside. The sun god offering up his bounty.
She felt the touch of a dozen hands — male and female — all at once, stroking, squeezing her breasts and thighs, her ass, a finger probing delicately inside her ass, another in her sex, flicking, rolling the aching clitoris, moving slowly in and out, moving wetly across her belly, replaced inside by two more fingers, then three, then four, male and female both, stretching her wide into a pink fleur-de-lis, the tongue of a tall black woman moving deep inside her mouth, hands and heat and lips and teeth gently biting, gently pulling at her swollen nipples tender from the pressure rings and the long, deep scent of human breath and human flesh.
She felt serene. Soaring. Stroked by a dozen hot winds.
The white bird sailing through the night.
And came and came again.
In the dream she stared, amazed. Beyond the dusk she saw cities, or things like cities. Cities so old they were black. Odd architectures which extended along a vanishing line of horrid lightlessness. A raging terra incognito. Horizons crammed with stars sparkled close against cubist chasms. She saw buildings and roads, or things like roads, tunnels and pyramids and strange flattened edifices whose chimneys gushed oily smoke. It was a necropolis, systematized and endless, endless as eons. Squat, stygian churches sang praise to mindless gods. Ataxia the only order. Darkness the only light.