"What's going on?" Cumber Sedge didn't seem nervous, just confused, but then he probably didn't have as much to worry about as Theo did.
"Checkpoint," explained Zirus. Theo could vaguely make out a dark shape blocking the way, some kind of wall. Low voices spoke for a moment, their own driver no more intelligible than the guards or whatever they were, then the coach again moved forward, but more slowly this time.
"There it is," said Zirus. "Hellebore House. Mad bastards, the lot of 'em, but you have to admit the old place has style."
Theo couldn't make out much of anything until the young Daffodil lord flicked his fingers at the door and the window slid silently down, letting in a spatter of misty rain. After Theo blinked the water out of his eyes he saw the huge pale spike.
It was so strange an object that it took him a moment to get the perspective. If it had looked more like an office building or a castle tower it would have happened immediately, but it looked like nothing so much as a kind of ivory chess piece out of some abstract set — a very slender rook or a predatory queen. It was not cylindrical like the Daffodil towers, but four-sided, as far as Theo could tell, although neither of its visible sides were rectangles — not quite, although they looked like they might have started that way. The whole structure seemed to have been stretched out of true, as though a great hand had reached down, grabbed the tower by its spiky, many-gabled roof — an odd contrast with the simplicity of the rest of the building's lines — and yanked on it, pulling it up into the dark sky like a piece of bone-colored taffy. It was lit by carefully arranged spotlights, some with a reddish tint, and all its windows were black. It looked like the shell of an alien animal or a skull with hundreds of eye sockets.
"I… I don't like that place." There was more to Theo's aversion than he could express, an alien coldness that came down on him suddenly and with great weight. It reminded him queasily of something — a nightmare? — but he could not remember what it was. He only knew that he was having trouble getting his breath, and that he wished he were somewhere else.
"Why should you like it?" Applecore asked. "They're not nice people in there." Cumber Sedge only mumbled as he stared out the window — the ferisher, Theo realized, was pretty seriously drunk.
"Wait until you see the club," said Zirus, pouring himself another drink. "It's really interesting."
Theo had now heard the word "interesting" several times from Lady Aemilia and her son. He was beginning to suspect that it had two meanings for them, and neither of those matched the definition of the word as he had previously known it. One was "horrible." The other was "especially horrible for mortals."
"I don't think I want to see any more interesting things," he announced, but it was far, far too late. They were already in the driveway that led to the main gate. He felt as though something was waiting for him, something dreadful. He hoped it was only that he wasn't used to fairy liquor.
At first it seemed like it was going to be even worse than he had thought — the hulking ogres at the massive gate shining lights into the car, the long wait which Theo was convinced would end with them all being dragged out and handcuffed, or put into stocks, or whatever restraints they used on wanted criminals in Fairyland. Applecore had moved to his shoulder; he could feel her sitting there, a tensed, hard little object that seemed made of springs and knobs. He realized he'd never seen their driver, and had a sudden suspicion that the creature behind the wheel was one of the corpselike hollow-men, that this whole episode had been an elaborate trap. But instead the ogres stepped back and the limousine suddenly rolled forward again through a renewed flurry of rain that slapped against the windshield, then down a dark and disturbingly long tunnel that dumped them into an underground parking lot about five seconds before Theo's paranoia hit the critical point. In a daze, he followed Cumber Sedge, who didn't seem any more eager to go than he was: Zirus Jonquil almost had to push them both out of the car. As they walked across the echoing, silverlit garage, Theo looked back at the limousine but could not make out the driver's face through the darkened windows.
They could already feel the music as they waited for the elevator, a thumping, jarring sensation as though something extremely large was trying to escape from the floor below them. A few more fairy lordlings joined them, laughing and talking so fast and in such emphatic slang that Theo couldn't understand a word. He let himself be moved into the elevator like a puppet.
When the door opened the sound hit him like an explosion, a walloping bass and strange polyrhythms he couldn't quite wrap his head around, topped with a soaring wind instrument like a clarinet. Two huge gray hands patted him down in a rough but cursory fashion, then shoved him through into the noise and the flashing lights and the crowds of extravagantly dressed (although some were nearly naked) and almost uniformly gorgeous young fairies. Transparent shapes gyrated in midair among the dancers, shapes that looked like nothing so much as ghosts and which popped like soap bubbles when the dancers touched them. But nothing stunned him as much as realizing what the club actually was.
A church… ! He had been expecting something more in keeping with the name, some kind of mock-horror decadence with a Yuletide theme — serial-killer Santa maybe, mutilated elves, black tinsel and scorched trees. Instead he could have been in the chapel — albeit a large one — of an Episcopalian church. There were stained glass windows, lit from behind, and a simple altar near the far wall beneath a large crucifix, from which even the most frenetic of the dancing fairies in their extravagant finery seemed to keep a respectful distance. The Jesus on the cross was not even one of the more tormented, bloody sorts he had marveled at in Mexican churches during his traveling days. He was about to say something about it to Cumber Sedge — bellow something, since that was all that could be done — but the ferisher stumbled against him and almost fell.
"This… is… horrible," Cumber groaned.
"We have to get him out of here," Applecore shouted in Theo's ear.
"Is he drunk?"
"It's that." She pointed a tiny hand at the crucifix. "These people… they're all crazy. Sick."
And suddenly he remembered what she had told him about swearing, and realized that it was the Christian symbols themselves which gave this place its nasty cachet. They didn't need to have pictures of mangled children or evil toys: it wasn't the Christmas bit that was the draw here for Faerie's jaded gentry, it was the Christ bit — not modern Christmas, but Christ Mass.
"Where are you going?" Zirus shouted. He had already found a drink, somewhere. "This is fabulous, isn't it? They've actually hired Bishop Silver to do the music. All those great old music charms — everyone wants to get him. He's absolutely the most vaporous tunesmith in the city. Makes his own phantasms, too, you know."
Theo waved his hand in a distracted way. He guessed that the phantasms must be the transparent, faintly glowing figures flying around the dance floor. The music certainly was interesting — he could hear all kinds of strange fragmentary resonances, and could sense noises in it that he couldn't quite catch with his ears. He would have loved to learn more about it, but not here, not now. "Yeah, it's great," Theo roared back above the din.
"Can I get you something?"
"Cumber's not feeling very well." Theo struggled to keep the ferisher upright. He'd been in this position before, but it was the first time he'd ever had to carry someone out of a club because of too much Jesus. "Is there another room?"