Luda, p.13
Luda, page 13
It’s telling us to follow it! I felt certain of this.
Is that a good idea?—the cautious student inquired.
The Glamour always sends an emissary to open the path—I went on. You’ve heard of familiars?
As far as I knew it was the first time I’d mentioned them, but all the same, she had.
An emissary. Luda repeated the word, each time with a deeper sense of portent until no further gravitas was possible and a dirty laugh came bubbling up.
Think of it as a sign—I said earnestly. The path is open. The catwalk awaits.
A pantomime cow is our familiar—she said as if I’d told her my uncle Bob was an octopus. God knows he might as well have been, Bob’s hands were everywhere.
Well, what did you expect?—I said. A pair of pantomime cows like us!
She had no answer to that.
This was the Glamour in action, I told her. The Glamour in the shiny surface of things, in the moment, always deceptive, seductive.
What was the cow trying to say to us?—I asked Luda. Use your imagination!
It was trying to say…follow the cow—she said so very seriously we couldn’t stop laughing as we clattered, all heels, in the wake of the nag, chasing its receding footfalls, tracking the hand-stitched spirit creature’s spoor through what might have been an underground laundry room as it made its ungainly clip-clopping way back to whatever cellar of the Abyss had calved it.
The mood was mock-Arthurian. The Questing Beast. The Unicorn. The White Hart. Sacred and heraldic beasts cantering through a profane Cumalot. We both knew we were honor-bound to follow the lowing cry all the way to the shadiest of Hades if need be.
This bovine entreaty led us to strange stone stairs that gave access to an unexpected basement level, a Santa’s Grotto lit green and red; we could both agree on that in hindsight. And we both recalled a misshapen four-footed shadow splashed back across the whitewashed wall.
They’re an endangered species! People hunt them you know—I deadpanned. It’s terrible—parties like this! They arm themselves with popguns and water pistols—it’s the only thing that can kill a pantomime animal!
Is it just horses and cows?
I don’t see why it has to be—I whispered, theorizing a whole panto-zoo; hand-stitched mockeries of nature pacing in traumatized circles behind imaginary bars, or swinging on tires with a knitted dick in one hand and a lump of papier-mâché shit in the other.
We should have stopped but we didn’t, even when the idling engine turnover of conversation receded to a faraway grumble of departing motorboat noise stranding us far from shore.
Luda wanted to know about the other pantomime animals, a cladogram of cloth and glass, a bestiary of rags and cast-offs.
Pantomime lions. Pantomime Komodo dragons—I said then slipped into a minor fall. Extinct soon.
We should have reconsidered our course when the music became a subliminal bass pulse so soft it might as well have been our watches ticking for all the sound it made.
Luda joined in—Pantomime unicorns!
Cackling, we rolled halfway down the stairs. Going down always easier than trying to get back up, as we’d find out soon enough.
Only a true virgin can tame a pantomime unicorn—I deadpanned with an exaggerated Twankey eyebrow raise. Which puts you out of the running, I’m sorry to say.
There were Roman candles in her eyes when she laughed at my stupid jokes with toothpaste advert tiers of teeth a dentist in her Marvell days had made for her.
The radiant moment lasted less than a second before her laughter was stopped dead by the most spine-chilling screech anyone could imagine. A slaughterhouse yodel, an abattoir soprano…it could only be the inhuman death screech of a cloth-and-canvas cow with a tail made of rope and bristle.
In a nerve-racking aftermath, clots of silence thickened to a fog that clogged our ears as we sank into its deaf and dumb acoustics.
Maybe we should go back—I heard her say. I should have listened, but I never do. In my own defense, I wasn’t ready to listen to one more sound at that exact moment.
As to where we’d found ourselves, knock-kneed and clinging to each other like a kooky fashion shoot in the Bates Motel basement, it might have been a wine cellar except for a distinct lack of bottles on the conjectured racks. It was too dark to tell. It was too dark to think.
Did you hear that?—I whispered, reaction delayed by the pause button of shock. I had no idea how much of anything she’d heard; or how much meaning she’d extracted from the marrow-freezing sequence of catgut squeal and slobber. The pallid horror on her sweet rag-doll face told me it must have been enough and as she gave in to an enchanting and vulnerable moment of ripped-back panic, Luda’s fingers gripped mine so fiercely it felt like we’d been stapled together by a sexually repressed bank clerk.
Oww—I said. She was sorry, wide-eyed. I was her only protection against the capering, demented Unseelie Court that might at any moment charge loose from the wallpaper and the moldings, inflating with life and menace in a tidal surge of collapsing perspective and ill intentions.
I think it needs help. The cow—Luda whispered, as if afraid to draw attention to herself.
By the sound of that spastic scrabbling for purchase, those indrawn bellows for breath, the artificial mare had blundered into a well, straw hat floating on quicksand or tar as the head went under, the glassy goggle eyes rolling in four directions at once, the tongue a dishcloth lolling from a grinning face that would be comical but for the death throes.
I think we’re in the spirit world—Luda said in that disconcerting way she had of making things creepier.
I nodded slowly.
Something at the foot of the stairs stopped us short. The plunge from a boast to a scream as they say.
Luda had found something to stare at on the floor and I followed her gaze to where several variously proportioned amoebic asterisks on the wooden floor were splottered in bright comic-book red.
Fresh BLOOD!—Luda said hoarsely, and for one horrible moment I took it as a request.
I thought of that poor pantomime cow, an endangered species, wounded and dripping the lurid red carnations of its lifeblood as it grew weaker, swaying in the limelight. Brought to four human knees it never knew it had, wearing lace-up sneakers beneath patent-leather cloven hooves.
Prey of the vampire!
* * *
—
Clip 6. And this is where what happened becomes inextricable in hindsight from the range of severely distorted impressions and disassembled episodes provided by the drugs we’d taken.
Two “Skyfall” ecstasy tablets. Two or three drops from an eyewash bottle of liquid LSD my dealer Paddy sourced ten years ago.
The Byzantine sport of chemicals combining with subconscious emotions—occurring in the expansive cathedral ambience of minds whose incessant running commentary has been stunned into a prayer-like hush by MDMA. Anything can happen.
Except we both remembered it the same way.
I know, I said it before, we should have gone back upstairs, we should have forgotten about the stricken pantomime cow, but they never do, do they? In spooky stories, they never do the sensible thing. A glimpse of the Underworld’s too much of a temptation.
When the Glamour calls, when the power of the strange and forbidden comes into your boring old life, it’s hard to resist at first. It wouldn’t be the Glamour if it didn’t seduce with a promise of sin.
After a few experiments in conceptual lighting design, Luda succeeded in directing her phone at the sudden darkness. The beam from the screen clipped out a giddy trapezoidal section of corridor and I thought about H. P. Lovecraft and what a strange life he’d had. We seemed, you and I, to be fastened inside a black-and-white movie reel where the edges on everything caught in the projector beam were dissolving into those fizzing feathered spectra on the blue end.
It’s a bit spooky…
Shadows congregated from every corner as we tiptoed on down some nonfigurative representation of a hall; vague specters magnetized to our iPhone light, our crown chakras radiant on molly and mandy, their separate forms condensing around that elongated lozenge of visibility, suggestive of a gathering crowd, a gas of intimidating shapes discovering their common cause as one all-engulfing life-hating darkness made of who knows how many lost and pissed-off individuals. Their edges mingling, running together into a fused mulch of rage, turmoil, and self-hatred.
I decided it was time to pop the expanding bubble of fear in my chest and seized my chance to show off.
Disregard the air of menace—I said. I knew these shades of old and I told her so. And with all my meridians opened wide, I felt only a profound compassion for these tattered revenants, as I put it later. They gave me an unexpected chance to impress Luda.
Electing myself Afterlife Agony Aunt, I reached for that kindly, I know you’ve taken something but there’s still hope…voice I’d taught to everyone in the office when I did six months on the suicide hotline, and I addressed any attendant bad spirits.
I made what I thought was quite a generous offer to listen very carefully to their afterlife grievances and promised frank and sincere counseling.
That seemed to do the trick; the looming swarm of shadow-people was suddenly dispersed, obliterated as if in some bright Fiat Lux! accompanying my voice. If you don’t know what that means, some say it was the car God drove to get there in time for verse 1, line 3 of the Book of Genesis.
In this instance, I’m talking supernova. Big Bang. The triumph of Light Supreme over Eternal Darkness, accompanied by a flat metallic tick, a sound effect sublime in its straightforward, secondhand annunciation of the Kingdom of Heaven.
The shadows had utterly dispersed, banished to the corners at precisely the same instant as the primal click I’d experienced! If nothing else, here was a sturdy basis for religions of Gnostic binary austerity, I reasoned, imagining Sherlock Holmes doing clever diagrams in his head. The 1:2:3:4 rhythmic finger-pop that started so many songs.
In the thumb-and-forefinger snap of awakening, the pabitra mudra became a bebop count-in that made the house lights blaze.
At the heart of this cascading muddle of effect and cause and mystical speculation lay a simple reality; Luda had found an antique light switch—one of those round Bakelite domes with a lollipop-shaped metal toggle—which cunningly and with much consideration she’d then maneuvered to the “on” position so that we stood in a drably illumined hallway painted leaf green and pale mustard yellow.
It occurred to me that we hadn’t moved an inch since Christmas or last Saturday, stopped dead at the door of what I took at first to be an abandoned school classroom beyond the frosted pane.
Tiled walls. That’s usually a bad sign—was the best I could come up with. Makes you think of mad butchers, serial killers, torture camps…
Don’t say that!—she said, too late to stop me.
My recollections of that night remain as rapidly edited shaky cam footage of piled-up newspapers from decades gone by. Elections lost and won. Wars and weddings. Discarded headlines wrapped in bundles at the bottom of a long flight of stairs, stacked in the alcoves that lined a short corridor with a green door at the end, like in the song.
This incredible pileup of incident and detail happened to someone but surely not me?
It occurred to me again that we hadn’t moved since Christmas or last Saturday. We were stopped dead at the door of what I took at first to be an abandoned school classroom beyond the frosted pane.
Are you seeing this?
It occurred to me again.
* * *
—
Clip 7. I was witnessing green gloss paint, decaying over decades, throbbing with significance and portent. Not the faerie jade of the Celtic Otherworld—this was a 1950s hospital spinach.
What remained, what intensified to an in-held breath that went on too long, was a terrible impulse to hide from forces beyond all control.
It’s like in Equus—where the boy goes mad and mutilates the horses—I observed, lost in pop culture.
Luda shuddered. Frying on the egg-pan of her mind were frenzied collages of disfigurement and animal sacrifice, enacted by stripped puppets in Hell. The last thing she wanted was nihilistic humor. I kept on, secure in my conviction that a gallows grin was the best medicine..
It’s that—but with a pantomime cow. That’s my pitch, Mr. Spielberg!—I screeched. I was only trying to make her laugh, but I think I came over a bit demented.
Don’t open it—said Luda as I reached for the distempered brass knob.
Beyond the green door, though I don’t remember it opening, we found a pea-green and custard-yellow room; big, vacant. A lecture theater. Mission control.
The room had the feeling of somewhere you shouldn’t be but not scary—the second pill had lifted us above mere human concerns—we felt clear, hyper-aware, experiencing every subatomic nuance of this remarkable experience.
Imagine a schoolroom in summer’s limbo months. There’s that evocative thrill of trespass, but you wouldn’t want to be found at your desk by a prowling janitor; or think of when you were little and there was that recently vacated house, the kind that only pretends to be abandoned to lure you in. Hollow rooms without furniture except pianos, scrawling with the impending apprehension that any moment now, a door would open, and it would be too late to escape—it was all of that—as if we’d descended through memories into the world of dreams itself.
Is this like a film set?—Luda ventured.
Imagine a crime scene. To move at all is to disturb the dusts and the tape—and soon they’ll return.
The atmosphere thickened through Goth into positively primeval where our unnatural presence seemed to insinuate a crouched hidden intent, as though a leopard-thing from the ancestral dark had its greedy eyes on us, coiled to spring from cover behind the antiseptic mint gloss paint when we least expected it.
There was a worry that we might never find the door we’d come through. A worry we might never be sane again. I reassured her. What about Alice in Wonderland? This is like that but with rubber! She came back sane, didn’t she? I couldn’t put any money on that last bit and tried to dispel the sudden squall of seamy sexual feelings; me the degenerate headmistress leading another innocent unhinged child to the basement…
It’s a museum—I said. It’s like Churchill’s Bunker. It must be something from the War—I said.
And that sparked something. What if it’s his dungeon?—Luda theorized.
Sex dungeon—I nodded, clinging anxiously to the splintering driftwood of rationality. What else could it be? This is where he gets up to all sorts. High Court Judge. Top legal mind. It would be exactly like this, wouldn’t it?
Then I had a better idea; I think it’s just more of the art like upstairs. A creepy art installation.
Looking back, these were all good enough guesses. The place didn’t seem fixed. Depending on the angle, it could be one thing or another.
I mean, why would you have that in a dungeon? Are there people who get off on gradients and river valleys?
It was a question that made no sense even to me until I became aware that Luda was examining a map hanging on the wall.
Is this the spirit world?
I nodded.
I say hanging on the wall, but the map was the wall; six feet tall by twenty-five feet wide, it depicted a sprawling city not unlike Gasglow as an immense unfolded urban nervous system, pinned like hide on the walls of a municipal premises storeroom in the underworld, with its colored wiring for streets and flyovers, its capillaries and tributaries in the form of roads branching off into avenues, crescents, circuses. Its rivers and ponds opened up, stretched and pinned as a freaky anatomy lesson.
The detail, crystal clear in the jeweler’s magnifying lens of memory, was quite extraordinary, and there was even a bas-relief effect—with the little hills standing up from the surface as proud scar tissue. The rivers fingering forth from Mother Dare’s splashy roots thirty miles upriver cut tiny trenches no deeper than the grooves on a vinyl record.
You’d think a master jeweler made this—look at the little bits all moving…—I said, wandering in wonder.
And there, that master jeweler thing again, which is why I bring it back up. The map was something you’d see in display windows in the arcade—wedding-ring worlds of glittering diamond separating the light into planes.
I first extended my leather-gloved fingers to touch the map then withdrew, suddenly afraid that if I made contact whole city blocks would collapse in the real world, as a force unknown toppled the flyovers, snapped the bridges, and let the floods charge in.
Thereafter, I thought, I’d surely be hauled before a jury comprising history’s most sadistic and inhumane fiends.
Charged with Reckless Apocalypse, I’d pay the inevitable price for prompting wide-scale havoc and loss of life with a flippant flick of my false nails. I couldn’t take anything seriously. That was my problem. That was where I’d gone wrong.
The leering, lascivious, downright homicidal jury mocked me, as if I was some new arrival, thrown into the weird offenders’ wing.
It’s Gasglow—but it’s NOT.
Luda was correct: The map showed Gasglow but not; bigger, sprawling past the city’s recognized boundaries, to spread its mycelial threads in directions only sleepers recognize from dreams they’ve had…
Seen from a few steps back, I swear I saw what Jim Morrison was on about. The snake that was long, and old, hooded and tensed to strike as it writhed through the Dare valley to the sea.
The blue, winding river Dare divided the city into north and south; widening to the cobra fan of its head where it dislocated immense jaws as if to swallow the ocean whole. The river’s natural course was embroidered upon by more recent human interventions; abandoned docks and shipyards left traces chiseled out in deft right angles from the curving mother current.
