and Falling, Fly

In my midnight midtown apartment, the demon of despair regards me in the red wink of my answering machine. Adam called again while I was out. I watch the diabolical electric blinking. Modernity is keen to alert us to what we’ve missed: calls, turns, TV programs. The city is ablaze with missed connections. I pull the blackout drapes closed against mine: Maria, Evie, Adam . . .

The death that comes with each new day, the pulseless, breathless sleep of angels has shuttered my race in the sexless bed of coffins out of simple convenience. But shadow can always be found or made. This is not true of light. Darkness clings in the corners and insides of things, but with blackout drapes and a little planning, the modern vampire can make her entire home a tomb. Handy that. Since 1962, I have kept my stone coffin, with my shadow and my wings, at home in Ireland.

I meet the answering machine’s small, steady stare. “What do you do when God tells you no?” I ask. But it doesn’t answer me, so I undress for bed. We are all pitch-black in the belly and the lungs; light reaches no deeper in than our closed mouths and eyes. The blackness without and the night within, barred only by flesh, longs to merge, fold on fold, into itself, touching both sides of my senseless skin. No other light, no other thought reaches me, and the green blush of tonight’s absinthe is swallowed by blinking, red-eyed despair. Who am I to deny that demon’s desire?

Without my loophole, without even its quest to scaffold thought, and unable to escape even into tumbling madness, I must still fall. It’s who I am. All I have left is my truth. I liked the taste of it in my mouth tonight. I want to go home.

“Damn!” The water bath had just reached a hundred degrees, but the pounding on Dominic’s back door continued. He took a deep breath to calm himself, inhaling the familiar, pungent scent of developer and bleach. It was Paul, he was certain. The dogged postdoc would keep up the steady tattoo of fist-on-wood until Dominic came to the door. He looked balefully at the precise, ordered rows of tanks in his sink line, grunted, and marched up the basement stairs.

Dominic watched Weisel wind around Paul’s ankles. Even though he shared a back fence with Paul, the two neuroscientists never “hung out.” The sullen man appeared at Dominic’s back door several times a semester with a concern he would worry like a chew toy, growling and slobbering, but for the most part, they saw more than enough of each other in the lab. Dominic got himself a beer and allowed Paul, Weisel, and finally Hubel to follow him downstairs.

“Your basement is backwards,” Paul observed, squeezing himself through the darkroom’s narrow door. “The furnace is out there on its own, and the rest of the space is walled in.”

Dominic laughed and moved a large trash can full of rejected prints, film ends, and empty chemical packets outside the darkroom door. He pushed the stool from its place in front of the enlarger into the trash can’s empty spot, and Paul plopped down on it while the cats curled up before the metallic warmth of the exposed furnace.

In the brown shadows of the safelight, Dominic rechecked the water bath temperature and began loading film onto reels. He loved the smells and rituals of processing, the precise gestures and times, the slow discovery of what was hidden, but the darkroom itself was just a false front. Dominic refused to glance at the door in the back wall that led to his private lab. That, he wouldn’t show even to the cats.

Paul surveyed the darkroom’s interior—a study in utility over aesthetics. The small space was not drywalled, and blue electrical boxes capped with timers, dimmers, and switches clung to the bare studs like snails. Wires, tubing, and PVC pipe ran precisely, but exposed.

Dominic looked up from his reels and spindle rods. “Nope. I’m sure I’ve violated city codes all over the place. But I figure I know a thing or two about electrons. It’s safe.”

Dominic chuckled and set a timer. He placed his film into the first tank with precise, familiar movements. He would need to agitate it every few seconds, but he fixed Paul with a hard stare. Time to make the fat man ’fess up. “Why do you ask?”

“Like Europe? Maybe Ireland?” Paul’s irritating adolescent habit of curling his inflection up midsentence got more pronounced when he impressed himself with his own cleverness.

Dominic kept his eyes on the clock, counting off the resting and agitating time, waiting for the information to spill out of the man perched on his stool like pudding on a lollipop stick.

“Ireland is where Trinity is,” Paul observed in a conversational tone so tortured Dominic was grateful neuroscience required no acting. He said nothing. Paul jerked his sagging body straight. “Oh my God, are they recruiting you? I already know they’re after Dysart. . . .”

Paul executed a neat fade from frightened to affronted. “I pre-screen his correspondence for him. The faculty at Trinity’s Multisensory Cognition Lab has been trying to recruit Dysart since they got their fMRI machine. He’s considered the expert on fMRI localization on anatomical images, you know.”

“Yeah, you would.” Paul rolled his cow eyes heavenward. “But if they’ve gotten their mitts on a MEG scanner,” he pondered, “you’re the one pioneering an integrative fMRI-MEG approach—Oh God! You’re going to end up full faculty at Trinity and I’m going to spend the rest of my life counting neurons!” Paul made an anguished noise. “Is that why you’re going to Dublin?”

“I’ll bet he said I was going to Ireland.” Dominic transferred the film to the first wash tank and turned around to study his almost-apoplectic audience. Dominic didn’t like to lie, but Madalene had made it very clear that the primary condition of her additional grant to MIT was the secrecy of Dominic’s Irish fieldwork.

“You’re taking vacation?” he spluttered. “You never take vacation. And a whole month? That’s”—he groped angrily for a word that captured his anxiety and suspicion—“weird.”

Dominic moved the film into the fixer. Paul was all cortex—no primitive territorial awareness, no love of battle, but his flaccid body registered as a physical encroachment in Dominic’s private space and tweaked a limbic violence in him. Paul sat stolidly outside Dominic’s holy of holies, scheming how to position himself for the coveted Senior Researcher title in the event that Dominic accepted a nonexistent offer elsewhere. He and Peter had been out-maneuvering each other over that feather for years. Paul sat up so abruptly he slipped off the stool.

Dominic turned back to hide a chuckle. Paul didn’t move quickly often. It was a good thing. “I don’t know,” he said. Dysart had asked him which of the Ps he thought should take over his teaching duties for the next month. Dominic had promised to decide, but hadn’t yet. Peter was good with students, but enjoyed his office hours with the female ones just a little too much. Paul hated people.

“No.” Paul clambered off the stool. “I should look those over now, before I go, if you don’t mind. You’ve got a printer, don’t you?” He was reaching for the doorknob. Dominic’s hand closed hard over the spongy wrist. “Ow!” Paul whined. “What did you do that for?”

“You’re fine,” Dominic said, lifting the film into the final wash tank. He had dodged the Ireland question, but his laptop was on the wrong side of the darkroom’s back door.

“I have never seen you with that bag beyond arm’s reach.” The flaps of Paul’s face quivered in agitation. “What the hell is going on? You’re taking a month off. You’re forgetting your laptop. Are you sick?”

Dominic sighed and hung the film to dry. It wouldn’t matter what he said now. Or what he did next. When he came back from Ireland, everyone on campus, with the possible exception of Dysart, who had been told a portion of the truth by Madalene, would believe he had returned from inpatient treatment.

“God damn it!” Paul roared, then clamped a meaty hand against the rolling flesh of his face. “God damn it,” he whispered. “I’ll wager your five-million dollar grant that’s Peter at your door! Isn’t that just like him! The rumors of your vacation just came out today and already that fuckwad is over here, sniffing around for an advantage while you’re away in rehab. I don’t want him to see me.” Paul set off through the back door at a heavy scurry and squeezed through the fence into his overgrown backyard.

Dominic checked his watch. He’d missed his next dose by half an hour. He knocked a capsule from the bottle in his pocket and swallowed it as he reached the front door. He had less than a week to prepare for this trip, and he was running out of time. He was confident he could get packed, fill enough capsules, and secure his lab before then. But he was equally certain that no amount of time could ready him to face the old man and his godforsaken hotel. The thought dropped a cold iron fist of terror into his gut. Dominic swallowed hard and opened the door to begin Peter’s scene in the afternoon’s farce.

You’re going to Hell, I psycast, but her mortal ears can’t hear me. “Yes,” I say aloud, “we all are.” The flight is JFK to Shannon, but the idiot traveler beside me just grins.

This is the closest I get to penetration—art, music—the frisson shock of the perfect new. The first chords of Undertow twisting into me, Van Gogh’s riotous blue night. I turn up the electric Stravinsky, and look down on the ocean. We are traveling into time, burning two hours for every one I endure beside this babbling, cursed child of Greece. I see them all the time, these bastard half children of stories and mortals, trapped between worlds, the genetic lineage of myth reasserting itself across the inextricable ages. Helen of Troy is born the socialite child of a partial Zeus mated to half of a swan-loving Leda, the mythic DNA in each of them dormant until they breed and damn their offspring with its expression. It would be easier for her if she understood, finally, who she is, but I can’t be bothered.

“. . . and then we may go west, Galway, Sligo . . .” The Persephone beside me prattles on, flying east into the night. Does she think this trip out of Hell will be any different? “. . . see Yeats country . . .”

“Olivia Adies,” I say and finally meet her inquisitive gaze. I could take her home to Hell as my captive wife. The bare desire in my smoldering eyes silences her at last and I look instead into the ocean under me.

From this height, the waves form black hills, motionless and dead, but I know otherwise. Distance makes a topographical map of the ocean—a snapshot of the waveforms as they stand in a moment, frozen in time. But I know how movement below—and even on—the surface, unseen at elevation, is definitive at sea. The water roils, and the waves rise or vanish. You cannot map the sea.

Years ago, I sailed across these heaving, howling waters in the soft, feminine arms of my closest-to-love, my most happy days. In my darkest night, I fly above them in push-button electricity. The ocean is unchanging as I am. And as bottomless and cold.

Thousands of gas flames springing, without intervening glass or metal fixtures, from the naked stone walls lit the vast, cavernous space with a flickering blue-orange glow and gave the impression that the rock itself was burning. Dominic would have liked to investigate, but his jetlag-eroded attention kept being torn and refocused by the sheer, enormous scale of Hell.

Beautiful, doll-like women and dark, brooding men flocked across the rich, carpeted floor, or stood sniffing the air. They spread like nightmare crows around him in the foyer and above him on the sloped balconies that spiraled inward like an inverted conch shell toward the vast empty space of L’Otel Matillide’s central hall.

That the ruined stones of Cashel stood stolidly in tower and spire somewhere above them all became unthinkable to Dominic. The weight of all the earth bore down on him despite the sailing brass buttresses and ornately wrought, cantilevered platforms. He looked up. Graceful folded metal webs of glass and carpet, brass and hewn stone flew into a slowly closing dome unreachably high above him. Jetlag and low blood sugar added to a vertigo so overwhelming Dominic shut his eyes.

Just before crossing the county line into Tipperary, Dominic had stopped for the night. From his window at the bed-and-breakfast, he had looked out over the rooftops of a small, remote Irish town and marveled at the climbing vines that draped every structure in flowers. In this land, Nature aggressively reclaimed her own from any incursions by the work of merely human hands. Dominic was determined not to be so swallowed.

He drew himself up to his full height, testing his own strength, closing his fists into hard rockets of compressed anger. Already, nothing made sense. Corsets and hoopskirts swayed beside prowling latex and dog collars. There was nothing extreme or profane enough to elicit censure in this great hall of the damned. Dominic was the only ordinary, unremarkable man, eccentric in jeans and a jacket. Even so, he felt no shadow of judgment in this alien den of freedom and perversion. Normal was invisible. A hot prickle of shame snaked across the back of his neck. He was the outsider here.

He was curious about the light. It seemed to have no central source, and gave a strange, live quality to even the shadows. Dominic touched the camera pocket of his laptop bag unconsciously with fingers that itched for the F-stop dial. The light was so diffuse he could probably shoot straight up into the gigantic globe of brass-veined glass that capped the space. He wandered toward the center of the lobby, looking up, wanting to frame a shot from dead-center below the dome.

Dominic’s eyes, uncomfortable being held by Gaehod’s keen gaze, scanned the hall. A vast network of corridors wound through every artery of the hotel’s Byzantine complex of madness to spill into this central meeting space, each marked with a sign above the passageway.

“I believe you’ll be impressed, my old friend,” Gaehod beamed. “We’ve made quite a few updates. There’s a computer terminal in every room now. Your eight vitae, as well as what we had of the one in progress have been scanned and put online. No need to face the scriptorium again. Your most recent incarnation date is your log-i n. You just pick a password, and jot down what you’ve been doing since you visited here last. At your leisure of course.”

“No, of course not.” The innkeeper gestured toward a delicate Victorian settee on the far wall. “Let’s have a seat, my friend.” Dominic followed the old man’s graceful back to a discreet sofa masked by a potted fruit tree that flourished strangely in the firelight. Here they could talk unseen. Nobody noticed Dominic, but Gaehod, in his subdued pinstripes and graying auburn hair, drew everyone’s eyes.

As the old man settled his coattails with a magician’s elegant flick and seated himself, Dominic watched tiny ball bearings in the settee’s legs spin down into channels that scored the floor. He had forgotten the bizarre ecology of Hell, where each expenditure of energy is harvested. He shuddered and plunged in. “Gaehod, I’ve come back here to study—and I believe to help—your, ah . . . the hotel’s guests?”

“Fine, your children. I know you believe you’re helping them with your record keeping and storytelling, diaries for the reborn, dances for the Bacchae, but I am working on more concrete ways to improve these people’s lives.

“You told me once that I would return here when my desire for truth outweighed my fear of it. I’m back. I would like to administer some standard psychiatric tests to your . . . children, and interview a few of them. I have arranged to have some detailed chemistry work-ups done, particularly on the vampires, and by incredible good luck, there’s a magneto-encephalography lab in Dublin. They are willing to let us use their fMRI machine for a half-dozen brain scans.”

Dominic suppressed a shudder, tired from travel and irritable with fear. “Actually, the connection of body and mind is exactly what I’m interested in. What pathologies in thought can be traced to abnormalities in brain structure . . .”

“Damn it!” Dominic sprang to his feet, his voice too loud in the underground birdcage, but the innkeeper did not move, did not startle, and the resplendent clientele decorously ignored the agitated man by the potted plants. Gaehod patted the seat beside him.

“I can’t keep a journal.” Dominic’s voice was fierce. “Certainly not here. Not for you.” Gaehod’s assigned exercise was an absolute trigger for visual and auditory seizures. He remembered its iterations in completely unacceptable ways. He remembered pages beneath his drying brush, scratching quill, and flowing ballpoint. He remembered its vellum and paper, hundreds of years filled with the same flat script. “It almost broke me last time.”

“We are all broken, Dominic, all of us—cursed, or damned. Our fragile minds cannot span the paradox. We wish to stand out and fit in, to be unique but not alone, one with God and still ourselves.”

“That just means we’re not done. Gaehod, let me come back and study your children. If I can find a physiological source for their feelings of damnation, maybe I can cure them. Think what it would mean to free them.”

The innkeeper’s eyes pierced Dominic’s for a brief but unnerving moment, in which Dominic held the fleeting conviction that nothing could be hidden. “Very well, my son. Register and update your vitae, and you may have unfettered access to every hall and quarter. I can, of course, give only my permission. Any subject you select must also give his or her own informed consent. We do not lie amongst the damned.”

Gaehod froze as though summoned. His keen eyes shone eerily, and Dominic, even through his agitation, recognized the signs of the entranced. Did Gaehod have auditory hallucinations?

A warm smile creased the old man’s features. “I’m afraid it is impossible. Legends is a charming establishment—I know the innkeeper well—but you cannot work here and stay on the surface. You must sign into your room or stay in our nonresident rooms. But they will not meet your needs, I fear. Limbo is comfortable enough, but you would be unable to . . .”

The typical manhole cover in Cashel boasts an ornate Celtic tri-spiral bordered by knot work. I have come to loathe these ancient Irish glyphs for being such fitting symbols of modern Irish inefficiency. Surface navigation here, no matter what lies the map tells, is never a matter of intersecting roads and steep-angled turns. The only approach is oblique, a slowly closing spiraling-in on a destination.

The driver I hired to bring me from Dublin traced his country’s arcane pathways with native contempt, but I feigned sleep during most of the twisting, turning drive. His youthful hunger made me itchy. The surfaces of my peasant’s body prickled as they paled to match his nationalist preference for fair-skinned girls.

The eyes of men, the smiles of women crawl across my flesh like maggots. The woman on the plane smiled larvae. The driver leered worms. I told him my name was Olivia Patrick and paid him cash, slipping a fingertip along the outside of his hand. Without hunger, I sucked the nicotine and whiskey blood from beneath my unbreakable nail as I watched him drive off. He would believe he had a paper cut, if he noticed the scratch at all.

I spent what remained of the day searching the forsaken roads for the one manhole cover upon which serpents form the twisting border knots. I found it on the fourth of five lanes which terminate at the base of the towering limestone acropolis known, with typical Irish understatement, as “the rock” of Cashel.

I have returned to it now, at night, a dull matte bruise on the shimmering blackness of wet street. It does not glint or reflect. It is as invisible as the black sky, invisible as I am, standing rigorously casual nearby. I push an organic smell from the leaves that stick to the boundary of metal and asphalt with the toe of my boot. No need for expensive shoes now.

At four in the morning, the narrow streets of Cashel twine solidly silent. Certain, at last, that no one is watching me, and swiftly casual no more, I drop to my knees, shift the black metal sewer disc, and drop without a sound into the darkness. I crouch beneath, grating it—too loudly—across the asphalt. It clangs into place above my head like an inverse halo, absorbing all the light. Dark envelops me like water, touching every surface all at once. I am black as you are wet, diving into a summer lake, as suddenly and as totally immersed. Drying out takes longer.

I am less than an hour away from the old man. Underground now, I can almost sense him. I stand inside an iron pipe, metallic like blood and as cold. I touch the walls with the white tips of my fingers. Revolving, I explore the rough surfaces until I find a colder vein of silver. This I trace down the wall to where it bubbles into a spherical indentation. I grip the key I wear on my left wrist with my right hand and slot it into the crevice, pushing until my flexed wrist presses against the stone. Deep in the rock, I hear the mechanical whir of lockwork come to life. The sound radiates from the insertion point like fractures across glass. Reluctantly, I lean my scarred shoulders against the wall. It gives without a creak or whisper, easing open against the force of my senseless body pressing into it. Not much farther now.

A narrow stone pathway slopes down into a damp, subterranean darkness. I trail a hand across the rough walls, stepping down and down, looking for the dull metallic faces, eyes shrouded, blind and mute, which mark the way toward the hotel and the old man. A brass gargoyle grimaces. His tarnished automaton’s eerie face contorts in greeting. I turn left. The underground damp travels up my fingers, shivers along the bones of my arm, and worms its way into me like terror.

Will Gaehod be happy to see me after so many years? No, I don’t care. His buried hotel is the closest thing I have to an ancestral home. He has to take me in. I will sign his fucking registry and trade him my last angelic blessing for the freedom of being fully damned. My fingers brush another contorted face whose tiny, machine teeth snap at me. I turn toward it, searching for the hidden door. My fingers crawl the surface, my cheek against the moist chill, legs braced, for the subtle flinch in the stone. I push my body against the naked, scraped rock.

Nothing shifts, and the very immobility shivers me against the implacable stone. The iciness seeps, stone to flesh, into me, in tiny quivering tendrils, melding with me, absorbing me, nerveless, hard, and creeping. I begin to shudder in frissons down my arms and up my legs until the shaking in my frame translates to the wall itself and, with a low rumbling resonance, the stone vibrates with me and dissolves. The old man might have engineered this new-style threshold just for me, but of course not. He has no way of knowing I am on my way home.

I walk the ancient tunnels now, not the temporary, shifting labyrinths of mingled path and sewer intended to misdirect and confuse the uninitiated. No, I am headed straight toward the belly of the rock, straight down, straight to him, still shivering.

The brass elevator-call button houses a glowing red fire trapped in glass. I push it without fear or hope. I have come back to surrender. Crawling, like a wounded warrior who expends his last, failing strength to drag himself from the field of battle to die in the shadow of the medic’s tent, I have come home.

A single word crowns the door, but I can’t read it. I memorize the Greek sigils as I wait, and step into the elevator car when the doors slide apart. My only goal, my last effort, has been to reach this place and turn myself over to the tender cruelties of my sisters and the old man who will surely be waiting for me on the other side of these elevator doors when they open.

Bright metal and firelight shine inside the elevator capsule. All four walls look the same, two glittering polished brass panels sealed with a black gasket at the center. There’s nothing to push, no buttons or dials, no speaker grille or telephone receiver. I listen instead to the machinery of the thing, gears engaging, cogs spinning. I revolve, looking for, but not finding, myself reflected, rippling golden in the gleaming surfaces. But I am being watched. It’s a familiar awareness, the sense that I am being scanned, but for once without the attendant subtle shift in my shape and hair. My body is not reforming to please the eyes that touch me. I am only being seen. Seen for what I am—damned.

I am a vampire. The carriage moves imperceptibly. I am the Undead. I cannot sense the direction it carries me, but I know I’m moving. I am desire without hope. The elevator carries me, but more than that, it encases me, senses me, transports me. I am impulse without promise. And although nothing changes, I know that I have reached my destination. I am instinct without life. All four metal doors slide apart soundlessly to become four shimmering lamp posts in a lush, Victorian salon. I am home.

A brass capsule rose, twisting from the center of the reception hall. It corkscrewed from the earth’s core, to deliver a woman onto the carpeted floor. Her black hair, sunglasses, and vinyl coat made it seem as though pale cheeks, forehead, and jaw had spiraled, disembodied, through the floor, and for a moment Dominic froze. Had full-blown hallucinations joined his repertory of dysfunction?

Gaehod swept up to the apparition, and as she bent to embrace the old man, the supernatural illusion passed. Dominic saw simply a sleek and stunning woman whose pale lips barely moved in the innkeeper’s ash and auburn hair.

“Down here, yo.” A nicotine-stained hand waved from beneath the sofa where Dominic and Gaehod had sat. From under the drooping upholstery, a disturbingly familiar face pillowed its unshaven cheek on the carpet.

“No.” Dominic straightened and returned his attention to the slender, latex-clad woman standing with Gaehod. Sin-black hair and virginal skin, the newcomer offered such a stunning exemplum of her type that Dominic registered a grudging admiration.

“Hell’s full of gorgeous girls,” the ruined voice croaked from under the sofa. “And they’re easy, most of them. Fucked up and angry and ready to work out their insecurities on your cock, if you know how to play them.” Dominic looked down with distaste at the tumble of legs and hair rolling out from under the sofa. “But even by our standards, that girl’s awesome.”

“Sure you are. Hell’s the only game going that isn’t about location.” The emaciated man fished a pair of goggles from the pocket of a filthy bathrobe and fitted them over his stringy hair. “That’s better,” he said looking up at Dominic. “So you’re a shrink, eh?”

The tilting man on the ground righted himself by sticking his scrawny legs straight out in front of him, a dirty tube sock hanging on one foot, the other one bare. “You’re not a shrink, but you want to do brain scans and shit? How come?”

Dominic wasn’t aware of staring at the striking woman talking with Gaehod until she glanced across the room at him. He scanned everything he knew about chronobiology, but couldn’t find anything to account for the sudden spike in heart rate he suffered when their eyes met. Was it possible that beauty alone had physiological repercussions? She was extraordinary, with an eerie grace to her movements that entranced him. Then Gaehod took her black-gloved hand in his, somehow both soft and strong, and led her across the room.

Exhausted, Dominic sat on the little settee and rubbed his sleep-starved eyes. The air around Gaehod’s newest conquest had seemed to shimmer, giving her a momentary illusion of ghostly wings behind her slender back. Dominic needed to get some rest before he ended up babbling on the ground beside his new acquaintance.

“You wanna scan my brain?” Craning his neck over his sagging shoulder, the dissipated ruin eyed Dominic through thick bronze lenses. What flesh was visible behind his goggles, hair, and stubble was pale and bruised. Everything about him, from his poor muscle tone and slurred speech to his disheveled bathrobe and smell of gin, indicated a state of chronic physical crisis, but he was still vaguely, irritatingly familiar to Dominic. At least he triggered no taste aura and no memory-like seizure.

Dominic stifled a grunt of rage. Gaehod was a menace to the mental health of anyone he got close to: this wreck of a man on the ground beside him, that intriguing, beautiful woman he’d just led off. Moral outrage twisted in Dominic’s empty stomach.

“Gaehod has taught you to think of yourself as cursed,” he said with a calm held between gritted teeth, “but you don’t have to think of yourself that way. You can learn to challenge that kind of thinking, to interact with more compassion toward yourself.”

Dominic was here to do Madalene’s research, but there was nothing saying he couldn’t do a little evangelizing on his own while he was underground. Gaehod wouldn’t like it, but if Dominic registered, there would be nothing to stop him from reaching out to people like this poor, muddled man and that captivating proto-vampire. He could study and influence. Observe and persuade.

“Damn, I can’t imagine what that would be like—to feel all squeaky clean.” Confusion played over the rock star’s lax face like shadows over mud. He hiccupped. “Must be nice. It’s not me though, I’m cursed all right. Everything looks like bullshit to me.” Alyx hugged the halves of his bathrobe closed across his emaciated chest. “I can’t believe in anything, so I got no meaning. And I can’t do shit about it. No power.”

He tightened the frayed bandanna that served as his filthy bathrobe’s makeshift belt and curled up on the floor. “The curse of modernity, Gaehod calls it. Meaninglessness and powerlessness—the ‘twin horsemen our alienated and depressed apocalypse.’ ” Alyx chuckled. “Gaehod says that if Armageddon is headed our way, it’s all going to end in a shrug. Smart fucker, that one.”

I watch the beauty in the gaslight. The damned swarm in elegant trios and couples around me chatting and laughing. Graceful brass beverage carts circulate smoothly in the floor tracks, their whirring gyros easily correcting for the shifting weight as full glasses are lifted and emptied ones returned. The perpetual movement of the damned and the machines that serve them soothes me.

I recognize the touch of the old man’s eyes from the elevator. Now they reach into mine, searching. I had drawn myself to standing tall and proud within the gilded box, but in the open space of the lobby, his clear eyes pull me, bending toward him, into the stooped embrace the healthy young bestow on the infirm aged. The momentary taste of my smoky homeland makes me close my burning eyes.

Gaehod’s flawless hand, with long fingers tapering to perfect teardrop-shaped matte gold nails, takes my arm. He’s speaking softly to me, but my attention wanders over the eddying beauty of the hall. But a dam of stillness in its unending stream arrests my lazy survey. A solitary man stands across the lobby from me. He’s tall, and so still amidst the commotion that I suffer a momentary vertigo. Eyes, blue as a gas flame, in the tangled heat of a redhead’s complexion—purple, russet, pure pale white—meet mine. I taste, for the first time since I mated the devil with the blinking red eye, the shiver of hunger.

Gaehod’s graceful hand holds open the arched door of the Registry Turret and I step alone into its small, circular reach. The book is ancient. The ink is red. I can no longer lie or hide.

I slip the waiting rings onto my left thumb. The first one slides all the way to the base, while the second one stays on the top joint. I connect the delicate metal hosing that bridges them at their jewel’s domed center, and stick my thumb-tip into the inkwell. There’s a low clicking as the rings’ bands begin to spin. I watch the stone blush deep red. When the rings are still and silent once more, I take them off and nestle them back into their velvet box. I dip the waiting black quill into the inkwell, and inscribe my one, true name, “Olivia,” on Gaehod’s magic list with my crimson ichor.

The old man inclined his rust-and-ice-crowned head. “I thought you did not believe in such things,” he said, rising. “Would you like to meet her? She’ll be at Pandemonium tonight, I should think.”

“Good morning, Alyx.” Gaehod beamed down at the heap of fabric and bone. “Pandemonium is our exquisite and divine retreat,” he said to Dominic, “a place to gather, to debate and dance.”

“It’s a kick-ass bar.” Alyx said, pulling himself up. He stood swaying behind Hell’s dapper innkeeper. “All kinds of girls there, if you know what I mean.” He tried to elbow the old man in the ribs, but missed and staggered against Dominic.

Dominic hefted the reeling man onto the sofa behind them. The momentum of Alyx’s fall was redirected through the sofa’s legs rather than being absorbed and wasted. Distant cogs whirred. “Gaehod, I’m willing to register, but I’m not interested in bringing my life story up to date for you.”

“Dominic, what threat could writing pose to you? Ideas are not so contagious, my friend, that mere exposure can infect the well indoctrinated—I mean inoculated. Damnation is not viral.”

“Then how could you be at risk here?” Gaehod rolled Alyx onto his narrow back and lifted his lolling head onto the arm of the sofa, sending shivers of black metal balls cascading into tracks. “Young Alyx here is making himself sick trying to change his perception with anything he can get his hands on”—Gaehod tucked the hem of Alyx’s stained bathrobe around the frail body—“while you worry that simply being here might alter yours without your consent?”

“It’s not that.” Dominic shrugged and followed the old man away from the unsleeping wreck of man on the sofa. “I’d just rather live on dry land than in a swamp. This place is not conducive to health.”

Dominic’s jaw gripped. There was no way Gaehod could know he was self-medicating. “I have a strong physiological constitution, if that’s what you’re implying,” he said icily.

“Precisely. Which is why you can allow your curiosity to lead you, even into Hell, for answers.” Gaehod beamed. “I think you will not be disappointed. Come to Pandemonium tonight, and I promise I will help you.”

“She would be an ideal subject for your research, I should think. And she’s newly returned, just as you are, and likely to be at Pandemonium tonight as well. But I am afraid, Dominic, that it is a very exclusive club.”

“Lead on.” But they had already arrived. Gaehod opened an arched door for Dominic, but did not follow him into the room. It was no larger than a closet, but perfectly round. On a podium, in the center, a massive book, a scalpel, and fountain pen waited. Despite everything he knew about self-mutilation, Dominic picked up the blade with untrembling hands and opened the cephalic vein of his left hand. He positioned the precise cut over the brass-rimmed bone pot on the podium and looked away from it. The room appeared to have no ceiling, reaching upward infinitely. If he could scale the walls, he would arrive, not on an Irish street, not atop the ancient ruin, but in the sky itself, among the stars, in Heaven. Dominic scowled. Already his imagination was becoming tainted in this place. Despite the calm and confidence he felt, he was in grave danger.

He mashed a gauze pad over the incision and pressed it against his thigh to apply pressure. “Never again,” he whispered to the boundless ceiling before he picked up the fragile glass fountain pen and dipped it in the bone inkwell. The weathered page before him bore a list of names in handwriting too similar to his. Shambhu, Bel-nirari, Gnith Cas, Antonius Musa, Huáng Zōngxī, Venerio lo Grato, Ambrose Wellesley, Nat Love. He signed on the last line: Dominic O’Shaughnessy.