The Mysteries

Amber presses forward in torn dress and muddy boots.

Never again, she tells herself.

No more.

 

It had been just another night in the bright, dark place. Just another ghastly fumble under the pulsing strobe. Just another sickening tangle with another unlikely lover. The last. Now she ran for her life through the sheet rain and ghosts of trees. Flashback images poured from her shorted mind, to project themselves on the rain-wall.

 

Last night and too many nights before. Pills and vomiting, too-bright lights and kisses that taste like dust. So many parties. So few conversations.

 

She hated it. But if she didn’t go…

A moan of wind and rain lifted Amber’s hair as she ran. This might have been fun, the Hallowe’en Frightfest.  October 31^st; deserted house in the woods; come as a dead person – she had come in her own clothes, which everyone agreed was really cool; elite few only. She had been among the elite. A rare honour. Her popularity must have increased: her plan had been a success. Yet more images swept from her, out onto the night.

 

Eleven years old, a girl with unkempt brown hair and wide, ecstatic eyes reads ‘The Magicians’ at her desk. It flies out of her hands. She looks up to see a pretty, sharp-faced girl in gold earrings flicking roughly through it. ‘God!’, she spits, ‘She’s a witch! Angela! Hey Angela! Everyone! Come and see, Amber’s a witch!’

She reads with relish to the gathered crowd. ‘Lord of evil, thou who dost reward our sins and heinous…’ this word mispronounced ‘…and heinous vices, Satan, it is thou whom we adore…’

The class laughs horribly. ‘It’s just a story!’ shouts Amber over the snorts and brays. ‘That’s just…it’s just a conversation! It’s out of context! Listen! How it starts… “They were in a cab jolting along the Rue de Vaugirard”. It’s just a…’

‘Witch! Witch! Witch! Witch! Witch!’

      Amber feels a tightening around the throat as torn pages float out of the window onto the newly-cut grass.

 

The projection faded. What a choice she had. To be her or to be them. The Frightfest, which should have been at least a little exciting, had been the same as every night preceding it. Another day in the time-loop: same night, different setting. The lights and the darkness. Writhing bodies, this time made up like corpses. Corpse entwined with corpse. How many corpses can I snog in one night? Corpses throwing up in the hall. Corpses with their make-up running, crying on the stairs.

 

She was far enough away now, although the heavy beat still pulsed in her head. Still running, she screamed, loud and long. ‘I’m Amber!’, she shouted over the rain and wind. ‘Amber! Amber! I’m Amber…’

She fell. The ground was soft, scratchy and wet under her hands and knees. ‘I’m Amber,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m Amber…what are you?’

She was addressing a large mound of earth, covered in sodden Autumn leaves. There was a hole in it – almost a cave – quite large enough for a small person to crawl through. She wiped the rain and tears out of her eyes. Why not? Being buried alive would be no more tedious than this. It could be a refreshing change. So long since I’ve had an adventure.

 

Amber crawled into the hole. It smelled of earth and spices, of decay, and of the musk of animals. On and on she crawled, surprised that it reached so far underground. She did not know of an animal that would make such a hole for itself. A badger, maybe? However, after she had crawled for some time, the space seemed to expand until it was large enough to comfortably walk. Amber’s heart pounded. It was moist, musty and dark, but not unpleasantly so. Suddenly she stopped. She strained her eyes at a point somewhere in the distance. She was sure she had seen, just for a moment, a flickering light. Yes, there it was again, brief and dim, but undeniably real. She began to walk again. 

 

The light she had seen belonged to a primitive-looking sconce, barely more than a flaming torch inserted into a hole in the wall. As she walked on, more sconces appeared on either side of the tunnel. Then, she stopped. The tunnel ended as abruptly as it had begun. Amber was faced with a wall of earth, rich and moist and alive with roots. She felt bereft. Petulantly she pounded the wall, and was surprised when it gave a little under her fists. She hit it some more. A small hole formed.

 

Now Amber dug with a fierce fervour. In her black cocktail dress, shredded by branches and thorns in the wood, she scrabbled as a burrowing creature, all claws and sleek fur and blind, black eyes. She was still half-blinded with her zeal to dig when strong hands clasped her arms and pulled her bodily through the hole she had made. 

 

It took some time to adjust to the new light, and to the new reality she had penetrated. The room was huge and every sound vibrated through the walls’ tender roots. Like the earthen corridor, the walls were lined with sconces, but that was by far the least surprising thing. For a sumptuous tune that was not a tune chimed through the air, and the hall was filled with people. Or nearly-people. Some were partly invisible. Some were skeletal, retaining the merest suggestion of flesh. Some looked badly-drawn, scribbled by someone who knew what people ought to look like only in theory. Some declared their presence only by preserving the play of light which fell on non-existent skin. All were masked. All were dancing.

 

Dazed and mystified, yet somehow not scared, Amber now looked up into the face – the mask – of the one who had lifted her through the hole. Waist-length pale red hair surrounded a white mask that entirely covered the figure’s face. On one side, a single black tear, stretched slightly as though by Dali, streaked down the bone-white surface. The figure wore a simple white gown. A woman, no more than a small, delicate-boned woman, yet she had lifted Amber like a flower. Amber noticed that the woman was not, like her companions, incomplete or shadowy. Indeed, she herself felt foggy and indistinct in comparison. This woman was, somehow, more real, more actual, more there than anything she had ever seen.

 

‘Amber,’ a voice began, ‘You have come to join us.’

 

Amber stared around her for the source of the voice, but soon realised it had emerged from the red and white lady standing before her. Silly, really. She had expected the mask’s lips to move.

‘I came here by accident,’ answered Amber, though she was not sure whether the woman expected an answer. If she answered, it implied a question, and she suspected – with a dull ache of portent – that what she had heard was no question.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘How do you know who I am?’

There was a slow pause. ‘It is my business to know who enters my domain. It is my lot to know. I…know…’

Amber waited for several seconds to hear what the woman knew, but apparently she had forgotten – or the sentence was already completed. She decided to change the subject.

‘These people…they’re…?’

‘Dead,’ spoke the masked woman.

‘But they’re dancing.’

‘I am often abroad in the Middle World. I pick up these customs, and pass them on.’

‘But a masquerade? Isn’t that…well, isn’t it rather an old-fashioned custom…I mean, these days?’

‘I pass on that which it pleases me to pass on.’

The soft tones had not changed, but at this Amber knew, as she knew she was alive, that she must ask no more.

‘Come,’ said the woman, ‘Let us dance.’

Amber had not known how to dance, yet in the pale woman’s arms she knew. They swept around the earthen floor like fleshly visitors to a dream, and as they danced, they spoke.

‘My lover rejoices at your presence,’ said the woman.

Amber looked around for a glimpse of anyone who could possibly be this woman’s mate. ‘Who is…’

‘Breathe in,’ said the woman.

Amber breathed in the heavy scent of bittersweet decay.

‘That,’ said the woman, ‘is my lover.’

 

Then they danced on, silently weaving between the faded ghosts, who revelled in the dance. As they swept past her, they plied her with food and strange, bitter drinks. She took all she could, ecstatic, abandoned, ravished by strangeness in this sweet, dark world. Then, abruptly, the music ended and the dance stopped.

‘You must decide now. Would you go or stay?’

The question seemed ridiculous. Of course Amber wanted to stay. She said so.

‘Very well. Eat, then. A gift, from the garden.’

In the delicate, long-boned hand lay twelve ruby pomegranate seeds. Pomegranate seeds…she was remembering something. Something she had read too long ago…yes! She knew!

‘I…don’t know if I should…’

The woman’s face darkened behind the mask. To Amber it was all too perceptible. ‘You come into our world, accept our hospitality, partake of our food and our wine, you would dance with Persephone and breathe Hades into your mortal lungs, you ask to be allowed to stay, and now you dare say you doubt?’

Amber did not feel wronged. She felt in her every atom the justice of Persephone’s words. Yet she was still afraid.

Persephone touched her shoulder, not roughly but with authority. ‘You know what you truly wish,’ she said.

 

Amber thought about her life.

 

      A half-nude man sits on the edge of the bed. ‘It’s not that,’ he says, ‘Last night was really special to me too, but I just can’t handle a relationship right now. Look, I’ll ring you, ok?’

 

      A young girl with unkempt brown hair – now somewhat tamed – trips a plain girl in the corridor. The girl looks up, and her injured eyes are just like her own.

 

      Amber presses forward in torn dress and muddy boots. Never again, she tells herself. No more.

 

      Steeling herself, she took a breath and ate. She felt the room smile, warmly and hazily. She felt Persephone’s smile, surreal, super-real, behind her white-bone mask. ‘Now,’ said Amber, ‘Why don’t you show me your face?’

      Persephone smiled again. ‘Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth,’ she said.

‘Not me,’ Amber murmured. ‘Never again. No more.’