City of Dark Magic (16 page)

TWENTY-ONE

B
ig whoop
, thought Sarah with more than a little disappointment. She checked her watch—fifteen minutes had passed after swallowing the toenail-shaped pill, and she felt nothing except boredom.
All I ever do on drugs is fall asleep.
It had been like that every time she had tried to alter her consciousness. Sarah had come to the conclusion that she was not malleable—drugs just didn’t work on her. Even at the dentist, she simply clenched her fists and told them to go ahead and drill because anything they gave her just made her groggy.

She had her nose, that was enough. And her ears.

Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, but then sat bolt upright, a feeling of panic suddenly rising in her chest. Her head was vibrating, like a cerebral earthquake, and then all of her senses felt strange. Her vision blurred, and sounds seemed far away but too close all at once. She had vertigo, and the touch of the coverlet under her hand was rough and painful. Worst of all was the onslaught of a stomach-churning stench.

Sarah stood up, but as she did, the dark room began to fill with sounds, and light, and people.
So many people
. The outlines of their bodies, faint at first, began to sharpen and solidify. She tried to push back into the corner, afraid of suffocating. How could so many people fit into a single room? She panted, terrified of the swelling noise and crowd.

It’s the drug, it’s the drug
, she told herself, but she began to hyperventilate, and tried to push through the bodies to the door. Pushing turned out not to be necessary. The people—
there were too many
—were not corporeal—she could walk through them. But their vaporous forms crackled with sparking energy, like touching hundreds of light sockets, and now the sound of their voices all talking, shouting, crying, laughing at once was intolerable. The smell, too, was as if a thousand years of smells were condensed into one reek. Her nose was overwhelmed and this more than anything made her feel crushed, suffocated, even as she realized nothing was crushing her except her own panic. She rolled into a fetal position, closed her eyes, and covered her nose, then opened her eyes slowly. In the hurricane of overlapping people, like a hundred movies being projected in the room at once, all of which had the volume turned up high, she suddenly singled out one man, in chains, sitting on the floor next to her. He was dirty, and covered with scabs and open sores. His hair crawled with lice. She could hear screams, and she forced her eyes away from the man in chains to another man, dressed in rags, who was, Sarah realized in horror, holding down a young girl and raping her
. Jesus Christ!
Sarah leapt on him and tried to pull him off, her own shouts mixing with those of the girl, but she merely fell through him to the floor, getting an electric shock in the process, and found herself eye to eye with a small child in a pressed white shirt and shorts, holding a teddy bear and whimpering. Superimposed over the child came a lurching pair of people making love, laughing, and over them a group of Nazi soldiers, sodomizing a young boy in a torn blue shirt who screamed in agony. When his screams became too loud, they shot him, and Sarah recoiled as he fell through her open arms and landed in a tangle of bloody limbs at her feet, his eyes staring up into hers. Though he was weightless, she could feel the energy of his body as it passed through hers, smell his urine, hear his heart stop beating.

It was hard to find the walls; the room now had strange, unfamiliar edges. She saw the rough outlines of a dungeon, the heaped-up stores of a root cellar, huge piles of wine bottles, and the smooth gray cement of a bomb shelter. She gasped as a lion wandered past, then she tripped over what must be her own bed and fell, hitting her head on the all-too-real bedpost.

Sarah sat on the floor, head throbbing, as water gushed into the room, rising quickly. She tried to swim but couldn’t feel the resistance of the water, and watched in disbelief as several people drowned in front of her, their hands reaching through her chest and face, grasping for life. She felt their energy envelop her, like waves of sonar.

“Make it stop!” she screamed, as all around her people writhed, died, gave birth, had sex, suffocated, and strangled one another. It was a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, and she couldn’t escape it.

Sarah told herself again it was the drug, but how long would this madness last? Maybe it would never wear off, and she would be trapped in this panic, this melee of humanity, forever. She tried to find the door handle to escape, but she was turning in circles, trapped in a lightning storm.

Finally she made it out into the corridor, but once there she couldn’t find her way—it was as if several basements and dungeons and wine cellars and passageways and grave sites were piled up all around her. A silver casket was being lowered into a grave as a woman shrieked with grief, someone was being lashed with a whip, and a man was lying on the floor drunk. She smelled shit, and offal, and rotting flesh. otta woShe began to retch.

Her heart was pounding faster and faster and she realized she was going to die, the atoms of her being would explode, forced apart by all the energy streaming through them.

“Sarah,” called a faraway voice, and suddenly Shuziko was there, looking into her face and trying to talk to her, asking her what was wrong, should she call an ambulance. Sarah tried to talk, but bodies kept imposing themselves between them, people stretched on a rack, someone being burned with a flaming iron. For a moment Sarah glimpsed someone in modern dress and, hoping it was Suzi, she reached out her hand to grab the woman and felt nothing but charged air.

“Sarah.” Suzi’s voice was calling her. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

Her brain and body overloaded with electricity, Sarah started to have a seizure. And then Max was there, pushing Suzi aside. Sarah felt a sharp, violent jolt as Max gathered her up in his arms and shouted at Suzi to open the doors, to help him get her upstairs.

“It was a dungeon,” he was shouting. “It was a fucking dungeon down here. We’ve got to get her out.”

Sarah buried her face in Max’s chest. It felt good to be limp. There was a part of her that was saying, “You’re Sarah Weston, no one carries you anywhere,” but his smell was so good compared to the stench of the basement, a thousand years of mold and blood and pain and rot. She closed a hand around his shirt and touched the reality of the rough cotton, his muscles moving underneath. She felt like she could feel the blood flowing in his veins, the cells dividing, the neurons firing. As if she had microscopic vision and telescopic vision and X-ray vision all at the same time.

Max carried her up several flights of stairs, Suzi just ahead, opening doors, keeping Sarah’s feet from banging against things.

“Why aren’t we calling an ambulance?” she demanded.

“She’ll be okay,” said Max. “She just needs to be in a happier place.”

“Where? Disneyland?” snapped Suzi. “You’re a lunatic, I don’t know why I’m listening to you.”

“The drug,” moaned Sarah.

“What drug?” said Suzi. “I’ve dropped acid and this is the worst acid trip I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s okay,” said Max. Sarah could feel him stop moving, and once again the energy pressed on her from all sides, though it was less frantic. “You can go now,” he said to Suzi. “She’ll be okay.”

“I am not leaving,” Suzi said.

“Sarah, keep your eyes closed,” Max whispered, depositing her on a low sofa. The fabric bristled under her skin. She could feel Max’s breath on her cheek. After all the horrors this was such a sensual, caressing sensation that she felt she might cry, or scream, or have an orgasm.

“Before you open your eyes,” Max instructed, “listen. Hear the music. Try to find the sound of a cello and then follow it.”

Still keeping her eyes tightly shut, Sarah realized she could, in fact, hear several orchestras playing at once. She concentrated, trying to separate one sound from all the others.

“What do you see?” asked Max.

“People at a dinner party,” Sarah muttered. “I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

Sarah shut her eyes again and tried not to swoon as the energy of the music flowed through her.

“It’s okay. Follow the music. And when you’re ready, try focusing on the people listening to the music,” said Max. Sarah imagined the energy of the Bach as a single thread, and followed it through the tangle of sound in the room. Cautiously, she opened her eyes and found herself surrounded by people wearing clothes from what she guessed was the early nineteenth century. Men in long jackets and tight satin knee pants, women in low-necked, high-waisted dresses with clusters of curls about their ears. When she focused, it didn’t hurt as much to watch them. Rather than being hit with a firehose of sensation, it was like a shower. She could still see Max and Suzi, faintly. Max was watching her intently, and Suzi looked concerned.

“You okay, Sugar?” Suzi asked.

“I can see them,” said Sarah. “They’re having dinner.” She ducked as a waiter went by with a tray of small roast birds.

Max put his arms around her and guided her toward the table. “Who’s the man in the third chair?” he asked her.

Sarah carefully made her way so that she was standing behind the third chair. She realized that the same furniture was there in the past and present. In the present, where Max and Suzi were, the chair she was looking at was old, the upholstery of the seat was ripped, and the paint was flaking off. In the present of her vision, the chair was freshly painted and new-looking.

Sarah reached down and touched the back of the chair, relieved that she could feel something solid under her fingers.

“Look at the man in the chair,” repeated Max.

The man had thick dark hair and was wearing a black wool coat. His high white collar was stained at the lapels. A red cravat circled his throat.

She felt strange, staring at someone who was right in front of her. The man was talking to the woman next to him, and shoveling food unceremoniously into his mouth. Suddenly he turned to quaff his wine and she came face-to-face with him.

“It’s Beethoven,” she said.

She could hardly say his name. It was crazy, it was impossible. But it was Ludwig van Beethoven. She’d been staring at the bust of him on her desk for years. Her stomach flipped over and it was hard to breathe again.
It’s a vision
, she told herself,
it’s only a vision
.

“Beethoven?” Suzi asked. “What the—?”

Max nodded and shushed her. “What’s he doingt B?” he asked softly.

“He’s eating, and flirting. And, um . . . burping.”

Beethoven. The greatest composer who had ever lived. Right in front of her. Eating—well gobbling, actually. What kind of a drug was this?

“What’s happening, Sarah?” asked Max.

“It’s crazy,” said Sarah. “I can see him. I can see the party. It’s like watching a movie—no, it’s like being in a movie. It’s all so real.”

“What the hell is she on?” said Suzi.

Max sighed. “What we see and feel and taste is a precept. It’s not what’s really out there in the world, it’s what our brain thinks we can handle. Her senses have been heightened, like turning up the volume. She can see the energy that people leave behind. The things that happened in this room.”

“So this isn’t a vision?” asked Sarah. “I can see it? I can see the past?” She was light-headed.

“It’s the traces of their energy, like the contrail of a plane or the tail of a meteor. The drug affects your glial cells, which heighten your brain’s awareness past the point where time has any real meaning. Because your glial cells are on super alert, you can see the traces of high-energy moments. Moments of things that happened in the past in this room. It’s not magic, it’s just an expansion of our senses. Your brain is filling in the dark spaces. That’s what Sherbatsky told me.”

“It’s so freaky,” said Sarah. “I’m staring at fucking Beethoven.”

“Well, you’re staring at the energy he left behind in this room,” clarified Max. “Normally you can’t see it because your brain has evolved into thinking it doesn’t need to, but we all have the capacity. The drug just lets you use the tools you already have in your toolbox.”