Ghosts of Eden (5 page)

They were the words of Caliban, the contemptuous slave, the retch. Garty watched the woman, enthralled. He hadn’t read
The Tempes
t in a couple of years, since his first year in college, but was still able to follow the story, even with the abstract and fluid motions of the woman’s interpretation, as she moved from spot to spot, her voice slurring as she recited the lines of each character in turn. As the final moments of the play began, and the entire cast of characters was assembled before Prospero the magician, he was riveted. He was completely fascinated by the woman as she writhed and babbled her way through the speech of each character, then finally, coming to Prospero’s epilogue, she turned to her audience and spouted the final lilting, rhyming verse in garbled and indecipherable shouts, falling to her knees, inviting her audience to set Prospero free from his island with their applause. Garty was thoroughly impressed and left with his head ringing and his heart pounding.

He spent the rest of the night with the girl he’d met earlier with the blonde ponytails, unsure, exactly, how he’d found her again. They seemed to dance for hours, facing each other; he watched her hands snake before him with practiced and fluid precision. They stood in each other’s arms watching a group of glow-stick wielding performers, spinning blue streaks on strings and flashing tracer beams of phosphorescence. Then he took her hand and led her to his tent. Without a word she knelt before him and he stood with the tent looming all around like stormy skies. It was a strange warm sensation as he watched her head bob, her hair, in the dark, shimmering with rippling waves. Somewhere a purple light pulsed and he felt as if he’d been detached from the world, as if some deity, finding him unworthy, had chipped him away from the substance of the universe and left him to float in the ether. When the girl lay back and guided him inside her, he felt hollow.

Later, he sat alone in the sand, watching the sunlight creep across the wasteland. As the intensity of the drugs began to recede, he watched the distant mountaintops, where he could see lines of people dancing, ushering in the new day. Or were they trapped, and waving desperately for rescue?

* * *

It was day three or four when he stumbled into the clearing where the longhaired woman had performed her strange version of
The Tempest
without any recollection of how he got there or why. But when he came into the clearing, it was like coming into old friends; he was greeted enthusiastically by a small group and invited to join them in their van.  

Inside, there was another world: glowing purple and green lights, lush and carpeted, the vague shapes of lounging people. A milk crate had been overturned to serve as a small table, a couple of unlit candles, some matches, a pocket knife, a shard of mirror dusted with powder, and a jar; and it was the jar—small, ornately carved, sealed shut with an old fashioned cork top—that his eyes came to focus on.

Someone passed him a joint. He inhaled and he passed it on. People’s eyes glimmered with the colors of the lights: deep purples, and deep greens, and deep reds. There was smiling and subdued laughter and at some point someone tapped him on the shoulder and when he turned a leering face asked him if he’d ever heard of the Umbra Ina.

“The what?”

The face leaned closer and Garty could tell, even in the dimness, the man’s eyes were blue and very pale. “Like most places, I’m afraid, it doesn’t really exist.”

Garty’s lazy thoughts seemed to waft slowly about his head like the languid smoke.

The grin on the face widened to reveal glistening teeth and an open mouth wet and dreadfully large, and the man leaned even closer and Garty realized the man was wearing a large, wide hat and that most of the illumination in the van was steaming from its brim, where several candles sat, flickering and sputtering with ghostly, colored flames. “Don’t open it until you’re told to do so,” the grin said to him.

Afterward he couldn’t remember how it happened. He stumbled back through the sea of cars, clutching the jar against his side. He returned to his tent, rolled the jar up in his sleeping bag as if in a dream, and stashed the entire ball in the corner of his tent. He returned to the rave and, for the next couple of days, forgot all about it.

* * *

Inside the tent, kneeling on his unrolled sleeping bag, he held the jar. He turned it slowly, examining its grooves. He ran his fingers through the inlaid designs, across the words carved in a language he couldn’t read. It seemed old, ancient almost, a very odd thing to find in a modern, plastic, Technicolor rave-world.

With a shrug, he pulled the old cork stopper out of the top of the jar. It popped loose with a hiss of strange acrid air that assaulted his senses. He wondered where that air had come from, how far it had travelled to get to him. He sneezed. Then, turning the jar so he could see its contents in the light, he scowled: empty. He turned the jar upside down: nothing. He shook it. “Whatever.” He put the jar down in the sand.

His hands were sweating. He looked at the jar, mired in the dirt as if it had been there for much longer than just a few seconds. What had the man with the hat told him? Had he paid for it? How much? Yes—that was the question. How much had he paid?

He wiped his hand into his grimy shorts and shrugged again. He’d take the jar back with him as a souvenir, he thought, and returned to rolling up his sleeping bag. When he was finished with that, he began to gather his other things, when he realized his hands were numb and shaking. An icy crust was beginning to form around the roof of his skull. He looked around. The walls of the tent were vibrating. “Shit. Did I take something?” He sat down, leaning against his rolled-up sleeping bag. There must have been something in the jar, the escaping gas. He waited. That was the only thing he could do. Enjoy the ride.

He remembered the first time he’d taken LSD, two years ago, his freshmen year in college, he’d been in one of the bathroom stalls in the dorms when it began to hit him, and sparks of pastel light began to corkscrew at the edges of his vision and the toilet became so bright it was blinding. The tiled floors began to revolve slowly. He’d returned to the dorm room where a couple of friends and his then girlfriend were and he’d seen a face push out of the wall like it was pushing through a sheet of cloth, then open its mouth and another face came out of the mouth, and then another. He’d let it get to him. He’d been scared. And when you were scared you had a bad trip, a paranoid nightmare. As his girlfriend tried to calm him, he’d seen her as a mischievous cat-person that wanted to play with him, poking and prodding him until eventually she found the stopper on the side of his head and pulled it and his brains began to slide out, soaking into the pillows on the bed. He’d cried like a baby and begged her not to leave him, as he shrank and shrank into a dull and empty husk of what he used to be.

He had, of course, dropped out many times since then and knew he had nothing to fear. He knew what he was getting himself into. He’d planned to leave the rave, but would stay one more night. He stood in the center of the tent and could feel the canvas walls breathing in and out. The flaps of the tent opened with a sudden gust of breath, flopped to the ground like etherized tongues, leaving a gaping crevasse into a churning blackness.

This was different.

Somewhere outside the tent, a wailing melody, the discordant chanting of invalid mouths, droned. He felt, then, on the threshold of a new world, one hidden at an infinite distance; yet now, only steps away.

The thought made Garty’s heart begin to race. Had the rumors been true? Could this really and truly be a gateway he now stood before? Could he pass through it and stand in the dark jungle on the other side?

But something was wrong. As the wailing melody grew louder—and he began to question what sort of trouble he’d stumbled into—a deep, unsettling fear grew inside him. What had he been told? There’d been admonishments. Talk of dangers, of sights best left unseen. The melody was behind him now and he turned and the tent was a vast open expanse; he could no longer see the canvas flap that was the back of his tent, only dirt and dimness. He felt very small. The light outside seemed to flicker, like candlelight, and there were large things moving, casting shadows on the canvas wall closest to him. He bent and picked up the jar sitting in the sand, instinctively aware it was somehow important to what was now happening—to where he was—that if the world began to bend and grow, he might lose it, and in doing so lose his way home.

“It once belonged to my grandfather.”

Garty spun around, just as a figure emerged from the shadows of the tent opening. It stood, looking at him calmly—draped in robes like wriggling mist, hairless head brushing the tent’s ceiling, skin pale, purplish. Its voice was wise and level, and seemed, to Garty, somehow ominous, like a judge who, without emotion or remorse, might pass a death sentence on a horrified and innocent man.

“It’s just a jar, for most, made from clay—a collectable, nothing more than a trinket to mark the passing of history. But, eventually, I knew it would fall into the hands of someone with just the right inclinations.” The observer smiled. “A simple vessel—the Vessex—which I finally have within my grasp.”

“The what?”

“The Vessex. The portal—from the first ages of my world.”

Garty looked down at the jar. The scrawl work on its surface seemed to writhe. Its polished interior shimmered. For a moment, he thought he could see faces—half-formed and wailing—sloshing about in its bottom.

“It has some amazing properties. One of which is to tear the fabric of the real, to allow members of The Council, of which I am a member, to reach your world. It is not the only means we have, of course, but most of our methods are lost to us now, their purveyors either dead or dying. There were once those with innate abilities, if they could be trained properly, if they had the discipline…”

“What do you want from me?” Garty interrupted.

The observer stopped, turning its eyes to Garty. It smiled again. “My apologies. I forget where I am sometimes. Are you ready?”

“For what?”

“You did it in ignorance?” the observer asked. “Opening the jar?”

“I guess.”

“That is quite remarkable,” the observer said. “You’ll have to come with me. You could be of great value to The Council. We have places for people like you.”

“What sort of places?”

“Oh, it’ll be dark, but there’s no point resisting.”

The observer stepped aside. The opening in the tent gaped, the darkness filled with movement, things that wriggled just outside the feeble reach of the light.

“And you can’t be allowed to keep the jar, I’m afraid.” The observer stepped forward, reaching its hand out. “I’ve waited too long to hold my grandfather’s jar, to have the power of the Vessex at my disposal.”

Garty took a step backwards. “Wait—” He tried to think what to do. His mind was a dull sludge inside his skull. This was a nightmare. There had to be a way to wake himself, to sober himself from this horrible trip.

The observer grinned at him. “It’ll be hard for you at first, but once your sanity breaks, once the fragile sludge of your identity is absorbed…” It shrugged. “You’ll find a way to cope; they always do.”

“No,” Garty said. “Please.” He glanced behind him, but there was nowhere to go. He couldn’t run. He was backed into a corner. He shook his head, blinked furiously, trying to awaken.

“I’ll take that now,” the observer said, looming closer and closer.

Garty began to back away, but even as he did so, he could feel the air around him thicken, like the saliva of an anticipatory hunger. He could feel himself slipping away from what he knew to be real, slipping into the nightmare. The cork stopper to the jar lay at his feet. In desperation, he snatched at it.

“Give that to me!”

The observer came at him, a giant purple-skinned hand clamped down over the top of Garty’s skull. If the jar had brought him here, he reasoned, perhaps it could get him back to where he’d come from. It was the only hope he had. The hand squeezed at his temples, painfully; his skull felt ready to burst like a fragile egg.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

He slammed the stopper down on the top of the jar.

Immediately, his senses were under assault—eyes watering, nose flaring, teeth clenching. His sight of the world became a spiraling smudge. “Damn you!” he heard the observer curse. Then, he was on his side in the dirt and his body was in revolt: spasms wracking through him as his gorge rose, and more vomit than he thought possible came up and forced its way between his teeth and lips and pooled and steamed out over the sand. He groaned. And the world went blank for a while.

* * *

The sunlight striking his face from between the tent flaps blinded him completely as he opened his eyes. For a couple of minutes all he could see were pulsing spots of dark matter. His body was hot and stiff, caked with grime he could feel cracking on his skin as he moved. He crawled towards the opening in the tent—like a tear into another world—desperate to escape the hot and humid confines of canvas and dust and earth tones. His lips were swollen and he was very thirsty. He wobbled to his feet. He stepped from the tent.

Outside, standing on rubbery legs that flared with pins-and-needles, his mouth dropped open. The mid-afternoon sun made his skin boil. He looked from side to side, taking in his singularity in the open heat and flattened landscape stretching from horizon to horizon, astonished to discover he was alone in the desert. The torn and shredded tarp was all that remained of the dance area. Trash littered the desert floor, caught in the trampled sage bushes, rolling and tumbling in the wind. His was the only tent still remaining. He could see his truck across the way, mired in the tire-marked sand, windshield coated with dust, parked without company. How long had he been in the tent? He looked down and realized he’d soiled himself.