Sweetblood (9781439108741) (11 page)

We follow, feeling pretty stupid.

“Last time I was here the door was locked,” Dylan says.

As we climb the stairs the smell of incense cuts through the perfume reek. The music gets louder. The lights in the stairwell are yellow. At the top of the stairs there is a landing not much bigger than the vestibule below. There are two doors. The one to the left has a steel bar across it with a large padlock. The other door, apartment number four, is painted purple. Or maybe it is maroon—it's hard to tell in the yellow light.

Marquissa and her friends walk right in. Dylan and I follow.

The first room is long and narrow. It looks like a stage set where the playwright has specified “ugly, gloomy, spooky, incredibly badly decorated room.” A bank of windows along the right-hand wall is covered with heavy dark green brocade curtains. The floor is carpeted, and the furniture—a sofa and four big overstuffed chairs—is all draped with the same green brocade curtain fabric. At the far end of the room a small fire flickers in an oversize fireplace. The only other light comes from two matching brass lamps with opaque shades.

“Nice place,” I say. Music is coming from farther back in the apartment, a throbbing, thumping, off-center beat.

Aside from us, there are only two people in the room: A guy and a girl sitting at one end of the sofa. I don't recognize them; they look older than us. Both are wearing the standard goth uniform: black, black, metal, red, black, metal, black, black. Standard Goth, of course, requires that each individual display at least one Very Unique (a redundancy, I know) Feature. In this case, the guy has a bolt through his lower lip. A nut is threaded onto the end of the bolt. It's probably not a real bolt, which would drag his lower lip down over his chin—not to mention the rust stains. I suspect it's a piece of hollow silver jewelry made to look like a bolt.

The girl's bid for uniqueness is orange stockings under her black leather mini. Orange is not one of the Approved Colors in the Official Goth Color Guide. It is a bold move, but not very attractive. (There are good reasons why orange didn't make the cut.)

On the table in front of them a spiral of smoke rises from an incense burner.

Marquissa and her crew walk right past them through a door leading farther back into the apartment.

“C'mon,” Dylan says.

As we walk past the couple on the sofa I see that the fire in the fireplace is actually several candles, and that the boy is holding a beer mug full of something thick, dark, and blood red.

The apartment is like a maze. No, it's more like a series of interconnected stage sets, each one populated by a collection of weird actors. In one room we come upon four guys with shaved heads and enough hardware stuck in their faces, ears, and scalps to set off metal detectors for miles around. They look like soldiers from the same demon army. They are sitting on the floor playing cards and smoking cigarettes and laughing. They are probably in their twenties, although with all the hardware I can't be sure. Two of them are drinking the same blood-red concoction.

I grab Dylan's sleeve.

“What are they drinking?” I ask.

“Snakebite. Wayne must have a keg going. You thirsty?”

“No!” Again, I think that I should leave. But somehow I don't.

Marquissa and her friends have disappeared.

“C'mon.” Dylan leads me deeper into the maze. We enter a smoky room where several goths are staring at a grainy black-and-white movie on an old-fashioned black-and-white TV set. The smoke reeks of cloves. The next room is the kitchen. Weevil is standing over a keg of beer. He fills his mug halfway, then opens a can of something—I can't read the label—and pours it into his beer. He notices us watching him.

“Hey there, baby bat,” he says, blinking orange lashes. “Welcome to Waynesville.” He takes another bottle from
the counter, pulls the cork, and pours a shot of blood-red fluid into his mug. The beer turns dark. He takes a gulp and grins. His teeth are red.

My stomach wants to crawl up my throat.

He carries his mug back into the TV room.

I take a closer look at the bottles. The red stuff is raspberry cordial. The can contains hard apple cider.

“That was a pretty awful-looking drink.”

Dylan is grinning at me. “It's called snakebite and black,” he says. “You want one?”

I shake my head. But I do wonder what it tastes like. I've had beer before. A few times. I actually don't mind it. I've had wine, too. My parents let me have a glass on special occasions. I can take it or leave it. Mostly I leave it. Alcohol has what Fish calls a “significant impact” on blood glucose. Besides, it clogs up my brain.

“Who is Wayne?” I ask.

“He lives here.” Dylan finds a clean mug and pours himself a beer. He leaves out the cider and cordial.

“I'll have a sip,” I hear myself say. I don't want him to think I'm a total prude.

He hands me the mug and I drink. A chain of bubbles gallops down my throat, bitter and sweet. Then I notice the butterfly on the knife.

At first I think it's a fake silk butterfly like you might see on a flower bouquet. But then it moves its orange and black wings, slowly. It is perched on the blade of a black-handled kitchen knife on the stained white Formica countertop next to half a lime. It feels wrong. What is a butterfly doing here, inside an apartment? On a knife blade? At night? In October?

I point at it.

“What?”

“The butterfly.”

Dylan looks. “Oh. They're all over the place. Wayne raises 'em.”

“He grows butterflies?”

“Where do you think I got you that chrysalis?”

The butterfly is slow-motion flapping.

“Does he let them go?”

“I guess they could fly out the window if they wanted.”

“It's cold outside. It's October.”

“They don't have to leave if they don't want to. C'mon.” He takes my arm and guides me out of the ex-kitchen. We walk down a short hallway.

“How big is this place?” I ask.

“He's got the whole second floor.”

The music is getting louder. We enter a large room with heavy brocade curtains and paisley wallpaper. About a dozen people, including Marquissa and her friends, are standing around smoking cigarettes, talking, and ignoring the three guys playing music. Actually, it's not really music. One of them, a big dopey-looking guy with huge hands, is slapping the fat strings of a bass guitar with his long fingers. Another one, smaller and sharp-featured, is holding a small drum between his knees, hitting it with his palms. The third musician is hunched over a violin, running a hairbrush up and down the strings. They all look drunk or stoned, and they sound like it.

I say in Dylan's ear, “They're really”—I search for the right word—“
dreadful
!”

He laughs, and we move to the next room. We are in a small library, bookshelves covering the walls. Bookcases are like magnets for me. I read some of the titles:
The Book of lies
by Aleister Crowley,
The History of Witchcraft and Demonology
by Montague Summers, a collection of vampire
books, and several titles by someone named James Branch Cabell. Whoever this Wayne is, he has interesting tastes in literature. I am reading the titles on the third shelf down when one of the books moves. I jerk back, startled, then realize that I am looking at another butterfly, this one sitting on the spine of a book titled
Practical Lepidoptery
.

Dylan touches my arm. I follow him down another short hallway and through a curtain made of heavy plastic strips.

We step into another world.

At least that's what it feels like. The heat and humidity and light hits me like a soft slap in the face. It takes me a moment to realize that we are surrounded by plants.

The room is long. I look up and see stars through a glass ceiling. We are in a greenhouse. The greenhouse is alive with butterflies. Butterflies in the air, butterflies on the leaves, butterflies everywhere.

Dylan leads me past a table covered with orchids, strange flowers with fleshy petals and leaves that look like the green skin of an extraterrestrial. I've never met an alien, but if I did meet one, they'd probably resemble an orchid. Along the glass wall is a long trough of dirt full of tall green weeds. The smell of plants—decay, fresh growth, and wet earth—is overwhelming.

At the far end of the room we come upon a black leather sofa, two matching chairs, and a long, low smoked-glass table. A man is sitting in one of the chairs with a glass of wine in his hand. He is looking down at the table and talking.

Across from him, on the sofa, sits a small, ghostly looking girl with black hair down to her waist. She is wearing a long black dress. Her legs are crossed, showing black
fishnet stockings. Her thin white hands are draped over her top knee.

We stop outside the furniture circle.

“That's Wayne,” Dylan whispers.

The man, Wayne, looks out of place. He is the first non-goth I have seen here. He has sandy, curly hair; a stubbly blond beard; and red cheeks. He is wearing a blue denim jacket over a Nike T-shirt. I think that he is about forty years old. His voice is very low, like the sound of boots scuffing through wet leaves. I can't quite hear what he is saying.

The girl is listening intently. A butterfly flits between them. Neither of them seem to notice. After another minute Wayne sits back and sips his wine. The girl nods, stands up, and walks past us as if we are transparent.

Wayne looks up, fixes his eyes upon me, and says, “Next victim?”

Wine Red

His red cheeks dimple like a little kid's. His teeth are small and short. I think if they were normal-size I might run, but those stumpy little teeth and red cheeks make him look harmless.

“Victim of what?” I ask.

“Your fate,” he says, all serious. Now his voice is that of a priest: soft and pleasant and insidious. Then he laughs, deep and warm. He points to the sofa. “Have a seat!”

Dylan and I sit down.

“Who do we have here?” he asks, looking at me but talking to Dylan. His eyes are dark brown—so dark that I can't distinguish pupil from iris.

Dylan says, “This is Lucy.”

“Ahhh!” He is looking at me so hard my skin feels hot. “My name is Wayne,” he says. “I live here.”

“It's very… nice,” I say, trying to be polite.

“Be honest, now.” He sips his wine.

I notice a large black and yellow striped caterpillar crawling across his knee. “You have a worm on your knee,” I say.

Wayne gently removes the caterpillar from his knee, walks it over to the trough full of weeds, and sets it carefully on a leaf. “They eat only milkweed, you know.” He watches the caterpillar hunch across the pale green leaf.

“Are you a professional butterfly rancher?”

He laughs. “It's just a hobby. Do you have any hobbies?” He sits down.

“Sometimes I pretend to be a high school student. I guess you could say that's my hobby.”

“I suppose school takes up most of your time. You are at Seward High, yes?”

“How did you know that?”

“I like to keep track of all the young goths.”

“I'm not goth.”

“Of course you're not—no more than I—but you do share a certain fashion sensibility with them.”

“I like black.”

“It's a very practical color.”

“Exactly.”

“Is it interesting, pretending to be a student?”

“Rarely. Not that it makes any difference.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, it doesn't matter how boring or not boring it is at school. At the end of the day I'm still myself.”

Wayne's eyebrows go up. “That is very astute. We are all trapped that way, are we not?”

“Is that a rhetorical question, or are you looking for an answer?”

“You
are
intelligent. Would you care for a glass of wine?”

“No, thank you.”

“A reading, perhaps?” He gestures at the table.

I look down at the deck of cards spread across the table. I've never before seen a real deck of tarot cards. They are slightly larger than regular playing cards. Each one has a colorful illustration. The scenes on them are quite strange—devils, magicians, bloody swords, and characters dressed in medieval clothing.

Wayne gathers the cards and slowly mixes them together. “Looo-seee,” he says, stretching my name out. “What shall we learn today about Looo-seee.”

I feel my thighs tense. I am one second away from standing up and walking out of there when Wayne spills out his nice deep laugh and says, “I'm sorry! I should know better than to mess with people's names.”

“That's okay,” I say.

“No, it's not okay.” He is serious again. “Names are important. Our names are who we are. You have a beautiful name. Lucinda. It means ‘light'. Did you know that?”

I nod, surprised that he knows my full name. Most people would have guessed Lucille.