A noise startles me, a deep rumbling that echoes back into the tunnel we’re in. Animals maybe, birds perhaps. I don’t know. And he’s still standing there, his frame backlit by the commotion of lights pulsing around us. He’s huge. Everything about him. Confounding, too.
“Our music is not in the notes, but in the silence between, Alice.”
I don’t know what that means. I only know the song he played, the notes I heard. But the silence? The silence at his feet was good. It was … noiseless. Just his breathing, that’s all I could hear.
My feet inch out into the chaos at the memory of it, hand reaching for his of its own accord. I was inside myself at his feet. Part of something I’d never felt before.
“We’ll learn to be quiet with each other,” he says, pulling me forward. “Why don’t you like to fly?” The door behind suddenly rolls closed, more clanks and grates proving that entrance is gone, and I start following unconsciously as he leads the way.
“Fear,” I mumble. “Too high. Or maybe not. I want to, though. Fly. Would be nice to fly.” So many people flash behind him, all of them moving slowly, laughing loudly. I’ve been here before on this floor, watched them and thought. I walked through them, felt them on my skin. I danced, swayed. I can sense the memory of that, feel the touch of them on my skin. “I’ve been here,” I muse, running my fingers over an old stone wall.
He chuckles weakly. “I saved you.”
“You did?”
“I did. You were about to be devoured.”
Oh. I smile a little at the thought, part amused at whatever those pills did to me back then. I wish I could remember fully. It’s all disjointed. Just dribs and drabs of memory, all of it involving him in some way. And it’s the same now, all fragmented and explosive colours dancing, but the white light from him is still most vibrant of all. It pulls me, somehow darts into me.
“Where are we going?”
“Down.”
“Why?”
He doesn’t answer. In fact, he doesn’t even look at me as we carry on journeying through the masses. He’s just walking, and I’m just following in some kind of trance. I must be. I mean, this is stupidity. I hardly know him and yet I’m following him into the depths of night, no care for the animalistic behaviour carrying on around me. It’s almost still to me, hazed but for the slow, undulating movement of them all.
I can hear the noise, though. Smell the sweat and feel the erotic nature of everything. Its building, growing inside me, and awakening me. He moves as if he’s barely acknowledging it, or as if it’s part of him, and the wave of people move for him, smile at him, some bow for him.
I’m mesmerised by all of it, and now contemplating more of those pills. My tongue rolls over my lips, thighs clenching together as he folds through another archway and reaches for something.
“Time to get lost, Alice,” he says, moving in front of me. I look up, watch as he lifts a mask into place on his face and swirls his finger in the air. The vison of it contorts and shifts the room around me, makes me rear back at the sight. His hand grabs me harshly, pulls me closer. “Remember this face. Imprint it. There’s only one of me here. Hunt for me.” White face, black flat lips, heavy black eyes that slant upwards at the edge. He pulls my hand to the mask, traces my fingers over the stark high cheekbone, and slips another pill in my lips. “Feel me. Trust me. Use yourself to hunt. Don’t let anything stop you getting to your goal.”
A new song starts playing, dark and angry sounds ringing out around the space. He puts a mask on me while I’m getting lost in this new look of his and the sound, ties it tightly around the back of my head. He looks evil like this, like a demon in his particular shade of nightmares – a devil. “Swallow, little Alice. Enjoy your flying.”
The pill travels downwards, and I step away, head moving around to peer through the slits now covering my eyes. Everything’s narrowed in my sight, just pinpricks of light and noise. My hands go to the shield on my face, fingers lightly tracing the feel of it. I’m hidden now, not who I was. I can be anything – anyone. For now, I like that thought. I can be whatever I want to be here.
It all makes me sharpen my gaze of all the others around me, perhaps allowing myself a private moment in time to actually see it all and watch. Two men are fondling each other, as a woman looks on. She’s as lost in the moment as I am - as perverted as I feel. Her hand’s tracing her thigh, fingers heading for her pussy. That makes me squirm, suck in some short breaths to stave off the need that continues to build. I’m not moving, though. I’m too fascinated to move. But I need … something. Something like before when I was touched and I danced.
“Malachi?”
No answer.
I turn and look for him, but he’s gone into a sea of other masks. Where have they come from? I shift back to the wall, snatching glances around at everything and everyone. No one is anyone suddenly. They’re just faces. Doll’s faces. Evil faces. Strange faces that twist and crawl somehow behind shields of masks. And some are just still. Perfectly still in the gloom around them.
Statues.
A scream sounds loudly, and I jump sideways, remembering that sound from before. The woman – she screamed. She screamed and she ran. I saved her. I think. But then he cut me. He sliced me like a knife through jelly. Where is my knife? I run my hands over myself, searching for pockets or zippers. Nothing. Nothing but tight leather and … my fingers find my cleavage.
“Ah, there it is.” I draw it out hold it in front of me, pointing it at anything that moves. Nothing does, but that isn’t stopping me from keeping them away. “Bad men,” spits out of me. “Stay back!” Malachi cut me – took pleasure in it.
I squirm at the thought, a wry smile on my face under this mask, as I move into the crowd. Hunt him, he said. Feel him. I’d like to feel him again – taste him even, like the way he tasted me. I watched him lick the blood from me. It was intimate, and I’m almost lost in its meaning, as I keep moving through masks and noise. He’s inside me again now – part of me. We’re two, or one.
Real and searching.
I chuckle at the madness of that thought. One? Unlikely. Malachi is one. He is him alone.
Apart from her.
