#thobh

[bluetonguedskinkthings]

Just remember, folks, after watching The Haunting of Bly Manor you need to drink a bottle of water to replace all those bloody fucking tears you just cried.

[the-haus-of-burning-hearts]

Only until. Always until.

***

The bar was called the Turn-Key, and it was a hole so small and so deep in the proverbial wall that it had been active for almost twenty years and there was hardly a soul on the street who knew about it—and yet, there was rarely a night you could walk in and not find some action there. It was one of those rare places that river-thrummed wild under the icy sheet of the quotidian; those who knew, knew. Entering it felt like entering somewhere you shouldn’t: you climbed up a small incline beneath and between the shadow of the old brickshamble towers that flanked the entrance, then down, down, down...

“Night Wynn,” Parks said as he entered. The bartender looked up at him from his post and offered a nod of greeting.

 “Night Parks,” he said.

And then it was Parks alone. The Turn-Key was good for that: solitude when you needed it, company when you didn’t. Its inside was more than a couple hundred square feet: a low ceiling adorned with flags from around the world, with thick wooden rafters you could scrape your knuckles on if you weren’t careful; walls of crumbled brick and patchwork mortar; a jukebox in the corner pumping out as much as you put into it. String lights and neon signs strung along the wild walls offered the only light, sending the whole place soft.

A pride flag hung behind the bar, loud as it wanted.

Parks had spent many a night here as a patron. The dancefloor was sizeable enough that, on a good night, if the music was right and the bar was busy enough, he could lose himself in the crowd: cast off all that he was or wasn’t in the world outside and become just the moment of his body. On a really good night, maybe a glance at the bar or on the dancefloor could turn into a hurried, heated rendezvous in the bathroom or the back alley, and on bad nights, when the only company he wanted was his own, he could vanish into one of the bar’s dark corners; step outside the world and watch it play about him for a while.

 Of late it was slowly becoming a hot spot for Marines— drunk Marines. The straight girls had gotten fed up with being drugged at the straight bars, and so had found their way here, and the straight boys, eventually, had followed. Things like that came in waves; all there was to do was buckle down and wait for them to pass. But tonight it was all but empty: just one sullen face hunched over the sticky-red cherry wood sheen of the bar; two more at a table near the back; and himself. Easy enough to tend to.

And so Parks polished the bar and cleaned the glasses and passed out drinks and thought only of the missing memory. He had been painting, then running—the cop had chased him into an alley, a long alley, with something at its end… Yes, that was it, that was something… an image slipped back into place: a door. A door he’d never seen before.

All of the expected questions: how had it gotten there? And when? And why? And what—he wondered, more keenly, more deeply, more insatiably than the others—had he 3 seen, when he’d peeked inside? At this point he could grasp only a fleeting strand of the feeling, a single white-washed frame of the impossible film of the moment, but even that was enough—a drop of water upon a dry-cracked tongue.

Suddenly, the sound of a crowd coming down the concrete hall. Parks braced himself behind the bar, eyes fixed upon the rectangular opening carved into the ancient brick, and saw the mass of their shadows coming down.

They entered. They were not Marines.

The way they moved, and talked, jeering and jostling like some roiling cloud, they were arresting, demanding. There were five or six of them, all told, but they filled the tiny bar like a crowd of twice the size. Parks’ first instinct was to scoff, to wince—another crowd of drunks to tend to. But there was something different about this crowd—they were unlike the others that ended up in here; merriment and warmth seemed to spill from them and into the air about them; the room seemed somehow brighter for their presence, more beautiful; the stones hummed with their passing, and the hanging lights above burned brighter. The whole world reaching and longing to join them, this merriest of bands.

They were all dressed differently—oddly—there was no unifying aesthetic, unless was to count their oddities. A man with close-cropped hair and a flannel shirt, scissor-cut into a vest, was the spearhead, followed close behind by a woman in a tutu and neon stockings, everything all lace and frills and color; and behind her, another woman—or maybe a man, or somewhere else along the spectrum—wearing beads and veils and heavy makeup, and on and on they marched.

But of them all, the oddest thing, if there could be said to be one, was that none of the bar’s other patrons seemed to notice them, and not in that normal way that one drunk ignores the other, not in that shameful un-looking of some man or woman or otherwise at the depths of their solitude. This group—bright and raucous as they were—would surely command at least a glance from even the most solitudinous drunk in the tank, but so completely was this crowd being ignored that it was almost as if they weren’t there. In fact, even as he watched them, Parks saw one or two of them—in their top hats and tutus and all their other draperies—perch and peer over the shoulders of one or two of the lonelier patrons and whisper into their ears—whatever words were spoken sent warm smiles breaking on their faces. And, even more strangely, he noticed with an odd tranquility that the air had thickened around him, had become soft and warm and enveloping, like an old bed, and his body had filled with a buzzing, tingling sensation; as if the whole of it had fallen asleep.

 One of them—a woman, wrapped in flowing, glittering shawls of sequins—caught Parks’ eye: first only a passing glance, and then another—disregard sharpening into rapt attention. She approached the bar; her eyes still locked on his own. In fact, he could not look away—the furthest he could manage was to her lips, painted a midnight blue beneath the glittering veil, and moving—molding some speech he could not hear. And at the words, there came a buzzing; Parks’ head was full suddenly of warmth and love and light, and feelings of purest bliss, contentment that he had not known in many, many years—so long, in fact, that it had become unfamiliar. Almost… unnatural. The dissonance between the feeling and its source split the one back into two—Parks blinked, one half of his brain still alight, the other muted and cold and knowing of the truth of the world.

 “Sorry,” he said. “What was that?” The woman blinked; her brow furrowed ever slightly beneath the matte of makeup.

 “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

“Can… I get you anything?”

Her dark lips pursed, then broke into a gentle smile.

“A round of shots, please” she said.

The walls, the cherry bar, the buzzing lights; the words melted them all away—he blinked, and the glittering shine of her eyes, her beads, her endless veils, became the sleek and shining surface of whiskey, bouncing light. It was a dream—a haze hung over everything, instant bleeding into instant, and he moved without moving, watching his body cut through these invisidescent waters while that lone part of his mind played and warmed itself as in a sunbeam. He blinked—the shots were poured and sitting at the bar, and the woman was still there, just as he’d left her, still staring with those seeing eyes. The rest of her group was waiting and eager, still talking amongst themselves, impossibly unnoticed.

“Thank you,” she said, and he was on a beach, warm sand between his toes, a warm summer breeze against his skin; no, he was in a forest, breathing clear, cold air; no, he was in a club, a dark maze of naked bodies against his own; NO, he was alone in a room with a ceiling, lying in a bed that was plush, and cool, and holding… but as soon as each image came, so too did that of the cold, the streets, the City, dark and enveloping, and the daily terror of an empty wallet and an empty stomach—and the promise of a living wage.

“Hey,” he said.

Something was not right, and that thought, that word, the not-rightness of it all, was a log in a raging river, and he clung to it, even as the force of persuasion tore at him.

 “You… you want to start a tab?”

He blinked. The woman was still eyeing him, as, now, were the rest of the crowd she had come in with.

“Huh,” she said. “You’re really something, aren’t you?”

Silence rippled out from the bar—their uncanny chatter briefly stifled, and they were all at once exactly as the other patrons crowded into that lonesome place, alone in themselves and in their silence. In her face, now, a mounting sense of realization. Recognition.

“Are you the one who…?” She stopped herself with a sudden pursing of the glittering lips.

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll take these, and you take the rest of the night off. In fact, you could retire right now, if you wanted. Where would you go, if you could go anywhere?”

Parks’ brow furrowed. There was something in the words, some underlying rhythm—almost a vibration, resonating with some hidden, vulnerable part of his brain. Places swam in and out of his mind. He had never been one for grand imagination—a hastened mural here or there was all he could spare—but even a mind like his could imagine the heights of purest excess: some castle in the mountains, full of food and sex and gold, and he all wrapped in fineries, in whatever dress he desired, and the whole world exactly as he dreamed it…this person could give it to him, he knew—he knew it by the truth in their eyes, the conviction in her voice.

But even vivid as it was, he knew that vision was just that: a dream, a haze, a projection of light onto some flimsy, vanishing screen. He knew places like that in that distant way that only those with nothing were destined to know much of anything: as pictures, as ideas—the idea of a place, the idea of happiness, the idea of safety, and security, and of forgetting hunger. What was much more real, what was much more vivid, was the cold blue night setting in against him as he left his parents’ house behind; the street, its cold embrace, better than that loathsome place if only because it was elsewhere.

“Nowhere,” he said. “Anywhere.”

“Come on,” she said. “That’s no good. You must want something.”

“This is all I’ve got. It’s not much. But it’s something real.”

“Okay…” and now there seemed to be something else on her mind, something more, for when next she spoke it was with a sort of gravitas, a weight and a deliberance that had not quite been there before.

“Let me rephrase the question. Is there, anywhere inside of you, some part of yourself that is never happy? Never quiet? Always wanting more—to be heard when you speak, and to be unafraid of speaking? Of being just and only as it is? Some part of you that bristles against the corners of the world, even as everyone around you slots right into them?”

“I…”

He blinked, and he was five years old again, and there was gum in his hair—how it had gotten there he could no longer say; his brother, maybe, or someone on the bus home from school—but it was deep, stuck down in the roots, and offered yet another reason for him to hate it, and he was standing in front of his bathroom mirror, his face red and fat with youth and tears, and he held a pair of scissors in his hand and bunched the offending region of his overlong hair in one hand and snip, snip, snipped it out—and what possessed him, then, as he stared at that ragged, short-cut patch on the top of his head, was the desperate sort of thirst that could only come from a life without water, and before he knew it, he was raising the scissors again, and cutting, and cutting, and then it was all gone, all short and rough, and something inside of him, some hose, all kinked and twisted up, finally came unwound, and for that immaculate instant, all was right. All was true. That was the start of it: the vicious pride in every step he took to shed the self that had been impressed upon him; the troubles that come with understanding what others refused to.

“Yes,” he said, and the word was charged with that same desiccate avarice, that same dire thirst. “All the time.”

The woman nodded, her eyes firm on his.

“So, let me ask you again. What do you want? If you could have anything, anything at all, what would you ask for?”

“I…” he said again.

The words were harder to find then he expected; there was a perfect vision of them in his mind, but they stumbled and fell on the way to his lips, and he could not conjure the whole of it with his lips and tongue alone.

“I want to be as I want to be. I want to be as I am. And I want to be more.”

The woman pursed her lips again, a gesture that was almost a pout, almost piteous. Murmurs now, through the settled silence. The strange folk whispered amongst themselves; their worry crackled through the air.

“Wands,” one of them said. “What is it?”

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s okay.”

At once, they quietened, and a light chatter began to rise back into the silence.

Wands, her name was. What kind of name was that?

“How about this,” she said. She removed a heavy pendant from her neck—an iron disc, hanging from a black string. “You take this. We take these. And tomorrow, someone will be along to pay the tab.”

Parks accepted the trinket, let it lay flat in the palm of his hand. It was small—no bigger than a penny; a lump of iron, pounded flat, with an odd symbol etched into its face: a barbed spiral, almost like a branch of thorns.

“Juanita,” someone in the crowd said, “Are you sure?”

 “Of course,” Juanita—Wands—replied, offering Parks a heavy wink. “This establishment is owed its restitution.”

 She reached out and closed Parks’ hand over the necklace.

“Tomorrow?” he said. His head was swimming. The room swam and vibrated, everything, every point of light and point where the light struck pulsed in an odd rhythm, almost as to a heartbeat.

“Tomorrow,” Juanita said. “Same time, same place.”

With a last, wry smile, they gathered the line of rinks in their hands and distributed them, and one by one, the odd crowd strode from the bar, that pregnant silence still hanging heavy in the air. They walked away—not back towards the door from which they’d entered, but deeper into the bar, towards the far back wall—and then, somehow, were gone. The bar was empty and silent. A dream? He looked down at his hand, still held closed atop the smudged polish of the bar. He unfurled his fingers, and there it was, waiting for him: that strange little trinket, heavier in his hand than any logic said it should be.

***

With a life as irregular as his, it was hard for Parks to have a truly good day. Working through the night meant that he spent his days more often than not dozing in some shelter or park or café somewhere, or else searching for some meal to carry him until the next. The day had become an unfamiliar and unwelcoming thing, full of promise that was not his. But on that day, as he emerged from the Turn-Key’s doorless entryway and back out onto the City’s streets to meet the rising sun, the strange pendant strung around his neck, he felt energized—his belly full, his head clear, as if he’d spent the night in a five-star hotel and not behind the bar of some crumbling dive.

The sky was blue and bright, and the air was light and smogless, and as the sun carved its gentle arc across the sky, he spent the hours walking along the riverside, smelling the sweet smells the wind carried down to him from the bakery and the ice cream shop, listening to the water licking and lapping at the pier, and his head was light, and his body was strong, and beneath it all there was an odd feeling that he had not felt before, that he could not place, until, sitting on a steel-and-marble stool in the tiny park that sat in the cul de-sac of the historic brick heart of the City, overlooking the river, he recognized it as contentment.

He put a finger to the iron pentacle, hanging from his neck. This feeling, this satiation… it was because of the charm. The fact of it burst up from his irrational unconscious with a geyser-force that launched it up into the realm of possibility. He fondled it as he walked back to the Turn-Key, pacing behind his elongated shadow, as if behind his own ghost, some echo of all the times he’d paced these streets that he had worn into the metaphysical fabric of this place through sheer repetition.

 He passed by the Door’s alleyway, and offered it a glance. It was still there. He lingered at the alley’s mouth— half-gripped by the desire to march right up to it and throw it open once again, and walk right in to whatever impossible place awaited beyond, full of its impossible people and their impossible charms. But something held him back. Not the Door’s invisible force-field, not this time. No, Parks knew what it was to be bothered, to be hounded, to be hassled… he would not do that. Not to them. He offered a glance, even a smile, to the thing, as if passing a not-quite-a-stranger in the street, but he made no further effort to probe it, or whatever scarce inhabitants it offered. After all, they had come to him, not the other way around. Besides, he had intruded once already… and though the specifics of what he had seen still sat outside of his mind’s capacity to grasp and recollect, whatever it was beyond that door was precious, delicate—it had to be wooed, courted. Like any other John.

 Tomorrow, the woman named Juanita had said. Same time, same place. Well, tomorrow was here, and he was nothing if not patient.

He left the Door behind him and went on towards the bar, passing alley after alley, street after street, all darkening in the advancing night. Suddenly, a shot of cold against him—like a cutting word. He stopped at the mouth of another alleyway and turned, looked down—there was nothing there, nothing but thickening shadow, but he could have sworn that, just before he had turned and fixed the whole of his vision on that spot, there had been something there—something watching, with flashing, hungry eyes.

***

 The man at the bar was so out of place that Parks knew as soon as seeing him that he had come from the Door’s other side. If recent events had not conditioned him to look twice, thrice, at everything, he would have assumed that the man had just come in from off a street corner, bearing some apocalyptic verse scrawled across a cardboard sign. There was a wild look about him: he lurked beneath the frizzy bursting of a cloud of grey-streaked hair, and wore a spaghetti-strapped black tank top that revealed a set of bony shoulders, black leather pants, and a heavy silver hanged-man pendant dangling just below the ridge of his collarbone. And yet, for as particularly disheveled as he seemed, there was dignity in equal measure: he sat with wizened hands folded in front of him, his silver rings catching the bar’s low light and throwing it back out in tantalizing gleams. And perhaps most out-of-place-ishly of all, he made no secret of the hard track of his black eyes. They were fixed on Parks from the moment the younger man noticed their presence, and unlike every other pair of eyes that slung his way, they did not dart hastily away after, only to come crawling, inching, shamefully, seductedly, back.

Those two things together were enough to pique Parks’ interest. He sidled up to the corner of the bar the man had commandeered and tried his best to look like he belonged there; that this was his domain, and the man was but a visitor.

Propped up on one arm, his chest held high, he said, “Just so you know, I’m not in for rough trade.”

“Nor am I,” said the stranger. His voice was a summer afternoon: soft, thick.

 Parks snorted. “Tell that to your nipple clamps. You’ve been staring at me all night.”

 It wasn’t a question. There was no offense in the words, either. It was nothing but a statement of fact.

“Do people often stare at you?”

“Just until I catch them. But usually they look again.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Hell no.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“I’m here. People wanna stare at me, that’s their business.”

“And what if they want to do more than stare?”

Parks shrugged. “Then it becomes my business. Either way, I can handle them. People are just people.”

“And what do you think of those people?” the man asked, each word on his tongue a pluck of some bass-string. The dark eyes in the wild face played as lightning in the low light of the bar.

“Those people, or people in general?” Parks asked.

“Either. Both. Do you see a distinction?”

“Not really.”

“Well, then. What do you think of the world?”

“I think people are born curious, and somewhere along the way some asshole found out that there was profit in turning curiosity to fear.”

“I see. In a word, then. Just one.”

“Pity.”

Parks had no idea where the answers were coming from—why they were so blunt, so ready on his lips. Well, no, that was a lie. He knew exactly where they were coming from—that secret that sits in all our hearts, that thing we guard and keep, that little private place where we speak only to ourselves…none of the thoughts were new—but none of them he’d ever spoken before. The only thing he could not tell was how they were getting from there to his mouth and out into the world. But despite that, it never occurred to him to be anything but honest with the man.

“Hm,” the man said. He drained the last of his drink, then pinned a crumpled twenty underneath the finger-smudged class.

“Thank you, Parks. I’ve heard enough.”

He stood from the bar and turned to leave, but before he had made it halfway to the exit, Parks called after him, “Hey! Forgetting something?”

The odd man turned back—was that bemusement Parks could spy, in those spare bits of face poking through that cloud of hair? A chuckle, and with a flourish, the man produced a wad of bills from somewhere—tight-rolled; more than enough to account for the tab his friends had racked up.

“Where’d you have that tucked? Leathers went out of style for a reason, you know.”

“I can see why Juanita likes you.”

 At the mention of the name, remembrance kindled in him—Parks reached up to unhook the pentacle pendant from around his neck, but before he could, the wild man said, “This was a debt; that was a gift.”

With that, he left—walked right out without a look back, a wry glance, a single uncertain step—as sure and certain as a bolt of lightning arcing down to earth. And the question on Parks’ mind was not how he knew his name, or why he’d met him there, or why he’d asked so many strange, but necessary questions.

No, the only question on his mind was, Where’s he going next?

***

“So? What did you think?”

 “He’s got something, I’ll give you that. But how much of it?”

“Wasn’t it your job to find out?”

 “What I found out was he’s quick with a joke, but only if they’re obvious; smart enough to see trouble coming, but stupid enough not to care; and completely and utterly dissatisfied with the whole goddamned lot of things.”

“Well, then. He’ll fit right in.”

[the-haus-of-burning-hearts]

CHAPTER ONE: CONSIDER THIS INITIATION

The room was wide and square, its ceiling tall and open, staring up into a starry sky. Balconies on its higher floors peered down into the courtyard; tapestries and bolts of fabric reached in a patchwork veil from hidden pins in the walls and across the open ceiling, giving the room at once the look of both a tent and a cathedral. It smelled of incense and of maple. Its floor was intricately tiled with painted bits of glass and ceramic, and at its very center, the insignia, painstakingly rendered: the red heart wreathed in fire; the fire burning in an open hand.

It was all these things, and it was empty. And so it did as all such spaces do: invited someone to fill it.

***

TheCitywaspinkinthemorningandblueintheevening, and in all the time between, it was grey, even when the sun shone down from a clear sky, even when the trees were gilded with autumn or adorned with azalea blooms in the spring, it was grey, inside and out—the floating, ethereal, colorless grey of hunger, of longing, of hopes left unfulfilled, of dreams un-dreamed. The City was many things, but mostly it was grey.

This was the City’s truth, one that Anderson Parks knew—knew well—and took upon himself to change.

***

The first, as always, was a woman: the folds of her face—aged with age and hardened living—softened beneath a sheen of foundation. She was the room wrought and wrested into human shape: a long, flowing gown, almost a kimono, spilled from her heavy-set form in the burnished pink and burning blue of the sunrise. Rings of topaz and turquoise and glistening, sickly silver adorned her gently gnarling fingers, and the subtle blushing of the dusk was painted in the corners of her eyes. She walked a pace or two into the room, tracing gently with the full finger of her being the curve of the face of the heart of the Haus, etched invisible upon the floor beneath her, and she smiled, and she waited, for the hour was soon come.

***

The spraypaint rattled in his hand; the chill of aerosol awakening spread over his palm. He aimed it at the flat wall before him and sent his color flying. A pink streak, then a green, then a blue—often he didn’t know what shape he was capturing until he was midway through it, and only then did the work truly take form and direction. He was supposed to be on his way to work—and, in fact, had just pulled on his threadbare coat and emerged from house he was squatting in—a ramshackle place, its walls blackened with mold, its ceiling half-open to the sky—to head toward his first shift, when the canvas of the empty wall had distracted him. A job, imagine! It would be the first time Parks had ever had money of his own in his pocket—the first time he would have any at all, since his parents kicked him out—and it was, already, the first time he’d thought about anything further in the future than where he’d get his next meal, or where he’d lay his head that night. But something in him called louder than even those desires—the procreant urge to be and build something more than hungry.

***

The second was another woman, whirling into the room on a streak of sunlight sequins: every strand of hair; every fold of fabric; from the glitter of freckles on her cheek to the facets of her eyes, she caught as much light as she could and then some.

“Oh, Madame A!” she said, spinning, her every word curling. Inertia caught her and the world settled gently on her shoulders. The woman named Madame A smiled at her—an easy and a common gesture, but by no means an insignificant one; a sunset of a thing.

“Hello, dear Juanita,” Madame A said. “You know, I was just talking about you.”

“What-who-me?” Juanita dropped her jaw in a shock that was only half-mocking.

“A friend of mine was asking about that trick you pulled at the Ostara Sabbath. What was it, a fractal interpolation of the Mutterings of AOS?”

“I don’t kiss and tell, you know that!” A wink. A tongue- tip between diamond teeth.

“Well, however you did it. Clever. Very, very clever.”

Juanita looked away—if only to avoid taking the complement, or if only to appear to—and into the empty room about them.

“Is it just us?” she asked.

“It seems so just now, doesn’t it?” Madame A replied. “Huh. I’m not usually one to come first.”

“Oh, if I still had such stamina.”

“Aw, come on. I’m sure you’ve got it in you!”

Laughter, then, a rumbling of it, as Madame A waved a ringed hand.

“Mind that antecedent, dear. I’ve had a lot of ‘its’ in me.

Oh, who’s this?”

A man, then, pale and thin as a drop of rain pulled down to earth. His head was a thunderstorm, his face hanging half- indistinct in a cloud of black and grey that stretched down past his shoulders. His hands were tree roots, gnarled and twisted in upon themselves, and banded with silver, gold, crystal—idols gleaming silent. His clothing was all black: black boots, stained white with dust and concrete; a blank tank top revealing his white, modestly-muscled shoulders, and the heavy silver pendant hanging around his neck, a crucifix at first glance, but of Odin, not of Jesus—the little figure hung from his neck by a noose, its body pierced on one side by a long silver spike.

His black eyes found the two women waiting in the room—lingered on Madame A’s for a moment, then found Juanita’s—and when they did, they darted away again. He offered a nod, an imprecise greeting, then moved deeper into the room—searching for its darkest corner. Juanita watched him as he walked, full of words and wanting, but did not speak after him.

“I do so wish you two would mend fences,” Madame A whispered.

“He’s a big boy. If he wants to go about in pity for himself, that’s not my problem.”

Madame A made no secret of her sigh.

***

The eventual image was of Cerberus, each of the three heads a different color and staring, open mouthed, out of the alley and towards the lightened street: guarding the gate of darkness. Parks stood back, allowed himself some satisfaction.

“Hey!”

He turned—a shadow, barreling towards him from the alley’s mouth. The slight shining on its chest told Parks it was a cop. He let the spray can fall and split from the spot, dashing down the alley with the cool fire of ritual completed burning in him.

Aleft,aright,aleftagain—behindhim,thecop’sheavy footstepsandheavierbreathingdroppedoffandaway,buteven assilencerushedintofillthatvacuum,hekeptrunning—if notforthechase,thenatleastforthefeelingofhisbodyinfull motion:thedullvibrationoftheorganofhisbeingagainstthe bony plate of the world.

To Parks, the advantageous part of being homeless, if there could be said to be one, was the knowledge it had given him of the City: its streets, its alleys, its long stretches of black brick broken only by the sharp crescent of a streetlamp shining down… there were many times he’d taken advantage of that knowledge—running from cops or from muggers, bashers out to catch a fag or two. Many a night he’d spent ducking into one alley or another, following their winding paths in darkness so thick he could have seen more with his eyes closed, letting the City hold him in its darkest corners, its smallest, warmest, most well-hidden nooks, and listening as the hurried footprints and harried breathing of whomever was out to get him that night passed him right by. The City, he had learned, was like an animal, a dog; it was loyal as much as it was savage, and it paid kind with kind.

All those harrowed nights, all that running, all that hiding, meantthatParksknewtheCitybetterthanmostpeoplewill gettoknowanythingintheirlives.

Which, of course, was why the Door came as such a surprise.

***

From the northernmost archway from the compass rose of the room’s center now stepped two more figures: on the right, a thin Black man, cooly striding, a red leather trench coat draped upon his shoulders, a white dress shirt and a loose black tie his armor underneath. A pair of rectangular sunglasses balanced on the tightrope of his nose-bridge, beneath a bursting of Basqiatesque locs. Beside him, the tallest, broadest, draggiest of drag things: a band wrapped about their bald head, encrusted at intervals with jewels of only the brightest colors, and their eyes and beard purpled in a nebula of glitter. A black mesh tank top covered the top of their torso, but bore the midriff, where a rhinestone sun radiated from their naval.

“What up, sluts?” they called.

“Dee,” Madame A said, “Alain. Welcome, welcome!” “Oh, shit—hey Madame A,” said Dee. “Of course, what

I meant to say was, ‘Salutations, ladies and gentlewhores!’” Juanita squealed, threw her hands in the air, and shuffled across the floor to meet the two newcomers, every sequin link of her dancing up and down. Alain embraced her briefly, then passed on; Dee met her in the middle of the room, and the two of them together cast all the light she caught through Dee’s jeweled prisms to play in a fractal rainbow on the floor.

“Bitch, this look is sickening,” Juanita said.

“Oh, I’m well aware,” Dee replied. “But nonetheless, I thank you. Now, what’s this I hear about you and Walt pulling all-nighters at The Cold Day? Don’t tell me you’re popping your tuck for that old whine-o.”

“Girl, no, it’s not—I—how did you know about that?” “Oh, you know me. If it’s happening, I’m there…” Meanwhile, Alain stepped to Madame A’s side.

“Madame Adorna. Sorry we’re late,” he said, kissing her once, twice on each cheek. “I was putting the finishing touches on tonight. I thought it was lacking in authority. Dee had the idea to Wyrk purely in association, and that cracked the whole thing open.” And then, when Madame Adorna raised a stenciled eyebrow, “I know, I know. But who says practice can’t be perfect?”

“You’ll be a revelation, dear. As always.”

She took his hand in hers and made herself a ballast through that storm of silence before occurrence, a solid, knowing thing to cling to in the mire of anticipation. It was a courtesy she offered each of them, when their own time came, and that they each accepted, begrudgingly or not. It was the truest mark of a bona fide dedicante to accept help when it was offered—it was written in the Haus rules, after all, and so only those who could follow it found their way here.

***

It was so simple and smooth an addition that no one else, not even the oldest of them, not even those who had come from the families that had come from the families that had laid the bricks that became this street, that street, and the buildings looming overhead, had or would detect its arrival. The sidewalk leading up to it was smooth and unbroken, it sat so comfortably, so perfectly, so squarely in the center of the old Wolworth Building, that it looked at first, at second, even at third glance like it had always, always been there. The City itself did not to notice its new addition—as one might miss an odd mole changing shape.

ButParksnoticed.

As he ran through the cobbled streets, beneath the old brick buildings by the riverfront that once had been something but now were nothing, and against the hot wind blowing down from the darkening sky and up from the black river, he turned his head, just for a second, and his gaze slipped into that alley— an alley he’d walked through, ran through, pissed in, slept in, you name it—and there it was. The Door. Sitting there at the end of the darkening strip.

Maybe,ifithadbeenadifferenttimeofday;ifhe’dbeen lookingupinsteadofdown,orleftinsteadofright;ifthewind had not blown his hair into his eyes just so, or if the pebble in his shoe had stayed somewhere a boulder and had not been whittled and weathered down to fit between his toes, he would not have—but these things happened, altogether, as if conspiring to show him that anomalous addition; that cover on the hole in the world: that Door, which had not been there, and yet there was.

Parkseyedthethingfromadistance,atfirst.Then,when he’d been convinced it wouldn’t snap at him, allowed himself to probealittlecloser.Thealleywasthesunsetoverwater:long, well-lit at one end and dark at the other, a narrowing branch of lighttheonlythingstretchingbetweenhimselfandtheDoor. Parks walked along it as if along a tightrope, mindful of his feet, careful not to slip into the waiting darkness.

***

One by one, slow and surmounting as the dawn, they emerged: out from the halls and high places of the Haus spread out and deep around them; in from the Doors to all its chapters, all its arms draped the out-world over: figures of all shapes and sizes they were, wrought from starlight and shadow, dressed in fire and ash and ice and the towering of trees and the heart of the sunrise: black suits and spilling dresses; pleated gowns and bejeweled necklaces; leather harnesses and silver rings—faces painted with ruby and sapphire and emerald, hair as short or as tall as was possible to be. Each was similar only in difference; no two were even close to the same. One man stood in flowing robes adorned with silver threaded embroidery, and a tall, pointed hat with a wide brim; a woman at his side wore a pale-white suit, cinched at the waist, her hair slicked back and blond, save for her temples, which were raven-black and blended smoothly into the thick makeup around her eyes; the person next to her wore a glittering, starry shawl that flowed down from the top of their head, obscuring all but the allusion of their form; and on and on they went, each more distinct and decadent than the last.

Gather as such they did and gathered as such they were the building charge in the thunder-cloud’s black heaven, waiting, expectant, for the world to open up beneath them: for time and space to conspire just so, and for the path to thus be opened between themselves and creation.

At the edge of the crowded ring, Madame Adorna squeezed her pupil’s hand once more, then stepped into the circle. As she walked, her kimono caught fire—a subtle burning, as of paper: a black-and-reddening of its edges, an inward-curl-and-creeping of its hem, and by the time she had reached the circle’s center, she wore a deep-cut dusk-violet dress that glittered and shone despite, in spite, of the low light of the room. Her face became immaculuntly beat: her cheekbones rounded in bronze; the edges of her eyes sharp and winged; her hair impossibly voluminous: brown curls that stretched at least a foot above her head, and cascaded down her shoulders. The sharp clack of her heels across the stone floor was the only sound; no one dared even to breathe, and as she walked, she seemed almost to shed stardust—to cast the glittering light of her bodice out into the very air about her; to transfigure the bland emptiness of the air with nothing but her presence in it.

“Aspira,” she said, her eyes shut, her mouth wide, her voice the timpani of summer thunder, cascading through the air. “Fontania. Giefan. Recaparen.”

As she spoke, she made—of all things—the sign of the cross, down her chest and over her breast. The crowd imitated the gesture—some repeating her words, others their own: a smattering of voices, a scattering of raindrop-words.

And with the ritual begun, Madame Adorna opened her heavy-lidded eyes and let her glittering arms fall once again to her sides.

“Friends. Neighbors. Comrades. Thank you for your presence here tonight: what will be our seven-hundred-and- seventy-fifth Séance. In my time as the matron of this Haus, I have seen so many of you come and learn and grow and go, and come, and come again...”

A smattering of laughter, which Madame Adorna received politely before going on: “Such wonders you have shown me, and each other—and there is no place nor time that I am happier to bear that heavy, heavy load than in these moments that are purely ours.”

For a breath, she paused, letting her smile sweep as the sun through windborne clouds over the gathered faces.

***

Just then he noticed, with a surprised curiosity, that with everystephetooktowardstheDoor,theacheinhisstomach, andhisfeet,andhishead,remindersallofwhathelackedand what he had to do to get it, of the job and the work and the money waiting for him, money for food, for clothes, for a whole and holeless roof over his head, were grown and magnified within him. Every inch closer to the Door’s slick-white sheen sent new cold waves of hunger crashing through him—and for most anyone else, such reminders would have been enough, would have turned away even the most inquisitive of souls through nothing but a yanking of the yoke of the world about their necks. But Parks was not so easily deterred, for even more than of hunger, he was possessed of an indignance so great it was the spark of revolution. When the world told him what he could not be, where he could not go, all it did was make him want it more. And a moment’s experimentation with this bizarre field of psychic resistance assured him—the Door did not want to be opened by just anyone.

ButParkswasnotjustanyone.Hewashimself,bygod, and besides—the Door was newer to this town than he was. Who was it to tell him where he could and couldn’t go?

***

Madame Adorna went on, “Whenever a new face joins us in the Haus of Burning Hearts, it is never a wonder what it is about them that got them here. For Alain Delaporte, it was his single-mindedness, his continuity of devotion, his ceaseless stride to grasp those gleams of unpossessèd knowledge in all the spheres before him, that distinguish and distinguished him to us. He keeps our Haus looking forward, always striving to be better than it was before. He is our Magus of the Morrow, our Prophet Prospectus, and we are lucky tonight, as we are every night he spends with us, to watch him Wyrk.”

She turned, starlight spilling from her shoulders, to face a corner of the room.

“Alain Delaporte, the floor is yours.”

Madame Adorna stepped aside; from the dark corner, there emerged the man.

Beneath the red leather coat draped over his shoulders, Alain Delaporte was the ember’s white-hot core, a walking cinder that, with each step into the circle’s center, into the spare and waiting light of the place, flared brighter, brighter still—the air seemed to move with him, to congeal at his passing in curlicues of smoke spilling out and up from his smoldering shoulders. At the center of the circle, he removed his dark sunglasses, revealing a pair of amber eyes that, for the instant before their revelation, appeared, themselves, as flames, as secret fires.

The sorcerer Alain Delaporte stood in the center of the crowd, the room, the world, and paid the silence its due. He stood with his eyes closed, the room storm-stirring around him, and took a long, deep breath. Alain opened his eyes, his mouth, and

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