Under Cover of Darkness (37 page)

Beroald clapped again.

The curtains drew back, revealing a dark opening in the black stone wall, like the mouth of a cave. In that mouth, King could feel, more than see, something moving, watching.

“And finally . . .” Beroald said, nodding back toward the front of the room.

King turned to look. At the top of the carpeted staircase stood a figure.

The Dancer.

She wore the ever-changing diaphanous gown from that morning, a morning from a lifetime ago. As the Dancer descended the stairs, the torches on the walls died, and the flames in the burners surrounding the dance floor leaped higher, casting the tables into shadow. The Dancer spun the length of the floor, past King and Beroald, to stand silently before the dark opening, eyes unfocused.

She raised her hands above her head, and the squeegee band began to play the now familiar song. At the first note, the opening quivered like a black membrane, then vomited a thick fog. Inside the dark mist, a misshapen form skittered into the room.

The Dancer began to dance. And glow. Her glow grew with each spin she made, each leap she took, until it lit the room and, finally, penetrated the dark mist.

And King could see the thing that had emerged from the opening.

The creature moved on six multijointed legs set below a body resembling the carapace of a huge beetle, black and shiny. Dark scales protected a short neck and a bulbous head. Long pincers extended from each side of a slitlike mouth writhing in a horrible parody of a human face. The thing measured at least ten feet from its head to the end of a barbed tail.

Red multifaceted eyes took in the diners. Suddenly, it scrambled forward.

King jumped up, ready to flee, but Beroald put a hand on his arm. “Watch,” he said.

The Dancer spun closer. The creature turned toward her. It stopped. The music played, and the Dancer danced. As she moved, the thing stood transfixed, swaying, red eyes locked on her, hypnotized by the spell she wove with her body.

The two curtain attendants, each holding long knives, approached the beast. The nearest drew his arm back, poised to strike.

The Dancer slipped.

It was a small thing, a muscle twitch out of rhythm with the song, but King felt it, as if the dance were a living thing and had skipped a heartbeat.

It was enough to free the creature from the Dancer's spell. Wheeling on the nearest knife wielder, the thing severed the man's head with a snap of its pincers, then turned toward the diners. People screamed and jumped up, King and Beroald included.

The Dancer leaped between them, in control of her every movement again. The beast froze, captured by her dancing once more. The second attendant closed on the creature, and with a smooth precise motion, slipped his blade between the scales around the beast's throat. The creature spasmed once, then slumped to the floor.

Thick blood spewed from the wound, a red so dark it seemed black. It flowed along the channels carved in the stone into the goblets set around the dais. When it stopped, the table attendants collected the goblets and began circulating among the tables.

As they did, the Dancer ran the length of the room, up the staircase and disappeared through a side archway. Beroald glared after her, then motioned for King to sit again.

King sat, trembling, trying again to control an urge to flee. The leopard-headed woman poured some of the blood into Beroald's and King's glasses. Beroald raised his and took a deep drink.

King stared at him in disgust. Beroald smiled, blood glistening on his lips. He leaned forward. “Do you recall anything of your first visit?”

King shook his head, not trusting himself to speak.

“How you felt afterward? The state of your health?”

The sweet smell of the blood reached King then. And he remembered. A host of minor ailments disappearing, a burst of energy for the next week. He looked at his glass, then at Beroald.

Beroald smiled. “The secret of the Red Door, Mr. King. The privilege that I spoke of.”

King swallowed. “Immortality?” he asked, not believing what he was asking.

Beroald shrugged. “Who knows? A cure for all known ills and a very long life, to that I can attest.”

“What I just saw . . .”

“A ritual, but a practical one. The creatures beyond that black portal may be killed solely by a thrust through a solitary and minute gap in their armor, a strike so precise that it can be executed only if the creature is immobile. The Dancer performs that function for us.” Beroald paused. “Preferably more reliably than tonight.”

A red-faced man with long white sideburns leaned over from an adjacent table. “Three times this month, Beroald. Three times!”

“I'm dealing with it, Shelby,” Beroald replied, his voice icy. The other man paled and turned back to his own table.

Smiling again, Beroald raised his glass in a toast. “To our health, Mr. King. Quite literally.”

King looked at the glass of blood before him, struggling to assimilate all he'd just witnessed and learned.

“The efficacy of the blood,” Beroald continued, “lasts but a short while.”

Immortality, King thought. He raised his glass. He drank.

Sweetness. Heat. Then . . .

A dam bursting inside him . . . a hidden lake released . . . his being flooded with rivers of vitality . . . freed from every bodily pain.

King gasped. He felt wonderful. He felt strong. He felt . . .

Powerful.

He laughed, and Beroald joined him. They roared with laughter, slapping each other on the back. At last, King sat back, wiping away tears of laughter, sipping the rest of the blood, reveling in his newfound vigor. Finally, he asked the question that he feared to raise, but for which he now had to have an answer.

“Beroald, will you accept me as a member here?”

Beroald smiled. “As I said, the Society of the Red Door is not a club. None of us may give or deny admittance. We are each here simply because we found a path to the Door, and can find it again whenever we desire.”

King's hopes leapt. “Then I can return?”

Beroald's smile disappeared. “I fear not.”

King felt a surge of fear and anger. “Why not? I found a path.”

Beroald waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “Ah, but could you find it again? The Song led you tonight. But the Song plays for one soul and one soul only—the Dancer.”

“Yet it played for me,” King argued.

Beroald frowned. “No doubt your unprecedented exposure to our lady today fooled the Song into accepting you tonight. Indeed, you still reek of her.” Beroald wrinkled his nose, and King wondered at this remark. “But, I assure you, it will not play for you again.”

King turned to where the Dancer had disappeared. “Why does it play only for her?”

Beroald shrugged again. “Who knows? The Song will pass to another only upon her death, which is happily unlikely, given her access to the elixir.” Beroald rose. “Now I must pay my respects to some friends. It has been a pleasure.” Shaking King's hand, he moved to another table.

Oblivious to conversations around him, King sat there stunned, imagining his freshly won vitality draining out of him with every heartbeat. To discover immortality and then to lose it . . .

No! He would
not
let this happen. He belonged here, among the elite, the powerful. There must be a way.

In front of him, the carving knife still lay beside the roast. King stared at the knife. He picked it up. The blade was sharp, slicing through the bloody meat easily. When no one was watching, he wiped the knife clean with his napkin and carefully slid it up his sleeve. He sat there trembling for a moment, then he rose.

Walking the length of the room, he climbed the stairs and went through the alcove where the Dancer had disappeared. He found himself on an outdoor terrace, halfway up the pyramid.

Beside a low stone wall at the terrace's edge, staring up at the red moon and the strange starless sky, stood the Dancer. He touched her elbow. She cried out and drew away, staring at him with wild, clouded eyes. Then a look of recognition danced over her face.

“You came,” she whispered.

She flew into his arms, kissing him hard, twining her fingers in his hair, forcing his mouth onto hers. She pulled back. “Free me,” she whispered.

“What?”

“Take me away from here. Never to return,” she pleaded.

King shook his head. “Are you mad? The Red Door offers freedom from death.”

She laughed bitterly. “This place offers many things, but freedom is not among them.”

King pushed her away. “I wish to return here, not leave.”

The Dancer looked at him, her shoulders slumping. “You will not free me?”

He ignored her. “Can you teach me to find the path to this place?”

“I don't know the way,” she said, her voice a dead thing. “I know only the Song.”

“Then teach me the Song.”

She stared silently at the dark jungle below. Then she straightened, as if reaching a decision. She turned back to him. “I cannot teach it, but I can give it to you.”

“How?”

She stroked the outline of the knife under his sleeve. He stiffened. Drawing out the knife, she pushed its grip into his now shaking hand, its tip resting beneath her sternum.

“Free me, as you planned,” she said, looking up into his eyes.

“Freedom for me. Immortality for you,” she said softly, pressing closer to him until the tip of the knife cut through her thin gown and into her pale flesh.

“Free me,” she said again. A patch of blood blossomed around the wound.

Immortality. Only upon her death.

“Free me!” she cried.

Immortality.

With a sob, King stepped forward, thrusting the blade up and into the Dancer. She spasmed, and her head jerked backward. Blood gushed from her chest, soaking her once-beautiful gown and King's hands and shirt. Crying out, he pushed her from him, and she slumped to the cold stone, no longer something elemental, just a dead thing.

What had he done? King stumbled away from her in horror.

And the Song exploded in him.

Before, it had often been so faint he could barely hear it. Now it pounded in his skull, filled his entire being. His very heartbeat seemed to match its rhythm. Beneath the music, he heard a chanting, whispers born in hidden places, words strange and sinister, rasped in cruel guttural tones from throats not human. A paralyzing cold crept into King's limbs. They felt numb, no longer under his control. His legs began to twitch. His arms jerked.

He began to dance.

He twirled around the terrace, leaping over the corpse of the Dancer, his toes drawing patterns in her blood. He kept dancing, unable to stop, even when Beroald entered.

Beroald looked down at the body of the Dancer. He smiled. He spoke.

He turned to King and laughed. “She had become . . . unreliable, as you saw tonight. She would have killed herself, but the Song would not allow it. Any of us would have killed her, but again, there was the Song. On the death of a Dancer, it inhabits the
nearest
person. And none of us wish to know the Song that intimately.” He looked at King who was still spinning around the terrace. “That is, none of us who know its true nature.”

Inside, the band began to play again, the same music that now pounded incessantly in his head, the Song that King, to his horror, knew would never stop playing for him.

“Mr. King,” Beroald said with a smile, “I believe they're playing your song.”

King felt himself pulled by invisible hands as strange strings strummed the night air. He began a tarantella, his steps matching the rhythm of tambourines and castanets from the band. Glowing as if on fire, he spun down the great staircase, across the dance floor, and onto the stone dais.

Alexander King danced that night, danced for the pa trons of that strange society, danced for the things behind the black portal, danced and danced.

As he would every night until his death, puppet to the Song, Dancer at the Red Door.

For the city has a song, and it plays in a minor key.

Julie E. Czerneda
is not a member of a secret society. Really. She doesn't know
those
people. They just happen to visit. When not practicing her secret handshake, Julie is a fulltime author and editor. Her tenth science fiction novel from DAW,
Regeneration
, Species Imperative #3 came out in 2006. Next comes a prequel to her Trade Pact Universe series,
Reap the Wild Wind
, out in July 2007. Her anthology
Space Inc.
won the Prix Aurora Award (Canada's Hugo). Julie has conspired with other editors before Jana, namely Isaac Szpindel (
ReVisions
from DAW) and Gene vieve Kierans (
Mythspring
from Red Deer Press). Otherwise, she works alone and in . . . the shadows . . . editing the science fiction anthology series Tales from the Wonder Zone (next title
Polaris
) and Realms of Wonder, original fantasy. Oh, the secret handshake? When she gets it right, Jana's promised to let her help take over the . . . well, she can't tell you. You understand.