The Altonevers (37 page)

Wide silver tinted cloud bottoms hang
high above, like set lights directing the sun over the whole of the
panchromatic city. Insatiable to the eye, like seeing the reality
around her as though her pineal gland popped and slowly dripped
over her pupils. Even more colors emerge and are continually
growing greater in intensity. Daisy is bouncing in the driver’s
seat humming and speaking even more upbeat than before.

“
This is it, this is the
place,” the starlet says, pulling up along an long ivy covered
white brick wall with each passing leaf being more lush, more
luscious looking than the last. Daisy stomps down, suddenly
screeching the brakes sliding them to stop an inch before large
polished brass pearl studded gates, adorned with the same art deco
eagle head that crowns the city's tallest skyscraper.

“
Daisy!” Daisy shouts into
a speaker box, and the brass gates glisten as they swing open to a
long, long driveway. At least a minute of speeding past elegant
sculptures of former film stars littering the great green lawn to
reach a lavish cream walled gilded age Manor house converted from a
baroque period theatre. The two, now horribly ill from dim
sickness, stumble up the red carpeted black marble stairs, each
step seeming like a struggle for their lives. They barely follow
Daisy up to a two story solid redwood double door decorated with
colorful inlays of elaborately detailed peacocks tails.

“
Do we knock?” she
asks.

“
No, I live here,” Daisy
says.

“
This is where we'll be
staying,” Cider mumbles.

“
Really?” Anna
asks.

“
Yeah Carrot’s, get used to
it. Forget those dives he’s been takin’ ya through,” Daisy says as
the heavy redwood doors swing open to a small atrium with Victorian
era gold leafed furnishings. A polar bear’s pelt hangs on the wall
over a large black and white checkered marble floor, and second
door, a smaller sort of the first door opens to six penguin suited
men bowing to Daisy and her guests. Welcoming them to a long hall
with gas lamps lining the walls and hanging from a tall vaulted
ceiling. Third eye piercing paintings run the length of the hall to
their left and life size stone sculptures of rich earth tones that
can be found nowhere else, to their right. Halfway through the hall
the floor opens to a large fountain forged of brass, pearls, ivy
and ivory. It’s centerpiece is a monolithic sculpture of three
mermaids climbing up a thirty foot tall merman, who's wrapping
around a turquoise oak tree and playing the harp with its bare
branches.

“
This is her favorite
fountain,” Daisy says.

“
Looks like it,” he
says.

“
Why?” Anna
asks.

“
I don't really know,”
Daisy replies.
Anna doesn’t know why, but
looking at the fountain is soothing. She rests her eyes in its
nearly invisible water until Daisy pulls her by her shirt back to
the red carpet. Nearing the third set of peacock decorated doors
they hear the rising rhythms of a brass band playing their hearts
out through their instruments. Leading them like bread crumbs
spread through a forest toward the rumblings of a crowd’s cheers
and laughter. The whole commotion is on the other side of the door,
but Anna's already swelling with a sensation of jollity sweetly
skinned and weightless, in anticipation of what hues she’ll see
next.

“
Ready Carrots. This can be
a bit much for even the normal visitors,” Daisy says with a hand on
a big brass doorknob. “This is where her vividness holds court.
It's a three level theatre room that was stripped of the ground
floor seats and replaced with marble, of course, and dining tables.
The stage is to the right and the bar is a little past that. The
Baroness sits across the room from the bar but where the room
starts to slim to the size of this hallway, okay,” Daisy says to
the squinted eyed Anna so she she’ll have some sort of way about
here.

“
Okay,” she says, “but why
are you telling the layout of the room?”

Daisy ignores her question, knowing
that to open the door will answer.

“
What about me?” Cider
asks

“
Oh shut up you,” Daisy
snaps.

“
What can be a bit much?”
Anna asks again “what? what is it?” she musters the strength to
fume. Daisy nods to one of the penguins and together they swing the
doors wide open, blinded Anna with what she thinks is the flashes
of a thousand cameras at once, though is actually the glimmer of a
thousand raised champagne glasses lit by a grand chandelier swaying
fifty feet in the air.

“
Wowww,” she says lowly, in
awe as her eyes breathe in ethereal hues making the light of the
heavens seem pale and feeble. She stumbles into the roaring
applause for Daisy's return, blinking uncontrollably, seeing
through throbbing heat for split seconds at a time, seeming like
epileptic optical Morse code is punctuating the perpetually
saturating chrome beaming radiantly richer by the step, already
shades far past what her mind can even comprehend. Everywhere she
look is blurring and melting from any form of shape.
A grand piano plays on, lightly under a frenzied
crowd of circus performers, acrobats, comedians, magicians,
assistants, ringleaders, strong men, snake oil salesman, actors,
playwrights, animal trainers, directors, and the most violent of
all sorts, the mimes. All dressed in a mix of new wave and
vaudeville looking clothes of mostly blacks, whites and shades of
silver. To represent the white of no color, the black of all color,
and the silver of the silver screen. They are the Baroness Vivian’s
clique of rabid criminals, the Vaudevs, filling the large dining
room floor with frenzied festivities. Many reaching out to shake
Cider’s hand and pouring fawning adoration over their dear Daisy,
the most brutal of them all, also their lieutenant answering to no
one but Vivian. To Anna’s surprise the smiling faces are
introducing themselves to her in the most polite way. A thousand
men must've kissed her hand, though she can hardly see a single
anything through her heat wavering visions of the dim sickness
delirium.

“
Vivian! Vivian we’re
here,” Daisy says ecstatically, jumping up and down like a
child.

“
Oh Daisy, Darling come
closer,” a woman’s waspy voice resounds with over the playing brass
of the band, and crowd of festivity frenzied Vaudevs like thunder
carries over water.

“
Where is Cider? where is
that young old fool of heart?” The voice of the omnipotent woman
says lovingly as she hugs the air from Ciders lungs, with a kiss on
the cheek as a greeting.

After a few suspenseful to seconds, to
Anna, of not seeing the source of this Altos spectrum of color, a
villainous mime steps out of the way, unveiling to her hue's
magnitudes more luminous than the effulgence of Helios himself.
With such vibrancy the light itself seems to be living, atomically
alive in themselves thriving vibrantly around her. Each of the
billions of shades in a single eyeful seem as though they’re
reveling in their own relentlessly rising resplendence. Even the
faintest speckle of light reflecting in the Baroness’ eyelash
scorches Anna’s vision like a hot spike is ran through her retina.
The afterglow enshrouding only her Vividness, is so crisp it makes
the invisible seeming air around her appear as a mist of shimmering
sapphire.

Every time Anna flitters her eyes she
see's and feels like it’s the first time she’d ever opened them for
her frazzling mind to see. A thousand times a minute to the sight
of a statuesque gilded age goddess standing before her. With legs
for day, a head taller than most men in the room, and pin straight
peekaboo platinum blonde hair flowing over the right side of her
exuberant face, then falling to her bare shoulders. Always half
asleep heavy eyelids cover half her enormous true blue iris, its
lore that for her to bat her lashes is akin to the kiss of death to
all but her closest friends. A small mole below her left eye and
beside her perky nose only adds to her elegant attractiveness,
luring any person into her soul illuminating gaze. Anna likes very
mush that she has slightly taller than average ears, almost like
that of a bunny, a flaw that endears her to adore her upon seeing
her.

The Baroness, her vividness
Vivian, the head of leviathan studios, is a room dominating
voluptuous virago vivifying every single thing in the metropolis
from big to small, and pig to man, everything for miles past the
city limits with pure polychrome emanating solely from the splendid
presence of her being. Her sumptuous candy apple painted lips move
sensually when speaking, She’s speaking directly to Anna whose eyes
are hot as boiling magma, barely able to squint through Vivian’s
vision enrapturing radiance to see her clearly. Anna's helplessly
captivated in blissful attraction to Vivian’s evening gown that
ceaselessly deepens into darker and darker shades of infinite
black, as though searching for absolute oblivion before her very
eyes.
A ringing sings through Anna's ears,
deafening her as much as her vision is blurred. She tries looking
away, to the ground, but can't resist following the long slit
showing the skin of Vivian’s thigh, drawing Anna’s blinking gaze
back to the depths of her infinitely blackening dress. She slips
deep into tunnel vision, ending with a mind bleaching flash of her
vision drenched brain reaching past its capacity of comprehension.
Anna wobbles on her feet intoxicated, Cider tries to catch her and
the crowd comes together, swooning around her as she faints and
falls. A place to feel home is the last thought Anna has before her
vision vanishes to the moving pictures in the afterglow of her
eyelids.

* * *

“
A Phone call was received
at 1:15 am. Saturday July first. Ms. Daisy, The Baroness'
lieutenant, the second most beautiful of all the stages, aside only
from Vivian herself. Drove out to a clam diner deep in the Drabs on
the Baroness word. Taking a seat across a suave looking man, she
began to move flirtatiously, gyrating in her seat, lifting a leg,
reaching for herself, then executing the man in his seat. She
picked up a notorious pan-Alto vault knocker, murderer, and jack of
some trades. The girl, his moll, is wanted for questioning in the
death of a Ribbit in another place awhile back. The three arrive to
the Baroness theatre at 9:27 am.” A man's white gloved fingers
punch from the keys of a typewriter, beating black ink onto one of
the many pages of obsessively collected daily reports on Vivian and
her every activities.

Breakfast with the
Baroness

Anna's ears are still ringing though
her eyes are no longer stinging when she blinks. She's glazed over
in the afterglow of a celebration’s morning after, hungover over a
barely eaten brunch of bacon and tarts. The two are bathing in the
sunshine of the ivy clothed mansion's expansive backyard. Sitting
across from the acme of all coloration, her vividness, the Baroness
Vivian, who's brimming in light bending spectral harmony emanating
like wavering heat from her skin in broad day with a scenic view of
a serene seeming spring lake over her shoulder. The lake scene
strikes Anna with a sense of déjà vu, something of this place, it's
blued grass and twisting tree branches reaching over the smooth
water surface resurfaces from somewhere in her memory.

“
Are you okay darling, you
seem dull,” Vivian says speaking slightly through her nose in a
slow spoken waspy tone that was prevalent in the time of the
talkies. Her eyelids are perpetually low as though she'd just woken
up, as the two are from the waterfalls of champagne guzzled along
with Daisy and the rest, Anna especially enjoying the light
splintered under the glorious grand chandelier hanging in the
heights of gilded age glamour as the centerpiece of the crown jewel
of Vivian's spectral studio empire.

“
You drank quite a bit last
night. You should eat something…stop pecking my dear” Vivian says
lovingly.

“
Yeah stop pecking,” Cider
says.

“
Carrots darling,” the
Vivian says, “You have to take care of yourself. You don't want to
age horribly do you?”

“
I guess, not…”

“
Harold, Harold. Yes, bring
Carrots something to eat will you?”

“
Yes Madam,” says a stout
penguin dressed butler with a cowboy’s hip holster holding his
pistols. His bald head disappears into the ivy covered walls then
reappears less than a minute later to place a piece of chocolate
cake on the table in front of Anna.

“
This is sooo good. Like if
chocolate ate chocolate,” she says with fudge frosting filling her
face, that's gluing her mouth closed and her tongue to the roof of
her mouth.

“
MMmm.”

“
Yeah, it looks good,”
Cider says.

“
Decadent to the palette,”
says Vivian.

“
NNn MMMMmmmMM” Anna hums
obnoxiously toward him for having cake when he doesn't. He steals a
bite with his fork.

“
I'll have some of your
cake too.”

“
MMMmm
nnnnMMmm.”

“
It's very goommMMMMnnmm,”
he says with his tongue trapped in fudge filling.

“
Oh, Harold, Harold be a
dear and get a glass of milk. Two glasses, thank you,” Vivian
shouts to her trusted butler.