Under A Velvet Cloak (22 page)

The shows and activities were fun. Kerena saw all manner of exotic animals and insects, and participated in wonderfully structured costume dances, and tasted ghostly pastries and wines. Gradually she perfected the ghostly semblance, so that the sensations became first real, then potent. At last, drunk on spirits in more than one sense, she had a sexual fling with a truly manly spook on a public stage that was fully satisfactory. Only the fancy rides were beyond her: the roller ghoster, the cart through the horror house, and the water mountain.

“It can be arranged, for a price,” a pair of young looking men informed her. Apparent age was determined by the time in life they died, so was deceptive, as was her own appearance. “What ride do you want?”

“All three,” she said, interested.

“Done.” A third young man came over, and she realized that it was one man per ride. So be it.

“This will be some experience,” Molly warned. “I’ll watch.” She separated into her own form.

Kerena sat on an isolated chair. Then illusion surrounded her: the cart and tracks of the first ride. She was not moving, but the image was, so that she seemed to be rolling forward. She let her mind accept it, beginning to feel the motion.

Men appeared on either side of her, and the third bestriding her. So it was to be all three at once. So be it, again. She was able to see through the one on top, so he didn’t interfere with the experience of the ride.

The scene tilted, as the cart was hauled steeply upward by a stout rope. The side men fondled her breasts and the top man kissed her lingeringly, his translucent skull framing her view.

The cart reached the top of the wood mountain, then angled to roll down the other side. It was awesome, like a long fall. The tracks descended to a seeming lake, and the cart plunged into it with a great loud splash. She seemed to feel the coursing water, though probably it was merely the questing mouths of the men as they kissed her breasts.

There were monsters under the surface: giant toothy fish, spectacular jellyfish with trailing sting lines, and huge squid with sucker-lined tentacles. One squid grabbed her with several arms and brought its deadly beak down to bite her face. All three men kissed her mouth and ears at that moment, making it seem more than real; a small cry escaped her, pleasing them. Girls were supposed to scream in horror scenes.

By the time the ride was done, so were the three men. She had had considerable multiple seeming plumbing. But also a phenomenal ride experience. “I must do that again, sometime,” she said dazedly as the track returned to the open court and the illusion faded, leaving her sitting alone.

It was Molly who called her to account. “You have acclimatized. You came here for a purpose.”

“So I did,” Kerena agreed, remembering. She threw off the daze of wine and illusion and concentrated. “Who here knows things I need to learn?”

“Many. But remember, you can’t trust them. It will be better to see for yourself.”

“I don’t even know where to look”

“Why not start with the origin of the Incarnations?”

“And how they became offices. Yes! How do I see that?”

“You travel back in time. But you will need a better guide than I can be. Someone who derives from those times.”

“Who would that be?”

A lovely ghost forged out of the throng. “That would be me.”

Oh, no! “Lilah!”

“Lilith, originally. The first woman.”

“You tried to keep my body.”

“Of course. A fool and her body are soon parted.”

“You aren’t even embarrassed about it.”

Lilah frowned. “Listen, you naive creature. I was the first feminist.”

“First what?”

“An anachronism in terminology, not in practice. I refused to consider myself Adam’s inferior, so I left him, and was expelled from Eden. I stand by my stance: women are at least the equal of men, and far less crude.”

“You said Adam wanted a virgin.”

“Well, I was one, until that first fuck, for which he was as responsible as I. But it was the virginity of the mind and spirit that counted. He wanted his woman to be inferior to him. That was laughable, and I would have none of it. Neither should you.”

Despite her ire at the betrayal, Kerena found herself warming to this woman. She was open and direct, and proud of her gender. “How can I trust you?”

“You can’t, until you are as cynical as I. That will require centuries. But you can be sure I will honor a deal that provides something I want. Make me that deal.”

“What do you want, aside from my body?”

“Next best is demon substance. That comes from the raw material of chaos. I can’t go that far myself, but maybe you can. Get me some of that so I can be a demoness and assume partial solidity when I want to.”

“Partial solidity? Why do you want that?”

“So I can have at men physically again, obviously. I won’t be able to stay solid full time, but an hour at a time will be fine. It will expand my potential enormously.”

“For this you will guide me to the origin of the Incarnations?”

“Exactly. That is near chaos.”

“How can you trust me to deliver, after you guide me?”

“You can be trusted, you naive tart. I am the one who can’t be.”

This was making uncomfortable sense. “What do you think, Molly?”

“She’s right. Set it up so she has to trust you, and you don’t have to trust her. She can be useful, for a price.”

So it seemed. “But I want you along, Molly.”

“Of course. I wouldn’t let you go with her alone. She’d find a way to cheat you, because you really are too trusting.” Molly merged again, disappearing into her body. Her presence was distinctly feminine and yielding, in contrast to the eager hard lust of the male ghosts.

“I am more like Eve than Lilith,” Kerena agreed with resignation. She found that an oddity, considering how many men she had serviced sexually, and her status as a vampire. “Very well: I will make that deal.”

“This way,” Lilah said. She began to move backward. Not exactly physically.

Kerena’s Seeing picked up on how she did it, and emulated it. She followed Lilah, and Molly followed her. They slid slowly back in time. It was like thinning and traveling across the globe, only in another direction. They were not moving spacially, but their surroundings were changing, as they had for the ghost ride. This, however, was not illusion. Darkness came, and light, and darkness, the nights and days of the recent past. Then the seasons changed, faster as they accelerated, until they flicked by in much the way the days and nights had before.

The Carnival of Ghosts was in a glade in a forest. The surrounding trees diminished, growing younger. New old trees appeared, filling in the glade. The forest became thick, overlapping Kerena’s space, but she was insubstantial and did not feel any impact of the trunks. The forest was a living thing, its parts shrinking while its whole remained. Everywhere trees appeared, shrank into shrubs, and disappeared into the ground.

Then the forest changed its nature, the leafed trees giving way reluctantly to firs. The pace increased, so that a tree that started as several centuries in girth descended into nothing in the space of a few seeming seconds. Hundreds of years were being traversed, then thousands.

Jolie was amazed and fascinated. This was an excursion beyond her expectation. Far farther back in time than ever. What would be seen at the end of this journey? Or the beginning, as it were.

Suddenly it stopped. They stood in a lush garden where all manner of fruiting trees grew. Tame-seeming animals grazed, unafraid of molestation. Indeed, there was a lion and lamb resting under a spreading tree. “Garden of Eden,” Lilah said. “We drifted a little in space to find it, as well as time. It’s in Africa.”

“But weren’t you banned from it?” Kerena asked.

“This is the Garden after Adam and Eve were booted. It’s empty of human beings. Nobody’s paying attention to ghosts anyway. This is as far as I can
go.
Only my pre-ban self appears here before this. You’ll have to continue back on your own.”

Kerena hesitated. “Why can’t you go farther back, skipping over Eden?”

“I can’t go to the time before I existed.”

“How is it that I can, then?”

“You’re not a ghost, for one thing. You have special powers, for another. You lack normal limits. That’s why I had my eye on you. No one knows your potential.”

Jolie was a ghost, but not in her own timeline, so was able to break the normal rules also. But Kerena was rapidly outstripping Jolie’s abilities. Jolie was no longer riding a kitten, but a tigress.

“No normal limits,” Kerena murmured thoughtfully. That was interesting, but this wasn’t the time to dwell on it. “How do I find the way?”

“Just keep moving back. You can’t miss chaos when you find it. I’ll be here when you return; there’s more to see.”

Kerena nodded and concentrated. She resumed traveling back, slowly. Lilah disappeared.

“Let’s move near the Tree of Knowledge,” Molly said. She was a ghost without special powers, but evidently could be carried along with Kerena’s sufference. “That’s where the action mostly happens.”

Kerena hadn’t thought they could talk while time traveling, but realized that they were in the same framework She adjusted her focus, and they angled toward the center of the Garden. There stood a giant tree with many different fruits: apples, pears, peaches, plums, oranges, bananas, cherries, pineapples, blackberries-everything Kerena had ever seen was there, and many more varieties. They all looked delicious.

“But don’t eat any,” Molly warned, mentally smiling.

Then they saw a man and a woman approaching the tree, backward. He discarded a fig leaf, putting it back on its tree. Now the man was naked and handsome, the woman clothed in a skirt of leaves but without upper clothing. They were trying ineffectively to cover their bareness with their hands. The man held a banana, which he was uneating; the fruit grew with each mouthful. Finally he reached up and put it in the tree, where it anchored. That was Adam, of course. He and Eve then faced the tree and backed away from it, he no longer ashamed of his lack of clothing.

Later (earlier) it was Eve alone who backed to the tree, discarding her improvised skirt, where she handed the apple she was uneating to the serpent that slithered backwards to receive it. She backed away from it, now nude and lovely. Her temptation and loss of innocence had just unhappened.

Evidently the visitors, as time traveling ghosts, were not apparent to the denizens of this wondrous garden. So Kerena followed the man and woman. They were completely unaffected, eating, sleeping, defecating, and having sex without inhibition. Their age of innocence.

Yet Kerena noticed that Eve never initiated a sexual encounter. She waited until Adam thought of it, then gracefully acquiesced. She seemed to enjoy it, but only by providing him his joy.

Eve disappeared and Adam was alone for a while. Then the original Lilah/Lilith appeared, backing haughtily up to Adam to have some kind of argument with him. She raised her arm and he unstruck it. So he had tried to resort to violence, but she had balked him there too. Kerena found herself privately applauding the woman. Why should she have to accept abuse from her man? It was Adam who should have been banished, not Lilith. The seed of his violence had passed along to his son Cain, who slew his brother. Instead, in the patriarchal scheme, she had been punished for defending herself.

But later (earlier) they were considerably more friendly. When it came to sex, Lilith was evidently the expert, throwing herself into it with seeming
abandon.
She would come to him, evidently demanding it, choosing the manner of it. He seemed to be not entirely satisfied with this, though he did participate. In time (earlier) Adam came to really like it, right up to the first encounter, where they mutually discovered the kind of interaction their bodies were capable of.

“Oooo, I wish I was doing that,” Molly moaned.

“Me too,” Kerena agreed.

Jolie agreed too. There was something about that first, innocent, tentative joy of union that was extremely seductive, surely by no coincidence. Yet it seemed Adam had in time blamed her for it, perhaps resenting her evident delight in it. It was, it seemed, only his joy that counted, not hers. In that respect, Eve had been better for him.

Then they were gone, and before long, so was the garden. There seemed to be nothing.

Kerena accelerated, trying to get beyond the blank spot. Suddenly she passed a flurry of odd action, and realized, that she had overshot. She slowed, then reversed, so as to pick up the events in time-forward manner.

“This must be Chaos,” Molly said.

So it seemed. Around them the universe was without form and void, a chaotic (naturally) mixture of light and darkness. Kerena tried to make sense of it, and slowly there came to be two overlapping scenes. One was of patches of light and darkness flying through space, coming from some monstrous distant explosion, coalescing into points of light which were actually giant hot balls of fire, admixed with great dark clouds of dusty vapors. As she strained to see more of this confusion, a bit of substance formed from a collapsing cloud and became a ball of hot rock. This bubbled and cooled, forming vapor around it, and later was coated with slime that became plants and creatures. Finally fish crawled out of the seas and became animals, and one of the animals was mankind.

“I can’t make any sense of this,” Kerena complained.

“You’re looking at one scene; I’m looking at the other,” Molly said. “Mine makes some sense.”

Kerena adjusted her vision to tune in on the other scene. In this one, Chaos became a huge animate living thing that heaved and hurled out two lesser things. One of the two was vaguely male, the other vaguely female, both clothed in darkness. They writhed, forming semblances that enhanced their genders: a monstrous phallus, a similarly monstrous vulva. They came together, their parts merging repeatedly. Then the female squeezed out a blob of energy that drifted away. She issued another, that also departed. Another, and another, until there were ten or more.

“She’s birthing babies!” Molly exclaimed.