9
Next stop on my whirlwind tour of the Garden of Abracadabra? Number Twenty-Seven, the lair of Jake, Flame, and Cuddles, a.k.a. Scorpio Rising. Have I ever, in my wildest dreams, wanted to meet the most famous disco superstars of that reviled big-haired ancient era, the nineteen-seventies?
Not really. Scorpio Rising had a badass reputation in the tabloids long before they overdosed on cocaine. Or was it heroin? I have eclectic tastes in music, from Renaissance pavanes to modern rock, and I’m no critic, but I just can’t forgive them for “Disco Divin’”. The tune is a mind-worm, stealthy and insidious. Once you have the bad luck to hear it on the sound system while you’re shopping for ayahuasca at Walgreen’s, you can’t pry that obnoxious beat or those falsetto vocals out of your head for days. For weeks.
I stride across the lobby where a man stoops before the mailboxes, a bicycle leaning against his hip as he plucks letters and magazines out of his box.
Oh, crap. Is it poor old Stanley, the prodigal super? Has he dragged his sorry ass back to reclaim his job, his salary, his apartment, and his garage, all of which–he must have realized when he regained his sanity–truly are too good to be true?
“I signed that employment contract in blood, wing nut. You can’t take the job back. I won’t let you, Stanley.”
The man turns around, not Stanley. He’s as unStanleylike as another twenty-something guy could be. A beanpole, he stands head and shoulders above me, his long limbs stick-thin. He’s tucked a long-sleeved white business shirt into neat gray trousers and slung an expensive leather backpack over his shoulder. His bushy black hair, eyebrows, and mustache play up his suspicious pallor. Peculiar eyes glow in his long, bony face, the irises swirling with streaks of color like the splash screen of some exotic software.
His bicycle isn’t an oily, mud-encrusted three-speed, but a sleek silver mountain bike with a dozen gears. Not the same bike as Stanley’s. Not the same bike, at all.
He grins, a very friendly, very human grin with uneven, crooked human teeth. “Stanley flew the coop, did he?”
“He couldn’t skip out of the Garden of Abracadabra fast enough. I’m Abby Teller, your new super.”
“Are you serious? I thought Abby Teller was dead.”
I’m not at all used to the reaction and the why of it still eludes me. “You must be someone in the World of Magic. I am Abby Teller, and I am not, repeat not, dead.”
“Awesome, Abby.” He looks me over the way Esmeralda did, curiously, a little suspiciously though not nearly as spooked as she was. He locks his mailbox and stuffs his mail in a pocket of his backpack. “I’m Tesla in Thirty-nine. If that antique iMac in your office ever bugs you, give me a call. I’m an electronics wizard.” He adds in a gloomy voice, “It’s my curse.”
Tesla wheels his bicycle across the lobby, heading for the staircase, weariness in every thump of his footsteps. He hoists the bicycle under his arm and climbs the stairs.
The electronics wizard is cursed? But how? And why? I make a mental note to give Tesla a neighborly call tomorrow or the day after. He and I, we should talk.
* * *
I climb three stories of stairs up the spiral staircase, heading for Twenty-seven. I’m reasonably fit from jogging and weightlifting, but I’ve planted my butt in a bucket seat for four very long days, and by the time I reach the third floor, I’m huffing and puffing and massaging my creaking knees.
Labyrinthine halls stretch before me, pools of light and pools of darkness. I sally forth in what turns out to be totally the wrong direction, turn back and stub my toe on a wall looming just around a corner. After another twist and a turn, I find my way to Number Twenty-seven.
Dead silence reigns outside the door. Whatever else they may be, the tenants are quiet. Which is commendable. Maybe collecting the check won’t be too difficult, after all.
I rap my knuckles on the door and wait. I wait long enough to recollect the iconic photograph of Scorpio Rising on the cover of The Black Album, a photo reprinted over and over in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. Jake, Flame, and Cuddles, in various stages of undress, posing on the hood and the roof of a black Rolls Royce painted with lurid licks of orange and yellow fire.
Now the door flips open and the semi-techno-pop, semi-bubblegum-pop, obnoxiously addictive beat of “Disco Divin’” strikes me in a wall of sound so deafening, I have to clap my hands to my ears.
An Odd Person the size of a refrigerator smirks in the doorway. I say “Person” because I can’t quite identify a gender. And “Odd” because he/she gazes at me out of thickets of false eyelashes in a fleshy face greased and powdered to the color of chalk. The lipstick, the nail polish, the waist-length cornrows, the laced and riveted clothes–all of it black, black, black, and black. Multiple piercings on ears, nose, and nipples–I still can’t quite identify a gender even after an eyeful of the nipples–and tattoos of screaming skulls complete the Odd Person’s fashion statement.
“Welcome to our party, darling,” he/she shouts in my face. The Odd Person pulls up his/her black lips in a grin of even, white teeth and offers me a token. It’s a cheap plastic skull and crossbones the size of a quarter embossed with a silver-tone number. “The suggested donation is twenty dollars or however much your heart moves you to give.”
“I need to see Jake.”
“Everyone needs to see Jake, darling, and I need to see your ID.” The Odd Person squints at the token. “You’re Number Three Hundred Eighty-four.”
I don’t take out my driver’s license. I don’t take the token. Donation? When Death Valley freezes over. I make a mental note to check the lease for rules about tenants conducting a business and receiving customers in their apartment.
“No, I’m Number One, and I don’t need to show you my ID. I’m the new superintendent and I need to see Jake. Right now, pal. I need for you not to give me a runaround or you, Scorpio Rising, and your party are so out of here. You savvy?”
“One moment, please.”
The Odd Person steps back into the darkness.
I barge in and gasp.
They’ve painted or plastered the walls a jet-black as sparkly as the patent-leather of Esmeralda’s high heels. Neon signs depicting daggers and skulls glow in the gloom. Hundreds of black-clad, heavily pierced and tattooed people dance with thrashing abandon on a sparkly jet-black floor that fills the entire living room. Overhead, a spinning glass ball faceted with tiny mirrors casts dizzying points of light.
One tune, and one tune only, plays over and over and over. Guess which?
I gag on cloying incense that can’t quite conceal the stench of hard booze, crack cocaine, marijuana, and a sickening metallic sweetish odor I can’t identify and am not sure I want to.
I look around for the Odd Person but he/she has abandoned me. I’m crushed. Guess I’ll have to find Jake on my own, which is just as well. I thread my way through the crowd past a mirrored bar where topless bartenders dispense drinks and collect cash or swipe credit cards. A floppy-haired boy growing peach fuzz where he’s hoping one day for a mustache clings to a girl in pigtails. The two teens tipple from a tequila bottle, weaving on their feet, eyes fuddled. Not good. Not legal, either.
I stride past a black leather couch and pause. From my recollection of the iconic photograph, I recognize the orange-pesticide-colored mane belonging to Flame. She wears a halter top baring her cleavage and expensively ripped jeans as she perches on the couch and bends over a man lying beside her.
He’s young and naked, and Flame presses her mouth against the swell of his chest, her lips wide over his nipple. She sucks and sucks as if she’s feeding on breast milk. She swallows, the muscles of her throat working hard, her eyes squeezed shut, her expression one of total concentration. She strokes his cheek with one hand, his erection with the other.
With each of her swallows, the young man groans half in pleasure, half in pain. Puncture wounds dapple his chest and belly and muscular thighs. His skin shines with spit and blood.
Flame’s eyes flip open and meet mine.
Instinctively I avert my eyes from that flat black predatory gaze.
She releases her lips from the young man’s chest and yanks her fangs out of his flesh. She rears up, rears back, and snarls. Snarls. The tips of her fangs retract, but not before they drizzle blood all over her lips and chin and breasts.
A pair of fresh puncture wounds in the young man’s chest leak blood, and he cries, “Oh, Flame, please don’t stop!”
She strokes his cheek, then playfully slaps him. She smirks at me, scoots down on the couch, and repositions her lips. Out curve the fangs, which she sinks into his thigh.
The young man screams sharply in pain, then groans, low and delirious, with pleasure.
Whoa. Whuff. I’m having a little trouble breathing. I pull my Eye and my Cross from the neckline of my dress. I wish I was wearing one of Stanley’s garlands of garlic bulbs. Maybe three or four.
I catch the arm of a Staff Person carrying a huge copper tray laden with joints and opium pipes. “Where’s Jake?”
He/she jerks a thumb in the direction of a smoky hall leading off the living room.
Excellent. Now I’m getting somewhere. I stride past the open door of a bedroom. Upside-down Day-Glo pentagrams add festive touches to the jet-black walls. A water bed undulates, liquid sloshing inside the bed frame beneath the weight of two bodies grappling.
A water bed. A water bed. Are those loathsome bedroom furnishings of the nineteen-seventies permitted at the Garden of Abracadabra? Most landlords forbid them since they have a nasty habit of splitting their seams and flooding perfectly nice apartments. I make another mental note to check the lease.
Those have to be the frostbite-blue curls Cuddles was famous for. I brace myself for the same scene I witnessed on the black leather couch.
No such luck.
Eyelashes fluttering over half-closed eyes, Cuddles presses her mouth to the plump naked belly of a girl so young, her breasts haven’t quite developed yet, though the rest of her has layered on fat.
Cuddles becomes aware of me watching. She rips her fangs out of the girl’s belly and rears up like a cobra about to strike. The vampire hisses. Hisses.
The girl begins to scream, then bursts into wild, sobbing laughter. Dripping puncture wounds dapple her arms, her belly, her thighs.
I should run screaming myself, but I don’t. No, I intend to get what I came for, get out of Number Twenty-seven alive, and consider my options. A visit to the Berkeley police seems amply in order.
I jog down the hall till I reach the door to the spacious master bedroom. Inside, hundreds of guys and gals in jeans and backpacks, each clutching a silver-tone token, wait with fervent, reverent expectation around a king-sized bed.
I push past them.
“Hey, man, you gotta wait your turn.”
“Trust me, I don’t.”
I’m the new super, I keep telling myself. I took this job to work my way through school. I’m the new super. I push my way to the side of the bed.
********
Enjoy the book here for free!
Or buy it at the links below. Or donate if and when you wish, whatever you wish, at https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/lisamasonthewriter/
The choice is yours!
The Garden of Abracadabra is on BarnesandNoble, US Kindle, Canada Kindle, UK Kindle, Apple, Kobo, and Smashwords.
The Garden of Abracadabra is also on Amazon.com in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, Japan, and India.
Copyright © 2012–2016 by Lisa Mason.
Visit me at Lisa Mason’s Official Website (newly updated for 2016) for books, ebooks, stories, and screenplays, reviews, interviews, and blogs, adorable pet pictures, forthcoming projects, fine art and bespoke jewelry, and more!
And on my Facebook Author Page, on my Facebook Profile Page, on Amazon, on Goodreads, on LinkedIn, on Twitter at @lisaSmason, at Smashwords, at Apple, at Kobo, and at Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
If you enjoy a title, please “Like” it, add five stars, write a review on the site where you bought it, Tweet it, blog it, post it,, and share the word with your family and friends.
Your participation really matters.
Thank you for your readership!
