AN ACCOUNT OF PARTIES UNATTENDED
I didn’t go to the Walton party last Friday either. It took place, so I’m told, in an abandoned slaughterhouse near the south exit of the city. The theme was Purple Fantasy and every attendee was supposed to wear a visible purple garment. I knew that just a handkerchief peeking out of your jacket pocket wouldn’t do, you had to bring a jacket, or a cape or just the most flamboyant skirt in your wardrobe. My friend Martina, always an eccentric, donned a purple turban with a ruby that she bought last summer in a bazaar near the industrial district. Jones had the cape that his grandfather, the magician who transfixed my parents’ generation, used to have on for his shows. I had my attire ready, I was going to wear black trousers and turtleneck and a beautiful purple silk robe over my shoulder and around my waist. Martina had offered to pick me up in the limo that she and her girlfriend had rented and I had already accepted, but perhaps half an hour before rendezvous time I received a call on my cell phone that pointed out the need for a new sacrifice near the docks, where the Esoteric Order of Dagon has its unscheduled get-togethers.
It was Wilbur, one of the newest members, saying that the seas had been bubbling black all week and the fetid smell that rose from the low tide foam spoke of an ancient wrath that laid waiting at the bottom of that salty darkness where we all hope to journey one day. I looked at my watch and sighed in exhaustion at the realization that there was no way for me to get to the docks, conduct the ritual and make it to the Walton party. On the third shelf of the gorgeous bookcase I bought last year I had the golden daggers that were fitting to the ritual since the moon was gibbous, this also meant it was my turn to slit open the neck of the ten non-baptized children and pour their blood on the marble goblet for all the believers to drink in the hopes of achieving eternal life once we leave behind this dreary dimension. The last time it was Delapore’s turn to skin the fetuses and feed them to the oily maelstrom just under the dock; he’s taken the first two vows of Dagon and so he can only perform the rituals when the moon is waning. I have taken four out of the five vows, so I’m entitled to wear the purple robe and recite the incantations regardless of the phase of the moon.
I called Martina and told her I was not going to be able to make it and I heard her scoffing clearly. I could pictures her turning to her girlfriend in the limousine and rolling her eyes in complete lack of surprise, as my devotional duties have kept me from attending some crucial soirees this summer. From her careless manner of speech I surmised she had been drinking champagne and working on becoming the toast of the town hours before Charles Walton revealed where the party was going to be. Charles is such an oddball. He’s always the last to arrive at his own parties and when he does, he makes sure he greets everyone like it means the world to him that you attend his event, even if he can’t, for the life of his, remember your name. Invitations to his parties are a social tonic for those who intend to become somebody in a world full of nobodies, and under my door one black card is slipped in every two months asking me to RSVP ASAP to his next “little do,” as he calls them. I made a strong impression on Charlie last December when he actually grabbed the phone and called to ask me if I was free for drinks that night. I told him I wasn’t, but that I had a counterproposal and told him to come with me to the initiation of one believer at the docks. Being the hipster of faith he has always been he agreed and met me outside my building just before midnight. He was wearing a double-breasted flannel jacket and a black keffiyeh over his head that I thought was rather overdramatic.
Once at the docks I put on the gold tiara and unsheathed the silver scimitar with which both shoulders of the candidate are cut as part of the initiation ritual. Walton asked if he could hold the candidate while I chanted the prayers and performed the cuts, I said no, the moon was full and the ceremony could go very wrong if someone who hasn’t taken any of the vows of Dagon participated. Walton stood back and observed, once the blood was spilt and the candidate renounced his beliefs in any kind of power wielded by humans and accepted that the sole purpose of our existence is to prepare this barren planet for the coming of the Old Ones who will teach us new ways of reveling in agony and orgiastic destruction, Walton grabbed me by the arm and confessed that my performance had moved him so much that I was going to be forever first in his guest list for parties to come. I offered him my hand drenched in the blood of a new believer; with a smile he said that he would shake it upon my arrival at his next little do. We laughed distractedly and he gave me a ride home.
The first party to which Charles Walton invited me I could not attend. My fear is that he stood all night by the door after his fashionably late appearance, waiting to shake a hand he surely remembered bloodied and expected clean that evening. It was impossible for me to go because I had spent all afternoon in Basil Serbanescu’s library studying certain letters from his ancestors that he had found in a little lead box hidden behind some old magazines that his mother had used to design the dresses for Serbanescu’s sister’s wedding. He was throwing away books he hadn’t used in years and came across the magazines, when he took them out of the shelf, he found the box. Once he examined the engraving on the lid, he decided to call me. “It’s a shape that I really don’t know how to describe” –said Basil on the phone-. “It’s a huge figure of semi-human proportions crouching like a rabid dog ready to attack, the whole body is scaly, its head is abnormally large and bulbous in the back with an array of tentacles where his mouth should be. The tentacles are stretched out like the beams of an evil sun, his enormous claws grip the edges of buildings that defy geometry and geography; on the monster’s back there are a couple of thin demon-like wings and his whole aspect is really disquieting.” Obviously, I went over immediately.
The letters we found in the box belonged to his great-grandfather, who had lived in Ardeal, near Timis in Romania in the 1800s, and wrote to his brother is Hungary, reporting strange ceremonies being carried out in the woods, where men in black hoods worshiped something they called “The black goat from the forest” and that late at night bursts of horrendous howling were heard. Some of the screaming was most definitely human, but other noises were not as easy to pin down. For a time and place where electricity was not a common household utility, Basil’s great-grandfather, Traian Serbanescu, spoke of a droning noise whose intensity increased and decreased at regular intervals, while its pitch was scarily stable all the time. We put the letters back in the box and Basil told me that the figure on the lid worried him greatly, but that he also found it impossibly alluring.
The time of Walton’s party had come but it was not to be, by the time he made his triumphal entrance into his own party, I was at the docks welcoming a new believer with a silver scimitar.
Tomorrow Julianne and Laura will finally receive the child they have been trying to adopt for months; they will leave the baby with a nanny and meet us all for drinks by the old theater. I love Julianne and Laura and I’m really happy for them but I don’t think I’m going to be able to meet them, the moon is nearly full and Wilbur has just sent me a text message describing black bubbles in the tide and awful growling from beyond invading his restless sleep.
FEDERICO AC. | 17.10.2KX1
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