Water courses over my back and my shoulders. I stand with my palms pressed to the tiles and watch as it swirls around the rusted drain. The air is thick with steam, and I breathe deeply, trying my best not to think of anything except the heat and the fall of water and the steam in my lungs, but other things keep creeping in. Like my ex parading around town with a new name, or the look of my own face in a mirror, warped by a distortion in the glass. I bend my head back to set my face directly into the spray until I can't stand it anymore and I reach for the knob and switch it off.
I get out and dry off, and then I sit down in front of the computer to check my email; Kelly still hasn't written me back, which is surprising given the fact that in my last email I told her I'd met her double. I thought that would have generated a response, even from her. Unless there is no double, and the girl I met the other night really was Kelly. Either way, short of going to the capital to confront her, there isn't much I can do about it now.
Forcing myself to get up, I leave the apartment, taking the Nascent bus as far as Norfolk. The night is chill and quiet, a few scattered street lamps burning like signal flares over the deserted streets. I have only the vaguest idea of where I'm going, and within minutes I'm lost, turning down a narrow alley behind a row of houses. Ahead of me I can just make out the shape of a woman standing in a faint pool of light. She is small, with a short mess of wavy hair above a delicate face. Despite the cold she's only dressed in a pair of loose pants and a simple, forest-green tank-top. She is facing me, and as I move closer she spreads her arms as if in welcome. Suddenly she crouches, and it's only then that I notice the outline of the brick wall showing through her body; I look up, following the trail of light to a projector set in the window of a nearby house.
The projected woman raises an arm above her head, and then her image flickers and cuts as she starts into a series of remarkably subtle movements. Her head tilts in my direction and her hollow eyes fall on me, and for a second it's almost enough to believe that she knows I'm here; abruptly cutting to a new position, the woman kneels with her head bent forward, the line of her back curled in a graceful arc. Slowly, she rises up to spread her arms in the same gesture of welcome or incantation that began the sequence.
I glance again at the projector, and examine the wall next to the woman, but there's no sign of anything written there, no signature or title to explain what I'm looking at. It's obviously some kind of art installation, but who would have bothered to put it here, in a back alley in Northside? I watch the projection for a while longer, and I can't help thinking of Kelly, and the way she made use of light in her paintings, but this doesn't feel like her work, and as with nearly everything else in the world it almost certainly has nothing to do with me.
The alley's mouth is blocked by a wooden fence, but at length I'm able to squeeze through one of the gaps between the half-rotten boards and onto the street. Opposite me is a large, brick building, and above the entrance is a sign with the word CAVERN carved lightly into its face. Crossing the street, I climb the low steps and open the door.
The place is deserted. On my left is a single counter, while the right-hand wall is covered in picture frames, each of them as empty as the bar. From below comes the sound of music, the bottles on the shelves behind the counter rattling in the thud of bass. The door at the far wall leads to the basement, and another bar laid out almost identically to the one above it. At least down here there are some people, most of them gathered in front of the counter or standing around with bleak expressions on their faces. The room is dark, with only a few candles to provide any light, but it doesn't take me long to find the door to the back room, hidden in the largest picture frame. Knowing that there's no use going back until Taylor has finished his set, I sit down on an empty stool and settle in to wait.
A tall, well-built man appears at the top of the stairs, cradling another, much older man in his arms. The well-built man's expression is placid, as if the old man was merely a paper replica, and threading his way through the crowd, he sets his burden down on the stool next to mine. The older man is stocky, with broad-shoulders and a disheveled head of gray, thinning hair. He leans forward, resting his weight against the counter and bobbing his head in time with the music. Not long afterwards, the well-built man reappears with a wheelchair. As he moves from the stool to the chair, the old man turns in my direction.
"Isn't he the best?" he says thickly. Although he is smiling broadly, his face is drawn, and his eyes have the unfocused, watery cast of a habitual drinker. Without a word, his younger friend moves behind the counter.
"You need a drink?" he asks me, and it dawns on me that he works here.
"A beer," I tell him. The man in the wheelchair orders a glass of rice alcohol and then moves onto the dance floor, the wheels on his chair lighting up blue with each revolution. The crowd around the bar begins to fill up, and I take my own beer to the corner; a slim woman who looks like she might have eaten a plate of acid for dinner glides past, and not far away two bald men in black coats and matching goggles are busy making their way to the bar.
Abruptly, the music sputters and dies. I swallow what's left of my beer, setting the bottle down on a speaker and moving across the room to the hidden door. It opens easily, and I step inside a long, ochre-coloured antechamber. After the darkness of the bar, this room is almost painfully bright; the ceiling is strung with unshaded strip-lamps, and dozens of glass fish tanks are stacked on shelves along the left-hand wall.
At a low desk in the back of the room is Taylor. Spread before him is an impressive array of sound equipment, a pair of laptops and several monitors, as well as a mixing board that stretches almost the entire length of the desk. Cables stemming from ports on his glasses and voice modulator connect him directly to the laptops, and his fingers are capped by black, thimble-sized cones, each with a wire stretching to a custom device next the mixing board; it's hard to say if he looks more like a puppeteer or a fetishist.
"It's Isaac isn't it?" he asks, his voice distorted by a harsh, binary echo. He tilts his head to one side, making a few, short twitching motions with the fingers on his right hand, and when he speaks again the echo is gone. "Sorry. Isaac?"
"Yes," I respond, surprised that he's forgotten. It's not as if we were close, but I thought he'd remember my name at least.
"Why would Isaac come here?" he asks. There's a note in his voice that makes it clear the question is rhetorical.
"I wanted to talk to you."
"To me?"
"You alright?"
"Yes," he says, startled. "I'm fine."
One by one he removes the caps from his fingers. He frowns, getting up and moving to the fish tanks stacked at the near wall. Only half of these actually contain any fish, while the others are designed for small animals or reptiles, and are bathed in the dry light of heating lamps.
"Look at this," Taylor says, tapping on the side of one of the tanks. There is a soft rustling of foliage, and a moment later a mid-sized lizard emerges from behind a rock. It moves slowly, its scales and eyes both a vibrant shade of orange.
"Very nice," I say.
"It isn't mine. All this belongs to the owner of the bar."
"Animal lover?"
"Not exactly."
"Listen," I say, trying to cut through whatever haze he's drifting in. "Is Kelly back in Newt Run?"
He looks at me, or at least I think he does – it's impossible to tell behind his glasses. Absently, he begins to scratch his cheek.
"Kelly?"
"I might have seen her the other day."
"Last I heard she was still in the capital. Why would she come back here?"
"No idea," I remark, trying to ignore the faint blossom of disappointment in my chest. I'm not sure what I'd hoped for, coming here; whatever Taylor had to say, the girl calling herself Hazel might be Kelly, and she might not be Kelly.
"You never met Nathaniel did you?" Taylor asks me.
"Who?"
"The bar o
wner."
"No."
"You should."
"Why?"
He tilts his head to one side, as if listening to something.
"Here he is."
Behind me, the trick door opens, and the man in the wheelchair enters the room. His face is flushed, and there are faint lines of sweat trailing from his temples to his jaw. He looks very drunk. The well-built bartender follows him in, silently closing the door behind them.
"Good set Taylor," the man in the wheelchair announces, beaming. "Good set."
The bartender leans against the wall next to the animal tanks.
"Who's your friend?" he asks Taylor.
"Isaac," I tell him. The bartender snorts. Taylor shifts on his feet, glancing at me.
"Isaac?" says the man in the wheelchair. There is an edge in his voice, as if he thinks I'm lying. "Well... I'm Nathaniel."
"You own this place?"
"Yes, but Jared here runs it." He jerks his head in the direction of the bartender. "I just own the building."
The old man closes his eyes, grinning to himself. His head rolls forward on his neck, and then he blinks, looking up at me.
"Isaac you said?"
"Yes. Is there some problem with that?"
"Problem? No. No problem... Taylor did you offer him anything?"
"I was waiting on you."
"That's good of you."
The older man wheels closer to the fish tanks and takes a pair of metal tongs from one of the shelves.
"Taylor showed me your lizard," I say.
"I've got several lizards."
"The orange one."
"They're all orange now." He laughs, wiping the sweat from his forehead and beginning to tap against the glass with the edge of the tongs. The interior of the tank is dark, but something is moving there, picking its way among a surface of decaying leaves.
"What is it?"
"Insects. Friend of mine came across them in the woods last year."
"They live that long?"
"They do now. Taylor, hand me a vial."
Opening one of the drawers beneath the desk, Taylor passes the old man a jar filled with what must be powder. Nathaniel lifts the tank lid and sprinkles some onto the bed of leaves.
I can see them more clearly now, a number of insects approaching the powder on long, slim limbs; they look like a type of mantis, but with much smaller forelegs, and delicate heads drooping from narrow, stalk-like necks. Like the lizard, they are all a dull, copperish orange.
"You feed them powder?"
"Not only powder," replies Nathaniel, somewhat defensively.
"He gives all the animals here powder," says Taylor, his voice modulated again, this time in the accent of a rich kid from the capital.
"Started with my cat," explains Nathaniel. "Gave her some powder when I was drunk. Just playing, you know."
"What happened?"
"Nothing at first. Then her eyes went orange. Next day she disappeared. Three days after that she came back as thin as a cancer patient. Thought she must have been sick and figured she was going to die, but then later when I was taking some powder she perked up. Kept mewling at me and pawing until I let her have some. She licked up the whole damn bag of it."
"Where is she now?"
"Dead," he says, and he moves his large head closer to the tank, so close I can see his face reflected in the glass, and the heavy shadows under his eyes.
"They look strange when they eat don't they?" he says, nodding at the insects.
"Yes."
"What brings you here tonight Isaac?"
"I wanted to ask Taylor about a friend."
"A girl?"
"Yes, a girl."
"Hm," says Nathaniel. He leans forward to reach into the tank with the tongs. In short order he succeeds in capturing one of the insects. It struggles in the air, clawing at the tongs with its stunted forelegs. The others, unbothered, continue their feast of powder.
"Pour some of that into my hand here," Nathaniel instructs me, indicating what's left in the glass vial. I dump it onto his open palm. He sets the insect down on his wrist and I watch as it moves to the powder. This close, it's clear that the thing must at one time have been green, the orange colouration more like a rust stain than anything natural, especially around its head and its joints.
"You know Isaac if you're here about a girl I think you're worried about the wrong thing," says Nathaniel, taking me in with his wide, dark eyes. The look of him, his damp, sweat-smeared face and the insect eating in his open palm, causes me to shudder inwardly; the scene has the tenuous, unbalanced weight of something glimpsed in a nightmare.
"I'm not worried," I tell him. "I'm curious."
"Curiousity is a kind of worry. It preoccupies the mind. And I think in this you're wasting your time."
"Is that right?"
"There are better things to worry about. More interesting curiousities."
"Like what? Bugs with a drug problem?"
He laughs softly, and from behind comes the sound of the bartender's snorted laughter.
"That's good!" says Nathaniel. "That's right. Like bugs with a drug problem. But even more interesting is the fact that you clearly aren't yourself."
"I'm not." I make it a statement instead of a question, but I can feel the situation getting away from me. The texture of the light and the features in the room, the rows of glass cases, the old man, as well as Taylor and the silent figure of the bartender, begin to take on the quality of still images, imperfectly linked. Taylor is sitting down again, staring at me through the featureless expanse of his glasses.
"No," says Nathaniel. "You aren't."
"Then who am I?"
"That's what you should be asking."
"Listen to him," Taylor puts in, and for once the voice that emerges from his modulator is one that suits him. The sound of it after so much distortion is as shocking as a slap across the face.
"I saw it too," he goes on. "Almost as soon as you came in."
"Saw what?"
"That you aren't yourself," he says, almost sadly.
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
Nathaniel closes his fist around the insect, leaving only the head exposed, and holds it out to me.
"Eat this," he instructs me.
"What?"
"Bite the head."
"You're fucking crazy."
"I'm drunk, I'm not crazy. And I've eaten these and I know something you don't know, Isaac."
His voice curls around the name in an audible sneer.
"Taylor," I say, looking at him for help, but he only shakes his head.
"I've already done it."
"You too?"
The bartender shrugs.
"We all have," he replies.
I could leave, I know that. Leave the room and then the bar and never look back. That's one thing I could do, but I won't: none of this makes any sense, but there's no reason that it should. You wind up living at the end of the world you've got no right to ask for sense.
"It has to be alive?" I ask instead.
"Of course it does," answers Nathaniel. "Why else am I holding the fucking thing?"
I look at the mantis head poking from the edge of the old man's grip, and before I have a chance to change my mind I bite down; its neck severs with a wet, popping crunch, and the brains and chitinous skull pass down my throat in an ugly, organic mess.
I pull away and Nathaniel opens his hand, revealing the rest of the body lying in his palm, its limbs still twitching, covered in clumps of sweat-dampened powder.
"You want to finish off the rest?" he asks me.
I find that I do.