Issue/Publication: First Published in City Slab #7 - Reprinted in the 2007 Bram Stoker Award Nominated Collection "Defining Moments"

Web Links

            The flick of a thumb, bright sparks and the faded Zippo lighter with the Grateful Dead emblem emblazoned across its front, came to life.  The scent of lighter fluid mingled with Sandalwood and hemp.  Shadows slid along the floor, wavering and dancing as long slender fingers raised the lighter, bringing the flame to rest beneath a dangling metal ball.  The ball was perforated, an old tea ball -- an infuser, Art had called it - dangling from a silver chain, suspended about a foot beneath an arching wrought iron frame.  Beneath it, glittering and green, sat a glass, half-full of a liquid too odd in coloration to be taken seriously.  Art had a name for the liquid, as well.  He called it Flubber.

            Leaning in close, long dark hair dangling over her wrist, Belle watched the ball intently, holding the flame to its base.  The heat from the lighter set the chain in motion, buffeting it ever-so-slightly as the point where flame met metal grew hotter.  Or maybe it was her breath.  It didn't matter - not as long as the pendulous motion didn't carry the ball beyond the boundaries of the glass beneath it.

            The sickly sweet stench of burnt sugar wafted across the room like the aftermath of a bad caramel, but Belle paid it no notice.  She watched the ball spin in lazy arcs over the glass, and, at last, the sizzle of thick brown liquid as the sugar inside melted and slipped through the infuser.  Dripping.

            Art watched, though not as closely as Belle.  He sat back in an overstuffed faux leather armchair with one hand curled around a bottle of beer, and the other held up and to the side.  He held a slender pipe between thumb and forefinger, angled carefully away from his face, as if anything could have prevented smoke from burning his eyes in a room so full of fumes.  Incense.  Tobacco.  The hash that was charring to ash in his small bowl.  The sugar in the infuser, dripping, each drop splashing into the green liquid beneath with an odd sizzle as heat met room-temperature liquid.

            Art had played a game much like this with his high school buddies.  A baggie, a glass of water, and flame.  The dripping, molten plastic made a distinctive sound when it hit the cold liquid.  ZILCH!  He heard that sound now, drifting through memory as he brought the pipe to his lips again.

            In the glass beneath the infuser, the green shifted with each zilching drop, growing more amber - less flubber.  Art grinned at the thought.  He imagined the glass rising and floating about the room as Belle, irritated, grabbed for it with long fingernails, trying to keep it from spilling.

            "It'll never get off the ground," he said to no one in particular.  Belle either didn't or wouldn't hear him, and no one else was in the room.  The image of Robin Williams, tiny fists pounding against the inside of the glass as the molten sugar dropped around his head like lava and the glass drifting toward the ceiling momentarily captured his attention, and he snorted, barely containing the laugh.  Barely containing the last hit off the pipe.  No smoke wasted.

            Belle had been at it for hours.  Hell, she'd been at it for fucking days - maybe her whole life.  Chasing the green.  To Art she looked like some sort of demented alchemist trying to will her lead into gold.

            "It's just a fucking drink," he said at last, irritated by her inattention to anything but the glass. He watched a few moments longer, the silence echoing more loudly as the sound of his own voice faded, ignored.  He stood, downed the rest of his lukewarm beer in a single swallow and slammed the bottle on the table.

            Belle turned to him for just a second, tilting her head at an inquisitive angle, her eyes deep in some other place.  Fevered.

            "It's just a fucking drink."  Art repeated.  He turned away and slipped out through a set of green plastic beaded curtains that separated the room they were in from the dingy kitchen.

            Belle turned back to the glass.  On the floor to her left a spiral notebook lay open near the center.  A pen lay atop the pages where lines were carefully filled with letters and numbers.  Many of these were rubbed out, erased, or, in a single instance, scribbled over with such force that the page had torn.  There were stains on the page as well.  In the dim light, they might have been from tears, or the dripping of sweat - the condensation from a bottle of beer - or the deep green, shifting-toward-amber liquid in the glass.

 

1885 - France - Incomplete

 

.025 kilograms of dried wormwood

.05  kilograms of anise

.05 kilograms of fennel

.95 liters of 85 percent ethanol

.45 liters of water

.001 kilogram of Roman wormwood

.001 kilogram of hyssop

5 grams of lemon balm

(All original numbers divided by 100)

 

            Let the mixture steep for at least 12 hours in the pot of a double boiler. Add water and apply heat; collect distillate. To approximately half the distillate, add Roman wormwood, hyssop and lemon balm, all of which have been dried and finely divided. Extract at a moderate temperature, then siphon off the liquor, filter, and reunite with the remaining distillate. Dilute with water to produce approximately 1 liter of absinthe with a final alcohol concentration of 74 percent by volume.         AND - SOMETHING - FUCKING -- ELSE . . .

 

            The lettering grew deep and frustrated at this point, slashing across the lined paper at angry angles.  Words were scrawled, then marked out and replaced with other words, also marked out.  In the center of the page, about three lines beneath the recipe itself and underlined so deeply the page was scored, the word Peppermint remained.  Alone, of a small battlefield of herbs and obscure terms, Peppermint survived.

            Belle leaned closer over the glass.  She'd removed the flame from the tea infuser and was watching the liquid intently.  Where globs of molten sugar had struck, whirling tendrils of yellowish hue spun down into the thick liquid.  Belle's hair dangled dangerously close, interwoven with several feathers and a small chain of beads.  Her eyes glittered - green eyes so dark they hinted of black. Her tongue slid back and forth across her teeth, touching the cheeks on either side, then swirling.

            Belle waited until the peppermint in her mouth had faded to such a thin wafer it threatened to melt over her lips and disappear, then she bent quickly and slipped her tongue into the Absinthe, letting the ghost of the mint slide into the green depths.  Her eyes closed, just for an instant, as she made contact with that slick, wet surface, then she drew back.  Peppermint.  Ghosts and hints in books she'd spent long hours poring over hinted that this was the secret.  She'd been told it soothed the stomach.  She'd been told that slid round and round a lover's cock with the tongue, it could bring hallucinations.  She'd been told it belonged in the Absinthe - told by voices long dead, preserved on parchments and the leaves of tattered books.  Recipes penciled into the margins of notebooks and tucked into unlikely hiding in diaries and family bibles. 

            Absinthe was the key, but it had to be the Absinthe.  His Absinthe.  Was it right?  Were the caves of ice raised from stalagmites of peppermint?  Did they tingle with too-clean, too-bright taste, or would that fail as it blended with the wormwood's bitter kiss?  What did he see?

            The mint drifted slowly, so thin it resembled a coin-shaped shard of ice.  Belle watched, waited, as it fluttered down to the bottom of the glass.  Fluttered and melted, flew and flown and - gone.  The Absinthe had swallowed it completely.

            Art shuffled back into the room, but she paid no attention to him.  She was staring into the green depths of the glass, mesmerized.  He watched her, sipping on a fresh beer and frowning.  Her hair dangled over and around the glass, and with the dim candlelight flickering, he could catch green glimmers.  The wink of some huge, forgotten emerald.  The eye of a great cat.  Spider webs of dark hair shimmered around it, slender pale arms braced against the floor.

            "Found the flubber, then, did you?" he asked softly, tipping the bottle up again.  He tasted the beer, but he remembered the bite of the Absinthe.  He remembered her concentration, and how it shifted.  He remembered long fingers and curved nails wrapped around a different glass, a slightly different green.  He remembered the taste, and the burn.  He remembered.

            Art turned away and lurched through the room, down the hall that branched left and right.  He turned left, not bothering with the lights.  Two doors ignored, the third entered and he stopped, tilting the bottle up and closing his eyes.  It was there.  He knew it was there, didn't need to see to know.  Moonlight streamed in the window and glowed on the surface of a canvas, reclining on an easel and watching him in return.

            To one side, on a dresser that had been recruited as a workbench, his palette sat, paint dried on the surface in careless blobs, brush dry-tight in the deep blue.  The palette itself was a work of art, a reflection of pain.  Art stepped closer and tipped the bottle back, gazing at the canvas.  He turned, grabbed a candle from the dresser and lit it with a match pulled from ratty jeans.

            The light flared.  Heineken bottle candelabra gleam lit the surface of the canvas with a dim, yellow glow.  Art drank, and stared, and drank again.  He reached out with one hand, tracing the brilliantly hued parapet of a domed cathedral, drawing down to rings of fruit trees, littered with bright-colored fruit, rooted in beds of flowers.  Ice coated the surface of the cathedral-like doors.  Behind, rising up and up the mountains disappeared into clouds that shimmered with colors, a cotton-candy treat for the gods.

              The temple was an entrance, doors swung wide to reveal a jeweled cavern within, lights placed strategically, every brilliant beam reflected and refracted, reflected again, dancing from surface to surface.  Ice.  It was a cave of ice.  Art drained his beer and wished it was something stronger, something with ice he could swirl around in his mouth as he had when he painted.  Cold, biting, distant.  Footsteps drifted in, quiet and rhythmic, but Art didn't acknowledge them.

            The scent of Jasmine teased his nostrils.  Art felt a small shiver run up his spine, but still, he didn't turn.  It was Sammy.  She made little sound, even when she was in the room you had to concentrate to realize she wasn't part of one of the tapestries on the wall, or an oversized doll.  Sammy was an afterthought to the world, so paper-thin, frail and pale she shimmered and sometimes, if you didn't look closely enough, she wasn't there at all.

            "It's like she's made of ice," Belle had said one day, watching Sammy flit about the room.  "The ice you see, just after it freezes, so thin on top of the water you know that if a wave rose up from inside, it would shatter."

            Art set the empty beer bottle beside the dried palette on the dresser and placed the candle in the top, dripping hot wax around the rim to hold it in place. 

            "Pretty," Sammy whispered, standing very close to his side and staring at the painting, as he knew she'd stared a thousand times before, when he was there, when he was out.  When he was sleeping.  Sammy was fascinated with the painting, and when she wasn't playing her music, she was staring at the painting.

            At first, Art had been jealous.  He liked Sammy, and he loved the painting.  Both meant a lot to him, but neither would share.  Sammy didn't ignore Art, but she didn't adore him.  She adored the painting, worshiped it, and that was supposed to have been Belle.  The painting was not for Sammy.  The house, its walls dripping thick with images and angst, dreams and nightmares leaking into them, all of it was an extension of Belle.  The painting was a failure.  Art had failed, and for his pain, a woman he quietly and privately loved had fallen in love, instead, with his failure.

            Art turned, pinched the wick of the candle between his thumb and forefinger, relishing the heat as he held tight.  The burn.  It took his thoughts away, for an instant.  He turned and headed to the door.  Sammy didn't move.  She stared at the painting as if the light had never shifted.  As if seeing the same image she'd seen by flickering candlelight.  As if she had never seen what Art had seen at all, or what he'd painted, but something more.

            Head pounding, Art paced back toward the kitchen for another drink.  Stronger, and more final.  Something tall and amber and clinking with ice that would burn his throat as the candle had burned his fingers, numbing the pain.

 

                                                                           * * *

            The night had deepened.  There was no light save that of the candles circling the room.  On the floor in the center of the patterned carpet, Sammy sat quietly.  On her lap, a wooden dulcimer rested.  Art sat slumped deep into the depths of his old armchair, cloaked in shadow.  Invisible.  Occasionally the soft clink of ice on glass could be heard, accompanied by a quick flash of reflected gold tossed between whiskey and candle through a lens of smudged glass.

            Belle knelt on the rug before Sammy.  In Belle's hand was a crystal goblet, glittering with ghosts of light from the candles.  The goblet brimmed with dark liquid.  The light was yellow.  Shadows loomed.  Art knew what was in the goblet, despite the lack of color.  He knew the deep, emerald glitter, and the scent, crusted sugar and licorice, the hint of something more.  Different, each time, and yet the demon's breath called with the same voice.  Words rose unbidden to Art's lips, and he whispered them, then downed another wet-hot gulp of whiskey.

            "As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

                        By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

              And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

                        As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing."

            Belle swung her gaze around, catching Art's eyes as he spoke.  She smiled, nodding slightly, then returned her attention to the goblet, and the girl before her.  Sammy gazed straight through Belle's eyes.  She didn't see the glass, or the long, slender fingers that proffered it to her.  She saw what she saw, and Art wondered, if his painting had been in the room, whether   whshe would have stared into its depths in that moment.  He shivered.

            "Drink," Belle whispered.  Beseeching.  Commanding.  Neither of them had ever seen Sammy drink anything alcoholic.  She seldom ate, and when she did, it was the picking of a bird, the brush of butterfly proboscis over nectar-soaked petals.  No substance.  Now, as they watched, Belle entranced, and Art aching, half-with the need for this moment to end badly, leaving him the one elevated moment, the knowing he had accomplished where another had failed, even if his offering had fallen short - and half with the need to know.  She would drink, or she would turn away.

            Art did not share Belle's dream, her deep encroaching need.  But he wanted to know.  He held his breath.

            Sammy took the goblet, staring into its depths as though seeing it for the first time.  Her concentration was absolute.  She held the goblet reverently, and Art knew the scent that reached her nostrils.  He knew the taste that would burn against her tongue, the numbing, intoxicating sensations to follow.

            Arthur had bought plenty of Absinthe since Belle had offered her goblet to him, but his purchases, steadily more covert and in-depth in their inception, had proven themselves to be nothing more than a series of well-crafted lies.  They had gotten him drunk.  They had similar taste, and, in a few cases, similar effects, but they were miserable recreations.  They were the work of a thousand clones, repainting over and over the work of the masters, vending their wares on dingy street corners and dreaming of castles of ice.  Belle was a master.  Belle might be the last master of a dead art.  Art had not painted since the night she had him drink.

            Sammy drank.  One last second's glance into the depths of the clear crystal, brimming with the green, and she shifted.  Everything shifted.  The glass tilted, Belle leaned back onto her heels, eyes glittering brightly, fixated on Sammy's face.  Her form.  Her eyes, now closed, head drawn back and long hair dangling behind as she drained the glass.  No sipping.  No tasting.  No hesitation. 

            Art expected her to spew.

            Sammy only smiled.   On her lap, the dulcimer sat silent.  Potential sound embodied in curving wood and twisted strings.  Gut strings.  Strings that had once been the inner workings of a cat or a horse.  Strings that had been part of the fabric of some living, breathing being, woven now to the wood, and to her fingers.  Sammy didn't speak.  She didn't even seem to breathe, though Art stared at her breasts.  She fascinated him.

            Then she moved.  Pale hands tipped by wraith-fingers slid to the strings, pressed against the frets, exploring.  No sound at first, only a flicker of fingertips that caused her nails to reflect the candlelight.

             Somewhere in the past moment Belle had reclaimed the goblet without insinuating herself into Sammy's motion.  Like a snake.  A dark snake, swaying in front of the one she would hypnotize, the one who hypnotized her.  Art lifted his drink, but it did not reach his lips.  Eyes still closed, lips parted slightly, Sammy began to play.

            There was a shift in the room.  Subtle, hard to pin down, and so complete that every detail was skewed.  Art held very still.  His fingers trembled, wrapped around the icy glass, slick with condensation, but he didn't risk draining it.  He might make some vulgar, slurping sound that would break the spell.  It would be his fault.  His mind snapped into focus on his painting.  It had been his fault that time, not again.

            Belle paid no attention to Art and his frozen mime-with-a-whiskey-glass pose.  Sammy paid no attention to Belle.  The music soared.  Pale fingers flew, dancing down chords and melodies with quicksilver speed and liquid grace.  The notes didn't fade.  Not for Art.  They hung before him, pixellating the air.  He somehow found the coordination to set his glass on the table beside his chair.  He did not see the table.  He felt no chair.

            The image of his painting grew before him, each color blending to the next, woven from a tapestry of threads that never existed in the center of the room.  Incense smoke and candle light?  Too much alcohol and flashback images?  Sammy played, and the questions faded to meaningless white noise in the back of his mind.

            The painting grew, hers now, his as well, but altered.  More vivid.  The notes danced along the iced parapets and flowed around the base of each tree, gushed from the geysers and taunted him with all that had remained just beyond his clouded vision.  He heard the birds.  He heard the rush of water and the echoes from within the caverns beyond the massive doors.  He heard the echo of drums, marching feet, a horde. A heartbeat.

            The image shivered, and Art held his breath.  The music reasserted itself, and the room flickered into focus.  He wanted to shake his head, but he held the urge in check.  The notes weren't stopping, merely shifting, and the smoky air coalesced once more.  A face twisted and writhed, fighting its way through the gloom, drawing strength from the sound.  The eyes flashed with emotion.  Anger?  Lust?  Rage?  Desire?  Art gripped the arms of his chair and leaned back.  The features snapped into focus for one long, lingering moment.  The eyes focused, not on Art, but on Belle, who lay back now, knees spread wide and back arched, long hair flowing over her shoulders to the floor scant inches beneath.  Her gaze was locked on that image, her lips parted and her breath came in heaving gulps.

            Art stared, the image forgotten, the music lost as the motion of her body called out to him.  His body reacted with stunning force and he gripped the chair arms more tightly still, hips arching, jerking.  Her flesh was coated in a hot sheen of sweat.  Her eyes were wide and her taut nipples strained against the loose fabric of her blouse.

            A string broke.

            The silence that followed this jarring sound was deep, molasses thick and cloying.  The scent of the incense flowed in.  The dim light of the candles drew back, dragging shadows across the floor and into the corners.  The image snapped from existence so suddenly that breath stilled. Nothing moved.  The room was a still life, each of them frozen in disbelief.  In loss.  In pain.

            Belle broke first.   Her carefully arched body, still stretching to the air above Sammy, curved like a tightly strung bow.  Her eyes rolled back and Art saw her hands slip to her hair.  Her shoulders slumped to the floor as she tore wildly at the long, silky locks.  Her lips parted, but no sound emerged.  Not at first.  She drew breaths too deep, too full for any lungs and her jaw worked so fiercely that he feared she'd bite through her own tongue.

            He started to rise, to go to her and pull her close and bring her back, to be the anchor that bound her to reality, despite the fuzziness in his own head. He nearly made it to his feet before she screamed.

            The sound pierced Art to the core of his soul.  He slapped his hands ineffectually over his ears, but it had no effect on Belle's tortured wails.  The sound vibrated through his skin, seeped into his pores and resonated deep within his senses.  His nails dug into the flesh of his cheeks and he pressed his hands so tightly to his ears that the pressure threatened to burst his skull.  He heard her as if he were kneeling beside her, ear pressed to her soft red lips.  There was no escape.

            Art dropped to his knees, and the screams slowly died to silence.  The dulcimer was silent as well.  Art eased the pressure of his palms on the sides of his head, and very gently opened his eyes.  Belle had not moved.  She lay back, arched against the floor, eyes closed and her hands tightly gripping long handfuls of her own hair.

            Art leaned closer, sliding his arms beneath her, one hand in the small of her back, the other behind her head.  He held her there, afraid to lift her free of the floor.  Afraid of her anger.

            So quietly that it was difficult to be certain she'd spoken at all, Sammy's voice broke the silence.  Art glanced at her, shocked again and unable to react in any way other than to listen.

           "A savage place! as holy and enchanted

            As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

            By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

            And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

            As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

            A mighty fountain momently was forced:

            Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

            Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

            Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail."

 

            Belle's eyes flickered.  Opened.  Art turned to her, watching her face. She barely breathed.  Her entire frame shook, trembling with the strain of holding the position she'd contorted herself into as she screamed, but she was unwilling to shift.  Art held her very still, and very carefully, not daring to speak and break the silence.  The air was a miasma of silence.  Sammy had returned to her mute scrutiny of things unseen.  Her fingers lay limp on the strings of the dulcimer.

            The glass, only a short time before brimming with liquid emeralds and alive with promise, lay canted to one side on the floor, a very thin trickle of absinthe feeling its way tentatively over the rim and seeping into the carpet.

             With excruciating care, Belle released her grip, letting her hair slide back and down over the carpet.  Over Art's hand.  She closed her eyes, relaxing, breathing, and very softly, she spoke.

            "Help me," she whispered.

            Art needed to hear no more.  He slid his arms under Belle's shivering frame more fully, braced himself, and lifted.  She came easily into his arms, slumping against him, and the nearness of her nearly buckled his knees.  His mind shot back to the way she'd arched, the way she'd looked as those eyes that could not have been there, floating above Sammy in the half-light, had devoured her form.  Art banished the images, and staggered from the room.

            Laying Belle gently on her bed, Art sat in a chair beside her.  She looked up only once, catching his gaze, holding it, then looking away and curling into a fetal position.  Art reached down, drew her blanket up over her thin shoulders, smoothed her hair gently, and stood.  As he left the room, he glanced back at her. She was asleep.

            With his mind awash in impossibilities, Art walked down the hall to his own room and did the same.

 

                                                                           * * *

            Belle was up, scribbling furiously in her notebook when Art staggered out of his room.  Her hair was wild, and he noticed with appreciation that all she wore was one of his own shirts, buttoned about halfway.  She was seated cross-legged on the floor. 

            Belle glanced up.  Without a word, she turned back to her work.

            Beside her on the floor she had arranged a number of things, a bottle with the latest recipe minus the peppermint and still intact, some vials, a sheaf of yellowed paper, and other implements so familiar Art paid them little mind.

            Apparently satisfied with whatever she'd been figuring, Belle dropped the notebook suddenly and grabbed a small mortar and pestle she had set aside.  With deft, sure motion she plucked two peppermints from a bag and dropped them into the wooden bowl.  With quick, decisive strokes she crushed them to powder, working well beyond the point where Art would have considered them to be dust.  Belle carefully inserted a small funnel into the mouth of the bottle and poured the peppermint through.  Art watched, fascinated, as the fine powder whirled in the green depths of the bottle like a small tornado, then faded.

            "That was it, then?" he asked softly.  "The missing link?  The big mojo?  Some peppermint?"

            Belle glanced up at him, more sharply, and gave her head a shake.

            "Not all," she said.  "Almost.  Very close."

            "It wasn't the broken string?" Art asked.  "I thought..."

            Belle shook her head.  She didn't look up, but she replied.  "The string broke because it wasn't right.  If it had been right, she would not have broken the string."

            Art frowned.  Strings broke all the time.  How could the mixture of a drink have any effect?  He might have bought it if Sammy had been trashed, but she had one drink, and only one drink, and she had been playing beautifully.  It had been real.  Too real, in fact.

            "Who was he?" Art asked, shifting subjects.

            Belle did not look up.  She did not answer.  Her cheeks colored, and Art's brow furrowed.

            "He wasn't real," Art said at last.  "He was an hallucination, Belle.  A dream."

            She ignored him, but the muscles in her neck tightened, and she leaned more closely over her work.

            "He wasn't real."  Art mouthed the words, but did not breathe them to life.  He turned away.

            Three deep green sprigs of parsley sat on a napkin at Belle's side.  She pored over her notes.  There was enough in the bottle for one, maybe two more attempts, and she'd have to start again.  The process was slow and tedious, bringing the mixture back to the point she'd already reached would take weeks.  She had narrowed the possible missing ingredients dramatically, but there were still unknowns.  Secrets were never easy to steal.

            Her mind drifted.  She could still feel the sharp tingling sensation of his gaze, probing her, commanding her.  She felt the heat rising and drew in a quick breath, gritting her teeth and clamping her eyes closed hard enough to send dancing spots across the inner screen of her eyelids.  She curled her leg back and pressed her heel tightly between her thighs, rocking against it for a moment and shaking.  The moment faded, and she breathed more slowly, not trusting herself to move for a long moment.  Everything she did had a price attached to it, and to spill the bottle, or ruin the mixture, would be more than she could bear.  She was so close.

            Sammy's voice lingered in the background of Belle's thoughts.  She'd heard that voice so seldom, and never the poetry.  It was a soft voice, rich in timbre, but subtle.  The room had resonated with each verse, but Belle knew that the silence that had been the backdrop was largely responsible for the illusion of volume.

            Belle's thoughts were clouded with the memory of heat.  Her body had reacted, held and stroked by each note from the dulcimer, bent and nearly broken by the words.  She had felt his breath, had shivered with the beat of something so alien, so powerful and erotic, that if she had died in that instant, the only thing she would have regretted was the incompletion   She'd been aware of Art, as well, had known his need and felt it funneled through her into the moment.   The hint of licorice burned on her tongue, coated in peppermint and soaked in deeper flavors.  So different from where she'd started, the green bottle with the white label, bought at an off-the-street liquor store for too much money and releasing only the slightest hint of the magic within.

            That same day, the day she'd found the forbidden drink, she'd found the bookstore.  Shelf after shelf of words coated in dust and forgotten.  She'd tasted the absinthe moments after purchasing it, slipping into an alley and taking a too-long draught from the neck of the bottle.  With her secret treasure tucked deep in the depths of her purse, she'd run her fingertips along the spines of novels and histories, biographies and collections, leather and cloth, some covered in brightly colored dust jackets, and others with gilt lettering stamped deep.

            Then she was discovered as a squat, balding man with one eye much larger than the other suddenly appeared around the end of one bookcase.  Belle, too startled to speak, backed away, her fingers gripping the first book that she touched and drawing it free, holding it out in penance for stolen moments of deeply clouded thought.  Money changed hands, money she could not afford, and the book was hers, as much a stranger as the man who sold it and she was off with her bottle and her dreams.

            Sometime that night, she'd begun to read.

            The parsley was more difficult than the peppermint.  The recipe was meant for a much larger batch than the single bottle Belle had concocted, and it took her more than an hour of teeth-gritting and mumbled curses to complete the calculations.  Even when she had the figure in her mind and on the paper across her knees, she agonized, going over each number one at a time as if afraid they'd shift and rearrange if she didn't pay close enough attention.

            At last she clipped the top of a single sprig of parsley and dropped it into her mortar.  She knew the faint dust of the peppermint remained, but it didn't matter.  She ground at the leaves with the pestle, pressing tightly and feeling the faint release of juice, the smearing.  She made a mental note to be very careful in removing it.  Pouring some of the absinthe into the mortar, stirring, and then pouring it all back through a funnel was the best way to be certain.  Her measurements were very exact, and if she left anything out, she would not be able to calculate the difference later.  She would have to start over.  Her shoulders sagged, just for an instant, at the thought.  So close.

            She worked the parsley slowly to a paste, tipping the bottle now and then to drip a trickle of green liquid over the top, then working patiently to blend the paste to a thick syrup.  Finally, wrists aching from the effort, she set the pestle aside on the napkin and reached for her funnel.  She inserted it in the neck of the bottle and with practiced grace, she poured the contents of the mortar through.  There was no discernible change.  Green to green, soft rush of bubbles and the bottle stood, still steeped in mystery.  Drenched in dreams.

            She corked it carefully and stood, holding the bottle in both hands and carried it to the altar.  It was actually a bar, or had been, but Art had renamed it the altar when Belle began insisting that nothing but her bottle be kept there.  The bottle, and the book.  Pressed beneath a sheet of glass in an old picture frame, it remained open to the same page that it had been open to for nearly three years. 

            Belle whispered softly to herself as she placed the bottle reverently on the bar.

            "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree,

                        Where Alph the sacred river, ran,

                        Through caverns measureless to man . . .

                                    Down to a sunless sea...."

            She shivered and the bottle nearly tipped as a moment of vertigo shivered through her.  She righted the bottle quickly and stepped back. The book and its frame seemed to watch her as she retreated, as she stumbled among the ingredients and tools and notes, as she tripped, finally, dropping to her knees.  She cried out at the sharp contact with the floor, but bit the sound off quickly.  She wanted no one else in the room.  Not yet.  Maybe not ever. 

            This time, she knew, it would have to be her.  Art could not paint this moment.  Sammy could not draw it from the strings of her dulcimer, or whisper it from her silent lips.  The bottle glittered, and Belle looked away.  She fought the urge to drink now, to soar and burn with the deep green liquor sliding through her system.  It wasn't time.  If she drank now, he might not come.  He might never come.  He might come, and leave her.  It had to be the afternoon.  She had to be alone.

            She stacked her papers as neatly as her trembling hands would allow and gathered her tools.  She needed to clean up, and to ready herself.  The others would have to be told, warned away and far from the bottle, and the room, when the time came.  Belle had work to do.

            Without a backward glance, she slipped from the room and into the kitchen.  Behind her, the bottle continued to glitter, as if that flickering, captured light dancing along the green glass could watch, or think.  Or dream.

 

                                                                           * * *

            Art didn't want to leave, but he knew from the expression on Belle's face that it was not a request.  It was her house, after all.  It was her gig, her dream or dementia or whatever you wanted to call it.  As much as Art liked to see himself as the other half of a couple involving Belle, he knew it was never going to happen.

            Sammy only nodded, packing up her dulcimer and donning a long, shapeless jacket before slipping out the back door and into the alley beyond. Neither Art nor Belle knew where Sammy went when she wasn't with them.  Just that moment, Art would have liked to know.  He would have liked to have been invited to follow, to belong somewhere during the period when he didn't belong in his own home.

            It was silliness, he knew, this jealousy he felt toward the bottle.  Pointless and foolish.  Any other night of the week he would have been up and out and gone without a word, but the thought that he was forbidden changed it all.  He hated it, chomped against the invisible bit it implied, and, in the end he grabbed his coat and stomped out into the streets without a word.   As he moved steadily down the street and away, he felt the vague flicker of something familiar and distant, and he stopped frowning.  He glanced at his hands, then back over his shoulder.

            Very suddenly, he felt like painting.  The urge came over him from nowhere, slipped into his thoughts and displaced his anger.  He stood, undecided, the scents of oils and canvas wafting enticingly from his memory.

            "Damn," he breathed softly.   He knew he couldn't go back.  Not yet.  Not now.  Belle wouldn't even open the door, and if he grew more insistent, she might go to his studio and his rooms and throw his things out the windows.  Images flickered through his mind.  Belle prostrate, lying back across the floor.  Sammy, fingers poised near the broken string, speaking softly, her words palpable in the incense-thick air.  The green bottle, pulsing, growing and winding in a coil that reached to circle Belle's prone form.  He wanted to capture it, but was forced to memorize, eyes closed, gripping tightly each sinuous roll of what he had seen and refusing to let it fade. 

            He would paint.  Not now.  Not tonight probably, but he would paint, and when he did, he would bring that image to life.  If he couldn't give Belle her magic, he could record their combined failures.  He could make it so real that the music and the lust burned the edges of the canvas.

            He couldn't shake the image of the coils.

            "Weave a circle round him thrice,

                        And close your eyes with holy dread."

            Art whispered the words, and again he shivered.  He pulled his jacket more tightly about himself and headed off for Sid's, a club where the music was dark and dreary and the lighting was more so.  He wasn't in a mood to dance or mingle, but the nightly call of alcohol rang in his ears.

            "Fuck it," he muttered to no one in particular.  "Just fuck it."

 

                                                                           * * *

            Belle poured the absinthe into a tumbler and set it upon the altar.  She knelt before it, trembling, feeling the weight of the empty house heavy on her shoulders.  Now that she'd sent the others away she felt vulnerable, fragile and inadequate to the task she had set herself.

            With a reverence that regularly brought scornful comments from Art, she opened her journal.  In the pages of this book she'd documented her quest, her dreams, each and every mistake and small success.  She had also recorded her research, and it was to this she turned for strength.  The words that had dragged her into this surreal otherworld.  The history of Xanadu.

 

            "The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic merits. In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, -  Here Belle had scribbled a furious note, drawn from other sources - letters and fragments, notes of Lord Byron himself.  She had crossed it all out, including the word anodyne, and replaced it with Absinthe -  from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimage':

            ‘Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall.'

            The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. "A person on business from Porlock" interrupted him and he was never able to recapture more than "some eight or ten scattered lines and images."

 

            Belle closed the book.  She had read the words so many times she could recite them as litany.  She had researched and delved into the letters of Coleridge and Byron, certain she would find the answers she sought.  Hundreds of lines, reduced to a snippet of rhyme, and still so powerful that movies had been centered around small quotes from the verse, and novels written in the attempt to finish the work.  To close the portal, or open it, as Coleridge had seen it.  To present to the world the quality that inspired Byron to insist on the publication of a broken poem, as if it were a key.  As if, beyond the inspiration of Coleridge himself, Byron alone could see.

            On the altar sat the fruits of years of labor.  Belle believed that she knew more of the essence of Absinthe than any living being, and still she quaked at her ignorance.  It was a gamble, each time, pouring the essence of each long-dead master's work into her bottles and vials, crashing into the walls of their failures and seeing, just beyond her grasp, the essence, the purity of form that would show her what he had seen, what he would have written.  The essence and completion of Xanadu that would make it real.

            Art had made it surreal.  He had grasped the tenuous threads of all Belle had striven for and woven them into an incomplete tapestry that teased her with its borderline truth.  She loved him for his devotion and cursed him for the failure, but she knew that the failure was really hers.  Sammy haunted her.  There was more to the tiny, frail musician than met the eye, but there was no history, no record of things gone and those to come to measure her against.  Sammy was as she was, and she, in the end, had failed as well.  This one, also, on Belle.

            Now came the test.  No conduit.  No half-truth or interpretation.  Belle, the glass, the deep green magic, and the words.  She would find the caves of ice and prostrate herself on their cold, sharp edges until she was accepted, taken or broken, but one with what had been lost.  Dark powerful eyes haunted her, tracking each motion and each thought, seeing through flesh and bone and soul.  Waiting.

            She took the tumbler gently into her hands.  Candlelight flickered about her, and the incense, ever-present, grew cloying and thick, a taste that lingered in the back of her throat, drying her out and reaching to the absinthe for succor and warmth.  Belle shivered a final time, so deeply that she shook and nearly spilled the thick green liquid over her hands and the floor.  Her knees rattled on the floor, and she gasped.

            Throwing her head back, she brought the drink to her lips and upended it.  The heat was intense, the burn glorious and excruciating and powerful, all at once, washing down through her  in a burst of fire and dripping behind, bringing secondary sizzle to slowly singe her throat. She did not move, fearing it would be too strong, that she might vomit or pass out, that she might fail herself as so many others who had gone before.  They hadn't failed, because they hadn't been reaching out for anything.  Only Belle had failed, and as the hot liquor burned down her throat, she knew it was her courage that had been lacking, not the ingredients, or the mix, not the strength of will of another, presented as her sacrifice.  Placing the glass on the altar, she glanced at her book - her notes - in scorn.  She had been hiding in the research, hiding between the pages, lacking the courage to see.  To know.

            She closed her eyes, and the words came unbidden, slowly, then with growing force.  She recited in a steady, throaty voice that purred with strength and resolution.

 

            "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

              A stately pleasure-dome decree:

              Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

              Through caverns measureless to man

               Down to a sunless sea.

              So twice five miles of fertile ground

              With walls and towers were girdled round:

              And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

              Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

              And here were forests ancient as the hills,

              Enfolding sunny spots of greenery..."

 

            Belle clamped her eyes tightly, her hands out to her sides for balance.  The Absinthe leaked into her thoughts and drew her deeper, thickening her tongue as she fought for completion.  Images opened in her mind.  Art's painting flashed into view, but with details he had never seen.  The ice rippled with fire.  The ground shook with the marching cadence of a horde of booted feet.  The landscape surged with greenery, and huge, spouting geysers splashed into the air and fell to the earth, all in the rhythm of a huge heartbeat, drawing her inward.

            Her body arched once more, prone against the floor, the altar before her and her knees spreading wider, inviting.  She wore a short, soft linen dress, nothing beneath, but it didn't matter.  The sensations that washed through her had nothing to do with clothing, or the room surrounding her, or the world where she lived and breathed and lusted for . . . what?

            "For he on honeydew hath fed,"

            The words seeped up from beneath her, hands fashioned of letters that lifted her and offered her. . . .

            "And drunk the milk of paradise."

            She saw a young man, long flowing dark hair and a broad nose, dark eyebrows furrowed in concentration.  In his hand he held a quill, dark with ink.  He seemed to see her in that same instant, studying her, every inch and curve, eyes bright.  His hand trembled, and a droplet of ink threatened to fall to whatever surface he penned upon.

            Beside him a bottle sat, aged and crusted with sugar crystals, the cork removed.  A crystal tumbler sat beside it, and Belle felt his fingers as he reached for that drink, felt them stroking her flesh and drawing her up, her hips rising to meet the fall of his lips.  His eyes never left hers, and the hand that did not hold the quill slid beneath her, curling into the small of her back.

            Belle cried out, trying to close the eyes that had opened when she clamped her own shut, trying to avoid the intensity, the absolute pleasure and terror and impossibility of that touch and that moment, but she could not give voice to the sound, or, if she did, she could not hear it.  Nor could he.

            He leaned closer, and she knew him, from portraits and descriptions, from the twist of the lips that would one day sneer at his own work, questioning its value and releasing it only at another's whim.  Those lips so close his breath, hot-sweet with absinthe, brushed her thighs.  Belle's entire being clenched.

            The air shattered with a sharp sound.  Belle clamped her eyes more tightly still, concentrating, but the moment was shattering around her, falling away.  The sound repeated, and she cried out.   She arched so violently that her back crackled, spine rearranging to try and compensate.  She ground her head into the floor, feeling the tug and tear as the motion pulled against her hair.  His face had faded and though the heat remained between her legs, the touch had never come.  The ice had faded to molten carpet that burned her as she stroked against it, and again, the sound, and again, blaring and bursting through her thoughts.

            Then there was nothing.

 

                                                                           * * *

            Art turned his key in the lock at last, determined, if this was his last night in the house, that he would spend it painting.  He could not block the images, and though he'd poured drink after drink down his throat, doubling the shots when the first few rounds failed him, his heart pounded and his head spun, not with drunken stupor, but with the images, drawn from the memory of Sammy's voice and the faces floating in air, the words and the incense, and the failure.  He had painted, but now he knew that he had not been true to himself, or the images.  He hadn't failed, he'd been a coward.  He knew, and he wanted to share that knowing, but the only way to do it was the painting.

            He opened the door and burst inside, and he found her, Belle, prostrate on the floor, bent nearly double and writhing against the carpet.  The incense was so thick he could barely make out the bar beyond the altar.  He saw the bottle sitting there, and a glance at the floor showed the empty tumbler.

            Belle was unconscious.  He didn't know why, or how, but he knew she was breathing.  Art lifted her in his arms and carried her to his room.  He placed her on his bed, covered her tortured features with his sheets and blankets and turned away.  She was alive. She was safe.  He had to paint.

            Art never knew when Sammy returned.  One moment he was lost in the painting, and the next he realized he was lost in the painting and the sound.  She had entered, opened the case, pulled out her dulcimer, and she was playing, matching the notes to his motion, or was he matching his motion to the sound?  It didn't matter.

            As he neared completion, he was aware of something more.  Belle had risen, first to sit on the bed, staring at him in wonder, then to rise and slip closer, molding herself to his body and pressing closer.  Other times, other worlds, and he would have worried that she would jostle him, drive him from the images or vice versa, but it was right.  Each counterbalance she caused brought the brush closer to perfection, and she held tightly.  The eyes glared back at them from the canvas, the ice glistened, and the heat throbbed.

            Sammy began to sing along with the tune she was playing, the words distant and familiar, though neither Art nor Belle had ever heard them spoken.  The final words of the poem passed, and the milk of paradise ran green in rivers flowing from Art's brush.  The eyes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge glistened with longing as he watched them, lost in a corner of the canvas, as they passed.  Beyond, seated in a garden, beneath lush fruit trees and near a fountain another sat, also watching.  Again they passed, and as they did, the man's tortured eyes slid over Belle and he whispered:

            "She walks in beauty, like the night."

            But they were gone.

            The words, so long forgotten, whispered over Sammy's lips, softer and lighter, fading to the sound of traffic passing on the street beyond.  The smoke of incense wisped about the room.  On the floor, soaked in deep green paint, the brush lay still, soaking its contents to the carpet.  The painting was spectacular, image torn from image, blended to other worlds and back.

            The room stood empty.

 

                                                                           ** *

            In the next room where she'd left it closed, Belle's book fell open silently.  The candles burned low, but the light was bright enough for reading.  Leaning low, a long-haired, oddly dressed man gripped the volume, holding it up and apparently marveling at the binding and the lined paper within.  The book had fallen open to a page etched with verse, and he read.  His eyes filled with an odd pain, then he placed the framed book on Belle's altar.

            Before him on that altar, sat the bottle.  One final shot remained within.  He lifted it, took a whiff of the contents, and smiled.   He knew that scent, one thing very familiar in a world suddenly gone mad.  Without thought, he poured the last of the absinthe into the tumbler, closed his eyes, and poured it down his throat.

            Lifting the pen, he stared at the paper, mouthing the final words.

            "And drunk the milk of paradise."

            Slowly, mind awash with images, he began to write.