You there! STOP! Stop right there!

  I’m not sure who said that, but I’m certain somebody did.

  As it was, we chose not to comply.

  * * *

  —

  Clip 8. Here all I can offer are smashed-plate recollections of narrow Cubist stairs that played havoc on our heels; flashing squad car lights ahead and behind us; the witch-whooping of burglar alarms and approaching banshee sirens attending our getaway.

  Far-off voices and music hastily assembled in our scrapbook awareness as if to suggest a narrative of relative sanity at the top of the stairwell.

  I half dragged my semi-conscious Sorcerer’s Apprentice, clattering upstairs on a halting, tumbling trajectory that seemed much longer than when we’d come down. If I hadn’t had sturdy ankle straps, if Luda’s platforms hadn’t been secured by tightly fastened cerise laces, we’d have lost our footwear down there along with our wits—as it is, I twisted my ankle badly enough to need an elastic bandage. My Little Shoe Box heels would never recover, and I loved them.

  There’s always a sacrifice, isn’t there?

  Jesus coughed his last on the cross to redeem us all in our personal stalled clocks of torment at the end, Odin hung by one leg from the Tree of Life for three days and nights and lost an eye to gain mastery of the runes for all humankind.

  There are no free lunches. Well, not unless you count the pigswill the catering staff dishes up during rehearsal.

  And Luda?

  Luda kicked and writhed in my arms. From the bubble-gum gloss of her doll-smooth lips, there effervesced a starry froth of Celtic knotwork, or so it seemed to me all lit up like a skyscraper. She sprayed a bardic foam of words that couldn’t be spoken, only interpreted by druids as they dripped sizzling in silver from her chin.

  Gasping, squealing, praying to Mercurius and any other listening deity with an ounce of providence to spare, I followed the thudding heart of all music, all defiance against death and restriction, closer to its source!

  Top of the stairs. Opening out again into colors and people, like those pop-up books you’d get as a kid where entire cardboard cities would spring from the pages with little stiffened paper levers to work the moving parts.

  Following our underworld adventure, the onrushing sensory excess seemed to immerse us completely in a welcoming warm wave; all naked bodies, strap-ons, gas masks, sweat, and scent, unfettered life.

  I rejoiced in the pulsing party light, the humanity, here in this room with its déjà vu reproduction of The Guitar Lesson.

  We’d made it. Here in the upstairs world, my body felt pleasantly cold in the heat and the body weather, the climatic sultry gusts of lube and pussy, ass and poppers, PVC and rubber, hors d’oeuvres. Goosed by a blade of air I could tell that I’d split my dress down the back, but it seemed a small price to pay for safe passage up from the Underworld. The noises, the shrieks and laughter, the grunts and glissandos of orgasm and desire, the commonplace lights of familiarity’s blessed shores. I was very, very, high, I realized. Something big had just happened, something inexplicably life-changing. No one seemed to realize any of this. Something had to be done about these closed-minded, hedonistic narcissists! Or so I thought.

  Someone began to yell, panicked, shrill, and theatrical. It turned out to be me.

  Is there a doctor?

  Picture me waving my arms like a chicken struggling to outrun the butcher’s wife.

  Luda shuddered and thrashed in my arms in sputtering black-and-silver flashes, her film spooling in checkered ribbons off its mortal reel. I have to say, she even made a seizure look hot.

  Please—I heard myself shrieking. Is there someone?

  I knew there had to be someone. There’s usually more than one qualified medical professional at these sorts of parties. I don’t know what it is about doctors and fetish, but you can generally count on that.

  Or at least you’ll get a dentist. Rarely a vet, I’ve found. I think they’re just too busy.

  That’s when the scenery flipped. What had been a bejeweled Versailles populated by some fantastic celestial and polyamorous elite turned squalid and flickering, a vintage dirty movie sputtering toward climax on an antique projector. I saw myself staggering through a post-nuclear flea market, lost among creaky splintered trestle tables laden with joke shop novelties of cardboard, tin, and enamel, threadbare soft toys, tattered books fresh from someone’s deathbed. The treasures of civilization. I had become nakedly aware. All at once came a razor-edged raw immediacy—a cold-water Baptism in the abrupt indecent squalor of the real, unmediated by chemicals and self-deception.

  I was unexpectedly sober in what some Buddhists call shunyata.

  The woman bent over Luda’s quaking body—a doctor I deduced—wore a mask like a raven’s head, beak and all, and nothing much else aside from a black hooded cape and a pair of Terry de Havilland boots to die for.

  I thought she was possessed!—I tried to explain. Your boots are incredible!

  It’s grand mal—the fabulous, feathered hybrid assured me in withering tones I felt were quite unnecessary. She’s having an epileptic fit. Tonic-clonic seizure.

  Often mistaken for demonic possession in the Dark Ages—I pointed out, so as not to seem completely gullible. Those are Terry de Havilland, right? Your boots.

  You must get her onto her side—she said but she’d already managed that, and she’d loosened Luda’s buckled collar, leaving me with nothing to do but helicopter nervously as the bird-lady placed a nearby cushion beneath Luda’s head and curtly monitored her watch.

  Shouldn’t we put something in her mouth to stop her biting her tongue?—I suggested, looking around for a suitable example, finding only dildos and vibrators.

  Only if you want to break her teeth or jaw—came the snippy reply. Am I using the right pronoun?

  To stay in the game, I nodded a series of fervent agreements. In my distraught and absented state of mind, I was certain I recognized this carrion Florence Nightingale as the Morrigan, battlefield goddess of the Celts, and I certainly didn’t want to find myself on her shit list.

  She’ll be all right—quoth the Raven as the jagged ferocity of Luda’s jerks and whiplashes began to ease off. That’s two minutes.

  The beaked head snapped round to confront me. I felt as though I’d done something to aggravate Batman.

  What were you doing? What did she take?

  We were looking for something—I confessed, cowering in the beady-eyed glare of justice. Something happened.

  Not all dialogue’s worth repeating. It went on like that for a minute or two while a whimsical crowd gathered, as if assembling to witness an accident in a circus brothel.

  I was handed what appeared to be a dead cartoon snake. It was the leash I’d buckled onto Luda’s collar. This almost strangled her—said the Morrigan gravely, as if the whole debacle was somehow my fault!

  I sat back awkwardly on my wonky heels as the miraculous lady doctor, this vision plucked nude and feathered from a Max Ernst canvas, cantilevered Luda into the recovery position where she rolled her eyes and ground her jaws as though intent on chewing through masonry.

  * * *

  —

  Clip 9. I knelt beside Luda holding her hand as she recuperated in a quiet wood-paneled library decorated as Tutankhamun’s Tomb. Looking back, that must have been when I took my glove off. No one had been keen to call the emergency services. Not to a party like this. There were too many well-known faces—celebrities, sportsmen, dentists to the rich and famous—to risk involving the authorities.

  Luda lay back in a decadent spill of Versace velvet cushions, obsessed with a tinkling music box, another of the fabulous château’s morbid art pieces, as it toiled its way through Cliff Richard’s “Devil Woman,” simplifying the Peter Pan of Pop’s 1976 chart hit to serial cracked chimes while a black-painted, pipistrelle-winged ballerina spun like a tiny toxic kebab in a tutu.

  Enthralled by the plinking, struggling music a grinning Luda extended her arms languorously, pantheresque! I had a suspicion, immediately to be confirmed, that she’d learned absolutely nothing from our recent brush with danger.

  I feel amazing—she said, proving me right. I’m so horny!

  You just had a fit—I tried to explain but she didn’t care.

  It’s not the first time—she said breezily. I’m used to it. It feels amazing when it stops. I’m just a bit tired.

  Chopping up coke some flunky had delivered on a silver saucer, she asked if I wanted to join her.

  I’m going home!—I said stunned. And you are too! I stood up briskly. I held out my hand as if to a reluctant child. Luda wasn’t interested.

  You just had an epileptic fit—I said. You need to take it easy after that.

  No, I don’t. Who the fuck are YOU?—she spat. You’re not my fucking mother!

  I wouldn’t have had you on a free offer, sweetheart—I said, keeping my cool as best I could in the face of chemical cues urging me to do otherwise. You look demonic. You shouldn’t be doing that…

  She bent across the bedside table to snuff a waiting tramline, then jerked up to face me. Her eyes shot blue-hot bullets.

  I understand now. About the Glamour.

  What?—I said. That’s just the drugs…I haven’t told you anything yet. But she wasn’t having it, directing her blowtorch glare as if by staring hard enough she could melt my contacts into glue.

  How it’s all changing all the time. How one thing can change into another! How one place can be all places! Like you, changing me into you—

  It was one way of putting it, I suppose. Maybe she had picked up some of the basics.

  You’re just mad because it’s taking me and not you—she announced, suddenly on her feet and in my face. You’re jealous it had a message for me and not YOU!

  Message? What message?—I sneered.

  You’ll find out—said Luda.

  I dismissed her with a condescending wave; watched her disappear, turned on her side, then rolled back into the throng, into the swollen throbbing beat, where a statuesque nude with the black marble-eyed head of a bird beckoned, waiting to take Luda by the hand and lure her into the churning quicksand of bare flesh, vinyl, buckles, and hot-pink rubber to be engulfed, squeezed flat as laundry. Alice in Wonderland somnambulant, squashed to her psychedelic pulp in the pulsing mass of those moist carnal multitudes.

  She’ll be all right—with me—I heard the Crow Doctor chuckle.

  I imagined Luda’s individual self, her own unique signal, absorbed to a final dwindling crackle in the synchronizing frequencies of the Party Pod People.

  With a nauseating lurch into present tense, I’m breathing loud and hard on the cold glaring steps outside the mansion. My shoulders heave. I do believe I’ve been sick, and it seems I’ve been crying too. I’m much better now, babes—I try to explain to the young men helping me into a taxi. Being sick felt fantastic. No really—

  I’ve lost a glove. I’ve lost Luda. Everything is hot and cruel, fizzing on a Catherine Wheel roundabout. Didn’t I just get here? Wasn’t I different then?

  The boys were nice. I remember them being lovely and kind. I’d dropped my purse and one of them found it for me on a chair near the stairs to the basement. Another of the lads slipped me his personal details written on one of those lurid flyers for the event I had now elected to flee.

  At least that’s what I thought until I called a few days later and got the Samaritans hotline!

  Thanks for that!

  Still. You never know when it might come in handy.

  * * *

  —

  Clip 10. How did I find my way home? Muscle memory. Instinct. A salmonlike sense of direction kicked in that knew to follow pre-ordained migratory routes whenever higher brain functions were obliterated. Nothing remains of the taxi ride, except for a savage stumble to the sidewalk at the end. Staggering against the wall, betrayed again and again by my treasured peep-toe plats, each ungainly step of the way to the third floor, the front door.

  I struggled to recall why I was carrying a towel.

  The impossible keys, the symbolic lock, the merciless light, with the hall carpet coming up to meet me. The mistress brought to her knees, with torn stockings and dribbling mascara in the third act of a comeuppance story from one of those old Stanton bondage comics.

  I looked like a hag in the mirror. A wretched, painted crone. A stupid, vain old bitch. The imprint of a kiss on the brutal glass reminded me of when I’d mistaken myself for beautiful not so long ago.

  I don’t fancy yours much—I had to laugh as I closed the front door behind me, a bed-seeking hag missile.

  My broken left boot-heel flapped loose from the sole on a tongue of leather. My ankle, swollen and throbbing, would recover but the beautiful shoes were toast. In a glint of recall I remembered when it had happened, on that frantic scramble up the stairs from the cellar, filling in another odd and amorphous jigsaw hole in the night’s puzzle.

  The cellar. It didn’t seem real. What happened in the cellar to ruin everything?

  I lay still under the duvet, counting the clips from 1 through 10. Savasana. Yogic corpse posture. Feeling the bruises. Shivering and wounded in the flaking emotional comedown, I was Icarus singed and practically hospitalized, repeating my personal mantra as I struggled to repel the foul fiends gibbering and gnawing at the fringes of consciousness where impending sobriety reared its misshapen bulk up from the primal ooze of intoxication.

  My left knee hurt badly where I’d cracked down on it, and there on my gloveless right forearm, the blue-black-and-yellow map of an alien continent could be seen, pictured as if from near Earth orbit, an undiscovered country fading into view in the style of a photograph developed in a tray.

  As I unzipped my hitherto skintight skirt, now bulging like sails in a Force 11, as it fell open in segments, I was rewarded with some crumbling morsels of poorly preserved incident; a thuggish good-looking Croatian boy is bringing a towel to (a) protect me from embarrassment and (b) spare guests the nauseating horror of my exposed back end, while a smirking dwarf looks on, a sleazy Yule Lad chugging on a cigar bigger than his forearm.

  By 6 A.M., adrift among starlit ashes, I was almost recognizable to myself again as I took up position for a gentle parachute reentry; I was troubled only by a small, infinitely concerned voice that advised me against drinking too much while still encouraging my drug consumption.

  I was glad to be alone. Scared that Luda would never show her face again. Dreading her inevitable return.

  Cars rolled as red flashed to green and their headlights across the wall threw narrow angular shadows—the leaning shapes of tall thin men marching in single file. Searching the room, shadowy detectives with hands stuffed deep in trench-coat pockets, on the hunt for clues, inclined against a wind only they could feel.

  She would have to leave, I told myself; Luda was a magnet for danger and derangement. The sinister aura of criminality, corruption, and carnage that attended her was heady nectar to flat policemen. Her very existence was an invitation to the forces of depravity. I should have known when we met; her cockroach problem only underscored my suspicions. They were night creatures scuttling in her shadow. She’d be telling me next about her problems with snakes, vampire bats, centipedes…

  So passed the untethered hours, locked in my cage at the glitter zoo by those traveling bars that striped the walls and ceiling on repeat. Those shapes that were not flat policemen. And on repeat, compulsively, I replayed the random clips compiled in my threadbare album of recollections.

  From Clip 1 to Clip 10, backward, forward, retrieving a few seconds of detail and incident on each anxious rerun, still cautiously pacing out the edge of a ragged lunatic hole at the center, where that basement room had plumbed deep foundations in my memory, sucking in light and sense; leaving nothing behind but an excreta of old newspaper scraps, torn headlines that only made sense as Surrealist poetry, and a restless unreliable map of the city of dreams. That bleeding vision of a contorted, hidden geography of Gasglow laid out in nauseating bas-relief, dissected on an autopsy slab for all to see.

  The entire sublime yet inconsequential psychodrama enacted beneath the uninflected gaze of a sacrificial pantomime cow, slaughtered in accordance with who knew what sacred screed or taboo.

  That was all I could remember. Just that.

  Of the ten hours since we’d left as a human storm of giggles, peacock shimmer, and flapping flamingo wings to the sound of “Two Ladies,” I had succeeded in pinning down perhaps fifteen minutes’ worth of reliably unfolding episodes.

  I cringed as if stung by a venomous swarm of hunter-killer memories; sobbing in the forecourt—promising blow jobs—the suicide hotline—oh fuck!

  I stayed awake, thinking she’d turn up and curl into my embrace before too long. Fantasies were entertained of what might come next in an ideal world.

  Unwilling to stay spiked beneath the tombstone clouds, the sun had risen from the grave like Dracula, sick ghost of itself in a gray shroud on that pale and rainy vampire dawn in late August.

  Teach her nothing about the Glamour—my Guardian Angel cried like a blue, red, and yellow parrot gone mad in a gilded cage. TELL HER NOTHING!

  Let Luda make her own mistakes. Hadn’t she hurt me enough?

  You’ll regret it!—my protector squawked more raucously until I shook with a last rattle of fury before lights-out.

  Why should I tell the ungrateful cunt anything?

  She’d only use it against me.

  You’ve met her now; what do you think?

  Me, I think I must have been eleven years old.

  We’ve all been eleven, let’s face it, unless the law’s relaxed its rules and allowed some inquisitive ten-year-olds in the jury box. Stranger things have happened.