Discoredia, page 22
“Let’s fuck ’em up.” And with that he was out the door.
Tom hoped his question would lead to a discussion, and if deemed appropriate, action. But it appeared that the planning element of their strategy had been declared unnecessary. He followed Oddball, and upon reaching the main room, could do nothing but stand wide-eyed in amazement.
The dance floor was packed and the crowd was going wild, but amongst the raving they could make out bodies on the floor. They could also see wisps of smoke coming from behind the bar to their right, as though there had been a fire. A figure slumped over the bar itself, flicking a lighter: open and shut, lit, and out. Open and shut, lit, and out. The stage was packed with ravers, all dancing around a young man; his arms were outstretched and head was back.
“Where’s the old guy?” yelled Alex from the side of the stage.
“Dunno mate, but that blokes got the same bastard coat on. This gets fucking weirder.”
The music eased a little, but was still exceptionally loud. The tunes were punctuated with piano based breakdowns and trancey sections, as if to give the crowd some chance of keeping up. To his right there was a crash. Looking up, he saw four women standing atop the balcony railing. Judging by the body next to him, there had been five moments before. Justifying his assumption, the next in line leaned forward and fell. Then the next, and the next, and the next.
All five were motionless on the floor, their lemming-like leaps unnoticed by the crowd. He was about to suggest that they forget retaliation and get out when––
“Help us.”
It was a voice they both recognized: Doodles, founder of the Discoredia Dance Troop. She was dancing wildly atop the speaker stack, her eyes staring at them, pleading for help. She looked ill, her face was pale and sweat was pouring from her. They could see her muscles in spasm, twitching as she danced. She nearly fell, clearly exhausted, but for whatever reason she was unable to stop.
“Help us. He’s got us under control. We’ve got to do as he tells us.”
The message came to Tom and Alex via telepathy rather than spoken word, yet neither of them thought it strange. The dose of Pandemonium they had taken weakened over time, but its effects were still there, clouding their judgment, and leading them astray. Unlike Doodles, and her dance partner Rainbow––who had taken up a similar position at the far side of the stage––they were unaware that they were under Neromark’s control, pawns in his twisted game, manipulated into becoming part of the show.
“You’ve got to kill him or I’ll die.”
The words were soft in their minds.
“We’ve got to kill him,” said Alex, who had a soft spot for her, yet never dared to say as much.
“Yes, or she’ll die,” said Tom, who’d always found her a bit irritating.
They clambered upon the stage and prepared to attack, neither of them noticing that Doodles had collapsed in an exhausted heap.
Unseen to them, Neromark smiled. She had served her purpose and baited the trap, and now it would spring shut.
Tom and Alex charged. Ravers parted like the Red Sea before Moses, but the only Promised Land that lay before them would be the afterworld. Neromark stood firm; he never looked at them as they ran across the stage.
One of the ravers stepped forward and thrust a grinder into Oddball’s face. The very grinder he used to shower sparks over the crowd as part of his act. It ground through the bridge of his nose and stuck fast along the bottom of his eye sockets.
A second raver, a boy too young to be there, swung the metal pipe Oddball used to grind along into Tom’s stomach, causing him to crumple to his knees. The man on the stage didn’t look at them, but Tom could see him laughing, his head thrown back as he howled with delight at the havoc he was wreaking.
The pipe came down and hit the back of Tom’s head. He slumped to the floor, groaned, and turned his head. His best friend was flailing his arms around in a blind fury, going ballistic and lashing out at everything around him. A haymaker of a punch sent the man with the grinder flying, and a second knocked a woman, too old for the outfit she was wearing, out cold. But there were too many people for him to handle. Tom could only watch as the grogginess kept him on the floor.
Alex was lifted and crowd-surfed across the stage to a position in front of leatherjacket. The music sped up and Tom managed to see Alex in the air; the fight had gone out of him. The crowd on the dance floor parted. Tom closed his eyes; he had no wish to witness what was coming. The music stopped for a second. Just long enough to hear the crack of his best friend’s spine as he landed on the standoff barrier in front of the stage. The beat kicked in once more.
A boot rolled him over and he opened his eyes to see two faces looking down at him. The first belonged to leatherjacket, who stood behind his head. The second belonged to a black guy who had been seriously burnt; the skin on the left side of his face was black and crispy, his neck was pink where his dark skin had been burnt away, exposing the flesh beneath. Someone passed the black guy a bottle of spirits––vodka or white rum by the color––with a piece of bar towel rammed into the bottleneck. He bent down, inches in front of Tom’s face. He lit the cloth and stood up, throwing it onto the dance floor.
Tom winced, expecting screams. None came, at least none that he could hear over the music, which continued to pound on and on. For the first time in his life he hated the repetitive beat. His head hurt inside and out; he could feel a definite bump on it now.
In his mind he heard leatherjacket speak. “This is my style, real hardcore, motherfucker. Now go see your wife.”
Leatherjacket walked away, and the black guy kicked him to get his attention. The smile on his lips caused the burnt skin on his face to crack and flakes of charred flesh dropped onto Tom’s face. He closed his eyes again. What had he meant about Alice?
If anything happened to her he’d… he’d what?
Tom was fucked and he knew it. Another bottle was lit inches from his face, and intuition made it plain that this one was his. He felt the bottle smash across his forehead, and for a second he tasted the rum on his face before it ignited. The pain was excruciating. He tried to raise his hands to beat out the flames, but they were being held down. His only consolation as he lay there ablaze, was that those pinning him to the floor might die with him.
* * *
Neromark had no desire to watch Tom burn; he had seen, and smelt, such things too many times. Nonetheless, he was having fun. Every decade, every century, had its own peculiar vices, its own appeal. He tasted them all and would never tire of doing so. He had seen so much. Such a shame that man’s experience of his own depravity was confined to what could be witnessed in a lifetime, and not what could be enjoyed over an eternity.
The music pounded on. The crowd rose and fell before him, worshipping him as a deity, ignorant of what they were truly in the presence of. Striding across the stage, he reached Rainbow. He grabbed her breast, firm and young, and it felt good in his hand, but the pleasures of the flesh no longer held much of a thrill to one such as him. He raised his other hand and gently placed it around her throat with his fingers curling over the black and pink choker she wore. As he squeezed the life from her, he kissed her.
***
The sensation was bizarre. She could feel the man’s fingers around her neck, and his tongue forcing its way into her throat, making breathing difficult, but after a momentary blackness, she could no longer see him. Nor could she see Discoredia. She was elsewhere.
The confusion that swarmed through Rainbow’s mind was overwhelming, but she couldn’t help take in the scene before her. A scene of bright white walls had replaced the darkness of the rave. She was in a marble hall, and the crowd before her was no longer representative of the youth of the early twenty first century, but of a past known only to her through movies. The choking sensation eased as the ghostly grip around her throat loosened. She felt a tingle of static through the white gauze top she wore as a second phantom hand groped her. There was also something alien in her mouth, wrestling with her tongue despite her being unable to see the perpetrator of such an invasive act. This could not detract her from surveying the scene before her. Most wore white togas, stained with food and blood. The scene was no senate hall, but rather a decadent orgy of food and wanton copulation. As her eyes flicked back and forth––she saw men with men, and boys, women with women, threesomes, foursomes and more.
She forced herself to look upwards, fixing her gaze on a central hole in the ceiling, through which she could see the starlight-punctured blackness of a night sky. A spectral palm pressed against the back of her head and forced her to look into the hall once more. Plates of exotic foods were being brought in through a side door before being devoured by people acting little better than pigs. At the rear, she could make out a ring of elderly men cheering as two naked women hacked at each other with swords in a human dogfight. All of this was being carried out to a beat only she could hear, for the musical accompaniment in her ears remained the hardcore of Discoredia, and not whatever was being played by the musicians arrayed at the foot of the dais on which she stood. Music, which still held her in its thrall, forcing her to dance as her mouth continued to be violated by an invisible tongue. Compelling her to dance on as she bore witness to some kind of illusory history lesson in perversion. It was too much for her mind to comprehend.
To her right she saw him, a man dressed in a jet-black toga. He, stood next to the golden throne of someone whose purple robes marked him as the master of the debauchery. The man in black looked at her, smiled, and gently touched the shoulder of the Emperor. He pointed at her, and they laughed.
Clamping her eyes shut, she wished the vision would cease. The sensation of hands over her body and the tongue in her mouth faded as she willed herself back to reality. When she opened her eyes, she realized she had failed.
The white marble was gone, replaced with wood. The Romans were gone, too. Those before her were dressed in fur and drinking from horns. It was clearly a feast of some sort, but the food was of simpler fare.
Suddenly, the doors at the end of the hall burst open and a screaming horde flooded in, their faces twisted with hate. What had been a feast was now a massacre, as those who burst in chopped and hacked at those who had been feasting. Some managed to grab weapons and fight back, but it was a losing battle. And there, in the middle, a berserker swinging a giant axe. A berserker wearing the fur of an ebony black bear. A berserker she recognized. Screwing her eyes shut she forced herself to concentrate. It isn’t real. It isn’t real. But real or not, the historical rollercoaster hadn’t come to a halt.
The walls were stone, not dissimilar to Discoredia, but the knights in their mud-splattered armor showed her trip through time was rattling ever onwards. And he was there again, the man in black, at the far end of a courtyard. Not in armor though, but in a robe once more, a robe with a bejeweled silver cross hanging upon its front. In his hand he held a flaming torch, which he gestured toward her before lighting the pile of wood by his side. A pile of wood with a human centerpiece, a young woman no older than herself, naked and bleeding from a hundred lash marks. Even over the music in her mind she could hear the screams. She could smell the smoke of the fire and the aroma of roasting flesh. The cheers of the knights joined the screams of the woman, and if it weren’t for the tongue, still trespassing within her mouth, she would have screamed, too.
Another push brought her forward through time again, but to her dismay, it wasn’t far enough. The room was full of soldiers in black and steel grey, pitchers of beer and plates of food being served to them by living skeletons clad in striped rags. It was clear that they were starving, yet being forced to dish up a banquet to their tormenters. The cruelty of it was indescribable. One of those serving was so weak he could barely walk, his bones stood out to such an extent that he looked as though he had been turned inside out. As she watched he stumbled, spilling some of the beer he was carrying onto the black clad man to his side. She knew who the man would be before he stood, before she saw the profile of his face and the evil sneer etched upon it. He pushed the man to the floor, took his pistol from his holster, and shot him in the head before sitting back down to his meal.
The tongue in her mouth grew in strength and the fight ebbed from her. Blackness swamped her, whilst her eyes remained open. She wasn’t dictating this, he was, the man in black who had tainted time with his cruelty, and was now playing with her. The blackness passed and she could see Discoredia again, but amongst the ravers, she could see the anachronistic afterimages of those she had witnessed in her visions. Romans, Vikings, knights and Nazis, all dancing to hardcore as though it were a fancy dress event. The room itself, though largely Discoredia, displayed ghostly elements of the past in its structure: a marble column here, a wooden beam and section of roof there. She began to laugh at the absurdity of it all, but the laugh was cut short, as she saw the Emperor walk toward her; the man in black was two steps behind.
The Emperor’s purple robe was covered in the pelt of a wolf, its head perched atop his. And as he approached her he began to change, becoming a wolf. The snout crept over his face and filled out, the pelt wrapped around his body, around his arms and hands, which ended in claws, not fingers and nails.
Her laugh became a croak, and the croak became a sob as the walls of her sanity finally began to collapse under the pressure. The Emperor fell to all fours and bared his teeth. The pelt, fully merged into him, engulfed and consumed the man he had been. He was no longer a man; he was a wolf with large yellow fangs and canines that were bared, ready to rip into her flesh.
The tongue left her mouth. She was back in Discoredia, although in truth, she never left it. The man in black, yes, still in black, yet dressed so differently, stood before her. His hot breath panted onto her face as though the act of kissing her had exhausted him, and his hand, which relaxed slightly during her ordeal, clamped once again around her throat.
“I hope you enjoyed your visit to the past, it’s where you belong. You have no future, your present is over, become part of history, my dear, your spark is gone.”
The music seemed to get quieter as her life was throttled from her, but she no longer had the mental facilities to understand much of anything. So collapsed was her mind that, as she was being strangled, she smiled. Perhaps, just perhaps, the innocence of her smile touched him, for he spared her the fate of choking. With a single vicious twist, Neromark snapped her neck and dropped her to the floor like a piece of litter, before using his boot to push her lifeless body from the stage.
CHAPTER 34
Just like Chris, Wendy was oblivious to the numerous horrific incidents going on around her. She was in a world of her own, dancing from place to place, spinning around. One hand was aloft, holding a pink glow-stick. The other hand was by her hip, clutching a bottle of water she didn’t realize was empty. It was a great night and the music was amazing, even if the Styles tunes were a little lacking. One minute she was at the front, the next at the back. She was all over the place, jumping, spinning, and skipping. She was like a demented pixie with the luck of a leprechaun. The Molotov cocktail thrown from the stage missed her by a matter of feet, and she spun her way past numerous individuals with murder in their eyes, never stopping in one place long enough to become a victim. She skipped over the body of a man cutting his arm to shreds with the jagged shard of a broken Stella bottle; desperate to release the spiders and bees crawling beneath the skin.
She danced past Chris, but he never noticed, and she never stopped. He was cute and cheeky, grabbing her arse like that. Tut, tut, but he wasn’t a patch on his brother. He was a real man, not like the kids in college. He was an adult, the sort of man she would like to know better, to date, settle down with and have kids. She was sure she would make a good mother; she definitely wouldn’t be as tight as her father, but wouldn’t spoil them either.
As if summoned by her thoughts, she collided with John. Only then did she stop.
“Have you seen Emm?” he asked, but she couldn’t hear him. She read his lips, but had no interest in what he was saying. She was smitten, experiencing feelings she never felt before. She had never been interested in boys, and was always apprehensive around men, but he was different. She gave him a coquettish smile, and held her arms open for a hug.
He leaned closer. “Wendy, have you seen Emm?”
He could do better than that stuffy girlfriend of his. She wrapped her arms around him in a bear hug, and standing on her tiptoes, kissed his cheek. He pushed her away and walked off, leaving her there, rejected. It hurt, but the drugs in her system anaesthetized the pain.
His loss, she thought, and resumed her whirling dance. It wasn’t playing, but in her mind she could hear the song Save Me.
Love this tune, she thought, as she became lost in the crowd once more. Lost in the music.
John had no time for loved-up little girls. The music was hard and heavy and seemed to be playing tricks on his mind. He could hear the sounds of war within the music. The rhythmic pounding of the bass akin to an artillery barrage, the rapid beat of the drum machine that sounded like a sub-machine gun, clicks that were the exact sound of a rifle being cocked, and whistles that replicated the sounds of bullets piercing through the air. The more he listened, the more he could hear: sirens, explosions, screams, flames, the hissing of gas, the dull thud of a mortar, the crack of a gunshot, and the boom of a shotgun. Were those sounds really part of the music, or was he losing it too?
Everything was wrong, the threat of real conflict weighed heavy on his mind and the music seemed to be taunting him. There was a rumble of bass that vibrated through his body, making him feel sick in the pit of his stomach. He took a deep breath and resolved to focus his mind, to fight against whatever was trying to take hold of him. The sounds were just part of the music, he knew that, although the shotgun blasts sounded genuine.
