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Abstract

cian’s slab in winter. It was cheap to enter, the music was loud and constant and the drinks were generous, so it was, of course, a fixture in the lives of many young people in the city.An old friend once told me the club had been built next to a mass grave, a plague pit whose inhabitants were sometimes roused from their sleep of death by the nightly revelry. Naturally, as we were both out of our minds at the time on as many stupefying substances as we could get our hands on, we had giggled with morbid delight at the idea.I think about this as the taxi draws up to the railway arches, where I spy a snaking line of club-goers outside a set of very familiar double-doors. It really hasn’t changed a bit since I was here last, the doormen even have the same haggard look of boredom and contempt.I join the line, and my phone buzzes with a shrill insect tremor: I look down at the screen to see what my new paramour has in store for me tonight. I see a photo he has sent from inside the busy club.In the picture, I see that his face is now a little puffed and sagged with age, but he is still recognizably handsome. In amongst the lurid lights and cheap mist of dry-ice he seems to beckon me, with comforting familiarity and desire.I find my way inside, past gruff doormen who grunt at my timid presence, and I check in my rain-soaked jacket at the coat-room. The attendant is a thin, unsmiling young woman with skin as pale as a snowdrop, who seems to have been poured into the tight leather dress she wears.She hands me a yellow ticket stub, and I push through the doors and down the stairs into the inferno of bodies below.The music is ear-splitting, with sounds and words that feel alien to me, accompanied by a constant thrum of bass that hits my chest like a clenched fist. I weave my way through to the bar, to find my long-lost lover. To fein interest in his newly acquired American ‘mannerisms’, and to stir the embers of our shared memories enough to convince him that tonight, I am his.I look up and down the bar, a long runway of polished metal ringed with a sediment of stale beer and cigarette ash. I waft away a plume of dry-ice smoke from in front of me, and still I cannot see him. I check my phone, but as I had expected the signal has all but died this far down, below the drenched streets above.I peer past young women with electric green hair and metal piercings that hang like stalactites from every visible orifice. I glance at the disgusting men who stand just outside the dance floor, who leer foggy-eyed and intoxicated at the spectacle of so much young flesh on display.I cannot see him here, my last hope of the night. He has abandoned me, like all the rest of them. Another ex-lover lost to chance.I want to go home. I am sick of everything, of these people, flaunting their youth amidst the bewildering sights and sounds that pulse among the vaulted ceilings and shadowy catacombs. I am sick of always being let down, always putting my faith in people, only to be discarded.A man behind the bar waves over to me, and gestures with a cupped hand to inquire whether I would like to buy a drink?My mind now a toxic pool of resentment, I nod to the man behind the bar, and point at the topmost shelf of bottles behind him. As I recall, this shelf contains within it the most potent types of poison to be found.It is six draughts of sickly-sweet liquor later, and I am dancing in the heart of the club. I am pressed up against a wave of frantic, glistening bodies. I don’t even hear the music anymore, my ears filled with the sound of hissing white noise, my chest hammering from the low frequency onslaughts that launch viol

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ently from the speakers, like the sounds of tectonic plates crashing against one another.In this way, perhaps I am no longer alone. In this pulsing mass of revellers, I am part of something bigger than myself. Something that will eclipse my loneliness.I look at the other dancers, the young men and women who shed layers of clothing across the dance floor, like flagellants beating their bodies with sonic flails. In the flashing lights and the thick smoke, they almost seem a separate species to me.A new strain of humanity, guided by vibrations in the air, performing strange rituals before the altar of sound.I look to my left, and the alcohol evaporating inside me makes my vision sway violently. I see that someone in the heart of the crowd is wearing a mask. Not unusual, as nearly anything goes in this club, clothed or un-clothed. It is the nature of the mask that disturbs me.It is a plague mask.I’d seen one before, in a museum in Venice, a lifetime ago. It had reminded me of a bird’s skull, its empty eye sockets perched atop a long, cruel beak. I remember that the masks had been stuffed with herbs and cloves to ward off the reek of disease, back when such things were thought to have an effect upon the cruel realities of infection and decay.As soon as I have blinked in shock, the figure in the mask is gone. Perhaps it was a figment of my fevered mind. I shrug it off, and I keep dancing, keep moving to ward off the oppressive thoughts that are weighing upon me.Though when I turn around again, it appears that others are also wearing masks. They look like skulls, with black hollow eyes. I laugh a little to myself, reminded of trick-or-treaters and childhood halloween’s where masked ghouls and goblins roamed the streets.But the masks they are wearing seem far too real. They are stained grey with mildew that collects across the sunken brows, and some have dark, pitted fractures that vein out along the bone toward the empty sockets.A hand reaches out by my side, and interlinks with my own. I am pulled into the crowd, and either side of me I am held by two grinning skeletal dancers. The crowd begins to spin in a wide circle, all arms woven together to create a great loop of movement.I feel sick, I want to stop. My heart is racing, and my body feels like it’s on fire. Faster and faster they spin, a whirligig that turns us like an unending wheel. I try to shake off the arms that hold me, but I am too weak.The faces of the dancers shift in the pulsing lights. I see hollow cheeks and dead eyes mixed in with grey, bloated skins and mottled brows. Bodies so thin they seem barely able to stand, some so puffed and sickly with putrefaction they look fit to burst.And in the middle of the twirling dancers, the figure in the plague mask stands. Though it isn’t really a mask, but a face: two pin-prick red eyes glow with malevolence out of the dark sockets.As I feel my feet begin to crack and bleed inside my shoes, I beg out loud to be set free from this circling torment. All I had wanted was to not be alone tonight. To be loved. To feel desire in all its intoxicating aspects.Within my pocket, I can feel that my phone is buzzing. My hands are fixed through the arms of the dancer’s beside me, and I cannot answer its call. Cannot satiate the need to find meaning, in the words and actions of others.The plague doctor in the middle of the circle conducts this morbid symphony, that roars in my ears in a wave of dissonant harmonies. The music has become a waltz now, a lilting tune to wake the dead from their slumber. And all around me, the dead are dancing.</article></body>

Danse Macabre

Fiction

The rain is coming down hard outside, and I’ve sat in this bar full of strangers for the last two hours, waiting. Waiting for him.

Bastard, I think to myself as the window in front of me grows thick with the fog of condensation, the warm breath of others creating a murky halo around the outside world. He always does this to me, and I know he won’t change. Even if I try my hardest to will it so.

Out of the blue, he texts me in the dead of night and asks me what I'm ‘doing’. What I’m ‘up to’ right now. Sleeping, I should have replied tersely, but his words send an electric jolt of desire through my body. I tell him ‘oh, nothing much, you?’. This leads to hours of twilight conversing between us, my body tucked beneath the bed-sheets, giddy with intrigue.

And with that, I’m hooked on him again.

Like a junkie chasing their fix, I come to him when he calls. We agree on a time and place to meet the following evening. Just meeting as friends, he says, but it never ends this way. Every time we meet, we fall into each other's arms all over again.

I know deep down that love should not hurt you, nor make you mad. But then again, what if I’m wrong this time?

And now I am here waiting for him in this bar full of strangers, and yet again he lets me down.

He sends me a text message, a paltry excuse for his absence that is as insubstantial as the fog around the window I sit before. I reply to his message with ‘fine, have fun without me then.’ hoping that he is not so self-absorbed as to misinterpret my curt response.

As I sit there alone in a room full of strangers, the music playing behind the bar now becomes a cacophony of angular harmonies that to my ears sound like the lamentation of lost souls.

I want to cry, the sting of abandonment and shame burying itself in my skin and burrowing into my core.

My phone buzzes with life in my hand. I look at the screen, half hoping, half dreading the reply to my previously dismissive words. Instead, it is the voice of another that calls my attention to the screen: an ex-lover, now living in North America, who has come back home for his annual victory lap of self-proclaimed success. He wants to know what I’m up to tonight. Who I'm with, or perhaps if I’m alone this evening.

I pause, my stomach lurching between excitement and numb withdrawal. I know that deep down, all I want right now is to not be alone. To feel the warmth of another, to feel desired.

I muster the energy to reply with my own subtle flirtation, neither showing my hand fully nor shooing away his coy advances. It is a game everyone plays with former lovers: a game of chance.

He takes the bait, and with that, I am no longer alone. He tells me he is on the other side of town, in that club we used to dance in half a lifetime ago. Meet me in the pits, he tells me. I finish my drink, brave the rain outside and hail a taxi.

The joke around town is that the club in question really is the pits. The last time I dared to enter, It was still a shambolic, subterranean labyrinth that reeked of sewage in summer and was cold as a mortician’s slab in winter. It was cheap to enter, the music was loud and constant and the drinks were generous, so it was, of course, a fixture in the lives of many young people in the city.

An old friend once told me the club had been built next to a mass grave, a plague pit whose inhabitants were sometimes roused from their sleep of death by the nightly revelry. Naturally, as we were both out of our minds at the time on as many stupefying substances as we could get our hands on, we had giggled with morbid delight at the idea.

I think about this as the taxi draws up to the railway arches, where I spy a snaking line of club-goers outside a set of very familiar double-doors. It really hasn’t changed a bit since I was here last, the doormen even have the same haggard look of boredom and contempt.

I join the line, and my phone buzzes with a shrill insect tremor: I look down at the screen to see what my new paramour has in store for me tonight. I see a photo he has sent from inside the busy club.

In the picture, I see that his face is now a little puffed and sagged with age, but he is still recognizably handsome. In amongst the lurid lights and cheap mist of dry-ice he seems to beckon me, with comforting familiarity and desire.

I find my way inside, past gruff doormen who grunt at my timid presence, and I check in my rain-soaked jacket at the coat-room. The attendant is a thin, unsmiling young woman with skin as pale as a snowdrop, who seems to have been poured into the tight leather dress she wears.

She hands me a yellow ticket stub, and I push through the doors and down the stairs into the inferno of bodies below.

The music is ear-splitting, with sounds and words that feel alien to me, accompanied by a constant thrum of bass that hits my chest like a clenched fist. I weave my way through to the bar, to find my long-lost lover. To fein interest in his newly acquired American ‘mannerisms’, and to stir the embers of our shared memories enough to convince him that tonight, I am his.

I look up and down the bar, a long runway of polished metal ringed with a sediment of stale beer and cigarette ash. I waft away a plume of dry-ice smoke from in front of me, and still I cannot see him. I check my phone, but as I had expected the signal has all but died this far down, below the drenched streets above.

I peer past young women with electric green hair and metal piercings that hang like stalactites from every visible orifice. I glance at the disgusting men who stand just outside the dance floor, who leer foggy-eyed and intoxicated at the spectacle of so much young flesh on display.

I cannot see him here, my last hope of the night. He has abandoned me, like all the rest of them. Another ex-lover lost to chance.

I want to go home. I am sick of everything, of these people, flaunting their youth amidst the bewildering sights and sounds that pulse among the vaulted ceilings and shadowy catacombs. I am sick of always being let down, always putting my faith in people, only to be discarded.

A man behind the bar waves over to me, and gestures with a cupped hand to inquire whether I would like to buy a drink?

My mind now a toxic pool of resentment, I nod to the man behind the bar, and point at the topmost shelf of bottles behind him. As I recall, this shelf contains within it the most potent types of poison to be found.

It is six draughts of sickly-sweet liquor later, and I am dancing in the heart of the club. I am pressed up against a wave of frantic, glistening bodies. I don’t even hear the music anymore, my ears filled with the sound of hissing white noise, my chest hammering from the low frequency onslaughts that launch violently from the speakers, like the sounds of tectonic plates crashing against one another.

In this way, perhaps I am no longer alone. In this pulsing mass of revellers, I am part of something bigger than myself. Something that will eclipse my loneliness.

I look at the other dancers, the young men and women who shed layers of clothing across the dance floor, like flagellants beating their bodies with sonic flails. In the flashing lights and the thick smoke, they almost seem a separate species to me.

A new strain of humanity, guided by vibrations in the air, performing strange rituals before the altar of sound.

I look to my left, and the alcohol evaporating inside me makes my vision sway violently. I see that someone in the heart of the crowd is wearing a mask. Not unusual, as nearly anything goes in this club, clothed or un-clothed. It is the nature of the mask that disturbs me.

It is a plague mask.

I’d seen one before, in a museum in Venice, a lifetime ago. It had reminded me of a bird’s skull, its empty eye sockets perched atop a long, cruel beak. I remember that the masks had been stuffed with herbs and cloves to ward off the reek of disease, back when such things were thought to have an effect upon the cruel realities of infection and decay.

As soon as I have blinked in shock, the figure in the mask is gone. Perhaps it was a figment of my fevered mind. I shrug it off, and I keep dancing, keep moving to ward off the oppressive thoughts that are weighing upon me.

Though when I turn around again, it appears that others are also wearing masks. They look like skulls, with black hollow eyes. I laugh a little to myself, reminded of trick-or-treaters and childhood halloween’s where masked ghouls and goblins roamed the streets.

But the masks they are wearing seem far too real. They are stained grey with mildew that collects across the sunken brows, and some have dark, pitted fractures that vein out along the bone toward the empty sockets.

A hand reaches out by my side, and interlinks with my own. I am pulled into the crowd, and either side of me I am held by two grinning skeletal dancers. The crowd begins to spin in a wide circle, all arms woven together to create a great loop of movement.

I feel sick, I want to stop. My heart is racing, and my body feels like it’s on fire. Faster and faster they spin, a whirligig that turns us like an unending wheel. I try to shake off the arms that hold me, but I am too weak.

The faces of the dancers shift in the pulsing lights. I see hollow cheeks and dead eyes mixed in with grey, bloated skins and mottled brows. Bodies so thin they seem barely able to stand, some so puffed and sickly with putrefaction they look fit to burst.

And in the middle of the twirling dancers, the figure in the plague mask stands. Though it isn’t really a mask, but a face: two pin-prick red eyes glow with malevolence out of the dark sockets.

As I feel my feet begin to crack and bleed inside my shoes, I beg out loud to be set free from this circling torment. All I had wanted was to not be alone tonight. To be loved. To feel desire in all its intoxicating aspects.

Within my pocket, I can feel that my phone is buzzing. My hands are fixed through the arms of the dancer’s beside me, and I cannot answer its call. Cannot satiate the need to find meaning, in the words and actions of others.

The plague doctor in the middle of the circle conducts this morbid symphony, that roars in my ears in a wave of dissonant harmonies. The music has become a waltz now, a lilting tune to wake the dead from their slumber. And all around me, the dead are dancing.