Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu (14 page)

He looked at me in surprise,
then his expression grew thoughtful. “I wonder.”

“What the hell are you?”

“I’m a mutant freak, just like
you said.”

“No, you’re something else.
You’re like, I don’t know, a witch.”

His lips twisted. “You have no
idea.”

“What did you do to make that
blue lightning stuff?”

“Channelled some power.” He
laughed.

I could tell I wasn’t going to
get any real answers out of him. “Okay, Witch, give me your hand
again.” I smeared the ointment on his palms, carefully wrapped
gauze and tape around them, and covered up the bandages with red
silk scarves.

“Thanks, human scum,” he said,
but the tone was warm, teasing. Then he smiled at me, a shiny
bright smile. And, oh wow, my insides lit up like a firecracker. I
swear, no one had ever smiled at me like that before. It was as if
the sun had suddenly broken through a hole in the roof. If I’d
thought him attractive before, it was nothing like the breath-taken
feeling I had now. I started to smile back, then remembered that
smiling didn’t improve my appearance. Glamour, that was what Dr.
Sligo had called it, that special quality that Wraeththu have. I
thought I understood it then. I didn’t understand anything.

I turned away, feeling anxious
again. “So, I see you’re nearly naked now, but probably not enough
for Sligo. What are you going to do for your act?”

“You’ll see.”

“No, I won’t. I’ve got my own
act to do. I’m a spectacle, just like you.”

“So, why do you hate me and not
them? Aren’t we of a kind, in the same boat, so to speak?”

I flinched. “We are nothing
alike. I despise your kind.”

“Perhaps in time you’ll change
your mind.” He seemed to be mocking me. It made me angry again.

“I doubt it. I’ve hated the
Wraeththu all my life, before I even knew what to call you. That
hate is like breathing to me.”

He nodded. “It can be like that
for us too. Where I’m from, the humans curse us, hunt us down.
There’s going to be war soon. What’s your name?”

“My name?”

“Not such a hard question, is
it?” He laughed softly.

“Jareth Nine,” I said. “My
stage name is Janus.”

“Ah, of course. Janus, the
Roman god of gates, doorways, and beginnings. He who has two faces
and can simultaneously see both the past and the future. How
appropriate. Can you predict the future, Jareth Nine?”

He was looking at me intently
again, as if he could see past my disfigurement. I had one of those
moments that hit the pit of my stomach, like falling through the
air. I saw myself standing at a door, looking out into a forest of
towering ponderosa pines, knowing that something terrible had
happened. God of doorways and beginnings.

“Sometimes it seems so,” I said
cautiously. “I mean sometimes I get premonitions, usually just
feelings, and then something significant happens.”

He picked a piece of glitter
off his thigh. I noticed that he didn’t seem to have hair on any
part of his body except that luxuriant growth on his head.
Certainly, there was no shadow of a beard on his face. He nodded.
“Yes, it makes sense. You’re special, Jareth. I knew from the
moment I laid eyes on you.”

“No, I’m not. I’m just a
freak.” Yes, a freak, destined to be reviled by everyone and to
live out my days in loneliness.

“No, I don’t think so.” He
rocked forward. Slowly as if reaching for a skittish horse, he put
his hand through the bars and touched the burned side of my face,
brushing it with his fingertips in a gesture as delicate as the
twitch of a butterfly’s wing. It ignited the tingling sensation,
this time more profoundly than before. I jerked away from him,
angry again.

“So much pain,” he said. He
sounded sad.

“I hate you!” I stood up to
leave. “I’ve gotta go now.”

“Jareth, would you come back
and see my act? I would feel better knowing there was at least one
friendly face in the crowd.”

“Mine wouldn’t be
friendly.”

“At least it would be
familiar.”

“I have my own act.”

“Leave early.” He paused.
“Please, Jareth Nine.”

“I’ll see you later,” I said.
“I’ll bring some dinner after your show. That’s all I can promise.”
I started to walk away, then paused, looking back at him. “I told
you my name, Mutant. What about yours? Do you have a name, or do I
just call you Wraeththu Scum?”

He laughed as if I’d made a
joke. “My name is Kithara. I am one of Thiede’s elite. That means
nothing to you yet, but it will. I feel change blowing through me
as keenly as a northerly wind. Don’t you?”

“No,” I said. It was a lie.
Like a bug, I scurried back to my dark booth.

As I stood in my booth, turning
first one way, then the other, beauty, ugliness, light, dark, and
listening to all the idiot gawkers, it seemed that Kithara’s spell,
for so it must have been, fell away from me. When I was near him,
he had the power to make me forget what I was, and even imagine
myself as normal. Once reality kicked back in, I was left with
anger and bitterness and only wanted to go back to the trailer to
drug myself into oblivion. I refused to leave early to see whatever
new act Kithara had dreamed up in order to keep Dr. Sligo from
frying him. Instead I did my job, returning to his tent when the
show was done.

Wearing my mask, I stood by the
exit door and listened to the people emerging. Something was
different this time. “It’s a man, I tell you,” one woman was
arguing.

Her male friend replied, “No,
it’s a woman. I’d never be that turned on by a man.”

“Maybe you’re just one of those
latent homosexuals,” the woman said with a laugh, which brought an
angry splutter in reply.

“Whatever it is, it’s weird,”
another man was saying.

“Downright sexy as hell,”
someone else said.

Others emerged silent, almost
embarrassed to look at each other. But I noticed many of them went
and stood in line to buy tickets for the midnight show. Oh Kithara,
what are you doing?

Dr. Sligo showed up, beaming,
and waved the last rubes out of the tent, since they were hanging
around as if they didn’t want to leave. “Well, that was much
better,” Sligo chortled. “Our boy in there has real potential.” He
rubbed his hands together. “We can make this into something
spectacular in the future, but for tonight, we’ll have to
improvise. Jareth, get Ricky to come in here and work on the
lighting and then you run to supplies and get some long chains. Get
a pair of acrobats’ leather wrist cuffs with a metal link to attach
to the chains. Then, pick up ten pounds of dry ice in a cooler and
ask Barry in concessions to boil about six gallons of water for us.
Hurry up, we’ve only got an hour until the next show.”

So, we were going to create
some mood with fog and special lighting. Okay. But why did Sligo
want chains? I rounded up the equipment, then came back lugging an
ice chest full of dry ice. Some kid was balanced on a ladder
fiddling with the lights in the framework at the top of the tent
while Ricky worked a slider box adjusting the spots, changing
colours, bringing them up and down. “How will I know the timing on
all this?” he asked Dr. Sligo.

“You’re going to have to
improvise,” Sligo said. “Just watch what he does and create some
drama. Try turning up the music now, so I can hear what it sounds
like.”

Through all this Kithara was
standing in the cage in his glittery red costume with one hip
cocked, arms folded, shooting us all a look of scorn.

Sligo turned to him. “If you’re
a good boy tonight, you’ll get a reward, an actual bed to sleep in.
Maybe a shower.”

“And if I’m not?” Kithara
asked.

“Cattle prod. Up the ass this
time,” Sligo said. He leered.

“Do you know if I even have an
asshole?” Kithara said. He raked his teeth across his bottom lip in
a way that was just completely sexy.

“Shut up,” Sligo said. “Jareth!
Hey, quit staring and come up here.” He beckoned. “I want you to
put the cuffs on him.” I climbed up on the stage, noticing that
they’d locked the chains around some steel loops in the stage
floor.

“What’s this for?”

“Audience can’t see him so well
in there behind the bars. With this he can come out as far as the
edge of the stage.” He turned to Kithara. “Now then, boy, I’m
standing here with the prod, so don’t try anything.”

“As if I could get far if I
made a run for it,” Kithara scoffed. He held out his wrists. “Go
ahead, slap them on, Jareth. I’m finding this rather kinky.”

Sligo unlocked the cage door
and I went in with the cuffs, which I fastened around his wrists.
Standing so close to him was actually causing me to feel feverish.
“I’m sorry about this,” I mumbled.

“It’s not so bad, Jareth,”
Kithara said. “We do what we must to survive.”

We worked like fiends to get
set up. I was wondering the whole time what on earth Kithara was
going to do. It looked like I was going to find out this time
because Dr. Sligo told me to stay to create the fog, which meant I
got out of my own little show. That suited me right down to the
ground. I kept my mask on and hung out in the curtain at the side
of the stage, ready with a bucket of boiling water, the chest of
dry ice, and a blow dryer. It was twenty past midnight when we were
finally ready. I could hear the crowd outside: buzzing,
restless.

“Consider this a rehearsal,”
Sligo told us. “Bring down the lights, Ricky. Mood music on low.
Let them in.”

We had a full house. Dr. Sligo
got up on the stage and made an impressive speech. He told about
the rumours of strange mutant beings that had arisen in a city
ghetto east of here and were now secretly spreading out across the
country. I poured some of the hot water on the dry ice and blew the
fog out across the stage as Sligo described a horrific scene of a
boy lost in a back alley coming across a gang of mutants who
attacked him, ripping off his clothes and raping him. He writhed in
the way the boy might have done and described the smoking ruin of
his body graphically enough to make me shudder. “Now, we have
captured one of these creatures, a mutant hermaphroditic being.
Soon you’ll see the truth for yourselves. Here it is – a creature
from your darkest, sexiest nightmares!”

The spot hit the cage. Music
swelled, an exotic Eastern sound with softly pounding drums and
clacking finger symbols. I conjured some more fog. Kithara moved in
the cage, weaving back and forth for several beats. Then he pushed
open the door, emerged onto the stage, and began to dance. When he
moved, you had to watch, whether you wanted to or not. It was as if
he had invented the word seductive. He had unbraided his hair, so
that it flowed about his body like a rippling cloak. Arms swirling
as if gathering air, he stalked towards us, red scarves trailing
from his hands. Murmuring, the crowd recoiled. Kithara laughed,
throwing his head back and whirling about. He bent backwards and
walked over his hands. I had no idea he was that flexible. The
chains dragged and clattered along behind him, but he incorporated
them into the dance, pulling them around his body, beating them on
the floor in syncopation with the drums and running them across his
mouth.

He slowly pulled off his halter
top and let it fall, so that he was bare-chested, the effect of
that disrobing so much sexier than if he’d started out that way. He
removed the sheer, glittery veil from around his hips and used it
as a banner, swirling it about, holding it spread in front of
himself and dancing behind it, then pulling it through his legs
like the most wanton stripper. He came right to the edge of the
stage, threw himself onto his belly, reaching out towards the
audience, beckoning, playing to both men and women. It was almost
as if he was calling out to us, touching our deepest desires. He
invited a young couple up on stage with him, a guy wearing a
baseball cap and a woman with long blonde hair, and danced around
them, caressing them both with light teasing touches. He was
mesmerizing. I was hard as a rock and had visions of grabbing him,
bending him over, and ravishing him. Faces in the audience looked
fascinated, shocked, desirous. All eyes were riveted on him and I
realized we had a star on our hands.

Dr. Sligo came up next to me,
chuckling with glee. “He’s a natural. He just needed a little prod,
that’s all.”

“No pun intended,” I said dryly
and he laughed some more.

When it was over and we’d
chased out all the people, Kithara collapsed into a heap on
stage.

“Where did you learn to dance
like that?” I asked, like some mooning fan boy.

“Some time I’ll tell you,” he
said. “Right now, I’m starving and exhausted. Sligo better make
good on his promise.”

Dr. Sligo practically oozed
delight. He said, “You’ll find that I reward good behaviour and
punish bad. You have pleased me, Mutant.”

“His name is Kithara,” I
said.

Sligo laughed. “I see you’re
working your magic on our burned boy. Watch out, Jareth, or you’ll
end up fried inside as well as out.”

I glared at Sligo, but his
attention was on Kithara. Narrowing his eyes in menace, Sligo said,
“Well, then
Kithara
, I’ll have Pavel escort you to a trailer
where you can get something to eat, shower, and sleep in an actual
bed. The place will be guarded by large men with even larger guns.
Just so you know.”

“You’re such a humanitarian,”
Kithara said.

That night I tried to sleep in
my stifling trailer, lying naked on my bed, tossing and turning.
Feverish. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see him, dancing on
that stage like he owned the world. Maybe he did. I took care of
myself numerous times, but couldn’t be sated. He replaced all the
dream boys I carried in my head; the only lovers I had ever known
or would know. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer and got up,
intending to smoke myself into a stupor. Took out the pipe, tamped
a little black chunk of choi in the bowl and hit it. Lay back for
the rush. The sweet, pungent smell drifted around me, taking away
the pain.