Babylon (26 page)

I reached out to take her hand. And as I took it, I immediately felt her grip tighten in my own.

‘Best friends?’ she said.

‘Best friends,’ I said.

She turned to me, her smile broadening, even as it became sadder and wiser. ‘I love
you,
Maddy.’ She coughed. ‘I’ve always loved you.’

‘I love you too, Cliticia.’

Something was happening to me. My skin was like ice, covered in a damp patina of sticky pink snowflakes; yet I felt no discomfort. In fact, the sensation was quite pleasant. I was cocooned in sweetness—the coolest of sweet-smelling gelatins, perhaps, or syrups; the mintiest, most gelid, of comfits or jujubes. Beneath my heavy clothes, the pink mist had enamelled my flesh, forever separating me from the world.

Cliticia stumbled. Then, collecting herself, she stood upright, her gaze seeking the depths of the mist for some clue that might provide an answer to what was happening to her. ‘I, I don’t understand,’ she moaned. ‘It’s nice, but—’ I put an arm about her shoulder. ‘Oh, Maddy, I’m frightened!’ She inclined her head, resting it against my bosom. She was cold, and impossibly smooth, like a marble statue frosted with icing sugar.

‘Women have no souls, and no need of immortality
,’ I said, haunted by the opening statement of his lordship’s speech. It was a line that I felt might well be inscribed on our tombstones, to subsequently haunt all those who either mourned, or rejoiced at, our fate. And perhaps for pitiful young women like us it would be a fitting obituary so long as it were followed by a rider.
‘But beauty lives on
,’ I added. Cliticia began to grow limp in my arms. Her face possessed an unnatural sheen, painted, as it was, with a pink lacquer that was quickly becoming indistinguishable from her flesh. The bleached hair began to secrete its blonde dye, her forehead and cheeks streaked with amber rivulets. And, paradoxically, beneath the dye, those corkscrew locks that had once been black glistened like the purest spun gold.

The screaming that, a few moments before, had echoed throughout the basilica, had ceased.

Still holding on to each other, like lovers found at the bottom of a lake, entwined in death as they had been in life, we sank to the floor.

This was the
hieros gamos,
I told myself. The meaning of the swastika. This was the sacred wedding as it was always meant to be.

We lay still. I was no longer able to speak. The pink mist had seeped through my pores and into my blood. There was no pain. I was effortlessly passing from one state of being into another. Whatever anxiety I had felt left me. My muscles went into spasm, once, twice, then were still, set like jelly in the mould of my new, inorganic flesh. I heard the thud of my pulse begin to slow, like the pendulum of a grandfather clock that is running down, and then I heard it falter, and stop. The pink mist had found its way to my heart. And it too became plastic.

Whenever I wake within the prison of my cold, dead flesh, and cry for times long past, I think of how everything might have been different. I imagine myself back in London, walking through the front door in Wilmot Street to be greeted by a call from Mum; getting married and having children; moving away from Whitechapel, perhaps, to somewhere leafier, with good, clean air. And I imagine a knock on the door, and, on opening it, discovering Cliticia. She would have married, too, of course. And together, we would tell our children about the adventures we had off-world, in Babylon, before two little women became two little wives.

I think of all this, and of how it might have been possible if, in one moment of sanity, I had killed Jack the Ripper.

I hear things, strange rumours. The sinking of a great ship called
Titanic.
Foreign spies in London; industrial disputes; suffragettes; an expedition lost in the Antarctic. There is a nagging fear of invasion. And there are rumours of war.

Again, I wake. A country house, viewed as if from the bar of heaven. I sit amongst the clouds. But heaven is closed to me...

Not so to the V8s, or
Manisolas.
Thousands of them ply the skies high above England. They scream like Valkyries. Today, one hovers above the country house. Silver, with rose-coloured contrails, it is decorated with swastikas, the newly adopted emblem of the Black Order. Beneath it, a patchwork quilt of rolling, English fields stretches out, precisely organized as if to specifications encoded in a Jane Austen novel. Lining the approach road are hundreds of flagpoles, each one of which displays a red flag upon which the ubiquitous black swastika is set against a circular white background.

A carriage pulls up before the portico. A man in a black leather uniform gets out and looks up to where Doric columns meet with the pediment, and then, tilting his head back a little further, to where a great bronze eagle with a swastika in its claws adorns the building’s coping-stone. The man is the
Künstlerpolitiker,
Lord Azrael. He passes between two huge Greco-Roman statues, on his left
Atlas,
holding the heavens, and on his right
Tellus,
holding the Earth—nude, muscular men supremely violent, supremely beautiful—and then receives the salute of his staff.

The house is made of granite. Austere, cold, and granular, it is a fitting dwelling place for the Supreme Lord of the Black Order and Universe.

Sometimes he has friends for dinner. And, although I am dead, I hear him introduce us. ‘This is Scarlett, Cliticia, Faye, Vanity, Narcissa, Séverine, Omphale, and Fellatia.’ Then he gazes across the table, and bestows upon me an indulgent smile. ‘And Madeleine.’ Dressed in our Wonderland frocks, we slump, flop, sprawl, and loll in our seats, ingeniously embalmed corpses that will be forever seen, but never heard.

‘Have you considered the arguments for enslavement, or are you convinced, sir, as are so many others, that we have no option but to plastinate?’

‘I have considered them, sir,’ Lord Azrael answers, ‘and find them preposterous. They are only taken seriously by some of my younger comrades, who have little experience of the deviancy of the Babylonian whore.’

‘I understand their deviancy, sir. But lord knows, their wish to become slaves is as genuine as it is fervent. Why should we not indulge them? We might colonize Babylon, might we not?’

‘No, sir, we might not. You do not comprehend the nature of female treachery. While it is certainly true that those in Joy Division are quite happy to betray their sisters in return for a little romantic dalliance, it is equally the case that once a man makes a pet of a girl, he spoils her. She becomes like any other pampered, domesticated item of livestock—subject to whims, caprices, vapours, spleen, fainting fits, and
strange feminine moods.
Women are the nervous sex. And, in the Shulamite, this nervousness is transformed into a hysterical nymphomania. Believe me, sir, the day will come when such a girl will turn upon her master and betray him, just as easily as she betrayed her own kind, if only to recapture the
frisson
of her first days in captivity.’

‘Then we must content ourselves with the dead?’

‘Sir, believe me, these young women are happier dead.’

‘Certainly,’ says a third party, ‘death has wrought a wonderful metamorphosis.’

‘They are so white!’ says another.

‘So blonde!’ adds yet another.

‘Indeed,’ concludes Lord Azrael, ‘like butterflies, they have emerged from the pupae of life to be immortalized by the killing jar and specimen cabinet. They are our brides, gentlemen. They are our brides.’

There is an interval of darkness, and then, after days, weeks, months, perhaps even years, I am again in the Mens’ presence, but this time in a smoke-filled room. I find myself an adornment to a conference, much like the vases of fresh flowers, the decanter of port, the boxes of cigarettes and cigars. I slouch on a sofa, an opera glove unconscionably rolled down to my wrist. The valet has neglected to properly dress me.

‘The “Other” is always feminine, whatever mask it hides behind,’ declaims the Autarch, Lord Azrael. ‘When a society persecutes its outsiders, whether they be racial minorities, political dissidents, or sexual non-conformists, it persecutes the
feminine
, however loath it may be to admit it. The great, eternal war between authority and society’s malcontents has always been a gender war. The difference between ourselves and the Illuminati, gentlemen, is that we do not sublimate, but rather, admit it.’

There is the sound of measured but nevertheless earnest clapping.

‘We must move East—East into Russia, the heartland of the Asiatic soul, where so many Shulamites still live. The East is the land of the Dark Mother. The East, gentlemen,
is
the feminine.’

‘Indeed, my Autarch,’ says a voice. ‘But what will transpire when we have completed our mission and the Whore of Babylon is no more?’

There is an uncomfortable silence, the men who have assembled about the table to discuss the war frozen in a tableau of collar patches, belt buckles, field caps, service medals, sig-runes, and death’s-head badges. They are frozen just as I am frozen. And for the same reason. The world has become a work of art, frozen in time by an
esthétique du mal.
The world has been transformed into a vast necropolis. A
Totenreich.

‘There are those among us,’ says Lord Azrael, with deliberation, ‘who may have considered reneging on their oath. These traitors believe extermination should merely serve an end: the enslavement of Babylon and a regulated cull.’ He is talking about the split in the Black Order, between those led by himself, who call themselves Absolutists, and the breakaway party of the Consolidationists, whom he is at present vilifying. The Consolidationists believe that they can never prevail against the Illuminati by force of arms. They thus avow a policy of exterminating all Shulamites in positions of authority while enslaving those that are left. Their message to Earth Prime:
Continue sending Shulamites off-world, and implement the political reforms that we specify, or we will kill all remaining Shulamites in our charge.
Such a policy, they believe, would set a pattern for a workable New Order. No matter that those the Consolidationists enslaved, much as Lord Azrael had predicted, were continually betraying them. No matter that they had come to feel themselves hostage to the whims and caprices of those who responded to clemency as spurned lovers, forever seeking to reacquire the attention of their men by spiteful acts of treachery and deceit. ‘These apostates can have no part in our struggle,’ Lord Azrael continues. ‘For us, the end is clear: total extermination of the Babylonian menace. After which—’

‘After which,’ interjects another voice, ‘it falls to us to submit to a
Götterdämmerung.
For when the last Babylonian falls, what point shall any of us have in living?’

‘Mass suicide?’ says another voice. ‘Ridiculous!’

‘Would you embrace a less noble path?’ says Lord Azrael. ‘Think of those who have fallen even lower, and skulk in Nimrud.’ He speaks of those of whom I have heard previous mention: those men fallen away from the Black Order who inhabit the wilds and wastelands to the north of Babylon’s walls. These corsairs, or
kobolds,
as they are known, raid the temples up and down the Anatolian Peninsula. And hearsay has it that they are cannibals.

‘I say enslave,’ says someone who for the first time lifts his voice in anger. ‘Enslave, and institute a cull!’

‘We thereby accommodate the Illuminati!’ says Lord Azrael. ‘We would become part of that established world order that we have so long despised!’

‘But what other options do we have?’ says another voice. ‘Perhaps the time has come to negotiate a settlement, a peace. Our numbers are so few. How, Autarch, can we hope to fulfil your dreams of world conquest? We hold Babylon by the throat. We must use that as a negotiating tool.’

Lord Azrael brings his fist down on the table.

‘There will be no accommodation!’ he cries. ‘But only blood, iron, and the dead!’

Sometimes, I dream. I dream the dreams of the dead: mad, feverish dreams of an iron metropolis and the
Totenreich.

See. There it is. The cold, metallic city. A monumental, futuristic London, world-capital of black marble, steel, and ice. Everywhere, the triumphal arches, the bronze eagles, the impersonal lines of columns, the cruel, austere, absurdly muscular sensuality of statues by Arno Breker and the stark, monochromatic colonnades of Albert Speer. Black saucers fly in close formation above the stadia, the rallying points, the monuments, the great mausoleums, and the grid-like streets. And on those streets there are only men. Men in black leather uniforms, endlessly marching, marching, marching. There is no colour. No flesh, save the overarching integument of leather and metal—metal that glitters, or else is as dull as blood—that is the city itself. There is nothing but a raw, mazy expanse of black and white and a constant, ferrous taste to the air. The taste of iron. The taste of death.

The Minotaurs are necrophiles. They relate to things, not people. If they knew that their dolls still preserved a selfhood—no matter how small, or contingent—then surely we would not enjoy their love.

Last night, Lord Azrael took me to his bed. In the morning, after he had gone into his study, his servants appeared, picked me up, and returned me to the toy chest where I share the darkness with Cliticia. The toy chest is a great, oak cabinet that he keeps in the room he calls his
'Wunderkammer.
There are several such cabinets, and in each one he keeps a brace of dead girls, as a lepidopterist might his fritillaries.