The ITN News at Ten carried a small joke item about the crew of an Air India 797 claiming to have spotted a UFO over the Atlantic the previous night, and this somehow added to his general sense that nothing was quite real. After the news, he found himself faced with The Poseidon Adventure. He drifted with the ponderous stupidity of the inverted ocean liner without coming up with any fresh revelations. Sure, he knew what he had to do; how to go about doing it was the hard part. It was about the point Shelley Winters was making her heroic underwater swim that his peace and quiet started to noticeably decay.
Through most of the evening muffled sounds had drifted up from somewhere below; for a while it had been a high-pitched electronic hum, and then that had been replaced by shouts in a strange language, bursts of drumming and clusters of sub-bass harmonics. He had assumed that Windemere was doing something in the basement and left it at that. It was only when a strange smell seemed to be creeping through the house-a jungle-sweet, heavy scent like damp vegetation burning-that it became impossible to ignore. The smell clung and infiltrated and seemed to insinuate its way into his pores. His legs and arms grew heavy, and a dull weight settled on his brain. At first, he resisted, but very soon just let it drift around and over him while he listened to the increasing volume of sound that came from the basement. The random bursts of harmonics had been replaced by an almost hypnotic pulsing, and Gibson caught himself nodding in time and all but drifting into a shallow trance.
Gas! The smell was a colorless gas. He didn't want to think about gas. It was just a smell. He had to focus his eyes and concentrate. Thinking required effort, as did willing himself back to functioning reality, and, once back, he was both suspicious and a little alarmed. Was someone trying to fuck with him again, or was the effect a by-product of the party down below? Either way, he decided that he had the right to take a look. Just a glance down the basement stairs to see what he could see was hardly an invasion of his host's privacy, particularly when whatever his host was doing in private was noticeably leaking through into the rest of the house. He stood up, turned off the TV, and suddenly felt dizzy. Was the smell causing it, or just a delayed reaction to the events of the last few days? The world seemed to have taken on a greenish tinge. Indeed, the greening of the room seemed to have extended to his own face. He groaned as he caught a glimpse of it in the mirror above the fireplace.
"You poor-ass bastard, you look like the walking dead."
He leaned into the mirror and pulled down the lower lid of his left eye. The white of the eye was more than bloodshot. It looked like a color photograph of the planet Mars.
"No wonder, this shit's killing you."
He took a deep breath but it didn't help; the smell was still there, like a warm night on the Amazon. He started for the door. He was definitely going to have a look in the basement.
The pulse was louder and the smell thicker and more pungent as he stepped out onto the first-floor landing. He looked down the stairs into the ground-floor hallway. The door that led to the basement was open, and weirdly oscillating lights were reflected in the polished wood-red, yellow, and orange, like strobing electronic hellfire.
He reached the front hallway but hesitated at the top of the basement stairs, standing just outside the door, just listening to the complex weave of the outlandish rhythm pattern. It wasn't merely a pulsing hum. Rising and falling tones were punctuated by shimmering flutters and mutters that could almost have been human voices except that, without warning, they would lift through eight-octave runs like the music of an Inca Sundance and then roll away with the finality of a breaking wave.
He pushed the door open a little wider and put his foot on the first step. He knew that he was completely out of line, and he was suddenly a little scared. Windemere could be doing practically anything down there. Suppose it was something serious and bad? He took another step; now he was committed.
Going down the basement stairs, he could see only a small area of floor. The red and orange lights flashed through curls of heavy vapor that slowly undulated across it like phantom snakes.
As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he realized that he had intruded on something decidedly private. He was turning to go when Cadiz bore down on him and seized him by the arm with an angry, almost desperate whisper.
"Not here, Senor Gibson. Not here."
As Cadiz propelled him back up the stairs, Gibson wondered at what he had seen. Windemere had been sitting naked inside a pyramid in the center of the floor that appeared to be constructed out of some kind of sheet crystal. Windemere wasn't alone in there. A woman was with him. She was also naked, muscular and very black, and her body was in violent motion. Her mass of braids swung like whips each time she moved her head, and she was moving her head a great deal. Windemere and his companion were seated facing each other with their naked torsos pressed together and their legs and arms wrapped around each other's bodies, but within these confines,they writhed against each other like twining snakes. Light reflected from bodies that were slick with either oil or mingled sweat, and Windemere's back was daubed with a large single ideogram that seemed to have been painted in what looked uncomfortably like blood.
The pyramid itself was maybe eight feet high and wide enough at the base to contain the two seated people. It glowed as though it was alive with energy and the sheet crystal was somehow conductive. It stood on a solid, square platform that appeared to be constructed of alternate sandwiched layers of bright metal, polished steel or maybe silver, and strata of dark, compacted organic fiber. Some kind of supercharged orgone box? The most elaborate sex aid that Gibson had ever seen? The rest of the room looked like nothing more than a very expensive recording studio. The ceiling was filled with pulsing track lights, and the sound came from eight large speaker bins. The four walls were lined with ranked racks of electronics, each unit powered up and highlighted by its own set of rippling and flashing LEDs. If Windemere was practicing witchcraft, it was a form that could only have been developed in some dark subbasement of NASA or MIT.
When they reached the inside hallway, Gibson turned and faced Cadiz. "What the hell are they doing down there?"
Cadiz shook his head. "No questions, senor. No questions."
"What's that pyramid thing?"
Cadiz's eyes flashed with implacable warning.
"I said no questions, senor. Just go on upstairs and forget everything you have seen."
The threat didn't have to be stated. The tattooed teardrops said it all. Cadiz stood in the hallway, watching Gibson as he climbed the stairs. He hesitated outside the drawing room door. Perhaps he should have a nightcap and think about all this.
Cadiz called up to him. "It would be better if you went to your own room, senor."
Gibson wanted to snap back that he wasn't about to be ordered to his room like a naughty child, but he restrained himself. At the top of the next flight a second voice called out to him.
"Joe Gibson."
This time, it was Christobelle. What now? If she wanted to frolic again, he wasn't sure if he was in quite the right mood. One door on the second landing stood slightly ajar, and her voice was coming from inside.
Gibson stopped at the top of the stairs. He was more than a little wary.
"Yeah, right. That's me."
"Please come in here."
Gibson shrugged to himself. What did he really have to lose? The spectacle in the basement had put an end to any ideas of sleeping in the immediate future. If Christobelle had decided to be nice to him again, who was he to refuse? It sure beat brooding. He went to the door and stepped inside, feeling a little like a character in a French farce. The bedroom was large and dark, and the spacious bed was quite capable of accommodating four or five people with no effort. Christobelle sat alone in the middle of it, cross-legged with her toes curling into the black fur cover. It was a very different Christobelle. The androgynous daytime severity had been replaced by a houri straight out of some sultan's fantasy. Chiffon scarves in soft pastel colors were draped around her neck and did nothing to hide her breasts. The scarves and the collections of gold chains and bells and bracelets on her wrists and ankles were all that she was wearing apart from a gold Balinese headdress that would have delighted Mata Hari. She was backlit by a collection of a half-dozen candles in a floor-standing candelabra on the far side of the bed.