Venera Dreams Read online

  The antipasti are brought to the table. Carlo describes it all with the enthusiasm of a sensualist gourmand, but Jana makes no effort to understand. She lets his sensuous words flow like music as she bites into the exotic concoctions, not caring what they are or what they contain. Every bite is a tiny orgasm. Everything is delicious. And everything, she suspects, is laced with yet more vermilion.

  Yet more food is served. Every bite is more meltingly succulent than the previous. She hears herself talking, but by now she pays as little attention to her own words as she does to Carlo’s. She cares not at all what they are discussing, or if even anything they say makes any sense. She abandons herself to the euphoria induced by the vermilion … until she hears Carlo say that name: “… Natasha …”

  Jana forces herself to focus, although it’s very difficult. The more she tries to fight the euphoria, the more she tries to concentrate, the more nightmarish hallucinations of sight, sound, and smell gnaw at the edge of her perception. She tries to ignore the subtle terror creeping inside her and asks Carlo: “Can you say that again? What about Natasha?”

  “She and your man, Dean, were teenage sweethearts. She told me that he left Venera without telling her, without ever writing, without letting her know that it was over between them.”

  This was not entirely a surprise to Jana. “How did she find him?”

  “Fate, Jana. Masara. Or perhaps you would prefer to think of it as coincidence. She has worked at the World Tree Hotel for many years. Longer than I have. She’s a very passionate woman. Perhaps too passionate, I would say.”

  “How do you know all this about her and Dean?” She’s unable to suppress the accusation in her tone.

  “Natasha likes to talk. Especially when she is angry. And she was very angry when she left your room the other day.”

  “Have you seen them together? Or him? Have you seen Dean?”

  “No, Jana. I do not know where your man is.”

  “Take me to her. Take me to Natasha. She knows. And you know where to find her.”

  “No, Jana. I cannot do that. Whether or not I know where to find Natasha, it is not my business to intrude on her privacy. Or to involve myself in this drama of yours. You are a stranger here. Your man, Dean, is not. He is Veneran. Perhaps he is where he belongs, now. Perhaps you should return to your home. Forget Venera. I do not mean to be unkind, but I do not think you are well suited to this place.”

  The monstrous carvings on the walls and ceiling disengage from their perches. They move in the shadows, never allowing her a clear glimpse of their shapes and sizes.

  “You drugged me on purpose. You’re in on it with her!”

  “No, Jana. No. There is no plot against you. I am trying to be your friend. But you do not understand life here.”

  Fearing for her safety, Jana rises from her seat. She rushes outside without even glancing back. The rain is still torrential. She has no idea how to find the World Tree Hotel. She doesn’t want to go back to her room, though. Maybe there’s a Canadian embassy or consulate where she could seek refuge. Then take the first boat out to the mainland and fly back home. Save herself.

  She wanders aimlessly in the rain, shivering down to the bone. How will she ever find her way? She could be anywhere. The whole world is nothing but rain, dense and impenetrable. Rain is all she sees, all she smells, all she feels. It’s as if her own body were dissolving, merging with the downpour.

  Strong arms enfold her. It is Carlo.

  “Miadama. Jana. You will catch your death. Let me bring you back to the hotel.”

  Jana feels week, defeated. She leans into Carlo’s muscular frame and lets him take over, not knowing whether she is saved or doomed. Barely caring which.

  As soon as she is back at the World Tree and sheltered from the weather, the paranoia once again focuses her mind. She claws at Carlo’s face, drawing blood, and escapes his grip.

  She runs deeper into the World Tree Hotel, not really knowing what she is running from or where she is running to.

  Jane recognizes the architecture and decor of the hotel — its aquamarine and earth-brown colour scheme; its hopelessly labyrinthine corridors; its disorienting ceilings of varying heights; its cavern-like lighting — but she finds no comfort in that recognition. She has no clue for how long she has been wandering this neverending, oppressive, deserted sameness. In desperation, she finally decides to knock on a random door. There’s no answer. She tries the handle but finds it locked. She repeats her attempt on dozens of doors, but it’s always futile: all the doors are locked, and there is never anyone who answers. Occasionally, she believes she hears the murmur of voices inside. Those times, she knocks more insistently, shouts her desperation at the anonymous patrons. Always, she is ignored.

  At some point, probably before she and Carlo reached the World Tree Hotel, Jana lost her handbag. Along with her room key, her money, and her passport.

  Jana needs to think her way out of this. She’s aware that the vermilion is still influencing her perceptions but unsure to what extent reality is being distorted by the drug. Still, there must be a way out of this nightmare. The pressure on her bladder makes it impossible for her to concentrate. Seeing no other option, as all the doors are locked to her, she squats against a wall and relieves herself.

  The deserted hallway now reeks with the musk of her piss. But Jana has regained some clarity of mind. She must locate the lobby. And from there get a word to Canadian authorities and find her way off this island. Carlo was right. She has to forget Dean and return home. There’s nothing for her here.

  In time, desperation once again clouds her mind. No matter how far she walks, Jana cannot escape the stench of urine — and worse. She peers at the floor in the near dark. With increasing frequency, she finds suspicious wet spots, piles of feces, rotting carcasses of small mammals and lizards. Gradually, the halls no longer look merely cavernous; gradually, the signs of civilization are stripped from her surroundings. No matter which direction she takes, Jana steps farther into a maze of narrowing caverns. Iridescent vermilion veins crisscross the surface of the rock walls, providing faint illumination. She had believed vermilion to originate from a plant, but here it appears to be a mineral.

  Aware that she is straying deeper and deeper into the bowels of Venera and farther away from any possible exit, Jana tries to climb back up to the surface, but the labyrinth defeats her. Regardless of the direction she attempts to take, Jana continues her unwilling descent.

  She has moved beyond the zone of decay and animal waste. The air is getting damper, almost palpable. It is not dank, however, but numinously clean — like breathing psychotropically potent mineral water: at once reinvigorating and heady, refreshing and dizzying, bringing about both clarity and confusion.

  Her surroundings are now in perpetual transformation, taking on configurations she can neither recognize nor fully comprehend. Sometimes, her situation no longer seems claustrophobic. Vast alien subterranean vistas open up before her, exotic formations — which she cannot distinguish as fauna, flora, mineral, or artificial — spread outward for unfathomable distances. And then, with a step, her world shrinks again to a confining tunnel. The only constant is the faint burnt-orange glow of the strains of vermilion illuminating every surface.

  Jana now stands at a threshold. At her feet are gigantic roots emanating from the chamber before her. The roots break through the stony ground, burrowing deeper still into the earth.

  There’s the flickering light of a fire coming from inside. Its warmth beckons her. Its aroma is intoxicatingly familiar: vermilion.

  She steps inside. At first, her senses are drawn to the flames of the vermilion fire. On the ground rests a large terracotta pot onto which is carved the weird, obscene logo of the Kibbudea; the reddish flames that sprout from the vessel make the air inside the chamber shimmer, as if the reality revealed by the firelight were not any more substantial than a projected image.

  And here, having abandoned any desire to locate him, she f
inds Dean. His naked body is chained to the trunk of a giant tree. Blood leaks from multiple small wounds in his flesh, running down the bark into the soil. The roots near where the blood pools pulse like veins.

  Kneeling before the tree is a naked woman with long, dark hair. She turns her neck to greet Jana with a solemn nod. Jana recognizes the maid, Natasha, Dean’s former lover.

  In Natasha’s hand is a dagger made of wood. She plunges the dagger into the ceremonial fire. The flames roll over the dagger and the bare skin of her hand, but do not burn either. She pulls out the dagger, which is now incandescent with vermilion, as is her hand. She reaches toward Dean and with the dagger cuts two small slivers of flesh from his calf.

  Dean moans slightly, as if he were dreaming.

  Natasha stares at Jana, but the meaning of the Veneran’s stoic gaze is impenetrable.

  Although her head is spinning from inhaling the vermilion fumes, Jana makes a decision. It feels as if she has no other option: she disrobes and joins the other woman.

  Natasha hands a slice of Dean’s flesh to Jana, keeping the other for herself. At the same time, they consume the meat of their common lover.

  Natasha presents the wooden dagger to Jana. Splinters dig into the palm of her hand as she grips it firmly. With the intrusion of the slivers of wood into her flesh comes communion with Yggdrasil, from whose bark, it is thus revealed to her, the dagger was formed.

  The flesh Jana carves with this dagger is hers to ingest; but not the blood that flows from the wounds. The blood seeps into the soil, sustaining the World Tree.

  THE VENERA FANTASY CONVENTION

  Thave now attended thirteen consecutive Venera Fantasy Conventions, and almost each occasion has been an epic event, host to intense emotions, unlikely encounters, professional breakthroughs, and welcome depravities. My publishers, Sanderson Grecko and Bettina Easton of Darkbright Books, the illustrious Guests of Honour at this year’s VFC, have asked their staff and authors to share their favourite memories of VFC 50, but, as part of ongoing tensions between us, I was singled out and specifically instructed to “keep it clean” — and so I shall not be able to regale you, dear readers, who were not present to enjoy the unfettered festivities, with the full account of the debauched decadence that unfurled during the last weekend of March in wondrous Venera.

  No … I must refrain from telling all. I will not divulge the unspeakable obscenities committed on each other’s bodies, in a profound moment of shared existential gloom, by two of my Darkbright Books colleagues, authors Brad Blue (Vermilionarama; Melancholia Girls) and Chas Roberts (Whores and Other Horrors; The Ascension of Sex), during the overnight ferry from the Italian mainland to Venera — which, at the World Tree Hotel bar, farcically intoxicated from their first-ever exposure to the Veneran psychotropic spice, vermilion, they drunkenly admitted to me, their ersatz confessor, in order to expunge their lingering shame. No, neither shall I mention the throng (or is that thong?) of scantily clad sorority girls who — after my latest book, The Back Door to Lost Girls, had been passed frantically among them — lined up outside my room at the break of dawn and who one by one bared their bottoms, hungry to be administered a spanking the likes of which their unformed, inane, and self-important frat-boy companions were too immature to provide with an adequately confident and wry hand. No, on such subjects, and others like them, I shall remain absolutely mute.

  Nor shall I detail my epic struggles to reach the Mediterranean oasis of Venera, facing extreme weather, mechanical failures, and all sorts of unlikely obstacles, including nearly being left stranded in foreign territories such as Montreal, Chicago, London, Budapest, Belgrade, and Rome. Fate seemed determined to keep me from Venera, but that only strengthened my resolve. That tumultuous odyssey, although mythic in scope, was too unsettling to rank among my favourite moments. Were it not for the intervention and friendship of literary critic Roger Lobo, I might not have survived the Chicago flash flood, which was responsible for thousands of deaths; probably not counted among the official numbers were the scores and scores of homeless, all too invisible, alas, due both to their socioeconomic status and the darker colour of their skin, a reminder of an even darker history that has yet to be fully resolved.

  Instead, I shall fondly remember joining up with my Darkbright Books brother-in-arms Daniel Dimes as soon as I stepped off the boat in Venera on the Wednesday, to then together spend a quiet evening (first over a Chinese buffet and then over vermilion cocktails in the hotel bar) ruminating on the greatest wonders of the world; that is, women and girls — and, more precisely, what makes some girls and others women, and the differences that make them each so fascinating and desirable. Daniel and I were supposed to have been discussing our contracted collaboration for Darkbright Books, The Phantasmagorical Odyssey of Scheherazade, a mosaic of nested fantasies tinged with dark eroticism, set in the Venera of antiquity, but perhaps that is a book best written without too much planning. Alas, in the aftermath of violent altercations during VFC 50 between myself and various staff members of Darkbright Books — all, I believed at the time, meant in good if somewhat extreme fun — my erstwhile publisher has since cancelled the contract, which has killed Daniel’s interest in pursuing the project.

  It was with great joy that, the second day, for the first time in a decade, since VFC 40, I re-encountered avant-garde writer Sandy Irish, who composes fiction out of hand-crafted jewellery instead of words; Sandy introduced me to her friend Renata Austin, a singularly alluring and enchanting woman whose first action upon meeting me was to hug me in a most lascivious way, whispering in my ear: “I loved your novel Echoes of the Ice Age with a violent passion.” Renata was a jetsetting Veneran expat with no permanent address, author of two books, the novel The Pull of Heaven and the obliquely titled poetry collection And, both winners of the prestigious Venera Fantasy Award. I have read neither but am now compelled to seek them out and perhaps ask their seductive author to collaborate with me on my now-orphaned project, The Phantasmagorical Odyssey of Scheherazade — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  After this rather electrifying introduction to this sultry former Veneran, she then proceeded to ignore me and flirt with every man in the room and no small number of the women. In fact, I am nearly certain that, at one point, I espied her reaching into a man’s lap to pull out his cock and stroke it, right there in bar, among the gathered literati — a bold and shocking move, even in libertine Venera. However, the crowd was so thick that I cannot be certain of what I saw. Was it even her hand? Did I extrapolate from fragmentary glimpses an erotic vision, fuelled both by my already inebriated state of mind — it was still only mid-afternoon — and by the lust this woman had instantly provoked in me?

  To my astonishment and, I will admit, my pleasure, as dinnertime neared, Renata took my arm, her other arm already entwined with Sandy Irish’s, and then led us to this most bizarre restaurant, whose speciality was a fusion of Spanish and Japanese cuisines. The three of us shared a companionable evening, drinking too many sake margaritas tinged with vermilion, and eating exotic concoctions whose name and taste I entirely forget. Yes, partly due to the alcohol and the Veneran spice, which was present in every menu item, but also due to the fact that, under the table, Renata had coiled her bare leg around my own leg — alas I was wearing trousers and thus could not fully enjoy the proximity of her flesh, but it nevertheless kept me oh so very distracted. Despite that, with a great effort of concentration, I kept up my share of the conversation with these two lovely women and remember, even, amusing them to laughter, although my witticisms are also lost to intoxication and memory. It does not escape me, with the clarity of sober hindsight, that they were most likely laughing at me rather than with me.

  Later that evening I was delighted to once again encounter cult writer Sandrine Columbia — many believe that she, like her notorious creation, Patricia Edge, is a centuries-old vampire; I know the truth, but I am sworn never to reveal it. This I can say: Sandrine’s true nature is not easily categoriz
ed. She is a veteran of shared, sacred bacchanalias at the previous year’s VFC, the 49th edition. But propriety, editorial edict, and legal caution forbid me to be more candid on such salacious topics as to what pranks and indiscretions we engaged in either this or the previous year.

  Saturday afternoon, I took great pleasure in performing my scheduled reading (those who are familiar with me know how much I enjoy performing public readings) — a chapter-long excerpt from my work-in-progress, Venera Dreams, followed by several short Cryptolegends. I was later pleased to discover that, at the award banquet that closed off the convention, my performance had earned me the annual award for Best Reading Performance at VFC. (Please forgive this moment of boastful pride.)

  Soon after my reading, on that same afternoon, I joined my fellow Canadians Chas Roberts, Brad Blue, and anthologist of the macabre Kevin Angel in the inner yard of the hotel; we held court, amusing ourselves with the Perverse Golems of Istanbul and other exotic and taboo delights my companions would rather I keep hidden from their spouses. Already, rumours abound regarding that gathering, which has now passed into legend.

  The Sunday — a usually quiet day at these events, by which time the intense conversations, flirtations, and rivalries have relaxed into something akin to survivalist camaraderie — was disrupted by a notorious trio of party crashers: the filmmaker and surrealist pornographer Tito Bronze, accompanied by two writers — the pompous, self-aggrandizing Bram Jameson and the mad genius Magus Amore. These unavoidable icons yet pariahs of the Veneran arts scene have in recent years been made unwelcome at the Venera Fantasy Convention. The three men were awarded a lifetime ban three years ago, each for different reasons: Tito Bronze for a partly hushed-up sex scandal involving the tween-age triplets of VFC 47’s Guests of Honour, fantasy opera composer Neal S. Palmer and his paramour and star performer Mandy Gay; Bram Jameson for heckling every panel, reading, talk, and performance by those same Guests of Honour; and Magus Amore, simply for being insane beyond redemption — the former bestselling author has long ago lost all sense of propriety, parading his scrawny naked body everywhere, pissing and defecating like a wild animal, relentlessly spewing incomprehensible gibberish at the top of his lungs. Still, all three of them are famous, exuding an aura of larger-than-life grandeur — thus, none dared block them or invoke the ban. These three old tricksters had each of them, on numerous occasions over the past decades, faked their deaths, and a significant number of gullible VFC 50 attendees were thus awed when these celebrities showed up alive at the gathering. Eager sycophants swarmed to them, gaggling like overexcited geese, disrupting that day’s schedule and entirely spoiling what had been shaping up to be a pleasantly congenial day.