“Nectar of the gods,” answered an elderly lady who wore a mask and a sparkling tiara in her gray hair and nothing else. From her excruciatingly posh drawl, Wilde recognized the lady as none other than the dowager Dame Helen Montague-Hunt. She was sipping a glass as she reclined on a pile of cushions, her spindly legs thrown over the shoulders of a muscular young man who was enthusiastically rogering her.
The green liquid glided down Wilde’s throat like molten gold. He felt his body changing state from solid into gas, as if he were sublimating, an atom at a time, into the surrounding air. While he was still able to form a cogent thought, he stopped a passing servant and asked, “The marquess?”
The masked servant pointed upward to the hammer-beam ceiling.
As if on queue, a woodwind of Middle Eastern origin wheedled an insinuating tune. The bacchants paused in their exertions to look up, calling and applauding as something extraordinary was lowered from the rafters of the great hall. At first, Wilde could not make out what it was, but as it descended from the shadows, he descried the shape of a giant cross, hung inverted. Lashed to the cross by ropes binding his arms and feet was the slim figure of a man, naked apart from a ragged loincloth, his tumble of red tresses capped by a crown of thorns.
Rufus DeVayne.
The orgiers parted as the cross touched ground. A bevy of servants rushed forward to catch it and turn it right side up. Amidst applause and cheers, the marquess was unlashed and stepped down from the cross blowing kisses. A smile lit his face as he noticed Wilde, and he moved forward to greet him, his slender body flushed, his eyes spilling stars.
“Oscar, my new friend. You came!”
“Dear boy, where beauty summons, Oscar Wilde must follow.”
The marquess shrilled a delighted laugh. He snapped his fingers and a servant scurried to offer up a tray of green cocktails. The marquess snatched one up, tossed it down, and snagged himself a second. A pair of servants came forward to draw his arms into the sleeves of a silk gown embroidered with hierophantic symbols and tighten the sash. He threw a slender arm about Wilde’s shoulders and whispered, “You must come up to my rooms.” He semaphored a vulpine smile. “I have something very special prepared for us.”
Wilde leaned his head toward the younger man, drunk with the liquor of longing. For a brief moment, he saw himself with a terrible acuity, and he knew that, if he followed the young man, he would leave his old life behind forever. He grasped that “Oscar Wilde,” the persona he had spent a lifetime crafting, would be utterly annihilated. He would be mad to succumb to such a risk. The cliff edge yawned before him and Rufus DeVayne beckoned him to step off into the abyss.
“Lead on, sweet youth,” he heard himself say, “I would follow you into oblivion.”
As the younger man led him from the hall, the marquess noted, “I see you chose not to wear a mask.”
“Yes, I came as Oscar Wilde. I could think of nothing more apropos.”
DeVayne laughed as they reached a grand staircase and began to climb. “Come, Oscar,” the marquess said, taking him by the hand. “We must ascend to Elysium.” At the top of the stairs they turned onto a long corridor. Although his feet still trod the earth, Wilde’s mind was a helium balloon tugged along by a string.
Their promenade along the hallway could have taken seconds or days. Suddenly, Wilde found himself inside a huge and sumptuously appointed bedchamber hung with paintings and lithographs that shared a common theme of nudity and torture. As DeVayne had promised, one wall held a giant canvas: a lithograph of a torture chamber of the Inquisition: a hanged man dangled from a gibbet, an arc of semen jetting from his huge erection.
“Do you like my art, Oscar? I have my own personal torture chamber close by should you wish to indulge.”
A premonitory jolt of anxiety swept through Wilde. “Perhaps another time,” he said, his lips dry.
The room was opulent with soft pillows and low sofas. An impossibly huge four-poster dominated one side of the room. Lying atop the bed were two children, a boy and a girl of perhaps six or seven. Their eyes were heavy-lidded and possessed only a smear of focus, suggesting both had been drugged. The children were naked apart from cherub’s wings strapped to their backs, and had been posed stretched out upon the bed, head to head. Each rested upon an arm that was in turn pillowed upon a human skull. A leather strap dangled loose about their throats. A short wooden stick lay close by.
Wilde scrambled to catch hold of the bobbing balloon of his mind and reel it back in. “What is this?” he asked.
“Do you not see? One for you. One for me. You may take either the girl or the boy. In truth, I am not particular.”
“What in God’s name are you proposing?”
The marquess chuckled. “Nothing we do here tonight is in God’s name. I presume you read the book I gave you? The ritual of immortality requires the sacrifice of a virgin.”
Wilde’s face turned to stone. “What? You mean the stick? The leather strap?”
“A garrote.” DeVayne’s face loomed close. Warm, carnivore’s breath washed Wilde’s cheek. “You will find strangulation far more intimate than sex. To stare into the eyes of your sacrifice and watch the soul slip from its fleshy prison gives you not just immortality, but eternal youth. I have read Dorian Gray a hundred times. Is that not your deepest desire? Eternal life? Beauty that time cannot wither? But while you can only write about it, I can manifest it.”
Wilde’s tongue was thick and clumsy in his mouth as he struggled to speak. Suddenly his intoxication was a leaden blanket he wished to shake free of. “B-but these are innocent children!”
“Yes, quite innocent. Guaranteed virgins. The boy cost me five pounds. The girl was ten pounds.” DeVayne giggled. “I think the family thought I was purchasing her for a brothel, hence the higher price. Fortunately, there are many parts of London where life is a commodity cheaply purchased.”
“Surely this is all a tasteless joke!”
DeVayne misread the look of horror on Wilde’s face. “Do you doubt me? Do you doubt my abilities?” He reached in the pocket of his robe and drew out a small pistoclass="underline" a two-shot derringer with an up-and-over barrel. He pointed the gun at the Irishman’s chest and for a terrible moment Wilde thought he was about to die. But then the marquess flipped the gun in his hand and extended it, grip-first to Wilde, who accepted it numbly. The marquess seized the barrel and drew the muzzle to his own chest.
“Put a bullet through my heart and I shall resurrect myself before your very eyes. Do it, Oscar. Shoot.”
Wilde’s finger trembled on the trigger. For a giddying moment he knew that, in that instant, he was entirely capable of murder. That nothing would give him greater pleasure than to end the life of Rufus DeVayne.
“Go on.” A mad smile quivered upon the marquess’s lips. “I can see from your eyes that you lust to kill me. Do it! I have heard you say that you can resist everything except temptation. Why begin an unpleasant habit now, when you stand upon the threshold of immortality?”
Wilde dithered. “I imagine the pistol is a stage prop. Or loaded with blanks.”
DeVayne shook his head. “Oh no. It is as real as I.”
The Irishman was seized by a sudden resolve. “Then we will see if your imagined immortality can withstand a real bullet.” DeVayne’s smile buckled as Wilde’s finger tensed on the trigger. But at the last second, he whipped the pistol aside and pointed the muzzle at one of the plump bed pillows. The gun fired with an ear-ringing BANG and the pillow exploded. Feathers and white down floated down from the ceiling, settling on DeVayne’s fiery hair and shoulders.