Elizabeth Hand - Glimmering

“Hold on,” he muttered. Clovis stopped and bounced restlessly on his bootheels. Trip pulled off the anorak and shoved it into the knapsack, stood shivering in his flannel shirt and the thick wool sweater Martin had given him. He ran a hand through his hair, traced the outline of the cross branded above his eyes—he must look like shit, no one would recognize him now. He shrugged the knapsack back onto his shoulder.

The way in proved to be not via the library’s main entrance, which was blocked off with sheets of stainless steel and plywood, but through myriad service doors and windows that had been linked via a slapdash array of building materials—foam rubber, plastic bags, planks and Styrofoam insulation and hurricane fencing—to form an elaborate network of chutes and passageways, all leading into the basement. Dozens of solar panels leaned up against the building’s exterior walls. Like the makeshift entryways they had a haphazard look, but people seemed careful not to knock into them. And while the crowd had grown substantial—Trip guessed there might be a thousand people out there in the frigid wind, which seemed pretty good for an abandoned library in a city with no electric lights—once some secret signal had been given, and the doors and windows opened, everyone disappeared inside within minutes.

“Once you’re in you can’t get out till morning,” explained Clovis. “Unless we get busted.” Trip wondered if someone would search him and find the guns in their hidden holster; but when it was their turn to crawl through a rusted culvert, he found no one on the other side inclined to do anything except shout at them to move.

“G’wan! Keep going, keep going! ”

A hugely fat man in a caftan and surgical mask waved them on. He held a green lightstick, and waved it like a traffic cop’s baton. “Pay inside!” he bellowed. “Pay inside! Keep moving—”

It was dark, and suffocatingly hot. A mechanical drumbeat throbbed relentlessly from upstairs, loud enough to make the room shake. Muscular men in white caftans elbowed through the mob. They wore money belts, and each had a third eye tattooed on his forehead.

“Twenty dollars!” they shouted, breasting through a sea of rippling arms as people shoved money at them. “Twenty bucks, no barter!”

Trip struggled to reach his wallet, managed to pull out two tens. The bills were snatched from him, he hoped by one of the bouncers; then the three men were gone. The crowd’s peristaltic motion carried him forward. Bass-heavy electronic music thundered directly overhead. Trip braced himself, praying that he wouldn’t fall.

“Stay tight!” Clovis shouted. “Stay tight—”

The room was black, save for the luminous tattoos and scarifications on the people pressing against him, the fat man’s baton and, stuck on the ceiling, a few plastic light boxes. The crush of bodies exuded a thick rank smell—sweat and marijuana smoke and Viconix and a bitter chemical odor Trip almost recognized. A smell that was more like a taste, something that nudged the back of his throat, something he could almost name—

But then the crowd surged forward. Trip grabbed at Clovis to keep from being trampled underfoot.

“We’re there, buddy, we’re there!” Clovis said.

There turned out to be a broad ascending stairway. Deafening percussion raged down it like an avalanche. Trip bounded up behind Clovis.

Clovis yelled over the thunderous music. “You ready?”

Trip nodded, not ready at all. As he stumbled into a vast space rent with flickering lights and shadows, moving bodies, music.

“That way—” Clovis forced his way through the crowd.

Solar panels lined the perimeter of the room, flickering jade, cobalt, scarlet beneath banks of empty bookshelves. People stood or sat, talking, drinking, selling things—T-shirts, silvery crescents and discs, luminous drinking coils, fake tattoos…

“Hey, man—acid? X? Ice?”

A tattooed girl in ripped tunic and leggings stopped in front of him. Within her flat grey eyes the pupils had almost disappeared; the corners of her mouth were cracked and raw.

“Ice, man?” Her voice rose a little desperately. Trip was unsure whether she was looking to buy or sell. He glanced down, saw her bare feet shuffling restlessly back and forth across the dirty floor. When he looked up again she licked her lips and made as though to grab him, her hand twitching ineffectually a good six inches from his chest.

“Eeeeyyesssss …” She coughed, then wiped her eyes. With a beseeching expression she raised her hand, so that Trip could see a greenish crust glinting on her fingertips.

“Izzit?” the girl croaked, blinking. “Whadizzit?” Her hand flailed, trying to grasp him again, but Trip turned in disgust.

He saw Clovis talking to a cluster of dreadlocked men in kilts and sleeveless flannel shirts. Clovis dug into his pocket, handed one of them a small object that sparkled; the man looked away from him, his eyes locking for a moment with Trip’s as he palmed something to Clovis. Trip hesitated, then began edging through the crowd toward them. Music flowed from unseen speakers, switching from techno to jackhammer to Japanese covers of antediluvian disco to enhanced versions of TV music—commercial jingles, theme songs—that Trip recalled from childhood. He edged past a jury-rigged DJ’s booth laid out across a long table, a tangle of power cords and speaker wire and equipment, some kind of video projector. In the middle of it sat a woman, headphones threaded into her shaven skull, fingers stabbing at a knee top. Her eyes glittered metallic red, her cheeks were pierced with dozens of long silver needles. He could smell her, patchouli and another smell—that weirdly familiar, corrosive scent he’d first noticed when he entered the library. Like hot metal or burning plastic or gunpowder.

He frowned, trying to place it; and stumbled over a knot of electrical cords.

“Watch it!” the red-eyed woman shouted.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. He picked his way carefully back into the mob of dancers, his eyes fixed on the floor. When he looked up, Clovis was gone.

Trip clutched his knapsack, trying to still the panic boiling inside him. Someone jostled his arm, a dreadlocked boy wearing a velvet smoking jacket and very little else.

“Uh—sorry, hey man, I’m sorry—” The boy’s eyes were preternaturally wide. Sweat blackened the velvet jacket and matted the tangled hair across his forehead. “Are you—you—?”

Cigarette smoke, and that same sharply unpleasant odor again. The boy stuttered, bewildered; then stammered something incomprehensible and shambled off. Trip watched him go, neck hairs prickling.

And suddenly he remembered Leonard Thrope pressing an emerald ampoule against the crook of his elbow, hand splayed across his leather trousers. The smell was everywhere, Trip knew what it was.

IZE. He was in an icehouse. All around the music soared and stuttered; someone bumped into him. Trip whirled and struck out with his arm.

He panted, pausing to catch his breath. His heart pounded, his sides were hot and damp with sweat; he had to blink furiously to clear his vision, focus on something besides glittering pinwheels and faces like exploded blossoms. His breath caught in his throat.

Because suddenly the smell was no longer all around him. It was in him, it filled his nostrils like rank water and coursed down his throat, coated his tongue as he felt that same liquid heat flashing through him, the same prickling of his flesh. He shuddered, clutching at his stomach; squeezing his eyes shut so he wouldn’t see a garden of faces turned rapturously sunwise where there was no sun, hair moving like sea anemones. Even with eyes closed he saw them: disembodied arms and legs, mouths and eyes swarming like plankton; a scintillance exploding upon his flesh. And sound, too, that he felt as a thinning in his blood, skin taut between his fingers, a saline film clotting tongue and gums. A girl walked past him, laughing. Her eyes were wide and staring. Flecks of emerald glittered in their corners.