The Juliette Society(74)

I can hear music, the sound of drums and flutes. It seems to be coming from the ogre’s mouth.

I’m wavering between anxiety and determination, and I wish Anna was here. I think, what would Anna do? But I already know the answer. None of this would faze her. She’d just skip inside gaily because, to her, every experience is a new adventure, a new challenge, a new frontier to cross.

The murmuring sex is speaking to me. It says, ‘Come inside.’ So I do.



Inside it’s so dark that I stumble on a rock almost immediately and nearly fall face forward. I extend my arms out on either side to touch the walls, the ogre’s mouth and throat. They are so close that my arms are still bent at the elbows but I can stand upright without stooping. The walls are cold and damp to my touch.

I feel my way along, stepping gingerly, until gradually my eyes start to adjust to a soft light up ahead. I arrive at a long staircase, cut into the rock with a rusted wrought iron balustrade, leading down into a natural cave system. The roof of the chamber droops like the ceiling of a canvas tent during heavy rain and its surface is covered with long spindly stalactites, brilliantly colored reds and browns at the base, yellow and white by the tip – like the spines of a giant sea urchin. Water drops from the spines into small pools in the rock surface and, as it does so, it reverberates and echoes around me like a bell. Rivulets of water run underneath my feet and I have to hold onto the iron rail to stop myself from slipping. It too feels wet to my touch, as if it’s rotting. The air is stale and sharp.

It feels like I’m descending into the belly of the earth through the gullet of the ogre, like Jonah wandering aimlessly through the whale. There’s nowhere to go but onward, wherever that may lead.

I can see the bottom of the staircase now and I look behind me to see how far I’ve come and figure I’m about halfway down. The further down I go, the louder and more frantic the music gets. It sounds like a hubbub of voices all yelling to be heard.

At the bottom of the steps is a passage that’s barely wide enough for one person and I have to bend down as I walk through. After a few hundred yards it opens out onto a platform that looks out over a large grotto, with stairs cut into the rock leading down to it.

I’m standing halfway up the face of the cavern and opposite, at the other end, there’s a natural waterfall that emerges through a deep fissure in the rock face above it that opens onto the night sky, through which the moon shines down, illuminating the grotto with a spectral silvery light. Flaming torches fixed to the walls provide another source of light; just enough to see that the walls of the grotto are painted with a vividly colored fresco of the garden I’ve just walked through, with the path winding through it and the same stone statues I saw peeking out from behind the foliage. The floor of the grotto is covered in a luminous pink moss that clings to the rock face and glistens and shines in the torchlight like burnished gold.

At the base of the waterfall, the water runs off in two streams that form an island. On the island stands a small round colonnaded stone structure, like a podium or bandstand, that’s open on one side and spotlit by the moon. Arrayed around either side of the podium are several figures wearing white robes and oversized cartoonish animal costume heads, each playing an instrument – either a hollow-bodied hand drum or small cymbals. Two of the figures are playing long wooden flutes that flare out at the end. The music is so loud and piercing as it echoes around the grotto that it fills the space with a disorientating clamor of conflicting rhythms and pitches and I can feel it reverberating through my body.

On the podium is a throne with upholstered red velvet seating trimmed in gold and a lion carved into each of the two front legs. And on the throne sits a veiled figure in long flowing white robes that are so loose around the body it’s hard to determine its sex. At its feet is a woman, a naked woman with blonde hair, just like Anna’s, and my heart skips a beat when I see her, but I can’t tell if it really is Anna because she’s too far away and she’s kneeling with her head in the lap of the robed figure, whose gloved hand rests on her head, the way a cleric might do when granting a parishioner absolution from their sins.

This woman has clearly committed great sins because her back is covered in a criss-cross of painful-looking red welts and another robed figure is standing behind her with a whip drawn back, ready to administer more. I think back to the time Anna showed me the marks on her wrist and how horrific it looked, and I realize how naive I was, how that was really nothing at all.

Five other naked women, two blondes, two brunettes and one redhead, are kneeling in a semi-circle at the base of the steps leading up to the podium, facing towards the throne, their hands on their knees and their heads bowed. Waiting their turn.