Ascent
or, the Risen and Fallen on the Seventh Floor
by Kirryn Lia Todd
The thing with being crazy is that you can get away with a lot of things that most other people wouldn’t. If I had been sane, my freakout in the hallway that Nutmeg had seen would have caused more than just a stir. It would have been talked about for the next ninety days. Nutmeg wouldn’t have even had to have told anyone about it. I’ve found that when you’re sane (or pretending to be), rumours tend to fly a lot faster, sharper and heat-seeking. Before you'd even left your house the next day, you’d be face to face with stories of what you’d done and said and how you’d reacted, even if you couldn’t recall doing anything in that way.
Rumours are a bit like being crazy, I suppose.
I walked back into my apartment eventually — even I wasn’t so insane as to think I could stand outside in the hall for the rest of the evening listening to the music coming from Apt 7C. But when I got back inside, I didn’t bother crawling into bed again, or switching on my bed lamp, or changing into sleepwear. I just crouched by the door, my ear pressed to the thin line where the door met the frame, listening to the soft sound of this Killian’s guitar.
It was definitely the music that I was remembering, when I first woke up from twelve months of not sleeping only a few hours ago. That was the sound that made me realise that I had been asleep for so long. And I needed it more than I’d ever needed anything else in my life…which was saying something, as I’d had quite a bad (or possibly good) relationship with certain not-quite-legal drugs when I was about nineteen.
I don’t know how long I crouched there, just listening — could’ve been minutes or hours. Time stopped existing while that music was playing. It wasn’t that the guitarist was particularly talented — in fact, it was somewhat the opposite. He stumbled over quite a few notes, and there were stops and restarts peppered through the music. But the sound, the song was too beautiful for me to comprehend. The lucid, sane part of my brain gave way willingly to something deeper than my insanity, somewhere deeper than my bones, futher in than my marrow, and more permeating than my blood. It wasn’t music I understood — it was music that had to be felt. I knew that, semi-instinctively. It sunk in, and I soaked it up. I wondered a few times if I closed my eyes and wished, if I’d be able to grow luminous white angel wings. I felt like I could.
He stopped playing, finally, possibly somewhere around midnightish. I kept my ear pressed hopefully to the door for a while, but no more music came from the hall. Understandably, after all, everyone needed to sleep, and most people slept during the night. I tried to, whenever I could, but sometimes it tended to be easier said than done.
I got up shakily, and that was when I saw the demon.
He was standing against my open window, gazing out at the night with what seemed to be an extremely amused grin. At least, I thought it was amused. Perhaps devils and demons and various other scary monsters (and super creeps? I remembered David Bowie’s music, but how could you forget that?) had different emotions to ours, and expressed them differently. I didn’t know. But the quirk of his mouth and the raised state of his upswept eyebrows communicated amusement, to me. I wonder what was so funny about the city?
He was definitely a demon. I knew that because of his horns. (See, I meant it when I said I knew some things.) They weren’t massively long or curling or anything like that, not ram-like nor goat-like — just two blood-red horns, perhaps a few inches long, jutting out from amidst impeccably groomed midnight coloured hair, which was swept back from a face that, for some reason, reminded me of Nutmeg’s. Recklessly attractive. Also, dangerous. Very dangerous.
He was also smoking one of my cigarettes.
I blinked at him.
He smiled at me, pure hedonism curling around his lips, and suddenly I remembered that I was a girl. Not that it was a bad thing. Just an odd thing.
“That’s one of my cigarettes you’re smoking,” I said to him, stepping away from the door and into the main area of my apartment. I didn’t want to get too close — well, all right, that was a complete lie. I wanted to reach out and grab him by the lapels of his finely tailored suit to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. Then I wanted to touch his horns, which, upon closer inspection, looked like smooth red ivory. That is, I wanted to make sure he was real.
“I’d hoped you wouldn’t mind,” he replied.
“Well, of course I mind,” I spluttered. “They’re twelve dollars a packet, Reds. And I go through a few.”
His smile merely got wider. It was far too insidious and elegant to be called a grin.
“So, you never share your cigarettes with any of the residents of this fine establishment?”
I squirmed a little. “Well…” The fact of the matter was that I did. Whenever anyone asked. But it wasn’t too often, because Nutmeg claimed she didn’t smoke cigarettes, and poor Vincent in 7E was trying to quit, so I was careful not to smoke around him now. I only ever shared with Wender when I was in a particularly good mood, however. That was not often.
The demon laughed, the sound rich and pleasant, a lot like a swathe of red velvet converted to sound. Or perhaps a swallow of good Scotch whiskey, heady and delicious. I hadn’t had any good Scotch since I had moved into the hotel, although the aforementioned Vincent would share his bad Canadian whiskey with me. (Nutmeg much preferred wine, the more expensive, the better. She really did stick out like a sore thumb in these parts.)
“I am a resident of this hotel, from now on,” the devil said to me. “So I’m sure you would share a breath of smoke or two with me, wouldn’t you?”
Something about the way he said that made me blush right up to my ears. I could feel the heat rising from my neck and crawling upwards, a rush of prickling warmth that took over my face and made me feel heady. The demon noticed and laughed again, which only made the blush worse.
“Ah, Ms. Sievers. How normal you seem, sometimes. Like any other girl.”
“Something tells me that you know I’m not,” I replied, looking at him askance. “If you know my name, you probably know that I’m not normal.”
“I did say ’sometimes’,” he replied, exhaling a cloud of smoke that looked charcoal blue in the night light of the city flowing into the apartment. I tilted my head.
“Are you a hallucination?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you think I’m a hallucination?”
“I have trouble distinguishing reality from hallucinations, sometimes.”
“Have you done anything that would cause you to hallucinate, this evening?”
“I don’t know,” I said, thinking back to the beautiful sound, manically pressing my ear to the door, not wanting it to stop or ever let it go. “I heard some music.”
The demon nodded as if this was a completely acceptable answer. “Music has strange effects on some people.”
“This wasn’t just any music,” I insisted. “It was…like…a new sun being unleashed from the strings of a guitar.”
That made him whirl right around from his leaning position and pin me down with a gaze so full of raw power that it frightened me. His eyes were a burning blue, I noticed then — bright, burning the colour of thunder. I’d never seen blue eyes like that in my life. I didn’t mean there was anything unnatural about them — I’m sure there are men in the world with eyes that particular shade of blue (although I don’t think it would be terribly common…I’m no social butterfly but I’m sure I would have seen them before in someone else if they were), but there was something about those eyes that was simply…more than blue. Deeper. As deep as the music had flowed into me, before.
“Perhaps you’re exactly the one I’m looking for,” he murmured, maybe to himself, maybe to me. The sound of his voice made all the fine hairs on my body stand up lightning-straight, low electricity hummed through the air. He stalked across the apartment, feral and dangerous and impossibly sensual.
“What…what’s your name?” I blurted out. I felt that just by looking at him, I would pass into something very akin to the state I had been in while listening to Killian’s guitar. I wasn’t sure if I could handle that twice in one night.
His amused look returned at my question. “I’d hoped you’d guessed my name.”
“Is that how you knew mine? Guessing?”
“No, no,” he smiled again. “I know everybody’s name. I know you probably even better than you know yourself.”
“That wouldn’t be hard,” I commented wryly. “I am insane, you know.”
He laughed at that, a full laugh, but never lost the savage, slick elegance that he possessed. Once again he turned his candle-flame gaze on me, but his eyes were turned up in mirth.
“My name is Mephisto. And you are Jade Elouise Sievers…of course.”
It was my turn to raise an eyebrow. “Me…phisto. The Mephisto?”
His smile turned dazzling and more than a little mocking. “I only ever knew of one.”
“You haven’t confirmed or denied your status as a hallucination,” I pointed out.
“That is true,” he replied. He moved forward. I suppose I should have moved away, or flinched, or something of the like — but I couldn’t. Thinking back on it, I don’t know if I was frozen with some kind of emotion other than fear (because I wasn’t frightened of him) or if I was just stupid, or maybe it was a little bit of both. I honestly couldn’t tell. So I stood there, still as a standing stone, while the devil — Mephisto — brushed the tips of his fingers along my cheekbone with a softness and strange gentleness that I thought belonged more to angels than to demons. I blushed immediately, but that wasn’t my chief concern. As soft as his touch had been, it was a real, tangible touch. He didn’t fade away, or turn into a blurred image and waver without any senses except maddened sight responding to it. He was real.
I suppose that meant something dire, Mephisto appearing in your apartment.
“Do you know,” he asked, tucking a lock of my hair behind my ear — more evidence that he was here and real — “Most young women would have reacted a little differently to that touch than you just did?”
“To you touching me? How so?”
Mephisto smiled, more genuine amusement along with a flicker of smooth, liqueur-coated malice dancing across the planes of his face. “The best of them usually lose most of their motor control. The worst…tend to go mad.”
“I’m already mad,” I said. I felt oddly proud, although I wasn’t sure exactly how much talent it took to be mad. Or if it was really all that helpful at all, from a wider perspective.
“Thus, my charms won’t work,” he chuckled. “Alas, alas.”
“Maybe they do,” I replied. “And I’m just too mad to know it?”
He blinked at me for a moment, before bursting into laughter. He flicked the butt of his (my) cigarette out of my open window in an elegant motion, and put his hand on my face again, patting my cheek the same way Nutmeg had earlier in the evening. I wondered if I could actually feel my skin tingling beneath his touch, or if I was just hyperwired, feeling everything and nothing coming at me from all sides and nowhere. I thought Mephisto being real would provide clarity, instead I just felt more confused. But it was a gentle, rocking sort of confusion that cradled me as much as it shook me.
“You are amazing,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. If it’s all right to think of a demon having a twinkle in its eye. “I’ll quite enjoy my stay here, I think.”