Blankets buffered my fall, and after the first bounce, I felt strong male arms close around my torso to keep me steady. But I was no one’s whore. I lunged out with my fists.
“Help!” I clawed at my face, fighting to get my wet hair out of my eyes, and kicked to untangle my legs from the blankets. “Help! Rape! Fire!”
(I’d always been taught that people pay more attention when you yell “Fire” than when you yell “Rape” because fire endangers them as well. Fun world we live in, huh?)
“Help me, please!” My fist grazed someone’s jaw.
“Ow! Amy, jeez, chill out.” I paused in my flailing for a moment and peered through the ropy strands of my hair to see who was holding me. It was Malcolm, robed, but with his hood pushed back off his face.
“Get your hands off me, you political slime,” I shouted, “or I swear to God I’ll make sure your father never holds elected office again!”
These are the types of threats one makes at Eli.
He laughed then, and loosened his grip, setting me on my feet. “You’re preaching to the choir, girl.” He brushed my hair back behind my ear. “And no one’s going to touch you, least of all me. It was just a joke.”
I looked around at the boys who stood there, holding the ends of the makeshift blanket parachute, and then up at the staircase landing, where the plywood coffin stood open. A few more robed figures were traipsing down the stairs to join us, pushing their hoods back as they went.
“Well, it wasn’t funny,” I said, straightening my clothes and glaring at Malcolm. “Especially the bit about the pool. I have a phobia about water.”
“What?” Malcolm’s voice betrayed genuine surprise.
“Oh, right. Like you know who my third-grade homeroom teacher was but not why I never joined the swim team?”
Malcolm’s gaze flashed to the leader of the staircase crew, who merely lifted his chin in defiance. The guy was slim of build, with dark hair and very pale skin. I’d never seen him before, but knew instantly that this was my Sith M.C., Shadow Guy #2, he of the This-Is-Your-FBI-File line.
“Well, now you can add it to your fucking files.” I wrung out my left pant leg and straightened. “Where’s the exit?”
Malcolm’s face fell. “You’re not leaving?!?”
“You bet your GPA I am!” I pointed at Darth Digger. “I wouldn’t join a tea party that asshole’s at.” I headed off, ignoring the squishing sound in my left sneaker and hoping that I was correct in my assessment that I was walking toward something vaguely exit-esque. The hallways were lined with dark red paper and lighted only intermittently by dim candles in skull-shaped sconces. With my luck, I would end up in their dungeon, and in seventy years, it would be my cranium lighting their way.
“Amy, wait!”
I turned, but it wasn’t Malcolm who’d put his robed hand over mine.
“I’m sorry,” the jerk said. His head was bowed as if in contrition, but the position just made him look like he was doing that evil looking-at-me-through-his-eyebrows thing so popular on horror movie posters. “Can we start again?” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Poe.”
“Is that Korean?”
He blinked at me. “It’s my society name.” He pointed back at Malcolm. “Like Lancelot. We can’t use any others while inside the tomb.” He raised his eyebrow and gave me a wry smile. “And now that I’ve told you, you’ve got to join.”
“Or what?”
“Or we’ll have to kill you.” Totally deadpan.
I nodded and opened the door. “Good luck with that. I’m going home.”
No such luck. The door did not lead to High Street, but instead to a small, square courtyard ringed all around with towering walls of brown sandstone. Crap.
Poe chuckled softly. “Nice try, Neophyte.” He leaned against the doorjamb and I could see Malcolm—I mean, Lancelot—join him on the other side.
Wait, what the hell was I thinking? I wasn’t a Digger. I could call him whatever I wanted. Malcolm, Malcolm, Bo-Balcolm…I folded my arms across my chest.
“Come on, Amy,” Malcolm said. “It’s a little late to back out now. You accepted the tap.”
“That was before the swimming lesson.”
Malcolm tossed a look at Poe, who returned a smug smile. “I told you this would happen.”
“Poe,” Malcolm said in warning.
The guy sighed, then grumbled, “Okay. We don’t have a pool.”
My jaw forgot how to work. “But how—”
“Old trick,” Poe said through clenched teeth. “Coolers filled with water on either side of you, sloshing. Super Soakers for the leakage.”
Genius. Malicious, but genius. And it was killing him to tell me. I loved it.
Malcolm stepped forward and took my hands in his. “I won’t lie and say we’re all nice, Amy, but we’re good people to have on your side. Trust me. This is the best thing you’ll ever do at Eli.” His eyes were pleading, practically desperate, but he straightened then, and spoke in a much louder voice. “The life that we invite you to share in our society is based on such intangible factors that we cannot meaningfully convey to you either its nature or its quality. I’d ask you not to judge our worth by a few ill-advised jokes.” And then, in a hushed whisper: “Come on, what do you say?”
I was so going to regret this.
“Aye.”
I told Lancelot that I’d prefer they didn’t carry me.
He said it couldn’t be helped.
I wanted to know in advance where I would be taken.
He said all would become clear in time.
I was absolutely adamant that there would be no drinking of the blood of slaughtered virgins.
He said he’d see what he could do.
And that’s how I found myself suspended in the arms of six hooded figures, blindfold loosened at last, poised over what looked for all the world like a skull full of blood. But in the plus column, how was I to know the sexual proclivities of the blood’s previous owner?
“Drink it! Drink it! Drink it!” the figures chanted. The cup was lifted and placed in my hands, and the blindfold whisked away completely. The bone was smooth and almost slippery beneath my fingers, worn, perhaps, from almost two centuries of use. They’d plugged up the holes with the same clay that lined the interior, but that small nod to decency hardly swayed me. Drink it? This had been part of a person once.
And in all likelihood, it had also been a biology project, my rational side reasoned. Where else would college kids get their specimens? Okay, Amy, time to get into the spirit of the proceedings. Skulls, schmulls. I took a deep breath and Tory’s Cupped it.
A fruit juice of some sort, perhaps mixed with Gatorade. There was a strange, tart current beneath the flavor, hinting at an additional ingredient—maybe dye to give it that dark red coloring?—but I’d bitten my tongue enough times in my life to know this wasn’t blood. I finished it off, gave the skull a little rub on my shirt—no way in hell would I lick the bowl—and earned a few chuckles from my companions who recognized the act.
“Thatagirl,” Lancelot said, as he tied the blindfold back on. “And away you go!”
Looking back, it’s tough to define a chain of events for Initiation Night. Everything moved so quickly, with such chaotic visuals, and a cacophony of sounds, that I remember it mostly as a series of tableaux—a slide show of moments that all led up to the main event. They kept our blindfolds on as we moved from room to room, perhaps to make each vision all the more shocking by revealing it to us all at once, when we were already in the midst of the scenes. Indeed, with all the frenzy of the players, it took me several flashes of sight to even notice I was now in the company of other neophytes, two or three intersecting in any given room at a time.
This is what I remember:
*Flash*
A courtyard ringed in fire, in which a man dressed as a devil jumped around, letting out deep-throated shrieks. A group of men in rags stood before him, chained, and let out soft moans.
*Flash*
A tiny room lit by candlelight, with a figure dressed as Quetzacoatl, in shimmering gold and colorful feathers. He leaned over a stone slab, a golden knife poised ready to cut out the heart of a maybe-naked woman who lay with her long black hair splayed out behind her. As he brought the knife down, the candle went out. The woman screamed.
*Flash*
Antony standing over the body of Cleopatra, holding a live asp. Or maybe it was a boa constrictor. I don’t know my snakes as well as my Shakespeare. And I think Cleopatra was a mannequin in a black wig.
*Flash*
A room full of Puritans, standing watch over a gallows lit by a spotlight. It looked as if we were back in the Firefly Room. There were three women hanging with nooses around their necks, black bags tied over their faces. I’d have thought they were fakes, but their feet were twitching….
*Flash*
There were hands on my shoulders, walking me down the hall, but whoever placed the blindfold over my face after the Salem room wasn’t too careful. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a tiny flash. Light, bouncing off metal zippers. They removed the blindfold to view the next tableau—something about a bowl full of fruit and the groaning of ghostly souls in torment—but I was too interested in those zippers, and the person wearing them. It was George Harrison Prescott in the hall outside the room, and he was being stripped of his offensive jacket and—yes, shoved into a smallish plywood coffin. They’d clearly staggered our entrances and were amusing each of us in turn with the various aspects of the initiation. I wondered what still lay in store.
*Flash*
They shoved me into a seat and secured my hands behind my back. Something was placed over my face before the blindfold was yanked down. When I opened my eyes, I saw that I was looking through tiny eyeholes in a mask. At first I thought I’d been placed in front of a mirror, because before me I saw another masked figure tied to a chair. Her mask was elaborate and golden, with an elegant bird’s beak and shimmering jewels that suggested arched brows and a cruel, predatory mouth. But she struggled against her bonds while I remained still. At last her hands came free and she pulled her mask off her face.
Clarissa Cuthbert.
I gasped and she reached across to snatch my mask away. I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye. A crone.
She frowned. “So you are here,” she said, before they took her away. My blindfold was replaced before my hands were released or my mouth remembered how to work.
*Flash*
A vampire rising from his coffin, blood dripping down his chin.
*Flash*
A pale young man sat on a toilet seat in his underwear. He had a gun pointed to his head, and he was repeating the same phrase over and over again. In Latin.
*Flash*
George Harrison Prescott turned to me, in a room where Othello was strangling Desdemona, and said in a tone entirely unsuited to the bizarre situation, “The matches didn’t work, by the way. I had enough sulfur on me to bring down half a dozen Diggers.” I was hurried away before I had a chance to ask him what he meant.
*Flash*
The scenes began to blur together after a while, and over everything there were voices screaming phrases in other languages, shouting obscenities, chanting in gibberish, shrieking, “The President Is Dead!” “The End Has Come!” “The Devil Has Risen!” and other dire warnings. I felt a strange headiness, and wondered if there had been alcohol in the “blood” or if I was just succumbing to the magic of the evening. The downtimes seemed to float by as if in a dream and I stopped counting steps from room to room. I don’t know how many times I made the circuit, or how many costume changes the players underwent. But at last I was shoved in a room, and I heard a door slam behind me as the racket was suddenly cut off.
By this point, I was so used to the tableaux being revealed that it was several heartbeats before I reached up to remove my own blindfold.
Before me stood the Grim Reaper in his black robe. He carried a scythe in his hand, and a grinning death’s head hung with flaps of rotted flesh stared out at me from beneath the hood. I glanced around, but we were the only people in the room. The Reaper turned toward a cabinet that contained two skeletons.
“Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, wer Bettler oder Kaiser?”
He pointed at each of the skeletons in turn, then handed me a crown. It was heavy in my hands, and I wondered for a moment if the jewels and gold around the red velvet base were real.
“Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, wer Bettler oder Kaiser?” he said again, a little more insistently.
“I never took German,” I replied helplessly.
He pointed at the crown, then at the two skeletons.
He wanted me to put the crown on one of their heads? Ah! Kaiser. “Kaiser” meant king in German. Enlightenment hit, and with it, another little lesson from history class. The Dance of Death from the Middle Ages. Alas, poor Yorick, and all that Hamlet jazz. The king was not either of the skeletons, but the force that had defeated them both.
I stepped forward and placed the crown on the head of the Reaper.
“Gut! Ob Arm, ob Reich, im Tode gleich.”*[3] He captured my hands in his. “Nice move, Neophyte. You’ll learn yet.” He pulled me forward until my face was inches from his putrid one, and for a very scary moment, I was afraid the thing was going to kiss me, which was a little too Goth for my taste. I locked my elbows and resisted, and he released me, triumph glinting in his pale eyes.
I stumbled backward as the light went off, and I felt myself being whisked away once again.
This time, when the blindfold was removed, I was standing before a long wooden door, with two tall men flanking me. Before me was a knocker engraved with the Rose & Grave seal. The hooded figure to my right reached up and thumped the knocker three times, then once, then twice again.
“The Neophyte approaches!” someone inside yelled, and a bone-chilling din began beyond the doors. They screamed and shouted, hooted and groaned. Finally, beneath it, I could make out a chant that soon overwhelmed every other element of the noise. “Who is it? Who is it! Who is it? WHO IS IT?”
“Amy Maureen Haskel.” I smiled. “Neophyte Haskel!”
The doors flew open and I blinked. This was by far the most elaborate of all of the tableaux. It looked like a carnival inside, and it was obvious I was the main attraction. The round room had a domed ceiling painted dark blue and dotted with tiny golden stars. Around me stood players, all masked, in the most outlandish costumes. They were all shouting my name.
The two hooded figures shoved me against a carved teak desk and pushed my head toward a piece of parchment.
A man in a gold, jewel-encrusted robe put down wizened hands on either side of the page. His half mask had hexagonal eyeholes and was covered in real roses, and above it his hair was gray. “Read it! Read it! Read it now, or look your last upon the Inner Temple!”
This is the vow I took:
I, Amy Maureen Haskel, Barbarian-So-Called, do hereby most solemnly avow, within the Flame of Life and beneath the Shadow of Death, never to reveal, by commission or by omission, the existence of, the knowledge considered sacred by, or the names of the membership of the Order of Rose & Grave.
When I read it aloud, everyone cheered. They picked me up and whirled me around to face a tiny engraving of a woman in a Doric chiton, holding a skull in one hand and a flower in the other.
“Behold our goddess!” shouted one, and the others set up a chant.
“Persephone! Persephone! Persephone!”
Persephone, Goddess of Spring. Daughter of the Goddess of the Earth, Demeter, and wife of the King of the Underworld, Hades. According to what I remember from my World Mythology survey class, she was doomed to spend half of every year as the Queen of the Underworld—one month for each pomegranate seed she’d eaten in his gloom-filled garden. The other six months of the year, she was able to return home to her mother, who was so happy to see her daughter that she brought life back to the earth. Suddenly, the “rose” and “grave” of Rose & Grave made perfect sense.
I was yanked back to the desk bearing the oath, with another injunction to “Read! Read!”
“I, Amy Maureen Haskel, Barbarian-So-Called, do hereby most solemnly avow, within the Flame of Life and beneath the Shadow of Death, never to reveal, by commission or by omission, the existence of, the knowledge considered sacred by, or the names of the membership of the Order of Rose & Grave!” When I read the oath of secrecy this time, I was louder, more sure of myself.
And then back to the engraving, which was set by itself on an altar in a little wooden cabinet. The plaque shone with the patina of age and care.
“Persephone! Persephone! All hail Persephone!”
I pictured the scores of men who had come before me—raised in their fancy, rich boarding schools, destined to become captains of industry and leaders of nations. Good thing they took a vow of secrecy. Bunch of heathens. What would their constituents and boards of directors have thought had they known these guys had spent their senior year of college professing to worship a minor goddess of ancient Greece? Persephone? Please!
I read the oath one more time before they took me to another side of the room. On the wall hung a glorious oil painting of a nude with a come-hither look in her eye. A figure dressed as the pope and wearing a white bird’s mask pumped his fist in the air. “Behold, Connubial Bliss!”
“Yeah, looks like it,” I said, noting the woman’s ample curves. God bless 19th century ideals of feminine beauty. If the men of today had commissioned that portrait, she’d have as much meat on her as one of the skeletons.
This time, when I was returned to the teak desk, there was a different parchment waiting for me.
“Read it! Read it! Read it!” the crowd yelled.
I, Amy Maureen Haskel, Barbarian-So-Called, do hereby most solemnly avow, within the Flame of Life and beneath the Shadow of Death, to bear the confidence and the confessions of my brothers, to support them in all their endeavors, and to keep forever sacred whatsoever I may learn beneath the seal of the Order of Rose & Grave.
Aww, that’s sweet.
The company cheered again after I read it, and they rushed me around the room three times. I began to feel dizzy and more than a little breathless, and they deposited me on the ground in front of another skull full of red liquid. This time, when I drank the sweet “blood,” I recognized the flavor immediately. Pomegranate juice. How fitting.
Two more trips back to the oath of constancy—and in between, one trip around the room, then two—and they deposited me in front of the golden-robed man with the gray hair.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” he said in a booming voice. “I am Uncle Tony Cthony Carnicks Carnage Carthage Parnassus Phinneas Philamagee Phimalarlico McPherson O’Phanel.”
“Say it!” They all shouted at me. “Say it! Say it! Say it!”
So, not a student? But I bit back the smarm, for this didn’t seem the time. “Uncle Tony…um, Carnage…”
“She can’t say it! She can’t! She can’t!” A figure bounced up, dressed in red and painted to look like Lucifer. He swung his long, forked tail at me, whipping my face and arms playfully as he taunted me. Beneath the grease paint and prosthetic hooked nose, I noticed a set of sparkling white teeth.
They shoved me toward a guy dressed in 19th century garb, holding a leather-bound book marked all over with the Rose & Grave seal. He showed me the book—upside-down Greek. I think.
“Read it! Read it! Read it!”
Yeah, right! But this time, they hardly gave me a second before beginning to cry, “She can’t read! The neophyte can’t read!”
Their teasing seemed to have reached a crescendo, though, and I suspected it was because they were drawing to the end of the allotted time to issue such abuse. The golden-robed Uncle Tony propelled me back to the teak desk, where there stood a third and final oath. The oath of fidelity. “Let’s see if she can read this!” he shouted.
I, Amy Maureen Haskel, Barbarian-So-Called, most solemnly pledge and avow my love and affection, everlasting loyalty and undying fealty. By the Flame of Life and the Shadow of Death, I swear to cleave wholly unto the principles of this ancient order, to further its friends and plight its enemies, and place above all others the causes of the Order of Rose & Grave.
Ah, this was the oath that the conspiracy theorists loved to point at. This was the reason they attacked the President for being a member of Rose & Grave. I admit that even I, who was not a leader of men and had no intention of ever being so, faltered at the wording of the vow. Did I know these people enough to cleave wholly unto their principles? What were their principles? What if the causes of Rose & Grave were to destroy democracy, outlaw pizza, and overcome the knee-high leather boot industry? What if the enemies I was supposed to plight included the Dalai Lama, or Brad Pitt? I cast a furtive glance at the ridiculously dressed figures surrounding me.
Nah, probably not.
I spoke the oath of fidelity three times, and as the final words fell from my lips, the room seemed to crackle with the power of my promise.
(Although, in these pages, I have broken the first two vows, I have kept the third, and always shall, until the end of my days. Those of my brothers who believe my transgressions unforgivable, look again at my oath, and tell me if I am indeed forsworn.)
They lifted me up and placed me gently at the feet of a man dressed like Don Quixote. He wore a suit of ill-fitting armor and had scraggly gray whiskers beneath a long-handled saucepan hat. He lifted a rusty, ancient-looking sword and tapped me on the left shoulder. “From this moment on, you are no longer Barbarian-So-Called Amy Maureen Haskel. By the order of our Order, I dub thee Bugaboo, Knight of Persephone, Order of Rose & Grave.”
Someone struck a tocsin thrice, once, and twice again, and everyone shouted, “Diggers!”
And that was it. I was a Digger.
Named Bugaboo.
The confessor later learned the full text of the scene translated to: “Who was the fool, who the wise man, beggar or king?” and “Good. Whether rich or poor, all are equal in death.”