The Dark Side of the Sky, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Leave us a Review
Copyright
Dedication
1 Our Feast
2 Our Revelations
3 Our Roots
4 Our Nature, Unfolding
5 Our Stand
6 Them
7 Us
8 Her
Author’s Note
Toasts
About the Author
THE DARK SIDE OF THE SKY
Also by Francesco Dimitri and available from Titan Books
THE BOOK OF HIDDEN THINGS
NEVER THE WIND
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The Dark Side of the Sky
Print edition ISBN: 9781803362786
E-book edition ISBN: 9781803363721
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First edition: May 2024
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© Francesco Dimitri 2024
Francesco Dimitri asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Cosmology is a literary art.
Northrop Frye
1
OUR FEAST
THE BASTION
At dusk, we made a circle around the body.
Lila started on her drum, each beat a thunder in tune with our hearts. Charlie shook a tambourine with a clatter of fresh rain. Sam, an attention-seeker until his last breath, rose his head to the sky and howled. We’ll never forget how Sam would howl; someone always howled back. We joined in, clapping our hands, beating our chests, humming. It was a cure for the gloom. We stomped our feet, we laughed, we swayed, we sung, Lila now drumming fast, Zoey and Mikka drumming with her. We were a family, we had each other’s backs. We had to keep that in mind. We were a little tense – it was the first time we would taste human flesh.
The sky was orange, the land red and green, the winter grass soft underfoot. Our world was almost perfect. Yes, cracks were appearing, spreading fast, but we were young, each in our own way. Heartbreakingly beautiful. We were so young as to believe that we could just ignore the badness and the badness would go away.
Rebecca raised her arms, and the music wound down. When she beamed her full presence at you, you realised that you had been living in black and white, while she was tawny, blue and chestnut. She would paint you in bright colours too, if you listened to her. Everybody listened, friend or foe. You could love her or hate her, as some of us came to do, but you could not ignore her. A journalist recently published a long-winded piece arguing that Becca’s personal charm was a fabrication of lawyers and media outlets. The hack had never met her in person.
‘This is a great day,’ she said, ‘and nothing great was ever easy.’
Her eyes were bloodshot, her lovely cheeks pale, her voice unsteady.
‘And I…’ she stopped. Our heartbeat stopped. We had never seen her falter, not once.
‘Nothing great is ever easy,’ she repeated, in a lower voice. ‘We are gathered here tonight because of death, the greatest mystery, and the hardest one. It is a mystery we have already met. What is death?’ she asked.
‘A blank slate,’ we answered immediately, as we should.
‘What is death?’ she asked again, in a louder voice.
And we answered: ‘An opportunity.’
‘What is death?’ she asked for the third time, not quite shouting.
‘A gift!’ we shouted back.
That pleased her. ‘And the truth of that gift is change. Imagine how dreadful it would be to be stuck in this one form for ever,’ she said, touching her own face, and we thought that her face was lovely, not dreadful at all. ‘To know only one body, only one sex, one race, one set of circumstances. If we didn’t die, if the eyes we have now were open for ever, we would only see what they see, only that, and nothing more. We might be born rich and smart and gorgeous. We might have it good. But any river, no matter how pure, becomes a swamp when it stops flowing. Death is what keeps our river flowing.’
She paused, and we had time to think her words through. They told us nothing we didn’t know, and yet, with Ric’s body lying naked in the centre of our circle, they seemed to hint at some deeper truth.
The silence stretched to unsettling lengths. A sparrow landed on Ric’s forehead to rest there a moment, then flew away. We listened to the wind and the birds, we breathed in the clean air. We wished Becca would start talking again.
On cue, she said, ‘We may weep because Ric left us. I have spent the last day crying, and I am going to cry tomorrow, and for days to come. I am barely…’ She stopped. ‘I am barely able to get ahold of myself as it is. We may weep if we need; we may voice the pain we feel. Give sorrow words, Shakespeare said. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.’
The mark of great thinkers: they are not afraid to use the words of others to put across their own message.
‘But we should know why we mourn. Nothing sad happened to Ric. Something sad happened to us: we lost a dear friend, a guide. I will be missing him every day I have left to live. He will not be with me by the fireplace tonight. He will not touch the nape of my neck the way he used to do, he will not…’ She paused again, and swallowed back her tears.
We were crying with her. We saw an Oddball hovering above us, a crow with a rat’s head and the tiny hands of a mouse.
‘So yes,’ she said, after composing herself. ‘We may cry, but we must know we cry for ourselves, rather than for him. There is no reason to cry for him.’
She brought a hand to her belt, where she had her working knife. She unsheathed it. We held our breath while she walked to the body.
‘Jesus of Nazareth asked his disciples to eat of his body and drink of his blood, in token. It is not our custom to do things in token. What would Ric say?’
‘Be real,’ Lila answered. ‘Be real to the end.’
‘And hell, are we real.’
We stood in silence while the birds sung and there was a gentle scraping of metal against flesh. Becca chewed, and swallowed. Someone offered her a sip of water.
‘Come, my friends,’ she said.
We took our knives and swarmed on Ric.
Had he not died, we would be looking at a different story. A triumph, perhaps.
CHARLIE
It wasn’t like now, when you can google the Bastion and see the pinewood, that spectacular beach, almost all of our faces. When Bertrand and I started looking into it, there were no photographs. What pics you could see on their Insta were attractive, but vague: thick myrtle on dunes, tattooed hands playing a theremin, a silhouette of a man (or perhaps it was a woman, you couldn’t tell) skinny-dipping into moonlit dark waters. What did Becca and Ric look like? What kind of folks did they attract? Some people would wonder; only a fraction of them, as it happens, would be curious enough to investigate online; and only a fraction of those would go and see for themselves. Becca and Ric taught us, ‘Fate is nature unfolding.’
ZOEY
Yeah, filling my application, I massaged the truth where the truth was sore, starting with my name and job. I could not disclose I was Zoey Lee, CEO of Soul Journey. We were perhaps not the biggest Mind, Body and Spirit festival in the world, but the best-known for sure. I’m not bragging; it is what it is. From Reiki to witchcraft to astrology, we covered the whole spectrum of woo-woo, with glitz.
Everybody in the industry knew SoulJo and everybody knew me and my partner (my business partner, that is), Janis Mackenzie. I thought the application was a gimmick to make people feel special while gathering info. I know better now, but at that time I’d have bet good money that the Bastion accepted everybody solvent, and that disclosing my identity would be the only surefire way to get rejected.
I wrote, Zoey Pagano.
CHARLIE
Bertrand and I sent our application on a blustery night. I remember every moment of it as if it isn’t a memory, but something that is happening now. A part of me is still in Saint-Malo with Bertrand, checking the Open Feast’s website on my phone. We are both naked under a rough woollen blanket, lying on a piece of cardboard as wind and rain rage against what passes for our window. But it is a memory after all. I am a different person now. I am in a different place.
I said something along the lines of: ‘The glass could give up at any time.’
‘It could.’
‘It’s wonderful.’
He kissed me and I curled up against him. Being happy is not like riding a bike; you can forget how to do it. Not so long before, Bertrand and I had lost faith we would ever remember, but here we were, against all odds.
ZOEY
‘Are you using your real first name?’ Janis asked.
She was sitting by my side on the perfectly round, perfectly white, Saarinen tulip table in my living room. We used to work like that, side by side.
‘I need something I’ll answer to instinctively. I’m not sure what to write down as my job though.’
‘HR? It’s generic enough.’
‘They might check LinkedIn.’
‘Good point. Landlady then? No social networks needed.’
‘I just rent what I inherited. A quiet job, off the radar. Brilliant.’
To be clear, I’d not inherited a thing. What I had, I had fought tooth and nail for, starting with my apartment in Greenwich Village, New York. I loved it: I close my eyes and it is there, in all its swankiness. The living room was painted light green, with a window opening onto a leafy street. In a corner was an Arco floor lamp, with an Eames chair under its round metal shade. Framed on a wall was a Leonora Carrington limited print, the one with the woman in a white cloak and a halo of flames, or hair, around her head. On another wall was the promo poster of the first Soul Journey Festival that Janis and I produced: a white background, and at the centre, a black spiral, hand-drawn, from which different religious symbols (a crucifix, a rune, a pentacle, a half-moon with a star…) hung like small charms from a bracelet. It was an amateur’s work that Janis made with input from me. The budget for that first festival had been non-existent, and we made do. The DIY aesthetic was key to our early success; now we had a hired agency making sure that the aesthetic kept a DIY feel.
CHARLIE
Bertrand and I had married (it was a small ceremony with only a handful of friends) on 19 January 2020. Yes – 2020, the year the Earth stood still. The winter wedding was Bertrand’s idea. January sucks, he proclaimed, and we would set it right. From then on, January wouldn’t be the unforgiving month of frost and fasting, it would be the month of our anniversary, a party time to shake off the winter blues. Bertrand could come across like a giant, over-eager puppy, but he was a thoughtful man.
What he wasn’t – and me neither – is a seer. He could not know that in a matter of weeks the winter blues would be the last of our problems. The pandemic swept France along with the rest of the world, finding us completely unprepared, along with the rest of the world. Bertrand was a session saxophonist, I was a junior doctor, which meant that while his income dropped to zero from one day to the next, I found myself working all day, every day. Married life felt like war – until I got sick.
The public doesn’t fully realise yet what a meat-grinder the pandemic was for people working in hospitals: we were called ‘front-line’ as if it were a metaphor, but it wasn’t. We were in the trenches, keeping our heads low and praying enemy fire wouldn’t hit us. The day I saw the two lines on my test was the day I had learnt a colleague of mine, the same age as me, with no pre-existing conditions, had passed. I saw those two lines and my body went cold with fear. I remember thinking, I’m going to lose everything, oh my God, I’m going to lose everything. The numbers were on my side; most people my age and with no conditions got out lightly, but fear hears no reason, and I felt I was done for.
Well – I was on my feet in four days, with nothing more than a little cough. Meanwhile though I’d passed the bug to Bertrand, and it wasn’t so easy for him. He spent two weeks in bed, and when he managed to kick that bastard illness out, it took his wind in revenge. Bertrand couldn’t blow as much as three notes before getting short of breath. It was heart-rending to hear what muffled, pitiful wheezes he managed to produce, like an old lion whose vocal cords had been cut by some sadistic poacher.
I’m ashamed to say I was happy to go back to work. I knew I should have been by my husband’s side, but I just couldn’t see him so dejected. I became angry so as not to feel guilty – somebody had to bring money home, right? Bertrand sensed I was running away, but he couldn’t say much, because it was true that we had rent to pay. It was a bad time, which left us exhausted, penniless, all too ready to snap at each other.
‘It’s a miracle we stayed together,’ Bertrand would say later, with a large grin, when he was in an especially good mood. Which happened a lot, after we got to the other end of it. With patience, his wind came back, the world started to spin again. Not only did we stay together, but we rebuilt our relationship, our whole life, from scratch, and a fine life it was at that. We were right to be proud, both of us.
ZOEY
‘Look, they’re asking for a personal essay.’
Janis touched her loop earrings. ‘Only two hundred words.’ She read the question aloud. ‘Describe your biggest fear: what keeps you awake at night? What is it that makes you feel desperate, and helpless?’ She paused. ‘These guys are intense.’
‘Say it. They’re nuts.’
‘Some call us that too.’
‘Yeah, no, it’s different.’
‘So, tell me, Zoey, my friend, who’s your bogeyman?’
‘Like hell I’m going to tell the competition.’
I started writing some bullshit on spiders, then I deleted it. On the off chance the Bastion folks actually read the application, I thought, they’d want some juice. Strangers, I wrote. I went on about how little understood I was, how mistrustful of new people, and ended with a flourish about finding succour in books. The shy-bookish-girl act is an evergreen; three-quarters of the Soul Journey audience fancied themselves romantic introverts, to justify their being narcissist assholes. Stories are my escape hatch, I wrote. Doors onto better worlds. That crap on stories being doors never failed to make a workshop audience nod thoughtfully. Trust a cliché and it will take you places.
Janis said I was a monster, laughing.
CHARLIE
A blast of rain rattled the window like a convict beating on his cell’s bars.
‘First thing we get is a new window,’ Bertrand said.
‘We can afford a good one straight away – if we get on a diet of crackers and tap water for two months.’
He laughed, called me one of our private names, and kissed me on the tip of my nose. We were penniless again by that point, but in a completely different way. As of that day, we owned a home, a one-bedroom flat in a nice part of town. IKEA furniture (including a bed) was coming soon. We had a mortgage and the means to repay it. There was little left at the end of the month, but there was something. We were not flush, but who was, after the plague? We were okay. We had seen through the bad times and now we had every intention of enjoying the good ones, on a budget.
Hence the Open Feast – a friend of Bertrand’s swore it was a cheap holiday. The organisers were a group called The Bastion: they had an Insta, a sparsely populated Mastodon account, and a lean website (when I say lean, I don’t mean it was elegant and minimalist, I mean that it looked like it had been cobbled together in a couple of hours, as an afterthought). Hard as we looked, we could not find any mention of prices.
ZOEY
‘You call me a monster?’ I said to Janis. ‘Look at the next question: Tell us about something you always desired and never quite achieved. Blah blah blah. See what they’re doing?’
‘Gathering data.’
‘To mindfuck their clients.’
‘You don’t have to go.’
‘You were supposed to go,’ I said, pretending to be annoyed, while actually being annoyed. ‘But you had to get knocked up.’ I rested my open palm on the bump of her belly, not because I particularly wanted to, but because I knew Janis liked it. She was stubbornly deluded I was happy about her pregnancy.
‘It was a miracle.’
After three years of attempts, nobody believed a baby would happen. It was a miracle for sure, but I couldn’t say of which kind. Janis had told me (even before telling her husband) and I had not taken it well. Until that moment I still fantasised I had a chance with her, and I still believe I did. I only had to find the guts to tell her how I felt, and she would have left that useless man she had fished on Tinder. She could have had a relationship with him and me both, for all I cared. I’d have been fine with that, as long as she kept the two of us on separate rails. But I hadn’t found the guts, and my friend, my sister, the woman I loved, had a baby on the go with an hombre so shallow that even his dog couldn’t remember his smell.
