Home » Archives » December 2003 » David Parker’s Journal: 3

12/26/2003: "David Parker’s Journal: 3"

Music: Grateful Dead
Mood: Grateful I'm not dead

I stood just within the pool of light just inside the entry, commanding my heartbeat to slow as I peered upward into the yawning darkness.

A surreal atmosphere permeated Hibernian Hall. It was if I had opened the door and steeped into a dream that was on the verge of transforming itself into nightmare.

Who would draw me to such a place?

There was sense of great age about the old social hall, the feeling of time passing and time past. It came from more than just the century-and-a-half of dust settled deep into the walls and floorboards. People do not congregate in closed spaces for long without leaving something of themselves behind. So it was in this brick relic of a time before automobiles and air travel, before computers, telephones, and even electricity. The voices of the dead whispered indistinctly in the shadowy rooms overhead, a psychic residue, the human stain of pent up passion and despair, the afterimage of life that lingers behind on the mortal plane long after spirits depart.

Reaching again with my preternatural senses, I found no sign of another of my kind in the building, just the residual energy of the dead and the gibbering of the dozen or more ghosts trapped in the hall. Some of the ghosts were curious about me, some angry, some desperate to find the missing bit of understanding needed to free them from earthly bondage.

“No,” I whispered, making it plain that I refused to have anything to do with them that night. I had not been called there by them or for them, and I would not be diverted by their pleading or their threats. I was not frightened. There was nothing the dead can do to harm me.

The stairway rose steeply, the risers six-feet across ascending into the darkness with the dramatic verticality of a set built for a stage production of “Nosferatu.” A modern architect would never design a stairway so daunting to the healthy – and utterly impassible to the physically challenged. But Hibernian Hall was from another era, a time of few conveniences, when people were sturdier. Or had they be merely indifferent to weakness in the past? Partly, perhaps, I thought, but there was probably less need to take account of the infirm back then. In the 19th century, the weak died.

The walls along the stairs were decorated with advertisements for men and women’s clothing from the 1920s and 1930s. A sign painted on the door behind me indicated there was a shop on the second floor specializing in “antique & vintage” clothing.

I began to climb. The risers creaked loudly with each step, but there was no reason for stealth. Whoever else was there, hiding from my keen Vampiri senses, they already knew I was there because they had summoned me. The leading edge of each stair was covered with a rough black non-skid adhesive to prevent feet from slipping. A wise precaution, since a fall the length of the stairs would kill a mortal.

The first landing: I came around the corner and froze, startled to see the couple standing there, staring at me with unblinking eyes. I had to laugh – silently – in spite of myself. It was a pair of mannequins, a man in a tuxedo and a woman decked out like a flapper from the Roaring Twenties. What was wrong with me? I wasn’t a six-year-old boy exploring the old hall. If anything, whoever else was in the hall should be afraid of me.

The dummies stood beside the doorway to the used clothing shop. I glanced at the tarnished brass lock set. I could open the lock easily enough with my mind, but I could sense that there was no one inside.

I continued down the hall toward the next landing, past locked office doors belonging to an astrologer, an acupuncturist, a masseuse. The doorway at the end of the hall had a strange pattern in the grain, the wood nearly black with age and grime. In the next moment a man’s face emerged upside down in the wood. The ghost grimaced, screaming soundlessly, begging me to help, as if there were anything I could have done to help.

The ghost of suicides are particularly unpleasant. Perhaps I find them so because I came so close to taking my own life when I lived in Chicago – if you could call it living, weighed down as I was by an unhappy marriage, a profession in the law that I loathed, and an unhealthy affection for cocaine.

The third floor landing opened expansively. (Why was it that the farther back in time you go, the more lavish people seemed to be when it came to space?) A statue of Buddha sat on a table in the corner, a white carnation balanced in its folded hands. The top floor of the hall was home to the local yoga school. I smiled inwardly. Even in the Midwest, here in this smallish city on the Mississippi, the human hunger for spiritual enlightenment continues its esoteric quest. I reached out and sensed nothing – no person, no vampire, no ghost. All was quite on the top floor of Hibernian Hall, the space made peaceful through asana and meditation.

The door to the school was open – not just locked but open, though there were no lights on inside.

I went it and found myself in a central reception area, perhaps fifteen feet across and twice as long, running before me to the front of the building and a bank of windows that reached to the ceiling, which was at least twenty feet above the floor. I took it all in with a single glance: The table with the recipe box filled with the students’ cards; the bookcase with yoga mats, books and tapes available for sale; the smaller table holding brochures listing class information and a small statue of Buddha; the coat rack made of metal pipe; two chairs and some low benches to sit while taking off shoes for class, or putting them on before descending back down the stairs and out into the chaos of the world.

A pair of sliding pocket doors opened to my right. Inside, I found a large room, carpeted, with a marble fireplace against the far wall and no furniture except for a fish tank. A yoga studio.

I crossed back through the entry and past curtains into an even larger studio at the opposite side. This room was not carpeted. The oak floor had been recently stripped and refinished. Even the little light spilling in from the street suffused the wood with a rich golden glow. It would have been a travesty to hide such a beautiful floor. Against the marble fireplace in this room leaned rolled up yoga mats.

I didn’t notice the ceiling when I came in, but now I stood with my hands on my hips, looking up at the observatory-like dome recessed deep into the ceiling. Even in the darkness my eyes saw the outline of the compass plastered over and painted, still enough of the outline remaining for a vampire’s keen sight to see the distinctive semiotics of the Freemasons.

Strange.

Parallels between the Freemasons and Illuminati are well known, though I have never been sure whether the members of the mortal organization were witting conspirators of the vampire brotherhood, or if it was merely a case of humans imitating something sublime and powerful beyond their comprehension.

If Hibernian Hall had once been a Masonic Temple, then there was a remote chance the Illuminati had once been through the city. The Vampiri tended to congregate in the most elegant, and ancient, cities of Europe and Asia, but with the Illuminati, anything was possible.

I should know.

I was once one of them, before my period of darkness – before they expelled me.

“David…”

I heard myself gasp. There was only one who said my name so sweetly: “Dah-veed.”

I spun and saw her standing in the corner behind me to the left, wrapped in a hooded cloak of black velvet that would have been perfectly at home in Russia in 1914 – or in Paris on a cold December night, where I had last seen my beloved.

It was Tatiana.