MORNING SERIAL
ILLIE necked his drink with one sharp movement and without any ceremony, and so I followed suit and we left.
The Castle was on the next street over. A vast, intimidating, post-apocalyptic nightclub that went up two storeys and then down into the ground three or four more. It was loosely themed along medieval lines, but it took no more than a glance to see few historians of the period had been consulted on the set-up.
Staff in peculiar garb of chainmail and Romano-Greco leathering showed off their oiled and perfect bodies near doorways, behind bars, and waiting tables. The entire establishment pulsed with the unintelligible music that throbbed and groaned around us – each floor had its own focus but they all had dance floors and DJs overseeing the dance floors like demigods, although a man revving a chainsaw into a microphone might have had the same sonic effect.
As far as I could tell the deeper one went, the more the ground shook with sound, and the more the sound began to have an unsettling effect on the soul. The upper floors ran on air, and there were even pockets in which some people seemed to be in conversation. The top two floors were open to the elements, the very top floor simply being a gallery to look down upon the Roman forum of the floor below.
It was the oblivious human shipwreck compared to the mouth of Hades that went on deep in the belly, several floors down. Everything was dark, and only occasionally a smile from a passer-by brought some blacklight teeth out, or a strobe hitting some fake bedrock walling. The atmosphere of the place was of confidence and the clientele, what could be seen of them, were ships passing in the night. This was the centre point of Napa, and it seemed to speak of a heavy silent truth to the place. So many people were just watching, gliding from one shadow to the next, drinking in the gloopy oceans before them. Beneath the heart-pounding of the music was a silence of people as dense as a black hole.
> The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond is published by Parthian www.parthianbooks.com