Dancing Monkey

Benson ordered two more beers, upping me to two and him to four.

"I wouldn't say so, no," I said.

"You're not listening to me, they're round— they're round-ish," he defended.

I held up my empty bottle. "It's bottle shaped, so... I'd give you cylindrical. But I wouldn't say round."

"Ok, wise guy, but what's a cylinder?" he asked. "Buncha circles stacked up on eachother, ain't that right? An infinite amount."

"And so because the circles that make up the cylinders that partially resemble bottles are round..."

"Then bottles are round, Mr. Leslie," Benson said. "Can we agree on that now?"

The waitress brought two new beers. Benson's lagging palm pushed his bottle arrogantly away but his drunkenness hadn't penetrated his fingers just yet, their nimble tips stamping on either side of the neck. He fixed his grip and took an unhealthy swig.

"Why must a bottle be round, Mr. Benson?"

He coughed, spraying me a bit, and said, "Because they're wheels, Leslie!"

"Bottles are wheels?" I didn't chuckle, but bared some teeth.

"Bottles are wheels and this bar is at the top of a hill."

"That it is," I confirmed. "But I still don't understand why bottles must be wheels."

"Because once you get four beers, you're on a roll!" he exclaimed with great enthusiasm, but the words barely reached my ears before his expression changed. "Or... a car without four wheels can't roll... can't roll down a hill... can't... can't drive if you roll..."

His face contorted like an infant's when jamming a peg in the wrong hole. He mumbled while I dug halfway through my beer, and then he finished his before shouting spittily once more.

"I didn't say it quite right, but it's something about how it ain't drunk driving, leaving this here bar, it's drunk rolling, cause you're... with four beers you roll down the hill. Do you see what I mean Leslie? Doesn't it sorta make you think?"

I took another drink.

"It makes me think of bicycles."

He blinked so slowly I thought he fell asleep. I finished my beer and collected my jacket while his eyes refocused in my direction.

"Do you need help getting home, Mr. Benson?" I asked him. "If not, I'm off."

"Wait a minute there, Leslie," he said, both hands flat on the table like there was some earthquake he was trying to stop. "I've got an invitation for you. To..." almost asleep again "...an event I'm attending. At Mr. Highland's. Know him?"

"I don't."

"He's a smart fella. Intellectual type, like you. Hell, he'd probably take more to you than he does to me. I go... I go for the hors d'oeuvres. Detectible... de... delicate... delit... uh... tasty little things." He actually licked his lips. "Anyway, you oughta come. Hell of a time you'd have."

"When's this?"

"Tomorrow. Seven or somethin'. He's at the woodsy end of uh... what's the... oh yes, Main Street, a mile outta town."

"I'll come."

He said nothing more, his eyelashes clasping, until I touched the doorknob leading outside.

"Purple house!" he called to me. "Ugly damn thing."

-----

"Mr. Leslie, is it? Benson said you'd stop by."

"I'm afraid I'm early. He told me seven."

The house was not big but it was purple inside and out. Nearly everything was, if not purple, accented by it. Very little of it matched, lilacs and magentas and reddish-wine colors, but it wasn't offensive, somehow. It's resonant clashing made the place feel like a garden that sprouted only violets.

"Oh no, seven is quite right. It's only six-forty-something. They'll all be by when the bell tolls."

He, Mr. Highland, dismissed his servant man who'd met me at the door to some other part of the house and took my jacket himself.

"You run a tight ship then, sir?"

"Benson told you about my Navy days?"

"Sorry, just a lucky guess," I told him.

I sat when he motioned me to but he did not, instead opting to lean against the purple mantle and drink something clear out of an ornate glass without offering anything to me. He was old, but not too old. His clothes were brown, but the soft lamps didn't light the deeply painted room well enough and it made him look darker.

"I don't mean to rush in without meeting you, really, I only know your name, but... I must know what Benson has told you."

"That your house is purple."

"Ha!" The old man loosened up. "And damn it all if he isn't right. I'm sorry. My mind is... elsewhere."

"Am I intruding, Mr. Highland?"

"Heavens no... no."

He finished took a final swig and looked into the glass.

"I should've offered you a drink, shouldn't I have?" he said.

"Society would say yes, but I would have said no," I said, relieving him of the impasse.

"But I've taken away your right to refuse, which I do say is unconscionable. I should like to tell you why."

"I should like to know."

He rushed over to me like he had some secret to tell. He set his glass on the edge of a mauve table and it fell onto the mulberry board floor, shattering like it were shot by a gun.

"I don't care about that," he said. "Benson is a curious man to have you here tonight and I wonder why he might have done it. I might ask him but I might not. Mr. Leslie, tonight my friends and I— and you, seeing that you stay— are doing something you will have read about in books and scowled at in tribunals."

He paused, waiting for me. His voice and eyes were rational but his gesticulation was mad, though he wasn't. I nodded for him.

"I am summoning... a beast, you'd say. Not quite a beast, but you'd call it a beast. It's a spirit-sort of beast, and not a beast like an animal but like a man. It is nowhere near a man, truthfully, but it more thinks like a man than it does an animal. Have I lost you yet?"

"I'm under lock and key, actually, Mr. Highland."

"...I like you Mr. Leslie. I might take to you more than I do dear Benson."

He stood and circled his seat.

"You see, Mr. Leslie, I find rituals to be... primitive. You think of a ritual and you think of... drums and fire and things. Magicians, which you laugh at, or savages, which you fear, or pity. And the things, the robes and candles and the damn chickens and goats— it's so comedic. It can be embarrassing."

He stood profile to me and his eyes darted left, making sure my attention remained on him.

"I can understand that," I affirmed.

"I don't think rituals do anything. I think if one intends to perform a ritual, whatever the ritual is meant to conjure or inflict, will already happen, or have happened. If there are forces beyond our control and understanding, I think it is foolish to pretend that our terrestrial bones and metals and waxes can control or induce understanding. The magic does not flow through us or our actions, Mr. Leslie, but far away and separate from our little human ways. In fact, we have nothing to do with it."

"Then why— if I may— am I here, and why are others coming, to perform a fake ritual?" I pondered, standing as well.

"The ritual is not fake, but it is not powerful either," he explained. "It is practical. It's a cue. If what I wish to summon is already summoned by my wishing that it was so, I need only let it know that I'm ready, but I don't suppose that I can write it a letter or knock on its door. Instead, I must humiliate myself with chalk on the floor and a cloak around my shoulders."

The doorbell chimed at the same time the purple grandfather clock cooed.

"You're not a Christian man, are you Mr. Leslie?"

"If I feared sin, I would not have entered a house the color of a cabbage."

-----

I had a heavy robe across my back, a silver dagger in my left hand, and a blood-soaked rose in my right. Fecal scents plagued the room as the severed bowels of three livestock animals pulsed flaccidly from open abdomens. Sigils from an old leather-bound book riddled the floor and Mr. Highland stood upon a podium with gold dust sticking to his hands and face, shouting latin to nothing. Benson, four other men, and I stood around a cauldron full of petals and seeds. We repeated some phrase full of moris and igniss and a fifth gentleman slit his own palm, though not very deeply, with a shard of obsidian.

-----

"Didn't I say you were in for a show?" Benson said to me while we cleaned ourselves off.

"No, actually, you didn't. You didn't tell me anything Benson, save for the color of the house and the time to arrive."

"Well aren't you glad to have come?"

I didn't answer him. I washed many silly things off my hands into a plum basin and threw my robe into a basket held by the servant man.

"I appreciate the attendance gentlemen," Mr. Highland said, coming into the room with glitter stuck in his eyebrows. "I'm only sorry our efforts couldn't have been more fruitful."

The other men patted his shoulder and began to follow their thanks and apologies out. Benson and I, having been the final two to begin washing up, soon found ourselves alone with Mr. Highland who leant against the wall.

"It was a spectacle to behold, Mr. Highland," I told the older man.

"A goddamn thrill, I'd say," Benson exclaimed, drying his hands. "Why don't we do this act every week, huh? Make ourselves a little Shriner club out of it or something?"

"A grand idea, Benson, but I can only buy so many live animals before people start asking to see their pens."

"Give a dozen eggs to the mailman every other week and nobody'll be the wiser," Benson suggested, straightening his hair in the mirror before shaking our host's hand. "But be sure to call me, Highland. Meg would like to see you soon, you know. And she'll kill be if I'm not back by eleven."

"Yes, next week perhaps. Goodnight, Mr. Benson."

"Goodnight. Goodnight, Leslie! Glad you made it out."

Benson was gone. I finished scraping some coagulation from my pinky nail and rolled my cuffs back down. Mr. Highland's eyes were closed and he swayed a bit against the doorframe.

"Mr. Highland... you've given me a night I won't soon forget."

"Have I, sir?" His eyes squeezed open and he stood freely. "Well, if nothing else."

"You think it didn't work?"

"I think... I don't know if I should trust my intuition as much as I have. If I should trust my own, so-called, knowledge."

"I think you're a very intuitive and knowledgable man Mr. Highland, from what little time we've had together."

"And I think you understand me better than most Mr. Leslie, from the same."

"Still, I'd like to understand you more sir, before I go. Was that ritual based in any particular culture or creed I'd know?"

"What? That facade? Those silver knives are ninety-percent tin," he admitted. "I never even studies latin."

"Yet you still hoped to summon something?"

"No Mr. Leslie, I told you before, the thing I wish to summon, if it exists at all, is already here. The ritual was merely my message. I can only hope I was heard."

"It was heard, Mr. Highland, I assure you."

My eyes turned black.

"I heard every word."