CHAPTER SIXTY
“I’m surprised I would need to ask you to come to bed with me, Perseus.” James held his charming aura with ease. He was magnanimous, extinguishing both of their torches, before he opened the private compartment for him.
As they stepped inside, Perseus reminded him, “I am a married man.”
“When has that ever stopped you before?” James remarked with a smirk, entering the scent of twentieth-century engineering and liquor. The servers waited in a structured line to greet them and accommodate their needs with efficient execution.
“I would never betray Lucy.” Perseus smiled his infamous traitor’s smile.
Lucy Swann already had her young widow’s gown.
The chiffon was exquisitely tailored, and the veil trimmed perfectly in case she grew bored of him earlier than expected.
Whenever Lucy went shopping, she swiped his card, and she rehearsed his eulogy.
She studied the ancient tragedies to learn convincing expressions of morbidity, anguish, and grief. She was expressionless otherwise.
She practiced his burial rites as she perused her magazines.
She hunted men with crude crossbows for leisure in case that was how she decided to end Perseus’s life.
Lucy was as loyal as her husband, which made them the perfect pair.
“Perhaps you’ve invited me to a private bacchanal?
” Perseus presumed. On September third in the annals of AEscwulf history, the fourth year students that survived the winter ritual celebrated with Bacchic frenzy.
In their final year, they were finally freed of terror.
They stripped themselves naked in wild, drunken nights of promiscuous revelry, folkloric songs, and intense passion in ritualistic madness.
The Feast of Bacchus. To reach a state of divinity, they purged themselves of fear and repression, partaking in the orgiastic traditions of the Ancient Romans.
“I’m hardly dressed in proper 200 BC regalia.
Will we be headed to the wilderness afterward? ”
James hailed a server. “I could procure mountain laurels for you, if you are particularly interested.” James mused with him. “Perhaps we will be possessed by Dion?sos in the wilds.”
“If you plead to me nicely, I might possess you.”
“If you plead to me on your knees sweetly, I might teach you true possession, Perseus.”
Perseus was entertained with the rivalry. Their forefathers had participated in bacchanals in their time at the College; it was tradition. “You and I will partner in September?”
“You will be very pretty in your laurels when I penetrate you, Perseus. You feel like the forest princess of the night.”
“I will not be the one penetrated, James. The honor will be reserved entirely for you.” Perseus held no interest in men; he never had sexual attraction to men either; but attraction was of little relevance to sexual acts in the Baneburian mindset.
Carnal rites. Primal instinct. Psychedelics.
Their intention was to attain momentary immortality.
“I will give you a coronet of thorns, petals, and rowan before I enter you, James. You’ll be the most beautiful prince in the wilds.
That rouged mouth of yours will cry with praise when I have my way with you. ”
James suppressed his smile. “Your mouth is even prettier when you pretend. You will blush furiously for me.”
Perseus was served his usual earl grey English tea by white-gloved servers as he sat beside James. “In all seriousness, where could we possibly be headed? Surely not to Wulfram’s antechamber?”
Perseus did not recognize the ancient theater antechamber with immediacy. However, he knew only cabal mentors held their private antechambers furthest from even the sight of the students.
While Professor Ilaria lavished James with frequent invitations to visit her at his will, Wulfram had never invited Perseus to his private antechamber.
Wulfram wrote almost entirely in dead languages, therefore, Perseus transcribed his Hellenistic lecture notes and documents for him.
He handed the organized paperwork to Wulfram in his train compartment. Then, Wulfram locked him out afterward.
Perseus was not permitted to take the train expedition to his antechamber. Helmut Wulfram did not believe in fraternization with students as though they were his colleagues or his peers.
“No, not Wulfram.” The train lurched them forward, propelling them into the dark, as the cabin lanterns were dimly lit for their comfort. James kept him well distracted. “Wulfram could inform us of how to properly perform a bacchanal, surely though? Perhaps we should pay him a visit.”
“Of course not.” Perseus helped himself to sugar cubes and a spot of mink milk. “He scarcely wrote more than a few terse sentences in his account of his own Bacchanal.”
“A few sentences?” James piqued a brow. He expected far more than a few sentences.
Wulfram delivered the annual lecture on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian duality in The Birth of Tragedy for the week of the bacchanal.
It was one of the rare weeks Wulfram lectured on modern philosophy.
Nietzsche was a philosopher that was too modern for his taste.
“Perhaps the terse sentences could be useful.”
Neither of them had ever experienced a bacchanal, they’d only heard of the debauchery from former students.
In history, the Bacchanalia had been a cult of secrecy, and privately funded, therefore the tragedians and laureates of the time might not have even known the exact rites.
The students of AEscwulf relied on Euripides’ The Bacchae to initiate themselves in the rituals.
Who knew what the students did at the AEscwulf Bacchanal?
What if they all stood around, anxiety-struck, and they smoked cigarettes until the sun rose?
What if the young men leaned themselves against the trees, flaccid, and the women dryly recited The Bacchae aloud, bare-breasted, until nightfall?
I am Dionysus, the child of Zeus, and I have come to this land of the Thebans, where Kadmos’ daughter Semele once bore me, delivered by lightning-blast.[22]
“Isn’t your bloodline Greek?” James asked him.
He knew Perseus had a great-great-grandfather who had been the former president of the Second Hellenic Republic.
Further, Perseus’s father had a noble lineage from England and Norway, Perseus had inherited his aristocratic, erudite accent whenever he was angered.
Wilde’s own father was an aristocratic Englishman; he couldn’t escape his high born inflection either.
“What detail did Wulfram provide on the bacchanal?” James inquired in interest. “We could do it the way he did it.”
Wulfram was likely very popular in his fourth year.
His attractive features were of Antiquity; the prominent bridge of his Roman nose resembled historic sculptures, Wulfram’s perceptive eyes were reflective of aged knowledge, and his muscled physique was reminiscent of the mythic statue of Achilles.
His fierce eyes were burnished hazel and dark; his waves the brunet of a bronzed crown.
“I will not treat the Bacchanal the way Wulfram did.” Perseus set aside his tea. Perseus was visibly triggered by his mentor and his telestic practices. “Wulfram desecrated the honorarium.”
James was served iced, briny sterlet caviar with champagne. “Who was the honorarium in his year?”
They were nearly at their destination.
“Marcus Hexley.” Perseus folded his newspaper.
“Wulfram was fond of him. The Hexley twins were roommates with Helmut Wulfram and Thierre Montclair for four years in Swiehun Hall. Wulfram fornicated with the younger twin to comfort him at the Bacchanal.” That’s what Perseus mistakenly believed when he’d read Wulfram’s diārium.
Then he translated the subjunctive and optative.
Wish and desire. He deciphered the encrypted language Wulfram had written in.
He uncovered that Wulfram devoured the older twin’s heart to be close to him.
“His heart?” James was stunned. “Did he fall in love with the pair of twins?”
James heard of the year where there had been a deadly affair between all four roommates at Swiehun Hall, escalating into a violent murder on campus.
Afterward, the College banned men from rooming to together and every student was thereafter forced to their own dormitory bedroom.
That might’ve been Marcus Hexley’s year, if memory served.
Was Thierre Montclair the senior elector that sent Malcolm to hang?
Was Marcus the student that took his twin’s place to save him? Was Wulfram the one in love with him?
“Love?” Perseus tightened his fists as he remembered the accursed diārium.
He didn’t dare speak the written words in their entirety, in case the train attendants listened in.
Wulfram was incapable of a full range of emotions.
He’d been born with an inability to exhibit or experience certain feelings, therefore he translated through someone else to experience them.
He believed ritualistic fornication let him intuit natural, raw emotions.
“Wulfram fornicated with him ‘to taste the intensity of grief and agony on his tongue. To know sorrow and loss in its purest form as it had been kept from him.’”
Two men existed within Helmut Wulfram.
Hellmouth was primitive, brutal, and murderous.
Helmut was civil, rational, and stoic. Neither side of himself could feel immense loss.
Therefore, he felt the gods had abandoned him because he could not feel the high emotions required to reach them.
“He believed the heightened thlípsi and sensuality would drive him out of his mind to communicate with the gods. Wulfram slept with a grieving college man in communion to the gods. He did not even let fraternity keep him from his Hellenistic devotion. No, I do not want to learn the ritualistic frenzy from him.”
James went silent for a moment in thought. “‘To know sorrow and loss in its purest form as it had been kept from him.’ What if the line meant that Malcolm kept his emotions from Wulfram and therefore Wulfram wanted him to release his grief. To purge his emotion. Catharsis.”
Catharsis happened through art; in Banebury, intercourse itself was treated as art; lovemaking was art.
Perseus hadn’t heard a word he said; he reclined in distaste. “Can you imagine emotion by way of penetration? That you would need to penetrate a man in order to feel what he feels?”
James lied, “No, I can’t imagine penetrating a man to experience emotion.
Did he mention why he devoured the heart?
” It made him uncomfortable how innately he understood Wulfram.
There were moments when he wanted the presence of Elliott, if only to feel the proximity to all he lacked within himself. Purity. Forgiveness. Youth.
Perseus leaned forward. “In his farewell letter, Marcus Hexley had written that he was afraid to die alone, and in response, Wulfram ate his heart so he wouldn’t be by himself; he’d be within him.
Who the hell even thinks to do that?” Perseus massaged his migraine.
“I am exceptionally close with my cousins; if anyone clawed into my cousin’s heart after death, then fucked my younger cousin afterward, I’d want to know who to strangle. He’s a barbarian.”
“No one would fault your hatred of him.” In the end, James thought perhaps he did not innately understand Wulfram.
They were not the same men. He would not have consumed Finch’s heart after burial, even to remain close to part of him; Perseus was right, that would’ve been desecration. It would’ve been barbarism.
None of it mattered any longer, however, they had arrived.
James hadn’t touched the champagne or caviar, and if Perseus noticed, he didn’t mention it. Courteous, James took a serviette, and he offered to carry Perseus’s tea for him. He held the rim methodically with the cloth.
Even though the cutlery and porcelain were strictly restricted to the URR, James rose out of his seat with Perseus’s intricate tea cup.
At that moment, the steam locomotive ground to a whistled halt.
“I thought I’d give you the honor of meeting my mentor.”
“Your mentor?” Perseus snorted. “Hardly an honor.”
“Hardly an honor is an honor nonetheless.”
“She’s an eccentric obsessive without a single thought of worth in that hysteric head of hers.
If it were me, I would’ve removed myself from her tutelage a long time ago.
She’s the only mentor worse than Hellmouth.
” Perseus spoke without realizing he was headed to the serpent den.
He only paused after they stepped down from the train and the URR departed without them.
Without a torch above them, it was entirely dark.
They were plunged into the grotesque shadows. “What the hell is that sound?”
Perseus paled as his eyes strained to adjust to the dark.
His python-leather soles crunched over dead, shriveled, shedded skin of some sort of reptile.
His ears perked at the increasing hisses sibilating through the sightlessly black atmosphere.
Slithering around his ankles, something viscously cold wrapped itself around his knife-pressed pleated Yves Saint Laurent trousers, cinching his tendon tightly. Furious, he snarled towards James.
“What devilry is this?”