Under the Hill Ch. 01

Editor's note: The following manuscript, found bundled in a subway station, have been traced to a 25-year old freelance writer named Ashleigh Winters. Most of her work before had been movie and concert reviews, interviews and style pieces. If she believed the stories that the interviews recounted seem to imply, she may have believed this would be a breakthrough piece for her. Clearly these aren't her original notes but a rough draft of a nonfiction book she intended to publish. The original record and audio of the interview has never been found.

Some people have connected some of the subjects of the interviews with other people who've disappeared in the city, but it is difficult to believe the interviewees are real without believing in the existence of the club known as Under the Hill, and by extension the existence of the group she identifies as the Kind People or Kind Ones. But no rational person will accept the idea that in the bowels of the city a whole group of people, including Ash Winters herself if hints in the manuscript can be believed, lives even now in psychic slavery so an ancient race can use their bodies as toys. So these notes are merely preserved as evidence of the degree to which a person can follow a delusion.

What really happened to Ash Winters remains a mystery.

*

"You know they don't call them that because they are kind," the woman said.

I knew that, but I was ready to let her tell me anyway. But she didn't finish. Maybe she could see in my eyes that I had heard this from other people before. Maybe she could tell I didn't believe her. At the time I was simply tracking what I considered a remarkably persistent urban myth. I might have been lucky in that way; she might not have told the story if she thought I believed it.

I'll call her Stephanie, though I don't know if a pseudonym will really help her.

She got up and walked across the apartment. It wasn't very far to walk. Her place was the plainest drywall coffin. She had a couple of frameless prints of the kind you got at a museum tacked to the wall, that only made them look emptier.

"I was about your age when I first met them," she began.

I almost laughed at that, because she looked scarcely my age now. She is long and wispy but with cheeks that look like they should have dimples if she smiled. But she hadn't smiled yet. Whether she was telling the truth or not something about her demeanor suggested the story she told me was nothing to laugh about.

Stephanie's Story

This short but good-looking guy kept trying to talk us into going to a bar with him. He must have been my height on his tippy-toes but he didn't look like a little person, just small. That's not why I blew him off; for one thing I was getting married the next day. Also, he looked like a real freak: wild hair, huge sideburns, dressed in leather & studs. The other two guys and the woman with him were even crazier looking than him. If you wanted to ask someone in the bar where to buy drugs, they'd be the ones you picked.

I'd have forgotten about him if the whole bachelorette party hadn't gone to hell. I got in a fight with Brian's sister Tania about the stupidest thing. She was talking about this house that was available near her in Fort Lee; apparently she'd already told him. I wanted to know if she thought he was going to drag me off to the suburbs and turn me into a Real Housewife of New Jersey like her. I don't think I put it quite that nasty, but she got the gist. Then Anastasia jumped in.

"You're halfway there, sexy. Why not go all the way?" She tried to take the edge off with a laugh, but she was drunk as I was, so it came off bitter.

"This isn't about you, Nasty," I said. "I didn't act jealous when you moved in with Steve. It wouldn't kill you to be happy for someone. "

There isn't time to get into how many lines I crossed with that. I had called her Nasty between the two of us since tenth grade, but never in front of anyone. Also Steve dumped her a few weeks ago. She was staring at me like I'd knifed her. And Tania was staring at us both wondering exactly what was going on with the two of us.

Let her wonder. I left the table before Nasty could recover. I couldn't come back then so I went out front, only to find the wild foursome smoking out front. That was unusual then; this was back when you could still smoke in a bar.

I guess I needed to prove that just because I was married I didn't have to be boring. I walked up to the short guy.

"Hey, are you guys still going to that other place? Wonder Hill or whatever it was?"

He looked at his three friends. They were all taller than he was, but seemed to treat him as an unofficial leader.

"I don't know, Tina, we still going to the Wonder Hill?"

Tina had long limbs and long hair that was greenish black like the back of a Mallard duck. She was holding the joint they'd been passing around but hadn't taken a hit. She was studying it like it was going to do something.

"Is it that time already, Rob?" she said.

Then she looked at me again, like she hadn't really noticed me before. I remember her eyes now; they were so green. Her skin was the color of a new penny, and when she looked at me that way I couldn't move. She walked over and pushed a strand of hair out of my eyes, then smiled. You remember that feeling when you're just a kid hanging out with your friends and someone pulls out a cigarette for the first time? That thing in your gut like you're looking over the edge of something, and you want to run home and hide under your covers but you need to go over and see what's on the other side? I want to say I did what I did because I was drunk, but her look sobered me up in an instant.

"You're right, Rob," she said. "This one's different. I hadn't noticed. Bill, do you see it?"

Bill had the darkest skin I'd ever seen, with silver eyes and fine silver short hair. Instead of a cigarette he was smoking an old-fashioned pipe, the kind Sherlock Holmes smoked in the movies. But the smoke coming out of it was greenish and smelled neither like pipe tobacco or any drug I knew about. He was wearing a black velvet smoking jacket that reflected silver from some angles.

"Stephanie," he said, though I hadn't told him my name. "What is the cruelest thing you ever did to anyone?"

He wasn't looking at me; his eyes were vaguely focused on the pipe. But I felt like it was important that I answered his question right. If you asked me if I ever did anything deliberately cruel I'd have said no. But as soon as he asked I remembered a girl named Kristen, who'd been my friend for the first few years of elementary school.

Some friends and I had convinced Kristen she was exchanging notes with a boy that she had a crush on. Well, I was the one that had convinced her. I worked with some other girls to make the notes get nastier and nastier, just to see how far she'd go. She'd gone pretty far. This was before everyone had AIM, back when notes were still mostly written on paper. But the gossip network among fifth grade girls is far more resilient than the internet protocol, and soon everyone in the school knew what she'd written.

I'd buried Kristen in my mind; it was easy enough to do since she'd moved to a different school not long afterward. The worst part was that my betrayal had benefitted me for a while. The popular girls let me be part of their crowd, until they grew tired of me and excluded me in some similar act of humiliation.

I cast around for a different story in my mind; I couldn't bear to tell them that one. But Bill just looked at me with his silver eyes, smiled and nodded. Somehow he knew exactly what I was thinking of.

"Yes, that will do," he said. "Tom, are you ready to go?"

The man he called Tom was doing something with a golden rope that matched his blonde hair and tanned skin. Tom had long hair, eyeshadow and blush, but it didn't make him look effeminate.

"Look at this one," he said; he didn't seem to have heard Bill.

He held the rope up and began twisting it into fantastic knots in the air. It didn't look like he had to hold the rope up, though he never entirely let it go. But when he ran pulled a cord or ran a loop through a knot it seemed to stay in place in the air for him. The knots were hypnotizing; the gold rope shone in the streetlight like neon twisted in ancient glyphs.

"Come on, Steph," said Tina.

She put her hand on the underside of my wrist, which had been turned up. Two long fingers ran down to my palm, the rest wrapped gently but firmly around my upper arm. Rob grabbed my other hand; his fingers were rough as old leather.

"I don't know," I said. "I think maybe I should go back inside. My friends will wonder where I was."

Tina laughed; her voice was like a frozen stream on old stones.

"They left a long time ago, Steph," she said.

I looked back at the bar. It was closed, and dark; when I'd stepped outside it had been been bright and loud. What's a regular person say when something like that happens? I don't remember what I said. Stammered like an idiot, I guess -- what, how, who, the usual. Tina and Rob weren't holding me tight, but I couldn't have twisted free from their grasp.

"Ah, there's the car," said Bill.

They were already pulling me in by the time I'd known the vehicle was there; I hadn't heard it because it didn't make any noise whatsoever. It was a Land Rover, I think, solid white, but it looked like it was made of something besides metal. I didn't get a good look before I was inside. There was too much room in there, more than a vehicle of that size could contain. It had facing seats like a stretch limo, but instead of car seats they were modernist couches. An ivory-topped table was in the middle. There were no seatbelts, but then I didn't really feel the car moving.

There was a woman sitting on the floor next to the table with slender pale legs curled next to her. She was wearing nothing but a long, white, men's shirt. She was beautiful but a little older, maybe forty, with a little bit of gray in her long hair that ran down to the floor.

"Elizabeth," said Tom. "Can't you see we have a new guest? And you haven't offered her a drink. How rude."

He poked at her under the shirt with one of his oxblood wingtips. She blushed and rose to her knees. The shirt was very thin, and she wasn't wearing a bra. I made myself look at her face.

"Miss, I'm so sorry," she said, and touched my hand.

I was embarrassed for her. Did she just sit in the car like this and wait to serve them drinks?

"It's okay," I said. "I'll just have..."

But she wasn't listening to me. She turned her back on me and reached in a small bar on one door of the vehicle. She pulled out a tall glass vial full of something white. Then she took out a glass.

It was a martini glass like a smooth, uneven hyperboloid. The stem was smoked crystal, but the bottom of the glass and the rim were made of gold. Somehow the smoked crystal was connected seamlessly to the gold of the rim and the bottom, fading smoothly from glass to metal in a way that shouldn't have been possible.

Elizabeth put the glass on the table and opened the vial. She poured a pearly white fluid in. She held the vial incredibly carefully, and the stream from the vial to the glass looked like stretched spider silk. Her eyes were locked on the pool that was collecting in the bottle of the glass. Her other hand, the one that wasn't holding the vial, was shaking.

"Um, I think that's enough, Elizabeth," said Tom, and everyone laughed.

She blushed, tipped up the vial and sealed it. Then she got out a smaller bottle. This one was made of brown glass with a metal top. The label looked like something that would come from an old-fashioned pharmacy. She tipped the small bottle over the drink and poured in a tiny dash of something bright green. The green didn't combine with the pearly liquid but spun in distinct green strands through it until the drink looked like the surface of a fancy bowling ball. She sealed the small jar, then held the glass out toward me. The luminescent substance was filled so high that it was raised in a convex lens from the top by surface tension. She was trembling all over and staring at what was in the glass, but somehow held it completely steady. I didn't see how I could take the glass without spilling it over the side.

"Um," I said. "I don't know. Maybe I had enough back at the bar."

"Tina, she doesn't trust us," said Rob. "Give it here, Elizabeth, we'll drink first."

She handed it to each of them and they took a long sip. Instead of passing it around they each passed it back to her, and she gave it to the one afterward. The whole time her eyes were locked on the stuff in the glass. After they'd all drunk, Elizabeth offered the glass to me again.

"That's okay," I said.

Elizabeth put the glass back on the table, then looked at it longingly. There was half a jigger's worth left in the glass. She gave Tina a questioning look.

"Elizabeth," Tina said, and cupped her chin with her long hands. "You look like a desperate little puppy. Aren't you on the clock?"

She looked down.

"I'm sorry Miss Tina, I just..."

"Oh, give the poor thing a break," said Rob, and dipped his finger in the drink.

The green-tinted pearly drink clung to his fingertip. He held it teasingly up over his lap. She knelt up higher toward him with her head back and her tongue out. I could see down her shirt now. Her breasts were flat on top and slightly round on the bottom. They'd kept their shape in spite of her age, probably because they were small.

"Enjoying the view, Stephanie?" whispered Tina in my ear.

I blushed and looked out the window. I didn't recognize the part of town we were in. There were fine-looking brownstones but a little worn. It could have been Bed-Stuy, but I think I'd have noticed if we'd crossed a bridge into Brooklyn.

"Nothing to be embarrassed about," whispered Tina in my ear. "It's normal to appreciate the form of a beautiful woman. Here, I'll give you a better view."

There was something on Tina's breath, a smell that made my head swim. Was it jasmine? Juniper? Some subtle combination of rare flavors. It was the smell of the drink, I realized, and I began to understand why Elizabeth was acting the way she was. The woman didn't even notice that Tina was unbuttoning the top of her shirt, she was just stretching her tongue out toward Rob's finger.

Just as Tina slipped the shirt off, Rob stuck his finger in her mouth. Elizabeth's nipples grew erect and she shuddered all over. I looked down and saw that Bill's foot was between her legs. Her pubic patch was kinky and bushy with a few strands of grey. I squeezed my legs together.

"No, nothing to be ashamed of at all," whispered Tina, the flavor of the drink intoxicating me further. "But you already know, don't you? You've put your hands on a woman's body before."

I had, but that was different. Anastasia and I would come home after a night's drinking, when neither of us had met a guy worth going home with. We'd laugh, and pretend to wrestle with each other. Then we'd get in bed naked, hold our bodies against each other, and sometimes pleasure each other with tongues or fingers. But we only did it quietly in the dark, under thick covers. And we had never spoke about it, not even between each other.

I squeezed my legs together again, and opened my mouth a little. Before I knew what was happening Tina had locked lips with me. Her tongue, coated with the flavor of the drink from the golden cup, filled my mouth. I put my hands on the seat and arched my back up. This had gone far enough. I had to get home. But her mouth tasted so good. And her hand was under my ass. I was wearing my favorite knee-length sleeveless black dress, and she started to tease the dress up under my hip. I found my legs starting to drift apart.

She pulled her mouth away from mine, but I still smelled the intoxicating flavors. I opened my eyes and saw she was holding the last of the drink in the cup a few inches from my face. Her other hand had just pulled the dress out from under me.

"Stephanie," she said. "You're torturing poor Elizabeth leaving your drink in the glass like this.

Actually Elizabeth had other concerns now. She was leaning over Rob's lap, and her head was moving up and down. Her hands were behind her; Tom had grabbed them was tying the rope into an elaborate knot up her arms. Bill was still teasing her cunt with her foot as he leaned back and sucked on his pipe tentatively.

I took the glass from Tina and looked in the emerald-swirled pearly drink.

"What is it?" I asked Tina.

"Nothing special," said Tina. "Moon's tears with essence of spring. But you'll never get another chance to drink from that cup."

Bill opened his eyes and sat up.

"Rob, we're here," he said, and looked down at Elizabeth working at his crotch. "You might have to finish off inside."

"I'm good," said Rob, and Elizabeth coughed and choked a little.

Tom threw open the door and slid out with Bill. Tina's hand had been right between my legs and slid out from under me as she exited the car; I found myself wishing it was still there.

Rob was on the other side of me. Elizabeth fell backwards, her eyes glazed, breathing deep. I thought Rob was just fixing his pants, but then I looked and saw he was staring at me. I realized there was only a door on one side, and I was blocking his way.

"You need to finish that now, Steph," he said, pointing at the glass in my hand. "We aren't allowed to bring it inside. Even Under the Hill has some rules."

I had already taken the cup in my hand. Putting it down would probably be rude. Rob was getting impatient.

So that's how it happened. That's how I drank from the Golden Cup. I'd like to say I didn't know what that meant, but I'm not so sure now. Elizabeth was blissed out naked on the floor in front of me. So I must have had a clue.

I guess you'll want to know what Under the Hill looked like on the outside. Not that there's much point. If you ever find it, it will be somewhere else. That night it was a side entrance by a small parking lot, the kind that have a frame in the back where they lift the cars up three on top of each other. There was a little red velvet rope between two poles and a big guy out front, but if you'd been walking down the street you might have gone right by it.

Everyone else was already inside. Rob was leading me to the door by my arm, but he stopped.

"Wait a minute, you can't go in wearing that," he said, and then nodded a little bit. "That's more like it."

I was wearing a silver evening gown. I mean, I think it was really silver, made of miniscule connected links. It ran down from just above my breasts, supported by a small strand around my neck, and clung to my figure from my ankles. My back was exposed, and I wasn't wearing any underwear.

I was feeling a lot of things when we went in. I was guilty, okay? I was going out on my fiance the night before the wedding. And another part of me was looking at the dress thinking this is more like it. The thing I wasn't thinking is what a guy who can change your clothes by snapping his fingers might do with that.

Then I was inside Under the Hill. It was dance music that night, house music I guess. Everybody was dressed in designer clothes you couldn't afford with a year's salary. Everybody that was wearing anything at all, I mean. The servers were all in the same outfit, men and women: a pair of sequined short-shorts, cuffs and a bowtie, no top. One of them approached us as soon as we came in, a slender blonde boy with eyebrows so light they looked like they were barely there.

"Mr. Rob, welcome, I've already seated your friends. I'll be serving you tonight."

"Hmm, what were they calling you?"

The boy blushed.

"My name is, I mean, sorry, they've been calling me Sandy."