Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

CXI. House of the Rising Sun

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      There is a hotel in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun.

      Underneath a rotten sky, where the clouds swelled with rage and the rain sank its teeth deep into his skin, there were ruinous cracks of its vaults force themselves open to let a dying, decaying skinwalker through. The ghost of Johnny Cash would meet the carnage of the devilʼs zombie bride, our hailed New Orleans, and at the crossroads, Lafayette sat on his knees, veins slit in sacrifice to the blue orbed Giant, in an effort to milk the pain from his raw wounds. Under a sea of moldy oak, Lafayette watched as the rain spat him up and out into the murkiness of hell, where his motherʼs blood painted the floorboards a murky black, mixing with his.

Here you will die, the wind gasped, choking as a woman would.

     Death was waiting for him La Dame Blancheʼs hut, that house of the Rising Sun. The Haitian spirits called to him, screaming, crying under Adya Houn'tòʼs whiskey moon, whispering "isit la, ou pral mouri" until the blood spilled from his ears and noses. That beautiful black bride with the decaying, black roses attached to her body. As Lafayette cried, he traded those salty tears for the sea, which called to him in the shape of four heads: a woman of Polynesian and African birthright, without flesh, just dead black flowers, dead black fish scales and teeth, and barnacles of a broken, decaying sea.

"Rise, my son," she wept, gasping. "Your blood will not have you today."

"I ainʼt got blood left."

"Blood is all you have left, chérie."

"Blood is all I have left."

In Haiti, there were stories. Of a sea witch who took the Quechua of Peru, who performed the Taki Ongoy, and gave birth to great evil. Their bodies had split in half, a bouquet of arteries and veins coiling at his feet, bones barbed like sharpened claws. She gasped like a fish out of water and Lafayette froze, unable to stare at the woman that rose from the watery floorboards, Death, with that same foul stench: of the eels braided in her hair, of the barnacles that clawed at her. The stench of babyʼs blood that would quench the thirst of El Dorado, the story of how the Oracle of Four Heads ate the baby whole, and all that was left was her shadow.

The same shadow next to him, today.

Lafayette prayed, wheezing as blood flowed from his body...

"You know, in dreams, I used to pray to the blue orbed Giant, every night. Lost in that castle in the sky, a castaway drowning in oceans of sleep. And still, I would pray."

...and he prayed harder as the shadow came to him, craving death.

His death.

"Hush now, chérie. Your blood is not what I want."

A childʼs cry, choking on the Rising Sun's mold.

"W-what do you want?"

"My dreams back."

The Oracle stared at him, all four of her eyes shredded in-front of him, and all four heads hissing at him. Lafayette cried harder, praying for Death to take him.

"Oh, what dreams I had, Lafayette! Dreams of the sea, dreams of the everlasting, dreams of eternal love...why do you cry? Cry at my dreams? You are made cold by this face. You pale at the sight of me. You know, that is what the dreamer fears most. The eternal drink of nothing. The jaws of the darkest depths of the ocean, that gaping cold pit, between this world and the one below. That dark, black hole of being swallowed into nothing, and becoming nothing. Dust in the wind. In dreams, I saw you, Lafayette. And that is why I am here. I am in a dream."